FICTION
“What Is Visible”
Kimberly Elkins
Twelve, $25, 320 pages
Few public figures can top Helen Keller’s lasting fame, even if she’s mostly remembered as the tempestuous 7-year-old in “The Miracle Worker” whose teacher spells “water” into her hand at an outdoor pump. She and the scene are an iconic piece of American history.
But before Keller, another deaf-blind child once accomplished feats just as miraculous and as widely renowned: Laura Bridgman, who acquired the use of language 50 years earlier.
In a stunning fictional biography, “What Is Visible,” Kimberly Elkins re-imagines Bridgman’s life from the age of 12 to her final years, a period that spans the Victorian era, the Civil War and the dawning of women’s rights. When first we meet Bridgeman in the prologue, she’s a sickly, cranky, former superstar meeting a young Helen Keller for the first time. Keller’s urgent request, “Tell me about you,” sparks the story into life.
Born in 1829, Bridgman was 2 when she lost four of her five senses to scarlet fever: sight, hearing, taste and smell. At seven, she was “discovered” by Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perkins Institute for the Blind. Not only did Howe become Bridgman’s teacher, but envisioned her as “the greatest philosophical and religious experiment of the century.”
Under Howe’s doting, fatherly attentions, Bridgman thrived. She learned to read raised letters, write and sound out words, and regularly demonstrated her skills onstage to hundreds of admiring fans. She held court with some of the most progressive minds of her time, including Charles Dickens, whose “American Notes” put her on the map.
By the age of 17, Bridgman was one of the most famous women in the world, second only to Queen Victoria — and with a prima donna personality to match. Yet before she turned 20, her rising star was dimming and her beloved (and now famous) teacher had distanced himself from his “experiment,” leaving her increasingly trapped inside herself, heartbroken and forgotten.
Bridgman’s first-person account plunges readers into the restless consciousness of a girl habituated to acclaim and attention — and fully aware of her own importance. The novel opens at the peak of her popularity, during a special visit in which the inquisitive, self-possessed preteen is not the least bit intimidated by Mr. Dickens.
“You write books?” she signs. He signs back that she reminds him of Little Nell, a character in his last book. “Had scarlet fever like me?” she asks. “No, but hard life like you.” “She can see and hear?” signs Bridgman. “Taste and smell?” When he confirms it, she sets him straight: “Then she is not like me.”
Though she relied on Bridgman’s letters and journals to tell the story, Virginia native Elkins found it easy to “inhabit” her character: “I got inside her head and heart,” she says, “and she in mine.” The result is a mesmerizing interior voice that conveys the eccentric, sometimes terrifying poetry of a life cut off from everything but touch.
Elkins’ Bridgman is no angel. She’s mischievous, witty, demanding and often jealous, a far more complicated personality than her high-minded mentor can handle. She slaps and bites and pulls hair and cuts herself. At one point she projectile vomits in a way that seems intentional onto Howe’s marriage bed. Contemporary notions of Victorian propriety war with her powerful sensuality.
“My universe is manifest only through my fingertips,” Bridgman says, “and I refuse to be a stranger to it.” Desperately tactile, her worst fear is to be “gloved” — a frequent penalty for fondling herself or the blind girls in her dormitory, and one that keeps her from “all but the roughest impressions of the world itself.”
But a far greater punishment was Howe’s rejection of his protégée. As the child rescued from the “darkness and silence of the tomb” bloomed into a spirited young woman capable of speaking her own mind, Howe thought her “charmless” and unladylike. When Bridgman objects to the restraints Howe inflicts — refusing to let her read the Bible, or denying her the blue glass eyes she hoped would normalize her appearance — his revenge is as subtle as it is lethal.
Selected letters and alternating viewpoints — from Howe, his wife Julia Ward and Bridgman’s teacher, Sarah Wight — open out the times Bridgman found herself in, and drive home the limited freedoms even a sighted, hearing woman could enjoy during that era. Ward, a poet and suffragist, battles her husband’s restrictive notions of womanhood; Wight’s marriage, at first promising freedom, comes to eerily echo Bridgman’s handicaps.
While previous books about Bridgman have portrayed her as a casualty of Howe’s grand schemes, Elkins trades the Pygmalian-style narrative for a literary triumph that makes visible the rich, deeply felt reality of a woman who longs to be remembered for “how little one can possess of what we think it means to be human while still possessing full humanity.”
