The primacy of touch: Helen keller’s embodiment of language

Abstract

In 1908, Helen Keller, the first deaf-blind person in the United States to pursue higher education, published The World I Live In. This chapter explores how Keller’s linguistic sense relies on the primacy of touch by reading this memoir, one of Keller’s less discussed works, and contrasting it with the more popular The Story of My Life (1903), which was heavily influenced by Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan. Spirituality and physicality, even sexuality, coexist in Keller’s system of language, thereby complicating the traditional presentation of her as a child-like, even ethereal, super-human, and angelic being. Keller’s notion of language is inextricably intertwined with her tactile sensations and thereby questions the conventional hierarchy of the senses by suggesting the primacy of touch.