What Helen Keller can teach Kaavya
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The letter dismisses all the talk of plagiarism as “unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque”, inasmuch as there is really no such thing as original thought, and all authors steal from others. Twain’s letter is certainly interesting, but the historical context for it, which the GLOBE left out, is oddly revelatory. For Helen Keller was the subject of a controversy very like that which Kaavya Viswanathan is traversing now.
As a young teenager, Helen Keller wrote a story, “The Frost King,” which her “teacher” and companion Annie Sullivan wrote down, and which she sent to Michael Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institute in Boston and a much-beloved mentor. Anagnos was so impressed by the work that he publicized it heavily, and warmly congratulated the young genius. Soon the resemblance of the work to Margaret Canby’s book “The Frost Fairies” was discovered. The young Keller was publicly denounced as a fraud, and lost the esteem of Anagnos. She was so wounded by the criticism and rejection that forever after (including her time at Radcliffe) she was exceedingly careful in constrained in her writing, so as to avoid any charge of plagiarism. Twain’s letter to her, written after he learned of this early incident, was an attempt to cheer her and remove some of the sting of the experience.
Kaavya Viswanathan, who as a current student at Harvard is in a sense Helen Keller’s descendant, has had a similar blow. Her work, written in a time of youth and not intended for publication, was taken by well-meaning people around her and transformed (or packaged) into a work with outer aims (in this case, not to prove something about the deaf-blind, but to make money and perhaps show off the genius of South Asian Americans). Let us hope that the real writer that Viswanathan can still become will not be crushed, as Keller was, by this incident. Rather, let us hope that it will inspire her to continue to write, as Keller did, and to find challenges for herself.