                           SHACKLED IMAGINATION:
                    LITERARY ILLUSIONS ABOUT BLINDNESS 
                          by Deborah Kent Stein 

To the members of the Chicago Chapter of the National Federation of 
the Blind of Illinois, she is known as Debby Stein, but to the thousands 
of fans of her dozen books for young adults, she is Deborah Kent, 
an author who understands what it's like growing up in the 1980s. 
In addition to her fiction Deborah Kent has written thoughtfully and 
with insight about blindness and disability in general as well as 
authoring several in a series of children's books about the states 
of the Union. 

After earning a master's of social work from Smith College, Debby 
Stein worked for several years in community mental health. Then, in 
1975, she decided to spend a year in a writers' colony in San Miguel 
de Allende, Mexico, learning whether or not she could make it as a 
writer. Her year stretched into five, and the answer to her question 
was a resounding yes. Her first book, Belonging, was published 
in 1978. It is an exploration of the struggles of a blind teenager 
to fit into her high school. Four of Ms. Kent's books are part of 
the National Library Service collection: Belonging, Te Amo Means 
I Love You, Heartwaves, and Jody. One Step at a Time, published in
September, 1989, is the story of a teenage girl who learns that she has
retinitis pigmentosa. It may soon become part of the NLS collection as
well. Deborah Kent lives in Chicago with her husband, Dick Stein, and their
six-year-old daughter Janna. She is an active member of the National
Federation of the Blind. 

The following is an expanded version of a paper presented in February, 
1988, at the Second International Symposium on Vision Loss sponsored 
jointly by the American Foundation for the Blind and the Foundation 
for the Junior Blind. One hundred eighty speakers were brought to 
the Beverly Hills Hilton in Los Angeles, California, to take part 
in the five-day-long program. Ms. Kent's analysis of the literary 
handling of blind characters down through the ages and particularly 
today is both penetrating and accurate. It seems useful to print this 
successful blind author's assessment of historic and current literary 
treatment of blind characters. Here it is: 
 
"There isn't much to tell," says Hester when asked to describe herself.
"When you're blind it's all inside. ...People wait on me. They have to. And
I think a lot, listen to music, I'm fond of flowers." (Sontag, 1967, p.
45). Hester, in Susan Sontag's novel, Death Kit, has many of the 
traits commonly found in literary representations of people who are 
blind. She is almost helpless, she does not contribute to society, 
and she is miserable beneath her tranquil veneer. Sontag depicts Hester 
here as inhabiting a world of darkness akin to a living death. 
In his study, The Meaning of Blindness (1973), Michael Monbeck 
identifies 15 traits frequently ascribed to blind characters in literature 
through the ages. Nearly all these traits are negative, reflecting 
the low social status blind people are usually accorded. These fictional 
blind characters are miserable, helpless, useless, maladjusted, mysterious,

evil, or pitiful. They may be fools or beggars. On the one hand, they 
live in a terrifying, death-like world of darkness, are being punished 
for past sins (often sexual in nature), and are to be feared and avoided. 
On the other hand, they may possess superhuman powers and insights, 
to compensate for their blindness, or they are morally superior to 
sighted people because they are not tarnished by the shallowness of 
the visual world (Monbeck, 1973, p. 25). 

Other traits can be added to Monbeck's list. Blind characters are 
asexual or not allowed to express their sexuality because of their 
disability. They are bitter about their condition and envious of sighted 
people. When they are cheerful and well-adjusted, they are merely 
concealing a profound depression. 

Contradictions abound in these lists. Blind characters may be diabolically 
evil or sublimely good: blindness may be divine punishment or it may 
be compensated for with heavenly gifts. But whether the blind character 
is inferior or extraordinary, she or he is set apart; to most writers, 
as well as to the general public, blind people are a unique class 
because they are blind. Regardless of gender, age, or social origin, 
blind people are thought to have much in common with one another and 
little in common with anyone else. 

Some blind people do reflect the popular literary image, failing to 
adjust to vision loss and remaining helpless and miserable. A few 
are beggars, and some--like a number of sighted people--are 
fools. But most of the traits possessed by blind characters have no 
factual basis. Blind people do not have extraordinary powers, and 
they fall prey to the same vices that sighted people do. After a period 
of adjustment lack of sight is not comparable to darkness, and it 
is not connected to death. In short, fiction's blind characters have 
little to do with real blind people. Blind people comprise a random 
sampling of individuals with all the diversity of the general population. 
It is ironic that writers--creative people who pride themselves 
on their powers of observation and their insight--have embraced 
such commonly held beliefs about people who are blind. Leonard Kriegel's 
remarks about the writer's concept of the cripple are equally true 
for the writer's concept of the blind person: Writers, by and large, view
the world from the vantage point of the "normals." Writers like to think of
themselves as rebels, but the rebellions they are interested in usually
reinforce society's concepts of what is and what is not desirable. And most
writers look at the cripple...with the same suspicion and distaste that are
found in other "normals." ...The world of the crippled and disabled 
is strange and dark, and it is held up to judgment by those who live 
in fear of it (Kriegel, 1987, p. 33). 

Perhaps one reason writers insist upon such views of blindness is 
that their experience with blind people is limited. Blind people have 
always constituted a tiny minority, about one percent of the total 
population (Twersky, 1955, p. 10).  Deafness, orthopedic disabilities, 
and a host of other handicaps are far more common. Yet blindness especially
fascinates the public, perhaps because of a primordial dread of the 
dark and the conviction that blind people live in a world of perpetual 
gloom. Writers choose to portray blindness more often than any other 
disability. 

The blind character can be a shortcut to pathos or horror or both. 
Blindness is also a rich mine for metaphor: it can represent "blind" 
prejudice; it may stand for purity or for freedom from the tainted, 
physically viewed world; or, it, as it does for Sontag, can symbolize 
forces of darkness and death. Writers' imaginations are shackled to 
notions about blindness that they have accepted as literary fact, 
despite all evidence to the contrary. 

Several scholars (Twersky, 1955; Kirtley, 1975; Monbeck, 1973) have 
analyzed hundreds of works in which blind characters appear. The period 
of these works ranges from Classical Greece to modern times. A few 
of their findings are offered here, before some recent works are discussed.
In these contemporary representations the use of old themes, as well 
as interesting new trends in the portrayal of blind characters, are 
examined. 

A well-known early depiction of a blind man appears in Sophocles' 
Oedipus at Colonus.  Oedipus, who put out his eyes when he discovered 
that he had murdered his father and married his mother, wanders for 
20 years, scorned and pathetic, unable to care for himself, and depending 
on his daughter, who must lead him everywhere. Here blindness is seen 
as a fate worse than death. In Antigone, Tiresias' sight is destroyed by
the gods, but he is granted the gift of prophecy in recompense, and he is
also able to travel because he has a magic staff to guide him. 

The image of the helpless blind person reappears in Elizabethan English 
literature. Shakespeare, ordinarily the master interpreter of the 
human condition, presents the Earl of Gloucester, blinded as punishment 
for adultery and led about by his son, Edgar. Blindness renders Gloucester 
so unaware of his surroundings that Edgar convinces him that they 
are climbing a hill overlooking the sea, when in fact they are crossing 
level ground inland. Wishing to die, Gloucester attempts to leap to 
his death. Edgar persuades him that he has fallen a great distance. 

By the nineteenth century, the pioneering era in the education of 
blind children, at least one author has a different attitude. Elizabeth 
Maclure, in Sir Walter Scott's Old Mortality, is an elderly 
blind woman who operates a successful boardinghouse, assisted only 
by her twelve-year-old granddaughter. Another Scott character, Old 
Alice, in The Bride of Lammermoor, supports herself by keeping 
bees. Though both characters are idealized and are held up to the 
reader as examples of what can be accomplished through faith and
perseverance, they are a vast improvement over Oedipus and Gloucester. 
Such portrayals of competent blind people, functioning in society 
through the use of their ears and hands, and through common sense, 
are all the more remarkable because they are so rare. Through the 
nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, blindness remains 
synonymous with pathos. In Lord Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of 
Pompeii (1834; reissued by Dodd Mead in 1946), the blind flower 
seller Nydia travels throughout the city. A fairly complex character, 
torn between love and jealousy, she is always called the poor blind 
girl. Rejected by the man she loves, who cannot comprehend that a 
blind girl could entertain romantic feelings, she commits suicide. 
The association of blindness with death is demonstrated in Nydia's 
song to prospective customers: 
 
Ye have a world of light, 
Where love in the loved rejoices;
But the blind girl's home is the House of Night, 
And its beings are empty voices. ...
Hark! How the sweet [flowers] sigh (for they 
have a voice like ours),
The breath of the blind girl closes 
The leaves of the saddening roses- 
We are tender, we sons of light. 
We shrink from this child of night. 
From the grasp of the blind girl free us-- 
We yearn for the eyes that see us... 
                                  (Bulwer-Lytton, p. 6) 
 
Blind characters as special beings blessed by God appear frequently 
in nineteenth-century literature. In The Man Who Laughed, Victor 
Hugo writes of the blind girl Dea: [She was] absorbed by that kind of
ecstasy peculiar to the blind, which seems at times to give them a song to
listen to in their souls and to make up to them for the light they lack by
some strain of ideal music. Blindness is a cavern to which reaches the deep
harmony of the Eternal (Hugo, quoted by Twersky, 1955, p. 32). 

Also in the nineteenth century are some first examples of the blind 
character as evil. The pirate Pew in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure 
Island, the villain Stagg in Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, 
and malevolent Captain Wolf Larsen in Jack London's The Sea Wolf 
are superbly competent as they pursue their evil goals. Their agility 
renders them particularly horrifying, as though they were aided by 
Satan himself. 

This image of the blind character (usually male) as evil survives 
deep into the twentieth century. In Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go 
Home Again (1940), George is chilled by his encounter with the 
wicked Judge Rumford Bland: At the corners of the mouth he thought he also
caught the shadow of a smile--faint, evil, ghostly--and at the sight of it
a sudden and unreasoning terror seized him.... He just sat quietly,... the 
sightless eyes fixed in vacancy, the thin and sunken face listening 
with that terrible intense stillness that only the blind know; and 
around the mouth hovered that faint suggestion of a smile which...had 
in it a kind of terrible vitality and the mercurial attractiveness 
of a ruined angel (Wolfe, p. 60). 

Sinister blind characters appeared at a time when blind people were 
becoming educated, participating members of society. It's as though 
authors believed God intended blind people to remain helpless but 
pure. While they stayed in their place they could be pitied and given 
charity, or even admired for their innocence. But if they entered 
the real world to compete on equal terms with sighted people, then 
perhaps they came as disciples of the devil. 

All the stereotyped notions described here persisted well into the 
1950s. However, one might hope to find some improvements during the 
1960s and 1970s. During these crucial decades minority groups, including 
disabled people, became a political force and demanded equal access 
to education, employment, housing, and other amenities. In a growing 
body of work, minority authors spoke with new voices about issues 
and feelings long suppressed and previously considered too inconsequential 
or too offbeat for literary treatment. Blacks, Native Americans, women, 
and gays molded their life stories into fiction and drama. 

As shown by the blind characters discussed so far, the public has 
long held negative stereotypes about blind people--stereotypes 
that have helped to keep blind people from realizing their full potential. 
Though in every historical period some blind people have been assimilated, 
the blind, generally, have been subject to discrimination. Blocked 
by protective parents, skeptical teachers, and employers who refuse 
to accept their credentials, blind people know about the dream deferred. 
Blind people and others with disabilities often spend a lifetime searching 
for their niche in society, for good feelings about themselves. 

A host of articles and personal essays written by people who are blind 
and directed at a blind audience emphasize again and again that public 
prejudice is the most relentlessly difficult aspect of being unable 
to see. An era obsessed with political and personal liberation should 
afford a perfect opportunity for blind writers to channel their experiences
into fiction aimed at the public at large. The actual experiences 
of blind people, rather than assumptions about what those experiences 
must be, might even spark the imagination of a sighted writer or two. 
Keeping these possibilities in mind, I will examine the portrayal 
of blind characters in a number of works, both popular and serious, 
which appeared between the mid 1960s and late 1980s.  

The blind character as evil has nearly disappeared in contemporary 
fiction. The only such character who comes to mind is Margaret Durie 
in Stanley Ellin's suspense novel, Very Old Money (1985). Margaret 
is helpless, depressed, and sinister. After losing her sight at the 
age of eighteen, she retires to her room for 50 years to brood before 
taking horrifying revenge on the woman who caused her blindness. 
The sweet, innocent blind girl, blessedly removed from an impure world, 
is alive and well in Charlton Ogburn's novel, Winespring Mountain 
(1973). Raised in rural West Virginia, Letty is at home among the 
birds and flowers, but has had little contact with people outside 
her family. Wick Carter, a young man from the city, is stunned by 
her beauty when he sees her from a distance. But when he realizes 
that she is blind, he rejects her as a romantic partner. Their platonic 
friendship does not blossom into true love until Letty's sight is 
miraculously restored. Then Letty is deluged with invitations from 
people who never paid her the slightest attention when she was blind. 
No one in the novel expresses a glimmer of resentment at such treatment, 
and seemingly Ogburn never questions it himself. Blindness made Letty 
an outcast; sight made her acceptable to society. 

This novel notwithstanding, recent fiction has carried blind characters 
a long way toward full participation in society. Sexuality is one 
realm that reflects a change in attitude. Once treated as almost neuter, 
blind characters have benefited from the sexual revolution. Letty 
is one of the few fictional characters in the past two decades who 
while blind is denied sexual expression. 

If anything, contemporary authors are inclined to endow blind characters 
with extraordinary sexual prowess and sometimes tilt toward the ancient 
theme that blind people are amoral. Even the helpless, passive Hester 
in Sontag's Death Kit, described at the opening of this article, 
is not only sexually active, but also aggressive and uninhibited. 
Within half an hour of meeting Dalton on a train, she leads him into 
an empty washroom for a scene of passion. 

Hester's sexuality is a metaphorical land mine. Rather than establishing 
her as a bona fide woman, it allows Sontag to explore an underlying 
theme--the psychic and spiritual connection between sex and death. 
Hester's blindness, we are told, is a suffocating darkness that gradually 
extinguishes Dalton's life force. 

Several other works break free of the tragic image, fostered by
Bulwer-Lytton's rejected Nydia, of the isolated blind woman who is destined
never to be loved by a man. In Blind Love (1975), Paul Cauvin recounts the
summer affair between Jacques, a quiet French schoolteacher, and Laura, his
blind love. Jacques accepts Laura without reservation at once, but it is
Laura who objects to their relationship. Her adventurous spirit masks a
profound depression over the loss of her sight, a loss she says she never
forgets. In one scene Laura puts on dark glasses and gets out the white
cane she normally refuses to use, trying to shock her lover with "the
insignia of her infirmity." Convinced that she would only be a burden to
him, she warns him that he is not cut out to play nursemaid for the rest of
his life. Laura never breaks free of this self-loathing, and the novel
never examines the social landscape that brought it into being. 

Two best-selling authors, Irving Wallace and Fred Mustard Stewart, 
also depict attractive, desirable blind women. In Stewart's Ellis 
Island (1983), Georgie O'Donnell's lover, Marco, rejects her not 
because she is blind but because he succumbs to another woman's wealth 
and prestige. Devastated, Georgie prepares to spend the rest of her 
life alone. Stewart makes it clear, however, that she has other options. 
Her family wants to introduce her to suitable men, but Georgie takes 
no interest in them. Then, after years of unhappy marriage, Marco 
is widowed; and he and Georgie are reunited. Georgie proves to be 
an ideal mother; and when Marco is elected to the Senate, she is perfect 
in the role of senator's wife. Though this novel is superficial, it 
does present a blind woman who is not an outcast, but rather fulfills 
the feminine role as it is idealized in popular fiction. 

Wallace's portrayal of Nataly Rinaldi in The Miracle (1984) 
relies more heavily on conventional devices. Nataly, a beautiful actress 
who lost her sight three years earlier, hastens to Lourdes when the 
Pope announces that the Virgin Mary will reappear to effect a cure. 
She promptly wins the love of a young man staying at her hotel but 
does not suspect that her lover is a Basque terrorist intent upon 
dynamiting the shrine. At last the Virgin appears to her and restores 
her sight. The would-be terrorist is also redeemed, and the two go 
off together, in the standard happy ending. 

Nearly all these fictional blind women, though attractive to men, 
are passive and helpless. Only Georgie O'Donnell in Ellis Island 
learns even minimal travel skills. The use of a cane is generally 
pictured as degrading. These women are easily victimized, too, and 
in need of help and protection. On the night of their first meeting, 
Nataly's soon-to-be lover rescues her from a would-be rapist. 
The depiction of these blind women as sexual beings marks an enormous 
stride from the portrayal of Nydia. It is interesting, however, that 
blind women are cast as romantic leads at a time when women in general 
are increasingly independent. Even in romantic fiction, female characters 
are in control of their lives. Perhaps the perceived helplessness 
of blind women appeals to writers and readers who feel uneasy with 
today's liberated woman. 

Blind men, too, are sexual beings in contemporary novels. Mitchell 
Ashley, in Robert O'Neill Bristow's Laughter in Darkness (1974), 
scandalizes his landlady by entertaining a stream of female readers 
and housekeepers. His lover Georgia, though hurt and outraged by Mitchell's
conduct, cannot bring herself to leave him, for no other man has ever 
so gratified her. And rerunning the myth that blind people are compensated 
with extraordinary insight, she "wondered if God had given him 
a sense, and he was seeing her as no man would ever see her, deep, 
deep inside where there were no lies."  (Bristow, 1974, p. 114). 
Though Mitchell's competence in bed is well established, he is
astonishingly helpless in nearly every other activity. Unlike the female
characters described above, Mitchell insists on being allowed to do things
for himself. In the novel's opening scene, he drops several bags of
groceries on the sidewalk. Though a friend offers to assist him, Mitchell
refuses all help as he proceeds to step on the bread and slither about in 
the eggs. Later, Mitchell forces his friend to stand silently by as 
he attempts to make himself a sandwich. He first slathers the bread 
with horseradish, believing he is using mayonnaise. When he realizes 
his mistake, he gets a fresh slice of bread and daubs it with bacon 
grease. Even in his own apartment, Mitchell cannot move about freely 
without the help of his dog guide. 

Nevertheless, despite its misrepresentations, Laughter in Darkness 
depicts blindness with a refreshing twist of humor. There is an adolescent 
quality to much of Mitchell's behavior--he rewards his guide dog 
with slurps of beer and boasts of his involvement in a barroom fight--but
he also has a genuine sense of wonder and adventure. Central to Mitchell's
story and to several other recent works portraying blind characters is the
theme of independence. After Mitchell loses his sight, his mother begs him
to move back home, but he is determined to make his own way in the world.
He trains with a dog guide and lands a teaching job at a small college. Yet
he still finds:  people preconditioned to serve him and the only way,
unless one surrendered, was to fight for independence. Because he suspected
at first and knew later that surrender was like, exactly like the loss 
of his sight, gradual, more and more, and if he let them, they would 
feel virtuous, close to God while they destroyed him (Bristow, 1974, p.
67). 

Writing at the height of the "Me Generation," Bristow tries 
to demonstrate that no man is an island, that all human beings need 
love and support. Unfortunately, however, Mitchell's need for closeness 
is tied to his blindness. His pleas for independence are absurd when 
he is clearly unable to handle responsibility and to care for himself. 
At last, after a cathartic LSD trip during which he imagines that 
he can see again, Mitchell is reconciled to his blindness and to his 
need for Georgia's love. When he invites her to live with him, he 
tells her he needs her to help grade student papers as well as to 
share his bed. In the end Bristow indicates that Mitchell must bow 
to his limitations by living with a woman who will nurture him. 
The theme of independence pervades the Broadway play Butterflies 
Are Free, by Leonard Gershe (1969). Don Baker, a young blind man, 
has been coddled by his clinging, domineering mother, but he finally 
persuades her to let him rent an apartment in Greenwich Village on 
a two-month trial basis. As the play opens, he meets Jill Tanner, 
his next-door neighbor--a free spirit. After some light banter 
and a picnic of apples and cheese on the floor, Jill seduces Don, 
and he looks forward to an ongoing relationship. 

When Don's mother warns her about his needs and limitations, however, 
Jill is frightened away. Don is so depressed by this that he is ready 
to abandon his dreams of independence, and he implores his mother 
to take him home again. It is Mrs. Baker, however, who insists that 
he accept life's disappointments and learn to survive on his own. 
Jill learns an essential lesson as well. In a confrontation, Don tells 
her that she needs him as much as he needs her, and she joins him 
for another picnic. 

This work, too, avoids depicting blindness as a tragedy, and injects 
some humor into the story. Yet the premise seems to be that for Don, 
as for Mitchell, independence is an illusion. After a month in his 
apartment, he must leave his door unlocked so that visitors can let 
themselves in, since it would take him too long to answer the door 
himself. In his neighborhood he has learned only to travel to the 
delicatessen and the laundromat, and this only by counting steps. 
Tutored at home, he has no experience of the world, no training that 
would equip him to hold a job. Don's only salvation is a link with 
a woman who will tend to his needs. Preposterously, Gershe implies 
that Jill, whose greatest commitment to date has been a six-day marriage, 
must and will become that woman. 

The old theme of blindness as retribution surfaces in Jonathan Penner's 
novel of guilt and atonement, Going Blind (1977). While his 
close friend August is slowly dying of cancer, Paul Held becomes sexually 
involved with August's wife, Ruth. Like Oedipus, Paul brings about 
his own blindness--through an automobile accident caused by his 
own carelessness. Again, blindness is compared with death. Having 
lost the vision of his right eye, Paul ponders: "And my Ruth?...How could
she marry a Cyclops,...or any man less than whole after her life with
August? If something happened to my remaining eye, she would be worse off
with me than she had been with him" (Penner, pp. 29-30). 

For a time Paul manages to conceal the gradual loss of vision in his 
remaining eye. As expected, Ruth is aghast when she learns of his 
impending blindness and tearfully leaves him. Paul also faces the 
loss of his college teaching position, and he again hides his visual 
loss. Only when his tenure is secured does he admit his disability. 
News of his tenure brings Ruth back into his life, and when she becomes 
pregnant they joyfully plan to marry. 

By the novel's close, Paul has learned Braille and can travel with 
a cane. After his months of anguish, blindness is no longer an obstacle 
in his professional or personal life. He emerges, a man restored after 
a sojourn in purgatory. But he never even thinks to challenge the 
attitudes of Ruth, the college, or the world. The problems lie not 
in society but rather in Paul himself. He feels that it is only natural 
that he be rejected because of his blindness. James Dickey's novel, Alnilam
(1987), offers a different perspective on a blind character's relationship
to society. A loner most of his life, Frank Cahill feels that he has tacit
permission to live outside the law when be becomes blind. In the opening
scene Frank is unable to find the bathroom while spending the night at a
rooming house. Without compunction he makes his way outside and relieves
himself in the yard. Later he reflects, "[Blindness] placed him beyond or
to one side of the law. He knew that everyone who came into contact with
him...would sense this to be the case. It was provable and he was living
it" (Dickey, p. 26). 

Blindness, according to Dickey, also gives Frank a unique window on 
the truth. A doctor tells him: "... you're headed for the big dark, the
solution to the universal puzzle...You'll be seeing in other ways
now....Your other senses will become far more acute. You'll be able to hear
a baby cry through a stone wall. Music, any music, will have so many levels
it'll be like whole buildings, floors or sounds. And your nose...is going
to be an entirely new implement. Whatever's in the wind or in the air of 
a room, you'll know and the others won't." (Dickey, p. 16). 

To heighten the sense that Frank is privy to special knowledge, Dickey 
frequently divides the pages of the book into two columns, DARK and 
LIGHT. In the LIGHT column the narrator recounts events as they occur; 
in the DARK, Frank himself interprets these events. Before the novel opens,
Frank had received a telegram that his son Joel had died in a training
accident at an Air Corps base. Though he had never seen his son, since his
wife had left him before Joel was born, out of curiosity he begins an
odyssey to learn what he can of Joel. 

At the training base Frank gradually unravels the truth about his 
son--that he had inspired a secret cadet society, Alnilam, bent 
on the spread of anarchy. The members of Alnilam's inner circle perceive 
Frank as a seeker and bearer of truth and revere him as a being free 
of the constraints of law. After they cause a fatal flying accident, 
the cadets are triumphant, telling Frank that he has become the symbol 
they will carry with them forever.
 
Alnilam offers a complex portrait of a blind character. Frank 
Cahill, often abrasive and self-indulgent, has moments of gentleness 
and sensitivity as well. With no close connections to other people, 
he nonetheless is intensely interested in everyone around him. A seeker 
of truth, he is also a master of deception as the owner of an Atlanta 
carnival. Frank's almost egotistical self-confidence helps him adapt
quickly to his blindness, rarely regarding it as an impediment but rather 
taking each situation in stride. Blindness is a loss but not a tragedy; 
it simply requires that he learn new techniques for such activities 
as traveling and carpentry. But this realistic portrait is distorted 
by Dickey's conviction that blind people, as a class, have a direct 
line to truth. Even in his exploration of Frank's relationship to 
law and anarchy, Dickey never perceives him as a member of a minority 
group forcibly excluded from society. 

Most of these works concentrate on the individual's adjustment to 
vision loss, as though once she or he has come to terms with blindness 
on a personal level, there are no more issues with which to grapple. 
Even Don Baker in Butterflies Are Free, though he has been blind all his
life, is entering the adjustment process as he tries for the first time to
survive on his own. This emphasis on the adjustment period keeps blindness
at center stage in most of these works. It is seldom allowed to recede into
the background, to blend in with the other aspects of a character's life
and situation. 

All of the works I have discussed so far have been written from the 
outside, by sighted authors trying to depict the experiences of people 
who are blind. In many cases the author does not even try to enter 
the blind character's world but conveys it indirectly, through the 
perceptions of sighted people in the story. To my knowledge only two 
authors who are themselves blind, Gary Adelman and Jacob Twersky, 
have written adult novels which involve blind characters. 

In Honey Out of Stone (1970), Adelman recounts the inner journey 
of Ben Storch, who lost his sight from diabetic retinopathy. Ben, 
a poet and a professor of literature, at the opening of the book is 
in prison for aiding draft resisters during the Vietnam War. Through 
intricate flashbacks and poems, Adelman braids together the many strands 
of Ben's past and present--his loves and friendships and his political 
convictions and artistic passion. Blindness brings no mystical
compensation; he is neither better nor worse than other people. After an
initial period of mourning, he resumes his life where it had left off. 
Yet, as in Penner's Going Blind, the loss of sight becomes a metaphor for
death, and Ben's adjustment to blindness a kind of resurrection. In his
opening paragraph Adelman writes: "I would describe this place. I am blind,
yes, but that coffin had its key." (Adelman, 1970, p. 1). 

The other novel by a writer who is blind is The Face of the Deep 
by Jacob Twersky (1953). It precedes the period under discussion by 
more than a decade, yet it is the only novel written in any era which 
focuses squarely upon the issue most crucial to people who are blind: 
the struggle for genuine equality. Twersky tells the interlocking 
stories of five blind men and women from childhood to adulthood. Through 
many vivid incidents the reader is shown blind children rejected by 
their families and educated by teachers who regard them as inferior 
and unable to compete in the world. Twersky recounts the patronizing 
remarks of strangers on the street and shows the devastating rejections 
of would-be employers. Yet this novel is far more than a tract about 
negative attitudes, for its main purpose is to explore the effects 
of prejudice upon blind people themselves. 

Though all these characters--Rosie, Ken, Fred, Clare, and Joe--perceive 
themselves as stigmatized, they respond in a variety of ways. Rosie 
and Ken cling to the blindness system, cultivating only blind friends, 
and working in sheltered shops; they never attempt to find a place 
in broader society. Fred, on the other hand, tries to dissociate himself 
from his blindness to prove that he is superior to ordinary blind 
people. Clare pretends to be the sweet bringer of sunshine most sighted 
people want and expect her to be. 

The most powerful theme here is the divisiveness of self-hatred. Fred 
and Clare dream of finding sighted partners, and their deepening love 
for each other is destroyed because neither of them wants a blind 
mate. Fred, who has entered his father's business, refuses to give 
Ken a job when he is out of work, fearing that his colleagues will 
not respect him if he is supervising only blind workers. Ken also 
represents everything Fred despises about blindness. In the novel's 
closing scene Ken stands on a corner with a tin cup, the victim of 
another blind man's prejudice and contempt. 

The novel's last blind character is Joe, who earns a doctorate in 
history and, after a series of rejections because of his disability, 
obtains a teaching position. He also marries one of his readers. Despite 
his success Joe continues to feel a profound kinship with other blind 
people. Contemplating the good things in his life, he realizes how 
easily he might not have had any of them. Joe describes himself as 
a man at a banquet, surrounded by starving people. 

Blindness is never a tragedy in The Face of the Deep, but the 
discrimination that blind people encounter is shown to have devastating 
consequences. As this brief sampling shows, the blind characters in Western
literature of the past two decades are more competent, mobile, attractive,
and well-rounded than ever before. Nevertheless, the old stereotypes
flourish. 

Ironically, such popular authors as Fred Mustard Stewart seem best 
able to avoid stereotyped images. Georgie O'Donnell is neither a saint 
nor a villain, neither a bearer of truth nor a harbinger of death. 
A young Irish immigrant, disappointed in love, she happens to be blind. 
Writers of serious fiction, however, almost inevitably write about 
their blind characters using all the old images and ideas, in part 
because serious fiction is founded upon metaphor. Thus such writers 
as Sontag, Penner, and Dickey included their blind characters for 
their metaphorical value. Yet serious literature is learning new ways 
to interpret what it means to be black or female. It is time for writers 
to question their hackneyed notions about blindness and to discover 
new ways for blind characters to function within a literary context. 
One of the most serious problems in depicting blind characters is 
the tendency of both author and reader to assume that a particular 
character is a blind "Everyman," though there are novels, 
such as The Face of the Deep, which present more than one blind 
character and thus convey the diversity of the blind population. However, 
if an author takes the trouble to become educated about blindness, 
and has a sincerely positive attitude, even the portrait of a single 
depressed, helpless blind person need not stand for all blind people. 
White-Eye Ramford, a minor character in Anne Tyler's novel, Searching 
for Caleb (1976), is a blind street musician in New Orleans. In 
"The String-Tail Blues," he laments his life of dependence: "Once I walked
proud, once I pranced up and down/Now I holds to a string and they leads me
around" (p. 278). 

But Tyler does not accept this helplessness as inevitable. She explains, 
"He had lost his sight at twelve, or maybe twenty, his stories 
differed; and by the time he reached middle age he should have learned 
how to navigate but he hadn't. He was hopeless." In two sentences, 
Tyler shows that Ramford's life could have been different, that not 
every blind person sings "The String-Tail Blues."  Ramford is resigned to
hopelessness, but he does not speak for the millions of other blind people
who walk the earth. If  writers come to follow Tyler's example, they might
break the shackles of stereotype and free themselves to portray blind
people as the diverse collection of individuals they truly are. 
  
POSTSCRIPT: Since I wrote this article in 1988, several new novels 
which include characters who are blind have appeared on the scene. 
Blindsight by Michael Stewart is based on the notion that blindness 
is a fate worse than death. Stewart's protagonist submits to a series 
of painful, life-threatening experimental treatments which may restore 
his sight, though major brain damage is a possible side effect. This 
novel perpetuates some of the worst and most bizarre notions about 
blindness--Stewart even has his hero cut his toast diagonally, 
because it is easier for him to angle it into his mouth point first. 
Overall, however, the most recent books veer away from the tragic 
mode, portraying blind people who are self-assured, inventive, and 
adventurous. In Loving Little Egypt by Thomas A. McMahon, a 
brilliant student at a school for the blind sabotages the telephone 
system and triggers a series of madcap escapades across the country. 
In Peggy Payne's Revelation, a twelve-year-old boy adjusts 
to the loss of his sight after he meets a group of active blind children 
his age. John Moon in Joanne Greenberg's powerful novel Of Such 
Small Differences is a deaf-blind poet who struggles for dignity 
in a world which would prefer to keep him out of sight. Greenberg 
exposes the custodialism of sheltered workshops and the misconceptions 
of the general public and depicts some acutely painful moments between 
John and his guilt-ridden family.
 
These books seem to be setting an encouraging new trend, portraying 
people who are blind more honestly than ever before. Let us hope that 
the trend will continue as we carry on the work of educating the public 
about the realities of blindness. 
