How did her ailments affect helen affect helen's attitude?
Answers
Helen Keller describes herself as able to initially adapt after the illness leaves her blind and deaf. She at first developed a sign language with her mother, such as pantomiming slicing and buttering toast when she wanted bread and butter or pretending to work the freezer and shivering when she desired ice cream. She played with a young companion named Martha Washington, and Helen did what she could—even sometimes by kicking her nurse—in order to have her needs met.
However, as she grew older, and her crude ability to communicate became less suited to her developing brain, Helen became increasingly enraged at her inability to express herself. She started having "outbursts of passion" when she failed to make herself understood. These became more frequent, because she felt that "invisible hands" were holding her down. She began to have daily and even hourly meltdowns, which led her parents to seek out help. On the eve of Anne Sullivan's arrival, Helen writes that
Anger and bitterness had preyed upon me continually for weeks and a deep languor had succeeded this passionate struggle.
After Miss Sullivan's arrival and Helen's acquisition of a far more sophisticated sign language, she became much happier, describing her teacher's arrival as marked in her own mind by the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects.