Blind People in Literature Written By Visually Able Authors
It is impossible to make a blanket generalization about how the blind were treated in literature beyond that point – they were marvelous, gifted, evil, malicious, ignorant, wise, helpless, innocent, or burdensome depending upon who wrote the story – except to say that blindness is perceived to be such a loss that it leaves an indelible mark on a person’s character.
Even pioneers in training the blind, such as Dorothy Harrison Eustis, harboured negative stereotypes about them. Blind people had, in her opinion, grown so accustomed to waiting on others as to be passive and 'whiney.'
Father Thomas Carroll, who founded the Carroll Centre for the Blind, wrote Blindness: What It Is, What It Does and How to Live with It in 1961. In it, he characterized blindness in terms of 20 losses, and as the ‘death’ of the sighted individual.
In "Moumoku Monogatari" Junichiro Tanizaki retells the well-known tale of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi from the perspective of a blind servant. The character is portrayed as demonstrating a number of traditional Japanese virtues, but ultimately falls prey to his own human flaws.
"The Country of the Blind", a short story by H. G. Wells, is one of the most well-known stories featuring blind characters. A sighted man finds himself in a country that has been isolated from the rest of the world for centuries, wherein all the inhabitants are blind even as their ancestors had been. These people are depicted as self-sufficient, having developed their other senses, but they are ultimately closed-minded and insular to the point of xenophobia. As they themselves have no sight, they wish to deprive the traveler of his own eyes in this allegorical tale of stagnation.
Read more about this topic: Blindness In Literature
Famous quotes containing the words blind, people, literature, written and/or authors:
“It hurts me to hear the tone in which the poor are condemned as “shiftless,” or “having a pauper spirit,” just as it would if a crowd mocked at a child for its weakness, or laughed at a lame man because he could not run, or a blind man because he stumbled.”
—Albion Fellows Bacon (1865–1933)
“What it comes down to is this: the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the merchant, the landlord, the druggist, the liquor dealer, the policeman, the doctor, the city father and the politician—these are the people who make money out of prostitution, these are the real reapers of the wages of sin.”
—Polly Adler (1900–1962)
“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Paper is cheap, and authors need not now erase one book before they write another. Instead of cultivating the earth for wheat and potatoes, they cultivate literature, and fill a place in the Republic of Letters. Or they would fain write for fame merely, as others actually raise crops of grain to be distilled into brandy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)