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Breaking Through in The Miracle Worker
- Stephen Gerringer
- Oct 26
- 7 min read
Updated: Oct 27
When exploring archetypal figures, I find it useful to start with word origins, which offer a sense of the source of the image. For example, to teach someone is etymologically to “show” them (from the prehistoric Indo-European root *deik: “show”).
Of course, showing someone how to do something is very different from just telling them. It’s all too common to assume teaching is merely an intellectual exercise. But what does a teacher do when there are no words? This is the conundrum facing Annie Sullivan (Anne Bancroft) in The Miracle Worker, the 1962 film that presents the real-life story of Miss Sullivan’s introduction to her one and only student, blind and deaf Helen Keller (played by a young Patty Duke).
The plot is familiar to many in the United States, where the screenplay has long been standard fare in junior high school literature classes:
Set in the 1880s, 19-month-old Helen Keller falls ill, losing her sight and hearing. As the child ages, unable to communicate beyond displays of raw emotion, her family contemplates committing her to an asylum for the mentally defective, so that she would at least be cared for throughout her life. Nevertheless, Helen’s mother, Kate, persuades her skeptical husband to write the Perkins Institute for the Blind, in the hope of finding an instructor who could reach their child.
Enter Annie Sullivan, a brusque, barely-sighted twenty-year-old graduate of Perkins with no prior experience. Sullivan, recognizing Helen’s potential, has her hands full battling the Keller’s low expectations for their daughter and Helen’s own resistance, expressed in dramatic tantrums, at being forced outside her comfort zone. Annie’s persistent efforts to teach the essence of communication to a child with no concept of language appear futile, until Helen experiences a dramatic breakthrough in one of the most iconic scenes in American cinema.
Characteristics of the craft
A good teacher is there to watch the young person and recognize what the possibilities are. (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, 176)
Annie Sullivan intuitively employs methods common to all master teachers. She observes Helen closely, paying attention to her moods, her actions, and how she engages her surroundings. When she sees that Helen is clever and acts with purpose, Annie works to convince the concerned parents that their pity and low expectations actually encourage and enable Helen’s self-defeating behavior.
Annie Sullivan’s primary goal is to teach Helen language by using a manual alphabet, consisting of a unique hand sign for each letter, to spell words into the girl’s hand. When she gives Helen a slice of cake, she spells out C-A-K-E. Helen has no difficulty imitating these signs, but it’s just a game to her, absent meaning.
This initially seems a pointless exercise to the Kellers (“spelling to a fence post”). Asked why she does so, Annie points out that’s how children learn to speak:
Any baby. Gibberish, grown-up gibberish, babytalk gibberish, do they understand one word of it to start? Somehow they begin to. If they hear it. I’m letting Helen hear it. (The Miracle Worker: Act II)
I think of this as “show and spell.” With everything they do together––eating meals, stringing beads, climbing trees, hunting eggs––Annie spells out the names of objects for Helen.
Though Helen just doesn’t get it, the Kellers are nevertheless satisfied that she soon seems better behaved. Annie points out that there is a wide gulf between training Helen like training a dog, and teaching her how to communicate and understand. Impressive as Miss Sullivan’s persistence is, that breakthrough remains elusive.
what does a teacher do when there are no words?
Archetypal elements
Screenwriter William Gibson employs a range of symbols that emphasize Annie’s key role in Helen’s life––starting with the image of a key (pun intended). When they first meet, Annie lets Helen unlock her suitcase. Minutes later, Helen throws a tantrum because she wants to play with the doll Annie gave her while Annie is trying to teach her to spell D-O-L-L. Dashing out of the bedroom in a rage, Helen slams the door and turns the key in the lock. When no one can find where she has hidden the key, Annie must climb out the window and down a ladder.
The next morning over breakfast, Helen wanders the table, sticking her hands in everybody else’s food; she throws a fit when Annie does not allow her to do the same. As tensions rise, Annie banishes everyone but Helen from the dining room, locks the door, and places that key in her pocket. Helen becomes frantic when she realizes she’s locked in with her tormentor; an epic, hours-long battle of wills ensues, at the end of which Helen has learned to eat her own food and fold her own napkin.
Keys continue to surface, in tandem with Annie’s struggle to unlock Helen’s mind. At one point, Annie tells Kate that she had at least taught Helen how to spell “key” and “water” that morning, even if the child does not understand what they mean
. . . which connects the symbol of a key to an even more primordial Image.
Water and well
We first meet Helen playing by the well pump in the Kellers’ front yard. This pump helps orient her when feeling her way around the yard, and offers security: immediately after Helen locks Annie in the bedroom, she retreats to the well. Wells are a recurring theme in mythology, from the healing waters of the fairy well of Tubber Tintye in Celtic mythology, to a whole series of Biblical patriarchs who find their brides at a well (Rebekah, who marries Abraham’s son, Isaac; Rachel, the wife of Isaac’s son, Jacob; and Zipporah, who encounters Moses at the well of Midian).
Joseph Campbell expands on this theme, observing that the tale of Joseph, cast by his brothers into a dry well and sold into Egypt, symbolizes the passage of the children of Israel through water into bondage, who then, centuries later, emerge, again through water, with the parting of the Red Sea:
Water always represents the realm below the field of manifestation, the place of the new energy, the new dynamism. It refers to the field of the unconscious, going down into that realm and coming back out of it. (Thou Art That, 55)
We learn from Kate that one of Helen’s first words was water––“wah wah”––but that awareness had dropped into the depths of the unconscious when her daughter lost hearing and sight. Hard to miss the resonance on an archetypal level when, after locking her teacher in the bedroom, Helen intentionally drops the key into the well.
Breaking through
Annie’s focus is on unlocking the potential that has been lost down that metaphorical well, a seemingly futile task. When Helen regresses and throws a major tantrum that includes tossing contents of a water pitcher into Annie’s face, Annie hauls her outside to the well to refill the vessel. While Helen holds the pitcher, Annie works the pump with one hand and, with the other, spells W-A-T-E-R into Helen’s free hand.
Helen abruptly freezes, connecting what all those other times Annie spelled W-A-T-E-R have in common with this emotionally charged moment, and . . . epiphany! The pitcher shatters as Helen thrusts both hands under the pump and struggles to say “wah wah” as she spells W-A-T-E-R with her fingers.
When Annie affirms Helen’s sudden satori, the child’s excitement is irrepressible. She pounds on the ground, caresses the pump, raps on the step, and touches a tree as Annie spells out their names. Calling out “She knows!” to Helen’s parents, Annie spells M-O-T-H-E-R and P-A-P-A as they sweep Helen into their embrace.
Then, pausing, Helen gently pulls away, turns toward Annie, and points, asking a silent question.
Annie responds with T-E-A-C-H-E-R.
Overcome with emotion at this breakthrough, Annie sits down at the well as Helen turns back to her parents. She pats her mother’s apron pocket until Kate pulls out the key her daughter knows she keeps there. Kate, who has been learning fingerspelling from Annie, is momentarily puzzled, until Helen spells out T-E-A-C-H-E-R. Once more approaching Annie at the well, Helen offers her teacher the key. At last, Annie has unlocked the door that kept Helen imprisoned in her own mind.
Beyond the events depicted in the film, the rest, as they say, is history. Helen continued her education, with Annie at her side, eventually graduating from Harvard University’s Radcliffe College to become the first deaf and blind person to earn a degree. One of the most famous Americans of her time, Helen Keller authored fourteen books, advocated for people with disabilities, fought for women’s suffrage and worker’s rights, supported the NAACP, and, in 1920, co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union––accomplishments that would have been out of reach without Annie Sullivan.
Though not every moment in the classroom today is quite so fraught with drama, teachers who closely observe their students, “show” rather than just “tell,” focus their pupils’ attention on unlocking the potential hidden in their own depths, and, most of all, persevere, are miracle workers in their own right.
For another take on the Teacher archetype, please read this two-minute selection from my Joseph Campbell Foundation colleague Bradley Olson on The Teacher as Midwife.
MythBlast authored by:
Stephen Gerringer has been a Working Associate at the Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF) since 2004. His post-college career trajectory interrupted when a major health crisis prompted a deep inward turn, Stephen “dropped out” and spent most of the next decade on the road, thumbing his away across the country on his own hero quest. Stephen did eventually “drop back in,” accepting a position teaching English and Literature in junior high school. Stephen is the author of Myth and Modern Living: A Practical Campbell Compendium, as well as editor of Myth and Meaning: Conversations on Mythology and Life, a volume compiled from little-known print and audio interviews with Joseph Campbell.
This MythBlast was inspired by Myth & Meaning and the archetype of The Teacher.
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