American Action Fund for Blind Children and Adults
Future Reflections Fall 2022 REVIEW
by M. Leona Godin
Reviewed by Deborah Kent Stein
There Plant Eyes: A Cultural and Personal History of Blindness
by M. Leona Godin
Pantheon Books, 2021
331 pages
Available from audible.com and National Library Service (NLS). Also available on bookshare.org
When she was ten years old Leona Godin began to have trouble seeing the blackboard at school. Her mother took her to an ophthalmologist who suggested, "Her eyes are growing too fast for her body." For years her mother took her to one eye doctor after another, but none of them seemed to take Leona's symptoms seriously. One highly respected specialist even suggested, "Maybe she can't see because you've been taking her to so many eye doctors."
At last Leona Godin was diagnosed with a progressive condition called retinal dystrophy. Over the next three decades she passed through several stages of visual impairment and finally arrived at nearly total blindness. As a professor of literature, she was inspired by this journey to study the ways blindness has been imagined and interpreted in Western culture from classical Greece to the present day.
From Homer to John Milton, Louis Braille to Helen Keller, our ocular-centric culture simultaneously holds divergent views of blindness and blind people. Godin writes, "The blind are either idealized in theory, as being exceptionally pure or super powered, or pitied in practice, as being inept or unaware." The richly varied lives of actual blind people are seldom portrayed in literature or in the media.
Godin draws her title from a passage in John Milton's Paradise Lost. The poet, blind from the age of forty-four, calls upon God to "Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence / Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight." Milton suggests a deeper perception beyond physical vision, the poetic imagination that will enable him to create his literary masterpiece. Ironically, hints of oncoming blindness also sparked the imaginations of the learned ophthalmologists who examined young Leona's eyes, only "to grow frustrated and spin yarns."
Godin points out longstanding themes in the literary and cultural depictions of blind characters. Blind characters such as Tiresias in classical Greek drama have the superhuman ability to see into the future. Godin delivers a long list of present-day blind superheroes, including Sensei Tomonaga, the blind zombie slayer in World War Z; Alicia Masters, the blind sculptress in The Fantastic Four; Eli in The Book of Eli; Toph in Avatar; Blindfold in the Marvel Comics series; and Daredevil of the Daredevil comics.
Although memoirs by blind people abound, blind authors have published very few works of fiction that depict blind characters. In contrast, sighted writers frequently include blind characters in novels and screenplays. Godin strongly suggests that the publishing industry is not yet open to the work of blind writers who portray blindness from the inside. Similarly, blind characters abound in film and television, but nearly all of them are represented (badly, Godin assures us) by sighted actors. The public clings tenaciously to long-held stereotypes about blindness, unwilling to explore the experiences of actual blind people.
Woven throughout Godin's examination of literary figures and cultural icons are reflections drawn from her own life as a blind woman. "The discomfort of a specimen stuck but not yet dead," she writes, "is one that I, as a blind person, can easily relate to, especially when I venture out alone." She is inspected as “other” by the curious sighted gaze, while her unique personal characteristics are entirely unseen. The notion that sight is highly superior to the other senses allows the sighted public to dismiss the blind person's knowledge and opinions as trivial or, at the other extreme, altogether remarkable, considering the source.
Godin's exploration of blindness in culture reaches beyond literary representations. She also examines historical figures, especially Louis Braille and Helen Keller, and the ways their lives and achievements are understood and misrepresented by the sighted public. She discusses the nineteenth-century blind traveler, James Holman, whose life and work were dismissed and forgotten by the public until rediscovered by the biographer Jason Roberts in 2006.
In her final chapter Godin ponders the notion of blind pride, of blind people celebrating their power, achievements, and potential. Strangely, however, she does not draw upon the history of the organized blind movement. She mentions the National Federation of the Blind when she writes about the need to improve Braille literacy. As a case in point, she recounts the battle waged by past president of the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children (NOPBC), Carlton Anne Cook Walker, to obtain Braille instruction for her blind child. Yet the Federation's efforts over the past eighty years to achieve equality, opportunity, and security for the blind go unmentioned.
Apart from this omission—and, granted, it is a significant one—There Plant Eyes is a remarkable book, a highly readable and thoroughly fascinating history of blindness. While blind readers are likely to say, "Yes, of course! As I've always known!" sighted readers may come away with a fresh perspective that will start them thinking in new ways.