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On the left,"The Blind Girl" by John Everett Millais. 1856. Two beggar girls, presumably sisters, sit on the roadside after a storm. The older blind sister raises her face to the sunlight, fondling some grass in one hand, a concertina in her lap. The younger sighted sister looks to the distance, where a double rainbow arcs over the sky.
On the right, a statue of Lady Justice. She wears a blindfold and a plain, flowing dress reminiscent of ancient Rome. In her left hand, she holds up a set of scales. In her right, she wields a sword.
Abstract
The “Blind Angel” is a character archetype portraying the blind and visually impaired as inherently moral, saintly, innocent, and cheerful. Almost always conveyed through feminine characters, the Blind Angel misrepresents the diverse and complicated life experiences of the visually impaired, relegates them to the outgroup of “other,” and discounts their achievements. This trope has old roots, going back to Victorian era British and American literature. Helen Keller neglects to include her life’s messier bits, depicting her adolescent years with fond romanticism. In the few troubles that she does mention, Helen still remains an icon of steadfast innocence, likely feeling pressured by her contemporary culture’s expectations for literature. On the other hand, Lucilla Finch in Poor Miss Finch, while having a few Blind Angel characteristics, defies the trope more so than ascribes to it. She herself is discriminatory, forthrightly sexual, and by all means typical. Compared to both, Daredevil deflects the trope in every instance, focusing more on creating controversial narratives on ethics.
If you have watched any number of Hallmark-esque movies that aim to warm the heart and inspire self-reflection, there is a good chance that you have come across a character whose main features of interest are their blind eyes and childlike spirit.
Let's imagine she's a little girl or a sage old woman. She notices the sighted protagonist’s true feelings before they can themselves. She listens to the protagonist’s troubles and, before she even opens her mouth to provide some wisdom, you already have the feeling that their issue is nowhere nearly as drastic as the lady’s blindness. Yet, thanks to her blindness, her heart is pure and unburdened by the weight of the world, and she carries her burden of blindness with graceful ease. Although her life is so different from the norm, she is happy, and that makes you happy too.
This is just one character that has reappeared countless times across literature and media with slight variation through the centuries. But what does the prevalence of this character say about sighted society? What if the story was written by actually blind and visually impaired authors? What would happen if another story was told about a blind character who was not a saint but struggled with inner demons and made “unholy” choices? Are there any examples of the trope that are actually good?
By looking closely at Helen Keller, Lucilla Finch, and Matt Murdock, we get some fictional and autobiographical case examples of how mainstream society’s toleration of the visually impaired are represented and subverted through this saintly archetype.
(Note that I will not delve into the Blind Seer or Infantilized Cripple archetypes; although there are numerous instances where they overlap, they deserve their own explorations.)
What is a "Blind Angel?"
But first, what exactly is the “Blind Angel” trope?
In my words, it is a character archetype in literature and media that represents as a person – almost always a female – whose visual impairment is contrasted and/or complimented by her extraordinary perfection. She is virtuous, wise, altruistic, innocent, chaste, and always cheerful.
All tropes and archetypes serve as a package; the means of unwrapping deeper ideas and exploring thought experiments. However, the ideas exploited via the Blind Angel have historically carried harmful misunderstandings, even if the misunderstanding is affirming in intention.
The “’good’ [O]ther becomes the positive stereotype,” having an “infallible correctness” that serves to contrast with the “flawed image of the self” (Gilman 20). The Blind Angel trope is a positive stereotype that says more about the sighted population than the blind due to how gravely the sighted miscomprehend them.
...the Bling Angel trope is a positive stereotype that says more about the sighted population than the blind and visually impaired due to how gravely the sighted miscomprehend them.
ID: "The Blind Beggar" by Josephus Laurentius Dyckmans. 1852. Outside a church, an elderly man in plain, dark clothes holds a cane and hat turned up to receive alms. On his left arm, a girl in a green dress seems to lead him to a spot of sunshine. Some onlookers stare or avert their gaze from the shadows nearby.
But why must this archetype surround a character who is perfect?
For centuries, nondisabled mainstream society has classified the blind life as one not worth living, a step closer to death, and an existence wasted on beggary and ignorance. If the blind also deal with inner conflict, pain, emotional disorders, or additional otherizing issues, such a life appears completely irredeemable. The only way the blind life is redeemable is if the individual is otherwise perfect aside from their disability. The blind life makes the sighted sad. But by being cheerful and unstained from the darkness that supposedly surrounds her, the Blind Angel relieves the watching world of its tension and melancholy.
Yet, pity remains.
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
IDs: On the left, a First Edition copy cover. The Story of My Life. Helen Keller. With Her Letters And A Supplemental Account of Her Education. 1903. The Cover is green cloth with gold lettering with an inlaid photograph of Helen with Ms. Sullivan and a man. Helen holds Sullivan's hand while examining Sullivan's face with her fingers.
On the right, a photograph of Helen as a youngish adult. She sits wearing a fine pale blouse, sniffing a vase of roses with a pleased expression. In her lap sits a large braille book.
Bolt, an expert on disability studies, details the rise of life writing from the visually impaired:
However, at various junctures throughout the history of literature the blind voice is articulated, these interspersed lone voices find more collective expression, and build towards a chorus towards the twentieth century, where a number of highly personal and affecting autobiographical accounts of blindness and the process of becoming blind are offered. These voices include Helen Keller's The Story of My Life (1903) … which portray the inner world of a deaf-blind girl.
This context introduces Helen Keller’s works as some of the first and leading pieces of life writing by the blind, taking the blind narrative back from the hands of the sighted. However, I argue that Keller’s The Story of My Life is still under the control of mainstream sighted society by how much Keller depicts her growing up years with idyllic rosiness. When looking closely at Keller’s 1903 autobiography, and comparing it to current blind critics, we see how a real-life person can be – or at the least, profess to be – an example of the Blind Angel.
Throughout the chapters detailing her childhood years, Helen depicts her days with flowery prose. She describes the indescribable when giving accounts for her pre-linguistic life, her learning life, and her academic life, even calling her early self “Phantom.” Although she characterizes this period by inner darkness, ignorance, and lovelessness, she still carries it by prosaic narration, interspersed with nostalgic recollections of her life-long love for nature. This style of writing is heavily reminiscent of the American Romanticism popular at the time, which gives me the idea that Helen was selling to her readers a story as much as sharing her memories. Helen, perhaps knowing that her Victorian audience would not have likely taken well to a morally ambiguous self-account, passed her memories through the filter of the Blind Angel and even played into it. Since “biographical treatments of blind figures simply reproduce the conventional imaginary of the blind by the sighted,” it is not impossible that the same extends to the autobiographical (Bolt). When sighted readers come across “portrayals of blindness by blind writers,” much dissonance and confusion result (Bolt). Likely having to choose between being perceived as a “poor blind child” or an “angel,” Helen had no fair option but to choose the latter.
Aside from her famous journey to academic enlightenment, the one conflict the angel faced was a plagiarism scandal.
Around 11 years of age, Helen wrote a story for her friend, who in turn had it published in the school newspaper. However, the story was cited for plagiarism, and a serious investigation by the Perkins Institution council followed. In what could be said to be young Helen’s greatest battle, Helen withstood the adults’ sharp and harrowing questions with demure and frightened compliance. They asked her where her story came from, whether she remembered having read the original before, if Anne Sullivan was behind it, and how Helen knew the difference between recollection and original thought. “These are questions for psychologists, neurologists, and philosophers, not … even one as eager to please as” Helen (Kleege 12). It is more likely that Helen was behaving like a shocked child would, being only able to speak “in monosyllables” and wait for the inquisition to be over (Keller 27). However, some criticize her for being a people-pleaser who shelved her right to ambiguity and capability of creative thought in favor of polite answers to harsh questions, rolling over to show her belly and “answering everything they threw … until they were satisfied” (Kleege 12).
Kleege, a visually impaired professor and writer, is not alone in her bafflement and resentment towards Helen Keller as a paragon of innocence and virtue; a legend of gratefulness and positivity that perhaps ended up causing more problems for the deaf and blind communities than advancement. As Kleege confesses in a hypothetical letter to Helen, “I hated you because you were always held up to me as a role model, and one who set such an impossibly high standard of cheerfulness in the face of adversity … many disabled people think you did our cause a lot of harm” (Kleege 1).
Looking back on Helen’s life accounts, Kleege wishes for nothing more than to know the complicated, real, and unfiltered life of Helen Keller, especially her childhood:
I knew that if I bent down to touch you, you would catch hold of my hand. Your touch would not be gentle. You would smear your hand around my face to check if I was someone you knew. You would pat my pockets, looking for candy. Finding none, you might thrust my hand away, slapping me, kicking at my legs with your calloused heels. Then you would scramble away from me, scoot backward into the darkness. That was the child I went there to find, not the “lovely child” of the photographs, the paragon of cheerfulness and industry. In your adult writings when you attempted to re-create your pre-linguistic experiences, you called that child “Phantom.” I wish you’d found a different name. Phantom is too ghostly, too wispy, when my sense of that child is solidly corporeal, a dense tangle of physical needs and desires (5).
Kleege wishes that, if Helen was indeed as human as everyone else, then she should have written with the honest, messy, and uncomfortable details that a real life contains. Unfortunately, we will likely never know the deeper, imperfect, and significant musings of the Blind Angel.
Lucilla Finch, Poor Miss Finch
ID: A contemporary cover for Poor Miss Finch. It reads: Poor Miss Finch. A Novel. By Wilkie Collins, author of "The Woman In White," "No Name," "Man And Wife," etc., etc. In Three Volumes. Vol 1. London: Richard Bentley and Son. 1872. (All Rights Reserved.)
... if she was not there to be a cautionary tale, she was there to be an angel; either way, the disabled female was the image of pity.
We meet in Wilkie Collins’ 1872 novel Poor Miss Finch a young adult Lucilla Finch, and watch how her plot to marry her love dramatically conflicts with the secret plot of the twin brothers to trick her, each with a secret plot to trick the other.
Collins’ personal fascination with disability led him to write several works containing disabled women and, for his time, create realistic and relatively affirming portrayals of disability in Victorian era literature. Lucilla Finch is an outspoken woman who finds a happy ending in the married motherhood she always desired. Still, while “Collins subscribes to conventional, sentimentalized views of bodily ‘affliction,’ … he never pathologizes a disabled woman's entry, through marriage and motherhood, into the definitionally anti-exotic realms of domestic life’,” a life which blind women were not presumed to enter (Holmes 61).
Generally disabled female characters in Victorian era literature dwelled “on the margins of the plot” and existed “to generate emotion and moral development in others by being innocent and saintly, surprisingly cheerful, … or simply by being disabled, without any of these other conditions’ (Holmes 60-1). In other words, if she was not there to be a cautionary tale, she was there to be an angel; either way, the disabled female was the image of pity.
While it is tempting for post-modern readers to resent Lucilla’s self-realization through domesticity, we must maintain Collins’ work in its cultural context. We must acknowledge how “Lucilla Finch not only challenged the assumption that disabled (particularly blind) women do not marry, but also threatened” the emerging concept of able-centered eugenics, which claimed that those with disabilities should not procreate (Holmes 62). So, while Lucilla Finch plays into the modern concept of Blind Angel, she also defies it in numerous ways.
Firstly, let us regard Lucilla’s conventional Blind Angel aspects. When reading Poor Miss Finch, we are frequently reminded by the sighted narrator Madame Pratolungo how sympathy, childlikeness, and loveliness are Lucilla’s most noticeable characteristics aside from her blind eyes. Lucilla’s angelic nature is alluded to when the two characters meet and Pratolungo is “irresistibly reminded of the gem of that superb collection—the matchless Virgin of Raphael, called ‘The Madonna di San Sisto’” (Collins 13). Lucilla’s gender, physical beauty, graceful manner, and innocent nature all lend to her image as a non-normative character built for eliciting awe and sympathy, from narrator and reader alike.
Hoffer draws from historical perspectives to explain how deeply the cultural roots of this attitude of sympathy run:
Sharon Marcus notes that “Victorians accepted friendship between women because they believed it cultivated the feminine virtues of sympathy and altruism that made women into good helpmates” (26). Essentially a salaried friend serving as a helpmate for another woman, the paid companion was expected to provide the sympathy Victorians supposed to be organic to female friendships; … depictions of the mistress companion dynamic throughout the fiction … emphasize the centrality of sympathy to the mistress / companion relationship. (80)
Put otherwise, sympathy and pity were deemed core characteristics of feminine friendships and business interactions. When Lucilla weeps over her social troubles, her hired companion shares in her misery as both friend and caretaker. Pratolungo describes her feelings when Lucilla’s tears “dropped from those poor sightless eyes on my cheek. . . . The sweet girl! How you would have pitied her—how you would have loved her!” (Collins 79). This pity for such a sweet and blind character is incentive for the reader to draw near, which stands in opposition to the archetype of the “blind beggar,” pity for whom tends to repel more so than attract, both in real life and in literature. And whether life imitates art or art imitates life, who can say.
ID: A close-up of the painting "La Madonna di San Sisto" by Rafael. 1513. A young, fair woman in flowing clothes and headscarf gazes to the viewer with wide yet placid eyes. In her arms, she holds Christ as a toddler, who holds the same expression. Behind their heads are faint circles, signifying halos for holiness.
The Blind Angel, for all her virtues, is never “one of us,” yet Lucilla defies this label by being normal first and blind second.
But otherwise, Lucilla tends to defy the Blind Angel expectation more significantly than she ascribes to it, being at many times more childish than childlike.
Firstly, while Pratolungo is met by the face of a Madonna, the “pretty tableau of a spiritualized, dependent blind woman is interrupted posthaste, however” (Holmes 74). Lucilla notices Pratolungo’s dark colored dress, recoils from her, and scolds her for her disturbing fashion choices. With this unexpected interaction, “[T]he ‘innocent, afflicted creature,’” is “not just the pristine object of seeing eyes,” but becomes one who objectifies others in turn (Holmes 74). The Blind Angel is physically and morally incapable of judging others for their appearances, and yet Lucilla has no qualms doing so.
A second way Lucilla contradicts her angelic qualities is in her expressive sexuality, being one of her most striking personality traits and is something most if not all Blind Angels lack (Holmes 74). Blind Angels dwell in the margins of a plot, serving to assist the protagonist in their love exploits. But "[I[nstead of her blindness making her nervous” Pratolungo points out, “[I]t made her fearless" (Collins 37). In this novel, the titular character sits at the center of events and puts in the work for the romantic relationship she wants.
Thirdly, even considering all this, it is Lucilla’s conventionality, not her bossiness and sexuality, that is most notable about how Collins writes his disabled heroines (Holmes 77). Taking a look at the bigger picture of Lucilla Finch, we see aspects more closely matching typical Victorian heroines. Lucilla is pretty, clever, sentimental, and from a privileged background, if not an even higher background than most of her counterparts in the novel. The Blind Angel, for all her virtues, is never “one of us,” yet Lucilla defies this label by being normal first and blind second.
Matthew Murdock, Daredevil
IDs: On the left, a poster for Netflix's live-action Daredevil, staring Charlie Cox. Matt Murdock, a thirties-aged white man, stands alone in a city alley in slightly disheveled business formal. He wears round, red glasses and grips a white cane in bloodied knuckles.
On the right, a comicbook cover for Daredevil. Daredevil stands before a city backdrop, a flock of pigeons filling the sky. He forms an X with bloodied hands as sound rings like sonar or halos circle him. The only colors are greyscale and his red suit.
But how do sighted audiences react when a character subverts the Blind Angel trope entirely?
Let me enter into the ring Matthew Murdock, a.ka. Daredevil from the Marvel comic universe. Created by Stan Lee and Bill Everett, Daredevil has been a fan favorite since his comic book debut in 1964. Mainly famous for his contrasting characteristics -- edginess and morality, darkness and hope, blindness and heightened senses -- he has been the topic for hot debate among critics and fans in the realms of ethics and disability alike.
On the subject of disability, many purport that Murdock should not be claimed by the blind community due to the extraordinary nature of his extra-sensorial powers, and how he is a common and unfair comparison used by the sighted community. Is Murdock technically blind? Yes. Is he disabled? No. While he can sense if someone is lying by listening to their heartbeat, "[H]e’d fail an eye exam miserably and the state of New York will never issue him a driver’s license" (Hanefalk). As to whether his abilities and inabilities cancel each other, the jury is still out. But this article is not dedicated to proving or disproving Murdock's blindness; there is already enough discussion out there on this subject, and interrogating an individual's level of sight only perpetuates the sighted populace's tired habit of doubting the blind.
The first reason Daredevil is the antithesis of the Blind Angel is the immediate fact that he faces more severe obstacles than his blindness. Daredevil's life excites readers and viewers, not because of his navigating life blind, but because of his superhero adventures and legal antics. Fighting villains on the backstreets of New York on a nightly basis is no small challenge. By day, he struggles as an attorney, trying and sometimes failing to defend citizens' rights through a broken justice system. If one was not cumbersome, the balancing act of the two is his ongoing cross to bear, both presenting their own dangers and risks to his life. Not the least of his challenges are his mental struggles, which deserve their own section below.
One of Daredevil's ongoing struggles takes the form of doubt, specifically doubt in his own morals and priorities. As one media-literate fan points out, Daredevil's doubtful conflict of interest takes the lead in spurring discussion around controversial topics of ethics:
Daredevil does not hesitate to tackle the questions that are relevant today: Does the greater good precede legality? Should the end justify the means? Is the inherent goodness of an action subjective? ... What do we do when the systems and beliefs we have always believed in begin to fails us? With Matt struggling with his faith in God and the criminal system ... these questions become more relevant as the story progresses. (More Than an Engineer)
Daredevil, seemingly as a matter of course rather than a DEI checkbox, never shies away from hard concepts that ascend beyond disability studies. For example, Daredevil's no-kill rule -- which serves in a philosophical dialogue against more forcible anti-heroes like The Punisher and real-life skeptics -- blows up in his face a time or two. This causes him to question if his self-enforced boundaries will actually leave a sustainable impact on his community. Then, when he takes off his mask and returns to his office to represent a failing case against corrupt higher-ups, he wonders which side of justice takes priority: vigilante justice or systemic justice. Numerous times in the comics and tv show, Murdock fails to show up to a hearing because of his crimefighting, creating rifts between his legal allies, his Daredevil persona, and his Matt Murdock persona. Rather than preach the basic lesson that "blind people are people too," Daredevil presents a self-insert approach to audiences, begging them to ask themselves, "what would I do?"
Likely the greatest internal struggle that haunts Daredevil are his antisocial tendencies, mental health concerns, and staunch imperfection.
His trust issues and deadpan expressions set him opposed to the whimsical, lighthearted angels we have previously encountered. Murdock's trust issues do not exist in an angsty vacuum, however, but pose detrimental consequences on his relationships and goals. Especially in the TV adaptation, Murdock consistently keeps his allies out of the loop regarding his plans when it matters most and the risks are highest, thus burning bridges when they must be built.
Across the comics, Murdock suffers from not just one, but multiple, mental breakdowns and identity crises, even losing himself in so far as losing his memories (Daredevil #284-291). In the comics, he actually steps away from heroism several times and even changes sides of morality (Daredevil, #512). Without much surprise, he also hosts a rap sheet of tumultuous relationships, begun and ended in thanks to his conflicted life as a vigilante.
"Daredevil," in all his iterations and forms, has never sought to illicit the warm fuzzies that sighted audiences crave from Blind Angels. Instead, he has been in "constant search of ambiguous questions for us to answer" because his character "isn’t afraid to make us question the principles we thought we already have established ... using characters and situations that are not only complex but are deeply intimate and relatable" (More Than an Engineer). However classic and even expected such angsty struggles may be for an anti-hero, these circle back to subverting expectations of perfection and innocence.
Since Daredevil is an ongoing character participating in continuously published media, there is no singular pretty bow wrapping up his life forever. New challenges, opponents, and adventures are waiting even now to be released. Thus, in-universe for Murdock, even when the day is saved, it all too often comes at a heavy cost. Allies perish, bridges are burned, and the enemy is defeated, only to reveal a bigger, meaner enemy has been lurking in the wings. "While all of these are happening, we are forced to see the price Matt ... [has] to pay to uphold [his] beliefs, and how [he is] eventually torn apart by it" (More Than an Engineer). While Helen Keller and Lucilla Finch find happy endings through enlightenment and domesticity, Daredevil receives no definite happy ending, foregoing the satisfying simplicity of the trope for complex realism.
Lastly, but perhaps most apparently, Daredevil stands in defiance to the Blind Angel through his thematic imagery. His being a blind lawyer harps on the allegorical figure Lady Justice, who classically wears a blindfold as a shield against bias. As a catholic, he serves as a darkly humorous pun, having "blind faith" amidst civil evil. While Blind Angels tend to have childlike understandings of spiritualism, seemingly being privy to wisdom unobvious to the sighted, Murdock's obtuse interactions with Judeo-Christian iconography border on irreverent: the appropriations of a doubtful man going through the motions. What is more, his devil persona -- whether by personal choice or by in-universe news tabloids -- is a far cry from angelic as can be found. After all, he is not called "The Angel of Hell's Kitchen" for a reason.
As stated earlier, the Blind Angel's life is typically free of any major trials, presumed on the basis that blindness alone is as heavy of a burden to bear as can be. While Daredevil's unique premise and makeup draw readers in, the credit of what keeps fans invested goes to his personal arcs, which flips the trope on its head by making Murdock's personal struggles his main point of interest, rather than his blindness or perfection. As Bolt reminds us, the shock at unsaintly depictions of blindness raises “questions concerning the understanding of ‘blindness,’ and challenge the investments by the sighted in what the blind and vision impaired” actually experience in real life (Bolt). Interestingly, it is precisely Daredevil's imperfection which makes him a fan favorite, signaling -- hopefully -- sighted audience's increasingly positive receptions to morally ambiguous blind characters and more obvious subversions of the Blind Angel trope.
Why Should This Matter?
But why should any of this matter to sighted society? Why should discussions about this trope not be relegated to niche media subspaces and disability studies?
Because the danger of the “single story” – having only one or a small handful of ideas attached to a diverse spectrum of people – is that it robs people of their dignity and emphasizes our differences more than our similarities (Ngozi Adichie). An oft promoted principle by the National Federation of the Blind proclaims that "[T]he real problem of blindness is not the loss of eyesight, but the misunderstanding and lack of information which exist" (Peskoe).
On the one hand, when the visually impaired dare to express unhappiness, the presumption that those with visual impairments are blessed with cheerfulness inevitably leads to discomfort among sighted people, as if blindness and cheerfulness are inextricably linked. If the Social Model of Disability argues that unhappiness is the result of living in a discriminatory society and not because of disability itself, then it follows that happiness is not automatically the direct result of being disabled either (Bolt).
On a similar note, and related to a point made in a previous paragraph, the Blind Angel minimizes space for those with visual impairments to struggle with additional issues, such as multiple disabilities, mental illness, or general internal conflict. While the Blind Angel of fiction is unburdened and untethered to this world, real people with blindness are planted on this marble spinning through space like the rest of us, and the pressure to be carefree only adds to the burden. The Blind Angel may be blind to evil like Lady Justice, but real blind people are not.
Finally, the Blind Angel trope creates a correlation between an individual’s blindness and their achievements, thus downplaying their qualities and successes and relegating them to their otherness (Bolt 26). In her speech on the “danger of the single story,” Nigerian authoress Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shares how her American college roommate was shocked by her competency in normal activities such as speaking English, driving, and using a stove. Similar to the single story sighted people are told about the blind, Americans are told the single story of there being “no possibility of Africans being similar … in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals” (Ngozi Adichie 4:54). While empathy connects humans, it is tropes, condescension, and well-meaning pity that separate.
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