The Reappeared Archive: Where Helen Sits– Disability & Silence in 1893

About the Series: The Reappeared Archive is where we bring lost texts back into the light — voices silenced by time, stigma, or circumstance. In keeping with our mission to explore the intersections of literature, trauma, and healing, this series resurrects writings that wrestle with embodiment, illness, recovery, or the search for meaning in the midst of pain.
These are not always published authors. Sometimes they are anonymous. Sometimes their words were never meant to be seen. And yet — they speak to us, across time.

Where Helen Sits (Excerpted)

First published in Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1893

Poem by Laura E. Richards

Where Helen sits, the darkness is so deep,
No golden sunbeam strikes athwart the gloom...
Yet the clear whiteness of her radiant soul
Decks the dim walls, like angel vestments shed...

Richards, Laura E. "Where Helen Sits." The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, June 1893. Courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library. Accessed April 18th, 2025. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39076000391941&seq=190

Laura E. Richards, writing in Century Illustrated Magazine in 1893, dedicates this poem to a young Helen Keller, described in a footnote simply as: “Helen Keller, deaf, dumb, and blind.” The poem offers a poignant vision of a child surrounded by silence and shadow — but filled, in the poet’s eyes, with transcendent inner light.

Yet for all its tenderness, the poem also reveals a powerful Victorian idealization of disability: Helen is rendered not quite human, but ethereal — a “radiant soul,” a “holy innocence,” a figure whose inner purity compensates for, and even sanctifies, her physical isolation.

Where others might describe a schoolroom or home, Richards describes a shrine. Helen’s physical stillness becomes symbolic — not of suffering, but of serenity. There is no sound, no sun, no smile — and yet, this deprivation is spiritualized. “Love and Beauty,” she writes, “sing as the stars of Eden’s morning sung.”

This is a powerful reversal of common 19th-century pity narratives about disability. But it also participates in a literary tradition that treats disabled children as symbols more than subjects — more angel than girl.

This poem invites a meditation on how we frame disabled experience:

• When does admiration become erasure?

• How do we tell stories of disability that honor complexity rather than purity?

• Who gets to narrate the silence — and what happens when we fill it with metaphor?

Today, Helen Keller is remembered as an activist, writer, and political radical — not simply a girl in silence, but a woman who made noise. Where Helen Sits is thus not just a tribute — it’s a reminder of how cultural narratives can elevate or limit, depending on who tells them.

Archival Source:

Title: Where Helen Sits
Author: Laura E. Richards
Published in: Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1893
Available at: Selected library archives and collections with historical periodicals
Primary Text Source: Transcription shared from public domain poem, with attribution to the original publication context.

✍️ Let This Be a Prompt:

• Write a poem that centers silence without sanctifying it.

• Compose a response from Helen Keller — the activist, the thinker, the woman — to this poetic portrayal.

• Reflect on how metaphor has shaped your understanding of the body, ability, or isolation.