The Miracle Worker

The "miracle" in The Miracle Worker occurs when Sullivan and Keller are at the water pump refilling a pitcher. It is at this moment that Keller makes the intellectual connection between the word Sullivan spells into her hand and the tangible substance splashing from the pump. Keller demonstrates her understanding by miraculously whispering "wah-wah", the baby talk or gibberish equivalent of "water".

Many have questioned the reality of this depiction, as Keller had not uttered a single vowel in the course of the film, and, as an apparently prelingually deaf and blind child, would not have been aware of the existence of verbal communication. Although the moment of comprehension is the most satisfying scene in the film, it was designed for hearing audiences. A hearing audience would not be expected to fully relate to the importance of the moment by seeing Keller merely spell the word, which would require an understanding of the manual alphabet. Keller mimics the words Sullivan spells into her hand throughout the film by spelling them back in Sullivan's hand, so at this moment it would only seem that Keller was continuing to mimic without understanding the concept. To bridge that problem, the film's writer and director had actress Patty Duke (and others who portrayed Keller in subsequent remakes of the film) speak the word "wah-wah" while she fingerspelled "water". The moment of revelation thus becomes clear for hearing audiences, but has been criticized for setting unrealistic expectations for deaf children to "be like Helen Keller" and speak, when even the most gifted deaf child realistically takes years to utter a comprehensible syllable and a lifetime of speech therapy to maintain the ability. Keller herself never spoke with complete clarity although she practiced daily from her tenth year.

Nevertheless, according to Keller's own account in The Story Of My Life, she was not actually just a little baby when she experienced the illness that destroyed her sight and hearing; she was a year and a half old, at a developmental stage where she understood what was said to her and she had a small spoken vocabulary, including "How d'ye," "tea, tea, tea," and "water", which she in fact pronounced "wah-wah". She continued to say "wah-wah" long after becoming deaf; she describes it as the one word she kept, while substituting a large vocabulary of signs for everything else she wanted to say. She not only remembered that speech existed, but she constantly put her hands over others' mouths as they were talking and attempted to talk as well. This is depicted accurately in the play. Like Laura Bridgman, she did have that year and a half of developmental "normalcy", and it is not unreasonable to assume that this is one reason "water" was the first spelled word that gave her the understanding that the symbol and the water itself were meant to be linked.