Sight Unseen: An Encyclopedic Guide to Georgina Kleege's Examination of Blindness

The Evolution of Blind Identity and the Impact of Nomenclature

Georgina Kleege asserts that the process of writing this book effectively "made her blind." This does not refer to physical deterioration during the writing process, but rather a profound shift in her self-identification and understanding of her condition. Diagnosed at the age of $11$, she spent decades using imprecise euphemisms such as "partially sighted" or "visually impaired." Only through this project did she adopt the white cane, learn Braille, and fully embrace the word "blind."

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Kleege critiques the social pressure to use "verbal smiley faces" on conditions that deviate from the norm, such as "differently abled" or "handicapable." She rejects terms like "low vision" (which she notes sounds too similar to the prison slang term "short eyes" for child molesters) or "partially sighted." For Kleege, "blind" is a simple, unmodified adjective that constitutes her reality. She observes that the modern legal definition is arbitrary, established by the American Medical Association in $1934$ and adopted by the Social Security Act of $1935$. Legal blindness is defined as having visual acuity of $20/200$ or less, or a visual field of $20$ degrees or less in the better eye with correction. This definition measures only two aspects of sight and ignores how an individual utilizes residual vision.

The Phenomenology of Vision and Macular Degeneration

Kleege provides an exhaustive look into the visual experience of macular degeneration. The macula is the central region of the retina, approximately $5\,mm$ in diameter, densely packed with cone cells responsible for fine detail. In Kleege’s case, these cells did not regenerate, leaving her with a large central "blind spot" or scotoma. She notes that the common perception of blindness as "total darkness" is true for only about $10\%$ of the legally blind. For the rest, vision involves light, color, motion, and form, but lack of central detail.

When staring at a blank wall, Kleege does not see a black hole but rather an irregularly shaped, throbbing blotch of deep blue-violet or teal green. This area is filled with pulsating white, yellow, or violet flecks. She describes her central vision as a "jellyfish" that precedes her, erasing whatever she looks at directly. To see a card on her desk, she must look at the coffee mug behind it; to see a cat, she scans its periphery. She describes the phenomenon as a "swirling, spiral motion" around a central vortex, where objects appear to dissolve into the air or shimmer like the feed of a court witness whose face is obscured by moving squares on a television screen.

Cinematic Nightmares and Stereotypes of the Blind

Kleege analyzes the representation of blindness in film, noting that filmmakers often treat the blind as a "worst nightmare" because they cannot be dazzled by the medium’s visual artistry. She categorizes movie blind characters into two harmful extremes: the "whiners" who wallow in tragedy and the "mystics" who possess compensatory supernatural powers (the blind seer). Characters like Whistler in Sneakers ($1992$) or Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman ($1992$) reinforce the idea that blindness is an insurmountable barrier to a normal life.

Male blind characters are often portrayed as "castrated" or asexual, while their sexuality is treated as kinky or deviant. In Proof ($1992$), the character Martin is presented as bitter and mistrustful, and his relationship with a sighted woman is portrayed as disturbing and aggressive. Conversely, blind women like Susy in Wait Until Dark ($1967$) or Helena in Jennifer 8 ($1992$) are depicted as hyper-vulnerable, needing sighted men (cops or husbands) to protect them from serial killers. In Blink ($1994$), the restorement of a woman’s sight is linked to her sexual initiation and her transition from a "wanton" blind girl to a one-man woman.

Literary Tropes and the Shadow of Oedipus

Kleege identifies Oedipus as the forefather of all blind representations in literature, where blindness is a self-inflicted punishment for sin, specifically incest. This trope persists in nineteenth-century fiction: in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre ($1847$), Mr. Rochester is blinded as divine retribution for his attempt at bigamy, eventually regaining some sight only after he has been "tamed" by Jane. In Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed ($1900$), Dick Heldar’s blindness punishes the political sin of imperial exploitation.

More complex treatments of blindness appear in works like H.G. Wells’s The Country of the Blind, where a sighted man in a valley of blind residents is viewed as a deformed mutant because the residents have adapted their environment perfectly to sightlessness. D.H. Lawrence’s The Blind Man and Raymond Carver’s Cathedral explore the "intimacy of the touch" where the blind protagonist actually "unsights" or enlightens the sighted rival by forcing him to experience the world through physical contact or closed eyes. In J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians ($1980$), the blind girl is a cipher, her vision described verbatim as a "blur on a window" that the protagonist cannot "decipher."

The Social Mechanics of Eye Contact and Interaction

Eye contact is described as a "mystery" to Kleege. While it is a primary social signal for the sighted, she must fake it to appear "normal." She notes that eye contact produces physiological responses: increased heart rate and brain stem activity. Because of her macular degeneration, she cannot see the eyes of someone sitting across from her; they are decapitated by her blind spot. She jokes that she is a "virtuoso" of deception, aiming her eyes at sounds to mimic focused gazes.

She recounts an anecdote from a tabloid TV show where a mother shot a child molester only after looking him "dead in the eye" to search for remorse. This highlights the weight the sighted put on the gaze as an infallible indicator of the soul. Kleege points out the paradox: while the sighted claim eyes "sparkle" or "glow," scientifically, eyes only reflect light. The "spark" is a trick of lighting as the lids rise. She discusses "gay-dar" and cultural differences, noting that in some Asian cultures, the direct gaze is considered offensive, whereas Westerners use eye contact as a measure of truth and power.

Art, Craft, and the Inheritance of Vision

Kleege reflects on her father, the sculptor James H. Kleege, and her mother, both visual artists. Her father believed drawing was simply a matter of learning to see. He used the mantra "Look. Draw. See" to describe the cycle of revision inherent in the artistic process. Kleege describes her father’s hands as his most distinctive feature—massive and bone-dry, possessing a precision that made his metal sculptures (made of scrap iron and aluminum I-beams) seem like static energy.

Kleege inherited her macular degeneration from her paternal grandmother. Her father originally dismissed her grandmother's blindness as "hypochondria" because she seemed to see "when convenient," such as finding familiar objects while failing to read print. This led Kleege to hide her own struggle from her father for years to avoid being labeled needy or weak. Eventually, her father took up painting in his final years with cancer, producing an abstract work with regular, rectangular slashes of color that Kleege identifies as the most accurate representation of her own scintillating, fragmented vision.

The Technology and Identity of Reading

Kleege examines the varied methods of blind reading: audio recordings, magnification, and Braille. She uses services like the National Library Service ($NLS$) and Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic ($RFB\&D$). She describes the "voices in her head" created by these readers, noting how she can tell when a reader is interested, bored, or indignant. She often identifies with a reader's "slips of the tongue," such as a reader in a Fitzgerald story saying "run 'round" instead of "run around," which Kleege feels captures the social coyness of the era.

Braille is presented not as a language, but as a "tactile code." It consists of a six-dot cell. Kleege recounts the thrill of reading her first words ($Abe$, $Ada$, $cabbage$, $baggage$) and how she eventually reached a "state of serenity" reading Jane Austen's Emma. She learned Braille at the Hadley School for the Blind. She visited the birthplace of Louis Braille in Coupvray, France, where she reflects on the history of the code. Louis Braille based his code on Charles Barbier's military "night writing" system. Braille’s innovation was reducing the cell to six dots and making it accessible for children to write as well as read. Kleege notes that braille was historically suppressed by the sighted because it gave the blind a secret, unmediated form of communication.

Experience vs. Compensation and Final Reflections

Kleege concludes that the belief that sight is the primary and virtuous way to live is a cultural construct. She mentions the "hysterical blindness" she experienced as a teenager while playing Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker, an event that revealed her deep-seated anger at the sanitized, "good-girl" image of Helen Keller. Ultimately, Kleege argues that reading Braille has given her a sense of autonomy and identity that print reading (with its associated pain and eyestrain) and audio listening (with its mediated voices) could not. She suggests that when everyone closes their eyes, the divide between the blind and the sighted finally disappears.