In Chapter 1, Helen uses a metaphor that likens her reluctance to write to a veil that covers her childhood memories:
It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life. I have, as it were, a superstitious hesitation in lifting the veil that clings about my childhood like a golden mist. The task of writing an autobiography is a difficult one.
Here, she confesses her hesitation to lift the metaphorical veil that clings to her childhood. With this metaphor, she conveys the fact that something covers her memories of childhood—namely, reluctance. She does not want to recall the more painful aspects of her youth, nor does she want to misrepresent the events in her life. In service of accomplishing her goals, she minimizes her hardships, (humbly) emphasizes her triumphs, and includes only the most important episodes. Helen often uses meta-discourse, which means that she writes about the process of writing and explores her own interests and challenges in taking on the project of a memoir.
This metaphor also reveals the emotional difficulties of writing a memoir. In the spirit of complete honesty, Helen strives to describe the most crucial aspects of her early life, which include "the illness that deprived [her] of [her] sight and hearing." She garners the reader's respect and reverence with her straightforward honesty both by describing events and crafting her prose carefully. This book contains strong themes of determination and perseverance, and this initial admission of her fear makes the feat of writing and publishing such a high-quality work seem all the more impressive.
At the end of Chapter 2, Helen writes that she and her sister Mildred existed for a while in a "valley of twofold solitude," which is a metaphor for their initial relationship:
Thus it is that when we walk in the valley of twofold solitude we know little of the tender affections that grow out of endearing words and actions and companionship. But afterward, when I was restored to my human heritage, Mildred and I grew into each other’s hearts, so that we were content to go hand-in-hand wherever caprice led us, although she could not understand my finger language, nor I her childish prattle.
This metaphor demonstrates the distance between the two sisters; they walk in a valley together (because they are blood relatives and live in the same household), but they remain in "twofold solitude" because of Helen's jealousy and the fact that her inability to see and hear functions—at first—as an obstacle in their relationship. Helen was extremely jealous of Mildred; she thought of her as an "intruder" and hated that she herself had "ceased to be [her] mother's only darling." Helen even overturns the cradle and admits to lacking the "tender affections" that a sister is supposed to have. However, at the end of the chapter, Helen notes that she was able to exit the "valley" and form a bond with Mildred once she "was restored to [her] human heritage."
This metaphor reinforces the themes of loneliness and isolation that often appear in the first part of the memoir. Helen found it very difficult to communicate with most people until she learned finger-spelling and other methods at the Perkins Institute, but she managed to find a way out of the "valley of solitude" and into a relationship with her sister before she learned those strategies. In the span of a very short paragraph, Helen describes her initial difficulties and subsequent friendship with her sister Mildred. Their familial bond overcomes the seemingly unbridgeable gap between them in their "valley of twofold solitude."
