Helen breaks her doll in frustration when Anne Sullivan is trying to teach her language. At this point in her education, Helen understands words that are finger-spelled into her palm, but she cannot grasp that a single word can refer to more than one object. In particular, she can’t understand that the word “doll” might refer to all dolls, not just one. Her teacher repeatedly tries to make Helen understand this; eventually, in a fit of temper, Helen throws her doll onto the floor and breaks it. She writes that she "was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet.” Later, when Anne is successful in making Helen understand that “everything has a name,” by holding her hand under a stream of water and spelling the word “water” into her palm, Helen realizes what she has done in breaking the doll: “for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.”
Helen's Aunt Ev makes her a towel doll before Helen embarks upon her trip, a journey that will culminate in a famous, life-changing meeting with Alexander Graham Bell. The doll is hastily made and improvised. Naturally, it doesn't have the features one would expect to find in a toy store doll. But it is one particular feature of the doll that's important: its lack of eyes. Even though she is blind, Helen already understands how important a pair of eyes can be to someone's identity, and she wants this to be reflected in her toy doll. So Aunt Ev sews on a couple of buttons for the doll's eyes. After she does this, however, Helen completely loses interest in the doll. She has made her point. It wasn't so much that she wanted a doll with eyes; it's that she wanted to communicate a relatively sophisticated concept, something she seldom gets the chance to do before Annie Sullivan enters her life.
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