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ОглавлениеReading Victorian Deafness
Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture
Jennifer Esmail
ohio university press athens
For my grandparents, Joan and Lauri Kangas
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful for the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Department of English at Queen’s University; the Department of English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto; and the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. I am also thankful for the assistance of Alex Stagg and Dominic Stiles at the Library of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf; Peter Jackson, from the British Deaf History Society; and Judy Yaeger Jones.
It has been a pleasure to work with Kevin Haworth, Joseph McLaughlin, and Nancy Basmajian at Ohio University Press, and I appreciate their thoughtful engagement with my work. I am also very much indebted to the anonymous readers of the manuscript. Some of the material in chapter 1 appeared in Victorian Poetry 49, no. 4 (2011) and Sign Language Studies 8, no. 4 (2008). A portion of chapter 2 appeared in ELH: English Literary History 78, no. 4 (2011). Thanks are due to these publishers for permission to reprint this material.
I am enormously grateful to Laura Murray, Maggie Berg, and Kate Flint for their insight, advice, and support throughout the writing of this book. I would also like to thank D.M.R. Bentley, Jason Camlot, Mary Wilson Carpenter, Lennard Davis, Cathy Harland, Elizabeth Hanson, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Christopher Keep, and Vanessa Warne, who have always been generous with their time, expertise, and encouragement. I feel so fortunate to have a circle of colleagues who have kindly provided feedback, support, and, most importantly, friendship, throughout this project: Lindsey Banco, Veronica Blackbourn, Jason Boulet, Karen Bourrier, Gregory Brophy, Laura Cardiff, Constance Crompton, Cheryl Cundell, Heather Emmens, Alan Galey, Eddy Kent, Jenny Kerber, Sarah Krotz, Tara MacDonald, Daniel Martin, Sara Mueller, Vanessa Oliver, Dana Olwan, and Emily Simmons. Extra appreciation is due Fiona Coll, whose thoughtfulness and insight have helped shape this work. I also appreciate the support of Vikki Cartwright and the Esmail, Kangas, and Carlson families. Finally, I am deeply thankful to Eric Carlson, who has enriched both this book and my life beyond measure.
Introduction
In a series of paintings made between 1883 and 1900, Scottish painter William Agnew recorded a conversation between a hearing person and a deaf person that took place in signs. The deaf woman, Elizabeth Tuffield, lying in her sickbed, is the daughter of a postmaster on the Isle of Wight. The hearing woman offering comfort and signed conversation to the invalid is Queen Victoria. This moment of “Royal Condescension,” as some versions of the painting are titled, not only depicts a unique conversation between a monarch, known for her fingerspelling fluency, and one of her poor and ill subjects but also allows us a rare glimpse into the visual language of deaf Victorians (figure I.1).1The Queen’s “condescension” involved her willingness to use her hands to communicate, rather than expect Tuffield to use spoken or written English. Indeed, Queen Victoria insisted on accommodating Tuffield’s linguistic orientation; as a deaf periodical noted in 1898, the Queen always “talk[ed] to [Tuffield] in our language, ‘never allowing anyone to interpret for her.’”2Furthermore, Agnew’s paintings of Victoria signing, one of which won a prize at the 1890 Edinburgh exhibition and was displayed at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, were simultaneously aesthetic and political statements because Agnew, like Tuffield, was deaf and communicated through signs. His preference for signing, and, indeed, even the Queen’s own use of signs, was controversial because over the course of the nineteenth century, deaf people faced extraordinary cultural pressure to relinquish signing for speaking in English. It was during Victoria’s reign that “oralism,” a widespread movement to force deaf people to speak and lip-read instead of sign, burgeoned and became extremely influential in deaf life. Created in the midst of this cultural battle over deaf language use, Agnew’s paintings were artistic validations of the linguistic preferences and rights of deaf signers. If signing on the fingers was suitable for the Queen of England, then it was certainly a mode of communication fit for her deaf subjects.
The Queen’s willingness to engage in dactylogical communication irked those hearing doctors, educators, and parents of deaf children who were proponents of oralism.3Despite the almost unanimous opposition of deaf communities, oralists aimed to entirely eradicate signed languages by mobilizing various strategies, including establishing speech-based schools, lobbying governments for educational reform, and deriding signed languages in public forums. As this book will demonstrate, oralists charged signed languages with being primitive, with being rooted in iconicity and materiality, with lacking intellectual and linguistic rigor, and with isolating deaf people from the society of hearing people. While one key oralist goal was to institute speech-focused education for deaf children, the oralists’ wider desire to efface the linguistic, sensory, and cultural differences of deaf Britons exceeded the strictly pedagogical. That the century-long oralist program has been called a form of cultural “genocide” reflects the threat that the eradication of signed languages posed to deaf people who, instead of understanding their sensory and linguistic difference as a problem, often expressed pride in their language of signs.4
The moment captured in Agnew’s painting belies the oralist construction of sign’s inferiority to speech and instead aligns signing with the status and sophistication of royalty. The delight taken in Agnew’s paintings by deaf communities both in the late nineteenth century and today resides largely in their endorsement of sign language. As a prominent and vehement opponent of oralism, Agnew argued that oralists, who were almost exclusively hearing, “‘do not know what we deaf folks know of the people they deal with, and we must try to open their eyes as well as enlighten the public.’”5Agnew and his Scottish deaf contemporaries, then, used the attention Agnew’s paintings received from hearing people to promote their vision of deaf communication and education—a vision centered on the visual language of signs. For example, in addition to being showcased and celebrated at the Edinburgh exhibition, the 1889 version of “Royal Condescension” was exhibited to Queen Victoria, after which she agreed to patronize Agnew’s building fund for the Glasgow Institute for the Deaf and Dumb, where signs were used in the classroom.6Agnew used his considerable artistic and administrative talents, then, to resist oralism, promote a deaf perspective on signed languages, and establish an institutional space for deaf self-determination.
Reading Victorian Deafness traces the cultural conditions that led to oralism’s overwhelming success in Victorian Britain. By the mid-nineteenth century, deaf people (whose literacy had been increasing, who had been teaching other deaf people in schools, and who had been standardizing and spreading the use of signed languages for a century) were prevented from continuing their efforts at political and social independence. By the turn of the century, signed languages were outlawed in many deaf schools, deaf communities were being dissolved, and signed languages were being disparaged as inferior forms of communication. Oralism was much more than a pedagogical movement, and this book addresses both its broader cultural influences and its social import. I move beyond the schoolroom to attend to widespread Victorian conceptions of both disability and language. Victorians understood signed languages in multiple, and often contradictory, ways: as objects of fascination and revulsion, as having scientific import and literary interest, and as being both a unique mode of human communication and an apparent vestige of our bestial heritage. This book argues that deaf people’s marginalization in the nineteenth century was, in part, attributable to Victorian misunderstandings not only of signed languages but also of the concept of “language” altogether. Language was an overdetermined category for the Victorians, who used it to define notions of Britishness, normalcy, and the human; when definitions of language are invested with such cultural power, their expansiveness has important consequences. Unfortunately, as I argue, “language” was consistently and narrowly constructed as a product of the voice in a wide range of Victorian disciplines. While this approach to language is not limited to the Victorians—Lennard Davis has argued that “one of the foundational ableist myths of our society [is that] the norm for humans is to speak and hear”7—it was during the nineteenth century that definitions of language and the human—and the important relationship between the two—were under extraordinary pressure and subject to redefinition in the service of Victorian Britain’s various national and ideological projects, including imperial, scientific, and technological endeavors. This book, then, illuminates the cultural factors that contributed to the Victorian movement that sought to limit the modes of human language in favor of an insistence that everyone, hearing and deaf, should speak.
In addition to closely examining Victorian understandings of signed languages, this book focuses on two related topics: Victorian cultural constructions of deafness and the lived experiences and self-representations of deaf Victorians. By weaving these three threads through the following five chapters, this book creates a comprehensive account of Victorian deafness that reveals central Victorian beliefs about language and its relationship to human ability. Reading Victorian Deafness, then, uses an exploration of the Victorian controversy over sign language to illuminate wider Victorian cultural developments and debates that regularly hinged on definitions of human language: changes to literary genres and models of authorship, imperialism and colonialism, eugenics, the nature and origins of language, the species question in the age of evolutionary thought, nationalism, the “woman question,” and institutional developments in social welfare and education. In these disparate areas, Victorian ideas about the parameters of both language and the human were subject to constant scrutiny and contestation in the face of new developments in medical, scientific, philological, technological, and cultural knowledge.
In this historical moment when categories of both language and the human body were epistemologically vulnerable, deaf people’s language use became increasingly important in establishing the parameters of human language use and, by virtue of that, the human itself. As I argue in the chapters that follow, deaf people were used as imagined limit cases and as material test subjects as part of the Victorian process of understanding the scope and dimensions of human language use. Indeed, Reading Victorian Deafness argues that the very specific marginal position of deaf people in Victorian culture—that is, their sensory and linguistic difference—meant that they afforded Victorians an important imaginative space for interrogating ideas about the connection between the body and language, including the fraught question of the materiality of language. One of this book’s central contentions is that thinking through deafness was a consistent rhetorical practice that spanned a wide range of Victorian discursive fields interested in human language use.
A principal thread of this book’s interrogation of the Victorian understanding of the relationship between language and the body, including, more specifically, the connection between language use and constructions of disability, is focused on literature. Literary texts from a range of genres, including poetry, fiction, and life writing, are deployed in the five chapters of Reading Victorian Deafness to investigate how they textualize both deafness and signed languages. The somewhat discordant relationship between signing and writing, which springs from a range of causes including the basic fact that signed languages have no written equivalent, reveals important dimensions of Victorian beliefs about what it means to be deaf, to not speak, and even to write literature.8Indeed, I argue that attending to how deafness and signed languages are represented in fiction or poetry provides a unique lens through which to understand generic practices that may be taken for granted by literary critics. For instance, Charles Dickens’s and Wilkie Collins’s constructions of silent deaf heroines highlight what I suggest (in chapter 2) is a pervasive Victorian imagining of the novel as a transcription of orality. Furthermore, deaf people’s own literary production often contains aesthetic meditations on their unique relationship to English writing as nonspeakers. For example, deaf British writer and missionary John Kitto includes tightly rhymed and regularly metered poetry in his book The Lost Senses immediately following his declaration that deaf people, including himself, are incapable of writing poetry.
Inherent in my attention to literature as both a product of and a challenge to Victorian cultural beliefs about language and human ability is an interrogation of Victorian perceptions about the triangulated relationship between speech, writing, and sign. Various contemporary critics of Victorian literature have attended to the role of “voice” in Victorian literature or the contradictions of the perceived relationship between speech and writing.9Reading Victorian Deafness augments this critical attention to the dyad of speech and writing by attending to the third mode of human language use that has hitherto been ignored. My focus on signed languages creates a lens through which to interrogate Victorian ideas about language that may be taken for granted when the signer’s perspective is overlooked. For instance, a critical attention to sign language reveals the untenability of the belief that speech and writing are bound inextricably. That is, a deaf person who does not speak can still write in English, and this use of visual language without recourse to oral/aural language troubles many Victorian (and, indeed, contemporary) beliefs about what language is, what language does, and the mutual interdependence of speech and writing.10
Reading Victorian Deafness also contributes to the broad and growing concern with the Victorian sensorium, including the expansive body of scholarship on Victorian visual culture and, more recently, the increasing critical interest in Victorian touch, taste, smell, and hearing.11In all of these critical endeavors, scholars have attempted to illuminate Victorian conceptions of the relationship between the subject, the body, and the world by attending to how sensory experience bridges these entities. Victorians interested in medicine, education, psychology, and literature were all intently drawn to tracing how the senses mediated an experience of the world, which they often articulated through using examples of sensory disability. For instance, Laura Bridgman, the deaf-blind American woman who was reportedly the most famous woman in the world after Queen Victoria in the mid-Victorian period,12was a frequent subject for biomedical, educational, and philosophical musing and experimentation. In the realm of fiction, Wilkie Collins used a blind character in Poor Miss Finch and a deaf character in Hide and Seek to meditate on the psychological, philosophical, and social consequences of sensory difference. Considering how Victorians understood the senses, including the vast continuum of sensory difference, permits new insights into Victorian approaches to larger questions about subjectivity, body-mind dualism, and human existence. In particular, Reading Victorian Deafness is in conversation with the recent and burgeoning scholarship in Victorian sound studies, a field that is formulating a way to understand the Victorian soundscape. By situating my study of Victorian deafness within this emerging critical paradigm of Victorian sound studies, I offer a new, and necessary, perspective on how Victorians understood what it meant to hear and not to hear.
While my reference to “not hearing” seems to frame deafness as a lack, this book follows the practice of most of the deaf Victorians it describes by resisting an understanding of deafness as necessarily disabling; as deaf people have argued for more than a century, deafness becomes disabling through social conditions and need not be inherently problematic or undesirable. My approach is aligned with the cultural model of disability as it circulates in contemporary disability studies, and Reading Victorian Deafness aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of Victorian disability studies.13As a field, disability studies generally posits, in Davis’s words, that “disability is not a minor issue that relates to a relatively small number of unfortunate people; it is part of a historically constructed discourse, an ideology of thinking about the body under certain historical circumstances. Disability is not an object—a woman with a cane—but a social process that intimately involves everyone who has a body and lives in the world of the senses” (Enforcing, 2). Following the approach taken by Davis and other disability studies scholars who emphasize the importance of contextualizing disability in a critical and historical framework, this book attends to the historical specificities of Victorian understandings of what we now call the category of “disability.” It is also allied with those theorists who have criticized the “medical model” of disability that considers certain kinds of physical, mental, or intellectual difference as inherently deficient and as requiring recuperation, isolation, or cure.
These articulations of disability as a social construction have revolutionized the study of disability in the humanities over the past two decades and have catalyzed a perspective that is focused on power, including how various incarnations of hegemony can pathologize difference for their own ends. However, this dichotomous system of a medical model versus a cultural or social-constructivist model oversimplifies the vast range of approaches, and their respective strengths and weaknesses, in contemporary disability studies. While the medical model has garnered criticism for its insistence on understanding diversity as a problem, for largely ignoring the perspectives and rights of people with disabilities, and for adhering to an oversimplified binary of ability and disability, the cultural model also has its limitations. For instance, the cultural model has been accused of effacing the important issue of impairment: that is, the deafness or paraplegism or autism that is being medicalized and given cultural meaning. Reading Victorian Deafness is deliberately less concerned with the physiological experience of deafness, including its physical causes or medical treatment, than it is with the culture that constructed the nonphysiological effects of deafness in particular ways.14
How, then, can we—as critics, historians, and members of these communities—create a responsible and progressive model of thinking about social categories such as race, gender, sexuality, and disability that balances the reality that bodies are simultaneously cultural formations and material entities? In recent writing, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has registered her concern about how to theorize disability in a way that keeps difference itself in tension with a critique of a culture that constructs this difference in the first place. That is, she asks how we can attend to disability without reinscribing the flawed ideological system that devalues certain kinds of bodies. In writing about Victorian freakery, Garland-Thomson advocates a “shift[] from a social-constructivist understanding of freakery to a rigorous materialist analysis. . . . The virtue of this analysis is that the freaks cannot be relegated to metaphorical figures of otherness, but rather they are enfleshed as they are enfreaked, always particular lives at particular moments in particular places.”15
In its attempt to balance these myriad questions facing the field of disability studies, Reading Victorian Deafness follows both Garland-Thomson and Davis in arguing that historicizing how concepts of disability came to be and the material realities of those people who have been labeled, or who identified as, disabled are both necessary steps. This book is invested in finding a third space—a space that simultaneously eschews metaphorical or transhistorical accounts of deafness, avoids effacing bodily diversity or impairment, and still interrogates the cultural meanings granted to those impairments. Accordingly, then, I examine how deaf people came to be understood in the nineteenth century as a pathologized Other who violated the norms of human communication while simultaneously addressing how particular deaf people lived among, created, and responded to those constructions of what it meant to be deaf in Victorian Britain.
Victorian Cultural Constructions of Deafness
In part, then, this book traces the various appearances of deaf people and signed languages in Victorian culture to examine hearing people’s interest in sign language and, more specifically, their attempts to use signing deaf people as a site for exploring larger concerns about the relationship between the human body, ability, and language. While today deaf people and their languages are typically studied in the disciplinary margins of education and medicine—couched in the rhetoric of rehabilitation, assimilation, literacy, and cure—I argue that over the course of the nineteenth century, understandings of deaf people and their language use informed broader cultural debates around the nature of language, the meaning of bodily and linguistic difference, and the definition of the human. This is not to say that this rhetoric of assimilation, illiteracy, and cure was not in use during the Victorian period; in fact, much of our contemporary discourse around deafness can be traced explicitly to Victorian constructions of what it means to be deaf.16One contribution of this book to contemporary disability studies, then, will be to adumbrate the nineteenth-century roots for many of the pervasive and recalcitrant cultural constructions of what it means to be deaf today. However, alongside this Victorian relegation of deaf people to the margins, I also wish to underscore the significant role that deaf people and their very marginality played in the wider cultural discourse of the Victorian period, which I discuss in the chapters that follow. For now, I will emphasize the pervasiveness of figures of signing deaf people in Victorian culture; they fascinated the various Victorians who encountered them, whether through Queen Victoria’s silent conversations; the popular life writing of deaf writers, including Harriet Martineau and John Kitto; the well-attended, public exhibitions of deaf schoolchildren across Britain; the debates around oralism that appeared in the pages of the Times; the discussion about deaf people’s “bestial” and “primitive” language use in the evolutionary debates; or the deaf characters penned by popular novelists including Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.
While the various, and competing, constructions of deafness in Victorian culture changed through the decades, some conventional images of deaf people appeared with some persistence. Above all, hearing Victorians understood deafness as a pathology, believed that deaf people were suffering under a heavy misfortune, and assumed that deaf people needed pity and charity. This is also the construction of deafness (and, of course, disability more generally) that largely persists in the twenty-first century; I wish to underscore that this denigration of deafness is neither straightforward nor natural but instead is a historical construction and, in particular, is a Victorian idea that presages our own contemporary approaches to deafness.17The pity response I have noted—what Garland-Thomson has called the “diminishing, too frequent response to disability” that becomes an “emotional cul-de-sac”18—inhered, in part, in the pervasive construction of deaf people as alienated from essential Victorian institutions and values: mainstream culture, Judeo-Christian religion, the English language, national affiliation, family relationships, employment and independence, education, and higher cognitive abilities. As will become clear in later chapters, oralism and related disenfranchisements of deaf people were often framed as gestures of inclusion. As Douglas Baynton, Christopher Krentz, and Neil Pemberton have demonstrated, this construction of deaf people as outsiders to a dominant national or religious culture fueled the various attempts by missionaries and educators to assimilate deaf people into the hearing and speaking world in both Britain and North America.19Another dimension of this construction of deaf person as outsider that was of even more concern for hearing Britons and North Americans was termed “deaf clannishness.” Hearing people who wrote about deafness often constructed deaf people as a race apart and described their books and articles as passports to a “land of silence” or to “a world of deaf and dumb; or, a land with 1,000,000 deaf-mute inhabitants.”20As historians including Baynton and Jonathan Rée have noted, Victorians increasingly understood this group of people, with an unintelligible language and a distinct culture, as a kind of “enigmatic secret society.”21It was not only hearing people who understood deaf people as a nation apart. Deaf writers, too, constructed their world as quite distinct from the hearing culture that surrounded it. For instance, John Kitto borrowed the generic paradigm of his travel writing when he wrote his autobiographical account of deafness in The Lost Senses. Kitto argues that a deaf person “lies under the same obligation to the public of describing his own condition, as a traveler is under to render his report respecting the unexplored countries which he has traversed in his pilgrimage.”22
Before moving to an assessment of how deaf Britons responded to these kinds of constructions of their marginality in Victorian cultural and national life, I want to attend to the ideological resonances of the Victorian terminology for deafness. The terms used most frequently to refer to deaf people in nineteenth-century Britain and North America were first deaf and dumb and then deaf-mute. These terms attempted to capture the dual nature of deafness: deaf people cannot hear and often sign instead of speak. The distinct terms were also useful in distinguishing deaf people who signed—typically those people who were born deaf or became deaf at a young age and generally did not use speech—from those people who experienced deafness because of illness, injury, or age but used speech to communicate. This, admittedly oversimplified, distinction is often maintained in contemporary Deaf culture and Deaf studies by a difference in case. That is, a lowercase d in the word deaf refers to the audiological condition of deafness: someone who does not sign and is not part of the Deaf community or Deaf culture is referred to as deaf. Uppercase-D in Deaf refers to a particular Deaf identity that typically involves communication through sign language, membership in Deaf community and culture, and an orientation toward what is called Deaf pride (which is often aligned with a rejection of the medicalized model of deafness). However, this practice has recently been called into question. The major objection to the d/D distinction is that it fails to encompass the complexity of a deaf/Deaf person’s experience in the world or the range of possibilities for deaf/Deaf identity.
Furthermore, categorizing deaf people who lived in the nineteenth century as either deaf or Deaf is extremely complicated. In its interest in the cultural iterations of Victorian deafness, this book predominantly focuses on those people we might consider culturally Deaf: users of signed languages, attendees at schools for the deaf, and members of a larger deaf community. However, while almost all of the deaf people I discuss used signed languages in some form, some of them may not have self-identified as culturally Deaf. Figures such as John Kitto, who signed but was not active in a deaf community, and Harriet Martineau, who spoke and often denigrated the capacities of “deaf-mutes,” render any attempts to define parameters around “deafness” inadvisable and problematic. In general, however, because of my focus on signed languages and deaf culture, this book concentrates most of its attention on those whom Victorians would have understood as “deaf-mute” rather than those who experienced partial or progressive hearing loss due to illness, injury, or aging. Because of the inability of the d/D practice to address the intricacies of deaf identities, I use the potentially problematic term deaf with a lowercase d in this book unless referring to contemporary Deaf issues, for which I maintain the d/D distinction. Although the term deaf-mute seems pejorative today, the resistance to the term in the Victorian period arose not from deaf people themselves but instead from oralists who wished to divorce deafness from muteness and insisted on the fact that deaf people were physically capable of creating speech.23While oralists were accurate in claiming that deaf people could produce speech physiologically—muteness is, in fact, remarkably rare despite its frequent literary presence24—they effaced the distinction between functional capability and the importance of cultural learning, sensory barriers, communal orientation, and personal choice.
Deaf Victorians: Their Lived Experiences and Self-Representations
This book moves beyond the Victorian cultural reception of deafness to also consider the lived realities of deaf people in the Victorian period and their own textual constructions of what it meant to be deaf in Victorian England. These communities often resisted the cultural construction of deafness that circulated in Victorian culture. Agnew, who, as I noted, believed that deaf people should educate hearing people about deafness, and not vice versa, was only one deaf Victorian among many who wrestled with the cultural meanings attached to his or her sensory difference and sought to defend deaf people’s rights and abilities. After all, deaf Victorians were neither passive victims nor “silent” followers of dominant discourses around deafness or policies authored by hearing people (even though most institutional locations discounted their perspectives).25Many deaf Victorians resisted the imposition of the speech paradigm on their lives, argued unremittingly that signed languages were as sufficient as spoken languages, and insisted that deaf people should not be pitied, patronized, cured, or ignored. From their unique cultural perspective, deaf signers revealed important insights about the ideologies and prejudices of hearing people about language and ability.
Nonetheless, deaf Victorians certainly faced societal barriers including difficulties finding employment, struggles with an educational system that was increasingly eliminating the use of signs, and daily existence in a culture of hearing and speaking people that sought to assimilate rather than accommodate them. But this, of course, was only one element of being deaf in Victorian England. While fighting for access to employment or education, deaf people also created opportunities within their own deaf communities. There were a variety of spaces, including deaf schools, churches, associations, clubs and families, where deafness was predominant and signs were the primary mode of communication. Many deaf people described their experiences as contradictory; they understood their cultural location as an interstitial space, one captured by American deaf poet Angie Fuller Fischer in “The Semi-Mute’s Soliloquy” when she declares herself “an alien though at home, / An exile even in my native land.”26For Fischer and many of her contemporaries, the use of a different mode of language than the majority, a visual orientation in the world, and a feeling of alienation from a hearing culture that denigrated deafness meant that a deaf person was simultaneously an insider and an outsider in his or her society. Some deaf people used the audist rhetoric of their cultures to describe what they believed were the deficits of deafness while simultaneously participating in deaf culture and agitating for deaf rights. Christopher Krentz has described these contradictions as examples of how some deaf people “internalized the majority’s attitude that cast[] [them] as . . . subordinate other[s].”27However, deaf Victorians also continually emphasized that their differences need not be understood as deficits. In their writing, they expressed pride in their unique language, celebrated their close communities, and highlighted the fact that they were as capable as hearing people. From writing autobiographically to publishing poetry to asserting their linguistic and reproductive rights, deaf Victorians (and their North American counterparts) created their own representations of physical and cultural deafness. In the pages that follow, Reading Victorian Deafness attends to the varieties of Victorian deaf self-representation and analyzes how deaf people constructed and communicated their own ideas of what it meant to be deaf in a largely hearing world.
Deaf Victorians understood that the sign language debates were momentous in the history, and to the future, of deaf communities. The debates pitted a growing community that was increasingly proud of its abilities, particularly its language use, against a majority perspective that considered signing deaf people less than human because they did not speak. This battle played out in various forms throughout the Victorian period, when a range of marginalized groups advocated and agitated for what they saw as their human rights: whether to be free from enslavement, as in the case of Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African-Americans; to escape colonial tyranny, as in various British imperial locations including India and Jamaica; to have space for community cultures, languages, and self-rule, as in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; to have voting and representation rights in government, as embodied in the various reform movements; to have the right to one’s own property after marriage, as in the case of British women—to name only a very few of the various examples of embattled minorities struggling for the recognition of their rights, aims, abilities, and even humanity. Deaf people fighting oralism, then as now, often saw themselves as fighting the epic battle of the marginalized and disenfranchised against the powerful.28In this battle, language was the instrument both of oppression and of resistance.
Victorian Approaches to Signed Languages
The third focus of this book, which of course is connected to both the Victorian reception of deafness and the self-representation of deaf people, is Victorian understandings of signed languages and the oralist movement that grew out of them. The book traces how Victorian beliefs about what language is and how it should function culturally underpinned the changing fortunes of signed languages over the course of the nineteenth century. Signed languages, as contemporary linguists have shown, are natural and complete human languages in every way, with their own distinct lexicographical and grammatical systems. The components of signed languages are neither universal nor transparent gestures. For instance, the signed language used in Britain (British Sign Language [BSL]) and the signed language used in English Canada and the United States (American Sign Language [ASL]) are mutually unintelligible. Both ASL and BSL are not simply gestural representations of English words but are, instead, their own complete languages. Deaf Britons, then, use BSL as their first language and English as a second language.29Many contemporary misunderstandings about signed languages date back to the nineteenth century and, indeed, were often deployed as part of the oralist argument for speech.
The oralism movement, what H-Dirksen L. Bauman has called a “medico-pedagogy,”30began in nineteenth-century Britain and North America. Although there had been individual cases of speech training for deaf people for centuries, and even of specific schools that were speech-oriented, oralism as a widespread pedagogical trend began and burgeoned in the mid-nineteenth century. As various historians including Lennard Davis, Douglas C. Baynton, Jonathan Rée, Christopher Krentz, Harlan Lane, and Jan Branson and Don Miller have documented, European and North American deaf schools, languages, and communities were largely established in the latter part of the eighteenth century and early part of the nineteenth century. Branson and Miller explain that the British “historical record prior to the sixteenth century is scanty as far as the use of sign languages is concerned, but from the sixteenth century, we find clear evidence that, in Britain, sign languages were regularly used among people who were deaf and between deaf and hearing people.”31Davis identifies the eighteenth century as the point at which the category of “deaf people” coalesced and sign languages became standardized. He argues, “It was only by attending the residential schools created in the eighteenth century that the deaf became a community. The dramatic rise in the number of deaf schools in Europe—there were none at the beginning of the eighteenth century and close to sixty by the end—indicates the groundswell that made this new ethnic group self-aware.”32These developments were accompanied by, or perhaps were a product of, a wider cultural and philosophical interest in deaf people and signed languages.33Davis argues that “deafness was for the eighteenth century an area of cultural fascination and a compelling focus for philosophical reflection.”34This cultural fascination with deafness in eighteenth-century Europe revolved largely around philosophical inquiry into the nature of reason and language. Philosophers and other writers sought answers about language and the senses through examining the case of deaf people as demonstrated in the numerous plays, books, treatises, and public demonstrations of deaf children that appeared over the course of the century.35
These historians have claimed that in the early part of the nineteenth century—and continuing over the course of the century—significant changes arose in the cultural construction of signed languages and deafness.36The enlightenment interest in reason and universal languages transformed into Victorian concerns about “man’s place in nature,” the origins of language, and imperial encounters with colonized groups.37The relevance of these emerging cultural issues to the situation of deaf people is investigated in the chapters that follow. The most significant change that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century was the growth of the oralist movement. Branson and Miller suggest that in the first half of the nineteenth century the “education of deaf students began to expand and diversify as schools were established throughout Britain and Ireland.”38While there were certainly earlier isolated attempts to train individual deaf children in speech, not until the foundation of deaf schools, and the development and propagation of signed languages within them, did a broader movement to advocate for speech-based rather than sign-based education emerge. According to Branson and Miller’s evidence, some of these schools employed some articulation training and some rejected it entirely.39However, oralism clearly became more and more influential over the course of the nineteenth century.40The oralist movement gained strength as the century wore on, culminating with the oralist victories of the 1880s and ’90s (including the recommendations in favor of oralism at the various commissions concerning the issue of deaf education, including the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan [1880] and the British Royal Commission on the Blind and the Deaf and Dumb [1889]).41
Deaf people were almost entirely absent from these commissions and, more importantly, were almost entirely opposed to oralism.42Even when they accepted the arguments for some classroom speech training, they rejected the total elimination of signed languages from deaf education and deaf life. This point is essential to understanding the sign language debates. It was entirely hearing people—hearing parents, hearing educators, and hearing governmental representatives—who paternalistically advocated oralism in opposition to the desires of deaf communities. By the end of the nineteenth century, oralism was the predominant pedagogy in British and North American deaf education and continued to be so until the 1960s and ’70s, when sign language was finally reinstated to centrality in deaf education.
While this sketch of oralism focuses mainly on deaf education, oralism’s scope extended far beyond pedagogical matters; this extension, rather than the pedagogical specificities of British deaf school programs, is the focus of this book. I aim to expand our understanding of oralism’s mandate and demonstrate how it participated in key Victorian concerns. The oralist movement sought the complete eradication of signed languages from deaf life and the assimilation of deaf people as speaking and lipreading members of a hearing society. As will become clear in the chapters that follow, oralists aimed to eradicate deaf cultures, communities, and identities. The widespread movement attempted to influence all areas of deaf people’s lives, from their language use in both educational and social spaces to their occupational choices to their selection of marriage partner to whether they should have children. Where sign language was constructed as an insidious threat not only to deaf people themselves but also to society more generally, oralists constructed speech—particularly certain European languages—as the pinnacle of the human language hierarchy and the only suitable option for European and North American (white) deaf people. The sign language debates of the nineteenth century were fundamental threats to deaf culture and language use. They are an essential feature of deaf history that inform how deaf communities in the West today understand their language, their history, and their place in the world.
These incursions into deaf life were not limited to Great Britain. Oralism appeared throughout Europe and North America. This book, therefore, extends its focus beyond Victorian England, particularly toward North America, to address the transnational struggle over signed languages. Although this book is centered on Victorian deafness, isolating deaf Britons from their North American counterparts would be impossible. Not only were the sign language debates simultaneously occurring in Britain and North America, but also both sides of the Atlantic featured the same key players and created similar constructions of deafness and signed languages. Deaf communities considered their transatlantic peers in their creation of culture and community. Just as national boundaries did not confine the efforts of those various Victorians and North Americans—the women’s rights advocates, antivivisectionists, and abolitionists—who crossed the Atlantic literally and figuratively for their causes through shared visits, literature, periodicals, and scientific research, deaf people formed transatlantic alliances. As Joseph J. Murray notes, deaf people of this time “created and maintained consistent contact with each other over national and continental boundaries.”43They shared strategies at deaf conferences, reported each other’s news in their English-language periodicals, and expressed solidarity with the fights against oralism that the others were waging.
Considering the influence of Alexander Graham Bell, the most prominent oralist in Britain and North America, illuminates the value of a transatlantic perspective in British deaf history. Bell’s oralist efforts spanned four countries. He was born in Scotland, apprenticed at Susanna Hull’s oralist school in London, and then spent the rest of his life in Canada and the United States promoting this oralist method. He established oralist organizations in the United States, wrote to the Canadian government about his concern regarding deaf settlements, and testified at the British Royal Commission on the Blind and the Deaf and Dumb. A study bounded by a focus on particular national contexts risks omitting important elements of the sign language debates and effaces the fact that deaf people often felt as though they shared more in common with deaf people in other countries than with hearing people in their own (including their educational interests, mode of language, and visual orientation to the world). Keeping my analysis of the reception of deafness and signed languages in Victorian Britain in conversation with the events and discourses of North America will allow a fuller understanding of the nature of these transatlantic debates about signed languages as well as the way that a focus on national boundaries can obscure the importance of transnational affinities based on language or disability.
Reading Victorian Deafness posits that the Victorian period was an important time in British deaf history. As many historians of the deaf community have noted, it was then that deaf people became a community. Brought together through the forces of urbanization, industrialization, and the establishment of deaf educational institutions, they created their own cultures, languages, and literatures and increasingly constructed group and individual identities that grew out of deafness. Second, it was in the nineteenth century that the greatest threat to these identities emerged in the form of oralism because it aimed to disintegrate deaf communities and assimilate speaking and lipreading deaf people into the hearing population. In these decades deaf people both created their identities, languages, and communities and fought for their very existence. While it was in the eighteenth century that widespread deaf education emerged and in the twentieth century that the dominance of the oralist regime finally came to an end,44it was during the nineteenth century that the fight was waged for what it means to be deaf and to use a mode of language outside of speech and writing. That fight is an important area of study not only because it oppressed deaf people but also because of what that oppression exposes about Victorian beliefs about language and humanity.
Each of the five chapters that follow examines Victorian constructions of signed languages and, more broadly, the parameters of language itself, in a range of cultural locations. They each highlight a particular Victorian understanding of the triangulation of speech, writing, and sign. These chapters also trace the cultural work performed through marginalizing signed languages and the deaf people who used them, which generally involved using the concept of language to delineate the parameters of ability and humanity. Each chapter, therefore, also uncovers Victorian cultural constructions of disability, constructions that registered in divergent ways in different disciplinary locations.
The first chapter of Reading Victorian Deafness focuses on a little-known body of literature—poetry written by deaf Victorians and their North American counterparts—to suggest that this poetry can provide us with a new insight into how Victorian poets, deaf and hearing, may have understood the aesthetic conventions of their art. This chapter also demonstrates the inextricability of literature from cultural constructions of disability; in this example, deaf people and their advocates used poetry as a weapon in their fight against widespread cultural myths about deaf people’s intellectual and linguistic deficits. Indeed, considering this body of work not only demonstrates how literary form can be a source of resistance to oppression but also, I argue, forces us as critics of poetry to reconsider the requirements of the genre.
In chapter 2, I address the textual barriers that appear in Victorian attempts to represent deafness in fiction. While characters with disabilities appear frequently in Victorian fiction, deaf characters, specifically, are almost entirely absent. In fact, the only deaf characters in Victorian fiction are Madonna Blyth in Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek and Sophy Marigold in Charles Dickens’s “Doctor Marigold.” Grounding its analysis in these two texts, this chapter contends that a deaf character’s relationship to language, in particular, is what disqualifies him or her from conventional representation in Victorian fiction. Through contextualizing Hide and Seek and “Doctor Marigold” amidst Victorian deaf history, interrogating Collins’s and Dickens’s realist impulse in representing disability, and highlighting Victorian generic conventions rooted in transcribing orality, this chapter argues that the absence of deaf characters reveals the investment of mid-Victorian fiction in a particular and normativized relationship between bodies, spoken language, and textuality.
I contend, in chapter 3, that the oralist desire to eradicate signed languages grew out of a variety of wider social concerns including British imperialism and the dissemination of evolutionary theory with the publication of Charles Darwin’s works The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. When contextualized amidst the sign language debates, these broader cultural issues appear inextricably linked because of an influential strain of Victorian philological thought, linguistic Darwinism, that hierarchized not only kinds of language (English, Cree, British Sign Language) but also modes of language (writing, speech, and sign). The problematic, though widespread, yoking of those groups perceived as linguistically inferior to the literate Englishman—whether indigenous North Americans, Africans, deaf signers, or nonhuman animals—depended on a teleological model of language development from “primitive” expression tied to the body to advanced literacy emanating from the mind. Chapter 3, then, addresses a range of nineteenth-century texts, from dictionaries of indigenous American and deaf American signs to the transatlantic public battle over evolution between philologists F. Max Müller and William Dwight Whitney to oralist treatises that describe signers as apes to literary texts by Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells that exemplify how language threatened to bridge the animal-human barrier in the Victorian imagination. By considering the rhetoric of primitivism that surrounded Victorian signers, this chapter reveals the important role of the concept of language in defining the human and the ways in which humans who did not speak challenged hierarchies of worth, whether speciesist, racist, or ableist.
Chapter 4 examines the Victorian and North American cultural reception of deaf marriage and deaf community, primarily during the eugenicist turn taken by oralism from the 1870s onwards. In this chapter I attend to a range of texts including Alexander Graham Bell’s eugenicist projections of a “deaf variety of the human race,” various oralist educational treatises, and deaf-authored schemes to establish deaf settlements. Each of these texts touched on the cultural anxiety around deaf people’s bodies and the potential for their reproduction. This chapter demonstrates that signed languages were increasingly understood as the mechanism enabling this oralist projection of a dystopian future of isolated and self-reproducing deaf communities. This chapter also examines the value of these same signing deaf communities through the eyes of deaf people who increasingly sought refuge among themselves from a hearing world that threatened to strip them of their language, their community and culture, and even their right to be married or bear children. Inherent in these utopian schemes to form deaf commonwealths is the belief that deafness is disabling only in certain cultural contexts. For these deaf communities, disability was a product of social conditions rather than inherent physical difference. This social-constructivist model of deafness and disability anticipates contemporary Deaf and disability studies’ theorization of disability as a social process.
Like chapters 3 and 4, chapter 5 can be read as an important case study of how nineteenth-century science was marshaled to eradicate difference. I contend that the central nineteenth-century sound technologies, the telephone and the phonograph, were products of the Victorian interest in deafness and a related faith in technology’s potential to remedy the perceived deficiencies of disability. In particular, various Victorian technologies grew out of attempts to write sound by inventors explicitly interested in deafness. In fact, Alexander Graham Bell used the proceeds from his development of the telephone to form an oralist advocacy group that still exists today. This chapter reveals how we owe most of our modern sound technology to research on how to teach deaf people to speak and interrogates the Victorian discursive logic around prosthetics for deafness.
This book, then, is insistently interdisciplinary in its focus. My first two chapters are linked in their attention to particularly literary concerns, and I argue, in both cases, that important facets of Victorian generic conventions are uncovered through attending to the relationship between deafness and literary aesthetics. In chapters 3 and 4, the book’s concern with language shifts away from the realm of aesthetics and into the domain of science. These two chapters attend to the scientific rhetoric around signed languages to demonstrate how deafness was imaginatively deployed to both access human prehistory and speculate about the future of the species. Finally, chapter 5’s attention to language and technology reveals the culmination of Victorian and North American attempts to manage both deaf people and their use of a third mode of human language. The chapter examines how technological incursions into deafness were imagined as a prosthetic solution to the challenges deaf people posed to the cultural reverence for both speech and “normalcy.” This final chapter traces a desire for, indeed even a faith in, technology’s ability to dissolve intractable differences.
Together, these five chapters contend that the Victorian cultural reluctance to accept both the validity of signed languages and the variability of human abilities was rooted in particular historical concerns about the definition of language and its relationship to the human. Signed languages—which exist outside of the imagined language dichotomy of speech and writing—destabilized the precarious Victorian notion of human ability that was buttressed by particular conceptions of language, including the belief that human communication was tied to orality. Davis has argued that the category of “disability” is a “product of a society invested in denying the variability of the body”;45building on Davis’s argument, this book’s consideration of Victorian deafness reveals that the oralist enterprise was a “product of a society invested in denying the variability” of language. Through their use of a visuo-spatial mode of human language, deaf people offered, and continue to offer, important insights about language and disability. Reading Victorian Deafness, then, aims to shed new light on familiar themes in Victorian studies—subjectivity, identity, culture, nation, and difference—through the lens of deaf Victorians, a group of people who celebrated, and fought for, a unique mode of human language.
1
“Perchance My Hand May Touch the Lyre”
Deaf Poetry and the Politics of Language
In his autobiographical book The Lost Senses: Deafness and Blindness (1845), deaf British writer and missionary John Kitto declares that deaf people cannot write poetry. Kitto argues, “[F]or want of hearing others speak, it is next to impossible that [a deaf person] should have that knowledge of quantity and rhyme which is essential to harmonious verse.”46However, after pronouncing his personal disqualifications as a poet, Kitto provides specimens of his own verse to demonstrate his attempt at “the tuneful art” (1.171). Kitto suggests that “[i]f the reader can discover the formal errors—the bad rhymes—the halting, hopping, stumping feet—which I am unable to detect, then my proposition is demonstrated; but if he can make no such discoveries, it must then be admitted with some qualification” (1.171). While Kitto’s compositions provide evidence of his poetic ability, his preface exposes his anxieties about writing in a genre that he believed required the ability to hear. Kitto’s strange vacillation between proclaiming the impossibility of a deaf poet and publishing his own poetry reflects the complicated position inhabited by a nineteenth-century deaf poet writing in English.
Kitto, like all other nineteenth-century poets, whether hearing or deaf, was facing a cultural definition of poetry that was inextricably linked to orality, especially in terms of formal features including rhythm and rhyme. Kitto was not the only deaf poet who felt ambivalent about participating in a genre tied to sound and speech. About a dozen American and British deaf poets, who used signed languages or fingerspelling to communicate, published one or more volumes of writing during the Victorian period. These deaf poets often acknowledged that their position was contradictory in a cultural environment that invested poetry with a special relationship to aurality and orality. This chapter addresses how these deaf poets balanced cultural beliefs about the primacy of sound to poetry with their own desire to sever hearing ability from poetic ability. By considering both the formal conservatism and the thematic radicalism of their constructions of sound in poetry, I argue that these poets capitalized on the tensions between sound, writing, and deafness. Nineteenth-century deaf poets ambivalently maintained an idea of “vocality” in their poetry while underscoring how that imagined “voice” was a silent construct of print. This chapter, then, also explores what this tension in deaf poetry can reveal about wider nineteenth-century perceptions of the relationship between sound and poetry. Finally, I also contend that deaf poetry became a political tool: the perceived gap between deafness and poetic ability was exploited by deaf people, and their allies, in their fight to defend sign language use.
The poets I examine in this chapter were all involved with this unique genre of deaf poetry. They constitute what I propose is the canon of nineteenth-century deaf poetry in English, which spans the 1830s to the 1890s. Despite the diversity of their class, gender, national, racial, educational, audiological, and historical experiences, these poets shared a concern that their deafness might preclude poetic achievement.47Early deaf poets such as Kitto (1804–1854) and American poets James Nack (1809–1879) and John Burnet (1808–1874) did not have deaf forebears to validate their desire to write poetry. However, as the century wore on, gains were made in deaf education and more deaf people read, wrote, and published poetry. For example, British poet William Henry Simpson (dates unknown) published a book of his own poetry to correct Kitto’s “erroneous impression” that deaf people could not write poetry.48Later American poets including Amos Draper (1845–1917), Mary Toles Peet (1836–1901), Laura Redden Searing (1840–1923), Angie Fuller Fischer (1841–1925), and John Carlin (1813–1891) were involved to different degrees with the National Deaf-Mute College in Washington, D.C. They would have been familiar not only with the work of earlier deaf poets such as Burnet, Nack, and Kitto but also with their published and unpublished peers at the college. In fact, as E. M. Gallaudet, the leading American educator of deaf people, noted, “[a]mong the students of the College for Deaf-Mutes at Washington, compositions in verse are not uncommon.”49In a lengthy 1884 article for Harper’s magazine on the “Poetry of the Deaf,” Gallaudet asserts that despite cultural skepticism about deaf poetic ability, “the deaf, in no inconsiderable numbers, have essayed to mount on the wing of poetic expression.”50In this article, Gallaudet collected the work of many of these poets to refute Kitto and validate deaf poetic achievement.
Poetry was a valued element of nineteenth-century deaf culture in both Britain and North America. Important events in the deaf community, including deaf school graduations, for instance, were often commemorated with occasional poems written and signed by pupils. Furthermore, the vast network of periodicals created by and for deaf people in Britain and North America, including the widely circulated American deaf school newspapers known as the “Little Paper Family,”51published poetry by deaf writers in monthly poetry columns. Nineteenth-century deaf poetry culture was deeply transatlantic and therefore provides an example of the value of employing a wider geographical lens, one that transcends national boundaries, when examining deaf history. The print culture of deaf periodicals was transatlantically entwined, and North American and British periodicals habitually responded to, and reprinted, articles and poetry from each others’ journals. H. B. Beale, one of the members of the editorial staff of The British Deaf-Mute in the 1890s, so frequently published his poetry in the journal that the editor began calling him “our own poet.”52But Beale’s poetry also appeared beyond his own journal; the American periodical The Silent Worker also regularly published Beale’s work and featured him in a full-page story, titled “H. B. Beale: Deaf Poet and Journalist of Great Britain.”53This mutual transatlantic interest extended to books and other pamphlets that addressed the lives of deaf people in the nineteenth century. For instance, both Manchester missionary Ernest Abraham’s A Chat about the Deaf and Dumb and headmaster of the Midland Deaf and Dumb Institution W. R. Roe’s Poems on the Deaf and Dumb reprint poetry written and published by deaf Americans, without noting their nationality. There were, of course, also significant national differences in these deaf poetry cultures. For instance, the existence of the National Deaf-Mute College in Washington, D.C., fomented a strong deaf literary culture, including the establishment of literary societies. Indeed, many of the published American deaf poets were tied in some way to the institution, whether as students or as teachers, and the presence of this locus of American deaf culture (which did not have a British counterpart) may explain why many more American deaf people published books of poetry than British deaf people did. Nevertheless, through avenues such as British deaf periodicals and books such as Abraham’s and Roe’s, even this American poetry circulated widely in British deaf culture.
While deaf poets garnered attention and respect in British and North American deaf communities, they nevertheless understood that they faced a cultural definition of poetry that was rooted in orality. Searing, for example, wrote about hearing audiences’ preconceptions about deaf poets, most notably in her prose-poem “The Realm of Singing: An Autobiographical Allegory.”54The allegory of the work concerns a bird whose “crippled” wings prevent her from ascending the “tree of poetry” in the “Realm of Singing.” Searing invokes the oral connotations of poetry in naming this world the “Realm of Singing.” However, Searing also explicitly decouples the bird’s physical disability from its ability to sing. That is, the bird’s crippled wings are as unrelated to poetry as is the deafness of the poet in this “autobiographical allegory.” While the “crippled” bird can sing, her wings prevent her from climbing the “tree of poetry” and thereby gaining recognition:
“I think I can sing a little,” she said, and so she hopped painfully upon the very lowest twig and began:
How shall a bird on a crippled wing
Ever get up into the sky?
Is it not better to cease to sing—
To droop and to die?
There are so many before me there,
With songs so loud and long and sweet,
They startle the passer unaware—
I am at his feet!
And though I sing with a quivering breast
And a dewy eye and a swelling throat;
My heart so close to the thorn is pressed,
That I spoil each note.
And if ever I sing a song,
Sweet of the sweet and true of the true—
All of it’s drowned by the birds ere long,
Up in the blue.
O, for one hour of rapturous strength!
O, to sing one song in the sky!
High over all the birds at length—
Then I could die!
(207)
The poem repeatedly emphasizes that the “crippled” bird sings as skillfully as the other birds. The real challenge facing Searing’s bird—and all nineteenth-century deaf poets—is not a particular physical disability but rather cultural prejudices about the relationship between disability and poetry. Those who pass by the “crippled” bird admire her singing until they spot her wings and reply:
What have we here? A crippled bird that tries to sing? Such a thing was never heard of before. It is impossible for her to sing correctly under such circumstances and we were certainly mistaken in thinking that there was anything in such songs. Our ears have deceived us. (208)
By emphasizing that the listeners’ “ears” have deceived them, Searing implicates hearing audiences in the mistaken belief that deaf people cannot write poetry. In overvaluing their own ability to hear, this audience underestimates those who do not hear. Searing argues that her poetic ability is intensely scrutinized only after her deafness is discovered, which reveals that ideology rather than evidence informs skepticism about deaf poetry.
Editors who published deaf poetry also consistently underscored its apparent impossibility. When deaf poets published their work for hearing audiences, rather than in deaf-specific publications, they were shackled to the identity of deaf poet—a commodity and curiosity—rather than a poet who was deaf. For instance, when Nack’s “Spring Is Coming,” which repeatedly references the sounds of spring, including “birds . . . chirping” and “insects humming” (line 2), was published in 1845 by the New York Tribune,55the paper attributed the poem to “Mr. Nack who is deaf and dumb since his childhood.” This foregrounding of Nack’s deafness suggests the unfortunate possibility that his deafness was as important as his poetic skill to the publication of his poetry. Even journals devoted to deaf issues, such as the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, highlighted the contrast between the deafness of the poet and the oral resonances of the genre. Carlin’s poem “The Mute’s Lament” was published in the Annals in 1847 with a lengthy editor’s preface about the “special surprise” excited by a poet born deaf.56The editor declared, “We should almost as soon expect a man born blind to become a landscape painter, as one born deaf to produce poetry of even tolerable merit” (14). After assuring readers that Carlin’s poem had not been edited, he emphasized that while “The Mute’s Lament” did not contain rhyme, Carlin did frequently write in regular rhyme and meter. Carlin’s ability to master the apparently sound-based elements of poetry such as rhythm and rhyme was instrumental to the establishment of his poetic credibility.
Like Carlin, Kitto believed that his authority as a poet depended on his use of the formal poetic features traditionally tied to sound. However, Kitto’s self-assessment of his “bad rhymes” and “halting, hopping, stumping feet” is entirely mistaken. Reviewers of Kitto’s work often commented on his facility with poetry; the reviewer from the Westminster Review, for instance, declares that “it would puzzle any one to discover deficiencies either of sense or [of] rhythm” in Kitto’s verse.57However, this evidence of a deaf man’s poetic ability does not preclude the reviewer from echoing Kitto’s own denigration of deaf poetic ability: “[T]he deaf . . . have no command of language, no ear, and a sad deficiency of ideas and emotions” (186). In his “Poetry of the Deaf” article, Gallaudet disputes Kitto’s disparagement of deaf people’s poetic abilities by using Kitto’s verses as proof; according to Gallaudet, “Kitto’s poetry is better than his reasoning” (91). Kitto skillfully manipulates rhyme and rhythm in his poetry. For example, his poem “Mary,” which describes how both his visual acumen and the communicative potential of his wife’s eyes compensate for his deafness, is roughly iambic. In a stanza describing how deafness complicates social interactions, Kitto mourns the loss of exposure to new ideas:
True, that the human voice divine
Falls not on this cold sense of mine;
And that brisk commercing of thought
Which brings home rich returns, all fraught
With ripe ideas—points of view
Varied, and beautiful, and new,
Is lost, is dead, in this lone state
Where feelings sicken, thoughts stagnate . . .
(lines 66–73)
The stanza deviates most strikingly from its regular rhythm in line 70. This irregular line, punctuated with a dash, describes the “ripe ideas” and “points of view” that the “speaker” misses.58His desire for variety is therefore mirrored in the metrical singularity of that line, which diverges markedly from the pattern of the rest of the stanza.
Whereas Kitto experimented with various forms of poetry, many deaf poets adhered to genres with rigid patterns of rhyme and meter. Draper, for instance, wrote a Petrarchan sonnet titled “Memories of Sound”:59
They are like one who shuts his eyes to dream
Of some bright vista in his fading past;
And suddenly the faces that were lost
In long forgetfulness before him seem—
Th’ uplifted brow, the love-lit eyes whose beam
Could ever o’er his soul a radiance cast,
Numberless charms that long ago have askt
The homage of his fresh young life’s esteem;
For sometimes, from the silence that they bear,
Well up the tones that erst formed half their joys—
A strain of music floats to the dull ear,
Or low, melodious murmur of a voice,
Till all the chords of harmony vibrant are
With consciousness of deeply slumb’ring pow’rs.
When Draper deviates from his patterns of rhythm and rhyme, he playfully highlights the apparent obstacles facing a deaf poet. The two lines that stray from iambic pentameter, lines twelve and thirteen, have eleven syllables and an irregular meter. These two lines are the only lines that explicitly reference “melod[y]” or “harmony,” yet they blatantly resist the harmonious with their metrical irregularity. Draper thereby facetiously underscores the potential inharmoniousness of the deaf poet’s lines. Furthermore, the poem contains one eye rhyme—“bear” and “ear”—that appears when the “speaker” explicitly mentions his “dull ear” (lines 9, 11). It is only fitting that the line that references this deaf ear rhymes “ear” with a word that only looks as though it rhymes. Finally, Draper mobilizes the rigidity of the octave-sestet structure of the sonnet, and the centrality of the sonnet’s turn, to consider the shift between being deaf and being hearing. The octave treats vision exclusively and turns to remembrances of sound only in the sestet. Therefore, this poem, which is explicitly about the “speaker’s” “memories of sound,” is dominated by visual description. Draper uses the formal features of the sonnet to highlight the perceived barriers to deaf poetry. His inharmonious lines about harmony, his eye rhyme that reflects his “dull ear,” and his emphasis on visuality in a poem titled “Memories of Sound” are moments where Draper uses the formal properties of the sonnet to undermine the centrality of sound to his poetry.
Kitto and Draper, whom I use to represent early and later nineteenth-
century deaf poetry respectively, are examples of the larger trend in most nineteenth-century deaf poetry toward fixed patterns of rhythm and rhyme. While the formal innovation taking place throughout the century—from new genres such as the dramatic monologue to experiments with what we would now call “free verse”—was striking, what was most notable about these deaf poets on both sides of the Atlantic is how they generally refrained from this kind of experimentation. Their understanding of the relationship between sound and poetry—as it was expressed formally—adhered to cultural constructions of poetry as a genre dependent on the aurality of spoken words. However, this very obedience to fixed measures of rhythm and rhyme raises questions about how deaf poets accessed poetic features generally associated with sound. These are questions without straightforward answers. Various factors complicate any attempt we might make to explain deaf poets’ accuracy in versification: degree of deafness, age of onset of deafness, literacy in English and in a signed language, amount of oral training, reliance on friends’ and family’s hearing ability, use of written dictionaries, and class and educational background all influenced deaf poets’ abilities to master the resonances of English words in written poetry.
Victorian audiences also seem to have wondered about how deaf people accessed these poetic elements, because deaf poets often prefaced their poetry with anxious justifications of their poetic ability. For example, Burnet, one of the first published deaf poets and a teacher of deaf children, who became deaf at eight years of age, writes that he began to “make rhymes at an early age . . . when the recollections of sounds were fresh in his memory, and his reminiscences of the harmony of measured syllables and rhymes were vivid and distinct.”60As he explains in Tales of the Deaf and Dumb with Miscellaneous Poems (1835), “[W]hile nearly all other recollections of sounds have faded from [the poet’s] memory, he is still capable of forming a tolerable judgment of the effect on the ear of a line of poetry” (230). Most of the nineteenth-century deaf poets claim this ability to versify without entirely explaining its source. For example, in the preface to his Daydreams of the Deaf (1858), Simpson explains that he has “an intuitive perception of improprieties of rhythm and rhyme” (xiii). For Simpson, “it does not follow that one deaf person should not have a keener perception of the properties and harmony of verse, both as respects rhyme and quantity, than another whose tastes and talents do not lie that way; just as one person who can hear will more readily detect a false note in music than another, because his soul is satisfied with nothing less than perfection” (xiii). Simpson rejects generalizations about the poetic abilities of deaf people in favor of attention to the particular inclinations and skills of each individual, whether hearing or deaf. Indeed, Simpson entirely severs poetic ability from hearing ability and instead aligns it with a personal dedication to aesthetic excellence.
To supplement their “intuitive” ability to versify, many deaf poets also turned to written texts for instruction on the supposedly aural dimensions of poetry. Instead of relying on the sense of hearing, deaf poets such as Carlin, for example, used writing to access rhyme and rhythm. Carlin explains that he improved his initial “discordant verses” and “inability to catch and con long and short syllables intonated in strictly poetic feet” through studying “the best English poets.”61Beyond modeling his work on literary precedent, Carlin also turned to written reference works. Carlin studied “Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary, and also his Rhyming Dictionary, a book which contains all the fundamental principles of poetry.”62Carlin, who explained that he had “no idea of vocal sounds,”63relied on written texts to access the world of English versification. His patterns of rhythm and rhyme were therefore moored in textual practices rather than sound experiences.
There is another, perhaps more trenchant, response to these questions about deaf poetic ability: we should investigate the critical investments that are revealed by wonderment at a deaf poet’s skill with rhythm and rhyme. Skepticism about deaf poetry is buttressed by an assumption that poetic ability does, in fact, reside in the ear. However, as these deaf poets testify, the ear is only the imagined, but not the necessary, home of poetic ability. A critical consideration of deaf poetry permits a unique opportunity to interrogate the notion that written poetry is best created through orality and experienced through aurality. These poets permit us to move beyond the idea that poetry produced through deafness is absurd. I invoke the term absurd because the nineteenth-century deaf poetic community used it on more than one occasion to describe deaf poetry. For instance, in “The Realm of Singing,” Searing calls the “crippled” bird’s songs (which allegorically represent deaf poetry) “absurd singing” (208). Similarly, Gallaudet invokes the term absurdity in “Poetry of the Deaf.” After citing Edgar Allan Poe’s insistence on the importance of music to poetry, Gallaudet responds, “If this dictum of so great a master of the music of verse is accepted, the declaration that poetry may be appreciated, and even produced, by those bereft of the sense through which alone music can be enjoyed, presents an apparent absurdity” (87).
Gallaudet’s and Searing’s use of the term absurd when referring to poetry by deaf people disentangles and then re-entangles the issues that arise in the intersections between deafness, sound, and poetry. Absurd is derived from the Latin absurdus, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “inharmonious, tasteless, foolish.” Absurdus unites ab, denoting “from,” and surdus, which means “deaf, inaudible or insufferable to the ear.” Therefore, absurd poetry is literally poetry from the deaf. While Searing’s and Gallaudet’s uses of the term absurd may not have been intentional invocations of the slippage between inaudibility and denigration that the term captures, I reclaim the term absurd poetry here to refer to deaf poetry. Absurd poetry does not “hear” and does not “speak,” that is, it was not derived from orality, nor should it necessarily be forced into aurality. The term absurd poetry is especially suggestive because the gap that exists between “inharmonious” and the pejorative description “tasteless” in the definition of absurdus, or between “inaudible” and “insufferable to the ear” in the definition of surdus, is the location of the question of deaf poetry. Deaf poets force their readers to confront the possibility that poetry can be inaudible and yet not insufferable to the ear.
The audibility of Victorian poetry has become an important issue in Victorian poetry criticism, as demonstrated by the ongoing discussion between critics including Herbert Tucker, Isobel Armstrong, Eric Griffiths, Yopie Prins, Matthew Campbell, Dennis Taylor, John Picker, and Ivan Kreilkamp. Kreilkamp notes, for example, that the wider relationship between speech and writing was “a topic of recurring and urgent concern throughout the Victorian period.”64This issue is especially relevant to Victorian poetry, which experimented with a range of “voices”—in the dramatic monologue, for example—and with the textualizing of orality. As part of the contemporary discussion about orality and aurality, Prins has attempted to resist the critical tradition that overemphasizes audible voices in Victorian poetry by asking a prescient question: “How can we reverse our tendency to read these poems as the utterance of a speaker, the representation of speech, the performance of song?”65This widespread critical tendency, as Prins notes, is particularly glaring in some influential studies of Victorian poetry, including, for instance, Griffiths’s The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. While Griffiths strives to transcend literal voices in his readings of poetry, his theoretical orientation depends on his conception of the “loose fit of writing on speech.”66Griffiths argues that the “problems of translating the intended music of a voice into the scant notation of the written word” are productive because they allow a role for the reader in poetic interpretation and utterance.67As this quotation reveals, however, Griffiths privileges speech over writing, in part because he believes that vocal features including pitch, pace, stress, and volume augment the communicative potential of the voice.
In his introduction, Griffiths defends his privileging of speech through citing, strangely enough, a study of orally trained deaf children. This study, published in 1942, considered the intelligibility of the speech of 192 deaf children who had been undergoing speech training in an oralist educational system. This study found that the more errors these orally trained deaf children made in pitch, pace, stress, and volume, the less intelligible they were to a hearing interlocutor. Griffiths provides this study as an “instance of a practical connection between the prosodic features of a language and intelligibility [which] demonstrates a link between what might be thought of as the ‘form’ and the ‘content’ of an utterance.”68Essentially, Griffiths uses the obstacles facing deaf children who are being forced to speak in order to argue that the sound-features of language are essential to the intelligibility of an utterance. Griffiths concludes, therefore, that speech has a wider communicative capacity than does writing. Griffiths’s circular logic thereby uses evidence gleaned from the phonocentric system of oralism to defend phonocentrism.
Griffiths’s The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry, one of the major monographs on the role of sound in Victorian poetry, demonstrates that the cultural elevation of orality, often at the expense of deaf people, still informs contemporary critical practices. Pathologizing deaf people by using them as test cases to delineate “normal” communication persists into the twenty-first century. I use Griffiths as an example to demonstrate what a Deaf studies approach offers to the study of poetry. While I would not argue that aural considerations should be entirely divorced from poetic theory, I want to call attention, alongside other critics, to the limitations of this sound-based theory of poetry. Prins, for instance, has suggested that a study of historical prosody reveals how Victorian metrical theory “makes voice a function of writing” and provides a way out of the orality conundrum.69Kreilkamp has also challenged the critical desire to trace audible voices in Victorian literature, positing that “voice persists in the discourse of print culture where it remains as trace and residue capable of giving rise to inchoate new forms.”70One of the new forms to emerge from this discourse of print culture is the deaf poetry that burgeoned in deaf communities over the course of the nineteenth century. Indeed, in this absurd poetry we can most clearly trace how, in Tucker’s words, “[t]exts do not come from speakers, speakers come from texts.”71The fantasy of poetic orality cannot comfortably encompass deaf poetry. These poems were not forged in speech and molded into writing. Instead, writing was the primary site of poetic production and reception for deaf poets. Because the relationship between this absurd poetry and its creators—deaf people who used signed languages rather than voices—is uniquely configured, an examination of this poetry can help us redefine the questions we pose about voice in Victorian poetry through defamiliarizing our ideas of ability, both poetic and sensory.
Silent Soliloquizing: The Contradictions of Sound in Written Poetry
While deaf poets adhered to the formalism understood as sound-based by creating poetry that was stylistically conventional, they were more radical in their thematic treatment of sound. Turning from the formal arrangements of this poetry to its thematic content can demonstrate how deaf poets attempted to walk the fine cultural line between the inaudibility and insufferability denoted by the term absurd poetry. Nineteenth-century deaf poets emphasized the thematic presence of sound in their work in various ways to underscore the very paradox inherent in all poetry. These poets simultaneously emphasized their poetry’s silence and its imagined orality.
The most striking example of how deaf poets foregrounded the contradictory relationship between deafness and the aural/oral model of poetry is their figure of the “speaking mute.” With extraordinary frequency, nineteenth-century deaf poets highlighted the muteness of their poem’s “speaker” while simultaneously figuring the poem itself as speech. For example, in American poet Angie Fuller Fischer’s “The Semi-Mute’s Soliloquy”72and Carlin’s “The Mute’s Lament,” the poets self-consciously construct their poetry as speech while their “speakers” simultaneously bemoan their alienation from the speaking world around them. The speaking mute figure thereby mirrors the ambivalent position of deaf poets and the tension in their poetry between challenging and accepting the dominance of “voice” in written poetry.
The “speakers” of speaking mute poems describe their alienation as a state of being at once inside and outside their hearing-dominated society. Fischer’s “speaker” in “The Semi-Mute’s Soliloquy” foregrounds her ambiguous position as a soliloquizing mute:
No sound! no sound! an alien though at home,
An exile even in my native land;
A prisoner too, for though at will I roam,
Yet chained and manacled I oft must stand
Unmoved, though sounds vibrate on every hand.
No sound! no sound! yet often I have heard,
Echoing through dear memory’s sacred hall,
The buzz of bees, the rare song of a bird,
The melody of rain-drops as they fall,
The wind’s wild notes, or Sabbath bells’ sweet call.
No outward sound! yet often I perceive
Kind angel voices speaking to my soul
Sweetly consoling charges to believe
That this life is a part, and not the whole
Of being—its beginning, not its goal.
No sound! except the echoes of the past,
Seeming at times, in tones now loud, now low,
The voices of a congregation vast
Praising the God from whom all blessings flow,
Until my heart with rapture is aglow.
Fischer’s tightly rhymed poem foregrounds the contrast between the myriad voices in the world of the poem—the songs of birds or the voices of angels—and the silence of her “speaker.” It simultaneously accepts and disavows aurality by using rhyme while insisting that there is “no sound!”
The “speaker” of Carlin’s “The Mute’s Lament” echoes Fischer’s “speaker” in foregrounding his alienation from the speaking world:
I move—a silent exile on this earth;
As in his dreary cell one doomed for life,
My tongue is mute, and closed ear heedeth not;
No gleam of hope this darken’d mind assures
That the blest power of speech shall e’er be known.
Murmuring gaily o’er their pebbly beds
The limpid streamlets as they onward flow
Through verdant meadows and responding woodlands,
Vocal with merry tones—I hear them not.
(lines 1–9)
The “speaker” contrasts his cell-like muteness—where he is at once among, yet excluded from, the sound-filled world around him—with all the voices he cannot hear, including streamlets “vocal with merry tones” (lines 7–9), the melodies of birds (lines 10–14), the “deep pause of maiden’s pensive song” (line 17), the “orator’s exciting strains” (line 21), and the “balmy words of God’s own messenger” (line 27).
Both Fischer’s and Carlin’s “speakers” mourn the loss of speech that they experience as deaf people. However, this theme of bemoaning the personal failure of speech also appears repeatedly in canonical Victorian poetry. Victorian poets are frequently self-conscious about the possibilities and limits of using poetry as a medium to address the change, alienation, and struggles with subjectivity that sometimes leave the “speaker” without words. In “Break, Break, Break,” for instance, Tennyson’s “speaker” emphasizes his inability to speak by contrasting his grief-filled silence with the sounds of the world around him.73In what Campbell calls a “longing, lyric cadence,”74the “speaker” compares his muteness to the singing sailor lad and the shouting fisherman’s boy, declaring, “I would that my tongue could utter / The thoughts that arise in me” (lines 3–4). In mourning “the sound of a voice that is still” (line 12), Tennyson’s “speaker” loses his own voice. By using words on the page to despair of his inability to speak in the world, Tennyson’s “speaker” mobilizes a paradox similar to that of the deaf poets. In “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church” we encounter what Armstrong has called “the splutter of speech” in Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues.75From his deathbed, the Bishop calls out to his “Nephews—sons mine . . . ah God, I know not! Well—” (line 3). This poem is littered with ellipses and dashes that signal the Bishop’s struggles to articulate his last wishes for guaranteeing his posterity. Browning’s poem is only one example, of course, of how the entire genre of the dramatic monologue itself dramatizes the complicated interactions of speech and silence on the printed page. The very genre hinges on the disparities between what the “speaker” says about himself and what the paraverbal elements of the poem reveal in the “speaker’s” silences. This duplicity, then, is a symptom of the imagined fiction of Victorian poetry—that it is a form with a special connection to orality—when a written poem is, in fact, a silent text like any other.76The “speakers” of all these poems, whether deaf or hearing, connect a lack of speech with mourning, personal disconnection, and alienation from the world around them.
Deaf poets capitalize on this wider aesthetic theme of poetic muteness to point to the limits of understanding written poetry as a genre of speech. While the “speakers” in speaking mute poems bemoan their inability to speak audibly, they paradoxically claim a written “voice” for themselves through their poems. The titles of Carlin’s “The Mute’s Lament” and Fischer’s “The Semi-Mute’s Soliloquy” self-consciously appropriate orality and thereby play with the doubleness of the written poem that imagines an inherent vocality. The titular declaration of soliloquizing or lamenting claims a “voice” for those who would not otherwise use one. By definition, a mute person cannot speak, except by becoming the “speaker” of a genre of writing that calls itself speech.
The “speaker” of a written poem is able to access a voice because of a definition of poetry that invests it with an imagined orality. In fact, almost every nineteenth-century deaf poet explicitly invokes the “voice” of the poet. Pseudonymous contributors to the poetry columns in deaf periodicals consistently styled themselves along the lines of “Singing-Mute” with this contradiction of poetic orality in mind.77Searing’s poem celebrating John Keats has the refrain “O rare, sweet singer!” and Burnet’s mute “speaker” in “Passaic Falls” describes himself as “singing” “lays” as part of the tradition of the “bard” (lines 65–68).78In fact, in “Passaic Falls,” Burnet makes the paradox of written deaf poetry explicit: “ears to the deaf thou art, speech to the dumb” (line 49). Burnet imagines the pen and the page as material prosthetics that substitute for the deaf poet’s physiological difference.
However, while these deaf poets invest their written poetry with “orality,” they just as clearly highlight the absurdity of this orality’s origin in a mute “speaker.” The orality of their poetry is always juxtaposed with the muteness that inheres not only in their “speakers” but also in their personal experience. Through creating this paradox of the speaking mute, Carlin, Fischer, and other deaf poets foreground the problematic construction of written poetry as a genre of orality. In describing canonical Victorian poets, Armstrong has argued that “poets resort to songs and speech, as if to foreground the act of reading a secondary text, for the song is not sung but read, and the speech is not spoken but written.”79If this is true for canonical Victorian poets, then it is even more suggestive for deaf poets invested in challenging the hegemony of the audible voice in poetry. By emphasizing the silence of their lamenting, soliloquizing, and speaking, these deaf poets implicitly argue that written poetry can thrive outside of hearing and speaking. Poetry was generally produced, disseminated, and received through the written word in the nineteenth century. And for deaf people, at least, the oral and the aural were both audibly absent and legibly present in this written text. Deaf poets deployed the tension of the speaking mute figure to create a space for their absurd poetry in a genre that seemed to preclude deaf poetic achievement. However, these deaf poets also dramatized more forcefully the larger issue that all Victorian poets wrestled with: how far the “voice” inhered in their written words. That is, the sensory difference of deaf poets permits a moment of critical clarity because these poets are at once unique and yet akin to poets who are not deaf. By acknowledging the absurdities that may creep into conversations around sound in deaf poetry, we may recognize some critical oversights that have previously been obscured in approaches to the wider genre of Victorian poetry.
A second theme that appears frequently in nineteenth-century deaf poetry also relies on the space between sound and text as a locus for aesthetic power. These poets collectively constructed a group of poems that I call “sounds unheard” poetry. The five poems by Kitto, Draper, Fischer, Carlin, and Burnet that I have already discussed are examples of sounds unheard poems. For example, the “speaker” of Kitto’s “Mary” describes various sounds that he is unable to hear, including “the organ’s rolling peal” (line 31), “leaves rustl[ing] in the breeze” (line 45) and “the human voice divine” (line 67). Similarly, the “speaker” of Carlin’s “The Mute’s Lament” mourns all of the sounds that he has never heard:
The linnet’s dulcet tone; the robin’s strain;
The whipporwil’s; the lightsome mock-bird’s cry,
When merrily from branch to branch they skip,
Flap their blithe wings, and o’er the tranquil air
Diffuse their melodies—I hear them not.
The touches-lyric of the lute divine,
Obedience to the rise, the cadence soft,
And the deep pause of maiden’s pensive song,
While swells her heart with love’s elated life,
Draw forth its mellow tones—I hear them not.
Deep silence over all, and all seems lifeless;
The orator’s exciting strains the crowd
Enraptur’d hear, while meteor-like his wit
Illuminates the dark abyss of mind—
Alone, left in the dark—I hear them not.
(lines 10–24)
Each stanza’s description of myriad sounds unheard is followed by the refrain “I hear them not.” The central energy of Carlin’s poem emerges from detailed imaginings of sounds that the “speaker” has never experienced aurally.
Each of the nine nineteenth-century deaf poets I focus on in this chapter wrote a sounds unheard poem in which the “speaker” describes all the sounds that he or she cannot hear. (These poems include Burnet’s “Lines Written after a First Visit to the Passaic Falls, at the Age of Nineteen [Since Corrected],” Carlin’s “The Mute’s Lament,” Draper’s “Memories of Sound,” Fischer’s “The Semi-Mute’s Soliloquy,” Kitto’s “Mary,” Peet’s “Thoughts on Music,” Nack’s “Spring Is Coming,” Searing’s “Ten Years of Silence,” and Simpson’s “Recollections of Hearing.”)80These nine poems are extraordinarily similar in how they catalogue unheard sounds. First, they formally present long, descriptive lists of a variety of sounds. For instance, eight of the nine poems refer to birdsong, seven to music, six to wind, six to the human voice, and five to musical instruments. While mourning the human voice could perhaps be expected because its absence was believed to be so culturally and poetically disadvantageous, the frequent invocations of birdsong or wind are, perhaps, more puzzling. That is, why are each of these poems, by nine different poets—divided by age, gender, nationality, exposure to signed languages, and onset age of deafness—so remarkably similar in which sounds they represent? Second, the language used to describe each sound recurs again and again. Each of the four poets who mention a large body of water, such as the ocean or the sea, characterizes it as “roaring.” Each of the three poets who write of an organ describes its “pealing.” Three of the four poets who refer to a smaller body of water, either a “stream” or a “rill,” refer to its “murmuring.” The adjectives used to describe sound also mirror conventional descriptions of sound as they appear in texts by hearing people. The rain “patters” while the wind “whispers,” “sighs,” or “howls.” Bees are described as “buzzing” or “humming” but never as “crying,” “singing,” “cooing,” “trilling,” or “warbling” like the birds. The fact that Carlin, who would have never heard a stream, understood that streams “murmur” rather than “roar” (lines 1–2) reveals that sound description is available to him outside of his personal sensory experience.
This unique genre of sounds unheard poetry, I argue, reveals another important way that attending to deaf poetry—and its foregrounding of the illusory nature of sound in written poetry—may illuminate our understanding of the genre of poetry. The ability of deaf poets to describe sounds they have never heard underscores the conventionality of poetic language. Carlin, like most other British and North American deaf people, grasped English sound vocabulary through the writing and signing of others, and this vocabulary was meaningful because he comprehended the conventional definitions of these English words. One does not need to have ever heard a bird’s song to describe “the linnet’s dulcet tone” (Carlin, “Mute’s,” line 4), because a familiarity with the linguistic meanings of linnet, dulcet, and tone suffices. Furthermore, Carlin mines a particular poetic tradition of sound depiction by drawing on his extensive reading of canonical English poetry.81Descriptions of sound, for a poet such as Carlin, are accessible through reading, writing, and signing. That is, language mediates both the experience of hearing and the practice of representing that hearing in words. Sounds unheard poems demonstrate that deaf poets who do not have access to a sensory experience of sound do have access to a textual experience of sound.
While it seems obvious that experiences and descriptions of sound are bound by the conventions of language, there is nevertheless a long cultural history of considering hearing more immediate and unmediated than other senses, especially sight. Referencing the theological undertones of this long history that idealizes a “transhistorical” conception of the “interiority” of hearing, sound historian Jonathan Sterne has described an “audio-visual litany” of the supposed differences between hearing and seeing.82This problematic ideology includes beliefs such as, in Sterne’s words, “sounds come to us, but vision travels to its object,” “hearing is about affect, vision is about intellect,” and “hearing involves physical contact with the outside world [while] vision requires distance from it.”83Jacques Derrida has also traced the privileging of the “presence” of speech in Western history and philosophy. According to Derrida, this privileging of the voice—or “phonocentrism”—understands speech as embodied thought.84Both Sterne and Derrida highlight how aural and oral experiences have often been described as more powerful, natural, original, present, and interior than visual experience. Unfortunately, deaf people have been particularly oppressed by this cultural idealization of hearing and speech. In fact, the rhetoric of this “audio-visual litany” buttresses many Victorian incursions into deafness from medical attempts at a cure to pedagogical strategies to literary representations. From the “eh-what?” humor about deaf characters in Victorian fiction to the nineteenth-century campaign against sign language, speech and hearing were often constructed as integral to cultural participation and even to human identity.85
Because these deaf poets operated in a culture that elevated speech and denigrated signed languages, nineteenth-century deaf poetry is an important forum for interrogating the hegemony of hearing and speech. Sterne’s criticism of the construction of “hearing (and, by extension, speech) as manifesting a kind of pure interiority” is useful in challenging a particular model of poetry that constructs the poem as an unmediated transcription of a poet’s sensory experience of the world.86Sounds unheard poetry highlights the fact that describing sound in poetry does not require the ability to hear. Poets—hearing and deaf—often write about sound according to the conventions of poetic language rather than according to their experiences with hearing. The paradox of these sounds unheard poems, then, foregrounds how sensory information is processed through language and constrained by discourse. Furthermore, the deaf poets’ achievement of the seemingly impossible—that is, describing sounds they have never experienced aurally—poses a self-conscious challenge to the importance of the sense of hearing to poetry. While deaf poets do not have access to the sounds of words, they do have access to the words of sound.
Furthermore, the frequent references to birdsong, music, and wind in these sounds unheard poems reveal the influence of canonical poetic tropes: these are all conventional figures of lyric address. Deaf poets are not necessarily referencing the audible sensory experience of birdsong or wind but instead the symbolic resonances of these objects.87The most famous nineteenth-century incarnation of birdsong, of course, is John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” which, interestingly, is often prefaced by the assertion that it was directly inspired by Keats’s delight in a real bird’s song.88This biographical fact—and its insistence on the inspirational powers of sound for aesthetic production—is instrumental to the framing of the poem. Most Victorian poets, of course, also use these conventional markers of lyric address. For example, Tennyson replicates this construction of the poet as the fitting interlocutor of birdsong in “The Poet’s Mind,” in which, compared to others’ “dull” ears (line 35), poets have special access to the sounds of nature, including “merry bird chants” (line 22). Indeed, Tennyson is a valuable example of this supposed connection between the poetic and the sensory.89As Campbell notes, “In the Memoir, Hallam Tennyson quotes [Tennyson] as saying, ‘Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out “I hear a voice that’s speaking in the wind.”’ The pre-literate boy, we are asked to believe, could speak in pentameters.”90Like the story of Keats’s nightingale muse, this anecdote privileges the ear as the source of poetic inspiration. Poets must be more than superior writers; they must also have a special relationship to aural experience. Christina Rossetti borrows both Keats’s nightingale and his focus on mortality in “Song.” Matthew Arnold writes of nightingales in “To Marguerite—Continued” and of wind in “Dover Beach.”91Again and again, lyres and harps, birds and breezes appear in the sonic register of nineteenth-century poetry. By invoking these same markers of lyric poetry without actually being able to hear them, deaf poets illuminate the fact that nineteenth-century poetry—in this case, a particular Romantically influenced lyric poetry—is a discourse that typically relies on previous incarnations of poetry and figurative language even as it constructs itself as a product of the immediate impress of the senses. Indeed, by revealing that deafness does not preclude sound description, these poets formulate an alternative understanding of the role of sound in poetry.
Deaf poets extend this understanding of the textuality and conventionality of sound to the “voice” of a poem. That is, deaf poetry relegates the orality that appears so frequently in the sounds unheard genre to a product, rather than the source, of writing. My reading of these deaf poets is aligned with Prins’s, Tucker’s, and Kreilkamp’s understandings of how writing can produce an imagined echo of vocality. For example, Kitto subsumes the various sounds of nature and music in his poem “Mary,” including the ever-present nightingale, into the fraught concept of voice:
And so beneath o’ershadowing trees,
I’ve heard leaves rustle in the breeze,
Which brought me the melodious tale
Of all the vocal nightingale.
Or else the cushat’s coo of pride
Over his new mated bride;—
Yes: I have heard thee—Nature, thee,
In all thy thousand voices speak,
Which now are silent all to me:—
(lines 44–52)
Not only does Kitto attribute a “voice” to the nightingale, but he also categorizes the entire sonic register of the poem as Nature’s “thousand voices.” Kitto, who became deaf at the age of twelve, uses writing to describe sounds he can no longer hear and then to name these sounds “voice.” In “Thoughts on Music,” Peet also surveys the sounds around her in service of a higher “voice” that encapsulates all sounds:
And then they tell of the sounds which come
Afar from the sea’s deep caves,
Of the voice of the wind which sighs among
Old oceans’ towering waves;
And the wild, deep music, which comes up
From the breaker’s dashing roar
And the storm cloud’s voice, when, as in wrath,
His torrents madly pour.
(lines 9–16)
Peet’s stanzas list various sounds she cannot hear, such as “lark’s glad trill” (line 19) and “the evening zephyr’s notes” (line 30), in a progression toward the idea that within all these sounds, which she calls “Nature’s thousand tones” (line 39), there echoes one “voice,” presumably the voice of God (line 38).
This cacophony of orality appears frequently in sounds unheard poetry, from frequent references to human voices to descriptions of the “storm cloud’s voice” (Peet, “Thoughts,” line 15) and “woodlands, vocal with merry tones” (Carlin, “Mute’s,” 8–9). In Simpson’s “Recollections of Hearing,” the “speaker” explains, “nature now remains to me / comparatively dumb” (lines 51–52). In the genre of sounds unheard poetry, nonvocal sounds are transformed into orality through writing. Voices, animate and inanimate, dominate the imagined soundscape of these poems, thereby highlighting both the poet’s thematic alienation from orality and his or her interest in the formal intersection between orality and written poetry. The common construction of written poetry as a secondary product of an original bardic orality cannot incorporate absurd poetry, which is created by poets who sign rather than speak and reverse the traditional model to imagine orality as a secondary product of written poetry.
Because these poems—in their thematic treatments of speaking mutes and sounds unheard—render a textual (rather than audible) voice into print, nineteenth-century deaf poetry simultaneously displaces and conforms to the hegemony of orality in written poetry. These poets were shaped and constrained by both the cultural ideology that disparaged those who did not speak and the poetic ideology that considered poetry a genre of orality. While this absurd poetry strains against this definition by replacing the voice with writing and emphasizing poetry’s accessibility to deaf people, it was nevertheless hedged in by the cultural power of orality. And yet, this tension subversively reveals that the “voice” of a poem is usually metaphorical, and this metaphor is equally available to a deaf poet as to a hearing poet.
Although nineteenth-century deaf poets could not entirely escape poetry’s generic tie to orality, they created a position for themselves in the phonocentric landscape of nineteenth-century poetry by calling their writing “speech.” But this invocation of orality never eschews writing. At the center of every absurd poem there is a celebration of writing and an assertion of a deaf person’s right to poetry through their writing ability. One important example of this focus on the deaf poet as a writer, even as the poem imagines poetry as song, occurs in Peet’s “The Castle of Silence”:92
Low bending at thy shrine I come,
O radiant muse of song!
And though no sound my voice may wake,
No low deep tone the echoes break
That tremble round thy throne.
Perchance my hand may touch the lyre,
And bid some chord to thrill,
And though the minstrel’s home-land be
The realm of silence, still may she
Bring soul-gifts, at thy will.
(lines 1–10; italics in original)
Peet maintains the alignment of song and poetry—Kitto’s notion of a “tuneful art”—by understanding poetry’s muse as the muse of song and invoking the chords of the metaphorical lyre of lyric poetry. She does, however, use that metaphor to validate deaf poetry. Peet’s “speaker” replaces the poetic voice with her hand strumming the lyre. Her hand, with its access to both writing and signing, thereby becomes the instrument of poetic creation. Though a dweller of the “realm of silence,” Peet asserts her right to lyric poetry through writing and signing.
Furthermore, Peet’s privileging of her hand as that which connects her to the lyric tradition is even more suggestive in the context of the performance history of this poem. Peet presented “The Castle of Silence” in sign language for an audience of hearing and deaf people at the 1859 closing exercises of the New York Institution of the Deaf and Dumb, from which she had graduated six years earlier. A reporter for the New York Times in attendance applauded Peet’s “muse” and declared that her “words were fitted together . . . euphoniously.”93Despite the reporter’s invocation of poetic sound, and the fact that the poem may also have been recited orally, the poem was primarily produced and disseminated in sign. This moment where Peet silently signs her “euphonious” poem—a strictly rhymed poem that defends silent deaf poetry—embodies the central tension of nineteenth-century deaf poetry. This poetry vacillates between adherence to and subversion of the hegemony of the voice in nineteenth-century English poetry. On one hand, these poets typically conformed to conventional patterns of rhythm and rhyme to demonstrate their poetic abilities. On the other hand, they challenged the alignment of poetry and sound through emphasizing the apparent contradictions of deaf poetry. This simultaneous formal capitulation and thematic resistance in the previously unexplored canon of deaf poetry offers a new perspective on the relationship between sound and poetry. Nineteenth-century deaf poetry insistently places writing, rather than speech, at the center of poetic production and reception.
Nineteenth-century deaf poetry provides a unique and important lens through which to examine issues of voice, sound, and textuality in Victorian poetry, because its creators were socially marginalized by a cultural reverence for the voice. Absurd poetry also illuminates the limitations of the perception of a natural or necessary relationship between speech and written poetry. For deaf poets, poetry is not a “tuneful art.”94Through their use of the sounds unheard theme and the speaking mute figure, these deaf poets exploited the sound-based theory of poetry to highlight the very written-ness—the very absence of speech—that characterized all nineteenth-century printed poetry. In reimagining the relationship between sound and text, insisting on written texts without corresponding sensory experiences of sound, and celebrating the possibilities of writing, deaf poetry provides one more avenue to complicate our critical understanding of the places where writing and speaking meet and where bodies and texts intersect.
The Political Uses of the Poetic
While, as I have argued, attending to deaf poetry can expand and complicate widely held definitions of poetry and formulations of the relationship between the audible and the aesthetic, deaf poetry was also used politically as a form of resistance to oralism. For instance, in 1886, at the height of the sign language debates, Edward Miner Gallaudet, a leading figure in American deaf education, was called before the British Royal Commission on the Blind and the Deaf and Dumb. The commissioners Gallaudet faced were charged with investigating the best ways to educate both deaf and blind children in government-funded schools, and this mandate involved settling the controversy over which of the competing systems of deaf education—oralism, manualism, or a combined system—would be best for both deaf students and the nation in general.95In his testimony, Gallaudet aimed to defend the use of signed languages in deaf education and the wider deaf community. The commissioners, who were especially concerned about oralist claims that deaf people who did not speak faced poor economic prospects, asked Gallaudet to describe the professions of the nonspeaking graduates of the American National Deaf-Mute College. Gallaudet gave examples of graduates who communicated “entirely by writing or by the fingers” and were prospering in various fields.96He declared that these successful graduates “show[ed] that the practice of the oral method with the deaf is not essential to the highest success in the various pursuits which they take up” (“Testimony,” 468). And then, to emphasize his point, Gallaudet read aloud Draper’s Petrarchan sonnet, “Memories of Sound.”
While a sonnet seems like an anomalous piece of evidence for the vocational success of deaf people, especially when considered alongside the various reports, statistical analyses, and concrete data presented to the commission by other witnesses, Gallaudet’s recitation of Draper’s sonnet was an example of the common practice of refuting oralist arguments by exhibiting the skills of signing deaf people. Furthermore, this poetry reading at the Royal Commission was only one example of a larger mobilization of deaf poetry to defend signed languages. Though the oralist movement waged its war against signs in government commissions, congresses of educators, educational journals, and the popular press, members of the deaf community (who, we should note, were often denied a “voice” at these official forums) resisted oralism through creating counternarratives to oralist denigrations of signed languages and signers. By publishing their poetry, deaf people and their supporters were able to both offer their own perspectives on signed languages and provide textual evidence of the linguistic and intellectual capacities of signers. Indeed, after reading Draper’s sonnet aloud, Gallaudet submitted his own Harper’s magazine article on deaf poetry, which included British poets, as evidence for the Royal Commission.
Carol Padden and Tom Humphries have argued that American Sign Language (ASL) poetry played an important role in the American Deaf cultural movement that took place from the 1960s through the 1980s. They have suggested that this poetry contributed to the growth of a new pride in ASL and offered a deaf perspective on the value of signed languages (Inside, 131). I believe we can extend Padden and Humphries’s assessment of the political and social value of deaf poetry to another important era in deaf history: the nineteenth-century sign language debates in Britain and North America. The deaf poetry I have been discussing in this chapter was instrumental to demonstrating deaf people’s abilities in the face of an oralist ideology that claimed that speech was essential to a deaf person’s success.
The entire oralist project was premised on the claim that signed languages were inferior to spoken languages in almost every dimension. As scholars including Baynton, Branson and Miller, Krentz, and Rée have argued, North American and British oralists attacked signed languages for nearly a century, through a rhetoric of xenophobic, racist, speciesist, and ableist invocations of the “primitive” nature of signed languages. Because nineteenth-century oralists on both sides of the Atlantic claimed that signed languages were inferior to spoken languages for a variety of reasons (including their insistence that signed languages prevented abstract thought and interfered with English language acquisition), defenders of sign were repeatedly forced to prove the intellectual and linguistic capabilities of nonspeaking deaf people. An essential tactic in battling oralism, then, involved offering an alternative, positive version of signing and demonstrating that signers could think abstractly and write in English. This need to defend signers informed the common nineteenth-century cultural practice of publicly exhibiting deaf students. Indeed, there is an important continuity between these public educational exhibitions and the way in which Gallaudet and others marshaled deaf poetry as evidence of the success of the manualist system.
During the frequent and widespread public exhibitions of deaf students put on by nineteenth-century deaf schools in Europe and North America, deaf pupils presented readings in signed languages, gave dramatic performances, executed mathematical and other exercises at a chalkboard, and answered questions from the audience. As various historians of deaf education, including Davis, Baynton, Rée, Krentz, and Lane have established, these exhibitions were intended to display the positive attributes of signing as well as demonstrate the intellectual capacities of deaf children, including their comprehension of abstract concepts and their ability to read and write in English and other languages. Often these exhibitions of deaf children using signed languages—languages that Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet called “highly poetical”97—foregrounded poetry. For example, at an 1857 exhibition in Mississippi, a deaf student presented a poem called “The Mute Sister” in sign.98This poem, written by James S. Brown, principal of the Louisiana Institute of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, was about a deaf child whose only deaf sibling succumbs to illness. When the poem’s “speaker” mourns the loss of the one person whose “signs . . . I alone could freely read” (line 5), the poem highlights the importance of signed languages and deaf community in a hearing-dominated world. The fact that this sentimental poem was presented by a young deaf pupil in sign underscored its thematic content. Furthermore, as Krentz has noted, at these public demonstrations, “the students’ visual performance provoked wonder and fascination; they were seen as possessing a beautiful language and skills that most hearing people did not have.”99
Deaf students had to refute the oralist claim that signed languages could only incompletely convey the complexity of human thought. Some oralists maintained that as languages of the limbs, signed languages were mired in concreteness and iconic representation, and therefore signers could not think abstractly unless taught how to speak. For instance, one proponent of this position, Thomas Arnold, who was Britain’s leading oralist, argued, “Signs are pictures of objects, and therefore resemble them. The one suggests the other from this semblance. But by what signs shall we express abstractions, purely mental states, operations and intuitions? As none of these can be reduced to a material form it is impossible to figure them by signs. . . . The processes of the understanding cannot be described on the fingers.”100Arnold shared this belief in sign as a mode of pantomime with many oralists and even the general public.101One of the principal aims of the deaf schools’ public exhibitions, then, was to correct this misunderstanding of the qualities of signed languages. Indeed, during the question period at these presentations, audiences often asked students about abstract ideas such as God, whether they could distinguish between closely related concepts—such as “authority and power” or “mind and intellect”—and how they imagined inaccessible sensory experiences such as music.102As Lane notes, these interrogations were “a kind of test of [a deaf person’s] intelligence, and if they particularly dwelt on abstractions it was because hearing people were under the misapprehension that the deaf could only deal with concrete things.”103
Public attempts to showcase the abstract reasoning and linguistic skills of signing deaf children extended beyond the school auditorium; the many articles printed in deaf periodicals and the various books published by educators as testimonies of deaf students’ intellectual capacities demonstrate the widespread and pernicious influence of the cultural devaluation of signed languages. For instance, in 1845, H. B. Bingham, the principal of the College of the Deaf and Dumb in Rugby, published a collection of student essays to “pro[ve]” to the public that “when educated, [deaf students] possess a quickness of apprehension, and a scope of imagination equal to those of their own age who are not naturally deaf.”104The essay topics echo the questions posed by the public at school exhibitions. The Rugby students were asked to write about pertinent social issues (such as slavery, revolution, and the advantages of the railway), topics related to their deafness (such as whether it is worse to be deaf or blind), and abstract concepts including “death” and “light.”105
The public exhibitions of deaf students also aimed to demonstrate that these students, who did not speak, could use written English. Most oralists claimed that using signs to any extent, even alongside speech and writing, interfered with the acquisition of English language skills. For oralists, the “inverted” logic and grammar of signed languages marred their users’ linguistic capacities.106For example, Alexander Graham Bell, who, like Gallaudet, testified at the British Royal Commission on the Blind and the Deaf and Dumb, argued that a deaf person could not successfully use both English and a signed language. In his testimony Bell claimed that a signing deaf child “has learned to think in the gesture language, and his most perfected English expressions are only translations of his sign speech. As a general rule, when his education is completed, his knowledge of the English language is like the knowledge of French or German possessed by the average hearing child in leaving school. He cannot read an ordinary book intelligently without frequent recourse to a dictionary . . . and he can generally make people understand what he wishes in broken English, as a foreigner would speak.”107Oralists held English literacy at a premium and refused to recognize both the value of literacy in a signed language and the possibility that, as recent studies have shown, this sign literacy actually improves literacy in a written language.108Manualist teachers, too, foregrounded the acquisition of written English skills in their attempts to justify the use of signed languages. In introducing a public exhibition of his students, James S. Brown argued that the “great work” of the deaf pupil is “to receive and acquire a knowledge of written language” and that it was the audience’s role to judge his students’ success.109A central element of these exhibitions, then, was a student’s performance of written exercises at a chalkboard to demonstrate, in Krentz’s words, his or her “mastery of logocentric forms.”110
In this sign-hostile climate, engendered by the rise of oralism, then, manualist educators and other deaf signers mobilized deaf children’s abilities for public and political aims. Understanding Gallaudet’s recitation of Draper’s sonnet through the lens of this culture of public exhibition illuminates his motivations for submitting poetry as evidence alongside more quantitative data about salaries and occupations. However, Gallaudet’s poetry reading was only one example of the way in which nineteenth-century deaf poetry was yoked to the deaf community’s resistance to oralism through, in part, exhibiting the literacy skills of deaf signers. After all, cultural beliefs about sign language’s deficiencies—that it is closer to gesture than it is to “language,” that it is incapable of describing the abstract, and that it interferes with proficiency in English—should have rendered deaf poetry impossible. According to these beliefs about language, a deaf person who communicated primarily in signs could not possess the ability to compose poetry in English. Their language of the body precluded the creation of poetry from the mind. It is important to remember, therefore, that in addition to his or her inability to hear, a deaf poet’s inability to speak made his or her poetic ability seem implausible.
The nineteenth-century deaf poetry that is the focus of this chapter is important, then, not only in expanding paradigmatic definitions of poetry but also in drawing attention to the struggle of the deaf community for self-determination and language rights. Deaf poetry was one tool used by supporters of sign against the oralist ideology that insisted that signing deaf people would be unable to succeed in their use of the English language and therefore in their lives.111The deaf poets examined in this chapter offered various explanations for their desire to write poetry, and very few stated overtly political aims. Regardless of their intentions, however, I argue that the poetry of the deaf, through its very existence, challenges the claims underpinning the oralist program. I do not mean to suggest that there is any clear evidence that these poems written by deaf individuals were demonstrably instrumental in making political gains for deaf communities. After all, despite Gallaudet’s poetry reading, the British Royal Commission still endorsed speech training for all deaf children.112Unfortunately, the subversive potential of deaf poetry was often neutralized, for reasons enumerated later in this chapter. Nevertheless, because deaf poetry affirmed deaf people’s linguistic skills, it intervened in the sign language debates of the nineteenth century.
Some deaf poets clearly did write poetry in order to refute the idea that it was absurd for them to do so. Simpson, a British teacher of deaf children, credited Kitto’s “erroneous impression” (Simpson, Daydreams, xii) that the difficulties facing an aspiring deaf poet were “insuperable” (Kitto, Lost, 168) with spurring him to publish his poetry. In the preface to his book of poetry, Daydreams of the Deaf (1858), Simpson begins by agreeing with—and partially plagiarizing—Kitto but then disputes the “insuperability” of the obstacles to a deaf poet when he explains that “in deaf people, the absence of oral guidance, and that perfect knowledge of quantity and rhyme, essential to harmonious verse, must surround them with difficulties and tend to prevent the attainment of any great excellence in the cultivation of the muses and yet not be so much so as to form an ‘insuperable’ obstacle to a persevering mind” (xii). Simpson explicitly constructs his book of poetry as a refutation of Kitto’s claim that deaf people cannot write poetry. However, Simpson also shares Kitto’s ambivalence about deaf poetic achievement: he does affirm Kitto’s point that deafness “tend[s] to prevent the attainment of any great excellence in the cultivation of the muses” (xii). Simpson, like Kitto, vacillates on the importance of sound to poetry. However, for Simpson, at least, deaf poetry is not an absurdity.
In other instances, deaf poetry’s interrogation of phonocentrism was clearly unintentional, because some deaf poets were hardly strident advocates for deaf rights. For example, Carlin, though never orally trained himself, supported oral training and made derogatory comments about the capabilities of deaf people. Krentz explains Carlin’s strange negativity towards his fellow deaf Americans by suggesting that Carlin “appears to have internalized traditional negative attitudes so completely that his work overflows with sentimental self-pity and woe[;] . . . such dejection is perhaps understandable given the barriers that Carlin, a gifted deaf man, must have encountered in ante-bellum America.”113Kitto, who became deaf as a young child and believed that deaf people could not write poetry, deeply underestimated the capacities of people who were born deaf and used signs exclusively. Neither Kitto nor Carlin was a model supporter of the deaf community that they were a part of, yet each man, through writing poetry, inadvertently refuted his own claims about the inferiority of deaf people’s cognitive and linguistic abilities.
In other cases, such as the two poems, “Holy Home” and “Light and Darkness,”114written by deaf-blind American Laura Bridgman, deaf poems were published mainly as a curiosity, which drained them of some of their subversive potential. They were put on display, as Bridgman was herself, as evidence of the success of her education. In “Light and Darkness,” Bridgman explores these two extremes of visual experience in highly metaphorical terms.
Light represents day.
Light is more brilliant than ruby, even diamond.
Light is whiter than snow.
Darkness is night like.
It looks as black as iron.
Darkness is a sorrow.
Joy is a thrilling rapture.
Light yields a shooting joy through the human (heart).
Light is as sweet as honey, but
Darkness is bitter as salt, and more than vinegar.
Light is finer than gold and even finest gold.
Joy is a real light.
Joy is a blazing flame.
Darkness is frosty.
A good sleep is a white curtain,
A bad sleep is a black curtain.
The language of this poem points to Bridgman’s absorption of the rhetoric of the dichotomy of light and dark, in which darkness represents the negative, the evil, and absence. These terms were experientially meaningless to Bridgman’s daily experience, for light and dark would have had no effect on her personal navigation of the world. However, through her reading experiences and her communication with others, she absorbed the cultural construction that considered the darkness—and perhaps even the blindness that is associated with darkness—as a “sorrow.” Whereas sighted people may understand evil through the metaphor of darkness, Bridgman reverses the tenor and vehicle of the metaphor to understand darkness through the notion of evil.
Bridgman’s poem also employs sensory imagery of vision, taste, and touch. Her use of visual description is understandable because her topics of light and darkness are visual phenomena; Bridgman would have absorbed this vocabulary of the visual through her experiences with language.115While she uses the language of taste in describing light as sweet and dark as bitter, these terms are again metaphorical descriptions of positive and negative attributes rather than about the actual experience of tasting light and dark. The place where Bridgman is perhaps less metaphorical in describing her sensory impressions is in linking light to the warmth of a flame and darkness to frostiness. As someone who navigated her world by touch, Bridgman would have primarily experienced light, whether produced by the sun or by the flames of lamps and fires, in terms of warmth. Like the genre of sounds unheard poetry, Bridgman’s seemingly synesthetic representations of light and darkness reveal what is sometimes imperceptible when we consider poetry: descriptions of sensory experience are often more about metaphor and cultural understandings of what constitutes poetic language than they are about the actual materiality of the body.
While Bridgman’s poetry does not adhere to a fixed pattern of rhyme or meter, it does have a very clearly defined rhythm. The structure of “Light and Darkness” alternates between descriptions of light and dark and dwells on the intertwining of light and joy. Where light “yields a shooting joy through the human (heart)” (line 8), joy itself is “a real light (12)” She uses a parallel couplet structure throughout, including her last two lines: “A good sleep is a white curtain, / A bad sleep is a black curtain.” Although Bridgman carefully composed these English words that she could not hear or see into a rhythmic pattern to bring light and darkness into direct comparison with each other, adherents to sound-based theories of poetry refused to consider her poetic efforts legitimate. For instance, those who wrote about Bridgman’s poetry engaged in linguistic contortions to describe it within a model of poetry centered on sound. These commentators struggled to indicate that Bridgman’s writing both was and was not poetry. In her book Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman, the Deaf, Dumb and Blind Girl, one of Bridgman’s teachers, Mary Swift Lamson, details Bridgman’s educational progress in diary form. At the very end of her book, Lamson notes, “[Bridgman] has written, within a few years, two compositions which she calls ‘poems.’”116Lamson refuses to categorize these texts as “poems”; instead she relies upon quotation marks to qualify Bridgman’s label. In their book Laura Bridgman: Dr Howe’s Famous Pupil and What He Taught Her, Maud Howe and Florence Howe Hall, the daughters of Bridgman’s famous teacher Samuel Gridley Howe, use the same awkward qualifier to introduce Bridgman’s poetry. In their book they provide an example of “those compositions which she called poems.”117They suggest that Bridgman must have been taught the “rules of versification” “unsuccessfully” because “there is neither rhyme nor rhythm in her poetry; and yet she was not wrong in calling these effusions poems, for they surely express poetical ideas.”118For the Howe sisters, poetry requires particular fixed patterns of rhyme and meter. However, while refusing to use the term poem, they affirm the accuracy of Bridgman’s appellation because of its appropriateness to the content of the poems. The Howe sisters’ inconsistency stems in part from their adherence to the sound-based theory of poetry. Nevertheless, the fact that Bridgman’s writing was an effusion—some kind of expression of the self—as well as the fact that it included “poetical ideas” mattered to the Howe sisters when determining its generic status. Furthermore, the Howes suggest that Bridgman’s writing is valuable only insofar as it intersects with Bridgman’s disabilities: “[T]he interest excited by [Bridgman’s] writings is essentially non-literary, it is human and psychological. Having no conception of the value of sound, the quality which we call style was not be hoped for in anything she could write.”119Despite their assertion that there is no room for literary interest in Bridgman’s poetry, the Howes append an essay titled “The Writings of Laura Bridgman” to the end of their book. This essay was written not by a literary critic but by a psychologist, E. C. Sanford, who argues that “a word upon Laura Bridgman’s ‘poems’ is sufficient.”120Like Lamson and the Howe sisters, Sanford distances himself from the use of the term poetry for Bridgman’s poems. He highlights the speciousness of the label through enclosing it in quotation marks and dismisses the poems through indicating that they can be dealt with in only “a word.”
Even Gallaudet, the promoter and defender of deaf poetry, sidesteps the use of the term poetry when referring to Bridgman’s writing. In his Harper’s article “Poetry of the Deaf,” he writes, “[I]t is a fact that Laura Bridgman, the mere mention of whose name touches a chord of sympathy in every heart, has lately, in the evening of her days, given expression to her reflections in a form that is highly poetic, even though her lines do not follow the modern models of versification.”121The sentimental tone of Gallaudet’s introduction, typical of writings about Bridgman, coupled with his refusal to refer to her writing as “poetry” in favor of the noncommittal phrase “reflections in a form that is highly poetic,” demonstrate that even he holds to the necessity of fixed patterns of versification. In fact, every poem he includes in “Poetry of the Deaf,” aside from Bridgman’s, has a very regular pattern of rhyme and meter even though the poets he quotes from did not always write such tightly rhymed and regularly metered poems.
Beyond the ways that deaf poetry could be denied generic authority through how it was framed, the forms of publication of deaf poetry restricted its reach at times. Most deaf poets published their work in forums for deaf audiences, such as deaf journals and newspapers. Other deaf poets, as Gallaudet notes, were students and professors working at the National Deaf-Mute College in Washington, D.C.; at this college, the existence of a deaf poet was rather commonplace. In fact, public presentations of occasional poetry written by deaf people were often used to mark important events at the college. Furthermore, the authorial decision to target a narrow, specific, or marginalized audience instead of curry favor with a wider reading public was often constructed as deliberate. For instance, at the end of her poem “The Realm of Singing,” Searing explicitly reveals her social aims: the singing bird-poet decides to sing of her struggles to “the sick, the sad, the maimed, the feeble, the betrayed and the lonely ones” (212). In fact, she refuses the invitation of the elite birds higher in the tree of poetry to join them. The bird decides that it is her calling to stay “down low” and sing to “sweeten [the] sorrow” of those who, like herself, have been trampled by the world (212). Her absurd, inaudible melodies are best suited to the plight of “the weariest of all the world’s wayfarers” (212). Searing’s bird deliberately rejects the standards of song in the “Realm of Singing” and chooses instead to honor her “absurd singing” and those who respect it.
However, in other cases, the conditions and format of the publication of deaf poetry also suggest that the political objectives of some nineteenth-century deaf poets could best be reached through including hearing readers. Deaf poets frequently combined their poetry with historical information and political statements about signed languages, which indicates that they understood their poetry as integral to defending sign language use. For example, Burnet’s book Tales of the Deaf and Dumb with Miscellaneous Poems (1835) is dominated by its preface and introductory section, which present information about signed languages and the experiences of deaf people; in fact, the literary pieces do not appear until page 150 of a 230-page book. As Burnet admits, the title of the book, which indicates its literary slant, “may make it necessary to inform the reader that nearly two-thirds of its contents consist of facts and documents” about “the principles, history, and present state of the art of instructing the deaf and dumb, statistics of the deaf and dumb and anecdotes of deaf and dumb persons” (3). While Burnet’s book title self-identifies as literary, the bulk of his text focuses on the political realities of signed languages and deaf education. Though Burnet acknowledges that “the poetical pieces at the end of the volume might appear to more advantage if published separately,” he expresses hope that they will not be overlooked when prefaced by the factual information he provides (4). Burnet, a deaf teacher of deaf children, published his book early in the nineteenth century when the oralist program was not as influential as it would come to be by the end of the century. Nevertheless, Burnet suggests in his preface that his goal is to inform his readers about the advantages of the manualist system. By uniting his poetry with this treatise on deaf education, Burnet indicates that he considers his literary production instrumental to this aim. Burnet was not alone in appending political, biographical, and historical information about deaf education to his poetry; other deaf poets, including Simpson and Kitto, likewise crafted texts that wove poetry into their reporting of facts about deaf history, education, and language use.
Some nineteenth-century deaf poets also included illustrations of the sign alphabet in their poetic publications in another implicit support of signed languages. Burnet’s book, for example, is not only a vehicle for celebrating signs in education (in both its preface and its poetry) but also an educational text for the propagation of signed languages among his readers. Burnet explains that the engraving on his book’s frontispiece of the one-handed manual alphabet was published so as “to enable any person to acquire the art of talking with the fingers in a few hours” (4). This incorporation of an illustration of a basic finger alphabet initially suggests that Burnet targeted his book to hearing people who did not know how to sign. But Burnet actually imagines his target audience as dual when he describes his intended readers as “the educated deaf and dumb, and those who take an interest in the education of this unfortunate class” (3). The image of the sign alphabet and the information about deafness seem aimed at those who are unfamiliar with deafness rather than deaf people themselves. The poetry itself seems suitable for both audiences as both a testament to deaf people’s abilities aimed at hearing people and a form of literary entertainment for deaf people.
Simpson, who taught at the Old Kent Road deaf school in London, likewise paired his poetry in Daydreams of the Deaf with an introductory preface on the social conditions of deaf people. He aimed “to draw attention to the real condition of [the very peculiar class of mankind to which I belong], and to correct the erroneous impressions and prejudices that exist regarding them” (v). Like Burnet, Simpson intended to educate hearing people about the lives and abilities of deaf people.122Kitto, who communicated primarily through the manual alphabet, included illustrations of the one-handed and two-handed manual alphabets (typically used in North America and Britain, respectively) in The Lost Senses, which also contains his poetry and information about deaf education (figures 1.1 and 1.2). Kitto enumerates the benefits of the manual alphabet and encourages his hearing readers to acquire the skill. The readers of Kitto’s and Burnet’s books are therefore not only learning about the competing systems of deaf education, while reading English poetry produced by these signers, but also are exhorted to learn the sign alphabet so they can communicate with deaf people on their own terms.
Celebrating Sign Language through Written Poetry
In addition to propagating a sign-based form of communication, the poetry written by signing deaf individuals contests commonly held beliefs about the characteristics of sign language because they displace the authority granted to speech and emphasize the communicative potential of the nonverbal and extra-oral. It was not only the sound theory of poetry that led to cultural skepticism about the poetic abilities of deaf people but also Victorian misunderstandings of the properties of signed languages. In opposition to the common alignment of language with speech in nineteenth-century culture, deaf signers understood that signed languages were linguistically sufficient. By and large, the poetry written by nineteenth-century deaf poets celebrates forms of communication outside of speech, even while the “speakers” sometimes bemoan their inability to hear and speak. Examining Kitto’s poem “Mary,” Searing’s “My Story,” and Burnet’s “Emma” demonstrates how these poets displaced the oral in favor of other forms of communication. While each of these poets had a different personal view on the merits of sign language, they were united in their attention to the communicative potential of the nonoral within their written texts.
The “speaker” of Kitto’s ten-stanza poem “Mary,” who bemoans the loss of his hearing and the “long silence” in which he has lived his life, celebrates the superior communicative abilities of oral communication. After enumerating a list of sounds unheard, the poem becomes a celebration of Mary’s eye and its ability to communicate with the “speaker,”
Mary, one sparkle of thine eye
I’d not exchange for all the gems
That shine in kingly diadems,
Or spices of rich Araby
(lines 94–97)
The “speaker” explains that he values Mary’s eyes because of their ability to communicate thoughts, hopes, and feelings to him, since “the human voice divine / Falls not on this cold sense of mine” (lines 66–67). Kitto writes,
But Mary, when I look on thee
All things beside neglected lie,
There is a deep eloquence to me
In the bright sparkle of thine eye.
How sweetly can their beamings roll
Volumes of meaning to my soul,
How long—how vainly all—might words
Express what one quick glance affords.
So spirits talk perhaps when they
Their feelings and their thoughts convey,
Till heart to heart, and soul to soul
Is in one moment opened all.
(lines 82–93)
The “speaker’s” synesthetic description of Mary’s eye as eloquent attributes the communicative powers of speech to the formerly mute gaze. Furthermore, the poem argues that the eye’s communicative power is superior in both “eloquence” and efficiency to cumbersome spoken words. Of course, Kitto’s celebration of the way in which lovers can communicate outside of words borrows from a wider cultural poetic discourse of romantic love that asserts the extralinguistic powers of communication that exist between lovers and the insufficiency of words to capture love. For example, in Sonnets from the Portuguese, written the same year that Kitto published The Lost Senses, Elizabeth Barrett Browning draws upon this convention of love poetry.123In Sonnet 13, the “speaker” assures her lover that she cannot “fashion into speech / The love I bear thee” (lines 1–2). Instead she asks her lover to “let the silence of my womanhood / Commend my woman-love to thy belief” (lines 9–10). In Sonnet 39, Barrett Browning’s “speaker” moves from expression beyond words to reception of the extraverbal. She describes her lover’s power to “look through and beneath” (line 2) the surface into her “soul’s true face” (line 4). In both of these examples, spoken words are represented as less powerful than visual communication. Kitto uses this convention for his particular circumstance as a deaf man who cannot hear his Mary’s voice but can “read” his Mary’s eye.
Searing’s poem “My Story” shares “Mary’s” focus on communication outside of the oral and aural. The poem was published in Searing’s book of American Civil War poetry Idylls of Battle. The “speaker” of “My Story” describes her experience with deafness and then compares her story with “A nation’s tears! A nation’s pains! / The record of a nation’s loss” (lines 49–50). By the end of the poem, the “speaker” refocuses her pain and tears away from her “lighter cross” (line 52) of deafness toward the suffering of her country:
Henceforth, thou dear, bereaved land!
I keep with thee thy vigil night;
My prayers, my tears, are all for thee,—
God and the deathless Right!
(lines 53–56)
However, the first twelve stanzas of the fourteen-stanza poem do not mention the war but concentrate instead on the “speaker’s” pains, struggles, and hopes regarding her deafness. The “speaker” primarily experiences the world through her vision, which allows her to “read” thoughts and feelings in the faces and eyes around her.
I learned to read in every face
The deep emotions of the heart;
For Nature to the stricken one
Had given this simple art.
The world of sound was not for me;
But then I sought in friendly eyes
A soothing for my bitter loss,
When memories would rise.
And I was happy as a child,
If I could read a friendly thought
In the warm sunshine of a face,
The which my trust had wrought.
(lines 17–28)
In Searing’s poem, as in Kitto’s, eyes communicate with eyes and faces are texts to be read. These facial texts are especially legible to the deaf “speaker,” who can read the typically hidden “deep emotions of the heart” on the faces around her, as a kind of compensation for her deafness. This construction of faces as texts appears frequently in the writings of nineteenth-century deaf poets. Kitto, for example, argues that because deaf people do not have the ability to judge a person’s character by “tone of voice and manner of speech,” “everyone who is deaf must become a physiognomist” (Lost, 61). These poets participate in what Deidre Lynch has called “the Victorians’ fascination with the insights to be obtained from the sight of another’s countenance” to suggest that visual communication trumps oral communication in both its efficiency and its revelation of truth.124
Various Victorian canonical hearing poets also deploy this physiognomic logic in their poetry, including, for example, Robert Browning. In “Fra Lippo Lippi,” the “speaker” explains that his marginalization as a poor boy taught him to read faces and therefore to become a great artist: “When a boy starves in the streets,” “Why soul and sense of him grow sharp alike, / He learns the looks of things” (lines 112, 124–25).125 “How It Strikes a Contemporary” is rife with paranoia about surveillance and the poet “as a recording chief-inquisitor” who wanders the streets “looking [the world] full in the face” (lines 39, 11). “My Last Duchess” famously treats the speciousness of reading faces and the gendered danger of a woman’s face revealing too much or too little about her thoughts and feelings. In each of these examples, face reading is somewhat threatening in its ability to reveal what the object of surveillance may wish to hide. In the examples of “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “My Last Duchess” specifically, the poems’ insistence on the readability and transparency of a person’s exterior reflects the dramatic monologue’s generic ability to reveal secrets implicitly while the subject dissembles explicitly. The reader of the poem becomes a poetic physiognomist of sorts, able to read the truth of the “speaker” outside of the words that the “speaker” utters. So, although celebrations of face reading and validations of the art of physiognomy in deaf poetry participate in wider nineteenth-century cultural preoccupations, deaf poets claim a unique and positive relationship to face reading. For Kitto and Searing, who figure this reading of faces as a form of compensation for their deafness, deaf people are better physiognomists than hearing people are. These poets thereby appropriate the cultural authority of the rhetoric of physiognomy to validate nonoral methods of communication.
In addition to her eyes, the “speaker” of “My Story” uses her hands to negotiate and communicate with the world around her through the sense of touch and the use of space. The “speaker” refers to hands three times within the first four stanzas. In the first, she “grasp[s] the hand” of her interlocutor (line 1). She then characterizes her deafness as the “hand of God” falling “heavily / upon [her]” (lines 6–7). In the fourth stanza, she describes how her
. . . poor life, so silence-bound,
Reached blindly out its helpless hands,
Craving the love and tenderness
Which every soul demands.
(lines 13–16)
This focus on hands as the medium of intercourse between the “speaker” and those around her (including her God) implicitly reveals that she uses sign language. While this focus on deaf people’s nonverbal communication—on eyes, faces, and hands as instruments of communication—recurs frequently in deaf poetry, many of these poets are even more explicit about manualism and signed languages than Kitto and Searing.126
Burnet’s long narrative poem “Emma” describes deaf students learning sign language, a “new language,—all their own, / Where mind was visible,—and knowledge shone” (lines 308–9). “Emma” is about a young deaf girl’s journey from isolation to intellectual enrichment and community through learning sign language and attending a school for deaf children. Like Kitto and Searing, Burnet invokes the visibility of thoughts and feelings in this new language, where “mind was visible.” At the school for deaf children
from the speaking limbs, and face divine,
At nature’s bidding, thoughts and feelings shine,
That in thin air no more her sense elude,–
Each understands,—by each is understood.
Here can each feeling gush forth, unrepressed,
To mix with feelings of a kindred breast.
(lines 330–35)
Like Kitto’s celebration of the eloquence of Mary’s eye, Burnet’s synesthetic yoking of speech and visible limbs affirms the communicative capabilities of signed languages, albeit in the hegemonic rhetoric of orality. The potentially problematic construction of deaf people possessing “speaking hands” and “listening eyes” (Peet, “The Castle,” 105, 109, emphasis in original) recurs frequently throughout nineteenth-century deaf poetry; indeed, the phonocentric resonances of the English vocabulary of communication are nearly impossible to escape. However, by yoking this terminology of speech and sound to celebrations of signed languages, at least, these poets deploy the rhetoric to buttress their sign-positive aims. In opposition to oralists’ claims about the necessity of speech for literacy, Kitto, Searing, and Burnet celebrate the avenues of communication that exist outside of the hegemony of orality.
Furthermore, the imagery in the section of the poem that deals with Emma’s learning of this new language and knowledge is notably spatial:
Here does her teacher’s skilful hand unroll
The curtain that hung around her darken’d soul,—
Revealing all the secret springs that move
The once mysterious scene, around, above.
(lines 336–39)
This italicized Here is repeated three times in the section about Emma’s education. This deixis emphasizes the physical space of the residential school. Burnet’s focus on spatiality continues with the metaphor of the teacher’s hand physically unrolling the curtain to reveal the scene in the space “around” and “above” Emma. Emma’s education is described again and again in imagery of space and motion—it allows her to “spurn this clog of clay and wander free / Through distant ages,—o’er far land and sea” (lines 342–43). Her experience of life before learning sign language is compared to being mired in clay, whereas sign language allows unfettered movement through space and time and frees Emma from her “once cag’d and insulated mind” (line 324).
Burnet deploys spatial and visual imagery in an especially provocative manner when discussing Emma’s religious education:
her teacher,—pointing to the skies,—
Unrolls the sacred volume to her eyes,—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The teacher stands, to pray or teach, and all
The eyes around drink in the thoughts that fall,
Not from the breathing lips,—and tuneful tongue,—
But from the hand with graceful gesture flung.
The feelings that burn deep in his own breast
Ask not the aid of words to touch the rest;
But from his speaking limbs and changing face,—
In all the thousand forms of motion’s grace,
Mind emanates, in corruscations, fraught
With all the thousand varied shades of thought.
(lines 348–49, 360–69)
Emma’s teacher imparts the doctrine of Christianity to his students visually through his facial and bodily movement, including pointing to the sky and his “thousand forms of motions grace.” Emma’s new conceptions of the “scene, around, above” her, through learning sign language, are directly aligned with her education in Christianity.
Burnet’s explicit alignment of sign language to Christianity is a political move that was made by many advocates of manualism who were responding to the idea that deaf people were shut out from Christian salvation. As Baynton notes, at the time that Burnet was writing “Emma,” “deafness was often described as an affliction that isolated the individual from the Christian community. Its tragedy was that deaf people lived beyond the reach of the gospel.”127Sterne has also argued that Saint Augustine’s “literali[zing of] the dictum, ‘Faith comes by hearing’” positioned deaf people as outsiders to Christianity for centuries.128In “Emma,” however, faith comes not by hearing but by seeing. Burnet directly refutes his culture’s constructions of the discontinuity of Christian faith and deafness by celebrating religious instruction as a visual enterprise accessible to deaf people. Burnet was only one of many supporters of manualism who defended the right of deaf people to sign by arguing that it allowed them access to Christian thought and doctrine. For example, Reverend Thomas H. Gallaudet described signed languages as languages in which “the deaf-mute can intelligibly conduct his private devotions and join in social religious exercises with his fellow pupils.”129Burnet extends this argument even further by arguing that religion is more successfully taught in sign than in speech. Emma’s religious instruction is “not in a cloak of words obscur’d, confined— / Here free conceptions flash from mind to mind” (lines 370–71). In his poem “Recollections of Hearing,” Simpson similarly claims privileged access to religion or God because of his deafness. He argues that his deafness allows him to better “hear the ‘still small voice’ / that bids my heart and soul rejoice” (lines 71–72). In “Emma,” Burnet justifies sign language through its ability to teach Christian doctrine, the same doctrine that had been used in the past to exclude deaf people from the salvation offered to all humanity. He employs the language of stasis and motion to describe spoken words as trapping ideas and signs as enabling movement. He also reverses the terms of the audio/visual binary that links the audible, or the vocal, with evanescence and impermanence and the visual with the material and the concrete. Finally, Burnet suggests that the abstract principles of Christianity can be imparted through signs more fittingly than through speech, thereby challenging the notion that signing cannot represent abstract or metaphysical thought.
This attention to the communicative capacities of faces and hands appears repeatedly in the corpus of nineteenth-century deaf poetry. This poetic attention to the body reveals that these poets were attuned not merely to “body language” but to the properties of signed languages, even when not explicitly referencing signs. Linguists now know what nineteenth-century users of signed languages had not yet codified: facial expression and the spatial motion of the arms are integral parts of the grammar of signed languages. In contemporary signed languages such as British Sign Language and American Sign Language, the component parts of one sign are hand shape, movement, location, orientation, and nonmanual signals (facial expression).130In these signed languages, facial expression and arm movement are not merely incidental or extralinguistic but are essential elements of the meaning of a sign. The ability to read faces and attend to the motion of the hands and arms is less a compensation for deafness than a reflection of the actual linguistic properties of the language deaf poets are using. By celebrating the communicative powers of signed languages and even suggesting that this visual language of “speaking limbs” was superior to speech in its communicative capacities, nineteenth-century deaf poets used their poetry to resist oralist constructions of signed languages as limiting to their users.
While most nineteenth-century deaf poets celebrated the properties of signed languages in their written poetry, some of them, including Searing and Peet, even created sign poetry. Though evidence for nineteenth-century sign language poetry is limited, there are clear indications that sign poetry was an element of the culture of poetry in nineteenth-century deaf communities. As noted above, at public school exhibitions deaf students presented signed readings including Bible verses, poetry, and other texts typically used in elocutionary exercises. For example, at the closing exercises of the New York Institution of the Deaf and Dumb in 1859, a deaf student “recited” Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” in signs, which “elicited a great deal of applause” from the audience.131Then Mary Toles Peet, who had graduated from the institution six years earlier, presented her original, “euphonious,” composition “The Castle of Silence” in signs. Searing signed her own poem “A Farewell” at her 1858 graduation from the Missouri School for the Deaf.132Additional reports reveal that other people also publicly staged Searing’s poems in signs. At the 1889 dedication of the statue of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Searing’s poem “Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet” was performed in both signs and spoken English.133Krentz has argued that at that historic moment of erecting a monument to a founder of deaf education, “deaf Americans showed just how self-respecting and independent they were”;134one demonstration of the self-respect of this community was its desire to create and present poetry in what most of its members considered their natural language. The simultaneous presentation of Searing’s poem in signed and spoken language affirmed the communicative and expressive capabilities of signed languages while also demonstrating Searing’s skill in written English.
This group of accomplished poets, who created poetry in both signed languages and written English, refuted the oralist argument that deaf people could never attain a high level of English literacy without the total eradication of signed languages and the introduction of speech training. Therefore, the existence of deaf poetry makes the case for English literacy through sign literacy. During his testimony to the British Royal Commission, for example, E. M. Gallaudet addressed oralist claims that signers were shut out from English idioms and were generally deficient in English literacy: “In manual schools where thoroughly competent and judicious teachers are employed the use of signs is not only found to be no impediment in the acquisition of the power of using language idiomatically, but is found to be a great help in reaching that end.”135Gallaudet and other proponents of the argument that signing allowed deaf children to perform better in all areas of study claimed that signs needed to be used “for the purpose of explanation” and posited that oral training hampered deaf students’ scholastic achievement because it wasted so many classroom hours on articulation and lipreading instruction instead of other academic subjects.136Furthermore, some deaf poets explicitly located their English writing skills precisely in their lack of speech. Searing, for example, initially stopped speaking after losing her hearing at the age of thirteen because her speech “brought shocked looks and cruel commentary” from her family.137Searing wrote, “Soon my school slate and chalk, or pencil and paper became my main method to communicate with others. It was as if I were born with a pen and paper in hand in which to express my thoughts.”138
In the context of the oralist-influenced belief that signing hampered English language skills, the political implications of Gallaudet’s interest in deaf poetry become clear. While at first it seems curious that he read a sonnet in response to a commissioner’s question about the occupational prospects of deaf signers, evidently Gallaudet connected the ability to write English poetry to the capacity to succeed, economically or otherwise, in the hearing-dominated, English-speaking cultures of Britain and North America. As with deaf students’ public “recitations” in signed languages and writing on chalkboards in auditoriums filled with curious hearing spectators, Gallaudet used deaf poetry as a public demonstration of the linguistic and intellectual capacities of signing deaf people. These signing poets valued what they considered their natural language of signs and offered a counternarrative to the oralist construction of signers as intellectually and linguistically bereft. Because writing poetry in English required both English fluency and the use of abstraction in language, the genre was the perfect battleground for challenging oralist claims. Furthermore, because, as Branson and Miller have argued, a misunderstanding of signed languages is “at the heart of the discrimination against deaf people,”139the construction of signed languages as equal or superior to English, as expressed through the hegemonic form of written English poetry, allowed some British and North American deaf people to resist oralism. Through poetry, they offered a new, public, and more accurate construction of the properties of signed languages and the abilities of the signing deaf community.
2
“I Listened with My Eyes”
Writing Speech and Reading Deafness in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
In Harriet Martineau’s novel Principle and Practice; or, The Orphan Family (1827), Charles Forsyth injures his leg and, during his convalescence, seeks refuge in books.140In his course of reading, Forsyth notices a lack of realism in fictional depictions of disability, one that affects different impairments asymmetrically: “Blindness is frequently made interesting in books; deafness seldom or never. There are interesting and poetical associations connected with blindness; ridiculous, low, or common ones only with deafness. A blind heroine is charming; but would not all the world laugh at the very idea of a deaf one?” (122–23). While some forms of disability, impairment, and illness render a character an object of interest in Victorian fiction, deafness, as Martineau’s novel suggests, is generally immune to this fictional construction. Martineau wrote Principle and Practice early in the nineteenth century, but the literature that followed did not alter the truth of her observations. For instance, there are dozens of Victorian texts featuring blind characters by writers including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, Dinah Mulock Craik, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Arthur Conan Doyle.141Conversely, Wilkie Collins’s novel Hide and Seek (1854, 1861) and Charles Dickens’s Christmas story “Doctor Marigold” (1865) are the only Victorian fictional texts to feature a deaf character who uses a signed language.142How can we explain the remarkable absence of deaf characters from Victorian fiction? Why is the very idea of a deaf heroine, in Martineau’s words, “ridiculous”?
