Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
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