Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
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