Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
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