Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
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