Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
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