Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
poets had a different personal view on the merits of sign language, they were united in their attention to the communicative potential of the nonoral within their written texts.
The “speaker” of Kitto’s ten-stanza poem “Mary,” who bemoans the loss of his hearing and the “long silence” in which he has lived his life, celebrates the superior communicative abilities of oral communication. After enumerating a list of sounds unheard, the poem becomes a celebration of Mary’s eye and its ability to communicate with the “speaker,”
Mary, one sparkle of thine eye
I’d not exchange for all the gems
That shine in kingly diadems,
Or spices of rich Araby
(lines 94–97)
The “speaker” explains that he values Mary’s eyes because of their ability to communicate thoughts, hopes, and feelings to him, since “the human voice divine / Falls not on this cold sense of mine” (lines 66–67). Kitto writes,
But Mary, when I look on thee
All things beside neglected lie,
There is a deep eloquence to me
In the bright sparkle of thine eye.
How sweetly can their beamings roll
Volumes of meaning to my soul,
How long—how vainly all—might words
Express what one quick glance affords.
So spirits talk perhaps when they
Their feelings and their thoughts convey,
Till heart to heart, and soul to soul
Is in one moment opened all.
(lines 82–93)
The “speaker’s” synesthetic description of Mary’s eye as eloquent attributes the communicative powers of speech to the formerly mute gaze. Furthermore, the poem argues that the eye’s communicative power is superior in both “eloquence” and efficiency to cumbersome spoken words. Of course, Kitto’s celebration of the way in which lovers can communicate outside of words borrows from a wider cultural poetic discourse of romantic love that asserts the extralinguistic powers of communication that exist between lovers and the insufficiency of words to capture love. For example, in Sonnets from the Portuguese, written the same year that Kitto published The Lost Senses, Elizabeth Barrett Browning draws upon this convention of love poetry.123In Sonnet 13, the “speaker” assures her lover that she cannot “fashion into speech / The love I bear thee” (lines 1–2). Instead she asks her lover to “let the silence of my womanhood / Commend my woman-love to thy belief” (lines 9–10). In Sonnet 39, Barrett Browning’s “speaker” moves from expression beyond words to reception of the extraverbal. She describes her lover’s power to “look through and beneath” (line 2) the surface into her “soul’s true face” (line 4). In both of these examples, spoken words are represented as less powerful than visual communication. Kitto uses this convention for his particular circumstance as a deaf man who cannot hear his Mary’s voice but can “read” his Mary’s eye.
Searing’s poem “My Story” shares “Mary’s” focus on communication outside of the oral and aural. The poem was published in Searing’s book of American Civil War poetry Idylls of Battle. The “speaker” of “My Story” describes her experience with deafness and then compares her story with “A nation’s tears! A nation’s pains! / The record of a nation’s loss” (lines 49–50). By the end of the poem, the “speaker” refocuses her pain and tears away from her “lighter cross” (line 52) of deafness toward the suffering of her country:
Henceforth, thou dear, bereaved land!
I keep with thee thy vigil night;
My prayers, my tears, are all for thee,—
God and the deathless Right!
(lines 53–56)
However, the first twelve stanzas of the fourteen-stanza poem do not mention the war but concentrate instead on the “speaker’s” pains, struggles, and hopes regarding her deafness. The “speaker” primarily experiences the world through her vision, which allows her to “read” thoughts and feelings in the faces and eyes around her.
I learned to read in every face
The deep emotions of the heart;
For Nature to the stricken one
Had given this simple art.
The world of sound was not for me;
But then I sought in friendly eyes
A soothing for my bitter loss,
When memories would rise.
And I was happy as a child,
If I could read a friendly thought
In the warm sunshine of a face,
The which my trust had wrought.
(lines 17–28)
In Searing’s poem, as in Kitto’s, eyes communicate with eyes and faces are texts to be read. These facial texts are especially legible to the deaf “speaker,” who can read the typically hidden “deep emotions of the heart” on the faces around her, as a kind of compensation for her deafness. This construction of faces as texts appears frequently in the writings of nineteenth-century deaf poets. Kitto, for example, argues that because deaf people do not have the ability to judge a person’s character by “tone of voice and manner of speech,” “everyone who is deaf must become a physiognomist” (Lost, 61). These poets participate in what Deidre Lynch has called “the Victorians’ fascination with the insights to be obtained from the sight of another’s countenance” to suggest that visual communication trumps oral communication in both its efficiency and its revelation of truth.124
Various Victorian canonical hearing poets also deploy this physiognomic logic in their poetry, including, for example, Robert Browning. In “Fra Lippo Lippi,” the “speaker” explains that his marginalization as a poor boy taught him to read faces and therefore to become a great artist: “When a boy starves in the streets,” “Why soul and sense of him grow sharp alike, / He learns the looks of things” (lines 112, 124–25).125 “How It Strikes a Contemporary” is rife with paranoia about surveillance and the poet “as a recording chief-inquisitor” who wanders the streets “looking [the world] full in the face” (lines 39, 11). “My Last Duchess” famously treats the speciousness of reading faces and the gendered danger of a woman’s face revealing too much or too little about her thoughts and feelings. In each of these examples, face reading is somewhat threatening in its ability to reveal what the object of surveillance may wish to hide. In the examples of “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “My Last Duchess” specifically, the poems’ insistence on the readability and transparency of a person’s exterior reflects the dramatic monologue’s generic ability to reveal secrets implicitly while the subject dissembles explicitly. The reader of the poem becomes a poetic physiognomist of sorts, able to read the truth of the “speaker” outside of the words that the “speaker” utters. So, although celebrations of face reading and validations of the art of physiognomy in deaf poetry participate in wider nineteenth-century cultural preoccupations, deaf poets claim a unique and positive relationship to face reading. For Kitto and Searing, who figure this reading of faces as a form of compensation for their deafness, deaf people are better physiognomists than hearing people are. These poets thereby appropriate the cultural authority of the rhetoric of physiognomy to validate nonoral methods of communication.
In addition to her eyes, the “speaker” of “My Story” uses her hands to negotiate and communicate with the world around her through the sense of touch and the use of space. The “speaker” refers to hands three times within the first four stanzas. In the first, she “grasp[s] the hand” of her interlocutor (line 1). She then characterizes her deafness as