Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
Reached blindly out its helpless hands,
Craving the love and tenderness
Which every soul demands.
(lines 13–16)
This focus on hands as the medium of intercourse between the “speaker” and those around her (including her God) implicitly reveals that she uses sign language. While this focus on deaf people’s nonverbal communication—on eyes, faces, and hands as instruments of communication—recurs frequently in deaf poetry, many of these poets are even more explicit about manualism and signed languages than Kitto and Searing.126
Burnet’s long narrative poem “Emma” describes deaf students learning sign language, a “new language,—all their own, / Where mind was visible,—and knowledge shone” (lines 308–9). “Emma” is about a young deaf girl’s journey from isolation to intellectual enrichment and community through learning sign language and attending a school for deaf children. Like Kitto and Searing, Burnet invokes the visibility of thoughts and feelings in this new language, where “mind was visible.” At the school for deaf children
from the speaking limbs, and face divine,
At nature’s bidding, thoughts and feelings shine,
That in thin air no more her sense elude,–
Each understands,—by each is understood.
Here can each feeling gush forth, unrepressed,
To mix with feelings of a kindred breast.
(lines 330–35)
Like Kitto’s celebration of the eloquence of Mary’s eye, Burnet’s synesthetic yoking of speech and visible limbs affirms the communicative capabilities of signed languages, albeit in the hegemonic rhetoric of orality. The potentially problematic construction of deaf people possessing “speaking hands” and “listening eyes” (Peet, “The Castle,” 105, 109, emphasis in original) recurs frequently throughout nineteenth-century deaf poetry; indeed, the phonocentric resonances of the English vocabulary of communication are nearly impossible to escape. However, by yoking this terminology of speech and sound to celebrations of signed languages, at least, these poets deploy the rhetoric to buttress their sign-positive aims. In opposition to oralists’ claims about the necessity of speech for literacy, Kitto, Searing, and Burnet celebrate the avenues of communication that exist outside of the hegemony of orality.
Furthermore, the imagery in the section of the poem that deals with Emma’s learning of this new language and knowledge is notably spatial:
Here does her teacher’s skilful hand unroll
The curtain that hung around her darken’d soul,—
Revealing all the secret springs that move
The once mysterious scene, around, above.
(lines 336–39)
This italicized Here is repeated three times in the section about Emma’s education. This deixis emphasizes the physical space of the residential school. Burnet’s focus on spatiality continues with the metaphor of the teacher’s hand physically unrolling the curtain to reveal the scene in the space “around” and “above” Emma. Emma’s education is described again and again in imagery of space and motion—it allows her to “spurn this clog of clay and wander free / Through distant ages,—o’er far land and sea” (lines 342–43). Her experience of life before learning sign language is compared to being mired in clay, whereas sign language allows unfettered movement through space and time and frees Emma from her “once cag’d and insulated mind” (line 324).
Burnet deploys spatial and visual imagery in an especially provocative manner when discussing Emma’s religious education:
her teacher,—pointing to the skies,—
Unrolls the sacred volume to her eyes,—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The teacher stands, to pray or teach, and all
The eyes around drink in the thoughts that fall,
Not from the breathing lips,—and tuneful tongue,—
But from the hand with graceful gesture flung.
The feelings that burn deep in his own breast
Ask not the aid of words to touch the rest;
But from his speaking limbs and changing face,—
In all the thousand forms of motion’s grace,
Mind emanates, in corruscations, fraught
With all the thousand varied shades of thought.
(lines 348–49, 360–69)
Emma’s teacher imparts the doctrine of Christianity to his students visually through his facial and bodily movement, including pointing to the sky and his “thousand forms of motions grace.” Emma’s new conceptions of the “scene, around, above” her, through learning sign language, are directly aligned with her education in Christianity.
Burnet’s explicit alignment of sign language to Christianity is a political move that was made by many advocates of manualism who were responding to the idea that deaf people were shut out from Christian salvation. As Baynton notes, at the time that Burnet was writing “Emma,” “deafness was often described as an affliction that isolated the individual from the Christian community. Its tragedy was that deaf people lived beyond the reach of the gospel.”127Sterne has also argued that Saint Augustine’s “literali[zing of] the dictum, ‘Faith comes by hearing’” positioned deaf people as outsiders to Christianity for centuries.128In “Emma,” however, faith comes not by hearing but by seeing. Burnet directly refutes his culture’s constructions of the discontinuity of Christian faith and deafness by celebrating religious instruction as a visual enterprise accessible to deaf people. Burnet was only one of many supporters of manualism who defended the right of deaf people to sign by arguing that it allowed them access to Christian thought and doctrine. For example, Reverend Thomas H. Gallaudet described signed languages as languages in which “the deaf-mute can intelligibly conduct his private devotions and join in social religious exercises with his fellow pupils.”129Burnet extends this argument even further by arguing that religion is more successfully taught in sign than in speech. Emma’s religious instruction is “not in a cloak of words obscur’d, confined— / Here free conceptions flash from mind to mind” (lines 370–71). In his poem “Recollections of Hearing,” Simpson similarly claims privileged access to religion or God because of his deafness. He argues that his deafness allows him to better “hear the ‘still small voice’ / that bids my heart and soul rejoice” (lines 71–72). In “Emma,” Burnet justifies sign language through its ability to teach Christian doctrine, the same doctrine that had been used in the past to exclude deaf people from the salvation offered to all humanity. He employs the language of stasis and motion to describe spoken words as trapping ideas and signs as enabling movement. He also reverses the terms of the audio/visual binary that links the audible, or the vocal, with evanescence and impermanence and the visual with the material and the concrete. Finally, Burnet suggests that the abstract principles of Christianity can be imparted through signs more fittingly than through speech, thereby challenging the notion that signing cannot represent abstract or metaphysical thought.
This attention to the communicative capacities of faces and hands appears repeatedly in the corpus of nineteenth-century deaf poetry. This poetic attention to the body reveals that these poets were attuned not merely to “body language” but to the properties of signed languages, even when not explicitly referencing signs. Linguists now know what nineteenth-century users of signed languages had not yet codified: facial expression and the spatial motion of the arms are integral parts of the grammar of signed languages. In contemporary signed languages such as British Sign Language and American Sign Language, the component parts of one sign are hand shape, movement, location, orientation, and nonmanual signals (facial expression).130In these signed languages, facial expression and arm movement