Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
of “speaking limbs” was superior to speech in its communicative capacities, nineteenth-century deaf poets used their poetry to resist oralist constructions of signed languages as limiting to their users.
While most nineteenth-century deaf poets celebrated the properties of signed languages in their written poetry, some of them, including Searing and Peet, even created sign poetry. Though evidence for nineteenth-century sign language poetry is limited, there are clear indications that sign poetry was an element of the culture of poetry in nineteenth-century deaf communities. As noted above, at public school exhibitions deaf students presented signed readings including Bible verses, poetry, and other texts typically used in elocutionary exercises. For example, at the closing exercises of the New York Institution of the Deaf and Dumb in 1859, a deaf student “recited” Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” in signs, which “elicited a great deal of applause” from the audience.131Then Mary Toles Peet, who had graduated from the institution six years earlier, presented her original, “euphonious,” composition “The Castle of Silence” in signs. Searing signed her own poem “A Farewell” at her 1858 graduation from the Missouri School for the Deaf.132Additional reports reveal that other people also publicly staged Searing’s poems in signs. At the 1889 dedication of the statue of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Searing’s poem “Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet” was performed in both signs and spoken English.133Krentz has argued that at that historic moment of erecting a monument to a founder of deaf education, “deaf Americans showed just how self-respecting and independent they were”;134one demonstration of the self-respect of this community was its desire to create and present poetry in what most of its members considered their natural language. The simultaneous presentation of Searing’s poem in signed and spoken language affirmed the communicative and expressive capabilities of signed languages while also demonstrating Searing’s skill in written English.
This group of accomplished poets, who created poetry in both signed languages and written English, refuted the oralist argument that deaf people could never attain a high level of English literacy without the total eradication of signed languages and the introduction of speech training. Therefore, the existence of deaf poetry makes the case for English literacy through sign literacy. During his testimony to the British Royal Commission, for example, E. M. Gallaudet addressed oralist claims that signers were shut out from English idioms and were generally deficient in English literacy: “In manual schools where thoroughly competent and judicious teachers are employed the use of signs is not only found to be no impediment in the acquisition of the power of using language idiomatically, but is found to be a great help in reaching that end.”135Gallaudet and other proponents of the argument that signing allowed deaf children to perform better in all areas of study claimed that signs needed to be used “for the purpose of explanation” and posited that oral training hampered deaf students’ scholastic achievement because it wasted so many classroom hours on articulation and lipreading instruction instead of other academic subjects.136Furthermore, some deaf poets explicitly located their English writing skills precisely in their lack of speech. Searing, for example, initially stopped speaking after losing her hearing at the age of thirteen because her speech “brought shocked looks and cruel commentary” from her family.137Searing wrote, “Soon my school slate and chalk, or pencil and paper became my main method to communicate with others. It was as if I were born with a pen and paper in hand in which to express my thoughts.”138
In the context of the oralist-influenced belief that signing hampered English language skills, the political implications of Gallaudet’s interest in deaf poetry become clear. While at first it seems curious that he read a sonnet in response to a commissioner’s question about the occupational prospects of deaf signers, evidently Gallaudet connected the ability to write English poetry to the capacity to succeed, economically or otherwise, in the hearing-dominated, English-speaking cultures of Britain and North America. As with deaf students’ public “recitations” in signed languages and writing on chalkboards in auditoriums filled with curious hearing spectators, Gallaudet used deaf poetry as a public demonstration of the linguistic and intellectual capacities of signing deaf people. These signing poets valued what they considered their natural language of signs and offered a counternarrative to the oralist construction of signers as intellectually and linguistically bereft. Because writing poetry in English required both English fluency and the use of abstraction in language, the genre was the perfect battleground for challenging oralist claims. Furthermore, because, as Branson and Miller have argued, a misunderstanding of signed languages is “at the heart of the discrimination against deaf people,”139the construction of signed languages as equal or superior to English, as expressed through the hegemonic form of written English poetry, allowed some British and North American deaf people to resist oralism. Through poetry, they offered a new, public, and more accurate construction of the properties of signed languages and the abilities of the signing deaf community.
2
“I Listened with My Eyes”
Writing Speech and Reading Deafness in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
In Harriet Martineau’s novel Principle and Practice; or, The Orphan Family (1827), Charles Forsyth injures his leg and, during his convalescence, seeks refuge in books.140In his course of reading, Forsyth notices a lack of realism in fictional depictions of disability, one that affects different impairments asymmetrically: “Blindness is frequently made interesting in books; deafness seldom or never. There are interesting and poetical associations connected with blindness; ridiculous, low, or common ones only with deafness. A blind heroine is charming; but would not all the world laugh at the very idea of a deaf one?” (122–23). While some forms of disability, impairment, and illness render a character an object of interest in Victorian fiction, deafness, as Martineau’s novel suggests, is generally immune to this fictional construction. Martineau wrote Principle and Practice early in the nineteenth century, but the literature that followed did not alter the truth of her observations. For instance, there are dozens of Victorian texts featuring blind characters by writers including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, Dinah Mulock Craik, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Arthur Conan Doyle.141Conversely, Wilkie Collins’s novel Hide and Seek (1854, 1861) and Charles Dickens’s Christmas story “Doctor Marigold” (1865) are the only Victorian fictional texts to feature a deaf character who uses a signed language.142How can we explain the remarkable absence of deaf characters from Victorian fiction? Why is the very idea of a deaf heroine, in Martineau’s words, “ridiculous”?
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