Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
myths of our society [is that] the norm for humans is to speak and hear”7—it was during the nineteenth century that definitions of language and the human—and the important relationship between the two—were under extraordinary pressure and subject to redefinition in the service of Victorian Britain’s various national and ideological projects, including imperial, scientific, and technological endeavors. This book, then, illuminates the cultural factors that contributed to the Victorian movement that sought to limit the modes of human language in favor of an insistence that everyone, hearing and deaf, should speak.
In addition to closely examining Victorian understandings of signed languages, this book focuses on two related topics: Victorian cultural constructions of deafness and the lived experiences and self-representations of deaf Victorians. By weaving these three threads through the following five chapters, this book creates a comprehensive account of Victorian deafness that reveals central Victorian beliefs about language and its relationship to human ability. Reading Victorian Deafness, then, uses an exploration of the Victorian controversy over sign language to illuminate wider Victorian cultural developments and debates that regularly hinged on definitions of human language: changes to literary genres and models of authorship, imperialism and colonialism, eugenics, the nature and origins of language, the species question in the age of evolutionary thought, nationalism, the “woman question,” and institutional developments in social welfare and education. In these disparate areas, Victorian ideas about the parameters of both language and the human were subject to constant scrutiny and contestation in the face of new developments in medical, scientific, philological, technological, and cultural knowledge.
In this historical moment when categories of both language and the human body were epistemologically vulnerable, deaf people’s language use became increasingly important in establishing the parameters of human language use and, by virtue of that, the human itself. As I argue in the chapters that follow, deaf people were used as imagined limit cases and as material test subjects as part of the Victorian process of understanding the scope and dimensions of human language use. Indeed, Reading Victorian Deafness argues that the very specific marginal position of deaf people in Victorian culture—that is, their sensory and linguistic difference—meant that they afforded Victorians an important imaginative space for interrogating ideas about the connection between the body and language, including the fraught question of the materiality of language. One of this book’s central contentions is that thinking through deafness was a consistent rhetorical practice that spanned a wide range of Victorian discursive fields interested in human language use.
A principal thread of this book’s interrogation of the Victorian understanding of the relationship between language and the body, including, more specifically, the connection between language use and constructions of disability, is focused on literature. Literary texts from a range of genres, including poetry, fiction, and life writing, are deployed in the five chapters of Reading Victorian Deafness to investigate how they textualize both deafness and signed languages. The somewhat discordant relationship between signing and writing, which springs from a range of causes including the basic fact that signed languages have no written equivalent, reveals important dimensions of Victorian beliefs about what it means to be deaf, to not speak, and even to write literature.8Indeed, I argue that attending to how deafness and signed languages are represented in fiction or poetry provides a unique lens through which to understand generic practices that may be taken for granted by literary critics. For instance, Charles Dickens’s and Wilkie Collins’s constructions of silent deaf heroines highlight what I suggest (in chapter 2) is a pervasive Victorian imagining of the novel as a transcription of orality. Furthermore, deaf people’s own literary production often contains aesthetic meditations on their unique relationship to English writing as nonspeakers. For example, deaf British writer and missionary John Kitto includes tightly rhymed and regularly metered poetry in his book The Lost Senses immediately following his declaration that deaf people, including himself, are incapable of writing poetry.
Inherent in my attention to literature as both a product of and a challenge to Victorian cultural beliefs about language and human ability is an interrogation of Victorian perceptions about the triangulated relationship between speech, writing, and sign. Various contemporary critics of Victorian literature have attended to the role of “voice” in Victorian literature or the contradictions of the perceived relationship between speech and writing.9Reading Victorian Deafness augments this critical attention to the dyad of speech and writing by attending to the third mode of human language use that has hitherto been ignored. My focus on signed languages creates a lens through which to interrogate Victorian ideas about language that may be taken for granted when the signer’s perspective is overlooked. For instance, a critical attention to sign language reveals the untenability of the belief that speech and writing are bound inextricably. That is, a deaf person who does not speak can still write in English, and this use of visual language without recourse to oral/aural language troubles many Victorian (and, indeed, contemporary) beliefs about what language is, what language does, and the mutual interdependence of speech and writing.10
Reading Victorian Deafness also contributes to the broad and growing concern with the Victorian sensorium, including the expansive body of scholarship on Victorian visual culture and, more recently, the increasing critical interest in Victorian touch, taste, smell, and hearing.11In all of these critical endeavors, scholars have attempted to illuminate Victorian conceptions of the relationship between the subject, the body, and the world by attending to how sensory experience bridges these entities. Victorians interested in medicine, education, psychology, and literature were all intently drawn to tracing how the senses mediated an experience of the world, which they often articulated through using examples of sensory disability. For instance, Laura Bridgman, the deaf-blind American woman who was reportedly the most famous woman in the world after Queen Victoria in the mid-Victorian period,12was a frequent subject for biomedical, educational, and philosophical musing and experimentation. In the realm of fiction, Wilkie Collins used a blind character in Poor Miss Finch and a deaf character in Hide and Seek to meditate on the psychological, philosophical, and social consequences of sensory difference. Considering how Victorians understood the senses, including the vast continuum of sensory difference, permits new insights into Victorian approaches to larger questions about subjectivity, body-mind dualism, and human existence. In particular, Reading Victorian Deafness is in conversation with the recent and burgeoning scholarship in Victorian sound studies, a field that is formulating a way to understand the Victorian soundscape. By situating my study of Victorian deafness within this emerging critical paradigm of Victorian sound studies, I offer a new, and necessary, perspective on how Victorians understood what it meant to hear and not to hear.
While my reference to “not hearing” seems to frame deafness as a lack, this book follows the practice of most of the deaf Victorians it describes by resisting an understanding of deafness as necessarily disabling; as deaf people have argued for more than a century, deafness becomes disabling through social conditions and need not be inherently problematic or undesirable. My approach is aligned with the cultural model of disability as it circulates in contemporary disability studies, and Reading Victorian Deafness aims to contribute to the burgeoning field of Victorian disability studies.13As a field, disability studies generally posits, in Davis’s words, that “disability is not a minor issue that relates to a relatively small number of unfortunate people; it is part of a historically constructed discourse, an ideology of thinking about the body under certain historical circumstances. Disability is not an object—a woman with a cane—but a social process that intimately involves everyone who has a body and lives in the world of the senses” (Enforcing, 2). Following the approach taken by Davis and other disability studies scholars who emphasize the importance of contextualizing disability in a critical and historical framework, this book attends to the historical specificities of Victorian understandings of what we now call the category of “disability.” It is also allied with those theorists who have criticized the “medical model” of disability that considers certain kinds of physical, mental, or intellectual difference as inherently deficient and as requiring recuperation, isolation, or cure.
These articulations of disability as a social construction have revolutionized the study of disability in the humanities over the past two decades and have catalyzed a perspective that is focused on power, including how various incarnations of hegemony can pathologize difference for their own ends.