Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
of a deaf/Deaf person’s experience in the world or the range of possibilities for deaf/Deaf identity.
Furthermore, categorizing deaf people who lived in the nineteenth century as either deaf or Deaf is extremely complicated. In its interest in the cultural iterations of Victorian deafness, this book predominantly focuses on those people we might consider culturally Deaf: users of signed languages, attendees at schools for the deaf, and members of a larger deaf community. However, while almost all of the deaf people I discuss used signed languages in some form, some of them may not have self-identified as culturally Deaf. Figures such as John Kitto, who signed but was not active in a deaf community, and Harriet Martineau, who spoke and often denigrated the capacities of “deaf-mutes,” render any attempts to define parameters around “deafness” inadvisable and problematic. In general, however, because of my focus on signed languages and deaf culture, this book concentrates most of its attention on those whom Victorians would have understood as “deaf-mute” rather than those who experienced partial or progressive hearing loss due to illness, injury, or aging. Because of the inability of the d/D practice to address the intricacies of deaf identities, I use the potentially problematic term deaf with a lowercase d in this book unless referring to contemporary Deaf issues, for which I maintain the d/D distinction. Although the term deaf-mute seems pejorative today, the resistance to the term in the Victorian period arose not from deaf people themselves but instead from oralists who wished to divorce deafness from muteness and insisted on the fact that deaf people were physically capable of creating speech.23While oralists were accurate in claiming that deaf people could produce speech physiologically—muteness is, in fact, remarkably rare despite its frequent literary presence24—they effaced the distinction between functional capability and the importance of cultural learning, sensory barriers, communal orientation, and personal choice.
Deaf Victorians: Their Lived Experiences and Self-Representations
This book moves beyond the Victorian cultural reception of deafness to also consider the lived realities of deaf people in the Victorian period and their own textual constructions of what it meant to be deaf in Victorian England. These communities often resisted the cultural construction of deafness that circulated in Victorian culture. Agnew, who, as I noted, believed that deaf people should educate hearing people about deafness, and not vice versa, was only one deaf Victorian among many who wrestled with the cultural meanings attached to his or her sensory difference and sought to defend deaf people’s rights and abilities. After all, deaf Victorians were neither passive victims nor “silent” followers of dominant discourses around deafness or policies authored by hearing people (even though most institutional locations discounted their perspectives).25Many deaf Victorians resisted the imposition of the speech paradigm on their lives, argued unremittingly that signed languages were as sufficient as spoken languages, and insisted that deaf people should not be pitied, patronized, cured, or ignored. From their unique cultural perspective, deaf signers revealed important insights about the ideologies and prejudices of hearing people about language and ability.
Nonetheless, deaf Victorians certainly faced societal barriers including difficulties finding employment, struggles with an educational system that was increasingly eliminating the use of signs, and daily existence in a culture of hearing and speaking people that sought to assimilate rather than accommodate them. But this, of course, was only one element of being deaf in Victorian England. While fighting for access to employment or education, deaf people also created opportunities within their own deaf communities. There were a variety of spaces, including deaf schools, churches, associations, clubs and families, where deafness was predominant and signs were the primary mode of communication. Many deaf people described their experiences as contradictory; they understood their cultural location as an interstitial space, one captured by American deaf poet Angie Fuller Fischer in “The Semi-Mute’s Soliloquy” when she declares herself “an alien though at home, / An exile even in my native land.”26For Fischer and many of her contemporaries, the use of a different mode of language than the majority, a visual orientation in the world, and a feeling of alienation from a hearing culture that denigrated deafness meant that a deaf person was simultaneously an insider and an outsider in his or her society. Some deaf people used the audist rhetoric of their cultures to describe what they believed were the deficits of deafness while simultaneously participating in deaf culture and agitating for deaf rights. Christopher Krentz has described these contradictions as examples of how some deaf people “internalized the majority’s attitude that cast[] [them] as . . . subordinate other[s].”27However, deaf Victorians also continually emphasized that their differences need not be understood as deficits. In their writing, they expressed pride in their unique language, celebrated their close communities, and highlighted the fact that they were as capable as hearing people. From writing autobiographically to publishing poetry to asserting their linguistic and reproductive rights, deaf Victorians (and their North American counterparts) created their own representations of physical and cultural deafness. In the pages that follow, Reading Victorian Deafness attends to the varieties of Victorian deaf self-representation and analyzes how deaf people constructed and communicated their own ideas of what it meant to be deaf in a largely hearing world.
Deaf Victorians understood that the sign language debates were momentous in the history, and to the future, of deaf communities. The debates pitted a growing community that was increasingly proud of its abilities, particularly its language use, against a majority perspective that considered signing deaf people less than human because they did not speak. This battle played out in various forms throughout the Victorian period, when a range of marginalized groups advocated and agitated for what they saw as their human rights: whether to be free from enslavement, as in the case of Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African-Americans; to escape colonial tyranny, as in various British imperial locations including India and Jamaica; to have space for community cultures, languages, and self-rule, as in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; to have voting and representation rights in government, as embodied in the various reform movements; to have the right to one’s own property after marriage, as in the case of British women—to name only a very few of the various examples of embattled minorities struggling for the recognition of their rights, aims, abilities, and even humanity. Deaf people fighting oralism, then as now, often saw themselves as fighting the epic battle of the marginalized and disenfranchised against the powerful.28In this battle, language was the instrument both of oppression and of resistance.
Victorian Approaches to Signed Languages
The third focus of this book, which of course is connected to both the Victorian reception of deafness and the self-representation of deaf people, is Victorian understandings of signed languages and the oralist movement that grew out of them. The book traces how Victorian beliefs about what language is and how it should function culturally underpinned the changing fortunes of signed languages over the course of the nineteenth century. Signed languages, as contemporary linguists have shown, are natural and complete human languages in every way, with their own distinct lexicographical and grammatical systems. The components of signed languages are neither universal nor transparent gestures. For instance, the signed language used in Britain (British Sign Language [BSL]) and the signed language used in English Canada and the United States (American Sign Language [ASL]) are mutually unintelligible. Both ASL and BSL are not simply gestural representations of English words but are, instead, their own complete languages. Deaf Britons, then, use BSL as their first language and English as a second language.29Many contemporary misunderstandings about signed languages date back to the nineteenth century and, indeed, were often deployed as part of the oralist argument for speech.
The oralism movement, what H-Dirksen L. Bauman has called a “medico-pedagogy,”30began in nineteenth-century Britain and North America. Although there had been individual cases of speech training for deaf people for centuries, and even of specific schools that were speech-oriented, oralism as a widespread pedagogical trend began and burgeoned in the mid-nineteenth century. As various historians including Lennard Davis, Douglas C. Baynton, Jonathan Rée, Christopher Krentz, Harlan Lane, and Jan Branson and Don Miller have documented, European and North American deaf schools, languages, and communities were largely established in the latter part of the eighteenth century and early part of the nineteenth century. Branson and Miller explain that the British “historical record prior to the sixteenth century is scanty as far as the use of sign languages is concerned, but from the sixteenth century, we