Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
among people who were deaf and between deaf and hearing people.”31Davis identifies the eighteenth century as the point at which the category of “deaf people” coalesced and sign languages became standardized. He argues, “It was only by attending the residential schools created in the eighteenth century that the deaf became a community. The dramatic rise in the number of deaf schools in Europe—there were none at the beginning of the eighteenth century and close to sixty by the end—indicates the groundswell that made this new ethnic group self-aware.”32These developments were accompanied by, or perhaps were a product of, a wider cultural and philosophical interest in deaf people and signed languages.33Davis argues that “deafness was for the eighteenth century an area of cultural fascination and a compelling focus for philosophical reflection.”34This cultural fascination with deafness in eighteenth-century Europe revolved largely around philosophical inquiry into the nature of reason and language. Philosophers and other writers sought answers about language and the senses through examining the case of deaf people as demonstrated in the numerous plays, books, treatises, and public demonstrations of deaf children that appeared over the course of the century.35
These historians have claimed that in the early part of the nineteenth century—and continuing over the course of the century—significant changes arose in the cultural construction of signed languages and deafness.36The enlightenment interest in reason and universal languages transformed into Victorian concerns about “man’s place in nature,” the origins of language, and imperial encounters with colonized groups.37The relevance of these emerging cultural issues to the situation of deaf people is investigated in the chapters that follow. The most significant change that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century was the growth of the oralist movement. Branson and Miller suggest that in the first half of the nineteenth century the “education of deaf students began to expand and diversify as schools were established throughout Britain and Ireland.”38While there were certainly earlier isolated attempts to train individual deaf children in speech, not until the foundation of deaf schools, and the development and propagation of signed languages within them, did a broader movement to advocate for speech-based rather than sign-based education emerge. According to Branson and Miller’s evidence, some of these schools employed some articulation training and some rejected it entirely.39However, oralism clearly became more and more influential over the course of the nineteenth century.40The oralist movement gained strength as the century wore on, culminating with the oralist victories of the 1880s and ’90s (including the recommendations in favor of oralism at the various commissions concerning the issue of deaf education, including the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf in Milan [1880] and the British Royal Commission on the Blind and the Deaf and Dumb [1889]).41
Deaf people were almost entirely absent from these commissions and, more importantly, were almost entirely opposed to oralism.42Even when they accepted the arguments for some classroom speech training, they rejected the total elimination of signed languages from deaf education and deaf life. This point is essential to understanding the sign language debates. It was entirely hearing people—hearing parents, hearing educators, and hearing governmental representatives—who paternalistically advocated oralism in opposition to the desires of deaf communities. By the end of the nineteenth century, oralism was the predominant pedagogy in British and North American deaf education and continued to be so until the 1960s and ’70s, when sign language was finally reinstated to centrality in deaf education.
While this sketch of oralism focuses mainly on deaf education, oralism’s scope extended far beyond pedagogical matters; this extension, rather than the pedagogical specificities of British deaf school programs, is the focus of this book. I aim to expand our understanding of oralism’s mandate and demonstrate how it participated in key Victorian concerns. The oralist movement sought the complete eradication of signed languages from deaf life and the assimilation of deaf people as speaking and lipreading members of a hearing society. As will become clear in the chapters that follow, oralists aimed to eradicate deaf cultures, communities, and identities. The widespread movement attempted to influence all areas of deaf people’s lives, from their language use in both educational and social spaces to their occupational choices to their selection of marriage partner to whether they should have children. Where sign language was constructed as an insidious threat not only to deaf people themselves but also to society more generally, oralists constructed speech—particularly certain European languages—as the pinnacle of the human language hierarchy and the only suitable option for European and North American (white) deaf people. The sign language debates of the nineteenth century were fundamental threats to deaf culture and language use. They are an essential feature of deaf history that inform how deaf communities in the West today understand their language, their history, and their place in the world.
These incursions into deaf life were not limited to Great Britain. Oralism appeared throughout Europe and North America. This book, therefore, extends its focus beyond Victorian England, particularly toward North America, to address the transnational struggle over signed languages. Although this book is centered on Victorian deafness, isolating deaf Britons from their North American counterparts would be impossible. Not only were the sign language debates simultaneously occurring in Britain and North America, but also both sides of the Atlantic featured the same key players and created similar constructions of deafness and signed languages. Deaf communities considered their transatlantic peers in their creation of culture and community. Just as national boundaries did not confine the efforts of those various Victorians and North Americans—the women’s rights advocates, antivivisectionists, and abolitionists—who crossed the Atlantic literally and figuratively for their causes through shared visits, literature, periodicals, and scientific research, deaf people formed transatlantic alliances. As Joseph J. Murray notes, deaf people of this time “created and maintained consistent contact with each other over national and continental boundaries.”43They shared strategies at deaf conferences, reported each other’s news in their English-language periodicals, and expressed solidarity with the fights against oralism that the others were waging.
Considering the influence of Alexander Graham Bell, the most prominent oralist in Britain and North America, illuminates the value of a transatlantic perspective in British deaf history. Bell’s oralist efforts spanned four countries. He was born in Scotland, apprenticed at Susanna Hull’s oralist school in London, and then spent the rest of his life in Canada and the United States promoting this oralist method. He established oralist organizations in the United States, wrote to the Canadian government about his concern regarding deaf settlements, and testified at the British Royal Commission on the Blind and the Deaf and Dumb. A study bounded by a focus on particular national contexts risks omitting important elements of the sign language debates and effaces the fact that deaf people often felt as though they shared more in common with deaf people in other countries than with hearing people in their own (including their educational interests, mode of language, and visual orientation to the world). Keeping my analysis of the reception of deafness and signed languages in Victorian Britain in conversation with the events and discourses of North America will allow a fuller understanding of the nature of these transatlantic debates about signed languages as well as the way that a focus on national boundaries can obscure the importance of transnational affinities based on language or disability.
Reading Victorian Deafness posits that the Victorian period was an important time in British deaf history. As many historians of the deaf community have noted, it was then that deaf people became a community. Brought together through the forces of urbanization, industrialization, and the establishment of deaf educational institutions, they created their own cultures, languages, and literatures and increasingly constructed group and individual identities that grew out of deafness. Second, it was in the nineteenth century that the greatest threat to these identities emerged in the form of oralism because it aimed to disintegrate deaf communities and assimilate speaking and lipreading deaf people into the hearing population. In these decades deaf people both created their identities, languages, and communities and fought for their very existence. While it was in the eighteenth century that widespread deaf education emerged and in the twentieth century that the dominance of the oralist regime finally came to an end,44it was during the nineteenth century that the fight was waged for what it means to be deaf and to use a mode of language outside of speech and writing. That fight is an important area of study not only because it oppressed deaf people but also because of what that oppression exposes