Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
of the five chapters that follow examines Victorian constructions of signed languages and, more broadly, the parameters of language itself, in a range of cultural locations. They each highlight a particular Victorian understanding of the triangulation of speech, writing, and sign. These chapters also trace the cultural work performed through marginalizing signed languages and the deaf people who used them, which generally involved using the concept of language to delineate the parameters of ability and humanity. Each chapter, therefore, also uncovers Victorian cultural constructions of disability, constructions that registered in divergent ways in different disciplinary locations.
The first chapter of Reading Victorian Deafness focuses on a little-known body of literature—poetry written by deaf Victorians and their North American counterparts—to suggest that this poetry can provide us with a new insight into how Victorian poets, deaf and hearing, may have understood the aesthetic conventions of their art. This chapter also demonstrates the inextricability of literature from cultural constructions of disability; in this example, deaf people and their advocates used poetry as a weapon in their fight against widespread cultural myths about deaf people’s intellectual and linguistic deficits. Indeed, considering this body of work not only demonstrates how literary form can be a source of resistance to oppression but also, I argue, forces us as critics of poetry to reconsider the requirements of the genre.
In chapter 2, I address the textual barriers that appear in Victorian attempts to represent deafness in fiction. While characters with disabilities appear frequently in Victorian fiction, deaf characters, specifically, are almost entirely absent. In fact, the only deaf characters in Victorian fiction are Madonna Blyth in Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek and Sophy Marigold in Charles Dickens’s “Doctor Marigold.” Grounding its analysis in these two texts, this chapter contends that a deaf character’s relationship to language, in particular, is what disqualifies him or her from conventional representation in Victorian fiction. Through contextualizing Hide and Seek and “Doctor Marigold” amidst Victorian deaf history, interrogating Collins’s and Dickens’s realist impulse in representing disability, and highlighting Victorian generic conventions rooted in transcribing orality, this chapter argues that the absence of deaf characters reveals the investment of mid-Victorian fiction in a particular and normativized relationship between bodies, spoken language, and textuality.
I contend, in chapter 3, that the oralist desire to eradicate signed languages grew out of a variety of wider social concerns including British imperialism and the dissemination of evolutionary theory with the publication of Charles Darwin’s works The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. When contextualized amidst the sign language debates, these broader cultural issues appear inextricably linked because of an influential strain of Victorian philological thought, linguistic Darwinism, that hierarchized not only kinds of language (English, Cree, British Sign Language) but also modes of language (writing, speech, and sign). The problematic, though widespread, yoking of those groups perceived as linguistically inferior to the literate Englishman—whether indigenous North Americans, Africans, deaf signers, or nonhuman animals—depended on a teleological model of language development from “primitive” expression tied to the body to advanced literacy emanating from the mind. Chapter 3, then, addresses a range of nineteenth-century texts, from dictionaries of indigenous American and deaf American signs to the transatlantic public battle over evolution between philologists F. Max Müller and William Dwight Whitney to oralist treatises that describe signers as apes to literary texts by Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells that exemplify how language threatened to bridge the animal-human barrier in the Victorian imagination. By considering the rhetoric of primitivism that surrounded Victorian signers, this chapter reveals the important role of the concept of language in defining the human and the ways in which humans who did not speak challenged hierarchies of worth, whether speciesist, racist, or ableist.
Chapter 4 examines the Victorian and North American cultural reception of deaf marriage and deaf community, primarily during the eugenicist turn taken by oralism from the 1870s onwards. In this chapter I attend to a range of texts including Alexander Graham Bell’s eugenicist projections of a “deaf variety of the human race,” various oralist educational treatises, and deaf-authored schemes to establish deaf settlements. Each of these texts touched on the cultural anxiety around deaf people’s bodies and the potential for their reproduction. This chapter demonstrates that signed languages were increasingly understood as the mechanism enabling this oralist projection of a dystopian future of isolated and self-reproducing deaf communities. This chapter also examines the value of these same signing deaf communities through the eyes of deaf people who increasingly sought refuge among themselves from a hearing world that threatened to strip them of their language, their community and culture, and even their right to be married or bear children. Inherent in these utopian schemes to form deaf commonwealths is the belief that deafness is disabling only in certain cultural contexts. For these deaf communities, disability was a product of social conditions rather than inherent physical difference. This social-constructivist model of deafness and disability anticipates contemporary Deaf and disability studies’ theorization of disability as a social process.
Like chapters 3 and 4, chapter 5 can be read as an important case study of how nineteenth-century science was marshaled to eradicate difference. I contend that the central nineteenth-century sound technologies, the telephone and the phonograph, were products of the Victorian interest in deafness and a related faith in technology’s potential to remedy the perceived deficiencies of disability. In particular, various Victorian technologies grew out of attempts to write sound by inventors explicitly interested in deafness. In fact, Alexander Graham Bell used the proceeds from his development of the telephone to form an oralist advocacy group that still exists today. This chapter reveals how we owe most of our modern sound technology to research on how to teach deaf people to speak and interrogates the Victorian discursive logic around prosthetics for deafness.
This book, then, is insistently interdisciplinary in its focus. My first two chapters are linked in their attention to particularly literary concerns, and I argue, in both cases, that important facets of Victorian generic conventions are uncovered through attending to the relationship between deafness and literary aesthetics. In chapters 3 and 4, the book’s concern with language shifts away from the realm of aesthetics and into the domain of science. These two chapters attend to the scientific rhetoric around signed languages to demonstrate how deafness was imaginatively deployed to both access human prehistory and speculate about the future of the species. Finally, chapter 5’s attention to language and technology reveals the culmination of Victorian and North American attempts to manage both deaf people and their use of a third mode of human language. The chapter examines how technological incursions into deafness were imagined as a prosthetic solution to the challenges deaf people posed to the cultural reverence for both speech and “normalcy.” This final chapter traces a desire for, indeed even a faith in, technology’s ability to dissolve intractable differences.
Together, these five chapters contend that the Victorian cultural reluctance to accept both the validity of signed languages and the variability of human abilities was rooted in particular historical concerns about the definition of language and its relationship to the human. Signed languages—which exist outside of the imagined language dichotomy of speech and writing—destabilized the precarious Victorian notion of human ability that was buttressed by particular conceptions of language, including the belief that human communication was tied to orality. Davis has argued that the category of “disability” is a “product of a society invested in denying the variability of the body”;45building on Davis’s argument, this book’s consideration of Victorian deafness reveals that the oralist enterprise was a “product of a society invested in denying the variability” of language. Through their use of a visuo-spatial mode of human language, deaf people offered, and continue to offer, important insights about language and disability. Reading Victorian Deafness, then, aims to shed new light on familiar themes in Victorian studies—subjectivity, identity, culture, nation, and difference—through the lens of deaf Victorians, a group of people who celebrated, and fought for, a unique mode of human language.
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“Perchance My Hand May Touch the Lyre”
Deaf Poetry and the Politics of Language
In his autobiographical book The Lost Senses: