Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail
answers. Various factors complicate any attempt we might make to explain deaf poets’ accuracy in versification: degree of deafness, age of onset of deafness, literacy in English and in a signed language, amount of oral training, reliance on friends’ and family’s hearing ability, use of written dictionaries, and class and educational background all influenced deaf poets’ abilities to master the resonances of English words in written poetry.
Victorian audiences also seem to have wondered about how deaf people accessed these poetic elements, because deaf poets often prefaced their poetry with anxious justifications of their poetic ability. For example, Burnet, one of the first published deaf poets and a teacher of deaf children, who became deaf at eight years of age, writes that he began to “make rhymes at an early age . . . when the recollections of sounds were fresh in his memory, and his reminiscences of the harmony of measured syllables and rhymes were vivid and distinct.”60As he explains in Tales of the Deaf and Dumb with Miscellaneous Poems (1835), “[W]hile nearly all other recollections of sounds have faded from [the poet’s] memory, he is still capable of forming a tolerable judgment of the effect on the ear of a line of poetry” (230). Most of the nineteenth-century deaf poets claim this ability to versify without entirely explaining its source. For example, in the preface to his Daydreams of the Deaf (1858), Simpson explains that he has “an intuitive perception of improprieties of rhythm and rhyme” (xiii). For Simpson, “it does not follow that one deaf person should not have a keener perception of the properties and harmony of verse, both as respects rhyme and quantity, than another whose tastes and talents do not lie that way; just as one person who can hear will more readily detect a false note in music than another, because his soul is satisfied with nothing less than perfection” (xiii). Simpson rejects generalizations about the poetic abilities of deaf people in favor of attention to the particular inclinations and skills of each individual, whether hearing or deaf. Indeed, Simpson entirely severs poetic ability from hearing ability and instead aligns it with a personal dedication to aesthetic excellence.
To supplement their “intuitive” ability to versify, many deaf poets also turned to written texts for instruction on the supposedly aural dimensions of poetry. Instead of relying on the sense of hearing, deaf poets such as Carlin, for example, used writing to access rhyme and rhythm. Carlin explains that he improved his initial “discordant verses” and “inability to catch and con long and short syllables intonated in strictly poetic feet” through studying “the best English poets.”61Beyond modeling his work on literary precedent, Carlin also turned to written reference works. Carlin studied “Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary, and also his Rhyming Dictionary, a book which contains all the fundamental principles of poetry.”62Carlin, who explained that he had “no idea of vocal sounds,”63relied on written texts to access the world of English versification. His patterns of rhythm and rhyme were therefore moored in textual practices rather than sound experiences.
There is another, perhaps more trenchant, response to these questions about deaf poetic ability: we should investigate the critical investments that are revealed by wonderment at a deaf poet’s skill with rhythm and rhyme. Skepticism about deaf poetry is buttressed by an assumption that poetic ability does, in fact, reside in the ear. However, as these deaf poets testify, the ear is only the imagined, but not the necessary, home of poetic ability. A critical consideration of deaf poetry permits a unique opportunity to interrogate the notion that written poetry is best created through orality and experienced through aurality. These poets permit us to move beyond the idea that poetry produced through deafness is absurd. I invoke the term absurd because the nineteenth-century deaf poetic community used it on more than one occasion to describe deaf poetry. For instance, in “The Realm of Singing,” Searing calls the “crippled” bird’s songs (which allegorically represent deaf poetry) “absurd singing” (208). Similarly, Gallaudet invokes the term absurdity in “Poetry of the Deaf.” After citing Edgar Allan Poe’s insistence on the importance of music to poetry, Gallaudet responds, “If this dictum of so great a master of the music of verse is accepted, the declaration that poetry may be appreciated, and even produced, by those bereft of the sense through which alone music can be enjoyed, presents an apparent absurdity” (87).
Gallaudet’s and Searing’s use of the term absurd when referring to poetry by deaf people disentangles and then re-entangles the issues that arise in the intersections between deafness, sound, and poetry. Absurd is derived from the Latin absurdus, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “inharmonious, tasteless, foolish.” Absurdus unites ab, denoting “from,” and surdus, which means “deaf, inaudible or insufferable to the ear.” Therefore, absurd poetry is literally poetry from the deaf. While Searing’s and Gallaudet’s uses of the term absurd may not have been intentional invocations of the slippage between inaudibility and denigration that the term captures, I reclaim the term absurd poetry here to refer to deaf poetry. Absurd poetry does not “hear” and does not “speak,” that is, it was not derived from orality, nor should it necessarily be forced into aurality. The term absurd poetry is especially suggestive because the gap that exists between “inharmonious” and the pejorative description “tasteless” in the definition of absurdus, or between “inaudible” and “insufferable to the ear” in the definition of surdus, is the location of the question of deaf poetry. Deaf poets force their readers to confront the possibility that poetry can be inaudible and yet not insufferable to the ear.
The audibility of Victorian poetry has become an important issue in Victorian poetry criticism, as demonstrated by the ongoing discussion between critics including Herbert Tucker, Isobel Armstrong, Eric Griffiths, Yopie Prins, Matthew Campbell, Dennis Taylor, John Picker, and Ivan Kreilkamp. Kreilkamp notes, for example, that the wider relationship between speech and writing was “a topic of recurring and urgent concern throughout the Victorian period.”64This issue is especially relevant to Victorian poetry, which experimented with a range of “voices”—in the dramatic monologue, for example—and with the textualizing of orality. As part of the contemporary discussion about orality and aurality, Prins has attempted to resist the critical tradition that overemphasizes audible voices in Victorian poetry by asking a prescient question: “How can we reverse our tendency to read these poems as the utterance of a speaker, the representation of speech, the performance of song?”65This widespread critical tendency, as Prins notes, is particularly glaring in some influential studies of Victorian poetry, including, for instance, Griffiths’s The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. While Griffiths strives to transcend literal voices in his readings of poetry, his theoretical orientation depends on his conception of the “loose fit of writing on speech.”66Griffiths argues that the “problems of translating the intended music of a voice into the scant notation of the written word” are productive because they allow a role for the reader in poetic interpretation and utterance.67As this quotation reveals, however, Griffiths privileges speech over writing, in part because he believes that vocal features including pitch, pace, stress, and volume augment the communicative potential of the voice.
In his introduction, Griffiths defends his privileging of speech through citing, strangely enough, a study of orally trained deaf children. This study, published in 1942, considered the intelligibility of the speech of 192 deaf children who had been undergoing speech training in an oralist educational system. This study found that the more errors these orally trained deaf children made in pitch, pace, stress, and volume, the less intelligible they were to a hearing interlocutor. Griffiths provides this study as an “instance of a practical connection between the prosodic features of a language and intelligibility [which] demonstrates a link between what might be thought of as the ‘form’ and the ‘content’ of an utterance.”68Essentially, Griffiths uses the obstacles facing deaf children who are being forced to speak in order to argue that the sound-features of language are essential to the intelligibility of an utterance. Griffiths concludes, therefore, that speech has a wider communicative capacity than does writing. Griffiths’s circular logic thereby uses evidence gleaned from the phonocentric system of oralism to defend phonocentrism.
Griffiths’s The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry, one of the major monographs on the role of sound in Victorian poetry, demonstrates that the cultural elevation of orality, often at the expense of deaf people, still informs contemporary critical practices. Pathologizing deaf people by using them as test cases to delineate “normal” communication persists into the twenty-first century. I use Griffiths as an