Reading Victorian Deafness
Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture
Jennifer Esmail
ohio university press athens
For my grandparents, Joan and Lauri Kangas
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful for the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Department of English at Queen’s University; the Department of English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto; and the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. I am also thankful for the assistance of Alex Stagg and Dominic Stiles at the Library of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf; Peter Jackson, from the British Deaf History Society; and Judy Yaeger Jones.
It has been a pleasure to work with Kevin Haworth, Joseph McLaughlin, and Nancy Basmajian at Ohio University Press, and I appreciate their thoughtful engagement with my work. I am also very much indebted to the anonymous readers of the manuscript. Some of the material in chapter 1 appeared in Victorian Poetry 49, no. 4 (2011) and Sign Language Studies 8, no. 4 (2008). A portion of chapter 2 appeared in ELH: English Literary History 78, no. 4 (2011). Thanks are due to these publishers for permission to reprint this material.
I am enormously grateful to Laura Murray, Maggie Berg, and Kate Flint for their insight, advice, and support throughout the writing of this book. I would also like to thank D.M.R. Bentley, Jason Camlot, Mary Wilson Carpenter, Lennard Davis, Cathy Harland, Elizabeth Hanson, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Christopher Keep, and Vanessa Warne, who have always been generous with their time, expertise, and encouragement. I feel so fortunate to have a circle of colleagues who have kindly provided feedback, support, and, most importantly, friendship, throughout this project: Lindsey Banco, Veronica Blackbourn, Jason Boulet, Karen Bourrier, Gregory Brophy, Laura Cardiff, Constance Crompton, Cheryl Cundell, Heather Emmens, Alan Galey, Eddy Kent, Jenny Kerber, Sarah Krotz, Tara MacDonald, Daniel Martin, Sara Mueller, Vanessa Oliver, Dana Olwan, and Emily Simmons. Extra appreciation is due Fiona Coll, whose thoughtfulness and insight have helped shape this work. I also appreciate the support of Vikki Cartwright and the Esmail, Kangas, and Carlson families. Finally, I am deeply thankful to Eric Carlson, who has enriched both this book and my life beyond measure.
Introduction
In a series of paintings made between 1883 and 1900, Scottish painter William Agnew recorded a conversation between a hearing person and a deaf person that took place in signs. The deaf woman, Elizabeth Tuffield, lying in her sickbed, is the daughter of a postmaster on the Isle of Wight. The hearing woman offering comfort and signed conversation to the invalid is Queen Victoria. This moment of “Royal Condescension,” as some versions of the painting are titled, not only depicts a unique conversation between a monarch, known for her fingerspelling fluency, and one of her poor and ill subjects but also allows us a rare glimpse into the visual language of deaf Victorians (figure I.1).1The Queen’s “condescension” involved her willingness to use her hands to communicate, rather than expect Tuffield to use spoken or written English. Indeed, Queen Victoria insisted on accommodating Tuffield’s linguistic orientation; as a deaf periodical noted in 1898, the Queen always “talk[ed] to [Tuffield] in our language, ‘never allowing anyone to interpret for her.’”2Furthermore, Agnew’s paintings of Victoria signing, one of which won a prize at the 1890 Edinburgh exhibition and was displayed at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, were simultaneously aesthetic and political statements because Agnew, like Tuffield, was deaf and communicated through signs. His preference for signing, and, indeed, even the Queen’s own use of signs, was controversial because over the course of the nineteenth century, deaf people faced extraordinary cultural pressure to relinquish signing for speaking in English. It was during Victoria’s reign that “oralism,” a widespread movement to force deaf people to speak and lip-read instead of sign, burgeoned and became extremely influential in deaf life. Created in the midst of this cultural battle over deaf language use, Agnew’s paintings were artistic validations of the linguistic preferences and rights of deaf signers. If signing on the fingers was suitable for the Queen of England, then it was certainly a mode of communication fit for her deaf subjects.
The Queen’s willingness to engage in dactylogical communication irked those hearing doctors, educators, and parents of deaf children who were proponents of oralism.3Despite the almost unanimous opposition of deaf communities, oralists aimed to entirely eradicate signed languages by mobilizing various strategies, including establishing speech-based schools, lobbying governments for educational reform, and deriding signed languages in public forums. As this book will demonstrate, oralists charged signed languages with being primitive, with being rooted in iconicity and materiality, with lacking intellectual and linguistic rigor, and with isolating deaf people from the society of hearing people. While one key oralist goal was to institute speech-focused education for deaf children, the oralists’ wider desire to efface the linguistic, sensory, and cultural differences of deaf Britons exceeded the strictly pedagogical. That the century-long oralist program has been called a form of cultural “genocide” reflects the threat that the eradication of signed languages posed to deaf people who, instead of understanding their sensory and linguistic difference as a problem, often expressed pride in their language of signs.4
The moment captured in Agnew’s painting belies the oralist construction of sign’s inferiority to speech and instead aligns signing with the status and sophistication of royalty. The delight taken in Agnew’s paintings by deaf communities both in the late nineteenth century and today resides largely in their endorsement of sign language. As a prominent and vehement opponent of oralism, Agnew argued that oralists, who were almost exclusively hearing, “‘do not know what we deaf folks know of the people they deal with, and we must try to open their eyes as well as enlighten the public.’”5Agnew and his Scottish deaf contemporaries, then, used the attention Agnew’s paintings received from hearing people to promote their vision of deaf communication and education—a vision centered on the visual language of signs. For example, in addition to being showcased and celebrated at the Edinburgh exhibition, the 1889 version of “Royal Condescension” was exhibited to Queen Victoria, after which she agreed to patronize Agnew’s building fund for the Glasgow Institute for the Deaf and Dumb, where signs were used in the classroom.6Agnew used his considerable artistic and administrative talents, then, to resist oralism, promote a deaf perspective on signed languages, and establish an institutional space for deaf self-determination.
Reading Victorian Deafness traces the cultural conditions that led to oralism’s overwhelming success in Victorian Britain. By the mid-nineteenth century, deaf people (whose literacy had been increasing, who had been teaching other deaf people in schools, and who had been standardizing and spreading the use of signed languages for a century) were prevented from continuing their efforts at political and social independence. By the turn of the century, signed languages were outlawed in many deaf schools, deaf communities were being dissolved, and signed languages were being disparaged as inferior forms of communication. Oralism was much more than a pedagogical movement, and this book addresses both its broader cultural influences and its social import. I move beyond the schoolroom to attend to widespread Victorian conceptions of both disability and language. Victorians understood signed languages in multiple, and often contradictory, ways: as objects of fascination and revulsion, as having scientific import and literary interest, and as being both a unique mode of human communication and an apparent vestige of our bestial heritage. This book argues that deaf people’s marginalization in the nineteenth century was, in part, attributable to Victorian misunderstandings not only of signed languages but also of the concept of “language” altogether. Language was an overdetermined category for the Victorians, who used it to define notions of Britishness, normalcy, and the human;
