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 example to demonstrate what a Deaf studies approach offers to the study of poetry. While I would not argue that aural considerations should be entirely divorced from poetic theory, I want to call attention, alongside other critics, to the limitations of this sound-based theory of poetry. Prins, for instance, has suggested that a study of historical prosody reveals how Victorian metrical theory “makes voice a function of writing” and provides a way out of the orality conundrum.69Kreilkamp has also challenged the critical desire to trace audible voices in Victorian literature, positing that “voice persists in the discourse of print culture where it remains as trace and residue capable of giving rise to inchoate new forms.”70One of the new forms to emerge from this discourse of print culture is the deaf poetry that burgeoned in deaf communities over the course of the nineteenth century. Indeed, in this absurd poetry we can most clearly trace how, in Tucker’s words, “[t]exts do not come from speakers, speakers come from texts.”71The fantasy of poetic orality cannot comfortably encompass deaf poetry. These poems were not forged in speech and molded into writing. Instead, writing was the primary site of poetic production and reception for deaf poets. Because the relationship between this absurd poetry and its creators—deaf people who used signed languages rather than voices—is uniquely configured, an examination of this poetry can help us redefine the questions we pose about voice in Victorian poetry through defamiliarizing our ideas of ability, both poetic and sensory.
Silent Soliloquizing: The Contradictions of Sound in Written Poetry
While deaf poets adhered to the formalism understood as sound-based by creating poetry that was stylistically conventional, they were more radical in their thematic treatment of sound. Turning from the formal arrangements of this poetry to its thematic content can demonstrate how deaf poets attempted to walk the fine cultural line between the inaudibility and insufferability denoted by the term absurd poetry. Nineteenth-century deaf poets emphasized the thematic presence of sound in their work in various ways to underscore the very paradox inherent in all poetry. These poets simultaneously emphasized their poetry’s silence and its imagined orality.
The most striking example of how deaf poets foregrounded the contradictory relationship between deafness and the aural/oral model of poetry is their figure of the “speaking mute.” With extraordinary frequency, nineteenth-century deaf poets highlighted the muteness of their poem’s “speaker” while simultaneously figuring the poem itself as speech. For example, in American poet Angie Fuller Fischer’s “The Semi-Mute’s Soliloquy”72and Carlin’s “The Mute’s Lament,” the poets self-consciously construct their poetry as speech while their “speakers” simultaneously bemoan their alienation from the speaking world around them. The speaking mute figure thereby mirrors the ambivalent position of deaf poets and the tension in their poetry between challenging and accepting the dominance of “voice” in written poetry.
The “speakers” of speaking mute poems describe their alienation as a state of being at once inside and outside their hearing-dominated society. Fischer’s “speaker” in “The Semi-Mute’s Soliloquy” foregrounds her ambiguous position as a soliloquizing mute:
No sound! no sound! an alien though at home,
An exile even in my native land;
A prisoner too, for though at will I roam,
Yet chained and manacled I oft must stand
Unmoved, though sounds vibrate on every hand.
No sound! no sound! yet often I have heard,
Echoing through dear memory’s sacred hall,
The buzz of bees, the rare song of a bird,
The melody of rain-drops as they fall,
The wind’s wild notes, or Sabbath bells’ sweet call.
No outward sound! yet often I perceive
Kind angel voices speaking to my soul
Sweetly consoling charges to believe
That this life is a part, and not the whole
Of being—its beginning, not its goal.
No sound! except the echoes of the past,
Seeming at times, in tones now loud, now low,
The voices of a congregation vast
Praising the God from whom all blessings flow,
Until my heart with rapture is aglow.
Fischer’s tightly rhymed poem foregrounds the contrast between the myriad voices in the world of the poem—the songs of birds or the voices of angels—and the silence of her “speaker.” It simultaneously accepts and disavows aurality by using rhyme while insisting that there is “no sound!”
The “speaker” of Carlin’s “The Mute’s Lament” echoes Fischer’s “speaker” in foregrounding his alienation from the speaking world:
I move—a silent exile on this earth;
As in his dreary cell one doomed for life,
My tongue is mute, and closed ear heedeth not;
No gleam of hope this darken’d mind assures
That
