deaf poetry provides a unique and important lens through which to examine issues of voice, sound, and textuality in Victorian poetry, because its creators were socially marginalized by a cultural reverence for the voice. Absurd poetry also illuminates the limitations of the perception of a natural or necessary relationship between speech and written poetry. For deaf poets, poetry is not a “tuneful art.”94Through their use of the sounds unheard theme and the speaking mute figure, these deaf poets exploited the sound-based theory of poetry to highlight the very written-ness—the very absence of speech—that characterized all nineteenth-century printed poetry. In reimagining the relationship between sound and text, insisting on written texts without corresponding sensory experiences of sound, and celebrating the possibilities of writing, deaf poetry provides one more avenue to complicate our critical understanding of the places where writing and speaking meet and where bodies and texts intersect.
The Political Uses of the Poetic
While, as I have argued, attending to deaf poetry can expand and complicate widely held definitions of poetry and formulations of the relationship between the audible and the aesthetic, deaf poetry was also used politically as a form of resistance to oralism. For instance, in 1886, at the height of the sign language debates, Edward Miner Gallaudet, a leading figure in American deaf education, was called before the British Royal Commission on the Blind and the Deaf and Dumb. The commissioners Gallaudet faced were charged with investigating the best ways to educate both deaf and blind children in government-funded schools, and this mandate involved settling the controversy over which of the competing systems of deaf education—oralism, manualism, or a combined system—would be best for both deaf students and the nation in general.95In his testimony, Gallaudet aimed to defend the use of signed languages in deaf education and the wider deaf community. The commissioners, who were especially concerned about oralist claims that deaf people who did not speak faced poor economic prospects, asked Gallaudet to describe the professions of the nonspeaking graduates of the American National Deaf-Mute College. Gallaudet gave examples of graduates who communicated “entirely by writing or by the fingers” and were prospering in various fields.96He declared that these successful graduates “show[ed] that the practice of the oral method with the deaf is not essential to the highest success in the various pursuits which they take up” (“Testimony,” 468). And then, to emphasize his point, Gallaudet read aloud Draper’s Petrarchan sonnet, “Memories of Sound.”
While a sonnet seems like an anomalous piece of evidence for the vocational success of deaf people, especially when considered alongside the various reports, statistical analyses, and concrete data presented to the commission by other witnesses, Gallaudet’s recitation of Draper’s sonnet was an example of the common practice of refuting oralist arguments by exhibiting the skills of signing deaf people. Furthermore, this poetry reading at the Royal Commission was only one example of a larger mobilization of deaf poetry to defend signed languages. Though the oralist movement waged its war against signs in government commissions, congresses of educators, educational journals, and the popular press, members of the deaf community (who, we should note, were often denied a “voice” at these official forums) resisted oralism through creating counternarratives to oralist denigrations of signed languages and signers. By publishing their poetry, deaf people and their supporters were able to both offer their own perspectives on signed languages and provide textual evidence of the linguistic and intellectual capacities of signers. Indeed, after reading Draper’s sonnet aloud, Gallaudet submitted his own Harper’s magazine article on deaf poetry, which included British poets, as evidence for the Royal Commission.
Carol Padden and Tom Humphries have argued that American Sign Language (ASL) poetry played an important role in the American Deaf cultural movement that took place from the 1960s through the 1980s. They have suggested that this poetry contributed to the growth of a new pride in ASL and offered a deaf perspective on the value of signed languages (Inside, 131). I believe we can extend Padden and Humphries’s assessment of the political and social value of deaf poetry to another important era in deaf history: the nineteenth-century sign language debates in Britain and North America. The deaf poetry I have been discussing in this chapter was instrumental to demonstrating deaf people’s abilities in the face of an oralist ideology that claimed that speech was essential to a deaf person’s success.
The entire oralist project was premised on the claim that signed languages were inferior to spoken languages in almost every dimension. As scholars including Baynton, Branson and Miller, Krentz, and Rée have argued, North American and British oralists attacked signed languages for nearly a century, through a rhetoric of xenophobic, racist, speciesist, and ableist invocations of the “primitive” nature of signed languages. Because nineteenth-century oralists on both sides of the Atlantic claimed that signed languages were inferior to spoken languages for a variety of reasons (including their insistence that signed languages prevented abstract thought and interfered with English language acquisition), defenders of sign were repeatedly forced to prove the intellectual and linguistic capabilities of nonspeaking deaf people. An essential tactic in battling oralism, then, involved offering an alternative, positive version of signing and demonstrating that signers could think abstractly and write in English. This need to defend signers informed the common nineteenth-century cultural practice of publicly exhibiting deaf students. Indeed, there is an important continuity between these public educational exhibitions and the way in which Gallaudet and others marshaled deaf poetry as evidence of the success of the manualist system.
During the frequent and widespread public exhibitions of deaf students put on by nineteenth-century deaf schools in Europe and North America, deaf pupils presented readings in signed languages, gave dramatic performances, executed mathematical and other exercises at a chalkboard, and answered questions from the audience. As various historians of deaf education, including Davis, Baynton, Rée, Krentz, and Lane have established, these exhibitions were intended to display the positive attributes of signing as well as demonstrate the intellectual capacities of deaf children, including their comprehension of abstract concepts and their ability to read and write in English and other languages. Often these exhibitions of deaf children using signed languages—languages that Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet called “highly poetical”97—foregrounded poetry. For example, at an 1857 exhibition in Mississippi, a deaf student presented a poem called “The Mute Sister” in sign.98This poem, written by James S. Brown, principal of the Louisiana Institute of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, was about a deaf child whose only deaf sibling succumbs to illness. When the poem’s “speaker” mourns the loss of the one person whose “signs . . . I alone could freely read” (line 5), the poem highlights the importance of signed languages and deaf community in a hearing-dominated world. The fact that this sentimental poem was presented by a young deaf pupil in sign underscored its thematic content. Furthermore, as Krentz has noted, at these public demonstrations, “the students’ visual performance provoked wonder and fascination; they were seen as possessing a beautiful language and skills that most hearing people did not have.”99
Deaf students had to refute the oralist claim that signed languages could only incompletely convey the complexity of human thought. Some oralists maintained that as languages of the limbs, signed languages were mired in concreteness and iconic representation, and therefore signers could not think abstractly unless taught how to speak. For instance, one proponent of this position, Thomas Arnold, who was Britain’s leading oralist, argued, “Signs are pictures of objects, and therefore resemble them. The one suggests the other from this semblance. But by what signs shall we express abstractions, purely mental states, operations and intuitions? As none of these can be reduced to a material form it is impossible to figure them by signs. . . . The processes of the understanding cannot be described on the fingers.”100Arnold shared this belief in sign as a mode of pantomime with many oralists and even the general public.101One of the principal aims of the deaf schools’ public exhibitions, then, was to correct this misunderstanding of the qualities of signed languages. Indeed, during the question period at these presentations, audiences often asked students about abstract ideas such as God, whether they could distinguish between closely related concepts—such as “authority and power” or “mind and intellect”—and how they imagined inaccessible sensory experiences such as
