abstractions it was because hearing people were under the misapprehension that the deaf could only deal with concrete things.”103
Public attempts to showcase the abstract reasoning and linguistic skills of signing deaf children extended beyond the school auditorium; the many articles printed in deaf periodicals and the various books published by educators as testimonies of deaf students’ intellectual capacities demonstrate the widespread and pernicious influence of the cultural devaluation of signed languages. For instance, in 1845, H. B. Bingham, the principal of the College of the Deaf and Dumb in Rugby, published a collection of student essays to “pro[ve]” to the public that “when educated, [deaf students] possess a quickness of apprehension, and a scope of imagination equal to those of their own age who are not naturally deaf.”104The essay topics echo the questions posed by the public at school exhibitions. The Rugby students were asked to write about pertinent social issues (such as slavery, revolution, and the advantages of the railway), topics related to their deafness (such as whether it is worse to be deaf or blind), and abstract concepts including “death” and “light.”105
The public exhibitions of deaf students also aimed to demonstrate that these students, who did not speak, could use written English. Most oralists claimed that using signs to any extent, even alongside speech and writing, interfered with the acquisition of English language skills. For oralists, the “inverted” logic and grammar of signed languages marred their users’ linguistic capacities.106For example, Alexander Graham Bell, who, like Gallaudet, testified at the British Royal Commission on the Blind and the Deaf and Dumb, argued that a deaf person could not successfully use both English and a signed language. In his testimony Bell claimed that a signing deaf child “has learned to think in the gesture language, and his most perfected English expressions are only translations of his sign speech. As a general rule, when his education is completed, his knowledge of the English language is like the knowledge of French or German possessed by the average hearing child in leaving school. He cannot read an ordinary book intelligently without frequent recourse to a dictionary . . . and he can generally make people understand what he wishes in broken English, as a foreigner would speak.”107Oralists held English literacy at a premium and refused to recognize both the value of literacy in a signed language and the possibility that, as recent studies have shown, this sign literacy actually improves literacy in a written language.108Manualist teachers, too, foregrounded the acquisition of written English skills in their attempts to justify the use of signed languages. In introducing a public exhibition of his students, James S. Brown argued that the “great work” of the deaf pupil is “to receive and acquire a knowledge of written language” and that it was the audience’s role to judge his students’ success.109A central element of these exhibitions, then, was a student’s performance of written exercises at a chalkboard to demonstrate, in Krentz’s words, his or her “mastery of logocentric forms.”110
In this sign-hostile climate, engendered by the rise of oralism, then, manualist educators and other deaf signers mobilized deaf children’s abilities for public and political aims. Understanding Gallaudet’s recitation of Draper’s sonnet through the lens of this culture of public exhibition illuminates his motivations for submitting poetry as evidence alongside more quantitative data about salaries and occupations. However, Gallaudet’s poetry reading was only one example of the way in which nineteenth-century deaf poetry was yoked to the deaf community’s resistance to oralism through, in part, exhibiting the literacy skills of deaf signers. After all, cultural beliefs about sign language’s deficiencies—that it is closer to gesture than it is to “language,” that it is incapable of describing the abstract, and that it interferes with proficiency in English—should have rendered deaf poetry impossible. According to these beliefs about language, a deaf person who communicated primarily in signs could not possess the ability to compose poetry in English. Their language of the body precluded the creation of poetry from the mind. It is important to remember, therefore, that in addition to his or her inability to hear, a deaf poet’s inability to speak made his or her poetic ability seem implausible.
The nineteenth-century deaf poetry that is the focus of this chapter is important, then, not only in expanding paradigmatic definitions of poetry but also in drawing attention to the struggle of the deaf community for self-determination and language rights. Deaf poetry was one tool used by supporters of sign against the oralist ideology that insisted that signing deaf people would be unable to succeed in their use of the English language and therefore in their lives.111The deaf poets examined in this chapter offered various explanations for their desire to write poetry, and very few stated overtly political aims. Regardless of their intentions, however, I argue that the poetry of the deaf, through its very existence, challenges the claims underpinning the oralist program. I do not mean to suggest that there is any clear evidence that these poems written by deaf individuals were demonstrably instrumental in making political gains for deaf communities. After all, despite Gallaudet’s poetry reading, the British Royal Commission still endorsed speech training for all deaf children.112Unfortunately, the subversive potential of deaf poetry was often neutralized, for reasons enumerated later in this chapter. Nevertheless, because deaf poetry affirmed deaf people’s linguistic skills, it intervened in the sign language debates of the nineteenth century.
Some deaf poets clearly did write poetry in order to refute the idea that it was absurd for them to do so. Simpson, a British teacher of deaf children, credited Kitto’s “erroneous impression” (Simpson, Daydreams, xii) that the difficulties facing an aspiring deaf poet were “insuperable” (Kitto, Lost, 168) with spurring him to publish his poetry. In the preface to his book of poetry, Daydreams of the Deaf (1858), Simpson begins by agreeing with—and partially plagiarizing—Kitto but then disputes the “insuperability” of the obstacles to a deaf poet when he explains that “in deaf people, the absence of oral guidance, and that perfect knowledge of quantity and rhyme, essential to harmonious verse, must surround them with difficulties and tend to prevent the attainment of any great excellence in the cultivation of the muses and yet not be so much so as to form an ‘insuperable’ obstacle to a persevering mind” (xii). Simpson explicitly constructs his book of poetry as a refutation of Kitto’s claim that deaf people cannot write poetry. However, Simpson also shares Kitto’s ambivalence about deaf poetic achievement: he does affirm Kitto’s point that deafness “tend[s] to prevent the attainment of any great excellence in the cultivation of the muses” (xii). Simpson, like Kitto, vacillates on the importance of sound to poetry. However, for Simpson, at least, deaf poetry is not an absurdity.
In other instances, deaf poetry’s interrogation of phonocentrism was clearly unintentional, because some deaf poets were hardly strident advocates for deaf rights. For example, Carlin, though never orally trained himself, supported oral training and made derogatory comments about the capabilities of deaf people. Krentz explains Carlin’s strange negativity towards his fellow deaf Americans by suggesting that Carlin “appears to have internalized traditional negative attitudes so completely that his work overflows with sentimental self-pity and woe[;] . . . such dejection is perhaps understandable given the barriers that Carlin, a gifted deaf man, must have encountered in ante-bellum America.”113Kitto, who became deaf as a young child and believed that deaf people could not write poetry, deeply underestimated the capacities of people who were born deaf and used signs exclusively. Neither Kitto nor Carlin was a model supporter of the deaf community that they were a part of, yet each man, through writing poetry, inadvertently refuted his own claims about the inferiority of deaf people’s cognitive and linguistic abilities.
In other cases, such as the two poems, “Holy Home” and “Light and Darkness,”114written by deaf-blind American Laura Bridgman, deaf poems were published mainly as a curiosity, which drained them of some of their subversive potential. They were put on display, as Bridgman was herself, as evidence of the success of her education. In “Light and Darkness,” Bridgman explores these two extremes of visual experience in highly metaphorical terms.
Light represents day.
Light is more brilliant than ruby, even diamond.
Light is whiter than snow.
Darkness
