Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail

or social-constructivist model oversimplifies the vast range of approaches, and their respective strengths and weaknesses, in contemporary disability studies. While the medical model has garnered criticism for its insistence on understanding diversity as a problem, for largely ignoring the perspectives and rights of people with disabilities, and for adhering to an oversimplified binary of ability and disability, the cultural model also has its limitations. For instance, the cultural model has been accused of effacing the important issue of impairment: that is, the deafness or paraplegism or autism that is being medicalized and given cultural meaning. Reading Victorian Deafness is deliberately less concerned with the physiological experience of deafness, including its physical causes or medical treatment, than it is with the culture that constructed the nonphysiological effects of deafness in particular ways.14

      How, then, can we—as critics, historians, and members of these communities—create a responsible and progressive model of thinking about social categories such as race, gender, sexuality, and disability that balances the reality that bodies are simultaneously cultural formations and material entities? In recent writing, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has registered her concern about how to theorize disability in a way that keeps difference itself in tension with a critique of a culture that constructs this difference in the first place. That is, she asks how we can attend to disability without reinscribing the flawed ideological system that devalues certain kinds of bodies. In writing about Victorian freakery, Garland-Thomson advocates a “shift[] from a social-constructivist understanding of freakery to a rigorous materialist analysis. . . . The virtue of this analysis is that the freaks cannot be relegated to metaphorical figures of otherness, but rather they are enfleshed as they are enfreaked, always particular lives at particular moments in particular places.”15

      In its attempt to balance these myriad questions facing the field of disability studies, Reading Victorian Deafness follows both Garland-Thomson and Davis in arguing that historicizing how concepts of disability came to be and the material realities of those people who have been labeled, or who identified as, disabled are both necessary steps. This book is invested in finding a third space—a space that simultaneously eschews metaphorical or transhistorical accounts of deafness, avoids effacing bodily diversity or impairment, and still interrogates the cultural meanings granted to those impairments. Accordingly, then, I examine how deaf people came to be understood in the nineteenth century as a pathologized Other who violated the norms of human communication while simultaneously addressing how particular deaf people lived among, created, and responded to those constructions of what it meant to be deaf in Victorian Britain.

      Victorian Cultural Constructions of Deafness

      In part, then, this book traces the various appearances of deaf people and signed languages in Victorian culture to examine hearing people’s interest in sign language and, more specifically, their attempts to use signing deaf people as a site for exploring larger concerns about the relationship between the human body, ability, and language. While today deaf people and their languages are typically studied in the disciplinary margins of education and medicine—couched in the rhetoric of rehabilitation, assimilation, literacy, and cure—I argue that over the course of the nineteenth century, understandings of deaf people and their language use informed broader cultural debates around the nature of language, the meaning of bodily and linguistic difference, and the definition of the human. This is not to say that this rhetoric of assimilation, illiteracy, and cure was not in use during the Victorian period; in fact, much of our contemporary discourse around deafness can be traced explicitly to Victorian constructions of what it means to be deaf.16One contribution of this book to contemporary disability studies, then, will be to adumbrate the nineteenth-century roots for many of the pervasive and recalcitrant cultural constructions of what it means to be deaf today. However, alongside this Victorian relegation of deaf people to the margins, I also wish to underscore the significant role that deaf people and their very marginality played in the wider cultural discourse of the Victorian period, which I discuss in the chapters that follow. For now, I will emphasize the pervasiveness of figures of signing deaf people in Victorian culture; they fascinated the various Victorians who encountered them, whether through Queen Victoria’s silent conversations; the popular life writing of deaf writers, including Harriet Martineau and John Kitto; the well-attended, public exhibitions of deaf schoolchildren across Britain; the debates around oralism that appeared in the pages of the Times; the discussion about deaf people’s “bestial” and “primitive” language use in the evolutionary debates; or the deaf characters penned by popular novelists including Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

      While the various, and competing, constructions of deafness in Victorian culture changed through the decades, some conventional images of deaf people appeared with some persistence. Above all, hearing Victorians understood deafness as a pathology, believed that deaf people were suffering under a heavy misfortune, and assumed that deaf people needed pity and charity. This is also the construction of deafness (and, of course, disability more generally) that largely persists in the twenty-first century; I wish to underscore that this denigration of deafness is neither straightforward nor natural but instead is a historical construction and, in particular, is a Victorian idea that presages our own contemporary approaches to deafness.17The pity response I have noted—what Garland-Thomson has called the “diminishing, too frequent response to disability” that becomes an “emotional cul-de-sac”18—inhered, in part, in the pervasive construction of deaf people as alienated from essential Victorian institutions and values: mainstream culture, Judeo-Christian religion, the English language, national affiliation, family relationships, employment and independence, education, and higher cognitive abilities. As will become clear in later chapters, oralism and related disenfranchisements of deaf people were often framed as gestures of inclusion. As Douglas Baynton, Christopher Krentz, and Neil Pemberton have demonstrated, this construction of deaf people as outsiders to a dominant national or religious culture fueled the various attempts by missionaries and educators to assimilate deaf people into the hearing and speaking world in both Britain and North America.19Another dimension of this construction of deaf person as outsider that was of even more concern for hearing Britons and North Americans was termed “deaf clannishness.” Hearing people who wrote about deafness often constructed deaf people as a race apart and described their books and articles as passports to a “land of silence” or to “a world of deaf and dumb; or, a land with 1,000,000 deaf-mute inhabitants.”20As historians including Baynton and Jonathan Rée have noted, Victorians increasingly understood this group of people, with an unintelligible language and a distinct culture, as a kind of “enigmatic secret society.”21It was not only hearing people who understood deaf people as a nation apart. Deaf writers, too, constructed their world as quite distinct from the hearing culture that surrounded it. For instance, John Kitto borrowed the generic paradigm of his travel writing when he wrote his autobiographical account of deafness in The Lost Senses. Kitto argues that a deaf person “lies under the same obligation to the public of describing his own condition, as a traveler is under to render his report respecting the unexplored countries which he has traversed in his pilgrimage.”22

      Before moving to an assessment of how deaf Britons responded to these kinds of constructions of their marginality in Victorian cultural and national life, I want to attend to the ideological resonances of the Victorian terminology for deafness. The terms used most frequently to refer to deaf people in nineteenth-century Britain and North America were first deaf and dumb and then deaf-mute. These terms attempted to capture the dual nature of deafness: deaf people cannot hear and often sign instead of speak. The distinct terms were also useful in distinguishing deaf people who signed—typically those people who were born deaf or became deaf at a young age and generally did not use speech—from those people who experienced deafness because of illness, injury, or age but used speech to communicate. This, admittedly oversimplified, distinction is often maintained in contemporary Deaf culture and Deaf studies by a difference in case. That is, a lowercase d in the word deaf refers to the audiological condition of deafness: someone who does not sign and is not part of the Deaf community or Deaf culture is referred to as deaf. Uppercase-D in Deaf refers to a particular Deaf identity that typically involves communication through sign language, membership in Deaf community and culture, and an orientation toward what is called Deaf pride (which is often aligned with a rejection of the medicalized model of deafness). However, this practice has recently been called into question. The major objection to the d/D