Writing Deafness

The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Christopher Krentz

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781469606682
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

Taking an original approach to American literature, Christopher Krentz examines nineteenth-century writing from a new angle: that of deafness, which he shows to have surprising importance in identity formation. The rise of deaf education during this period made deaf people much more visible in American society. Krentz demonstrates that deaf and hearing authors used writing to explore their similarities and differences, trying to work out the invisible boundary, analogous to Du Bois's color line, that Krentz calls the "hearing line." Writing Deafness examines previously overlooked literature by deaf authors, who turned to writing to find a voice in public discourse and to demonstrate their intelligence and humanity to the majority. Hearing authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain often subtly took on deaf-related issues, using deafness to define not just deaf others, but also themselves (as competent and rational), helping form a self-consciously hearing identity. Offering insights for theories of identity, physical difference, minority writing, race, and postcolonialism, this compelling book makes essential reading for students of American literature and culture, deaf studies, and disability studies.

1
I Write What You Speak

WRITING AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE AMERICAN DEAF COMMUNITY, 1816–1835

Why then are we Deaf and Dumb? I do not know, as you do not know . . . why there are among the human kind, white, black, red and yellow men.
Laurent Clerc (1818)

One of the advantages of a text-based society is that individual voices and minority opinions can be more easily heard, if they are permitted access.
Lennard J. Davis (1995)

In the fall of 1816, a group of civic leaders in Philadelphia assembled to see what most of them had never before encountered: an educated deaf person. Laurent Clerc, a thirty-year-old deaf man, had recently arrived from France to help found a school for deaf students in America. After a colleague read aloud a short speech Clerc had written in favor of deaf education, an audience member asked Clerc how he knew whether he thought in the same way as people who could hear. The question was interpreted into sign language and Clerc moved to a chalkboard to reply. “I can express my own ideas by writing,” he wrote, “and as what I write is what you speak, I can judge that I possess the same faculties of mind as you do.”¹ Clerc’s answer indicates how he saw writing not only as evidence of his intelligence, but also as an effective means for him to communicate with hearing people who did not know sign language. Suddenly deaf people in the United States had a voice in national discourse.

To say a “deaf and dumb” person has a voice may seem paradoxical, but as Carol Padden and Tom Humphries remind us, “voice” has dual meaning; it may signify not just talking with the mouth, tongue, and larynx, but also “being heard,” no matter what the mode of communication (Inside 58).² As deaf Americans came together as a group in the early nineteenth century, they made themselves heard not so much through their vivid sign language as through their writing in English. To be sure, their signing often made a tremendous impression on hearing spectators, but because few hearing Americans understood the language, it stopped short of serving as a public voice for deaf people. However, the emergence of print culture opened up the possibility of direct communication with the larger populace that did not know sign language. In the silent, visual space of the text, they found a place where the differences between hearingness and deafness appeared to recede and the hearing line could potentially be effaced.

In this way, deaf people resemble and are somewhat representative of other disempowered groups who took advantage of a growing text-based culture in antebellum America to try to write themselves out of their marginalized status. With the advent of penny newspapers, a profusion of reform literature, and a dramatic rise in the amount of fiction and poetry, Americans increasingly perceived reality through the written word. While William Apess wrote essays in which he attacked white attitudes toward Native Americans, Frederick Douglass eloquently criticized slavery in his autobiography, and Margaret Fuller published a spirited denunciation of society’s treatment of women, early deaf authors like Laurent Clerc and John Burnet argued for the just treatment of deaf Americans, adding to a potent literature of resistance to the hegemonic norm. The words of these writers found an audience of readers, which slowly but undeniably began to affect the way society perceived their respective groups. In the terms of Henry Louis Gates, these authors’ writing served as the “visible indication of reason” (“Race” 8), demonstrating their intellectual abilities and feelings to a public that commonly viewed them as inferior. In addition, writing “created some version of solidarity for marginalized groups,” helping to reinforce their shared experiences and goals (Davis, Enforcing 66). At the same time, as Jill Lepore has pointed out, English literacy helped to Americanize “othered” people, to begin to unite a racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse nation (5). By breaking out of their silenced state, deaf people and other marginalized groups began to achieve a measure of political power and move closer to the center of American society.

Yet deaf authors differed from these counterparts because they did not speak vocally to the public at all, testing whether writing could truly serve as a complete substitution for speech. Since ancient times, people believed that the ability to speak vocally is what makes one human. As George Steiner puts it, “That articulate speech should be the line dividing man from the myriad forms of animate being, that speech should define man’s singular eminence above the silence of the plant and the grunt of the beast . . . is classic doctrine well before Aristotle” (36). This view contributed to the oppression and exclusion of deaf people from society for centuries, casting them as inferior beings without language;³ the etymological root of “language,” langue, is Latin for “tongue” (Bauman 242). With writing, deaf authors attempted to disprove such prejudiced notions and attest to their humanity without speaking vocally. Minorities who could hear and speak also found a public voice through writing, but their situation was different. Gates goes so far as to assert that “black people could become speaking subjects only by inscribing their voices in the written word” (Signifying 130), maintaining that, ironically, only through the silent act of writing could African Americans be heard in a society that privileged writing as proof of rationality. However, he perhaps overstates the case, as fugitive slave orators like Douglass and William Wells Brown were definitely heard in public; their vocal speeches played a crucial role in the abolitionist movement. Clearly written English allowed disadvantaged groups to gain a more effective voice in public discourse, but no other group depended on it to circumvent the long-held belief that vocal speech signified humanity. Could it alone provide the common language that Hegel, in his master-slave dialectic, argued is necessary for individuals to achieve reciprocity and recognize each other as persons (Gibson 29)? Deaf authors in nineteenth-century America offer an illuminating test of these issues, demonstrating both the power and limitations of the written word in the quest for equal rights and respect.

For deaf people, as for many other minority or subaltern groups, writing in the dominant language was not easy or straightforward. Congenitally deaf people often struggled to express themselves in written English, which was essentially a foreign language to them. Even those who found English a congenial mode of expression had to struggle to postulate a complete self in a language freighted with negative assumptions about deafness. In English, “deaf” not only means “does not hear,” but also has been associated with callousness, insensitivity, evil, insanity, and isolation; such meanings are inscribed in the language, its idioms (from “turn a deaf ear” to “dialogue of the deaf”), its metaphors, and its very etymology. Furthermore, what nineteenth-century Americans referred to as “the language of signs,” and we now know as American Sign Language (ASL), is not a written language. Deaf American authors had to attempt to convey their identities without using the language in which they conversed with each other in person, the language that bound them together as a community. Just as African Americans had a vernacular tradition they used for face-to-face communication before they began to write in English, so deaf Americans had a sign tradition, and both black vernacular and sign language continued to exist alongside (or outside) their writing.⁴ Through writing in Standard English, they often sought to bridge the color or hearing lines, to address white hearing people who might be ignorant, biased, or even hostile to what the African American or deaf author was trying to express. Writing was thus a different kind of speech act than using black vernacular or sign. It requires more “double vision” (to use Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s term) on the part of the black or deaf author, where they must be much more aware of identity and difference (51). Still another barrier was that deaf people of color did not have much access to education or literacy, preventing them from representing themselves in national discourse.

Given such formidable challenges, it is no wonder that scholars in postcolonial studies have vigorously debated the possibility of oppressed people achieving a true public voice at all. In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak concludes that colonized groups cannot achieve a clear and effective voice in the larger society. Since subalterns are always heterogeneous groups, they have no autonomy, Spivak asserts. Their attempts at speech are never pure but always mixed, always weakened by the conceptual categories and structures of the dominant language in which the subaltern attempts to communicate. Yet critics like Homi Bhabha perceive such hybridity more positively, seeing in the ever-vacillating complicity with and resistance to the dominant ideology a fundamental ambivalence that contains the possibility of unsettling the colonizer’s power.⁵ While Spivak and Bhabha are referring to oppressed people in colonial situations, their insights directly relate to deaf Americans’ efforts to enter the discourse of the dominant hearing society around them, and deaf authors, in turn, offer a compelling test case for subaltern theory.

How did deaf American authors represent themselves? What forces shaped their written voices? How did they internalize, reject, or adapt for their own ends the language that hearing people applied to them? This chapter examines the formation of a public deaf voice and the deaf community on a national level in the early nineteenth century by considering the first three published deaf writers in America: Laurent Clerc, James Nack, and John Burnet. These authors learned to write by reading works in their cultural moment and in the dominant Western literary tradition, which shaped their voices. Yet if, in writing in the language of the majority, they often replicate hearing forms and attitudes, they also occasionally appropriate English to give a sense of their own unique identities. Behind the work of each writer lies a shared sign language and communal consciousness, although the way they express this consciousness varies a great deal. In moving from Clerc to Nack to Burnet, we can trace the evolution of early deaf American voices and discern how these writers repeated, imitated, and revised each other. Like other minorities, they used writing to break the discursive silence that the majority sometimes cited as evidence of their inferiority. Their literary production helped to define not just themselves as individuals, but also their class, as it was often called. Instead of letting hearing people fill the deaf side of the line with their own imaginings, writing allowed deaf people to gain more control over their own representation, to prove their reason and humanity, and to contest prejudice. With writing, they began to unhinge traditional assumptions about deaf identity as the antithesis of language, awareness, intelligence, goodness, and citizenship,⁶ and opened up new ways for being deaf in America.

BEGINNINGS: LAURENT CLERC

By the time Laurent Clerc came to the United States from France in 1816, he already had substantial experience representing deaf people to a hearing public. Deafened as an infant, he had become a brilliant student and, later, teacher at the National Institute for the Deaf in Paris, where he regularly participated in exhibitions before crowds of inquisitive spectators, including leaders like the emperor of Austria, the members of Parliament in London, and the pope. At these events the school’s hearing director, the Abbé Sicard, would lecture theatrically about his methods of instruction, and then Clerc and Jean Massieu, another gifted deaf man, would answer questions from the audience to demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods.⁷ The queries were interpreted into French Sign Language and the two would write their replies in French on a chalkboard for all to see. Despite the freak-show overtones of these exhibitions, in which he was, in Lennard J. Davis’s phrase, “the focal point of the clinical gaze” (Enforcing 56), Clerc participated in them willingly, for he saw them as educating the public about deaf people’s potential. In 1816, when a young hearing minister from Connecticut named Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet asked Clerc to return to the United States with him to assist in establishing a deaf school there, Clerc quickly assented. He liked Gallaudet and was eager to help spread deaf education to other countries. During their fifty-two-day voyage across the Atlantic, Clerc tutored Gallaudet in French Sign Language while Gallaudet coached him in written English.⁸ By their arrival, Clerc was ready to serve as the voice of deaf education to America, but to do so he had to negotiate a confusing welter of linguistic and ideological constraints.

Laurent Clerc. (Painting by Charles Willson Peale, 1822.) Courtesy of the American School for the Deaf.

As he and Gallaudet traveled through New England to raise funds for the proposed school, Clerc’s initial written voice was deeply hybrid, marked by the dominant concepts and rhetorical figures of the day. He not only answered questions from audiences, but also wrote short speeches for Gallaudet to read aloud, thereby taking Sicard’s former role. Perhaps not surprisingly, in these first addresses Clerc replicated some of the dramatic imagery with which he had seen Sicard impress emperors and nobility. To a group in Boston in September 1816, Clerc wrote, “Mr. Gallaudet and I are in the design of raising those unfortunates [uneducated deaf people] from their nothingness” (“Laurent” 109). This language is reminiscent of Sicard’s habit of comparing uneducated deaf people to blocks of unchiseled marble or statues not yet animated with life (Sicard, in turn, probably borrowed the statue image from the French philosopher Condillac, who used it to describe humans’ awakening senses and mental understanding).⁹ We see Sicard’s influence more clearly when Clerc warns that if no action is taken, deaf people “would be condemned all their life, to the most sad vegetation” (“Laurent” 108); Sicard had employed the same trope the year before, stating that a deaf person is “doomed but to vegetate, when left to himself” (Ladebat xxi). Such echoes raise the question of whether, in Spivak’s terms, Clerc truly has a voice here. Clerc goes on to assert that the new school would enable deaf people to “pass from the class of brutes to the class of men” (“Laurent” 108). His language of blankness and brutishness assumes a colonizing mentality, making uneducated deaf people appear subhuman, much as contemporary representations depicted black people and Native Americans as savages. Steeped in the dominant ideology of the time, Clerc’s words advance the Enlightenment concept that, as Gates puts it, “the absence or presence of reason . . . delimit[s] and circumscribe[s] the very humanity” of people deemed different from the norm (Signifying 130). Clerc presents education as the means to lift deaf people up the great chain of being, to transform them from obscurity and animalism into conscious, civilized members of society. What is harder to determine is whether Clerc completely subscribed to this view or employed such rhetoric because he knew it would appeal to the sensibilities of his hearing spectators.

As Clerc was no doubt aware, these hyperbolic representations distorted reality. True, before the rise of deaf education many deaf Americans lived apart from each other, largely isolated and illiterate. Some did not know a language at all. Given such severe circumstances, we can perhaps understand how sensationalistic descriptions came about. However, as F. A. P. Barnard pointed out in 1834, “To be deaf from birth . . . is to be ignorant, not weak, stupid, or savage” (6). Before the founding of deaf schools, some deaf Americans led productive, socially connected lives. Nora Ellen Groce has shown that on Martha’s Vineyard from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, a high rate of hereditary deafness led to a vibrant community in which both deaf and hearing people used a sign language. In addition, since a small percentage of deaf children had a deaf parent, some deaf people had families that knew and understood their situation. For instance, Thomas Brown, a nineteenth-century deaf leader, had a deaf father, Nahum Brown, who signed, so Thomas grew up in an environment where he felt unstigmatized and could readily communicate. Despite not knowing how to read or write, the elder Brown was a successful farmer in New Hampshire, married a hearing neighbor, and raised a family. According to the deaf writer William Chamberlain, Nahum Brown’s “shrewdness, as well as sterling honesty, were everywhere recognized and acknowledged, and many an anecdote is told of him to show his keen native humor, which found ready and intelligible pantomimic expression and was always appreciated” (In Memoriam 5). Far from being nothing or brutish, Brown was a respected member of his village. Nor were all deaf Americans before 1817 uneducated. A few wealthy families sent their deaf children to Europe to attend school, while other deaf people managed to educate themselves. Although he was born deaf and apparently received no formal education, John Brewster Jr. learned to write some words, could communicate via home signs and pantomime, and had a successful career as a portrait painter in early America.¹⁰ Such accounts contradict Clerc’s bleak language describing deaf Americans in 1816.

Further complicating Clerc’s voice was the evangelical enthusiasm of the moment, which caused many Americans to view those who did not know the Gospel as lesser beings in need of being saved. Historically, efforts to rescue deaf people’s souls were often the raison d’être behind attempts at deaf education. Many hearing pioneers in teaching deaf individuals were priests or clergymen, who were often among the first to reach out to disadvantaged groups.¹¹ Clerc, a Catholic, continued this tradition. When Sicard reluctantly agreed to allow his star teacher to accompany Gallaudet to the United States, he wrote that Clerc was “the Apostle to the Deaf-Mutes of the New World” (qtd. in Lane, When 203). In his public presentations, Clerc often accepted that role, suggesting that the new school would be the site no...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Writing Deafness
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 I Write What You Speak
• 2 Essaying the Unsayable
• 3 Powers of Deafness
• 4 A Sense of Two-ness
• 5 Playing with the Hearing Line
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index