Reading Victorian Deafness. Jennifer Esmail

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СКАЧАТЬ her lover that she cannot “fashion into speech / The love I bear thee” (lines 1–2). Instead she asks her lover to “let the silence of my womanhood / Commend my woman-love to thy belief” (lines 9–10). In Sonnet 39, Barrett Browning’s “speaker” moves from expression beyond words to reception of the extraverbal. She describes her lover’s power to “look through and beneath” (line 2) the surface into her “soul’s true face” (line 4). In both of these examples, spoken words are represented as less powerful than visual communication. Kitto uses this convention for his particular circumstance as a deaf man who cannot hear his Mary’s voice but can “read” his Mary’s eye.

      Searing’s poem “My Story” shares “Mary’s” focus on communication outside of the oral and aural. The poem was published in Searing’s book of American Civil War poetry Idylls of Battle. The “speaker” of “My Story” describes her experience with deafness and then compares her story with “A nation’s tears! A nation’s pains! / The record of a nation’s loss” (lines 49–50). By the end of the poem, the “speaker” refocuses her pain and tears away from her “lighter cross” (line 52) of deafness toward the suffering of her country:

      Henceforth, thou dear, bereaved land!

      I keep with thee thy vigil night;

      My prayers, my tears, are all for thee,—

      God and the deathless Right!

      (lines 53–56)

      However, the first twelve stanzas of the fourteen-stanza poem do not mention the war but concentrate instead on the “speaker’s” pains, struggles, and hopes regarding her deafness. The “speaker” primarily experiences the world through her vision, which allows her to “read” thoughts and feelings in the faces and eyes around her.

      I learned to read in every face

      The deep emotions of the heart;

      For Nature to the stricken one

      Had given this simple art.

      The world of sound was not for me;

      But then I sought in friendly eyes

      A soothing for my bitter loss,

      When memories would rise.

      And I was happy as a child,

      If I could read a friendly thought

      In the warm sunshine of a face,

      The which my trust had wrought.

      (lines 17–28)

      In Searing’s poem, as in Kitto’s, eyes communicate with eyes and faces are texts to be read. These facial texts are especially legible to the deaf “speaker,” who can read the typically hidden “deep emotions of the heart” on the faces around her, as a kind of compensation for her deafness. This construction of faces as texts appears frequently in the writings of nineteenth-century deaf poets. Kitto, for example, argues that because deaf people do not have the ability to judge a person’s character by “tone of voice and manner of speech,” “everyone who is deaf must become a physiognomist” (Lost, 61). These poets participate in what Deidre Lynch has called “the Victorians’ fascination with the insights to be obtained from the sight of another’s countenance” to suggest that visual communication trumps oral communication in both its efficiency and its revelation of truth.124

      Various Victorian canonical hearing poets also deploy this physiognomic logic in their poetry, including, for example, Robert Browning. In “Fra Lippo Lippi,” the “speaker” explains that his marginalization as a poor boy taught him to read faces and therefore to become a great artist: “When a boy starves in the streets,” “Why soul and sense of him grow sharp alike, / He learns the looks of things” (lines 112, 124–25).125 “How It Strikes a Contemporary” is rife with paranoia about surveillance and the poet “as a recording chief-inquisitor” who wanders the streets “looking [the world] full in the face” (lines 39, 11). “My Last Duchess” famously treats the speciousness of reading faces and the gendered danger of a woman’s face revealing too much or too little about her thoughts and feelings. In each of these examples, face reading is somewhat threatening in its ability to reveal what the object of surveillance may wish to hide. In the examples of “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “My Last Duchess” specifically, the poems’ insistence on the readability and transparency of a person’s exterior reflects the dramatic monologue’s generic ability to reveal secrets implicitly while the subject dissembles explicitly. The reader of the poem becomes a poetic physiognomist of sorts, able to read the truth of the “speaker” outside of the words that the “speaker” utters. So, although celebrations of face reading and validations of the art of physiognomy in deaf poetry participate in wider nineteenth-century cultural preoccupations, deaf poets claim a unique and positive relationship to face reading. For Kitto and Searing, who figure this reading of faces as a form of compensation for their deafness, deaf people are better physiognomists than hearing people are. These poets thereby appropriate the cultural authority of the rhetoric of physiognomy to validate nonoral methods of communication.

      In addition to her eyes, the “speaker” of “My Story” uses her hands to negotiate and communicate with the world around her through the sense of touch and the use of space. The “speaker” refers to hands three times within the first four stanzas. In the first, she “grasp[s] the hand” of her interlocutor (line 1). She then characterizes her deafness as the “hand of God” falling “heavily / upon [her]” (lines 6–7). In the fourth stanza, she describes how her

      . . . poor life, so silence-bound,

      Reached blindly out its helpless hands,

      Craving the love and tenderness

      Which every soul demands.

      (lines 13–16)

      This focus on hands as the medium of intercourse between the “speaker” and those around her (including her God) implicitly reveals that she uses sign language. While this focus on deaf people’s nonverbal communication—on eyes, faces, and hands as instruments of communication—recurs frequently in deaf poetry, many of these poets are even more explicit about manualism and signed languages than Kitto and Searing.126

      Burnet’s long narrative poem “Emma” describes deaf students learning sign language, a “new language,—all their own, / Where mind was visible,—and knowledge shone” (lines 308–9). “Emma” is about a young deaf girl’s journey from isolation to intellectual enrichment and community through learning sign language and attending a school for deaf children. Like Kitto and Searing, Burnet invokes the visibility of thoughts and feelings in this new language, where “mind was visible.” At the school for deaf children

      from the speaking limbs, and face divine,

      At nature’s bidding, thoughts and feelings shine,

      That in thin air no more her sense elude,–

      Each understands,—by each is understood.

      Here can each feeling gush forth, unrepressed,

      To mix with feelings of a kindred breast.

      (lines 330–35)

      Like Kitto’s celebration of the eloquence СКАЧАТЬ