The Discourse of Embodiment in the Nineteenth- Century British and North American Sign Language Debates

THE DISCOURSE OF EMBODIMENT IN THE NINETEENTH- CENTURY BRITISH AND NORTH AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE DEBATES by Jennifer Esmail A thesis submitted to the Department of English In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (September, 2008) Copyright ©Jennifer Esmail, 2008 Library and Archives Bibliothèque et Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de l’édition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre référence ISBN: 978-0-494-69936-2 Our file Notre référence ISBN: 978-0-494-69936-2 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non- L’auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant à la Bibliothèque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par télécommunication ou par l’Internet, prêter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des thèses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, à des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non- support microforme, papier, électronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. 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Abstract The Discourse of Embodiment in the Nineteenth-Century British and North American Sign Language Debates examines the transatlantic cultural reception of deafness and signed languages to determine why a largely successful nineteenth-century movement known as Oralism advocated the eradication of signed languages. The dissertation answers this question through exploring a range of texts including fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Oralist texts by Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Arnold, and deaf resistance texts including poetry and proposals to establish Deaf settlements. I argue that Oralists – and a wider Victorian culture – believed that signed languages were inferior to spoken and written languages because they believed that signed languages were more embodied than these other modes of language. This charge of embodiedness produced negative constructions of signed languages as more concrete, iconic, and primitive than speech and writing. In chapter one, I examine poetry written by deaf people in order to uncover the phonocentrism that underscored both Oralism and the dominant nineteenth-century construction of the importance of aural and oral sound to poetry. In chapter two, I consider the relationship between the sign language debates and the debates around evolution in order to argue that both sides of the evolutionary debate were invested in making deaf people speak. In chapter three, I consider Wilkie Collins’s depiction of a deaf heroine in his novel Hide and Seek. I argue that Collins’s desire to make his heroine speak through her body rather than sign points to the difficulties of representing a signing deaf person within the conventions of the Victorian novel. Finally, chapter four focuses on the rhetoric around deaf intermarriage and community as it arose in the eugenicist turn taken by Oralism. Using a variety of theoretical approaches including Deaf and Disability Studies, post-structuralist understandings of language, and animal studies, I examine how cultural constructions of deafness and signed ii languages reveal nineteenth-century anxieties about the nature of language, the meaning of bodily difference, and the definition of the human in the post-Darwinian era. iii Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful to Laura Murray and Maggie Berg for their insightful suggestions, expertise, and unflagging support. I would also like to thank Cathy Harland, Elizabeth Hanson, and Mary Carpenter at Queen’s University who have always been generous with their time and knowledge. Christopher Keep and D.M.R. Bentley, at the University of Western Ontario, have modeled exceptional Victorian scholarship and have been constant sources of information and encouragement. This research was made possible through a Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and an Ontario Graduate Scholarship. I am also indebted to the help of the librarians at the Library of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, London, England. I also appreciate Judy Yaeger Jones’s assistance with my research on Laura Redden Searing. I cannot begin to thank those friends and colleagues who have kindly provided feedback, friendship, and support throughout this project: Dana Olwan, Laura Cardiff, Daniel Martin, Sarah Krotz, Fiona Coll, Cheryl Cundell, Lindsey Banco, Heather Emmens, Sara Mueller, Vanessa Oliver, Karen Bourrier, and Jason Boulet. These scholars have helped shape my project through their thoughtful engagement and their kind encouragement. I also appreciate the support of my family and friends including the Esmail and Kangas families. Most of all, I am grateful to Eric Carlson whose brilliance has challenged me, whose kindness has supported me, and whose insight is reflected on every page. iv Table of Contents Abstract...................................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgements...............................................................................................................................iv Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... ............v Introduction: Speaking Minds and Signing Bodies ..............................................................................1 Chapter 1: “Perchance my Hand may Touch the Lyre”: Deaf Poetry and the Nineteenth-Century Sign Language Debates........................................................................................................................41 Chapter 2: “Human in Shape, But Only Half Human in Attributes”: Sign Language, Evolutionary Theory and the Animal-Human Divide...............................................................................................97 Chapter 3: Ventriloquizing the Deaf Heroine in Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek ..........................129 Chapter 4: “A Deaf Variety of the Human Race”?: Sign Language, Deaf Marriage, and Utopic and Dystopic Visions of Deaf Communities.................................................... .................................182 Conclusion: Apologia: Linguistic and Corporeal Inclusivity in Deaf Studies................................223 Works Cited........................................................................................................................................242 Appendix A: Poems Discussed in Chapter One................................................................................259 v vi Introduction: Speaking Minds and Signing Bodies In 1872, Thomas Arnold, a prominent British teacher of deaf children, published a pamphlet on “The Education of the Deaf and Dumb.” He began his pamphlet by emphasizing the importance of the question of whether deaf children should be educated to use speech or sign language: The importance of the recent correspondence in the Times on the rival systems in which the deaf and dumb are educated can hardly be over-estimated, not only from its bearing in the Science of Language, but also from the fact that the rescue from ignorance, the usefulness and the happiness of thousands of our own and all coming generations are involved in the controversy. (3) Arnold illuminates how the nineteenth-century sign language debates were of interest to more than those people closely connected to deaf people. While deaf people and their language use are usually considered today as a minority issue that exists on the margins of educational or medical discourse, over the course of the nineteenth century the language use of deaf people informed wider cultural understandings of the nature of language, the meaning of bodily difference, and the definition of the human. In fact, as Arnold notes, vehement arguments about the systems of deaf education spilled onto the pages of Victorian England’s newspaper of record. This passage from Arnold’s pamphlet also reveals that the public interest in the sign language debates served two masters: public understandings of the general “Science of Language” and only secondly, the needs and desires of deaf people themselves. Overall, the purpose of Arnold’s pamphlet is to argue that deaf people should be forced to speak rather than sign; he believed

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