Title
Author(s)
Sign language and the moral government of deafness in
antebellum America
Wang, Chao; 王超
Citation
Issued Date
URL
Rights
2014
http://hdl.handle.net/10722/211119
Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License
Abstract of thesis entitled
Sign Language and the Moral Government of Deafness in Antebellum America
Submitted by
WANG Chao
for the degree of Master of Philosophy
at The University of Hong Kong
in August 2014
Many Deaf people today consider themselves a linguistic minority with a culture
distinct from the mainstream hearing society. This is in large part because they
communicate through an independent language——American Sign Language (ASL).
However, two hundreds years ago, sign language was a “common language” for
communication between hearing and deaf people within the institutional framework
of “manualism.” Manualism is a pedagogical system of sign language introduced
mainly from France in order to buttress the campaign for deaf education in the early19th-century America. In 1817, a hearing man Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (17871851) and a deaf Frenchman Laurent Clerc (1785-1869) co-founded the first
residential school for the deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. These early manualists
shaped sign language within the evangelical framework of “moral government.” They
believed that the divine origin of signs would lead the spiritual redemption of people
who could not hear. Inside manual institutions, the religiously defined practice of
signing, which claimed to transform the “heathen deaf” into being the “signing
Christian,” enabled the process of assimilation into a shared “signing community.”
The rapid expansion of manual institutions hence fostered a strong and separate deaf
culture that continues to influence today’s deaf communities in the United States.
However, social reformers in the mid-nineteenth century who advocated “oralism”
perceived manualism as a threat to social integration. “Oralists” pursued a different
model of deaf education in the 1860s, campaigning against sign language and hoping
to replace it entirely with the skills in lip-reading and speech. The exploration of this
tension leads to important questions: Were people who could not hear “(dis)abled” in
the religious context of the early United States? In what ways did the manual
institutions train students to become “able-bodied” citizens? How did this religiously
framed pedagogy come to terms with the “hearing line” in the mid 19th century? In
answering these questions, this dissertation analyzes the early history of manual
education in relation to the formation and diffusion of religious governmentality, a
topic that continues to influence deaf culture to this day. (334 words)
Signed ______________________________________
WANG Chao
!
Sign Language and the Moral Government of Deafness in
Antebellum America
WANG Chao
B.A.!Nankai!
A"thesis"submitted"in"partial"fulfilment!of#the#requirements#for"
the$Degree$of$Master!of#Philosophy"
at#The#University#of#Hong#Kong."
"
August!2014 "
!
!
Declaration
I declare that this thesis represents my own work, except where due acknowledgement
is made, and that it has not been previously included in a thesis, dissertation or report
submitted to this University or to any other institution for a degree, diploma or other
qualifications.
Signed ______________________________________
WANG Chao
i!
Contents
Declaration ..................................................................................................................... i
Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... ii
List of Illustrations ....................................................................................................... iii
Introduction: Manual education and the religious construction of deafness ........ 1
"
Chapter 1 Signing Christian: Thomas Gallaudet and the rise of manual
education in America (1815-1830) ........................................................................... 10
1.1 Early interest in deafness: Thomas Gallaudet and Alice Cogswell ................................... 10
1.2 Governed by signs: The idea of deafness in the Second Great Awakening ....................... 14
1.2.1 The discipline of hearing in Christian worship ............................................................... 14
1.2.2 Deafness reconceptualized in New Haven Theology: The role of Gallaudet ................. 17
1.3 The transatlantic communication of sign language: Gallaudet’s journey to Europe
(1815-1816) .............................................................................................................................. 23
1.3.1 The procurement of sign language from Europe ............................................................ 23
1.3.2 Methodical signs and the origin of the French manual system....................................... 30
1.3.3 “A system of doing good”: Gallaudet’s rhetorical formation of manual education in
America .................................................................................................................................... 43
1.4 The American Asylum as an institutional practice of moral government (1817-1830)..... 50
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 59
"
Chapter 2 Thomas Gallaudet and the cultivation of morality in sign language
(1830-1850) ................................................................................................................. 62
2.1 The fight over “methodical signs”: in search for the American system in the mid century
.................................................................................................................................................. 62
2.2 The paradox of “naturalness”: Revisiting Gallaudet’s two treatises on the “natural
language of signs” (1847-1848) ............................................................................................... 72
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 79
"
Chapter 3 The challenge from oralism .................................................................... 81
3.1 The early debate over manualism: Horace Mann and Thomas Gallaudet ......................... 81
3.2 Samuel Gridley Howe and the oralist practice of “moral discipline”: Teaching Laura
Bridgman .................................................................................................................................. 92
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 108
"
Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 110
Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 119
ii"
Illustrations
Figures
1. Alice Cogswell, Letter to Mr. Thomas H. Gallaudet, April 1815 ........................... 29
2. Juan Manuel Ballesteros, The Spanish manual alphabet ........................................ 33
iii"
Introduction
Manual education and the religious construction of deafness
"
In 1815, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (1787-1851), a hearing man from Hartford,
Connecticut, started his life-long career as a teacher in the field of deaf education.
Two years later, he became the inaugural principal of the first residential school for
the deaf in America. Gallaudet and his fellow evangelical reformers turned the school
into a symbolic representation for the “moral government” of deafness.1 By claiming
that sign language could rescue deaf people from intellectual darkness, the school
assimilated many deaf students from across the country into its institutional
framework and saw them as faithful Christians. In the Antebellum Era, such
residential schools had fostered a growing deaf community under “manualism,” a
pedagogical system of sign language mainly introduced from France in order to
buttress the manualist campaign for deaf education in the Early American Republic.
In contrast, “oralism” is a rival approach advocated in the 1860s to campaign against
the use of sign language and replace it with the exclusive methods of lip-reading and
speech.2 Different from the oralist approach to science, manual education contributed
to understanding deafness as a religious construct of “(dis)ability.” By training a deaf
person to sign for God, it rendered his or her biological differences recognizable to
those who could hear, while at the same time created a distinct “deaf culture” in sign
language.
In fields of Deaf Studies, the lower cased “deafness” refers to the audiological
condition of hearing loss, while the capitalized “Deafness” emphasizes the linguistic
and cultural formation of deaf community based on sign language communication.3
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1
The idea of bringing “moral influence” in the “government and discipline” of deaf people implies
Thomas Gallaudet’s inherited influence from the religious doctrine of “moral government” in New
Haven Theology. Gallaudet advocated the idea as the organizing principle for teaching sign language
in deaf schools founded by manualists in early-nineteenth-century America.
2
The two terms are often used in relation to each other as the “manualism-oralism controversy” (also
known as the communication debates). See Susan Burch, ed., Encyclopedia of American Disability
History (Infobase Publishing, 2009), 313.
3
See Carol A. Padden and Tom Humphries, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Harvard
University Press, 1988), 16-17. Also see Padden and Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture (Harvard
University Press, 2005), 1.
"
1"
However, I choose not to adopt the “d/Deafness” distinction in my dissertation to
describe the early history of deaf education mainly out of three reasons: First, the
cultural and linguistic impacts on the formation of “Deaf community” in
early-19th-century America did not eclipse the connotations of “audiological deafness”
in deaf people’s institutional and social experience. Second, deaf people have had a
shared history with the hearing, and both took the social and cultural construction of
“otherness” into the process of self-identification. Early history of deaf education well
illustrates the point from the religious rendition of sign language as a “common
language” that is germane to the understanding of “deafness” in manual education.
Third, following the disability scholars such as Lennard Davis and Simi Linton, I
agree that claiming deafness as a category of disability rather than defining it vaguely
as a “different experience” is the necessary step toward recognizing the deaf culture.4
To understand the social implications of early national efforts to restore
communicative abilities to the deaf through manualism, this dissertation considers
three interrelated historical themes: First, the analysis raises the question of how the
deaf were “disabled” in the context of Christianity, and how the hearing educators in
the antebellum period sought to restore their “lost hearing” by constituting a
normative sign language that was based in religious goals of moral education and
governance. Second, it proposes a constructive critique of this norm by looking at
conceptual shifts in deaf education from manualism to oralism in the mid-nineteenth
century. In so doing, this dissertation opens up an array of questions regarding the
differences in how to perceive deafness in broader society. “Oralism” argued against
the relationship between signs and speech that the manualists had established, and
mobilized modern science to de-humanize language. Third, the dissertation seeks to
address the social and cultural implications resulting from manualism’s initial
fostering of a sense of deafness as a cultural experience in relation to the ambivalent
attitudes from across “the hearing line.”5 All these three parts contribute to the scope
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4
See Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (NYU Press, 1998). Lennard J. Davis,
The Disability Studies Reader (Routledge, 2013), 305.
5
The term is coined by Christopher Krentz as “the invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing
people.” As Krentz suggests, although audition is invisible, the biological difference of deafness is
always there. The hearing line therefore reveals a complex and shifting relationship between physical
difference, cultural fabrication, and identity. See Christopher Krentz, Writing Deafness: The Hearing
"
2"
of my historical inquiry in the religious construction of deafness. The thesis is
indebted to the extensive body of scholarship that has either focused on the role of
hearing individuals in shaping the early deaf education or on particular issues with the
debates over sign language in mid-19th-century America.6
I therefore focus my study on the particular tension created by the religious
conception of sign language and its role of understanding the early formation of deaf
culture. The issue has been broadly discussed in the previous literature on early deaf
history. Douglas Baynton’s foundational work Forbidden Signs examines the
changing cultural attitudes toward sign language from the debates between oralism
and manualism in the middle of the nineteenth century, and suggests the declining
influence of religion by which the manualists had shaped in deaf culture.
Secularization and the increasing concern with the “national community” changed the
course of manualism in movements that sought linguistic purification, ultimately
resulting in oralism.7
Recent studies featured a revisionist approach to the argument of the
“pedagogical shift” by demonstrating the complexity of the period’s various strategies
in deaf education.8 For example, Rebecca Edwards’ Words Made Flesh offers a
historical account of the deaf Americans who recognized their cultural identity as
“bilingual-bicultural citizens” at the inception of manual education. This sense of
bilingualism enabled a growing network of manual institutions that fostered a strong
sense of community among those with the ability to communicate through manual
sign language. This sense of community cohered among deaf people as well as among
manualists who could hear and not hear.9 In this revisionist account, sign language
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (UNC Press Books, 2007), 2.
See, for example, Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (Random House, 1989).
John Vickrey Van Cleve and Barry Crouch, A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in
America (Gallaudet University Press, 1989). Douglas Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture
and the Campaign Against Sign Language (University of Chicago Press, 1996)."
6
7
Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 9-10.
8
R. A. R. Edwards, Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf
Culture (NYU Press, 2012)."
9
"
Ibid., 48.
3"
developed as a sort of “creolization process” in which deaf culture rose as it formed
through uniformity.10 Taking this into account, I argue that the idea of “common
language” of early manualists cultivated a belief in the “natural language of signs”
that served religious goals of moral governance. Manualism assimilated those who
could not hear into a “signing community” as “the deaf,” which was a crucial first
step toward the deaf in turn seeing themselves as a distinct community.
This “moral efficacy” upon which educators of sign language based their efforts
also testifies to the enduring effect of social integration. The evolution of manual
institutions produced such an ironic result. As Susan Burch pointed out, the
manualists’ intent to integrate deaf people into hearing society by enrolling them at
residential schools instead fostered a strong and separate deaf culture. Similarly, the
oralists sought to disrupt the isolated deaf culture through the mainstreaming process.
Like the manual ministers who intended to assimilate deaf people into Christendom
by teaching them to sign, the oralists extended the goal of integrating deaf people into
the mainstream hearing society by forbidding the use of sign language.11
On the other hand, some scholars in Deaf Studies approach the social and cultural
embodiment of deafness by emphasizing its rhetorical construction of sign language.
As Brenda Jo Brueggemann writes in Lend Me Your Ear, sign language constituted an
alternative literacy by which the deaf became part of the dominant social grammar of
the mainstream society. 12 Likewise, Tracy Ann Morse, in her recent Signs and
Wonders, singles out the religious rhetoric which historical and contemporary deaf
community has employed to overcome the oppression of a dominant hearing
community that suppressed the use of sign language or continues to misunderstand
the value of it to the preservation of deaf culture.13
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10
Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi, “Review of Edwards, R. A. R., Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf
Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture,” H-Disability (H-Net Reviews, April, 2014), accessed
August 4, 2014. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=39225.
11
Susan Burch, Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II (NYU
Press, 2004), 10.
12
Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness (Gallaudet
University Press, 1999), 178.
13
"
Tracy Ann Morse, Signs and Wonders: Religious Rhetoric and the Preservation of Sign Language
4"
In review, much of the scholarship related to the intersection of religion and
manual education lacks an integral analysis of the role that manual institutions had in
shaping sign language toward religious goals. In moving from manualism to oralism,
in what ways did the rhetorical construction of deafness change and how did these
changes affect the practice of deaf education in the public sphere? In this regard, the
thesis assesses the implication of “moral government” being the foundation on which
early manual educators constructed deafness. By placing sign language at the center
of an examination of the formation and diffusion of the religious governmentality, the
thesis could hopefully unravel the problems with the disciplinary effects on deaf
education and its broader cultural implications to present-day deaf communities.
The first chapter considers how deafness became a “disability” through the
religious implications of “lost hearing.” According to Baynton’s suggestion, God had
not given the deaf the capacity for language to develop over time, while the
manualists held gestural signs were the “original language” and “closer to creation.”14
The first generation of Protestant reformers adopted the idea of rescuing those who
could not hear from spiritual isolation as a manifestation of Evangelical Revivalism.
They later applied the principle of moral government to the manual institutions for the
stimulation of antebellum reform in the public school system. They also targeted
individuals who were physically or mentally impaired, whose infirmity could only be
brought into the evangelical framework of moral government by “substitute[ing] for
external constraint the inner discipline of responsible morality.”15 As noted by the
religious historian Daniel Walker Howe, the redemptive process of salvation was both
constraining and liberating. Specifically, deaf redemption required subjection to a
Christian worldview in which a language of signs incarnated morality for the deaf.
The act of a deaf person praying in the asylum by sign language or learning to sign
English in class also changed the social meaning of deafness. In accordance with the
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(Gallaudet University Press, 2014), 4-5.
14
Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 39-40.
15
Daniel Walker Howe, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North During the
Second Party System,” The Journal of American History 77, no. 4 (March 1991): 1220.
"
5"
religious principle of moral government, the pedagogy of sign language served to
persuade the public that people who could not hear were intellectually educable and
spiritually redeemable as “the deaf.” By augmenting the religious implications of a
morally instructive sign language, the manualists looked beyond the biblical precept
of God’s “miraculous healing” of deafness to make a general society one that was
aware of the deaf.
The early manualists also envisioned the institutional practice of signing as a
means of training the deaf to become equally competent as the able-bodied person
under the definition of citizenship in the early republic. This newly framed concept of
“virtuous citizenship,” which was widely preached by the religious leader Timothy
Dwight as a way of assimilating the various individuals into the secularization of
moral government, represented an aligned practice between enlightened religion and
social politics in New England. As Edwards pointed out, the newly defined concept of
“Godly Federalism” helped provide the ideological ground for the deaf to achieve
their full citizenship in the able-bodied society. 16 This chapter thus unfolds the
historical narrative in which the cultural meaning of sign language was shaped
conceptually by individual educators and assimilated into the institutional operation
of deaf residential schools that embodied the practice of Christian moral government
in antebellum America.
In comparing the two aspects of training the deaf to sign, this chapter reveals that
incompatibilities exist between the rhetorical formation of manual education and its
institutional practice featured in the American Asylum. The religious belief held the
divine origin of signs as the answer to deaf redemption, while the corporeal discipline
exercised in the institution emphasized the deaf person’s “ability” of becoming the
competent labor. Therefore the institution failed to deliver the idea of God to the deaf
through moral education. Instead, it confined sign language to the scope of training
the deaf into being the “docile body” under the hearing regime. By the 1860s, the
network of deaf residential schools had produced several generations of deaf students
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
16
"
Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 18-20.
6"
who maintained a separate identity as constituted by the use of sign language. This,
however, shows the hidden value of the signing community under the cover of
bilingual-biculturalism. It also might contribute to the understanding of Burch’s point
of a separate deaf community that was produced on the premise of acculturation.
The second chapter addresses how the transmission of signing pedagogy coped
with the atmosphere of the manualist camp during the 1830s-50s by illustrating
Gallaudet’s search for “natural signs” in relation to his idea of “cultivated signs” as
the embodiment of Christian morality. In readdressing the standard narrative of
Gallaudet’s mission for procuring manualism from Europe, it illustrated America’s
conceptual inheritance from the French system, in which the methodical signs
influenced Americans’ way of teaching the deaf English by signs. The route of sign
language’s cultural transmission also reflected the adaptability of moral government,
which was enshrined in the establishment of the hearing authority over the
conceptualization of the deaf culture.
However, the historical process of shaping sign language into the so-called
“American system” invites two levels of examination. First, by tracing a series of
debates among educators of the major manual institutions over the reception of the
French system, the chapter illustrates the controversial attitudes of treating manualism
across the hearing line. It argues that the cultural significance of sign language was
downplayed by the tendency of reducing the various modes of deaf signing in daily
communication to standardized signs for the purpose of learning English. The
growing fissure resulted in the manualist camp by the late 1850s also signified the
arrival of oralism, which claimed to substitute the use of signs with speech and
lip-reading. Second, the works of Thomas Gallaudet written a decade after his
retirement from the American Asylum reflected his full-fledged thoughts on the
function of natural signs in preserving the characters that were crucial to understand
the formation of deaf culture. He also explained the ways in which moral education
could be effectively imparted through the communal practice of signing.
Therefore, Gallaudet’s reimagining of the “naturalness” in signs and the religious
influence he aimed to produce through ritualizing the sign language turned manual
"
7"
education into a practical system in which the deaf cultural self-awareness could
thrive on the growth of “signing community.” This marked a fundamental difference
with the oralist idea of “social integration,” which renders the cohesion of the national
identity with the enforcement of English as a common spoken language.17 Therefore,
the oralist campaign against sign language was out of the fear of creating a separate
deaf community, and it was part of the national movement for integrating cultural
minorities into the mainstream American society. In this regard, Gallaudet and his
fellow manualists held against the idea of abandoning sign language, and they wished
to acculturalize the deaf from the margins of the hearing culture. This broader concern
with deaf culture later became the prevailing argument for the advocates of
manualism in combating the threat from oralism.
The third chapter examines the early challenges from oralism against the
manualist religious construction of deafness in the late 1850s. It takes inquiry into the
conceptual change happened in the realm of deaf education that highlights the shift
from antebellum idea of assimilating the deaf into Christian community toward the
increasing social disruption of the signing community in which deafness was created.
This chapter demonstrates the ways in which early figures of oralism misrepresented
manualism by stigmatizing sign language as the symbol of digression from the norm
established by modern science. By studying the case of Samuel Gridley Howe’s
education of the deaf-blind girl Laura Bridgeman, it addresses that the oralist view on
deaf education was colored by the misunderstanding of sign language based on the
pseudo-scientific theory of Phrenology, which interpreted the superiority of speech
over signs by the physiological observation of the brain. The phrenological
perspective of human faculty as determined by the physiological constitution of the
brain largely undermined the fact that sign language was a part of the deaf culture.
Instead of seeing it as a linguistic alternative for the deaf, the oralists claimed sign
language as a linguistic barrier that prevented the deaf person from being restored into
the broader hearing society. The abandonment of sign language also signified the
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17
"
Burch, Signs of Resistance, 13.
8"
oralist attack on the mode of moral governance, and they held the manual institutions
as places that fostered social segregation of the deaf people.
Because neither manualists not oralists could accept both equality and difference
in deafness, their vying for pedagogical legitimacy had blurred the institutional
boundaries and diffused the power of inclusion in broader society. Baynton suggested
the irony that both manualism and oralism sought to shape deafness according to their
own cultural biases, which led seemingly opposing pedagogies to striking similarities
under the imperative of “mainstreaming” deaf people. Baynton’s idea of
distinguishing an “unconstructable reality” of deafness from deafness as a mere social
construction is plausible in understanding the complexity of the hearing line, but we
also should bear in mind that the “physical reality” of deafness could not “transcend”
the culture in which it embedded.”18 The interpretation of deaf experience, therefore,
should unravel the cultural fabrics that directly and indirectly associated with the
biological difference of the deaf people, while not reducing it to “disability” alone.
The study of sign language and its historical development could contribute to our
understanding of deaf culture in at least two possible ways. First, as a symbol of
social construct, sign language could help us understand the practice behind different
pedagogies and the ways in which they function to create different meanings of
deafness. Second, as an embodied experience of deaf people, the physical reality in
which signing communication occupy in space and time could be seen by cultural
interactions with the mainstream hearing society. The thesis thus contributes to the
purpose of understanding the early formation of deaf culture in relation to the
functions of religious governmentality in manual education that had provided both the
institutional and cultural underpinnings to be either invoked or challenged in later
periods of deaf history.
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
18
"
Baynton, 159-60.
9"
Chapter 1
Signing Christian: Thomas Gallaudet and the rise of manual
education in America (1815-1830)
1.1 Early interest in deafness: Thomas Gallaudet and Alice Cogswell
"
In 1802, a student from Hartford entered Yale College as a freshman of Divinity
and instantly became a student of Timothy Dwight, who was the then president of the
College and religious leader of the Second Great Awakening. After graduation, he
took up the public profession in the Congregational church at his home for several
years, and proceeded for further theological training at the Andover Seminary until
1814. Three years later, the young man made his contribution to a whole new industry
known as deaf education, and became the inaugural principal of the American
Asylum for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb (“American Asylum” for short in
the following chapters). The student’s name was Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a
hearing man who brought the seed of manual education from the Europe and nurtured
it in the new world. As written by one of his classmates at Yale, Gallaudet was among
the first generation of manualists in America who “was to enter a new and then
unexplored field of Christian philanthropy.”19
The years in college had nurtured in Gallaudet the spirit of Christian benevolence,
which served as a shaping force of his career in the work of social charity. The
education at Yale instilled him with the genuine knowledge of the New Haven
Theology, a dominant school of Congregational thought in the region of New England
at the height of religious revivalism. Gallaudet’s personal relationship with Timothy
Dwight also paved the way for his introduction of manual education to Hartford. This
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19
Heman Humphrey, The Life and Labors of the Rev. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (New York, 1857),
25.
"
10"
was later proved valuable as Gallaudet sought for assistance from Dwight in
appealing for financial support of his school for the deaf. As a young man who was
trained to become a theologian, Gallaudet surely aspired to take his practice soon in a
wider public. But he was not an idle man who was satisfied with the ordinary work of
being a respected minister in Hartford. Before he finished his professional training as
a Congregational minister, he worked as a lawyer and planned to enter the legal
practice shortly after graduating from Yale in 1805. The legal field acquired him with
the habit of punctuality and a sense of pragmatism. However, due to a serious illness,
Gallaudet was forced to quite the legal practice and returned to Yale as a tutor. During
the time, his bad health made him depressed because he thought of it as a sign of
moral depravity. According to his son, Gallaudet possessed the true character of
humility and self-discipline. “It is a fact that long before the temperance movement
began, Gallaudet was a strict abstainer from everything that could intoxicate.”20
Gallaudet’s engagement with deaf education was triggered by the plight of a
family, whose motivation for helping a deaf child acquire the systematic instruction of
sign language finally turned into the founding of the nation’s first residential school
for the deaf. Mason Fitch Cogswell, a prominent eye surgeon in Hartford, who was
also known as the father of the deaf child Alice Cogswell, had exhausted every means
in searching for a cure for his unfortunate daughter. Dr. Cogswell was among the
many desperate parents who were unable to rescue their deaf children from the
isolation that kept them from relating to the hearing world. In 1807, a serious stroke
of spotted fever made the two-year-old Cogswell unable to hear. Dr. Cogswell refused
to accept his daughter’s plight as “the condemnation bestowed from the Creator” as
many puritanical minds held to believe. Instead, he wished to afford his daughter an
education. In 1812, John Braidwood, a Scottish deaf instructor from the well-known
Braidwood Academy arrived to America and soon captured the eager attention of
Mason Coswell, who learned the news of Braidwood’s mission to establish an
institution for deaf education in the United States. Later, Cogswell wrote a letter to
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20
Edward M. Gallaudet, Life of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet: Founder of Deaf-Mute Instruction in
America (New York, 1888), 35.
"
11"
him regarding his daughter. He said in the letter, “[Alice]…belongs to the class of
unfortunate beings” who had made him “felt the importance of establishing a school
for the instruction of the Deaf and Dumb.” Cogswell further mentioned his plan for
“applying to the legislature of the State for pecuniary aid” in order to hire an
instructor from “the appropriation obtained from a school fund,” until the School
could support itself.21 The letter was obviously an invitation for John Braidwood to
join the plan for advancing a public institution for the deaf in Hartford. However, the
letter failed to attract John Braidwood’s attention because his mission was to found a
private institution in the South.
Later in a vacation during Gallaudet’s study at Andover, Dr. Cogswell, who was
also his neighbor at Hartford, invited him for a visit. This event brought an
unexpected outcome to Gallaudet regarding his meeting with Alice Cogswell.
According to a friend of his, Gallaudet had shown “a compassionate interest” in the
condition of the deaf girl, and was eager to alleviate it. He also tried to converse with
the deaf girl through signs, and succeeded in teaching her the word Hat.22 Gallaudet’s
interest in deaf education began to take a practical shape after his meeting with Alice
Cogswell. Since then, they had developed a close relationship over time through
informal instruction. Mason Cogswell was very pleased to find that a successful
education of his daughter could have been accomplished in the hands of potential
teachers like Gallaudet. Inspired by this idea, he decided to send Gallaudet, instead of
his own daughter, to Europe for procuring the system of manual education. This was
also an experiment that assumed much hazard given the previous contact with the
Braidwood. In fact, at the time Alice Cogswell was receiving tentative instruction
from a local teacher named Ms. Lydia Huntley, who considered her deaf student to
have great potential in learning. Huntley was also convinced of the power of gesture
in expressing ideas more vividly and imaginatively, yet she deplored of its immature
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
21
Stephen Williams “A Sketch of M.F.C”; and Mason Fitch Cogswell to John Braidwood, April 20,
1812, in Father and Daughter: A Collection of Cogswell Family Letters and Diaries (1772-1830), ed.
Grace Cogswell Root (West Hartford, Conn.: American School for the Deaf, 1924), 64-65; 66-67.
22
"
Edward M. Gallaudet, 47-48.
12"
state as compared to Europe. “The language of signs, as now exhibited in its
wonderful copiousness and power, had not then crossed the ocean to this western
world…and the rapid manual alphabet had not reached us.” This later recollection of
Ms. Huntley not only bemoaned a late-coming manual education of the time, but also
reflected an eagerness to explore the use of signs. “Having no guide in this species of
instruction, I earnestly labored to enlarge the number of signs,” said Ms. Huntley.23
The fascination with sign language also stirred the imagination of Gallaudet. In his
early Reverie, Gallaudet envisioned “a universal language” that could carry God’s
second coming to the new world. The strong conviction of Millennialism made him
consider sign language as a way of turning the pious ear into the faithful vision of
Christ’s order:
Before the millennium arrives will one language prevail and swallow up the
rest, or will mankind agree to form a universal language? …Is there already
one, provided by Nature herself, easy of acquisition, universal in its
application, and which demands neither types nor paper?24
Gallaudet considered the value of signs to have the potential of universalizing
the Christian faith. His view of signs as the divine creation further encouraged him to
think of it as a way to acquire the “spiritual hearing,” and to restore the
communicative ability of those who could not hear by the language of signs. Guided
by this belief, Gallaudet promised to Mason Cogswell that he would be willing to
take the opportunity as a start of an enterprise in deaf instruction.25 Before unfolding
the historical narrative of Gallaudet’s transatlantic experience, this chapter begins by
situating his early engagement with sign language in the historical context of the
Second Great Awakening, in which his intellectual trajectory of pursuing the career
in deaf education could be better understood.
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
23
Lydia Huntley Sigourney, “Alice Cogswell,” in Letters to My Pupils: With Narrative and
Biographical Sketches (New York, 1853), 250-251.
24
Edward Minor Gallaudet, Life of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1888), 37.
25
Thomas H. Gallaudet, A Journal of some Occurrence in my life, which has a relation to the
instruction of the Deaf and Dumb (1818), unpublished manuscript, T. H. Gallaudet and Edward Miner
Gallaudet Papers (MSS21832), Library of Congress, 1-2.
"
13"
1.2 Governed by signs: The idea of deafness in the Second Great Awakening
"
1.2.1 The discipline of hearing in Christian worship
"
The revival movement in the early 1800s was carried out in continuity with the
Edwardsian doctrine, and furthered by the “New Haven theology” of Timothy Dwight.
This trend of religious influence brought to the intellectual shift from earlier religious
enthusiasm to a down-to-earth practice that encouraged social charity works in
Connecticut as well as other regions of New England, though local phenomena had
not captured the imagination of the expanding country. As the religious historian
Charles Keller pointed out, the success of humanitarian movement in early
nineteenth-century America was a result of the convergence of Evangelical
Protestantism and the borrowed Humanitarianism from Enlightenment Europe. The
process of social uplift was also undergirded by the country’s increased wealth in the
North. Especially in New England regions such as Connecticut, leading
Congregationalists played an important part in combining religious revival and social
reform.26
Thomas Gallaudet’s role in the advancement of deaf education in the Second
Great Awakening was a proof of how religious motivation turned the individual
sympathy for the disadvantaged “others” toward the common practice of asylum
building around the time.27 He believed that sign language could help to restore their
“dumbness,” or the ignorance of knowledge resulted from hearing loss. 28 More
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
26
Charles Roy Keller, The Second Great Awakening in Connecticut (Yale University Press, 1942),
162.
27
Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers: 1815-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), 211.
28
Traditionally, the term “deaf” was used to describe the person who suffered from the condition of
hearing loss, while “mute” and “dumb” came to mean the inability to speak. They were often used
interchangeably as “deaf and dumb” or “deaf-mute” until the late nineteenth century, when the
misnomer had associated “dumbness” with the negative connotation of intellectually deficiency given
the ascendency of Eugenicism. It was not until 1916 that deaf activists formally responded against the
stigmatized label, and the NAD (National Association of the Deaf) finally changed it to “deaf” and
“hard of hearing” as more appropriate labels. The term “deaf and dumb” or “deaf-mute” ceased to use
publicly in the decades before the WWII. See “deaf and dumb” in Burch, ed., Encyclopedia, 237-238.
"
14"
importantly, the divine origin of signs implied from the biblical texts also rendered
the logic of salvation apparent in the narrative of God’s miraculous healing of
deafness. However, the Yale education as well as the strong congregational influence
in Hartford made him realize that evangelical piety relied more on the seeking of
religious self-discipline in the practice of Christian worship. Therefore the idea of
moral discipline inspired him to find the ways in which the deaf condition of being
isolated from God’s voice could be transformed into a redemptive process toward
individual salvation.
Though preaching at the time remained fundamental to the evangelical
experience, the practice of “spiritual hearing” played as the most direct, if not the only
rewarding, way of connecting the individual to the divine call from God. As shown
from the early modern text of Protestantism, spiritual hearing entailed the significance
of receiving God’s order far more than the form of attentive listening to sermons.
Because the spiritual experience was so crucial to the idea of “conversion,” the deaf
person’s access to language was considered in the early texts as the remarkable
wonder of God. Back in colonial period, the Puritan preacher Increase Mather
documented such an early case of deaf conversion. Sarah Pratt, a deaf woman from
Massachusetts who acquired the knowledge of reading the Bible through learning
gestural signs and a partial English. As discussed by Carty, Macready and Sayerss,
this case also reflected the open attitude of early Puritans to accommodate difference
by drawing the narrative of conversion from the educational, social and spiritual
implications of deafness.29
Later, the reformed theology in New England also exemplified the role of
individual choice in determining the path to salvation. Worship required individuals
to turn from corporeal, or the experimental faculty, to the mental experience of God in
order to attain evangelical piety. The practice of the spiritual senses thus essentially
carried out by seeing and hearing, but it was nonetheless derived from external
perceptions alone. The internal communication with God’s voice was recognized as
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
29
Breda Carty, Susannah Macready, and Edna Sayers, “A grave and gracious woman: Deaf people and
signed languages in colonial New England,” Sign Language Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 313-317.
"
15"
new ways disclosed to the regenerative souls. This interpretation of the spiritual
senses mainly came from the advocates of “evangelical mysticism,” which was a
popular exposition of the experimental religion in the period of American
Enlightenment.30
Jonathan Edwards was among the pioneers of those who presented the doctrines
of spiritual senses to his evangelical audiences. In his Religious Affections, Edwards
stressed the superiority of the spiritual sense over the external ones. He explained that
the “spiritual supernatural sense” could enact the transformative experience of a man
and guides him into conversion. “Even if a man who had been born blind, and with
only the other four senses,” said Edwards, “should he be imparted with the spiritual
opening of the eyes…the spiritual sense [of sight] is infinitely more nobler than that
[of the external sight].”31 However, it should be cautious that in Jonathan Edwards’s
view, the spiritual senses are no new “principles” than the external senses. As he
explained, that God is only “impressing” his ideas, which “will be received by sight
and hearing.”32 In this view, the idea of spiritual senses is nothing more than an
extension of the cognitive faculty as the ordinary sense perception. But since Edwards
adopted Locke’s idea of identifying reason with the process of gaining empirical
knowledge from either internal or external sensation, he could not claim spiritual
cognitions as rational intuitions.33 Thus the function of spiritual senses, as indicated
from the classic Protestant tradition, relied on the exercise of the external senses in an
ascetic commitment to spiritual purity.34
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
30
The term “Evangelical mysticism” was discussed majorly in the writings of the Methodist writer
John Fletcher. See John Fletcher, “On Evangelical Mysticism,” in The Works of the Reverend John
Fletcher, Late Vicar of Madeley (New York: Lane and Scott, 1851), 7-13. See in Leigh Eric Schmit,
Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2000),
40.
31
Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections: In Three Parts (James Crissy, 1821),
219.
32
Ibid., 139.
33
Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity
(Cambridge University Press, 2012), 240.
34
For reference of this tradition of moral discipline of the senses, see Louise Vinge, The Five Senses:
Studies in a Literary Tradition (Lund, Sweden: Gleerup, 1975), 84-85, 95, 122-124.
"
16"
In order to attain the perfection of spiritual senses, the Protestants always hold the
belief that the idea of “spiritual discipline” was reflected in the practice of true
worship, which directly combined with evangelical piety. The discipline of the ear, in
particular, was widely perceived as the symbol of pietistic campaign against the fake
voices, the treacheries of imagination, and the dangers of heresy. Like Edwardsianism,
the reformed tradition of Calvinism was especially careful about the excess of the
sound as a sign of deviation from the true religion revealed from God’s spiritual voice.
“False religion may cause persons to be loud and earnest in prayer,” said Edwards,
and the persons from false religion “may be inclined to be exceeding abundant in the
external exercises of religion.”35 The noise stirred by religious excitement was also
perceived as an auditory manipulation, which should be contained by the moral
discipline of the ear, and turned into the pious hearing. Hence, evangelical piety came
to represent the ability of listening to the divine calls. As the historian Leigh Eric
Schmidt observed, these “beckoning voices” of God speaking to the pilgrim soul are a
reflection of the auditory intensity of early modern spirituality.36
1.2.2 Deafness reconceptualized in New Haven Theology: The role of Gallaudet
"
Gallaudet’s teacher Timothy Dwight was the leading figure of the Edwardsian
theology in New England and the founder of the New Haven Theology. But different
from his predecessors like Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins, Dwight had
directed the Second Great Awakening to place more emphasis on the natural abilities
of the individual to respond to the gospel. In adapting the Scottish philosophy from
Locke and Berkeley, this new trend of intellectual and moral legacy continued to
exert its influence in the public sphere until the middle of the nineteenth century.37
One of the inherited, yet much developed, doctrines of the New Haven Theology is
“moral government.” Joseph Bellamy first used the phrase to invoke the Edwardsian
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
35
Jonathan Edwards, 93.
36
Schmit, Hearing Things, 39.
37
Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press, 2004).
"
17"
teaching in the Great Awakening. The doctrine was later illustrated by Timothy
Dwight and then came to dominant among the New Englanders in the time of Lyman
Beecher and Nathaniel William Taylor. This line of thought inherited Jonathan
Edwards’ emphasis on the corporeal practice of orthodox Calvinism, and came to
influence the important transition of New England theology during its later struggle
with the Unitarian controversy.38 Leonard Woods, the first professor of theology at
Andover Seminary defended the Americanization of Calvinism as “a scheme of
religion” that “must exhibit a moral government.” 39 In its heyday, Taylor well
defined the principle of moral government to his Yale Divinity students as “the
influence of the authority…designed so to control their action as to secure the great
end of action on their part, through the medium of law.”40
The notion conveyed by this trend of religious thought aimed not only to enforce
God’s authority over the moral agent for the benefit of the individual salvation, but
also to maintain the good order of society. It also rendered the individual as an active
agent to carry out the scheme of moral government in his free will. “He cannot…be
inactive,” said Taylor, and the free will should be maintained to “perform what it aims
to prevent…and to secure.”41 Influenced by the benevolence of God, the individual
could labor to turn their conscience into the practice of self-discipline as a way to
achieve the greater governance of society. Therefore the exercise of moral
government finally intends to transform the public sphere. As noted by the religious
historian Mark Noll, it was both an urgent vocabulary shaped by the Whig discourse
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
38
The “Unitarian controversy” refers to a self-conscious theological movement that emerged in
turn-of-the century New England as Unitarianism, which denied Orthodox Calvinism in its claim for a
united God than the Trinity. For detailed historical account, see Conrad Wright, The Beginning of
Unitarianism in America (Boston, 1955); Conrad Wright, The Unitarian Controversy: Essays on
American Unitarian History (Skinner House Books, 1994); George Ellis, A Half-Century of the
Unitarian Controversy (Massachusetts, 1857); Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience:
Harvard moral philosophy, 1805-1861 (Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
39
Leonard Woods, Letters to Unitarians occasioned by the sermon of the Reverend William E.
Channing: at the ordination of the Rev. J. Sparks (Flagg and Gould, 1820), 136.
40
Nathaniel W. Taylor, Lectures on the Moral Government of God (New York, 1859), 7.
41
Ibid., 8.
"
18"
in the broader public life, as well as a self-regulating government of society against
the chaos of the new world.42
In particular, the grand design of moral government laid the fundamental
relationship between the ability of hearing and the ways in which evangelical piety
could be reached. The discipline of the ear was reemphasized in the canonical text of
New Haven Theology. As Dwight noted, “Faith, cometh by hearing; and hearing, by
the Word of God. This Word is to be faithfully explained, and enforced, by the
Preacher; and faithfully received by those who hear him.” He also reminded his
evangelical audience the importance of bringing spiritual discipline to the corporal
exercise of religion. “The spiritual worship of the Gospel is ever in danger of
becoming a mere bodily exercise, unprofitable in itself, and destructive of piety.”43
If evangelical piety remains in the practice of disciplined hearing, then what
about those people who could not hear physically, and hence become spiritually
disconnected with God’s voice? As previously discussed, evangelical conversion is an
auditory act that requires the role of the ear to hold evidence of the Gospel. Deafness,
as physically opposes to the ability of hearing, had been considered as a state of
sensorial isolation that cut the linkage between the deaf person and the access to the
intellectual world. Deafness is also a state of spiritual isolation, which drives the deaf
and mute off the passage to Christian salvation. Nothing is so important than the
naturally endowed hearing. As written in the Bible, “The greatest achievement of the
ear is to hear as a prophet (Isa. 22:14; 50:4f)…for the ear was given priority over the
eye for the reception of revelation.” But Christianity holds deafness in a redeemable
state. As the New Testament writes, “He who has an ear to hear, let him hear what the
Spirit says (Rev. 2:7, 11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13, 22). Therefore, Jesus heals the deaf (Mk.
7:31-37).”44 This is surely a positive response to the Old Testament, which holds that
the Kingdom of God could not come if men cannot hear the word of God.
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
42
Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University
Press, 2002), 290-292.
43
Timothy Dwight, Theology Explained and Defended (T. Dwight & son, 1839), 266.
44
Geoffrey W. Bromiley. The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, Vol II: E-J (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 2-3.
"
19"
But in biblical language, there also exists a basic difference between hearing and
understanding the word of God, as noted by the church historian Geoffrey Bromiley,
“listen is often used in a way that could be interpreted either as an attention-getting
device, or as a call to hear and understand and…respond in obedience or faith (Mt.
17:5 Par., Mk. 4:3, Acts: 13:16; 15:13; Jas. 2:5).”45 Just as the hearing person could
not simply understand the religious truth from attentive listening, so the “healed”
deafness, which was considered as the redemption from God’s benevolence, should
also entail a regenerative understanding, or the response of faith. In this view, the
evangelical language of spiritual discipline seeks to address both the necessity of
having a pious ear for the hearing, and for the redeemed faith of the deaf.
Since the late eighteenth century, institutional confinement had framed the
inability of hearing as a typical social deviance. The deaf person, as those who
suffered from the loss of sight, tongue, or even reason and intellect, were also deemed
as among the “heathens” that lived beyond Christianity. However, they were also the
people who proved God’s benevolence in the most revealing ways. In Christian
theological tradition, three basic notions were generally perceived in explaining
deafness, or any other kind of “disability.” First, it was an ordained existence by God
or God’s purpose. Second, people with deafness or other kinds of disabilities should
believe in Christian hope (God’s benevolence) that was grounded in the healing
narratives of the Bible. Third, they were depended on the charity of the church and
society to carry the good will of God and help alleviate their sufferings.46 Therefore,
moral discipline renders a new way to enact the secular bonds in Christian community,
and the theological conception of deafness also fits neatly into the general scheme of
moral government.
This idea of restoring the lost hearing inspired Gallaudet to frame a new
understanding of deafness in light of the religious principle of moral government. The
miraculous healing of deafness revealed to him the benevolence of God as a source
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
45
Ibid., 649.
46
Amos Yong, Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (Baylor
University Press, 2007), 38-40.
"
20"
for spelling out the idea of Christian salvation in the act of accommodating the
“heathen deaf” into the hearing community. However, the act of benevolence was
more than a wish for the betterment of deaf condition, as seen in the worship of God
or the attentive listening of the divine call. Gallaudet argued that the true value of
rescuing deafness from spiritual isolation was in the act of training the deaf to “hear.”
In this sense, the act of “training” depended largely on the role of the hearing to help
the deaf create a language of their own.
This generic understanding of deafness as a social construct challenged the
Edwardsian framework of moral discipline by exposing its limit of understanding the
concept of spiritual discipline on the basis of auditory manipulation. It revealed that
deafness could demonstrate the enduring ways in which moral discipline could
actively engage in the practice of retrieving the language for the deaf and restoring
their faith in God. This regenerative understanding of deafness as the “redeemed
hearing” further suggested the necessity of reconfiguring deaf education in the
framework of moral government. Gallaudet perceived deafness as the alienated “other”
to showcase the idea of transforming the orthodox view of evangelical piety into the
practical aspect of understanding Christian benevolence in view of the binary notion
of hearing/deaf. In his view, the hearing played the role of moral agent, who assumed
the responsibility from God to practice in the corporeal training of the deaf as a part
of religious self-discipline.
His understanding of deafness also relied on the way in which sign language
could function in the moral sense. In this view, the natural configuration of signs was
the symbolic representation of God’s authority, which directly related to the
constitution of the moral nature of deafness. Since “the God of nature has laid a
necessity upon them (the deaf) to employ…this visual language,” said Gallaudet, “it
is cruel to try to take from them this spontaneous and ready means of intelligible
intercourse…to the development of their intellectual and moral faculties.” 47
Therefore the preservation of the religiosity of signs contributed to the establishment
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
47
Thomas H. Gallaudet, “On the natural language of signs,” in Humphrey, The Life and Labors of the
Rev. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, 179.
"
21"
of the moral government of deafness. More importantly, Gallaudet considered the
divine origin of signs as the medium in which deafness could be categorized as a
religiously redeemable condition, and the deaf a socially acceptable class. The
“regenerative hands,” as held by the founders of the American Asylum, could help
restore the lost hearing and hence improving the social status of deaf people.48
Therefore, the act of training the deaf to sign entailed a process whereby the
hearing sought to establish a moral authority over the deaf in the name of Christian
benevolence. In practice, they promoted deaf education through mobilizing social
charity to build manual institutions. As the historian Conrad E. Wright pointed out,
the New Englanders in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century defined “charity”
as an organized benevolence, which illustrated the tendency of transforming the
benevolent emotion into social action. 49 In this sense, the charitable activity of
manual education framed the meaning of deafness into the process of social uplift and
redirected the redemptive purpose of deafness toward the end of social reform.
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
48
Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2012), 67.
49
Conrad E. Wright, The Transformation of Charity in Post-revolutionary New England (Northeastern
University Press, 1992), 7.
"
22"
1.3 The transatlantic communication of sign language: Gallaudet’s journey to Europe
(1815-1816)
1.3.1 The procurement of sign language from Europe
"
On the 25th of May 1815, Gallaudet set sail for Liverpool, where he embarked his
mission to visit the schools of deaf education in London and Edinburgh. With letters
of introduction, he met the most distinguished philanthropists in Britain, but to his
dismay, the committee of deaf schools held the method of instruction a private
property that could be only accessed by manual instructors of the family. It was
recorded in Gallaudet’s correspondence that the only way he could learn the method
in the Braidwood’s Academy was “to be engaged as an assistant for three years.”50
This condition, if accepted, would put Gallaudet under the tutelage of Dr. Joseph
Watson, who was the nephew of Thomas Braidwood. But this also meant that as a
member of the Academy, the method should not be disclosed to the public. Therefore
Gallaudet turned to the Edinburgh instead, and readdressed his wish to procure the
English system for the benefit of opening a school in America. His message was
brought to the then principal Robert Kinniburgh, who told Gallaudet that he himself
was under a contract not to communicate the method to any individual for seven
years.51 The replies from two major schools reflected a highly restricted state of the
English system that was considered as an intellectual property of the time. But what
was the system like? First, it was generally a manual system composing the
communication of gestures and fingerspelling.52 Some of the notable American deaf
pupils of Braidwood, like Charles Green and Thomas Bolling, were said to have
demonstrated a competitive degree of signing and the master of English language in
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Thomas H. Gallaudet, Letter to Mason Cogswell, 15 Aug. 1815, from London. T. H. Gallaudet and
Edward Miner Gallaudet Papers (MSS21832), Library of Congress. Reprinted in Herman Humphrey:
(1857), 35.
50
51
Humphrey, 36-37.
52
Hugo Arnot, The History of Edinburgh from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time (William
Creech, 1788), 425-26.
"
23"
reading and writing. Thomas Bolling was even described as possessing the
“admirable speaking abilities.53 Second, the manual instruction embodied a universal
character with regards to the use of “natural sign.” According to the account of
Dugald Stewart, the famous Scottish moral philosopher observed that Braidwood’s
deaf pupils from different countries all agreed “in expressing assent by holding up the
thumb, and dissent by hold up the little finger.”54 Since it was an illustration of the
instinctive propensity of communicating ideas, as held by Stewart, the display of an
artificial language consists of visible signs was equal to the formation of speech.55
This idea on the alternative function of signs as “gesture language,”56 which was a
preliminary concept of sign language, heavily influenced Gallaudet’s perception of
manualism at the time.
During his stay in Edinburgh, Gallaudet paid a visit to Dugald Stewart, who was
deeply interested in discussing the condition of a deaf-blind girl from America named
Julia Brace. Gallaudet first brought up her case in a previous letter, stating the fact
that the girl had been suffering from the lost of sight and hearing since she was four
years old. After she was kept in the school of Lydia Huntley, Julia Brace gradually
lost her remaining function of speech, but her senses of touch and smell had been
growing more accurate and discriminating.57 In a letter written to the American
philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gallaudet described that he was “Dugald-zied” in
the Scottish metaphysics, and came to believe the idea of “the traits of mind whose
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
53
Jan Branson and Don Miller, Damned for Their Difference: The Cultural Construction of Deaf
People as Disabled: A Sociological History (Gallaudet University Press, 2002), 100-104.
54
Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, in Sir William Hamilton ed., The
Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, Vol.4 (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable, 1860), 16-17.
55
Ibid., 19-20.
56
The use of the term “gesture language” is highly controversial since the Deaf community may
consider it as a reminder of the history of linguistic oppression. However, gesture language also offers
us a broader conception of sign language in “a double movement of over- and underestimation, a
process precisely constitutes the mythologizing and fetishizing gesture by oral cultures.” As mentioned
by W. J. T. Mitchell, it addresses the “utopian gesture” that idealizes the evolution of sign language in
a counterproductive way; while it also associates the dystopian counterparts of sign language with
savagery and disability. See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Utopian Gestures,” in Signing the Body Poetic: Essays
on American Sign Language Literature, ed., H-Dirksen (University of California Press, 2006), xv-xxiii.
57
Thomas H. Gallaudet, Letter to Dugald Stewart, Sept. 26 1815, from Edinburgh. Excerpt from
Edward M. Gallaudet, 89-91.
"
24"
existence and modifications depend on external objects.”58 The conversation later
inspired Gallaudet to think that the language of signs could be imparted through the
sense of touch for the benefit of the deaf-blind. He mentioned later to Mason
Cogswell that the benefit of manual education could be applied to instruct Julia Brace
by a “tangible alphabet.”59
Gallaudet’s interest in the case of Julia Brace was an extension of sign language
in the education of deaf-blindness. However, the practice was succeeded by Samuel
Gridley Howe’s famous experiment of sign language in the oralist instruction of the
deaf-blind girl Laura Bridgman in the mid-century. (This later influence of manualism
will be further discussed in Chapter 3) But it was primarily his continuous care for the
situation of Alice Cogswell that made his visit worthwhile. During his tour, Gallaudet
had shown to many people in Britain his correspondence with Alice Cogswell. While
the letters demonstrated the improvement of her written English, they also reflected a
deep sense of self-repentance regarding her idea of being a “deaf and dumb.” In a
letter written to Gallaudet, Cogswell expressed her fear of being a deaf and dumb,
whom God held to be morally bad. “I am very much afraid God think me very wicked
and bad heart. I am not good heart…I wish good heart…God made me Deaf and
Dumb…Perhaps me very bad I hear not…”60 The handwriting of Cogswell, though
not fluent enough, clearly expressed her thought of deafness as a sin of moral
corruption. The fear of punishment, therefore, drove her to be remorseful of her state.
In his reply, Gallaudet wrote, “Jesus Christ is the friend of all penitent sinners…we
ought all to think so, for we have all sinned…” He also asked her to learn to pray for
the forgiveness of God. “If you pray, he will hear you, and his Spirit will make you
good.”61
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58
Thomas H. Gallaudet, Letter to Mr. Ralph Emerson, Jan. 11 1816, from Edinburgh. Excerpt from
Humphrey, 45-49.
59
Thomas H. Gallaudet, Letter to Dr. Mason F. Cogswell, Dec. 6th 1816, Edinburgh. Extracted from
Humphrey, 53-54.
Alice Cogswell, Letter to Mr. Thomas H. Gallaudet, April 1815, unpublished manuscript, T. H.
Gallaudet and Edward Miner Gallaudet Papers (MSS21832), Library of Congress.
60
61
Thomas H. Gallaudet, Letter to Alice Cogswell, Aug. 15th 1815, Edinburgh. Extracted from
Humphrey, 41-43.
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The personal correspondence between Thomas Gallaudet and Alice Cogswell
helped to explain the way in which religion came to influence a deaf person’s
self-identification in view of his or her hearing counterparts. Christianity defines
deafness as a sin that keeps the deaf person from the benevolence of God, but
Evangelism goes beyond the original sin and encourages those who could hear to
abandon the self-love in order to help the deaf creating a path to individual salvation.
This idea was later suggested in Gallaudet’s research in deafness, as he told Mason
Cogswell that he and other friends tried to analyze the letters of Alice Cogswell in
order to discover her mental state. Religion also encouraged Gallaudet to assume a
seemingly paternalistic role over his deaf pupil. “I long to be in the midst of my deaf
and dumb children,” said Gallaudet, who believed that the Providence had assigned
him the task of discovering the “silent and despised graces of moral worth.”62 As
argued by Phyllis Valentine, this “benevolent paternalism” of Gallaudet was inherited
from his social status as an upper middle class Protestant in his community, and hence
influenced his religious conviction that “the less-fortunate should willingly defer to
the paternalism of a select, highly educated and socially prominent few whom God
had chosen to lead them.”63
However, the interpretation of Christian Paternalism from a materialistic
rationale oversimplified the situation in which Gallaudet and his fellow manualists in
America lived with. First, it fails to address the complexity of individual motivation
for joining the manualist campaign. Second, the way of considering manual education
as an extension of Paternalism narrows down the scope of deaf education to the
constraining model of explaining social order in the antebellum history. From the
private correspondence between Gallaudet and Alice Cogswell, we find a becoming
pedagogical relationship that was mediated through the intellectual inquiry of sign
language, which served to define the roles for both the hearing and deaf. Religion also
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62
Thomas H. Gallaudet, Letter to Dr. Mason F. Cogswell, Jan.11 1816, Edinburgh. Extracted from
Humphrey, 48-49.
63
Phyllis Valentine, “Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet: Benevolent Paternalism and the Origins of
American Asylum,” in Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New Scholarship, ed., John V.
Van Cleve (Gallaudet University Press, 1999), 58.
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26"
placed the hearing and deaf in the reciprocal relationship towards the end of salvation.
Therefore the moral authority could neither refer to the hearing nor the deaf, for they
were all subjected to the benevolence of God. In other words, it was the recognition of
manual education as an extension of God’s benevolence that set the ends for both.
The early experiences during his stay in Britain made Gallaudet increasingly
convinced, from both his observation in the schools and talks with the manual
instructors and philanthropists, of the legitimacy in applying the manual system to the
education of the deaf. When he was still in Edinburgh, Gallaudet was informed of an
opportunity to meet the French manual instructor Abbé Sicard, who was giving
lectures in London regarding the French system of methodical signs. With introducing
letters by his friends in Edinburgh, Gallaudet was able to approach to Sicard. To his
delight, the Abbé quickly promised to have him in his lectures, and invited him to
come to Paris for further exploration of the French system. In the Spring of 1816,
Gallaudet visited the Institution for Deaf Instruction in Paris and attended the class
daily for months, from the lowest to the highest levels. During the time, Gallaudet
formed a close relationship with a young deaf instructor named Laurent Clerc, who
was one of the prominent students of Sicard. According to Clerc’s diary, Gallaudet
met with him three times a week for private instruction, but he told Gallaudet that the
method could be fully mastered within at least six months of training. This worried
Gallaudet since he could not stay in Paris for too long, so he approached to Clerc in
the middle of May and made a formal request to him, asking if he could to go to
America and help establishing a school for the deaf.64 This request finally managed
to reach a contract between the two men. Under three years of employment, Clerc was
hired as an instructor of the proposed school in Hartford to teach and assist in public
demonstration. Besides, there was also a stipulation that prohibited the attempt of
proselytizing Clerc from his Catholic faith.65 The recruitment of Clerc was very
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
64
Laurent Clerc, Diary Of Laurent Clerc’s Voyage From France To America (Jun 18- Aug.8, 1816),
Laurent Clerc Papers (MS140). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
Contract Between Thomas Gallaudet And Laurent Clerc (Jun 13, 1816), unpublished manuscript, T.
H. Gallaudet and Edward Miner Gallaudet Papers (MSS21832), Library of Congress.
65
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27"
important to Gallaudet’s plan for organizing his enterprise of deaf education, and his
devotion to Christian charity in general. Later he described in a letter of Clerc as his
“fellow-laborer” who brought in the French manual system and qualified himself to
instruct his deaf countrymen.66
But one may wonder the state of French manual system around the time when
Gallaudet encountered it. How the system came to influence the ways in which sign
language was introduced to the early nineteenth-century America? In order to
understand the historical process of linguistic and cultural transmission, we need to
curl back and trace its origin in Paris from the mid to late eighteenth century.
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66
Thomas H. Gallaudet, Discourses on Various Points of Christian Faith and Practice (London:
Ellerton and Henderson for J . Hatchard, 1818), vi-vii.
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28"
Fig. 1, Letter to Mr. Thomas H. Gallaudet, April 1815 by Alice Cogswell, unpublished manuscript, T.
H. Gallaudet and Edward Miner Gallaudet Papers (MSS21832), Library of Congress.
"
"
29"
1.3.2 Methodical signs and the origin of the French manual system
"
The inception of the “manual alphabet”
Before the 1800s, early efforts of instructing the deaf were accompanied by an
intermediate system known as the “manual alphabet,” which was said to have existed
for more than two centuries before the establishment of modern sign language system
in the eighteenth century.67 The manual alphabet was derived from the old “finger
calculus” as a sophisticated system of representing numbers, and was later applied to
deaf instruction in sixteenth-century Spain. In 1620, fingerspelling first appeared in a
book written by Juan Pablo Bonet, a hearing Spanish teacher of the deaf. According
to the historian Lois Bragg, over the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the system of
manual alphabet, though had been undertaken as a novelty in the deaf education, was
nothing more than a mnemonic device for learning human speech.68 A century later,
Jacob Pereire introduced the one-handed manual alphabet to France (See Fig. 2). The
manual alphabet hence became a part of the French manual system in the time of
L’Épée. Later, Laurent Clerc brought it with him to America and used it in the
American Asylum. In this regard, although the manual alphabet was less successful in
teaching the deaf to speak, it did play an important role in shaping the early history of
manual education.
In the wake of Enlightenment, the pedagogical system of sign language collided
with the cultural-specific context of modern France. At the time, the idea of
materializing a visual language that is equal to the function of speech for those born
deaf encouraged hearing educators to find inspiration from deaf people themselves. It
was considered at the time that gestures employed by the deaf provided the basis of
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67
Details of the historical development of the manual alphabet for deaf instruction are cited in a wide
literature. See, for example, Susan Plann, A Silent Minority: Deaf Education in Spain, 1550-1835
(University of California Press, 1997).
68
Lois Bragg, “Visual-Kinetic Communication in Europe Before 1600: A Survey of Sign Lexicons
and Finger Alphabets Prior to the Rise of Deaf Education,” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf
Education 2, no.1 (Winter 1997): 23-24.
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sign language, albeit a crude form of communication. Therefore the early
development of sign language in modern France illustrated the linguistic transmission
from fingerspelling to a system of methodical signs, and the process also manifested
the way in which religious influence could function through the pedagogical teaching
of sign language.
In 1751, a young Portuguese named Jacob Pereire successfully demonstrated his
method of teaching the deaf pupil to read and speak in French in front of the Royal
Academy of Sciences and instantly gained notoriety in Paris. The examination was
conducted on the language acquirement of a deaf pupil named Saboureux de Fontenay
by a distinguished committee on the 13th of January 1751. To the committee’s
astonishment, the deaf pupil was impressive in his command of spoken French. The
academicians observed that Saboureux had “clear and distinct” pronunciation of the
vowels and consonants, including complicated nasal sounds. One of the examiners
was Buffon, the famous naturalist of the time, who wrote in the report that the deaf
boy could not only understand a few French expressions by fingerspelling, but also
recite the whole passage of the Lord’s Prayer in Latin.69 This event made Pereire
famous for his talent in educating the deaf to acquire verbal language, and later
enabled him to gain access into the circle of French philosophes. Since then, Pereire
was constantly mentioned as the great “demutizer” of the deaf in Europe. The
philosopher Denis Diderot also noted the case in his Encyclopédie, in which he
considered that “…the most intelligent man, with most sensitive ear and most flexible
speech organs, is in the same situation as M. Pereire’s pupil.” Diderot also mentioned
in the footnote that Pereire had developed “a sign system for teaching the deaf
mute.”70 Though Pereire kept the method as a secret to the public during his lifetime,
it was later revealed that he communicated with his pupils mainly by the use of
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
69
The report of the examination was consigned in Rapport de Buffon, Mairan et Ferrein sur la method
de Pereire (1749), cited in Édouard Séguin, Jacob-Rodriques Pereire (Paris, 1847), 57-60, accessed
October 5, 2013. http://web2.bium.univ-paris5.fr/livanc/?cote=70653x02&p=61&do=page.
70
Denis Diderot, “Encyclopedia.” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative
Translation Project, trans., Philip Stewart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2002),
accessed October 5, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.004.
"
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manual alphabet in a preliminary stage for teaching the deaf to learn the basic words
in French, and he expanded the alphabet so as to include more fingerspelling
corresponding to spoken French as well as written French. But how could the
instruction finally proved to “open the mouth” of the deaf pupil? Since the report was
specifically centered on the miracle of teaching the deaf to speak, a historical account
of demystifying the method is to be stated as follows.
A letter written by the deaf pupil Saboureux himself was published in 1765, when
the detailed account for Pereire’s instruction was revealed to the public. According to
the letter, Saboureux acknowledged that he was received education from M. Pereire
when he was nearly thirteen, when he was already grasped the basic knowledge of
fingerspelling from his previous teacher M. Lukas when he was eight and a half, and
he also had some habitual uses of the gestural language. However, M. Pereire told
him to abandon the “home sign,” which was formed at the rudimentary level of
communication, in favor of the improved Spanish manual alphabet. As noted by
Saboureux, the manual alphabet was a one-hand fingerspelling system, which consists
of twenty-five signs for the letters of the alphabet and many signs for speech sounds.
With altogether more than eighty signs, Pereire called the system as “dactylology,”
which was made to conform the rules of spoken French.71
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
71
Saboureux de Fontenay, “Extract of a Letter From Saboureux de Fontenay, A Congenitally Deaf
Person, To Mademoiselle ***,” in Harlan Lane ed., Franklin Philip trans., The Deaf Experience:
Classics in Language and Education (Harvard University Press, 1984), 26. The letter was originally
published as “Lettre de Monsieur Saboureux de Fontenay, a M. Desloges,” (October 10, 1779) in Abbé
Deschamps, Lettre A Monsieur de Bellisle (n.p.: 1780).
"
32"
Figure 2. The Spanish manual alphabet. From Juan Manuel Ballesteros, Manual de sordo-mudos y que
puede servir para los que oyen y hablan. Madrid: Colegio de Sordomudos, 1836, accessed October 5,
2013. http://bib.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras/67924066542336128843457/ima0191.htm.
The three methods mentioned to teach the deaf pupil French were described as
“writing, spelling in the manual alphabet, and signs in the usual manual alphabet.” “In
this way,” as Saboureux noted in the letter, “I reached a clear and automatic
understanding of the meaning of pronouns, conjugations, adverbs, prepositions,
conjunctions, and other parts of speech.”72 In order to enhance the language acquired
from everyday usage of speech, the deaf pupil was also shown to observe their
counterparts in the real life experience. As noted by Saboureux, that “the chief
aim…of my tutors’ attempts [are] to make language intelligible through
practice…and to get me to appreciate terms for sensory impressions, circumstances,
and persons.”73 As he was constantly warned by his teacher of the drawbacks of his
habitual signs may hinder the further learning of speech, Saboureux spent a large
amount of time repeating the words and memorizing them according to the sensual
perception from experience. After a considerable time of training, even the manual
alphabet was abandoned in the everyday communication. According to Saboureux,
his “fairly advanced understanding of everyday language” finally stopped him from
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
72
Ibid., 18-19.
73
Ibid., 20.
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signing at all.
He (M. Pereire) had me express myself in French without my usual signs,
and informed me that he had no trouble understanding what I was trying to
say, even without these signs…and they (Pereire and Saboureux’s uncle)
spoke to me either aloud or, to explain themselves better, with gestures
assisted by fingerspelling, in a way much like that of talking with speech
sounds.74
In this regard, we could see that the true outcomes of the so-called speech
training for the deaf pupil was actually a quasi-spoken performance done by the fast
fingerspelling process that was a mimicry of human speech. There was probably not a
single voice uttered by the deaf pupil as clear as human speech, and no one other than
the experienced trainer could fully understand his deaf pupil. Besides, it was recorded
that a linguist who met Saboureux at the age of thirty “found not a trace of his speech
lessons.”75
The failure of speech training in the case of Saboureux also lies in its inability of
bringing the effective religious knowledge to the deaf. Saboureux himself later
criticized the practice of fingerspelling as a degraded form of communication because
it could not convey religious ideas in a manner. In the letter, he recalled his religious
conversation with Father Vanin, who was said to be the first person to teach religious
knowledge to the deaf through the use of gestural signs. To Saboureux, the ideas of
religion acquired from Vanin’s teaching were “concrete, physical and mechanistic.”
The method of gestural language was so rudimentary to his understanding than the
use of fingerspelling, while it could also acquire him with the intellectual and abstract
ideas more clearly. Saboureux gradually formed his opinion on the use of gestural
language. “I came to realize how inadequate is the method of religious instruction
[through fingerspelling]…and how cumbersome is the system of assigning a given
sign to a given word,” said Saboureux, who also held it as a way of degradation the
humanity. “As the sign determines too narrowly the idea of the word whose use
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74
Ibid., 25.
75
Harlan Lane ed., Franklin Philip trans., The Deaf Experience: Classics in Language and Education
(Harvard University Press, 1984), 15.
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34"
makes the meaning more extended, we may regard this instruction as mechanistic and
nearly identical to the training of animals.”76 This claim of gestural language was
based on his own experience with other deaf people, who were found naturally
resistant to the manual alphabet because of its complexity in retaining language and
expressing themselves properly. In this regard, the case of Saboureux just served to
explain the ordinary condition of the deaf around the time. It was probably because
the manual alphabet failed to apply to a wider deaf audience, so its actual influence
was limited to a narrow spectrum as inherited from ways of “secret training.”
However, another indication from the case was the close connection between sign
language and the practice of religious teaching. Though sign language was considered
as a natural expression of the deaf, it had to prove itself as a vehicle of religious
knowledge that testified its capacity of conveying abstract ideas.
Thus in view of the continuance of the age-old method of manual alphabet in
modern France, certain things regarding its important role in the development of a
systematic sign language could be settled here. First, as a tool for language instruction,
the manual alphabet rendered religious education accessible to the deaf, and proved
its adaptability in the practice of deaf instruction in modern France. Second, the
controversy centered on whether the manual alphabet was a friendly partner or
antagonistic rival to the later development of sign language, according to Carol
Padden and Darline Gunsauls, was ironically shown from its structural properties to
meet both ends.77 Last, the historical development of the French manual system
experienced the adaptation of fingerspelling to a more complex one that involved the
use of sign language.
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
76
Saboureux de Fontenay, 25-26.
77
Carol Padden and Darline Gunsauls, “How the Alphabet Came to be Used in a Sign Language,”
Sign Language Studies 4, no.1 (Fall, 2013): 13.
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“Methodical Signs” and L’Épée’s religious instruction of the deaf in Paris
In the mid-1750s, the use of sign language as a pedagogical device for teaching
the deaf was carried out by religious instructions offered by individual clerics from
the Catholic Church. From the letter written by Saboureux, we know that apart from
the daily instruction of French language communication, he also received from Father
Vanin the religious teaching using the gestural signs, albeit a crude one that mingled
with pictures and hand drawings. According to historical records, Father Vanin was
among the few known clerics of the time who had some knowledge of sign language.
Detailed accounts of how the practice of the cleric in using sign language to instruct
the deaf was not known, however, it was clear that Father Vanin’s influence on
L’Épée’s later development of methodical signs. As noted by the historian Harlan
Lane, L’Épée’s instruction of the deaf was succeeded by Saboureux’s encounter with
Father Vanin. “Incidently, Saboureux makes it quite clear in his autobiography that
Father Vanin used engravings to teach religion, and sign language to explain the
engravings and the words printed beneath each,” wrote Lane, who argued that the
same method was used by L’Épée to instruct the deaf pupils in Paris.78
The Charles-Michel, Abbé de L’Épée was born in 1712 into a wealthy family in
Paris, his father was an architect for the King. L’Épée was well educated at an early
age, with particular influence of the Lockean philosophy that the minds are shaped by
experience. He had also become a pious Jansenist cleric of the Church and led a
peaceful life since then. It was not until the 1759, after the death of Father Vanin, that
L’Épée took his position in a local church. According to his later memoir, the idea of
instructing the deaf came from the responsibility of taking care of the pupils from
Father Vanin. As he mentioned, “Realizing therefore that these two children would
live and die in ignorance of their religion if I did not try to find some way to teach it
(sign language) to them, I was filled with compassion. I said they could be brought
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
78
"
Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (New York: Random House, 1984), 426.
36"
round to me, and I would do what I could to help them.”79 Here, the idea of seeing
sign language as the vehicle of imparting religious influence to the deaf shares the
commonality with evangelical interpretation of restoring their spiritual hearing, even
though the French Catholicism did not consider manual education as an active process
of individual salvation.
L’Épée tried to continue the education of Father Vanin since he believed it was
necessary for exerting the influence of the church. According to the memoir, however,
it was clear that L’Épée held doubts about Father Vanin’s method, because he thought
the ways of instructing religious knowledge by showing the sacred drawings to the
deaf child could only satisfy the demands of literal meanings assigned to each scenes.
Abstract ideas of religion, such as the meaning of salvation and spiritual matters,
could never be fully realized by this. L’Epée did not show great interests to
articulation either, for he concluded from the case of Saboureux that such way of
speech training was futile to master the verbal language through the translation by
fingerspelling. At the beginning of his instruction of the two deaf girls, L’Epée did
use a two-handed manual alphabet to teach them the basics of reading and writing, but
he was not satisfied with the laborious process of copying every word from the
manual alphabet. Instead, he taught his pupils without forcing them to comply with
fingerspelling, but to observe their own conversing with signs, which he believed to
be their “natural language.” This idea allowed him to avoid imposing the arbitrary
language at the early stage, and in this way L’Epée was consciously exploring the
nature of gestural language, from which a manual system of “methodical signs” began
to flourish.
Within a period of observation, he realized that “every deaf-mute sent to us
already has a language,” L’Épée wrote, “He is thoroughly in the habit of using it, and
understands others who do.... We want to instruct him and therefore to teach him
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
79
Charles-Michel de l’Épée, Institution des Sourds et Muets par la voie des signes méthodiques,
Ouvrage qui contient le projet d'une Langue Universelle, par l'entremise des Signes naturels assujettis
à une Méthode (Paris, 1776), 8. Cited in Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: Deafness, Language and the
Senses –A Philosophical History (NY: Metropolitan Books, 1999), 145.
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French. What is the shortest and easiest method? Isn’t it to express ourselves in his
language? By adopting his language and making it conform to clear rules (the
grammar of French) will we not be able to conduct his instruction as we wish?”80
This reflection soon led L’Épée to recognize the possibility of inventing a
grammatical independent system equal to the French language. He also found that the
gestural language used by deaf pupils when they communicate themselves was
actually a system of “combined signs.” It comprised verbs, nouns, pronouns,
prepositions, conjunctions and adjectives…and implicitly made basic grammatical
distinctions of person, number, tense, mood, case and gender.”81 In recognizing this,
L’Épée therefore constructed a set of methodical signs based on the elements he
observed from the gestural language conducted by his pupils, and later he applied to
the instruction of the methodical signs. L’Épée’s methodical signing, while contains
the beauty of body movements for signaling the abstract ideas that simply could not
be accomplished by fingerspelling, still bears the complexity from its irregular syntax.
The method was later depicted as “lacking unity, full of distractions, and far too long
for a single unit of meaning.”82 Despite the critiques from his companions, the
methodical signs developed in relation to the natural signing of the deaf, and the early
instruction often involved the use of manual alphabet in order to help the deaf pupil to
develop a sense of signing for the purpose of creating an independent system of sign
language. As described later, the basic progress of Épée’s instruction was as follows:
The pupil would first learn the manual alphabet, one handshape for each
letter in French, so he could fingerspell French words. Next he would learn
to write these letters and then to write out the conjugation of a verb…[Then]
he was taught the methodical signs for the persons and tenses of the verb he
had conjugated, as well as a few signs for articles and prepositions. Now he
could write his first sentence in French in response to dictation in
methodical signs. From here on in, the lists of nouns and verbs and
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
80
Lane, 59-60.
81
L’Épée, Institution, cited in Rée, 148.
82
Critiques of L’Épée’s method could be found in: Morel, (1846), 83; Magnat, Historical Sketch of the
teaching of deaf-mutes in France, in Alexander Bell Association, Proceedings (1896), 66-81; Peet
(1859a); Bébian (1827), 191-207; Sicard (1790); Berthier (1840c), 44; (1852), 31. Cited in Lane, 424.
"
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methodical signs grew.83
L’Epée’s design of methodical signs was neither an arbitrary imposition of verbal
language nor an attempt of training them to speak. It was, as Jonathan Rée described,
“to extend the native sign-language of the deaf with supplementary methodical signs
until it became the intellectual equal of any spoken language, and capable of
translating the sign for word exactly.”84 In devising the system of methodical signs,
L’Epée’s idea of first “becoming a pupil of the deaf” in order to observe the traces of
their language use was probably came from the conceptual influence of empiricism as
advocated by his contemporaries like Condillac and Diderot. But unlike the pure
intellectual passion that had driven the philosophers to explore the possibilities of
understanding the human condition, L’Epée’s exploration embodied the Christian
morality in his undemanding way of finding a language for the deaf. His religious
motivation, according to Lane, lies in at least two respects concerning his pedagogy
with the wider social spectrum: “He was enlightening his society, as were the
Encyclopedists, and fearing that the education of the deaf as a social class might end
when his own labors ended, he hoped, by drawing public attention to his work, to see
it sponsored by sovereigns worldwide.”85
Differing also from his precursors of deaf education, L’Epée held his teaching not
as a secret method, but as a way for remedying the plight of the deaf children through
the teaching of religious knowledge. “My element is theology,” he said, and his
purpose of creating a system of sign language was to enlighten his deaf students with
the truth of religion, and the truth could only be taught in a natural language of
themselves. In this regard, L’Epée’s method was soon disseminated into the public,
and had drawn more students as well as spectators into his class. Started from 1771,
L’Epée began to take public demonstrations in his chapel-based class and asked his
pupils to write versions of their own sign language before he adjusted them to
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
83
Lane, 62.
84
Rée, 149.
85
Lane, 47.
"
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methodical signs. In 1776, L’Epée’s book titled Instruction of Deaf-Mutes by Means
of Methodical Signs was published. In the preface of the book, L’Epée declared to the
public about the purpose of his instruction:
Religion and humanity inspire me with such a great interest in a truly
destitute class of persons who, though similar to ourselves, are reduced, as it
were, to the condition of animals so long as no attempts are made to rescue
them from the darkness surrounding them, that I consider it an absolute
obligation to make every effort to bring about their release from these
shadows. … The book will show…how to go about bringing in through the
window what cannot come in through the door; namely, to insinuate into the
minds of the deaf through the visual channel what cannot reach them
through the auditory channel.86
To L’Epée, the purpose of deaf education was truly a humanitarian one, and his
hope for rescuing the deaf from the “intellectual darkness” was quoted by his
counterpart Thomas Gallaudet in America half a century later. More importantly, his
idea of creating the French manual system was not simply to educate, but to construct
a social identity for the deaf through learning the language. As L’Epée explicated
clearly that his “essential duty” in performing the task of education was to “enable
many deaf persons to take part in public exercises.” The message conveyed from
L’Epée’s definition of pedagogy implies the transformative potentials that all hearing
educators shared in mind, but how exactly was the plight he wished to rescue the deaf
from? It was the “closed door,” the obstructed auditory channel that shut the deaf
from perceiving the mental ideas through language; it was also the isolated condition
of being “the uninstructed deaf and dumb” that hindered the deaf from getting into the
enlightened French society. These metaphors were repeated and readapted half
century later by Gallaudet, and they also helped to shape the deaf American
experience in a different historical and social context.
However, the issue of whether sign language was natural or an arbitrary one
needs explanation. It was first addressed by a deaf individual named Pierre Desloges
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
86
Charles-Michel de l’Épée, Institution des sourds et muets, par la voie des signes méthodiques (Paris,
1776), cited from an abridged translation of the book “The True Method of Educating the Deaf,
Confirmed by Much Experience,” in The Deaf Experience: Classics in Language and Education, ed.,
Harlan Lane, trans., Franklin Philip (Harvard University Press, 1984), 51.
"
40"
in his book A Deaf Person’s Observations about an Elementary Course of Education,
which was published in 1779 for the purpose of supporting L’Epée’s method from a
deaf person’s point of view. Though he had never been a student or a close friend of
L’Epée, Pierre Desloges appreciated L’Epée’s idea of learning the sign language from
the deaf before enacting a methodical education, and he also emphasized that in the
system of methodical signing, L’Epée’s role of preserving the original forms of
signed language exceeded his distortion of its nature. Pierre Desloges also referred to
the condition of a wider communication through signs that was already presented in
the experience of the deaf in Paris before L’Epée’s invention of methodical signs. As
he wrote, “There are congenitally deaf people, Parisian laborers, who are illiterate and
who have never attended the Abbé de L’Epée’s lessons, who have been found so well
instructed about their religion, simply by means of signs…We express ourselves on
all subjects with as much order, precision, and rapidity as if we enjoyed the faculty of
speech and hearing.” He also concluded in a paragraph of what sign language meant
to the deaf:
The language we use among ourselves, being a faithful image of the object
expressed, is singularly appropriate for making our ideas accurate and for
extending our comprehension by getting us to form the habit of constant
observation and analysis. This language is lively; it portrays sentiment, and
develops the imagination. No other language is more appropriate for
conveying great and strong emotions. 87
According to Dislodges, sign language reflects the meaning of naturalness in at
least two aspects. First, it is inherently related to the sight to translate direct visual
image of physical objects into the mind, and it helps to furnish the mental process
through this visual analogy that the means of voice could not simply achieve. Second,
it combines human sentiment within its expression, and conveys deeper emotions
through the vivid body movements. However, Dislodges’ claim from a deaf stance
did not cover the extent to which this naturalness lies. In other words, he did not show
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
87
Pierre Desloges, Observations d'un sourd et muèt, sur un cours élémentaire d'éducation
des sourds et muèts (Amsterdam and Paris: Morin, 1779), in The Deaf Experience (Harvard University
Press, 1984), 36-37.
"
41"
the difference between the natural signs and the “acquired signs” from a deaf person’s
learning experience. Therefore the important distinction in the nature of sign language
did not come to influence the way people treat methodical signs in the time of L’Epée.
However, the point that Dislodges raised became a defining issue for America’s break
with the French system half century later. The situation was later recapitulated in its
transmission to the United States. In the early nineteenth century, methodical signing
was also criticized for turning the natural signs to a substitute of manual English.88
To this purpose, methodical signing was denigrated to an intermediate method as the
manual alphabet. As Lane noted, “[B]y the 1830s methodical signs had disappeared
on both sides of the Atlantic.”89
However, the retracement of the historical origin of the French system closes at a
time when L’Epée’s methodical signs still marked the rise of manual education in
France. L’Epée’s purpose, as indicated above, lies beyond the instruction of language
itself. The French manual system was a part of the expression of Christian morality as
well as the embodied social politic in the time of revolution. To L’Epée, the
methodical signs constituted the realm in which religion and humanity could join to
enlighten the French society. Just as the historian Sophia Rosenfeld shows, L’Epée’s
invention of the methodical signs was later adopted miraculously by the French
revolutionaries to imagine an ideal state of communication in the midst of a perceived
crisis in language and politics.90 Is sign language a gift from God or an embodiment
of the religious principle that needs to be practiced and redefined in the social context?
The problem with the representation of signs and the effectiveness of the French
system continued to exist in the struggle for understanding deafness from the
American experience of manual education, and the cultural significance of sign
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
88
The American reception of the system of methodical signs was followed by the critical appraisal the
French method in the 1820-30s, which finally led to the official recognition of the American Sign
Language (ASL) in the 1960s by the linguist William Stokoe. See David F. Armstrong et al., ed., The
Study of Signed Languages: Essays in Honor of William C. Stokoe (Gallaudet University Press, 2002).
89
Lane, 63.
90
Sophia A. Rosenfeld, “The Political Uses of Sign Language: The Case of the French Revolution,”
Sign Language Studies 6, no. 1 (2005): 17-37.
"
42"
language in challenging the mainstream notions was revealed in the course of its
historical transmission in the nineteenth century.
1.3.3 “A system of doing good”: Gallaudet’s rhetorical formation of manual
education in America
"
The fact that manual education claimed its pedagogical authority in the first half
of the nineteenth century owes largely to the increasing social awareness of deaf
people as a social identity constituted by the use of sign language. The process
whereby the hearing defined manual education as the means of incorporating deaf
people into the embodied citizenship unfolds in two aspects. First, the early
manualists advocated the religious perception of deafness in their preaching to the
public spheres of Christianity, such as local churches and hearing communities.
Second, the establishment of the American Asylum provided the exemplary pattern
for the rapid expansion of such manual institutions across the country that collectively
engaged
the
discourse
with
mainstream
society.
The
early
decades
of
nineteenth-century America witnessed the formation of a manual system different
from that of France, since the American system subscribed the idea of deafness to the
evangelical teaching and an intensive labor training program that designed to
transform the deaf person into being equal competent as the able-bodied person in
society.91 In this regard, the initial efforts of the hearing individuals were crucial for
the early development of manual education.
Upon Gallaudet and Clerc’s arrival to America, they busily engaged in the
fund-raising for the school. In early September 1816, after attending several meetings
with the board of directors of the Asylum at Connecticut, Gallaudet and Mason
Cogswell accompanied Clerc to Boston in order to seek for financial support from the
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
91
Edward Allen Fay, Histories of American Schools for the Deaf, 1817-1893, Volume 1 (The Volta
bureau, 1893), 9-15.
"
43"
state legislature. Clerc’s performance excited the board by demonstrating sign
language as “the regenerative hands” that would pass the deaf “from the class of
brutes to the class of men.”92 Back then, the rhetoric of sign language implied
negative connotations borrowed from the French context, though the term “brute” or
“savage” was rarely used in America to describe the deaf condition of the time.
Ironically, this evolutionist perspective came to influence America since the 1860s
with the rise of oralism, a rival method of deaf instruction that emphasized lip-reading
and speech training. As suggested by Baynton, “evolutionary theory fostered a
perception of sign languages as inferior to spoken language, fit only for ‘savages’ and
not for civilized human beings.”93
However, prior to the campaign against sign language, manualists advocated sign
language as a civilized symbol for national pride. Just as Clerc questioned the
American civil servants before him, “In Europe, each nation, however small, has an
institution for the deaf and dumb, and most of these institutions are at the expense of
the government. Will America remain the only nation which is insensible to the cry of
humanity?”94 Besides addressing the necessity of building a state-sponsored public
institution for deaf instruction in America, the importance of making such a rhetorical
statement existed in the universal application of sign language.95 Because it was as
simple as nature, this universality could be extended to any deaf person in the world.
Thus early manualists saw the value of romanticizing sign language as a way of
reaching out to deaf communities beyond national boarders and bringing together the
isolated deaf people from the scattered areas of the country. In short, manualism
played the role of organizing the country’s deaf citizens in the form of public
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
92
Laurent Clerc, “First Speech in America,” in Christopher Krentz, ed., A Mighty Change: An
Anthology of Deaf American Writing, 1816-1864 (Gallaudet University Press, 2000), 9.
93
Douglas C. Baynton, “ ‘Savages and Deaf-mutes’: Evolutionary Theory and the Campaign Against
Sign Language in the Nineteenth Century,” in Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New
Scholarship, ed., John V. Van Cleve (Gallaudet University Press, 1999), 93.
94
Clerc, “First Speech in America,” 10.
95
This early romanticization of sign language was limited to only those gestures and mime in modern
view, since the ASL (American Sign Language), like other signed languages today, has its own
independent linguistic possessions and thus is unintelligible to others.
"
44"
education. Equally important was to see the millennial vision that carried the idea of
universality in sign language to the practice social charity. Like Gallaudet, the
manualists saw the humanitarian act in general and sign language in particular as the
means by which a benevolent system could be established.
Gallaudet clearly emphasized the practice of bringing manual instruction into the
public spheres of Christian teaching. This was probably conceived maturely during
his service as a temporary priest in Paris. He later mentioned to a friend upon his
sailing back from France that he was persuaded by the truth of the act of doing good.
“It has become so honorable to do good for a Christian,” as he said to a friend,
“[Since] it requires no great sacrifice to be engaged in public efforts of
benevolence…but to ask how much he did for the souls…and in benefiting them, no
eye will see but that of God.”96 The message that Gallaudet was trying to convey was
that the quotidian works of Christian philanthropy should develop into “a system of
doing good,” an organized form of charity that engaged the practice of deaf education
with the public interest.
On April 20th 1817, the American Asylum was formally opened as a permanent
deaf school in Hartford under the sanction of the Legislature of Connecticut. At the
opening ceremony, Gallaudet addressed to the audience his intention to turn the
public interest in deaf education to the general welfare of God’s benevolence that was
to endow upon the whole Christian society. He thus delivered to his fellow men:
Every charitable effort, conducted upon Christian principles…forms a part
of the great system of doing good…Therefore, my hearers, I would
endeavor to excite an interest in your hearts in behalf of our infant
establishment, by portraying its advantages…Permit me to place before you
the purest and noblest motive of all, in this and in every charitable exertion
---the tendency it will have to promote the welfare of the Redeemer’s
Kingdom.97
Gallaudet knew that the success of promoting the organized charity of deaf
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
96
Thomas H. Gallaudet, To Mr. Wilder, on the eve of sailing for France, March 24th 1817, Hartford.
Excerpt from Humphrey, 81.
97
Thomas H. Gallaudet, A Sermon delivered at the opening of the Connecticut Asylum for the
Education of Deaf and Dumb Persons, April 20th, 1817 (Hartford: Hudson & Co., Printers, 1817), 12.
"
45"
instruction relied on the way in which deafness was conveyed as a condition that was
both intellectually educable and spiritually redeemable. To the Christian community,
every charitable act of bringing deaf education into broader spheres of society
necessarily contributed to knowing what it meant to be “hearing.” And the individual
could incorporate this knowledge into the possibility of achieving self-redemption.
Gallaudet argued that manual education launched “a new mode of gaining access to
the minds of such heathen nations as have no written or printed language.”98 In turn,
the sign language also rendered the deaf body visible to the public, and at the same
time created an image that was subjected to differentiation. As Rosemarie Thomson
points out, “Disability is a system that produces subjects by differentiating and
marking bodies.”99 Because deafness in the early nineteenth century was primarily a
passive existence yet to be revealed by the hearing of its potential, the power of
defining it culturally was assumed by the hearing. Because the religious rendition of
sign language brought in new perspective of understanding “hearingness,” the notion
of deafness was formed in constant negotiation with those who could hear.
In the early works of introducing manualism to the public, Gallaudet successfully
devised such a hearing-based rhetoric that represented the image of deaf person in
relation to the hearing. It illustrated metaphorically the state of those “uninstructed
deaf” as living in the “mysterious darkness.” This condition addressed the idea of
intellectual isolation. As Gallaudet suggested, rather than bringing sickness to the
body, the ignorance of religious knowledge had “imprisoned [the deaf] as not to be
able to unfold its intellectual and moral powers.”100 This imagined deaf condition
also reflected the hearing way of self-differentiation. Gallaudet then raised several
questions regarding what it meant to be deaf. These questions, such as to ask the
difference in language communication and in moral reception, actually revealed the
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
98
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Letter to Dr. Chalmers, Sept. 20th, 1820, New York. Excerpt from
Humphrey, 97.
99
Rosemarie G. Thomson, “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular
Photography,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed., Paul K. Longmore and
Lauri Umansky (New York University Press, 2001), 347-348.
100
"
Gallaudet, Sermon, April 20th, 1817, 8.
46"
self-assumed superiority of the hearing in a religious sense. It also served to deepen
their feeling for the misfortunes of deafness, and helped to cultivate a humanitarian
sensibility among the hearing. “The pleasure of doing good was the necessity for
those who went about doing good,” as Gallaudet argued, because the religious
sensibility also motivated “the public bodies of men” to act in the spirit of God’s
benevolence.101
Therefore the humanitarian sensibility helped to create a moral code among
Christians who were involved in the works of deaf education. Other than treating
deafness as an alienation from Christianity, the millennial vision also encouraged the
communal interpretation of deafness as “the heathen among us,” as Gallaudet phrased.
In this sense, he tried to assimilate deaf people into the framework of building a
secular world of God and create a deaf community out of Christian society. Because
the deaf were bereft of access to salvation but whose spiritual isolation could be saved
by education, they also demonstrated the transformative vision of Millennialism. Why
then, was the deaf deemed as heathen? In his sermon, Gallaudet creatively explained
against the alienation of deafness through reinterpreting the Protestant theology:
Do you enquire if the Deaf and Dumb truly deserve to be ranked among the
heathen? With regard to their vices they surely do not; for a kind
Providence…has given to the condition of these unfortunates many benefits.
Possessing indeed the general traits of our common fallen nature…they
have, nevertheless, been defended, by the very imprisonment of their minds,
against much of the contagion of bad example; against the scandal, the
abuse, the falsehood, the profanity, and the blasphemy, which their ears
cannot hear nor their tongues utter… Thus, they have been kept, by the
restraining grace of God, from much of the evil that is in the world.102
In returning to the Calvinist doctrine of human depravity, Gallaudet successfully
subscribed the natural affliction of deafness to the Original sin. But he emphasized
that the deaf ear might bring benefits from such an imprisoned mental state, because
the inability of hearing allowed deaf people to live in the secular world without
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
101
Ibid., 110-111.
102
Thomas H. Gallaudet, Sermon On The Duties And Advantages Of Affording Instruction To The
Deaf And Dumb (Hill, 1824), 20.
"
47"
knowing the evil. Thus the rhetorical strategy effected a change from earlier
assumptions of hearing superiority toward the appreciation of spiritual purity, which
was an expression of evangelical piety. Therefore the unfolding of the process of
differentiation also engendered a “negotiated space” in which deaf people could
possibly be guided to their redemption.
In a similar fashion, the appeal to universal suffering helped to inhibit the
formation of moral hierarchy, and provided the space for raising the deaf awareness.
In an address to the Legislature of Connecticut in 1818, the deaf French instructor
Laurent Clerc stated explicitly the kind of message on behalf of an emerging deaf
community at that time:
Every creature, every work of God, is admirably well made; but if any one
appears imperfect in our eyes, it does not belong to us to criticize it…But
nothing can correct the infirmities of the bodily organization, such as
deafness, blindness, lameness, palsy, crookedness, ugliness… Why then are
we Deaf and Dumb? I do not know, as you do not know why there are
infirmities in your bodies, not why there are among the human kind, white,
black, red and yellow men….I think our deafness proceeds from an act of
Providence, I would say, from the will of God, and does it imply that the
Deaf and Dumb are worse than other men?103
Though radical in its expression, the idea of aligning the deaf with the widest
sense of “infirmities” demonstrated deafness was a common state of existence no
inferior than other kinds of human sufferings. Like Gallaudet, Clerc also took inquiry
into deafness as a way of furnishing the understanding of humanity. Reducing the
meaning of deafness only to a common affliction was surely an act of expediency, but
the message also implied that deafness, like other kinds of infirmity, could not be
labeled a stigma. Because the sign language rendered deaf people distinguishable in
public, it was not for people to judge it as a social deviance. For those who could not
hear, the only purpose of claiming deafness was to seek for spiritual redemption.
But how could the deaf be redeemed? Gallaudet went on to suggest the way in
which sign language could serve to establish the innate logic of practicing the charity
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
103
Laurent Clerc, “Address to the Connecticut Legislature,” in A Mighty Change, ed., Christopher
Krentz, 16.
"
48"
for the deaf as a form of mutual assistance among the sinners. In so doing, Gallaudet
offered his solution for enacting such charitable act in the will of God:
For a most singular trait of the language of gestures and signs…is
sufficiently significant and copious to admit of an application even to the
most abstract, intellectual, moral, and religious truth… the intellectual and
religious truth may be taught them by the language of signs, and even
before they are capable of reading and understanding ours.104
Therefore, it was the “language of signs” that Gallaudet sought to impart the deaf
as a channel of bridging the isolated world of deafness to the enlightened society of
intellectual and religious truth. In his view, the language of signs and gestures
embodied the divine origin of naturalness, and “possesses a power of analogical and
symbolical description which can never belong to any combination of purely arbitrary
sounds and letters.”105 The analogy between the “natural” and the “arbitrary” origin
of language suggested the fundamental distinction of Godliness from a degenerative
existence of humanness. In this regard, the linguistic distinction also helped to justify
the equal access of religious salvation for the deaf.
The clear purpose of early sermons was to raise the social awareness of deaf
condition and spread the spirit of charity in the Christian community. The traits of
signed language, as well as the rhetorical formulation of deafness in light of Christian
benevolence, expressed the religious motivation for establishing a system of doing
good, which provided the very basis of social change through the advancement of
deaf education. The system also embodied the principle of moral government in its
rhetorical formation. In doing so, the first step was to cultivate a humanitarian
sensibility for the purpose of allowing the hearing to assume an authoritative role
from God, and to shape the scheme of moral government into a strategic relationship
between the hearing and the deaf. The immediate appeal of a “negotiated space”
helped to eliminate the stigma of deafness resulted from differentiation. Manualism
was promoted as a legitimate solution to the problem of engendered hierarchy, and as
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
104
Ibid., 44.
105
Ibid.
"
49"
a way for the deaf to learn from using signs to achieve the redeemed hearing.
Therefore, the early sermons showed the ways in which deaf education was phrased
by Protestant moral suasion in the public sphere.
1.4 The “American Asylum” as an institutional practice of “moral government”
(1817-1830)
From exclusion to inclusion: the role of institution in shaping deaf education
Historically, deafness was depicted as a “discursive nonexistence” without either
group solidarity or social category of disability. As Lennard J. Davis argued, before
the eighteenth century, the concept of “deafness” did not exist mainly for two reasons:
First, the majority of deaf persons who were born into a hearing family only lived as
an aberration from the construction of normality that assumed the ability to hear.
Second, those hereditary descendants living in families whose members all could not
hear were not aware of any deviance as their sense of normality grew out of a
functioning system of communication that did not require hearing.
106
The
conceptualization of deafness began when either side of the hearing/non-hearing
dichotomy became socially aware of and related to the existence of the other. That is
to say, the category of deafness was to some extent a social construct, and the
institutional network of religious education that recognized deafness did so from
social points of references that assumed hearing was normal as a precondition for
effective communication.
The involvement of social reform in the Second Great Awakening helped
accelerate the institutional process of deaf education in America. Schools as well as
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
106
Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (Verso, 1995), 51-52,
175. The latter referred to a community with hereditary trait of inability to hear that made them ignored
of the condition of hearing, hence non-hearing. This was specifically studied in the case of Martha’s
Vineyard, which was home to one of the earliest substantial minority group of deaf people in the U.S.
since 1633. The people from Martha’s Vineyard considered them as the users of sign language, or a
language minority. See Nora Ellen Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness
on Martha's Vineyard (Harvard University Press, 2009).
"
50"
other forms of charitable institutions were built with imperatives of social reform.107
From 1798 to the end of 1830, successive revivals had swept across Connecticut and
spurred on the idea that God’s “second coming” demanded speedy reform movements
to hasten its arrival. This sense of urgency was undergirded by Millennialism, a
theological doctrine that rejected religious pre-determinism and called for freeing the
individuals from the passive reception of the grace of God to be saved. It promoted
individuals to seek for salvation on their free will. The logic of this Millennialism
influenced Christians across denominational lines, asserting the equal status of all
human being through God’s benevolence. Deaf people became a group who ought to
be saved before the Day of Judgment. The belief in the inevitability and malleability
of human nature justified the afflicted persons with equal sufferings as those with
other kinds of misfortunes happened to themselves; and as part of God’s benevolent
creation, the deaf and blind deserved equal treatment of the hearing and sighted due to
their natural condition as their counterparts.
Charity works by the Christian communities promoted broader social reforms.
The treatment of deaf people at the institutional level also worked to govern moral
behavior in the domestic realm. The antebellum idea held that deviance was caused
by “the failure of upbringing,” and “the collapse of family control. ”108 In the case of
deafness, the lack of knowledge either in medical or pedagogical sense had left most
families with deaf children helpless. The deaf child in a hearing family, whether he or
she was identified by congenital deafness or hearing loss caused by illnesses like
scarlet fever, the family usually failed to cope with the situation. Prior to 1817, when
the founding of the Connecticut Asylum for the deaf and dumb had not become a
source of public welfare initiated by the efforts of the Cogswell family, most
American families failed to consult even for their anxieties resulting from the inability
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
107
For more on the Second Great Awakening and American reform movements/benevolent societies,
see Keller, 162-187; Jonathan Sassi, Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the
Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (Oxford University Press, 2001), and Mark Noll’s America's
God (Oxford University Press, 2002).
108
"
Rothman, 65.
51"
to cope with the misfortune. The only option for families with deaf offspring was to
send their deaf children to established schools in Europe that had the reputation for
educating the deaf and dumb persons.
It is worthy to note that the earliest effort in advancing the career for deaf
education in the United States could be traced back to a private endeavor from the
south, notably from the wealthy Bolling family who sent their deaf descendants to
European deaf schools. Due to the close relationship formed since 1771 when the first
deaf descendent from the Bolling family went to Scotland to receive education from
the Braidwood School, which was famous for its method known as oralism for the
instruction of the deaf, the coterie of private relations finally benefited the founding of
the Cobbs School in rural Virginia in 1815. Unfortunately, this private effort lasted
for no more than a year before the American School for the Deaf (ASD) was founded
in 1817 in Connecticut. The historical occasion that had driven to the completely
different outcomes of the two institutions could be explained by differences resulted
from either cultural and economic backgrounds between the Northern and Sothern
states, the introduction of different pedagogical methods, and the inherited personal
characters of founders.109 However, the early divergence between the two schools
regarding the motivation of deaf education informed us of a growing public concern
in the North that had driven the shared domestic calamity of the individual families
into the practice of social reform.
The intention of founding a residential school for the deaf, as Gallaudet
rearticulated his mission in a report to the local committee, was to achieve the idea
that deaf people “may not only be rescued from intellectual darkness, but that they
may also be brought to a knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus, and finally be found
among the redeemed of the Lord.”110 Building a residential school for the deaf thus
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
109
Barry A. Crouch and Brian H. Greenwald, “Hearing with the Eye: The Rise of Deaf Education in
the United States,” in The Deaf History Reader, ed., John Vickrey Van Cleve (Gallaudet University
Press, 2007), 24-46.
110
American School for the Deaf, First Report of the Directors of the American Asylum at Hartford
for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons (Hartford: Hudson and Co. Printers,
1817), 5.
"
52"
became the social embodiment of Christian charity. Prior to the existence of such
public measures, the deaf were kept apart from the mainstream hearing society and
were not fully recognized what it meant to be deaf among the hearing. However, as
the historian Susan Burch noted, early efforts to integrate the deaf into the hearing
society by placing them in residential schools instead fostered the rise of a separate
and strong deaf culture.111 Especially in the early nineteenth century, residential
schools were built to assimilate the deaf into Christianity, and by teaching them how
to sign for their prayer, the manualists believed the regenerative hands could redeem
the lost hearing and to embrace the heathens into the realm of evangelical piety. Thus
this fostering of religious conversion played the central role in defining deafness.
After 1817, the American Asylum became an inaugural public institution for deaf
education. Different from its European counterparts, the pattern of residential schools
for the deaf in America was designed to reach cooperation between private charity
and governmental support. This ensured both the independence of the school under
private operation and the reliable source of funding from state government. With only
twenty pupils who ranged from different ages at the beginning, the school promised to
look after every student in their intellectual and moral development.112 Religious
instruction was placed at the center, because it could cultivate a sense of belonging to
the community in which the deaf students lived with their hearing teachers.
Twenty-nine graduates from Yale College were recruited as the first set of trained
manual instructors in the American Asylum. As they all learned the system of manual
instruction from the “living embodiment” Laurent Clerc, the Asylum functioned for a
long time as the normal school of training the country’s first generations of deaf
educators.113 Also, the school considered itself as “an instrument” by which the
students could pass a sense of Divine existence, and recognized it through daily
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
111
Burch, Signs of Resistance, 10.
112
The age of admission was started from ten and later reduced to eight, because the Asylum assumed
the deaf students to be kept at least for five years as sufficient to their education, and the period could
be extended judging from individual condition. See American School for the Deaf, Twenty-Seventh
Report (Hartford: Hudson and Co. Printers, 1843), 14.
113
"
Fay, Histories of American Schools for the Deaf, 14.
53"
communication of knowledge.114 Teachers in the asylum played the role of parental
supervision over the physical and mental health of their deaf students, and held
responsible for their conduct both in and outside the classroom. Therefore the
institution could be seen as a place designed not only to bring education and
socialization for the deaf, but it was also a site of achieving Christian redemption.
Sign language as being assimilated into the institutionalization of moral government
It is important to note that the process of institutionalizing the principle of
Christian moral government in the asylum demands much for the role of signs to train
the deaf body. Therefore the manual signs in general were assimilated into the schema
and manifestations of the corporeal and mental discipline of the deaf. The visual
engagement with signs in daily life not only rendered the asylum a place for deaf
experience, but also served to enhance the sense of creating a “signing community”
through religious activities and the interactive learning in classroom.
Speaking of manual instruction, there were four modes of communication
employed to help facilitate the language instruction for the deaf students in the
Asylum.115 The “natural signs” were used most widely among the deaf, since it was
the most applicable one which consisted of basic gestures and facial expressions that
allowed the deaf to understand each other in a daily context. The early American
manualists also stressed the expressiveness of natural signs by comparing it with other
modes of communication in other cultures. They believed that the signing of
indigenous Indian tribes and Chinese writing were more permanent than the
alphabetic system, which was varied in spelling forms.116 In this view, they regarded
the natural signs as having the same potential to become an alternative system of
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
114
First Report, 11.
115
Articulation, or the speech training method was not incorporated into the curriculum in the Asylum
until 1845, since it had proved few successful cases and was considered not beneficial to the
intellectual and moral development for the deaf. See: American School for the Deaf, Third
Report (Hartford: Hudson and Co. Printers, 1819), 8-9.
116
"
Ibid., 6.
54"
literacy for the deaf themselves. But they also knew that the development of sign
language in America must follow the process of standardization in order to be
recognized by the mainstream hearing culture.
Therefore the instructors turned to the “methodical signs,” which was derived
from the natural signs but reduced to one general standard for coping with the
structure and idiom of written language. This methodized language was the creation
of French manual system by the Abbé de L’Épée and was inherited by his student
Sicard. When Laurent Clerc brought the methodical signs to America, the system was
still largely dependent on the grammatical rules and idioms of French language, so
there was a similar process in which the manualist instructors in the American
Asylum took the conceptual structure of the French system and readapted it to the
English language. However, the methodical signing was gradually abandoned in its
day. It was not fully recognized as a language but rather regarded as nothing more
than an encoding system like the Morse telegraphic code.117 Besides, there was a
third medium that enabled the manualist to translate the written language by
fingerspelling. It was called “the manual alphabet,” a visual graph consisted of
different handshapes in accordance with the letters. This one-hand manual alphabet
could provide accuracy in spelling words among the deaf, and it was primarily used to
teach the deaf students in English reading. Finally, writing was the last means to
cultivate a standard literacy among the deaf. A classical example of manual
instruction was described as follows:
The idea was first given by free, natural signs, next in word signs (manual
alphabet) in order of the words, and lastly, by [methodical] signs in the
order of the words, each word being accompanied by other signs indicating
the part of speech and giving its grammatical construction. After all these
preparation came the written language for the idea.118
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
117
John Tabak, Significant Gestures: A History of American Sign Language (Praeger Publishers, 2006),
19. This change was later proved essential for the development of the American Sign Language (ASL),
because the hearing attitudes toward the abandonment of methodical signs reflected the reception of
deaf culture. See the detailed discussion in Chapter 3.
118
"
Fay, Histories of American Schools for the Deaf, Volume 1, 22-23.
55"
All four steps of manual instruction provided a unified system in conveying idea
in the medium of sign language, and through experiments, the method experienced
with along with the correction, revision and expansion of the old French system into a
new American system. More importantly, it was the essential pattern of manual
instruction that had thoroughly functioned as a mode of employing the religious truth,
and helped convert the deaf into faithful Christians. Because achieving mental
development was much slower than bringing an effective moral government to the
deaf, the early period of instruction emphasized primarily the practice of religious
obligation as seen from daily requirements of praying and confessing. “Religious
obligation…usually receives a prompt assent and a ready compliance, so far as the
external conduct is concerned.”119 Early instructors believed that religious influence
could be slowly imparted to the deaf mind if they were instructed to form a habit of
experiencing signs in the religious service. As described by a superintendent of the
American Asylum, the regularity of prayer was established on the routine exercise of
natural signs:
The pupils assemble in the chapel in the morning, a short time before the
hour of school. The seats rise from the platform towards the door, so that
every one in the room can have a distinct view of the person who officiates;
the boys being arranged on one side, and the girls on the other. A text of
Scripture, which has previously been written upon the large slates
occupying one side of the room, is carefully explained by natural signs and
commented upon. They then rise, and prayer is offered in the same
language. At the close of school in the afternoon the pupils again repair to
the chapel…and a prayer by signs closes the service.120
Religious worship provided the very basis of ritualizing the sign language, and
the effect of bringing discipline was immediate. “Let moral effect be a guiding
principle of all things,” said one instructor, “the stimulus to mental improvement
should never be pressed so far as to endanger moral welfare.”121 Such ways of
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
119
Collins Stone, “On the religious state, and instruction of the deaf and dumb,” American Annals of
the Deaf and Dumb 1, no. 3 (April, 1848): 143.
120
Stone, “On the religious state,” 145-146.
121
L. H. Woodruff, “Moral education of the deaf and dumb,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb
3, no. 2 (January, 1851): 69.
"
56"
framing the practice of moral education reflected a highly concentrated hearing
surveillance over the deaf. In particular, the role of sign language rendered the daily
communication among deaf students visible in school, and provided the perfect
medium of supervision that enabled the hearing instructors in overseeing the
emotional state of the students and to make sure they were organized in a mentally
disciplined way. The religious activities conducted through sign language also
enhanced the sense of authority and the hierarchical order to shape the education of
deaf students in the classroom.
Racial and gender differences were also subtlety connoted in such a paternalistic
environment that assumed the white male domination in daily exercises within the
Asylum. Neither race nor gender appeared as standards for classifying the lists of
students who entered and graduated from the Asylum as shown from the institutional
reports. Despite the fact that many northern and western schools extended manual
education to black students, scant records from deaf newspapers suggested white deaf
people’s concern about racial minorities’ access to sign language. As noted by Burch,
few black deaf people received schooling prior to the Civil War due to the resistance
from southern schools and they established segregated institutes for the black deaf.122
These differences, however, contributed to the complexity of understanding the
function of sign language in the subtexts.
The operation of a wholesome moral government also incorporated the
instruction of manual labor as a way to discipline the deaf body. Since the directors of
the American Asylum thought it would be a better way to convince the public that
their deaf pupil, after leaving the school, could at least acquire the practical skills as
the proof of their values, they trained their students in horticulture and mechanics.
They also believed that the manual labor could “help to maintain the state of bodily
health, and check upon irregularity and idleness, which are the foundation of all
correct moral instruction and discipline.”123 Starting from 1822, the deaf students
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
122
Burch, Signs of Resistance, 62.
123
American School for the Deaf, Fourth Report (Hartford: Hudson and Co. Printers, 1820), 4.
"
57"
whose age ranged between twelve and twenty were required to participate in the
branches of manual labor, for the directors believed that by doing so, the course
“could promote health and lead to a love of order, of carefulness and
subordination.”124 Within a common period of three years, they were instructed in a
general curriculum that consisted of reading and writing in English language,
arithmetic and supplemental courses on calculating. Also, they were arranged into
devotional trainings groups taught by local artisans. These included workshops in
cabinet making, shoe making and tailoring. The first department of manual instruction
was opened at 1822, with workshops primarily for boys, and in 1829 there was also
tailoring training for girls.125 The Asylum showed deaf students could be molded into
a well-regulated class that equipped them with a respected degree of literacy and a
practical skill able to support oneself in society. The directors of the Asylum
considered the devotional training as a necessary step toward claiming equality for the
deaf in the mainstream society.126
However, vocational training had only proved a modest success in the nineteenth
century due to the limited choices given in school and the educator’s ignorance of the
deaf student’s initiative. The deaf activist John Carlin criticized the poor training
quality of the manual labors by pointing out the phenomenon that “the eastern cities
were flooded with poorly trained deaf students who were locked into undesirable
trades with limited opportunities.”127 Besides, even though the first generations of
deaf graduates from the American Asylum who benefited largely from the educational
and vocational training did not achieve equality, with female and African Americans
students generally faring worse. As suggested by Robert Buchanan, racial and
gender-biased notions rooted in hearing society “narrowed the boundaries of
membership in the deaf community and contributed to the educational and economic
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
124
American School for the Deaf, Twentieth Report (Hartford: Hudson and Co. Printers, 1836), 17.
125
Fay, 15.
126
American School for the Deaf, Eighth Report (Hartford: Hudson and Co. Printers, 1824), 5.
127
John Carlin, “On The Mechanical and Professional Occupations of Deaf-Mute Graduates,”
Proceedings of the Third Convention of American Instructors of the Deaf and Dumb (Ohio: Steam
Press of Smith and Cox, 1853), 204.
"
58"
segmentation of deaf women and men.”128 While the vocational training offers deaf
students a way to get rid of their social stigma as a dependent class, the unequal
treatment by gender and race in the participation of manual works suggests the hidden
challenges facing the growth of deaf community.
Conclusion
"
Had the mental and physical discipline exercised inside the manual institution
brought a successful moral government of deafness? A later principal of the Asylum,
Lewis Weld, raised the question regarding the state of religious perception of deaf
students. Several superintendents of the major manual institutions responded later
based on their personal experiences with the course of manual instruction. As for the
American Asylum, both Gallaudet and Clerc answered no. As a senior deaf instructor,
Clerc experience did not contribute to the knowledge of God or the existence of the
soul. He said, “It never occurred to me to seek to know what was that within me.” He
also mentioned his deaf pupils’ unwillingness in exposing the state of religious
ignorance to public observation.129 William Turner, another hearing instructor who
had served the Asylum for over 17 years, expressed the same view. As he noted, “The
most intelligent deaf-mutes…at different stages of their education, uniformly testify
that they never had any idea of a God or of their own soul…”130 Similarly, Gallaudet
believed that a deaf person by nature could never realize the existence of a Creator or
Moral Governor of the world, neither could he or she form any notions of the
immateriality and immortality of his own soul. However, he held that deaf people,
even in their uninstructed state, could generate moral judgment. “He [the deaf-mute]
forms notions of what is right and wrong, with regards to the relations which he
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
128
Robert M. Buchanan, Illusions of Equality: Deaf Americans in School and Factory, 1850-1950
(Gallaudet University Press, 1999), 17-18.
129
Laurent Clerc, “Letter of Mr. Clerc,” April 27th, 1838, in Twenty-Second Report, ed., American
School for the Deaf, 27-28.
130
"
William W. Turner, “Letter of Mr. Turner,” May, 19th, 1838, in Twenty-Second Report, 32-33.
59"
sustains to his parents and other members of the family to which he belongs, and of
the community in which he resides.”131 This response registers his belief that the
successful government and discipline of the deaf inmates largely depends on the
moral influence imparted to them through communal interdependence. In this regard,
the Asylum was successful in keeping order and maintaining the “moral effect”
produced and communicated by signs.
Others expressed differently regarding the role of sign language in bringing moral
influence. Mr. Harvey Peet, who was the principal of the New York Institution of the
Deaf, mentioned in particular the limit of “natural language of signs” in conveying the
notion of God to deaf students. “Because the natural signs were confined to the
sensible objects that existed in daily life,” said Peet, “they [deaf mutes] have no
motive to extend their ideas beyond the pale of sensible objects.”132 Given this, he
further questioned the use of sign language to deliver religious purposes in the
Institution. As he asked, “[C]an it be supposed that they [deaf-mutes] will conceive
the notion of God, to whom they are under obligation to render religious worship?”
Peet’s account reflected a common misunderstanding held by the public around the
time. That is, the visitors from outside the institution tended to confuse the “ritualized
signing” with the sign language communicated among teachers and students. In fact,
it was the widely perceived act of signing, but not the instruction of sign language
alone, that guaranteed the effectiveness of moral government inside the manual
institutions.
The religious interpretation of signing that has emerged from the foregoing
analysis demonstrates both the universality and uniqueness of applying the idea of
moral government in manual education. Conceptually, it turned the “heathen deaf”
into the redemptive process toward being the faithful Christian. Practically, it trained
them to become “docile bodies” that subjected to the disciplinary influence produced
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
131
Thomas H. Gallaudet, “Letter of Mr. Gallaudet, April 24th, 1838,” in Twenty-Second Report,
26-27.
132
Harvey Peet, “Letter of Mr. Peet, Principal of the New York Institution of the Deaf and Dumb, May.
15th, 1838,” in Twenty-Second Report, 28-30.
"
60"
by the asylum. In other words, while the popular belief of the divine origin of signs
persuaded the public to educate the deaf, the practice of signing inside the asylums
contributed to strengthening the corporeal exercise of religion. The exercise of
manual labor provided an access for the deaf body to gain equal competency in the
able-bodied society, but the institutional training of deaf students rendered the
concept of equal citizenship all but an illusion. While the hearing-based manual
instruction proved effectiveness in establishing authority and keeping order, it also
fostered a sense of hierarchy that both suppressed the assertiveness of deaf identity
and ignored the subtexts of racial and gender differences under the cover of religion.
In review, early manualists borrowed the idea of “signing” from the reformed
theology of individual salvation and localized it institutionally to support the
educational practice that “restored hearing.” The emphasis on the relationship
between social charity and deaf redemption successfully gained support from the
public, and in this way aggregated the deaf people from across the country, as deaf
institutions trained them to become “able” to communicate and find vocational work.
By the 1860s, the network of deaf residential schools had produced several
generations of deaf students who maintained a separate identity reflected in their use
of sign language. This, however, implies the hidden value of the religiously
constructed “signing community” in fostering the deaf culture. Yet the deaf identity
inspired by Christian charity could not transcend the physical differences between the
hearing and the deaf. As the next chapter will show, during two decades after
Gallaudet’s retirement from the American Asylum in 1830, the formation and
broadening of the “hearing line” across manual institutions had sharpened the notions
of “normalizing” the sign language and challenged the religious construction of
deafness.
"
61"
Chapter 2
Thomas Gallaudet and the cultivation of morality in Sign Language
(1830-1850)
2.1 The fight over “methodical signs”: in search for the American system in the mid
century
Ever since the American reception of methodical signs, the founders of American
Asylum had proved the effect of the French manual system in organizing deaf
instruction under moral government. However, the pedagogical question of whether
the system of methodical signs could activate the deaf mind remained controversial in
the practice of deaf education. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the deaf Parisian
Pierre Deslodges raised the distinction between the “natural” and “acquired” signs to
suggest that deaf people could naturally express ideas through gestural language prior
to the means of education. This point later triggered a series of reflections on the
limits of the French system in relation with the nature of sign language. Because
L’Epée designed methodical signs for improving the effect of translating the
grammatical structure of French language in assistance with the manual alphabet, the
system itself was dependent on verbal language and subjected to grammatical
variations. Roch-Ambroise Bébian, a prominent French instructor of the deaf and
vigorous critic of L’Epée’s method, summarized the French perception of methodical
signs in the early nineteenth century. Bébian believed that the methodical signs lacked
an informed grammatical structure that would qualify it as an independent language,
and considered it a visual substitute for French. In 1817, shortly after his colleague
Laurent Clerc left the Institute for America, he published the Essay on the Deaf and
Natural Language. In this famous article, Bébian fiercely criticized the dominant role
of methodical signs:
"
62"
[S]igns were considered only in relation to French, and great efforts were
made to bend them to that language. But as sign language is quite different
from all other languages, it had to be distorted to conform to French usage,
and was sometimes so disfigured as to become unintelligible.133
In Bébian’s view, the real problem facing deaf education was that methodical
signs made deaf students subject to the memorization of the transposed signs from
spoken French in order to associate with ideas. He also defended the natural signs
against the oppressive role of methodical signs that prevented the deaf from
perceiving a social identity of their own. In a letter, he mentioned the peril of
advancing the old method by saying that “the more students were subjected to
methodical signs, the further they got away from the language of the deaf, from their
intellectual capacities and style of thinking.”134 From this we can infer that during the
time L’Epée and Sicard were working, the application of methodical signs had not
been recognized as the best solution for improving language communication among
deaf people. In the National Institute for the Deaf, the method was applied only in
translating the idea of French words and grammar to deaf pupils. In the public sphere,
methodical signs also intervened the formation of deaf community by replacing the
use of natural signs among deaf people themselves. As implied from Deslodges’
writings, the entire Parisian deaf society, which evolved linguistically as the natural
language of signs grew more elaborate, gradually dissolved by the increasing spread
of methodical signs.135 The failure of sustaining a self-organized deaf society in Paris
also pointed to the hearing ascendency in deaf education.
Later, as methodical signs developed, the French system encountered greater
challenges from America until it finally ceased to dominant on both sides of the
Atlantic by the 1830s. The reason for the demise of the French system also explains
the rise of the so-called American system that finally became the American Sign
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
133
Roch-Ambroise Auguste Bébian, “Essay on the Deaf and Natural Language, or Introduction to a
Natural Classification of Ideas with Their Proper Signs,” in The Deaf Experience, ed., Lane, 148.
134
Anne T. Quartararo, Deaf Identity and Social Images in Nineteenth-Century France (Gallaudet
University Press, 2008), 57.
135
"
Ibid., 103.
63"
Language (ASL), which had been proved by the linguist William C. Stokoe as an
independent language system in the 1960s.136 In fact, the manualists’ search for a
system of sign language in early-nineteenth-century America was a shared process
profoundly influenced by the Franco-American linguistic tradition. As the linguistic
historian Julie Anderson noted, the 19th-century American linguists saw sign language
of the deaf as effecting the same social and historical change as the “spoken signs”
(i.e. speech) did for the hearing. 137 This chapter thus focuses on the historical
transmission of sign language in the early decades of the nineteenth century to
illustrate the ways in which deafness carried meanings in the broader social context of
developing nationhood.
In the early years of introducing the French system to American deaf schools, the
manual instructors adapted the methodical signs in the teaching of the deaf, and
rendered it the most applicable method in bridging the gap between verbal and
gestural language. In the American Asylum, it was applied as the basic mode of
language communication in translating the English language. However, the American
adaptation of the French system also entailed critical reception. Early manualists
realized limits of methodical signs and they tried to avoid the same pitfalls that had
rendered the French system a threat to the cultivation of natural signs. As observed by
a senior deaf instructor who had served in the American Asylum for twenty-eight
years, the methodical system was “an artificial and inverted process…ignorant of
elementary principles and practice.”138 Because the French system aimed at teaching
language in connection with grammar, it imposed the grammatical rule on the deaf
students before giving them ideas of words and sentences. As he proposed, this
hearing-centered approach proved to be a barrier for the intellectual growth of the
congenital deaf children, though it worked better for those who had lost their hearing
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
136
David F. Armstrong, Michael A. Karchmer and John V. Van Cleve, ed., The Study of Signed
Languages: Essays in Honor of William C. Stokoe (Gallaudet University Press, 2002), 191.
137
Julie Tetel Anderson, Linguistics in America 1769 - 1924: A Critical History (Routledge, 1995),
154-157.
138
W. W. Turner, “Course of Instruction,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 2, no. 2 (January
1849): 101-102.
"
64"
after learning to speak. By contrast, early manualists considered the natural signs the
most advantageous medium for enacting an early education for deaf children. By
teaching them to imitate the surrounding objects with natural signs, manual
instructors could cultivate a vocabulary before beginning instruction about grammar.
So there was a tacit agreement in the early American deaf education that the natural
signs should be promoted to reveal the potential of deaf children as he or she
developed an intellectual capacity. However, since the natural signs were loosely
organized due to the absence of a standard grammar, only deaf students applied it
creatively in colloquial conversations. Though the natural signs (or “colloquial signs”)
used in deaf students’ daily communication still needed to develop the forms of unity
with the assistance of methodical signs as taught in class, the phenomenon of their
coexistence reflected the variety of signing experiences that directly contributed to the
growth of deaf community within the institutional framework.
An article appeared in the Literary and Theological Review in 1835 best
summarized the skepticism toward the French system in early American practices.
Written by Frederick Barnard, a professor of the New York Institution for the Deaf,
the article pointed out, “The system [of methodical signs] is exceedingly deceitful. It
deceives both instructor and pupil, by affording to the latter a mechanical guide to the
construction of sentences, which he does not understand.”139 In his view, methodical
signs fell short of being an effective tool and were meaningless of its own. To
illustrate his point, the author returned to the issue of natural signs. He gave an
example to illustrate the extent of naturalness in signs as in painting the idea of “A
man kicks a dog.” “I should begin naturally with the dog, and afterwards represent the
man in the act of kicking. To paint first this act, to exhibit a man kicking the air,
would be unnatural.”140 Therefore he held that the methodical signs were a forced
method that aimed to indoctrinate the deaf with codes unrelated to the meaning of
words, and thus rendered a sign language that deviated from natural points of
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
139
Frederick A. P. Barnard, “Existing state of the art of instructing the deaf and dumb,” Literary and
Theological Review 2, no. 7 (September 1835): 389.
140
"
Barnard, 375.
65"
reference. However, the American perception of natural signs, as shown from
Gallaudet’s experiment, was to engage human countenance with sign language for the
purpose of recalling the descriptive quality of natural signs in the colloquial
application, which, as the author noted, was “an exceedingly abridged imitation [of
nature]”141
In the early 1850s, there were debates on whether the methodical signs were still
favorable compared to the development of natural signs in the teaching of deaf
schools, and how the limited experience of teaching sign language in the public
institutions influenced the ways in which deafness was presented in the shared space
with the hearing. In 1851, the Second Convention of American Instructors was held at
Hartford, Connecticut. Superintendents and senior educators from major manual
institutions across the country sat together to exchange ideas that directly related to
the discussion of the issues with the perception of the French system. The convention
focused on resolving the problem of defining the extent to which methodical signs
should be exercised in view of the natural signs. The controversial attitudes toward
the methodical signs and the French manual system in general reflected the growing
fissure inside the manualist camp, and it came to exemplify the divergent ways in
which manualists contributed to defining deafness in the mid century.
In the beginning, there was a line of argument that claimed methodical signs as
the basis on which deaf people realized a sense of communal identity. Lewis Weld,
the second principal of the American Asylum, reconceptualized methodical signing to
incorporate natural signs for the instruction of grammar and writing in classroom. He
held that fixing the variability of natural signs into the regularity of the methodical
system could enhance the clarity and uniformity of language instruction and religious
practice within the institution.142 As a hearing person, Weld was not fully convinced
that natural signs could free the deaf from the dependence of verbal language. More
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
141
Ibid., 374.
142
Lewis Weld, “Suggestions on Certain Varieties of the Language of Signs as used in the Instruction
of the Deaf and Dumb,” Proceedings of the Second Convention of American Instructors of the Deaf
and Dumb (August, 1851): 79-81.
"
66"
importantly, he believed that any assertion of sign language’s linguistic autonomy
would lead to the separation of the deaf from the hearing, and was therefore
detrimental to manual education. To conclude his reflections, he wrote:
[T]here are those who think that in many of its applications there is a beauty,
a force, an attractive and persuasive power in the language of signs,
unequaled by any other language of man! To the deaf and dumb this may be
true, but to us who hear, such an assertion need to be qualified.143
What Weld wished to maintain was in fact a hearing authority established over the
deaf by means of the “shared pedagogy” among all teachers. He thus promoted the
extension of methodical signs as a way to bring the natural signs into regulation, and
deemed it an effort of “preservation through improvement.” Weld’s attitude towards
sign language recognized the deaf as an emerging social class whose identity was
supposed to be defined by those in society who could hear. His concern later
intensified in the debates over oralism.
Unlike Weld and those who believed that the meaning of deafness was stemmed
from the practice of methodical signs, critics of the French system questioned the
presumption of hearing, and claimed to distinguish natural signs from the all-inclusive
system of methodical signs. Collins Stone, a hearing teacher in the American Asylum,
objected to the abuse of methodical signs in theory. First, Stone questioned whether
methodical signs were arbitrary representations of words but not related to ideas.144
Second, he suggested that the abuse of methodical signs could lead to much confusion
over the use of synonyms in verbal language. The analogical principle of methodical
signs forced the system to trace back every word to a single signification, while in fact
a lot of words are used interchangeably in verbal communication. Therefore the limits
of methodical signs imposed a codified system on the deaf mind and narrowed the
space for them to exercise the expressive potential of natural signs to exchange
ideas.145 In Stone’s view, Weld’s argument underscored the varied practical uses of
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
143
Ibid., 85.
144
Collins Stone, “On the Use of Methodical Signs,” Proceedings of the Second Convention of
American Instructors of the Deaf and Dumb (August, 1851): 88.
145
"
Ibid., 92.
67"
methodical and natural signs in the classroom and everyday life. When lecturing deaf
students on the reading and writing of English, the teacher might choose methodical
signs to consistently translate each word with a standard sign. However, in daily
communication, the teacher could encourage the use of natural signs in order to
facilitate the expression of ideas. Stone’s suggestions thus helped to place the debate
over methodical signs at the center of the French/American collaboration.
A second wave of debate over the role of methodical signs soon followed. In 1855,
the Annals published a sensational article written by J. A. Jacob, who was the then
principal of the Kentucky School for the Deaf and a graduate of the American Asylum.
In the article, Jacob clearly rejects the notion that the sign language was a real
language independent from verbal language, or capable of representing ideas just
through the medium of signs. He maintains that the colloquial natural signs most
commonly employed by the deaf were less effective to the study of English language.
Moreover, he refutes the assumption that methodical signs ceases to function outside
the classroom. Instead, he argued that the abuse of natural signs in colloquial
discourses was the major reason why methodical signs could not extend to represent
ideas in the deaf mind.146 In other words, since natural signs had prevented the deaf
from thinking in ways of verbal language, the employment of methodical signs could
not fully achieve its educational purpose. Therefore, he proposes to disuse the natural
signs in any colloquial communication and to replace them by methodical signs alone.
In so doing, he believed that the employment of verbal language could better foster
thinking habits. “My theory proposes…to discontinue the instrumentality…of this
class or order of signs,” he claimed, “and by signs following the order of words, and
by language either alphabetical or written, to accustom them to think…in the order of
spoken language.”147
In fact, Jacob’s proposal to abandon natural signs was based on the commonly
held misconception that the deaf could adjust themselves to any instrumental practice
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
146
J. A. Jacob, “The Disuse of Colloquial Signs,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 7, no. 2
(January 1855): 70-71.
147
"
Ibid., 71.
68"
of signing, whether it was natural or arbitrary. Because “the deaf-mutes think in signs,”
they could manage to develop a pattern of thinking based on the set of practice with
which they habitually engaged. Although the methodical signs seemed “unnatural” to
the deaf, it was an alternative approach to implement the common understanding
between the deaf and hearing. This explained why he changed the preferred calling of
the distinction between the natural and methodical signs, and termed them as
“colloquial” and the “general signs.” What Jacob tried to do was to shift the
conversation from the “imagined deafness,” which was heavily relied on the idealized
definition of “natural,” to a normative construction of deafness that was defined in
relation to the hearing authority. In this regard, he recapitulated what Weld had argued
earlier for the extension of methodical signs, and further demonstrated the inevitability
of letting the natural signs comply with the standards of an established language.
However, his plan of abandoning natural signs never materialized and neither did
he provide any empirical evidence to support his claim. Nevertheless, the broadened
scope of methodical signs in the system of deaf communication reflected how the sign
language was becoming a norm in the debates of manual education. Because there was
no unanimous agreement with the definition of “natural signs” of the time, the
manualists who joined the debates tended to acknowledge the hearing rules while
maintaining an open attitude toward the existent variety of deaf signs. In other words,
the effort to normalize the “American system” of sign language was consciously taken
up by both sides during the debates, while opinions varied only on how to achieve a
better solution for implementing an effective sign language capable of transmitting
ideas as in verbal language. Since they all agreed on the pedagogical aim in residential
schools of teaching deaf students the national language of English, the replacement of
colloquial signs with general signs was surely an indication of eliminating the
resistance of locality. As Collins Stone confessed, the greatest difficulty in manual
instruction lay in the vernacular.148 He suggested that it was the language of ideas, not
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
148
Collins Stone, “Third Convention,” Proceedings of the Third Convention of American Instructors
of the Deaf and Dumb (October, 1853): 135.
"
69"
words that separated the deaf from effectively receiving the standard manual
education.
One of Jacob’s critics was John Burnet, a deaf teacher from the New York
Institution who doubted the value of methodical signs in shaping the ideas of the deaf
as equal to that of the natural signs. He argued that if the methodical signs could
enable the formation of ideas without reversing back to the order of verbal language,
then natural signs should have been abandoned in the colloquial communication.
However, the fact that natural signs were still employed widely by the deaf made him
strongly doubted the effectiveness of introducing the general signs. “Since the best
masters of methodic signs have never been able to bring them into colloquial use
among their pupils,” he asserted, “there must be some principle of repugnance, some
antagonism in the mental habits of the deaf and dumb and in the genius of their native
language, which opposes this attempt to make a language of one set of elements
conform in syntax to a language of a totally diverse set of elements.”149 Therefore, by
referring to the deaf resistance against the attempt of normalizing the natural signs,
Burnet proved Jacob’s claim for replacing the natural signs with methodical signs
unsubstantiated. He further pointed out that it was impossible to employ the
methodical signs in colloquial communication for the purpose of invoking the spirit of
natural signs to exchange ideas.
It was not until the end of the 1850s that the debates finally ended. Harvey Prindle
Peet, the principal of the New York School, made the last response to Jacob and
rejected his proposal for maintaining the use of methodical signs. Peet agreed with
Burnet that the methodical signs alone could never fulfill the purpose of conveying
ideas, and its place in the instruction of English was intermediate and auxiliary. In
terms of the function of ideas, the methodical signs were mere codes that imitated the
grammar of English, and the whole system was meaningless if isolated from verbal
language. “The arrangement of signs in the order of English words must always seem
unnatural to the deaf-mutes,” he pointed out, “He [the deaf person] may become
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
149
John R. Burnet, “The Necessity of Methodical Signs Considered: Further Experiments,” American
Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 7, no. 1 (October, 1854): 5.
"
70"
accustomed to it by repetition, but the experience of many teachers who reject
methodical signs shows that he equally becomes accustomed to the order of words by
repetition.” 150 Here again, the conversation returned to the defining character of
naturalness, which held that natural signs were distinctive as a real language and that
was necessary for the development of ideas among the deaf.
There were, as indicated from the mid-century debates over methodical signs,
implications beyond the level of language education. As Rebecca Edwards pointed out,
the debates that arose in the 1850s also reflected new cultural concerns toward
recognizing deaf culture in a larger culture that came to define deafness along the
hearing lines.151 In responding to the limits of manualism in the advancement of a
single national language, many deaf and hearing educators collectively reached out
from the manualists camp to form a broader alignment under the principle of social
integration. However, this movement inevitably faced a dilemma: Since some
manualists aimed to integrate those who communicated through sign language to the
mainstream hearing society, they had to either forge a campaign against the natural
signs or to radically abandon manualism and the institutional base on which deafness
thrived. To be sure, they could choose neither. Therefore, prior to the ascendency of
oralism, those manualists who supported the methodical signs tacitly agreed with the
cultural concerns oralists raised to disintegrate the solidarity of manualism, though
they could not accept the radical abandonment of sign language. 152 Also, since
religion tied deafness closely to the “ability” of using sign language, the process of
effecting a conceptual change that renders deafness as a “disability” has to disrupt the
order created by the religious governmentality. The mid-century debate over
methodical signs thus implies the tendency of bringing the “hearing line” into the
institutional framework and jeopardizing the religious governmentality.
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
150
Harvey P. Peet, “Words not ‘Representatives’ of Signs, but Ideas,” American Annals of the Deaf 11,
no. 1 (January, 1859): 6.
151
Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 164-165.
152
Edwards, 180.
"
71"
On the contrary, those defending natural signs thought that the French system
would do more harm than good, since it sought to disrupt the natural order established
over colloquial communication. The purpose of preserving the natural signs also
reflected a deeper cultural concern for the uniqueness of individual deaf experiences
and for a common experience derived from existing in the world without the sense of
hearing. In short, though some welcomed the extension of methodical signs as a way
to assimilate the deaf into the mainstream hearing culture, others hoped to preserve
natural signs as a way of searching for the unique experience of deaf people inside the
institutional framework. This unique experience, as postulated by Gallaudet, lies in the
cultivation of “naturalness” in sign language. In order to understand the value of
“naturalness” and how instructors defined deafness based on different understandings
of manualism, we need to revisit the most important pieces written by Gallaudet that
reflected the manualist response to the controversy of sign language.
2.2 The Paradox of “Naturalness”: Revisiting Gallaudet’s Two Treatises on the
“Natural Language of Signs” (1847-1848)
"
The controversy of “natural expression”
Starting from 1847, a group of manual instructors fostered the awareness of the
limits of French system by advocating the significance of natural sign language in
manual education. They published abundantly in the journal American Annals of the
Deaf and Dumb, which was edited by the Convention of American Instructors of the
Deaf. This important publication had promoted a considerable amount of academic
conversations among both hearing and deaf instructors regarding the advancement of
deaf education in the country. The journal also demonstrated the opinions in favor of
advancing an “American system” that emphasized on the cultivation of the natural
signs. In this regard, the renewed interest in discovering the nature of sign language
had shaped a rival discourse against the growing divergence resulted in the manualists
"
72"
camp, and more importantly, against the major challenge from oralism. They built
their arguments around the issue of redefining the “naturalness” of sign language that
marked the fundamental difference between the French and American system of
manual education.
The most elaborate view was from Thomas Gallaudet, the doyen of the field who
had retired from the American Asylum since 1830 and later worked on the idea of
cultivating the “moral nature” in the “natural language of signs” from a religious point
of view. It is worth noting that during the internal debates in the 1850s, none of the
participators discussed methodical signs as having religious connotations. However,
from the previous chapter we know that religion had played a central role in
promoting the development of manualism and shaping the institutional practice of
moral education in America. In this sense, the effort of those who argued for defining
the nature of sign language in comparison with the established system of methodical
signs aimed not only to counter the opposing voices that sought to undermine the
integrity of manualism, but also to restore a Christian worldview that was increasingly
threatened by the rise of secular education in the mid 19th century.
The manualists did not have a unanimous agreement at the beginning. The
renewed interest in discovering the nature of sign language was firstly taken by a
dispute on the characteristics of “naturalness” existed in sign language
communication, in which the most controversial one featured the role of facial
expression. Some supporters held that facial expression was an intrinsic “grammar” to
signing communication for both hearing and deaf people. As Charles Turner pointed
out, “[facial] expression is the eloquence of sign language.” Like the orator who
engages in using stress and accent in order to convey sentiment in speech delivery,
“the sign lecturer,” he noted, “must faithfully reflect his thoughts…with countenance
beamed with animation and interest.”153 While some held facial expression as a
linguistic imperative existed in the sign language, others refused to admit it as a
general standard. For example, Lucius Woodruff objected and later decried the abuse
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
153
Charles P. Turner, “Expression,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 1, no.2 (January, 1848):
78.
"
73"
of facial expression in sign language, describing the phenomenon of “grimacing” as
follows:
There is a strong tendency to grimace in the natural language of the deaf
and dumb…leading him to call in the aid of distorted features and uncouth
expression to help out his meaning. Thus he overacts, and, as teachers learn
the language of signs in a considerable degree from the mutes themselves,
they imbibe, almost unconsciously, their peculiar expression and manner,
and thus permanency is given too much that is both unnecessary and
ungraceful.154
Woodruff believed that the “uncouth expression” was a reflection of a failure to
communicate through sign language, and further suggested it was a threat to the
communication with those who could hear. Woodruff’s reasoning implied his goal of
distinguishing natural signs from primitiveness. To some of the hearing manualists,
the “grimace” was such a sign of primitiveness that it was antithetical to sign
language. Therefore, in order to establish the sign language as a civilized language,
they framed “naturalness” in terms of religious propriety.
In this regard, J. A. Ayres argued that the quality of natural expression resided in
sign language would function as a way to alleviate the condition of deafness. “It is
true that this language…is yet imperfect and limited when compared with the
excellences of speech…It is also a language requiring more effort, more
exertion…Yet, it is a language capable of cultivating the understanding, refining and
drawing out the emotions of the soul…”155 Here we see him framing sign language
as a supplement of speech, and while he labels it “beautiful language,” natural signs
were not legitimated unless fully cultivated.
Admittedly, the early manualists did not know if the nature of sign language
suggested religious affinities that would influence the deaf. However, they assumed
the natural signs were the ideal medium for religious teaching, through which a
desired cultivation of deafness could be enacted. “Signs, at all times beautiful and
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
154
Lucius H. Woodruff, “Grace of Expression,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 2, no.4 (July,
1849): 193.
155
J. A. Ayres, “An Inquiry into the Extent to which the Misfortune of Deafness may be alleviated,”
American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 1, no.4 (July, 1848): 222-23.
"
74"
expressive, are endued with peculiar power, giving utterance and affections and
desires of the soul. Itself a pictured and poetical language, it swells to sublimity or
sinks to tenderness while passing out of the religions of observation and fact, to
commune with the unseen realities of God and eternity.”156 The potential of natural
signs, as imagined by the poetic description, could affect the cultivation of the moral
nature of deaf people. Ayres concluded, “We can develop and cultivate the moral
nature with a success [in natural signs]…as in the case of those whom religion and
morality appeal through the medium of speech.”157 Therefore, the cultivation of
“naturalness” reinvigorated the spirit of religious benevolence. As indicated from the
discussion, the embodied function of sign language helped channel the religious
sensibility and influence on deaf people in regard to morality.
Framing morality in “natural language of signs”
Perhaps the most complete and eloquent expression of the value of natural signs
was found in the writings of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who later became the
leading voice for advocating the American system. During the year 1847-1848,
Gallaudet published two treatises on the uses of “natural language of signs” in the
Annals. It was the first time that Gallaudet publicly asserted the role of manualism as
the fundamental justification for the scheme of “moral government,” which
constituted the uniqueness of the American system.
Differing from his French precursors, Gallaudet held a holistic view on the use of
sign language. First, he mentioned that the “naturalness” of sign language derives
from its divine and fundamental relationship to God, which adapts to “the spiritual as
well as material objects.” In this way, “it [the natural language of signs] brings
kindred souls into a much more close and conscious communion than that of speech.”
The nature of sign language, as Gallaudet continued, also lies in the very spontaneity
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
156
Ayres, 226.
157
Ibid.
"
75"
of communication. “This natural language of signs, spontaneously employed by the
deaf-mute, and gradually enlarged and rendered more and more accurately descriptive
by himself, …develops itself with a remarkable similarity.”158 Gallaudet exemplified
the universality of signs as derived from the benevolence of God, and being
self-evident as a native language to deaf themselves, who, without instruction, could
well communicate with others who share the same misfortunes of the lost hearing.
Gallaudet also implied that it was the natural language of signs that first appeared
as a symbol of identification among the deaf students since the day of entering the
Asylum. His idea of perceiving the role of visual language in forming linguistic and
cultural community could also be found from his reference to the journal of Major
Stephen H. Long, whose account of his encounter with the native Indians west of the
Mississippi documented the various native sign languages used to communicate
among different tribes as the evidence of the formation of aboriginal identities.159
Second, the naturalness of sign language delineated a visual quality that is
superior to oral language. In his second treatise written in 1848, Gallaudet continued
his reflection upon the natural language of signs with special attention on its
physiological and moral characters. He began by portraying the natural state of sign
language as the embodiment of the unity between life and spirit. As he wrote:
The life, picture-like delineation, pantomime spirit, variety, and grace with
which this may be done, with the transparent beaming forth of the soul of
him who communicates, through the eye, the countenance, the attitudes,
movements and gestures of the body, to the youthful mind that receives the
communication, constitute a visual language which has a charm for such a
mind, and a perspicuity, too, for such a purpose, that merely oral language
does not possess.160
In this poetic definition of the natural signs, Gallaudet portrayed with much
enthusiasm the visual quality that embodied in his holistic reception of the language.
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
158
Thomas H. Gallaudet, “On the natural language of signs; and its value and uses in the instruction of
the deaf and dumb,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 1, no. 1 (October 1847): 56-58.
159
Ibid., 59.
160
Thomas H. Gallaudet, “On the natural language of signs II” American Annals of the Deaf 1, no. 2
(Jan. 1848): 80.
"
76"
The “pantomime spirit” was carried out in a synthesis of body movements consisting
of gestures, facial expressions, and emotional transmission. Thus in his understanding,
the naturalness was found not in the partial movement of the hands alone, but in a
“visual harmony” functioned as the projection of the minds to the open space. Unlike
those who disregarded the facial expression and deemed “grimacing” as a primitive
and unnecessary part of nature, Gallaudet emphasized facial expressions as a major
component in bodily movements, whose integration was key to understanding the
ways in which the naturalness could be preserved and revived. It was this quality of
“language of signs” that mere sounds could not possess. However, the ideal function
of natural signs, as Gallaudet later maintained, should be cultivated in order to bring
back such naturalness to the fullest sense. Thus the cultivation of naturalness in sign
language, as Gallaudet hoped to illustrate to his audience, lies in the essence of
bringing manual instruction into the framework of moral government.
How can the deaf-mute in the family and the school be brought under a
wholesome government and discipline without it? Moral influence is the
great instrument to be used in this government and discipline. …This moral
influence, too, must reach him as a social, religious being. He must feel it in
common with others of the community to which he belongs.161
For Gallaudet, exerting moral influence in deaf education was to conceive a
moral nature in deafness, which showcases the idea of training the uninstructed and
disoriented deaf person into being a part of the social and religious community. This
was also a process whereby the deaf must receive a wholesome moral government
from living with the institutional life and receiving communal assistance from hearing
people. However, this ideal state of moral government depends on constructing a
medium in which the corporeal discipline of religion could also be activated on the
deaf person. As he proceeded:
There must be a suitable medium of communication between these two
minds, a common language which both understand…in order to exercise a
successful moral influence over the child in his government and
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
161
"
Ibid., 82.
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discipline.162
Therefore, the pursuit of “common language” as understood and communicated
by both hearing and deaf people became the necessary first-step toward claiming a
linguistically and culturally independent deaf community. In fact, it fostered a strong
and separate culture as expressed in the use of sign language both as the instrument of
teaching and as the vehicle of religious practice. It also served to extend the boundary
beyond the extent of spontaneity, or of nature herself. The cultivation of “naturalness”
in sign language finally led to the mental and corporeal embodiment of moral
government, which was clearly illustrated from the pattern established by the
American Asylum.
Still, one may find the logic of “naturalness” quite paradoxical in the texts.
Because if we by defining a “natural language,” we think of it as something that is not
a product of culture, and we assume it to be a representation of Nature or God.
Specifically in Gallaudet’s words, the “natural language of signs” was “not arbitrary
and
conventional”
like
that
of
human
speech.
However,
in
the
early
nineteenth-century America, the manualists were well aware of the fact that resorting
to “naturalness” would inevitably face the challenge returning to a social sense of
“normality.” Like L’Epée who invented the methodical signs from observing the
colloquial signs communicated by deaf people in Paris but then reduced the system to
a mere reading and writing parallel of French, Gallaudet also could not avoid the
dilemma of rendering the American system as a natural creation without the
contaminating its naturalness with an overriding concern of how it enabled the deaf to
relate to the English language.
How then did the early American educators refer to the meaning of naturalness
when they talked about the “natural signs?” The definition of the “cultivated signs”
may be an important indication. As an ideal common language practiced and
understood by the hearing and deaf, the “cultivated signs” was an improved form of
“natural signs” that claimed to have preserved the naturalness of the “pantomimic
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
162
"
Ibid., 83.
78"
spirit.” Gallaudet mentioned that the spontaneity of the “natural signs” adopted from a
deaf individual by birth should be socialized in order to improve its function as a form
of moral government, which was believed to be the embodiment of deafness in this
very language.
Conclusion
"
In review, the extension of “naturalness” for normative purposes was a way of
retrieving oneself from primitiveness but retaining a natural purity or virtue. Because
of “the conception of the natural was rooted in Romantic-era assumptions about the
interconnectedness of human activity with nature,” as noted by Baynton, the project
for the educators was “to seek to understand the nature of the world and to see that it
grew and developed into its intended state.”163 Thus the early manualists in America
saw the cultivation of “natural signs” as a process of internalization of the
“normalized” human nature by the Divine order. Deafness was hence defined in the
moral government of a language so natural to itself, while so determined in the
Christian faith of its intended consequence, namely, the salvation.
Deafness was also defined by the role of “socialization,” which contributed to
rescuing those who could not hear from the state of ignorance and isolation to the
“enlightened” hearing society. As demonstrated both in the case of France and
America, the purpose for crafting a signing pedagogy did not create a new social class
as much as it situated the “instructed deaf” in a transformative condition within the
hierarchical order organized by those who could hear. This “ability to hear” was more
than a literal condition of registering sound. It also secured a framework of moral
government manifested in Christian charities that intervened in the training of deaf
people.
The developments of deaf education in France and America, despite their
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
163
"
Baynton, 115, 126.
79"
similarity, were different in character. The French system emphasized the role of
methodical signs in bringing religious knowledge to deaf students, but it failed to
cope the pedagogical practice with the religious framwork. The American manualists,
in contrast, envisioned the signing pedagogy as a transformative process that saved
the souls of the deaf by orienting natural signs in an evangelist frame.
The evangelical American reformers trained the deaf in ways that disciplined
them into religious belief for productive lives in secular society. Gallaudet viewed
“natural signs” as the ideal vehicle for introducing deaf students to the concept of
discipline, truth, “enlightened self-interest,” hope, ambition, and fear. The philosophy
of deaf education changed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This was mainly
because the linguistically defined notion of signer/non-signer and the entailed
meaning of being Christian/heathen were replaced by the biological difference
between the hearing and deaf under the mainstream notion of disability. Therefore, in
the manualist definition, it was not “deafness” per se, but the act of “signing” that
contributed to assimilating those who could not hear to a society in which normality
was defined by the ability to “hear” from God.
To sum up, manualism not only reinforced the authority of those who could hear
physically, but also provided an alternative means of defining the deaf culture in view
of deaf peoples’ “ability” to sign as a symbol of their Christian faith. This
regenerative understanding of deafness, as first postulated in Gallaudet’s theological
reinterpretation of signs, encountered its enemies in the late 1850s. Internal debates
over methodical signs as well as external challenges from oralist idea of social
integration urged new approaches to deaf education and new definitions of deafness.
The changes that happened in the realm of deaf education clearly reflected a growing
threat from the “hearing line,” threatening to disintegrate the religious norm of
signing and its construction of deafness within the manual institution.
"
80"
Chapter 3
The Challenge from Oralism
3.1 The early debate over manualism: Horace Mann and Thomas Gallaudet
Mann’s initial attack on sign language
The prevailing role of manualism finally encountered its greatest challenges from
oralism in the 1850s. The oralists considered deafness as a handicap to be overcome
and held the method of speech training and lip-reading as the only ways in which the
deaf person could be integrated into the mainstream society.164 This divergence in
conceptualizing deaf education marked the beginning of the long-lasting pedagogical
controversy, which challenged manualism in the name of modern science.
The most significant figure in the early movement of oralism was Horace Mann,
who was known both as the father of modern educational reform in the United States
and the founder of the public education system in the nineteenth century. However,
little was said about his interest in deaf education until the year of 1843, when he
returned from a research tour of European common schools and brought back special
observations gained from his visit to the various deaf institutions in Prussia. In his
lengthy Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Education of 1844, Mann publicly
praised the Prussian deaf schools and viewed them as models for the American
residential schools for the deaf. “The schools in this class [deaf persons]…seem to me
decidedly superior to any in this country,” wrote Mann, who concluded in this report
that the fundamental difference lies in pedagogy. “With us, the deaf and dumb are
taught to converse by signs made with the fingers. There, incredible as it may seem,
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
164
Margret A. Winzer, The History of Special Education: From Isolation to Integration (Gallaudet
University Press, 1993), 126.
"
81"
they are taught to speak with the lips and tongue.” Excited by the effect of teaching
the deaf to speak, Mann believed that “…a person, utterly deprived of the organs of
hearing, should be able to talk, seems almost to transcend the limits of possibility.”
The successful experiment of the Prussian schools turned him to reflect upon
what he considered as the gap in knowledge that had hindered America from
advancing its educational system. “In the countries last named, it seems almost absurd
to speak of the Dumb. There are hardly any dumb there; and the sense of hearing,
when lost, is almost supplied by that of sight.”165 Mann believed that the domination
of manual instruction in handling the uninstructed condition of deaf people in the
country was due to the absence of a rival method, and the sign language alone could
do nothing to integrate the deaf to a hearing society other than increasing their
isolated condition. “It is a great blessing to a deaf-mute to be able to converse in the
language of signs,” said Mann. But in a broader scope beyond the confinement of
institutions, he doubted the value of sign language in achieving the role of social
integration. “It is obvious that as soon as he [the deaf person] passes out of the circle
of those who understand that language, he is as helpless and hopeless as ever.” As
Mann further pointed out in the report, “the power of uttering articulate
sounds…alone restores him to society.”166 Here he was also suggesting that the
language of signs was no more than a barrier that hindered the deaf from conversing
in ways desirable to the mainstream hearing society.
Mann’s formulation of the general argument on the social influence of
pedagogical training became a typical expression of oralism in later times.
Specifically, the oralist way of teaching the deaf to speak relied on a different
understanding of deafness that assumed the deaf person had the same natural impulses
to express his feelings through vocal sound as people who could hear. Also, the
oralists held that if deaf people could be taught to learn to speak and read lips, then
the hearing people would “converse with them willingly.” This would in turn make
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
165
Horace Mann, “Seventh Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of Education,” The Common
School Journal 6, no. 5 (March 1, 1844): 75.
166
"
Ibid.
82"
the deaf more successful in learning how to read and write. More importantly, Mann
asserted that the oralist method of speech training could bring “an extraordinary
humanizing power” to the deaf in order to restore their connection with families and
their full participation in society.167 Here, the idea of speech being the most salient
character of the hearing came to measure the capacity of the deaf to become “more
human,” and this fundamental difference in conceptualizing deafness rendered
oralism a complete departure from the manualist approach, which moralized the idea
of deafness. Instead of recognizing an “alternative literacy” in sign language
communication, the oralists made clear their purpose of correcting the deviancy in
being not only “deaf,” but also “dumb.” They believed that moral correction as held
by religion could not suffice to change deafness as a category of disability, so
replacing sign language with the normality of speech was the only way for the
rehabilitation of the disabled body.
Mann’s opinions may have impressed the general public but not those who had
spent their lives educating the deaf. Shortly after its publication, Mann’s report was
reviewed by several major journals that unanimously pointed to the author’s
hyperboles in claiming the superiority of European educational system. The North
American Review said the article’s “several assertions are too unqualified.” In
particular, given the shortness of Mann’s stay abroad and his limited knowledge in
deaf instruction, an experienced writer from Mercantile Journal responded to the
report with quite strong objections: “It would not be at all surprising if a gentleman of
Mr. Mann’s intelligence, laboring under the disadvantages of having no practical
acquaintance with deaf-mute instruction, and perhaps not even acquainted with the
history and extensive literatures of the science, should form hasty and erroneous
conclusions on a subject for the most part.”168 Besides, the article also received full
attention from the American Asylum, which held that the necessity of proving the
practicability and effectiveness of teaching the deaf by means of articulation in the
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167
Ibid., 80.
168
Association of Masters of the Boston Public Schools, Remarks on the Seventh Annual Report of the
Hon. Horace Mann (Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1844), 25.
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country should be considered before any exaggeration was made. Even prestigious
institutions did not generally acknowledge the success of speech training. 169
Nevertheless, due to his high social status and influence in the sphere of public
education, Horace Mann’s idea of introducing the Prussian model in the establishment
of the common school system in America seemed to overshadow the particular
achievements in the field of deaf education.
Gallaudet’s response
The leading manual instructors immediately sensed an upcoming crisis. In May
13, 1844, Thomas Gallaudet, the leading voice of the American manual education,
made a formal reply to Horace Mann. In the letter, Gallaudet tried to delineate a
unique path taken by the American manualists that aimed to provide a referential
experience from which a necessary comparison could be made between the two
systems of deaf pedagogy. “You ought to be thoroughly acquainted with the system
of discipline and instruction pursued in our Asylum and other American institutions in
its details and practical results…in order to say which system is decidedly superior,”
as Gallaudet wrote, because “the teaching of the deaf-mutes to articulate…is but one
part of their education.”170 He then proceeded to suggest the essential parts of early
education as to meet the purpose of an effective moral government. These could be
summarized mainly in two general aspects, which incorporated both mental and
bodily discipline. The first was on the development of “the intellectual and moral
faculties of deaf mutes,” such as the teaching of written language and readings in
moral and religious knowledge, which could lead the deaf to a state of self-culture.
The second part was the engagement of the “social and public devotional exercises of
the Institution,” which included the ability of acquiring a trade or other skills of
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169
American School for the Deaf, Twenty-Eighth Report (Hartford: Hudson and Co. Printers, 1844).
170
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Letter to Hon. Horace Mann, Hartford, May 13th, 1844, in Humphrey,
209-10.
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becoming a self-sufficient labor in the society.171 All of these improvements, as
Gallaudet pointed out, could be achieved without being able to articulate verbally.
While he also admitted that the potential of combining articulation and signing had
not yet been fully recognized, he held to the necessity of applying sign language in
the early period of instruction. As he went on to say, “The complete education of
deaf-mutes…cannot be successfully carried on, especially during the early stages of
their instruction, without the use of that very distinct, intelligible, copious, and
beautiful language of natural signs, which nature has prompted them in their separate
and insulated state, originally to invent, in its more simple elements, and which
science and art have advanced to a high degree of perfection.”172 Without sign
language being the primary means of communication, the instructors cannot access to
the mind of the deaf students. The natural sign language was the necessary first-step
toward opening the imprisoned faculties of the deaf and to allow them getting into the
process of learning to articulate.
Gallaudet’s personal correspondence with Mann was published in the Annals as
the debate heated up in the 1860s. Following the letter, several leading
superintendents of the manual institutions were sent to Europe in 1844 for the purpose
of discovering the condition of foreign institutions. However, important figures such
as Lewis Weld of the American Asylum and Harvey Peet of the New York Institution
all brought back to their home institutions the proofs against Mann’s assertions.173 In
the Twenty-ninth Report of the American Asylum, which was published in 1845,
Lewis Weld presented his survey of more than thirty schools mainly from England,
French and German. He concluded firmly that despite of the local differences of
various institutions, they all shared the common principles regarding the ways of
manual instruction. “Everywhere,” he said, “the natural signs are the great means of
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171
Ibid., 210.
172
Gallaudet, Letter to Hon. Horace Mann, 211.
173
See William W. Turner, “Biographical Notice of Lewis Weld, esq.” American Annals of the Deaf
and Dumb 6, no. 3 (April 1854): 188. Also see, Winzer, The History of Special Education, 126.
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communicating instruction of the deaf and dumb.”174 Some cases regarding those
pupils who acquired a proficiency of reading lips showed the use of signs in
combination of articulation. “The articulation in these cases however, is only another
kind of signing,” as he noted, “for the sound accompanying it is quite lost to the
pupil.”175 As he further explained in the condition of articulation in the three major
systems in Europe, the English and French schools considered articulation as a tool of
retaining the function of speech only for the semi-deaf and mutes, who engaged to a
less extent the use of signs in their communication than other deaf students. However,
as some cases suggested, most of these articulating pupils “became able to read aloud
to the understandings of others, but might not understand themselves.”176
Measuring the impact of oralism: Voices from the manualists
Was Mann’s attack fatal to the legitimacy of the American system? As seen from
Weld and Peet’s report, the invalidity behind Mann’s claim further pointed to the
oralists’ misrepresentation of manualism around the time. Although Mann’s assertion
tended to sharpen the theoretical confrontation between manualism and oralism, sign
language and speech training were not mutually exclusive in the practical instructions
in both institutions. In fact, the German system commenced the teaching of
articulation in an early period, but it was the natural signs that had intervened the
entire course of instruction. As Weld quoted from the testimonies of the principals,
who uniformly came to admit the fact as follows.
“The communication of actual knowledge to the mind is by natural signs; and,
though these may, from the first, be accompanied by speech, the latter is
powerless for the great ends of instruction, except as associated with the
former.”177 (Italics in text)
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174
American School for the Deaf, Twenty-Ninth Report (Hartford: Hudson and Co. Printers, 1845), 30.
175
Ibid., 31.
176
Ibid., 69.
177
Ibid., 71.
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Therefore, the claim of oralism’s success in the Prussian schools was nothing but
an overstatement of the actual condition regarding the method of articulation. While
hearing educators considered the natural signs essential to deaf instruction in the
German system, those visitors who came to the schools with a keen interest in
articulation falsely perceived speech training as the only way of instructing the deaf.
According to some superintendents, the report on the “miraculous phenomenon” of
deaf individuals who achieved oral proficiency was misinformed. Because those who
could speak had retained some degrees of hearing or speech after they became deaf.
Therefore, the misconceptions were due to the lack of informed knowledge regarding
the state of articulation. As mentioned by a Prussian teacher, “people want to be
deceived, and the marvelous has so much enticement, that it would be next to cruelty
to destroy those erroneous notions which seem to make them so happy.” 178
Furthermore, it was common in Germany that “the deaf and dumb, after leaving
school, to relinquish a great degree of…the articulation they had acquired in
school.”179
Conversely, most of the manual institutions in America retained to some extent
the use of articulation since their founding. According to the account of Edward Allen
Fay, a senior fellow of the American Asylum, before the year 1864 when the first
private oral school was opened in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by Harriet Rogers, the
teaching of articulation was practiced tacitly as a supplement for training the specific
group of deaf students in nearly every manual institution of the deaf. The American
Asylum, for example, had always kept the training of articulation with the semi-deaf
and mutes, who were not considered the same class with those who were born deaf
and those who have lost their hearing by diseases. Also, Fay noted that the subject of
articulation “was investigated from time to time in its workings in other countries by
special agents of this and other schools.”180 His account suggested the fact that from
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178
Ibid., 78-79
179
Ibid., 108-109.
180
Fay, Histories of American Schools for the Deaf, Volume 1, 23.
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the beginning of manual instruction, institutions did not abandon the use of
articulation, but they kept the method as an alternative means of strengthening the
idea of bilingual teaching. The term “bilingualism” referred to the practice of
instructing American Sign Language (ASL) as a natural first language to all deaf
students in the deaf schools, and spoken and written English was taught in turn
through the medium of sign language.181 However, the practice was already common
and widely recognized in the early history of manual instruction. Early educators did
not render the two methods mutually exclusive. This idea again demonstrated that
manualism was not a monolithic system. Just as Rebecca Edwards argued in
agreement with the recent scholarship on early deaf history, the antebellum
bilingual-bicultural approach to deaf education was in fact the American innovation in
a system of education largely imported from France.182
Oralism took hold in the United States
Instead of denying the effectiveness of articulation, Weld chose to defend the role
of sign language by invoking the practice of bilingualism in the American Asylum.
Considering the method of articulation beneficial to those pupils who retained partial
function of speech, he proposed to add speech training to the curricula for the semi
deaf-mutes in the Asylum. Since it was worth experimenting in the American system,
the board of directors finally reached in agreement for the decision of adding the
instruction of speech and lip-reading into the formal curricula of manual
instruction. 183 In order to maintain the residential school system, the American
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181
The present model of Bilingual–bicultural education is a set of practices starting from the 1960s
based on James Cummins’ model of linguistic interdependence, which postulates that a single
cognitive process is shared by a first language and a second language acquisition. In today’s society
bilingualism in deaf education involves the acquisition and use of both a signed language, as a minority
language, and at the same time a majority-spoken language in its written form. Under this condition,
deaf students are perceived as bilinguial and bicultural. See Marc Marschark, Gladys Tang and Harry
Knoors, Bilingualism and Bilingual Deaf Education (Oxford University Press, 2014), 2.
182
Edwards, 3.
183
Ibid., 8.
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Asylum responded to challenges from oralism with such decision that sought to
compromise the threat and reclaim the legitimacy of manualism. As Fay pointed out,
after the decision was made, the number of pupils who received special instruction in
speech and lip-reading increased from thirty to forty by the end of the 1840s, which
suggested the persistent attempt in the spirit of the resolution.184
However, permitting the instruction of articulation was not a sign of retreat. The
manualists never surrender in front of the rising threat to sign language. On the
contrary, they actually benefitted from the gesture of bringing in the method of speech
training as a complement to the growth of the American system. As Collins Stone, the
later principle of the American Asylum, argued, “In the successful education of a
deaf-mute, two objects must be secured. We must obtain ready access to his
mind…and we must supply him with a medium of free and easy intercourse with the
world around him. The question between articulation and signs, as systems of
instruction, is simply which will secure both these results.”185 Built on the former
claims made in Gallaudet’s letter and observations written from the reports, Stone
tried to delineate the boundary of the American system in view of the function of
signs. In this regard, he entered the debate for the purpose of clarifying the position of
the manualist camp in a way that he believed as the best solution for coping with the
controversy. In other words, Stone hoped to marginalize the practice of articulation
inside manual education, and to gradually dissolve its importance before the rival
discourse could shape the practice.
In fact, such reaction from the manualist camp did serve as a preventive measure
that had kept a system of oralism from coming into shape at the time, and thus
prevented the oralists from gaining ascendency from the debates until the 1860s. As
Stone argued in the Annals, “The first objection to articulation as a system of
instruction is the difficulty of imparting it to the deaf and dumb.”186 By difficulty, he
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184
Fay, 24.
185
Collins Stone, “Articulation as a method for the instruction of the deaf and dumb,” American
Annals for the Deaf and Dumb 2, no. 2 (January, 1849): 108.
186
"
Stone, “Articulation,” 109.
89"
meant the laborious process of lip-reading as shown in the learning of German and
English, in which the sound of letters and words could never be fully understood by
the deaf. The second objection to articulation was regarding to the scarcity of
deaf-mutes who could actually benefit from it. As he mentioned the experiments
conducted on the congenitally deaf and those who became deaf by disease in the
Asylum, that “a great number are found…to make no perceptible progress in
articulation, and never to acquire a sufficient knowledge of language to be of any
practical use to them.”187 However, the little practical benefit of articulation to the
large class of deaf-mutes was by no means a sign of deficiency in their intellect. As
most cases demonstrated, the failure of imitating the sound of spoken language was
compensated for the fact that many deaf students did acquire a good knowledge in
written language.
Because there were claims from both sides that aimed to degrade the value of
natural signs to mere primitive gestures, Stone’s article also aimed to defense the
moralizing influence of sign language, and to object the claim that rendered deafness
a stigma of the savagery. Therefore the argument against the de-humanization of sign
language was necessarily a reinvigoration of sign language’s divine origin. As Stone
made his last argument against the system of articulation on the basis of religious
influence, he considered it the most serious of all. For one reason, articulation forced
to defer the early period of religious instruction for the deaf-mutes. Moreover, “it is
an exceedingly difficult, imperfect, and uncertain medium for conveying religious
truth to the minds of those whose ears are insensible to the sound of human voice.”188
In this regard, the defects of articulation not only restrained the pedagogical functions
of sign language, but also threatened the whole scheme of moral government. The
critiques of articulation thus reflected the general concern of the legality of the
American system as tied to the religious implications of signs. The individual
responses to the oralists’ initial attack also contributed to diffusing the religious
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187
Ibid., 232.
188
Ibid., 242.
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sensibility into the social discourse of constructing new meanings of deafness.
In review, Mann’s initial plan for introducing the rival model of oralism not only
aimed to improve deaf education, but also to disintegrate the institutional barriers
created by residential schools for advancing his agenda of common school reform.
This historical movement had transformed the mid-century pedagogical debates into a
multi-faceted discourse of social construction, in which the religious conception of
deafness was contested in the growing trend of secular and common education. The
implications revealed from the manualism-oralism controversy could be briefly
summarized as follows: First, the mainstreaming process of integrating deaf people
into hearing society fundamentally challenged the religious narrative that rendered
deaf people as abled signers of Christianity, and defined deafness as a category of
disability.
As a result, the formalization of speech training in major manual institutions
contributed to disintegrating the religious governance by signs. The ways in which
manualists responded to the challenge from oralism also reflected their worries of
coping the religious construction of deafness with the changing social perceptions of
sign language. Second, the network of “uncommon schools,” in which the early
manualists sought to institutionalize manual education as a way of achieving the
religious conversion of deaf students, was receding given the decline of financial
supports both from the state and from public charity. This was also due to the
“self-sufficient” model created by deaf residential schools that did not emphasize on
social integration. As the historian Jane Berger noted, reasons such as the high rates at
which deaf people married each other due to their linguistic affinity and the
vocational training implemented in the asylum all contributed to the growth of a
self-sufficient deaf community that rejected the antebellum stereotype of deafness as a
socio-economic dependency.189
Therefore, the rise of oralism exacerbated the struggle for pedagogy in the
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189
Jane Berger, “Uncommon schools: institutionalizing deafness in early-nineteenth century America,”
in Foucault and the Government of Disability, ed., Shelley L. Tremain (University of Michigan Press,
2005), 167.
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mid-nineteenth century by sharpening the binary notion of hearing/deaf-ness in the
emerging social discourse of deaf education. This in turn had brought in various
lenses through which the religious conception of deafness came to terms with the
increasing social appeal to a broader sense of social integration beyond institutional
boundary. The problem revealed from the early debates between manualism and
oralism was more profound than the immediate threat posed by Mann’s report,
because the prelude of the campaign against sign language reflected the incursion of
the notion of disability that sought to disrupt the religious governmentality of
deafness by aligning the rival discourse of oralism with the advancement of modern
science. The implications of this conceptual change could be found in the localities of
social and educational reform as discussed in the following cases.
3.2 Samuel Gridley Howe and the oralist practice of “moral discipline”: Teaching
Laura Bridgman
"
The oralist misrepresentation of sign language: Its pseudo-scientific root in
Phrenology
More than a decade before the American Civil War, some oralists began to
participate in the experiment of sign language on deaf individuals. Through scientific
observation, they categorized deafness as a disability that they sought to address
through physiological training and education. Today their practices are regarded by
most historians as largely biased due to their engagement with the proto-eugenic
understanding of deafness as a genetic defect that could be managed biologically.
Such conceptual change in the realm of deaf education was shaped by the early
practices of radical social reformers such as Horace Mann and Samuel Howe. “The
transatlantic appeal of eugenics,” as Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell argued,
“would rest primarily on its ability to offer up the power of classification to a host of
professions and cultural administrators rather than hoarding the technology within a
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disciplinary or national domain.”190
During the period from 1850 to 1860, oralism had been influenced by a popular
trend of scientific movement across the Atlantic known as Phrenology, which was a
classic pseudoscience founded by two German physicians named Franz Joseph Gall
and Johann Spurzheim. Phrenology claimed to measure the individual characters
according to the physiological analysis of the skull. In their visit to the “wild boy”
after Jean Itard’s experiment, 191 the two doctors concurred with the French
psychiatrist Philippe Pinel’s diagnosis of idiocy and concluded that it was due to the
defects of his shape of skull, which was depicted as “low, narrow forehead, with small,
deepest eyes and poorly developed cerebellum,” that resulted to the mental retardation
of the wild boy.192 This new approach to the physiological investigation of human
nature was the heir of the intellectual movement of the Idéologie, because it also
sought to explain the moral faculty in view of the physical constitution of the senses.
But unlike the Condillac’s sensationalism, the phrenologists held that the innate
features of the brain determined all faculties and organic functions. They believed that
the brain, being the most intricate design of God, should be articulated in view of the
natural laws of government. This in turn provided a religious justification for the
design of the social experiment.
Phrenology addressed the issue of human mental condition not on the basis of
metaphysics, but according to the scientifically informed pedagogy. As Gall argued in
his foundational work, the purpose of the phrenologists was to study the physiological
constitution of the human brain in order to demonstrate along the route of observation
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190
Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (University of Chicago
Press, 2010), 113.
191
Here it refers to the case of the French physician Jean-Marc Itard’s education of the wild boy
“Victor of Aveyron” from 1801 to 1806. The experiment shaped the early oralist perspective of seeing
the use of natural signs as an indication of primitiveness and mental deficiency. Though largely biased
due to the unfounded claim of the boy as a real deaf person, Itard’s experiment challenged the
manualist’s romanticization of sign language and later influenced the phrenological interpretation of
deafness as a sign of “feeble-mindedness.” See Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Harvard
University Press, 1976).
192
Franz Joseph Gall and G. J. Spurzheim, Anatomie et physiologie du systême nerveux en général, et
du cerveau en particulier (F. Schoell, 1818), 35.
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what God had revealed to us by means of cerebral organization.193 This assertion
implied the assumption of rendering Christian morality as the foundation of scientific
inquiries to the human mind. The idea of unifying science and liberal theology was
later exposited by George Combe, who developed “a practical Christianity in which
human actions were dictated by knowledge of God’s will as revealed in the laws of
nature.”194 In his book The Constitution of Man, which was published in 1828, the
leading figure of the phrenological movement summarized the principles of applying
the grand design of natural laws to the moral and intellectual government of the world.
As Combe pointed out, “the man who cultivates his intellect, and habitually obeys the
precepts of Christianity, will enjoy with himself a fountain of moral and intellectual
happiness, which is the appropriate reward of that obedience.”195 In saying this, what
he wished to do was to examine from practical observation and reflection on the
physical and organic function the moral constitution of the human mind. Because “it
is presumable that the same Divine power…which instituted the eye, and adapted its
structure to light, presided also over the institution and adaptations of the internal
organs of the mind.”196 As held by Combe, this knowledge of the independent
operation of the natural laws could serve to dispel the confusion in the religious
scheme of moral government.
During 1838 to 1840, Combe came to America for three times and lectured in the
study of Phrenology, which had become a widespread popular movement at the time.
In the third phase of his lecturing in the state of New York, Combe visited the
American Asylum at Hartford with Thomas Gallaudet and was particularly interested
in the manual education of the deaf. He recalled in his account that Gallaudet rejected
the claim made by Harriet Martineau that the deaf were also mentally defective.
Instead, he mentioned that he saw the deaf students “perform a variety of exercises,
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193
Franz Joseph Gall, On the Functions of the Brain and of Each of Its Parts (Marsh, Capen & Lyon,
1835), 43-44.
194
Stephen Tomlinson, Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social
Thought (University of Alabama Press, 2013), 112.
195
George Combe, The Constitution of Man (Marsh, Capen, Lyon and Webb, 1841), 23.
196
Ibid., 24.
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indicating great intelligence and mental resources.”197 This evidence of mental ability
clearly demonstrated that the loss of one or more senses did not necessarily result to
idiocy.
According to Combe, the physiognomy, or natural language was rendered in
Phrenology as a branch of philosophy of the mind. To his interest, “Mr. Gallaudet,
without the aid of Phrenology, but from extensive practical observation and
experience, had been led to the conclusion that these natural signs may be taught with
manifest advantage to children in general, as a branch of education.”198 Combe was
impressed by the fact that the instruction of the deaf by sign language could help
facilitate the mental development of the mind. He then explained from a
phrenological point of view that Gallaudet learned sign language from his experience
with the Africans of the Amistad, and learned from their history and opinions, and
afterwards ascertained the correctness of his interpretation of their language. As for
the improvement of mental function of the deaf, Combe explained, “In exhibiting the
natural language of any faculty, the faculty itself is called into action, and teaching the
natural language will thus become an important auxiliary in training children to
virtue.”199 Combe further suggested that sign language was the same with that taught
by phrenologists, because both were drawn from nature. In view, the experience
drawn from the American Asylum was suffice to prove the sign language as an
alternative communication method for the deaf, and the employment of vision and
physical movement could enhance the connection between the brain and the external
world.
However, the achievement of Gallaudet’s manual instruction did little to
convince Combe of manualism’s superiority over oralism, since it depended much on
the external senses rather than connecting them with the scientific observation of the
internal mind. In fact, what fascinated Combe during his visit was his engagement
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197
George Combe, Notes on the United States Of North America during A Phenological Visit in
1838-39-40 (Edinburgh, 1840), 121.
198
Comb, Notes, 93.
199
Ibid., 97.
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with the interesting experiment conducted by Samuel Gridley Howe, who faithfully
applied the theory of Phrenology at the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston.
Accompanied by both Howe and Mann upon his visit to the institution, Combe was
impressed with Howe’s achievements in teaching the blind students to communicate
through reading, cyphering, and demonstrating mathematic propositions in dark
rooms.
In particular, Combe mentioned the spectacular achievement of Laura Bridgman,
a deaf-blind girl by birth and was about nine or ten years of age. As Combe described
in his journal, “She (Laura Bridgman) has grown considerably stature since last year,
and I observe a distinct increase in the size of her brain. The coronal, or moral
region…has become larger…in proportion to the animal region. The organs of
domestic affections are amply developed, and in the best feminine proportions. …The
anterior lobe of the brain also is large, and both the knowing and reflecting
departments are well developed.” 200 His phrenological observation of Laura
Bridgman demonstrated to us of a typical way of assigning the physiological parts of
the brain to their functions in human disposition. Regarding the way of examining the
mental development of Bridgman, Combe also explained how the idea of “sex” was
successfully taught through education. He noted that when he placed his hand on her
head, she was troubled and removed it; but she was not interested in removing a
female hand. Also, he mentioned that her natural language of countenance was
facilitated by the finger-alphabet, in which she was able to present her greetings as
she wrote “Laura glad see Combe. 201 These evidences, as held by Combe, all
suggested the success of Phrenology in applying to the pedagogical practice of
improving the mental state of the persons with defects in their senses.
By the end of his visit, Combe concluded to his American audience that only in a
democratic society could men achieve the benefit from freely exercising the organs of
the brain. However, he also addressed to the American people the danger of excessive
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
200
Ibid., 187.
201
Combe, Notes, 187-88.
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liberty. “Our affective faculties, both animal and moral, are in themselves blind
impulses,” said Combe, “There must be government, and enlightened government
before happiness can be attained.”202 (Italics added) He also reminded the fellow
social reformers of the country that education is the key to guide the faculties in the
right path. “I desire to see in this country a moral and intellectual machinery put into
vigorous action…and to train the young to impose the restraint on themselves, and to
act self-control…under the yoke of morality, religion, and reason.”203 This very
conception of the scientific government of society, which emphasized on educating
the individual brain in order to achieve the better function of social action, was a
scientific principle as well as moral imperative for the social reformers.
Framing “moral discipline”: Howe’s educational philosophy
Samuel Gridley Howe was known as a renowned social reformer, abolitionist,
physician and keen advocate for the instruction of the deaf and blind. In the field of
deaf education, he was also considered a life-long collaborator of Horace Mann in the
campaign for oralism. As the director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, he had
earned his reputation in the scientific community with his famous experiments with
Laura Bridgman. By turning her deaf-blindness into a scientific observation on human
nature, Howe successfully applied the principles of Phrenology into the realm of deaf
education, and revealed to the public what had left unanswered in Itard’s story of the
wild boy and the meaning of a scientific understanding of human nature. Historically,
as noted by the historian Ernest Freeberg, Howe’s interpretation of the education of
Laura Bridgman should be situated in a historical context of antebellum reform, in
which the liberal reformers such as Howe and Mann attempted to combat the
traditional pedagogy as rigidly ordered by the religious pessimism of human nature,
and to turn a wide array of liberal causes to showcase the “moral discipline” as a new
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
202
Ibid., 401.
203
Ibid., 404-05.
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form of social correction.204
On the other hand, Howe’s phrenological experiment of deaf-blindness was also
a compliment to religion. When he remarked about education and religion in his
lecture to the Boston Phrenological Society, Howe framed his argument in view of the
religious idea of “moral government.” As he pointed out, the faculties of perception,
which God had given to human, could be “unnatural” when they became diseased or
ceased to function. Under this condition, “the individual is not a free moral agent,”
and “by neglecting or abusing his corporeal organization, God will punish him.”205
Therefore, Howe’s practice of moral discipline was a divergence from the
evangelical doctrine of moral government since he sought to establish a new moral
standard based on the scientific laws of human mind. As a disciple of Combe, Howe
believed that the science of Phrenology had proven to the world that the benevolence
of God created the human nature with the complexity of physical, mental, and
spiritual faculties. “Phrenology,” as defined by Howe, “is a system of moral
philosophy which distinctively recognizes the innate religious sentiments of man.” As
he further postulated, “[A] true phrenologist is, and must be religious, he perceives
that the many religious institutions of the day are of such a nature as obviously to
induce men to run counter to the principles of his science…” 206 When Howe
criticized the religious institutions for their “neglecting and abusing of the physical
nature of man,”207 he probably had in mind the repressive model established by the
deaf residential schools. Also, he may logically conclude that the “religious rites”
conducted by signs inside the manual institutions did nothing to contribute to the
intellectual improvement of the deaf people.
Howe maintained that only the scientific insights into the brain could help
improve the defective conditions of the senses. In this way, the effective moral
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204
Ernest Freeberg, The Education of Laura Bridgman: First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn
Language (Harvard University Press, 2001), 4-5.
205
Samuel Gridley Howe, A Discourse on the Social Relations of Man (Marsh, Capen & Lyon., 1837),
4.
206
Ibid., 28.
207
Ibid., 11.
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discipline could impose on the animal nature of human being. More importantly,
Howe also based on this phrenological notion to interpret the regulation of social
relations. “All the institutions and regulations of the society, which is built upon this
social principle should be formed with a view to the development of all the
propensities, faculties, and sentiments of man in their due proportion, and in their
natural order…should cultivate, and develop his physical, moral, and intellectual
nature.” 208 Under this conception, the evolutionist perspective of society as
encapsulated in the brain further suggested a new morality as determined by religion
and fulfilled by science. As Howe concluded, “the government and control of the
whole comes the moral and religious nature of the man, with its organs, where the
governing ones should naturally be, on the top of the head.”209 Howe’s idea of moral
discipline was deeply grounded in religion, as the biographer Harold Schwartz noted,
but he wished to see Christianity purified of its fanaticism and all observances
injurious to physical health or cerebral functions.210
Given this, we could briefly summarize Howe’s formulation of “moral discipline”
as an oralist in comparison with his manualist counterpart Thomas Gallaudet. Like
Gallaudet, Howe saw the necessity for a deaf person to practice corporeal discipline
in order to freely exercise his or her natural function of the mind. Differing from
Gallaudet’s reinterpretation of signs in the theological framework of moral
government, Howe’s educational philosophy places the restoration of deafness in a
biologically defined rationale that requires no effort in generating an “unnatural
medium” to activate the connections between the physical and the moral. In his view,
signing could only impose an external constraint of the physical organizations of the
deaf body, whereas the “natural” speech alone could restore their mental function.
Therefore his scientific inquiry challenged the repressive nature of the religious moral
governance and relied its liberal ends on the internal awakening of the deaf mind.
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208
Ibid., 7.
209
Ibid., 8.
210
Harold Schwartz, “Samuel Gridley Howe as Phrenologist,” The American Historical Review 57, no.
3 (April, 1952): 648.
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Teaching Laura Bridgeman: from signs to speech
Guided by the principles of Phrenology and the faith in God, Howe envisioned
the education of Laura Bridgman as a testimony of how science could restore the
physical damage caused by deaf-blindness and retrieve back the “mental deficiency.”
The experiment was vital for confirming his idea of moral discipline, since it relied on
the cultivation of the intellectual faculty in order to set her imprisoned organic
functions free as a moral human being. When Bridgman was first sent to the Perkins
Institution under the custody of Howe in 1837, he began to contemplate the means of
accessing her mind. As he presumed that the normal functions of her brain were
hindered or in a dormant state, Howe followed the phrenological theory of Combe to
make a practical first-step in her language teaching, which was considered to be the
particular organ for the engagement of the intellectual faculty. He was well aware that
before Bridgman was sent to the institute, she had already shown a preference of
communicating by her own language of signs. Howe also recognized the fact that
Bridgman was able to develop on the basis of the natural signs if left alone, just as
other deaf pupils in the American Asylum.
Therefore, at the beginning of his instruction, Howe did not intervene her
employment of natural signs. Instead, he tried to examine the role of signing in
affecting Bridgman’s mind. “There was one of two ways to be adopted,” as Howe
wrote in his Ninth Annual Report, “either to go on and build up a language of signs on
the basis of the natural language which she had already herself commenced; or to
teach her the purely arbitrary language in common use: that is, to give her a sign for
every individual thing, or to give her a knowledge of letters, by the combination of
which she might express her idea of the existence, and the mode and condition of
existence, of everything.”211 He chose the latter and the more difficult way because
he thought it would be more effectual in activating Bridgman’s mental function.
Howe made this decision in view of his previous work with another deaf-blind
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211
"
Samuel G. Howe, Ninth Annual Report of the Perkins Institution (Boston, 1841), 24.
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girl named Julia Brace, who was educated in the American Asylum with the
cultivation of the natural signs. By the time Brace was sent to the Perkins Institution
at 1842, she had demonstrated an “unfavorable symptom” regarding her mental
activity. As Howe described, “her inexpressive face…and a certain passivity denoting
habitual inattention to external objects, which contrast strongly with Laura
Bridgman.”212 The failure of instructing Julia Brace, as he concluded, was due to the
reliance on the natural signs, whose simple and primitive character hindered the
mental development of the woman at a quite mature age. Later, Combe also supported
this point with his phrenological description of the physiological condition of Julia
Brace. “The anterior lobe of her brain is well developed, indicating natural intellectual
talent, but the coronal region is rather deficient…and she has received little
instruction.”213
All the evidences confirmed Howe’s belief in experimenting the arbitrary signs
with Bridgman’s linguistic faculty. In doing so, he first decided to teach Bridgman the
tangible manual alphabet, which could be activated by her remaining sense of touch.
Drawn from his reading of Diderot’s treatise on the blind, Howe stressed the
importance of cultivating the sense of touch in order to improve the function of others.
“The touch is capable of being perfected as that of the hearing,” as he noted from
previous experiments from the European institutions, “and the system of letters could
be learned much quicker by the blind children…if tried in great numbers.”214 Surely
the secret of Bridgman’s success belied the laborious process of repetition and
imitation, as Howe started to teach Bridgman by rendering to her simple objects in
different shapes, and then tried to associate letters with each object she felt after
detached from the corresponding ones. “The process had been mechanical,” as he
described, “but now the truth began to flash upon her—her intellect began to
work—she perceived that here is the way by which she could herself make up a sign
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212
Samuel G. Howe, “Julia Brace,” in Tenth Annual Report of the Perkins Institution (Boston, 1842),
43.
213
Combe, Notes, 122-123.
214
Samuel G. Howe, “Education of the Blind,” The North American Review (July, 1833): 10.
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of anything that was in her own mind; and at once her countenance lighted up with a
human expression…it was an immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of
union with other spirits! ... I saw the great obstacle was overcome…”215 This early
linguistic breakthrough in the use of signs had proven more successful than Itard’s
experiment with Victor, and hence made Howe especially convinced of it as a piece
of evidence of the innate capacity of the mind.
In 1843, He further pointed out in the Eleventh Annual Report that Bridgman’s
natural tendency of using the language of signs was a proof of the activation of the
mental state in corresponding with certain linguistic faculty. Since the manual
alphabet had become the natural language of presenting the idea of her mind, Howe
believed that the audible signs could be equally learned in association with her vocal
organs. Since he believed that vocal speech was contemplated by nature, and was
specially fitted by the organs, Howe contended, “All people, as they rise out of
savagedom and pass through barbarism, follow the instinct or disposition to express
themselves by audible sounds.” 216 In view, his idea of the natural language
represented an early version of the evolutionist perspective that sought to discredit the
humanizing function of sign language. This was probably formed on the basis of
Itard’s experiment of sign language with the wild boy, and developed into the oralist
argument for campaigning against manualism. Just as Baynton pointed out, this
“linguistic atavism,” which portrayed sign language as a throwback to savagery, had
led to the oralist charge of the use of sign language as damaging the mind of the deaf
people.217
Therefore, as Howe noted in the report, “it is of the kind we should bestow on
mechanical contrivances for imitating the human voice; and it would seem to be as
wise to teach a child to talk by directing him to contract this muscle, as to teach the
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215
Howe, Ninth Annual Report, 26
216
Laura E. Richards, Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe: The servant of humanity, Vol. 2
(D. Estes & Company, 1909), 55.
217
"
Baynton, “Savages and Deaf-mutes,” 139, 145, 155.
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deaf-mute the use of the different parts of speech.”218 Different from the manualists
in the American Asylum, who would never think of retrieving the function of speech
by relating the faculty with its counterpart of the brain, Howe’s phrenological vision
made him realized the value of developing Bridgman’s ability of speech. “Now as she
cannot hear a sound, as she never attempts, like deaf and dumb persons to attract the
attention of others by making a noise, it follows that, impelled by the natural tendency
of the human mind to attach signs to every thought, she selects the natural vehicle for
the expression of it, and exercises the vocal organs, but without any definite view of
producing an effect.219
Given the fact that Howe had observed from time to time that Bridgman often
displayed the tendency of uttering sound when she was aware of the presence of
others, he came to affirm his premise that it is possible to substitute Bridgman’s
finger-spelling and knitting with the audible signs of speech. “I knew that Bridgman
must have this innate desire and disposition,” said Howe, “although by reason of lack
of sight and hearing she could not follow it in the usual way, and imitate the sounds
made by others…she would readily adopt any substitute which should be made
comprehensible to her in her dark and still abode.”220 Although progress was gained
very slowly through constant repetition and imitation, Howe did find his experiment
satisfying regarding the association of Bridgman’s vocal organs with her mind. The
nasal sound Bridgman uttered when she saw someone were evidently signs affixed to
each person. As Howe suggested, “these noises become so intimately associated with
the persons, that sometimes when she is sitting by herself, and the thought of a friend
comes up in her mind, she utters his ‘noise’…as she calls her his name.”221
The vocal sounds no doubt demonstrated the innate capacity of Bridgman’s
linguistic faculty, but the problem came with its rude and imperfect quality. Moreover,
because of her deafness, she could not perceive the response of her utterance from
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218
Samuel G. Howe, Eleventh Annual Report of the Perkins Institution (Boston, 1843), 27.
219
Ibid., 28.
220
Richards, Letters and Journals, 56.
221
Howe, Eleventh Annual Report, 28.
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others. These two great obstacles seemed to prevent her inarticulate sound from
becoming a real phonetic language. As she gradually improved her language skills in
finger alphabet, Howe encouraged Bridgman to engage more in this socially
acceptable medium other than indulging her with the grating voice. As observed by
the famous educator and lexicographer Francis Lieber, “Laura was positively
interrupted in the formation of her imperfect and elementary phonetic language…in
order to make her a being of intercourse in our society.”222 However, the endeavor of
improving Bridgman’s vocal capacity never stop, since the oralists at first believed
that speech could be activated along with the development of the language of signs.
This linguistic relativism was fully expressed in Lieber’s works, which suggested that
Bridgman had demonstrated the “habitual symphenomena” as she engaged her finger
spelling with the spontaneous vocal sounds uttered at the same time.223
Therefore, we could sense a striking similarity of linguistic perception between
the precursors in the movement of oralism and their manualist counterparts. Since
they believed the entry of “spoken signs” and “manual signs” both denote to the
definition of “language” as “God-given” where ideas are communicated “by signs”
and proceeds to a long passage on the “visible signs” of the deaf, the underlying
assumption of a moral nature embedded in signs was shared on both sides. 224
However, differing from the manualist notion of cultivating the morality in sign
language as a way to regenerate the “lost hearing” from God, the oralists held speech
as the only way of correcting the deficiency in the physiological constitution of the
deaf mind. In consistent with Howe’s Tenth Annual Report, Lieber argued that
Bridgman’s habitual engagement in vocal sounds proved its particular function of
expressing the mind that the sign language could not simply replace. This further led
him to conclude, “The deaf-mutes…must be able to attain to a complete phonetic
language. For…the impulsive utterances which form the incipient elements of
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222
Francis Lieber, “On the Vocal Sounds of Laura Bridgeman,” Smithsonian Contributions to
Knowledge 2 (Smithsonian Institution, 1851): 12.
223
Lieber, 13.
224
Anderson, Linguistics in America, 116.
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language…can be evolved by constantly repeated and enduring vocal intercourse.”225
The importance of speech training in the physical and moral correction of
deaf-mutism was also emphasized in Mann’s Seventh Annual Report, in which he
combined his foreign experience with the local practice drawn from Howe’s
experiment with both speech and sign language. In claiming that deaf people possess
the natural tendency for expressing their feelings by sounds, Mann confirmed his
theory by noting the case of Laura Bridgman. He also mentioned the importance of
training the deaf-mute to “read language upon the lips and the muscles of the face,”
because in darkness “they are cut off with that intercourse with humanity”.226
This line of argument based on the oralist perspective of Laura Bridgman’s
deaf-blindness reflected the fact that speech training may not be the only way to
instruct the minds of the deaf and blind, but it was definitely the most desirable
method to render them acceptable in the mainstream society. As Howe later addressed
in front of the Board of State Charities in Massachusetts, “Speech is essential for
human development, without it full social communion is impossible.” Regarding the
limited value of manual instruction, he argued, “The rudimentary and lower part of
language, or pantomime, is open to mutes; but the higher and finer part of speech is
forever closed.” As he continued, “To be mute…implies tendency to isolation.” The
greatest obstacle for social integration of the deaf and blind, in his view, came from
the various systems of sign language. “Finger language…can never become our
vernacular,” said Howe, “the special method tends more to segregate him and his
fellows from ordinary society.”227
Therefore, the oralists like Howe and Mann had shaped their understanding of
deaf education mainly based on the evolutionist theory in the nascent stage of social
progressivism, and they turned their focus on the campaign against sign language. In
their minds, the improvement of the mental and social ability of the deaf persons
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225
Ibid.
226
Mann, Seventh Annual Report, 79-80.
227
Samuel G. Howe, Second Annual report of the Board of State Charities of Massachusetts (Boston,
1865), liv.
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should really depend on the transformation of deaf culture from a primitive stage of
signing toward the civilized speech.
The early success in Bridgman’s language education had experienced a
transformation from physiological experiment to a psychological, or moral inquiry of
the minds of “others.” As Freeberg noted, Howe was consciously seeking to
demonstrate the case of Laura Bridgman as the key for solving the century-long
debate on the role that senses play in determining human nature, for he believed it
was a clear refutation to the Lockean idea of the “blank state” of the infant mind, as
well as a proof for the mind over matter.228 Given this, Howe wanted to prove to the
public that the moral nature of the deaf and blind persons was gradually shaped by the
improvement of the intellectual faculties through training.
Like his manualist counterparts, Howe chose religion as the testimony for his
moral discipline. In the case of Laura Bridgman, he wished to see that the sense of
religion could be received naturally by the development of her physical, intellectual
and moral faculties, which were considered by Phrenology as “the last and noblest
fruits of the growing mind.”229 Howe tried various attempts during the years to lead
Bridgman’s thoughts to the feeling of God, and those attempts were often made in
ways of questioning her about the spiritual existence. However, instead of forcing her
with the teaching of religious creed, Howe’s liberal stand against orthodox Calvinism
made him decide that the best way to guide Bridgman to the religious truth was to
develop her mental powers. “One can look only to the book of nature,” said Howe,
“and that seems to teach that we should prepare the soul for loving and worshipping
God, by developing its powers, and making it acquainted with his wonderful and
benevolent works, before we lay down rules of blind obedience.”230 In view, his
Unitarian faith as well as the phrenological conception of human nature revealed to
him that the moral influence of religion would spontaneously emerge from the
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228
Freeberg, The Education of Laura Bridgman, 39-41.
229
Ibid., 132.
230
Richards, 76.
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maturing mind where the formation of natural language is associated with the organic
functions of speech.
However, the result did not successfully come as expected in the end. The
abstract idea of God and his spiritual existence was proved no more than an imagined
person, or personal friend whom Bridgman often pictured in her mind. As Howe
suggested, “I am aware that many will say it is impossible that Bridgman, ignorant as
she is, should have by herself conceived the existence of God, because it is said that
of the thousands of deaf-mutes who have been received into the institutions of this
country, no one ever arrived at the truth unaided.”231 However, as compared to the
religious education of the deaf-mutes who were indoctrinated by the revealed religion,
Howe argued that Bridgman’s religious instruction had preserved the very idea of the
liberal faith.
By the end of 1840s he finally discontinued the endeavor of religious instruction,
since he concluded that Bridgman’s failure of attaining the knowledge of spirituality
was due to the immature state of mental development. Though he lamented the social
convention that forced men to comply with the orthodox notions of God, Howe did
articulate a new understanding of deaf-blindness based on the practice of moral
discipline. In his view, the fundamental principle of moral education should rely on
the betterment of the physical condition, in which the laws of nature provided the
possibility of overcoming the biological defects of the deaf and blind. Unlike the
orthodox Christians who rendered the infirmities of deafness and blindness as signs
for the original sin, Howe tried to provide a scientific explanation based on the
concept of heredity. “Blindness, or a strong constitutional tendency to it, is very often
hereditary.” As he argued, “the laws of nature…send outward ailments as signs of
inward infirmities.”232 Howe believed that a deeper consideration behind the bodily
infirmities was to understand the defects, such as deafness and blindness, as
symptoms or local manifestations of the general cause of sufferings in the mind.
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231
Ibid., 84.
232
Samuel G. Howe, Sixteenth Annual Report of the Perkins Institution (Boston, 1848), 50.
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Therefore he proposed to take scientific inquiries into the mental and moral powers of
the individual for better instructing the brain and strengthening its associations with
different faculties.
Conclusion
"
In review, Howe’s idea of moral discipline, as informed by the hybrid notions of
liberal religion and the pseudo-scientific theory of human nature, failed to represent
the transformative function of education yet subjected to a false perception of
biological determinism. “Can any thing be done, either to lessen the number of blind
persons born into the world, or to improve the physical condition of those who must
be born?” asked Howe, “I think that much can be done in both ways. The number of
persons born blind will be diminished when the hereditary transmission of tendency
to bodily infirmities is well understood.”233 Since Howe believed that it was the
hereditary transmission of biological defects that hindered the progress to elimination,
his social understanding of deaf-blindness inevitably entailed the eugenic solution to
disability. His idea of social reform thus held in agreement with the later treatment of
biological defects as symptoms of social disease that should be eliminated by birth
control.
However, he considered oralism the final means to shape the morality of the deaf
and blind. In his education of Laura Bridgeman, Howe’s experimentation of the
organic functions of speech relied more on the deaf-blind individual’s internal
perception than Gallaudet’s way of bringing moral discipline to a community of
signing where each individuals should follow the order imposed and regulated by the
use of sign language. So it is apparent that Howe’s educational philosophy necessarily
places the understanding of deafness in the mainstream view that renders the deaf
person as singular existence of deviance inside the hearing society, whereas Gallaudet
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233
"
Ibid., 51.
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sees deafness as a plural form that needs to be accommodated within the Christian
society. In other words, like the manualists who devoted to the religious education of
the deaf, the scientific impulse had driven the early oralists to see deaf education as a
way of achieving social integration. Unlike the manualists who masked the social
implications of disability by creating a regenerative understanding of deafness
through the religious practice of sign language, the oralists refused to see it as a
linguistic alternative and misconceived manualism as a threat to social segregation.
The early rise of oralism also featured the movement of secular education.
Mann’s common school system increasingly challenged the network of residential
schools. As Mann and Howe advocated their educational philosophy on major
publications such as The Common School Journal, they not only revealed to the
public the phrenological proof of deafness as blindness as social deviance, but also
attracted national attention to advance the educational reform of the disabled children
in normal schools. Specifically, the State of Massachusetts was among the first to
practice the ideal of transforming deaf education from the system of manual
institutions into the public schools for the scientifically proven methods of speech
training and lip-reading.
"
109"
Conclusion
Following Mann’s initial attack on manualism, Howe’s education of Laura
Bridgman effected a conceptual change in perceiving deaf education. The oralist
experiment concluded that deafness was a sign of mental defect that should be
corrected by speech training. However, this assertion was unsubstantiated. Since
Howe misconceived Bridgman’s meaningless vocal sound as proof of the internal
awakening of her mind, his objection against sign language was fallacious. Besides,
his reasoning of the scientific “moral discipline” appropriated the religious influence
manualists sought to retain in sign language, and ironically fired back to claim the
central place of speech. Falsely guided by Phrenology, Howe claimed that sign
language was “unnatural” because it was an arbitrary reaction to the hearing defect.
As he argued, signing as a disciplined bodily movement was also an external
constraint to the deaf mind. In contrast, only speech is “natural,” because it was the
organic function of the human body. Therefore he claimed that speech training alone
could restore the mental function of deafness. Led by Howe’s experiment, the oralist
reaction against sign language had contributed to the increasing diffusion of
manualism into the broader spheres of hearing society. As a result, the “hearing line”
took the idea of deafness beyond the institutional shields and diffused the religious
narrative into the socially constructed discourse of deaf education.
After Howe’s appointment as the president of the Board of State Charities in
1863, he launched the campaign for establishing the model of oral education in
Massachusetts. In his public address, Howe recapitulated Mann’s Seventh Annual
Report and argued for the advancement of a new system of oral education in the spirit
of science. By refuting the previous responses made by Gallaudet and his fellow
manualists of the American Asylum, Howe argued, “The friends of the system of
articulation do not believe that it ever can have a fair trial in the Hartford
school…because the managers have the whole power in their hands, and being
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honestly and firmly wedded to the old system, will feel obliged to adhere it.”234 In his
view, Gallaudet’s American system was too ingrained in the preservation of sign
language, and thus unable to comprehend the meaning of social integration.
By bringing oralism into the education of the deaf, the society could counter “the
evils arising out of congregation of great numbers of persons of like infirmity.” As
Howe believed, the institutional aggregation of the deaf people could only contribute
to the growth of infirmity. Deafness and blindness were such manifestations of the
“morbid tendencies,” Howe argued, because “they are strengthened by associating
closely and persistently with others having the like infirmity.”235 Here, Howe was
attacking the so-called “asylum life” that had created a large group of deaf inmates
whose deviance was collectively defined by the use of sign language. In this sense,
the model of the American Asylum was a dangerous incursion to hearing society,
because it had fostered the undesired growth of a great number of residential deaf
communities under the religious influence of manual education and ritualized
practices. As Howe claimed, “Living many years in such a congregation strengthens
that tendency to isolation which grows out of the infirmity of mutism, and intensifies
other morbid tendencies.”236
Finally, this eugenic understanding of disability led him to conclude that the
purpose of oral education was to correct the deviance by reducing its kind through the
process of integration in the mainstream hearing society. “They ought to be lessened,
not strengthened, through education.” Thus in Howe’s conception of social reform,
those people with defects should be prevented from developing into the various forms
of deviance. Deafness as a kind of social deviance was dangerous, Howe argued,
because it would become a dependency of the mainstream hearing society. As he
quoted from the Emersonian teaching of individualism, the deaf-mutes trained in the
American Asylum lacked the very knowledge of “self-reliance.” However, “this
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234
Howe, Second Annual Report, lviii.
235
Ibid., lii.
236
Howe, lx.
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[self-reliance] is especially needful for those laboring under an infirmity, [because]
the natural tendency of which is to isolate them from other men, and from ordinary
social relations.”237
The oralist stigmatization of deafness as a “dependent class” was fully executed
in 1883, when Alexander Graham Bell, the leading architect of the oralist social
engineering, addressed the idea in a paper delivered to the American Academy of
Sciences. Later, Bell reasserted in his memoir that deafness constituted to a threat to
America’s wellbeing. He reasoned that through generations of deaf intermarriage, the
United States would produce a large genetically deficient class that mobilizes more
social resources than those who could hear.238 The only solution, as Bell proposed,
was to force deaf children to use spoken English, banish sign language from
classroom, mix hearing and deaf students in common schools, and prevent deaf
people from marrying each other by legislative enactment.239 Finally until 1900, the
term “deaf” no longer simply connoted the antebellum ideas of “heathen” and
“unfortunate class.” It came to mean those deaf individuals who were not only
isolated from religious truth and education, but also “isolated” as a “pathological class”
from the mainstream. In this regard, the oralist advocacy of social integration
challenged the manualist conception of deafness by diffusing the religious mode of
moral government into an individual-oriented social discipline.
In review, the conceptual divergence in perceiving deaf education could be
summarized by their metaphorical depictions of deafness as “otherness.” On the
oralist side, Howe alienated the deaf people as “them” from the hearing as “us,” and
tried to make “them” more like “us.”240 This assumption led the oralist to conclude
that even those who in favor of the methodical signs could not be accepted by the
hearing, since sign language is fundamentally different from speech. In contrast,
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
237
Ibid.
238
Alexander Graham Bell, Memoir upon the Formation of Deaf Variety of the Human Race (National
academy of sciences, 1884), 3-4.
239
Ibid., 45-48.
240
Edwards, 187.
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Gallaudet and his fellow manualists held the deaf person not only as “heathen,” but
also as “heathen among us.” 241 Therefore the religious construction of deafness
implies a cultural identity constituted by the act of signing, which masked the binary
notions of hearing/deaf-ness inside the institutional framework. The training of the
deaf into being a Christian entails the universal logic of salvation, but the use of sign
language had indeed rendered deaf people visibly different. Given that, neither
oralists nor manualists had treated the biological difference of deaf people equally,
because both intended to render deafness in the hearing-centered rationale for shaping
the discourse.
Specifically, the crux of interpreting the morality of sign language lies in
manualism’s uneasy position with the idea of “naturalness.” In Gallaudet’s time, the
religious framing of “natural signs” conveyed both the “uncultured” bodily movement
and the disciplinary influence that education (i.e. the “cultivated signs”) affected on
deaf individual’s capacity of expressing ideas. After the oralist intervention, the idea
of naturalness no longer suggested the distinct value of sign language in the
constitution of deafness. Since the oralists observed that deaf people also make vocal
sounds, they mistakenly forced them to give up signing and denigrated it as a sign of
savagery. Conversely, manualists considered the incomprehensible deaf voice equal
to grimace, because they are both “against nature.”
Following the mid-century debates over sign language, manualists responded to
the controversy with the compromising gesture of inviting speech training in their
curricula and assisted in restoring those hard of hearing back to society. In coping
with the idea of bilingual-biculturalism, their uneasiness in asserting sign language’s
naturalness was apparent. As the manualists saw deaf people’s engagement with the
visual/gestural as natural, the oralists considered the oral/aural natural to the hearing.
Since both of them invoked the concept of nature and divided the term according to
their own, the struggle of naturalness only sharpened the binary notion of
hearing/deaf-ness. In 1867, the founding of Clarke School for the Deaf in
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
241"
Gallaudet, Sermon On The Duties And Advantages Of Affording Instruction To The Deaf And
Dumb (Hill, 1824), 20."
"
113"
Northampton, Massachusetts marked the oralist triumph over the model of signing.
As a first permanent institution of oral education, Clarke School symbolized the rise
of a hearing-centered social engineering that sought to eliminate “deafness” by
dismantling the congregational influence of sign language. In this regard, it was not
the idea of “naturalness” per se, but the religiosity of sign language that the oralists
considered a threat to social integration. Therefore, only through banning sign
language could they counteract the growing abnormality of a defected class. By the
end of the 1860s, manualists had lost the antebellum predominance over deaf
education. Because they conceived sign language in such a “moral efficacy” that
relied heavily on the practice of moral governance in the “asylum life,” once the
institutional shields were gone, the diffusion of religious rhetoric could hardly bring
back the religiosity of sign language.
Nevertheless, the religious construction of deafness did contribute to empowering
the deaf community conceived by sign language in latter times. Throughout the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, deaf communities promoted various mediums
for the diffusion of religious influence. The antebellum religious sensibility that
manualists had cultivated in sign language also contributed to advocating the deaf
identity. Specifically, in deaf activists’ engagement with newspaper, film and other
secular contexts, the various themes stressed on the presentation of morality as a
value of the emerging deaf culture. The national deaf newspaper The Silent Worker,
which published since the 1890s, became a solid base for disseminating the value of
sign language and dissenting from the dominance of oralism. By insisting that all
educated deaf individuals were abled and morally obliged to establish themselves as
self-reliant citizens, the Worker empowered deaf Americans to counter the oralist
stigmatization of deafness as a social dependency. As Buchanan noted, this collective
ethical code rejected the medical-based portrayal of deafness as a severe deficiency
and instead transformed deafness into a common cultural and linguistic attribute that
encouraged deaf citizens to promote their collective advancement.242
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
242
Robert Buchanan, “The Silent Worker Newspaper and the Building of a Deaf community:
1890-1929,” in Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New Scholarship, ed., John V. Van
"
114"
The religious topics filmed in sign language also aimed to inform a broader
hearing and deaf audience that the deaf community was educated, moral and capable
of serving society by demonstrating its values. Since 1910, many films made by the
National Association of the Deaf (NAD) featured the employment of religious
rhetoric to overcome the oppression from a dominant hearing community.243 As a
popular resistance to oralism, the creative use of technology not only contributed to
asserting the cultural-linguistic identity for deaf people, but also conveyed the
naturalness and the beauty of sign language to broader society.
Particularly, in the influential piece of George Veditz’s The Preservation of the
Sign Language, the master signer evoked biblical theme of the Exodus to condemn
the oralist campaign against sign language. By referring to the oralists as new
pharaohs who enslaved the Israelites after their compassionate ruler Joseph died,
Veditz bemoaned deaf people’s similar fate as they lost the protection under the
benevolence of Thomas Gallaudet.244 Religious rituals as presented in “The Lord’s
Prayer” also persuaded audiences that the deaf community could be identified by its
religious practices. Such religious rhetoric, As Tracy Morse noted, also reinforced the
similarities between the deaf community and the dominant Protestant society of the
early twentieth century.245 Burch also suggested, by engaging the interrelated themes
of American patriotism, Deaf history and religious faith, the films enhanced the
connection between religion and deaf culture.246
Therefore, in responding to the challenges from the “hearing line,” the manualists
exerted the influence of moral governance in various social mediums beyond the
institution, and hence transformed manualism into being a new ethic for the deaf
"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Cleve (Gallaudet University Press, 1999), 189.
243
In 1910, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) initiated a decade-long campaign to produce a
series of films. As a response to Bell’s assault on deaf communities and the use of sign language, the
NAD filmed ASL masters to preserve the language for future generations. See “National Association
of the Deaf sign language film preservation campaign,” in Burch, ed., Encyclopedia, 644.
244
Tracy Ann Morse, Signs and Wonders, 93-94.
245
Ibid., 91.
246
See Burch, Signs of Resistance, 56-61.
"
115"
community to claim its cultural independence through the preservation of sign
language. Today, though not all deaf people believe in God, they do share a cultural
identity based on the collective awareness in the “common language.” The divergence,
however, lies in the shifted priority of defining sign language: In the antebellum era,
Gallaudet created the phrase “common language” in order to maintain a Christian
“signing community” consisted of both hearing and deaf people. Since the late
nineteenth century, oralism had forged the “hearing line” against the religious
imperative and banned signing in mainstream society. As a result, sign language’s
marginalized status instead aligned deaf communities to resist the hearing domination.
The preservation of sign language thus increasingly demonstrated the enduring
morality as shaped by the collective experience of manual education.
But is sign language a representation only for deaf people themselves? The
answer is no. Today, the morality of sign language conveys precisely the message
Gallaudet had in mind two hundred years ago. Since the act of signing does not
contribute to excluding hearing people from engaging in discourses with the deaf, the
“common language” opens the channel in which both hearing and deaf people could
be mutually informed. In reality, however, sign language still could not eliminate the
hearing dominance in the mainstream. In some cases, it even speaks for the hearing. It
is worth mentioning a recent incident happened during the memorial service of
Nelson Mendela in Johannesburg. Thamsanqa Jantjie, a hearing South African sign
language interpreter, was accused of “faking sign language” during the whole event.
“The structure of his hand, facial expressions and the body movements did not follow
what the speaker was saying,” said Braam Jordaan, a deaf South African and board
member of the World Deaf Federation.247 Since “he made up his own signs” in front
of the camera, Jordaan considered the fake behavior “truly disgraceful” to the
audience. “He is making a mockery of our profession,” added Francois Deysel, a
qualified South African sign language interpreter. Later, what surprised the public
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
247
Alexandra Topping, “Sign language interpreter at Mandela memorial accused of being a fake,” The
Guardian, Wednesday 11, December 2013, accessed August 4, 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/dec/11/mandela-memorial-sign-language-interpreter-making
-it-up-fake.
"
116"
was that the fake signer claimed of “seeing angels coming down to the stadium” while
he was signing.248 As Jantjie described in an interview, his signing was a nervous
reaction to the vision.249 Finally, the press reported that the hallucination was a
medical symptom of the man’s schizophrenia.250
Is Jantjie’s signing a “fake”? Not in the eyes of those who hear well and do not
understand sign language. Also, it is not necessarily an insult to the deaf communities
because it is after all a sign language that has the pretense of meaning in his body
movement. However, Jantjie’s “meaningless” gesticulation troubles those signers who
hold fast to the normative view of sign language. Though there was not much vivacity,
let alone the “grimace” in Jantjie’s signing, his unregulated signs at least constituted
to the “uncouth expression” that denotes primitiveness and absurdity. Therefore, the
“fake signs” was a threat to the hearing acculturation of deafness. As a result, the
South African government denied Jantjie a fraud but admitted his signing was a
mistake because he was not “trained well.”251
In this sense, the measurement of sign language depends entirely on the
translation of speech. As Slavoj Žižek incisively questioned, “Are sign language
translators not much more intended for those who can hear than for the deaf? [Are
they not] giving us a satisfaction that we are…taking care of the underprivileged and
hindered?”252 The case is also a revelation of the paradox of “naturalness,” which
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
248
Thamsanqa Jantjie, interviewed by Alan Clendenning, “ ‘Fake’ interpreter claims he had visions of
‘angels’ during Nelson Mandela memorial,” (video), The Telegraph, December 12, 2013, accessed
August 4, 2014.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/nelson-mandela/10513199/Fake-interpreter-claims-he-ha
d-visions-of-angels-during-Nelson-Mandela-memorial.html.
249
Alan Clendenning and Juergen Baetz, “Fake signer at Mandela event says he hallucinated,”
Associated Press, December 12, 2013, accessed August 4, 2014.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/interpreter-mandela-event-i-was-hallucinating.
250
David Smith, “Mandela memorial interpreter says he has schizophrenia,” The Guardian, Thursday
12, December 2013, accessed August 4, 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/12/mandela-memorial-interpreter-schizophrenia-sign-lan
guage.
251
Ibid.
252
Slavoj Žižek, “The ‘fake’ Mandela memorial interpreter said it all,” The Guardians, Monday 16,
December 2013, accessed August 4, 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/16/fake-mandela-memorial-interpreter-schizoph
renia-signing.
"
117"
symbolized the divergence in conceptualizing deafness. Jantjie’s vision of angels
descending to earth seemed to invoke the religiosity of sign language, but the public
considered it an abnormality. Because sign language is no more “natural” unless it is
“cultured,” deafness as a social construct could never be fully comprehended until the
hearing line recedes from dominance. Only in this way could we appreciate the values
of deaf culture as we learn to be hearing.
"
118"
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