“Scenes in the History of the Deaf and Dumb”: Angeline Fuller’s Strategic Sentimentality and the Development of an American Deaf Identity

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most deaf Americans were isolated, both from one another and from the communities in which they resided, by linguistic barriers. At the time, no common American sign language existed, meaning that deaf people who did not speak English had to resort to a series of home signs invented with their families to communicate. The formation of the first permanent schools, beginning in 1817 with the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, began to change this situation.¹ The language developed at these schools allowed the Deaf to begin identifying themselves as a distinct cultural group and to articulate their own history, customs, and values.²

Writing played a critical role in spreading this sense of community beyond school walls. As Christopher Krentz has noted, writing “has the ability to shape and share cultural identity and to produce relationships between groups. Through writing, people can support or subvert power arrangements, not to mention concepts of reality and order.”³ For Deaf authors in particular, writing provided a space where communication could occur without the barriers often imposed by face-to-face encounters, allowing them to forge relationships with deaf people from around the country. While some early Deaf writing fell into the trap of uncritically repeating stereotypes about deaf people, much of this literature took advantage of the medium to question what it meant to be deaf in America and, in so doing, to begin to outline a Deaf cultural identity.⁴

Angeline Fuller’s “Scenes in the History of the Deaf and Dumb,” which appeared in her book The Venture (1883), participates in this project by providing one of the first literary accounts from a Deaf perspective. Throughout the volume, Fuller alternates between convention and this new perspective to deconstruct assumptions about deafness. In “The Blind Deaf-Mute,” for example, Fuller challenges the notion that disability is necessarily synonymous with hardship. While deafness (and, in that poem, blindness as well) “seems so hard, so hard,” Fuller explains, such conditions cannot be understood only as lack. Despite being deaf, blind and mute, the speaker of the poem “senses all/Keener than ours, pierce the celestial spheres,/And while we pitying say, ‘Deaf, dumb and blind!’/Rare sights delight her eyes, rare sounds her ears.”⁵ “Scenes” expands on this idea, moving between Biblical and nineteenth-century Deaf history—of the poem’s six sections, which Fuller calls “scenes,” the first two recount Old Testament stories, the third focuses on the New Testament, and the final three describe the founding of the American Asylum by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc—to express two quite startling ideas. First, Fuller highlights the presence of disability within the Bible as a way of demonstrating that, far from existing only at the margins of society, the deaf and disabled have always played central roles in our foundational texts. Secondly, Fuller provides what we might now refer to as a social constructionist critique of deafness, naturalizing it and arguing that its associated disability is located not in deaf individuals themselves, but rather in the social conditions that sometimes make it difficult for them to communicate with others.

As the title of her book suggests, Fuller’s attempt to redefine deafness is a fraught endeavor; in challenging the idea of deafness as nothing more than sensory lack, Fuller risks alienating hearing audiences who had been charitable to the deaf based on this perception. Fuller tempers this risk by operating within nineteenth-century poetic conventions—employing iambic pentameter, an alternating rhyme scheme (ababcdcdee), and rooting her discussion in common religious references, all of which create the appearance of propriety. While Fuller’s use of these conventions has caused her work to be almost entirely overlooked, her poem explores ideas about disability that anticipated by over a century key components of Deaf and Disability theory and that functioned at the time as retorts to common perceptions of deafness. Identifying these ideas in the poems of a writer working at the very beginning of...