The Mute’s Voice: The Dramatic Transformations of the Mute and Deaf-Mute in Early-Nineteenth-Century France

What does the mute have to tell us? In France at the end of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth centuries, this question propelled some important early melodramas, including Guilbert de Pixérécourt’s Cœlina ou l’Enfant du mystère (Coelina, or the child of mystery) (1800) and Jean- Nicolas Bouilly’s L’Abbé de l’Épée (1799), with the secrets harbored by the mute character being central to the play’s resolution. Outside the theater, in classrooms, hospitals, and institutions, this question also challenged pedagogues and philosophers who sought to determine just what kind of consciousness lay within the so-called deaf and dumb. The deaf-mute’s social identity also performed important symbolic work in late-eighteenth-century France, as representative of those exiled from power and citizenship who were being welcomed into the new national community. This blend of the theatrical, pedagogical, and sociocultural significance of the deaf-mute is nowhere more apparent than in Bouilly’s play L’Abbé de l’Épée, a dramatization of an episode from twenty-five years earlier in which the Abbé Charles- Michel de l’Épée, renowned for his work in teaching the deaf and dumb to communicate through manual sign language, embarked on a quest to have an abandoned deaf-mute adolescent recognized as the deposed Comte de Solar and returned to his rightful social position. Just as this play was drawing Parisian audiences, the capture of a feral boy in the woods of Aveyron, followed by his transfer to Paris to be examined by the leading intellects of the day, posed a similar set of questions: Who is this mute, and what can he tell us? The wild boy quickly became a subject for speculation and narrative appropriation in journals and on stage, and the language and imagery of the theater, in return, exerted its influence on scientific and philosophical observations, weaving with them to shape the way in which he was to be perceived by his contemporaries.

This essay develops a perspective informed by disability studies to track the literary and social significance of the mute and muteness in Bouilly’s play and in the world outside the theater in France at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Bouilly’s L’Abbé de l’Épée offers a unique site of tension between modes of representing the mute, thanks to its ostensibly realistic portrayal of a thinly veiled historical deaf-mute individual, the Comte de Solar, and his teacher and patron, the Abbé de l’Épée.¹ The narratives around the mute “wild boy” captured in Aveyron and brought to Paris early in 1800 express the immediate impact of literary and theatrical discourses in shaping a popular understanding of the kind of difference embodied by the feral child, who was to become the subject of an extended and influential philosophical and educational experiment conducted by Jean Itard. Juxtaposed, Bouilly’s play and Itard’s reports on his pedagogical progress with the boy can be seen to share significant features, including a concern with the place of the mute in society and the presentation of the teacher as heroic advocate of the disadvantaged. But we can also catch glimpses of literary, especially theatrical, narrative in Itard’s portrayal of his wild boy.

My primary interest is in the relationship between the theatrical representations of muteness and that muteness—often combined with deafness—that existed outside of the theater, in the towns and villages of France. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue that “disability pervades literary narrative, first, as a stock feature of characterization, and second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device.”² Coining the term “narrative prosthesis” to point to how literary narratives “lean on” disability imagery “for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight,”³ they argue that “disability characterization can be understood as a prosthetic contrivance upon which so many of our cultural and literary narratives rely.”⁴ That is, the image of the disabled individual acts as a...