Women and Deafness: Double Visions

The Aesthetics of Linguistic Envy: Deafness and Muteness in Children of a Lesser God and The Piano

The Aesthetics of Linguistic Envy Deafness and Muteness in Children of a Lesser God and The Piano Jennifer L. Nelson Deaf and Dumb: A Group by Woolner Only the prism’s obstruction shows aright The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light Into the jewelled bow from blankest white; So may a glory from defect arise: Only by Deafness may the vexed Love wreak Its insuppressive sense on brow and cheek, Only by Dumbness adequately speak As favoured mouth could never, through the eyes. —Robert Browning (105) In Robert Browning’s poem ‘‘Deaf and Dumb: A Group by Woolner,’’ the qualities of deafness and dumbness are physical obstructions that nevertheless reveal something—‘‘the secret of a sunbeam.’’1 In Browning’s revelation, the qualities of deafness and dumbness thus function to facilitate the expression of abstract concepts such as love and language, as the secret ‘‘breaks its light / Into the jeweled bow from blankest white.’’ The prism’s obstruction leads to enlightenment, and then attention becomes focused on the glory revealed as well as the physical mechanism for this revelation. Bodies become enviable sites of language production and expression : ‘‘Only by Deafness may the vexed Love wreak / Its insuppressive 189 190 Jennifer L. Nelson sense on brow and cheek, / Only by Dumbness adequately speak / As favoured mouth could never, through the eyes.’’ Even as the mouth or speech are ‘‘favoured’’ in society, Browning expresses muteness or deafness as obstacles. Yet as an obstructing deaf/mute body becomes the locus of attention, it also becomes the ‘‘prism’’ that refracts an aesthetic and abstract ideal. The body as enabling something ideal seems to be a tradition in poetry, as seen (for example) in Thomas Traherne’s poetry, which celebrates elective muteness and deafness in order to reach spiritual enlightenment.2 We also see this tradition in the French Enlightenment, where silence is seen as more natural via the Rousseauesque expression/articulation of bodily gestures as closer to nature and the ideal than speech.3 Paul De Man also writes about the concept of an obstacle leading to a greater aesthetic ideal, as in ‘‘a glory from defect’’ in Blindness and Insight, where the critic’s ‘‘blindness’’ sparks or leads to insights (xx, and ‘‘The Rhetoric of Blindness,’’ 102–41). Lennard Davis, a cultural and literary critic, also writes of the ‘‘deafened moment’’ when one reads (mutely) the printed page; as such, deafness enables the act of reading (4, 104). Ironically , though, such metaphors reinforce the disabilities themselves; for example, when Davis stresses that the act of reading is a ‘‘deaf’’ act because one doesn’t need a voice, thus making the voice less dominant, he also incidentally reinforces the idea of deafness as being cut off from the world and as such perpetuates this stereotype. In addition to De Man, Davis, and others, critic Barbara Johnson also articulates this poetic tradition , and she names it ‘‘muteness envy’’ in her critical essay on Keats’s ‘‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’’ poem and Jane Campion’s film The Piano. Johnson notes, ‘‘The ego-ideal of poetic voice would seem, then, to reside in the muteness of things’’ (129). These ideas of bodily obstruction and then aesthetic expression have particular resonance as applied to the deaf and/or mute female bodies in the films Children of a Lesser God (1986) and The Piano (1993). Deaf and/or mute women, when they ‘‘speak’’ (their art, their will, their resistance , their expression) differently and beautifully using their bodies via sign language or pianos (to name two of the modes of expression featured in these films) become particularly prone to sexual, bodily interpretation and sometimes violence or coercion. This interpretation and resulting co- The Aesthetics of Linguistic Envy 191 ercion colonizes, because there is often a desire to gain or control the ‘‘secret’’ Browning refers to in his poem by seizing, observing, and coercing the body. These films go further than Browning’s explication of the body as leading to ‘‘insuppressive sense,’’ in that they illustrate what happens when observers (in these films, the male protagonists or agonists) try to grasp and control the ‘‘secret of the sunbeam’’ for themselves; further, the deaf and/or mute female is oddly positioned because there is the double bind of attraction yet pressure to conform and change on their parts. Browning’s ‘‘favoured mouth’’ indicates a whisper of this attitude in his acknowledgment of the value society places on...