Mrs. Sigourney of Hartford: Poems and Prose on the Early American Deaf Community

Excerpt on Alice from Letters to My Pupils (1851), including “Excuse for not Fulfilling an Engagement” (1815) and “Alice” (1831)

64 Part 1 Excerpt on Alice from Letters to My Pupils (1851), including “Excuse for not Fulfilling an Engagement” (1815) and “Alice” (1831) This excerpt comes from a section entitled “My Dead,” in which Sigourney provides a prose “sketch” of each of her twenty-six former pupils who had died by the date of this book (1851) and, in some cases, a “tribute” in the form of a poem. The sketch of Alice is the eleventh entry in this section. Sigourney begins her sketch of Alice by saying that “the deprivation of hearing and speech, opened for her new avenues to tenderness and sympathy,” the new “avenues” being the use of facial expressivity, which is “comprehended by all” and is an “avenue to the soul.” This passage is high praise indeed in the language of sentimentalism, as it positions Alice as the virtuoso of “the language of affections” and accounts for the high regard in which Sigourney says she was held by all her classmates: she was “the darling of all.” Although Sigourney, using the diction of the time (which we also see in the writings of, for example, Laurent Clerc) calls her deafness a “misfortune,” this passage is clearly not a play for pity—quite the contrary, the passage is praise of Alice’s extraordinary fluency in affectional communication. Sigourney goes on to describe Alice’s intellect and “thirst for knowledge,” and to note the “considerable histrionic talent” that is common in deaf children, though Sigourney wouldn’t have known that when she first encountered Alice. As is typical for a sentimentalist , Sigourney sees Alice’s “loving heart” as the full equal of her “fine intellect.” Sigourney’s reference to a two-handed alphabet is usually taken as evidence that a British finger alphabet chart was available in Hartford by 1815, but the alphabet in question is almost certainly the American “old alphabet,” widely printed as late as the early twentieth century and still in use by some older Deaf Americans decades later. Because the “old alphabet” clearly descends from the British finger alphabet and seems to be most closely related to versions current only in the eighteenth century, we can assume that it was known in 1815 Connecticut, although how the Cogswells or Sigourney would have learned it is unclear.67 Sigourney Main Pgs 1-162.indd 64 4/4/2013 12:35:31 PM Alice 65 “An Excuse for not Fulfilling an Engagement” was composed when Sigourney was twenty-four, and it is one of her best poems. Her image of the Muses calling on her to inspire her composition but stopping at her schoolroom door and declining to stay for a writer who “kept a school” is a lovely expression of how the demands of a teaching job will win out over even a visit from one’s Muse. “An Excuse” was published in Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse (1815) and in the Miscellaneous Journal* the same year, and later as “Teacher’s Excuse, Written in School” in Sigourney’s The Girl’s Reading-Book (1841) and, under slightly different titles, several more times in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and in her Book for Girls (1844). The story about Alice’s visit to distribute firewood to a poor family was published as a prose accompaniment to “Teacher’s Excuse” in The Girl’s Reading-Book and Book for Girls, and as “Be Kind to the Poor” in The Episcopal Recorder, 1849. Another version appeared in Sigourney’s Olive Leaves (1852), where it was incorporated into an essay called “Silent People.” As we can see in the 1841 Girl’s Reading-Book version, Sigourney was especially proud of the charitable society that her students established, since it was their own idea and was run on their own time. The school week stretched from Monday morning to Saturday noon, leaving only Saturday afternoon for free time (since Sundays were engaged in religious observance). Yet the girls, on their own volition, gave up this precious free afternoon to come back to the schoolroom to mend old garments and knit stockings for poor families. Remembering their happy faces on these afternoons, Sigourney says they were “like a band of sisters.” The “society” also collected monthly contributions from each girl, which were used to buy firewood and books. Sigourney ’s translation of Alice’s signed narrative as given here exhibits vestigial elements of a signed-language grammar, though these were lost in the interests of idiomatic English in...