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Excerpt on the American Asylum from Scenes in My Native Land (1845)
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78 Part 2 language of signs, wholly unaware that he was witnessing the birth of a new language. But the number of marriages among pupils and the rapid recognition of alumni as experts who went on to found and lead deaf schools in other states presaged the debate of 1858, carried out in the pages of the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, on the establishment of a deaf state.70 Lydia Sigourney saw it all, close up. Despite witnessing so many deaf boys and girls grow up into literate, self-sufficient adults, Sigourney never abandoned her sentimentalist approach to the world, her beliefs that true affection was the highest virtue and human relationship the highest good to which one could aspire on earth, and that heaven was where all deficits would be made right. And to illustrate this ideology, she continued to take deaf children as subjects for her work. What we would give today for a poem of hers on, for example, Laurent Clerc as a teacher or father, or Sophia Fowler Gallaudet as the grandmotherly “Queen of the Deaf”! But this was not to be. The poems and stories collected here nevertheless cast some welcome light on the lives of deaf children before their enrollment and on deaf pupils attending a local church, returning to their families with a signed language, and marrying another deaf person. Excerpt on the American Asylum from Scenes in My Native Land (1845) Scenes in My Native Land was one of Sigourney’s contributions to what was in America an emerging genre, travel books; the other was her earlier Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands (1843) about her travels in Europe. But while the so-called Grand Tour of continental Europe had long been an established element of social polish, the notion of touring picturesque spots of the American landscape, where access roads were so poor, could not have emerged before the refinement of the steamboat after 1800, when the establishment of regular steamboat service could bring tourists upstream and inland . By the 1820s, therefore, American tourism became possible and American travel books were not far behind. One early tour took travelers from the Long Island Sound up the Connecticut River Valley, through Hartford, and into Massachusetts and even New Sigourney Main Pgs 1-162.indd 78 4/4/2013 12:35:31 PM Deaf Hartford 79 Hampshire; another took tourists up the Hudson River through the Catskills to Albany, then westward on the Erie Canal to Niagara. Both these tours are represented in Scenes. In addition to unusual or romantic scenery, common stops on these tours were the various new institutions: prisons, asylums for “the insane,” and schools for deaf and blind children. Tourists visited these sites not for entertainment , as had famously motivated eighteenth-century Londoners to visit the Bedlam hospital, but rather out of genuine interest in such modern, efficient, and apparently successful establishments. That they were often built on hilltops and other highly visible sites demonstrates that their founders saw them as show pieces. This untitled essay introduced readers all over the country to the school in Hartford and its modern, spacious campus—on a hilltop at 690 Asylum Avenue, currently the site of the world headquarters of the Hartford Insurance Company. Sigourney was not the only woman of her era writing travel literature , and the genre was not uncommon in the women’s magazines. However, many readers must have found it untoward for women, whose sphere, after all, was supposed to be the “cradle, hearth-stone, and death-bed,” to be writing about trips to Niagara Falls. Sigourney , for her part, justified women’s travel by asserting that it “teaches the value of sympathy.”71 Julia Brace, the deaf-blind woman who was the topic of so many of Sigourney’s poems, is mentioned here, though without being named. As was Sigourney’s regular practice, this essay is sandwiched between two poems, “Prayers of the Deaf and Dumb” and “Les Sourds Muets se trouvent-ils malheureux?” both reprinted elsewhere in this volume. • The American Asylum for the deaf and dumb, is a large and commodious edifice, in a commanding situation, at a short distance from the city of Hartford, in Connecticut. It has in front a spacious area, planted with young trees; and the principal avenue of approach is bordered with flowers. In its rear are work-shops, where the pupils can obtain useful exercise for a portion Sigourney Main Pgs 1-162.indd 79 4/4...