Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture by R. A. R. Edwards (review)

Had Cochlear implants been available to deaf people in early nineteenth-century America, our hearing ancestors would hardly have doubted the implants’ good purpose. Deafness was a flaw in the human condition, a restriction, even a burden that evoked pity. That twenty-first century deaf people would develop a culture with its own language, traditions, and values would have been unthinkable. That they would reject Cochlear implants and find living with deafness as valid as living with hearing would have seemed ludicrous.

Rebecca Edwards takes us back to the beginning of the nineteenth century when American deaf education emerged out of the eighteenth-century French schools for the deaf. Following the lead of French educators, Thomas H. Gallaudet and the French deaf teacher Laurent Clerc opened the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817. Under their direction, the school established manual signing as the sole educational method in their school and in other deaf schools they helped to found throughout the nation.

Making a distinction between Deaf and deaf, Edwards uses the former with its upper case D to refer to deaf culture, and the latter to indicate the physical absence of hearing. She maintains this distinction as she writes about American deaf education beyond its earliest years. As she points out, deaf educators faced the question of how to integrate the English of the hearing majority into what became American Sign Language. Should deaf people learn a version of ALS grounded in English spelling, diction, and syntax, or should they learn ASL with its own language structures? Most educators wanted their deaf students to read and write English, but only to acquire an understanding of the various American cultures ancillary to their own. Other teachers of the deaf, however, insisted that signing conform to English spelling and sentence structure, thus abandoning ASL and its unique grounding for deaf culture. In this context, Edwards explores the formation and character of a “Deaf point of view,” one that abandoned the notion of deafness as a disability.

Beyond the controversy of the proper place of English in deaf culture, a greater threat to manual deaf education became oralism. In Prussian schools for the deaf, oral communication—lip reading and speech—had long been practiced. Americans like Samuel G. Howe and Horace Mann had seen firsthand what they found to be effective deaf education that, as they saw it, brought deaf people into the wider community of speakers and hearers. Edwards traces the concatenated and contentious history of proponents of ALS and of oral communication. As Edwards argues, the champions of integration, like Howe, Mann, and later Alexander Graham Bell, claimed a “superiority of the normal,” which they believed would be good for all deaf people. Deafness, as they saw it, was a flaw that blocked social participation; they entertained no idea that deafness might have a culture of its own.

My only quibble with this superb book is that Edwards, following a tradition begun by Harlan Lane, assumes villainous motives of the champions of oralism. They were wrongheaded, to be sure. But their failure to envision deaf culture came from their commitment to the integration of traditionally devalued people into the dominant culture—the only culture they could imagine. Apart from this quibble, Words Made Flesh is a stimulating, beautifully written, and thoroughly engaging book.