Un-Telling “The Eugenist’s Tale”: Early Twentieth-Century Deaf Writers on A. G. Bell and Eugenics

In Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race (1883), Alexander Graham Bell proposed several preventative eugenic measures to reduce the transmission of deafness, including oralism, or the pedagogical approach for the exclusive teaching of speech and lipreading, and the reduction of deaf–deaf intermarriage. In answer, writers in Deaf community publications made appeals for autonomy embedded within hegemonic social norms related to race, class, gender, and able-bodiedness. Because marriage autonomy was often conflated with labor and class rather than treated as one of several interwoven strategies in Bell’s eugenic argument, it has been argued that Deaf community leaders underestimated the threat they faced from rising nativist beliefs merged with eugenics in the post-bellum era on into early twentieth-century America. However, in their fiction, white/biracial Deaf creative writers of this era, namely Douglas Tilden, Hypatia Boyd, Guie Deliglio, and Howard Terry, complicated, re-inscribed, and countered these ideologies.

Introduction

In 1883, the same year that statistician Francis Galton proposed the term eugenics to describe the “cultivation of better men and women” through the study of hereditary traits, inventor Alexander Graham Bell famously alerted his listeners at the National Academy of the Sciences to the “fact that in this country deaf-mutes marry other deaf-mutes” (original emphasis) (Bell 180). Such intermarriage “should result in the formation of a deaf variety of the human race,” a “defective race” in which “calamitous results” will have been visited upon the offspring of such unions (Bell 180, 187). Bell’s concerns were not limited to the propagation of disability, however. Bell also argued that “deaf-mutes think in the gesture language and English is apt to remain a foreign tongue”; sign language cuts deaf-mutes off from the “literature of our society” and consolidates them into a “distinct [and thus separate] class” (Bell 218, 219).

In the post-bellum years, as the nation transitioned to a wage labor economy and mechanized labor, disabled people became “unproductive citizens in the cultural imagination”; disability became conflated with notions of public dependency, poor citizenship, and the inability to work productively (Rose 2). Additionally, perceptions of separateness became laden with anxieties related to immigration; as a result, “foreignness” became a way of denoting not only a separate—and inscrutable—space within American national life but also a problem to be solved (Baynton 29). Bell’s address slightly preceded—and his later thinking coincided with—a period of massive changes in immigration (Nies 7). In many ways, eugenics became a discourse on whiteness and nationalism, and as seen later, in the use of fables and utopian tales in Francis Galton’s own writing, eugenic science perpetuated narratives and mythologies of whiteness as well (Galton; Richardson xvii). If hereditarian beliefs linked with reproductive control are the politics of nation and state mapped onto bodies, then concerns about deaf “intermarriage” are, in turn, anecdotes of the body embedded within discourses of nation, race, class, labor, citizenship, and disability.

Much of the scholarship on the impact of Bell’s Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race has focused on the intersection between eugenics, autonomy, and education, but an important corollary impact was labor and employment in the midst of the growth of modern capitalism. Additionally, contemporary scholarship does not focus at length upon how creative writing from Deaf authors of this era provided a venue for discussing the implications of Bell’s Memoir. Creative writing texts reflect and refract cultural and social concerns and anxieties of their time, and a study of the fiction of this era, as written by selected white or biracial Deaf writers, provides insight into the ways that the varying threads of Bell’s argument were perceived; especially in their fiction do we see counterarguments. Indeed, creative writers of this era inverted Bell’s arguments. However, unweaving the convoluted threads of a eugenicist’s tale comes with a price; in their creative writing, early twentieth-century Deaf writers both subverted and re-inscribed eugenic discourse. Occasionally, their use of narrative conventions...