Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History by Jaipreet Virdi

In 1924, when Dorothy Eugénie Brett traveled to Taos, New Mexico, with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, she carried a flat tin ear trumpet. Brett was a Bloomsbury acolyte of aristocratic British extraction who attended the Slade School of Art and whose mystical paintings of Native Americans would later be acquired by the Tate and Smithsonian museums. She gave her ear trumpet a boyish name, Toby, and used him to aid her in conversations as her hearing declined. Brett and Toby appear together in her 1925 Self-Portrait. When Brett embraced new electronic listening devices later in life, D. H. Lawrence complained that her "machines" were an unnatural impediment to conversation—"I cannot think of anything to say to a black box" (88). When they toured Mexico together, he suggested that the Virgin of Guadalupe might cure her deafness.

In Jaipreet Virdi's Hearing Happiness, technologies like Toby, used by individuals with a range of auditory abilities to navigate the hearing world, appear within a vast archive of patent medicines and procedures aimed at treating deafness. Virdi weaves together stories of deafened people, like Brett, with narratives of competing inventions, from "finger surgery" to artificial eardrums and cochlear implants, whose legitimacy and effectiveness is often under question. Deafness cures proliferated in the Anglophone world from the mid-nineteenth to late twentieth century with capitalism and quackery as easy bedfellows, and they continue to multiply in the present. Curing deafness through technology, in Virdi's account, is a metonym for the effects of medical modernity on the American body.

Virdi's book is about "oralist experiences of deafness, hardness of hearing, and hearing impairment, not cultural Deafness" (xii, xiv). For most of her subjects hearing loss remains ambivalently medicalized, somewhere between a cultural identity, a clearly defined symptom, and an inevitable effect of aging. This distinguishes Hearing Happiness from works like Brenda Jo Brueggemann's Deaf Subjects, which uses a disability studies framework to examine the cultural experience of the Deaf community.² Hearing Happiness is conversant with disability studies, particularly in its discussions of passing and ableism, but its methodology derives primarily from medical history. Virdi's argument depends on reading deafness broadly, as a common deviation from the eugenic norms of western biopolitics, in which citizenship and ability often go hand in hand. Rebecca Sanchez suggests in Deafening Modernism that Deafness was understood by literary modernists as a linguistic detour, an occasion to explore the embodiment of language.³ Yet the story of deafness in modernity is as much a narrative of medicine and technology as it is one of communication and identity.

Verdi frames her historical argument with a compelling metanarrative describing her own experience of deafness. The book begins with bacterial meningitis, an infection the author contracted in early childhood that left her with "profound-to-severe" hearing loss (Virdi, 7). The account of her illness is embedded in social history: religion, immigration, education, and of course, technology, all shape her experience of sickness and its sequelae. She uses her own narrative to frame her encounters with historical subjects. Not only do we see her as a scholar in the archive, requesting permission to try a Victorian ear trumpet, we also see her as a child with her d/Deaf classmates, being fitted for hearing aids "as we squirmed and giggled when the wet silicone mold was injected into our ears," and as an adult, experiencing difficulty switching from analog to digital hearing aids (258). Virdi uses her own experience as an analytical tool and narrative device to make Hearing Happiness a well-written, accessible critical intervention.

This narrative mode has an affinity with the work of Black feminist scholars like Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, who use their own embodied experience of Blackness to bring the hidden archives of slavery and segregation to life.⁴ Yet Virdi's book remains largely silent on questions of race. While the author's Punjabi heritage and her family's immigration to Canada are prominent features of the text, they are subsumed into the larger narrative of deafness, in which disability serves as the primary marker of difference. When Virdi's first pair of behindthe-ear hearing aids make her six-year-old ears stick out, and her hair "tied in a long braid as per the Sikh tradition, did little to disguise them," it is the hearing aids, not the braid, that provoke "snickers, puzzled glances, and finger-pointing from younger children" (18). Her "accent"—a classic marker of immigrant difference—is "the result of a speech impediment, [which] gave away the fact that I was not truly 'hearing'" (5). If Virdi's story suggests a rainbow coalition of liberal Toronto in the late eighties where only ableism remains uninterrogated, the whiteness of her archive belies the structural continuity between race and ability in the eugenic science that undergirds much of modern medicine. A hierarchy of human difference is implicit in the images of young white women that populate the advertisements reproduced in Hearing Happiness, which Virdi acknowledges but does not interrogate. The archive speaks for itself: in America only certain disabled bodies deserve the benefits of modern science.

Advertisements for hearing aids and other remedies, in Virdi's analysis, work to make deafness visible, so that it can be rendered invisible again through science. Exemplary in this regard were the accessories designed to hide hearing aids for fashionable women, like Sonotone's signature "Sono-Charm" jeweled pins that disguised microphones of analog hearing aids (Virdi, 217). The tautology of deafness rendered visible made hearing aids aspirational: "No illusion or trick could conceal obvious markers of deafness, so it was crucial for women to wear hearing aids; to stop being deaf, and instead to keep their deafness a secret" (224). For men, the rhetoric was tied more directly to citizenship, as Virdi shows through advertisements that portrayed hearing aids as necessary to the war effort. Such devices made the desire to "pass" as hearing into a demand of civic life.

Another key argument addresses the role of quackery in the formation of medical modernity. Pseudoscientific cures abound in the history of deafness, yet much of what looks like patent nonsense from our perspective was legitimate, mainstream treatment. Virdi writes that "even if historically—and actually, even now—the demarcation between quack cures and legitimate cures is difficult to pinpoint, the demarcation itself is a product of history" (29). This is true of the larger history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medicine. Radium earbuds and aural vibrators parallel other health fads of their moment. Yet because of the rhetorical construction of deafness, with its mandate to cure, persons with hearing loss have been particularly vulnerable to swindles and shams of all sorts. This remains a concern of the present: the author describes how consumer rights probes by "Nader's Raiders" and other regulatory groups have revealed a culture of high-pressure upsells and unscrupulous marketing tactics targeting elderly persons with hearing loss. The economic imperatives of American medicine, in this regard, have a considerable impact on the legitimacy of biomedical science and merit further study.

The biopolitics of deafness challenge our cultural investment in the technological miracles of modern medicine. As Peter Baldwin suggests in Fighting the First Wave: Why the Coronavirus Was Tackled So Differently Across the Globe, such an investment led the US to pour resources into vaccine development and spurn commonsense public health measures that saved millions of lives in other nations.⁵ Baldwin argues that the technological focus allowed governments like the US and Israel to avoid addressing intractable problems within their own political systems, yet Virdi's book suggests a different answer. Rather than a strategy for surmounting the divide between Democrats and Republicans, Americans view technology as a tool that writes the line between normal and abnormal. We sought the vaccine as a means to return the world to "normal" without considering the structures of oppression that support our norms, or those who were already cast out as "abnormal" in our pre-pandemic status quo. The moral imperative to technological cure is a persistent rhetoric of modernity that warrants greater critical attention in our ongoing present.