Crossing the Divide: Representations of Deafness in Biography

5. Corinne Rocheleau: Rescripting Life as a Deaf Woman

109 5 Corinne Rocheleau Rescripting Life as a Deaf Woman Corinne Rocheleau (1881–1963), an accomplished Franco-American deaf feminist, essayist, and biographer, challenged the norms of earlytwentieth -century society by the way in which she lived her life and by her adept chronicling of her own experience of marginality and that of others. Her biographies reflect her efforts to negotiate and expand the boundaries of her life and to reconnect in a creative way with the society at large. Corinne Rocheleau wrote with an intuitive understanding of the principles that govern good biographical writing. She believed that biography should “reveal the individual within history and society.”1 Her portraits of early French female settlers of the New World (Françaises d’Amérique, 1915) carefully document the political and religious events that impacted the lives of the women. Similarly, in Out of Her Prison (1927), Rocheleau describes the situation of poor farmers in rural Canada and the limited opportunities for the education of deafblind people at the end of the nineteenth century to provide background and justification for the neglect experienced by her subject, Ludivine Lachance. Rocheleau pondered carefully the question of how biographers choose their subjects. Numerous times in the course of her career, she wrote that her own disability sensitized her to the suffering and challenges of others like herself, and this sensitivity led her to chronicle their experiences. Like biographers who followed her, particularly Edel and Maurois, the portrayal of this condition or characteristic led to a catharsis or transformation in her own life.2 But as a deaf biographer, writing about deaf subjects and deafness, Rocheleau faced an additional challenge. She was doubly marginalized as both a woman and a deaf person. She used her writing to give voice to the “voiceless” subjects of her autobiographical essays and biographical studies. Whether dealing with the early Franco-American women settlers whose lives had been ignored by historians (Françaises d’Amérique) or writing of the retrieval, against all odds, of the deaf-blind Ludivine Lachance (Hors de sa prison), Rocheleau pursued her agenda of speaking for those who lacked power or were forgotten by society-at-large. Rocheleau was born hearing, in 1881, in Rochester, Massachusetts, to a privileged Roman Catholic family. She was born on a Sunday, and her parents, who were extremely devout, wanted her christened at once. Her father wrapped her up, climbed into a streetcar, and headed to the parish church. Rocheleau, predictably, began to cry on this first, rather premature, journey. Hearing the timbre of the cry, the woman sitting near Mr. Rocheleau said, “This child seems to be a very young one, sir!” “Absolutely, madam,” he answered; “she will be one day old tomorrow!”3 Rocheleau’s French ancestors had immigrated to the New World centuries before and had been pioneers, either in Canada or in New England. Her parents were intellectuals, with artistic talents, and their home was filled with books, music, and paintings. The family got along harmoniously, as well. Until the age of nine, Rocheleau lived happily in her large family circle of parents and six brothers and sisters. Rocheleau described her father as “a real Lincoln!”4 She worshipped him, and she admired her mother’s charm and dedication to the family, although her relationship with her mother was more strained. In her ninth year, she contracted mumps and the grippe, and as a result, she became deaf. In spite of good medical care, this progressive deafness could not be arrested by the best specialists in Boston and Worcester. Her deafness shattered her comfortable world of family stories shared as part of a large and loving household. In an autobiographical essay “My Education in a Convent School for the Deaf,” she describes the trauma she underwent: “Along about my tenth year, then, my whole world would become out of joint and I had to adjust myself to the abnormal life of the deaf.”5 110 Crossing the Divide Rocheleau tried unsuccessfully to keep up with the other children in the classroom and on the playground. She was then sent to a boarding school but felt isolated there, as well. Since she couldn’t understand the speech of teachers and friends, she was given special lessons through writing. Because she was unhappy at school, her father would come and fetch her and bring her home. But then the parents, realizing that this...