Deaf American Poetry: An Anthology

Angeline Fuller Fischer (1841–1925)

55  Angeline Fuller Fischer (1841–1925) What the signing community in the nineteenth century knew of its history was limited to the Bible, the founding in Paris of the first school for the Deaf, and the saga of how Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc began the education of the Deaf in America in Hartford, Connecticut. This wispy past did not stop Deaf people from cultivating what most cultures enjoy—a creation story. Angeline Fuller Fischer’s “Scenes in the History of the Deaf and Dumb” has all the trappings of what was and would be told and performed in Deaf schools and clubs generation after generation, with little, if any, variation; that is, how deaf people were “considered brainless, soulless, useless things” before education of the Deaf was born. “To a Deaf-Mute Lady” is about the special bond between Deaf people who share things in common in addition to being Deaf. The signing community has always been a small world, but in the days when travel was slow, Deaf meetings were especially cherished events. Deaf people could not afford to be selective about their friends, but the Deaf experience created a link strong enough to overcome most, though not all, of mainstream society’s prejudices regardinggender,class,race,andeducation.Fischer’spoemappears to be dedicated to a Deaf woman with whom she connected on an even deeper level, giving her the occasion to write “spirits grow / By slow degrees, yet ever quickly note / Affinity, wherever it exists.” Angeline Fuller Fischer was born in Savanna, Illinois. She attended a local school until whooping cough and typhoid deafened her in 1854. For the next five years she floundered, unable to continue her education, until she learned about the Illinois School for the Deaf. Fischer enrolled in the school, but because of recurring blindness, she left two years later. Angeline Fuller Fischer 56 Beginning in 1875, Fischer became active in the signing community , doing volunteer work, teaching, and writing. By 1880, she was the leading Deaf feminist; she pushed for women’s participation in the first National Association of the Deaf conference. At the conference, she met George Fischer, the Deaf editor of a mainstream county newspaper in Maine, and they married in 1887. She published a collection of poems called The Venture in 1883. ...