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54 Brenda Jo Brueggemann Read My Lips: Mabel Hubbard Bell’s “Subtle Art of Speechreading” In an effort to engage her life during a period of great change in deaf education and sign language, I have been writing postcards to Mabel Bell—who wrote voluminous letters in her own lifetime. Throughout her lifetime, Mabel Bell’s letters to her husband, the famous Alexander Graham Bell, repeatedly express frustration and even anger at his inability to write to—and communicate with—her. My postcards, in part, also then aim to fill some of that communication void as I reach across centuries and experiences to understand her life and experiences. In 1895, she published an essay about speechreading in Atlantic Monthly, and in this essay, she argued for the importance of deaf people learning “speechreading” while she documented her own skills at it. Although there are numerous accounts indicating that she managed to lipread, as one biographer of A. G. Bell put it, “so well that none of the family thought of her as deaf” there are also references throughout the voluminous letters she wrote during her lifetime of her “struggle” to live and negotiate in a hearing world. She died January 3, 1923, just five months following A. G. Bell’s death. s Dear Mabel: I’ve been puzzling through the chronology of materials and moments from your life as crossed with the materials and marked moments from Mr. Bell’s life. Crossing one: The year is 1867. You are eight years old, have been deaf for five years and are studying abroad, in Germany, the country most known for its deep oralist practices in educating deaf people. The Germans, don’t you know, they frown on sign language; bodies loose and alive with expression, gestures gone wild, faces that explode with meaning. Verboten! These things rather horrify the starchy German character. They prefer only mouths to move, marching through the mountains of syllables that make up a good German noun, tongues clicking and clacking through the fricatives, throats hawking out the gutturals. Sprachenlesen wir mussen! In 1867 Mr. Bell, of strong Scottish stock, is just 18 himself, new in his profession as a deaf educator but already an inventor too—in fact, he and his father, Alexander Melville Bell have recently devised a method of instructing deaf pupils that they call “Visible Speech.” You are not yet even Mr. Bell’s student, Mabel, but soon you will be. And you will become an authority as well on the visibility of speech. Your stars will cross in this sky. Main_Pgs_1-330.indd 54 3/28/2012 10:24:49 AM Brenda Jo Brueggemann 55 A second important crossing comes, it seems to me, sixteen years later in 1883. Here are some facts for this moment. You have been married to Mr. Bell for six years. You are twenty-five. You already have two daughters—Elsie, now five and Daisy, now three (which is the age you were when you became deaf from scarlet fever). But, dear girl, you’ve also given birth to two sons, Edward (who would have been two) and Robert (who has just died). It is also now three years after the famous Milan Conference of 1880—an international conference of deaf educators held in Milan, Italy. At this major turning point in international deaf history, the 164 conference delegates declare that oral education is superior to manual (sign language focused) education and they pass a resolution banning the use of sign language in all deaf schools around the globe. Deaf schools in Europe and the United States switch almost entirely and immediately to the use of speech therapy and oral instruction without support from sign language as the primary method of education for their deaf students. It’s all mouths, all the time. With their hands tied—sometimes literally—behind their backs, deaf students spend arduous hours laboring in speech lessons—Now say this! Repeat after me! Place your tongue here! And likewise, they engage endless speechreading drills: Now read my lips. And read this: Out of the 164 delegates attending the famous Milan conference from numerous countries, only one, James Denison, was himself deaf. You yourself did not attend, but Mr. Bell was a key figure at this conference and his influence on the final vote spoke volumes. And you, dear Mabel, were the poster child for his campaign. But Milan, in 1880 and three years prior, is a mild matter for me in the crossing...

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