In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Part 3 The Deaf-Blind Girls: Julia Brace and Laura Bridgman Laura Bridgman (1829–1889) has been the subject of two excellent books, both published in 2002, one by Elizabeth Gitter and the other by Ernest Freeberg, to which interested readers are referred. In contrast, what we know about Julia Brace (1807–1884) is little more than what we learn from Sigourney’s essay reproduced here, which she wrote for children and which bears signs of having been cleaned up quite a bit—according to other sources, Brace was no saint. Another fact that Sigourney consistently omits to mention is that when she wrote the essay “The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl” (1828) and the poem “On Seeing the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl of the American Asylum, Hartford, at a Festival” (1827), Brace was no “girl”: she was a young woman of twenty-one, and, of course, older still when “On Seeing the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl, Sitting for Her Portrait” was published in 1834. As with Alice Cogswell, Julia Brace perhaps remained, in Sigourney’s eyes, the girl she was when Sigourney first met her, which, in Julia’s case, must have been when she was no more than sixteen. Julia Brace had become deaf and blind as a four-year-old, but despite Sigourney’s efforts over at least two years to secure waivers of tuition, room and board, and a clothing allowance for her, she was not enrolled in the Asylum until she was eighteen. Unsurprisingly at that age, she made next to no progress in her studies. Although online sources such as Wikipedia claim that Brace learned to communicate in “tactile American Sign Language,” Sigourney states in an 1828 letter to the school’s directors that, after three years of enrollment at the Asylum, Brace was “unable to make [her wants] known, except to a few, whose sagacity, or sympathy, have rendered them familiar with her limited mode of communication.” 118 Sigourney Main Pgs 1-162.indd 118 4/4/2013 12:35:32 PM In the 1828 essay reproduced immediately below, Sigourney mentions signing only to say that when Brace had to be assured that something handed to her was a gift she could keep, this was done “by a sign which she understands,” suggesting that the young woman had little or no facility in the sign language evolving in Hartford but, rather, was dependent on a limited lexicon of signs standing for the small and finite number of objects and activities in what was for her a small and cloistered community. In reminiscences of Martha Dudley , the matron at the Asylum when Brace was admitted, the young woman could understand detailed instructions, such as to store her boots in a particular place and put on her shoes.76 But this does not amount to the use of language; working border collies respond to instructions at that level, both signed and spoken. In Sigourney’s poems, the notion that Brace is wholly unable to express what she is thinking is a recurring and important theme. In 1834, Samuel Gridley Howe, who founded and headed the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, visited Hartford to meet Brace, of whom he was aware perhaps from Sigourney’s published writings about her. Howe wanted to make an experiment in teaching a deaf-blind child, but found Brace, then twenty-seven, far too old. Three years later, Howe located his perfect subject, Laura Bridgman , and set about teaching her English by means of, first, embossed letters and then the finger alphabet he had seen used at Hartford. In the meantime, he kept up a correspondence with Sigourney, who continued to hope he would try his methods with Brace. In a series of letters continuing into the early 1840s, Howe declares himself delighted to find in Sigourney a kindred spirit who is not shocked or saddened by deaf-blind people and, although he elsewhere expressed reluctance, professes himself eager to teach English to Julia Brace. In an 1841 letter, Howe suggests that if only Brace could meet Bridgman, she “would herself undertake to learn to talk and succeed in the attempt,” the word “talk” as used by Howe meant to “talk on one’s fingers”—Bridgman certainly did not speak.77 The notion of letting Brace, now a middle-aged woman by 1840s New England standards and certainly set in her ways, be carried off to Boston for English lessons must have created some adverse reaction at...

Share