Mrs. Sigourney of Hartford: Poems and Prose on the Early American Deaf Community

Part 1. Alice

Part 1 Alice Alice Cogswell (1805–1830) was naturally the subject, the addressee, or the impetus for many of Sigourney’s poems about deaf people. Her early childhood and seven years as a student at the Asylum are relatively well documented, but we know nothing about her life between the time she completed her studies under Clerc and Gallaudet and her early death, just as we know nothing of her mother’s life. Sigourney wrote only of Alice’s childhood, perhaps out of personal nostalgia for those happy years as a teacher before her marriage, as well as sentimentalist avoidance of educated, middleclass adults as subjects. Alice’s portrait was never painted, although a childhood silhouette was made and has survived. Even the obituary poem (in this section) that Sigourney wrote on her seems to place her back into her childhood family. Why she did not marry, as so many of her classmates did, or what she did with her time in her parents’ home, whether needlework or charitable pursuits, are complete mysteries, never mentioned in the historical record. Perhaps she was already suffering the early stages of tuberculosis when she completed her course of study at the Asylum. “For Alice” (1815) This poem was composed when Sigourney was twenty-four-yearold Miss Lydia Huntley, during her first year of teaching Alice and fourteen other Hartford girls in Mrs. Wadsworth’s house. It is not clear whether Sigourney first met Alice in her new schoolroom in the fall of 1814 or whether the first meeting had occurred earlier that year, or even on one of her earlier trips to Hartford. In any case, this seems to be Sigourney’s first effort to write about Alice. 51 Sigourney Main Pgs 1-162.indd 51 4/4/2013 12:35:30 PM ...