What Bell failed to realize, or chose not to see, was that for many deaf people, the nineteenth century was far from a time of solitude. The first school for deaf people in America was founded in 1817 by Laurent Clerc and Thomas Gallaudet in what has become an origin myth for the American Deaf community. In the U.K., where I’m from, numerous schools for deaf people opened across the country throughout the 1800s, as well as across Europe more widely. These schools primarily used signed languages as the language of instruction. This was a time of emergence for Deaf culture as deaf people came together, in large numbers, for the first time. As the century rolled on, Deaf churches, Deaf associations, and Deaf newspapers were founded. When I started researching A Sign of Her Own, I was fascinated by these networks and connections. The more I looked, the more instances I found. In 1886, for example, an amateur Deaf theater group in London staged a performance of Hamlet in sign language for an audience of 600. Bell himself learned some sign language when visiting the larger schools in the States, so he would have been aware of this growing sense of collective consciousness amongst deaf people. Nonetheless, he concluded that lipreading and speech were the preferred routes for the deaf child.
Bell’s concerns about deaf people’s education reflect mainstream anxieties emerging in the second half of the century. Some of these anxieties can be seen as a reaction to deaf people’s lack of solitude; in their preference to associate with each other. In the States, deaf people’s “difference” became embroiled in alarmist views over a perceived increase in immigration and what this meant for national culture and identity. Anxieties also arose in light of Darwin’s new theory of evolution, and what distinguished humans from primates. In an era increasingly concerned with progress, the oralists decreed speech to be the chief attainment of human evolution. Bell was also interested in the early eugenics of the time and wrote a paper warning that deaf people’s association with each other would lead to a “deaf race.” Though he later backtracked on some of his public recommendations that deaf people shouldn’t intermarry, he remained involved in eugenics committees and continued to campaign for speech training as the route by which deaf people would learn to socialize with hearing people, meaning they would be less likely to associate with one another.
