The New Other: The Deaf
By Anna
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In Victorian Britain, it was a social tragedy to be deaf, for “deaf people lived beyond the reach of the gospel” as they could not hear the word of God or speak the word of God (Banyton 33). This inability to partake in church activities in the usual way of verbalized worship with song and prayer caused the deaf to be seen as sacrilegious and unworthy. The idea that deafness was a punishment from God began to circulate, and the deaf came to be disconnected from religion in the eyes of society. As faith and belief are deeply connected to morality and hope, all qualities that are intrinsically human, the inability to partake in religion and thus the severing of ties between religion and the deaf added to the argument that they must be sub-human.
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“Signed language [held an] interstitial position between human speech and animal gesture, and thus the placement of those who used signed language mirrored this sentiment (Esmail, 112). “In Victorian Britain, and beyond, signed languages were often (mis)understood as a ‘primitive’ mode of communication, one that might even be accessible to animals, thereby destroying the fortification of human uniqueness built on our ability to use language” (Esmail, 104). There was no differentiation made between detecting and understanding; the idea that one could not detect sound was incorrectly correlated with the idea that one could not understand the thoughts that were being said or the information that was being transmitted within the sound.
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“Debate constructed sign language as less than fully human”, and Victorian society accepted and codified this debate as newspapers regularly published jokes and art that fed into the stigmatization of deafness.
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