Lyda 1
Heather Lyda
Dr. Patrick Erben
Early American Lit
17 November 2006
Textual Editing Project:
“The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl.” by Lydia Howard Sigourney, 1828
Introduction
In 1851, representatives from many nations gathered to display their country’s “finest contributions to nineteenth-century civilization” at the “Great Exhibition” in London (Freeburg 3). After the American display, which contained a set of false teeth, received much criticism, the editor of the Boston Evening Transcript suggested that the greatest accomplishment was not a material object, but living proof of strides made in educating its citizens: a deaf and blind woman named Laura Bridgeman (Freeburg 3). Though her story coincided with the inception of freak shows and “entrepreneurs like P.T. Barnum were first learning how to make money by satisfying the public’s demand for novelty,” Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe did not exhibit his prized pupil. Nonetheless, she remained a popular symbol for “transformative power of Christian philanthropy and enlightened democratic education” that was so highly valued in America at that time (Freeburg 3). Jack R. Gannon’s Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America claims that Bridgman is the first deaf and blind woman to be formally educated in America, and Earnest Freeburg wrote an entire book chronicling her education. However, history overlooks another, less successful attempt to educate a deaf and blind person some twenty-three years earlier. A newspaper article that appears in the bilingual Cherokee Phoenix tells the story of Julia Brace, Dr. Howe’s first pupil. In what amounts to a modern day human-interest story, Lydia Howard Sigourney’s article titled simply “The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl.” tells about Brace’s everyday life at the “Asylum” in Hartford, Connecticut in 1828.[1]
Though no definitive proof exists as to why this particular article was printed in the Cherokee Phoenix, a Cullen Joe Holland’s Doctoral thesis claims that editor Elias Boudinot probably selected news items to impart strong moral values he learned while attending the American Board of Commissioners Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut in the late 1810s and early 1820s (qtd. in Frizzell).[2] Holland explains that while some of the news items appear in the paper carried political significance, others “were selected for their human interest” (qtd. in Frizzell). In fact, Holland specifically notes Sigourney’s article when referring to the paper’s printing of “sad stories” and “melancholic fare served up in other newspapers” (qtd. in Frizzell). The Cherokee Phoenix reprinted the January 1828 article from the May 1828 Juvenile Miscellany and a copy of it also appears in both the Youth’s Companion on June 6, 1828 and, with a short introduction, in the Religious Intelligencer for August 9, 1828.
Since the article appears in the Religious Intelligencer, whose subtitle describes it as “Containing the Principle Transactions of the Various Bible and Missionary Societies, with Particular Accounts of Revivals of Religion,” Holland’s assumptions about Boudinot’s criterion for selecting stories seems accurate. The general tone of the text, and also of the introduction that precedes it in the Intelligencer, is one of admonishing those without sensory impairment for not taking full advantage of, nor being thankful for, their God-given abilities. Sigourney reminds readers to show gratitude to “Him who gives you with unveiled senses to taste the luxury of knowledge” (“The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl.”). Even other works that exhibited a more scientific than religious qualities contained moral leanings.
Sigourney mentions the work of Dugald Stewart pertaining to a deaf and blind European boy named James Mitchell. Stewart does include some information about Mitchell’s personal relationships and the methods by which he educates himself (by smell and taste); however, the substance of his report chronicles both the effort to teach Mitchell words and various attempts to restore the boy’s sight by surgically removing his cataracts. Doctors gave up trying to help Mitchell when he refused to lie still during the procedures, which involved inserting a needle into the milky tissue covering his eyes (Stewart 319). Apparently conscious of the ethical considerations of their relationship with Mitchell, the conclusion of the lengthy report endeavors to solicit funds for his and his sister’s support:
For the purposes already mentioned in this paper, the funds of the Society, I am well aware, are altogether inadequate; but if they shall be pleased to recommend the business to the consideration of their Council, I have no doubt that something may be suggested for the accomplishment of a measure which, even if it should fail in adding materially to the stock of useful knowledge, would at least prevent the regrets which might afterwards be felt, if so rare an opportunity for philosophical observation and experiment should be suffered to pass before our eyes, without any attempt being made to turn it to the advantage of science. (Stewart 337)
The last part of the passage quoted above essentially reinforces the moral obligation presented by Sigourney in the original article—that those whom God has endowed with powers of sight and hearing should not let the opportunity pass to make good use them in the pursuit of education.
Sigourney, characterized as being a “woman of letters and philanthropist,” and as a long time resident of Hartford, lent “her name to a range of public causes including temperance, peace, missionary societies, women’s education, Native American rights, and institutionalized care for the disadvantaged” (American National Biography Online). According to Dartmouth University biographer, Gary E. Wait, Julia Brace was the subject of three of Sigourney’s poems in the 1830s (3). In order to highlight the sense of moral urgency surrounding her association with Brace, one is reprinted below:
On the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl of the Asylum at Hartford, Connecticut.
Yet deem not, though so dark her path,
Heaven strew’d no comforts o’er her lot,
Or in its bitter cup of wrath
The healing drop of balm forgot.
Oh no!—with meek, contented mind,
The needle’s humble task to ply,
At the full board her place to find,
Or close in sleep the placid eye,
With order’s unobtrusive charm
Her simple wardrobe to dispose,
To press of guiding care the arm,
And rove where Autumn’s bounty flows,
With Touch so exquisitely true,
That vision stands astonish’d by,
To recognize with ardor due
Some friend or benefactor nigh,
Her hand mid childhood’s curls to place,
From fragrant buds the breath to steal,
Of stranger-guest the brow to trace,
Are pleasures left for her to feel.
And often o’er her hour of thought,
Will burst a laugh of wildest glee,
As if the living forms she caught
On wit’s fantastic drapery,
As if at length, relenting skies
In pity to her doom severe,
Had bade a mimic morning rise,
The chaos of the soul to cheer.
But who, with energy divine,
May trend that undiscover’d maze,
Where Nature, in her curtain’d shrine,
The strange and new-born Thought arrays?
Where quick perception shrinks to find
One eye and ear the envious seal,
And wild ideas throng the mind,
Which palsied speech may ne’er reveal;
Where instinct, like a robber bold,
Steals sever’d links from Reason’s chain,
And leaping o’er her barrier cold
Proclaims the proud precaution vain:
Say, who shall with magician’s wand
That elemental mass compose,
Where young affections pure and fond
Sleep like the germ mid wintry snows?
Who, in that undecipher’d scroll
The mystic characters may see,
Save Him who reads the secret soul,
And holds of life and death the key?
Then, on thy midnight journey roam,
Poor wandering child of rayless gloom,
And to thy last and narrow home
Drop gently from this living tomb.
Yes, uninterpreted and drear,
Toil onward with benighted mind,
Still kneel at prayers thou canst not hear,
And grope for truth thou may’st not find.
No scroll of friendship or of love,
Must breathe its language o’er thy heart,
Nor that Blest Book which guides above,
Its message to thy soul impart.
But Thou, who didst on Calvary die,
Flows not thy mercy wido and free?
Thou, who didst rend of death the tie,
Is Nature’s seal too strong for thee?
And Thou, oh Spirit pure, whose rest
Is with the lowly, contrite train,
Illume the temple of her breast,
And cleanse of latent ill the stain.
That she whose pilgrimage below
Was night that never hoped a morn,
That undeclining day may know
Which of eternity is born.
The great transition who can tell?
When from the ear its seal shall part
Where countless lyres scraphic swell,
And holy transport thrills the heart.
When the chain’d tongue, which ne’er might pour
The broken melodies of time,
Shall to the highest numbers soar,
Of everlasting praise sublime,
When those blind orbs which ne’er might trace
The features of their kindred clay,
Shall scan of Deity the face,
And glow with rapture’s deathless ray.
L. H S.
The question that begs asking about this woman for whom Sigourney and Howe showed so much concern is this: why is her name virtually unknown? Most Americans know about Helen Keller, and some even know about Laura Bridgeman, whom Howe had already been tutoring for four years when he met Brace. Sadly, the name Julia Brace remains largely omitted from public consciousness because Dr. Howe did not meet Brace and attempt to teach her the English language until she was almost thirty-five years old (Wait 4). Though Brace was both able and willing to learn and she managed to compose complete simple sentences, she eventually reverted back to communicating in sign language; in short, “they had begun too late” (Wait). Bridgeman’s education—the case study Freeburg says Howe “used” to conduct public attacks on both the Calvinistic view of human nature and “educational practices of rigid order and rote learning”—however, never enabled her to think and write on abstract concepts (5). Though the memories of Brace and, to a lesser extent Bridgeman are overshadowed by the spectacular achievements of Helen Keller, their common bond with Dr. Howe is what led to her education:
“It was through reading an account of Laura Bridgeman in Dickens’ American Notes that the parents of Helen Keller applied to the Perkins Institution for a teacher for their deaf-blind daughter. As Berthold Lowenfield succinctly states in The Changing Status of the Blind: From Separation to Integration, the stories of Brace and Bridgeman constitute “the beginning of emancipation for this group of most severely handicapped individuals (91). It took Keller’s example, Lowenfield reminds us, to spur progress in the education of deaf-blind persons in the 20th century, and it was only recently, in the late 1960s did the Federal Government take financial responsibility for it (91).
Wait’s biography of Julia Brace paints a colorful picture of her as one of the early catalysts for the development of education for the deaf and blind. He claims that since Brace’s day, “the doors of opportunity were opened wider and sooner by the achievements of Julia Brace and those who befriended her,” but I am not so sure he is correct in that assertion (4). I am affiliated with Deaf Education in my work as a sign language interpreter in the state of Georgia in 2006, and as recently as two weeks ago, I received an email from the Department of Education that a new master’s degree is now available in Early Intervention for Deaf/Blind Infants. Though I have only met two Deaf/Blind people (adults) in the course of interpreting work—both of whom are lively and intelligent—I am ashamed that I do not know more about the systems in place to educate America’s Deaf/Blind children. This project has broadened my perspective on the plight of Deaf/Blind; the next time I find a pair of hands feeling a little too heavy on mine as I interpret, I will think about how far they have come and wonder just how long it is going to take America to finish what people like Dr. Howe and Lydia Sigourney began one hundred seventy-eight years ago.
From the Juvenile Miscellany.
THE DEAF, DUMB, AND BLIND GIRL.
In the city of Hartford, Connecticut, among other interesting institutions, is an Asylum for the education of the deaf and dumb. The building is large and commodious, and finely situated upon a commanding eminence. The present number of pupils is 120, who in different classes and under the superintendence of several teachers, are engaged in the pursuits of knowledge. They are cheerful and happy, and enjoy their intercourse with each other, which is carried on by the language of signs, and the aid of the manual alphabet. It is peculiarly affecting to see this silent assembly offering their morning and evening prayers. Many visitors have been moved to tears, by this voiceless communion of young hearts with their Maker.
Among the inmates of this mansion is one who particularly excites the attention of strangers. She is entirely deaf dumb and blind. Her name is Julia Brace; and she is a native of the immediate neighborhood of the Asylum. She is the only instance of so great a misfortune, of which any record is extant, except one European boy by the name of James Mitchell, concerning whom the celebrated philosopher, Dugald Steward, published an interesting memoir many years since in the Edinburgh Review. He was so irritable that few experiments could be tried for his benefit; Julia has been mild and docile, from her childhood.