title: "I listened with my eyes": writing speech and reading deafness in the fiction of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.
abstract: While characters with disabilities appear frequently in Victorian fiction, deaf characters, specifically, are almost entirely absent. In fact, the only deaf characters who use sign language in Victorian fiction are Madonna Blyth in Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek and Sophy Marigold in Charles Dickens’s “Doctor Marigold.” Grounding its analysis in these two texts, this article contends that it is, in particular, a deaf character’s relationship to language that disqualifies him or her from conventional representation in Victorian fiction. Through reading Hide and Seek and “Doctor Marigold” in the context of Victorian deaf history, Collins and Dickens’s realist aims, and Victorian generic conventions rooted in transcribing orality, this essay argues that the absence of deaf characters reveals the investment of mid-Victorian fiction in a particular and normativized relationship between bodies, spoken language, and textuality.
authors.forename: Jennifer
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Esmail
mesh_terms: D003638:Deafness / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history; D006233:Persons with Disabilities / Q000193:education / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D007802:Language / Q000266:history; D008091:Literature / Q000266:history; D011932:Reading; D012919:Social Behavior / Q000266:history; D012934:Social Isolation / Q000523:psychology; D057545:Social Stigma; D006113:United Kingdom / Q000208:ethnology