An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature
Trent Batson and Eugene Bergman, Editors
Preface to the First Edition
In this book, you will find selected fictional and biographical works of the last century and a half which deal with deafness- that is, they all have deaf characters in them. This collection, then, is an extremely valuable tool for those who are interested in understanding deafness better because it is a unique collection and with it, one can study deafness in a totally new way. From these selections it is possible to know much about the attitudes in the western world toward deaf people, and how these attitudes have changed over the last one hundred and fifty years. The characters range from sweet to profane, from tyrannical to helpless, from good to bad, but they are all human, alive, in the midst of things. Far from being isolated from life, they are in the thick of it. In a sense their stories are stories of how they triumph over their affliction and arrive at self-fulfillment or painful self-understanding. They are fully developed, living characters.
The book is divided into three parts: the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and deaf authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of these three sections, in many ways the most interesting (and certainly the most revealing about the deaf experience) is the third one because here we find genuine concern with aspects of the deaf experience. The accounts are written in the first-person mode, which is just as characteristic of them as it has been of black writers, from Frederick Douglass through Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson, to Richard Wright and James Baldwin.
This preoccupation with the self, with one's own story, can be traced to the exposed existential position which members of a minority occupy in society. The blacks have their tale of oppression and de facto second-class citizenship to tell, and so do the deaf. The deaf writer confines his imagination to the autobiographical mode because to him the struggle for dignity and assertion of the self in the community is an overriding and passionately absorbing concern. This is perhaps best exemplified in Albert Ballin's autobiography, The Deaf Mute Howls, which incidentally is most recommended to the reader, whether hearing or deaf, because it states so clearly the misunderstandings burdening the deaf in the public eye, and it also reflects the depth of emotion which the deaf feel about their own language-sign language, which is still suppressed in many places the world over.