For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind

by Mahoney, Rosemary

  As for communicating her desires:

  I offered my tiny hand to my mother, entreating her that she might know of my want for some thing to eat or drink. I stroked on my hand for some butter spread on a piece of bread. I could not assure her whatever I should like for a drink or nourishment, because I was incapable of making the deaf alphabet.…I used to make a sign for my dear mother that I wished to lie down on the bed. I nodded my head on my hand for that want of putting me immediately on the bed.

  When Samuel Gridley Howe heard Laura’s story, he saw in her an opportunity to experiment with the ongoing question of whether a blind-deaf child could be taught. Diderot had written about precisely this in his Letter on the Blind. “There is no communication between us and those born deaf, blind and mute. They grow, but they remain in a condition of mental imbecility. Perhaps they would have ideas, if we were to communicate with them in a definite and uniform manner from their infancy.”13 A child unexposed to sensory information, experiences, and ideas from the external world would provide Howe with an opportunity to study what in the human mind is innate and what is learned, the old Enlightenment question of the philosophy of the intellect, a question that still had not been answered entirely.

  In 1837, when Laura was seven years old, Howe persuaded Bridgman’s parents to let him take her to his asylum in Boston, and after working intensively with her for several months, he succeeded in making her understand the meaning and reason of language. In his Ninth Annual Report of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, Howe described the epiphany:

  Hitherto, the process had been mechanical, and the success about as great as teaching a very knowing dog, a variety of tricks. The poor child had sat in mute amazement, and patiently imitated every thing her teacher did; but now the truth began to flash upon her—her intellect began to work—she perceived that here was a way by which she could herself make up a sign of any thing that was in her own mind, and show it to another mind, and at once her countenance lighted up with a human expression: it was no longer a dog, or parrot,—it was an immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other spirits!

  Howe and the teachers he employed at Perkins taught Laura the manual alphabet of Charles de l’Épée. For a blind-deaf person such as Bridgman, the letters of the alphabet were formed with the fingers and pressed into the palm of the “listener’s” hand.

  With Howe’s writings about Laura and his frequent public exhibitions of her remarkable linguistic capabilities, the pair quickly captured the public imagination. In the 1840s, Howe’s annual reports from the Perkins Institution—including private remarks that Laura made to her teachers as well as intimate details of her personal habits, her fastidiousness, her desire for affection and approbation—were in demand all over the United States and Europe. Newspapers and magazines began regularly printing sensational articles about the girl. A savvy publicist, Howe knew that the notoriety was good for the future of his school and used his storytelling ability to emphasize Bridgman’s most admirable qualities—purity, sincerity, patience, determination—and thus appeal to the sentiments of his readers. In his Eleventh Annual Report, published in 1843, he wrote in his baroque style of Laura’s transformed life at Perkins:

  She begins the day as merrily as the lark; she is laughing as she attires herself and braids her hair, and comes dancing out of her chamber as though every morn were that of a gala day; a smile and a sign of recognition greet everyone she meets; kisses and caresses are bestowed upon her friends and her teachers; she goes to her lesson, but knows not the word task; she gaily assists others in what they call housework, but which she deems play; she is delighted with society and clings to others as though she would grow to them, yet she is happy when sitting alone, and smiles and laughs as the varying current of pleasant thoughts passes through her mind; and when she walks out into the field, she greets her mother nature, whose smile she cannot see, whose music she cannot hear, with a joyful heart and a glad countenance; in a word, her whole life is like a hymn of gratitude and thanksgiving.

  And, less cloyingly, in the Ninth Report:

  The innate desire for knowledge, and the instinctive efforts which the Human faculties make to exercise their functions, are shown most remarkably in Laura. Her tiny fingers are to her as eyes, and ears, and nose, and most deftly and incessantly does she keep them in motion.…When she is walking with a person, she not only recognises [sic] everything she passes within touching distance, but by continually touching her companion’s hands she ascertains what he is doing. A person walking across a room, while she had hold of his left arm, would find it hard to take a pencil out of his waistcoat pocket with his right hand, without her perceiving it.14

  Finally, an excerpt from a letter that Howe wrote to the poet Mary Howitt15—and that she published in its entirety in her London magazine Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress—illustrates the spectacular mawkishness he was capable of in his portraits of Laura:

  Is there not something very touching about it? A poor diseased child lived away up in the wild mountains of New Hampshire, her soul buried a thousand fathoms deep—so deep that no one could reach it or make a sign to it—under the burden of blindness, deafness, and mutism. But it was known that that soul was alive and struggling to get out into communion with other souls; and a hopeful man [himself] went to work to aid her, and toiled on for years, receiving at first a faint sign of recognition from below, and getting nearer and nearer, while people from all parts of the world looked eagerly on and uttered their words of encouragement; and when the child was raised by the hand and came out and walked with her fellows, all the people raised a shout of joy, and poor little Laura Bridgman was raised into the human family with a heartier shout of welcome than a purple-born princess.

  On his 1842 tour of America, Charles Dickens visited the Perkins Institution and was, not surprisingly, deeply moved by his meeting with Laura Bridgman. Hers was a case that would have fit ideally into one of his own novels. In his American Notes for General Circulation, Dickens quoted Howe’s annual reports on Laura Bridgman at length, adding, “There are not many persons…who after reading these passages, can ever hear [Laura’s] name with indifference.” Of his own experience with Laura, he wrote:

  There she was before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that an Immortal soul might be awakened. Long before I looked upon her, the help had come. Her face was radiant with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands, was bound about a head, whose intellectual capacity and development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline.…From the mournful ruin of such bereavement, there had slowly risen up this gentle, tender, guileless, grateful-hearted being.

  Elisabeth Gitter suggested that for Dickens, as well as for the general public, “Laura mattered mostly as a metaphor…a kind of allegory…freed from her dark prison and summoned to life, she now had the power, through her example, to redeem the spiritually deaf and the morally blind.” Upon publication of Dickens’s American Notes, Laura Bridgman’s fame exploded—hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the Atlantic came to know and marvel at her story. Now when Howe brought Laura on his traveling exhibitions, enormous crowds showed up for the spectacle. On the first Saturday of every month, the Perkins Institution was open to the public, and on those days the blind students demonstrated their various skills for visitors. As Laura’s celebrity grew, the numbers of visitors to Perkins increased; on Saturday, July 6, 1844, eleven hundred people gathered to see Laura writing letters, reading books of raised type, threading fine needles with her tongue, and spelling sentences into her teacher’s hand; they clamored for her autograph, pieces of her knitting and needlework, samples of her writing, and bits of her hair. All over America, little girls began poking their dolls’ eyes out, tying green ribbons across t
hem, and renaming them Laura.

  Laura Bridgman became what the public wanted: an idealized, sentimentalized symbol of suffering tempered by goodness and hard work. She was an example of the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity. She was also a novelty in an age newly fascinated by celebrities and curiosities, a trend fostered and fueled by the advent of the high-speed printing press. Ernest Freeberg, in his history of Howe and Bridgman, The Education of Laura Bridgman, suggested that one explanation for Bridgman’s fame was that she was a human aberration, “a freak of nature who captured the attention of a society that was hungry for spectacle,” and that she happened to be living in a time when entrepreneurs like P. T. Barnum were turning human marvels into public entertainment. “The public’s fascination with Laura Bridgman,” he wrote, “might well be classified with their desire to see Barnum’s exotic but ‘scientific’ curiosities, such as Tom Thumb and the Fiji Mermaid.”16

  Laura had no idea of the extent of the world’s interest in her or of how much of her private daily life was exposed to the public, and she certainly had no control over it. Able to read only that which was available to her in raised type, she was not privy to most of the essays published about her. Her sense of self was strong enough, though, that she would probably have been annoyed and upset by the trespass on her privacy. Emotionally, Laura was extremely attached to and dependent on Howe, yet when Howe once opened a letter that was addressed to her, she was offended and firmly told him, “Doctor was wrong to open little girl’s letters. Little girls open theirself.”

  The real Laura Bridgman was both more interesting and less angelic than Howe and Dickens led the public to believe. She was intelligent and had a very strong will, which at times she refused to curb to suit what Howe and the other teachers wanted of her. When she was instructed not to make loud and “disagreeable” noises with her unmodulated voice, she responded, “God gave me much voice!” Contrary to her public image, she was not always (in fact, not even often) a model, saintly child. Nor was she entirely “tender, gentle, and guileless.” When a mouse got into her room, she managed to kill it by stomping on it. (Although this seems nearly impossible even for a person with the keenest eyesight, one of her teachers confirmed that the story was true.) She had fits of temper and more than once hit her adult teachers. She occasionally deceived them, several times stole food from other students, sometimes pushed, pinched, and bit people, and could be irritable, moody, and selfish. She was contemptuous of students who seemed to lack intelligence and she treated them imperiously. She was emotionally needy, had fits of nerves, and in her late teens became anorexic. She was, then, not unlike a lot of teenagers.

  When Laura was eleven, Howe conceived of an experiment to isolate her from all religious ideas in an effort to determine whether notions of God came naturally to human beings or were instilled by others. He instructed her teachers to deflect any questions she had about God and religion. Inevitably exposed to religious notions through her contact with the other students, and having discovered the Bible in the Perkins Institution library, Laura was already inordinately curious about the subject.

  Soon after Howe devised this scheme, he married Julia Ward, and they went abroad for eighteen months on their honeymoon. He was not present to oversee his own religious experiment with the girl, and he left her feeling utterly abandoned. Laura’s mother—the only other person of extreme importance to her—was busy with five other children and the household demands of a farmer’s wife and so had stopped responding to Laura’s letters. At age fourteen, Laura was left to the care of a gifted but not exceptionally affectionate teacher, Mary Swift. The turmoil she was feeling, along with her confusion and bafflement at Swift’s repeated deflections of her religious questions, began to manifest itself in unruly behavior and violent tantrums that Swift found increasingly difficult to subdue. In her teacher’s journal, Swift gave an account of a battle of wills she and Laura had engaged in over a handkerchief. Swift always advised Laura to keep her handkerchief in her desk. On this particular day, Laura left it on top of her desk; Swift directed her to put it away, and Laura stubbornly put it in her lap instead. On Swift’s insistence, Laura finally “lifted the lid very high, threw the handkerchief into the desk, and let it fall with such a noise as to startle all in the school-room. Her face was growing pale, and she was evidently getting into a passion.” Swift directed her to take the handkerchief out of the desk and put it away properly. Laura “sat still awhile, and then uttered the most frightful yell that I ever heard. Her face was perfectly pale, and she trembled from head to foot.”

  As an evangelical Christian, Swift found it difficult to accept Howe’s ban on religious instruction, particularly in the face of Laura’s persistent question, “Why can I not know?” When a group of orthodox evangelical Christians came to the school, they ignored the request to refrain from religious discussion and gave Laura what amounted to a crash course in their beliefs. When Howe returned to Perkins and found Laura, who was no longer a child but a teenager, spouting evangelical dogma, he declared publicly that his project had been contaminated by “ignorant and selfish persons” and was therefore ruined. The blank slate that Laura had provided had been scrawled upon by interlopers; Howe was devastated by the failure.

  With his project soured, disillusioned by both his own failure and Laura’s glaring and seemingly sudden faults, he effectively turned against her. After years of pouring praise on her for the public’s consumption, he now stated that his hopes for her had been disappointed “clearly because they were unreasonable” and because he had “overlooked” her “deranged constitution” and the “undue development” of her nervous system. In short, Howe maintained that Laura’s flawed genetic inheritance and physical handicaps had warped her character and left her mentally and even intellectually defective.

  Elisabeth Gitter argues, with much persuasive evidence, that Howe, who had a frequent habit of abandoning his own projects, had many complex personal reasons for feeling he couldn’t continue his work with Laura Bridgman, including that he may have felt overshadowed and defined by Laura’s fame and that “one way out was to claim that Laura was simply unfit for it.” Which is, inarguably, the coward’s way out. Gitter writes, “After 1844, he no longer thought her important.” Realizing that the graduates of the Perkins Institution were in fact not able to support themselves with suitable work upon leaving the school, Howe seemed to turn against them too. (Although the public enjoyed seeing the Perkins students performing, the prejudice against them beyond its gates was still very strong. A local church that had hired the Perkins choir to sing regularly for its congregation soon told Howe that it had decided to “dispense with their services” because it didn’t want to “subject any of the Society to unpleasant emotions,” which tended to arise at the sight of the blind. Many of Howe’s graduates wrote him letters requesting permission to return to the institution because they were failing to succeed in the outside world.)

  Howe had stated firmly at the start of his career that the blind were no different from the sighted and that blindness was a superficial handicap, but after ten years of work at the Perkins Institution, he radically reversed his position. In his Sixteenth Annual Report, he claimed that his views had been modified by experience, and, in order to “unveil the shield of truth,” he stated in emphatic uppercase letters: “THE BLIND, AS A CLASS, ARE INFERIOR TO OTHER PERSONS IN MENTAL POWER AND ABILITY.” Contradicting in the extreme many of his earlier statements, Howe went on to insist that the senses, especially sight, are crucial to the development of the mind, and that people who were born blind or became blind due to illness were victims of poor heredity that left them inferior both mentally and physically. “Thus we see that the blind, as a class, do not labor under the disadvantage of want of sight alone, but that, as compared with others, they have less bodily health and vigor, and less mental power and energy.” He described the blind boys who had recently entered Perkins as having “pale faces, stooping forms, puny limbs, feeble
motions,” and a “hesitating tread.” Howe stated that his experiences with hundreds of blind people convinced him “that when children are born blind, or when they become blind early in life, in consequence of diseases which do not usually destroy the sight, the predisposing cause can be traced to the progenitors in almost all cases.” Although Laura was rendered blind and deaf by scarlet fever, Howe suggested that her susceptibility to the disease and the resultant blindness derived from her slightly “scrofulous” and supposedly small-brained parents. (The parents naturally took umbrage.) And this was not simply a genetic failing he was positing; it was a moral one. “When men commit sin and violate the ‘natural laws,’ nature corrects them…she sends outward ailments as signs of inward infirmities.” The moral transgressions—what Howe cryptically referred to as “sensual indulgences” and “hellish passions”—of the parents would be visited upon the children.

  The wit of man cannot devise a way of escape from the penalty of a violated law of nature; that not a single debauch, not a single excess, not a single abuse of any animal propensity, ever was or ever can be committed without more or less evil consequences; that sins of this kind are not and cannot be forgiven.…There will appear in the far-off and shadowy future the beseeching forms of little children,—some halt, or lame, or blind, or deformed, or decrepit,—crying, in speechless accents, “Forbear, for our sakes; for the arrows that turn aside from you are rankling in our flesh.”

  The report went on page after page in the same vein. There was a sense of personal injury in Howe’s damning indictments of the blind. Despite all the progress that had been made over the past several thousand years, by 1850, the so-called father of the American blind had figuratively kicked them back to the Gospel according to Mark and its question “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?”