Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture by R. A. R. Edwards (review)

Reviewed by: Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture by R. A. R. Edwards Margret Winzer (bio) Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture, by R. A. R. Edwards (New York: New York University Press, 2012, 263 pp., ISBN 978-0-8147-2243 In recent years, the history of Deaf culture and the Deaf community has animated scholars. Fascinating and detailed accounts have emerged, particularly those of Susan Burch, Douglas Baynton, and Harlan Lane, which focus specifically on deafness, and of Robert Osgood, which presents a more general, special-education stance. A recent text by R. A. R. Edwards, Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture, adds to this mix. However, this is not a book for those who are encountering a text on the development of the Deaf community for the first time. Throughout the book, the author’s references to events and actors demand a substantial prior knowledge of the field. Edwards presents her main arguments and discussion within a restricted time dimension. Essentially, she focuses on the Deaf community and a Deaf culture bonded by sign language in the first half of the nineteenth century. She starts with the founding institution at Hartford and finishes with the discussions in Boston about the founding of the Clarke School, which was, in reality, the first determined onslaught on sign language from the so-called oralists. Edwards introduces the reader to the American Asylum at Hartford and details the pervasive influences of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and especially Laurent Clerc. She examines the pedagogical and communicative battle in this early period, which was not to withstand the oral imposition but whether to adopt natural or methodological signs for instruction and recreation. These arguments regarding communication mode are reiterated throughout the text. [End Page 130] In addition to her discussions on sign language, Edwards offers fascinating insights into actors, both deaf and hearing. Perhaps none is more interesting than the rather strange and sad J. J. Flournoy, advocate for a geographically and culturally separate Deaf community in the late 1840s. Together with the detailed accounts of Flournoy and his schemes, fascinating insights emerge when the author discards her strict historian’s cap and speaks about the deaf participants in her text as though they were old friends. In doing so, she offers a warm and intimate view of how the community functioned in institutional settings and in the conventions and meetings that became increasingly basic to community solidarity in the early nineteenth century. The text closes in the early 1860s with an overview of the contentious debate among manual teachers of deaf children and the rising advocates of oralism. In a final brief chapter Edwards draws parallels between (and visions of) the very early events and current processes and prospects. Particularly in relation to the careful scrutiny of individual actors and their roles, this is an interesting and worthwhile text. In some ways, however, the discussion is unsatisfactory. Although Edwards includes deaf education, she speaks only to communication mode. Another area would have been closer links with instruction—what was actually taught via sign language—and the impact of school curricula on adult opportunities and on the stability of the Deaf community. Moreover, a huge variety of elements embedded in the larger social and political contexts of action influenced the Deaf culture. Expanding the discussion to give some credence to such events would have strengthened the work. In summary, this is an interesting text on the development of Deaf culture that supplements an established set of fascinating works. It is perhaps too time bound and narrow in its scope and leaves much of deaf education, interpreted as pedagogy and curriculum, aside. [End Page 131] Margret Winzer Margret Winzer is Professor Emerita with the University of Lethbridge, Canada. Copyright © 2013 Gallaudet University

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