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Harriet Martineau: Gender, Disability and Liability

SUSAN F. BOHRER

ritical assessments of Harriet Martineau by her contemporaries respond to her as a physical subject within the paradigms of the Victorian ideal woman. The very designation of Martineau as a woman situates her within the nineteenth-centurys cultural framework that determines the meanings of femininity through analyses of biological and anatomical structures. Martineaus own strategies for confronting the issue of her femininity, as her peers dene it, occur within a mode of discursive resistance and suggest she both internalizes as well as rebels against the restrictions which ensure that the feminine domain is a limited dominion. Martineaus interpretation of her self as independent, intellectual and forthright, contravenes the set of assumptions limiting the nature of woman to her form as the determinant of her abilities and her function. To uncover the signicance of this nineteenth-century woman writers perception of herself in contrast with those who measure her against the standard female gure, requires recognizing that Martineau is aware of the social imposition of constraints and that she attempts to free herself and other women. Late twentieth-century readers such as Deidre David, Sidonie Smith, Valerie Sanders, and Diana Postlethwaite, acknowledge the importance of Martineaus gender. By and large, these critics suggest that although Martineau became an audible voice in a period requiring womens silence, this female specimen of authorship contends with the dominant culture in a typically submissive way by deferring to the greater authority of her patriarchal fathers and brothers. Deidre David, for example, insists that Martineaus tales of political economy imitate Smith, Bentham and Malthus, without recognizing that these fables include such issues as civil disobedience, antiprimogeniture and universal suffrage across class and gender lines (40 42). Sanders, Smith and Postlethwaite, on the other hand, remark upon the psychological conicts Martineau suffers for her choice of and success at a predominantly male profession, and contend that Martineau becomes a victim of her own guilt for her lack of conformity to a domestic role. According to Postlethwaite, Martineaus uterine tumor develops from her hysteria, a consequence of her inability to fulll an appropriately lial and womanly station (585). Sanders maintains a similar view of Martineau and argues that she adopts a submissive, feminine position by using her brother Thomas and brother Jamess approval of her endeavors to justify her success (54). In addition, Sanders proposes that Martineau negotiates a place for herself by labeling her career a duty, rather than claiming a space of her own within the canon of male authors (54). Sidonie Smith concurs with David that
ISSN 0890-5495 print/ISSN 1477-2663 online q 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0890549032000069122

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the nineteenth-century woman writer renders male doctrine into palatable ction, and along with Sanders and Postlethwaite renders Martineaus situation as problematic with regard to womans passivity and reticence (Smith 123 49). In a chapter entitled Harriet Martineaus Autobiography: Desire of a Life Like a Mans, Smith maintains that Martineau refuses the role of a woman, but suffers from her desire to be masculine. The price for Martineaus conicts with her femininity becomes for Sanders, Postlethwaite and Smith forms of self-repression, which according to Smith and Postlethwaite explicitly develop into neuroses that are manifested in her physical ailments. These critics conclude that the impact of an imposing mother compounded by rigorous social expectations, disrupt the progressive feminist self required of a remarkable nineteenth-century woman. Smith and Postlethwaite categorize Martineau as a participant and or victim of the prevailing binary attributions of male/masculine, female/feminine and the conguration of separate spheres, masculine/public, feminine/private. Such analyses implicate that Martineau succumbs to illness and neuroses as a consequence of her status as an eminent, public presence and all too nearly recall the nineteenth-centurys critical responses to Martineau. These modern versions of her, like those of their predecessors, belie the subtlety with which she condemns the notion of herself as possessing a masculine mind. The attribution of masculinity to a woman as the rationale for a womans success was of great value to the ideology of separate spheres. This nineteenth-century evaluation of Martineau as the exceptional, unt, displaced woman has currency for readers who continue to perceive her as unprepossessing rather than as the radical advocate of egalitarianism, which her works and self-portrait proclaim. Unlike those critics who relegate Martineau to the inescapable connes of gender barriers, Alison Winter, in her article, Harriet Martineau and the Reform of the Invalid in England, and Maria Frawley in her discussion of Martineau, A Prisoner to the Couch: Harriet Martineau, Invalidism, and Self-Representation, interpret her illness as more than the hysterical manifestation of a woman who transgresses against the precepts of femininity. These readers recognize that Martineau assumes a position of authority and self-assertion despite her inrmity and appearance of frailty. Winter asserts that Martineaus illness is a public affair through the documentation and publication of her intimate experiences as a patient in Life in the Sickroom (LSR). The details of the invalids priorities, needs and his/her purview over the sickroom, endow the patient with the control of his/her situation. The ensuing controversy over Martineaus mesmeric cure and the subsequent publication of her Letters on Mesmerism brings the entire course of the authors condition, according to Winter, into the public arena and challenges the nascent medical establishment during its most precarious phase (612 613). The very premise of the interior, domestic and private space of the sickroom, which replicates the conning parameters of a womans place, is contested through Martineaus authorship and authority. Martineau through the course of her Tynemouth illness remains in public view, active as a spokesperson for the debilitated through her advocacy of a patient centered patient controlled sickroom. The publication of Life in the Sickroom, however, was not Martineaus only resistance to passivity and silence. She produced the four childrens novels that became known as The Playfellow. The series includes The Crofton Boys, Settlers at Home and Abroad, The Peasant and the Prince, Feats on the Fiord, as well as the romantic history of Toussaint LOuverture, The Hour and the Man. These works demanded research in geography and history. These projects were undertaken in addition to her voluminous correspondence and her letters lobbying politicians.

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The respite as rebellion formula, and the conicted woman in domestic retreat perspectives on Martineau, overlook the contradictory status of a woman who has taken to bed but retains public stature. Frawley, like Winter, contends that Martineau overcomes the limitations of the sickroom. Martineau achieves a privileged, expanded vision of greater truths as a result of her experience as an invalid, which Frawley conceives of as a spiritual and personal form of superiority. Again Martineau disavows the connement of her prisoner designation and disputes the position of women by her ability to see and speak truths. Martineau dees the stereotype of the recumbent, ailing female, who represents the submissive, passive, incapable women patient frequently depicted in nineteenth-century pamphlets, medical texts and ction. For Frawley, it is Martineaus nearness to death that produces her acuity and endows her with the capacity for a wider and deeper understanding of the meaning of life. This lends Martineau an ethereal quality that resembles the attributes of female invalids who acquire unearthly, angelic natures and higher wisdom. Frawley claims that through her window, Martineau has access to the wider world, but it functions symbolically. . . to signify the meditative and visionary powers of the invalid (183). Yet in describing the world outside her window, Martineaus visionary powers are earthbound and aimed at improving her world. Frawleys interpretation neglects the prescriptive nature of Martineaus insight and her appeal for action. Martineaus day-to-day observations reveal both the wonders of human love and the sight of so much gratuitous pain that she concludes with the importance of seeking a remedy (LSR 86). Martineau adheres to the restorative and curative powers of education and the recognition of duty that ensues. Through her window, Martineau envisions, as in many of her other works, a microcosmic scene that reveals a macrocosmic principle or truth. Her analyses, she claims, might take a volume but result from the vista outside of one back window where the domestic lives of her neighbors reveal the knowledge of life itself(LSR 85, 86). The pattern of discerning truths through scenes of domestic life forms the plan of all Martineaus Illustration of Political Economy, and its pedagogical bases. The tales highlight individual lives in order to exhibit the laws of economics and politics, as well as the necessity for social reform. Through interfacing the narratives of her characters daily lives and issues of policy, Martineau exposes the complex interdependence of public and private domains, and presents the intersection, rather than the separation of spheres. With the eradication of the dichotomy of spheres, Martineau simultaneously erases the distinctions between abstract truths and practical ideas. In Society in America, Martineau assures her readers that her access to domestic life renders her better prepared than most to address American social, political and economic issues than male travelers who remain excluded from the revelations and truths afforded by intimate views and intimate conversations. The embodiment of truth within the example, the conviction that the power for change is replicable from a pattern illustrated through the account of a tale, a scene or a life story, pervades Martineaus work and reshapes the meaning of her autobiographical texts as well as her political and social commentaries. The tale of the individual evolves into the stories and principles of laws and truths applicable to all. Within her autobiographical works, she sets forth her own success and competency to suggest that self-determination and the use of ones powers to the fullest are the legitimate parameters of womans sphere, and refutes the boundaries that delimit womans place and range of accomplishments. She depicts throughout

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her writings, including her socio-political works, what is possible for all women. For Martineau, to be an exemplary woman is to be an example, rather than extraordinary. In his compilation of biographies, Samuel Smiles demonstrates his appreciation of Martineau and refers to her as a model for others in her independence of mind and her efforts at self-control, self-direction and self-help (499). He labels her work as a model of composition (507). Smiles remarks clarify Martineaus intention of educating and cultivating the abilities of the individual, regardless of gender. Despite Smiles admiration, he, like other nineteenth-century reviewers, believes Martineaus abilities are uncommon and inaccessible to other women: Miss Martineau is a woman with a manly heart and head (499). Somehow Miss Martineau was fortunate enough to acquire these manly organs within a female body, and appears to Smiles as she did to others as a distinctly extraordinary breed, a kind of intellectual hermaphrodite. In addition to being considered anomalous because of her gender, Martineaus characterization appears through the renderings of her critics, as what Bakhtin refers to throughout Rabelais and His World, as the grotesque. The exceptional woman, she gures forth an outrageous body, her abilities disproportionate to the brain shes allocated. Her feats of travel to the Middle East in 1847; her westward navigation along the Mississippi and the Great Plains in the 1830s; her perils as an outspoken abolitionist in a volatile Boston and the South, all require the prowess of masculine muscles, the innate stamina and assertiveness expected of a man. Martineaus accomplishments as a female verge on the monstrous. The woman who assumes male qualities manifests the ability to traverse obstacles, but at the same time, poses a threat as she intimates that whole categories of gendered behaviors are insignicant if not obsolete. Rosemary Garland Thompson in her study, Feminist Theory, the Body and the Disabled Figure, discusses the construction of normalcy within the context of a male dominated hierarchy. She avers, Aristotle initiates the discursive practice of marking what is deemed aberrant while concealing the position of privilege by asserting its normativeness (280). The privilege of assigning norms and thereby dening deviance, reinforces the salient meanings of those terms while the power of those who determine such labels prevails within the proliferation of a discourse of the normal. Garland Thompson addresses the distinctions between certain bodies outside of the normative center and the bodily value that is iterated through the designation of normal (279). She suggests that the assigned value supports and maintains the hegemony and hierarchy that originally invests difference and normal with signicance (280). The established social, economic and political structures uphold and depend upon their own denitions and elaborations of difference. Harriet Martineau by her public presence and her renown as an author not only threatens to rattle the structures supporting the ideological assumptions about the normal role for women, her insistence upon reinterpreting the notion of separate spheres has the potential to destabilize the political, social and economic institutions that depend on normative gender patterns as the premise for womens disenfranchisement. In Society in America (SA) Martineau proposes that the true parameters of a womens sphere are not those imposed
by the ruling party, appointed by men and bounded by their ideas of propriety, a notion from which every woman may fairly dissent. The broad and true conception is of the sphere appointed by god and bounded by the powers he bestowed. This commands the assent of both men and women; and only the question of powers remain to be proved (153).

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The question, Martineau contends, can only be answered when women are given adequate and equal opportunities to develop their powers. Martineaus challenge portends the imminence of the threat to the male/female dichotomy that she poses. She admits the potential of her proposition to dismantle the privileged male hierarchy. She asserts that the education of women is feared and repressed and that the denial of womens rights xes the status quo. While there are natural rights which women may not use, just claims which are not listened to, large objects which may not be approached, even in imagination, intellectual activity is dangerous (228). The danger such women embody is depicted within a discourse of normalcy. The ambitious woman, the intellectual woman who oversteps the limits of her sphere, Martineau claims, is deemed unt (228). The woman who ventures forth into male territory is assigned an abnormality. The term unt denotes her physical inferiority and her unsuitable, unhealthy species of intellect. Martineau, as a deaf woman, carries along with her a visible sign that contributes to her already precarious status as an intellectual and vigorous woman. By using a speaking tube or cartochouc tube, Martineau possesses, as Erving Goffman denes it, a stigma (Stigma 2, 3). Her success as an author, however, makes her a public presence and a real, material body demanding repeated recognition. Stigmatized by her disability and marginalized by her gender, her critics contend with her deviance, exaggerating her appearance to display her as the grotesque, the exceptional and the abnormal. The public response to Martineau as a signicant gure with whom nineteenthcentury politicians and social theorists must contend, hinges upon investing both her deafness and her gender, her unt(ness) with as much social disqualication as possible. In an attempt to elude the ramications of his misguided rejection of Martineaus proposal for a series on political economy, the renowned Member of Parliament Lord Brougham, labels the overwhelmingly successful author of The Illustrations of Political Economy the little deaf woman from Norwich. While neither a little woman, nor merely a little deaf, Lord Brougham conates within the image he projects of Martineau the criteria which identify her to the Victorian press and which popular periodicals such as The Contemporary Review choose to cite for their reading public (XX1X: 1122). Brougham, without stating that Martineau should be unable to perform the monumental task of writing thirty-four tales involving theoretical premises, determines her insignicance, belittling her through the very use of little and diminishing the importance of her texts. By remarking upon her deafness and womanhood Lord Brougham defers to the stereotypes associated with both women and the deaf. As a woman and as disabled, Martineaus work represents the transgression of the limits of her proper sphere. Her actions, defying the principles of a female constitution as well as of the abilities of the deaf, render her as exceptional. The improbability of her achievements is contingent upon the immediate recognition by her contemporaries of her divergence from their expectations. Lord Broughams reaction to Martineaus popularity also reveals the anxiety produced by her transgression. Since both Martineaus hearing impairment and her femininity should conne her to domesticity and a severely restricted intellectual capacity, her engagement within theoretical and political realms reveals how ignominious her trespass is. She steps unhesitatingly into Broughams own arena. Martineaus venture into the male territory of political economy determines her as dangerous; for as she dees the norm of domesticity, she also poses the perilous possibility that the norm itself is neither universal nor true.

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Broughams epithet for Martineau associates the stereotypes of one marginal group, the deaf, and applies it to another group, women. To Martineaus nineteenthcentury audience, women and the deaf share specic characteristics. The nineteenthcentury stereotypes of gender, disability, and race incorporate the scientic rationale that the structures of the body determine the psychological, biological and intellectual propensities of the individual. The proliferation of such scientic studies as phrenology, social Darwinism, craniometry and eugenics, point to the material body as the map for drawing the boundaries of who one is and who one becomes. The predominant qualities assigning women to household tasks and maternal duties refer to her low weight, slight stature, undeveloped musculature, and reproductive functions, as well as the small size of her brain. These phenomena determine womans incapacity for abstract and/or scientic thought, her vanity and narrow-mindedness, as well as her inherent frailty and dependency. In 1834 in an article arguing in favor of the education of the deaf, The North American Review repeats these traits of intellectual limitations and personal deciency to depict the nineteenth-centurys presuppositions about the nature of the deaf. The inability to think in abstract terms results, according to the author, from contemporary beliefs about the use of sign language. Maintaining that signs are concrete and create a one-to-one correspondence between object and word, the argument follows that the deaf lack opportunities to exercise the faculty of abstraction, and therefore, never develop the segment of the brain where abstraction occurs. A lack of mental exercise also fosters narrow-mindedness and dependency. The article emphasizes that educators have retained the arcane principle that the absence of conversation encourages the mind of a deaf person to close in upon itself, resulting in an unhealthy self-contemplation and a lack of exposure to others ideas. The deaf come to regard their own views as unopposed, and thus become prideful, as they never share continuous communication and exchanges with their hearing compatriots. The vanity to which the deaf are predisposed, compounded by the dependency of the hearing impaired upon family and friends for care, reinforces the sense of self-importance that begins with the reclusive behavior of the deaf (North American 38: 307 57). Conforming to the principles of nineteenth-century linguistic theory, and in keeping with theories about the structures of the brain, the stereotypes about deafness gain substantial credibility. The validity of these perceptions of the deaf is determined through their repetition and representation as scientic and for their compatibility with the prevailing values. Accepting the portrayal of the deaf given by phrenologists, scientists, linguists, and educators, the deaf community absorbs the predominant attitudes about deafness. The marginalized group itself contributes to the reinforcement and perpetuation of its own stigma. The success of the disqualifying marks depends on this pattern of cultural diffusion. Martineau herself subscribes to these commonplaces about the deaf. In Household Education, she comments that the deaf are more unfortunate than the blind, from the important power of abstraction being in them very feeble in exercise and sadly restricted in the material on which it has to work (Household 132). The faculty of abstraction, according to nineteenth-century lore, requires constant stimulation. Since sign language in this era connotes a referential language of action pantomiming concrete objects, the deaf are restricted to a non-symbolic world, and the material they are apt to consider is similarly narrow and predetermined. The deaf remain locked inside the world of their own considerations. In addition to referring to

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the weakness in the faculty of abstraction, Martineau denes the deaf individuals sphere of activity as similar to the closed doors of domesticity. The territory the deaf are given entry to is private and sheltered. The assumption is that the capacity for thought remains rudimentary and based upon practical, obvious concepts due to deciencies in linguistic and cerebral development; the result is the construction of social relations. The inherent false pride to which the deaf are predisposed results from the problems of socialization produced by their inrmity. Martineau argues, Deaf children are apt to be proud and vain, and apt to take advantage of the pity which everybody feels for them (Household 123). She reiterates the assumptions presented by The North American Reviews assessment of the popular conceptions about the deaf, discovering grounds for vanity because the deaf become the center of attention, and as the absence of intercourse precipitates an inward preoccupation. Without directly referring to it, Martineaus concern over the self-interest she perceives in the deaf, infers the detrimental effects of the dependency upon others, which ensues from the pity of family and friends. Inscribed within an autobiography depicting her as the victim of familial antipathies and maternal neglect, Martineau presumes her audience will recognize that the dependency fostering egotism and narrow-mindedness are outside of her early experience, and that her ensuing deafness in adolescence was more a source of derision than of indulgence. She describes herself as free of the tricky, selsh and egotistical nature of the born deaf (Autobiography 1: 52). She owes her better nature to the belated acquisition of deafness, as well as to the bitter fact that when her hearing impairment rst occurs, her siblings taunt her as unwilling to listen, and her mother disbelieves her. Rather than becoming the pitied pet of the family, Martineau convinces her audience of the necessity for her self-reliance. She develops a singular maturity of character and mind resulting from the lessons of endurance she undergoes through her familys incredulity and cruelty. The hearing decit merely bolsters the dual images Martineau wishes to impress upon her readers, her resourcefulness and the self-control essential to the ideal Victorian. Martineau manipulates the tropes of deafness to set herself apart from stereotypical disqualications and revises them to emphasize her own independence and intellectual prowess. Acquiring her deafness at the late age of fteen, for example, she claims the advantage of language development. She avers, her education was considerably advanced before my hearing began to go (Letter 24). Furthermore, in her own case, solitude enhances her opportunities for reading, theorizing, writing and self-discipline, while the sophistication of her thought and her liberty to form opinions result from her inability to maintain constant social intercourse. Her perceptions, rather than shaped by narrow-minded solipsism, result from her exposure to a wide array of texts. Books, articles, periodicals, primary sources such as records of parliamentary proceedings, are the vehicles for her self-education and her guardians against the evils of isolation. According to Mary Jo Deegan in her article, Making Lemonade: Harriet Martineau on Being Deaf, Martineaus deafness inuenced her career as a sociologist and social observer. But Deegans enthusiasm for Martineaus exertions as a deaf woman, and the praise for her taking lifes lemon and making world-class lemonade ignores that Martineau overcomes the consequences of deafness by writing (41). Lennard J. Davis in his work on eighteenth and nineteenth-century perceptions of the deaf Universalizing Marginality, relates the story of a young deaf man who composes the history of his education. Davis asserts that through writing the young man participates

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in a language that challenges the perception of the deaf as mute. This textual language is neither performative in the manner of sign, nor spoken as is oral communication. Writing is available to any audience, hearing or deaf. To be deaf is to experience the written text in its most readerly incarnation. The text would not then be transformed into an auditory translation but would be seen as language itself (117). In fact, the hearing reader approaches a text with muteness and attention to nonverbal signs (118). While Davis is interested in asserting the political changes incumbent upon an increasingly literate public and the social class issues of sign, his argument invites the proposition that the hearing/deaf dichotomy is eluded by readers and texts. Textual language is of the utmost importance for Harriet Martineau. Reading and writing grant her relief from the toils of social intercourse and the efforts of hearing. She repeatedly states in letters and in her autobiographical works that for those who are decient in a sense, daily life always involves a struggle. Yet Martineaus position as a writer alters the nature of her struggle and grants her an identity as a public gure that allows her to portray herself to readers as a character of strength and intellect and a model for others. Deafness does not debar her from the pursuit of abstract and/or complex issues, nor does it silence her. Within her autobiographical Letter to the Deaf, a public document intended to meet the needs of the deaf community, Martineau identies herself as what Goffman terms the representative gure or spokesperson for the group (Stigma 24). Her own victory over the susceptibility to self-indulgence and social isolation transforms her condition into a source for her own exemplary status. To create the image of herself as the model of the self-discipline she advocates for the deaf, Martineau draws upon the nineteenth-centurys glorication of self-denial as a venerable form of stoicism. In addition, she associates the necessity for the repression of personal desires with the Christian tradition of suffering as a means for moral improvement and as the instrumental exercise of Christian duty. The author reminds her deaf readers that the soul prots from the torments of the body:
The thrill of delight which arises during the ready agreement to prot by pain must subside like all other emotions; but it does not depart without leaving the spirit lightened and cheered; and every visitation leaves it in a more generous state than the last (Letter 259).

Martineau aspires to convince the deaf that their suffering is a means for growth, and insists upon the unselsh, expansiveness possible for them. Not only do ethics and theology emerge through her use of spirit and generous, but in describing the experience as a visitation, she emphasizes the recurrence of the opportunity, and evokes the presence of an angel or of God as the principle behind the incidents. The Christian motif within Martineaus Letter works to dispel notions of the deaf as selsh as well as to undermine the derogatory implications of insularity. By addressing the community of the deaf as a representative gure, she invites the comparison between others and herself not to emphasize her superiority or her distinctions, but to persuade others to follow her path. The self-restraint she professes promotes the strength of mind identied with the self-renunciation of saints and martyrs. Martineau addresses her readers as sufferers and compares the urge to depend upon a companion for comfort and constant interaction in the company of others as lures toward sin, replicating the perilous situation of a saint when evil disguised as pleasure appears. The deaf, she writes, must face up to our enemy and stand alone in the midst of temptations (Letter 250 251).

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She argues for a strong will, personal resolve and independence, and she rejects passivity by projecting the image of one in active combat against evil. Martineau also discourages mere tolerance: Submission is not enough. . . .Nothing short of acquiescence will preserve the cheerfulness of our acknowledgement of an inrmity. . .hearty acquiescence cannot fail to bring forth cheerfulness (Letter 259). Acquiescence requires agency. The individual offers his/her own agreement and acknowledgement. Submission, on the other hand, all too closely resembles the deference expected of inferiors and particularly women; Martineau replaces surrender with choice. In her Autobiography, Martineau replicates and extends the image of saintliness to those who forcefully resist the evils of their disability. She likens such combativeness to that of St. Joan. She deploys her own increasing deafness to create a brave woman who unhesitatingly faces dangers: Instead of drifting helplessly as hitherto, I gathered myself up for a gallant breasting of my destiny; and in time I reached the rocks where I could take a rm stand (Autobiography 1: 58). The young woman Martineau depicts resembles a military leader or an explorer on the verge of a conquest. With both steadfastness and self-direction, Martineau uses her deafness as a means for establishing her courage and strength. Though she attains her goal, she indicates that the achievement requires persistence and vigilance as she steps onto the precarious rocks. Like the hero and saint she portrays, Martineau rehabilitates herself by asserting that her accomplishments result from inner resources and self-command. In addition to facing the reality of her disability, she recognizes that she must direct her own course. She states that it was imperative to take my case in my own hands and refuses assistance (Autobiography 1: 58). Martineau renounces the well-intentioned but detrimental advice of others, calling her position one of hard discipline as she forgoes special attention, refusing to be the central gure at public gatherings (Autobiography 1: 57). Casting herself as independent and self-sufcient, citing instances of self-denial and resilience, she dees what she considers overbearing interference and asserts her independence (Autobiography 1: 58). Martineau contravenes the stereotypes in which her disability is embedded. Harriet Martineaus critics, nevertheless, avail themselves of the opportunities afforded by the authors vulnerability as the little deaf woman from Norwich. The Nineteenth Century, for example, in its 1877 review of Harriet Martineaus Autobiography, faults her for her strong mindedness and interprets this aw as a corollary of her vanity. Citing the source of Martineaus misconceptions and limited intellect as a consequence of her disability, the critic argues, Her deafness absolutely disqualied her for either accurate observation or positive judgments of men, yet she never appears to have dreamed of this disqualication (Nineteenth II: 103). Martineau dares not only to assert herself in spite of her deafness, but the critic claims, shes narrow-minded and vain enough to believe herself able to voice her own opinions. Although the author, W.R. Gregg, introduces Martineau as extraordinary because she is a thinking woman, the reviewer nevertheless leaves no reservations about her inability to perform her function as an author and social critic. In society, he notes. she heard only what was directly intended for her, and moreover only what was specically designed to pass down her trumpet; statements that must go through this ordeal are inevitably manufactured, or at least modied for export (Nineteenth 2: 103). The commentary lends itself to a graphic, cartoon-like exaggeration of Martineau, likening dinner conversation with her to a limited, impersonal and torturous gesture. This caricature further degrades her by setting up an elaborate

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factory for communication. By distorting Martineaus need for a trumpet, Gregg depicts an outspoken deaf woman as grotesque. Using the identical strategy as The Nineteenth Century for accentuating the signicance of Martineaus deafness as a means of reproach, The Quarterly Review in its 1877 discussion of Martineaus Autobiography focuses upon the authors inadequacies as a proto-sociologist. For The Quarterly, Martineaus deafness determines her intrusiveness, her presumptuousness, and in a parodic depiction of her, the critic suggestively alludes to her social behavior as replicating the entrance of sin into the Garden. The reviewer comments:
. . .[T]here was something appalling in her preparations for colloquial enjoyment. At one time besides the large trumpet, she had one with a large cartochouc tube, long enough to be passed across the dinner table, winding like a serpent amongst the dishes. . . The interchange of mind this effected could hardly be called conversation: it was dialog, or monologue under difculties (Quarterly 143: 509).

In this case not only is conversation manufactured, but suggestive of the disruption of bodily and social boundaries contaminating all those sharing the space. The loss of appropriate barriers by the invasion of the tube creates a threat that replicates the advent of sin. It was the serpent wending his way through the gated Eden who tempted Eve and convinced her she was capable of superior knowledge. Eves presumptuousness encroaches upon the division between human abilities and Gods omniscience. The critics distortion of Martineaus public presence not only draws a ridiculously large hearing apparatus, but also ridicules her aspiring to knowledge beyond her ken: if Martineau presumes to know society, she is as na ve and as falsely proud as both Eve and the serpent. The ill-fated entry of the serpent at the table and in Eden, suggests the trespass of boundaries that Martineaus advent into politics, press, economics and sociology portend. Her pretensions are as foreboding of evils as Eves. Martineaus emergence as a public gure intimates that the territory of the existing social hierarchy is not securely gated, and the province of male intellectual superiority may be subject to incursions. These nineteenth-century challenges to Martineaus authority as a sociologist, theorist and writer betray her audiences anxiety with her ability to both publicly speak for herself and to be heard. The comments all suggest that her views are defective through manipulations of her hearing decit. Alleging that Martineaus inability to hear the voices of others impairs her own ability to speak her mind, these reviewers claim that she should depend on the truths of others rather than formulate her own. Martineau is faulted for passing her tube around the table, ultimately determining for herself who and what she wants to hear. In The Contemporary Review, Henry Richardson claims, the lady suffered much and lost still more from her deafness. She heard specic remarks and formal conversation (Contemporary XXIX: 1122). Richardson attributes many of her errors to her inability to catch nuances, and therefore, the subtleties of conversation, which shift as speakers alternate (Contemporary XXIX: 1122). Martineaus loss, according to the critic, is the truth. For as she directs her tube from one person to another, she misses what may be said in between the lines. The belief held by the woman from Norwich that she can decide for herself, speak for herself, and listen for herself, challenges the assumptions about her performance as female and as deaf. The coalescence of Martineaus deafness and her sex lies not only in the acceptance of Broughams epithet, but is attested to by reviews in which her

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deafness is not the source of her grotesquerie or the premise for the absurdity of her prominent public role. The authors of these commentaries focus upon Martineaus intellectual deciencies and professional failings as a consequence of her gender. Conceit, inexibility and the authors reliance on her own assessment of theoretical and practical matters factor into her undue pride and her lack of conformity. William Empson, in an 1833 Edinburgh Review article on Martineaus Illustrations of Political Economy, nds that her ability to separate her own ideas from typical Whig assessments of Utilitarianism results from her predisposition to unhesitatingly speak her own mind. According to Empson such speech invokes a similar sense of threat to that which Brougham identies by the masculine nature of Martineaus work. Moreover, the impending danger of the Quarterlys serpent shows its fangs in The Edinburgh Review, when Empson expresses his concern over the tales. He fears that the particular opinions by the expression of which our suspicion has been aroused. . .can only have been arrived at by a rashness of assumption (Edinburgh LVII: 10). Martineaus haste in judging for herself allegedly undermines, for Empson, the young womans perspicacity and merit. Empsons comments reect that the issue is Martineaus belief that she is knowledgeable and accustomed to theory as well as to practice:
If Miss Martineau really thinks that at her time of life and with her opportunities, she is competent to legislate for mankind anew on its most complicated institutions.. . ., we suggest to her the propriety of more deliberation and forbearance on questions of such immense magnitude (Edinburgh LVII: 11).

The problem for Empson is that Martineau contemplates legislation and argues for her vision of just policies. This entry into the male domain of policy making, reinforces Martineaus continual disregard for the barriers intended to culturally and socially exclude her. As with the presumptuousness evoked by the Quarterlys serpent, Empson protests that Martineau presumes to understand, what for him could only be undeliberated assumption. Empson continues to rebuke Martineau for the solitary process by which she arrives at her ideas. He attests that her condent imagination had run wild in the paradise of its own conception (Edinburgh LVII 10, emphasis added). Martineaus vanity conquers, according to Empson, her ability to reiterate the established doctrines of her male contemporaries, and leads her, he suggests, back to the old Eden where woman rst sins. The fault in Martineau, as for womankind since Paradise, seems to remain the trust in her own wisdom. To Empson, Martineaus wanderings occur when she professes to know more than or to differ from her male counterparts who predominate in the elds of politics, economics and social policy. The tales of Political Economy take Martineau into the masculine arena of social science, political theory and economics wherein she ventures to deviate from the tenets of such eminent men as Smith, Bentham, and Malthus. In his chastisement of her, Empson refers to the instances where Martineau endorses egalitarian marriage and universal suffrage, as she does in For Each and For All; civil disobedience, a theme in Berkeley the Banker; her proposition of transportation versus imprisonment, as well as her rejection of capital punishment, which appear in At Home and Abroad; and her position against primogeniture in Brooke and Brooke Farm. These persuasions diverge from a capitalist, utilitarian agenda and while not unheard of in the 1830s certainly represent Martineaus own political and philosophical arguments. Empson alleges that her

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belief that she can wrestle the foundations of transmission of property, (and) dispense with criminal law and is ready with a millennium of her own in which our ladies have taken out of our monopolizing hands the course of Parliament and public life, there is no knowing (Edinburgh LVII: 11)

where into the lofty empyrean of her imagination she will soar. Ultimately, Empson fears the Amazons of politics, women who like Martineau who may stake a claim in the frontiers of the masculine realm and rule with womanly force the newly conquered territories (Edinburgh LVII: 10). Not only does Empson cite the Amazons of politics in order to inate the proportions of a political woman to a mythical being, but he intimates such women are in battle with the proprietors of Parliament (Edinburgh LVII: 10). Empson fully reveals the foundations for his lack of faith in Martineau as he gently admonishes her to give up the vagaries of her own notions and hearken to the judgments of her superiors. He admonishes her, The intellectual fever. . .under the excitement of which they (her views) can alone have broken forth, will, we trust ere long be thoroughly be subdued, partly from deference to the opinion of others (Edinburgh LVII: 11). For the Edinburgh critic, discussion of alternative principles without acknowledging an inuential, or doctrinaire male precursor manifests a womans susceptibility to wild ideas. The suggestion that Martineau needs to be subdued and that her opinions have broken forth, emphasizes the fear that this woman has clambered over the fence and escaped into the free range of her own views. To do so, according to Empson, signies that she is ill, and her sickness is one of an agitated mental state, a condition endemic to women. The woman authors state of mind is rendered feeble, while her surrender to greater authority will cure her. The critic discovers resources for undermining Martineaus authority using gender stereotypes of frailty, physical debility, vanity, and willfulness, all of which replicate the rhetorical defamation of the deaf. Empson never needs to refer to her cumbersome speaking tube; he need only mention that the author he discusses is woman. In its 1833 article on Martineau, The Quarterly Review nds the young authors gender an ample target for reproach, leaving the question of her insidious serpentine intrusiveness to its later 1877 critique. The reviewer, in 1833, aims at Martineaus feminine failing in scientic methods and her trespass into the masculine region of theory, as well as her traipsing about in the masculine realm of politics, policy and economics. Unlike the kindly Empson who merely prods Martineau to deference, the Quarterly urges the young woman to abandon all hope. The best advice we can give her is to burn all the little books . . .till she has mastered a better set of principles (Quarterly XLIX: 136).The attitude presented by the critic for the Quarterly seems to be that if Martineau, as Empson recommended, only listened to her betters, she would possess better facts and beliefs. The critic reveals that gender is the primary issue disturbing him by distinguishing the Malthusian tale Weal and Woe in Garveloch for his most scathing invectives. In this tale Martineau espouses the preventive check, the nineteenth-century euphemism for birth control, and promotes the necessity, quite unheard of in this era, of a womans right to choose. Martineau points out that the issue of population control depends on women. She proposes that a woman decide whether or not she will bear children, and by such determinations she ultimately assumes responsibility for when and if she will engage in sexual relations. The reviewer responds to the prospect of women impinging upon the male prerogative with regard to sexual behavior, by attacking Martineaus theoretical proposition as deeply awed in its Malthusian premises. The critic determines that Martineau is simply wrong. The breadth of her error ranges from her miscalculations in

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mathematics with regard to Malthus estimations of population growth, as well as to her social impropriety as a single woman who dares to mention sex. The Quarterly exclaims:
A little ignorance on these ticklish topics is perhaps not unbecoming a young unmarried lady . . .Poor innocent! She has been puzzling over Mr. Malthuss arithmetical rations for knowledge which she should have obtained by a simple question or two of her mama (Quarterly XLIX: 131).

With a deft stroke, the reviewer relegates Martineau back to her appropriate domainout of the sphere of politics and back to the familial hearth. At her mamas side. Martineaus childishness is emphasized, as is the necessity for learning from the Victorian ideal woman, the mother. Katie and Ella, the two spokespersons in the Garveloch story are both mothers who through observations of the hunger around them and recognition of the uctuations of supply and demand in industry come to espouse the preventive check. Because they are mothers, these outspoken women challenge the prevailing notions about the nature of female sexuality and the unquestionable force of maternal instinct. Both of the Highland woman are employed; both control their sexuality. Katie, a widow, refuses to marry again in order to limit the number of her children; Ella endorses the preventive check. For the Quarterly, these women measure the danger posed by women who believe themselves licensed to express themselves, who enter the workforce, and who determine the course of their domestic lives. The critic voices his own incredulity that such women exist: The notion of such dialogues, on such subjects between a couple of bare-legged Highland queans was never surpassed in the dreams of Laputa (Quarterly XLIX: 141). Through the reference to Laputa, Swifts land of philosophical absurdities and impossibilities, the critic denounces Martineaus text for its ridiculous theoretical bases, underscoring her feminine irrationality. At the same time, the Quarterly assails Martineau for her scandalous protagonists. Her characters openly acknowledge such subjects which like the preventive check is a euphemism for birth control and sex. These improper women, Katie, Ella and their creator, Martineau, maintains the critic, represent the ultimate in unseemliness. The reference to Laputa resonates with its Spanish counterpart of whore, condemning not only the importunity of addressing sexuality, but also accusing Martineau of selling herself. As a writer who enters the public marketplace, Martineau voices clearly and distinctly her ideas, and prots from her openness and lack of modesty within full view of an audience who expect no less than deference and no more than subjection at her mamas knee. Martineau having internalized the nineteenth-centurys biological and social descriptions of women and the deaf confronts the consequences of leaving her mothers domicile and of pursuing complex and problematic questions as a professional author. In her Autobiography, she refuses to accept limitations on her ability to theorize, observe, and analyze, while she perseveres in her rejection of overweening pride. Most signicantly she objects to cultural paradigms enforcing womens silence. She cites her intellectual development, forthrightness and emancipation as the core of her essential self: My business in life has been to think and learn and to speak out with absolute freedom what I have thought and learned (Autobiography 1: 102). Establishing herself as vocal, educated, and unconstrained, Martineau signals her departure from the nineteenth-centurys idealized version of a woman. Designating her lifes purpose within the terms of intellect and freedom, she suggests that through her own efforts she broke through the existing barriers responsible for isolating the deaf and keeping women in their

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domestic place. Yet the tacit acknowledgement of her ability to penetrate boundaries allows Martineau to subtly erode the popular creed of female inferiority as a natural fact. Instead of creating an exceptional woman, she renders what is possible and a fundamental human right. Martineau chooses to escape the conventional parameters of the womans sphere and to contest the connement to domesticity when dening her lifes purpose as business, asserting her participation in the masculine realm. She acknowledges, nonetheless, a need to justify her status outside of a womans place by framing the narrative of her avocation within the section of her Autobiography that offers the rationale for her status as childless and unmarried. She claims that her temperament and xed sense of herself as a writer disqualify her from the intimacy and demands of family life. I rejoice she avers, not to have been involved in a relation for which I was, or believed myself unt (Autobiography 1: 100). Refusing to involve herself in the conditions to which married women subject themselves to, Martineau claims for herself the status of the happiest single woman in England (Autobiography 1: 102). Her avoidance of wives and mothers in terms of establishing a happiness quotient conveys Martineaus unwillingness to discuss, as she does in Society in America, the aws in marriage as it was conceived of by the government and practiced by religions. She evades the question of married woman while giving herself an advantageous situation. Admitting that she is unsuited for a traditional role, Martineau recognizes the norm, while disavowing its primary value as a universal rule. As with her self-determination, liberty and speech, Martineau identies her deafness as a disqualication for the circumscriptions of womens domesticity. Yet her inability to fulll a marital, maternal part substantiates her unique qualications for her lifes work. Her deafness makes constant social relations overly demanding; her escape from society promotes contemplation and independence of mind. Still, Martineau explains her difference from other women as consonant with her fundamental afnity with them. She reminds her readers that through her vocation along with family ties and such domestic duties as I have been blessed with. . .as every womans heart requires,. . . I am the happiest single woman in England (Autobiography 1: 102). Reassuring her audience that she is no anomaly, no grotesque gure of a manly woman, Martineau manages to free herself from a nineteenth-century womans limitations and to establish herself as a signicant public heroine. Her strategy portends that in her likeness to all women, all women possess a likeness to her; they share the potential for similar heroism: intellectual freedom and a public life. Within her Autobiography, Society in America and in Household Education, Martineau insures that her readers understand that the success of women depends upon equal access to education and opportunities for independence. She begins her argument by asserting the moral imperative of allowing each human being to fully develop his/her intellect. . . .I suppose none of us will doubt that everything possible should be done to improve the quality of the mind of every human being (Household 240). In so generalizing, Martineau espouses a universal ethic that conforms to scientic trends of opportunity and competition and the economics of the utilitarian marketplace as well as a Christian sense of the value of all life. Furthermore, Martineau replays each prejudicial aphorism to protest against its value. For example the argument concerning womens incapacity for abstract thought by virtue of their neurological structures is, according to Martineau, easily refuted by the numbers of women, who like herself, demonstrate facility with difcult subject matter.

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If it is said that the female brain is incapable of studies of an abstract nature,that is not true: for there are many instances of women who have been good mathematicians and good classical scholars. The plea is indeed nonsense on the face of it; for the brain which will learn French will learn Greek; the brain which enjoys arithmetic is capable of mathematics. (Household 241)

By iterating that women are capable, Martineau intimates that her own acumen is neither unique nor deviant. She insists that her distinction remains a consequence of circumstances. As with her deafness, her advantage lies in the breadth of her education. In addition, her deafness and solitary nature, qualities that would appear to impede her public success and her access to resources, on the contrary, reinforce her propensity for her work. Nevertheless, as she declares in almost all of her writings, the availability of education, which privileges the powers of her own mind, must become the standard for all women. Not only does Martineau append a moral conviction, she refers to education in the nineteenth-centurys weighted rhetoric of duty and of rights.
What we have to think of is the necessity,in all justice, in all honour, in all humanity, in all prudence,that every girls faculties should be made the most of, as carefully as boys. (Household 245)

This egalitarian plea suggests that the cultivation of the female intellect is a necessity and one invoking an iconoclastic sense of righteousness. Martineaus own accomplishments result from her endeavors and resources, and her insistence upon her own rights. Rather than perceiving her success as an adaptation of the structures of a female brain to that of a masculine mind, what differs in Harriet Martineau is her autonomy. Martineau distinguishes herself through the act of becoming a representative gure. She represents the community of the deaf and of women as she speaks for those who tolerate their subjection and/or refuse to speak for themselves. As a disabled women who has become a public gure and a renowned author, Martineau eludes the signicance her critics attach to her stigma. Martineaus gender and disability are personal assets fostering her development as a social critic and writer. In the autobiographical Preface to her social and political analyses in Society in America, she anticipates the allegations likely to ensue from her deafness and her gender. Her strategy is to state the potential drawbacks posed by her hearing impairment and then to unhesitatingly offer her ability to counter them through enhanced opportunities. During her visit to America, the insidious trumpet metamorphoses from the disgusting interloper at the table to Martineaus secret triumph. Her hearing device elevates her above tourists, travel writers, and male journalists as her use of the trumpet promotes condences through the intimacy of conversation. She asserts that her use of the speaking tube seems to exert some winning power, by which I gain more in tete-a-tetes than is given to people who have general conversation (Society xiv). As the sole auditor, Martineau hears not what is for public consumption, nor what might be edited for politeness or for the sake of convention; the social observer in America hears the uncensored truth. Acquiring rst-hand, accurate, information through private conversations reects upon Martineaus position as a woman as well as her use of her trumpet. She avows that as a woman, she gains access to hidden sources of facts. She enters the nursery, the boudoir, the kitchen witnessing much more of domestic life than could possibly have been exhibited to any gentlemen traveling through the country (Society xii). Lest her investigations of the private sphere validate her limitations as a woman and as disabled, Martineau promises her audience that she learns more than the typical man. Martineau elaborates upon the whos who in America, noting that through her

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speaking tube she enjoys the conversation of nearly every eminent man in politics, science and literature and every distinguished woman (Society xii). Her interviews with the most inuential within a broad spectrum of interests include her as a member of the elite and increase the parameters of her business in life from the kitchen, and boudoir to the White House and Senate. Neither her deafness nor her gender appears to impede her lifes work. Martineau insists that no fact that I wished to learn or any doctrine I desired to comprehend was ever kept from me (Society xii). What Martineaus critics see as her greatest liabilities, her gender and her deafness, become for the little deaf woman of Norwich, the foundation of her fortitude, intellect, and unlimited opportunities for fullling her lifes business. WORKS CITED
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA and London: M.I.T. Press, 1965. Davis, Lennard J. Universalizing Marginality. The Disability Studies Reader. Lennard J. Davis, ed. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Deegan, Mary Jo. Making Lemonade: Harriet Martineau on Being Deaf. Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives. Eds. Michael R. Hill and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale. New York: Routledge, 2001. 41 58. Empson, William. Miss Marcet and Miss Martineau. Edinburgh Review LVII (1833): 3 39. Frawley, Maria. A Prisoner to the Coach. The Body and Physical Difference. Eds. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. Garland Thompson, Rosemarie. Feminist Theory, The Body and the Disabled Figure. The Disability Studies Reader. Lennard J. Davis, ed. New York and London: Routledge, 1977. Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Management of a Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963; Touchstone, 1986. Gregg W.R. Harriet Martineau. The Nineteenth Century. VI.ii (1877): 97 112. Martineau, Harriet. Harriet Martineaus Autobiography. 3 vols. Ed. Maria Chapman. Boston: Houghton, Mifin and Co., 1877. . The Crofton Boys. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1842. . Feats on the Fiord. London: Charles Knight and Co., 1844. . Settlers at Home and Abroad. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1841. . The Hour and the Man. London: Edward Moxon, 1841. . Household Education. London: Edward Moxon, 1848. . Letter to the Deaf. London: Edward Moxon, 1834. . Letters on Mesmerism. London: Edward Moxon, 1845. . Life in the Sickroom. Boston: William Crosby, 1845. . The Peasant and the Prince. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1841. . Society in America. London and New York: Saunders and Otley, 1837.

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Postlethwaite, Diana. Mothering and Mesmerism in the Life of Harriet Martineau. Signs. 14 (1989): 583 609. Sanders, Valerie. Absolutely an Act of Duty. Prose Studies. 9.3 (1986): 54 70. Smiles, Samuel. Harriet Martineau. Brief Biographies. Chicago: Belford, Clarke and Co., 1883. 499 507. Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Womens Autobiography. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987. Winter, Allison. Harriet Martineau and the Reform of the Invalid in Victorian England. The Historical Journal. 38.3 (1995) 597 616.

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