Laura Bridgeman is mentioned, in a life of Helen Keller, as the plain, middle-aged deaf-blind woman who taught Anne Sullivan finger spelling. When she was a child, Bridgeman was said to be the most famous woman of the 19th century, except for Queen Victoria. She appears in Boston tour guides from the period. Thousands came to see her at the Perkins School, on exhibition days. It was was common then for asylums to exhibit their inmates. P.T. Barnum was garnering fame for his freak show at the same time.
Bridgeman was the first deaf and blind woman to be educated. On June 1, English professor Elizabeth Gitter of John Jay College, New York read from her new life of Bridgeman, The Imprisoned Guest, while her own guests enjoyed wine, cheese and musical chairs at The Bookstore in Lenox.
Gitter said she came to Bridgeman’s story the same way Helen Keller’s mother did. Helen Keller’s mother read about Bridgeman in the Boston chapter of Charles Dickens’ American Notes. Gitter is a specialist in Dickens and the Victorian era. Her parents also live near the Perkins School for the Blind, where Bridgeman was educated, and Gitter grew up in Boston.
Gitter visited the Perkins School out of curiosity, and found the school had all of Bridgeman’s correspondence in cardboard boxes in its archives. It was a treasure trove, Gitter said. Famous minds had written to and about Bridgeman: Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin. Gitter found two autographed Dickens letters no one knew about. Gitter said she felt like the character in A.S. Byatt’s Posession, who discovers an unknown letter by a famous poet, and from it a whole correspondence.
Besides these minds, Bridgeman’s correspondence revealed her own, and Gitter said Bridgeman was simply an amazing person. She wrote prolifically and well. Hers is a strong voice. She gave a vivid, extended picture of the life of an institutionalized woman in the 1830s. (Gitter said has a lot in common with Little Nell in Dickens’ A Curiosity Shop, though Gitter said there is no evidence Bridgeman had a direct effect on the book, and Bridgeman was already famous when the book was written.)
The Imprisoned Guest is Gitter’s first trade book. She has written a number of scholarly books, and published scholarly work, discussing Bridgeman in a Victorian context. Bridgeman was a figure of paramount importance; in the imagery at the time, she was a person buried alive or drowned, and raised to life. Gitter thought Bridgeman had been buried again. She wanted to raise Bridgeman again, to recognize Bridgeman as an important and exciting figure in her own right and in her century. She she felt Bridgeman’s story was relevant to current debates about the role and treatment of the disabled.
Bridgeman’s education sprang from a common movement in the early half of the 19th century. It was the rise of the asylum in the United States, Gitter said. Horace Mann was instituting universal education for the poor. Dorothea Dix reformed mental asylums. Reformers Samuel Gridley Howe and Thomas Gallaudet travelled to Europe. Gallaudet returned to found a school for the deaf. Howe founded the Perkins School for the Blind and a school for the “feebleminded,†and collaborated with John Brown’s abolitionist raid on Harper’s Ferry.
Children throughout New England qualified to study at the Perkins School. Laura Bridgeman was from Hanover, New Hampshire. Scarlet fever killed her two older sisters when she was two years old, and took her eyes and ears. (Her eyes shriveled during the illness; she wore a green ribbon over them at the school. Much later, when they came into fashion, she got a pair of dark glasses.) The fever may have dulled her sense of smell and taste as well.
Her parents would pat her head in approval, or tap her back to reprimand her. They could communicate very little else, though they taught her to set the table and churn and braid. Gitter cites letters she wrote later, remembering the feel of grass and apples under her feet, the heat and sweetness of maple syrup after the boiling, or the wild tantrums she sometimes threw, clinging to her mother, until her father ordered her to be calm. She wrote that she had had some happy times as a child, though her only plaything was an old boot. “I never knew how to kiss my boot, or my folks,†she said.
Howe heard of her through a journal from a school for the deaf and went to see her. She was seven years old and very bright, “the perfect candidate for education.†Howe thought his methods of teaching the blind could be adapted for her. There was, Gitter said, no eureka moment in her teaching. As Howe described it, teaching Bridgeman was like dangling a cord to a person under water. There came a moment when she grasped it.
Howe taught Bridgeman finger spelling, letters spelled into the hand of the deaf person. One woman in The Bookstore audience demonstrated the alphabet, moving combinations of fingers and fist briskly across her other palm. Good finger spellers are very quick, and there are many shortcuts, Gitter said. When Helen Keller went to Vassar, Anne Sullivan, who had never gone to college, sat with her in all her classes and finger spelt the lectures, in German, Latin, Greek.
Bridgeman was the “beneficiary and victim of America’s first attempts to help the disabled,†Gitter said, 50 years before Helen Keller. “She was intellectual phenomena ... a kind of genius.†Before her, deaf and blind people were thought of as idiots. There were few of them, and many had other disabilities as well. A child born blind and deaf will also have developmental difficulties that Bridgeman and Helen Keller, who both lost sight and hearing at age two, did not have.
Bridgeman read raised print and wrote well. As a child, she was small, pretty, a “cheerful sufferer.â€
Howe shaped Bridgeman’s story. He framed his reports of her, in popular and scientific journals, with scientific passages and religious metaphor. She was an answer to popular philosophic debate, Gitter said, and an affirmation of Unitarian Boston’s confidence in the redemptive power of education. She upheld the Victorian faith in scientific solutions to social problems. Howe built her image so successfully, and his own with it, that Horace Mann reportedly said he would rather have built up the blind asylum than have written Hamlet.
Bridgeman was a subject for studies of the nature of language, the origin of language and ideas. She was tabula rasa, a blank slate. Psychologists, phrenologists and others were challenging enlightenment theories on the workings of the mind. Linguists had looked for studied wild children in order to study the development of speech. Anthropologists looked for “precultural minds†— without success. Bridgeman proved that a human with almost no outside sensory stimuli could learn language and develop abstract thought as well as any other. “Howe saved her from numbing isolation,†Gitter said, “but she saved him too ... because against all odds, she had the tenacity to learn language.â€
After such widespread fame, why was Bridgeman buried? Gitter said there were three forces shifting the rubble. First, the Civil War shifted the altruistic public’s attention, and Howe’s, toward abolitionism. Then, maybe most tellingly, Bridgeman grew up. “Everyone loves a disabled child,†Gitter said. Charities advertise today with pictures of children. She noted the popularity of recent “blind-girl movies.†And Helen Keller was so loved. She was nine when Bridgeman died, Gitter said, and even as an adult, she was very attractive. “She wasn’t frightening,†Gitter said. “She knew how to be a disabled adult.â€
Gitter said Bridgeman was a difficult person. She did not smile for photographs. When she was sad or angry, she said so. She taught informally at Perkins as an adult: she made lace, handiwork, crochet and taught the girls these things. She sewed beautifully, could thread a needle with her tongue and use a sewing machine. She was an exacting sewing teacher, Gitter said, and would rip out stitches if she did not approve of her pupils’ work.
She never let herself be made into a poster child. Helen Keller gave a good imitation of a hearing, sighted person. She worked at it. Her glass eyes looked real. She kept an attentive smile in place in public, and made a show of appreciation for music, art, nature. She once said, Gitter added, that the happiest worker in the orchard might be a cripple.
“Laura said what she thought, and was terribly impatient with people who didn’t finger spell quickly,†Gitter said. Bridgeman hit it off with Anne Sullivan because Anne Sullivan was very smart and caught on quickly. At other times, she got frustrated with slow conversations and slapped people. Bridgeman grew from a charming girl into a plain, outspoken, lonely woman. Her champion, Howe, lost interest in her.
Howe married Julia Ward Howe when Bridgeman was 13. When he was away on his honeymoon, Bridgeman had a dream that “Doctor [Howe] came home and did not ask how I did.â€
She wrote to Howe on his honeymoon. She wrote his wife, when she heard they had a child, promising her loyalty. She would pretend to talk to Howe’s empty chair, asking if he was glad to be home. Howe did not answer her letters, and they grew more despairing: “Do you pray for me? — I love you — I will give your baby a gift — I will pull you home on a long string ...†She seems to have known, Gitter suggested, that she would be abandoned. “Everyone said she was unbelievably perceptive,†Gitter said: she could read someone’s mood by touching their face and pick up the atmosphere in a room.
Gitter said she did not know exactly why Howe abandoned Bridgeman; she could only conclude that puberty had something to do with it. Howe came back from his 18-month honeymoon (and an unpleasant honeymoon, according to Gitter), looked at Bridgeman, and said ... ugh. She had lived in his house. As soon as he returned from his honeymoon, he sent her to a girls’ dormitory. “He had a terrible marriage,†Gitter added. “He was an irascible man.â€
“Just what a 15-year-old girl needs,†someone in the audience said.
Gitter also said Howe was disappointed that Bridgeman did not become Unitarian, as he was. She became Baptist. As Howe was switching his chief interest from Bridgeman to abolition, a new Baptist preacher came to Boston. The Baptist community rallied around Bridgeman and came to visit her. And she could connect far more readily to a deity that was there with her, Gitter said, than to Howe’s Unitarian abstractions. He thought this showed a lack of mental development.
Bridgeman’s parents were Baptists. They had not made a push to have her baptized, because they wanted Howe to keep her with him. They had had a brood of children since Bridgeman left them, and they did not know how to deal with her. She stayed at Perkins off and on throughout her life.
The Perkins School was not meant for adults. But no one in Bridgeman’s family knew how to finger spell. When she went home, she had no one to talk with. She would starve herself, in an agony of boredom, until she was so feeble Howe agreed to take her back, to keep her alive.
Gitter said Bridgeman never learned to speak, or to sign in American Sign Language (ASL). As a child, she pantomimed simple requests to her parents: a spreading motion for butter on her bread, tipping her fist to her mouth for drink. Howe believed in speech for the deaf without knowing how to teach it. Helen Keller learned to speak, but not clearly. She used to practice for hours a day, to be intelligible.
Talking for the deaf, Gitter said, is still a hot debate. Gallaudet taught a version of ASL. He had educated a deaf and blind girl as well, and had taught her to sign. In Howe’s opinion, this debased her.
Deaf communities were very active in the states until after the Civil War, when Bridgeman was middle-aged. They had sign newspapers, Gitter said. They felt, and still feel, that sign was their language. The debate still rages, whether deaf children should learn only sign, or learn to speak and lip read as a second language, or learn only to speak. Howe, Gitter said, was a hero to the blind, but a villain to the deaf.
Howe supplied books with raised letters, for blind readers. The good news about these books, Gitter said, was that they were books for the blind, they were beautiful, and sighted people could also read them. They were expensive, but he worked to get them. The bad news is that braille is much easier to read, she said, and Howe was against braille.
Howe and Alexander Graham Bell were leaders in a movement to break up deaf communities. They acted on a theory of eugenics: they believed that deafness was hereditary, as it can be, and therefore that deaf people should not marry and have children. They nearly succeeded in stamping out sign language, Gitter said. A radical branch in the sign debate has argued that destroying sign language would be genocide.
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Berkshire County Homes Celebrating Holiday Cheer
By Breanna SteeleiBerkshires Staff
There's holiday cheer throughout the Berkshires this winter.
Many homeowners are showing their holiday spirit by decorating their houses. We asked for submissions so those in the community can check out these fanciful lights and decor when they're out.
We asked the homeowners questions on their decorations and why they like to light up their houses.
In Great Barrington, Matt Pevzner has decorated his house with many lights and even has a Facebook page dedicated to making sure others can see the holiday joy.
Located at 93 Brush Hill Road, there's more than 61,000 lights strewn across the yard decorating trees and reindeer and even a polar bear.
The Pevzner family started decorating in September by testing their hundreds of boxes of lights. He builds all of his own decorations like the star 10-foot star that shines done from 80-feet up, 10 10-foot trees, nine 5-foot trees, and even the sleigh, and more that he also uses a lift to make sure are perfect each year.
"I always decorated but I went big during COVID. I felt that people needed something positive and to bring joy and happiness to everyone," he wrote. "I strive to bring as much joy and happiness as I can during the holidays. I love it when I get a message about how much people enjoy it. I've received cards thanking me how much they enjoyed it and made them smile. That means a lot."
Pevzner starts thinking about next year's display immediately after they take it down after New Year's. He gets his ideas by asking on his Facebook page for people's favorite decorations. The Pevzner family encourages you to take a drive and see their decorations, which are lighted every night from 5 to 10.
In North Adams, the Wilson family decorates their house with fun inflatables and even a big Santa waving to those who pass by.
The Wilsons start decorating before Thanksgiving and started decorating once their daughter was born and have grown their decorations each year as she has grown. They love to decorate as they used to drive around to look at decorations when they were younger and hope to spread the same joy.
"I have always loved driving around looking at Christmas lights and decorations. It's incredible what people can achieve these days with their displays," they wrote.
The Wilsons' invite you to come and look at their display at 432 Church St. that's lit from 4:30 to 10:30 every night, though if it's really windy, the inflatables might not be up as the weather will be too harsh.
In Pittsfield, Travis and Shannon Dozier decorated their house for the first time this Christmas as they recently purchased their home on Faucett Lane. The two started decorating in November, and hope to bring joy to the community.
"If we put a smile on one child's face driving by, then our mission was accomplished," they said.
Many homeowners are showing their holiday spirit by decorating their houses. We asked for submissions so those in the community can check out these fanciful lights and decor when they're out.
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