A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States
2003; Gallaudet University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sls.2003.0004
ISSN1533-6263
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Linguistics and Language Studies
ResumoIN 1848 Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraphy code, married a deaf woman, Sarah Elizabeth Griswold, his second cousin. A former student of the New York School for the Deaf, Griswold was twenty-six. Morse was fifty-seven. Griswold’s “beauty,” “artlessness,” and “amiable deportment” impressed Morse, but her deafness attracted him as well, according to historian Jill Lepore. She quotes a letter from Morse to his brother, saying that Griswold’s “misfortune of not hearing, and her defective speech . . . excited the more my love & pity for her” (157). That was not all. Morse believed that the young woman’s deafness would make her dependent on him, ensuring that he could be “doubly & trebly sure” of “her sincere devoted affection” (ibid.). Did similar attitudes lead other famous hearing men, such as Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Alexander Graham Bell, to marry deaf women? Lepore does not say in A Is for American, but her book is a good read for students of sign languages and deaf communities.
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