{"id":1054,"date":"2022-12-12T08:00:49","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T08:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/?p=1054"},"modified":"2023-03-28T11:04:21","modified_gmt":"2023-03-28T11:04:21","slug":"i-shall-shift-my-trumpet-and-take-up-my-knitting-disability-sex-and-self-assertion-in-the-autobiography-of-harriet-martineau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/i-shall-shift-my-trumpet-and-take-up-my-knitting-disability-sex-and-self-assertion-in-the-autobiography-of-harriet-martineau\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I shall shift my trumpet and take up my knitting’: Disability, Sex, and Self-Assertion in the Autobiography of Harriet Martineau"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today on the blog, we welcome our colleague Clare Walker Gore<\/a>, who has recently joined us as a Lecturer in Victorian Literature. Clare offers us a glimpse into her research interests by sharing<\/em>\u00a0insights into the multiple ways nineteenth-century writer Harriet Martineau<\/a> represented her experience of disability.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I first came across Harriet Martineau\u2019s \u2018Letter to the Deaf\u2019 (1834) when I was writing my book on representations of disability in nineteenth-century fiction. I had been drawn to Martineau as an example of a writer who was herself disabled, having lost most of her hearing in childhood, but whose life signally failed to conform to the expectations established by fiction of the period for disabled characters.<\/p>\n

By 1834, when she published this article on her experience of deafness, Martineau was well known as a writer unafraid to tackle controversial and even ostentatiously \u2018unfeminine\u2019 subjects. In 1832 she had made her name, and indeed her fortune, by publishing a spectacularly successful series of pamphlets, Illustrations of Political Economy<\/em><\/a>, and become a notable \u2013 in some circles infamous \u2013 champion of free market capitalism.<\/p>\n

She went on to tackle a wide range of inflammatory subjects, apparently undeterred by attacks on her character in the press and even by ostracism from her own family.<\/p>\n

Martineau was clearly a woman who thrived on conflict. As she admitted in her Autobiography <\/em><\/a>(1877), she found hostile reviews more inspiring than positive ones, declaring that \u2018the more brutal, the more animating\u2019 they were (Martineau, Autobiography<\/em> II, 158)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Harriet Martineau
by Richard Evans
oil on canvas, exhibited 1834
NPG 1085
\u00a9 National Portrait Gallery, London<\/p><\/div>\n

So it came as something of a surprise to me to find that in her \u2018Letter to the Deaf\u2019, Martineau advises her Deaf readers that they must \u2018submit to be usually insignificant\u2019, and accommodate themselves to hearing society in every possible way, recommending positively masochistic strategies of self-suppression (Martineau, \u2018Letter\u2019, 176). She promises that Deaf readers who mask their true feelings and adopt the rule of turning \u2018every sigh into a smile\u2019 will experience the \u2018thrill of delight which arises during the ready agreement to profit by pain\u2019 (Martineau, \u2018Letter\u2019, 177).<\/p>\n

How could so self-assertive and combative a writer have integrated such a view of her own disability with the narrative of her own life?<\/p>\n

An answer is offered, I think, by the way Martineau develops her apparently depressing advice as the \u2018Letter\u2019 goes on. She exploits one of the commonest tropes of disability in contemporary fiction to offer her Deaf readers a potentially powerful self-image.<\/p>\n

Most nineteenth-century novels depict disabled characters as either exceptionally flawed or exceptionally virtuous. Martineau taps into this tradition, suggesting that her Deaf readers will emerge from their \u2018trial\u2019 as either \u2018selfish in principle, sour in temper, and disagreeable in manners\u2019 or \u2018with principles strengthened, affections expanded \u2026 and manners graced by the permanent cheerfulness of a settled mind and a heart at ease\u2019 (Martineau, \u2018Letter\u2019, 179).<\/p>\n

The exceptionally virtuous deaf subject will achieve such perfect self-control, in Martineau\u2019s account, that they will be able to withstand anything in the future: \u2018If you have brought vigour out of this conflict \u2026 your cheerfulness will probably be beyond the reach of circumstance\u2019 (Martineau, \u2018Letter\u2019, 179). In other words, Deafness necessarily entails conflict and possibly produces heroism; it also puts the Deaf subject beyond the comprehension or judgement of their hearing counterparts. \u2018No one can <\/em>judge for you\u2019, she assures her Deaf readers (Martineau, \u2018Letter\u2019, 177).<\/p>\n

It is this understanding of her disability which shapes Martineau\u2019s self-representation in her Autobiography<\/em>. She depicts the onset of her deafness as \u2018about the best thing that ever happened to me\u2019 (Martineau, Autobiography<\/em> I, 78). In her account, the struggle it entailed formed her character and freed her from dependence upon her family, in both an intellectual and an emotional sense. In Martineau\u2019s telling, deafness essentially made her the heroine of her own story, the self-reliant and resourceful woman who could reject the belief systems she had inherited, and the limitations imposed by her society.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Martineau suggests that disability put her beyond the scope of conventional femininity and allowed her to draw on masculine forms of heroism \u2013 acting, as she told her mother in one letter of 1833, the part of \u2018a professional son\u2019 rather than a daughter (Martineau, Autobiography<\/em> III, 91).<\/p>\n

Martineau\u2019s choice to live by herself, when she could have lived with members of her family, shocked some reviewers. The novelist Margaret Oliphant<\/a>, for example, clearly found Martineau\u2019s preference for \u2018bachelor life\u2019 deeply unfeminine, suggesting that the Autobiography<\/em> proved her to be \u2018a very clever writer\u2019 who was \u2018not much of a woman at all\u2019 (Oliphant, 52; 59).<\/p>\n

Martineau anticipates and attempts to disarm such a reaction by insisting that her deafness effectively excepted her from ordinary rules, just as it excluded her from conventional femininity.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, however, Martineau occasionally uses her disability not to circumvent but to re-affirm her femininity, in the face of accusations that her writing has in some sense unsexed her. She was criticised, for instance, for championing Thomas Robert Malthus<\/a>\u2019 highly controversial Essay on the Principle of Population<\/em><\/a> (1798), in which he argued that over-population would lead to disaster unless drastic action were taken \u2013 often interpreted as an argument for the use of birth control. In an essay for the conservative Quarterly Review<\/em>, John Lockhart<\/a> accused her of having \u2018no modest misgivings\u2019 as she promoted \u2018unfeminine and mischievous doctrines\u2019 (\u2018Miss Martineau\u2019s Monthly Novels\u2019, 136).<\/p>\n

Recalling how she dealt with such criticism, Martineau uses her ear trumpet \u2013 a nineteenth-century version of a hearing aid \u2013 to defend her impugned modesty:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Credit: Ear trumpet, 19th century. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2018I consider it, as treated by Malthus, a strictly philosophical question. So treating it, I find no difficulty in it; and there can be no difficulty in it for those who approach it with a single mind. To such I address myself. If any others should come whispering to me what I need not listen to, I shall shift my trumpet, and take up my knitting.\u2019 (Martineau, Autobiography<\/em> I, 202)<\/p>\n

In this scene, Martineau\u2019s ear trumpet becomes an instrument of self-assertion, just as her deafness, while cast as \u2018affliction\u2019, became a means of writing herself out of one, undesirable role and into an alternative, more heroic one. It\u2019s an intriguing example of the multiple uses to which disability could be put in nineteenth-century texts, and into both the difficulties but also the possibilities opened up by an autobiographer\u2019s dual identity as both \u2018woman\u2019 and \u2018writer\u2019.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Clare Walker Gore has recently joined the Department of English and Creative Writing as a Lecturer in Victorian Literature. She is the author of <\/em>Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth Century Novel<\/a> (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and is now pursuing a project on women novelists\u2019 life writing in the nineteenth century.<\/em><\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/u><\/p>\n

John Lockhart, \u2018Miss Martineau\u2019s Monthly Novels\u2019, Quarterly Review<\/em>, 49.97 (April 1833), 136 \u2013 152<\/p>\n

Harriet Martineau, Autobiography<\/em> (1877), 3 vols, repr. Cambridge University Press, 2010<\/p>\n

Harriet Martineau, \u2018Letter to the Deaf\u2019, Tait\u2019s Edinburgh Magazine<\/em>, 1834, 174\u201379<\/p>\n

Margaret Oliphant, \u2018Harriet Martineau\u2019, Blackwood\u2019s Edinburgh Magazine<\/em>, 121 (April 1877), 472-96<\/p>\n

Suggested Further Reading<\/u><\/p>\n

Harriet Martineau, Deerbrook<\/em> (1838), repr. Virago, 1983<\/p>\n

Margaret Oliphant, The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs Margaret Oliphant<\/em> (1899), repr. Broadview, 2002<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today on the blog, we welcome our colleague Clare Walker Gore, who has recently joined us as a Lecturer in Victorian Literature. Clare offers us a glimpse into her research interests by sharing\u00a0insights into the multiple ways nineteenth-century writer Harriet … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[329,330,324,332,327,335,331,333,336,323,334,326,339,338,328,337,325],"class_list":["post-1054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","tag-and-self-assertion","tag-autobiography-of-harriet-martineau","tag-clare-walker-gore","tag-deafness","tag-disability","tag-essay-on-the-principle-of-population","tag-harriet-martineau","tag-illustrations-of-political-economy","tag-john-lockhart","tag-letter-to-the-deaf","tag-margaret-oliphant","tag-open-university-english-and-creative-writing","tag-plotting-disability-in-the-nineteenth-century-novel","tag-quarterly-review","tag-sex","tag-thomas-robert-malthus","tag-victorian-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1054"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1081,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1054\/revisions\/1081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}