SPEAKING BODIES, SPEAKING MINDS: ANIMALS, LANGUAGE, HISTORY

History and Theory, Theme Issue 52 (December 2013), 91-108 © Wesleyan University 2013 ISSN: 0018-2656

SPEAKING BODIES, SPEAKING MINDS: ANIMALS, LANGUAGE, HISTORY

SUSAN PEARSON

ABSTRACT

This essay explores a nineteenth-century debate over the linguistic capacity of animals in order to consider the links among language, reason, and history. Taking the American animal-protection movement as a point of departure, I show how protectionists, linguists, anthropologists, and advocates of deaf education were divided about the origins and nature of language. Was language a product of the soul and thus unique to humans, or was it a function of the body, a complex form of the corporeal expressions that humans and animals shared? Was language divine or natural? The answers that different activists and intellectuals gave to such questions shaped their view of the relationship of humans to animals and the inclusion of the latter in the moral and political community. I suggest that such debates are helpful to historians since the possession of language—and its traces in the written word—has traditionally been used to divide prehistory and natural history from history proper. If we are to include animals in “history,” we must rethink the relationship of the discipline to language.

Keywords: language, animals, animal protection, human–animal boundary, reason, mind–body dualism

In February 1869, a magazine called Our Dumb Animals, which was the foremost journal of the American animal-protection movement, printed an article by the renowned author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Entitled “The Rights of Dumb Ani-mals,” Stowe’s article emphasized animals’ speechlessness. Stowe wrote that, “If there be any oppressed class that ought to have a convention and pass resolutions asserting their share in this general forward movement going on in this world, it is that hapless class that not only can neither speak, read nor write, but who have no capacity for being taught any of these accomplishments.”1 By suggest-ing that animals were “hapless” because they could not speak or write, Stowe linked linguistic to political capacity. Democratic participation of the sort that Stowe imagined depended on language, for it was in and through language that citizens could represent themselves and engage in deliberation with their fellows. In suggesting that animals were bereft of language, Stowe echoed not only the title of the journal—Our Dumb Animals—but also the slogan of the Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCAs) that had formed across the United States following the Civil War. The slogan of SPCAs was: “We speak for those

1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Rights of Dumb Animals,” Our Dumb Animals 1, no. 9 (1869), 69.

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who cannot speak for themselves.” The claim that animals had no language was, then, integral to the animal-protection movement. Indeed, as Stowe and other protectionists would argue, animals’ silence was a source not just of animals’ difference from human beings, but also of humans’ duty toward animals. For protectionists, animals’ inability to speak rendered moral obligation as linguistic surrogacy.

But not all animal protectionists agreed that animals were congenitally silent. The very next month, in March 1869, Our Dumb Animals received a letter protesting the magazine’s titular designation of animals as “dumb.” Implicitly criticizing Stowe’s emphasis on animal speechlessness, the letter-writer asked this question: “Is there no language but that made up of vowels and consonants, and uttered by the vocal organs?” The problem, for this letter-writer, was that the magazine and its representatives like Stowe employed too narrow a definition of language. Language, according to this letter-writer’s more expansive defini-tion, was comprised not simply by articulate speech, but by communication, and communication could assume a variety of forms, some of which were nonverbal. Nonverbal language was often overlooked, the writer contended, because it “is unintelligible to the majority of the human family, many of whom are far beneath the brutes, in what I must call soul, for that is the only word that fits.” In the let-ter-writer’s imagination, the language of the soul did not obey the limits of either words or species. As an example, the writer offered her own dearly departed cat, Bessie, a faithful companion and attentive listener. “I am confident that she understood everything I said to her. When I spoke, she would look eagerly into my eyes, with a searching, far-reaching gaze, as if to get at the full extent of my meaning.”2 While not claiming that Bessie could organize the neighborhood cats into the sort of political convention that Stowe imagined, this letter-writer none-theless challenged the suggestion that animals had “no capacity” for language. By defining language broadly as communication rather than as articulate speech, she included animals in the linguistic, the moral, and the political community. Moreover, the letter-writer suggested that nonverbal language, which she called the language of the soul, was superior to verbal language.

Though the anonymous letter-writer and Stowe offered different opinions about whether animals had language, both identified linguistic capacity as a critical means by which animals’ difference from or similarity to humans could be measured. The fact that animal protectionists used language as an index of difference and similarity is not surprising. The stakes of having or not having language were, by the mid-nineteenth century, well established; linguistic capac-ity had long been fundamental to the definition of humanity and personhood. Language was central to centuries of theological, philosophical, and natural-historical efforts to draw the boundary between humans and animals. Far from a technical question, the possession of what nineteenth-century linguists would call “articulate speech” was connected, from Aristotle forward, with the possession of a distinct human character or essence, whether that went by the name soul, mind, or reason. As one writer remarked in an 1884 issue of the Princeton Review, lan-

2. R. E. R., “Graceful Bessie,” Our Dumb Animals 1, no. 10 (1869), 75.

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guage “has always been regarded as one of the most important distinctive marks of man, and many have made it the one essential distinction from which gradually all others have arisen.”3 For those who believed that humans and animals were separate in the order of creation, language was proof that humans had a distinct, immutable, and perhaps immortal essence.4 In standard dualistic terms, if animals were body and humans were mind, then language was the wedge separating the two. The implications of using language to separate (or join) humans and animals are not, however, simply moral and political. They are also historical and histo-riographical: for it is language—and more particularly writing—that is used to separate the fossil record from the archive, natural history from history proper.5

The tensions expressed in animal-protection propaganda reflected a larger set of debates about the origins and function of language in nineteenth-century America. In fact, the source of the disagreement between Stowe and the anony-mous letter-writer is that each was operating according to a different definition of language. For Stowe it is verbal communication—speech and writing—for the letter-writer, it is expression more broadly construed. The same debate about whether language was speech or expression took place among contemporary scholars in fields such as philology, anthropology, psychology, and biology, and among reformers such as deaf educators. These larger debates about language have much in common with the tensions in animal-protection propaganda. For many nineteenth-century Americans outside of animal-protection circles, the dif-ference between expression and language was the difference between the natural and the conventional. Expression was natural and corporeal—it was the facial expressions, the gestures, the grunts, and the groans that the body gives forth. Language, on the other hand, was conventional and came not from nature or the body, but from the mind and human culture. The question of whether animals had language—and the larger question of how to define language—engaged mid-to-late nineteenth-century Americans in speculation about whether the boundaries of humanity and, more broadly, the moral community, were defined in terms of minds or bodies. Following the lineaments of this debate we learn not simply

3. Joseph Leconte, “The Psychical Relation of Man to Animals,” Princeton Review (June–July 1884), 238.

4. Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the History of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 278-280; Tim Ingold, “The Animal in the Study of Humanity,” in What is an Animal?, ed. Tim Ingold (New York: Routledge, 1994), 84-99; Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate, Cor-nell Studies in Classical Philology v. 54 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 78-85; Duane Rumbaugh, “Primate Language and Cognition: Common Ground,” in Humans and Other Animals, ed. Arien Mack (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 301-320; Matthew Senior, “‘When the Beasts Spoke’: Animal Speech and Classical Reason in Descartes and La Fontaine,” in Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, ed. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (New York: Routledge, 1997), 61-84; R. W. Serjeantson, “The Passions and Animal Language, 1540–1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001), 425-444; Brian Cummings, “Pliny’s Literate Elephant and the Idea of Animal Language in Renaissance Thought,” in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica Fudge (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 164-185; Cary Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animals, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1-57.

5. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy,” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 27-68.

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about the preoccupations of nineteenth-century Americans, but also about the terms by which we can recast language, the animal, and the body, in history.

Unsurprisingly, one of the mid-to-late nineteenth-century groups most interested in elucidating the origins and function of language was professional philologists. Although language had a prominent place in centuries of philosophical efforts to distinguish humans from animals, it was also central to mid-nineteenth-century-scientific efforts to do the same. In Darwinian-inspired debates about whether humans could have evolved from animals, and about whether humans were descended from a common ancestor, language served as a key piece of evidence for advocates on both sides of each issue. In part this reflected the general absorp-tion of previously speculative and metaphysical questions by the burgeoning natural sciences, but the centrality of language to evolutionary debates was also due to the development of comparative philology as a separate discipline.

Though it had traditionally been concerned with the exegesis of canonical texts, during the first half of the nineteenth century, philology began to lay claim to the status of a science. Grasping the tools of a comparative method that were then also dominating fields such as psychology and ethnology, comparative philologists—the progenitors of modern linguists—redefined their field’s scope. “We do not want to know languages,” declared the prominent Oxford philologist Max Muller in 1861, “we want to know language . . . its origin, its nature, its laws.”6 Rather than seeking to understand French, German, or Hindi, scientific philologists were after something bigger. As William Dwight Whitney, one of nineteenth-century America’s foremost philologists and popularizers, put it, the new breed of linguist sought, among other things, “to trace out the inner life of language, to discover its origin, to follow its successive steps of growth, and to deduce the laws that govern its mutations.”7 Far from being a narrow pursuit, linguistic science would, Whitney predicted, yield important insights about a whole host of crucial questions, from the nature of the difference between man and animals to the historical and present relationships between “the different divisions of mankind.”8 As comparative philologists distinguished themselves from traditional philology, they claimed that the study of language was the best empirical tool with which to resolve fundamental questions about both the origins and the limits of humankind.

These grandiose promises were not unfounded. Indeed, as the historian Ste-phen Alter has shown, linguistic evidence played an important part in the devel-opment of Darwin’s arguments in The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin had to prove not only that humans could have descended from animals, but more basically that all humans shared a common ancestor. Linguistic evidence and linguistic models helped him to make both arguments. In

6. Max F. Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1862), I, 33.

7. William Dwight Whitney, Language and the Study of Language (New York: Charles Scribner & Company, 1867), 397.

8. Ibid., 8. See also Stephen G. Alter, Darwin and the Linguistic Image (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); J. W. Burrow, “The Uses of Philology in Victorian England,” in Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain, ed. Robert Robson (London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1967), 180-204.


1816, the German linguist Franz Bopp published his seminal work documenting the existence of the Indo-European family of languages. This was an important development for philologists since it showed that there might be a fundamental structural unity of language rather than myriad separate languages. But Bopp’s findings also provided linguists with a model of origins and of developmental change that Darwin would later borrow.9

From his extensive readings in philology, Darwin adopted a historical model of change: that is, he came to understand that apparently dissimilar entities could have descended from a common ancestor and undergone gradual evolutionary change. This was what linguists like Bopp surmised had happened with the lan-guages that comprised the Indo-European family. Moreover, from his study of linguistics, Darwin came to understand that the pattern of this change could be envisioned as a branching tree rather than as a chain of being. “The formation of different language and of distinct species, and the proof that both have been developed through a gradual process, are,” Darwin wrote in Descent, “curiously parallel.”10 Beyond supplying Darwin with an analogous model for evolutionary change, contemporary philologists’ claim that their findings revealed racial as well as linguistic unities provided Darwin with evidence that he needed to argue against polygenesist creation narratives.11 In the late 1840s, for example, the Ger-man linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt was arguing that “the comparative study of languages shows us that races now separated by vast tracts of land are allied together . . . [and came] from one common point of radiation.” Indeed, before Darwin published either Origin or Descent, American authors were using lin-guistic evidence to shore up arguments against polygenesis.12 If such apparently disparate languages as Sanskrit and German might be shown to have a common origin, why not all humans? And why, Darwin asked, not humans and apes?

Darwin did more, however, than just repeat philological findings. Not want-ing his theory of evolution to founder on the objection that language, because it did not exist in animals, could only be a product of God and not of a chaotic and undesigned natural process, Darwin argued for continuities between forms of human and animal expression. In Descent of Man, Darwin claimed that ani-mals, through their grimaces, gestures, and tones, could make the contents of their minds known to others, including to humans. And he argued not simply that animal expression had the language-like power to communicate, but also that man “uses, in common with the lower animals, inarticulate cries to express his meaning, aided by gestures and the movements of the face.”13 Like the letter-writer who objected that animals were not “dumb,” but spoke a language of the soul, and like those who claimed that animals testified with their faces and their

9. Alter, Darwin and the Linguistic Image, chapter 1.10. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. [1879] (Lon-

don: Penguin, 2004), 112-113.11. Alter, Darwin and the Linguistic Image, chapter 2.12. Quoted in “The Human Family,” Southern Quarterly Review (1855), 160. For linguistic evi-

dence used to undermine polygenesis, see ibid.; “Language as a Means of Classifying Man,” Chris-tian Review (July 1859), 337-67.

13. Darwin, Descent, 107.

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eyes, Darwin included corporeal signs such as gesture and grimace under the rubric of language.

For Darwin, corporeal expression was linked to articulate speech both contem-poraneously and historically. The signs of the body were both the companion and the antecedent to speech. Indeed, Darwin went so far as to claim that human lan-guage had its origins in “the imitation and modification of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries, aided by signs and gestures.” The chief difference between human and animal communication lay, Darwin claimed, not so much in its nature as in humans’ “infinitely larger power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas.”14 Just as Darwin argued for morphological similarities in human and animal bodies to establish the possibility of their descent from a common origin, through language he likewise drew links between the human and animal mind, arguing that the differences were of degree rather than kind. Human speech was not separate from corporeal expression, but rather emerged from it. In order to combat philosophical tradi-tions that privileged the mind as the seat of man’s distinctive, nonanimal, and divinely bestowed capacities, Darwin had to displace what many took to be the chief index of man’s mind: his language.

In addition to the arguments he forwarded in Descent, Darwin’s 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, developed a larger argu-ment for the continuity between human and animal communication. In this volume, Darwin subordinated language to expression. As he explained in Expres-sion, “actions of all kinds, if regularly accompanying any state of the mind, are at once recognized as expressive. These may consist of movements of any part of the body, as the wagging of a dog’s tail, the shrugging of a man’s shoulders, the erection of the hair . . . and the use of the vocal or other sound-producing instruments.” Here Darwin defined expression broadly to encompass any bodily action that expressed a mental state, and he listed oral language as but one form of expression that could link an outward sign with an inward mental state. Language was merely one among many forms of expression that had continuities with the obviously corporeal and emotive idiom of grunts, groans, and grimaces. For Darwin, expression was natural and instinctive, and therefore corporeal in origin. Expression—whether it be the bristling of fur, the lowering of ears, the howling of wolves, or the laughter of an infant—developed to convey basic emotions such as anger, terror, love, and joy. “The chief expressive actions, exhibited by man and the lower animals, are . . . innate and inherited—that is, have not been learnt by the individual.”15 Imagined as natural rather than conventional, as an artifact of the body rather than of the soul, and as continuous with expression more broadly, language posed no barrier to Darwin’s theory of evolution.

And though Darwin drew heavily on the historical models and empirical evi-dence of nineteenth-century comparative philology, its findings were also used against him to reassert the primacy of human superiority and the claims of natu-

14. Darwin, Descent, 108.15. Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals [1872] (New York: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1998), 347-348.


ral theology.16 Among philologists, no one more fiercely equated language with reason than Max Muller. The German-born Muller was the era’s most popular and widely known philologist, broadcasting his ideas from his seat at Oxford through a series of widely popular lectures, books, and regular magazine con-tributions. Unlike Darwin, who saw a sort of language as common to both man and animals and differentiated their linguistic abilities according to degree rather than kind, Muller steadfastly denied language to animals. “The one great barrier between the brute and man,” Muller told an audience at Britain’s Royal Institu-tion in 1861, “is Language.” Muller allowed that animals had “five senses, just like ourselves,” experiences of pleasure and pain, a memory, a will, and even a rudimentary intellect, which he defined as “the comparing or interlacing of single perceptions.” He also admitted that animals communicated through their bodies and vocalizations. Dogs, for instance, could signal shame with their lowered tail, pride with their sparkling eyes. But language, he nonetheless insisted, “is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it.” Language, Muller elaborated, was “thought incarnate,” the outward sign of man’s ability to abstract from particular sensations and objects to general states and categories.17 Rather than functioning chiefly to express feelings and thoughts or to communicate with other beings, language was, for Muller, a tool the mind employed to order to sort the raw data of perception. The animal perceived, whereas man conceived. Not surprisingly, Muller rejected Darwin’s account of man’s evolutionary—and animalistic—heri-tage and was hailed by Victorians in search of the grounds to refute the heretical materialism that evolution seemed to herald.18 By making language into “thought incarnate,” and denying the same to animals, Muller had given man back his unique soul in the form of articulate speech. Muller’s position was one that Stowe would have recognized, for it denied animals language and reinforced the notion that one of the chief differences between humans and animals was linguistic.

The American philologist William Dwight Whitney disagreed sharply with Muller. An American defender of Darwin, Whitney saw no shame in admitting the animal origins of man’s language. Unlike Muller, who was steeped in Kan-tian idealism, and who therefore tended to locate the meaning of words in innate and immutable concepts, Whitney was a product of the Scottish common-sense philosophy that dominated early nineteenth-century American universities. Like his intellectual forbears, Whitney defined humans as essentially social creatures and argued that language was chiefly an “instrumentality” designed to facilitate communication. It is, he wrote in 1875, “expression for the sake of communica-tion.” Like Darwin, Whitney agreed that communication could assume many forms—“gesture and grimace, pictorial or written signs, and uttered or spoken signs”—but unlike Darwin, he sharply distinguished human speech from animal communication.19 Because he believed that speech was the product of human

16. Burrow, “The Uses of Philology,” 193-196.17. Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language, I, 354, 384.18. Burrow, “The Uses of Philology”; Susan Jeffords, “The Knowledge of Words: The Evolution

of Language and Biology in Nineteenth-Century Thought,” Centennial Review 31 (1987), 66-83.19. William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language [1875] (New York: Dover, 1979),

1-2.

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efforts to communicate, Whitney located the meaning of words in social conven-tion—words meant what people agreed that they meant, and agreement was gen-erated by the reciprocal exchanges of everyday usage. “Every word handed down in every human language,” he boldly wrote, “is an arbitrary and conventional sign.”20 Indeed, far from denigrating human speech, its conventional nature was precisely what Whitney believed differentiated human from animal communica-tion. “No man can become possessed of any existing language without learning it,” he wrote. On the other hand, “no animal (that we know of) has any expression which he learns, which is not the direct gift of nature to him.” Although Whit-ney agreed with Darwin that some forms of expression were innate rather than learned, he departed from Darwin in cordoning off language from such innate, or natural, forms of expression. Thus, although Whitney defended Darwin and sharply disagreed with Muller’s account of linguistic origins, he shared with Muller a desire to retain language as a special property of humankind. Where Darwin argued that language was a form of expression, Whitney differentiated language from expression, granting the latter but not the former to animals. “Natural expression”—the grunts and gestures of Darwin’s argument—func-tioned only, Whitney believed, to express emotions. He wrote that, “It is where expression quits its emotional natural basis, and turns to intellectual uses, that the history of language begins.”21 Expression was instinctual and natural, but language was learned and conventional. It could thus only exist culturally—that is, within human societies. Because Whitney linked language to culture, he also regarded it as the foundation of history. Language “alone makes history possi-ble,” he contended, because through language each generation can “hand over to its successors, its own collected wisdom, its stores of experience, deduction, and invention, so that each starts from the point which its predecessor had reached.”22 In Whitney’s vision, history was cumulative and progressive, language the engine of its movements.

Linking language to human progress and positioning it as the agent of human history was not unique to Whitney. The way that Whitney both defended and defanged Darwin’s view of language origins is typical of how the theory of evolution was in general received in the United States. One of the ways in which evolutionary theory was adapted and even perverted was through its application to the study of human societies in fields such as anthropology. Ethnologists took older ideas about the stages of human civilization—the notion that mankind progressed in linear fashion from hunting to herding to agriculture—and infused them with new life in the post-Darwinian era. Evolution might explain not only the descent of humans from animals, but also the progress of humankind through its developmental stages. Civilization, and not just humanity, could be under-stood as the product of evolution through natural selection. Here too, the issue of language was an important means of marking boundaries.

Language served ethnologists not primarily as a means of distinguishing humans from animals, but instead as a means of placing humans on the evolu-

20. Ibid., 19.21. Ibid., 283.22. Whitney, Language and the Study of Language, 441.


tionary scale. Anthropologist Henry Lewis Morgan, for example, proposed in his famous 1877 work Ancient Society, that mankind progressed from savagery through barbarism to civilization. Among the indices that Morgan used to trace these changes in social organization was the development of language, for Mor-gan maintained that the stages of development were not simply social, but also mental. Picking up on ideas expressed by Darwin and ratified by Whitney, he claimed that “gesture or sign language seems to have been primitive, the elder sister of articulate speech.” Morgan went on: “It is still the universal language of barbarians, if not savages.” Morgan noted that in the progress of mankind, ges-ture and articulate speech seemed to exist in an inverse ratio: as man ascended toward civilization, he relied less on gesture and facial expression to convey meaning and more on precisely rendered words.23 Just as some philologists and natural scientists believed that humans were separated from animals by the pos-session of articulate speech, so too anthropologists believed that the civilized could be distinguished from the savage by the relative importance of gesture ver-sus speech in communication. And like Muller and earlier philosophers, Morgan and others continued to link language to mind: if mental and social development were linked, a people’s language would reflect their stage of development. If ani-mals and humans alike shared the corporeal language of gesture, then the further humanity ascended away from the animal, the less defined by the body, and the more civilized, he became.

The link ethnologists drew between social evolution and linguistic develop-ment helps explain the sudden upsurge in popular and scholarly interest in American Indian sign language during the last third of the nineteenth century. The use of sign language was, observers noted, particularly prevalent among the Plains Indians of the Far West. Though some antebellum explorers had noted the use of sign language by Indian tribes, developments in philology and anthropology, combined with the US Army’s post-Civil War campaigns against the Plains Indians, sharpened many Americans’ interest in the subject. Under the auspices of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology and the US Army, Garrick Mallery and William Clark—both Army men who had come to know Indian sign language while on duty in the West—published comprehensive treatises on the system of hand signs used by Native Americans to communicate intertribally.24 For anthropologists, modern primitive people were in an important sense not coeval with modern civilized people.25 In studying contemporary primitives, one could peer through the present and back in time to the early history of the human race. The study of American Indian sign language, the British philologist A. H. Sayce remarked in 1880, will make it “possible to reconstruct that primitive speech of mankind which preceded articulate utterance, which formed the bridge

23. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society [1877] (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 5, 36.

24. Garrick Mallery, Sign Language among North American Indians, Compared with That among Other Peoples and Deaf Mutes [1881] (The Hague: Mouton, 1972); W. P. Clark, The Indian Sign Language [1885] (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982).

25. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

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to spoken language, and expressed the earliest thought of the human race.”26 For ethnologists and linguists, the use of sign language by American Indians seemed to confirm both that Indians were more primitive than white Americans and that gesture preceded speech in the evolution of language.

Because students of Indian sign language believed that “gesture speech,” as they sometimes referred to sign language, was a clue to human mental and social evolution, they frequently employed a comparative method. By putting the signs of Indians alongside those used by deaf-mutes, Italians, and even animals, schol-ars hoped they would discover which signs were universal and therefore natural. Scholars of sign language frequently claimed that Indians and American deaf-mutes could easily and immediately converse with one another. This fact seemed to prove that signs were a routinized form of innate gestures whose meanings were fixed by nature rather than man. The recurrence of signs among different primitive peoples, over wide geographical areas, and across vast spans of time, was evidence that, as a review of Mallery’s treatise on Indian sign language concluded, “sign language is the mother language of Nature.”27 Like animal protectionists who asserted that animals communicated coherently with their bodies, students of “gesture speech” also believed that corporeal expression was a kind of language. They separated the signs of the body from articulate speech hierarchically, but saw the difference between the two as a matter of degree rather than kind.

Indians, savage though they may be, were not mute or dumb, but used signs only when speech failed them. As Mallery and Clark both acknowledged, sign language was for Native Americans what Clark called a “court language”; they signed only to communicate with those outside their own tribe or to avoid being overheard.28 Thus, although ethnologists agreed that the signing of Indians marked them as closer to nature, the body, and to the primitive origins of man-kind, they also distinguished between natural and conventional signs. Where philologists differentiated speech from gesture by arguing that the former was conventional, the latter natural, ethnologists went further and broke down the category of gesture into its natural and conventional components. Some signs were natural, or instinctual, and these were also universal. But other signs were arbitrary, conventional, and thus culturally specific.

This same tension between, on the one hand, regarding gestures as natural and primitive and, on the other hand, distinguishing between natural and conventional gestures, also characterized the thinking of deaf educators. Unlike Indians who could move between speech and gesture, the deaf were the original “dumb” creatures. Though they were not considered categorically savage, their lack of language did trouble their relationship to humanity. If language was, even in the post-Darwinian era, still widely regarded as essentially human, what was the sta-

26. A. H. Sayce, “Sign Language among the American Indians,” Littell’s Living Age 146 (July 24, 1880), 256.

27. “Ethnologic Studies among the North American Indians,” The Catholic World 33 (May 1881), 257.

28. W. P. Clark, “The Sign-Language of the North American Indians,” United Service: A Quar-terly Review of Military and Naval Affairs 3 (July 1880), 24.


tus of humans who could not speak? Did they have souls? Could they reason?29 Europeans’ and Americans’ persistent fascination with so-called wolf-children such as the Wild Boy of Avignon was in part an attempt to answer this question: what is the human mind without language? Like feral children, and like Native Americans, the deaf were also an object of fascination because they seemed to provide a living laboratory in which to test the relationship between mind and language.

During the nineteenth century, language instruction for the deaf gained institu-tional traction, but the method of best educating the deaf was also the subject of considerable debate from the antebellum period through the turn of the century. The debate, as described by historian Douglas Baynton, pitted manualists against oralists. Manualists dominated deaf education before the 1860s, whereas after the Civil War oralists came to prominence. Manualists believed that the deaf should be taught sign language in order to communicate; oralists, on the other hand, believed that the deaf should be taught to vocalize and to speak the same language as their fellow countrymen. Manualists believed that sign language was a form of “natural” language, but oralists believed that signing was primitive and animalistic. Oralists agreed that sign language was natural, but they believed that natural language was inferior to arbitrary, or conventional, language, which they identified with speech rather than gesture.30

In 1817, Thomas H. Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc founded the American Asylum for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. Gallaudet was a Congregational minister, and his primary concern was to teach the deaf language so that he might tend to their souls. Like many before him, Gallaudet believed that language was an expression of the soul that God had given to humans alone in the order of creation. Without language, the deaf were cut off from knowledge of their own souls and from knowledge of God. But for Gallaudet and other manualists of the antebellum period, bodily gestures, facial expressions, and manual signs were sufficient to reconnect the deaf with language and with God. In fact, many manualists believed that gesture, or sign, language might actually be superior to spoken language. In the antebellum period, the historical primacy of gestures marked signing as a natural language, but not necessarily as one more primitive or animalistic. In the pre-Darwinian era, the language of Nature was understood as the language of God rather than the material body. Antebellum deaf educators argued that natural language was the true language of the heart and that it was, therefore, closer to divinity.

That this language seemed to come from the body rather than the mind did not upset manualists. In the pre-Darwinian era, it was still possible to believe that the human body as well as the human soul had been specially formed by God. When British physician Sir Charles Bell wrote the first treatise on human expression

29. Douglas C. Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Baynton, “‘Savages and Deaf-Mutes’: Evolutionary Theory and the Campaign against Sign Language in the Nineteenth Century,” in Deaf History Unveiled, ed. John Vickrey Van Cleve (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1993), 92-112.

30. Baynton, Forbidden Signs; Baynton, “Savages and Deaf-Mutes.”

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in 1806, entitled The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, he compared the expression of humans and animals, acknowledging that both used their faces and bodies to convey meaning. He distinguished between the physical expression of man and beast, however, arguing that animal expression was purely instinctual and narrowly circumscribed. Animals could express only the basic needs of the body. Humans, on the other hand, had been created by God to give expression to a wider range of emotions than simply those of the body.31 For antebellum deaf educators, who shared Bell’s view of humans’ special creation, the fact that gesture was both more corporeal and more natural than speech did not mean that it was less human.

Deaf educators such as Gallaudet made links between the language of nature, the body, and God in the context of the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Compared to the religion of their Puritan forbears, the religion of men like Gallaudet was much more affective than intellectual—emphasis was on feeling more than reason. So although the soul had long been identified as the distinctive feature of humanity, and language as its index, the content of the soul could shift historically. Where many early modern and Enlightenment-era thinkers might have identified the soul with reason, antebellum evangelists were likely to equate heart and soul. In this context, deaf educators believed that sign language could effectively convey the feelings of the human heart; this natural language was, in short, equipped to rescue the deaf from their prelinguistic spiri-tual darkness.

For oralists, however, the embodied nature of sign language was a problem. Although manualists dominated antebellum institutions for the deaf, proponents of teaching the deaf to read lips and speak rose to prominence in the years after the Civil War. They were the children of Darwin, and were heavily influenced not only by the connections Darwin made between humans and animals, but especially by the kind of anthropological application of evolutionary theories to human social organization that we’ve just been discussing. Though their faith in Darwin should have prepared them to believe that human language was a product of nature, the association of sign language with the body and with primitive man made oralists wary. Oralists picked up on the ideas promoted by philologists and anthropologists, that gesture speech was characteristic of an earlier stage of human history and of primitive man, and they argued that the deaf deserved bet-ter than to be stuck at an earlier stage of civilization. An advocate of teaching the deaf to read lips and vocalize, J. D. Kirkhuff, of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf, reiterated the notion that “man emerged from savagery [and] he discard-ed gestures for the expression of ideas”; Kirkhuff concluded that the duty of deaf educators was therefore to “emancipate the deaf from their dependence upon ges-ture language.”32 For oralists, the problem was not, as it had been for antebellum manualists, that those bereft of language were trapped in a spiritual wasteland, but rather that without oral language, the deaf were trapped in a lower stage of human social and mental development. Rather than seeing the body as an expres-

31. Sir Charles Bell, Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1824), 16.

32. Quoted in Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 43.


sive resource, oralists saw it as a cage that imprisoned the mind; they believed that only articulate speech could liberate the deaf from its confines. The irony, of course, is that oralists were Darwinians who, in theory, should have abandoned this sort of mind–body dualism but who instead found the body’s evolutionary association with animality and savagery threatening to the humanity of the deaf. They therefore believed it necessary to sharply distinguish, as Max Muller and even William Dwight Whitney had, between expression and language, nature and convention, body and mind. By contrast, it was the pre-Darwinian manualists who felt comfortable locating language in nature and the body.

As the lively debates about the origin, function, and true nature of language in fields such as philology, anthropology, and deaf education demonstrate, the tension I identified in animal-protection propaganda was not peculiar to this circle of late-nineteenth-century reformers. Rather, the dual claims in protection-ist literature—that animals did and did not have language, that language was speech and that it was communication—reflected the major positions held by contemporaries whose work led them to speculate about language. The notion that language—defined as both articulate speech and as conventional—separated man from animal had a remarkable staying power even in the wake of Darwin’s explicit efforts to undermine such ideas. Only those anthropologists and reform-ers interested in sign language conceded Darwin’s point that articulate speech was the evolutionary heir of natural, corporeal expression. Even then, the anthro-pologists and postbellum deaf educators who adopted this idea used it to reinforce other hierarchies, not only between man and animal, but also between savage and civilized human beings. Language, in other words, remained an important means of marking boundaries, in no small part because it still functioned as an index of the mind. And whether the mind was seen as proof of the soul or of civilization, it remained critical to the definition of humanity.

The stakes of how one defined language and allocated linguistic capacity were not, in the mid and late nineteenth century, simply academic. Rather, the defini-tion and allocation of language had social, political, and moral consequences as well. This is no surprise given the link between language and the mind/body distinction. In a century that saw the expansion of white male suffrage, a war over slavery, the emergence of a women’s rights movement, an upsurge in politically organized nativism, the explosion of evolutionary theory, and the rise of race-based segregation, the relationship among the body, personhood, and citizenship was highly vexed. Philologists, for example, used linguistic evidence to argue against the theory of polygenesis and for the unity of the human race; such argu-ments, which equated race and language, found their way to the pages of antebel-lum American magazines in the midst of fierce debates over slavery. Antebellum deaf educators, the proponents of manual sign language, adopted the notion that language was natural and corporeal to rehabilitate the deaf from not only spiritual but also social isolation. In the postbellum era, anthropologists’ use of articulate speech as an index of civilization was absorbed by men like Mallery and Clark who served the United States Army at a moment when it was engaging in a long series of wars to claim yet more land from Native Americans in the West. And for

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animal protectionists, whose aims were the most explicitly political and moral of all the groups considered here, claims about language played a critical, if contra-dictory role. Let me return briefly here to animal protectionists to flesh out more fully the ways in which linguistic claims served their cause.

First, as we have seen, animal protectionists claimed that animals had no lan-guage. Formed in the wake of the Civil War, American animal-protection organi-zations borrowed this trope of speechlessness from antebellum abolitionists. As I mentioned earlier, the slogan of most SPCAs was “we speak for those who cannot speak for themselves,” and the most popular protectionist magazine was called Our Dumb Animals. This emphasis on animals’ inability to speak was clearly borrowed from abolitionists. Both British and American abolitionists connected speech to power. They described themselves acting as “mouth and utterance” for the enslaved and asserted that “we open our mouth for the dumb and plead for our brethren who cannot plead for themselves.”33 Though abolitionists claimed that slaves could not speak for themselves, they often specified that slaves were dumb because of social, not natural, conditions. The Lynn, Massachusetts Wom-en’s Anti-Slavery Society, for example, praised Frederick Douglass’s ability to “plead for those, who, by American laws, cannot plead for themselves.” Slaves were forbidden from making legal testimony against whites, and this rule served abolitionists as a metaphor for their larger condition.34 The difference between speech and silence was, abolitionists imagined, the difference between freedom and slavery; voicelessness was a trope of powerlessness. Abolitionists identified reform as a process of giving voice, either through surrogates or, in the case of abolitionists who published slave narratives, directly. Indeed, William Andrews has remarked that most antebellum slave narratives not only trace a slave’s journey toward freedom, but crucially, most identify the pivotal moment in the slave’s journey as “an awakening of their awareness of their fundamental identity with and rightful participation in logos . . . understood as reason and its expres-sion in speech.”35 Defying the ban on slave testimony in a different register, the slave narrative was the logical culmination of the awakening Andrews describes, as it symbolizes the former slaves’ entry into the community of free, literate, and, not coincidentally, speaking, persons.

Animal protectionists’ claim that animals were dumb and their slogan that “we speak for those who cannot speak for themselves” thus resonated not just with centuries of philosophical argument distinguishing animals from humans on the basis of capacity for language, but also with abolitionists’ attempts to link moral obligation with linguistic surrogacy. Abolitionists had suggested that their duty to “open our mouth for the dumb” was based on common humanity, on the fact

33. Thomas Clarkson, “To His Excellency, William Pennington, Governor of New Jersey,” The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal (December 19 1840), 96; A Subscriber, “Society of Friends—Slavery, and the Slave Trade,” The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal (June 3,1837).

34. “Lynn Women’s A. S. Society,” Liberator (August 11, 1843); Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 229.

35. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of African-American Autobiog-raphy, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 7.


that, as one put it, “the Lord Jesus Christ died upon the cross for them equally as for us.”36

But, unlike abolitionists, animal protectionists often figured animals’ speech-lessness as intrinsic rather than as socially, legally, or politically imposed. When Stowe, for example, asserted that animals “ought to have a convention and pass resolutions,” she was quick to point out that, much as they deserved to assert their share and much as they would benefit from so doing, animals also had “no capacity” to learn to speak, read, or write. Unlike slaves who had been artificially silenced, animals were, in Stowe’s formulation, congenitally silent. Their silence compounded their oppression to create moral obligation in humans. And because animals’ silence was innate, the moral obligation of linguistic surrogacy was based on—and reinforced—difference rather than commonality. This introduced a significant wrinkle into the formulation that animal protectionists had borrowed from abolitionists. The claim that humans should speak for animals reinforced traditional definitions of the species boundary even as it sought to create a moral code that would traverse that same boundary.

Perhaps because emphasizing animals’ silence reinscribed their difference from humans, protectionists also asserted that animals possessed linguistic capacity. In so doing, they created the ground of commonality upon which acts of cross-species moral obligation could rest. In the context of philosophical tradi-tions that privileged language as the seat of personhood and speech as an exercise of power and privilege, animal protectionists forwarded two central arguments in favor of animal language. First, they claimed that animals had a language of their own; second, they claimed that animals communicated through a corporeal language of physical signs.

Most simply, protectionists echoed a claim that animals had a language of their own. Animals were speaking to each other, but theirs was a foreign tongue. Nineteenth-century animal-protection publications were filled with anecdotes illustrating animals’ ability to communicate with one another. One author claimed to know two horses that seemed to instruct each other in how to behave toward humans. This author’s cat had also convinced her dog to mother the cat’s children when she was too frail to do so. “If animals have no language by which they can express their ideas of one another, how did the cat make known to the dog that her kittens required food and care?” the author queried.37 An article in the Illinois Humane Society’s monthly publication, Humane Journal, related how the howler monkeys of South America were given to assemble in groups in the morning and evening in order to sit and listen to one of their members speechify. “When he has done howling he motions to the rest, and then they all begin to shout. Then, by order, they all cease, the orator begins again, and after having been listened to with due attention they all depart. Now, don’t tell me,” the report concluded, “that such a proceeding is not exactly like an assemblage of human beings listening to a speech.”38 That human beings might not understand such

36. “England. A Synopsis of the Proceedings of the London Anti-Slavery Convention,” Liberator (February 12, 1841).

37. Beatrice, “Do Animals Talk to One Another?” Our Dumb Animals 6, no. 3 (1873), 23.38. “Can Monkeys Talk?” Humane Journal 10, no. 3 (1882), 42.

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animal talk did not, protectionists often claimed, mean that it was not a bona fide language. It only meant that, like any foreign language, it would have to be learned to be understood.39 Here protectionists clearly ratified the notion that animal vocalizations were a form of communication that was at least continuous with, if not identical to, language.

Though animals might both issue and comprehend vocalizations, protection-ists also insisted that verbal language was not the only relevant means of com-munication that animals had at their disposal. Although many freely admitted that animals could not articulate in human language, other SPCA activists argued that animal bodies spoke a corporeal language. This corporeal language was par-ticularly adept at communicating animals’ sentient experiences. Because animals were, as one SPCA activist put it, “doomed to suffer in silence, unless some such pitying heart … looked for the signs of suffering that could not make themselves heard in forms of speech,” it was the task of SPCAs to detect and translate such corporeal signs.40 The corporeal language of signs was a particularly important feature of animal-protection propaganda because, as James Turner’s work has shown, the ability of animals and humans alike to experience pain and suffering was a critical feature of protectionists’ anticruelty arguments.41 In claiming that sentience, or the ability to experience pain, made one into what philosophers would call a “moral patient,” protectionists suggested that the body rather than the mind was the morally relevant boundary marker.

And, just as they equated the human and animal experience of pain, protection-ists also equated their nonverbal expression of pain, insisting that bodily signs were as unambiguous as any conventional forms of speech. As the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Henry Bergh, put it, animals “give forth the very indications of agony that we do” and, he went on, “theirs is the unequivocal physiognomy of pain.”42 In addition to claiming that animals suffered pain, anticruelty activists tried to create a visual vocabulary of pain that stood in for animals’ own articulation of their suffering.

A good example of the effort to create this nonlinguistic vocabulary can be found in the widespread campaign against the check-rein, a device used to force a horse’s head to remain upright by preventing it from lowering its head. SPCA publications pointed out that most people preferred to use the check-rein for aesthetic reasons: they liked to see a horse with its head held high. To such people, the high head signified a lively, game horse, the very picture of a noble steed. Protectionists insisted that those trained in the detection of animal suffer-ing would begin to interpret the same scene entirely differently. Humane men

39. Henry Bergh, An Address by Henry Bergh, Esq., President of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Delivered in the Great Hall of the Putnam County Agricultural Society; on the Occasion of the Late Fair, Held at Carmel, on the 19th of September, 1867 (New York: Lange, Hillman & Lange, Printers, 1868), 6.

40. PSPCA, Third Annual Report of the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Philadelphia: PSPCA, 1871), 10.

41. James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). See also Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 2011), chapter 3.

42. “Extracts from Address of President Bergh, of New York,” Our Dumb Animals 1, no. 1 (1868), 6.


and women could see the expressions of pain emitted by the horse in check, what one SPCA publication called “the most unequivocal evidences of distress and agony.” Anticruelty publications showed adjacent pictures of horses in and out of check-rein, and instructed viewers to note that while in check “the corners of [the horse’s] mouth become raw, inflame, fester, and eventually the mouth becomes enlarged on each side, in some cases to the extent of two inches.” And, as if to answer the traditional charge that animals had no consciousness and no language, the anti-check-rein publication went on to assert that

Could these speechless sufferers answer the inquiries—Why do you continually toss your heads while standing in harness? Why do you stretch open your mouths, shake your heads, and gnash your teeth? Why do you turn your heads back towards your sides, as if you were looking at the carriage?— they would answer: All this is done to get relief from the agony we are enduring by having our heads kept erect and our necks bent by tight check-reins.43

Here the SPCAs posited evidence of suffering, straight from not just the horse’s mouth, but also from the horse’s body. In the face of animal silence, anticruelty activists’ efforts to train the public in the arts of detection insured that animal bodies, if not their voices, still spoke.

Unlike the suggestion that animals spoke a foreign language, humane activists assumed that the corporeal language of suffering was universal and required no special decoding skills. Here they assumed, with antebellum deaf educators, and with post-Darwinians who agreed that language was natural and corporeal, that the body was capable of producing meaning. But in contrast to the other thinkers I’ve discussed, protectionists tended not to position the body’s signs as inferior to articulate speech. In this, they were more like antebellum advocates of sign language for the deaf than they were like their postbellum contemporaries in phi-lology and anthropology. Indeed, one of my earliest examples—the letter-writer who protested that animals were not dumb—asserted that corporeal language was superior to speech because it was the language of the soul; as such, the language of the body might be a surer source of truth than the conventional language of the mind. In any event, protectionists believed that the natural language of signs provided all the information that was morally relevant to them: animals shared pain, pleasure, and affective experiences with humans.

It is tempting to see the debate between a view of language as expression, and hence as natural, and a view of language as speech, and hence as convention, as little more than a function of the broader debate about evolution that took place after the Civil War. That is, if you are a nineteenth-century philologist or anthro-pologist who accepts Darwin, you can accept that human language is a product of the body that evolved from forms of expression that humans share with animals. You argue that both mind and language are products of the body. But if you don’t accept Darwin, you categorically separate expression from language and define the latter as purely conventional and as bearing no relation to natural forms of expression such as gesture, grimace, and grunt. You continue to argue for the identity of language and mind, and you insist that they are distinct from the body.

43. “The Check-Rein,” Our Dumb Animals 1, no. 6 (1868), 44.

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The evidence from the history of antebellum deaf education and from postbel-lum animal protection, however, suggests that a broad definition of language as natural and embodied communication is not simply the product of Darwinian ideas. Rather it also had religious and sentimental roots that both predated the publication of Darwin’s ideas and existed alongside them. For in claiming the body and its language as morally relevant, animal protectionists did not rely much on Darwin. Indeed, the paucity of discussion of evolutionary theory in animal-protection propaganda is striking given how readily Darwinian ideas could have been put to use by protectionists.

The body, moreover, was not simply an awkward fact to be denied on the road to personhood. As scholars of liberal political theory and the history of liberal societies like the United States have suggested, the body has often been seen as the source of difference and hence of inequality. Liberal theory defines humans as rational and demands that the particularities and the passions of the body be denied in the quest for equality and inclusion. The debate I’ve been describing supports this view: for many philologists, anthropologists, and advocates of oral education for the deaf, the possession of language was tied to the triumph of mind over body, and the possession of language was used as a way of drawing morally and politically relevant boundaries. But the fact that there’s another side to the debate complicates the story. For the broader definition of language as natural and communicative is also linked to a definition of persons as not simply ratio-nal but as affective and embodied. In this alternative definition, exemplified by manualists, by Darwin, and by animal protectionists, the body is a resource rather than an embarrassment; it is the grounds for inclusion rather than exclusion. It is the source of language, not its antecedent or antithesis. As historians, we too, might locate not simply language but also history in the bodies of our subjects, animals among them.

Northwestern University

Documents

SPEAKING BODIES, SPEAKING MINDS: ANIMALS, LANGUAGE, HISTORY