Speech-reading, as she puts it, is enabled by reading: Yet, in contrast to the theories of lipreading instruction that fixated on training precise knowledge of labial positions and movements, Bell does not characterize lipreading solely as a science: she strikingly describes it as an “art.” Further, she posits that the ability to “read” words off the lips derives from a deep and intimate relationship to other acts of reading, literacy, textual knowledge, and literariness.
The influence of Mabel Bell’s essay, suitably entitled “The Subtle Art of Speech-Reading,” attests to the intensity of turn-of-the-century interests in speech and articulation instruction for deaf people. They also included Bell’s wife (and longtime student) Mabel Hubbard Bell, who drew wide acclaim for her speaking and lipreading prowess and who incorporated Bulwer’s words into her own epigraph for an essay published in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly in 1895. Advocates for Bulwer’s “subtile Art” included prominent deaf educator (and inventor) Alexander Graham Bell, known for his influential role in instilling speech and lipreading training into American deaf education and particularly for his “visible speech” methods that aspired to make phonetic information legible to the eye. Over two hundred years later, Bulwer’s resurgent words informed educational debates about deaf people’s potential to achieve social assimilation through trained “observation” and perceptual sophistication. The seventeenth-century deaf writer John Bulwer grandly characterized lipreading as a “subtile Art,” a matter of training the observations of the eye to stand in for those of the ear. “That subtile Art, which may inable one with an observant Eie to Heare what any man speaks by the moving of his lips.” By aligning deaf people’s visual skill with the act of reading, rather than with the physical conspicuousness of sign language, Mabel Bell and her contemporaries framed reading language “by eye” as the culturally trained, literate, individual, acceptably American, and invisible solution for deafness.
Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century accounts of lipreading conceptualize nonsigning deaf people as perceptive and profoundly literate figures who use their “intimate” knowledge of written linguistic meaning to achieve their own variety of silent, efficient, and productive reading. Nitchie of the Nitchie School of Lip-Reading, and examines how reading and literature became represented as essential tools in a deaf person’s communicative arsenal. The article considers Mabel Bell’s “subtle art” of deep textual deduction and its influence on other instructors of lipreading, particularly Edward B. Mabel Bell, the deaf wife of Alexander Graham Bell, was known for being a highly skilled “speechreader,” a narrative that played into the spread of oralist education philosophies at the turn of the twentieth century through characterizing deaf people as readerly figures who tapped into the perceptual skill and American cultural values associated with literacy and literariness.
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