Susan Pearson 2013. Speaking bodies, speaking minds: Animals, language, history.

8/10/2019 Susan Pearson 2013. Speaking bodies, speaking minds: Animals, language, history.

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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 languageand its traces in

the written wordhas traditionally been used to divide prehistory and natural history fromhistory proper. If we are to include animals in history, we must rethink the relationship

of the discipline to language.

Keywords: language, animals, animal protection, humananimal 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, Stowes article emphasized animals speechlessness. Stowe wrote that, Ifthere 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.1By 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 thetitle of the journalOur Dumb Animalsbut 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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SUSAN PEARSON92

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 magazines titular designation of animals as dumb. Implicitly

criticizing Stowes 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-writers 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-writers 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.2While 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 communicationrather 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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SPEAKING BODIES, SPEAKING MINDS 93

guage has always been regarded as one of the most important distinctive marks

of man, and many have made it theone essential distinction from which gradually

all others have arisen.3For 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.4In 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 languageand more particularly writingthat is used to

separate the fossil record from the archive, naturalhistory 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 communicationspeech and writingfor

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 corporealit 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

languageand the larger question of how to define languageengaged 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(JuneJuly

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, 15401700,

Journal of the History of Ideas62 (2001), 425-444; Brian Cummings, Plinys Literate Elephant and

the Idea of Animal Language in Renaissance Thought, inRenaissance 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 Wittgensteins Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the

Animal, inZoontologies: 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, inLiteracy in Traditional Societies,

ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 27-68.


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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 Bopps

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 inDescent, curiously

parallel.10Beyond 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.11In 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.12If 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.13Like 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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SUSAN PEARSON96

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 mans 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.14Just 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 mans distinctive, nonanimal, and

divinely bestowed capacities, Darwin had to displace what many took to be the

chief index of mans mind: his language.

In addition to the arguments he forwarded in Descent, Darwins 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 inExpres-

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 dogs tail, the shrugging of a mans 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.

Expressionwhether it be the bristling of fur, the lowering of ears, the howling

of wolves, or the laughter of an infantdeveloped 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 inheritedthat is, have not been learnt

by the individual.15Imagined 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 Darwins 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.


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ral theology.16Among philologists, no one more fiercely equated language with

reason than Max Muller. The German-born Muller was the eras 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 Britains 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 mans ability to abstract from particular

sensations and objects to general states and categories.17Rather 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 Darwins account of mans evolutionaryand animalisticheri-

tage and was hailed by Victorians in search of the grounds to refute the heretical

materialism that evolution seemed to herald.18By 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. Mullers 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 mans 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

formsgesture and grimace, pictorial or written signs, and uttered or spoken

signsbut 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 Review31 (1987), 66-83.

19. William Dwight Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language[1875] (New York: Dover, 1979),

1-2.


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SUSAN PEARSON98

efforts to communicate, Whitney located the meaning of words in social conven-

tionwords 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.20Indeed, 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 Mullers 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 expressionthe grunts and gestures of Darwins argumentfunc-

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 culturallythat

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 Whitneys 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 Darwins 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 civilizationthe notion that mankind

progressed in linear fashion from hunting to herding to agricultureand 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.


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tionary scale. Anthropologist Henry Lewis Morgan, for example, proposed in

his famous 1877 workAncient 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.23Just 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 peoples 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 Armys post-Civil War campaigns against

the Plains Indians, sharpened many Americans interest in the subject. Under the

auspices of the Smithsonians Bureau of Ethnology and the US Army, Garrick

Mallery and William Clarkboth Army men who had come to know Indian sign

language while on duty in the Westpublished 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.25In 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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SUSAN PEARSON100

to spoken language, and expressed the earliest thought of the human race.26For

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 Mallerys 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, Littells Living Age146 (July

24, 1880), 256.

27. Ethnologic Studies among the North American Indians, The Catholic World33 (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 Affairs3 (July 1880), 24.


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SUSAN PEARSON102

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.31For antebellum

deaf educators, who shared Bells 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 intellectualemphasis 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 weve 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.32For 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, 2nded. (London: John

Murray, 1824), 16.

32. Quoted in Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 43.


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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 mindbody dualism but who instead found the bodys 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 literaturethat animals did and did not have language, that language was

speech and that it was communicationreflected the major positions held by

contemporaries whose work led them to speculate about language. The notion

that languagedefined as both articulate speech and as conventionalseparated

man from animal had a remarkable staying power even in the wake of Darwins

explicit efforts to undermine such ideas. Only those anthropologists and reform-

ers interested in sign language conceded Darwins 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 womens 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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SUSAN PEARSON104

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.33Though 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-

ens Anti-Slavery Society, for example, praised Frederick Douglasss 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.34The 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 slaves

journey toward freedom, but crucially, most identify the pivotal moment in the

slaves 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.35Defying 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

FriendsSlavery, and the Slave Trade, The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal(June 3,1837).

34. Lynn Womens A. S. Society, Liberator(August 11, 1843); Thomas D. Morris, Southern

Slavery and the Law, 16191860(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, 17601865(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 7.


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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 Stowes 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 onand reinforceddifference 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 authors cat had also convinced her dog to mother the cats

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.37An article in

the Illinois Humane Societys 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, dont 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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SUSAN PEARSON106

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.39Here 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 lookedfor 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.40The corporeal language of signs was a particularly important

feature of animal-protection propaganda because, as James Turners work has

shown, the ability of animals and humans alike to experience pain and suffering

was a critical feature of protectionists anticruelty arguments.41In 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 experienceof 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.42In 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 horses 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 toAnimals(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.


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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

horses] mouth become raw, inflame, fester, and eventually the mouth becomes

enlarged on each side, in some cases to the extent of twoinches. 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 inquiriesWhy 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 horsesmouth, but also from the horses 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

Ive discussed, protectionists tended not to position the bodys signs as inferiorto 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 examplesthe letter-writer

who protested that animals were not dumbasserted 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 dont

accept Darwin, you categorically separate expression from language and define

the latter as purely conventional and as bearing no relation to natural forms ofexpression 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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SUSAN PEARSON108

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 Darwins 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 Ive 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 theres 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

Susan Pearson 2013. Speaking bodies, speaking minds: Animals, language, history.

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Transcript of Susan Pearson 2013. Speaking bodies, speaking minds: Animals, language, history.