Browsing by Subject "Alexander Graham Bell"

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“The romance of the telephone” : women, disability, and technology in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature
(2020-08-18) Picherit, Elizabeth Caroline; Murphy, Gretchen, 1971-; Minich, Julie Avril, 1977-; Barrish, Phillip; Wetlauffer, Alex; MacDuffie, Allan; Kafer, Alison
This project traces the literary and cultural history of the telephone and takes into account its complex origin points in sonic theory, oralism, and the intersection of deafness and femininity. The telephone’s origin story, summarized as what I term the “Romance of the Telephone,” situates it as a direct descendent of hearing assistive technologies designed for deaf people, in particular deaf women. As such, I examine how the telephone, as technological object and a cultural symbol, emerged out of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary and sociocultural narratives focused on disability and gender. Prior to the manifestation of the telephone in 1876, emergent sonic theories fueled the literary experiments of nineteenth and early twentieth-century women authors, particularly in terms of their representation of women’s sonic mediation. From deafness to super-hearing, the spectrum of women’s aurality became a literary testing ground in which authors could explore the possibilities and limitations of sound and sonic perception. By examining novels by Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, the oralist and eugenic writing of Alexander Graham Bell, and recovered texts by Florence McLandburgh and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, my dissertation tracks the literary and cultural evolution of women’s aurality in relation to 19th century communication technology, specifically the telephone. My first chapter reads Jane Eyre (1848) and The Mill on the Floss (1860) collectively as speculative fiction, arguing that both Brontë and Eliot used the figure of the female sonic mediator in order to develop and anticipate technological and ideological breakthroughs in sonic theory. My second chapter focuses on the narratives of invention that surround Alexander Graham Bell’s development of the Bell Telephone System, using the concept of crip temporality to reveal the presence of the telephone’s deaf ancestry. My third and final chapter reads two recovered short stories, McLandburgh’s “The Automaton Ear” (1873) and Phelps’s “The Chief Operator” (1909) in order to argue that the interconnected figures of the deaf woman and the telephone operator persist as representational embodiments of this technology’s functionality and accessibility.