The Role Of Blindness In Lou Ann Walker's A Loss For Words

In mainstream society, we, as hearing people, tend to consider deafness as a defect. We tend to look at them with a feeling of pity. If they success in the hearing world, we will applaud them for overcoming a severe deficiency. We tend to consider signing as an inferior replacement for “real” language such as English or Spanish. We believe that all Deaf people will try to lip-read when communicating with hearing people as the only way to interact. Finally, when we heard about the devices such as cochlear implants, we joyfully praised them as signs of hope that one day eliminate completely deaf. That’s also my point of view about deafness as the beginning of ASL and when I had just started to read A Loss For Words by Lou Ann Walker. I found a quote from Helen Keller in the book that got my attention at first: “Blindness cuts people off from things; deafness cuts people off from people." This quote seems a very accurate description of what Lou Ann’s parents - Gale and Doris Jean-’ world must have been. Their deafness separate themselves off from their family and people around …show more content…
Often in Deaf theater, hearing people are portrayed as rigid and unemotional. Much of this perspective comes from our use of English. Information in English is passed on almost completely orally; conversely, ASL substitutes grammar by facial expressions and body movements. There is a passage in the book that mentions about this aspect of Deaf culture: “In sign language, conversations like this are incredibly hard. You must look directly at the person as you talk to him, and as he talks to you. You can’t avert your eyes to relieve the tension…You can’t escape the emotion of the story. It reverberates through you. I flinched asking my father about the decree. My father flinched as he watched me ask, and as we talked, we could both see the ache. We were speaking in feelings. Words were not enough.” (p.