30 September 2021
Rhiannon Cogbill, Independent Scholar
A prefatory note to Living Alone (1919), the third novel by the early twentieth-century English writer, suffragist and campaigner Stella Benson, informs readers that it is ‘not a real book’ and indeed ‘does not deal with real people’.[1] One aspect of this unreality relates to genre: Living Alone, in which witches and wizards intrude upon the work of a charitable committee during the First World War, demonstrates what Nicola Darwood characterises as Benson’s ability to ‘cover a wide range of issues […] through a mixture of realism, fantasy and satire’.[2]
The novel’s characters are also associated with unreality. By ‘obviously trying to behave like a real human person’, the wry narrator observes, an unruly witch reveals herself to be otherwise-defined.[3] Our (human) protagonist, Sarah Brown — her name always rendered in full — is described similarly: ‘She was not a real woman, she was morbidly bodiless.’[4]
Sarah Brown’s bodilessness is curious because her body is a focus throughout the novel. Hoeing beans on a faery farm, for instance, awakens ‘that pain in her side under whose threat she had lived all her life’.[5] She is ‘constantly ill’, with ‘the worst of all’ being that her ‘ears are failing’, such that she considers herself to be ‘going deaf’.[6] In this essay, I will process notions of unreality and bodilessness by examining the impact of the telephone on concepts of embodiment, hearing and presence during this period of technological transformation.
The history of the telephone articulates how sound became, in Jonathan Sterne’s words, ‘an object to be contemplated, reconstructed, and manipulated’ during the nineteenth century.[7] Like other sound-reproduction technologies, the telephone works through use of a transducer, ‘turn[ing] sound into something else and that something else back into sound’.[8] I suggest that one way in which Sarah Brown can be approached as bodiless or unreal is through a metaphor of transduction.
At the beginning of Living Alone, Benson positions the character as a point of crossing between the human world and the witch. After the witch’s unexpected introduction, Sarah Brown’s questioning of the witch’s life and motivations orientates readers to the novel’s critical investments in irony and perception. The witch then induces Sarah Brown to move into the House of Living Alone, setting subsequent events in motion. Things happen, they are received and processed by Sarah Brown, and then things happen again. In another explanation of transduction, Stefan Helmreich writes that the term ‘names how sound changes as it traverses media’; through Sarah Brown, adventure becomes ideas becomes adventure.[9]
Sarah Brown thus begins the novel more as a process than a person. An overlooked intermediary, her war work has previously found her ‘sitting in ’buses bound for remote quarters of London’ and ‘ringing […] bells’ that go unanswered.[10] I argue that the novel advances Sarah Brown’s disconnection as a function of her ‘going deaf’.[11] Her deafness is initially shown to preclude her from full participation in modern life.[12]
Caroline Webb’s assessment of the novel as a ‘portrayal of modernity as a space of disconnection’ sits interestingly against the ‘uncanny’ material world of the period.[13] This was a time in which developments such as telephony suggested, as Pamela Thurschwell writes, ‘that science could help annihilate distances that separate bodies and minds from each other’.[14] In Living Alone, Benson uses the contemporary reception of such technologies as ‘living’ or ‘magic’ to conflate telephony and witchery through a framework of unreality.[15]
And yet, Sarah Brown’s belief that she is ‘rather good at ideas’ but lacks ‘youth enough to make the wretchedness adventurous’ is replete with dramatic irony.[16] She has grown ‘tired of proper answers’ and hollow niceties, and rapidly acclimatises to a more eventful life.[17] At one crucial point, she is able to summon a wizard because she is ‘not deaf on the telephone’, heralding another way in which we might conceive of the character as bodiless or unreal.[18]
Although Alexander Graham Bell ‘cited his work with the deaf and with the human ear as the inspiration behind his invention of the telephone’, as Coreen McGuire notes, the device ‘was originally designed for people with unproblematic hearing to communicate with each other’.[19] McGuire’s research on the Post Office’s interwar ‘telephone service for the deaf’ reveals that ‘the ability to use the telephone was contingent upon, and indicative of, “normal hearing”, even though […] the threshold for such categorisation was unstable’.[20]
Living Alone was published before the provision of the ‘amplified telephone’, but the shifting logic that McGuire uncovers nevertheless proves pertinent. Sarah Brown occupies a position of disjunctive reality: she believes that she is ‘going deaf’, and is also able to use the telephone and ‘hear magic’, through which the novel complicates the basis for her identification.[21] The very articulation of ‘going deaf’ is significant because it reflects hearing as a spectrum rather than a binary.[22] We see with Sarah Brown how scientific ‘standardised classification systems’ fail to accommodate the nuances of human specificity.[23] Even within Living Alone, thereality of her hearing shifts significantly.
That she perceives a punishing sense of ‘locked doors between me and the world’ during in-person conversations and confidently uses the telephone also suggests that she feels most present — most embodied— in the latter scenario.[24] Mara Mills, drawing from Robert Hopper, reflects that telephony affords ‘[a] surplus, a gymnastics of speech’ because it is ‘cut off from other communication cues’.[25] Sarah Brown is best able to partake in such gymnastics at a physical distance from her conversation partner.
‘Sometimes’, the witch reflects in response to Sarah Brown’s expression of deafness, ‘it’s better not to hear the other things’.[26] Benson contrasts a wizard’s indignant protest at a policeman’s ‘loud noises’ with Sarah Brown’s ability to ‘not hear’ them, which enables her to better shield the witch from arrest.[27] Sarah Brown thus actualises the wizard’s ‘long[ing] to be still and hear things very far off’ in a way that approaches an experience of deaf gain, a concept that H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph M. Murray, following Aaron Williamson, use to ‘de-center—and minimize—the frame of normalcy’ that poses d/Deafness as loss.[28]
As the novel draws to a close, Sarah Brown steps onto American soil. ‘I am as if dead in England now’, she tells the witch, speaking again to a sense of unreality and impermanence: ‘Nobody there will ever think of me again, except as a thing that has been heard the last of.’[29] We discover, when she ignores an American port official, that this statement can be twisted to convey that she has, in fact, heard her last: ‘“I cannot hear you,” said Sarah Brown. “I am stone deaf.”’[30]
Debra Rae Cohen reflects on this moment as an ‘emphatic refusal […] to “hear” the discourse of the law’, and I suggest that it also functions as a reframing of Sarah Brown’s feelings about ‘going deaf’.[31] The silence of Living Alone is, to borrow from R. Meredith Bedell, ‘neither insurmountable nor necessarily bad’.[32] Through a telephonic lens, as I have demonstrated, we can understand Sarah Brown as unreal, bodiless and, at the same time, working towards a self-defined fulfilment.
Image Credit / Caption: Sound waves. Image © Paul Griggs, Wellcome Collection
Sources:
[1] Stella Benson, Living Alone (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. v.
[2] Nicola Darwood, ‘Laughter and Dying: Stella Benson’s Hope Against Hope and Other Stories and Tobit Transplanted’, in Interwar Women’s Comic Fiction: ‘Have Women a Sense of Humour?’, ed. by Nicola Darwood and Nick Turner (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), pp. 63-82 (p. 64).
[3] Benson, p. 39. For discussion of similar language in Benson’s letters and diaries, see Catherine Clay, British Women Writers 1914-1945: Professional Work and Friendship (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 100-25.
[4] Benson, p. 188.
[5] Ibid., p. 173.
[6] Ibid., pp. 36, 36-37, 37. For discussion of Benson’s own health, see Joy Grant, Stella Benson: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 3-23.
[7] Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press: 2003), p. 9.
[8] Ibid., p. 22.
[9] Stefan Helmreich, ‘Transduction’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 222-31 (p. 222).
[10] Benson, p. 23.
[11] Ibid., p. 37.
[12] For discussion of modernism, deafness and communication, see Maren Tova Linett, Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017), pp. 85-117.
[13] Caroline Webb, ‘Magic, Modernity, and Women at Work’, in Modernist Work: Labor, Aesthetics, and the Work of Art, ed. by John Attridge and Helen Rydstrand (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 130-43 (p. 136); Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 3.
[14] Thurschwell, p. 3.
[15] See, for example: Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000); and Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002).
[16] Benson, p. 35.
[17] Ibid., p. 30.
[18] Ibid., p. 242.
[19] Coreen McGuire, ‘Inventing amplified telephony: the co-creation of aural technology and disability’, in Rethinking Modern Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures, 1820-1939, ed. by Claire L. Jones (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 70-90 (pp. 71, 70).
[20] Coreen Anne McGuire, ‘The categorisation of hearing loss through telephony in inter-war Britain’, History and Technology, 35.2 (2019), 138-55 (p. 139).
[21] Benson, p. 37.
[22] Ibid., p. 37.
[23] McGuire, ‘The categorisation of hearing loss’, 138-55 (p. 140).
[24] Benson, p. 37.
[25] Mara Mills, ‘The Audiovisual Telephone: A Brief History’, in Handheld? Music Video Aesthetics for Portable Devices, ed. by Henry Keazor (Heidelberg: ART-Dok, 2012), pp. 34-47 (p. 37, 36).
[26] Benson, p. 37.
[27] Ibid., pp. 229, 231.
[28] Ibid., p. 229; H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph M. Murray, ‘Reframing: From Hearing Loss to Deaf Gain’, trans. by Fallon Brizendine and Emily Schenker, Deaf Studies Digital Journal, 1 (2009), 1-10 (p. 2).
[29] Benson, p. 262.
[30] Ibid., p. 264.
[31] Debra Rae Cohen, Remapping the Home Front: Locating Citizenship in British Women’s Great War Fiction (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2002), p. 64; Benson, p. 37.
[32] R. Meredith Bedell, Stella Benson (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1983), p. 55.
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