Charity Bryant and the Queer Affordances of the Early American Acrostic

Abstract:This article investigates early American women's acrostic poetry, especially as it was written and exchanged in same-sex friendships and romantic relationships. It begins with a discussion of male poets' deployment of the print acrostic in the service of courtship, considering how such poems expose women to the public eye. Women's manuscript acrostics, on the other hand, refuse the isolation of the female subject in the heterosexual pair, instead creating community in their composition and circulation practices. By way of example, the article turns to acrostic poetry written and received by Charity Bryant, a young teacher from New England whose affections for other women prompted the exchange of manuscript acrostics that fit same-sex love into the larger framework of gendered respectability and morality. Taken together, these poems demonstrate the adaptation of women's manuscript practices to relationships that included but went well beyond the rhetoric of romantic friendship. In this exchange, the article argues, acrostics normalize same-sex relationships, making them legible and preserving them for posterity.