The female husband: Masculinity and femininity in Nineteenth century America

Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake were a lesbian couple living in 19th-century Weybridge, Vermont. Their story has recently been told by the historian Rachel Hope Cleves (2014 and 2015). In her work, prof. Hope explains how Charity and Sylvia’s marriage was regarded as an ‘open secret’ by their townspeople, who recognised them in terms of traditional couples clearly identifying “Miss Bryant [as] the man” and Sylvia Drake as her “fond wife” (Cleves 2014, 131). Starting from these premises, the present paper sets out to investigate the attribution of socially constructed and accepted gender roles in same-sex lesbian relationships. To this purpose, three satellite corpora were collected. The first consists of the publications by Rachel H. Cleves; the second of reviews on the book published in newspaper, journals and blogs. The third was collected with bootcat using as seeds keywords identified in the other two corpora. Through the tools and methodology of corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker 2014), the comparison of the three satellite corpora aims at identifying the evolution over time of masculinity and femininity traits in the representation of lesbian couples.