tive. Basil too is hypnotized by Verena and her hidden powers. James contrasts the two characters, Dr. Tarrant and his daughter Verena. Olive and Basil love Verena, but they dislike her father. It seems odd that they would dislike the father of the one that they hold dear, especially with all the same characteristics that they share. They are, in essence, both practicing the same type of medicine. They are using the subconscious to achieve their goals. The only difference is that Dr. Tarrant openly practices it while Verena uses the same power with knowingly accepting it. Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall is a look at the author’s own real life experiences. She just changes the name of the characters to hide their identities. The most interesting aspect of her book is the fact that she includes the lowers class women in her fight for women’s rights. Very few women activists included the lower classes in their strives for equality. Fanny Fern, another American writer was way before her time in this aspect.The middle-class women constituted most of the leaders of the women’s movement, and so their concerns were put in the forefront. Very little thought was given to the women who worked in the sweatshops or the factories during the nineteenth-century. Fanny does not seem to differentiate between the classes when it comes to the movement. She might be considered the founder of the lower-class women’s movement. But then again, there was no reason why middle class women should fight for the lower-class women’s rights when they thought that they were not their equals. The reader also gets a sense of what type of person Fanny was. She seems very outspoken and not too worried about conforming to the norms of the times. That could explain why she was not only fighting for the middle-class women’s rights, but the rights of all women, rich or poor, ugly or pretty, it made no difference to her. As ...
