The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern

The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern argues that Sara Parton and her literary alter ego, Fanny Fern, occupy a star-power position within the antebellum literary marketplace dominated by women authors of sentimental fiction, writers Nathaniel Hawthorne (in)famously called “the damn mob of scribbling women.” The Fanny Fern persona represents a nineteenth-century woman voicing the modern feminine within a laughter-provoking bourgeois carnival, a forerunner of Hélène Cixous’s laugh