For the presentation of Fanny Fern’s Tyrants of the Shop, I’ll be working with my fellow homie-gee Erick Gonzalez. We’ve decided to present this reading by conducting a close reading and comparing our differing perspectives. Each piece of writing encourages interpretation and they may not always be the same. I had done some background research on the author in order to better understand this piece. Fanny Fern was an American newspaper columnist, humorist, novelist, and author of children’s stories in the 1850s-1870s. Fern’s great popularity had been attributed to her conversational style and sense of what mattered to her mostly middle-class female readers.
While conducting this close reading I realized that Fanny Fern was a woman who desired change. She wanted to inform her readers of the travesties that young women in the work force faced. She explains that even though you may not witness it or ever suffer from it, it still occurs and is inevitable. Shop keepers consistently view their women workers as less valuable or less human, while at the same time they treat their customers with the utmost respect and dignity.