Verena Tarrant
Verena Tarrant is a beautiful pale redhead with an equally fiery ability to rouse crowds of women into supporting her calls for equality and suffrage. In the wake of the aftermath of the Civil War and the sudden deprivation of an entire generation of young men and basking in the successful completion of the movement to abolish slavery, a burgeoning women’s rights fever is beginning to rise thanks to the spirited oratory of leaders like Tarrant.
Olive Chancellor
Of course, very few political movements gain much traction with inspiring oratory alone. For the fever to spread in any serious way, funding sources must be found and convinced. The heiress of a notable upper class family, Olive possesses the sensibilities and the means to accomplish what Verena does in her speeches, but suffers the disadvantage of being “morbidly” shy. She despises men as an entire class of society and is secretly in love with Verena.
Miss Birdseye
Miss Bidseye is a relic from an earlier generation of feminists. She was at the vanguard of the abolitionist movement and has dedicated her life to supporting political goals without concern for individual gain. Her moral vision is ironically juxtaposed against her defining physical characteristic: the spectacles she requires to correct her actual vision.
Selah Tarrant
Selah is Verena’s father. He is a notorious figure amongst upper society due to whether one believes in his claims to have engineered miraculous cures using mesmeric healing or not. A demonstration of this controversial early prototype of clinical hypnosis is given using Verena as the subject of his hands-on treatment. Before each of her excitatory speeches rousing crowds of women to the fight for equality, she undergoes this treatment at her father’s hands which, as it is being performed, seems to put her temporarily into a catatonic state. In return, Selah has little compunction about using his daughter’s increasingly high profile to exploit his own thirst for publicity.
Basil Ransom
Basil is a handsome former slaveholding plantation owner who moved to New York City after discovering it actually takes business sense to make a profit when forced to pay workers. The retention of his southern aristocratic supremacy is typically unaffected by the humiliating surrender by the Confederacy. He is instantly attracted to Verena despite being repulsed by almost everything she believes and stands for. Having subsequently failed to carve out a second career as a writer of texts propagating his archaic philosophies, he dedicates himself to having Verena one way or another in order to keep her where she belongs: the kitchen and the bedroom.
