50 STATES > Texas

We were stunned to learn that such a confident and forward thinking advocate was part of the fin de siècle discourse on medicalizing homosexuality.

While certain parts of the novel, in particular Norma's trial scenes and her intercepted love letters, are poignant, articulate, and even poetic, we should also mention that the book is at its core a ridiculous dime-store novel with melodramatic twists, a treasure hunt for buried Mexican silver, and a ludicrous and hardly convincing, resolution in which the heroine is cured of her homosexuality through hypnotism. To give a sense of the convoluted plot twists, it turns out that Norma's mother, unbeknownst to anyone else, hypnotized the hypnotizing doctor to fall in love with her so that he wouldn't do anything harmful to Norma while hypnotizing the young woman to fall in love with her male suitor who has hired the doctor because he has been in love with Norma since they were children even though he knows full well of her love for Marie.