The basic subject of bestselling antebellum "woman's fiction" written by women about women for women was, according to G. M. Goshgarian, sex--more particularly, incest.
Goshgarian takes a close and penetrating look at the facts of life in the United States of the 1850s and offers "improper" readings of five bestselling works of women's fiction, now largely forgotten. In Goshgarian's view, the typical narrative of such domestic novels recounts the forging of a "true woman," detailing the trials and tribulations which--in one of the age's favorite metaphors--bring an excessively "passionate" adolescent heroine to "kiss the Father's chastening rod." Goshgarian maintains that, although their authors presented woman as pure and sexless, the pivot of these narratives was woman's, especially the moral mother's, natural incestuousness. Examining ideas about masturbation, female sexuality, the family, and post-Calvinist religion that shaped the readership of popular woman's fiction, To Kiss the Chastening Rod shows that passionlessness was the privileged theme of a pervasive discourse which sought to exert social control through the rigorous repression, minute supervision, and covert cultivation of sexuality. Through close readings of Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter, Mary Jane Holmes's Lena Rivers, Caroline Lee Hentz's Ernest Linwood, Augusta Jane Evans's Beulah, and Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World, it demonstrates how woman's fiction simultaneously perpetuated and subverted the image of the passionless true woman.
To Kiss the Chastening Rod will be read and vigorously debated by Americanists and Victorianists, literary theorists, and students of gender studies, popular culture, and the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature.