To Kiss the Chastening Rod : Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance

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.