This article explores one aspect of the ordinary manifestation of religio-sexual energy by examining popular romance novels written by nineteenth- and twentieth-century women about the ministry. I selected this group of novels because the ministry is the vocational theater in which the perplexities of religion and sex are often dramatized, and because the relationship of women to the ministry is a central ingredient in this dramatization.
It is my contention that the group of thematically distinctive novels I call "parsonage romances" represent an enactment of religio-sexual dynamics that serves to reinforce patriarchal structures of religion and culture. They do so by blaming women for any sexual dysfunctions that may seem to be attached to the pastoral vocation. The cultural work accomplished by such fiction is the acknowledgment of the troubling realities of religion and sexuality while at the same time absolving the church and her male representative of any responsibility for these dysfunctions. Virtually without exception, what can be said to characterize the female-authored parsonage romances is (1) the absolute restoration of the spiritually superior, exclusively male ministry, and (2) the proclamation of female culpability and clerical innocence in personal affairs, no matter what the circumstance. (87)
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Both religion and romance offer certainty in the face of contingency, and the romance formula nicely buttresses the internal religious promise of these fictions-that faith in God/male leadership promises the certainty of eternal life/marriage. Both invariably bypass the actuality of the physical body by idealizing the longings and impulses of the flesh as spiritual rapture/true love. In so doing, both religious and romance formulas also mask the covert violation of female integrity by presenting his sexual command as an irresistible grace/necessity. (91)
Here's an excerpt:
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This article formed the basis for a chapter in Morey's Religion and Sexuality in American Literature.