Religion and Sexuality in American Literature

See Chapter 5: "Comfort to the Enemy: Women Write about the Ministry. The Parsonage Romance."

As noted in the acknowledgements section,

A version of Chapter 5 first appeared as "The Reverend Idol and Other Parsonage Secrets: Women Write Romances about Ministers, 1880-1950," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 6 (Spring 1990): 87-103.

More details about the romances are given in Appendix B.

Some excerpts:

Both religion and romance offer certainty in the face of contingency, and the formulaic romance nicely buttresses the internal religious promise of these fictions-that faith (in God) in male leadership promises the certainty of (eternal life) marriage. Both invariably bypass the real works of the physical body by idealizing the longings and impulses of the flesh as a purity of (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. (146)

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Some of the novels under consideration here are about a marriage rather than a courtship and so do not strictly qualify as a romance. Others involve political or religious discussion that adds an element of seriousness that is missing in a conventional romance. The writing may proceed from an idealism and fervor that is not entirely vitiated by the formula used to convey it. There are also a significant few that offer only an ambiguous conclusion to marital stress and religious issues. But in one way or another, nearly all these novels are romances: they present a happy-ending love relationship between an idealized male minister and his stylized female parishioner. He is masterful, omniscient, and tender; she is spirited but dependent, perky but feminine, nominally rebellious but actually waiting to be awakened to true womanhood and faith by the same event - falling in love with (or confirming her wifely submission to) her minister. (148)

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From 1915 on, most of the parsonage romances will be preoccupied with the problems of city ministry, usually in the context of a well-heeled congregation coming to terms with urban social distress, and we find no instances in which a young woman provides religious leadership to a minister. Instead, the parsonage romances become increasingly coercive in their agenda for the future or present minister's wife, who causes him trouble in his ministry by her unwillingness, unworthiness, or ignorance relative to his goals and her proper role in a clergy marriage. Late nineteenth-century novels of this persuasion quote a good deal of scripture toward the goal of enforcing her identity. Early to mid-twentieth-century novels quote little scripture, relying instead on institutional precedent and shared cultural wisdom about such matters. (156)