SOURCE: Goshgarian, G. M. “Go Away and Die: The Lamplighter, ‘Lena Rivers, Ernest Linwood.” To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance, pp. 156-212. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Goshgarian surveys the display of paternal power over wayward females in The Lamplighter, focusing specifically on the incestuous undertones.

It is time we turned the light of Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854) back on the source. The Lamplighter, it will be recalled, affirms, expressis verbis, that the secret of true happiness lies in kissing the Father's rod (“a foretaste of heaven”).¹ One might reasonably expect the text to reinforce its unbending orthodoxy on this cardinal point by arranging, like the best-sellers we have already examined, for a fatherly martinet to discipline and then marry a congenitally wayward child-woman. But Cummins's novel develops and suppresses its patrimatrimonial implications with a lighter...