"This 'House of Refuge'": The Asylum and the Home as Sites of Religious Discipline in the US South

19th-century US historians have long recognized that both the insane asylum and the home have functioned as sites for disciplining bodies and minds into model citizens. Less attention has been given to the relationship between the asylum and the home and how both used religion to shape their residents into model citizens. This paper examines the synergistic relationship between the Southern home and the asylum and how their reality challenged their idealized archetypes as site of patriarchal authority. It also highlights how religion shaped and was shaped by the ideals of normativity – necessarily gendered/racialized – these sites were built to instill. As the niece of Duncan Cameron, one of the wealthiest slaveowners in North Carolina, Anna Cameron Kirkland’s story is an example of how religious discipline was used in the home and the asylum to discipline upper-class white women.