Allusions to sexually driven corporal punishment in two books by Isabel Allende

Eva Luna (1985):

Eight years before I was born- on the same day El Benefactor died in his bed like any innocent grandfather- in a village in the north of Austria, a boy named Rolf Carlé came into the world. He was the last son of Lukas Carlé, the most feared of all the upper-schoolmasters. Corporal punishment was a part of schooling; spare the rod and spoil the child was sustained by both popular wisdom and pedagogical theory, and so no parent in his right mind would have protested its application. But when Carlé broke a boy's hands, the school administration forbade him to use the ferule, because it was clear that once he began he lost all self-control in a frenzy of lust. [Chapter 2, opening paragraph]

From House of the Spirits (1982):

But he was determined that at least his sons would be kept at a sate distance from her magic, so Jaime and Nicolas were sent to a Victorian English boarding school, where any excuse sufficed for pulling down a student's pants and caning his buttocks. [p. 158 in Knopf Doubleday Publish Group edition (2005)]


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