Harvest Home (novel)

"Harvest Home" is the name of a 1973 novel by Thomas Tryon, which he wrote in the wake of his 1971 critically-acclaimed "The Other". The book became an NBC mini-series starring Bette Davis in 1978. The following entry summarizes the plot of the book, although the mini-series adaptation was generally faithful.

The Plot

Told in first person, "Harvest Home" is the story of artist Ned Constantine (the narrator), his wife Beth, and their young teenaged daughter Kate. Fed up with life in New York City, the family decides to relocate to the country, where Ned, a former advertising agency executive, can pursue his artistic career. After months of half-hearted looking, and while driving back to New York from the funeral of Beth's father, the family chances across a geographically and culturally isolated village, named Cornwall Coombe, in Connecticut. The village seems an idyllic farming community that offers all that Ned and Beth have been seeking. They express interest in an abandoned three hundred year old house, and they are contacted some weeks later by the Dodds, who live next door to the house and who tell them that it is for sale. The Constantines buy and renovate the house and move to Cornwall Coombe, breaking completely with their old life in the city.

The opening chapters describe several matters in innocent detail, including the past marital difficulties of Ned and Beth, now apparently long-resolved; the moody Kate's serious, life-threatening asthma, in part a psychosomatic reaction to those marital troubles; and, most importantly, the eccentricities of life in Cornwall Coombe. The villagers adhere stubbornly to what they call "the old ways," eschewing modern agricultural methods and contact with the outside world. They also celebrate a number of festivals, seasons, and holidays that revolve around the planting, growing, and harvesting of corn, which is their chief product. One of the most mysterious of these festivals is Harvest Home, which takes place at the conclusion of the harvest and thus the growing year. While the villagers are ardent churchgoers, Ned gradually becomes aware of the not-so-subtle paganism that surrounds these village rituals.

The Constantines are soon befriended by their new neighbors, the Dodds. Maggie Dodd plays the organ for the local church, while her husband Robert, totally blind, is a retired college professor. Other prominent villagers who become friends with the newcomers are Worthy Pettinger, a young man who disdains the old ways and wants to go to agricultural school; Justin Hooke, who serves as the village's ceremonial "Harvest Lord," and his wife Sophie, whom Justin has chosen to be his "Corn Maiden" in the approaching "Corn Play"; Jack Stump, a local peddler who like the Constantines has only recently arrived; and, above all, the Widow Fortune, the village herbalist, midwife, and matriarch.

It is during a late summer festival known as the Agnes Fair that Ned first begins to sense that something sinister underlies life in Cornwall Coombe. After most of the festivities are over, Ned hears a horrible cry and, rushing behind a barn, beholds a strange spectacle: a young child named Missy Penrose, of strange habits and regarded by the farmers as an oracle, stands over a newly-slaughtered sheep, touching her blood-drenched hands to Worthy's face. Ned later learns that this means Worthy has been chosen to be the "Young Lord," who will succeed Justin as Harvest Lord when Justin's seven-year term ends later that year.

After this bizarre event, more mysteries begin to arise. Jack Stump reports that he has seen a ghost in the woods called Soakes's Lonesome, named for a local family of moonshiners, and one night Ned himself sees a strange apparition and later finds a skeleton hidden deep within the woods. Worthy, meanwhile, grows more aloof and then secretly--with Ned's help--decides to leave the village rather than become Harvest Lord. Jack, too, disappears, leaving Ned to ponder developments alone. Ned, in the meantime, has grown preoccupied with the mysterious death of Gracie Everdeen fourteen years earlier. Buried in unhallowed ground, Gracie is even now often spoken of often and harshly by the inhabitants of Cornwall Coombe. Although the villagers do not go into great detail about the nature of her transgressions, the information Ned learns about her seems conflicting and inconsistent.

As harvest time approaches, Ned comes to realize that the village's pagan ways run deep. He finds a primitive corn dolly in Justin's fields; the Widow Fortune's medicinal remedies help to cure Kate of her asthma and, at one point, the Widow succeeds in resuscitating Kate and saving her from certain death; and one evening Ned, possibly hallucinating as a result of drinking some of the Widow's honey mead, believes that he sees the Harvest Lord and Corn Maiden trysting in a neighboring cornfield. During a harvest service in church, Worthy appears suddenly, cursing the corn and "the Mother" in a loud voice before running away for good. By now, too, Jack Stump has been found mutilated, the Soakeses having apparently cut out his tongue in retribution for Jack's trespassing into Soakes's Lonesome.

All of these events make Ned more anxious than ever before to solve the mystery that pervades the village. But at the same time, his personal life grows tangled. Tamar Penrose, Missy's mother, begins to try to seduce Ned, who resists, though weakly, as he tries to learn more from and about Missy. Through Tamar, Justin, and the Widow Fortune, Ned learns that the women of Cornwall Coombe practice pagan fertility rites, and that the Mother" is in fact Mother Earth. Tamar also reveals to him that fourteen years earlier, during the festival of Harvest Home, she had served as Corn Maiden, conceiving Missy in the process. Ned then learns other things as the strands begin to come together. Gracie, originally slated to be Corn Maiden for her fiancé Roger Penrose, had developed a disfiguring disease; when she was consequently replaced by Tamar, Gracie (like Worthy after her) cursed the corn, which produced years of drought.

But then Ned falls from favor in Cornwall Coombe. As the harvest ends, the villagers come together to celebrate with a husking bee, a riotous village party to mark the conclusion of the growing season, and Ned, along with many other men, drink heavily as part of the festivities. During the Husking Bee, the villagers put on the Corn Play, a symbolic fertility rite that foreshadows what will happen at the mysterious Harvest Home a few nights later. After the Corn Play Ned, now quite drunk, watches stuporously as the women perform a barefoot, pagan dance tracing sinister harvest shapes with their feet in a carpet of corn kernels. When the women draw Kate into their circle, Ned furiously breaks into the dance to pull her back out, and the villagers cast him into the street and pelt him with corn cobs for interfering in the ritual.

At the same time the Consantines' life has begun to come apart. Beth had hoped to have another child, but Ned has learned that his own sterility, and not Beth's problems while giving birth to Kate, has been preventing this. Beth has grown distrustful of Ned as she has seen him having run-ins with Tamar. For his part, Ned neither likes not trusts Tamar, whom the reader is coming to see as a metaphoric personification of the earth goddess, embodying the powers of both fertility and destruction. But at last, needled and encouraged by Tamar, Ned finally has sex with her in the woods--sex that seemingly begins as a rape but which ends with Tamar's complete domination of him, as Ned, too, sees her for what she is. The fact that Tamar represents a religion practiced in, and older than, ancient Greece, together with the fact that Ned's ancestry is Greek, emphasizes the ancient homage that men are forced to pay to the earth goddess.

Ned's rage at Tamar is fueled by a discovery he has made: it was not the Soakses but Tamar, with the help of the other village women, who cut out Jack Stump's tongue, in order to stop him from telling something about what he had found in the woods. Piecing the facts together, Ned realizes that Jack had found Gracie's skeleton in a clearing in the woods--the same skeleton that Ned later discovered. Rather than let Roger have Tamar, Gracie came to the Harvest Home celebration in the woods and was "a disruptive influence," with the women killing her as punishment. Ned then discovers, to his horror, that the villagers have found--and killed--Worthy Pettinger, hanging him in a field as a scarecrow and later flinging his body into a massive bonfire that takes place on Kindling Night. The climax approaches as, on the day of Harvest Home, Sophie Hooke, Justin's wife and Corn Maiden, kills herself. When Ned denounces the villagers and their ways, the Widow Fortune, who is clearly the Mother's high priestess, pronounces him an outcast. With all of the villagers gathered before the church, Missy warns them to confine Ned, which they do.

As night falls, Ned manages to escape from the room in which he is being held, finding a secret passageway from the building in which he is imprisoned to the church, where the village women are engaged in choosing a new Corn Maiden before proceeding to the woods to celebrate Harvest Home. He sees the heavily-veiled Corn Maiden, whom he is sure is Tamar, go with the other women and Justin to the woods. Ned then races to the clearing where he knows Harvest Home will take place, determined to discover the mystery of what happens at the celebration.

Shortly before being jailed, Ned had gone to his neighbor Robert Dodd for advice. Dodd had explained to him fully about matriarchal pagan fertility religions of antiquity, and he had advised Ned to steer clear of Harvest Home at all costs, since any discovery of the secret of these rites by a man always entailed dire consequences. But Ned, heedless of the advice, hides himself in the clearing. There he watches the women play out the rites, which include not only the rutting of the Harvest Lord with the Corn Maiden to symbolize and ensure the plowing and fertility of the Mother, but the poist-coital consummation of the rites. As he watches the rites, Ned realizes two things with a horrible shock, the first of which explains why Worthy fled and why Sophie killed herself: After Justin has had sex with the Corn Maiden, the women will sacrifice him to the Mother; and the new Corn Maiden is not Tamar but Beth. As he sees his wife Ned cries out, which allows the women to find and capture him.

In frozen horror, Ned is forced to watch while Justin and Beth have intercourse, and then while the women, after Justin's climax, slash the Harvest Lord's throat with a sickle and hurl his blood onto the ground throughout the clearing. Too late Ned realizes that the villagers have allowed his family to settle here in order to bring new blood--Beth's and Kate's--into Cornwall Coombe. Too late he realizes that Robert Dodd, too, had tried to witness the rites of Harvest Home, and that the Widow Fortune had blinded him with her shears as punishment. Now, as Ned tries to escape, the women surround him and proceed to cut out both his eyes and his tongue. We learn of this maiming months after the fact, as Ned recounts news of Beth's pregnancy and Kate's new role of Corn Maiden to the newly-chosen Harvest Lord.

Tryon and Neo-Paganism

Combining elements of such disparate stories as "Lost Horizon" and "The Lottery", Tryon reflected a growing interest in neo-paganism that grew out of the 1960s, and tapped into the lore of fertility cults to spin a tale of rural-gothic horror. Such themes dominated "The Wicker Man", which had been filmed (though not yet released) the year before, and may be found in works such as Stephen King's short story "Children of the Corn".

ee also

The White Goddess

External links

* [http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/frazer/index.htm The Golden Bough]
*imdb title|0077399|The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978)