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Harvest Home (novel)
Encyclopedia
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
. Harvest Home was a New York Times bestseller. The book became an NBC
mini-series called The Dark Secret of Harvest Home
starring Bette Davis
(as Mary Fortune) and David Ackroyd
(as Ned) in 1978. The mini-series was generally faithful to the plot of the book .
, Harvest Home (also known as The Dark Secret of Harvest Home) tells the story of artist Ned Constantine (the narrator), his wife Beth, and their 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 isolated, insular village in Connecticut, named Cornwall Coombe. 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.
The opening chapters describe several matters in innocent detail, including the past marital difficulties of Ned and Beth, now apparently resolved; the moody Kate's serious, potentially 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 limiting contact with the outside world. The villagers celebrate a number of festivals, seasons, and holidays that revolve around the planting, growing, and harvesting of corn
, which is their chief product. The most important rite is Harvest Home, which takes place at the conclusion of the crop growing year. While the villagers profess to be Christian, Ned gradually becomes aware of the not-so-subtle paganism
that surrounds the 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 current year'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 Mary Fortune, a widow, who is a herbalist, midwife, and one of the town's most influential people.
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, Missy Penrose, 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 still referred to harshly, but obliquely, by the locals. 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. One evening Ned, possibly hallucinating as a result of drinking some of the Widow's 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, scandalizing the town, before running away. In response, Worthy's parents are ostracized by the villagers who refuse their wares on Market Day. By now, Jack Stump has been found mutilated, having apparently had his tongue cut out and mouth sewn up in retribution for trespassing into Soakes's Lonesome.
All of these events make Ned more anxious than ever 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 the strange 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 Everdeen, 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; drought followed, for which she was blamed. As the harvest ends, the villagers come together with a husking bee, a riotous party marking the conclusion of the growing season. Ned, along with the other men, drinks 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. 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 Constantines' marriage has begun to unravel again. Beth had hoped to have another child, but Ned has learned it was his sterility which prevented this. Beth has grown distrustful of Ned, having observed his run-ins with Tamar. For his part, Ned dislikes and distrusts the rapacious Tamar, but finally has sex with her in the woods, sex which ends with Tamar's domination of him. 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 other villagers, 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, which the Widow Fortune told him were those of a "revenuer". Not wanting Roger Penrose to be Harvest Lord to Tamar, her replacement as Corn Maiden, Gracie had come to the Harvest Home celebration in the woods all those years ago and was "a disruptive influence", and was killed then and there. Ned also learns that, due to Tamar, the village's postmistress, having steamed open a letter Worthy Pettinger had mailed him, the villagers found and killed Worthy, who had fled to another town, hanging his corpse 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. A suicide, she is denied burial in the consecrated ground of the churchyard. Ned denounces the villagers for this and Widow Fortune, a revered 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, which Dodd had suffered himself. Dodd removes his glasses showing that he is not blind per se, but that his eyes had been gouged out, for his outsider's interference in the rituals. Ned, although repulsed, does not heed the advice and 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 postcoital consummation of the rites. As he watches the rites, Ned realizes two things: why Worthy had tried to escape and why Sophie killed herself. After Justin has intercourse with the Corn Maiden, the women will sacrifice him to the Mother; but the new Corn Maiden is not Tamar, but his own wife, Beth. As he sees his wife, Ned cries out, which alerts the women to his presence.
In frozen horror, Ned is forced to watch while Justin and Beth have intercourse, and then Tamar, after Justin's climax, cuts Justin's throat with a sickle, spilling his blood onto the ground throughout the clearing. Ned realizes that the villagers allowed his family to settle here in order to bring new blood, Beth's and Kate's, into Cornwall Coombe. Ned tries to escape but the women surround him and render him sightless, as they had done to Robert Dodd, and also cutting his tongue out.
Months later, while sitting at home having lunch, which Beth has had to cut up in order for him to eat, and listening to the record player, Ned hears news of Beth's pregnancy and Kate's relationship with the newly-chosen Harvest Lord, amid speculation that she may be destined to be the next Corn Maiden.
's short story Children of the Corn
.
1973 in literature
The year 1973 in literature involved several significant events and the writing of many notable books.-Events:*September 25 - The funeral of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda becomes a focus for protests against the new government of Augusto Pinochet...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by Thomas Tryon
Tom Tryon
Tom Tryon was an American film and television actor, best known for playing the title role in the film The Cardinal and the Walt Disney television character Texas John Slaughter...
, which he wrote in the wake of his 1971
1971 in literature
The year 1971 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*The Destiny Waltz by Gerda Charles wins the UK's first Whitbread Novel of the Year Award.-New books:*Hiroshi Aramata - Teito Monogatari...
critically acclaimed The Other
The Other
The Other is a 1972 psychological horror film directed by Robert Mulligan, adapted for film by Tom Tryon, from his bestselling novel. It stars Uta Hagen, Diana Muldaur, and Chris & Martin Udvarnoky.-Plot:...
. Harvest Home was a New York Times bestseller. The book became an NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
mini-series called The Dark Secret of Harvest Home
The Dark Secret of Harvest Home
The Dark Secret of Harvest Home is a 1978 television miniseries thriller, produced by Universal TV. The screenplay was based on the 1973 novel Harvest Home by Tom Tryon.-Cast and crew:...
starring Bette Davis
Bette Davis
Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis was an American actress of film, television and theater. Noted for her willingness to play unsympathetic characters, she was highly regarded for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical and period films and occasional...
(as Mary Fortune) and David Ackroyd
David Ackroyd
David Ackroyd is an American actor, who first came to prominence in soap operas such as The Secret Storm and Another World. He was born in Orange, New Jersey, a suburb of Newark.-Career:...
(as Ned) in 1978. The mini-series was generally faithful to the plot of the book .
The plot
Told in first personFirst-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
, Harvest Home (also known as The Dark Secret of Harvest Home) tells the story of artist Ned Constantine (the narrator), his wife Beth, and their daughter Kate. Fed up with life in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, 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 isolated, insular village in Connecticut, named Cornwall Coombe. 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.
The opening chapters describe several matters in innocent detail, including the past marital difficulties of Ned and Beth, now apparently resolved; the moody Kate's serious, potentially 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 limiting contact with the outside world. The villagers celebrate a number of festivals, seasons, and holidays that revolve around the planting, growing, and harvesting of corn
Maize
Maize known in many English-speaking countries as corn or mielie/mealie, is a grain domesticated by indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica in prehistoric times. The leafy stalk produces ears which contain seeds called kernels. Though technically a grain, maize kernels are used in cooking as a vegetable...
, which is their chief product. The most important rite is Harvest Home, which takes place at the conclusion of the crop growing year. While the villagers profess to be Christian, Ned gradually becomes aware of the not-so-subtle paganism
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....
that surrounds the 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 current year'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 Mary Fortune, a widow, who is a herbalist, midwife, and one of the town's most influential people.
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, Missy Penrose, 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 still referred to harshly, but obliquely, by the locals. 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
Corn dolly
Corn dollies or corn mothers are a form of straw work made as part of harvest customs of Europe before mechanization.Before Christianisation, in traditional pagan European culture it was believed that the spirit of the corn lived amongst the crop, and that the harvest made it effectively homeless...
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. One evening Ned, possibly hallucinating as a result of drinking some of the Widow's mead
Mead
Mead , also called honey wine, is an alcoholic beverage that is produced by fermenting a solution of honey and water. It may also be produced by fermenting a solution of water and honey with grain mash, which is strained immediately after fermentation...
, 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, scandalizing the town, before running away. In response, Worthy's parents are ostracized by the villagers who refuse their wares on Market Day. By now, Jack Stump has been found mutilated, having apparently had his tongue cut out and mouth sewn up in retribution for trespassing into Soakes's Lonesome.
All of these events make Ned more anxious than ever 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 the strange 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 Everdeen, 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; drought followed, for which she was blamed. As the harvest ends, the villagers come together with a husking bee, a riotous party marking the conclusion of the growing season. Ned, along with the other men, drinks 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. 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 Constantines' marriage has begun to unravel again. Beth had hoped to have another child, but Ned has learned it was his sterility which prevented this. Beth has grown distrustful of Ned, having observed his run-ins with Tamar. For his part, Ned dislikes and distrusts the rapacious Tamar, but finally has sex with her in the woods, sex which ends with Tamar's domination of him. 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 other villagers, 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, which the Widow Fortune told him were those of a "revenuer". Not wanting Roger Penrose to be Harvest Lord to Tamar, her replacement as Corn Maiden, Gracie had come to the Harvest Home celebration in the woods all those years ago and was "a disruptive influence", and was killed then and there. Ned also learns that, due to Tamar, the village's postmistress, having steamed open a letter Worthy Pettinger had mailed him, the villagers found and killed Worthy, who had fled to another town, hanging his corpse 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. A suicide, she is denied burial in the consecrated ground of the churchyard. Ned denounces the villagers for this and Widow Fortune, a revered 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, which Dodd had suffered himself. Dodd removes his glasses showing that he is not blind per se, but that his eyes had been gouged out, for his outsider's interference in the rituals. Ned, although repulsed, does not heed the advice and 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 postcoital consummation of the rites. As he watches the rites, Ned realizes two things: why Worthy had tried to escape and why Sophie killed herself. After Justin has intercourse with the Corn Maiden, the women will sacrifice him to the Mother; but the new Corn Maiden is not Tamar, but his own wife, Beth. As he sees his wife, Ned cries out, which alerts the women to his presence.
In frozen horror, Ned is forced to watch while Justin and Beth have intercourse, and then Tamar, after Justin's climax, cuts Justin's throat with a sickle, spilling his blood onto the ground throughout the clearing. Ned realizes that the villagers allowed his family to settle here in order to bring new blood, Beth's and Kate's, into Cornwall Coombe. Ned tries to escape but the women surround him and render him sightless, as they had done to Robert Dodd, and also cutting his tongue out.
Months later, while sitting at home having lunch, which Beth has had to cut up in order for him to eat, and listening to the record player, Ned hears news of Beth's pregnancy and Kate's relationship with the newly-chosen Harvest Lord, amid speculation that she may be destined to be the next Corn Maiden.
Tryon and Neo-Paganism
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 KingStephen King
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books...
's short story Children of the Corn
Children of the Corn
"Children of the Corn" is a short story by Stephen King, first published in the March 1977 issue of Penthouse, and later collected in King's 1978 collection Night Shift.- Plot summary :...
.