“Harvest Home (novel)”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

Ned (called "Nick" in the TV film) Constantine, his wife Beth, and their asthmatic daughter Kate relocate from New York City to an insular ("We don't mess with other folks and we expect them not to mess with us") isolated Connecticut village, Cornwall Coombe, where Ned can pursue an artistic career. The villagers adhere stubbornly to what they call "the old ways", eschewing modern agricultural methods and having very limited contact with the outside world. The villagers celebrate a number of festivals that revolve around the cultivation of corn, which is their chief product. The most important and secretive rite is "Harvest Home", which takes place once every seven years at the conclusion of the growing season.

Prominent villagers who become friends with the newcomers are Robert Dodd, his blind and housebound neighbor, a former college professor who arrived in Cornwall Coombe at the behest of his own wife, Maggie, who had been born in the village but was one of the few locals to leave and he returned with her after her parents died; Justin Hooke, who serves as the current year's ceremonial "Harvest Lord", and his wife Sophie, his "Corn Maiden" in the approaching "Corn Play"; Worthy Pettinger, a young man who disdains the old ways and wants to go to agricultural college and, most important, Mary Fortune, an aged but quite active widowed herbalist and midwife, called by most people (even others of the same age or older) "Widow", and the village's unquestionably most influential resident. When Kate suffers a severe asthma attack at home, the Widow Fortune performs a delicate procedure akin to a tracheotomy, and later prescribes home remedies which cure Kate of her seizures. This helps bind Beth and Kate to the Widow, but not Ned, who becomes increasingly resentful and distrustful of the Widow.

Ned digs deeper into the town history for a book he is considering writing and manages to learn about a young local who went missing years ago, Grace Everdeen. As Ned tries to solve the mystery, it becomes clear that the locals know far more about Grace Everdeen than they will ever acknowledge. Irene Tatum, a local, expresses a bitter and hateful screed against Grace after Ned asks about the missing young woman until Irene is chastised by the Widow Fortune, who feigns a more charitable opinion of the missing woman, whose fate Ned later uncovers.

Meanwhile, Worthy is selected by young Missy Penrose, who is believed to have special powers, to be the next "Harvest Lord", to which he is vehemently opposed for reasons he does not fully reveal to Ned. He is congratulated by the villagers and is assumed by them to be honored for his selection. During a harvest service in church, Worthy loudly curses the corn and "the Mother" and then flees. The community is scandalized and Worthy's parents are ostracized by the villagers and their goods boycotted. Ned becomes more intent on unraveling the village's secrets while his personal life goes awry. Tamar Penrose, Missy's mother, the postmistress, seduces him. Tamar had been the Corn Maiden 14 years ago. Grace Everdeen, originally slated to be Corn Maiden for her fiancé Roger Penrose (who fathered Missy), had developed a disfiguring disease. When she was replaced by Tamar, Grace cursed the corn. Drought followed, for which Grace was blamed, thus partially explaining the antipathy towards Grace by almost all the villagers (except Amys Penrose, the elderly local church bell-ringer and the village's informal historian and raconteur, whom Ned meets in the village pub), but this is not the end of Grace's story.

Beth, aware of her husband's dalliance with Tamar, grows more distrustful and estranged from Ned, who realizes the villagers practice pagan fertility rites connected to the earth mother and thus becomes suspicious of the upcoming Harvest Home, but the most anyone will tell him is that it is "what no man may see nor woman tell." Having learned Worthy's location from a letter he sent to Ned, which Tamar, the postmistress, steamed open, a posse is sent to retrieve him. He is returned home and killed. They hang his corpse in a field as a scarecrow and later fling it into a massive bonfire on Kindling Night.

On the day of Harvest Home, Justin's wife Sophie, the new Corn Maiden, commits suicide by cutting her wrists. She is denied burial in consecrated ground on the orders of the Widow Fortune, not the local minister, who does as she tells him. Ned denounces her for this cruelty. The widow, a revered high priestess, declares him an outcast. He is imprisoned in the village's makeshift jail as it is intuited that he might cause trouble on this most important of nights. Maggie Dodd brings him some food. He appeals to her but finds that having been born and raised in the village she is as dedicated to the rites and customs as any other villager, and Ned sees her in a new light. She warns him not to do anything stupid and he might just be able to recoup some of his fortunes once Harvest Home is over. Ned later finds an escape route through the jail's maze, remembering something old Amys Penrose mentioned the day Ned and Robert met him in the pub. Finding his car missing, Ned goes to his neighbor Robert Dodd to use the phone, but finds the line dead. Robert tells Ned that all the phones in the village have been disabled for Harvest Home and all the cars have been confiscated until morning. {{Why|date=December 2018}} Every man in the village is staying put in his own house on this night. Robert implies that Harvest Home might be a re-enactment of Eleusinian Mysteries in honor of the goddess Demeter. Robert reveals that he himself, who came to the village as an outsider, was blinded for attempting to discover the secret of Harvest Home and begs Ned not to go out again. Ned refuses to heed the advice and goes instead to find his wife and daughter, who have gathered with the other women for the ritual.

The village women have chosen the new Corn Maiden, who is heavily veiled. Ned believes she is Tamar. She departs with the other women and Justin for the Harvest Home ritual. Ned races to the forest clearing ahead of them, determined to discover what happens there. Relatively well-hidden, he watches the women play out the rites, which includes the copulation of the Harvest Lord with the Corn Maiden (both drugged to some degree) to symbolically ensure the fertility of the Mother and, ensure a bountiful harvest. To Ned's horror, the new Corn Maiden is not Tamar, but Beth, substituting for Sophie. Ned cries out and gives himself away, alerting the women to his presence. They would have killed him on the spot but the Widow orders that, as he had wanted so desperately to see the ritual, he be forced to watch while Justin and Beth complete their intercourse, finally learning why Worthy had tried to escape and why Sophie had killed herself: Justin's throat is cut with a sickle as he climaxes, spilling his blood onto the ground throughout the clearing. The villagers allowed Ned's family to settle here in order to bring new blood, Beth and Kate, into Cornwall Coombe. Ned tries to escape but the women surround him and render him blind, as they did to Robert Dodd, and cut out his tongue.

Months later, the blind, mute, dependent Ned learns both that Beth is pregnant and that Kate is to be the next Corn Maiden.

Reception

In a 1973 book review by Kirkus Reviews called the book "not only tethered to considerable earlier Americana but sometimes garroted by it—there's too much corn to husk before the last loaded third of the book."^[2] Writing in 1976 for The New York Times, Stephen King wrote, "It isn’t a great book, not a great horror novel, not even a great suspense novel ... Never mind the best seller list. Mind this, instead: Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it is a true book; it is an honest book in the sense that it says exactly what Tryon wanted to say. And if what he wanted to say wasn’t exactly Miltonian, it does have this going for it: in forty years, when most of us are underground, there will still be a routine rebinding once a year for the library copies of Harvest Home".^[3]

Plot

Reception

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