Essay notes

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  • 'I stand at the threshold of the gleaning field' continued
    • The theme of gleaning articulates a trajectory from subsistence to sale, from 'enough' to 'more'
      • The gleaning queen is despatched forcibly from the village into a commercial economy - abducted from her brief reign to be 'secured amongst the luggage like a market goose'
        • The subsistence conditions of 'enough' are shown to be less  than idyllic in terms of pre-enclosure social relations and agrarian labour
    • Thirsk - 'not a product of these commons...just a visitor' allows him to perpetuate cliches of rural community
      • His 'uncommon' diction and status can estrange him from his village neighbours
    • Thirsk laments the anticipated demise of ancient gleaning, leaving the master's doves 'searching for the gleaning fields, but there are none'
      • Reminded of tense villager-master inequalities the soon to be lost tradition encodes 'they take our grain,he takes our eggs, we see no benefit'
        • Carter's pre-enclosure commons can be stressful environments - 'the countryside is argumentative. It wants to pick a fight with you'
    • Working the land is a source of anxiety - not idyllic spaces 'we watched the barley with anxiety'
      • Master Kent 'wool is more predictable' - his imagined pastoral idyll supplants the uncertainties presented by the pre-enclosure commons
    • Post lapsarian rupture
  • When three strangers encamp on its bounds, the villagers respond with hostility, scapegoating them for burning Master Kent's dovecote
    • The villagers do not extend their hospitality despite the many vacant homes
      • The vagrants and villagers prove to have much in common, in time their predicament will be shared 'exiles from their own commons...hedged and fenced against their needs'
  • Alone in the village, Thirsk devouts hallucinogenic mushrooms - imagines himself gleaned from his supine delirium into uprightness, rescued and given backbone 'bones solidified'

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