Religion in Harvest

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  • Moralism, judgement and gratuity in Harvest
    • Crace demonstrates an indirect sympathy with the old biblical theme of the exile representing the everyman
      • The fate of an entire community is determined by the fate of the marginalised and dispossessed
    • The unending human struggle to create, circumscribe, and defend identity is central to Harvest‘s world, a late feudal manor and village with a benevolent lord and a group of peasants working on common land
    • A barn catches fire the night that three visitors arrive and exercise squatter’s rights; the insular village immediately scapegoats them
      • Hangs the two men upon the wooden cross of the unfinished church
      • Moral instinct: by trying to take possession of the land by excluding and even persecuting the three new arrivals, the villagers leave the realm of gracious tradition and enter a realm of right and possession. The law by which they exclude the visitors will in turn exclude them.
      • In denying hospitality to the newcomers, they forfeit their own right to the land, which is predicated on the same welcome they’re refusing. They want to fence the outsiders out; they will be fenced out. And for actively persecuting and blaming the newcomers, they will later receive corporate blame and will be exiled as a result.
    • Remarkably tight plot, as well as a thematic coherence
    • Barn fire started because three men were trying to smoke the lord’s doves out of their barn, since they had been feeding on the peoples’ grain in the fields.
      • The doves are originally threat by impinging on the village’s carefully-controlled fields;
        • This animosity toward the doves reprises itself in the hatred of the newcomers, who are seen as similar foragers, threats.

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