If one were to take Harvest Home seriously, one would suggest that it dramatizes an ancient male awe and dread of the Female as a source of love, creativity, and death. The author may have no actual belief that contemporary men still carry that secret fear of female power, although its vestigial presence in many men, in spite of longstanding male domination supported by the Judeo-Christian tradition, may seem clear from a study of history and Freudian psychology. (Try reading the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of the Witches, medieval guide to recognizing witches, for its amazing, superstitious dread of female sexuality.)

The imagining of an archaic farming community in New England, ostensibly Christian, but actually more concerned with the ancient Corn Mother of pagan Europe and Celtic England, is not so fantastic as to be utterly implausible for literary purposes. Certain pagan customs, or at...