All of Gene Stratton Porter’s books are An Experience, and The Harvester is no exception. At the beginning of the book, the Harvester has just posed to his dog (his sole companion) his yearly question: shall I get married this year?

He is appalled when the dog signifies a resounding YES! So he sits on his stoop, staring over the lake and sulking about how he’ll have to go COURTING and put on clean CLOTHES and she probably won’t like his CABIN, when out of the moonlight on the water a vision appears: a beautiful girl, glowing in gold, who floats across the lake to him, plants a kiss on his lips, and disappears.

Charged with this vision of the Girl, the Harvester begins to build a proper house for her. “Going to get married?” the builders ask. “Yep!” says the Harvester, who has not yet met the Dream Girl in the flesh.

(A sidenote: the Harvester and the Girl do eventually get names, but the narrative mostly refers to them as the Harvester and the Girl and so will I.)

The Harvester, by the way, is named for his profession of gathering medicinal herbs from the woods. Over the past decade, he has slowly transplanted to his woods medicinal herbs from the surrounding area, so the whole forest is one great medicinal garden where these plants can grow to their full medicinal potential in natural conditions.

But to return to our story. A few months later, the Harvester at last catches sight of the Girl at the local railway station! After a protracted search, he finds her staying at the home of her uncle, the Harvester’s most perfidious neighbor. To rescue her from this uncle (and after suggesting various other solutions to the problem of getting her away from this uncle, like sending the girl who is very ill to the hospital), the Harvester asks the Girl to marry him.

“YES we are going in for some FORCED PROXIMITY” I shrieked, and OH BOY ARE WE. The Girl moves into the Harvester’s house! The Harvester promises that she shall be free until she comes to love him! The book is about as forthright as a book in 1911 can be that this means the marriage will remain unconsummated until the Girl feels a reciprocal, passionate sexual love for the Harvester.

But the Girl’s ill health catches up with her. She is sick with Fever, that convenient early-20th century literary disease so conducive to hurt/comfort. In her delirium only the Harvester’s touch can soothe her. (GSP knows what the people want and she is GIVING it to us.) He strokes her hands and tells her of the beautiful life of the woods, tethering her to this world with the sound of his voice! When medicine gives her up for dead, he cures her with a natural elixir made from the medicinal plants grown on his land!!!!

The Girl is now passionately attached to him, and during her convalescence there’s lots of cuddling and hand-kissing. But she’s still not sexually attracted to him. At this point her mother’s relations conveniently appear, and she’s whisked off to a round of Society in Philadelphia, at which point the Harvester wearily confides to his friends that she loves him but she doesn’t LOVE love him, at which point they roundly scold him: doesn’t he know that a good girl won’t LOVE love him till after the wedding night? It’s up to him to teach her what passion is!

This is a common nineteenth-century idea, and GSP both kind of embraces and repudiates it. On the one hand, there’s all this cuddling and hand-kissing and face-kissing and that times the Harvester gives her a single passionate kiss on the lips just to show her the difference between that and the kiss of sisterly affection she gave him, and what can you call that but coaxing along the growing tendrils of the Girl’s sexuality?

But in the end, the Harvester’s decision to let her go and see if absence will make the heart grow fonder is vindicated. The Girl does come back to him from Philadelphia: she did realize, on her own, that she now passionately loves him, and it does give her that flush of warm sensation that he tried to describe. She comes to him through the moonlight, sitting by the lake, and at last plants her kiss on his lips.

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