A community that bans and punishes the open expression of desire does not remove it but concentrates it, so that longing becomes more acute and more disruptive for being forbidden. The stricter the moral surveillance, the more eroticism saturates ordinary interactions.
Reading a devout community through its hidden hungers reveals that professed religious purity often coexists with, and conceals, hypocrisy, lust and cruelty. What the group condemns most loudly is frequently what it practices in private.
A colonial settlement at the edge of the known world functions as a liminal space where the certainties of the old order are weakened and new, often violent, possibilities open up. The wilderness pressing against the community makes both liberation and danger feel permanently close.