Chrysalids

“When my father was a young man a woman who bore a child that wasn’t in the image was whipped for it. If she bore three out of the image she was uncertified, outlawed, and sold. It made them careful about their purity and their prayers. My father reckoned there was a lot less trouble with mutants on account of it, and when there were any, they were burnt, like other deviations.”

Old Jacob, p. 88

Wyndham uses Old Jacob to provide exposition on the practices that were in effect in the days when the Waknuk community first began. Jacob makes the clear connection between purity and religion, in that women who were not praying enough thus bore impure children due to their sin. Scarily for David, he realizes that his community used to be even more religious and punishing than it is now. Not only were fields burned and stock killed, but all forms of deviation, even humans, were burnt. This has parallels to the witch hunts of puritan times (Krome, Loving & Reeves, 54).

“A series of memories cut off what my eyes were seeing—my Aunt Harriet’s face in the water, her hair gently waving in the current; poor Anne, a limp figure hanging from a beam; Sally, wringing her hands in anguish for Katherine, and in terror for herself; Sophie, degraded to a savage, sliding in the dust, with an arrow in her neck… Any of those might have been a picture of Petra’s future.”

David, as narrator, p.197

David recounts all of the ways in which the women he cared about in the novel have been hurt by the intolerance and so-called "justice" of the society he lived in. The imagery of these women’s deaths, all violent in their own way, drives home the idea that David must protect his younger sister Petra from a life lived in the bleak and intolerant world of Waknuk.