When Harper first arrives at her holiday home in the sleepy village of Cotson, one of the first things she does is pluck an apple from the tree and bite into it. The camera lingers on her as she happily munches on the fruit in the quaint English country garden. Your name doesn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize there's some basic religious symbolism going on here. In the Bible, Eve is said to be the first woman, wife, and mother. She is hailed as the "Mother of All the Living," but gets an extremely raw deal for being the original female and is historically blamed for the fall of humanity.
The story goes that as a weak-willed and dizzy female, Eve was no match for Satan who appeared in the guise of a serpent and tempted her to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. God had forbidden both Adam and Eve to eat apples from the trees. To punish her disobedience, he kicked them both out of the Garden of Eden and insisted from there that it was a wife's duty to obey her husband in all things. When Harper bites into the apple, it's a reminder that women have long been held accountable for the majority of men's woes. As Geoffrey half-jokingly reminds Harper, "Scrumping, eh? No, no, no, no. Mustn't do that. Forbidden fruit." The sudden fall of all the apples could be a symbolic reminder of the inexorable fall of man, and the sheer number of women held responsible for it.
