To take a slightly different role in this post than I did in the last one, I want to take the opportunity to place A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley within the context of the Shakespeare play that it is a reimagining of – King Lear.
This text retells Lear’s story from a feminist perspective, taking the perspective of the eldest daughter. A detailed list of the Dramatis Personae in King Lear and their counterparts in A Thousand Acres can be found here.
For those of us who have several years between our last Shakespeare course and this book, I’ll review the major plot point of King Lear. The old king of Britain decides to retire and divide his land among his three daughters – but before the daughters can receive the land, they must declare their love for him. Goneril and Regan both proclaim effusively how much they love their father, and they each receive a portion of land and marriage to a duke. The youngest, Cordelia, says only that she loves her father as much as a daughter should. This enrages Lear, and he leaves her with nothing.
This is mirrored in the basic premise of the novel – Larry Cook, a farmer whose family has worked the lands for generations, has a thousand acres of land. He decides it would be prudent to divide up the land before his death; if he passes the land contractually to his daughters now, they will avoid paying estate taxes if they inherit the land upon his passing. When he broaches the idea, his two older daughters Ginny and Rose, both of whom help to farm the land along with their husbands, embrace the idea and encourage it, while Caroline, a lawyer who lives in the city, expresses doubt. For her initial voicing of concern, her father shuts her out of the contract.
This exchange of land takes place under radically different terms than the way Lear’s story depicts it. Ginny, the story’s narrator, makes it clear that she and Rose have lived their whole lives trying to appease their father’s angry, tempestuous nature, and to divert his wrath and attentions from their young sister Caroline, whom they raised after their mother died while she was still very young. While Goneril and Regan are portrayed as scheming and devious, Ginny and Rose celebrate their father’s idea, not because they see in it an opportunity, but because they have never questioned their father’s iron rule. And Caroline’s ability to question her father’s actions comes, not from a purer love for him, but from a blindness to his true nature.
I’m going to insert a spoiler alert here, because I’m about to divulge a major plot point.
As the story unfolds, it comes to light that Ginny and Rose have also been sexually abused by their father – it is with that revelation (Ginny has concealed this truth from herself, and Rose makes her realize it) that their attitude towards their father changes, and it paints their dynamic in a radically different light. The scene when the father is chased out into the storm, in the play a tragic moment of a father’s loss of family, becomes Larry heaping abuse and sexually loaded denigration on his eldest daughters before heading out into the storm, deaf to the pleas of his daughters and their husbands to return to safety.
The book mirrors the play in the subplots as well, in the stories of the other characters, and their relationships. However, as I’ve already taken up more than my share of blog space, I shall hold some of that information in reserve for class discussion.
To be fair, I am not a big fan of re-telling stories in a slightly modern sense, and for that reason I found it difficult to be fully engaged by this novel already knowing the plot and loving the play in its original form. However, in comparing the two, one of the most interesting parts to my mind, is the blatant adultery committed by Jesse (Edmund) first with Ginny (Goneril) and then with Rose (Regan); in King Lear Edmund’s promiscuity is assumed by the reader, however there is never explicit detailing of the adultery itself, which therefore provokes an air of ambiguity to the sexual relations between the three, left only to implications.
Being a huge fan of King Lear, I find the nature of female evil in King Lear to be somewhat of a philosophical enigma in its own right. The degree with which Goneril and Regan exploit their father with cold, calculated actions that deprive him of his wealth, soldiers, status, sanity and so forth, disappears in ‘A Thousand Acres’ as Larry (King Lear) surfaces as a molester that demystifies such quintessential malign Shakespearean characters. For this reason, I also think the study of the decline of Lear’s sanity to be too easily scapegoated with the self-denial of molestation. Lear’s decline can be seen as an inverse of human needs that begins with the loss of his riches and escalates to the loss of security, friends, family, even to his attire that leaves him fully dependent once again on others as his sanity has been robbed, leaving him as a baby. It seems to me that there is more left for the imagination or philosophical inquiry in ‘King Lear’ than in ‘A Thousand Acres.’
In this same vein, the poetic language in King Lear sadly disappears. Missing are nearly all the lines that make King Lear, King Lear. I don’t think Smiley’s rendition of the raging storm scene to be captured the way it is with King Lear, gone is:
“Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow,
Your cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
till you have drenched the steeples, drowned the cocks!”
The pure elements of evil, too are retold. Leaving out evil connotations such as menstruation, dragon tails, thought-executing-fires, sepulchering mistresses, adder strikes, fiendish deformities, to name only a few, thaw the intrigue for me. Reading Shakespeare evokes all sorts of philosophically rich undercurrents of Plato, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Lovecraft, etc., that I feel, could with much effort, be made captivating for students without re-telling in a conventional setting. Not to be too persistent (!), but if I were to share a text with my students set in the Mid-West United States, I’d rather open them up to Faulkner or Steinbeck. Anything can be made interesting for the students if necessary, but I like the idea of the students reading the original, and perhaps with proper guidance, enjoying it for being the philosophically complex piece that it is, and deservingly so.
I recently agreed to the Foreshadower role in my group, which means I was to be on the lookout for passages that foreshadow events in the novel. I already had one particular passage in mind that I remembered from my initial reading that left me with a strange suspicion. The passage reads:
My choice would show him something about me, either that I was selfish and inconsiderate (no eggs) or that I was incompetent (a flurry of activity where there should be organized procedure). I did it. I smiled foolishly, said I would be right back, and ran out the door and back down the road. The whole way I was conscious of my body – graceless and hurrying, unfit, panting, ridiculous in its very femininity. It seemed like my father could just look out of his big front window and see me naked, chest heaving, breast, thighs, and buttocks jiggling, dignity irretrievable.
Ginny imagines her father watching her as she runs to fetch eggs for his breakfast. She is consciously aware of his vantage point through the window and she unwillingly invites his stare onto her, but only in her imagination. The fact that she imagines him watching her, as told by her narrative, rather than actually verifying that he is watching her, has the effect of reinforcing Ginny’s paranoia of her father’s judgment. She invites his male gaze onto herself, as if drawing this frustrating and demanding presence onto her further. The male gaze in literature – made more popular in film theory, emphasizes the relationship of the spectator to the objectified female. In this case, the Fathers elevated vantage point and his distinguished role as the looker, functions to assign the father possession of Ginny. He owns the sexually objectified appearance of Ginny, something she is aware of while she scrambles to fulfill her subservient role. Through her paranoid awareness of his spectatorship, she reinforces his power role, as a dominant male onlooker.
Essentially, this passage hints to the idea of an unusual perversion yet unseen to this degree in the narrative so far. Especially since this takes place within her mind and makes the reader notice the psychological harm her father’s treatment may have on her over the years. Her father does not actually say anything to her and yet manages to convey a very strong sense of demand, over trivial items such as eggs. Ginny gets symbolically stripped of her dignity, rendered defenseless by her father’s simple but firm demands. Her figurative nakedness displays her vulnerability to her father’s wishes. Larry Cook possesses an ability to see through his daughter and sense her insecurities about displeasing him over insignificant matters such as breakfast. This passage certainly verifies a past abusiveness. In the way she willingly obeys her father and jumps to his unconscious signals, marks a very sensitive trained response that Ginny cannot resist. He effortlessly brings out her desire to please him; essentially, a childhood impulse to behave according to her parent’s rules and expectations.
Until reading this passage, I was not yet convinced of any incestuous relations. This passage only made me more aware of incestuous undertones used to describe the father-daughter relationship. That goes without saying that this passage may not necessarily foreshadow the incestuous relationship between the father and daughter for some readers, but this is among the first and most powerful of the passages to really jaunt me as a reader with the sexually explicit description of Ginny. From this passage forth, at the very least, I expected a strange and ambiguous response in the narrative, when Ginny and the father are isolated alone together.
My role as the Foreshadower is actually an adaptation of the Investigator role and the Passage master. In the accompanying blog entry, I investigate the social and psychological implications of character relationships by closely analyzing a specific passage.
I should also mention that Smiley’s writing allows for many interpretations given her very ambiguous style of writing. Students should be able to draw several interpretations from a given passage and form different opinions on the same passage. This makes this text very accessible and a good choice for classroom study. The text will certainly spark many discussions.
Included is a link to an article that uses psychological theories usually applied to abuse victims, in analyzing the daughters’ behavior in A Thousand Acres. Visit http://www.concentric-literature.url.tw/issues/29_1/05_lin.pdf
I appreciated the alternative perspective Jane Smiley provides us with in her novel A Thousand Acres in response to the narrative of Shakespeare’s play King Lear. In the original play, King Lear is portrayed sympathetically despite his petulance, blind stubbornness, and arrogance – all of which go unchecked as he assumes the role of a privileged male in a patriarchal society. A feminists reading of the play would suggest that Goneril and Regan are victims of this social framework, their very existence dependent on their father and subject to his temperamental emotions and unpredictable behavior. I remember studying King Lear in high school, and Lear was always portrayed as a noble and venerable man whose erratic actions were somehow always justified. Furthermore, as such a “noble” patriarch, it seems incongruent that he could unknowingly raise two scheming and self-seeking daughters. In contrast to Lear’s representation, Goneril and Regan are depicted as manipulative, power-hungry, and morally decrepit female characters. Due to their objections to their father’s (not to mention his knights’) riotous behavior during his stay in Goneril’s castle, the daughters are cast as treasonous and disloyal. This has always irked me a little – both in high school and even during my university study of the play – because I felt that the sisters’ objection to Lear’s behavior was a legitimate one, and that the backlash they received due to their refusal to quietly endure these abuses was at the very least unfair. Nevertheless, this “treachery”, as Lear sees his two eldest daughter’s objections, is described as if it were the height of a daughter’s betrayal when it is, in fact, a just and reasonable response to an irresponsible father and his lack of propriety in the home of another.
In her recreation and reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s play in her novel A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley provides us with a more sympathetic view of Regan (Rose) and Goneril (Ginny), and offers a critique of Lear (Larry Cook) and the entire patriarchal system that justifies male culpability and, instead, vilifies and subjugates women. In her narrative, Smiley suggests or theorizes that there is a reason that Rose and Ginny allow their antipathy for their father go to such an extreme. In his writing of the original play, Shakespeare chooses not to provide a background to Regan and Goneril’s lack of sympathy for their father; conversely, in her novel, Smiley reveals long-term sexual abuses of Rose and Ginny committed by Larry Cook as a motive or possible justification for the daughters’ antipathy and aversion towards their father. Furthermore, Smiley proceeds to disrupt the normalization of male patriarchy and female subjection to a male-oriented social framework. The fact that the story is written from Ginny’s perspective informs the reader that the female voice is an important one in this narrative despite both the abuses committed by the male characters, and the dominance that the system of patriarchy exercises over women in the novel. I appreciate Smiley’s intention in writing this novel, to fill in the “blanks” that Shakespeare chose to leave unwritten all those years ago, and by so doing providing us with another window into the text and into the realm of possibility.