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.

I may be misunderstanding the spirit of the blog posts for our lit circle novels, but I’m using it as a place to document the discussion points I’ll be bringing up for our novel. If (when?) we teach these books down the road, we’ll have a place to refer back to and see what others had to say before we tackle teaching these texts on our own.

I signed up for the roles of discussion director and stylistic foregrounder.

Discussion Director: ask questions about the story to help the group have dynamic discussions.

How do you feel about the role the grandmother played in the story? The grandfather?

Do you feel the mother’s depiction in the novel was realistic? Why or why not?

The book capitalizes on the fact that Oscar’s relationship with his father was so dynamic and multifaceted. How do you feel the book would have changed if it had been his mother that had died instead? Do you think the view we receive of his relationship with his father is accurate?

What could Thomas Senior’s silence be a symptom of? In what ways do we feel that the silence was metaphorical?

What connections did you make with this story on a personal level? Specifically, did the book make you remember any games you created or stories you told yourself as a child? Alternatively, did Oscar’s quest to find the owner of the key make you think of any beliefs or determinations that you held as a child that you’ve since let go of?

Stylistic Foregrounder: locate passages that are stylistically elevated, or complex. In the context of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I’ve also extended this role to facilitate discussion of some of the formatting choices made in the novel.

Passage titled “Why I’m not where you are 4/12/78”, starting on page 208.
Are there any thematic connections to the passages that have been circled in red pen? Besides the highlighting of errors in the text (who do you think is doing this highlighting?), do we feel that the phrases being drawn out illuminate the writer or the highlighter? Or both?

Passage titled “My feelings” starting on page 224
What effect is caused by the typographical choices made on this page? Does this serve to further or complicate our understanding of the text?

The repeated question: “Do you know what time it is?” in “Why I’m not where you are 5/21/63” starting on page 108
Why do we feel that this question is often offset from other text, isolated in the page, occasionally with at least a page between the question and other text in the narrative? Does this line up with our understanding of Thomas Senior’s silence or complicate it?

The passage from 292 to 302, in which the quest is resolved and Oscar speaks the truth about his father directly.
This passage does not have stylistic or typographical flourishes, which makes it stands out in the end of the book, as the book becomes very typographically diverse as it nears the end. Why do you feel the author made this choice? How does it make the content more or less effective?

Comments in Monday’s class regarding how one would engage students in Life of Pi as a whole got me thinking about the possibilities for teaching parts of this novel independently. As Brandon mentioned, the most action-packed aspects of the novel are contained from part 2 on. While I found myself picking out sections from part 1 as my “most compelling” passages, I can easily see how many students (especially those who are in an English class to satisfy a requirement, not a love of English) would find part 1 to be slightly “dry and yeastless”.

I ask this more as a question to the class than a concrete suggestion, but do you think it would be possible to teach on this book without requiring that the entire book be taken into account? While Pi’s reflections on the three faces of the divine come back and inform his struggles on the open ocean, are they necessary to the enjoyment of the story?

To teach the book from a thematic sense, surely that first section is vital. It lays the groundwork for his relationship with Richard Parker, the tension of dominance and subservience in the animal kingdom. It is in section one that much of the framing for the “right” story vs the “good” story comes into play, an idea that very undeniably comes back in the end and turns the entire narrative on its head. But speaking objectively, do you think students would be unable to understand these themes without this section one framing? I believe they could.

I’m loathe to advocate for chopping every novel into digestible morsels. But could it be possible that if you assign from section two through to the end at first read, and generate enough interest in the book as a whole through class discussion and engagement, perhaps more people would look to part one with interest? By piquing their curiosity with vivid discussions of how to tame a tiger, maybe they would open the book again from the beginning with joy, instead of plodding grimly through it at the outset, anxious to get to the “good” part.

Which raises a bigger question: where is our responsibility as an English teacher? Is it with the authors, to treat their books as whole and indivisible? Or is it to our students, to find the best ways to access their critical thinking and to kindle a passion for reading? I’m hesitant to start taking authors’ work to the chopping block, but I very clearly remember spending several classes on Macbeth and only glancing over whole sections, while spending days on his “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech. Surely, if the Bard can be subjected to this treatment for the sake of student engagement, the idea ought to be on the table for other works as well.