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Page 94 the continuous present-tense of her father’s world, where past sins disappear beneath the “unbroken surface of the unsaid” (94), Ginny must learn to reconcile two very different spaces, the present and the past, in her mind. By contrasting the flat, engineered surface of the farms with the repressed and swampy land that it covers up, Smiley maps out an imaginative landscape that acts as a metaphor for the process of re-vision as her protagonist learns to reconcile herself with her father’s curse. In the struggle between Ginny and her father and, in turn, between Smiley and Shakespeare, we can see a new sort of territory taking shape, the lines of which are defined by Shakespeare’s play. Smiley’s choice to import the structure of King Lear—a play in which mothers are conspicuously absent— into A Thousand Acres fits into Bloom’s idea of the struggle with a father. But Smiley’s novel also opens up that paradigm in a different way, achieving an “optimum distance” from her Shakespearean source by adding Meridel Le Sueur’s voice to the mixture. In contrast to those of the Shakespeare-driven figure of Ginny Cook, Le Sueur’s experiences as a young girl growing up in the prairies are defined by the presence of women: her mother, her grandmother, and a native American woman named Zona, from whom she learned to see the land from a completely different perspective. As Le Sueur writes in “The Ancient People and the Newly Come”: There was always this mothering in the night, the great female meadows, sacred and sustaining. I look out now along the bluffs of the Mississippi, where Zona’s prophecies of pollution have been fulfilled in ways worse than she could dream. Be aware, she had cried once. Be afraid. Be careful. Be fierce. She had seen the female power of the earth, immense and angry, that could strike back at its polluters and conquerors. (1982:48) Le Sueur’s portrayal of the landscape as an oppressed yet powerful female provides an image of the maternal not readily available in Smiley’s Shakespearean source. Importantly, both Le Sueur and Smiley locate female power in the natural world. On one level, Smiley evokes a relationship between Ginny and the landscape that is similar to Lear’s experience on the heath, a space in which he is able to challenge the order of the world in which he is living, the gods, and the elements. But as Smiley imports Lear’s heath to the space of twentieth-century Iowa, she could also be seen as redraw- |
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