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us. “I assumed that all of this was normal, the way it was for everyone. It went without saying that bodies fell permanently into the category of the unmentionable” (Smiley 1991:279). Smiley makes the female body a symbolic site of oppression, drawing on Lear’s own fears of female sexuality and, in particular, on Lear’s correlation between madness, the “mother,” and female hysteria: “O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!/Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,/Thy element’s below!” (2.4.54–56). Lear’s rebellion against the ‘‘rising mother” is an image that also characterizes Smiley’s landscape, marked as it is by this vertical struggle between masculine and feminine presences, between fathers and mothers. If, as Le Sueur asserts, the body repeats the landscape, then the body of A Thousand Acres provides a point of contact between two alternating parents. In this sense, Smiley’s novel both fits into and furthers Coppélia Kahn’s vision of the “maternal subtext” underpinning Shakespeare’s tragedy, in which Lear’s madness enacts an essential conflict between the patriarchal structures that loom on the surface of the text and “the psychological presence of the mother whether or not mothers are literally represented as characters” (Kahn 1986:35).

Smiley’s novel juxtaposes two views of the mother. On the one hand, A Thousand Acres creates a Lear-like world in which the mother is present only in the Iowan soil—not in the home, but in the cemetery. Victims of breast cancer, the women’s bodies pay the price for the chemicals and fertilizers used to control the surface of the land. The mothers who do appear in the novel are not exactly warm and maternal presences. Rose is undemonstrative and cool to her children while, according to Ginny’s memories, her own mother was just as no-nonsense a maternal presence as her sister. She did not breast-feed her children and never showed them much affection. As Ginny tells us, “there was no melding with the child into symbiotic and fleshy warmth” (Smiley 1991:93). In the end, Ginny’s mother was powerless—unwilling, even—to protect her daughters from their father’s rages. While Ginny does not have an intimate connection to her own mother, she does try to pursue motherhood for herself, through secret and futile attempts to have children. These attempts to become a mother end, tragically, in the fetuses that she buries underneath the barn. Molested by her father, acting as a substitute wife for him and a surrogate mother for her sisters, Ginny’s life has been defined by negative encounters with maternal roles.

In her re-vision of King Lear, then, Smiley does not merely act as

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