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Page 87 that pits Larry and “stickler for truth” Caroline against Rose and Ginny is finally subsumed into the larger framework of the novel, in which Ginny learns to connect herself to aspects of her past that are buried in the soil rather than in the farming structures that have been placed upon it. Smiley completely redraws the boundaries of Lear’s kingdom, using Ginny’s perspective to reassess the “champains riched” and “wide-skirted meads” of Goneril’s legacy (1.1.62, 63).2 In doing so, she examines Lear’s monumental decision to divide up his kingdom among his daughters in order to focus upon the “darker” nature of the physical and emotional territory that Ginny and her sister inherit from their father. While Larry ostensibly signs the farm over to his daughters, their ultimate inheritance rests, not on the surface of the land, but in the lies and secrets that it covers up. Smiley creates a landscape that is filled with poisons, with the fertilizers, destructive herbicides, and pesticides that are harbored underneath the seemingly abundant surface of the farm. Decades of chemical use have poisoned the well-water that Ginny and her family drink. Those poisons have been inscribed upon the bodies of women in the Cook family in different ways. Rose and, before her, her mother, are both victims of breast cancer; Ginny is unable to have children and has suffered several miscarriages. Larry’s land physically embodies the very “terrors of the earth’’ (2.4.277) that Lear attempts to conjure up for his daughters. But Smiley also works to undermine the basis of the Cook family itself. At the crux of the novel lies Smiley’s most potent addition to the Lear plot: the fact that both Ginny and Rose have been sexually abused by their father. In rewriting the Learstory, Smiley offers readers not just a feminized view of Shakespeare’s tragedy, but also a depressing and often harrowing portrait of American family life. In this essay, I shall look at A Thousand Acres as the product of Smiley’s struggle to map out her relationship to Shakespeare. In working to gain a foothold in her own past—to recover memory from silence—Smiley’s protagonist Ginny reflects Smiley’s own confrontation with an author whose presence at the hub of the Western literary canon represents a powerful and often overwhelming legacy. The Oedipal model of literary regeneration posited by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) rests on the assumption that an implicitly male sparring match dominates the experience of writing. Bloom asserts that great literature is the product of “major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize; figures of |
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