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Page 88 capable imagination appropriate for themselves” (5). Smiley reconfigures the father-son Oedipal paradigm for authorship in light of the monumental father—daughter struggle that is the subject of her novel. In the keynote address at the World Shakespeare Congress, Smiley explained what she gradually had begun to perceive as her own “wrestling match with Mr. Shakespeare” (1998:55): [Shakespeare’s] plot was always the test, a puzzle I had to work out. The challenge was sticking to the plot but substituting what many would say was simply a more congenial view of human nature. As I followed him into the story, the Shakespeare that I thought I knew rapidly metamorphosed into a harsher, more alien, more distant male figure. I felt very strongly our differences as a modern woman and a Renaissance man. (54) Through his play, Shakespeare begins to reveal himself as a harsh, distant, and importantly, male figure, against whom Smiley struggles to guard her own difference as a “modern woman.’’ Smiley writes herself into Shakespeare’s tragedy by feminizing it and transferring it to the American heartland. The novel’s epigraph, taken from Meridel Le Sueur’s “The Ancient People and the Newly Come,” becomes crucial to Smiley’s placement of herself in relation to Shakespeare: The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other. We are marked by the seasonal body of earth, by the terrible migrations of people, by the swift turn of a century, verging on change never before experienced on this greening planet. (Le Sueur 1982:39) Born in Murray, Iowa, Le Sueur was inducted into the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame on December 12, 1996. Author, poet, and lecturer, Le Sueur was blacklisted during the 1940s and 1950s because of her left-wing beliefs and, throughout her lifetime, remained active in human rights, feminist, and environmental movements.3 Le Sueur’s presence in A Thousand Acres indicates Smiley’s concern with the literary tradition in which she is writing, apart from her Shakespearean source. While Smiley seeks to “re-enter” Shakespeare’s text from a female perspective—in this case, Goneril’s— she defines her point of entry in American terms and through another woman writer. If, as Le Sueur asserts, “the body repeats the |
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