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ing the dimensions of that space in terms of a more localized, Midwestern tradition of writing that is also feminized.

In A Thousand Acres, as in “The Ancient People and the Newly Come,” the natural world becomes a site of resistance against the controlled world of Ginny’s father and the other farmers. Much of Ginny’s self-awakening comes through her growing awareness of her sexuality, primarily in her encounters with Jess Clark, which is figured through Ginny’s understanding of the Iowan landscape. The dump in which Ginny and Jess meet is, significantly, the place where the nearly extinct prairie grasses and small animals make their last stand. Ginny can still recall some of the names of the plants that grow there: ‘‘I know shooting stars and wild carrots, and of course, bindweed and Johnson grass and shatter cane and all that other noxious vegetation that farmers have to kill kill kill” (Smiley 1991:124). While Ginny herself paraphrases Lear’s desire to “kill, kill, kill” his sons-in-law (4.6.182), Le Sueur’s image of the land as a woman oppressed and enslaved by industry underlies Smiley’s construction of the natural world in A Thousand Acres and is crucial to Ginny’s perception of her body. Ginny sees herself taking on the characteristics of different farm animals; she is caged up and commodified like a sow, at one point and, later on, compares herself to a horse “haltered in a tight stall, throwing its head and beating its feet against the floor, but the beams and the bars and the halter rope hold firm, and the horse wears itself out, and accepts the restraint that moments before had been an unendurable goad” (Smiley 1991:198). Moving between images of freedom and claustrophobic images of entrapment, Ginny’s sense of her body is defined as a struggle between the natural world and the structures that her father has placed there. Like the land itself, her body is commodified, divided, and used, while her inner self is pushed further and further underground. The animalistic way in which Ginny perceives herself ironically echoes Lear’s misogynistic vision of female sexuality:

Down from the waist they are Centaurs,

Though women all above.

But to the girdle do the gods inherit.

Beneath is all the fiends’; there’s hell, there’s darkness,

There’s the sulphurous pit.…

(4.6.121–25)

Ginny internalizes Lear’s mistrust of women as she learns to deny her sexuality and her body. “I didn’t want to see my body,” she tells

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