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Page 90 motherless world of King Lear to challenge traditional female roles not only in the Shakespearean, but also in the American family. In this way, Smiley’s novel draws upon and furthers other feminist readings of King Lear. Marianne Novy, for instance, writes that Shakespeare does not permit Goneril and Regan “to point out wrongs done to them in the past.… If their attack on Lear can be seen as, in part, the consequence of his tyrannical patriarchy, they never try to explain it as an attack on an oppressor” (1984:153). Taking the part of Lear’s unloved daughters, Smiley rethinks the oppressively patriarchal family of Elizabethan society that Shakespeare represents in King Lear. Smiley told her Los Angeles audience that, while traditional interpretations portray Regan and Goneril as “figures of pure evil” (1998: 43), they seemed both sympathetic and familiar to her as women, especially in the scene where they talk between themselves about Lear’s actions, and later, when they have to deal with his unruly knights. They were women, and the play seemed to be condemning them morally for the exact ways in which they expressed womanhood that I recognized. I was offended. (43) Smiley portrays Ginny and Rose as women caught in traditional care-giving roles: working to please their father, cleaning his house, and preparing the meals that he insists upon having at the same time every day. In turn, their efforts are met by Larry’s stony silences. While their sister, Caroline, escapes farming life to work in Des Moines, the older sisters are constantly being given a different sort of love-test, the terms of which are defined by their father. In Shakespeare’s play, Lear demands of his daughters: Which of you shall we say doth love us most? That we our largest bounty may extend Where nature doth with merit challenge. (1.1.49–51) Smiley draws upon Cordelia’s response to Lear— “Sure I shall never marry like my sisters/To love my father all” (1.1.102–3) —to measure Ginny’s and Rose’s interactions with their father, ranging from his domination of their daily routine to the warped sexual relationship that he had forced upon them in adolescence. As Ginny tells us, “My earliest memories of him are of being afraid to look him in the eye, to look at him at all’’ (Smiley 1991:19). Like Goneril and Regan in Shakespeare’s play, Ginny and Rose seek safety by |
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