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Page 92 preparing poisoned sausages for her sister in a jealous rage over Jess, Ginny nearly succumbs to the tragic fate of her Shakespearean counterpart, who poisons Regan out of love for Edmund. But in the end, Ginny learns to come to terms with her past and, finally, to leave the farm behind. Ginny saves herself and survives, while Goneril is subsumed by the Shakespearean family tragedy, taking her own life. Ultimately, Smiley’s feminized version of Shakespeare’s play destabilizes his fixed position at the center of the Western literary canon as her novel becomes a testing-ground for new perspectives on “history,” in which fathers and daughters—both literary and familial—are pitted against one another. While Smiley draws on Bloom’s agonistic model of influence when she views herself as a writer “wrestling” with Shakespeare, her protagonist recognizes the difficulty of extricating herself from the coded, patriarchal world of the father. As Ginny wonders: Perhaps there is a distance that is the optimum distance for seeing one’s father, farther than across the supper table or across the room, somewhere in the middle distance: he is dwarfed by trees or the sweep of a hill, but his features are still visible, his body language still distinct. Well, that is a distance I never found. He was never dwarfed by the landscape—the fields, the buildings, the white pine windbreak were as much my father as if he had grown them and shed them like a husk. (Smiley 1991:20) Rejecting a Bloomian, ‘‘idealized” image of her father—in which he dwarfs the landscape around him—Ginny reconfigures her relationship with Larry through her own struggle for autonomy, coming to terms with a powerful memory of violation and abuse. Ginny and, indeed, Smiley herself, achieve that vantage point through an awareness of the soil underneath the structures of the farm: Ginny’s knowledge of what her father’s chemicals have done to her body empowers her, while Smiley draws on her knowledge of the Iowan landscape to achieve an “optimum distance” from Shakespeare and King Lear. III “The body repeats the landscape”As the epigraph from Le Sueur suggests, Smiley’s landscape provides a powerful metaphor not only for Ginny’s recovery of repressed |
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