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Showalter’s point is an important one, especially in view of the long period of silence that surrounded Le Sueur because her work was neglected, forgotten, and inaccessible to many for decades after she was blacklisted. But in Smiley’s novel, the tension resulting from the opposed voices is the strongest testimony of the novel’s function as re-vision. Just as Ginny finds a point of re-entry into her body by remembering the ways in which her father violated it, so too does Smiley use Shakespeare’s text as a point of entry into the problems inherent in modern American family life: she sees “with fresh eyes,” to echo the words of Adrienne Rich.

In A Thousand Acres, the tension between the catalogue-ordered house of Ginny’s childhood and the land on which it is built is repeated in the interaction between the imported structure of Shakespeare’s King Lear and the indigenous, Midwestern experiences of Le Sueur, between male and female, father and mother. In Smiley’s figurations of the American Midwest, the nightmare vision of American expansion that is the subject of Le Sueur’s essay becomes the occasion for Smiley’s intensive examination of literary generations in the Western canon, in which certain voices are paved over by others. Le Sueur writes of life in her grandmother’s house: “We crouched in an alien land under the weathers, tossing at night on this ancient sea, captained by women, minute against the great white whale” (1982:53). In this anthropomorphized landscape, the women are melded together in order to survive against the “white whale’’ of the storms raging outside. Sheltered inside the whiteframe house, they are able to survive, three generations of women from different backgrounds. In a similar way, A Thousand Acres itself stands as an act of survival.

By delving into the issue of legacy and inheritance from many angles, Smiley makes a statement about the uses of the past and the phenomenon of memory. From the shelter of the front porch, Rose screams at her father:

We never asked for what you gave us, but maybe it was high time we got some reward for what we gave you! … This is what we’ve got to offer, this same life, nothing more nothing less. If you don’t want it, go elsewhere. Get someone else to take you in, because I for one have had it.

(Smiley 1991:182)

The cold way in which Rose assesses her father’s gift, reducing their dialogue to a system of punishments and rewards for past deeds, is

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