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giving their father the right answers, telling him what he wants to hear. “My father was easily offended,” Ginny tells us. “But normally he was easily mollified, too, if you spoke your prescribed part with the proper appearance of remorse” (33). Smiley not only expresses sympathy for Regan’s and Goneril’s efforts to appease their father by making the reactions of the older daughters comprehensible, but she also translates Cordelia’s resonant response to Lear’s demand to be mollified— ‘‘nothing” (1.1.88) —into Caroline’s meticulous but icy allegiance to legalities: “She was always looking for the rights and wrongs of every argument, trying to figure out who should apologize for what, who should go first, what the exact wording should be” (Smiley 1991:33). Smiley rewrites Shakespeare’s play to declare her allegiance to Lear’s older daughters and to offer an alternative reading of King Lear’s patriarchal family.

For Ginny and Rose, escape from the roles assigned to them by their father entails not the silence of Cordelia, but a full-voiced articulation of their side of the story, a vocal challenge to the version of the past handed down to them by their father. Ginny escapes the farm at the end of the novel, taking a job at a roadside café and leaving behind once and for all her husband and the farm. When Ty comes years later to ask Ginny for a divorce, the two realize how very different their views of the past—of her family’s “history” —are. While Ty mourns the loss of the farm and the Cook family history that it represents, Ginny sees the double-sided nature of that legacy. As she explains to him:

It’s good to remember and repeat. You feel good to be a part of that. But then I saw what my part really was. Rose showed me. …She showed me, but I knew what she showed me was true even before she finished showing me. You see this grand history, but I see blows. I see taking what you want because you want it, then making something up that justifies what you did. I see getting others to pay the price, then covering up and forgetting what the price was. Do I think Daddy came up with beating and fucking us on his own? … No. I think he had lessons, and those lessons were part of the package, along with the land and the lust to run things exactly the way he wanted to no matter what.

(Smiley 1991:342–43)

In recovering her own memories of abuse, Ginny revises the received story of the Cook family legacy, as passed down to her by her father, by reassessing her own role in that history. When

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