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Page 97 the daughters’ advocate. She both challenges the vision of King Lear and rewrites the history of the American family, showing that both mothers and fathers are complicit in creating and perpetuating the disasters that befall their children. “Do we know what we are?” Ginny asks Rose at one point (216). Echoing Lear’s question, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (1.4.205), Ginny speaks of herself in terms of “what” rather than ‘‘who,” positing the materiality of her existence, her substance. Replete with her father’s poisons, containing the remains of her mother and her lost children, the land itself memorializes Ginny’s struggle with the past and her relationship to the future, both defining who she is and cursing her, as well. This is the legacy of both parents in A Thousand Acres. The attempt to remember the mother, however, also becomes the key to Ginny’s recovery of the past and her ability to forge a new life. Entering the house after her father has left, Ginny searches for and tries to imagine her mother: As I neared the house, it seemed like Daddy’s departure had opened up the possibility of finding my mother.… [N]ow that he was gone, I could look more closely. I could study the closets or the attic, lift things and peer under them, get back into cabinets and the corners of shelves.… Might there not be a single overlooked drawer, unopened for twenty-two years, that would breathe forth a single, fleeting exhalation? She had known him —what would she have said about him? How would she have interceded? Wasn’t there something to know about him that she had known that would come to me if I found something of her in his house? (Smiley 1991:225) While Ginny’s quest for objects left behind by her mother goes unrealized, she does come face to face with a more tangible and real truth—the truth about her father, the memories of his night-time visits that come welling to the surface when she enters her old room. The search for her dead mother ultimately brings Ginny to an empowering new knowledge of her father, a memory that rises up to the surface of her consciousness out of her mother’s silence. The recovered memories of her father’s abuse of her body give Ginny a new sense of herself, a new life that is revealed like a newly exposed skin: “My new life, yet another new life, had begun” (229). Tearing at the walls of her family home, she disassembles that structure in order to find some semblance of her own body trapped |
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