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seems to have been rooted from its inception in the process of “revision.” Adrienne Rich explains that:

Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.

(1979:35)

Smiley situates herself in the midst of this process; she completely refigures “pro-forma’’ critical responses to King Lear by retelling that story through the eyes of Goneril, Lear’s oldest, traditionally vilified daughter. She becomes Ginny Cook, the first-person narrator of Smiley’s novel.

Living in the fictional farming community of Zebulon County, Iowa in 1979, Ginny learns to cope with her father Larry’s legacy, as he suddenly and inexplicably decides to divide up his thousand-acre farm among his three daughters: Ginny (Goneril), Rose (Regan), and Caroline (Cordelia). Ginny and Rose are married to farmers, Ty and Pete (Albany and Cornwall), while Caroline escapes farming life by becoming a lawyer and working in the city. The year 1979 is important, marking as it does the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, when farmers were being encouraged to take out large loans and disastrous mortgages on their land. While Lear operates in a large political and moral sphere, Smiley shows a different sort of tragedy, the near-erasure of the family farm in the American Midwest in the mid-1980s. As in King Lear, the novel begins with a public gathering. Smiley’s Gloucester figure, Harold Clark, is holding a welcome-home barbecue for his son, Jess (Edmund), who has returned to Zebulon County after having spent years in Canada as a draft-dodger. It is here that Larry announces his plans to divide up his farm amongst his daughters and retire. Ginny and Rose nod their agreement to his plan, while Caroline expresses her doubt and is subsequently disinherited. The novel traces the widening rifts within the Cook family as the land is transferred from father to daughter, with Larry’s behavior growing increasingly erratic and the excluded Caroline growing more and more suspicious of Ginny’s and Rose’s newly inherited control over the farm. The family struggles culminate in a courtroom drama rather than on a battlefield—as in Shakespeare’s tragedy—with Larry and Caroline teamed up against Ginny, Rose, and their husbands.

In Smiley’s version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the battle for land

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