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Page 89 landscape,” that landscape is integral to Ginny Cook’s attempts to remember the horrific aspects of her past and to Smiley’s overall efforts to re-vision King Lear. The Iowan landscape also links Le Sueur and Smiley as writers. Offering us an alternative to Lear’s map of his kingdom at the beginning of her novel, Smiley bodies forth the landscape through Ginny’s eyes. Looking from the top of a small mound located at the “intersection of CR #686,” Ginny can survey her father’s land: No globe or map fully convinced me that Zebulon County was not the center of the universe. Certainly, Zebulon County, where the earth was flat, was one spot where a sphere (a seed, a rubber ball, a ballbearing) must come down to perfect rest and once at rest must send a taproot downward into the ten-foot-thick topsoil. (Smiley 1991:3) Ginny’s perspective allows the reader an alternative view of the land that she will one day inherit: a narrow map of a flat world, with Zebulon County at its center. But that point of view is contingent upon the place where she is standing, the view afforded to her from the vantage point of intersecting roads. Looking down into the poisoned waters beneath the surface structure of the farms, Ginny finds a new and empowering knowledge of the curses that have plagued her body and her mind. In the converging roads, we can also see the nucleus of Smiley’s relationship to Shakespeare, whose text she rewrites from a contemporary, feminine vantage point, filtered through two lenses: her own perspective and that of Meridel Le Sueur. Placing Meridel Le Sueur into the Shakespeare-Smiley equation, we can open up Bloom’s linear model of influence and appropriation and look at the novel as a true act of re-vision, a merging together of several different perspectives. We can see in A Thousand Acres a new territory taking shape, one that merges the strict, patriarchal family dynamics inherent in Smiley’s Shakespearean source with the more localized presence of Le Sueur and so challenges what Smiley refers to in her keynote address as “Mr. Shakespeare’s alleged universality’’ (1998:56). II Family histories in Shakespeare and SmileyAsserting her role in a literary family that includes both Shakespeare and Le Sueur—a father and a mother—Smiley confronts the |
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