lip lit: a thousand acres
My confession is that I hate King Lear. Possibly you disagree with me. But that is not to say that I hate all of Shakespeare (God forbid we have the arrogance to criticise the great Master!). Luckily, there is hope for me because others have retold and rewritten the play.
Jane Smiley has done just that in A Thousand Acres (1991), which transposes the story from Ancient Britain onto an Iowan farm at the end of the 1970s. Here, Smiley takes the play and turns it into a novel to tell the story through the point of view of one of the sisters, Goneril.
Why does she do this? The adaptation is overtly feminist in scope; when Smiley was re-reading the play as a university student, she took issue with what she and many others see as the play’s inbuilt misogyny. She ‘wanted to communicate the ways in which she found conventional readings of the play frustrating and wrong’. She remarked that it ‘seemed to be condemning Goneril and Regan [the ‘evil’ sisters] morally for the exact ways in which they expressed womanhood that I recognised’. So, out of this response to the play, she decided to foreground the daughters’ demonised and largely absent perspective and by doing so, attempts to offer us what she sees as a corrective vision of the gender in King Lear.
She also displaces Shakespeare’s title with the land itself, a fact that indicates that King Lear’s personal tragedy and journey through suffering towards (questionable) self-knowledge is not to be the focus of the novel. Rather, the focus is on the family’s failures and the tragedy to which that family and the female body is linked. For Smiley is not just focusing on the family rather than an individual – thus displacing the moral centre of Shakespeare’s plot by disrupting a discourse which positions the father’s perspective as the focus of history – but also engaging with ecofeminism and, as she says, ‘a vaguely Marxist materialism’.
While writing the book, she developed her thoughts about ‘the intrusion of notions of ownership and commodification upon familial and romantic relationships, of ownership and exploitation of the land, resources and the services of other human beings’. That is to say that she is concerned with the loss of connection between the human and natural realms and the interrelated exploitation of women and the natural world. Men care complicit in the system which disenfranchises women and in the discourse which equates them with the wide-open space that men tame. ‘Women’, as Smiley has remarked, ‘just like nature or the land have been seen as something to be used’. In a way, Smiley is engaged in the feminist task of recuperating the silenced voices of women excluded from official accounts of American farm life where women’s relationships to and from the land have been overlooked and where farming has been understood as a traditionally patriarchal institution. Indeed, nearly all the men in the novel position themselves in opposition to ‘you women’, as Ginny and Rose (the sisters Goneril and Regan) are referred to, and frequently name women solely in reference to their reproductive capacities. But what I think is particularly sophisticated about Smiley’s decision to portray the woman’s perspective is that she resists a sentimental portrayal of female empowerment. Ginny finds power through her voice but her perspective is always partial, speculative and she struggles with the repressions of memory.
But for many, Smiley’s does not seem like a valid interpretation of the sexual politics of King Lear because she reads into it what they do not think is in the original; namely, incest, in the literal sense. In the literal sense because some critics have detected the incest theme in the play but without ever suggesting that such readings could be taken literally. The representation of Larry’s (Lear’s) sexual abuse of his daughters is the central revelation of the novel and constitutes the greatest liberty it takes with the original. In A Thousand Acres, Lear is a far less complicated character: a misogynist and rapist; demanding, ignorant and abusive. Possibly you agree that incest is taking it too far. But I think that Smiley’s use of incest represents the extreme enactment of patriarchal ownership, a theme that pervades the novel in different forms; it is yet another way in which women are made to serve men, the way the ownership of property may serve men.
Whatever you think of the incest, what Smiley’s adaptation demonstrates is that there can really be no re-reading which is not also an appropriation. Smiley has received a text that has already been adapted, restaged, rewritten numerous times – even Shakespeare rewrote it from other sources. But she approaches it from her own ideological position and with her own political, cultural and critical lens. I think Smiley’s work bears witness to the importance of critical revision, and of seeing literary traditions in new ways.
The fact that King Lear has been so frequently adapted and so deeply contemplated by dramatists, directors, writers and critics also suggests something important about the long-term life and impact of Shakespeare’s text: its themes are still relevant and important to us. It is a good thing that the play is re-imagined and reinterpreted across the years because if theatre and literature are to remain central to our culture they need to debate the central issues of our time. The adaptations can help us to see how the ideas and questions posed in Shakespeare’s work have been answered and modified by history, as Smiley points out. There is hope in the writing of, the telling of, and rewriting of stories.
