'A Destiny We Never Asked For': Gender and Gifts, Property and Power in Jane Smiley's 'A Thousand Acres'

Abstract

Jane Srniley's A Thousand Acres (1 99 1) is clearly intertextually related to Shakespeare's King Lear, yet it is a distinctly American postmodern text. In her NBCC Award acceptance speech, Smiley said that the novel was a complex argument against a certain kind of farming and land use, that is leading us towards an environmental disaster, the destruction of the lives of people and of the moral life of our country.l The system under critique is one where industrial capitalist farming and a patriarchal value system interact; a system that exploits and poisons the body of land as well as the female body. Thus, this article will discuss Srniley's depiction of the Midwestern farming community of Zebulon County as a capitalist and patriarchal hierarchy. I will argue that the central movement in the narrative is analogous to Derridean deconstruction in its emphasis on exposing this masked and violent hierarchy.* Jacques Derrida provides a way to deconstruct such hierarchies, in a process that may be described in three phases. First, the entity that creates signification the center of the system is identified. Second, the opera-