Remembering/Engendering the Heartland: Sexed Language, Embodied Space, and America's Foundational Fictions in Jane Smiley's "A Thousand Acres"

Abstract

Benedict Anderson defines modern nation as an community that should be distinguished not by [its] falsity/genuineness, but by style in which [it is] imagined.' He suggests that we remember national history by forgetting, that in process of producing and maintaining a coherent community, a nation's past is mis-remembered. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, he proposes, spring narratives.'2 A ThousandAcres,3 Jane Smiley's seventh work of fiction and recipient of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, excavates gendered amnesias created by agrarian imagined communities inscribed across American landscapes.4 The novel exposes intertwined discourses of nation building and gender construction that locate paternal ownership at origin and center of nation while covering over alternative histories. A Thousand Acres reconceives King Lear through Goneril's point of view,5 focusing on cultural mechanisms that define and delimit a woman's place as her father's daughter. While distance between Shakespeare and Smiley may seem great, both are interested in a similar question: What happens when law of male ownership of land and women is interrupted. Smiley suggests that same logic of domination' constructs worlds of Lear and of her Iowa farm family, and, in making this connection, she invokes central concerns of ecological feminism, which takes as its starting point the connections within social systems of domination between those humans in subdominant or subordinate positions, particularly women, and domination of nonhuman nature.' Deborah Slicer suggests that recognition of the fact that naturism is linked to our multiple social oppressions, including sexism, constitutes ecofeminism's greatest insight. And finding theories and political strategies that effectively identify and