Three Daughters, Two Stories, One Tragedy: Ownership and Incest in William Shakespeare's King Lear and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres

Abstract

In Shakespeare's play, Lear links his daughters to British soil, making them his possessions. Seeing his daughters as owned things, Lear believes he can do what he wants to them. Subsequently, Lear crosses boundaries, namely in his "love test" where he expects competitive courtship behavior from his daughters. The father's peculiar actions and inappropriate conduct with his daughters carry incestuous resonances. These themes of ownership and incest are starker in Acres, specifically, when Larry rapes his daughters. Larry projects a wifely role onto his daughters by having sex with them. He then makes sex something daughters "owe" their fathers. This wifely role metastasizes so that, in the end, Larry's wishes transform his daughters beyond their role as surrogate wives into, collectively, a symbolic mother. With this metaphor, Smiley picks up on resonances in her Shakespearean source and extends this theme of ownership. Acres' blunt use of incest underscores the latent psychological effects suggested by Lear's possessive conception of parental roles. As a retelling, Acres posits that even the experiences of malevolent women require scrutiny through which their pernicious behavior can be understood.