An Analysis of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres tells a dark tale of a corrupt
patriarchal society which operates through concealment. It is a story in
which the characters attempt to manipulate one another through the secrets
they possess and the subsequent revelation of those secrets. In her novel,
Smiley gives us a very simple moral regarding this patriarchal society:
women who remain financially and emotionally dependent on men decay; those
able to break the economic and emotional chains develop as women and as hum
ans.
Roots of A Thousand Acres can be seen in numerous novels and plays,
the most obvious of which is King Lear. The parallels are too great to
ignore. Smiley is successful because she fills in so many of the gaps left
open in the play. She gives us new an d different perspectives.
One of the particular strengths of the novel lies in its depiction
of the place of women in a predominantly patriarchal culture. In this male
dominated culture, the values privileged in women include silence and
subordination. Ginny is acceptable as a woman as long as she remains
"oblivious" (121). She is allowed to disagree with men, contingent upon
her doing so without fighting (104). Ultimately, her opinion as a woman
remains irrelevant. Ginny remarks, "of course it was silly to talk about
'my po int of view.' When my father asserted his point of view, mine
vanished" (176). When she makes the "mistake" of crossing her father, she
is referred to as a "bitch," "whore," and "slut" (181, 185).
It could be argued that many of the male characters in the novel
are suffering from a type of virgin/whore syndrome. As long as the women
remain docile receptacles they are "good"; when they resist or even
question masculine authority, they are "bad." Rose complains, "When we are
good girls and accept our circumstances, we're glad about it....When we are
bad girls, it drives us crazy" (99). The women have been indoctrinated to
the point that they initially buy into and accept these standards of judgem
ent. The type of patriarchy described by Smiley simply serves to show the
inscription of the marginalization of women by men in the novel and in our
society.
Another strength of the novel is its treatment of secrets and
appearances. Like characters in a Lewis or Bellow novel, the characters in
A Thousand Acres are more concerned with maintaining a veneer of social
respectability than with addressing reality.
Life, for them, becomes some kind of facade. Nearly everyone has a
secret and nothing is as it seems. Our narrator tell us, "They all looked
happy" (38); and later, "Most issues on a farm return to the issue of
keeping up appearances" (199).
Amid all of the sub-plots and mini-themes (and there are many) in A
Thousand Acres, the one recurring theme which stands out is Smiley's
criticism of a masculine-dominated culture. The one element clearly valued
in a woman by this patriarchal society is silence. "The girls sat quietly"
(95) and they are good girls. For a woman to express her own feelings in
the novel can lead to harmful repressions. So it is that Ginny suppresses
her voice. Her inability and unwillingness to stand up to her father, and
even to Ty (in reference to the babies especially), shows that she allows
herself to remain marginalized throughout much of the novel.
In A Thousand Acres, Smiley tries to capture the tensions of real
everyday living in her representation of a dysfunctional rural family
steeped in a patriarchal tradition. She shows the effects of the
unreasonableness of our patriarchal society and indi cts it in the process.
Ginny is defined within a double set of cultural constraints. She is
confined not only by prevailing expectations regarding social behavior but
also by those governing the proper behavior of women. Reticence is an
essential part of the code of feminine decorum based on the idea of woman's
inherent weakness and the need to defer to and rely upon masculine strength
and protection. By allowing Ginny to break the chains of reticence and
flee, literally, to a new life, Smiley turns w eakness into strength as she
envisions a more reasonable (and perhaps more feminized) social order. She
forces us to ask what ideals we are being sacrificed to... patriotism?
Maintaining appearances? Maintaining patriarchal standards? Smiley speaks
for all who have been marginalized when she states (through Jess), "Maybe
to you it looked like I just vanished, but I was out there" (55)!Partner sites: Bulldog, Study Spanish in Mexico, and The Great Gatsby