An Analysis of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres Smiley Thousand Acres Essays

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)!