A Thousand Acres Stylistic Analysis

Jane Smiley’s novel, A Thousand Acres, is a contemporary interpretation of William Shakespeare’s classical tragedy King Lear. Comparisons are clearly visible in the very beginning of A Thousand Acres when Smiley begins with a vivid description of the landscape. Even the characters are similar and having read King Lear, I already had an impression of them before reading A Thousand Acres. But they are not completely similar as there are some differences due to the perspectives through which the stories are told. Smiley deliberately begins her novel by going into great detail about the landscape. She describes the landscape as “unquestionably flat” (Smiley 3) and the land that Ginny’s father owned as “six hundred forty acres, a whole section, paid for, no encumbrances, as flat and fertile, black, friable, and exposed as any piece of land on the face of the earth”(Smiley 4). Smiley also goes on to describe the Zebulon River which you can see running in the distance. Her purpose in describing the landscape is to parallel Lear’s description of his land in Act 1 where he says: “Of all these bounds, even from this line to this,/ With

Both are impulsive and easily offended over petty things. Lear is offended that Cornelia won’t take part in his game while Larry is upset that Caroline does not want his land. Both go mad and can’t take their daughters telling them what to do and their loss of power. Larry Cook is also very violent and has abused and molested his daughters in the past. While Lear is a dynamic character, Larry is a static character throughout A Thousand Acres. He shows no compassion or guilt unlike Lear. There may be differences present in how the characters are presented because A Thousand Acres is narrated by Larry’s daughter Ginny who was abused and molested along with Rose. Therefore, she is understandably biased while King Lear is a play with no