2. Sisterhood, Shame, and Redemption in Cat’s Eye and King Lear

1.1.King Lear in America

The desire to pass judgment on Lear is halted by the final image of suffering and injustice: the image of a dying father holding his dead daughter in his arms. One could stop with this ‘pieta-like’ image, but A Thousand Acres does not let us. It compels us to remember that fathers are responsible for the burden of guilt that is placed upon their children. As was pointed out above, King Lear has invited audiences/readers to suspend judgment of someone who is clearly not innocent, but it has also invited audiences readers to pass judgment on someone who is not altogether guilty. A Thousand Acres challenges that view. The reader’s attention is drawn to how daughters are driven into debt and guilt by their father, thus thwarting readings that would place all blame on the female representatives of the next generation. A Thousand Acres guides the reader towards the primary source of guilt instead: the father. The shift of guilt away from daughters discourages the reader from making incautious judgments and prevents him or her from identifying the elder daughters as evil incarnate. As suggested above, the de-activation of daughterly guilt in A Thousand Acres may even protect the female reader from the engendering of daughterly guilt.

It is time to look at what happens when the Lear-pattern described above is activated in A Thousand Acres, being applied to a book which is, as Edmund Fuller puts it, a ‘quintessentially mid-American’ novel. A Thousand Acres has been celebrated for its ‘profound look at American culture’ and its realistic portrayal of farm and family life. The novel’s attention to the land and to farm-life gives it, according to Martha Duffy, an ‘exact and exhilarating sense of place, a sheer American ness that gives it its own soul and roots’. For John Mack Faragher, ‘the power of A Thousand Acres comes from Smiley’s decision to root her story in American soil’. According to Kenneth Millard, the distinctive American peculiarities risk being lost in a comparative reading:
[A]n interpretation of the novel that is devoted to spotting correspondences with King Lear must be inattentive to the cultural specificity of the Iowa landscape, to the crisis in agriculture during Carter’s presidency, and to the history of the frontier which has no antecedent in Shakespeare’s play.
However, King Lear does capture the emergence of an important historical development; as land passes into private property, the great shift creates new rights and responsibilities of authority and tenure. And what is the history of the frontier if not ‘the transformation of land into private property’? The westward expansion transformed the land of America into individual holdings following Thomas Jefferson’s Land Ordinance in 1785,in consequence of which the agricultural system gradually gave way to owner ship. Mary Paniccia Carden observes that Shakespeare and Smiley ask ‘a similar question: what happens when the law of male ownership of land and women is interrupted?’68 Or rather, what happens when women become inscribed as owners of land and when new ideas, including ‘green ’ideas (expressed by Edmund/Jess), are brought to bear on established principles? Jane Smiley’s novel comes across as an attempt to answer such questions from a contemporary American perspective.
The presence of the Lear-pattern in A Thousand Acres elicits an important facet of American nation-building: the release from responsibility that attends the transfer of property. In spite of the contemporary setting of A Thousand Acres – 1979 in the Mid-West, just before the agricultural crisis – ‘its first paragraph returns readers to the birth of the nation, when American capitalism was blossoming, when the industrial revolution was getting its full head of steam, when American farmers were pushing west in search of new lands’. Ginny explains how her forebears left ‘the west of England, hilly country, and poor for farming’ to dig into ‘the prime valmold’ of Iowa, in 1890, just before the closing of the frontier. Ever since then, land has been transferred through patrilineality in Zebulon County and in the grand history of the farm. As long as society is dominated by this principle, sons are the temporary holders of land, power, and privileges. By staging a transfer of land and ownership to daughters, A Thousand Acres foregrounds the idea that patrilineality rests on the expectation that the younger generation discharge the owner from responsibility. However, what complicates the transfer in Smiley’s novel is not that daughters become recipients of inheritance, but that they do not liberate the owner from responsibility for what is passed on to them: a poisonous inheritance in more than one sense. Ginny and Rose, but also Jess, shift responsibility back to the older generation – to the fathers – who react by attempting to project a sense of indebtedness on to them. This reaction indicates how strong their desire to unburden themselves on ‘younger strengths’ is. That may come as no surprise – after all, when ownership is passed on, so is responsibility – but A Thousand Acres suggests that if such a divestiture means that the previous owner does not manage to escape accountability for what he bequeaths, the freedom from day-to-day responsibility for the managing of the property is a precarious benefit.
Lear’s desire to impose a debt of gratitude on his daughters and clear himself from responsibility for ruling is paralleled in the behave our of Larry Cook in A Thousand Acres. The two men’s shared wish to ‘unburden ’themselves – to become unencumbered, debt-free – but still live off their assets exposes their shortcomings as fathers and as rulers of land. The consequences of bad stewardship are evident in Lear’s failure to take care of the ‘Poor Toms’ of this world. Despite admitting that he has ‘ta’en/Too little care of this’ (III. 4. 32), Lear continues to indulge in his own suffering instead of involving himself in ‘Poor Tom’s’. Larry’s ‘rape’ of the land he poisoned was perpetrated in the name of profit and progress. In King Lear, land is conjured up as something that can be divided, apportioned, and given away. Both Larry and Lear regard themselves as owners of the land, not stewards – creditors, not debtors – who possess the right to divide the land as they please.
Kathryn Bunth off suggests that ‘Larry Coo’s decision to incorporate his farm is largely a product of his appetite for “more,” for increasing his sense of power and status and for bragging rights’. The daughters owe their father/landlord all, and they are asked to prove it. Their gratitude is expected to be expressed to the landlord, not to the land itself or to God. According to Sara Farris, ‘[i]n the farmer’s connection to this land, there is no echo of Farmer James’s most sincere gratitude” [sic] to the “lord of all land”’. In fact, there is no place for God in Zebulon County; just asin King Lear, there is never a sense of a sovereign benevolent deity. In A Thousand Acres, Ginny recollects that ‘[h]ow ever much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks’ (15, ch. 3).The property relation that exists between king and land in King Lear, and between farmer and land in A Thousand Acres, secures Lear’s author-ity in his kingdom and Larry’s elevated position in the community.76 In A Thousand Acres, Larry Cook is the king of his un mortgaged thousand acres of land and the epitome of power in the farming community. Larry is thus not just any farmer; as one of the most prosperous farmers, he is also one of the most revered men in the community. His ‘kingly’ standing is reminiscent of Lear’s majestic appearance. As James Keller says, ‘Zebulon County resembles feudalism with Larry Cook as principal ruler’.77 The community relies on investing the farmer with power and fuelling the myth of the self made man.
The farmer keeps his superior position partly owing to the debt of gratitude that is expected from the community to their landlord, the provider of food. Ginny observes that they ‘might as well have had a catechism: What is a farmer? A farmer is a man who feeds the world’ (47, ch. 8). InA Thousand Acres, the community attempts to in stil a debt of gratitude in the daughters too. Initially pleased with Larry’s decision to ‘retire’, Harold Clark will soon come to realize how much his own status is contingent on Larry’s. Harold is dependent on men like Larry in order to maintain his own authority, both in the eyes of his sons and in the eyes of the community. Hence Harold’s later keenness to defend Larry: ‘I want you to say that he’s your dad, and even though he’s a pain in the butt, you owe him. Rose owes him, too’ (220, ch. 26).When daughters receive their inheritance, their debt of gratitude is activated immediately, but when sons receive theirs, the debt is to an order of succession rather than to a person. In A Thousand Acres, it is daughters who inherit from the father; but the transfer benefits their husbands, Pete and Ty, just as much, perhaps even more. In fact, Ginny accepts the gift not only in deference to her father’s wishes but also in deference to her husband’s. During Larry’s announcement that he wants to ‘form [a] corporation Ginny remembers that Ty is the right man to carry the farm further, standing for much the same values and ideas as Larry. They work towards the same goal, a goal in which they themselves play an important part. Ty must maintain Larry as an exemplary figure and as an upholder of pioneer values, so that he can give something back to him as compensation for what he has been given. That is why Ty turns against Ginny when she attempts to disengage Larry from the elevated position of ‘almighty’ farmer and father. Larry is the upholder of a way of life that is close to sacred in Zebulon County, which is partly why the minister Henry Dodge, who wishes to be a peacemaker, comes to persuade Ginny to ‘preserve a way of life that [he and his wife] believe in’(287, ch. 34).
In A Thousand Acres, the older male generation owes a debt of gratitude to their settler ancestors. Larry’s status as a landowner is owing to the ‘hard work’ of these pioneers. Larry attempts to in stil the debt to the an cestorsin his daughter, who is ‘a beneficiary of this grand effort, someone who would always have a floor to walk on’ (15, ch. 3).79 With the assistance of pioneer stories, Larry inculcates the values or the ‘law’ of pioneer life in his daughters: ‘Every story, when we were children, revealed a lesson– “work hard” (the pioneers had no machines to dig their drainage lines or plan their crops)’ (142, ch. 18). But when ownership is transferred to his daughters, he comes to regard himself as one among these ancestors.
Larry views his daughters as recipients of what was his to give, and he starts collecting the debt of gratitude right away. The expression of gratitude expects from them goes beyond their usual habit of serving, pleasing, and appeasing him.80 Indirectly, his insistent demand for a return gift renders Ginny and Rose incapable of returning any debt of gratitude to their ancestors: his claim on them prevents them from being inscribed in the grand narrative of the farm as the rightful and dutiful heirs. In other words, Larry stops reminding his daughters of their debt to the pioneer ancestors because what they own, they owe to their father.
The stories that Larry passes on to his daughters are idealized descriptions of a past which leave out essential information about any female ancestors Consequently, any backward links that might have helped them conceive of a different role for themselves than that of homemaker are lost. That pride in the grand narrative of the farm which forms part of the American history of progress is contingent on the repression of shame stories. In A Thousand Acres and elsewhere, it is an uncomplicated success story as long as any tales of dispossession – of previous inhabitants or women – and of land abuse are repressed. To pass on stories that focus on strong white male individuals fighting their way to the top is also to passon silence about guilt and shame. As Carden points out: ‘Dutiful “girls”- - keepers of appearances - - perpetuate silence, a legacy from mother to daughter’.
As farm-wives, Ginny and Rose are expected to pass on these stories and to retain their place in this narrative as silent and passive women, just like their mother and grandmothers, as carriers and even guardians of guilt and shame; but the moment they are inscribed as owners of land in this story ,their roles change and they become agents – ‘creditors’ – not only in then arrative of the farm, but also in the narrative of American progress. The gender role that Larry has always expected them to play thus conflicts with their new role as owners of land, a role which engenders other responsibilities, obligations, and interests. Implicitly, they take over the right to expect repayment from the younger generation. When Ginny and Rose become and owners, the issue of guilt and responsibility is reopened and given anew direction.