A Thousand Acres

King Lear Retold in the Pulitzer Winning Fiction A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

There is the silhouette of  two people- a man in a cowboy hat is leaning against a red truck, and a woman, standing beside him, is merely touching his hands with hers. A neat barn with a white roof stands witness to their exchange, and above them the clouds are washed in the colors of a summer evening of this Iowan landscape that stretches beyond the horizon.
When my eyes first absorbed the cover illustration, an oil painting by Michael Bennallack-Hart, I imagined a story of love and peace, of reaping golden harvests and enjoying hearty dinners around family tables, of heroes and heroines in the tranquility of rural life.
However, Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Thousand Acres (1991), dwells deeper, unraveling the cruelest of human experiences in her modern version of Shakespeare's King Lear.
Larry Cook is one of the most respected farmers of Zebulon County, Iowa. His thousand acres of fertile land reflect the peril of generations of proud farmers. When Larry decides to retire and hand over the work to his three daughters in a joint ownership, his family, as well as the whole neighborhood, is taken by surprise. His two eldest daughters, Virginia and Rose, who have spent their whole lives on the farm, are enthusiastic about the idea. Together with their husbands, they dream of expanding the business to a hog operation of hundreds of animals, a modern farm equipped with the latest technology of the 1970's. The youngest daughter, Caroline, a successful lawyer living in Des Moines, is apprehensive. Her father misunderstands her rejection and cuts her out- "he took the door in his hand and slammed it shut in her face".
The names of the characters themselves are evidence of Shakespearean influence- Larry Cook is King Lear; Virginia, known as Ginny, is Goneril; Rose is Regan and Caroline is Cordelia. Harold Clark is not only their neighbor but also Larry's oldest friend and keenest competitor. He and his sons, Loren and Jess, serve the role of the Earl of Gloucester and his sons. Jess, who later becomes entangled in romance with both the elder sisters, leading to a breach of the strongest trust and love portrayed by the Cook family, is 'illegitimate' because he escaped to Canada to evade the Vietnam Draft.
However, the most striking resemblance to King Lear is the plot. In spite of some differences, the flow of the story is mostly identical. Memorable scenes that are reproduced include Larry stubbornly walking out into a storm after cursing his daughters, Rose's husband, Pete blinding Harold Clark by planning an accident with anhydrous ammonia and Caroline's last attempt to defeat her sisters by declaring a war, a lawsuit for 'mismanagement and abuse of property'.
Unlike Shakespeare's tale, A Thousand Acres, told from the point of view of the oldest daughter, Virginia, evokes a sympathy towards the eldest daughters and seemingly justifies their actions. Their mother dies when they are teenagers and they nurture Caroline, a child of six, to the best of their abilities. Their father is unsympathetic, cruel and dictatorial, beating them harshly for the slightest error. They try hard to save their little sister from the wrath of their father. With the passage of time they both, under different circumstances, grow up to become farm wives. Virginia is plagued by miscarriage after miscarriage and Rose is battling breast cancer and a marriage of broken dreams. But thanks to their efforts, Caroline, who dreamed of becoming a farmer instead of a farm wife, becomes a lawyer and settles in Des Moines. But in the wake of this battle for a thousand acres of greed and love, the dark past of the children reveal themselves as old scars are remembered.
A Thousand Acres is a story of dark pasts and unfulfilled dreams that has the rare ability to haunt its readers, inducing a strange sense of sympathy and longing for the characters Shakespeare once proclaimed to be unconditionally evil.