Remembering/engendering the heartland: Sexed language, embodied space, and America's foundational fictions in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres

Frontiers

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 181-202

  Carden, Mary Paniccia ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039377340     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3346974     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 6.
2. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 204.
3. Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). All references are to this edition and will be indicated parenthetically.
4. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 204.
5. Most reviewers have discussed the Lear connection. See, for instance, Ron Carlson, "King Lear in Zebulon County," New York Times Book Review, November 3, 1991, 12; and Edmund Fuller, "Kind and Unkind Daughters," Swanee Review 101 (1993): l-lii. While I don't wish to downplay this thematic, I do not have space to examine it in detail here; this essay is concerned with the gender-production attendant with America's foundational fictions, on the amnesias enforced by the mythology of frontier beginnings that equates male self-making with nation building.
6. Most reviewers have discussed the Lear connection. See, for instance, Ron Carlson, "King Lear in Zebulon County," New York Times Book Review, November 3, 1991, 12; and Edmund Fuller, "Kind and Unkind Daughters," Swanee Review 101 (1993): l-lii. While I don't wish to downplay this thematic, I do not have space to examine it in detail here; this essay is concerned with the gender-production attendant with America's foundational fictions, on the amnesias enforced by the mythology of frontier beginnings that equates male self-making with nation building.
7. Karen J. Warren, "The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism," Environmental Ethics 12:2 (1990): 132.
8. Karen J. Warren, "Introduction,"in Ecological Feminism, ed. Karen J. Warren (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1. Warren defines ecofeminist philosophy as multicultural, in the sense that "it includes in its analyses of women - nature connections the inextricable interconnections among all social systems of domination, for instance, racism, classism, ageism, ethnocentrism, imperialism, colonialism, as well as sexism" (2).
9. Deborah Slicer, "Wrongs of Passage: Three Challenges to the Maturing of Ecofeminism," in Warren, Ecological Feminism, 39.
10. Warren, "Introduction," 1.
11. Fuller, "Kind and Unkind Daughters," li.
12. Carlson, "King Lear in Zebulon County," 12.
13. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 5.
14. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 11.
15. Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 6.
16. Val Plumwood, "The Ecopolitics Debate and the Politics of Nature," in Warren, Ecological Feminism, 74.
17. Plumwood, "The Ecopolitics Debate," 74.
18. Nina Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors," in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 75.
19. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 88.
20. Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 3.
21. The familiar stories told and retold in literature and history are, Molly Hite argues, "always somebody's stories." She suggests that "the coherence of one line of narration rests on the suppression of any number of 'other sides,' alternative versions that might give the same sequence of events an entirely different set of emphases and values. One immediate consequence is that even though conventions governing the selection of narrator, protagonist, and especially plot restrict the kinds of literary production that count as stones in a given society and historical period, changes in emphasis and value can articulate the 'other side' of a culturally mandated story, exposing the limits it inscribes in the process of affirming a dominant ideology" (The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989], 4).
22. Jack Kirby, "Rural Culture in the American Middle West: Jefferson to Jane Smiley," Agricultural History 70:4 (1996): 590.
23. Deborah Fink, Open Country, Iowa: Rural Women, Tradition, and Change (New York: State University of New York Press, 1986), 232.
24. Fink, Open Country, 238.
25. Deborah Fink, Agrarian Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 12.
26. Fink, Agrarian Women, 28-29.
27. Joan M. Jensen, Promise to the Land: Essays on Rural Women (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 25, 26.
28. Kirby, "Rural Culture," 582, 584.
29. Kirby, "Rural Culture," 592.
30. Smiley prepares this embodied earth thematic with the novel's epigraph from Meridel LeSueur's "The Ancient People and the Newly Come": "The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other. We were marked by the seasonal body of earth, by the terrible migrations of people, by the swift turn of a century, verging on change never before experienced on this greening planet."
31. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 67.
32. I am obviously indebted to the many feminist analyses and revisions of Lacan's theory of language, sexuality, and subjectivity. See especially Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversive Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993); Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990); Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
33. I am obviously indebted to the many feminist analyses and revisions of Lacan's theory of language, sexuality, and subjectivity. See especially Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversive Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993); Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990); Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
34. I am obviously indebted to the many feminist analyses and revisions of Lacan's theory of language, sexuality, and subjectivity. See especially Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversive Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993); Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990); Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
35. I am obviously indebted to the many feminist analyses and revisions of Lacan's theory of language, sexuality, and subjectivity. See especially Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversive Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993); Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990); Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
36. I am obviously indebted to the many feminist analyses and revisions of Lacan's theory of language, sexuality, and subjectivity. See especially Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversive Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993); Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990); Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
37. I am obviously indebted to the many feminist analyses and revisions of Lacan's theory of language, sexuality, and subjectivity. See especially Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversive Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993); Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990); Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
38. I am obviously indebted to the many feminist analyses and revisions of Lacan's theory of language, sexuality, and subjectivity. See especially Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversive Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993); Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990); Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
39. I am obviously indebted to the many feminist analyses and revisions of Lacan's theory of language, sexuality, and subjectivity. See especially Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversive Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993); Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1990); Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), and This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
40. This category includes the voices of younger men, such as Rose's husband, Pete, and Harold Clark's prodigal son, Jess, men who have yet to attain the status of the father, men who resent and resist his discipline. Smiley's characterization of Pete, especially, suggests that men are not born like Daddy, but are made into him.
41. Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 142.
42. Kirby reads the novel as the story of a "family-farm succession crisis": "A widower with three grown daughters, Cook faced infirmity and death without the male heir that agrarianism demands" ("Rural Culture," 593). He responds by proposing the corporation, his "test of love and loyalty . . . like Lear's" (594).
43. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4.
44. This is Eve Kosofky Sedgwick's term. She defines male homosocial desire as "a pattern of male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality . . . in an intimate and shifting relation to class." It is "a kind of oxymoron. 'Homosocial' is a word occasionally used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by an analogy with 'homosexual,' and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from 'homosexual.'. . . To draw the 'homosocial' back into the orbit of 'desire,' of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual - a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted." Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1-2.
45. Rose's husband, Pete, is not the right kind of farmer in Daddy's eyes. He resists the farm culture and its definition for manhood and fights constantly with Daddy, who does not credit any of his suggestions or desires for the farm. However, when he does become a farmer he takes out his anger on Rose. Ginny fears Pete's temper but understands his frustrations, which form part of "the unsaid." Pete drowns himself in the quarry, which is "manmade but natural, too, the one place where the sea within the earth lay open to sight" (247).
46. Edith died at forty-three of unrecorded causes, and her daughters died in the 1917 influenza epidemic (132). In this culture, women die early, usually of disease, while men die violent deaths. Of the men's longevity, Rose says: "Don't you wonder if they all didn't just implode? First their wives collapse under the strain, then they take it out on their children for as long as they can, then they just reach the end of their rope" (187).
47. Daddy's friend Harold Clark, whose subplot parallels his, blames inheritance problems on women: "I've got myself into a fix now. One farm, two boys. Two good boys is a boy too many, you know. Pretty soon there are two wives and six or eight children, and you got to be fair, but there's no fair way to cut that pie. . . . So the wives start squabbling. That's the first thing, ain't it?" (156).
48. Baym, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood," 75.
49. I use the term "reiteration" in Judith Butler's sense. She argues that, although the paternal symbolic positions itself as the necessary condition of cultural intelligibility and coherent subjectivity, "what is 'forced' by the symbolic . . . is a citation of its law that reiterates and consolidates the ruse of its own force." She asks what it would mean "to 'cite' the law to produce it differently, to 'cite' the law in order to reiterate and coopt its power, to expose the heterosexual matrix and to displace the effect of its necessity" (Bodies That Matter, 15).
50. Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 143.
51. In the course of this search Ginny finds "one black-and-white picture of a baby in a hat" (226), a baby that could have been any of the Cook daughters, or all, or none. This unnamed baby is evocative of an existence that precedes the father's abuse and discipline, for the self that could have heard the mother's missing voice. However, the unidentifiable baby simultaneously reminds Ginny of the cultural silence around lost and forgotten children: "Maybe there was another one after all, one that came before me. It wasn't impossible, and not unlikely, either, that I wouldn't know about it. Another something less said about the better" (321). The photograph of the unnamed baby and Ginny's own ghost children (308) are evocative of the forgotten unsaid that haunts the farm culture.
52. Although Jess seems at first to offer attractive alternatives - he refuses the authority of father and nation, he wants to implement nonpoisonous farming methods, he seems to see women not as breeders but as equals - his relationship with Rose gradually reveals another impossibly regimented system as well as an equally destructive desire to remake the land in his own image.
53. Her sister Caroline, on the other hand, sustains the amnesia that supports Daddy's authority by refusing to hear Ginny's story, not wanting her memories of her childhood to be "wreck[ed]" (362).
54. She works as a waitress - the job Rose imagined for their mother in her fantasy that she had not died but escaped (187). She also attends college and plans to major in psychology (358), which Caroline studied briefly and used to analyze and account for her father (118).
55. Susan Strehle pointed this out to me.
56. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 24.