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Palimpsest of Subjugation: Inscriptions of Domination on the Land and the Human Body in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) is best known as a novel that rewrites Shakespeare’s King Lear, transposed to a contemporary setting in the American Midwest of the 1970s. This chapter focuses on the novel’s representation of the land and the interaction between humans and their environment, set against the history of the settling of the American West, and played out in the conflict centered on a family in crisis in a rural community. As the narrator-protagonist uncovers the palimpsest of the history of land acquisition, exploitation, and toxification, she also recovers from the amnesia that protected her from repressed personal memories of abuse, rooted in patriarchal domination and “unnatural” family relations. The novel’s exposure of the destructive forces at work in the agrarian landscape implies a reversal of some of the structures of the pastoral mode, and its dystopian vision of the contemporary agrarian landscape entails a severe critique of industrial farming and agribusiness.