Abstract
In 1991, Jane Smiley published A Thousand Acres, an adaptation of King Lear; in 1998, she retracted it. “I find myself having to disavow my most famous and admired novel,” wrote Smiley in a short piece, “Taking It All Back,” in the Washington Post Book World. Where in writing the novel she had “interpreted King Lear as a brief for the patriarchy, with the author [Shakespeare] identifying with Lear himself,” her interpretation of the play had since changed drastically to the point that she could no longer subscribe to her own novel’s premises (390).1 Ultimately, Smiley traced her dissatisfaction with her novel to a problem of knowledge: “The paradox of literature is that everything must be written with total commitment, or the work reads falsely and insincerely, and yet all total commitment is to partial knowledge” (392). It may at first seem that Smiley construes King Lear as the object of empirical knowledge. It might even appear as though Smiley is reverting to the reverential attitude toward Shakespeare which A Thousand Acres contested. But the situation is more complicated than it first appears.
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Notes
Jane Smiley, “Taking It All Back,” in The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, ed. Marie Arana (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 387–92.
See also Julie Sanders, “‘Rainy Days Mean Difficult Choices’: Jane Smiley’s Appropriation of King Lear in A Thousand Acres,” in Novel Shakespeares: Twentieth-Century Women Novelists and Appropriation, ed. Julie Sanders (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001), 191–216.
See, for instance, Caroline Cakebread, “Remembering King Lear in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres,” in Shakespeare and Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (New York: Routledge, 1999), 85–102.
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 22.
Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 39–123. References to the text are cited parenthetically.
On Ginny and Rose’s quest for knowledge, see David Brauner, “‘Speak Again’: The Politics of Rewriting in A Thousand Acres,” The Modern Language Review 96 (2001): 654–66
and Barbara Mathieson, “The Polluted Quarry: Nature and Body in A Thousand Acres,” in Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re-Visions in Literature and Performance, ed. Marianne Novy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 127–44.
Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991). References to the text are cited parenthetically.
Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 87.
Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English 34 (1972): 18.
Lee R. Evans, “Women, Energy, and Middlemarch,” Massachusetts Review 13 (1972): 228.
See also Judith Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978).
For a history of the controversies surrounding trauma and recovered memory, see Richard J. McNally, Remembering Trauma (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). Based on a large-scale survey of studies, McNally concludes: “The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support” (275).
Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5, 126.
Janice Haaken, Pillar of Salt: Gender, Memory, and the Perils of Looking Back (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 10, 82.
On how Ginny “struggles to liberate herself from the language of ownership,” see Almila Ozdek, “Coming out of the Amnesia: Herstories and Earth Stories, and Jane Smiley’s Critique of Capitalist Ownership in A Thousand Acres,” in New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism, ed. Andrea Campbell (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 66.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 92, 100.
For a related point about the ending, see Marinella Rodi-Risberg, “Trauma and its Resolution in Jane Smiley’s Novel A Thousand Acres,” in Reconstructing Pain and Joy: Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Chryssoula Lascaratou, Anna Despotopoulou, and Elly Ifantidou (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 204.
Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 2–3.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 141.
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© 2014 Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin
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Rivlin, E. (2014). Adaptation Revoked: Knowledge, Ethics, and Trauma in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres . In: Huang, A., Rivlin, E. (eds) Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375773_5
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