Synaptic

Writing Objective: Write a critical paper on A Thousand Acres

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In the opening page of her novel. Jane Smiley quotes Mendel Le Sueur: “The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other.” So it is in Zebulon County. where the land is not dry as it appears, Inn “ready at any time to rise and cover die earth again, except for die tile lines… The sea is still beneath our feet, and we walk on it (16). In Zebulon, good farmers exert authority, have control. A “good farmer” is “a man who so organized his work that the drainage-well catchment basins were cleaned out ever) spring and the grates were painted black every two years'” (47). These farmers–, however, poison this water with the farming and tile building. In A Thousand Acres, Larry Cook, the greatest farmer in Zebulon County, controls the land and his family to the point of poisoning them.

Smiley uses water to enhance her theme of appearances vs. reality. “There was no way to tell by looking that the land…was new. created by magic lines of tile” (15). The people of Zebulon mimic the water, and do not appear as they really are. They do not look past the surface of one another’s lives: they agree with Larry Cook: “less said about that, the better” (145). Ginny Cook, the narrator, describes her family as “well trained. We knew our roles…without hesitation and without consultation (215). Her relationship with her husband Ty, who also believes “people should keep private things private” (308). demonstrates this surface life. “We had spent our life together…putting the best face on things, harboring secrets’1 (280). The more there is to conceal the harder the Cook family works to keep dungs looking good. After Pete dies, Ginny calls this phenomenon, “the marvelous engine of appearances (317). But her family, and the other farmers are II..1 okay, even though “in Zebulon County…a good appearance was the source and the sign of all other good things” (215).

The appearance keeping is a form of control. Just as he controls the water, Larry also controls Ginny and Rose through Fear, by making them see things from his point of view: “he shouts, ‘l-l-l’ roaring and glorying in his self-definition. …And then he impresses us [his daughters] by blows with the weight of his ‘I’ and the feathery nonexistence of ourselves, our questions, our doubts, our differences of opinion” (331). Although it takes Ginny a long time to question her father, her sister Rose knows this all along. “You start seeing things from his point of view again and you’re just paralyzed…. That was his goddamned hold over me, Ginny!” (257). Rose wants to get beyond the appearances. She asks Ginny, “Don’t you just long to stand back and tell the truth about him for once?” (161).

How Larry fits in the land shows the extent of his control. “He was never dwarfed by the landscape – the fields…were as much my father as if he had grown them and shed them like a husk” (20). The water is symbolic for Ginn) and Rose, but not for their younger sister Caroline. Ginny is attracted to the water grates, but Caroline “never, as far as I knew, went near the grate over a drainage well” (66). Caroline is the one daughter Larry does not control, because he didn’t sexually abuse her, and because Ginny and Rose determined to give her more freedom than their mother allowed them. She is able to go to college and escape the farm. Ginny says. “I was terribly afraid of him [Larry] as a child, and Rose would stand up to him if she had to, but mostly stayed out of his way. With Caroline, it was like she didn’t know there was something to be afraid of” (133). Caroline’s not afraid to speak to Larry as a “woman rather than a daughter.” which is all Rose and Ginny know how to do (21).

Everything Larry controls is poisoned, both literally and figuratively. Ginny says, “a farm abounds with poisons, though not many of them are fast-acting” (836). Water is the medium of the poison. When Ginny tells the prodigal neighbor Jess Clark about her five miscarriages, he gets very angry. “People have known for ten years or more than nitrates in well water causes miscarriages and death of infants. Don’t you know that the fertilizer runoff drains into the aquifer?” (177). Rose dies from cancer, which also seems to be the result of drinking the Zebulon water. When Ginny confesses her plot to kill Rose, Rose replies, “Anyway, you didn’t have to bother. All that well water we drank did the trick” (383).

The poisoned water that Ginny and Rose drink symbolizes Larry’s incestuous relationship with them. Ginny fears her memories of her father, saying, “I feared how I would have to store them in my brain, plastic explosives or radioactive wastes that would mutate or even wipe out everything else in there” (247). His poison doesn’t just affect his daughters physically. Ginny believes her worst habit is “entertaining thoughts of disaster,” (68), which, according to Mary Carson, is a sure sign of toxic overload (30). Ginny is shy, and feels uncomfortable of people outside of the family (64). She recurrently feels shame: “I couldn’t look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled… More than that, I was uncomfortably conscious of my whole body (211). She thinks of herself as a freak, “a woman with three legs (283). She doesn’t enjoy sex and she doesn’t warn Ty to see her body (301). She tells us. “one thing Daddy took from me when he came to me in niv room at night was the memory of my body” (302).

Anger and her hatred for her father poison Rose. She refuses, to feel satisfied “until [Larry] knows what he is… Weakened is not enough. Destroyed isn’t enough. He’s got to repent and feel humiliation and regret” (233). She can’t seem to escape her father. “It’s like he’s going to smother me, just cover me over as if I were always his never my own (258). Because of her father’s nights of “seduction,” she’s promiscuous, trying to erase her memories, and “put him [her father] in context, or diminish him somehow” (323-24). But Rose doesn’t get what she wants, because Larry goes crazy, or senile, and becomes “safe from ever knowing” (327). Rose dies a very bitter person. “All I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn’t forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can’t stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That’s my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment (384).

In fact, Rose even turns into her father. She likes to control people. She ities to control Jess, and she smothers her sister. Ginny thinks that she contributed to the death of Pete. “Rose had been too much for me, had done me in. I didn’t agree with her that Pete’s last thought had been of Daddy. Surely, surely it had been of Rose herself, that she had ineluctably overwhelmed and crushed him” (329). It seems, though, that Larry played the bigger role in Pete’s death, never letting Pete have any control of his own. Ginny also says, “it took me years to understand the depth of Pete’s disappointment when his enthusiasms met with my father’s inevitable skepticism” (32). Pete dies m the water in the quarry, and his drowning is symbolic of Larry’s control overwhelming him.

It’s not just Larry who poisoned the water. Rose asks Ginny, “Don’t you wonder if they all [old farmers] 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” (202). Jess explains it – “Oh. Ginny, they have aimed to destroy us, and I don’t know why,” (212). Control is very important to the farmers in the book (Larry, Harold, and Ty). Harold manipulates people, especially his sons, by pretending to he foolish. Ginny accuses Ty of playing the peacemaker to gey what he wants.

The motif of water and poison in A Thousand Acres encompasses more than Ginny and Rose, more than Zebulon County. Ginny extends it beyond herself, making her memory of “the sound of water trickling in the blackness…the only photograph of some nameless and unknown children who may have lived and may have died, but at any rate have vanished into the black well of time (49). A real, tangible picture of an unknown infant exists in Larry’s house. It disturbs Ginny, because she doesn’t know who the baby is. She refers to the picture as “interchangeable youth (245). When she and Caroline divide up pictures. Rose asks Caroline. “why do you wain these things? Pictures ol strangers, dishes and cup and saucers that you ilon r remember? It’s like you’re just taking home somebody else’s farm childhood. You don’t know what it means!” (390).

Like Ginny and Rose, the land is literally controlled, literally poisoned, by Larry, his ancestors, and the farmers of Zebulon County. Jane Smiley uses the unknown baby picture to relate the Cook family to all farmers, to the people of the United States, to anybody who acts selfishly, without considering the consequences. In the end of the novel Ginny explains this to Ty.

“You see this grand history, but I see blows. I see taking what you [specifically Ty, then her ancestors, then farmers, people in general] want because you want it. then making something up that justifies what you did. I see telling others to pay the price, then covering up and forgetting what the price was. Do I think Daddy came up with beating and fucking us on his own? No. I think he had lessons, and those lessons were part of the package, along with the land and the lust to run things exactly the way he wanted to no matter what, poisoning the water and destroying the topsoil and buying bigger and bigger machinery, and then feeling certain that all of it was ‘right.’ as you say” (371).

What, then, is the solution for the poison? The cure for the poison also ties into the water. Rose senses this, but in a twisted way. “I know that his [Larry’s] face is a black ocean and there’s always always always the temptation to drown in that ocean, to just give yourself up and sink. You’ve got to stare back. We have to Stand up…and say, at least to ourselves, that what he’s done before is still with us, still right here in this room until there’s true remorse” (233). Rose is right, but she lets her desire for revenge, and her anger, consume her. It consumes her like her cancer. She insists, “there has to be making amends to the ones you destroyed, otherwise the books are never balanced,..” (254). She sees Harold’s blindness as deserved. “That’s farming. So, I say to Harold, gee, Harold, you should have checked the water tank. That’s farming. They [the old farmers] made rules for us to live by. They’ve got to live by them, too” (254).

Ginny also wants to expose the water. and she keeps feeling the desire to share her secret affair with Jess. “I remembered just then how my mother used to say that…a soul was as clear to God as a rippling brook… Wouldn’t it be a relief to have everything out in the open for once? But that question was easy to answer, too. And the answer was negative. The last few weeks had shown well enough for anyone to understand that the one thing our family couldn’t tolerate, that maybe no family could tolerate, was things coming into the open” (271-2).

Ginny wants to get past the appearances, which are part of the poison. The poison is so strong because “people don’t want to hear the truth” (279). Ty is blind. He doesn’t want the truth. Caroline is blind, and she buys into appearances. She tells Frank about her sisters, “They don’t see what’s there — they see beyond that to something terrible, and it’s like they’re finally happy when they see that! I think things generally are what they seem to be! I think that people are basically good…and ready to make amends! Look at Daddy! He knew he’d treated me unfairly…. lie made amends” (390). Ginny replies, “He thought you were dead.”

When Ginny becomes “new” is when she overcomes appearances, and begins to see people as they really are. “The strongest feeling was that now I knew them all. That whereas for thirty-six years they had swum around me in complicated patterns that I had at best dimly perceived through murky water, now all was clear” (330). When she drives home from dividing up stuff at Larry’s house, she passes drainage wells, and she stops the truck to go stand on one (393). By acknowledging the truth, by going beyond the tight grasp of appearances, by looking at the water and seeing the poison, she begins to gain control of her life. She surrenders to the water, and faces her secrets, the secrets of the family, It’s like Jess describes eastern religion, in the beginning: “They throw themselves on the waters of the world, and they know they will be borne up. They are more secure than you or I” (40). Ginny throws herself on the water.

Jane Smiley sets A Thousand Acres on a farm so she can use the landscape to emphasize the themes she’s trying to develop from the relationship between Ginny and Rose and their father. Her novel is a story about people who grab things, who mold land to their purposes without realizing or admitting that they might be harming or destroying it when they seek to control it. On one level, it’s about “the loop of poison we [Ginny and Rose] drank from, the water running down through the soil, into the drainage wells, into the lightless mysterious underground chemical sea, then being drawn up. cold and appetizing, from the drinking well into Rose’s faucet, my faucet” (398). On another level, it’s about Larry’s abuse, his poisoning his own family without even acknowledging what he’s doing, leaving an inheritance of shame, anger, and pain that eventually leads to the destruction of a thousand acres.