| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 外國語文學系 === 88 === What does the land represent and how does it relate to characters in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres? In this novel, people’s farming consciousness is always constituted by a certain ideology, which enters and helps form their beliefs, values, and ways of acting and feeling, and through which they perceive, explain, and interact with the world. With ideas or metaphors of all kinds, people are on their lands, having a land, or with their lands, thus making it difficult to exactly define what the land is. Herself being situated in tempo-spatial condition of the Iowa farm, the narrator (Virginia Cook Smith) reveals a story about her family (the Cooks) history and the Zebulon community environment. The imagination of the land is parallel to a certain concept of axis upon which many problems of the American family are projected. To identify the land is to make it take part in the signifying process. Signing or marking the land signifies its passage into writing, and through a series of changing process, the land is remapped symbolically. In this thesis, the issue of land is examined and the phenomenon of rewriting/remapping the land is studied.
This thesis includes an introduction, a main body of three chapters, and an afterword. In the introduction, the main ideas of the following three chapters are briefly introduced, and the story of A Thousand Acres is summarized. An interview of Jane Smiley is excerpted to illustrate how the author interprets her novel and the female characters in Shakespeare’s King Lear. In addition, there are discussions of Scott C. Holstad’s notion of the paternal language being the dominant language of the Iowa farm and Mary Paniccia Carden’s analysis of “the unsaid” told by Ginny to undermine the foundation of the father’s authority.
Chapter One proposes a synthetical reading of defining the metaphor of land as located in the cultural space of human beings. The land is considered as a sign (or, examined as a sign) or an allegory. Even the seemingly insignificant tile system or the wells on the farm help define the signified land. And through a series of changing process, how these characters define their common position and what it means for them become comprehensible. As long as the land becomes a subject/object that enters the process of writing, the configuration of the land can be drawn and the following issues will be addressed, for the land has become a commodity creating its use value, exchange system, fetishism, and power discourse.
In Chapter Two, economically, the problem of exploring the land is scrutinized. Based upon the concepts in Karl Marl’s Capital and Jean-Joseph Goux’s Symbolic Economics, the idea concerning the use value and exchange value of the land is examined. The land becomes both symbolic money and father whose economic power is operated in commodity exchange. With the land being the value form of money, the image of the golden father is created. Under the operation of this capitalistic system, the land ultimately means money and the urge for more industrial development is always there in this exchange system.
In Chapter Three, there is a survey of how rewritten lands influence lives of the characters in this novel. The living space on the land is the subject of the environmental concern. From an eco-centric point of view, the significant soil, the Iowa farm, is treated as a green language revealing a farm history with ecological developments. There are discussions of the concern of disease and polluted water, chemicals and polluted land, and organic food and the Foucaultian idea of regimen.
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