셰익스피어의 『 리어왕』 과 스마일리의 『 천 에이커』 : 딸들의 잊힌 기억 이야기

Abstract

An American novelist Jane Smiley, in her novel A Thousand Acres published in 1991, rewrites Shakespeare’s King Lear focusing on the father-daughter relations followed by father’s sudden decision to divide and inherit the kingdom/farmland to his daughters. Lear’s two older daughters, Goneril and Regan are two of most wicked characters invented by Shakespeare. But, their evil behaviors are presented as motiveless without being allowed any proper causes for their actions, and they are only used to recover male narratives and institution. Their history until their adulthood is completely erased. In order to rescue them from such notorious fame, Smiley’s overall purpose is to fill in many of gaps in Lear story: the story of missing mother, and the reason for the older daughters’ anger to Lear. In both of King Lear and A Thousand Acres the figure of mother is also absent, but the difference is: whereas Shakespeare erased any trace of mother, which leads to absence of women’s history, except a short remark on Edmund’s mother, Smiley frequently provides remarks on mother(s) and allows Ginny, the counterpart to Goneril and the narrator of the novel, to remember her mother’s past, which leads to her awakening to the fallacy of men’s continual efforts to expand the farmland. The purpose of male farmers’ activity has been to transform the natural land to arable land by taking advantage of any possible technologies. Remembering women’s history allows her to realize how men’s forcing development or exploitation of land having been destroying women’s bodies as illustrated in the fact that chemical fertilizers ever caused her a series of miscarriages. The process of Giny’s remembering of women’s past reaches a peak at her memory of incests done by her father in her childhood. For her father Larry, a Lear figure, abuse or exploitation of the natural land is closely connected with his abuse of women’s bodies. This is what Smiley insures is the very cause of the older daughters’ resistance to their father. Ginny hopes to construct an alternative life; she escapes from the a thousand acre farmland and her husband to a new city to start her life as a waitress at a roadside cafe. She recovers a mother’s role by taking care of the dead Rose’s two daughters, and a life of independent woman, who can write her own history, by studying psychology in a college. In the end she finds a way to be a woman and a mother.