King Lear and Good vs. Evil Theme Analysis

It’s no secret that A Thousand Acres is based on William Shakespeare’s famous tragedy King Lear. Where Shakespeare’s work is about an elderly king who tries to divide up his property between his three daughters, Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia, Smiley’s novel is about an elderly farmer, Larry Cook, who tries to divide up his property between his three daughters, Rose, Ginny, and Caroline. There are long passages in A Thousand Acres that are intended as homages to famous speeches from King Lear, and many of the secondary and even smaller characters have direct counterparts in Lear. It’s certainly important to keep the parallels between Smiley’s novel and Shakespeare’s play in mind while reading A Thousand Acres. But Smiley’s goal isn’t just to re-tell King Lear in a modern setting. Rather, she uses the original play as a source that she then plays with and revises, offering her own interpretation and critique of Shakespeare’s themes.

Lear, as its title suggests, puts the king at its center and explores its story around that central focus. A Thousand Acres, with a title that focuses on the land being divided rather than on any one character, takes a broader view, and in particular spends more time on the daughters’ side of the story: Ginny (the counterpart to Goneril, who in Lear is power-hungry and greedy above all else) is the narrator of the novel. By focusing on Ginny’s perspective, the novel presents her with real complexity. It isn’t that she’s presented as purely virtuous or good in the novel – she’s at times power-hungry, greedy, and vengeful, to name a few traits – but the novel does present her choices and actions within a broader context, and in doing so shows how so-called “evil” women might themselves be the victims of societal evils like sexism and abuse.

More broadly speaking, Smiley retells Lear in such a way that the characters in Lear who seemed more overtly evil (such as Edmund, Goneril, and Regan) are now presented as neither entirely sympathetic nor completely evil (Ginny, Jess Clark, Rose). Ginny initially seems to be a decent, moral person, and believes herself to be a decent person even after her actions grow increasingly greedy and cruel, making it more difficult for readers to condemn or condone these actions. Even a character like Larry Cook, who’s guilty of an unambiguously evil crime, rape, may himself be the victim of other people’s evil deeds later in life. In general, A Thousand Acres uses its Lear allusions to suggest that labels like “good” and “evil” often can’t be so firmly applied in the real world.