“A memory is what’s left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.”  —Edward de Bono

     Memory defines our lives and makes up who we were, who we are, and who we will become. Before smartphones, posterity relied on history regaled, retold, and remembered. Memory binds Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres from its start. Ginny, the eldest daughter in the Cook family, is the first-person narrator and exclusively uses the past tense. The fictionalized, almost memoir-esque reality forces Ginny to face her faulty memory and what it has done to her decades later. A Thousand Acres is a testament to the memories that bind us and the cost of remembering. 

     Memory highlights the novel’s theme. Misaligned realities stemming from mismatched memories among the Cook family and other minor characters buoy women’s status, generational conflict, farming, land, and land ownership in A Thousand Acres. While it is Ginny’s memory that readers understand the most, the narratives throughout pull from the past while bringing the unknown, and in some cases, the glaringly obvious, to the forefront. Smiley has created a throughline for trauma, memory, and psychology through interweaving narratives, subplots, themes, and revelations. 

     It is essential to note the period of the novel’s inception. The so-called “Memory Wars,” a controversial topic during the novel’s release, sparked debate on the validity of recovered memories (Schönfelder 204). While unabashedly broaching the subject, Smiley’s novel does readers a favor by not magnifying the political nuance and instead frames the effects of memory and trauma. Christa Schönfelder explicates A Thousand Acres in her book Wounds and Words—Childhood and Family Trauma in Romantic and Postmodern Fiction and describes the nature of Smiley’s response to the debate:

“While the novel implicitly subscribes to the psychological notion of memory recovery, its main concern […] is to investigate the psychological and interpersonal ramifications of both amnesia and memory recovery. In other words, A Thousand Acres endorses the notion of memory recovery not with polemical and political fervor but with a nuanced vision of individual and family psychology” (Schönfelder 212).

Memory and its recovery are crucial to the novel for almost all of the characters, but they are rarely questioned. 

     Once the initial shock wears off and the bodily recovery of Ginny’s memory returns, not even she questions herself.  After lying in her childhood bed, her understanding is undeniable, “lying here, I knew that he had been in there to me, that my father had lain with me on that bed, that I had looked at the top of his head, at his balding spot in the brown grizzled hair, while feeling him suck my breasts. That was the only memory I could endure before I jumped out of the bed with a cry” (Smiley 228). Any questions she may have vanished for Ginny and the readers at that moment. 

     While an obvious revision of Shakespeare’s King Lear, this subverted reimagining repaints the “evil” daughters by giving them a history; an abusive background from King Lear (substituted for the family’s patriarch, Lawrence “Larry” Cook) lays a solid foundation for the daughters’ actions. Here, Smiley uses memory as a device to justify the treatment of their father. They did not simply send him out in a storm; they used up all their resources before then and were finally at their wits’ end. Larry’s verbal abuse before the storm was the last straw. Though this theme slowly unravels, his abuse, both in childhood and beyond, infected their memories, outward identities, and sense of self. The magnification of the women’s perspectives is tied to memory and makes A Thousand Acres a genuine revisionist concept. 

     Ginny is a blank canvas in the novel’s first two books. She is complacent as things seem to happen to and around her. This lends to her “keeping up appearances,” a central theme in the book. This seeps into the “ideologies of separate spheres,” where the abuser, a man who works in public outside of the home, is separate from the abused, a woman who stays in the privacy of the home (Hall 371). This creates an imbalance between the “reality” outside of the home and the one inside it. Larry Cook, one of the most notable and respected farmers in Zebulon County, gets to create a narrative for the public. So now, the private life experienced by Ginny and her sister, Rose, goes unnoticed by outsiders. These parallel realities allow Larry to keep his reputation while the girls are censured (Smiley 219). 

     This private half-life creates a complicated reality for Ginny, Rose, and their sister, Caroline. The only reliable arbiter of truth is their memories, which swing violently throughout the novel. The “appearances” wear down two sisters and estrange the third. Brash and moody Rose cannot keep her anger, her rage, at bay. She wants revenge, suffering, and remorse from her abuser, something she does not get. Meek and agreeable Ginny is ambivalent. Her unconscious unhappiness swells so deep within her that for the first half of the novel, there is an air that anything, or nothing, can and will happen to her. Her emergence comes from the recovery of her memories. Caroline, assumingly untouched by her father’s “gift” —i.e., his abuse and its consequences— would rather keep her happy memories intact, so she erupts and blocks any admission of the truth from her sisters (Smiley 220). 

     The hidden memories and secrets also reside inside the home and on the land. The land on which this drama unfolds is also laden with memories and metaphors. Like the Cook family, the once swampy, soggy ground was fabricated, manufactured, and configured into pristine farmland. The tile irrigation allows Larry’s thousand acres to thrive in Zebulon County, but the land is tainted. It holds the memories of the generations before Ginny, and she has no qualms about expressing this to her husband, Ty, after their separation:

 “You see this grand history, but what I see blows. I see taking what you 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?” (Smiley 371). 

It remembers the poison of the previous farmers, Ginny’s ancestors, and colludes with the generational poison of the Cook family. The physically poisoned land and water are most likely responsible for Ginny’s infertility and Rose’s breast cancer. All of the Cook family memories, spanning three generations, lie on that land. It has seen the malicious rise and subsequent fall of the Cook family. 

     The absent mother overbearing father motif is a strong current for the sisters’ relationships. Without an actual mother, Ginny, then Rose, became surrogates for Larry and Caroline. This relationship forced them to contend with adolescent turmoil and maternal care for a child that is not theirs. They did not get to live the totality of childhood and, mixed with the violent abuse ostensibly,  never got to leave it. They were seen as daughters, not as women like Caroline got the chance to become. This setup begins the split in Ginn. She became a full-grown woman without any idea of how to be so. She became a role model, a martyr, and a villain without her consent, and ostensibly at the same time. She and Rose threw themselves on a sword so Caroline could live in privileged ignorance, thus solidifying Caroline’s memory in rose-colored lenses. 

     The execution of Larry’s memories is complex. In this modern tragedy, we “see how the pressures of life or the world warp and twist the average man into a shadow of what he used to be or may have been” (Otto par. 4). While Smiley does not have Larry acknowledge the abuse, his memories and grasp on reality fade. Unable to face his memories and their effects on his daughters, he erases Rose and replaces her with Caroline, the only daughter not tainted by his abuse (Smiley 272). Larry Cook does not have to face his memories or his daughters’ as his mind slips farther from reality. He retreats to Caroline and ostensibly shapes her memory of her sisters in the process. She has been cut off from the inside sphere of the farm and becomes part of the public, receiving the same fabrication as everyone else outside the intimate Cook family dynamics. 

     Ginny’s memory emergence at the midpoint relies on bodily triggers. It is not until she is lying on her childhood bed that she can no longer deny Rose’s accusation. Popular research and discourse, such as The Body Remembers and The Body Keeps Score, by Babette Rothschild and Bessel van der Kolk, respectively, expand on the idea that the body can remember what the mind tries to protect. Though Ginny initially refuses to accept her memories are false, their trail follows her relentlessly. 

     Jocelyn McCracken’s critical essay, “The Land and the Body in A Thousand Acres,” speaks on Ginny’s shame and fear since childhood and its relationship to her physical body.  She extrapolates on how “Ginny feared her father’s memories” by juxtaposing the farm’s poisoned water and Larry’s incestuous relationship with his daughters (McMcracken par. 6). Ginny thinks of her memories of her father as mutating “plastics or radioactive waste” that demolish everything else, much like the land he poisoned that physically harmed her (infertility) and killed her sister (cancer) all the while assuring their survival,  (Smiley 247). The corporeal symbiosis interweaves memory and reality into the Cook’s narrative. 

     The text itself comments on memory with readers experiencing characters’, Ginny especially, memory as they come to the surface. Schönfelder summarizes this: “The process of memory recovery is embedded in a textual structure that evokes central themes and plot elements of tragedy, including secrets and revelations, blindness and anagnorisis” (Schönfelder 212). The first two books leave readers and characters waiting for something to happen. Smiley creates a sense that Ginny is a reliable narrator as she seems “completely truthful, rational, and trustworthy, until Smiley lets us know halfway through the novel that there are things she has hidden from herself, throwing everything into question” (Depasquale par. 9); she seems rational and truthful enough to take readers along as memory unfolds. We are as repressed and confused as the protagonist. 

     The end of “Book Four” sees Ginny sway between the unsure comfort of appearance and the uncomfortable reality of the truth. “Here, I thought, were two people who agreed on so many things that their opinions automatically took on the appearance of reality […] It was […] small, complete, and forever curving back to itself. […] Their world looked far away to me” (Smiley 267-68). Though this comes before Ginny’s memory is triggered, it foreshadows the strength in understanding and the subsequent, and necessary, questioning of reality. Though at this point, she has only been told of her repressed memories, her appearances start to crack as soon as her memory does. 

     Ginny and Rose represent a split of trauma responses, with Ginny the repressed, subservient daughter who, at the core of it, just does not want to face reality until she no longer can. While Rose could do nothing but. The novel portrays two distinct female archetypes: Ginny, a soft, desperate, banal, childless mother, and Rose, the rage she cannot express. However, memory fuses them to the same coin even with such distinct personalities. Even with all her rage, Rose still made consistent meals for and tended to Larry until he left, later taking over the farm. While Ginny, unable to repress the anger any longer, finally leaves the farm and her family. Their memory of the abuse, repressed or expressed, stuck them in a daughter/woman limbo where they are both and neither at the same time. 

     Smiley’s A Thousand Acres could not exist without the explication of memory. The characters’ memories created the metafictional Cook family farm, literally and metaphorically. While the overarching theme of memory creating action is undeniable, Smiley has given breath and voice to trauma survivors and a narrative of the long-term effects of surviving trauma. Every single character is directly or indirectly affected by Larry Cook’s abuse. One man affected the memories, realities, and trajectory of generations, tattooing himself on everyone he touches in the novel. A Thousand Acres is more than a tome of the memories of the most well-respected farms in Zebulon County and what became of them; it is a testament to survivors. 

Works Cited 

DePasquale, Katie. “The Intersection of Memory and Power in the Witch Elm and a Thousand Acres.” The Ploughshares Blog, 13 Mar. 2019, blog.pshares.org/the-intersection-of-memory-and-power-in-the-witch-elm-and-a-thousand-acres/.

Hall, Kelley J. “Putting the Pieces Together: Using Jane Smiley’s ‘A Thousand Acres’ in Sociology of Families.” Teaching Sociology, vol. 28, no. 4, 2000, pp. 370–78. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1318586. Accessed 10 Apr. 2024.

McCracken , Jocelyn. “The Land and the Body in a Thousand Acres: Synaptic.” Central College, 2000, central.edu/writing-anthology/2019/06/17/the-land-and-the-body-in-a-thousand-acres/.

Otto, Diana. “The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.” Yale New Haven Teacher Institute, 1 Sept. 2001, teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/2001/4/01.04.06/3.

Rothschild, Babette. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma Treament. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

Schönfelder, Christa. Wounds and Words Childhood and Family Trauma in Romantic and Postmodern Fiction. Transcript Verlag, 2013.

Smiley, Jane. A Thousand Acres: A Novel. Anchor Books, a Division of Random House, 2006.

Van der Kolk , Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin, 2015.