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This paper aims to analyze A Thousand Acres with psychoanalysis through Peter Brooks’s plot theory. Brooks points out in Reading for the Plot a dynamic of desire animating narrative and construal of its meaning and a careful examination of Freud’s psychoanalytic practice and formulation of a “masterplot” or paradigm for reading plot in narrative.
A Thousand Acres is a story about loyal daughter and sons are bound to honored father with unbreakable chains of affiliation. This story is very similar to Shakespeare’s King Lear as the confession of the author and is always told in relation of parallel both story. But Its form and style become quite strange as soon as a reader identifies the looming presence of King Lear beneath the narrative surface. The difference dues to author’s narrative desire to express man’s imperious wrath and woman’s passive attitude through oblivion and abandonment. A woman story of mundane domestic life, told in a plain style, parodies a Shakespeare tragedy about kinship, pride, and death, told in elevated and ceremonious blank verse befitting noble speakers. Smiley’s remarkable achievement in A Thousand Acres is to expose the previously invisible linens of affiliation between these two kinds of narrative and thus to disrupt both. Smiley wants to
expose a patriarchal brute force owing to King Lear in this novel. But even so, She actually uncovers a weakness as a woman writer repeatedly. This story can be read another direction in terms of incest and echo-feminism about nature and human. Even though writer’s pleasure principle is to express man’s destructive authority, the recurrent compulsion is forgetfulness, concealment and inertia to the last extremity.