SOURCE: “Remembering/Engendering the Heartland: Sexed Language, Embodied Space, and America's Foundational Fictions in Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres,” in Frontiers, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1997, pp. 181–202.

In the following essay, Carden asserts that Smiley's A Thousand Acres exposes a cultural amnesia created by agrarian life in America that tends to forget and silence the stories of women.

Benedict Anderson defines the modern nation as an “imagined community” that should be distinguished “not by [its] falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which [it is] imagined.”¹ He suggests that we remember national history by forgetting, that in the process of producing and maintaining a coherent “imagined community,” a nation's past is mis-remembered. “Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances,” he proposes, “spring narratives.”² A Thousand Acres,³ Jane Smiley's seventh work of fiction and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, excavates the gendered “amnesias” created by...