The Self And The Other

Although the story frame of Jane smiley's A Thousand Acres comes from Shakespeare's King Lear, their subjects and meanings are different. Ginny, the heroine of the story, lives in a typical patriarchal family. After she is embittered by numerous frustrations, her self -consciousness wakes up gradually. Ginny's conservative and cowardly ideas are the inner enemy of women. A woman should have personal, economic, and most important of all, mental independence. At the same time, Jane Smiley also demonstrates how woman and nature are abused in a patriarchal society, encompassing her eco-feminist concerns.By employing the feminism and the first-person narration, Jane Smiley gives a meticulous portrayal of the psychological activity of the characters, demonstrating the confusion, contradiction, pressure and inner conflict of the contemporary women in their process of their selfhood.This thesis tries to analyze this novel from the theory of Lacan's Mirror Stage, which shows the construction of selfhood is dependent on the other. Selfhood can not be obtained without the interaction with the other. The heroine's long journey of searching for her selfhood is just the process of looking for reliable others. Finally, Ginny is successful in establishing her selfhood, which proves that one is emotionally as well as ontologically dependent upon the other to construct his/her identity.