King_Lear_Thousand_Acres

“A Thousand Acres” is a modern remake of the famous Shakespearean play, King Lear. As a result one can find many similarities between the two texts. There are also important differences that affect the final message of the texts. The following will cover the main similarities and differences between the two texts through a close study of Lear’s/Larry’s character. It will also demonstrate how minor changes in the fundamentals of a plot could consequently lead to a completely different approach the reader or viewer could’ve also considered. In Shakespeare’s play, Lear is initially portrayed as an arrogant, self-assured and over-proud king who is so drowned in the luxury of his authority and power that he has confused his kingship with his fatherhood. In an unexpected strategy, the proud king decides to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. However, he does not do it through a political sense and neither through common sense: the daughter which praises and flatters him the most will be his choicest for a greater percentage of the kingdom. It is shocking to see the king of Britian, a man whose wisdom is supposed to be helping an entire country, fails to help himself and understand how praise could be bought with wealth. Larry’s (Lear’s modern character in the movie) approach is far more conceivable and logically satisfying for the viewers. He gathers his daughters to simply tell them about his will to retire and give away the farm. He directly asks for their opinion, not their immediate praise or flattery. Since Larry’s position in his farming society has been established as a leader like Lear in his kingdom, he wishes not to be rejected and even opinions should be in his favour! Lear and Larry both are arrogant and over-ensured of themselves. Moorehouse represents Larry as a respected father and social leader whose word should never be let down, and Lear as the king of a country, whose praise should always, even if artificial, be the indication of his loyalty and wealth. Larry wants to use his influential position to reject every opinion; Lear wants to use his power and wealth to gain love. Both traits are indications of weak characters; Larry in decision, Lear in gain of love, and both most definitely in wisdom. From this it can be deduced that the characterization of Lear and Larry are very similar initially and show the two author’s objective to create symbols of power without wisedom. Morehouse’s later approaches towards Larry’s character changes. The reason for this is because Moorhouse chooses to reproduce King Lear through the eyes of the two “evil daughters”, a female narration compared to Shakespeare’s male-dominant reality. In Lear, the reader does not discover about Lear’s past. Whilst in the movie, Larry’s dark past is a motivation or an accepted excuse for the two daughters (and even for the readers) to bring justice back to the girls by treating their father the way they wish. Because the reader finds about Larry’s sexual history with his very young daughters, an immediate sense of hate is drawn towards his character and they do not, no longer feel pity for him compared to King Lear, where Lear has been mistreated harshly. This distinct difference is perhaps the most important as it shapes the symbol of the oppression in the reader’s mind. In one scenario, the poor Lear is harshly rejected by the oppression of his evil and money-hungry daughters, whilst in the other the daughters are those under oppression and it is their right to fight, even aggressively, for justice to be served. Moorsehouse has gone even further in adjusting the content of King Lear to fit it with her feminist approach. As a part of a classical tragedy, Shakespeare’s tragic hero, King Lear, undergoes through rapid moral changes in his personality – a very dynamic character. Larry is, however, not of that sort. Both Lear and Larry’s sense of betrayal and humiliation lead them to their madness and insanity, but they both do not end the same. Lear seemingly redeems himself and reaches back to intellect to see just how much he has hurt his loyal daughter, Cordellia. Larry, however, falls deeper in his world of confusion and fades away from the list of major characters towards the end of the movie just like Regan and Gonerill fade away in King Lear. Hence, if Shakespeare’s play revolved around the male character of Lear, then for Moorehouse to adapt her feminist approach and make the viewers (in plain terms) feel sorry for the two girls, then she must transform Shakespeare’s evil daughters to the oppressed elements of the play, and Lear’s dramatic death (a successful redemption) to a miserable life for Larry (an ongoing failure). Although Moorehouse gives us Shakespeare’s King Lear story backwards, but there surely exist connections between the two texts. It is obviously as a result of these similarities that AThousand Acres is considered a remake of King Lear and indeed because of the differences that the readers become exposed to a whole different approach which they might have not considered previously.