Body and Nature as Metaphor in A Thousand Acres Most problems on a farm come back to the question of keeping up appearances. (Smiley p.199)[T]he female body is a reservoir, a virgin area of ​​still, stagnant water where the fetus comes to term. (Paglia p.27)[A] the fetus is a benign tumor, a vampire who steals to live. (Paglia p.11) The epigraph of this novel is taken from "The Ancients and the Newcomers":The body repeats the landscape. They are each other's source and create each other. We have been marked by the seasonal body of the earth, by the terrible migrations of people, by the rapid turn of a century, on the edge of a change never before experienced on this increasingly green planet. This encapsulates much of what the novel is about, each sentence having some meaning to its project. Human bodies, as well as the "earth body", are subject to both seasonal and social changes. Elsewhere I argue how Ginny's body becomes a signifying system for social relationships, as does the scenery that surrounds her. Here I would like to explore the multiple meanings of the tile pattern. When Ginny's ancestors arrived, their land was swampy, damp, impossible to farm. The laying of the tiles drained the water and became the basis of their wealth: "magically, the tiles produced prosperity" (15). This means the control that capitalist industrial agriculture exerts over nature, a control that ultimately becomes destructive. As Jess tells Ginny, Larry's way of farming has poisoned the land and its people: "People have known for ten years or more that nitrates in well water cause miscarriages and baby deaths. Don't you know that Does fertilizer runoff end up in the aquifer?” (165). The richness of the surface and the treacherous, wet p...... center of the paper ......y to turn destructive forces to one's advantage. The important difference, which unites the issues of the body and nature in the novel, is that its poison is not chemical, but natural: the hemlock root. Ginny imagines the poisoning of Rose's body as the inevitable result of Rose's incest, but it is also indirectly the result of her abuse: "I thought [...] of that cell dividing in the dark and then lives rather than living." dying, subdividing, multiplying, growing, the true third son of Rose [...]. Her dark child, the son of her union with dad."(323)When he destroys the jar of poison, the only remaining object of his past life and metaphorical container of the destructive path of that life, he stops the spread of social and filial poison, preventing its influence on the lives of the future generation: Pammy and Linda This is the hope of the future.