Body and nature as a system of signification in a thousand acres The fascinating thing about theories about bodies is that our bodies lie somewhere in the gray area between the physical and the intellectual realm (in itself testifying to the falsity of such dichotomies). On the one hand they are organic; genetically programmed meat. On the other, they are continuous sites of signification; embodying (no pun intended) the essentially textual quality of a human subject's identity. A Thousand Acres foregrounds the questions raised by the perspective that one's body can be the vehicle for understanding oneself and the world. One of the ways in which this is done is part of a larger project of ecofeminist rhetoric, creating numerous analogies between the body and nature. This is first seen when Ginny uses nature in the Scenic. Not only are "cattails green and fleshy" (7, emphasis mine), but the natural scene forms a system as meaningful as its own body, a way to metaphorically internalize the problems of human interaction. The intertextual body created by A Thousand Acres and King Lear is also wonderfully incorporated into it. In the storm scene, Lear calls Regan and Goneril "those daughters of the pelican" (III.iv.75, meaning that they feed on the blood of their parents). At the Scenic, Ginny sees the pelicans re-emerge after being supposedly annihilated by her farming ancestors, foreshadowing the re-emergence of herself after a life of repression. He can read nature as a text about his own suppression and about the suppression and concealment of what is really happening between the characters in this novel: "The view along the Scenic, I thought, taught me a lesson about what is at below the level of the visible" (9). Nature, for Ginny, is understood through the intertwining of her body's past and that of her body. She "has always been aware [...] of the water in the soil, of the way it travels from particle to particle," an awareness that eventually evolves into understanding and identification. He reflects on the millions of years and billions of "leaves, seeds, feathers, scales, flesh, bones, petals, pollen" (131) that make up the soil on which they live. The hope is that this is a large-scale development of bodily transformation that transcends the exploitative small-scale agriculture of a patriarchal society, and that she is part of it. After all, his body is not just part of the soil, and vice versa, but of the poisoning of nature: "My inheritance is with me, sitting in my chair.