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familymembers. Since it published, A Thousand Acres has attracted many critics andscholars’ comparatively attention. Therefore, there have a lot of researches been doneat abroad and home.In the west, some scholars research A Thousand Acres from the perspective offeminism and eco-feminism. Marry Paniccia Carden’s Remembering/Engenderingthe Heartland: Sexed Language, Embodied Space, and America’s FundamentalFictions in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres claims that this novel excavates thegendered 'amnesias' created by the agrarian imagined communities inscribed acrossAmerican landscapes. In The Daughter’s Subversion in Jane Smiley’s A ThousandAcers by Susan Strehle, she argues that A Thousand Acres is a novel “in which loyaldaughters and sons are bound to honored fathers with unbreakable chains ofaffiliation”, and it “takes its place in the genre of domestic realism, written largelyabout and for women, often by women writers.” (Strehle 211) Some critics regard this novel as a pastoral novel and study ecologic thought in it. Sara Farris’s AmericanPastoral in the Twentieth-Century considers it as a pastoral novel which presentsthree versions of the late-twentieth-century farm family. Rinda West’s Eating theShadow: Polluted Nature in A Thousand Acres explores how Smiley understands theconsciousness and the problem of shadow in terms of the human relation to nature, inwhich the abuse of power over nature is reflected in two farm families whose bulgingbarns and tidy houses hide toxins and whose soil itself rests on tiles that tried tocontrol an underground sea.
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Chapter One Female and Male Identity Dilemma

Identity plays significant roles in both real life and literary works. There aremany elements which exert influence on the formation of identity. Among theseelements, gender is one of the most important aspects of identity formation.Exploring identities of females and males means looking at the relations betweenfemales and males, and at the relations of females to each other and of males to eachother in the context of a two-gender social reality. Therefore, in order to studyidentity, it is necessary to explore gender. One feature of gender is gender inequalitywhich exits pervasive and universal. For the purpose of better understanding theidentity of female and male, this chapter will focus on gender inequality betweenthem and how the gender inequality leads to female and male identity dilemma.

A. Gender Inequality between Women and Men
The foundation of traditional perceptions of gender is the belief that “there arereal, significant, and immutable differences between men and women.” (Lengermannand Wallace 41) In conventional view, women and men to do the same thing cannotbe expected and it is unnatural that both women and men are good at some things.The pattern of the relationship between female and male and the characteristicsbetween them are taken for opposite or dual, which refers to the assumption ofdualism that is women and men do not have identical attitudes on gender but ratherhave outlooks which are different but complementary. This kind of belief is taken forgranted that female and male generally act different functions in family, communityand society, and usually the dominant position is held by men. Therefore, it can becommented that it is the belief or dualism leads to gender inequality. Uttered byLengermann and Wallace in Gender In America, gender inequality cons