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| Housekeeping |
| 作者Author / Marilynne Robinson 瑪麗蓮．羅賓森 |
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Study Guide
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 A Summary of Housekeeping
Major Themes:
Mothers, (Fathers,) and Daughters
Feminine Writing and Women's Stories
Symbolic Meanings
The West and Transient
Housekeeping As a Metafiction
Reference
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| A Summary of Housekeeping |
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The two young girls, Ruth and Lucille are abandoned by a series of caregivers because their father leaves and their mother commits suicide. Thus, they are under the care of a series of family members: grandmother, two great ants and finally their ant, Sylvie.
The family house is in the small town on a glacial lake in West. The lake is where their grandfather died in a train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to death. Then, The two sisters gradually become different after Sylvie comes. Sylvie is a transient so her way of keeping house is also different from the conventional ones that are emphasized on a clean and order house. For example, Sylvie likes keep the door and window open in order to break the boundary between nature and her house. Actually, Ruth and Lucille have different views toward Sylvie and her housekeeping. Finally, they develop different subjectivity: Lucille follows her home-economic teacher to join the conventional and stable way of female life; Ruth chooses to follow Sylvie to be a drifter. In the end of the story, Ruth and Sylvie fire the house and begin their wandering life of being transients. Therefore, the house which the grandmother tries to keep for her whole life cannot be kept at all.
Plot:
1. grandfather's death --> grandmother's; 2. Lily and Nona's arrival and taking care of Ruth and Sylvie; 3. Sylvie's arrival; 4. the flood; 5. after the flood and Sylvie's housekeeping; 6 . the summer before Lucille changes, her disagreement with Sylvie; 7. summer truancies: spending the night in the woods; Lucille and Ruth taking different direction to search for their "home." Lucille's departure; 8. the trip to the "place" with a fallen house; 9. the town intervenes and Sylvie tries to reform her ways of housekeeping; 10. burning the books, 11. burning down the house and leaving.
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| Mothers, (Fathers,) and Daughters |
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"What you choose to do has a shadow of what you choose to forego.
In order to create that feeling of dimensionality, I simply split up one woman and made her into a group of women." (Robinson from the Interview )
Grandmother's housekeeping & love
- grandmother twofold marginalization (the town, how they recognize her death)
- after Grandfather's death: (1) p. 11-12; perfect serenity p. 13;
- Not really to keep them:
- Her feelings about Edmund's death and of his disappearance before his death 10;
- sense of love after marriage: (1) p. 12;
- the resurrection of the ordinary pp. 15-18 (or strangeness in the ordinary)
- changes in the daughter pp. 13-15
- 2nd-time childcare and housekeeping:
- as if dreaming, insecure 24-25; pie for ghost children-- with well-meaning and despair; 26
- aging p. 26;
Ruth and Lucille's "mothers"
- Helen and her house see only the tented top 20; string attached to the children 21;
- the two aunts, Lily and Nona:
- consensus, habit and familiarity: 30, 32;
- their dialogue p. 30;
- their response to the two girls: unpracticed pats and kisses. (2) p. 29; utter fear of the outside world p. 36;
- their views of Sylvie p. 38
Sylvie and her housekeeping
- her transienct actions: Sylvie on the rail 80; 82-83
- housekeeping: pp. 85; her ways of buying things 93; evening 99; Sylvie compared with Helen (7) p. 110
- how she changes her ways of housekeeping after the town's intervention 199
The daughters
- missing the mother: searching and waiting for resurrection like hoboes p. 96, missing the mother p. 121
- in need of a mother: snow woman 60; 96
- schooling 76
- Lucille vs. Sylvie: defending her p. 57-58; children p. 69 ; dressing 92-94; husband 100-101;
- Ruth's differences from Lucille: Lucille's response to the flood p. 65; her response to seeing Sylvie on the bridge 81-82; last summer (6) 98-99;
- different views of their "mother" (7) p. 109-110;
- Ruth needs Sylvie -- Ruth's fear of separation p. 68; p. 70-71; 106; 109
- Lucille's taking action (7) p. 122 -
- Ruth unwilling to follow; finds what she lost in Sylvie's house 124 -
- Ruth's growth 146, 162;
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| Feminine Writing and Women's Stories |
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- Confirmation and a metaphysical examination of what house/home keeping means.
- Narrative Style: circular and associative
- recurrence of her love for Edmund after his death : e.g. the wind passage -- pp.. 16-18;
- repetition of the quietness after the daughters' departure p. 15; repetition of descriptions of grandmother's housekeeping, e.g. 27.
- the train as a metaphor pp. 53-
- Women's stories:
- Molly p. 90; Helen, Sylvie,
- Bernice's taking care of Ruth and Lucille 21-22;
- grandmother's mother's story about a woman and ghost children 25-26;
- Ettie's story about an old lady and her parrot p. 24;
- Noa's wife 172; Lot's wife 153, 185 (loss)
- Sylvie's stories: lonely women 66-67; about traveling women: Edith, a woman of substance p. 87; Alma, seeing the sunset 88; the lady who goes to see her cousin being hanged 104; p. 171
Men in the novel -- shy, shown in photos, like to travel
1. Grandfather
- (1): pp. 3-4 -- his adventure;
- (1): pp. 5-6 -- the derailment of the train and his death
- (2): p. 40 -- his "importance" (the photo)
2. Reginald Stone
- mentioned on (1) p. 14 (photo); (3) pp. 51-52;
3. Fisher -- p. 15 not even a photo, no name. His job is unclear (6) pp. 101-102.
4. Cixous
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| Symbolic Meanings |
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Housekeeping vs. the lake and the flood; brightness and darkness; the train "A lot of the things that are in Housekeeping are preoccupations that emerged from this kind of writing without any specific intentions -- and they were preoccupations I wasn't particularly aware of, like housekeeping, and memory, and place" (Robinson from the Interview )
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| The West and Transient |
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About the American West. "That's the part of the country where I grew up . . . and it's a part of the country that people in general have a very impoverished imagination of." (source)
the town vs. transients:
- Ruth's feelings about the town and the world: the world's gaze (distorting) p. 99
- the town represented by Rosette Brown's mother (6) pp. 103; 104
- Ruth's association with hoboes 96; Fingerbone vs. transients (like ghosts, like people on the photos) 179
Ruth's growth:
R's silence (does not know what she thinks) 105; Ruth's awkwardness felt very tall 121;
Her narration shows how she understands grandmother and Sylvie. pp. 48-49.
Her use of "we" p. 98; Her different interpretation of staying overnight in Nature 116
speak to "you" about breaking up a family p. 190
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| Housekeeping As a Metafiction |
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As Patricia Waugh points out, "Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality" (2). Metafiction blurs the boundary between life and art, fiction and criticism, and fiction and reality.
Housekeeping doesn't show the elements of metafiction in its form but in its content. The centric issue of Housekeeping, as the main characteristic of metafiction, is blurring boundary. In Housekeeping, the boundaries such as life and death, inside and outside, nature and domestic place, and past and present are all blurred. Here, I am going to use water image, the lake in this novel, as an example to show how the boundary between life and death is blurred.
I. The passage about the lake in Housekeeping:
It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless water below. When the ground is plowed in the spring, cut and laid open, what exhales from the furrows but that same, sharp, watery smell. The wind is watery, and all the pumps and creeks and ditches smell of water unalloyed by any other element. At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black. Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock and see stony, earthy bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground. And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds. And above that the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains. (9)
 Explanation: The lake, which has four levels, is changeful.
(Actually, in this novel, nothing is fixed; even the house cannot be kept in the end).
I. The first level of the lake: the deepest level, the old lake where the dead are. (The grandfather and Helen, Ruth and Lucille's mother are dead in this lake.)
2. The second level of the lake: Fingerbone itself, the lake of human life and memory, the town can be a lake, the town is a lake and part of the lake. When there is a flood, the town is immersed in the lake.
3. The third level of the lake: it also touches life because the plants and grass absorb water from the soil.
4.The last level which is on the surface of the lake: the dampness in the air, water suspended in sunlight, the lake can rise and turn into air.
II. Boundary between life and death
- As for the lake itself: There are levels of death and life of the lake. Since the air and the soil are watery (and the circulation of water and air), the boundary between life and death is blurred. Thus the lake itself can be seen as all of human existence (include life and death) are unstable and changeful as the lake presents.
- As for the town and the lake: Through flood, there is no boundary between the town and the lake; again, no boundary between life (the town) and death (the lake). [Actually, the flood also makes no distance between Sylvie's house and the town (inside and outside)]
- There is no boundary between life and death, furthermore, no boundary between absence (the dead) and presence.
III. The characters who long for rootless are more akin to the lake.
- The grandfather who is anxious about "foreshortened" perspective pioneers the descent into the lake.
- Sylvie who likes the freedom of nature often spends her time at the lake and returns home "with fish in her pockets" (136).
- Ruth who also inclines for transient life likes go to the lake either for escaping human society or for remembering her mother.
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| Reference |
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Cixous: "The Laugh of Medusa"
- Why don't you write? (317)
- women's writing --
1. individually (writing from the body 320)
2. seizing the occasion to speak (321)
3. from woman and for women --"first music from the first voice of love"; writing in white ink (322);
4. the Realm of the Gift vs. the Realm of the Proper (property-- appropriate--the fear of castration)
5. writing (323-24) -- 'work on the difference'
6. the other bisexuality--multiple, variable and ever changing, consisting as it does of the 'non-exclusion either of the difference or of one sex'.
7. flying (325)
8. "heterogeneous" and erogenous
More about Cixous Helene Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa" Site (remote)
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