Yet how could it be otherwise, since the very notion of a self, the very shape of human life stories, has always, from St. Augustine to Freud, been modeled on the man?

Barbara Johnson, “My Monster/My Self”

When we write primarily of women and not in opposition to men, according to Mary Jacobus, we are subverting convention by presenting “a difference of view”—an attempt to inscribe female difference within writing as an alternative to separatism or appropriation.¹ Such subversions aptly characterize Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, a novel in which narrative view shifts quickly from Edmund Foster, the patriarch of the novel's central family, to the women who survive him: his widow, Sylvia; her three daughters, Sylvie, Molly, and Helen; and Helen's daughters, Lucille and Ruth (who serves as narrator). Husbands and fathers mysteriously disappear in the first chapter of Housekeeping before the lives of the women unfold, almost as a prologue to the novel proper.² The novel avoids thereby an oedipal narrative of Edmund Foster, a master plot determined by the role of the father, in order to represent those conflicts generated by the figure of the mother. With the novel's opening sentence (“My name is Ruth”) and its allusion to the Old Testament story of loyalty between daughter and mother-in-law, we are turned to a story of feminine escape and love. The allusion recalls for us how Ruth and Naomi, through their bond of devotion, escape the bitter abandonments of the past, and their escape informs Robinson's novel as its primary theme. Housekeeping clearly values the mother/daughter relationship, but in allowing the women of the novel to come into their own, Robinson also attempts a new kind of expressivity, inscribing female difference within writing itself. This “difference within,” as Barbara Johnson calls it, is enacted through Robinson's poetics of “transience,” a specifically female mode of experience and language.³

The place of this rewriting is the American pastoral. The impulse of the dominant ideology of this pastoral, brilliantly charted by Annette Kolodny, is to view the landscape as feminine and as victim to the masculine activity of cultivation.⁴ But Ruth's narrative in Housekeeping does not entail a despoiling of nature or of the mother; it tries to rid itself of the destructive tendencies which led Thoreau to recognize that “his own pen was a weapon that, however much it celebrated the settlement of America, aligned itself unnervingly with the destruction of the New Eden.”⁵ Ruth's narrative of female transience and unconventional housekeeping suggests that an illusion of ownership and mastery has blinded men to the meaning of a feminine nature. Ruth attempts to embrace feminine nature and the mother, countering the violence of what John Crowe Ransom in the 1930 agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand called “the masculine form.”⁶

Ruth's account of Edmund Foster before he dies follows the line of narratives that link the seekers of the American primitive with the violation of once inviolate land. The father embodies the American spirit of enterprise; his ambitions for “success, recognition, and advancement” are shaped by his youth spent in an eye-level, sod-bound, womb-like house in the Midwest.⁷ Foster, like many heroes from fiction by Cooper, Melville, James, and Fitzgerald, must confound the circumscriptions of his original home by appropriating a space fit for his imagination. He therefore flees the sod house, catches a train west, and settles in stupendously mountainous Idaho, in Fingerbone, a town created out of what “once belonged to the lake” (4) and for which the “whole of human history had occurred elsewhere” (62). Foster's settlement in Fingerbone is identified with the railroad's incursion into the wilderness. He rises rapidly to the rank of stationmaster, and we are reminded of Emerson's use of the railroad to represent the domination of men over nature and to represent the individual who stands out above the masses. The paradox at the heart of American pastoral colonization is the paradox of Foster's narrative: as Kolodny puts it, “The success of settlement depended on the ability to master the land, transforming the virgin territories into something else—a farm, a village, a road, a railway.”⁸ Foster's cultivation is like Thoreau's “penetration of Nature”—a project analogously yoking writing, building, and plowing—which, as Eric Sundquist rightfully observes, has two sides: “On the one hand, it is a rude despoiling, but on the other, it represents a fathering and impregnation, the necessary cultivation entailed by settlement.”⁹

Edmund Foster needs to find natural challenges his imagination can humanize, and his settling signifies claims of ownership and authorship. Foster settles on the outskirts of town, on top of a hill, and, knowing nothing of carpentry, nevertheless builds a house notable for its extraordinary trap doors and pulleys, random fenestration, and self-sufficient air. His yearly wildflower hunt, with its booty of flowers that he presses alphabetically into a dictionary, is an example of the way Foster's efforts mutilate and destroy the objects of his exploration and cast nature as the trophy of his knowledge. Foster is not content either to appreciate or simply pick the wildflowers, but lifts them “earth and all” to replant at home, where they will die. Edmund's wife, Sylvia, wishes that he, rather than a man hunting wildflowers attired in necktie and suspenders, were a “dark man with crude stripes painted on his face and sunken belly” (17). Sylvia wishes he would cultivate his own primitiveness rather than domesticate wildflowers—a reversal Sylvie and Ruth will successfully enact.

Because Foster prides himself on mastery, it is ironic that the event propelling the novel into its own female life is the derailment of the train he is riding, the Fireball, and its plunge off the bridge across the lake leading into Fingerbone. Although no one sees the Fireball's disappearance in the middle of a moonless night, it is the town's most widely, even nationally, reported news. The townspeople gather at the shore, and divers search the chilly, opaque waters through the following days, but the only items retrieved from the wreck are fragmentary, transient, literal, and, to the mind of the townspeople, worthless: a suitcase, a seat cushion, a lettuce—“no relics but three, and one of them perishable” (7). The Fireball, representative of civilization's agents and carrying Foster, the stationmaster, paradoxically repenetrates nature by plunging into the feminized landscape, the bottomless lake out of which Fingerbone was created, in an updated version of the “imperialistic eroticism” Kolodny has observed throughout American literature and described in the phrase “the lay of the land.” I say bottomless lake because Robinson emphasizes the impossibility of tapping its depths. When the divers search for Foster's train, the lake temporarily and tantalizingly seems to avail itself to their exploration, allowing what might be a glimpse of the actual train, only to seal over by evening.

The train's plunge might indeed be understood as a sublimated return to the Mother. This is no coincidence; for the women of the novel, the absence of husbands and fathers is the prerequisite for their own development. Housekeeping centers primarily on the two granddaughters, Ruth and Lucille. At an early age they are deserted inexplicably by their father and then as well by their mother Helen, who commits suicide by driving a car into the same lake her father's train fell into. Like Edmund Foster, Helen is never found. Her death allows a range of female relations to develop, all prompted by the girls' need of a mother. First, the grandmother, Foster's widow Sylvia, raises them, her second chance at mothering father-less daughters. Upon her death, the elderly, reclusive, and unmarried sisters-in-law, Lily and Nona, try their hand, with disastrous results; for they are too cautious and stiff in their ways to cope with the young girls or the natural challenges of life in Fingerbone. Their defeat makes the unthinkable thinkable—to recall home to Fingerbone the transient, wayward, and outcast Sylvie, sister of Helen, to raise Ruth and Lucille, her nieces. Sylvie had left Fingerbone some years before to marry, but her husband also mysteriously disappeared, and she began a satisfying life of transience, riding the trains, sleeping on the outskirts of towns with an assortment of female transients, whose stories she later tells—a life, in short, without claims of ownership or settlement. Yet she returns to Fingerbone to assume the care of Lucille and Ruth.

This series of examples of woman-centered housekeeping is neither a utopian fantasy of female homogeneity nor a monolithic tribute to female essence. The lake claims Foster, but traces of his power remain, as embodied in the social institutions of Fingerbone—the Methodist Church, the school, and the sheriff's office, which attempt to remove Ruth from Sylvie's care because their transient housekeeping does not conform to the town's standards. Although the novel concerns itself almost exclusively with the relations among women subsequent to Foster's death, the Foster females, isolated on the edge of town, still must respond to the authoritative dictates of Fingerbone, where social institutions insist upon a gender hierarchy and are intolerant of the unconventional, and from the town's masculine perspective, unfeminine behavior of Sylvie and Ruth, specifically their returning to Fingerbone in a freight car.

Foster's patriarchal legacy also resides in the house he has built—a “reliquary” where even lost things abide and haunt—wherein the women who survive him live, for building houses has been, most obviously in Thoreau's Walden, a metaphor for the highly valued masculine and figurative rituals of art. One builds houses to possess what nature otherwise possesses. For Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Emerson, writing is an analogy to building and depends upon the symbolic possession of landscape. But this paradigm is problematic for women and women writers, who in any traditional thematics of gender are identified with nature and matter and who are the caretakers, not the builders, of houses. If woman is identified with nature and matter—the objects of male symbolization—women may wish to preserve nature from the effects of symbolization as they may prefer to extend the rapport with their mothers rather than honor the symbolic order of the father.¹⁰

The novel begins with a structure of opposition between the sexes in place; its respective definitions of masculinity and femininity operate as a kind of Genesis or master story, and is referred back to as a point of origin the woman-centered novel departs from. Women's place in language and culture, from the master story's androcentric perspective, is suppressed and silent. Robinson uses the master story as a narrative the women's silenced story subverts. In this way Foster's death leaves a mixed legacy: it creates a received and socially reinforced past, symbolized most clearly by the house he built and the story of his death, and yet it makes possible a new freedom: “They were cut free,” as Robinson writes, “from the troublesome possibility of success, recognition, advancement. … Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, supper time, lilac time, apple time” (13). By convention, abandonment suggests suffering, nostalgia, a subjection to the past, but for Sylvie and Ruth, abandonment becomes a way of life, the means to overcome subjection to the past. While the losses of husbands and fathers mark their lives, these same losses enable. Loss operates as the fruitful disruption of a family life characterized by gender differences. Foster's death restores his wife and daughters to their “proper natures” (13) and issues in the evolution of gynocentric life among the surviving females, explicitly a return to the pre-oedipal bond between the mother and her three daughters, which foreshadows the later and more lasting bond created and sustained by Sylvie and Ruth: “After their father's death the girls attended to their mother in the intense way they had clustered about her as small children. … Their mother felt them leaning toward her, looking at her face and her hands” (11).

For the mother's part, she, too, was intensely aware of “the smell of their hair, their softness, breathing, abruptness” (11). The circle of mutual closeness filled the mother with “a strange elation, the same pleasure she had felt when any one of them, as a sucking child, had fastened her eyes on her face and reached for her other breast, her hair, her lips, hungry to touch …” (11). What has long been suppressed under the father's stewardship is allowed, only through his absence, to emerge. Edmund Foster's death brings a new intimacy between Sylvia and her daughters, as if finally, without the father, the daughters recover their mother. While serenity and intimacy are restored after Foster's death, they are fragile and short-lived, for the three daughters disappear “as absolutely as their father had done” (25). Of all the variations of gynocentric life, Sylvia Foster embodies the most traditional correlation between housekeeping and mothering. The nurturing of her daughters takes place through the daily rituals of housekeeping: whiting shoes and braiding hair are medleyed with frying chicken and turning back bedclothes. Although the bond between mother and daughters is temporarily complete, we infer that the closed, womb-like equation between mothering and housekeeping will finally prove claustrophobic for the daughters.

As I have said, traditionally women have been identified with the house they keep. Women's work—housekeeping, child-rearing, sewing, preparing meals—reflects the measly value of the feminine and literal in androcentric culture, even though they are processes of tending to imaginative space. The differing responses by the town to Edmund Foster's death and to his wife Sylvia's later death reflect this unequal valuation: Sylvia Foster's black-bordered obituary carries no picture of her and omits the time of her funeral, recounting instead the Fireball's derailment and featuring photos of Edmund and the train. The obituary defines Sylvia Foster's social importance only in relation to her husband and perpetuates women's silenced story.

The conventional ideology of housekeeping can be seen as a clinging to forms, conforming to female fate, and as such, a form of female mourning.¹¹ Sylvie's housekeeping and her eventual abandonment of housekeeping altogether is a reinvention of female fate. Her housekeeping reflects a radical autonomy and resists the conventional definitions and devaluations of women's sphere. It implicitly reverses the paradigm wherein men subject nature to the fabrications of human artifice. Like Wordsworth's ruined cottage, Sylvie's house appreciates in spiritual, imaginative and poetical value as its value as a structure of symbolic and human order declines.¹² Unlike the usual housekeeper who keeps raw matter and brute nature outside, guarding the womb from the assaults of weather, decay, darkness, and animal trespass, Sylvie invites such intrusions, thereby privileging natural flux until an equilibrium is reached:

… leaves began to gather in the corners. … Thus finely did our house become attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie's housekeeping. Thus did she begin by little and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats and barn swallows.

(85)

And again:

She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a world of darkness. Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship's cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude.

(99)

By inviting nature to replace her human housekeeping Sylvie subverts the canonical paradigms which have circumscribed women's relationship to housekeeping in the same way Ruth's storytelling expresses what is perhaps best represented by the story of Noah's nameless wife who would leave it to her sons to “tell the tedious tale of generations” and was at home “among all those who were never found and never missed, who were uncommemorated …” (172). Ruth's storytelling gives insight into the blind spot of canonical narratives: she sees into the extraordinary relations of women who have been literally and metaphorically nameless, made to be the female vagrants of literature by writers who considered their lives too ordinary or unimportant to record. The lost and homeless women overlooked by Noah's sons, Emily Dickinson's banished nobodies in her famous signature poem, find a home in Ruth's storytelling and are the substance of her subversive narrative.

The heroine of Housekeeping, by which I mean not any one character but a composite, is the mother. Some of the individual characters are biological mothers and some are surrogate mothers, but this heroine is the other in (m)other. The maternal bond depends upon—as Carolyn Burke has put it—“that component of relationships between women in which an idealized relation to the mother is reflected.”¹³ The novel is more interested in this maternal bond and the process of mothering than in specific mothers. Robinson's language recovers a suppressed mother-tongue within the dominant ideology—the “difference within.” Robinson's difference within is dependent upon displacement, subverts hierarchical oppositions, and is associated with the pre-oedipal, a language in which the mother is the authority. Although Robinson's Housekeeping is a re-writing of American romantic values, for which Kolodny has supplied a convincing framework to show that the specifically American landscape was and is experienced as “land-as-woman,”¹⁴ the more general notion (advanced by Luce Irigaray and Margaret Homans to name but two) that the death or absence of the mother is necessary for the founding and dominance of patriarchal culture makes clear the broader implications of the way language and culture are constructed, and the broader implications of Robinson's woman-centered novel.

Through Sylvie and Ruth, Robinson attempts to represent mother/daughter relations and their linguistic practices without the imposed framework of the dominant oedipal discourse. Unlike the earlier temporary and finally constricting bond between Sylvia Foster and her three daughters, recovered after the father's death and based on an equation between caretaking and housekeeping, Sylvie and Ruth grow to be more like sisters, and the equilibrium of their nurturing and housekeeping allows the relationship to survive the oedipally motivated disruptions the town performs in trying to separate them. Robinson attends to the mother and child as a transactional unit: for the motherless Ruth, the transient Sylvie is the site of “something which is both other and not quite other, of the other as self and the self as other.”¹⁵ This fluidity corresponds to the early part of a child's development, called the pre-oedipal, when there is no clear distinction between subject and object, the child and the external world. The pre-oedipal self seems to experience the fluidity of exchange wherein it passes into objects and objects pass into it, no more significantly experienced than in the symbiotic relation with the mother's body and the blurring of boundaries between the two. For my construction of mother/daughter communication, and the differences between Ruth and Lucille, I have drawn largely upon Nancy Chodorow, who argues that there are crucial differences between sons' and daughters' relationships with their mothers that have not been accounted for in Freudian or Lacanian oedipal psychodramas. For Chodorow, daughters are not encouraged to abandon their mothers as sons are and therefore do not always renounce their mothers, with the result that, first, they do not enter what Lacan calls the symbolic order at the same time or for the same reasons or as exclusively as sons, and second, they can continue affective relationships to their mothers long past the pre-oedipal period and view this prolongation positively.¹⁶ The possibility of a mother/daughter language depends upon Chodorow's sense that it can be continuous from childhood, even though derived from the earliest experiences of nurturing before figuration. It is “neither repressed nor capable of a dangerous return, it is instead, socially and culturally suppressed and silenced.”¹⁷ In following Chodorow's maternal discourse, I distinguish my view of the pre-oedipal from Julia Kristeva's notion of the repressed semiotic, consisting of body language and nonrepresentational sounds, central elements in the male modernists she valorizes. I share Domna Stanton's view that Kristeva's “model for engendering the poetic does not deviate fundamentally from the patriarchal oedipal script” in that she assumes that the child is male and therefore a return to the semiotic is a return of the repressed.¹⁸

Ruth's story is one of a daughter's long continuation of her pre-oedipal attachment to her mother and her near disregard for the symbolic order—the law-of-the-father. And further, Ruth views her continued attachment positively. Ruth discovers a likeness of herself and her real mother in Sylvie: “… as I watched Sylvie, she reminded me of my mother more and more. There was such similarity, in fact, in the structure of cheek and chin, and the texture of hair, that Sylvie began to blur the memory of my mother, and then to displace it” (53). As the novel progresses, Ruth and Sylvie increasingly reflect each other. Their symbiotic relations simulate or replicate the earlier world of plenitude the child experienced in the pre-oedipal stage of development, in which no real gap existed between signifier and signified, subject and external world. “Sylvie was in front of me, and I put my hands in my pockets, and tilted my head, and strode, as she did, and it was as if I were her shadow, and moved after her only because she moved and not because I willed this pace” (145). Like that earlier dyadic relation, the relationship between Ruth and Sylvie appears to exist in a sealed exchange and only tolerates other kinds of interactions. Social interactions such as visits by worried neighbors, attendance at school, the sheriff's checking up on them, constitute a threat to the continuance of their way of life. While no literal father disrupts Ruth's relationship with Sylvie, as the father enters and disrupts the child's libidinal relation with the mother in the Oedipus complex, the sheriff represents the law of the father whose entrance carries with it the recognition of a wider social and patriarchal order of influence which could potentially destroy the dyadic relationship between Ruth and Sylvie. When Sylvie first arrives in Fingerbone, Ruth imagines being taken away from her in images that foreshadow the sheriff's threat later in the novel: “an old man in a black robe would step from behind a tree and take me by the hand—Sylvie too stricken to weep and I too startled to resist” (68). Ruth's extension of the pre-oedipal relationship from her mother to Sylvie, in turn, extends what Lacan terms the “imaginary” order. Ruth, because she has refound her mother in Sylvie and experiences no real differences with Sylvie, neither searches for various substitutes for the mother's body, nor feels the absence of her original mother, and does not need the compensation the symbolic order offers, as Lucille does. In fact, it might be said that Ruth transforms the pre-oedipal attachment to her original mother, which was disrupted by her mother's abandonment, into a relationship of sisterhood with Sylvie based on reciprocity. Peering into a room where Sylvie sits before a mirror brushing her hair, this is Ruth's reflection:

They [Sylvie and Helen] were both long and narrow like me, and nerves like theirs walk my legs and gesture my hands. … Sylvie's head falls to the side and we see the blades of my mother's shoulders and the round bones at the top of her spine. Helen is the woman in the mirror, the woman in the dream, the woman remembered, the woman in the water, and her nerves guide the blind fingers that touch into place all the falling strands of Sylvie's hair.

(132)

Living within the pre-oedipal, Ruth is able to resist the pressures of socialization and its distinct gender roles.

But Lucille moves from the imaginary order, the world of plenitude with the mother, into the symbolic order of language and feels severed from the mother. Rather than experiencing no gap between language and what it signifies, Lucille learns that all language is metaphorical, that it endlessly substitutes itself for the object. Unlike Ruth, Lucille's identity develops as a result of her recognition of difference, specifically the way Sylvie differs from other girls' mothers, most importantly Rosette Browne's mother, who embroidered dish towels for Rosette's hope chest and took her to Spokane for ballet lessons. Lucille feels smothered by Sylvie's solitude and wants “to find some other people” (66); she dislikes eating supper in the dark “when the windows [go] stark blue” (86); and she prefers “worsted mittens, brown oxfords, and red rubber boots” (93) to Sylvie's preference for sequins, satin, and blue velveteen slippers. Lucille defines herself by excluding Sylvie, and eventually her sister, and functions within the given structure of social and sexual roles and relations. Lucille looked “the way one was supposed to look” (121). For Lucille socialization is intimately bound up with an awareness and acceptance of distinct gender roles.

The novel focuses on the differing perspectives of, first, Lucille, who rejects identification with the dead mother and Sylvie, and then Ruth, who embraces women's identification with the literal, with nature, and with matter. Lucille's sense of difference from Sylvie has its origins in Lucille's experience with her mother as a child. Unlike Ruth, who finds comfort in her identification with her mothers, Lucille experiences recurrent dreams of being smothered as a baby by Sylvie, who in the dream drapes blankets over her face and prevents her breathing. Ruth constructs a relationship to a plurality of would-be mothers; these female figures, such as the lady whose presence she conjures by accidentally whittling snow or the young woman “with a small head and a small hat and a brightly painted face” (54) in the window of the train she runs alongside, constitute traces of the mother/daughter bond even though the biological mother is dead. Because for Ruth memories are “fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows” (53), she remembers the unknown woman on the train neither “less [n]or differently than others she had known better” (55). Even before Sylvie returns to Fingerbone, Lucille and Ruth argue over the color of their mother's and Sylvie's hair. Lucille who has red hair would say, “I know it'll be brown like Mother's” and Ruth would reply, “Hers wasn't brown. It was red” (43). The summer during which Lucille and Ruth's differences become most pronounced, they hotly disagree about their mother. The mother each remembers bears no resemblance to the other. Lucille, who has renounced her most intimate bond with her mother, perceives her mother as lost, never to return, and needs the compensation of a substitute. Helen's absence allows Lucille to substitute an image she prefers, and so, Lucille constructs a mother who is “orderly, vigorous, and sensible, a widow who was killed in an accident” (109). In other words, Lucille, more than Ruth, aligns herself with the figurative operations of language.

Ruth, however, does not perceive her mother as permanently lost, just as Noah's wife views the accumulated past as that “which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains” (172). Ruth's construct of her perished mother attempts to produce a relation to a present body or bodies rather than to reproduce her mother or to replace her mother's figure with her own determinate signification. To use Thomas Weiskel's formulation, Ruth, in her remembering, seeks to halt “at a point where the image is … on the verge of turning into a ‘character.’”¹⁹ Ruth must constantly defer or displace signification, and substitute for Lucille's determinate meanings indeterminate ones. She must use literal language, which in Homans' definition is a “language of presence, in which the presence or absence of referents in the ordinary sense is quite unimportant.”²⁰ More than remembering the referents, Ruth remembers a relation between child and mother, a relationship that survives absence: “I could conjure her [Helen's] face as it was then, startled by the sudden awareness of our watching. At the time I think I felt only curiosity, though I suppose I remember that glance because she looked at me for signs of more than curiosity” (52). Even though Helen is dead, Ruth meditates upon that earlier exchanged glance and her mother's disappointment and continues the silent dialogue through Sylvie: “It occurs to me sometimes that as I grow older I am increasingly able to present to her [Helen's] gaze the face she seemed to expect. But of course she was looking into a face I do not remember—no more like mine than Sylvie's is like hers” (52-53). Because Sylvie comes to “blur the memory” of her mother and to “displace” rather than replace Helen, increasingly Ruth presents the face her mother expected to Sylvie even though she knows Sylvie could know nothing of the earlier exchange. Ruth, whose mother has perished, does not reject her mother or the mother tongue she learned as a child but attempts to recreate rather than replace her lost mother and her symbiotic closeness through Sylvie along with reproducing their presymbolic communicativeness. In so choosing, Ruth performs a feminist revaluation of the linguistic position of women in androcentric literary tradition. She embraces the very position the feminine is aligned with in androcentric theory—“the literal, silent object of representation, the dead mother, the absent referent.”²¹

Ruth and Lucille's differences are not limited to the way they remember their mother but carry over into their relationships with nature, both linked to the literal and transient operations of the maternal. The novel traces Lucille's aggressive attempt to naturalize herself to the “other world” of orderly, unequivocal sexual identity—the common persuasion—identified with the hierarchical world of gender differences that derailed with the train carrying her grandfather, whose traces can now be found only in the ordinary society of Fingerbone. Concurrently, it traces Ruth's preparation for a life of transience. An overnight fishing trip during their last summer precipitates their final parting. When they stay too late to return home, Lucille, a traditional homemaker, insists on building a stronghold to enclose and protect them against intruders and the dark. When the makeshift house collapses and exposes them, Lucille flies into a frenzy of activity to insure that her human presence is feared and respected: she whistles, paces, and throws stones. Ruth, on the other hand, accepts the shelter's collapse and finds the subsequent overrunning of her human “boundaries” exhilarating and revelatory. She lets the “darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in [her] skull and bowels and bones” (116). Ruth learns that she is “happily at ease in the dark” (204), and this experience begins to break “the tethers of need, one by one” (204). Ruth and Lucille return home confirmed in their different loyalties. Lucille sets to “improving” herself, styles her hair, buys dress patterns, frequents the drug store where her female schoolmates read fashion magazines, and finally moves in with the Home Economics teacher. In response to Lucille's defection, Ruth dedicates herself fully to life with Sylvie because she believes that whatever she has lost might be found in “Sylvie's house” (124).

After Lucille's defection for Miss Royce's tutelage, Sylvie and Ruth solidify their relationship further while on an excursion up into the islands and hills on the lake outside Fingerbone. Sylvie initiates the new phase of their relationship by commenting, “There are some things I want to show you” (142). She “steals” a boat and rows them to a beach she has often visited alone that leads to a valley of natural disorder and finally to the place she has told Ruth about—a “stunted orchard and lilacs and stone doorstep and fallen house” (151). What Sylvie has led Ruth to is a landscape where they might be able to live, a landscape which reverses Fingerbone's attempted acquisition of the lake and mastery over natural flux. Here they cannot identify to whom the houses belong for they've fallen into cellar holes, shingles are stripped from the roof, and “the poles and planks that remained seemed much less than the makings of a house” (155). In this valley the homesteads were not built to survive the harsh climate and their inhabitants were turned out of house, unsheltered, and frequently perished in the winter.

At the doorstep of the fallen house Sylvie most loved, she suddenly leaves Ruth without explanation in what at first appears a reenactment of Helen's abandonment of Ruth that opens the novel. Helen had driven her daughters from Spokane, deposited them upon her mother's doorstep, and driven her car into the lake. Her abandonment was complete since she died. In contrast, Sylvie temporarily abandons Ruth in a kind of test or initiation to see if Ruth truly wishes to become a sister transient. She leaves Ruth to meditate upon the landscape, its fallen houses and ghostly children, to traverse again anger, fear, loneliness, and longing until she herself wishes to be unhoused of her flesh and unsheltered. Sylvie return as inexplicably and soundlessly as she had left. In this deserted valley Sylvie has shown Ruth the completed erosion of building and housekeeping that has been progressing throughout the novel and what they will now return to Fingerbone to accomplish themselves. She bundles Ruth inside her coat and rocks Ruth. This physical contact is new, pleasurable for both, and signals that Ruth's initiation has broken through to a new intimacy. On the boat ride home to Fingerbone, back over the lake in which Helen drowned, Ruth undergoes a second birth; she becomes Sylvie's child:

I lay like a seed in a husk. … It was the order of the world that the shell should fall away and that I, the nub, the sleeping germ, should swell and expand. Say that water lapped over the gunwales, and I swelled and swelled until I burst Sylvie's coat.

(162)

When they eventually return to Fingerbone first by boat, and then by freight car, we realize that however incomplete Ruth's transience was before the trip, she is a transient now. Before the town's dogs barked and nipped at Sylvie's heels only; now the dogs barked and nipped more ferociously than ever at both Sylvie and Ruth.²²

When Sylvie and Ruth return by freight car after the late-night excursion on the lake, the townspeople are confirmed in their fears. By threatening to remove Ruth from Sylvie's care, increasingly the town makes it impossible for Sylvie and Ruth to continue their transient housekeeping, or housebound transience, for in the town's mind Sylvie's unconventional housekeeping is motivated by her unredeemable transience. Sylvie's failure to keep the house neat and secure—the cobweb filled parlor was full of newspapers, magazines, a can and bottle collection, the remnants of dead birds that the thirteen or fourteen cats had deposited—was equated to making a transient of Ruth. Neighbor women and church women bring casseroles and coffee cakes to encourage Sylvie to prepare cooked meals instead of her preference for the raw, and knit socks, caps and comforters for Ruth whose wardrobe does little to protect her from the elements, but Ruth is already “lost to ordinary society” (183). Sylvie, in a last-ditch attempt to keep Ruth, empties the house of its cans, burns the accumulated newspapers, buys artificial flowers, and cooks meals, only to find her efforts doomed, for they can neither convince the town nor carry their efforts through. To avoid separation from one another, they put an end to housekeeping by setting fire to the family house, leave Fingerbone, and begin a life of transience in earnest.

Robinson's poetics of transience unifies Sylvie's unconventional housekeeping and Ruth's storytelling, what might easily be read as discrete strands of the novel. But finally Sylvie and Ruth are a mother/daughter unit, who won't be separated, and whose acts and identities are mutual and shared. Sylvie's housekeeping privileges natural flux and as such reverses the oppositional hierarchy at work in the dominant ideology of housekeeping. Ruth's literal language, shown through her identification with the pre-oedipal, not the symbolic stage, reverses the cultural valuation of figurative language and naturalizes the symbolic. Together their disintegration of fabricated forms, rather than the building of them, reflects a way of being—transience—that doesn't involve claims of ownership. Transience enacts the suppressed alterity—the other in mother—the “difference within” dominant discourse. And for Robinson's novel at least, once what has been suppressed is unleashed, the social infrastructure of sheriff, school principal, and townspeople, cannot tolerate its presence; the representatives of order view Sylvie and Ruth as threats to ordinary society who must be excluded from their borders much as they protect themselves against the lake's bottomless depths.

In response to the town's exclusion, Sylvie and Ruth adopt a philosophy of aggressive motion.²³ They don't ride the trains in order to travel, for travel implies a plan, a destination, and a return home. Transience is the form their ordinary living takes and they inhabit the transitions between staying at home, on the one hand, and traveling, on the other. They are, in fact, always elsewhere. Like Ruth and Naomi from the Old Testament, the transience created by their abandonment becomes the vehicle whereby they escape separation and suppression. Setting the house on fire and entering a life of transience is a kind of declaration of existence. Dwelling in the ancestral house and in Fingerbone finally prevents self-creation, and must be abandoned as the “shellfish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of growth.”²⁴ When they leave Fingerbone in the middle of the night, with the house in flames behind them, their crossing the bridge over the lake by foot exactly reverses Edmund Foster's fatal crossing into Fingerbone that opened the novel. Throughout, the structure of the house as enclosure and reliquary has steadily been eroded. In setting fire to what has served as a female house of mourning, they set free what has been suppressed and regulated: “Imagine the spirit of the house breaking out the windows and knocking down the doors, and all the neighbors astonished at the sovereign ease with which it burst its tomb, broke its grave. Bang!” (211).

Notes

1. Mary Jacobus, “The Difference of View,” Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Crown Helm, 1979) 10. Although Jacobus is skeptical about identifying a special language for women, freed from the Freudian notion of castration, she does suggest that we “relocate sexual difference at the level of the text by undoing the repression of the feminine” (“The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss,” Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982] 38). For a related discussion, see Margaret Homans, “Her Very Own ‘Howl’: “The Ambiguities of Repression in Recent Women's Fiction,” Signs 9 (1983): 186-205.

2. Elizabeth Meese, Crossing the Double Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986) 58.

3. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1980) 4.

4. See Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975).

5. Eric J. Sundquist, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1979) 65.

6. The Southerners who issued I'll Take My Stand blamed the urge to mastery and possession for thwarting the pastoral possibility. John Crowe Ransom complained that “the masculine form” had become “hallowed by Americans … under the name of Progress” (quoted in Kolodny 139).

7. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1981) 13. Subsequent references are incorporated in the text in parentheses.

8. Kolodny 7.

9. Sundquist 69.

10. Margaret Homans believes the position of the literal, together with nature and matter, is problematic for women readers and writers because it has traditionally been classified as feminine, and “the feminine is, from the point of view of a predominantly androcentric culture, always elsewhere too” (Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth Century Women's Writing [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986] 4). But Sylvie and Ruth embrace the idea that the feminine is always elsewhere.”

11. For Emerson, “Conformity in all its guises is evidence of a desire to give our bounty to the dead” (Mark Edmundson, “Emerson and the Work of Melancholia,” Raritan 6 [1987]: 121).

12. Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986) 221.

13. Carolyn Burke, “Rethinking the Maternal,” The Future of Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1985) 119.

14. Kolodny 146.

15. Jane Gallop, “Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 317.

16. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: U of California P, 1978) 108-10.

17. Homans, Bearing 19.

18. Domna C. Stanton, “Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva,” Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia UP, 1986) 166. For another critique of the troubling relation between female-authored inscriptions of la difference feminine and modernism see Alice Jardine's “Gynesis,” Diacritics (Summer 1982): 54-63.

19. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1976) 173.

20. Homans, Bearing 18.

21. Homans, Bearing 32.

22. I am indebted to Leigh Gilmore for the helpful discussions we had concerning Ruth's initiation. Many thanks.

23. Robinson's notion of transience may well read the Emersonian imagination and reshape it from a feminine perspective: “The quality of imagination is to flow and not to freeze. All language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead” (“The Poet,” Emerson's Essays [New York: Harper and Row, 1951] 285).

24. “Compensation,” Emerson's Essays 91.