SOURCE: Ravits, Martha. “Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.” American Literature 61, no. 4 (December 1989): 644-66.

In trying to reinvent the American myth to fit female consciousness, the woman writer faces a double task: her work must respond to both the mainstream of native patriarchal literature and to the swelling current of writing—British and American—by and about women.¹ This dual artistic legacy creates double richness and a double bind for the contemporary woman writer that few have negotiated with the confidence of Marilynne Robinson in her 1980 novel Housekeeping.

Just two decades before, Leslie Fiedler had warned that our classic literature is “a literature of horror for boys.”² In forging a bildungsroman about a female protagonist, Robinson brings a new perspective to bear on the dominant American myth about the developing individual freed from social constraints. Her female adventurer emphasizes the motivations and imperatives of the classic quest and offers fresh testimony about the implications of its outcome—a survival strategy often taken for granted. Repudiation of the domestic sphere by her female quester enlarges the central tradition to include women but leaves them still at the crossroads in a materialistic, patriarchal society.

Robinson consciously sets her novel against the great texts of the American tradition. She opens Housekeeping, her first book, with a brief sentence that echoes the famous beginning of Moby-Dick—that prime American text about a castaway and survivor with a significant Biblical name: “My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.”³

This genealogy of ordinary women, a revision of Biblical patrilinear genealogies, indicates at the outset how Robinson's language steeps her novel in textual traditions that recall the very foundations of our cultural inheritance while shifting the vantage point to a female perspective. Through style, theme, and symbolism that adapt American literary romanticism and nineteenth-century prototypes to twentieth-century womanhood, Robinson both resists and augments our native strain.

In their essay “‘Forward into the Past’: The Complex Female Affiliation Complex,” Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, drawing upon Harold Bloom's theory of influence, write: “If we view a woman's attitude toward her literary inheritance as structured by an ‘affiliation complex’ modeled on Freud's account of female psychosexual development, we inevitably find the woman writer oscillating between her matrilineage and her patrilineage in an arduous process of self-definition.”⁴ In Robinson's case, self-definition through literary influence appears not to be repressed, as psychoanalytic theories would suggest, but openly acknowledged. The writer, herself an astute critic and essayist as well as a novelist, cites both literary “aunts and uncles” as sources of her stylistic and philosophical inheritance. For a symposium on influence, she detailed her own literary frame of reference:

If to admire and to be influenced are more or less the same thing, I must be influenced most deeply by the 19th-century Americans—Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson and Poe. Nothing in literature appeals to me more than the rigor with which they fasten on problems of language, of consciousness—bending form to their purposes, ransacking ordinary speech and common experience, rummaging through the exotic and recondite, setting Promethean doubts to hymn tunes, refining popular magazine tales into arabesques, pondering bean fields, celebrating the float and odor of hair, always, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, in the act of finding what will suffice. … I believe they wished to declare the intrinsic dignity of all experience and to declare the senses bathed in revelation—true, serious revelation, the kind that terrifies.

She concluded, “I happen to have read these old aunts and uncles at an impressionable age, and so I will always answer to them in my mind.”⁵ In personal correspondence Robinson claims Emily Dickinson in particular as the nineteenth-century ancestor she believes gave the American tradition “as bold and pure and radical a statement as anyone will ever give it.”⁶ (Dickinson is, not incidentally, the only writer whose work is mentioned by title in Housekeeping, when the young protagonist must recite “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” in high-school English class.)

Through Dickinson, Robinson's relationship to tradition bridges both the spheres of male and female influence and the spheres of poetry and prose. There has been a tendency in American letters to blend genres, to refuse to acknowledge literary boundaries, ever since Emerson founded indigenous romanticism by writing in both prose and poetry and by incorporating lines of verse into his prose essays. Thoreau did the same. These essayists, along with Whitman in his prefaces, created a prose style allied with poetry through the rhythms and rhapsodic structures of language. Robinson's own style adheres to this school: she captures the resonances of traditional American poetry and prose in her writing, embracing both sides of the American inheritance in her efforts to retell the story of heroic selfhood—even as her version, in Pound's words, “makes it new” by making it female.

In Henry James's The American, the male protagonist Christopher Newman asserts: “I have never had time to feel things. I have had to do them, to make myself felt.”⁷ Robinson's female protagonist Ruth, by contrast, has plenty of time to feel things as she wanders the lake district of Fingerbone, Idaho, either alone or in the company of her sister Lucille or her aunt Sylvia. As a young girl who has never known a father and who lost her mother to suicide and her guardian grandmother to old age, Ruth is a sorrowful, outwardly passive child. But her sphere of concern opens inward—her boldness resides in the active power of imagination. Her first-person narrative is the report of a protagonist who sees the world feelingly; for she is a dreamer, a visionary, an American romantic whose story consists of the interplay between perceptible nature and her own perceiving consciousness, the “luminous … envelope” of life that Virginia Woolf made the domain of the novel. In Robinson's work the hidden capacities of a young girl's thought and feeling animate and control the narrative in a manner that owes as much to the expansion and contraction of inner vision usually associated with lyric poetry as to the chronology of external events usually associated with prose fiction.

Housekeeping is to some extent a long mutability ode, a meditation on the nature of loss, for Ruth's consciousness is permeated by grief for the missing mother and an unfulfilled yearning for wholeness which connection with the mother implies. To her the disjunction between the realms of consciousness and reality is bridged by the inevitability of change and loss: “The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted. That is why the first event is known to have been an expulsion, and the last is hoped to be a reconciliation and return” (p. 192). Because for Ruth all change in nature reflects the devastating change she suffered after her mother's suicide in Lake Fingerbone, her story illustrates the determining influence of the mother-daughter relationship on the child's outlook and sensibility. Adrienne Rich has described the neglect of this crucial subject in our culture's literature: “The loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter is the essential female tragedy. We acknowledge Lear (father-daughter split), Hamlet (son and mother), and Oedipus (son and mother) as embodiments of the human tragedy; but there is no presently enduring recognition of mother-daughter passion and rapture.”⁸

Robinson's novel, while it takes up and re-examines archetypal patterns of the American male bildungsroman, is an “enduring recognition of the mother-daughter passion”—and the endless consequences of its disruption. Even in mother-child relationships that are not as abruptly severed as Ruth's, we recognize a primary human pattern, feelings of regret and abandonment that inevitably accompany the individual over the course of emotional development. Dorothy Dinnerstein writes that the loss of unity with the mother is “an original and basic human grief” that we continuously attempt to undo. The human individual's tie to the mother is “the prototype of the tie to life. The pain in it, and the fear of being cut off from it, are prototypes of the pain of life and the fear of death.”⁹ The measure of Ruth's loss in the novel, therefore, cannot be satisfactorily gauged by the actual facts of her experience, though these are drastic enough, because love for the mother is, at base, not governed by a sense of reality.¹⁰ According to Nancy Chodorow, “An account of the early mother-infant relationship in contemporary Western society reveals the overwhelming importance of the mother in everyone's psychological development, in their sense of self, and in their basic relational stance.” Individuals are “often unable to avoid recreating aspects of their early relationships, especially to the extent that these relationships were unresolved, ambivalent, and repressed.” In other words, “All people … partly live their past in the present.”¹¹

The orphaned Ruth in Housekeeping is, therefore, universally emblematic as a grieving child who carries the image of the lost mother and the unresolved past into all phases of her mental and emotional life. Her quest and choice is always for the missing mother. She can attain full selfhood only by squarely facing the sorrow of maternal abandonment that brings in its wake attendant fears about the wider world of indifferent nature. Ruth as bereaved quester asserts the primacy of the relation to the mother as none of the male orphans so prevalent in American literary history before her have done. Ishmael, Huck Finn, Isaac McCaslin undertook the struggle for maturity by choosing surrogate fathers. Ruth's quest focuses long overdue attention on the individual's resolution of feelings about the bond to the mother as the primary, requisite step in the ascension to self-hood. For the maturing female hero, it is the mother—missing, absent, but always present to the child's imagination—who is the key to reality, in Whitman's term, “the clef of the universes.”

Ruth's name means sorrow or pity, and her tale is filled with both. Before her birth, her grandfather died in a spectacular accident when the train he was riding derailed from the long bridge over the vast glacial lake at the edge of the town of Fingerbone. Years later Ruth's indifferent, distracted mother Helen drove her daughters to her hometown for the first time in their lives and left them with a box of crackers on her mother's porch to await her return. Then she drove her borrowed car off a cliff into the depths of the lake. Ruth describes even the last death in this family series, that of her maternal grandmother years afterward in bed, as a “drowning in air” (p. 164) that recapitulates the mother's death. To Ruth all generations, everything that lives and dies, seem to converge in the lake. The flux of the seasons, changes of weather, and the water that rises in basements and in plowed fields outside Fingerbone always remind her of the secret darkness that hides her mother, and, though she is inland, she asserts in Whitmanesque manner the connection among water, the mother, and the inevitability of death and change. Feelings of abandonment by the mother permeate all of nature: “But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills, and sometimes I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn … and there is … a deathly bitterness in the smell of ponds and ditches” (p. 198).

Nature itself, then, to Ruth seems dark and duplicitous: its changing patterns represent the flux of life and the dislocations of female experience. As a child abandoned so suddenly, she retains an abiding distrust of fate, a sense of being owed an apology, feelings of betrayal that coalesce into a fundamental belief in life's precariousness: “If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected—an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. … And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind” (p. 166).

Ruth's projection of the principle of loss upon the screen of nature is a reinterpretation of nineteenth-century doctrines. Since the time of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville, our fiction has been replete with heavily symbolic representations. It is not surprising, therefore, that Robinson's protagonist also should regard the sensible world “not as an ultimate reality, but as a system of signs to be deciphered.”¹² For Ruth, nature is at base the all-absorbing principle of death that swallows fathers and mothers without explanation or justification. The shimmering surfaces of nature, like the lake that can be viewed almost everywhere in Fingerbone, reflect back images without revealing what lies beyond or beneath or behind them. Therefore, the novel is concerned with surfaces and the rupture of surfaces, which Ruth distrusts, for as she says: “Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams” (p. 116). Only our thoughts, Ruth says, exist “outside the brisk and ruinous energies of the world.” She imagines her mother, too, trying to penetrate beneath the shifting appearances of nature: “I think it must have been my mother's plan to rupture this bright surface, to sail beneath it into very blackness, but here she was, wherever my eyes fell, and behind my eyes whole and in fragments … never dispelled but rising always, inevitably, like a drowned woman” (p. 163).

This image of the drowned mother is the theme repeated in endless variations in the music of Ruth's memory. In drawing this explicit connection between female experience and bereavement, Robinson's vision is allied to that of her precursor Dickinson, who once declared that she never had a mother, and who wrote that bereavement was primary and formative: “A loss of something ever felt I— / The first that I could recollect / Bereft I was—” Like Elizabeth Bishop, who labeled loss the “One Art,” Ruth makes the art of weaving the sense of grief into images of female perception a triumph of consciousness over unobjectified fear, as expressed in her twentieth-century correlative to Dickinson's notion of circumference: “When we were children and frightened of the dark, my grandmother used to say if we kept our eyes closed we would not see it. That was when I noticed the correspondence between the space within the circle of my skull and the space around me” (p. 198).

Ruth is a visionary whose unassuaged longing causes her to imagine possibilities of restoration in terms reminiscent of Emerson's doctrine of compensation.¹³ She calls her desired restoration the “law of completion,” the possibility of undoing the past and rolling back time in a process that will rescue the missing mother to make the world somehow comprehensible and whole. “What are all these fragments for,” she asks, “if not to be knit up finally?” (p. 91). But even in her fantasy of wish-fulfillment, Ruth acknowledges the role of illusion and admits that she is dreaming while she sketches out how the return of the mother might take place:

In my dream I had waited for her confidently, as I had all those years ago when she left us in the porch. Such confidence was like a sense of imminent presence, a palpable displacement, the movement in the air before the wind comes. Or so it seemed. Yet twice I had been disappointed, if that was the word. Perhaps I had been deceived. If appearance is only a trick of the nerves, and apparition is only a lesser trick of the nerves, a less perfect illusion, then this expectation, this sense of a presence unperceived, was not particularly illusory as things in this world go.

(Pp. 121-22)

By applying Transcendental principles, then, Ruth can imagine momentarily that the laws of mutability in nature suggest transformations that can cancel even time and death. Universal rules are bent to serve personal ends. Along with the flood image, the dark threat of water that runs throughout her discourse, there appears the contrary image of restitution and resurrection. Water that can swallow up the living can also cast up the dead. A vision of the return of the dead from Lake Fingerbone implies a general restoration which serves to bring back the mother: “Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection. Perhaps we expected a train to leap out of the water, caboose foremost, as if in a movie run backward, and then to continue across the bridge. The passengers would arrive, sounder than they departed. … Say that this resurrection was general enough to include my grandmother, and Helen, my mother. Say that Helen lifted our hair from our napes with her cold hands and gave us strawberries from her purse” (p. 96).

Later in the novel, while struggling for female identity in the wilderness, Ruth reflects back on the disappointments of experience and revises this poetic vision of the mother with caressing hands and an offering of strawberries into a generalized image of fulfillment, a nurturing angel embedded in a metaphor of “longing”:

For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow … and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we many lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.

(Pp. 152-53)

The figurative gestures here identify the angel of “longing” with the imagined mother Helen in the earlier passage to explain Ruth's motivation and quest throughout the novel as the search for the missing mother. Her yearning can be assuaged only when she recognizes in her mother's sister Sylvia her Naomi-figure or mother-substitute.

This recognition occurs in the climactic eighth chapter when Ruth is freshly vulnerable, having been abandoned once again, this time by her younger sister Lucille, the companion with whom she endured the tragedies and loneliness of childhood. Significantly, the rift between the girls is signalled by their differing interpretations of the mother, as though her image held the key to their diverging views of life in general: “Lucille's mother was orderly, vigorous, and sensible, a widow. … My mother … tended us with a gentle indifference … she was the abandoner, not the one abandoned” (p. 109).

The dual image of the mother here reflects the sisters' opposing attitudes toward social convention. With the onset of puberty, Lucille is busy cleaning up outward appearances and family history to conform to the social pressures of small-town life, while Ruth—like the mother herself, a dreamer and a loner—sees no reason to “improve” herself or to revise her memories of the mother. She does not desire to cross what she calls “the wide frontiers” (p. 123) into conventional womanhood as Lucille does. When Lucille finally bolts from the family home presided over by the girls' eccentric aunt Sylvia, Ruth finds herself newly bereaved and doubly abandoned. This crisis brings the deepest assault to her sense of self.

Until this point in the novel, Ruth's external personality has remained undefined. She has been the quiet, reserved sister who allowed Lucille to do the talking for her. When Sylvia once confronted Ruth about her own thoughts, Ruth, perspiring and flustered, replied that she didn't know what she thought: “This confession embarrassed me. It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible—incompletely and minimally existent, in fact” (p. 105). Ruth's admission is rendered briefly in the text but nevertheless corresponds to the familiar male “identity crisis” in fiction. Because female development inclines toward continued identification with the mother as opposed to the male struggle to break away from the mother toward individuation, contemporary psychologists believe that the female's course of maturation is generally less turbulent than the male's, with the result that well-defined ego boundaries (or what in a literary context we might call simply a strong sense of self) have not generally been regarded as female traits.¹⁴ Yet in modern novels of development, the growth of the heroic mind is often predicated on an arduous internal struggle for autonomy.

Carolyn Heilbrun has argued that problems for the female in our society “arise precisely from the lack of struggle, from the fact that she need never undergo an identity crisis, and indeed, is almost incapable of one.” Since in Ruth's case the relationship with the mother has been suddenly and painfully severed, the girl hardly knows where to turn in the process of identity formation and expresses this confusion as a feeling of being “minimally existent.” But this very bewilderment is ultimately fruitful, since it presses her toward the identity crisis that Heilbrun argues is a prerequisite for autonomy: “All societies, from the earliest and most primitive to today's, have ceremoniously taken the boy from the female domain and urged his identity as a male, as a responsible unfeminine individual, upon him. The girl undergoes no such ceremony, but she pays for serenity of passage with a lack of selfhood and of the will to autonomy that only the struggle for identity can confer.”¹⁵

Sylvia, whose Latinate name connects her with the woods, tries to console Ruth after Lucille's defection by taking her across the lake by boat into the remote wilderness where she will undergo the struggle for autonomy. Once landed, Sylvia leaves the girl alone to come to terms with her loneliness and thereby achieve the influx of will that brings self-reliance. The wilderness setting recapitulates the seclusion in nature long associated with similar male rituals in American fiction. The departure away from town and all vestiges of civilization into the depths of nature where identity is forged and tested has been a pattern in adventure tales from Washington Irving's “Rip Van Winkle” down to James Dickey's Deliverance. If the excursion into the woods suggests a period of recuperation, a metaphorical return to origins in a feminine landscape,¹⁶ then the consequences of this return would necessarily differ for each gender according to psychological modes of relationship to the mother. For Ruth as native daughter, the secluded woods mirror her disillusionment with the original, failed relationship to the mother and her adolescent need to review and reformulate that relationship before she can transcend its inhibiting effects.

By shaping a plot about a young woman's discovery of solace and self-realization in solitude with nature, Robinson lifts herself upon the shoulders of literary ancestors to demonstrate that the empowering attribute of self-reliance can be claimed by female as well as male protagonists. Ruth's sequence of revelation takes place at an abandoned homestead set in a secluded valley, a deep hollow between mountain ridges—a landscape of inescapable female symbolism for a scene of rebirth.¹⁷ This shaded valley, glistening with early morning frost, becomes the setting for Ruth's spiritual struggle and regeneration: “we came upon the place Sylvie had told me about, stunted orchard and lilacs and stone doorstep and fallen house, all white with a brine of frost” (pp. 150-51).

This description is overdetermined. It takes commemorative shading from Whitman's famed elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.” The abandoned homestead not only prefigures the desertion of the family home at the end of Housekeeping, it represents a crucial American topos (in the Greek sense for both place and literary topic). In our arts and letters the settler's cabin in the wilderness has long represented the idealized dream of solitary refuge and American self-reliance. The secluded cabin in modern texts therefore becomes an image of cultural inheritance, for it is no longer possible for contemporary writers—or readers—to arrive at this place and know it for the first time. The secluded woods echo with cultural memory. The wilderness homestead, once the epitome of American rugged individualism, has become part of our folklore: it is Abraham Lincoln's log cabin, the little house in the big woods of Laura Ingalls Wilder's children's classic, the pioneer homestead of Willa Cather's prairie novels, the affluent citizen's vacation retreat, and, perhaps above all, the cabin that Henry David Thoreau built and emblazoned on our national consciousness at Walden Pond.

The twentieth-century writer who returns to this place, then, faces the task of reviewing and rethinking what it means to write in the native strain. As a ruin the secluded cabin comes to stand for twentieth-century belatedness. Our lyric poets, always place-conscious, reinvoke the image of the abandoned site to bring the sublime down a key and add an elegiac note to reflections on native romanticism. Wallace Stevens in The Auroras of Autumn found the cabin deserted, an emblem of the passage of earlier, simpler times: “A cabin stands, / Deserted, on a beach. It is white, / As by a custom or according to / An ancestral theme. …” The quester in the American landscape of Robert Frost's poem “Directive” also stumbles upon ruins: “the house that is no more a house, / But only a belilaced cellar hole.” In Robinson's text the homestead has similarly collapsed into a belilaced cellar hole; it is a primal American image in shambles. The passages which make up the visit to the fallen cabin in Housekeeping are overlaid with meditations on lineage, ghostliness, and being turned out of house. For Robinson, as for other twentieth-century American writers, the deserted homestead represents not freedom but the narrowing of options and the dangers of nostalgia. Urban culture has moved beyond the self-sufficient, home-made world the cabin represents. The abandoned cabin is a moving tribute to American romanticism, but it is a ruin that cannot be restored.

In her essay “Writers and the Nostalgic Fallacy,” Robinson said, “When I wrote Housekeeping some five years ago, I made a world remote enough to allow me to choose and control the language out of which the story was made.”¹⁸ The quintessentially nineteenth-century wilderness setting is part of that remoteness. Her resources are steeped in the light of American antecedents, as she changes archetypal images of predominantly male experience into instruments for the expression of female sensibility. The abandoned homestead gives a local habitation and a focus to Ruth's feelings of desolation. The collapsed frame of the house represents both the failed security of the family structure and the fragility of female identity. As Ruth begins to dig frantically among the planks of the cabin, she imagines that she is performing a mission of rescue for abandoned children trapped in the ruins. The ghostly presences of these orphaned children supposedly lost in the wreckage are apparitions of Ruth's prior self, previous stages of need and development now buried under the snows of “far too many winters” (p. 158). In this scene the eternal daughter toils among the ruins of the past in an effort to undo or revise her own history of abandonment. Robinson presents a complex, fractured image of rescuing and becoming parent to the self—a paradigm of the creative process—in Ruth's efforts to resurrect childhood memories of longing and deprivation that have shaped her consciousness. As she struggles to free herself form the past in order to come to terms with herself as an autonomous individual, she passes through three significant emotional phases: first despair, then forgiveness of the departed mother, finally regeneration through attachment to a mother substitute. The deserted cabin is a crucial psychological locus where the novel's essential themes—home, mother, abandonment, and continuance—come together, wrenched from social context and viewed as part of a universal continuum.

Robinson's addition of glistening frost bathes this American scene in an ancestral white that obscures details and simplifies the landscape, just as memory serves to simplify and crystalize experience. At the ruined homestead Ruth imagines the frost-covered site as a valley of salt and by process of association links this whiteness with a vision of Lot's wife, forever locked in the posture of looking back. Here the snow-woman that Ruth and her sister had constructed at the beginning of the novel merges with the image of the Biblical woman as a pillar of salt to become a monument to female muteness and suffering. The frozen woman of Ruth's imagination is not a self-image, the inexperienced daughter as Sleeping Beauty from fairy tale, but the silent mother-figure, the unnamed wife in Genesis who is transfixed by gazing on too much experience.¹⁹ Lot's wife is one of several Biblical women—Ruth and Naomi, of course, Eve as mother, Noah's unnamed wife—whom Robinson retrieves from the stockpile of cultural memory and dusts off to use as archetypal referents. By highlighting overlooked aspects of these female figures, Robinson makes these symbolic women of woe cast shadows upon the modern page in an act of literary revisionism: “Lot's wife was salt and barren, because she was full of loss and mourning, and looked back. But here rare flowers would gleam in her hair, and on her breast, and in her hands, and there would be children all around her, to love and marvel at her for her beauty … and they would forgive her, eagerly and lavishly, for turning away, though she never asked to be forgiven” (p. 153).

This figure of nostalgia is a saving vision, a crux in Ruth's rite of passage. In it she projects the mother as a generalized personification of bereavement, “full of loss and mourning,” and sympathetically grasps the desperate female tendency to look back, to witness or re-view suffering and to be paralyzed by it. By re-imagining her mother as Lot's wife, Ruth can finally empathize with and forgive her for maternal indifference, and thereby become reconciled in some measure to her own fate as abandoned child.²⁰ Ruth, in recreating her cold, inadequate mother as a long-suffering figure of maternal beauty, seems, in Stevens' words, to bid “farewell to an idea” and to release from mind the compulsive yearning that has hindered her own psychological advancement. The struggle with feelings of isolation and mother-longing allows the girl to utter her own version of female heroic resolve, which stresses not separation from the mother but spiritual continuation: “Let them come unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart. It was no shelter now, it only kept me here alone. … If I could see my mother now, it would not have to be her eyes, her hair. I would not need to touch her sleeve. … She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished” (pp. 159-60).

Sylvie purposely has left Ruth to undergo this trial of loneliness and rite of self-recovery alone. Up to this point in the novel Ruth had expected the present to be made whole by explaining the past, so that she was herself trapped in the posture of looking back, of waiting—the attitude in which her mother had originally left her. Her sense of life's tragic disjunctions causes her, almost in despair, at the nadir of this scene to say, “Let them come unhouse me of this flesh.” Here is what Richard Sewall has called the “boundary-situation”—the hero pressed to the extreme and forced to confront the ultimate capacities and limits of human existence.²¹ Like Lear on the heath, Ruth comes to a new understanding of her own mortality and poverty: “It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. It is better to have nothing.” This acceptance of mutability is therapeutic, for even as it connects her with the mother, it allows her to choose autonomy and regeneration. This female rite of passage is muted in comparison with male rituals, often typified by some form of competition, hunting, or violence in American fiction. The female hero's courage consists not of physical fortitude tested against external dangers but of courageous subjectivity in the face of isolation and neglect, inner assaults to selfhood sustained over time. Despite these overt differences, Ruth's sojourn by the deserted cabin marks her as an outsider of insight. The journey into the wilderness recapitulates and soothes her mother-craving and, therefore, helps her to move beyond the pain it has caused her. In the memory-haunted valley, Ruth's image of the frozen mother is in part a revision of origins and in part a recognition that “loneliness is an absolute discovery” (p. 157) that must be re-experienced by each generation of womanhood. This stoic realization is the necessary prelude to Ruth's birth of authentic selfhood.

In the woods and later on the lake, Ruth adopts her aunt Sylvia as mentor and substitute mother in much the same way that the developing male in American fiction has taken an outcast as father-figure to facilitate his struggle for maturity. In Faulkner's The Bear it was the half-Black, half-Indian guide named appropriately Sam Fathers who left the boy alone in the woods to learn the ways of the hunt. Similarly, in Housekeeping Sylvia Foster leads her niece into the remote wilderness and leaves her alone at the abandoned homestead to face and resolve her inner crisis. Only then does Sylvia re-emerge from the woods to reclaim the girl and assume the role of “foster” mother, a motif in the novel that follows ancient matrilinear custom, for according to anthropologists, the mother is the indispensable parent; in the event of her death, “in a matrilinear society, the natural substitute for a mother is her sister.”²² Thus, Sylvia redeems young Ruth in the wilderness to become her spiritual mother and guide as part of what seems an archetypal pattern.²³ For Robinson's female protagonist, then, American self-reliance, the ability to stand as an isolated, autonomous individual, is a crucial stage of growth—but it is not the end point. The theme of wilderness rebirth in Housekeeping is rendered in unequivocal terms as a passage into a new life of relationship.

The scene of empowering selfhood at the deserted cabin is clearly framed in the language of Robinson's larger narrative as part of a birth sequence. To begin the excursion into the wilderness, Sylvia had awakened her niece and led her from the house before dawn. Ruth, exhibiting the passivity and regression of an unformed self, followed her aunt to the lakeshore thinking: “We are the same. She could as well be my mother. I crouched and slept in her very shape like an unborn child” (p. 145). After Ruth's internalized struggle at the abandoned cabin, Sylvia reappears from the woods to wrap the girl in her oversized transient's coat as though swaddling and embracing a newborn child. Ruth recognizes in this gesture the mentor's power to facilitate female mysteries and rites of passage: “By abandoning me she had assumed the power to bestow such a richness of grace. For in fact I wore her coat like beatitude, and her arms around me were as heartening as mercy” (p. 161). The language of religious redemption formalizes Ruth's conscious acceptance of Sylvie as adoptive mother.²⁴

For the voyage back to Fingerbone, Ruth and Sylvie must cross the vast lake at night in a small rowboat. While they drift and wait in the moonlight, Ruth reawakens to her own figurative rebirth. As she rests in the bottom of the leaky boat immersed in water like a fetus in amniotic fluid, she imagines herself swelling inside Sylvie's coat like a “seed in a husk,” a “sleeping germ” awaiting parturition—“though my first birth had hardly deserved that name, and why should I hope for more from the second?” (p. 162). The two women wait on the lake for dawn beneath the railroad bridge directly above the spot where Ruth's grandfather and, by extension, mother lie submerged. There Ruth concludes the imagery of rebirth and adoption when she calls out to Sylvie but uses the mother's name “Helen.”²⁵ In this context the child's commonplace act of calling the mother's name becomes paradoxically a trope for filial attachment and ascension to selfhood. A second chance at mother-daughter relationship is granted to Ruth just as it had been to her Biblical prototype. The pledge of Ruth to Naomi, “Whither thou goest, I will go,” becomes the tacit resolution also of the motherless child in this novel. By structuring the plot and imagery of this female alliance in rings of repetition and gradual realization rather than in linear fashion, Robinson translates the Biblical narrative of Ruth into a modern version of female loss and redemption. The female rite of passage, a ritual of rebirth and connection, is complete when Ruth's internalized struggle against the sense of abandonment is resolved in her kinship with Sylvia, a relationship that affirms the power of will and mutual choice above all else.

For, in a pattern familiar in American fiction, the bond between Sylvia and Ruth can remain unproblematic only in the wilderness. Back in town Ruth is forced to recognize the consequences of her choice. Society—as represented by the well-meaning citizens of Fingerbone—cannot tolerate the layers of “otherness” that Ruth takes on in choosing her deviant aunt, a transient, as mother-figure. When a custody battle threatens, the two kinswomen decide to flee rather than risk separation. Whereas the male hero typically outlives or outgrows his mentor, Robinson depicts the female hero as resisting severance in an act of radical defiance. Ruth and Sylvia, at peril of their lives, must cross on foot the railroad bridge over Lake Fingerbone at night as they escape from town into uncharted territory—the condition of being transients. Before departing they attempt to destroy evidence of their survival by burning as a sacrifice, in what is described as an act of reverence, the family home behind them.

Housekeeping is an ironic title, then, for its plot is shaped by house-leaving. The house, the major icon of the book and of female existence in our culture, is symbolically questioned and partially destroyed in this novel. (The fire fails to consume the whole structure, and in their hurry the women cannot turn back to relight it.) In renouncing the shelter of the familial home, being “put out of house,” as Ruth expresses it, the protagonist chooses the unfettered freedom that in American fiction has been reserved for males. The gender dichotomy in our society has dictated that the male hero roams the frontier “footloose and fancy free” while his female counterpart (as lover, sister, daughter, schoolmarm, or wife) remains behind in town, securely tucked away at home, herself the very embodiment of the stability and restraints of civilization. Leatherstocking, Ishmael, Huck Finn, Shane, a long list of American heroes stride or sail or ride off into the sunset and into adventure away from the clutches of the womenfolk who would try to tame them. The female by contrast, allied with the social forces of religion or education or cultural assimilation, stands opposed to that severe independence of spirit that has been regarded as quintessentially male. Heilbrun observes: “Women have avoided adventure, risk and opportunity because they have been taught that suffering, the shaking loose of the comfortable foundations of one's life, must be avoided at all costs.”²⁶

The woman in American folklore until recently could not assert the same freedom—in our culture identified with mobility—that a man could. Only the woman who was deviant like Annie Oakley, racially “other” like Sacajawea, or morally discredited like Hester Prynne could independently light out for the territory. In depicting not a heroine but a female hero whose adventurousness and willingness to face risk match those of the individualistic male hero, Robinson shows the disquieting effects of a female search for identity and autonomy outside the traditional bounds of domestic life. The independent, socially unfettered male is considered courageous; the independent, socially unfettered female is regarded as deviant.

Despite claims on the publicity poster for the movie version of Housekeeping, its conclusion is not “tidy.” The book's ending in which Ruth and Sylvie risk their lives to cross the symbolic bridge between the known and the unknown is disturbing to many readers. The two women are presumed (as reported in the local paper) to have perished like their kin in the lake crossing. Indeed, from society's vantage point they have literally passed beyond the pale: they have crossed from settled, routine existence as it is lived in America into a condition of being drifters—unsettled, rootless, wandering in a state of existential limbo or non-being. They have risked everything for the sake of preserving their relationship and know there is no going back, because as Ruth puts it, “we both knew they could always get you for increasingly erratic behavior” (p. 213). But they have maintained what is for them of higher priority—their kinship with one another: “For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings” (p. 194). Robinson makes the preservation of the sacred bonds of kinship and the tragedies of commonplace family life the domain of women, who in their folk wisdom eulogize and memorialize them, turn them into art, much as she has done in writing the novel.

But women artists not only record and eulogize; they must also break new ground to show where the stress-points of cultural tension lie. The image of the house as social institution and prime socializing agent gives way in this novel to a metaphorical representation of the house as material bond and metaphysical constraint for women in traditional sex roles.²⁷ Robinson in Housekeeping is an iconoclast, a breaker of sacred images. There are five images of the house or home in the novel. In two of these it is spoken of as a tomb. The grandfather's original Midwestern sod house was “a mere mound, no more a human stronghold than a grave” (p. 3). At the end, while crossing the bridge Ruth reflects on the family home built by that grandfather as a living entity giving up the ghost: “I thought of the house behind me, all turned to fire. … 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 up its grave” (p. 211). The crude shelter that Ruth and Lucille build together when stranded along the lakeshore one summer night becomes another version of the house, one that cramps and confines even as it shields them. In struggling to get out of it, Ruth literally breaks through the roof. The abandoned cabin in the woods, scene of Ruth's crucial revelations about self, was broken apart long before the women discovered it. Finally, as young girls playing house with dolls in the garden, Ruth and her sister had “played out intricate, urgent dramas of entrapment and miraculous escape” (p. 86). The cumulative effect of these images points to the house, the sacred home, the comfort and shelter of womanhood as confinement, a retreat from the larger arena of the world that the heroic individual must confront and learn to dwell in as the universal habitation of us all.

“From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines,” declares Whitman in “Song of the Open Road”: “divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.” Viewed from the perspective of this American paradigm of freedom, Robinson's metaphor of “being put out of house” expresses not only the renunciation of conventionality but also the assumption of metaphysical liberty. If the accumulation of possessions mirrors the unfolding of time, then in the largest temporal context such accumulation inevitably yields to impermanence, and to live without ties to material possessions, without the cultural baggage of the house, is to accept this philosophical recognition and stoic thrift. The transient lives outside the spoils of history. It is this insight that Sylvie expresses in her own laconic way when she comforts Ruth: “It's not the worst thing, Ruthie, drifting. You'll see” (p. 210). The worst thing would be for the kinswomen to separate, because Ruth in the revelatory scene at the abandoned homestead compares true shelter to the security of the bonds in sisterhood or friendship: “Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house” (p. 154). This image of the illuminated house suggests that the final refuge from mutability is to be found only in the intimacy of relationship, where one finds comfort from the outer darkness of indifferent nature and from the inner darkness of loneliness—and is thus accorded what Gaston Bachelard calls the “counsels of resistance.”²⁸

Yet Robinson does not sentimentalize the bonding between Sylvie and Ruth. It does not represent a utopian vision of possibilities, nor does it confirm feminist theories that women find fulfillment in relationship and community as opposed to autonomy. The novel ends with Ruth in “that sad and outcast state of revelation” (p. 184) where she can reflect on the difference between housekeeping and being turned out of house to comment on a materialistic society that falsifies the notion of female identity by equating female well-being with domestic life. In choosing her tie to Sylvie above all else, Ruth demonstrates that freedom for the female in our culture rests upon autonomous, unexpected choices, but that such freedom is still purchased at tremendous cost. At the end of this novel the female survivor, like her American male counterpart, is traveling into the unknown, but without sanction from any quarter. Robinson offers no directives. She measures Lucille's choice of containment and conventional life against Ruth's strange but heroic assertion of independence and finds sorrow either way. The paradox of this book is that through the strength of Ruth's heroic consciousness, as she traverses the shifting planes of reality and subjectivity, Robinson creates a story about the sorrow of female experience that is fortifying in its fictive power. Ruth weighs the meagerness of commonplace female security as we now conceive of it against the larger pressures of Heraclitan time and flux to conclude that stability is illusory.

With spiritual insight, then, Ruth chooses love, freedom, and the frontier of the open road. The quest of the female hero in this novel thus ends where that of the male hero in American literature began (and also ends). Yet for Ruth the breaking of family ties is never final, and the novel concludes with a coda in which she daydreams of seeing her sister Lucille again in Boston. This final projection of Ruth's imagination means that this novel set in the West ends, ironically, in the East, at the birthplace of American letters. This span indicates the novel's cultural reach, for Robinson's account of female sensibility extends and alters the scope of American literary tradition. The frontier in this contemporary novel is not a geographic or historic construct but the urge to move beyond conventional social patterns, beyond the dichotomy of urban and rural experience, beyond domestic concerns and physical boundaries into metaphysics. Ruth and Sylvia cross the modern frontier of Housekeeping into the unsettling, austere condition of transiency, perhaps the ultimate metaphor for female transition.

Notes

1. I gratefully acknowledge a grant from the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon which made possible my research for this essay.

2. Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Dell, rev. ed. 1966), p. 29.

3. Housekeeping (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), p. 3. All further references to this novel appear in the text.

4. In Historical Studies and Literary Criticism, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 242.

5. New York Times Book Review, 13 May 1984, p. 30.

6. Letter to the author, Oct. 1986.

7. The American (1876-77; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 67.

8. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 237.

9. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 60 and 34.

10. See Alice Balint, “Love for the Mother and Mother Love” (1939) in Primary Love and Psycho-analytic Technique, ed. Michael Balint (London: Tavistock, 1952), p. 98.

11. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978), pp. 76 and 51.

12. Fiedler, p. 29. Gunilla Florby applies Leo Marx's theory from The Machine in the Garden to Robinson's novel in her article “Escaping This World: Marilynne Robinson's Variation on an Old American Motif,” Moderna Sprøk, 78 (1984), 211-16. Elizabeth A. Meese applies feminist and deconstructionist theories to Robinson's text in chapter four of Crossing the Double-Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986). See also Thomas Foster's excellent analysis of Housekeeping using the theories of Julia Kristeva in “History, Critical Theory, and Women's Social Practices: ‘Women's Time’ and Housekeeping,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14 (1988), 73-99.

13. Robinson declares, “I am an Emersonian,” and applies the theory of language Emerson set forth in his essay “Nature” in “Let's Not Talk Down to Ourselves,” New York Times Book Review, 5 April 1987, p. 11.

14. Chodorow, p. 169.

15. Reinventing Womanhood (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 104.

16. Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 6.

17. For the classic discussion of landscape as earth mother imagery see Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1969), especially chap. 2, “The Great Goddess.”

18. New York Times Book Review, 13 Oct. 1985, p. 34.

19. It is interesting to note that in Marilyn French's 1980 novel The Bleeding Heart (New York: Random House), the central character, a feminist scholar, is at work on a book entitled “Lot's Wife: A Study of the Identification of Women with Suffering.” This figurative use of Lot's wife by two contemporary American novelists suggests one way in which feminist writers and poets are undertaking the project of reclaiming from history the female archetypes of Biblical narrative.

20. Psychologist Alice Balint describes maternal indifference in terms similar to Robinson's insight: “Coldness on the mother's part may, because of the child's unappeased love for her, prevent the requisite loosening of the bond between them. The child will still eternally seek, even when grown up, for a mother-substitute. …” Quoted in Chodorow, p. 135.

21. The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 5-8. Sewall ascribes the term to Karl Jaspers and Paul Tillich.

22. Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex, Culture, and Myth (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962), p. 141.

23. This substitution of the mother's sister for the dead mother is suggested in an earlier scene in the novel when Ruthie and Lucille watch Sylvia brushing her hair before the mirror in their grandmother's bedroom. The matrilinear surroundings and prototypically female hair imagery contribute to the identification of the mother's sister with the mother. As the girls watch Sylvia, the mother Helen becomes “the woman in the mirror, the woman in the dream, the woman remembered, the woman in the water” (p. 132).

24. In a curious use of the racially “other” as a figure of fate, Robinson creates an enigmatic old Indian woman, a vagrant, to solemnize the adoptive relationship by addressing Sylvie as though she had always been Ruth's mother (pp. 171-73).

25. Louise Westling points out that the name Helen may have been associated with an ancient Minoan tree-goddess. This would connect the mother's name with the meaning of Sylvia's. See Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985), p. 83. The women's married names also function symbolically in Housekeeping. The cold-hearted mother took the name Stone, while the aunt who redeems Ruth on the lake took the name Fisher.

26. Heilbrun, p. 68.

27. Annette Kolodny calls the “inversion” of traditional images a prominent feature of contemporary women's writing. She adds: “Extrapolated to thematic concerns, the inversion pattern may even structure the plot, by denying our conventional expectations for a happy ending and substituting for it an ending which is conventionally unhappy, but which, in terms of the particular work, pleases or satisfies nonetheless”—“Some Notes on Defining a ‘Feminist Literary Criticism,’” Critical Inquiry, 2 (1975), 81. Rachel Blau DuPlessis emphasizes that “narrative outcome is one place where transindividual assumptions and values are most clearly visible, and where the word ‘convention’ is found resonating between its literary and social meanings”—Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1985), p. 3.

28. The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1969), p. 46.