[In the following essay, Champagne contends that Housekeeping is a feminist postmodern text in which transience and relativity subvert traditional notions of fixity, linearity, and truth.]

This essay examines one important and idealized theme in women's literature in the context of postmodern literature: a woman's relationship with the domestic sphere. In Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1982), the townspeople of Fingerbone banish Ruth and Sylvie from their family home because they fail to read and follow the social prescriptions for female domesticity; that is, they refuse to read the social text which polices and maintains the boundaries that separate private and public conduct and discourse for women. Sylvie's housekeeping is abysmal, and in her displacement and reinscription of housekeeping, feminist readers can identify the historical burdens that constitute the “crisis” of female representation.¹

Fingerbone, the fictionalized place which foregrounds the characters' histories, is overshadowed by the role that the house plays. And houses (and housekeeping), like women's names in the patriarchy, are anonymous and replaceable; nevertheless, they act as vessels for the symbolic meaning that always/already takes on past-tense importance in the face of grief and loss. My first argument in this discussion is that place is always replaceable in women's lives because of the claims that cultural hegemonies have over women's bodies. To that end, I also assert that the category of place privileges male control of women's bodies and minds; after all, it is no coincidence that nature, always “she,” becomes that which must be conquered and raped in order to claim one's “rightful place” within culture.² My second point in this examination is that feminist postmodernity, with its emphasis on fluidity and receptivity, deconstructs traditional debates within the canon of American literature. While mainstream debates waffle between categorizing postmodernity either as a genre or as a period (and in so doing, reify the boundaries of both), feminist postmodernity reveals postmodernism as a practice, and thus as a hermeneutical politics of reading.

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping reacts against idols, notions of fixity, and narrative closure, i.e., “place” as keeper of the literary imagination, whether this takes the form of women who act as spokespeople, preservers of culture, or critics of the cultural imagination.³ Whereas the argument for androgynous vision is relevant to many contemporary feminist texts, the concept is not meaningful to Robinson: in Housekeeping (both the text and the institution) the male principle is expendable.⁴ In like, Housekeeping avoids the territory of marriage and male/female relationships because these are self-enclosed identities.

The tension between transience and fixity constantly negotiates positions and alliances among Sylvie, Ruth and Lucille. Transience in Housekeeping is that quality which is misunderstood and misrepresented by traditional social values, but is attained by those who have reconstructed (and so, recovered) their own history. Even before Ruth joins Sylvie in a life of transience, she feels comfortable with Sylvie's propensity for wandering:

I was reassured by her [Sylvie's] sleeping on the lawn, and now and then in the car and by her interest in newspapers, irrespective of their dates, and by her pork-and-bean sandwiches. It seemed to me that if she could remain transient here, she would not have to leave.

(103)

This passage also illustrates the combining of traditionally opposing notions—although “keeping house” normally connotes “keeping order,” in this passage and at the novel's end, housekeeping is inverted to privilege breaking fixed and closed ties to a house (and by implication, the standards that keep a woman enslaved within its confines) while preserving bonding between women.

Unlike Ruth, Lucille “hated everything that had to do with transcience” (103). Where Ruth is comfortable with non-delineation, Lucille needs to create arbitrary boundaries in order to define herself within these. When Lucille and Ruth are “trapped” by the night and must camp out in the woods, Lucille “sat down beside [Ruth] in [their] ruined stronghold, never still, never accepting that all [their] human boundaries were overrun” (115). In contrast, Ruth takes comfort in boundary disruption. In expressing her relation to the outside world, Ruth situates herself (albeit unwittingly) within the postmodern relation to politics. She thinks to herself:

Darkness is the only solvent. While it was dark, despite Lucille's pacing and whistling. … it seemed to me that there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, momento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace, if only darkness could be perfect and permanent.

(116)

Ruth knows that she is unable to be contained because the dimensions which she draws are fluid and ever-changing. Even when Sylvie and Ruth commit themselves to one another, their initiation to female bonding takes place when Sylvie “gives birth” to Ruth through metaphor:

Sylvie climbed in and settled herself with a foot on either side of me. She twisted around and pushed us off with an oar, and then she began to reach and pull, reach and pull, with strength that seemed to have no effort in it. I lay like a seed in a husk. … It was the order of the world that the shell could fall away and that I, the nub, the sleeping germ, should swell and expand. Say that. … I swelled and swelled until I burst Sylvie's coat. … Then, presumably, would come partuition in some form, though my first birth had hardly deserved that name, and why should I hope for more from the second?

(161-62)

Likewise, the narrative in Housekeeping does not function as a frame, but rather, the imagery establishes the narrative.

Once Lucille rejects Sylvie and Ruth for home economics, home permanents, coordinating wardrobes, and a heterosexual/heterosocial inscription of what good housekeeping is, Ruth realizes how even friendships frame the people involved, and in so doing, emphasize not what is inside the frame, but where the limits are drawn. Ruth muses:

Having a sister or friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. … Now there was neither threshold nor sill between me and these cold solitary children who almost breathed against my cheek and almost touched my hair.

(154)

This passage also illustrates important images in Housekeeping: artificial light and its intrusion on natural darkness; windows and their function as either barriers to freedom or mirrors; and abandoned children, contemporary signifiers of transience. The family name is Foster, yet one is never properly fostered in this text. Just as windows deceive vision and representation, both the flood (chapter 4) and the housefire (chapter 10) destroy all barriers and frames and portray a world without horizons. When a house is on fire, the windows are the first to explode. As mediums for vision or reflection, they are inadequate and suggest a deprecation of vision. As in the Kantian sublime, the perceived object always depends on its distinction from the perceiving subject. In a tactile, auditory world without light, there is a distrust of the metaphor as sight because this system depends on boundaries and divisions. The first object which acts as a barrier between life and death is the window of the train in which Ruth's grandfather dies. The train, sunk underwater, separates life from death. A neighbor boy jumps in the lake to search for the train and finds “A window. … He said only that smooth surface, of all the things he touched, was not overgrown or hovered about by a cloud of something loose, like silt” (8). After the good ladies of Fingerbone decide that Sylvie and Ruth must be separated and inform the patriarchal powers-that-be that Sylvie is an unfit guardian, Ruth immediately feels that her house is her enemy. Ruth sits outside the house and observes: “The house stood out beyond the orchard with every one of its windows lighted. It looked large and foreign. … I could not imagine going into it” (203).

When Lucille turns on the lights during dinner, she destroys the continuity of life with Sylvie:

… [S]he stood up and pulled the chain of the overhead light. The window went black and the cluttered kitchen leaped, so it seemed, into being, as remote from what had gone before as this world from the primal darkness.

(100)

The light changes the function of the window and it ceases to be transparent. In the world of Housekeeping, light distorts and misrepresents people and events. When Ruth makes loneliness analogical to light, we see that even when the misrepresentation is welcome, someone suffers.⁵

Sylvie and Ruth cannot allow the good neighbors of Fingerbone to separate them because when families are broken, this forces memory to replace repetition, and memory is merely “the sense of loss, and loss pulls you after it” (194). Repetition differs from memory as experience does from the construction of experience. Housekeeping is the comfort of repetition, and memory misrepresents the experience in question. Ruth says: “if I turned, however quickly to look behind me [at the burning house] the consciousness behind me would not still be there, and would only come closer when I turned away again” (154). Likewise, “Lot's wife was salt and barren because she was full of loss and mourning and looked back” (153). Looking back causes her fate; to be involved in memories is to be turned into “stone.” (Interestingly, “Stone” is Lucille's and Ruth's last name.)

Not only is all memory that of loss, but it militates against emotional progression and psychological connection because of the misrepresentations of comfort, nostalgia and closure memory necessarily produces. Memory collapses the construction of an experience (its reduction to narrative) with the “authentic” (that is, non-discursive) moment it tries to recapture:

What is thought, after all, what is dreaming, but swim and flow, and the images they seem to animate? The images are the worst of it. … like reflections on water, our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement. They mock us with their seeming slightness. If they were more substantial … if they had weight and took up space—they would sink or be carried away in the general flux. But they persist, outside the brisk and ruinous energies of the world.

(162-63)

In contrast, repetition is active:

… watching Sylvie seemed very much like dreaming, because the motion was always the same, and was necessary, and arduous, and without issue, and repeated, not as one motion in a series, but as the same motion repeated because here was the mystery, if one could find it.

(170)

Repetition implies the unresolved tension between preservation and loss. Ruth says that the heart of the lake is her grandfather's eye, and when she and Sylvie row the boat back to shore after the metaphorical birth scene, Ruth says: “It was possible to pass out of sight of my grandfather's eye, though the effort was dreadful” (170).

Ruth's childhood is filled with loss and, therefore, memory. Thus she understands why Sylvie is adamant that they remain together:

Sylvie did not wish to lose me. … She did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence. … For she could regard me without strong emotion. … She could forget I was in the room. She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her—this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all. But if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing.

(195)

While Ruth and Sylvie have repetition, Lucille is left with memory. Years after the housefire, Ruth thinks about contacting Lucille, then imagines her “in Boston, at a table in a restaurant, waiting for a friend … her water glass has left two-thirds of a ring on the table, and she works at completing the circle with her thumbnail” (218). Lucille still needs to frame her experiences, always seeking closure. In contrast, Ruth and Sylvie's lives have no frame, no boundary—“the perimeters of our wanderings are nowhere” (218). The narrative ends with (Ruth's construction of) Lucille closing the water-marks with her finger, forming a perfect hermetic circle on the tablecloth.

II

Given the canon war of the contemporary academic climate, categorizing any text written by a woman as postmodern carries subversive intent, since traditional anthologies of literature and literary dictionaries preclude the possibility of a feminist postmodernity through their lists of all-male postmodern canons.⁶ So, why categorize this text as feminist postmodern? On what terrain does such a reading locate the reader and the text? Endorsing Terry Eagleton's position that reception shares common ground with production (as both require cooperation from the subject as actor and agent), Housekeeping's politically subversive message becomes frighteningly clear when read as an example of feminist postmodernity: Ruth and Sylvie fulfill the feminist agenda of politicizing the body, and they do this through their transience. As Eagleton writes: “The production does not merely “double” the text's self-understanding, but constructs an interpretation of the self-understanding, an ideology of that ideology.”⁷

Ever since Louis Althusser defined ideology as a “representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”⁸ representation as something inherently powerful, misleading, deceptive, and in “crisis” has intrigued cultural critics. As we enter society “always/already” constructed by ideologies, reading, then, is not merely a matter of making meaning of a text, but an invitation to replicate how one always/already inscribed in ideology produces and hence re/presents ideologies which work through their invisibility. For example, in Housekeeping the final narrative moment relies on a displaced use of negatives. Ruth tells the reader: “the perimeters of our wanderings are nowhere. … No one watching this woman [Lucille] … could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie” (219). Ruth knows what Lucille cannot—that through absence we are changed.

What “politically subversive” message do I glean from using both gender and genre to categorize this text as feminist postmodern? That women can and do live without men or homes and through this absence, their lives have “authenticity” precisely because their “lifestyle” is anti-representational.⁹ Significantly, Ruth is a speechless narrator. But unlike the host of socially induced silent female narrators,¹⁰ Ruth chooses to not bring attention to the materiality of her discourse. Really, Ruth chooses not to articulate, to make speech and speech acts to other characters in the text. She narrates from the past and refuses to comment on an event with another character where her “words” may alter the reader's sense of presence, past and absence. And this is precisely why this text is postmodern in gender and genre: Ruth rejects articulation in terms of speech acts because to fix in narrative is to re/present, which is to say, make visible but false. When something or someone is repaired to a category, it has a shape, a form, a place in the world, and a script, but it also has the imposition of silence—it must fail to own what it had to “repair” out of itself to join the category of the represented.

Ruth seems to know unconsciously while she consciously rejects her powerful emotional resources. The power here is as subversive as the negative narrative—love between women, whether categorized as sexual or sensual, is always a subversive condition because, when women love women they resist the patriarchal ideologies which always/already determine the boundaries of their activism. In this way, Ruth's narrative enacts a juggling act between solipsism and existentialism: Ruth's preference for repetition indicates her understanding that though meaning depends on the solipsistic frame of the reader, the act of reading, and perhaps most importantly, the engagement in the act, are the only real opportunities at self-knowledge that we have available to us.

Housekeeping invades postmodern territory in its analysis of the way memory and repetition interrogate each other. In the text's terms, memory equals nostalgia for origins. This nostalgia depends on the belief that history exists outside our perception and construction of it. Thus memory acts as the keeper for both misrepresentation and value. As Susan Stewart in On Longing writes:

Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is in-authentic because it does not take place in lived experience. … Nostalgia, like any form of narrative is always ideological: the past it seeks had never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to produce itself as felt lack.

(23)¹¹

Ruth and Lucille disagree about who and what their mother was because the stakes are so high: nostalgia both depends on our perception of history and is inimical to notions of origin and “true” history. Memory makes us yearn for the pure moment of lived experience, for that time before we knew the outcome of the experience, and thus, before it had past-tense importance. As Hayden White has taught, narrative involves itself with retrodiction not prediction.¹² This double-directionality of history implies that the past contains ideological reality only. This revision of what history is—that a historical text is not a “fact” but rather a narrative, the conventions of which will determine whether it will become (through our reading) a “fact”—helps interrogate the privileged status of place, home or hearth in feminist theory.¹³

Repetition, however, equals transience. By avoiding the territory of value altogether, it does not leave itself open to re/presentation and therefore misrepresentation. Equally important, repetition, even as a “compulsion,” doesn't reinscribe itself as valuable and thereby invite our re/presentation of it on socio-historical grounds; that is, it does not abolish difference only to reconstitute difference according to a new set of equally oppressive boundaries. Ruth explains why the good ladies of Fingerbone feel moral compulsion to “save” her from a life of transience:

So the transients wandered through Fingerbone like ghosts, terrifying as ghosts are because they were not very different from us. And so it was important to the town to believe that I should be rescued, and that rescue was possible.

(178)

Transience, then, is a crime of production, not content. Transience has no transcendent value, but by virtue of its sheer numbers and abstract and anonymous repetition, Fingerbone cannot stand it; Fingerbone cannot tolerate what it cannot categorize in hierarchical determinations. Although Ruth knows no one can be saved from this life of transience just as no one can be saved from death (“The sorrow is that every soul is put out of house,” [179] Ruth says), the community of Fingerbone takes sustenance from the very acts of categorization that poison and repress Ruth and Sylvie (and, by implication, any woman who wants to break free from the discipline of heterosexism). In order for Ruth and Sylvie to accept a totalizing personal history as the “truth,” they must also accept the complicated and seductive self-deception that personal history is an experience as complete and attainable (and dead) as grasping grandmother's tea cup firmly in hand. Although they may fish Helen's body out of the lake that consumed her, they will not have her. Because we both do and do not stop at our skins, we are not traceable; our histories exist only in their tellings and re-tellings. That transience symbolizes death in this text is evident when the neighbor ladies visit Ruth and Sylvie in droves bringing with them the same modes of behavior and discourse they wear at funerals:

Neighbor women and church women began to bring us casseroles and coffee cake. They brought me knitted socks and caps and comforters. They sat on the edge of the couch with their offerings in their laps and made delicate inquiries about Sylvie's can and bottle collection.

(180)

That Ruth's narrative chronicles her un-narrativized life with Sylvie is significant. Ruth and Sylvie are not hypocrites: as they reject making histories that stand-in for truths with the good ladies of Fingerbone, so do they with each other. As transients, they live lives “authentic,” invisible and valueless in exchange for the limited truth-constructions of a world that repetitiously replaces geographical place while simultaneously decentering subject construction.

Notes

1. I am indebted to Professor Debra Moddelmog for her professional guidance and our many conversations that have inspired this revision. To Karen J. Hall, whose suggestions have made me re-think my well-worn assumptions in new ways, I also offer my gratitude.

2. See also Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Women, Culture and Society, eds. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lampshere (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974) 67-87.

3. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (New York: Bantam, 1982). All quotations are to this edition and are identified by page number in the text.

4. For a contemporary example of men's resistance to housekeeping, see Jim Miller, “Woman's Work Is Never Done,” rev. of The Second Shift, by Arlie Hochschild, Newsweek, 31 July 1989: 65.

5. This moment in the text reveals representation as an act of violence, and in so doing addresses most effectively how the “crisis” of representation manifests itself on feminist terms.

6. On the contentious relations between feminism and postmodernism, see Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge P, 1990). The possibility of shared feminist/postmodern turf is explored by Laura Kipnis in “Feminism: The Political Conscience of Postmodernism?” Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988) 149-166.

7. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso P, 1978) 69.

8. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes toward an Investigation,” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review P, 1971) 127-186.

9. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Value without Truth-Value,” Life after Postmodernism, ed. John Fekete (New York: St. Martin's P, 1987) 1-21. I am intentionally avoiding the territory of “value” and am thus working from Smith's distinction between “value” and “truth-value” which she employs to suggest: “That which we call “value” may be seen as neither an inherent property of objects nor an arbitrary projection of subjects (1).” I am using “value” in the text as something socially constructed by the patriarchy; that is, something which becomes “real” through (social) commodification, not (essential) nature.

10. King-Kok Cheung, “‘Don't Tell’: Imposed Silences in The Color Purple and The Woman Warrior,” PMLA 103.2 (1988) 162-174.

11. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984).

12. Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978) 81-101.

13. See also Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do with It?” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 191-212.