Housekeeping: An Aesthetic Appreciation
I want to lead off with a brief description of the remarkable images employed here, and point out the contexts in which the author uses them. We learn straight away that Edmund, a man employed by the railroad, perishes in a train derailment some years before the novel’s events. Specifically, this train went off a trestle as it traveled over Lake Fingerbone in Idaho, and fell into the depths of the lake. This accident must have been something horrendous with noise and loss of life, but Ruth, the man’s granddaughter and the book’s first-person narrator, describes it thusly: “Though it was reported in newspapers as far away as Denver and St. Paul, it was not, strictly speaking, spectacular, because no one saw it happen. The disaster took place midway through a moonless night” (Chapter 1, Location 60). (Locations herein refer to the novel as contained in an Amazon Kindle file. I will provide chapter citations as well for readers without the Kindle. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but I have been in the habit in late years of making purchases in e-reader form for books I want to own.)
Right out of the box the author presents two images which she employs throughout the rest of the narrative: water and darkness.
Water begins its function in Housekeeping as a menace or at least as a hazardous presence. Years after Edmund’s violent death, his daughter Helen takes a neighbor’s advice, borrows the neighbor’s car and drives with her daughters Ruth and Lucille from Seattle to Fingerbone, in Idaho, ostensibly to see her mother. Helen deposits the two girls, then in their early teens, on the front porch at Grandmother’s house, tells them to wait quietly, then calmly proceeds to kill herself by driving the borrowed car off a cliff into the depths of the lake. The lake passively takes the lives of two of our heroine’s forebears and I did think for a time that it was meant to represent society’s demands for orthodoxy, especially as it is required of women. I no longer think that.
Darkness plays another role. Throughout Housekeeping the author explores and explicates the nature of human perception in terms of light and darkness. She also considers the emotional and epistemological implications of what and how we perceive. She takes the example of a house in the evening with the interior lights lit, and reminds us that with the lights on, we only see reflections of ourselves in the window, nothing beyond. However, from a darkened house, we can see out into the evening and no one from outside can see in. We will revisit this image as we go on.
First, however, I want to further elucidate the symbolic functions of water here, because they are so varied and telling. Here is Ms. Robinson in the Chapter 1 introduction to Lake Fingerbone and its multi-faceted character:
In this single brief passage, Ms. Robinson establishes almost an encyclopedic set of characteristics for the Lake. Not only do we see the liquid and vaporous natures of the lake’s waters, but the liquid is further subdivided: we learn of the visible, known part of the lake which rests on the unknowable, pitch black part. The identifiable part is itself divided into the permanent and the temporary. And its vapor is equated with the breath of an animal. The lake suffers during the story, and can knit its surface of ice up when it has been breached. These are clearly living waters for our author, and they pervade every area of the town just as they pervade the book. We see the lake if not anthropomorphized, at least endowed with some attributes of a living creature.
As the story progresses, the two girls, Ruth and Lucille, are left with their grandmother in the town of Fingerbone. The grandmother’s health fails her before very long, and so two great-aunts, Lily and Nona, arrive from Spokane and take over as the girls’ guardians, to the best of their scant abilities. This task intimidates them, and they do what they can to find another to take over the girls’ upbringing. Before this can be effected, however, we learn a little about the two older relatives, and quite a bit more about the nature of water. Apparently this is a difficult winter, with snow cresting over everyone’s head. Water in the form of snow simply crushes a number of homes in Fingerbone. The snow terrifies them. So the girls and the townspeople spend a lot of time on the lake, skating, at least partly because they want to stay out from under threatened roofs. Apparently, the aunts would prefer the terrors of pneumonia to the terrors of a crushing death (Chap 2, Loc 423). In contrast to the liquid lake, which allows you to enter and drown, in its frozen form the lake, at least the visible portion of it, provides pleasure (Loc 424). Ruth and Lucille spend especially plentiful time at the surface of the lake, skating out farther and staying longer than anyone.
Lily and Nona provide, in their relatively feeble way, for the girls’ welfare and upbringing. The girls’ Aunt Sylvie shows up at the door somewhat unexpectedly – they sent a note but doubt Sylvie will see it because they assume she’s moved on to some unknown and unknowable location. Sylvie’s arrival and her assumption of parenting duties begins the process of bifurcating the two girls from each other as each elects what type of life she will lead. Sylvie’s guardianship, while kindly, does not incorporate many orthodox skills or activities. Dinner, when Sylvie makes it, is frequently eggs and bacon. She may sit out near the orchard to enjoy the evening (pronouncing it in three syllables, as though maybe it meant a leveling). It becomes too much for Lucille, as we shall see. This bifurcation progresses over time as the small occurrences build into clear preferences. Lucille’s eventual defection – she is in effect adopted by the high school’s Home Economics teacher – leads to episodes which attract the attention of the authorities, which in their turn conclude that Ruth may well belong in foster care. This neither Ruth nor Sylvie can live with.
The broad gulf between these choices estranges Ruth from Lucille, and poses for the reader the challenge of what to make of this skillful, daedal narrative, particularly because the author comes down so clearly on the perhaps counterintuitive side of the conflict. It is a straightforward plot, but the author arranges it in a highly memorable set of images which help to sharpen distinctions between the sisters Ruth and Lucille, give weight to their choices, and present questions of deepest significance about life, perception, society, and death.
Thematic Principles
As we shall show through extensive quotations and notes, Ms. Robinson posits each of the following:
But I would like to direct your attention to the more important effects of this flood, the new leaf turned over in the lives of Sylvie, Ruth, and Lucille. It submerges the frozen lake, for one thing, so that Lake Fingerbone’s menace diminishes – it becomes something else suffering in the flood: “Under the weight of the flood water it [the lake] sagged and, being fibrous rather than soft or brittle, wrenched apart, as resistant to breaching as green bones. The afternoon was loud with the miseries of the lake …” (Chap 4, Loc 874). So now, the lake joins the town in suffering, and with its multiple layers, and its breath like a live animal’s, we comprehend it a little more sympathetically; it has graduated from inert hazard to something alive for which we begin to feel an affinity. Further, the flood waters transform the girls’ home into an alien landscape, or maybe a vehicle. Walking through the pantry means fighting the eddies and currents, and all habitation must be done above stairs. At Location 975 (Chapter 4) Sylvie says she had never seen such a dark night. “‘I really never have,’ she said. ‘It’s like the end of the world.’” The three girls listen in the utter dark to the groans of the lake, to the brimming and simmering of the flood waters. In the quiet darkness, nothing is seen, and unless it is heard, it might not exist. And at Location 980, Ruth: “Deprived of all perspective and horizon, I found myself reduced to an intuition, and my sister and my aunt to less than that.” Here we encounter our first intimation of the mystical, other-worldly direction Ruth’s ruminations will take. These ruminations adumbrate later thoughts by putting into our consciousnesses the realization of the pervasive nature of water in life. It can be over-plentiful, and in this Idaho town it proves its capriciousness every year. But water will continue to serve its pivotal function as the themes and their implications become clear.
The town is plunged into darkness, the interior of the house perhaps even darker, and it is a very uncomfortable situation for Lucille, especially. She complains loudly, and Sylvie pats Ruth on the shoulder, thinking she’s patting Lucille. “I’m not Lucille,” says Ruth. Here the girls also have their first variance in how they react. Ruth wants it very clear to Sylvie that she’s not Lucille. The absolute darkness encompasses them; the girls can speak but no one can see anyone. When people make their way around the lower floor, it’s described with a “wash wash wash” as they make their way along. One night Sylvie descends and falls silent as the girls wait upstairs. Lucy complains again, and Ruth decides to search the house for the silent grownup. She wades along the lower floor, holding her arms wide and finds her aunt leaning against the window, very faintly silhouetted. She stands as still as “an effigy” (Chap 4, Loc 1008). Poor Sylvie, in a house whose lower floors are filled with destroying water, yearns for the great Elsewhere. Sylvie is in effect trapped, her lower extremities occupied by the urgent needs of her kin, her head elsewhere, peering into an unknowable universe. And in this image does Ms. Robinson again unite the darkness and the water. Sylvie stands in water up to some level on her legs, and the window to the outside world is at eye level. Here she stands as in the waters of parturition, as birth comes for the next epoch of these women’s lives. (Note here also, that when Sylvie first arrived she sustained the stares of Lily, Nona, Ruth, and Lucy “with the placid modesty of a virgin who has conceived, her happiness was palpable” (Chap 3, Loc 672). The lights are dark at the house, but there is very little to see beyond the window just yet. Just now, the world is dark and its possibilities belong to the imagination.
At the end of the flood rains: “The next day was very fine. The water was so still that the sunken half of the fallen tree was replaced by the mirrored image of the half trunk and limbs that remained above water” (Chap 4, Loc 869). The natural world as we know it is on its side, altered. We see nothing the way we used to. The pervasive water now bathes peoples’ powers of perception. It affects – it disrupts – our brains and our emotions. We see the disorder wrought by the flood, and we see the newness of the world in its wake, or at least the requirement that we look at it with fresh eyes.
I need also to discuss one other incident in which these continuing images tell the story. After power is restored to the town, the girls arrive home one evening and Sylvie is sitting alone in the dark. Ruth and Lucille understand that this means Sylvie feels in some way connected to something “out there” that they do not comprehend.
Now that the thematic landscape is established
The floodwaters recede after more than a week, exposing the lack of significance of the man-made Fingerbone, and finally relieving the lake of its burden. At Location 1051 (Chap 4), Ruth avers, “Two weeks after the water was gone, people began to believe that our house had not been touched by the flood at all.” Ruth’s family’s “standoffishness” and its exceptional recent history gives it a bad distinction in the town’s eyes. Their view that their house hadn’t been affected by the flood flows from this predisposition. However, houses in general have a special significance in this story, and the fact that this family’s is thought exempt, or apart, is very telling. Houses serve to protect their inhabitants from the elements, barricading the two environments from each other. (However, and critically, the house on Sylvie's watch is allowed to revert to nature, to surrender its boundaries.) Particularly with the interior illuminated, the outside world is not visible. Sylvie does not pursue those activities which solidify a house. She considers a house an encumbrance, a flimsy structure set up to alienate one from her surroundings, and her life. She allows the housekeeping to lapse and the house begins to become one with nature, with that which it was meant to keep out. Sylvie guides the sisters in this direction; one girl accepts the guidance and one does not. This episode further cements Lucille’s approach to life in this family. She begins afterward to insist on the light, on the china, and on meat and potatoes. Sylvie eventually just gives her the grocery money. For her own thin self, “Sylvie stashed saltines in her pockets, which she ate as she walked in the evening, leaving Lucille and me alone in the lighted kitchen with its blind black window” (Chap 6, Loc 1394). Sylvie’s stance leaves Lucille cold and ill at ease. She cannot abide it. She has a familiar, a friend from school, “whom she feared and admired, and through whose eyes she continually imagined she saw. Lucille was galled and wounded by her imagined disapprobation” (Chap 6, Loc 1403). Lucille has opted for a safe, orthodox approach to life. She cares deeply what others think and yearns for anonymity and acceptance, for ordinariness.
Watch Yale Professor Amy Hungerford's lecture on Housekeeping. Here's part 1:
In Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson recounts the story of Ruth, a teenage girl who survives her mother and her grandmother, and who, with the help of her Aunt Sylvie, decides on the path of her future life. Ms. Robinson establishes the fictional Lake Fingerbone at first as the prominent symbol of orthodox society’s demands, and pits her female protagonists – the two sisters Ruth and Lucille and their Aunt Sylvie – in various stances in rejection or acceptance of those demands. She explores the merits and compensations of an unorthodox life, a life outside everyday society, and how it seems naturally to flow from a deep understanding of life’s true issues and consequences. But at the heart of this superb fiction lies a generous and breathtakingly beautiful – in terms of the imagery painted and language used – consideration of the nature of consciousness and authenticity in the modern world. This aesthetic appreciation of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping lacks some of the accoutrements that might qualify it as a scholarly paper, but will I trust provide adequate basis for others to appreciate the author’s boundless artistry.
Briefly: the images we encounter
 |
Right out of the box the author presents two images which she employs throughout the rest of the narrative: water and darkness.
Water begins its function in Housekeeping as a menace or at least as a hazardous presence. Years after Edmund’s violent death, his daughter Helen takes a neighbor’s advice, borrows the neighbor’s car and drives with her daughters Ruth and Lucille from Seattle to Fingerbone, in Idaho, ostensibly to see her mother. Helen deposits the two girls, then in their early teens, on the front porch at Grandmother’s house, tells them to wait quietly, then calmly proceeds to kill herself by driving the borrowed car off a cliff into the depths of the lake. The lake passively takes the lives of two of our heroine’s forebears and I did think for a time that it was meant to represent society’s demands for orthodoxy, especially as it is required of women. I no longer think that.
Darkness plays another role. Throughout Housekeeping the author explores and explicates the nature of human perception in terms of light and darkness. She also considers the emotional and epistemological implications of what and how we perceive. She takes the example of a house in the evening with the interior lights lit, and reminds us that with the lights on, we only see reflections of ourselves in the window, nothing beyond. However, from a darkened house, we can see out into the evening and no one from outside can see in. We will revisit this image as we go on.
First, however, I want to further elucidate the symbolic functions of water here, because they are so varied and telling. Here is Ms. Robinson in the Chapter 1 introduction to Lake Fingerbone and its multi-faceted character:
“At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered, nameless, and altogether black. Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock, and see stony, earthy bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground. And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds. Above that the water suspended in the sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains.” (Chap 1, Loc 104-107).
In this single brief passage, Ms. Robinson establishes almost an encyclopedic set of characteristics for the Lake. Not only do we see the liquid and vaporous natures of the lake’s waters, but the liquid is further subdivided: we learn of the visible, known part of the lake which rests on the unknowable, pitch black part. The identifiable part is itself divided into the permanent and the temporary. And its vapor is equated with the breath of an animal. The lake suffers during the story, and can knit its surface of ice up when it has been breached. These are clearly living waters for our author, and they pervade every area of the town just as they pervade the book. We see the lake if not anthropomorphized, at least endowed with some attributes of a living creature.
As the story progresses, the two girls, Ruth and Lucille, are left with their grandmother in the town of Fingerbone. The grandmother’s health fails her before very long, and so two great-aunts, Lily and Nona, arrive from Spokane and take over as the girls’ guardians, to the best of their scant abilities. This task intimidates them, and they do what they can to find another to take over the girls’ upbringing. Before this can be effected, however, we learn a little about the two older relatives, and quite a bit more about the nature of water. Apparently this is a difficult winter, with snow cresting over everyone’s head. Water in the form of snow simply crushes a number of homes in Fingerbone. The snow terrifies them. So the girls and the townspeople spend a lot of time on the lake, skating, at least partly because they want to stay out from under threatened roofs. Apparently, the aunts would prefer the terrors of pneumonia to the terrors of a crushing death (Chap 2, Loc 423). In contrast to the liquid lake, which allows you to enter and drown, in its frozen form the lake, at least the visible portion of it, provides pleasure (Loc 424). Ruth and Lucille spend especially plentiful time at the surface of the lake, skating out farther and staying longer than anyone.
Lily and Nona provide, in their relatively feeble way, for the girls’ welfare and upbringing. The girls’ Aunt Sylvie shows up at the door somewhat unexpectedly – they sent a note but doubt Sylvie will see it because they assume she’s moved on to some unknown and unknowable location. Sylvie’s arrival and her assumption of parenting duties begins the process of bifurcating the two girls from each other as each elects what type of life she will lead. Sylvie’s guardianship, while kindly, does not incorporate many orthodox skills or activities. Dinner, when Sylvie makes it, is frequently eggs and bacon. She may sit out near the orchard to enjoy the evening (pronouncing it in three syllables, as though maybe it meant a leveling). It becomes too much for Lucille, as we shall see. This bifurcation progresses over time as the small occurrences build into clear preferences. Lucille’s eventual defection – she is in effect adopted by the high school’s Home Economics teacher – leads to episodes which attract the attention of the authorities, which in their turn conclude that Ruth may well belong in foster care. This neither Ruth nor Sylvie can live with.
The broad gulf between these choices estranges Ruth from Lucille, and poses for the reader the challenge of what to make of this skillful, daedal narrative, particularly because the author comes down so clearly on the perhaps counterintuitive side of the conflict. It is a straightforward plot, but the author arranges it in a highly memorable set of images which help to sharpen distinctions between the sisters Ruth and Lucille, give weight to their choices, and present questions of deepest significance about life, perception, society, and death.
Thematic Principles
As we shall show through extensive quotations and notes, Ms. Robinson posits each of the following:
-
that there is more than one authentic life a woman of that time and place (mid-20th Century Idaho) could lead, but to turn one’s back on the orthodox means leaving society almost completely behind. This announces itself through the text early on, but really only serves as a reflection of the larger spiritual consideration;
-
the deep truths about life are not available to one’s consciousness unless one opens herself to fairly careful and sometimes recondite flights of wit and fancy; and that
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the implications of our embracing these sometimes outré perceptions include surprising conclusions about death, family, and the necessity (or lack of it) of those objects we once thought gave us “perspective and horizon.”
After Grandmother’s and Edmund’s history, after the bewildering, grief-inducing behavior of Helen (Ruth and Lucille’s mother), after the faltering care of Grandmother, and Lily and Nona, Sylvie arrives in the girls’ lives, and with her, a devastating flood. When the flood hits, the story of Sylvie, Ruth, and Lucille starts. The flood rearranges the world and shows the utter ordinariness of man’s constructs and clutter. I can think of no better way than to quote the ineffable author: “Days of rain at just that time were a disaster. They hastened the melting of the snow but not the thawing of the ground. So at the end of three days the houses and hutches and barns and sheds of Fingerbone were like so many spilled and foundered arks” (Chap 4, Loc 851). The flood submerges the lower floor of Ruth’s home, and many houses in the town completely. The flood does quite a few things. At base, it destroys the town, and in the process of doing that, exposes the town as ordinary, pitifully so: “Much of what Fingerbone had hoarded up was defaced or destroyed outright, but because the hoard was not much to begin with, the loss was not overwhelming” (Chap 4, Loc 868). To press the point home, the author enumerates some truly unremarkable things, hooked rugs, needlepoint ottomans, photo albums. Clearly the author indicates that not much is lost because of this flood. There is no enumeration of injury or death.
But I would like to direct your attention to the more important effects of this flood, the new leaf turned over in the lives of Sylvie, Ruth, and Lucille. It submerges the frozen lake, for one thing, so that Lake Fingerbone’s menace diminishes – it becomes something else suffering in the flood: “Under the weight of the flood water it [the lake] sagged and, being fibrous rather than soft or brittle, wrenched apart, as resistant to breaching as green bones. The afternoon was loud with the miseries of the lake …” (Chap 4, Loc 874). So now, the lake joins the town in suffering, and with its multiple layers, and its breath like a live animal’s, we comprehend it a little more sympathetically; it has graduated from inert hazard to something alive for which we begin to feel an affinity. Further, the flood waters transform the girls’ home into an alien landscape, or maybe a vehicle. Walking through the pantry means fighting the eddies and currents, and all habitation must be done above stairs. At Location 975 (Chapter 4) Sylvie says she had never seen such a dark night. “‘I really never have,’ she said. ‘It’s like the end of the world.’” The three girls listen in the utter dark to the groans of the lake, to the brimming and simmering of the flood waters. In the quiet darkness, nothing is seen, and unless it is heard, it might not exist. And at Location 980, Ruth: “Deprived of all perspective and horizon, I found myself reduced to an intuition, and my sister and my aunt to less than that.” Here we encounter our first intimation of the mystical, other-worldly direction Ruth’s ruminations will take. These ruminations adumbrate later thoughts by putting into our consciousnesses the realization of the pervasive nature of water in life. It can be over-plentiful, and in this Idaho town it proves its capriciousness every year. But water will continue to serve its pivotal function as the themes and their implications become clear.
The town is plunged into darkness, the interior of the house perhaps even darker, and it is a very uncomfortable situation for Lucille, especially. She complains loudly, and Sylvie pats Ruth on the shoulder, thinking she’s patting Lucille. “I’m not Lucille,” says Ruth. Here the girls also have their first variance in how they react. Ruth wants it very clear to Sylvie that she’s not Lucille. The absolute darkness encompasses them; the girls can speak but no one can see anyone. When people make their way around the lower floor, it’s described with a “wash wash wash” as they make their way along. One night Sylvie descends and falls silent as the girls wait upstairs. Lucy complains again, and Ruth decides to search the house for the silent grownup. She wades along the lower floor, holding her arms wide and finds her aunt leaning against the window, very faintly silhouetted. She stands as still as “an effigy” (Chap 4, Loc 1008). Poor Sylvie, in a house whose lower floors are filled with destroying water, yearns for the great Elsewhere. Sylvie is in effect trapped, her lower extremities occupied by the urgent needs of her kin, her head elsewhere, peering into an unknowable universe. And in this image does Ms. Robinson again unite the darkness and the water. Sylvie stands in water up to some level on her legs, and the window to the outside world is at eye level. Here she stands as in the waters of parturition, as birth comes for the next epoch of these women’s lives. (Note here also, that when Sylvie first arrived she sustained the stares of Lily, Nona, Ruth, and Lucy “with the placid modesty of a virgin who has conceived, her happiness was palpable” (Chap 3, Loc 672). The lights are dark at the house, but there is very little to see beyond the window just yet. Just now, the world is dark and its possibilities belong to the imagination.
At the end of the flood rains: “The next day was very fine. The water was so still that the sunken half of the fallen tree was replaced by the mirrored image of the half trunk and limbs that remained above water” (Chap 4, Loc 869). The natural world as we know it is on its side, altered. We see nothing the way we used to. The pervasive water now bathes peoples’ powers of perception. It affects – it disrupts – our brains and our emotions. We see the disorder wrought by the flood, and we see the newness of the world in its wake, or at least the requirement that we look at it with fresh eyes.
I need also to discuss one other incident in which these continuing images tell the story. After power is restored to the town, the girls arrive home one evening and Sylvie is sitting alone in the dark. Ruth and Lucille understand that this means Sylvie feels in some way connected to something “out there” that they do not comprehend.
“When we did come home Sylvie would certainly be home, too, enjoying the evening, for so she described her habit of sitting in the dark. She gave the word three syllables, and indeed I think she liked it so well for its tendency to smooth, so soften. She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a worldful 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. We had crickets in the pantry, squirrels in the eaves, sparrows in the attic” (Chap 6, Loc 1349).A house, designed to keep out the natural world, is allowed in Sylvie’s administration to let a fair amount, an unorthodox amount, of nature in. Lucille objects to this, strenuously. In Chapter 5, in another kernel of brilliant phrasing and imagery, Ruth makes this statement: “I was content with Sylvie, so it was a surprise to me when I realized that Lucille had begun to regard other people with the calm, horizontal look of settled purpose, with which, from a slowly sinking boat, they might have regarded a not-too-distant shore” (Chap 5, Loc 1273). So as the Chapter 6 episode unfolds, Lucille demonstrates how fed up she is with Sylvie’s approach. Complaining (at Loc 1361) as she scratches her arms, that she must have got into something, Lucille “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.” The shabby, damaged, aging, or neglected contents of the kitchen glare in the harsh light. “In the light we were startled and uncomfortable. Lucille yanked on the chain again, so hard that the little bell on the end of it struck the ceiling, and then we sat uncomfortably in the exaggerated darkness” (Chap 6, Loc 1374). Lucille then cross examines Sylvie about her husband, in an intense and hostile way. She even says she doubts Sylvie ever had a husband. Sylvie responds serenely, that Lucille must think what she likes. “By that time the crickets in the pantry were singing again, the window was luminous, the battered table and the clutter that lay on it were one chill ultramarine, the clutter of ordinary life on the deck of a drowned ship” (Loc 1386). Yet another brief passage in which our chief images all play a part, and an added extra: the not-even-liminal level of housekeeping chez Sylvie. In this particular episode, Lucille’s hostility is clear, and Sylvie’s tendencies when evening comes, well established. Lucille rebels at the conditions in the home, and is content to just look at a window at night and see herself reflected back. The water image returns, too, in the description of the drowned ship. Sylvie has begun to succeed in bringing the house to the medium which it was designed to keep out – nature. It is almost like a witch’s spell.
Now that the thematic landscape is established
The floodwaters recede after more than a week, exposing the lack of significance of the man-made Fingerbone, and finally relieving the lake of its burden. At Location 1051 (Chap 4), Ruth avers, “Two weeks after the water was gone, people began to believe that our house had not been touched by the flood at all.” Ruth’s family’s “standoffishness” and its exceptional recent history gives it a bad distinction in the town’s eyes. Their view that their house hadn’t been affected by the flood flows from this predisposition. However, houses in general have a special significance in this story, and the fact that this family’s is thought exempt, or apart, is very telling. Houses serve to protect their inhabitants from the elements, barricading the two environments from each other. (However, and critically, the house on Sylvie's watch is allowed to revert to nature, to surrender its boundaries.) Particularly with the interior illuminated, the outside world is not visible. Sylvie does not pursue those activities which solidify a house. She considers a house an encumbrance, a flimsy structure set up to alienate one from her surroundings, and her life. She allows the housekeeping to lapse and the house begins to become one with nature, with that which it was meant to keep out. Sylvie guides the sisters in this direction; one girl accepts the guidance and one does not. This episode further cements Lucille’s approach to life in this family. She begins afterward to insist on the light, on the china, and on meat and potatoes. Sylvie eventually just gives her the grocery money. For her own thin self, “Sylvie stashed saltines in her pockets, which she ate as she walked in the evening, leaving Lucille and me alone in the lighted kitchen with its blind black window” (Chap 6, Loc 1394). Sylvie’s stance leaves Lucille cold and ill at ease. She cannot abide it. She has a familiar, a friend from school, “whom she feared and admired, and through whose eyes she continually imagined she saw. Lucille was galled and wounded by her imagined disapprobation” (Chap 6, Loc 1403). Lucille has opted for a safe, orthodox approach to life. She cares deeply what others think and yearns for anonymity and acceptance, for ordinariness.
Watch Yale Professor Amy Hungerford's lecture on Housekeeping. Here's part 1:
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