Housekeeping

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Housekeeping is a 1980 novel by Marilynne Robinson. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel. In addition to her tenure from 1991 to 2016 on the faculty of the University of Iowa, where she retired as the F. Wendell Miller Professor of English and Creative Writing, Robinson has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at many colleges and universities, including Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets and Writers. [18] In 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale University, where she delivered a series of talks titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. On April 19, 2010, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [19] In May 2011, Robinson delivered the University of Oxford's annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university's Rothermere American Institute. Early in the book Ruthie’s and Lucille’s mother takes their next door neighbor’s …show more content… Edmund Foster – Ruth and Lucille's grandfather, Sylvia's husband, and Molley, Helena, and Sylvie's father ("papa"). He was raised in a house, dug out of the ground, in the "Middle West". He is consumed with wanderlust and a desire to paint mountains. This desire leads to his job on a train and the related events form the foundation of the novel. Working on the train, he is killed in its crash into the lake of Fingerbone. Robinson has been a member of her church for almost as long as she’s lived in Iowa. She can regularly be found arranging the flowers in the sanctuary, socializing during coffee hour, and bowing her head during the Prayers of the People. Occasionally, she has preached exegetically rich sermons on, among other things, economics, scriptural language, and grace. Those sermons are sometimes disarmingly personal. “I have never been much good at the things most people do,” she confesses in one of them, before describing the single day she spent as a waitress—a spectacular failure, in which she spilled soup on a customer and was banished to the kitchen, where an older waitress, taking pity on her, tried to give her that day’s tips. Robinson likens the waitress’s offer to the widow’s mite, in the Gospels: “a gift made freely, in contempt of circumstance.” Yet she felt that she could not accept it, and struggles still with the question of whether she should have done so. She credits the waitress with teaching her that generosity is “a casting off of the constraints of prudence and self-interest.” In that respect, she notes, it “is so like an art that I think it may actually be the impulse behind art.”

DS: Is there significance to the name "Fingerbone"? There is one reference in the novel to a Native-American tribe called the Fingerbone tribe. After graduating high school in nearby Coeur d'Alene, Robinson followed her brother to Brown University in Rhode Island, where she studied with the writer John Hawkes and nurtured her interest in 19th-century American literature and creative writing. She graduated in 1966, and from there went on to earn a PhD in English from the University of Washington in Seattle. So, rather than submit to yet another assault on their strange and transient association, Ruth and Sylvie burn down their house and escape together across the lake. The townspeople, who cannot understand the idea of self-sufficient “homeless” women, decide Ruth and Sylvie are insane and that they must have drowned in the lake. Sylvia Foster – Ruth and Lucille's grandmother and the mother of Molly, Helen, and Sylvie. Sylvia lived her entire life in Fingerbone, accepted the basic religious dogma of an afterlife, and lived her life accordingly. Mother Country” also helped determine the future of Robinson’s fiction. After the Sellafield lawsuit, she sought solace in historical examples of people whose moral clarity was disregarded by their contemporaries. She read about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, then turned her attention to the life and work of abolitionists in the United States. The year after “Mother Country” was published, Robinson accepted the job in Iowa, and, once in the Midwest, began exploring a constellation of colleges those abolitionists had built, among them Grinnell, Oberlin, Carleton, and Knox. Many of these institutions were integrated by race or gender or both—an egalitarianism so radical that a century later it took federal courts and the National Guard to enforce it elsewhere—and Robinson wondered what had happened to the visionary impulses behind them. The Second Great Awakening began as a broad movement for social and moral reform and spread across the entire frontier, only to be snuffed out after a single generation and misremembered today as nothing but an outburst of cultish religious enthusiasm.

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I don’t think it’s unusual for those who have experienced loss to engage in this kind of superstitious thinking, and I recognized this anxiety the first time I read Housekeeping. Fearing another abandonment, Ruth and Lucille watch Sylvie with keen attention for signs that she intends to leave, as if predicting this possibility would help them prepare for it: “Lucille and I still doubted that Sylvie would stay,” states Ruth. “She resembled our mother, and besides that, she seldom removed her coat, and every story she told had to do with a bus or a train station.” By positioning the threatening, lush natural world of Fingerbone in direct opposition to the town’s genteel interiors—the houses full of furniture adorned with doilies, the soda shops teeming with girls poring over dress patterns in magazines, the schoolhouse full of children in neat rows—Robinson establishes the strange duality of her fictional town. As the novel progresses, Ruth and Lucille’s encounters with nature both nourish and frighten them, and Robinson explores both girls’ entry into womanhood through their very different relationships with the natural world. Ruth and Lucille are, at the start of the novel, both haunted by and drawn to nature. They arrive in Fingerbone knowing already that the vast lake at its center once claimed their grandfather Edmund’s life, only to have their mother Helen allow the lake to claim hers, too. Nevertheless, the girls soon begin skipping school frequently to ice-skate along the lake’s surface, fish down at the lake’s shore, and explore the woods around it. The girls are unintimidated by nature and coexist with it almost without a second thought. After a night spent out in the woods, though, the girls’ relationships to nature begins to change. While Ruth finds herself increasingly drawn to the dense forests of Fingerbone, the orchard behind her own house, and the magnetic, dangerous lake, Lucille begins to eschew the natural world and focus more and more intensely on beauty, grooming, and socializing. She becomes obsessed with making a dress for herself, starts hanging around with other, more “normal” girls from school, and even crushes some old pressed flowers Ruth finds in a dictionary to demonstrate how little nature has come to mean to her. Lily and Nona Foster – Sylvia Foster's sisters-in-law (i.e., Edmund's sisters), who moved from the Midwest to Spokane, to be closer to their brother. After Sylvia's death, they temporarily move from Spokane to Fingerbone to take care of Ruthie and Lucille. When this becomes too difficult, they summon Sylvie. Lucille has since abandoned Sylvie and Ruthie to live a "normal" life in town while the other two women ruminate about sorrow: Robinson was the keynote speaker for the 75th anniversary celebration of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in June 2011, and she gave the 2012 Annual Buechner Lecture at The Buechner Institute at King University. On February 18, 2013, she was the speaker at the Easter Convocation of the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa. In 2012, Brown University awarded Robinson the degree of Doctor of Literature honoris causa. [20] The College of the Holy Cross, Notre Dame, Amherst College, Skidmore College, the University of Oxford, and Yale University have also awarded Robinson honorary degrees. She has been elected a fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. [21] Commendations [ edit ]

It is up to the reader to decide whether or not one of these ways of coping with isolation is better than another one. However, it may also be assumed that each of these paths is flawed in some manner though still being a way to resolve the problem.

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980) tells the story of Ruthie, a quiet, friendless girl living in a remote Idaho town called Fingerbone. The train that travels into the cold mountains of Fingerbone crosses a lake that has claimed the lives of Ruthie's grandfather by accident and her mother by suicide, leaving Ruthie and her younger sister Lucille with their grandmother, Sylvia Foster. It is a story filled with colorful and alluring metaphors, which make the entire book compelling to read. Almost every line in the novel can be used both in and out of context, as the manner of writing is strangely musical and melodious, making it pleasant and interesting to read. The number of possible interpretations, the literary talent of the author, and the themes touched upon in the novel make it one of the contemporary classics for many generations to come. Plot Summary UI Writers' Workshop faculty member Marilynne Robinson win quarter-million-dollar award". February 4, 1998 . Retrieved March 29, 2016. Fay, Interviewed by Sarah. "Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction No. 198". The Paris Review . Retrieved 2017-02-05.

Allardice, Lisa (2018-07-06). "Marilynne Robinson: 'Obama was very gentlemanly ... I'd like to get a look at Trump' ". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2019-04-02. How do Sylvie's housekeeping habits compare those of her mother and the great-aunts? How do Lucille's personal habits compare with Ruthie's? Sandra Hutchison (15 February 2015). "Marilynne Robinson". Sandra Hutchison . Retrieved 2019-01-03. Overall, Housekeeping is filled with existential themes that are mainly tragic in tone and explore feelings of isolation, grief, loneliness, and inability to accept loss or even oneself. The author uses a number of plot devices and characters to explore these themes creating an image of emotional numbness and conflicts. Ruth and Lucille are essentially contrasted to each other to convey the idea of conflicting means of coping with both existence and the tragedy of losing a parent, family member, and friend.There is so little to remember of anyone—an anecdote, a conversation at a table,” writes Robinson. “But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanders will find a way home…” Robinson has served as visiting professor and writer-in-residence at several colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad. In 1991, she joined the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She currently resides in Iowa, where she teaches and writes. An Interview with Marilynne Robinson Lister, Rachel (2006-10-21). "Marilynne Robinson (1947– )". The Literary Encyclopedia . Retrieved 2009-06-22. Sylvia continues to live in her Fingerbone house, with no thought of flight after her husband's death. She raises her children Molly, Helen, and Sylvie with neither complaint nor affection, the same way she cares for Helen's daughters, Ruthie and Lucille, until her own lonely death at 76.