Balancing Acts - Robinson
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Sometimes, on a windy, chill evening, a person might take a walk, enjoying the evening light and the wildness of the wind. Even the cold seems exhilarating; walking alone in it makes one feel alive and vital. Even when the cold begins to bite and the walker begins to think of returning to warm rooms and the comfort of being inside and cozy, she still regrets leaving the wild, dark outside world. She lingers, unable to make a decision--go in or stay out a little longer. In Housekeeping, Robinson shows us the attraction of both wildness and domesticity--the conflicting pulls of stability inside traditional lifestyles and communities and of freedom outside, recognizing that traditional stability itself is easily broken and destroyed.
When their mother drives a car off a hill into Lake Fingerbone, Lucille and Ruth move into their grandmother's house. The grandmother and, at her death, their great aunts, try to shelter the girls in that house, try to assemble an ordinary life for them out of the daily tasks of housekeeping and the taken-for-granted connections among relatives. But when the great aunts, too, die and the girls are left in the care of their aunt Sylvie, the ordinary, daily world of housekeeping begins to crumble. Sylvie is a transient, a drifter. She provides unusual, random meals, leaves blow through the littered rooms of the once orderly house, the parlor fills with heaps of tin cans and old paper. Without a traditional family structure for stability, Ruth and Lucille try to keep their balance between Sylvie's world and the more conventional world of the small community of Fingerbone. Close at first, each sister must finally make her individual choice between those worlds, "outside" or "inside."
In a frosty early morning, Ruth stands in front of a collapsed house on the island Sylvie has brought her to. She imagines children lying under the fallen roof and walls of the old house. For her at this moment, even her grandmother's house begins to seem deceptively solid, as if it too were liable any minute to collapse under its own weight. "It is better to have nothing," Ruth says. And as she accepts loneliness and transience for herself, she feels Sylvie's arms around her. The two have become, as Sylvie will later say, as close as sisters or as mother and daughter.
Robinson makes us understand loneliness, wildness, and the impermanence of both relationships and material objects. Yet she also shows us that these qualities, usually seen as wholly negative, have their own beauty and value. Sylvie and Ruth take their dangerous night walk across the railroad trestle above Lake Fingerbone, an act of courage and delicate balance, into their chosen home a world stripped down to its essentials of change and motion.
Suggestions for further reading
Blew, Mary Clearman. All But the Waltz: Essays on a Montana Family. New York: Viking, 1991.
Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.
Leek, Leslie. Heart of a Western Woman. Pocatello, ID: Blue Scarab Press, 1987.
Yamamoto, Hisaye. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. Latham NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1988.