“Who would think of dusting or sweeping the cobwebs down in a room used for the storage of cans and newspapers—things utterly without value? Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and because she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift.”
What is housekeeping? Indeed, what is a home? Given the title, it is not a surprise that Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping is a reflection on that question.
The book is curious in a way. It is a novel with characters and a plot and a noticeable beginning, middle, and end. But, you’d never notice that while you are reading it. Sure, you notice the people and that there are things happening, but the reading experience is akin to being immersed in a sleepy timeless realm where nothing really changes. You just watch the events pass by as if you were a stowaway on a railroad car, hearing the steady drumbeat of the engine, but you aren’t really coming from or going anywhere in particular.
What is housekeeping? The narrator Ruthie has a sister, Lucille who knows. Housekeeping is most definitely not what is going on in their home. Adult caretakers move through their lives but the house itself, which may seem solid, is decaying around them.
An example. The children, who never knew their father, are further bereft when their mother commits suicide. They are cared for by a grandmother, a widow, who then too dies. A couple of great aunts come along, but they too soon leave when Sylvie, their aunt, shows up to watch them. Sylvie likes to eat in the dark, so in the summer they would have dinner at 11. A typical meal:
The table would be set with watermelon pickles and meats, apples and jelly doughnuts and shoestring potatoes, a block of pre-sliced cheese, a bottle of milk, a bottle of catsup and raisin bread in a stack. Sylvie liked cold food, sardines aswim in oil, little fruit pies in paper envelopes.
The house itself is like that dinner. Whatever happens to be there is there. The turning point in Lucille’s life comes one evening when she suddenly turns on the light in the kitchen.
We saw that we ate from plates that came in detergent boxes, and we drank from jelly glasses. (Sylvie had put her mother’s china in boxes and stacked them in the corner by the stove—in case, she said, we should ever need it.) Lucille had startled us all, flooding the room so suddenly with light, exposing heaps of pots and dishes, the two cupboard doors which had come unhinged are were propped against the boxes of china….Everywhere the paint was chipped and marred. A great shadow of soot loomed up the wall and across the ceiling above the stove, and the stove pipe and the cupboard tops were thickly felted with dust. Most dispiriting, perhaps, was the curtain on Lucille’s side of the table, which had been half consumed by fire once when a birthday cake had been set too close to it. Sylvie had beaten out the flames with a back issue of Good Housekeeping, but she had never replaced the curtain.
The back issue of Good Housekeeping is all you really need to get the picture. It is not long before Lucille, just entering her teenage years, decides to move in with a friend and build a normal life in a house which is kept according to conventional norms, a house where Good Housekeeping is more likely to be read than used to beat out a fire.
What does it mean to keep a house, to build a home? You know the answer to that. Housekeeping is bringing order to a disordered world. Housekeeping is establishing normality amongst chaos. Housekeeping means your door is a gateway where you leave the messy world outside and enter a world which is kept. Lucille grows up to realize that she longs for that kept house and she moves out of her childhood house in order to find it.
The narrator Ruthie is given every opportunity to follow Lucille into that world of tidy homes. She does not. Why? It is not inertia. It slowly dawns on the reader as the story moves by that Ruthie sees something essential: she is not at home in this world. It is not that the physical house in which she lives is not her home. There are no locations on earth which are home.
Ruthie is a fugitive and a vagabond in the world. Ruthie is Cain.
Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job’s children, and a voice was induced or provoked into speaking from a whirlwind; and Rachel mourned for her children; and King David for Absalom. 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 reconciliation and return.
Housekeeping is a reminder to all of us that this world is not our home. We trace our lives mourning by mourning. The state of Ruthie’s childhood home is merely an emblem of the sadness and decay that make up her existence. Yet Ruthie does not despair; she never despairs. She realizes that her life is rootless and thus never pretends she has roots.
Imagine that Noah knocked his house apart and used the planks to build an ark, while his neighbors looked on, full of doubt. A house, he must have told them, should be daubed with pitch and built to float cloud high, if need be. A lettuce patch was of no use at all, and a good foundation was worse than useless. A house should have a compass and a keel. The neighbors would have put their hands in their pockets and chewed their lips and strolled home to houses they now found wanting in ways they could not understand.
It sounds from this description that Housekeeping is a novel of despair and sadness, but it is not. It is a beautifully written tale of prophecy: “So memory pulls us forward, so prophecy is only brilliant memory—there will be a garden where all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine.” We begin in a garden. We end in a garden. And in between we are restless wanderers. What then is life? We are just seeing the fragments.
Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion—that everything must finally be made comprehensible—then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. Or why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that out thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, in not to be knit up finally?
Robinson is echoing Eliot: “Surely the great poet is, among other things, one who not merely restores a tradition which has been in abeyance, but one who in his poetry re-twines as many straying strands of tradition as possible.”
Housekeeping tells us that we are merely vagrants and wanderers on this earth. It also tells us, however, that the law of completion is real, that everything must finally be made comprehensible, that the strands will be knit again into a pattern, and that when that pattern is complete and order and beauty are established, it will be home.
