Housekeeping

by

Marilynne Robinson

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Abandonment and Loss Theme Analysis

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In the early pages of Housekeeping, Lucille and Ruth are abandoned on their grandmother Sylvia’s porch by their mother, Helen. Helen tells the girls that she’ll be back for them soon—but she drives away in the car borrowed from a neighbor back home in Washington and promptly motors off a cliff into the lake at the center of Fingerbone, her family’s ancestral home. Ruth and Lucille, seemingly numb to their mother’s death, are passed from family member to family member until eventually their mother’s sister Sylvie comes to care for them. As the girls settle into their lives with Sylvie, the emotional scars left by their own mother’s abandonment at last become evident. As the three navigate their relationships with one another and their own independent relationships to loss, loneliness, and fear of rejection and desertion, Robinson argues that abandonment at any stage of life has the power to calibrate the way one moves through the world and forms relationships with other people.

The early pages of Housekeeping describe a terrible tragedy—Ruth and Lucille’s mother Helen’s suicide—but do so in a way that is removed, and almost prim, as the girls are forced to inhabit the more immediate concern of who will care for them rather than tend to their own grief. As the novel progresses, however, the ways in which their mother’s abandonment has affected them become more evident—and by its end, Robinson suggests that the loss they faced in their youth has dictated the form and direction of both their lives. Ruth and Lucille’s grandmother cares for them after their mother’s death. Being raised by the woman who raised their mother is a comfort to them, and the time they spend in Sylvia’s care is nourishing and nurturing. When Sylvia, too dies, the girls are plunged once again into feelings of loss and abandonment. Their great-aunts Lily and Nona come to Fingerbone to watch over them—but the nervous, elderly spinsters are unequipped to understand or care for children, and quickly try to pawn the girls off on their aunt Sylvie, a transient and an eccentric woman who has been living all over the country for several years. Again, the girls are shown to feel detached from any emotions at all about Lily and Nona, or their desire to get away from Fingerbone; at night, Lucille and Ruth listen to their aunts’ conversations with mild interest, and seem to expect that the women will abandon them sooner or later.

Sylvie’s arrival seems to indicate that the girls have passed into the care of a permanent guardian at last. Sylvie is their mother’s sister, and they try to pry stories about what their mother was like as a young girl from their unwilling aunt in an attempt to grow closer both to their new caretaker and their rapidly deteriorating memories of their own mother. As Sylvie’s odd behaviors escalate, it becomes apparent that she has not fully let go of her transient ways and the habits she picked up over the course of a life spent riding the rails—the girls are gripped for the first time by a real fear of being abandoned. Their mother and grandmother’s abandonments through death snuck up on them, and Lily and Nona’s was not impactful enough to feel like a loss—but for Sylvie to leave them would indicate a willful abandonment. Anytime Sylvie leaves the house, the girls follow her into and around town; Ruth and Lucille themselves skip school and spend their days in the woods, seemingly testing the boundaries of what Sylvie will or won’t tolerate. It’s almost as if they want to prove to themselves that she will abandon them just as everyone else has—but when she discovers the girls’ truancy, she covers for them by writing their teachers notes explaining their absences and allows them to attend or not attend school as they please. Sylvie is devoted to the girls and loves them deeply, but even as they warm to her they constantly fear her leaving—abandonment is the only thing they have known.

Towards the end of the novel, Robinson briefly flashes forward into Ruth’s adulthood as Ruth describes the person she’s become and the life she’s lived. Ruth has embraced Sylvie’s transient lifestyle and become a rail-rider herself. They never set up shop in any one place for long, and if they do, they quickly begin to feel uncomfortable, vulnerable, and visible. Ruth relishes her freedom and her relationship with Sylvie, but freely admits that she and Sylvie have remained tethered together for so long less out of pure devotion to one another and more by circumstance. Ruth doesn’t know what has become of Lucille, but speculates that her sister is frequently alone and unsuccessfully tries to keep herself from always listening, waiting, and hoping for the return of Ruth and Sylvie into her life. Ruth and Sylvie have created a bond based on their commitment to continually leave their pasts behind, whereas Lucille, who once rejected Ruth and Sylvie, has become the one rejected by them. However, Ruth’s hopeful vision of Lucille—someone whose life has been calibrated by the loss of her and Sylvie—seems to indicate that it is Ruth almost wants her sister’s life to have been irreparably changed by her own abandonment. Ruth wants to believe that Lucille has felt the loss of her and Sylvie acutely and profoundly. Because of Ruth’s own traumas related to abandonment—Helen’s abandonment, Lucille’s abandonment, and Sylvie’s dreamy indifference—she wants to know there’s at least one person out there she’s been important to. By imagining that Lucille pines for her continually, Ruth is able to feel worthy of love at last.

The complex psychologies of the women who populate the pages of Housekeeping reveal the intense, lifelong effects of abandonment. Ruth and Lucille, abandoned by their mother, fear being abandoned and long to be the ones doing the abandoning. Sylvie, spurred along by the mysterious drive to erase and minimize herself, lives a transient life and leaves almost no footprints along the way, staving off the potential to abandoned by positioning herself as a continual abandoner, even of people she’s presumably close to (her mysterious husband) and places she’s familiar with (Fingerbone, for example.) All three women create patterns, ruts, and self-determined outcomes for themselves based on the ways the abandonments and losses they’ve suffered have altered and traumatized them.

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Abandonment and Loss Quotes in Housekeeping

Below you will find the important quotes in Housekeeping related to the theme of Abandonment and Loss.
Chapter 1 Quotes

Now and then Molly searched Sylvie’s room for unreturned library books. Occasionally Helen made a batch of cookies. It was Sylvie who brought in bouquets of flowers. This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father. That event had troubled the very medium of their lives. Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean. The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself, and if the calm that followed it was not greater than the calm that came before it, it had seemed so. And the dear ordinary had healed as seamlessly as an image on water.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother, Sylvia Foster, Edmund Foster, Molly Foster
Related Symbols: The Lake
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:

Lucille and me she tended with scrupulous care and little confidence, as if her offerings of dimes and chocolate-chip cookies might keep us, our spirits, here in her kitchen, though she knew they might not.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Lucille Stone , Sylvia Foster
Related Symbols: Housekeeping
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

Lucille and I took our skates to school, so that we could go to the lake directly and stay there through the twilight. Usually we would skate along the edge of the swept ice, tracing its shape, and coming finally to its farthest edge, we would sit on the snow and look back at Fingerbone.

We felt giddily far from shore, though the lake was so solid that winter that it would certainly have supported the weight of the entire population of Fingerbone, past, present, and to come. Nevertheless, only we and the ice sweepers went out so far, and only we stayed.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Lucille Stone
Related Symbols: The Lake
Page Number: 33-34
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

We had planned to try Sylvie, but perhaps because Sylvie had her coat on and appeared so very transient, Lucille did not wait till we knew her better, as we had agreed to do.

“Oh, she was nice,” Sylvie said. “She was pretty.”

“But what was she like?”

“She was good in school.”

Lucille sighed.

“It’s hard to describe someone you know so well.”

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher (speaker), Lucille Stone (speaker), Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 51
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Altogether [the snowwoman’s] figure suggested a woman standing in a cold wind. It seemed that we had conjured a presence. We took off our coats and hats and worked about her in silence. […] We hoped the lady would stand long enough to freeze, but in fact while we were stamping the gray snow all smooth around her, her head pitched over and smashed on the ground. This accident cost her a forearm and a breast. We made a new snowball for a head, but it crushed her eaten neck, and under the weight of it a shoulder dropped away. We went inside for lunch, and when we came out again, she was a dog-yellowed stump in which neither of us would admit any interest.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Lucille Stone , Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

I wanted to ask her if she knew what she thought, and if so, what the experience of that sort of knowledge was like, and if not, whether she, too, felt ghostly, as I imagined she must. I waited for Sylvie to say, “You’re like me.” […] I feared and suspected that Sylvie and I were of a kind, and waited for her to claim me, but she would not.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Lucille’s mother was orderly, vigorous, and sensible, a widow (more than I ever knew or she could prove) who was killed in an accident. My mother presided over a life so strictly simple and circumscribed that it could not have made any significant demands on her attention. She tended us with a gentle indifference that made me feel she would have liked to have been even more alone—she was the abandoner, and not the one abandoned.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Lucille Stone , Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:

“I was a baby, lying on my back, yelling, and then someone came and started wrapping me up in blankets. She put them all over my face, so I couldn’t breathe. She was singing and holding me, and it was sort of nice, but I could tell she was trying to smother me.” Lucille shuddered.

“Do you know who it was?”

“Who?”

“The woman in the dream.”

“She reminded me of Sylvie, I guess.”

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Lucille Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 120
Explanation and Analysis:

“I just want to go home,” I said, and pushed the door open. Lucille grabbed me by the flesh above my elbow. “Don’t!” she said, pinching me smartly for emphasis. She came with me out onto the sidewalk, still grasping the flesh of my arm. “That’s Sylvie’s house now.” She whispered hissingly and looked wrath. And now I felt her nails, and her glare was more pleading and urgent. “We have to improve ourselves!” she said. “Starting right now!’ she said. And again I could think of no reply.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Lucille Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher
Page Number: 123
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

I found a bag of marshmallows among the odds and ends that Sylvie had bundled into a checkered tablecloth and brought along for lunch—a black banana, a lump of salami with a knife through it, a single yellow chicken wing like an elegant, small gesture of defeat, the bottom fifth of a bag of potato chips.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher
Page Number: 151
Explanation and Analysis:

I knew why Sylvie felt there were children in the woods. I felt so, too, though I did not think so. […] I knew that if I turned however quickly to look behind me the consciousness behind me would not still be there, and would only come closer when I turned away again. […] In that way it was persistent and teasing and ungentle, the way half-wild, lonely children are. This was something Lucille and I together would ignore, and I had been avoiding the shore all that fall, because when I was by myself and obviously lonely, too, the teasing would be much more difficult to disregard. Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Lucille Stone
Related Symbols: The Lake
Page Number: 154
Explanation and Analysis:

I sat down on the grass, which was stiff with the cold, and I put my hands over my face, and I let my skin tighten, and let the chills run in ripples, like breezy water, between my shoulder blades and up my neck. I let the numbing grass touch my ankles. I thought, Sylvie is nowhere, and sometime it will be dark. I thought, Let them come unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

[Sylvie] did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be. For she could regard me without strong emotion—a familiar shape, a familiar face, a familiar silence. 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.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 195
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Sylvie and I (I think that night we were almost a single person) could not leave that house, which was stashed like a brain, a reliquary, like a brain, its relics to be pawed and sorted and parceled out among the needy and the parsimonious of Fingerbone. […] We had to leave. I could not stay, and Sylvie would not stay without me. Now truly we were cast out to wander, and there was an end to housekeeping.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher
Related Symbols: Housekeeping
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:

No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, 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.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Lucille Stone
Page Number: 219
Explanation and Analysis: