The entirety of Housekeeping—the events of Ruth and Lucille’s youth as they suffer the loss of their mother, enter the care of their eccentric aunt Sylvie, and struggle to determine what kind of young women they will become—is relayed retrospectively from the adult Ruth’s point of view. Interspersed with the bones of what happened to her in her childhood are reflections on nature, time, love, loss, and memory itself delivered by the older Ruth as a way of working through the fraught, enormous emotions she struggled with as a child. As the novel progresses, these fragmented moments occur more and more, and by the end, it becomes clear that the adult Ruth is a person ruled by her memories, her fractured perceptions of both her adulthood and the events of her youth, and indeed the fear of returning to Fingerbone, hunting down her sister, or in any way altering the memories that have become so precious and formative to her. Ultimately, Robinson suggests that memory is a kind of necessary torment—Ruth is both haunted and sustained by recollections of her past, and through Ruth, Robinson suggests that on some level, all people are similarly nourished and pained by their memories.
All of the major characters throughout Housekeeping reckon with memory over the course of the novel. Each of them struggles with the competing desires to cling to and reject their own memories—and to supplement their own painful pasts and resulting fractured understandings of themselves with one another’s remembrances and opinions. Lucille and Ruth find themselves struggling to accurately remember their mother in the wake of her death. Ruth remembers her as distracted, unemotional, and distant, while Lucille remembers her as having been loving and attentive. Because Ruth is the narrator—and because Helen killed herself—readers take Ruth’s account of Helen for granted as the truth. Lucille’s memories of a mother she never had are manufactured to soothe and abate her feelings of abandonment, loss, and rage. She blots out the painful memory of her mother’s abandonment with more palatable memories of how devoted her mother was to her in life. Lucille’s active intervention within her own past is perhaps the most potent example of the power of memory—and how warped one’s emotional life can become when the necessity of painful memories is erased. As a result, perhaps, of her refusal to accept pain as part of her past, Lucille seeks to remove pain, conflict, and any unpleasantness from her present. Her obsession with hair-setting and dress-making is symbolic of her attempts to try to spin an idyllic present (and future) for herself, while her attempts to recruit Ruth from Sylvie’s care and perhaps even drive Sylvie out of Fingerbone show just how averse Lucille is to anything that reminds her of the truth about her past.
Sylvie, too, seems to have difficulty with memory. When the girls bombard her with questions about what their mother was like as a child, she struggles to talk about Helen, claiming it’s “hard to describe someone you know so well.” She remembers small snippets about her sister—like the fact that she was pretty and a good student—but struggles to characterize Helen in a meaningful way in which the girls can latch onto. Much of Sylvie’s own youth is mysterious, and the factors which led her to marry and then abandon her husband for a transient, rootless lifestyle are unknown. The death of her father (Edmund) in her own youth, and the legendary quality his passing in a historic train accident took on, may have proved too painful a legacy for Sylvie to bear. Her desire to escape her childhood home and live rough in the wake of a dissolved marriage rather than return to the town that made her indicates that Sylvie, too, is dodging rather than embracing the duality of her own memories.
Because Ruth is the novel’s narrator, her memories are on display as the most potent and poignant of any character. Ruth remembers each and every detail of her childhood—the lush natural landscape of Fingerbone, the peculiarities of her grandparents’ home, the intense feelings of love, disappointment, fear, and embarrassment she felt during her childhood. Because Ruth is narrating the novel retroactively, readers understand that she is perhaps the only individual within the story who has chosen to accept that memories, though painful, are important to preserve. Ruth’s attachment in childhood to her grandmother Sylvia’s old possessions because of their sentimental value rather than their monetary worth—a lock of hair from her grandmother’s first haircut, a group of flowers her grandfather pressed between the pages of a dictionary—shows that she has always had a reverence for the past and the lessons contained within it. Rather than fearing the past, Ruth has always feared the future: the changes in her own maturing body during puberty, the threat of becoming a “normal” woman and taking up housekeeping, and the prospect of forgetting the events and forces that have shaped her are what frightens Ruth, not the past. Because she is unique in this regard from all the other characters in the novel, Ruth’s narration often delves into the deep past. She examines speculatively events from her grandparents’ and parents’ lives, and even attempts to imagine the moment of her own conception. Ruth is perhaps at the other end of the spectrum: so obsessed with the past that her own future slowly becomes unimaginable to her, causing her to choose a life which allows her to never settle on any one pursuit or place of residence but rather drift aimlessly through the world, indulging her extant memories rather than making new ones.
The function of memory in Housekeeping is complex and multilayered. Memory wounds and heals, sustains and weakens; memory creates divisions between characters and gives them a common ground. As the Foster women, throughout their generations, reckon in isolation with memories both pleasant and painful, they find themselves alternately leaning into and veering away from often difficult histories they might rather forget.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Memory ThemeTracker
Memory Quotes in Housekeeping
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
