In Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, the natural world is a character in and of itself. From the beautiful but dangerous lake at the center of Fingerbone to the rare and transformative experiences Ruth and Lucille have during their various explorations of the Idaho wilds, nature plays a pivotal role in the text and serves as a kind of litmus test in Ruth and Lucille’s attempts to discover what kind of women they want to be. Though Robinson frames nature as an intimidating and occasionally dangerous force, she ultimately argues that nature has the power not just to destroy but to remake, refract, and in a way christen those who encounter it with an open heart and mind.
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.
Towards the novel’s end, when Lucille moves out of the house and goes to stay with one of her teachers, Miss Royce, Sylvie fervently begs Ruth to accompany her on a journey to a “special” valley on one of the lake’s many island outcrops. Ruth is initially reluctant, but after realizing that Lucille is not coming back, she agrees to skip school so that Sylvie can take her to the lake as soon as possible. During their trek out to the valley—a frost-covered clearing in the middle of which sits a fallen-down house, reclaimed by nature itself—Ruth finds herself tormented by visions of her dead mother, questions about the ever-growing distance between her and her sister, and fear that Sylvie, too, will soon abandon her. Ruth’s intense journey into nature breaks her down and then builds her back up—when she and Sylvie at last leave the woods together, Ruth has reckoned with several huge questions about the nature of life, love, and memory, and seems reborn as Sylvie’s daughter rather than her mother’s. Indeed, in the novel’s startling final pages, Sylvie and Ruth work together to set fire to their family’s ancestral home in preparation for setting out together as a pair of transients. Their symbolic burning-down of the house reveals their commitment to eschewing the genteel interior spaces of the place that has become their shared hometown, and venturing out into the unknown—venturing out into nature—as a way of finding a place that will not try to contain them, but will rather allow them to continually expand and remake themselves.
At the novel’s end, Ruth tries to imagine her sister, Lucille, living in the old house in Fingerbone, but ultimately cannot. Instead, she pictures her sister living in Boston, a big city removed from nature—removed from the self-examining forces of refraction and rebirth. Ruth has chosen the stranger and more difficult path in life, the path Sylvie laid out for her—a path which continually demands she commune with the natural world and give herself over to its powers. Lucille, however, has chosen the simplicity of a normal life: a life full of doilies, dinners in fine restaurants, and perhaps a devotion to the art of housekeeping, the art of preserving the very spaces which entrap her.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Nature ThemeTracker
Nature Quotes in Housekeeping
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.
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.
Thus finely did our house become attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie’s housekeeping. Thus did she begin by littles and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats and barn swallows. Sylvie talked a great deal about housekeeping. She soaked all the tea towels for a number of weeks in a tub of water and bleach. She emptied several cupboards and left them open to air, and once she washed half the kitchen ceiling and a door. Sylvie believed in stern solvents, and most of all in air. It was for the sake of air that she opened doors and windows, though it was probably through forgetfulness that she left them open.
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.
