Throughout Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson uses the unpredictable and emotional character of Sylvie—a transient who has spent much of her adult life riding the rails across America and subsisting on her own wiles and the kindness of strangers she meets—to show both the danger and the beauty of submitting to the impermanence of the world. The citizens of Fingerbone, hardy people who have developed an insular community and a rote way of life in response to the dangerous natural forces that rule their valley, struggle to control the physical, emotional, and natural landscapes of their town, and never—like Sylvie and later Ruth—admit or submit to the fleetingness of their own lives. By demonstrating the perils and the joys of transient life through Sylvie, Robinson uses the concept of physical transience as a metaphor for emotional impermanence—ultimately suggesting that people fear transient individuals because they fear the transience of their own lives.
When Sylvie arrives in Fingerbone to “take up housekeeping” and begin caring for Ruth and Lucille, the girls know very little about their peculiar aunt. Right away, they sense that she is odd, eccentric, and afraid of connection and permanence. She has few possessions, she sleeps with her shoes on her feet or under her pillow, and she has a proclivity for canned or packaged food such as sardines and oyster crackers. As the girls grow closer to Sylvie, they constantly fear her leaving—a fact which is, to them, inevitable, and which sends ripples throughout the town of Fingerbone, as concern for and about Sylvie spreads far and wide. That Ruth and Lucille fear transience and transient people is a given—something instilled in them seemingly from a young age. It is unclear who taught them about the dangers of a life lived untethered to people, places, or possessions, but what is clear is that the girls are inherently skeptical of drifters. At the same time, though, once Sylvie arrives in Fingerbone, they develop an odd attraction to and fascination with those who exist on the margins of society—when they play down at the lake, they stare at the hoboes who gather under the bridge and at the shore, and they beg Sylvie for tales of the strange, crazy, lonely people she’s met in her years riding the rails. As the months go by, though, Ruth’s fascination with transience increases—while Lucille’s revulsion for such a way of life compounds. When Sylvie brings the girls gifts of sequined velveteen slippers, Lucille rips all the sequins off and asks why she couldn’t have gotten brown oxfords or red rubber galoshes—Lucille, according to Ruth, sees “in everything its potential for invidious change.” Something invidious is unpleasant, difficult, or inspiring of discontent—so, in other words, Lucille has developed a heightened sensitivity to and fear of things changing, decaying, or devolving.
While Lucille grows more and more ashamed of Sylvie’s odd outfits and odder behaviors—napping on park benches and in the family orchard, eating supper with the lights off to enjoy the evening light, cooking unlikely meals—Ruth becomes increasingly enamored of her aunt. Though both Lucille and Ruth for a long while feared Sylvie would leave them, in the end, Lucille is the one who does the leaving when she goes to stay with her home economics teacher, Miss Royce, rather than be subjected a moment longer to Sylvie’s whims. Lucille so detests the potential for transience and the creeping dread of change that she takes matters into her own hands and establishes the impermanence of her relationship with both Sylvie and Ruth on her own terms—in other words, she leaves before she can be left. Once Lucille is out of the house, she begins telling others in town lurid stories of how unfit and unpredictable a caregiver Sylvie is. The townspeople of Fingerbone begin dropping in on Ruth and Sylvie more and more, poking around the house and trying to determine whether Ruth is being changed or corrupted by Sylvie’s transient past. The townspeople, firmly rooted in their ways and afraid of the threat to their traditions Sylvie’s irreverence represents, lodge complaint after complaint until the sheriff intervenes to schedule a hearing and it becomes clear that Ruth will soon be taken away from Sylvie. Lucille’s actions and their repercussions are Robinson’s way of indicting the fear of impermanence. By trying to cling to the status quo and prevent change, she suggests, one can actually bring horrible change to fruition. Lucille does not foresee, though, what will happen next—she does not realize that to Sylvie and Ruth, their independence is all that matters, and that they will do anything to maintain it.
At the end of the novel, Sylvie and Ruth work together to set fire to the Foster family home. Ruth knows that they could not abandon the house without destroying it—to leave the objects it contains to be picked over and pawed at by the people of Fingerbone would be to do disservice to (and render tangible and thus permanent) the memories within the house’s walls. The fire is hard to start given the house’s dampness, and as Sylvie and Ruth leave Fingerbone by walking across the bridge over the lake, Ruth refuses to look back and see whether the blaze successfully engulfed the house. This moment shows how the fire—or its lack—makes the house into an object of impermanence rather than stability for Ruth. It is both forever on fire and intact, destroyed and everlasting—she is not sure whether it survives or not, and never once in her adult life does she return to Fingerbone to see what became of it either way.
Ruth ultimately dedicates her life to riding the rails and traveling the country with Sylvie, leaving Fingerbone behind for good. She embraces transience in her actions because she has come to understand, through her relationships with Sylvie and Lucille, that impermanence is an undeniable part of life—to attempt to ignore or outrun it only makes things worse. Ruth does not allow fear of change to rule her, and instead solemnly burns her old life to the ground to make room for the unknown.
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Transience and Impermanence Quotes in Housekeeping
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.
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 was content with Sylvie, so it was a surprise to me when I realized that Lucille had begun to regard other people with the calm, horizontal look of settled purpose with which, from a slowly sinking boat, she might have regarded a not-too-distant shore. She pulled all the sequins off the toes of the blue velveteen ballet slippers Sylvie bought us for school shoes the second spring after her arrival. Though the mud in the road still stood inches high and gleamed like aspic on either side where tires passed through the ruts, I had liked the slippers well enough.
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 and 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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
