Housekeeping

by

Marilynne Robinson

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Housekeeping makes teaching easy.

Women and Sisterhood Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Women and Sisterhood Theme Icon
Transience and Impermanence Theme Icon
Memory Theme Icon
Abandonment and Loss Theme Icon
Nature Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Housekeeping, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Women and Sisterhood Theme Icon

Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping is overwhelmingly populated by women. The women of the Foster family lose, eschew, or ignore their male partners completely, and devote themselves instead to the careful art of housekeeping and the collaborative bringing up of their younger generations. As the main characters Ruth and Lucille navigate their own relationship as sisters, they are brimming with questions about the relationship between their somewhat reluctant caregiver and aunt, Sylvie, and their mother, Helen, whose recent suicide has thrown the girls’ lives into turmoil. Surrounded by women but with little blueprint for how to navigate their burgeoning womanhood, Ruth and Lucille flail and fight as they try to discover how they should be—but are unable to find the answers in one another. As the novel progresses, Robinson explores, extolls, tests, and questions the bonds of sisterhood, ultimately suggesting that no matter how close any pair of sisters seems to be, and no matter how much their lives overlap, sisters can still be unknowable to one another.

Through two pairs of sisters—Helen and Sylvie, Ruth and Lucille—Robinson demonstrates the intense emotions and fraught decisions which comprise girlhood and womanhood. Robinson purposefully creates parallels and similarities between the two generations of sisters, but as the novel unfolds, she chooses to show how despite their shared blood, hometown, and ancestral living space, these two sets of sisters are essentially strangers to one another all throughout their lives. When Sylvie arrives in Fingerbone to take care of Lucille and Ruth, the girls pepper her almost nonstop with questions about their mother, Helen—what she was like as a girl, as a woman, as a sister. Sylvie’s answers are oblique and cryptic, and she insists that it’s “hard to describe someone you know so well.” Sylvie’s failure to be able to put her memories of her sister into words for the girls—or perhaps to access any memories at all other than the snippets and glimpses she ultimately provides—shows that sisterhood, though a sacred and intense bond, is a complicated one as well.

The distant relationship between Helen and Sylvie shows that physical proximity does not correlate with emotional closeness. The two sisters grew up in the same household, sharing clothes and space and food, but are revealed, ultimately, to know or understand very little about one another. Sylvie and Helen saw each other only a few times after leaving their hometown, and though their respective marriages seem to have both been fraught, unstable, and unimportant to the two women, they never bonded in adulthood over the hasty unions into which they plunged almost immediately upon leaving home. In the wake of Helen’s death, Sylvie’s befuddlement as to the truth of who her sister was deepens—and despite her duty to care for Lucille and Ruth and shepherd them through the difficult journey of sisterhood, she seems unprepared for the daunting task. Sylvie and Helen also have a third sister, Molly, whom they haven’t heard from in years since she left home as a teenager to become a missionary in China. Sisterhood does not guarantee closeness and understanding, and the fact that neither Helen nor Sylvie ever speaks of Molly or her whereabouts demonstrates this fact.

Ruth and Lucille’s relationship is the central one throughout most of the text. The girls, only a year apart, are constant companions at home and at school. They share a bed, they walk to and from their junior high together, and though they aren’t in the same classes, they make time for one another at lunch and recess. The girls begin cutting class together as well, spending their days exploring the shore and forests surrounding the large, dark lake at the heart of Fingerbone. They are physically together constantly, but when it comes to emotional connection and solidarity, the girls’ relationship is actually revealed to be quite shallow. Like Helen and Sylvie before them, the girls are mysterious to one another, unable to reach out across the large but ineffable chasm between them to help one another. Lucille gets her period and enters puberty earlier than Ruth, and Ruth feels the separation between her and her sister deepen as they struggle separately with their very different relationships to Sylvie. As the gulf between the pair widens and they eventually separate forever, it becomes clear that just because Ruth and Lucille are sisters—just because they share memories, traumas, and emotional and physical spaces—they are not bonded for life. Through Ruth and Lucille, just as through Helen and Sylvie, Robinson laments the fragility of a bond widely assumed to be unbreakable. By the end of the novel, Ruth has not spoken to her sister in more than seven years, and knows nothing about where she lives or who she is as a person. Ruth imagines that her sister watches and waits for her always, but has no way of knowing for sure whether Lucille still loves, misses, or wonders about her.

The confusing and ever-shifting rules and regulations of not just what it means to be a woman but what it means to be a sister define the emotional backbone of Housekeeping. Women are expected to be nurturers—to staunchly defend the bonds of family and support the women within their family units. The women of the Foster family, however, struggle with this role, and ultimately find themselves confused and confined by the expectations that come with being a woman and a sister.

Related Themes from Other Texts
Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…

Women and Sisterhood ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Women and Sisterhood appears in each chapter of Housekeeping. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
How often theme appears:
chapter length:
Get the entire Housekeeping LitChart as a printable PDF.
Housekeeping PDF

Women and Sisterhood Quotes in Housekeeping

Below you will find the important quotes in Housekeeping related to the theme of Women and Sisterhood.
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 5 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher
Related Symbols: Housekeeping
Page Number: 85
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Lucille Stone
Page Number: 92-93
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Lucille Stone
Related Symbols: Housekeeping
Page Number: 101
Explanation and Analysis:

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 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: