Challenge against Established Order and the Limits: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

Abstract

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping deals with a process of a family breakup. An unexpected death of father deeply affects the ways of living of the remaining members of the family, a widowed mother and her three daughters. They seem to maintain a peaceful family life but they prove to be estranged from each other when growing up. This estrangement is said to result from the deep sense of being abandoned because of father’s sudden death. The daughters themselves, however, repeat this abandonment to their own family members once they got married. Ruth and Lucille, the third generation of this family, are under the care of Sylvie, their mother’s younger sister. She shows her own ways of housekeeping which is quite contrary to the conventional notion and, in this sense, she is expected to subvert the established patriarchal order and save her nieces to bring freedom. Her housekeeping, however, seems to possess some defects and thus fail in the end, for Sylvie and Ruth are forced to abandon their house and are presumed to be dead. Through Sylvie and her housekeeping, the text suggests both the possibility and the limits of female/matriarchal values.