Enlarging Loneliness: Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping as a Reading of Emily Dickinson

Abstract

In a short piece in the 1984 New York Times Book Review, the novelist Marilynne Robinson describes her interest in Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson in these terms: "Nothing in literature appeals to me more than the rigor with which they fasten on problems of language, or consciousness -- bending form to their purposes, ransacking ordinary speech and common experience, . . . always, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, in the act of finding what will suffice. I think they must have believed everything can be apprehended truly when seen in the light of an esthetic understanding appropriate to itself, whence their passion for making novel orders of disparate things. I believe they wished to declare the intrinsic dignity of all experience and to declare the senses bathed in revelation -- true, serious revelation, the kind that terrifies" ("Hum Inside the Skull" 30). This is strikingly phrased: wrestling with "problems of language, or consciousness," constantly trying to create an arrangement that would "suffice" as an account of a just-out-of-reach order, these writers, for Robinson, communicate not exhaustion or speechlessness or retreat but wonder; they declare themselves "bathed in revelation." Returning to this subject in a 1992 interview, Robinson, author of the much discussed novel Housekeeping (1980), refers again to these writers, but now laments: "[T]here has been a rupture in the conversation of this culture, . . . all sorts of things that were brought up in the early conversation were dropped without being resolved, and . . . nothing of comparable interest has taken their place." She adds, and it is this idea I want to explore here, "[I]n writing Housekeeping I was consciously trying to participate in the conversation they had carried on and that I felt had been dropped" (Hedrick 1).1