Future-perfect: Gender, nostalgia, and the not yet presented in Marilynne Robinson's housekeeping

Abstract

Recent feminist theory has been preoccupied with the politics of taboo emotions such as nostalgia, mourning and regret; emotions that are generally viewed as being in conflict with feminism's desire for future change. This paper seeks to break down the implicit dichotomy between the desire for change and the backward glance through a re-reading of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Earlier readings of Housekeeping have tended to read the novel as a female quest for the 'not yet presented'. According to Friedman, this plot structure serves to differentiate the novel from 'male texts of postmodernity', with their thematic of nostalgia for the loss of the patriarchal certainties. My paper argues, contra Friedman, that the narrative voice in Housekeeping serves to construct a poetics of nostalgic mourning, but one that longs for what might have been rather than what was. Through this re-reading of Housekeeping, the paper argues for the necessity of re-evaluating the concept of nostalgia for feminist and left discourses. It concludes by suggesting that nostalgic longings (by acting as reminders of what might have been) may actually provide an impetus for future change; as such they offer a means of recuperating the utopian impulse that feminism currently mourns.