Loyalty Meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson's Fiction

Abstract

There is something about certainty that makes Christianity un-Christian.... I have cultivated uncertainty, which I consider a form of reverence. --Marilynne Robinson, Credo Marilynne Robinson's novels offer seasoned contemporary explorations of mysteries of scripture, by means of characters who embody nuanced variations on biblical roles. Such characters deepen our appreciation of mystery of grace as they exhibit striking dimensions of loyalty as well as prodigality. Robinson's fiction uncovers inner workings of mind and spirit with convincing displays of religious thinking and struggle, veiled hypocrisy, individual dignity, courtesy, sympathy, and grace. The essay Family from Robinson's The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998) equates love with loyalty, declaring loyalty to be not only the antidote to fear, distrust, [and] self-interest but also [t]he balm for failure or weakness (89). In absence of loyalty, attempts to prop family economically or morally or through education or otherwise will fail. The real issue is, will people shelter and nourish and humanize one another? This is creative work, requiring discipline and imagination (89). Robinson's novelistic endeavors take up this challenge. Here we focus on her creation of modern versions of and Prodigal Son, whose stories compel readers to contemplate realities of loyalty, prodigality, and grace through a lens of reverent uncertainty. Robinson's now-classic Housekeeping (1980) eludes categorization, though a typical literary source claims that novel represents a feminist revision of patriarchal traditions ... that suggests that freedom can be found through nonconformity and transience (Witalec). The first line, My name is Ruth (3), invites comparison to Bible's Book of Ruth, about a non-Hebrew widow who, rather than returning to her own people after death of her husband, chooses to remain with Naomi, her Hebrew mother-in-law. The story has key uncertainties: whether had a caring family to return to, a rationale for her loyalty to Naomi, whether she had any attraction to propertied older man she marries at Naomi's behest, bearing a son to carry on her deceased husband's name. Robinson's narrative is far more detailed, exploring depths of female loyalty in response to loss by death as well as abandonment. Foster, who narrates Housekeeping, is unmarried with a multi-layered history of traumatic family deaths and separations, bonds broken and unbroken. She chooses to follow a wandering aunt who belongs to a nameless tribe of transients who stand for all descendants of Cain. The loneliness and isolation this novel depicts has a prodigality of its own. and her sister Lucille were orphaned when their mother, Helen, drove off a cliff into deep waters of Lake Fingerbone in American Northwest (1) that had earlier claimed their grandfather. They were raised by their widowed grandmother, Sylvia, until her death, then briefly by Sylvia's two elderly sisters-in-law, who advertised to locate girls' married aunt, Sylvie Fisher. When Sylvie returns, husbandless, to take care of her nieces, she has spent years as a transient and seems drawn back from her vagabond life not by preference but by family loyalty. Keeping house does not come easily to Sylvie, but she assures and Lucille that she will not abandon them. Uncertainty reigns nevertheless. Sylvie occasionally disappears into uninhabited woods across lake, where she feels spirits of lost children; she keeps time solely by train schedules and serves girls haphazard dinners in dark. Exasperated with Sylvie's erratic care, Lucille moves in with her home economics teacher, determined to fit in at school and make new friends. The bereft Ruth, who dislikes school and lacks a strong sense of self, stays with Sylvie and adopts her habits--evidently not out of enjoyment or a desire for freedom but out of fealty and compassion. …