Their Own Private Idaho: Transience in Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping"

Abstract

irst published in 1981, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is a dreamlike, quirky novel, sustaining terse social commentary while describing intense, interior lives. Robinson's narrator, Ruth Stone, loses her mother, becomes estranged from her only sibling, and, finally, drifts into vagrancy under the tutelage of her Aunt Sylvie. Because Housekeeping challenges traditional notions of motherhood and domesticity, it is most often analyzed through a feminist lens. Yet Robinson's novel also offers another sort of narrative, one that reaches beyond real-life boundaries and literary convention in order to write the lives of female characters who live on