By positioning the threatening, lush natural world of Fingerbone in direct opposition to the town’s genteel interiors—the houses full of furniture adorned with doilies, the soda shops teeming with girls poring over dress patterns in magazines, the schoolhouse full of children in neat rows—Robinson establishes the strange duality of her fictional town. As the novel progresses, Ruth and Lucille’s encounters with nature both nourish and frighten them, and Robinson explores both girls’ entry into womanhood through their very different relationships with the natural world. Ruth and Lucille are, at the start of the novel, both haunted by and drawn to nature. They arrive in Fingerbone knowing already that the vast lake at its center once claimed their grandfather Edmund’s life, only to have their mother Helen allow the lake to claim hers, too. Nevertheless, the girls soon begin skipping school frequently to ice-skate along the lake’s surface, fish down at the lake’s shore, and explore the woods around it. The girls are unintimidated by nature and coexist with it almost without a second thought. After a night spent out in the woods, though, the girls’ relationships to nature begins to change. While Ruth finds herself increasingly drawn to the dense forests of Fingerbone, the orchard behind her own house, and the magnetic, dangerous lake, Lucille begins to eschew the natural world and focus more and more intensely on beauty, grooming, and socializing. She becomes obsessed with making a dress for herself, starts hanging around with other, more “normal” girls from school, and even crushes some old pressed flowers Ruth finds in a dictionary to demonstrate how little nature has come to mean to her.

UI Writers' Workshop faculty member Marilynne Robinson win quarter-million-dollar award". February 4, 1998 . Retrieved March 29, 2016. As I grow older, I notice both a fear and desire to relive aspects of my parent’s story, especially as I consider the possibility of motherhood myself. I am often haunted by certain parallels—my mother had been nineteen when she met my father, the same age I was when I started seeing the boy who would become the man I would marry. I was twenty-five on my wedding day; my mother had been twenty-four on hers. Repetition might be another spell of sorts, a way to retrace our steps, reverse time and undo the damage that was done if we could only figure out where it all went wrong. Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989) ISBN 9780374526597, OCLC 690002450 Miss Royce - the home economics teacher at Ruth and Lucille's school. Lucille eventually moves in with her.Biography - Fred Miller Robinson, PhD - College of Arts and Sciences - University of San Diego". www.sandiego.edu . Retrieved 2019-01-03. In the 1950's Pacific Northwest, a series of bizarre events unfold leading to the abandonment of two adolescent girls. In a dramatic early scene, the girls' misfit mother amiably asks some young boys for help in getting her car out of a muddy rut. When they do, she casually commits suicide in front of them by driving over a cliff. Her daughters, long abandoned by their father, become the wards of their grandmother and aunt, who see them into their early teens. When the deceased mother's sister shows up, the grandmother and great aunt disappear into the night, leaving them in the care of the newly arrived "Aunt Sylvie" (Lahtie). Ultimately and inevitably, outside authoritarian interference descends upon the trio; the tale alludes to fear of witches by the unsophisticated locals. Nonconformity is equated with a dread of the unknown. At this point, the slowly building tension between the girls' independence and the mainstream establishment comes to a rolling boil. The three must choose between two extremes, either one of which will create dramatic and permanent consequences. Later, Sylvie tries to change the way she acts to prevent neighbors and the sheriff from taking away Ruth (he tries to persuade Ruth to stay with him and his wife). Sylvie burns her collection of magazines and newspapers late in the night. After the sheriff leaves for the last time, Ruth and Sylvie decide to burn their home and leave the city via the railroad bridge. Ruth later claims it to be an event that changed her life. Ever since then, the two have lived on the road.

This is the dream at the very heart of Housekeeping—that need will “blossom into all the compensation it requires” and that what we’ve lost might be returned to us by force of sheer longing alone.

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This is some fancy hifalutin chat coming from such a callow youngster. And it never stops. Here she is thinking about her mother and her aunt (thinking about the mother and the aunt accounts for around 88% of Ruthie’s thoughts, with another 12% spent on her sister. She’s the only teenage girl ever who didn’t once think about pop music.) : In addition to her tenure from 1991 to 2016 on the faculty of the University of Iowa, where she retired as the F. Wendell Miller Professor of English and Creative Writing, Robinson has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at many colleges and universities, including Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst's MFA Program for Poets and Writers. [18] In 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale University, where she delivered a series of talks titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. On April 19, 2010, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [19] In May 2011, Robinson delivered the University of Oxford's annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university's Rothermere American Institute.

Sylvie is one of my favorite heroines, and the first female vagabond I encountered in contemporary American literature. She keeps newspaper clippings and a twenty dollar-bill pinned to the underside of her lapel and shops at the five-and-dime “not because she was close with money. . . but because only the five-and-dime catered to her taste for the fanciful.” When she walks through the neighborhood, dogs follow at her heels, baying in recognition at a fellow stray. After years of drifting, Sylvie can’t seem to settle in a home—she sleeps fully dressed on top of the covers, shoes beneath her pillow, her few possessions stored in a cardboard box under the bed. Overall, Housekeeping is filled with existential themes that are mainly tragic in tone and explore feelings of isolation, grief, loneliness, and inability to accept loss or even oneself. The author uses a number of plot devices and characters to explore these themes creating an image of emotional numbness and conflicts. Ruth and Lucille are essentially contrasted to each other to convey the idea of conflicting means of coping with both existence and the tragedy of losing a parent, family member, and friend. History & Literature of the Pacific Northwest: Marilynne Robinson, 1943". Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington. n.d . Retrieved 2008-04-13.

There are rare films that I like to watch over and over again which has happened increasingly less as time goes on. Of those, three films by Bill Forsyth are prime examples that combine high quality with unmatched enjoyment. They are "Gregory's Girl,""Local Hero" and "Houskeeping" which form an informal trilogy containing characters who feel out of place. One of the days, Lucille’s rebellion reaches its peak, and she moves to her Home Economics teacher (Miss Royce). The woman is then so moved by the girl’s trouble that she proceeds with her adoption. Needless to say, Ruth does not take it lightly. After all, the only person that was there for her is not with her anymore. After some time, Lucille tells Ruth that she does not need to stay with Sylvie, but Ruth would hear none of it. She values the integrity of the family, saying that “Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings” (Robinson 186). Home by Marilynne Robinson". Us.macmillan.com. Archived from the original on 2010-07-22 . Retrieved 2015-10-29. DS: Was the line "Like a long legged fly upon the stream, his mind moves upon silence"—from Yeats's poem "Long-legged Fly"—in your mind when you were working on this novel?

After graduating high school in nearby Coeur d'Alene, Robinson followed her brother to Brown University in Rhode Island, where she studied with the writer John Hawkes and nurtured her interest in 19th-century American literature and creative writing. She graduated in 1966, and from there went on to earn a PhD in English from the University of Washington in Seattle.It is a story filled with colorful and alluring metaphors, which make the entire book compelling to read. Almost every line in the novel can be used both in and out of context, as the manner of writing is strangely musical and melodious, making it pleasant and interesting to read. The number of possible interpretations, the literary talent of the author, and the themes touched upon in the novel make it one of the contemporary classics for many generations to come. Plot Summary