Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson How Ruth and

¶ … Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson [...] how Ruth and Lucille begin to be distinguished from each other somewhere in the middle of the book, and identify the point at which this differentiation occurs. It will also describe and discuss the differences in personality and behavior that emerges between them, and explain how we as readers, are supposed to interpret these differences. HOUSEKEEPING Robinson's novel received the PEN/Hemingway award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Later, it was also made into a film.

Robinson grew up in Idaho, and this novel, set in Idaho during the mid 1900s is not only a study of women, the times, and loss, it also highlights some of the beautiful natural areas where the novel is set, on the shores of Fingerbone Lake. The novel begins, "I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher" (Robinson 3).

A suicide's daughter, Ruth broods on broken families, the fragility of the body, and the slender lines we draw between domestic safety and howling wilderness, yet her very voice seems to elide the ferocity inherent in nature. She accepts, rather than fights against, the catastrophic events that shape her destiny as a transient (Gottfried 91). This is where we first meet Lucille and Ruth, and indeed, as sisters, they do seem very similar at the beginning of the book.

It is near the middle when their paths begin to diverge, and Lucille stops looking at Sylvie as a mother, while Ruth still reveres her. Ruth begins to see "that Lucille's loyalties were with the other world," because Lucille begins a "tense and passionate campaign to naturalize herself" and become more like the well-groomed girls at school (Robinson 95). Meanwhile Ruth feels comfort in the very things Lucille is trying to leave behind.

"I was reassured by her sleeping on the lawn, and now and then in the car, and by her interest in all newspapers, irrespective of their dates, and by her pork-and-bean sandwiches. It seemed to me that if she could remain transient here, she would not have to leave" (Robinson 103). It is here the two girls begin to drift apart, and the reader begins to understand they have very different pictures of their dead mother, which will eventually drive them apart.

Lucille's mother was orderly, vigorous, and sensible, a widow (more than I ever knew or she could prove) who was killed in an accident. My mother presided over a life so strictly simple and circumscribed that it could not have made any significant demands on her attention. She tended us with gentle indifference that made me feel she would have liked to have been even more alone -- she was the abandoner, and not the one abandoned" (Robinson 109).

Lucille leaves the family to live with the "sensible" home economics teacher, while Ruth stays with Sylvie, a woman least known for her housekeeping, but always known for her itch to travel. Here the reader really begins to take sides, just as Robinson was intending. Lucille is "taken over" by the other side, the side that does not approve of lifestyles like Sylvie's, and the two sisters are now on opposite sides of the fence, and so is the reader.

Lucille becomes less and less appealing, and less important in the book, and in the reader's mind, but not completely. "Robinson plays the perfect mother, refusing to abandon Lucille, and her departure remains a real loss for the characters of the novel, who forgive and regret and search" (Meese 61). When Ruth talks about Helen, the two girls mother, she really is talking about the loss of anyone that you love. Helen committed suicide by driving into the same lake (Fingerbone) that claimed her father in a train wreck.

"She left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released and we saw its wings and saw it fly a thousand ways into the hills" (Robinson 198). Ultimately, the two women's relationship and reaction to their mother's death is a metaphor for loss, our reaction to it, and how society places such restrictions on us all. Lucille chooses to live under the restrictions, to be "proper and normal," while Ruth chooses to live the life of a transient with Sylvie, her unconventional aunt.

"It's not the worst thing, Ruthie, drifting. You'll see. You'll see" (Robinson 210). The reader is left to make up their own mind, but it is easy to see the choices here. Lucille's life seems boring and predictable, while Ruth's seems wild and unpredictable - something many of us long to do with our own boring and predictable lives.

"So long as you look after your health, and own the roof above your head, you're as safe as anyone can be, God willing" (Robinson 27), their grandmother tells them before she dies at the beginning of the book. For Lucille, she is right, but for Ruth, the roof over her head does not mean anything, and it seems Robinson is urging us to look inside our own lives, and see what is most important to us. Robinson's approach to meaning within fiction suggests how we might compose meaning in life.

Our own strategies of interpretation, attribution, and assertion parallel those of the narrator and the author, with whom we share problems of deepest personal and philosophical import: what was, what is, what matters,.