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    A Study Guide for Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping"
    A Study Guide for Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping"
    A Study Guide for Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping"
    Ebook56 pages44 minutes

    A Study Guide for Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535825016
    A Study Guide for Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" - Gale

      12

      Housekeeping

      Marilynne Robinson

      1980

      Introduction

      Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, was published in 1980. Although both her agent and her publisher loved the book, they were not sure it would sell, since its style is wildly different from most of the minimalist and postmodern fiction that was being published at that time. However, Anatole Broyard gave it an early and enthusiastic review in the New York Times, stating that the book broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions, and achieved a kind of transfiguration. Housekeeping was nominated for a Pulitzer prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway prize for first novel.

      Housekeeping has become an American classic for a number of reasons, one of which is that Robinson, herself steeped in classic nineteenth-century American works by Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Dickinson, deliberately set out to imagine how the core story of American literature, that of the restless individual who cannot fit into society, might work if the protagonist were female. While Melville ships Ishmael off to sea, Twain sends Huck Finn down the river in a raft, and Thoreau himself journeys on foot, Robinson explores the fracturing in family and community life that might result in a girl like Ruth running off with her unmoored aunt Sylvie. Narrated in Ruth's voice, the book dramatizes the choices Ruth and her sister Lucille must make as they leave childhood and embark on adolescence—do they grow out of their familial inwardness and conform to the norms of Fingerbone, or do they choose the inward voice and sever ties forever?

      Although Robinson wrote two collections of essays after Housekeeping, it was twenty-four years before her next work of fiction was released. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, she published Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), two novels in which she continued to explore central themes laid out in Housekeeping: the tension between the ties of family and community, and the wild impulses that rule the individual soul.

      Author Biography

      Robinson was born on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho. Her father John worked in the timber industry, while her mother Ellen stayed home with Robinson and her older brother David. During her childhood, the family moved often, a situation that caused Robinson to joke in an interview with Anne E. Voss in the Iowa Review, I have travelled widely in Idaho! The family settled in Coeur d'Alene for Robinson's high school years, after which she followed her older brother David to Rhode Island for college. He was enrolled at Brown University, and since Brown did not, at that time, enroll women, Robinson enrolled at Pembroke, Brown's sister college (Pembroke merged with Brown in 1971).

      Robinson studied American literature, which, she told Sara Fey of the Paris Review, was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson. She also studied with John Hawkes (a postmodern American novelist). Hawkes was a defender of Robinson's style, which includes the long sentences and extended metaphors that still characterize her work. In the same Iowa Review interview, Robinson notes that one of the tasks a writer faces is

      to create a syntax that's amenable to your style of thinking.… If your style of thinking tends toward irony or reflection or ambivalence or whatever, then inevitably you push for syntaxes that accommodate it.

      It was while working on her Ph.D. thesis on Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part II, that Robinson began work on what was to become Housekeeping. As she told Fey, during her Ph.D. she had "started writing these metaphors down just to get the feeling of writing in that voice. After I finished my

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