Burning Down an Old House
“A house is like a person’s body. The walls are bones, the pipes are veins, it needs to breathe...”
“There’s no without. I am not gone. I’m scattered into so many pieces, sprinkled on your life like new snow.”
Marilynne Robinson’s 1981 debut novel Housekeeping is, surely, a novel not only of the act of housekeeping, but of transience. The Guardian named it No 92 of the 100 best novels, and the likes of Barack Obama and Barbara Kingsolver have praised Robinson’s classic American metaphorical prose, with Kingsolver calling it “a marvel of carefully measured meditation.” It’s a novel of Calvinist sensibility, of mundane divinity. Housekeeping is a modern classic that’s been around for four decades. What more could there be to dissect and discuss here? Allow me to offer a personal angle, perhaps a new angle, to this story: it’s a novel not only of housekeeping, not only of transience, but also of the manifestations of inherited family trauma.
I’ve been ruminating on this subject for a while now (social isolation has been dredging up all kinds of unwarranted introspection) and I couldn’t help but see it reflected in the novel as I read it. Housekeeping’s story revolves around a family house in the remote, lakeside town of Fingerbone, Idaho and the generations that inhabit it: Mrs. Sylvia Foster and her husband Edmund Foster, their three daughters - Molly, Helen, and Sylvie - and eventually their granddaughters, Ruth and Lucille Stone. Ruth tells us how her grandfather died in a train wreck, falling from a bridge over the lake and sinking into the water below. From the start, you get the sense that Edmund, a shadowy figure that crowns the novel like the point of a great pyramid, is at the very least a strange man, and at most a little mentally ill. Ruth says of his death, though an accident, that he “escaped this world years before [she] entered it.” And while he lived, he seemed distant and preoccupied. “How many times had [his wife] waked in the morning to find him gone? And sometimes for whole days he would walk around singing to himself in a thin voice, and speak to her and his children as a very civil man would speak to strangers.”
I have a similar sense of my own paternal grandfather, who, through intentional means, also escaped this world long before I entered it. Looking back, I suspect that this event changed my father irreversibly, made him the man as I knew him, the one who raised me and imparted his sensibilities in me. But as children, the only explanation my sister and I were given about his death was that he died of a faulty heart - giving us the impression that he passed away due to some kind of heart failure, like our maternal grandfather who died of a heart attack when we were toddlers. My mother eventually broke the news of his suicide to me over breakfast last year. This revelation pushed yet another shroud out of view of my family’s past, and I have no doubt that parts of whoever my grandfather actually was have bled their way through my father and into me. Still, I know as much about my grandfather as Ruth knows of hers: very little.
Even without the text giving much pomp to the accident, Edmund’s death sets his family’s path onto a strange, waltz-like motion:
This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father. That event had troubled the very medium of their lives. Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean. The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself, and if the calm that followed it was not greater than the calm that came before it, it had seemed so. And the dear ordinary had healed as seamlessly as an image on water.
So life goes on. As is the norm for most families, the daughters grow into adulthood and move away, leaving Sylvia to her housekeeping in solitude. Molly ventures off on a missionary trip and isn’t mentioned again. Helen, Ruth’s mother, marries and moves to Seattle. Her aunt Sylvie gets on a train to visit the newlyweds and there’s no indication that she returns home after this. The text gives no hint as to whether Edmund’s daughters are much unsettled by his death, and yet that seedling of trauma has nestled deep, going unspoken for many years. We catch glimpses of this truth through Ruth’s perspective, watching her mother’s behavior. In one memory, Helen takes Ruth and Lucille to a park and Ruth notes that her mother appears uncharacteristically happy. In another, she watches her mother shred an unopened envelope from her father, who doesn’t seem to be in the picture. Helen’s only response is “‘It’s best,’ and that was all [they] knew of [their] father.” Then Helen’s strange behavior crescendos into a morbid and symbolic act. Dropping her children off at her childhood home in Fingerbone, sat on the porch and told to wait quietly, Helen drives her borrowed car off a cliff and into the same lake that claimed her father’s life.
And so a ripple cuts an identical ripple over the surface of this lake, this story, and Ruth and her sister are left with the fragments their mother have left them. From here, the novel continues in that same slow, lulled pace as described before. Life goes on. Ruth and Lucille are raised in the Fingerbone house by their grandmother, who at times confuses them with her own children by dint of their similar quietude. When their grandmother passes away, their great-aunts take over their charge, but are comically unfit and rather unwilling to raise small girls. Then their aunt Sylvie arrives.
At first, it seems like Sylvie, Ruth, and Lucille are a good match for a household. Sylvie, once married but mysteriously mum on that topic, has adopted the drifter lifestyle, exhibiting her father’s fondness for trains by spending her life jumping cars. Ruth and her sister have learned the meaning of impermanence since their mother left them; and for a time, the girls behave in accordance with that confusing trance often created by grief, skipping school and spending time at the lake instead. Eventually, however, that wave breaks against the shore. Lucille, searching for some sense of normalcy, does everything in her power to escape their transience, while Ruth feels almost at home in it.
It’s at this point in the novel that we see Sylvie’s trauma more clearly, and Ruth’s develops in much the same way. They spend a day together after Lucille leaves home permanently, traveling along the lake in a commandeered boat to a clump of abandoned houses in the woods. Sylvie silently wanders off, leaving Ruth alone with her thoughts:
Let them come unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart. It was no shelter now, it only kept me here alone… If I could see my mother, it would not have to be her eyes, her hair. I would not need to touch her sleeve. There was no more the stoop of her high shoulders. The lake had taken that, I knew. It was so very long since the dark had swum her hair, and there was nothing more to dream of, but often she almost slipped through any door I saw from the side of my eye, and it was she, and not changed, and not perished.
So “housekeeping,” we can interpret, is also the act of holding oneself together, holding a darkness in. Like nesting dolls, the house is the building is the family is the individual, and no one part can be fully separated from the rest. Ruth’s trauma is the ghostly shadow of her mother, following her even as she drifts in her watery grave. This imagery brings to mind an identical metaphor used by The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, a story also of a house and of a family that experiences trauma together and cannot be extricated from the building or each other completely (though you’re far more likely to be terrified watching it than you would be reading Housekeeping). Sylvie’s trauma is a similar train of thought (pun intended) to Ruth’s. On their way back to the house, she rows their boat up under the bridge where her father’s accident occurred, and without prompting, as if carrying a conversation with herself, she says, “I probably wouldn’t have seen much anyway… I was just woolgathering, and all of a sudden it was right there on top of us. And it wasn’t loud, though… The train must be just about under us here.” Sylvie seems to relive the night her father died, likely seeing his ghost imprinted on the real train moving across the bridge above them. This excursion brings Sylvie and Ruth closer together - they each are content with the other’s oddness, their quiet. They are each recipients of their shared inheritance of grief.
The lake is an appropriate place for Ruth and Sylvie to experience this lingering pain and resulting camaraderie in more ways than one. It’s through the lake, as Mark O’Connell noted in The New Yorker, that the reader gets “the sense of a fallen world that’s filled with pain and sadness but also suffused with divine grace.” I mostly agree, but I don’t separate the pain from the divine. Robinson begins one of the book’s final chapters with a passage loosely tracing lineages of the Bible, in much the same way that the Bible tells how “so-and-so begot so-and-so begot so-and-so” and onward:
Cain murdered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth; the house fell on Job’s children…; and Rachel mourned for her children... The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted […] shock will spend itself in waves […] God troubled the waters where He saw His face, and Cain became his children and their children and theirs, through a thousand generations, and all of them transients… the earth ran with blood and sang with sorrow.
So pain and hardship is inherited from the moment of humanity’s creation, inherent to our condition. As O’Connell says, “resurrection is as central to Robinson’s aesthetic sensibility as the Christian resurrection is to her spiritual one. Her work is filled with countless indelible descriptions of water […] For Robinson, water is more than just a metaphor for God. It is itself a divine presence, a form of immanence that creates and sustains life, and sometimes destroys it.” The lake is a symbol of resurrection at large, certainly, but also of the resurrection of past suffering through generations, a geographic and metaphoric focal point not just for Ruth and her family, but for the whole of humanity.
We inherit the hardships of our past in the same way time washes over us: as a ripple in a lake. It’s something that doesn’t always need to be spoken aloud, but is intuited through shared ancestry and manifests in ways we often don’t understand until it’s too late to change who we are. It’s ultimately up to us to deal with those ghosts. Ruth and Sylvie burn the house and flee, breaking free of the baggage that it brought them, taking up the transient lifestyle together in earnest. Lucille shuns the drifter life and breaks the chain for herself - though it remains unseen whether she’s actually able to deal with the root trauma of her mother’s suicide. (Ruth likes to imagine that she doesn’t, that she returns to the house and takes over its housekeeping, waiting for her and Sylvie to return one day.) And I, left with nowhere to run but the borders of my own solitude in the midst of a global pandemic, am working on recognizing the various ghosts that have haunted their way down my family’s lineage and sprung up in me. It’s not like Robinson imagines, full of metaphor and faith and depth. But it might offer the same catharsis as burning down an old house.