Shout-out to Housekeeping. It was a good run, Ruthie and company. One of the
most obvious assets it’s got going for it is the ridiculous literary
attention-to-detail. Like I said in my
LAST blog post, every sentence is freakin’ loaded with intriguing descriptive
language and, in my opinion, serious symbolic imagery (Ooh!). I’ll admit, I
feel like a broken record on the symbolism thing. In my past three Mitchell
classes, I’ve written like two or three short essays on “symbology”, if I may.
That’s not a word but I didn’t wanna use symbolism twice. Specifically, I think
Marilynne Robinson focuses on the
elements of nature as symbols of
transience. Crazy, right? Time to lay it out for ya!
As some of you can probably guess
from my preface, water is a huge part of this elemental symbolism. Let’s think
about water for a second. No matter what you toss into it, what you slap it
with, or how much you perturb the surface, the ripples will eventually cease,
and the body of water will return to stasis as if nothing ever happened.
Robinson caught on to a perfect device to communicate transience! We have two
of the most monumental events in Fingerbone history—Helen’s suicide and the
train disappearance—both of which are shrouded in factual dispute and disguised
by the transient nature of the lake. Since when investigations are underway,
the ripples have disappeared, and “[b]y evening the lake there had sealed
itself over.” (9). All those lives and stories gone with a weasel-ploop.
There’s a ton more water stuff in this book, which is fair considering it’s
probably the most apt elemental symbol of
transience one could find. That’s not to say I don’t have more though!
Another very common elemental
example of transience is the air and wind. News flash, wind moves stuff around
and makes it go places, often in random directional fashion. Going “wherever
the wind takes you” is a common phrase for living out a transient ideology of
wandering. Therefore, Robinson throws it in there an inordinate amount to drive
her point home. One awesome excerpt involves air conjuring up the leaves, and
directly relates to Ruth’s perception of life.
“Every
spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, (…)
the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from
the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as
if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple
leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes
on.” (108)
It's a beautiful image; leaves
being picked up by the wind, floundering as if to shape a figure or eventful
dance, then just dropping to the side of a structure as the wind blows away. In
a transient view, human life equates to leaves catching a drift and riding it
out aimlessly for just a moment before ceasing. Pretty bleak I guess,
definitely doesn’t make you feel too special. Hey! All you dead leaves! You’re
just riding a drift for a few moments on the winds of time! There’s also
mentions of Ruth and Sylvie’s clothes billowing out from the wind as if they’re
about to be carried off, and Sylvie does open all the doors to expose their
house to the elements, but especially air as a solvent. All are great uses of
wind as a transience device.
The final of the major elements I
noticed in Housekeeping would be
fire. It has a brilliantly brief spotlight towards the end, and wraps up a
transience-trilogy of interfering natural occurrences quite nicely. Fire burns
stuff, and when stuff burns it goes away. Stuff often holds value and
significance, things like memories are kept in stuff. So when it burns,
especially in this non-digitalized world that the Housekeeping family lives in, all of its significance can go with
it. As Ruth would probably say, such is life! Importance is forgotten in time!
All things are insignificant! “The force behind the movement of time is a
mourning that will not be comforted [!!!!]” (288). Sorry, there’s actually a
period there. At least I bracketed the emphasis exclamations. EITHER WAY, what
do Sylvie and Ruth do with fire? They burn lots of stuff inside their house,
then eventually try to burn the whole dang thing down! Gosh darn transients,
always stamping on all the fleeting permanence we have in life!! But wow, how
blatantly symbolic can you get? The whole idea of Housekeeping going up in flames? All the cherished family memories
that are sanctified in the maintenance of said house? All gone to the wind (and
the flames) (and the water).
To close this off, here’s a little
snippet that I think ties this all together. Here’s a brief passage Ruth uses
to describe the ghostly state of affairs for Sylvie:
“She
had haunted the orchard out of preference, but she could walk into the lake
without ripple or displacement and sail up the air as invisibly as heat.” (307)
WOW, isn’t that everything I just
talked about? Holy smokes! Sylvie, as the pure transient, doesn’t even RIPPLE
the water when she walks into it, and can disappear at an instant like a
smokeless trail of heat. How uneventful can you get? I think I’ll leave it at
that. There’s the evidence you need to see that Robinson is employing these
elemental minions to do her transience-preaching bidding. They do a darn good job
after all.
