South -Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies (SAJMS) ISSN:2349-7858:SJIF:2.246:Volume 4 Issue 1
SELF- DISCOVERY THROUGH NATURE IN MARILYNNE ROBINSON’S
NOVEL HOUSEKEEPING
Shagun Singh1
Abstract: The paper explores the idea of self-discovery through nature. Robinson in her novel
Housekeeping(1980) talks about the impact of environment on the development of any person’s
self. The paper traces how the protagonist of the novel Ruth attains her identity and stripes away
the cultural baggage and societal rules and regulations by entering wilderness. By developing an
understanding of nature and its spiritual dimension we can know the different perspectives on
being in the world understanding our own selves and connecting earth to a larger cosmic realm.
In this paper I have shown how nature is all powerful and mystic which helps one to come closer
to one’s own sense of being and freedom.
Key Words- Development, Ecology, Identity, Landscape, Nature, Self-discovery, Wilderness.
Nature is a living entity that plays a very significant role in shaping our physical,
emotional and spiritual ideas. The identity of any person is immensely affected by the natural
surrounding because the environment leaves an indelible impact on the person. In the literary
scene of America nature has been remained significant in nurturing the democratic virtues of an
individual. Marilynne Robinson who is highly influenced by the nineteenth century American
transcendentalists is known for her distinctive style and great love for nature which thoroughly
echoes in her writing. She celebrates the landscape of the West in her novel Housekeeping
(1980). The novel has a powerful element of nature in its framework comprising of the whole
landscape in human terms with a narrative. In the novel we see Ruth entering wilderness, the
purest form of nature, in order to strip away the cultural baggage and societal rules and
regulations to become free and naturalized. Ruth approached nature, the wilderness as her foster
mother who would hold, guide and affirm her development of self.
1
Research Scholar, Dept. of English; Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi (U.P.)
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South -Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies (SAJMS) ISSN:2349-7858:SJIF:2.246:Volume 4 Issue 1
Marilynne Robinson considers the role of landscape as fundamental because it plays a
vital role in shaping the development of self of any person. In her essay entitled “Wilderness”
Marilynne Robinson writes:
“In fact, I started writing fiction at an eastern college, partly in hopes of making my
friends there understand how rich and powerful a presence a place can be which, to their
eyes, is forbidding and marginal, without population or history, without culture in any
form recognizable to them. All love is in great affliction. My bond with my native
landscape was an unnamable yearning, to be at home in it, to be chastened and
acceptable, to be present in it as if I were not present at all.”(Death of Adam: 246)
This soulful love becomes a necessity and a moral risk because although it threatens to
disintegrate the self and undermine the foundations of identity, yet it also exposes the self to the
self chastening and self-doubting experience of awe that nature can provide. Since the beginning
people have identified environment as intrinsic to the development of self. One can reach one‟s
inner self by recognizing the interconnectedness of life within the ecosystem. The time spent in
any terrain to understand the connectedness between the environment and the self brings one
closer to one‟s own self and promotes one‟s self-examination and growth.
Housekeeping (1980) is a novel where the protagonist Ruth with the guidance of her
transient aunt Sylvie takes refuge in nature in order to discover herself. Ruth and Sylvie do not fit
in the conventional oppressive community of people which is hostile to their inclinations and try
to restrict them with their ideas of life. On the contrary the world of nature not only accepts Ruth
but also helps her in putting things in perspective. Ruth finds a connection with the natural world
rather than the man-made society which tries to groom her in its own colors to become what she
is not. Nature helps Ruth in exploring herself and the idea of freedom. Robinson has also very
delicately raised the issue of nature's representation in the novel Housekeeping. The novel not
only traces the process of a woman's liberation from the dualistic constructs, but also accounts
for providing space for nature's self-expression. Her characters arrive at a sense of identity
through contact with nature and by metaphorical treatment of nature.
The time Ruth spends in nature helps her to discover her inner self which made her realize that
her loyalty does not lie to the man-made conventional society which always tries to limit a girl‟s
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South -Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies (SAJMS) ISSN:2349-7858:SJIF:2.246:Volume 4 Issue 1
sense of freedom. The two scenes in Housekeeping, each one involving a night spent outdoors,
illustrate this fact. The intimate experiences in nature laid the foundation for Ruth to know her
inclinations. During her stay away from home in the woods Ruth fully identifies with nature,
while Lucille, her younger sister, becomes afraid of it. Lucille was scared to feel that her identity
is undermined by blurring boundaries between nature and herself. As a result immediately after
reaching home, she dresses properly, fixes her hair, and goes to the drugstore. During her second
stay Sylvie initiates Ruth into the „maternal valley‟ where loneliness and cold were only the vital
elements. Sylvie takes Ruth into the woods and abandons her. In a stark and wrenching survival
course Ruth experiences her mother's overbearing presence and finally casts off her romantic
longings for her mother and the past. Ruth realizes things from becoming mere objects which
helps her in taking her decision to be a transient.
In Housekeeping the sense of place for Ruth is very crucial in the development and
understanding of her own self. Self knowledge and self-realization are delicately twined together
into the fabric of „where.‟ The self when gets connected with nature starts healing and involves
remapping of its external and internal terrains. The two nights which Ruth spent in wilderness is
a journey of affirmation of her own sense of self which she was able to discover in connection
with nature. Through continuous deep explorations and purging, one can find one‟s element and
better understands who one is and where does one belong. Nature always gives one a promise of
hope and regeneration capabilities, a place where one can be at ease with one‟s sense of self and
place. Just like Huckleberry Finn of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)or Edna
Pontellier from The Awakening(1899)Ruth got to know her real self in connectedness with
nature.
In the functioning of Robinson's ecology, water, land, and plant life offer a rich and ambiguous
sense of place in the American West. The natural landmarks help to root her characters in the
land, and also open them up to the vistas of otherness which are never fully assimilated. The
novel Housekeeping is full of woods, mountains, lake, sky which almost function like characters.
The novel Housekeeping‘s very setting and components like the lake, railroad track, the houses,
and the nearby village shares affinity with Thoreau‟s Walden (1854). A critic Martha Ravits
argues that Housekeeping takes up Thoreau‟s project of establishing spiritual freedom through
the renunciation of worldly burdens (664: Ravits: 1989).
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South -Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies (SAJMS) ISSN:2349-7858:SJIF:2.246:Volume 4 Issue 1
Once Ruth's aunt Sylvie takes over the charge of housekeeping, the boundaries between
the outer and inner world starts to blur: "Sylvie in a house was more like a mermaid in a ship‟s
cabin. She preferred [the house] sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude. We had
crickets in the pantry, squirrels in the eaves, and sparrows in the attic" (Housekeeping: 99).
Sylvie has different notions of housekeeping unlike others. For others the function of a house is
to provide a space in which its residents are separated and protected from their natural
environment, but Sylvie sets out to sabotage this very function. When the town of Fingerbone
experiences flood and the water enters the houses, Sylvie remains unbothered by this intrusion of
nature into their domestic space and is seen dancing and enjoying with Ruth through the icy
water: “Sylvie took me by the hands and pulled me after her through six grand waltz steps. The
house flowed around us” (64). Sylvie also embraces the change in nature by moving into the
room that was formerly occupied by her father, a room that has “glass double doors opening into
the grape arbor, which was built against the house like a lean-to, and into the orchard. It was not
a bright room, but in summer it was full of the smell of grass and earth and blossoms or fruit, and
the sound of bees” (89). Like Thoreau who believed that "a taste for the beautiful is most
cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper" (Walden:44) we find Sylvie
keeping the doors and windows open after dusting the sofa in the orchard for the old leaves and
paper scraps to accumulate in the corners. Thus, Sylvie‟s actions defy the general notions of a
female housekeeper. As the novel progresses Ruth says: “Thus finely did our house become
attuned to the orchard and the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie‟s
housekeeping. Thus did she begin by littles and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats
and barn swallows” (85).
Throughout the novel we see the natural and the domestic world coming together, and
Ruth‟s reminiscent descriptions of her natural environment suggest the kind of “luminous
interchange with the external world” (155: Buell: 1995) which Lawrence Buell welcomed as a
characteristic feature of Thoreau‟s progress in his passage from anthropocentrism:
“– an intensely pondered contemplation of characteristic images and events and gestures
that take on a magical resonance now that the conditions of life have been simplified and
the protagonist freed to appreciate how much more matters than what normally seems to
matter” (153).
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South -Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies (SAJMS) ISSN:2349-7858:SJIF:2.246:Volume 4 Issue 1
Ralph Waldo Emerson who led the transcendentalist movement also sees nature as a site of
rejuvenation and spiritual regeneration which is always there to sustain and nourish any
individual. Nature's spirituality is marked in the novel by the overbearing presence of the lake
which symbolizes death and a parallel life. It seems that a life alternative to Fingerbone's
superficial existence is at working beneath the lake‟s water surface. The natural world and the
lake in Fingerbone town appears as if they are suffused by the presence of a different order of
being:
“The mountains, grayed and flattened by distance, looked like […] the broken lip of an
iron pot, just at a simmer, endlessly distilling water into light. But the lake at our feet was
plain, clear water, bottomed with smooth stones or simple mud […], as modest in its
transformations of the ordinary as any puddle. Only the calm persistence with which the
water touched, and touched, and touched, sifting all the little stones, jet, and white, and
hazel, forced us to remember that the lake was vast, and in league with the moon (for no
sublunar account could be made of its shimmering, cold life)” (Housekeeping:112).
The town experiences extreme weather which symbolizes the great power of nature. While
exploring the lake with Lucille, Ruth notices that "the surface of the bay seemed almost viscous,
membranous, and here things massed and accumulated, as they do in cobwebs or in the eaves
and unswept corners of a house. It was a place of distinctly domestic disorder, warm and still and
replete"(114). The lake floods the town every year submerging and destroying the human
settlements which can be seen as an act of purging or cleansing where nature defies its
conventional roles just like women in Robinson‟s novel Housekeeping. Ruth has also talked
about the landscape and the dreadful noises coming from the lake: “From the lake came the
increasingly terrific sounds of wrenching and ramming and slamming and upending, as a southflowing current heaped huge shards of ice against the north side of the bridge” (120). Robinson
frequently mentions the action of Ruth collecting wild strawberries which symbolizes her
oneness with the nature. The mimetic depiction of the seasons like spring, winter, and the flow of
water in the environment by the writer expresses her desire to portray nature as an independent
element.
In the "Conclusion" to Walden Thoreau awaits resurrection and exalts the possibility of
new life. Ruth, like Thoreau also waited for resurrection. She reconsiders the different layers of
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people, including her mother and things lying at the bed of the lake, "fallen buttons and
misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin,"(Housekeeping: 92) and look at the flying gulls and
the gnats and the rustling of leaves in the wind, contemplating: "Ascension seemed at such times
a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion-that everything must finally be made
comprehensible then ... What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?" (92) Ruth
in her longing for her mother muse: "Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection. Perhaps we expected
a train to leap out of the water, caboose foremost, as if in a movie run backward" (96).We see
Ruth discovering herself and finding solace and comfort at Mother Nature‟s bosom. This is what
Emerson also discusses in his most hailed book Nature (1836) where he discusses how the
solitary engagement with the natural world allows the individual to catch a glimpse of God‟s
design; nature being a repository of transcendent and immutable meaning. The two nights which
Ruth spent in wilderness is a journey of affirmation of her own sense of self. She found her
connection to her being in nature.
By developing an understanding of nature and its spiritual dimension we can know the
different perspectives on being in the world understanding our own selves and connecting earth
to a larger cosmic realm. Nature is mysterious, mystical, magical and all powerful. It is not just a
means of providing sustenance but also a form of self expression and shaping our vision. The
world of nature always encourages explorations of consciousness. Thus, Robinson and her works
advocate for the rights of nature with an instigating effort to open our eyes and understand and
value and most importantly respect our ecosystem on which our lives are completely dependent.
By separating nature from mankind we ourselves have created a gap between the two worlds
which is the root cause of our alienation, sufferings and environmental degradation. But to be
true to one‟s own identity and self sometimes requires a break from some conventional norms,
social practices, the dominant culture and existing belief system. As the prevailing ideology
never allows you to be yourself in real sense where one is always chasing his worldly aspirations
and success and is bent down by various pressures and stress and strain of day to day life. The
anthropocentric notion that nature is here just to serve human needs should be laid aside and man
and nature should be put on equal footing with other non-human world. When we have achieved
this we will establish a spiritual connection among ourselves and the mystery and meaning
behind human existence will be revealed. Therefore, we need to redefine our associations with
nature and learn how to nurture a more spiritual connection with the world and its inhabitants.
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Works Cited
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation
of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.1995
Martha, Ravits. Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson‟s Housekeeping. Duke
University Press. American Literature 61.4(1989):644-664.
Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. London: Faber and Faber. 2005. Print.
---.The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. New York: Picador. 2005. Print.
David Thoreau, Henry.Walden.London: CRW Publishing Limited.2004.Print.
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