Transcendence in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping Essay -- Robinson H

Transcendence in Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping William H. Burke suggests that transience in Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping is a type of pilgrimage, and that the rigors and self-denials of the transient bread and butter are necessary spiritual conditioning for the valued crossing from the experience of a realness of loss and fragmentation to the sensing of a world that is whole and complete (717). The world of reality in Housekeeping is one fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through and through lighted windows (Robinson 50). Many of the characters that precede ruth in the narrative rebel against something in this world that is not right. Edmund Foster, her grandfather, escapes by train to the Midwest and his house is no more a human stronghold than a grave (3). His daughters, Molly, Sylvie, and Helen, all abandon their home and their mother Helen, in fact, makes the greatest leap away from the world into death when she cannot effectively deal wit h the expectations placed on her to set up housekeeping in Seattle with husband and children (14). Ruth takes up a transient life with her mentor and aunt, Sylvie, to escape from history and the past into a new life, a new awareness. Crucial to this spiritual awakening is the abandonment and the isolation of the self. Transience is Ruths escape from the impermanent illusory world, a world that rejects one of the tenets of transience, that the perimeters of our wanderings are nowhere , in favor of fixity and stasis (218). She acknowledges the worlds illusory nature when she admits that she has never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming, and that Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the worlds genuine workings... ...orld (219). Works CitedBurke, William H. Border Crossinsgs in Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping. Modern Fiction Studies. 37 (Winter 1991) 716-724.Mallon, Anne-Marie. Sojourning Women Homelessness and Transcendence in H ousekeepking. Critique 30 (Winter 1989) 95-105. Miller, Heather. Grace Through Isolation in Herland, Housekeeping, and Ellen Foster. Masters Thesis. University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg. December 1991.Ross, Dianne Lillian. The Circle in the Waters Unity and Visions of Regeneration and Immortality in Housekeeping, To the Lighthouse, and Surfacing. Masters Thesis. UVA May 1986Schuler, Carol. Crossing the Boundaries with M/Other beyond Dualism into the Dream of a World made Whole in Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping. Masters Thesis. California State University, Stanislaus. May 1994.