“An end to housekeeping”

Abstract

This chapter offers a reading of Marilynne Robinson’s 1980 novel Housekeeping—the story of a transient woman, Sylvie, who returns home to take care of her recently orphaned nieces, Ruth and Lucille, and the novel raises important questions not just about life on the road, but also about the house and home that is left behind. Whereas the Odyssey maintains a perpetually idealized notion of Penelope and Odysseus as emblems of a like-minded merger of travel and home by deferring indefinitely the moment when the two actually live (or travel) together, in Housekeeping there is always an attempt to blur the divide between people who stay and people who go, one that is most clearly embodied in the character of Sylvie. Like Odysseus, who will one day leave home again and whose travels are also always returns, Sylvie’s travels keep taking her home; yet like Penelope as well, she keeps her family by her side. In particular, by taking men out of the picture, Robinson radically reorients the traditionally gendered relationship of travel to home that Homer’s Odyssey represents, and the novel prompts us to ask how women can reconcile family responsibilities with travel. Can the possibilities, rather than the constraints, of mobility help redefine what makes a house a home?