The Lost Object of Love? The Mystery of Unperformed Mourning in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

The article investigates Marilynne Robinson’s debut novel Housekeeping in an attempt to uncover the origin of the book’s melancholy. Following Sigmund Freud’s insight about the lost object of love and combining Abraham and Torok’s and Kristeva’s writings on melancholy, the text argues that the Foster women’s overwhelming melancholy may be attributed to three factors: the grandfather’s death, creating the rupture in the symbolic order; the grandmother’s unperformed mourning, which failed to mend that rupture; and the house’s progressing decay—a constant reminder of the gap between the semiotic and the symbolic.