Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson – Wherever I Lay My Hat
When I was a young writer starting out, I read The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which made a significant impression on me. Based on the work of Karl Jung and Joseph Campbell, the book suggests that all stories derive from what it calls the Hero’s Journey, a kind of ancient training for young men, who will soon have to leave the camp fire and venture forth in search of resources, territory and discovery. This idea seemed compelling to me. In fact, once you see the journey laid out in its various traditional stages, it’s difficult to unsee.
Early on in his book, Vogler describes some objections to the idea of the Hero’s Journey. One of these is the suggestion that it is unsuited to the experience of women, who are perhaps less likely than men to move between one external goal and another in a linear way. Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping might serve as an illustration of this objection, because apparently it’s about staying home in a women-only household. How will a story work in that scenario?
Fittingly, we start with an accident that gets rid of a man. Edmund Foster lives in the remote town of Fingerbone, Idaho, a restless soul, who takes a job working on the railways. He dies when his train crashes from a bridge into the vast lake beside Fingerbone. With male influence removed at this early stage, direction seems to disappear from the lives of the wife and three daughters he leaves behind.
‘With him gone, they were cut free from the troublesome possibility of success, recognition, advancement. They had no reason to look forward, nothing to regret. Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, supper time, lilac time, apple time.’
With men out of the picture, the story confines itself to home and domesticity. However, we are not in the situation suggested by Christopher Vogler of female-being opposed to male-doing. Sylvia Foster, might lose her sense of direction after the death of her husband, but she also demonstrates that men don’t have a monopoly on seeing life in simplistic journey terms.
‘… she conceived of life as a road down which one travelled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning,’
Sylvia, after a few years of routine, man-free housekeeping, finds that her three daughters leave home. After a few more years, middle girl, Helen returns to Fingerbone with two daughters, Lucille, and Ruth – the story’s narrator. But Helen only drops off the girls at grandma’s house, before promptly committing suicide by driving into the lake, leaving Sylvia to look after her granddaughters. When Sylvia herself dies, Lucille and Ruth are looked after first by Sylvia’s stick-in-the-mud sisters-in-law, and then by her youngest daughter Sylvie, who returns to Fingerbone after living a rootless, hobo life, drifting around America.
We now seem to be asked a question – is life drifting from day to day at home in Fingerbone, really any different from an itinerant life, wandering from town to town by jumping on freight trains? Neither has any sense of direction. Sylvie is a ‘transient’ who never really settles in Fingerbone. Nevertheless, it is repeatedly made clear that Fingerbone is itself transient, a town that floods yearly, burns down occasionally, prey to all kinds of natural and economic hazards, enduring only due to the inertia of its unadventurous residents.
So, going back to the Hero’s Journey idea, in Housekeeping the experience of women who stay home overlaps with that of those who wander on endless journeys. I’m reminded of a song that was in the charts the week I myself left home, to go to university – Paul Young’s version of Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home).
I don’t know if Marilynne Robinson wrote this book to take on Joseph Campbell and his Hero idea. But in her essay collection, When I was a Child I Read Books, she does refer to Joseph Campbell, saying his scholarship ‘does not bear scrutiny.’ After reading Housekeeping it’s difficult to see much difference between life on the road and life back at home. This is a denial of the Hero’s Journey – though ironically, it could also be something of an ironic confirmation of its relevance. After all, Housekeeping is another book about journeys, even if they are contradictory, enigmatic, with a sense of being rather than doing.
Housekeeping was published in 1980, winning the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel, and now makes regular appearances on best novel lists.
