engleski

Beyond the Material: Family as Emotion in Marilynne Robinson’s „Housekeeping“

Based on the typology proposed in Ljubica Matek’s doctoral thesis, this paper will provide a reading of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping (1980) as one depicting a metaphorical family. Rather than maintain that family is really created by means of a place we call home, a house we keep, or performed through the conventions of blood connection and marriage, the novel suggests that family is rooted in the symbolic and immaterial realm of emotions. The story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who grow up without parents and parental love questions the traditional concepts of family, belonging and home, as well as identity that arises from our familial relationships. Although they grow up in the family house that is supposed to be their home, the sisters, raised by a succession of relatives, perceive their life as being permanently marked by absence or loss of their loved ones. The acute awareness of constant abandonment forces the sisters to question what it means to have a family and to belong. The younger sister, resenting their status as outcasts, opts for social convention, leaving her sister Ruth, who is her closest blood- relative, in order to live a “regular” life with her teacher, Miss Royce. Ruth, on the other hand, follows their nomadic aunt Sylvie and chooses a life on the road. Significantly, it is the latter sister that manages to find peace in her homeless life and to keep the family together in her memories, fantasies and emotions, creating a metaphorical family and home within herself. The idea that “families should not be confounded with genealogically defined relationships” (Weston 1991) has become more prominent in the late twentieth century, and Robinson’s novel shows this by excluding biology and genes from the discussion of family and, quite radically, by rendering the material space of home as irrelevant.

family, metaphorical family, Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

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