Abandonment And Desecurity In Marilynne Robinson s...
Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson, is a novel that explores growing up,
abandonment, insecurity, framily, and death. The book is narrated by Ruthie Stone,
who tells the story of she and her younger sister, Lucille s, unorthodox upbring and
transition into becoming young women. The girl s lives throughout the book lacks
stability due to the constant change of their guardians, which stems from their
grandfather s death in a train accident before they were born and their Foster/Stone
familycontinues to experience misfortune, when Ruthie and Lucille s mother
abandons them and commits suicide. The book takes place in a town called,
Fingerbone in Idaho on the shores of Fingerbone Lake. In Mark O Connell s New
York Times article he writes, Water... Show more content on Helpwriting.net ...
In the accident the train slides off the tracks, crashing into the lake and killing all
the passengers. The presence of Fingerbone Lake is heavily felt by its citizens,
who are constantly haunted by and reminded of the lives that were lost in the
Fireball accident and sit at the bottom of the lake, It is true that one is always
aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless,
waters below, (9). In Tom Conoboy s Writer s Blog, he describes Fingerbone Lake
as, home to the dead countless unfortunates reside within it, including the girls
grandfather and mother. After the death of Edmund Foster, Sylvia Foster, his
wife, is left to take care of their three daughters alone, Molly was sixteen that
winter; Helen, my mother, fifteen; and Sylvie was thirteen, (10). In the death of
their father, the girls future s are stolen from them leaving them feeling that, They
[have] no reason to look forward, nothing to regret, (13). The girls were changed
after their father s death, [A] perfect quiet had settled into the house, (15). Molly,
the eldest, was the first to leave Fingerbone, five years after her father s death.
Molly became very religious, practic[ing] hymns on the piano, and [mailing] fat
letters to missionary societies, in which included accounts of her recent
conversion, (13). Helen ran away with Reginald Stone, Ruthie and Lucille s father,
to Seattle to live and get married in Nevada, and Sylvie left Fingerbone for Seattle,
a few weeks after her sister Helen, to visit and didn t return to Fingerbone until she
got married to a man named Fisher. Helen returned back to Fingerbone, seven and a
half years after, to leave her children at her mother s house, and later committed
suicide by driving her car off of a cliff, She went back to the car and drove north
almost to Tyler, where