A Beautiful Opacity: Water and Darkness
in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping
In 1980, Marilynne Robinson published her debut fiction, Housekeeping. It won the PEN/Hemingway prize for debut fiction, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Mona Simpson in The Atlantic called it “one of the ten best novels of the past century. In its haunting voice and its inevitable movement, both fabular and precise, it is a nearly perfect work, still as singular and eerie as when it was published.” Robert McCrum, in The Guardian said, “As a modern classic, Housekeeping can bear any weight of interpretation. Like Fingerbone’s lake water, it has become a mirror in which generations of new readers can find themselves, as if for the first time.” And here is Anatole Broyard in The New York Times: “[Housekeeping] sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life … You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt.”
These encomiums merely sample a unanimous chorus of praise. And by all means, I am adding my voice to it.
In praising the work, my design is to excerpt its salient passages to review its principal plot events and relate them to images and references cited by the author herself. This will include a discussion of the aesthetic and metaphysical flourishes which distinguish this brilliant novel. Our discussion includes a consideration of a specific work by Emily Dickinson, since it relates closely to Housekeeping’s themes. In addition I will cite statements made by the author during interviews she has had with scholars; these words help illuminate her thinking during composition.
Author Marilynne Robinson has only eloquent words of praise for the classic 19th Century American authors—Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Poe, Emerson, and Whitman—and that she “will always answer to them in my mind.” So I plan also to take up a poem by Emily Dickinson, (J313) “I should have been too glad I see—” and relate it to Housekeeping in a way that reverberates with her novel and aligns with Robinson’s treatment of perception and consciousness.
In her novel Robinson tells the story of a young girl who has reached adolescence in mid-20th Century Idaho, but has reached it only after a series of cruel losses. Her mother had driven the two primary school-age sisters—our narrator Ruth, and her sister Lucille—from Seattle to a small town in northern Idaho—a fictional place called Fingerbone, on the shore of a lake that shares its name. She left them on their grandmother’s porch, and after telling them to behave themselves, drove off in her borrowed car and plunged it off a steep embankment into the lake, killing herself. Ruth spends almost five years in her grandmother’s care, but then the grandmother herself passes away, and the two sisters become stepchildren to their Aunt Sylvie, who has come to care for them from some unknown place.
Hero/narrator Ruth endures these challenging disruptions early in her life; along the way she gains from somewhere an aptitude for discerning the deeper truths behind the surface vagaries of her daily life. She’s given to speculating about a wide variety of things, and gives free rein to her imagination; she finds some startlingly incisive truths, which clearly her sister does not see, and these observations lead Ruth, with Aunt Sylvie’s gentle, almost nonexistent, guidance to follow an unorthodox path forward.
I have mentioned my intent to cite passages from the novel. Since these will be fairly numerous, with some running to some length, I trust I’m adding to the readability and interest of this paper, given that the prose is so beautiful. Robinson propounds her challenging themes of spirituality and consciousness with her trademark mellifluous prose, but we also praise her project for the sophistication of its design while dealing with deep currents of emotional and aesthetic intelligence. All these recommend this extraordinary work.
Robinson makes use of two images to help carry her story forward: water and darkness. She yokes them, singly or in tandem, to hide deeper and subtler insights into life and the workings of the world. Ruth plays an apprentice seer, and shows miraculous skills at sensing and deducing the arcane truths as she—and we—go along.
In addition to liberally excerpting her book, I will also quote the author from interviews she’s had with scholars and critics regarding her novel and about writing in general. I’ve mentioned her affinity for the 19th Century American masters, and my plan for focusing on an Emily Dickinson poem as an antecedent for the book. Here is Robinson’s statement in the Dickinson Electronic Archives:
“If to admire and to be influenced are more or less the same thing, I must be influenced most deeply by the nineteenth-century Americans — Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson and Poe. Nothing in literature appeals to me more than the rigor with which they fasten on problems of language and of consciousness — bending form to their purposes, ransacking ordinary speech and common experience, rummaging through the exotic and recondite, setting Promethean doubts to hymn tunes, refining popular magazine tales into arabesques, pondering bean fields, celebrating the float and odor of hair, always, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, in the act of finding what will suffice. I think they must have believed that everything can be apprehended truly when it is seen in the light of an esthetic understanding appropriate to itself, whence their passion for making novel orders of disparate things. I believe they wished to declare the intrinsic dignity of all experience and to declare the senses bathed in revelation — true, serious revelation, the kind that terrifies. Of course, there are any number of ways to write and things to write about, and the world is richer for the fact. I happen to have read these old aunts and uncles at an impressionable age, and so I will always answer to them in my mind.” (Retrieved May, 2026)
In addition, Robinson in 2006 had an interview with Thomas Gardner, Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Virginia Tech, where she said, “[Y]ou understand on the one hand that the world is quotidian, but then something leads you to think, well, it’s a complete anomaly relative to anything else we know about the universe. It’s utterly fragile, it’s utterly peculiar to itself.” (Gardner, T. (2006). A Door Ajar, Oxford University Press. We will return to this interview below.)
In the novel Ruth is clever enough to arrive at many of the arcane and recondite truths about how the world works—truths obscured from most of us in our day to day lives. She foils her sister Lucille directly on the point of needing shelter, of needing perspective, of even needing tomorrow. Ruth’s imagination roams far and wide: she speculates about her grandmother’s thought processes in scenes occurring before Ruth was even born. She draws startling parallels between highly arresting, outré elements. It’s startling, but also feels natural and elegant.
Returning to Robinson’s own words here, again in her interview with Thomas Gardner: during a discussion of perception, Robinson states that Walt Whitman did not observe reality as though it were separate from him and he was simply reporting it, but it is the primary locus of reality itself. Professor Gardner presses Robinson on this point:
“TG [Thomas Gardner]: Perception is the primary locus of reality?
“MR [Marilynne Robinson]: Yes. The idea that being is addressed to us. It is not something that exists independently of us upon which we report. … I was reading something that Isaac Newton wrote about the fact that his understanding of planetary motion did not align with biblical arguments. He said that the Bible wasn’t written for scientists and mathematicians; it was written to be meaningful in terms of perception. … in giving this account of the double nature of the universe, he’s quoting Calvin. … It means that, on the one hand, there’s more to reality than we perceive, and on the other hand, what we perceive is also a language through which things are communicated to us. Something that can be understood scientifically or intellectually, and something that can be understood simply at the level of perception, exist side by side without contradiction.”
Emily Dickinson frequently confronted this duality in her poetry; it had the power to stop the poet and force sudden reversals and reconsiderations of of philosophical and spiritual issues. She developed a strategy to understand and communicate the world’s mysteries; it led her to an idiosyncratic use of language. One concept Robinson acknowledges as bearing on her novel is Dickinson’s idea of the “circumference.” This term appears frequently in her poetry; we find it in a particularly apt sense in her poem catalogued as J313:
I should have been too glad, I see—
Too lifted—for the scant degree
Of Life's penurious Round—
My little Circuit would have shamed
This new Circumference—have blamed—
The homelier time behind.
I should have been too saved—I see—
Too rescued—Fear too dim to me
That I could spell the Prayer
I knew so perfect—yesterday—
That Scalding One—Sabachthani—
Recited fluent—here—
Earth would have been too much—I see—
And Heaven—not enough for me—
I should have had the Joy
Without the Fear—to justify—
The Palm—without the Calvary—
So Savior—Crucify—
Defeat—whets Victory—they say—
The Reefs—in old Gethsemane—
Endear the Coast—beyond!
'Tis Beggars—Banquets—can define—
'Tis Parching—vitalizes Wine—
"Faith"—bleats—to understand!
(“bleats” in the last line means “faints”)
I mainly want to relate the term “Circumference” to Housekeeping, so as part of my project, I will humbly and with trepidation, presume to parse part of Dickinson’s meaning: the poet declaims her shock and worry, thinking herself unworthy of Christ’s crucifixion. She suddenly realizes that her shallow life had given her no clue about the depth of the issues, the seriousness inherent in Christ’s undertaking. (Do not give the word “should” its normative current meaning. Read it as “would,” a customary usage in Dickinson’s time.) In the lines, “My little Circuit would have shamed / This new Circumference” she denigrates her old uncomprehending life in the quotidian realm, leading up to the moment of the poem. It’s a paltry life she’s lead in the face of “This new Circumference,” referring to her newfound and chastising understanding of the sacrifice at Calvary.
“Circumference”(and I’m following Robinson’s lead here; please refer to her interview with Thomas Gardner, cited above), refers to the boundary beyond which stands the enlightened—and terrifying—understanding of the depth of the Savior’s suffering. And this frontier, so tantalizing and enigmatic in Dickinson, is laid out in Housekeeping in concrete terms—using water and darkness—as elements blocking our view of the universe’s arcane truths.
Considering the last six lines of this poem:
Defeat—whets Victory—they say—
The Reefs—in old Gethsemane—
Endear the Coast—beyond!
'Tis Beggars—Banquets—can define—
'Tis Parching—vitalizes Wine—
“Faith” bleats—to understand!
Dickinson hints that since she thirsts so thoroughly to be worthy, she’s well aware of what it takes, and may become worthy as a result of knowing the requirements so well and intimately. The poet adds the example that offshore reefs make us yearn to reach the coast (“Endear the Coast—beyond!”), signifying that in her current state, the poet may well succeed in reaching the shore, and attaining redemption. The poet knows, or has perhaps newly learned, that Beggars, who long for the savory and nourishing Banquet, are experts in the bill of fare, who wish for it so hard they can taste it. And ’tis Parching that brings wine alive—never do we taste it quite so well and thoroughly as when we’re dying of thirst for it. Finally, Dickinson denigrates “faith,” viewing it as a tepid response to liturgy and precept, holding that understanding her doubts is beyond this type of devotee.
Robinson articulated this concept of “circumference” in a conversation with another scholar, Tace Hedrick, currently at the University of Florida, (“On Influence and Appropriation,” Iowa Review 22,1 (1992): I) Robinson calls attention to a characteristic pattern of American writing in which
“people go through a journey that leads to a kind of realization that is just at the limits of their ability to comprehend or articulate, and after that, there’s an openness where earlier experience becomes impossible, and you’re abandoned into a new terrain without being able to use your old assumptions about how to find your way.”
“The limits of their ability to comprehend or articulate”—the perfect definition of Dickinson’s “circumference,” as used in Housekeeping.
In her novel, Robinson sets very early the pattern for what will come later: water and darkness show up in high focus at the very beginning of the work. On the third page we learn of the death of Ruth’s grandfather Edmund, in a “spectacular” overnight derailment. A sleek train known at the “Fireball” jumped off the bridge spanning Lake Fingerbone and plunged to the bottom. Here the two act in tandem: under cover of darkness, the train pierces the surface of the lake and perishes. It becomes absolute history. Some men take on the hazardous duty to search the freezing cold lake, taking the precautions of covering themselves in black grease and tying rope harnesses around themselves, to no avail. “A suitcase, a seat cushion, and a lettuce were all they retrieved.” (p. 6) (page references cite the Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Picador, New York, 2020, ISBN 9781250769763) This is all that becomes of this heroic effort to research beyond the membrane of the lake’s surface. The paltry recounting of the physical objects recovered, one of which is perishable, has its echo later on, in another catastrophic episode about water. Robinson treats the physical relics of these disasters with a muted scorn.
In Robinson’s novel, narrator Ruth reflects on her mother’s unusual height, and how she sometimes set Ruth on her shoulders so that she could splash her hands in the cold leaves above their heads—a detail Ruth treasures as one of those small, accidental particulars that carry the full weight of a vanished life.
Lingering uncertainty emboldens some of the younger boys to leap off the bridge to look for themselves. At p. 7:
“After a while some of the younger boys came out on the bridge and began to jump off, at first cautiously and then almost exuberantly, with whoops of fear. … The surface of the lake was very still. As the boys’ feet struck the water, there was a slight sound of rupture. Fragments of transparent ice wobbled on the waves they made and, when the water was calm again, knitted themselves up like bits of reflection.”
Treatments like this vivid excerpt mark depictions of water throughout the book. Water by itself is a powerful obscuring element, both submerging things in its depths and reflecting, turning the viewer away, from its surface. When water combines with darkness, it portends the most salient, important events in the story. Ruth’s remarkable success in making sense of these events stands as perhaps the most central element of her journey, and thus of the novel itself.
Water’s tricks of appearance crowd Robinson’s narrative. At p. 15 the author describes the aftermath of Edmund’s death:
“This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father [Ruth’s grandfather]. … The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself, and if the calm that followed it was not greater than the calm that came before it, it had seemed so. And the dear ordinary had healed as seamlessly as an image on water.”
Immediately following this passage, we find Ruth speculating about her grandmother, exhibiting at this early juncture her depth of mind and understanding:
“One day my grandmother must have carried out a basket of sheets to hang in the spring sunlight, wearing her widow’s black, performing the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith. … say she stooped breathlessly in her corset to lift up a sodden sheet by its hems, and say that when she had pinned three corners to the lines it began to billow and leap in her hands, to flutter and tremble, and to glare with the light, and that the throes of the thing were as gleeful and strong as if a spirit were dancing in its cerements. That wind! she would say …”
Here we have young Ruth imagining a scene in which her grandmother struggles with and remarks on the wind. Such lovely description—how alive with image and possibility!
Ruth elucidates for us the manifold nuances and mental processes which she imagines in others, in scenes which she cannot have been present for. Here we get another early glimpse of Ruth’s characteristic way of elevating the ordinary and constructing a reality to explain her difficulties, and also, the true below-the-surface extraordinariness of daily existence. At p. 19, soon after the vivid imaginary scene above, she speculates again, getting even more deeply into her grandmother’s psyche:
“She felt the hair lifted from her neck by a swift, watery wind, and she saw the trees fill with wind and heard their trunks creak like masts. She burrowed her hand under a potato plant and felt gingerly for the new potatoes in their dry net of roots, smooth as eggs. She put them in her apron and walked back to the house thinking, What have I seen, what have I seen. The earth and the sky and the garden, not as they always are. And she saw her daughters’ faces not as they always were, or as other people’s were, and she was quiet and aloof and watchful, not to startle the strangeness away.”
Ruth imagines in her grandmother the sense of not wanting to disrupt an edgy, unusual mood, a mood of living on a different world, on a more expanded, revelatory plane. She occupies a realm where unseen forces become apparent, and a deeper reality thus becomes visible and comprehensible. Reality as she knows it is temporarily transformed. As the narrative progresses, Ruth has these spells of heightened awareness, of seeing things “not as they always were,” where if you even blink, it might dispel the mood. Is this an example of skirting close to the obscuring membrane of Circumference, of intimately flirting with it? I think it definitely is.
Water forms a key element of this “Circumference.” In Robinson’s hands it performs a variety of functions, and holds sway over human perception and in some cases, over human life. Of course the lake and its shores, its depths, its coldness, it odors, and its surface reigns as the source of water here. In Robinson’s hands it lives and breathes. At p. 9:
“It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below. When the ground is plowed in the spring, cut and laid open, what exhales from the furrows but that same, sharp, watery smell. The wind is watery, and all the pumps and creeks and ditches smell of water unalloyed by any other element. At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black. Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock and see stony, earthy bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground. And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds. And above that the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains.”
Thus is the novel’s body of water given life and distinction. Multilayered, mostly invisible, it has a shape on the map, it suffuses the ground around it, it supports life, it breathes. It provides the obscuring water, both real and thematic; simultaneously it physically drowns the living and raises the airy imagination to vivid flight.
Early in the book, at the outset of Chapter 2, Ruth’s grandmother “eschewed awakening” one winter morning. Her two sisters in law, Lily and Nona, are summoned to care for the girls, and they undertake the task willingly, but without hope of succeeding. However, while Ruth and Lucille are being minded by the two maiden sisters, Lake Fingerbone freezes fully over. The winter turns hard. The snow “crested, finally far above our heads. It drifted up to the eaves on one side of the house. … It was by grace of this dark and devastating weather that we were able to go very often to the lake to skate, for Lily and Nona knew that our house would fall, and hoped that we at least might be spared when it did, if only to die of pneumonia” (pp. 32-33). In Robinson’s hands Lily and Nona are risible characters, cowed by their young charges and utterly unsure how to nurture them. Ruth recounts how she and her sister were often the last of the skaters to leave the lake. The author takes pains to describe the frozen lake, a page and a half which lead into the passage I’m about to excerpt. Ruth and Lucille go directly to the lake after school. Pages 34-35:
“We were often the last to leave, so absorbed we were in our skating and in the silence and the numbing sweetness of the air. … And as we glided across the ice to Fingerbone, we would become aware of the darkness, too close to us, like a presence in a dream. The comfortable yellow lights of the town were then the only comfort there was in the world, and there were not many of them. If every house in Fingerbone were to fall before our eyes, snuffing every light, the event would touch our senses as softly as a shifting among embers, and then the bitter darkness would step nearer.”
Water in another form gives solid support to Ruth and her sister, but it still poses an impassable barrier. When Ruth imagines the darkness that would result from the extinction of the lights—not a far-fetched idea, as it happens—it brings on apprehension and the urgency of returning to their fragile house. As it turns out, water in the form of way too much snow threatens the town, and eclipses it in blackout anyway. So the loss of the town’s lights, an event that chills Ruth’s imagination, actually happens that very night: a blizzard that continues for four days causes a blackout for the entire town. This further baffles and alarms Lily and Nona, and leads to talk between them of moving the girls back to their home in Spokane. Robinson recounts through Ruth’s consciousness conversations of the two sisters, and this is another treat in and of itself. The two mature sisters knew each other so well, and agreed on all matters of import, so several pages of single and simple sentences go by with a back-and-forth between the two, and never a disagreeing nor a harsh note. I found it hysterically reserved and parochial.
The great-aunts were intimidated by the heavy responsibility, and so it is counted as providential when they hear from Sylvie, the two girls’ aunt, (a generation younger than Lily and Nona) just at this moment. Sylvie had sent a note addressed to her mother, (the young girls’ lately deceased grandmother) so she had to be brought up to date. A discussion duly ensues of the newspaper’s treatment of their grandmother’s death, and Lily and Nona go back and forth over this, and consider why it had omitted the grandmother’s name. They judged the paper remiss and negligent, which was typical of their opinion of newspapers. Overall, however, her quasi-obituary with the pictures of the derailed train and some of the victims was considered on balance to be a source of pride to the young girls. But Ruth relates:
“I was simply alarmed. It suggested that to me that the earth had opened. In fact, I dreamed that I was walking across the ice on the lake, which was breaking up as it does in the spring, softening and shifting and pulling itself apart. But in the dream the surface that I walked on proved to be knit up of hands and arms and upturned faces that shifted and quickened as I stepped, sinking only for a moment into lower relief under my weight. The dream and the obituary together created in my mind the conviction that my grandmother had entered into some other element upon which our lives floated as weightless, intangible, immiscible, and inseparable as reflections in water. So she was borne to the depths, my grandmother, into the undifferentiated past, and her comb had no more of the warmth of a hand about it than Helen of Troy’s would have.” (p. 41)
This vivid and astonishing image captures a young girl’s near-panic on the subject her grandmother’s death. Water had theretofore only ice as an alternative form. But now she dreams of walking across the lake, with the surface made up of a nightmarish mix of faces and hands and arms, which react slightly to Ruth’s passing weight. Her dream adds now-defunct generations as a potential substance of the obscuring membrane, and makes her think that life floats on some other element, “intangible, immiscible, and inseparable as reflections in water.” And what is more temporary or intangible than a reflection on water? This idea causes alarm in the adolescent girl. Perhaps she feels an instinct to plum the depths of this lake, to explore, and comprehend its functions better.
Sylvie duly arrives and, oh my, as she does so, water rushes in and inundates the book as well as the town, in the form of a devastating flood.
If Sylvie supposedly will supply guidance and sustenance and love—mothering—the girls will obviously come to rely on her. But finding any comforting domestic virtues will have to wait at least for the flood to subside, since homemaking in any orthodox sense is impossible. Because in spite of it having been built on a hill, the house is inundated to the level of the bottom floor. What follows forms for Ruth’s senses an eerie and memorable sequence. Water truly combines with the pitch blackness—the profound darkness which Ruth describes: both she and Lucille are upstairs and wondering where Sylvie is. Their new guardian is an utterly unknown quantity. From p. 70:
“‘Sylvie?’
“‘Here.’ Her voice came from the porch. ‘I’m just getting some wood. I’ve never seen such a dark night.’
“‘Well, come back in!’
“We heard the wash, wash, wash of her footsteps. ‘I really never have,’ she said. ‘It’s like the end of the world!’
“‘Well, let’s go back upstairs.’
“But Sylvie had fallen silent again. Guessing that she must be listening to something, we were silent, too. The lake still thundered and groaned, the flood waters still brimmed and simmered. When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all. The wind and the water brought sounds intact from any imaginable distance. Deprived of all perspective and horizon, I found myself reduced to an intuition, and my sister and my aunt to something less that that. I was afraid to put out my hand, for fear it would touch nothing, or to speak, for fear no one would answer. We all stood there silently for a long moment.”
Sylvie arrives as a powerful agent of change. She brings with her the flood, overwhelming the town and everything in Ruth’s world, including her home. Ruth feels intimidated, facing the terror of these changes. In this eerie scene, water and darkness trigger in the ungrounded Ruth deep doubts about her own existence, and she nearly concludes that Sylvie and Lucille are phantoms. How could she know otherwise?Floodwaters inundate not only the lower level of the house, but also Ruth’s comprehension of where her sister and aunt are, or indeed IF her sister and aunt are. This powerful scene combines water and darkness once again, and introduces Ruth to a radically different world when her perspective is shifted so completely.
Sylvie delivers this overwhelming water, which inundates sense, direction, and dimension. The element set up to obscure our and Ruth’s comprehension arrives and engulfs the three women and the house they live in. It occupies the town, even flooding the frozen lake surface. All reckoning is for naught. In the darkened house, amid the wash and ebb of floodwater, Ruth is moved to doubt everything, reflecting that even her own being is uncertain. Thus does water embrace our three principals in its muddling effects. The sisters and their guardian have a very intimate encounter with water; at least from Ruth’s viewpoint, when they are forced to move, function, walk, or speak in this waterlogged world, all three are reduced to virtual nonexistence. They become at any rate invisible, and for stretches of time, inaudible. This pervasive element, experienced at such a close range, throws perception for a loop, destroys it, in fact.
Robinson adds specific touches to the town’s distress. She reflects soberly at the town’s misfortune, but cannot resist poking oblique fun at the same time (p. 62):
Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere. That flood flattened scores of headstones. More disturbing, the graves sank when the water receded, so that they looked a little like hollow sides or empty bellies. And then the library was flooded to a depth of three shelves, creating vast gaps in the Dewey decimal system. The losses in hooked and braided rugs and needlepoint footstools will never be reckoned.”
Robinson brings the trivia of the loss clearly to our sight. It’s comically pathetic, that flooding a town would result in such a minute loss. After the flood recedes, and the three women begin to have a routine (even if it includes extended truancy through the spring for the two sisters), summer arrives. Ruth, content with Sylvie’s quirky calmness and liberality, is surprised to find that her little sister is not. At p.92:
“I was content with Sylvie, so it was a surprise to me when I realized that Lucille had begun to regard other people with the calm, horizontal look of settled purpose with which, from a slowly sinking boat, she might have regarded a not-too-distant shore.”
And perhaps Sylvie exacerbates Lucille’s misgivings when she embarks on an unorthodox housekeeping regimen in the house; she walks through the house carrying a broom with her hair in a scarf, but despite these efforts, leaves began to gather in the corners, desiccated, and reduced to veins. Little by little the house becomes “attuned to the orchard and the particularities of weather. … Thus did she [Sylvie] begin by littles and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats and barn swallows.” (p. 85) The house, under Sylvie’s stewardship, becomes permeable to the natural world, open to what it would normally have been made to keep out. Not only does this include leaves and assorted trash, but other, less obvious or material things. Sylvie even wanted the house to adopt the color of the outdoors, particularly at dusk and the hours that follow. She liked to eat supper in the evening, giving the word three syllables, as it referred to the same level of light inside the house as outside. The evening meal was taken before the kitchen window, with no light lit. From p. 100:
“One evening that summer we came into the kitchen and Sylvie was sitting in the moonlight, waiting for us. The table was already set, and we could smell that bacon had already been fried. Sylvie went to the stove and began cracking eggs on the edge of the frying pan and dropping them shoosh into the fat. I knew what the silence meant and so did Lucille. It meant that on an evening so calm, so iridescently blue, so full of the chink and chafe of insects and fat old dogs dragging their chains and belling in the neighbors’ dooryards—in such a boundless and luminous evening, we would feel our proximity with our finer senses. As, for example, one of the two, lying still in a dark room, knows when the other is awake.
“We sat listening to the rasp of the knife as Sylvie buttered and stacked the toast, bumping our heels with a soft, slow rhythm against the legs of our chairs, staring through the warped and bubbled window at the brighter darkness. Then Lucille began to scratch fiercely at her arms and her knees. “I must have got into something,” she said, and she stood up and pulled the chain of the overhead light. The window went black and the cluttered kitchen leaped, so it seemed, into being, as remote from what had gone before as this world from the primal darkness. We saw that we ate from plates that came in detergent boxes, and we drank from jelly glasses. (Sylvie had put her mother’s china in boxes and stacked them in the corner by the stove—in case, she said, we should ever need it.) Lucille had startled us all, flooding the room so suddenly with light, exposing heaps of pots and dishes, the two cupboard doors which had come unhinged and were propped against the boxes of china. The tables and chairs and cupboards and doors had been painted a rich white, layer on layer, year after year, but now the last layer had ripened to the yellow of turning cream. Everywhere the paint was chipped and marred. A great shadow of soot loomed up the wall and across the ceiling above the stove, and the stove pipe and the cupboard tops were thickly felted with dust. Most dispiriting, perhaps, was the curtain on Lucille’s side of the table, which had been half consumed by fire once when a birthday cake had been set too close to it. Sylvie had beaten our the flames with a back issue of Good Housekeeping, but she had never replaced the curtain. It had been my birthday, and the cake was a surprise, as were the pink orlon cardigan with the imitation seed pearls in the yoke and the ceramic kangaroo with the air fern in its pouch. Sylvie’s pleasure in this event had been intense, and perhaps the curtain reminded her of it.
“In the light we were startled and uncomfortable. Lucille yanked the chain again, so hard that the little bell at the end of it struck the ceiling, and then we sat uncomfortably in an exaggerated darkness.
* * *
“By that time the crickets in the pantry were singing again, the window was luminous, the battered table and the clutter that lay on it were one chill ultramarine, the clutter of ordinary life on the deck of a drowned ship. Lucille sighed again and consented to the darkness. Sylvie was relieved and so was I.”
I have excerpted all this because of how rich it is in Robinson’s thematic details. First, there is the ironic meaning of “housekeeping,” in which nature has been invited in, and has accordingly taken up residence. The details of the ramshackle kitchen highlight this result very clearly. The house is referred to as a foundering ark, and adrift as in a sea of that which it was supposed to keep at bay. This coextension includes even the ambient light, objected to by Lucille, who furiously lights the light, only to turn it off again, just as furiously, after the shabbiness of the cluttered kitchen becomes visible around them. The table and the clutter of ordinary life were “one chill ultramarine”—how fitting that it reverts to a single cool color. Sylvie endeavors to keep the house on the same schedule as the outdoors; she wants to let the natural outside light inform the house as to the world’s visible presence, not the other way around.
This scene also exhibits Lucille’s growing estrangement from her sister and aunt. Among the three only Lucille objects to the pedestrian glasses and plates, to eating in the dark, and having oddball menus, like watermelon pickles and canned meats, apples and jelly doughnuts and shoestring potatoes, a block of pre-sliced cheese, a bottle of milk, a bottle of catsup, and raisin bread in a stack. (p. 87)
In a pivotal, powerful scene, (Chapter 7) Ruth and Lucille go down to the lake of a summer’s day and go fishing. They eat their fill and more of lake fish, cooking it on improvised spits; they find ripe huckleberries. These “rituals of predation” take them well into late afternoon, until they realize they’ve stayed too long. Too frightened to walk back along the difficult shoreline at night, they agree to stay the night by the lake. They build a structure of driftwood, with a ceiling and floor of fir boughs. It was a “low and slovenly” structure, to all appearances random and accidental.” (pp. 114-115)
“Twice the roof fell. We had to sit with our chins on our knees to avoid bringing a wall down. We sat for a while side by side, adjusting our limbs cautiously, scratching our ankles and shoulder blades with the greatest care. Lucille crawled out and began writing her name in pebbles on the sand in front of the door. Evening seemed to have struck an equilibrium. The sky and the water were one luminous gray. The woods altogether black. The two arms of land that enclosed the bay were like floes of darkness, pouring into the lake from mountains brimming darkness, but stopped and turned to stone on the brilliant ether.”
Then Ruth wakes up in this inadequate shelter.
“I woke up in absolute darkness. I could feel the branches at my side and the damp at my back, and Lucille asleep against me, but I could see nothing. Remembering that Lucille had crawled in behind me, and that she crouched between me and the door, I scrambled out through the roof and over the wall in darkness no less absolute.
The girls hear coyotes, owls, and other wild animals. Unseen wildlife comes to the shore only a few feet away, and Lucille starts to throw stones at the sounds. She grumbles that “They’re supposed to be able to smell us.”
“For a while she sang ‘Mockingbird Hill,’ and then she sat down beside me in our ruined stronghold, never still, never accepting that all our human boundaries were overrun.”
Here Ruth launches into a philosophical flight, one of the most pivotal and telling in the entire story. She says that Lucille would tell this story differently, that Ruth had fallen asleep, but Ruth says she did not. At p. 116:
“I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable. Say that my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her shoulders so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say that my grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up her big black shoes. Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses that we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent. While it was dark, despite Lucille’s pacing and whistling, and despite what must have been dreams (since even Sylvie came to haunt me), it seemed to me that there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, memento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace, if only the darkness could be perfect and permanent.”
Ruth begins this aria by naming some internal structures of her body, reminding us that bodies house different spaces, just as people’s houses do. She then makes an effort to rationalize, or at least to come to grips with, the deaths of her mother and grandmother. Ruth realizes that permanence is only apparition, and she would have no rational basis to expect someone’s coat, or hair, or hands to continue forever in her life. And perfect darkness melts these images away; if only the darkness could be perfect and permanent, then that could be something we could depend on. Then, we could have our mother and her mother back, given that we were so well versed in the appearances and quirks. And in language recalling Anglo Saxon poetry, with its alliterations and consistent vowel sounds, she avers “there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, memento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace” of loved ones and missed ones.
In some way, Ruth knows what would make this darkness perfect. She has obviously dwelled on the problem of relatives fading from view, fading from Earth, and thought about many false images that seem permanent, but are anything but. She thinks in very eloquent terms that there would not be any reminder, there need not be any vision to prick her loneliness, because she has felt and seen them before, and she knows that the pitch darkness that entered her “skull and bowels and bones” will dissolve the images and make the memories so ethereal, but at the same time, close and familiar, that any yearning or grief simply becomes unnecessary. Like beggars, whose famished gullets are sated by their very hunger.
And note the structure the girls attempt by the lakeside. It’s pitifully weak and provides no security from creatures that crawl up and drink at the shore. The girls both burst through its ceiling, and the structure fails utterly. They’re too big for it, already outgrowing it immediately upon its construction. Robinson shows houses, physical structures, to be simply unnecessary. Worse than unnecessary, they obscure the world from our sight, especially when internal lights make windows reflect back on inhabitants. While keeping the world at bay, they do no service to its residents. Lucille doesn’t share in Ruth’s strategy of letting the darkness enter her. She tries to establish some identity for the poor edifice, arranging stones in the sand with her name, announcing the “structure” as with a welcome mat. No more clearly can the sisters’ bifurcation be drawn than this. Ruth knows, however, her only salvation is to let the darkness of the night enter her body, so that she can become one with it. She needs that solvent, and it “solves” the quandary of her aloneness; it’s not farfetched for her to believe that she will be united with her mother and grandmother, their images are so near and dear.
Come the predawn dusk, Ruth and Lucille walk their bedraggled selves home to Sylvie. Sylvie smiles when she sees them, but she smiles to herself, not at them. Their aunt brews something she calls “brimstone tea,” hot coffee with condensed milk and extra sugar. Ruth falls asleep in a chair, carefully holding her cup. Soon, as Sylvie and Lucille are talking, she falls asleep. She hears Lucille talking and Sylvie responding by singing to her, but acknowledges that that was just dreaming. Ruth:
“So this is all death is, I thought. Sylvie and Lucille do not notice, or perhaps they do not object. Sylvie, in fact, brought the coffee pot and warmed the cup in my hands and arranged the quilt, which had slid from my shoulder a little. I was surprised and touched by her solicitude. She knows, I thought, and I felt like laughing. Sylvie is sitting beside the stove, flipping though old magazines, waiting for my mother. I began listening for the sound of the door opening, but after a very long time my head fell sharply to one side and I could not lift it up again. Then I realized that my mouth was open. All this time the room was filling with strangers, and there was no way for me to tell Sylvie that the tea had tipped out of my hands and wet my lap. I knew that my decay, now obvious and accelerating, should somehow be concealed for decency’s sake, but Sylvie would not look up from her magazine. I began to hope for oblivion, and then I rolled out of my chair.
“Sylvie looked up from her magazine. ‘Did you have a good sleep?’ she asked.
“‘All right,’ I said. I picked up the cup and brushed at the dampness of my pant legs.
“‘Sleep is best when you’re really tired,’ she said. ‘You don’t just sleep. You die.’” (pp. 118-119)
What to make of Ruth’s figurative dying? Is that the only possible outcome after becoming coextensive with the pitch blackness? Her head lolls, her lap is wet, her mouth hangs open, and the room begins to fill with strangers. In her unconscious state, she has no way to ask for help, but just at the end of this scene, she begins to hope for oblivion. In the end, this scene has the feel of a rehearsal. Ruth learns that death isn’t a big deal, more like a deep sleep where you sometimes wish for oblivion.
Ruth also has no power to enforce, or even to request, propriety or decency. Ruth has visited the water’s edge and allowed the infinite blackness to enter her body. She senses the not-very-terrifying details that dwell beyond the membrane of “circumference,” has reached up and touched the screen, by letting the darkness occupy her body. She has skirted near the unseen truths of how the world functions. Her instinct for these truths carries her beyond lipstick and styling gel, beyond the surface friendships available at school, and attracts her to Sylvie. Bonds her with Sylvie.
Later that day, as Lucille browbeats her into following her to the drug store, Ruth needs to think of other things.
“I hated these excursions, and I would begin to think of other things in order to endure them. That particular day I began thinking about my mother. In my dream I had waited for her confidently, as I had all those years ago when she left us in the porch. Such confidence was like a sense of imminent presence, a palpable displacement, the movement in the air before the wind comes. Or so it seemed. Yet twice I had been disappointed, if that was the word. Perhaps I had been deceived. If appearance is only a trick of the nerves, and apparition is only a lesser trick of the nerves, a less perfect illusion, then this expectation, this sense of a presence unperceived, was not particularly illusory as things in this world go. The thought comforted me. By so much was my dream less false than Lucille’s [who’d dreamed of being a baby and being smothered by Sylvie]. And it is probably as well to be undeceived, though perhaps it is not.” (pp 121-122)
Here Ruth propounds a truly deep discussion of perception and imagination. She understands the trick the eyes and brain play on one’s consciousness, and in view of this, claims for herself the logic of expecting to see her mother. Even though her rational mind “knows” better, she states clearly that seeing her mother would not be so outlandish. We arrive at the Dickinsonian surfeit, the ‘sated-because-I-comprehend-what-I’m-missing’ principle.
After she and Ruth fall out, Lucille finally acts on her desire to get away from Ruth and Sylvie, moving in with her home economics teacher. This frees Ruth to accompany Sylvie, who are now clearly partners, on a sojourn to a remote cove in the lake, where she says some wild orphan children live. After Sylvie liberates a rowboat from apoplectic man and his missiles of hurled stones, she rows Ruth northward. The sun’s rays clear a mountain, and then a second one, “like a long-legged insect bracing itself out of its chrysalis, and then it showed above the black crest, bristly and red and improbable.” (p.147) We’re treated to a jarring image—the rising sun as insect emerging into adulthood. Is Ruth likewise emerging into a new phase in her life? The images that follow would not contradict such a conclusion. Is the acolyte Ruth following her mentor’s teaching and awakening to a new world of recondite lessons and truths? Has she already moved into this other world?
Sylvie rows Ruth over the lake surface beneath which hide her mother and grandfather. At p. 149:
“The fragmented image of jonquil sky spilled from top to top of the rounding waves as the shine spills on silk…Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place I have always known I would not be comfortable. They reminded me of my grandfather’s paintings, which I have always taken to be his vision of heaven. And it was he who brought us here, to this bitter, moon-pulled lake, trailing us after him unborn, like the infants he had painted on the dresser drawers, whose garments swam in some ethereal current, perhaps the rim of the vortex that would drag them down out of the enameled sky, stripped and screaming.”
Ruth dwells on the image of her grandfather at the bottom of the lake; her tone is unaccepting, almost scornful. Piercing the lake surface does not appeal to her. Using terms like “bitter,” “drag them down,” and “stripped and screaming,” she repudiates the example set by her grandfather, but interestingly enough, does not include her mother in her diatribe, but implicates her grandfather in her mother’s death.
At page 152 Ruth launches into a lengthy soliloquy, to appeal to our imaginations. The passage is so ornate and lovely, so enigmatic, and telling that I couldn’t resist:
“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.”
This passage urges us to face and tune into the arcane, the unexpected, workings of the universe. Robinson sets up this homily by stretching our imaginations: how could salt-sown Carthage blossom fruit? Her opening gambit comes to us like a miracle—vegetable profusion of rime and brine? Given adequate slaking, Ruth says, Yes! And she goes on with extravagant images of prisms and bright globes of water, and grapes and peaches. Yes, this is all available to us, even if we’re in Carthage. If we simply keep our imaginations focused, need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. Here again we have the Dickinsonian motif: “’Tis parching—vitalizes Wine—” in an expanded discussion, with allusions to an ancient time, and featuring brilliant, vivid images, which can answer all desires.
Sylvie and Ruth pull ashore near a ruined house, where Sylvie has said there were lost children. Left on her own temporarily, Ruth sees how beautiful the little valley is. It spends much of the day obscured from sunlight, being such a narrow cleft of a formation. Ruth imagines Lot’s wife, salt and barren, but surrounded and fêted by orphan children. The drape garlands on her, exclaim her beauty in awe, dance and celebrate. Ruth doesn’t know where Sylvie is, feels the cold, and thinks vaguely about building a fire with timbers from the wrecked house. She imagines, while pulling the timbers out and throwing them in a pile, that she’ll find the wild children and rescue them, with the “rain-stiffened hems of their nightshirts, and their small, bone feet, the toes all fallen like petals.” (p. 158) Without difficulty she imagines herself in their place, given that the relative solidity in her grandmother’s house was deceptive. She reflects on the large pieces of furniture, the couch and piano, and “For all the appearance these things have of substance and solidity, they might better be considered a dangerous weight on a frail structure.”(p. 159) After reflecting thus, Ruth gives up the pulling apart the demolished house, and still feeling the cold, sits down on the stiff, numbing grass. She feels Sylvie’s absence and
“I thought, Let them come unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart. It was no shelter now, it only kept me here alone, and I would rather be with them, if only to see them, even if they turned away from me, If I could see my mother, it would not have to be her eyes, her hair. I would not need to touch her sleeve. There was no more the stoop of her high shoulders. The Lake had taken that, I knew. It was so very long since the dark had swum her hair, and there was nothing more to dream of, but often she almost slipped through any door I saw from the side of my eye, and it was she, and not changed, and not perished. She was a music I not longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.” (pp. 159-160)
Ruth’s consciousness takes flight again: she would be rid of her corporal being if she could see her mother. But then she sees her anyway, through her mind’s eye. She knows what she’s imagining, the color of her mother’s hair, the stoop of her high shoulders, and draws sustenance from it. Being so familiar with the object of her love, she can see her, she feels the warmth and love of her.
And in that instant Sylvie arrives and wraps Ruth up in her trench coat. Sylvie’s embrace is at first awkward, with Ruth’s cheekbone pushed into Sylvie’s breastbone. She sways Ruth gently to a song only she hears. She stays curled up to such a degree that Ruth cannot see any light. She tells Sylvie, “I didn’t see them. I couldn’t see them.” Sylvie says, “I know, I know,” which is the song she rocked Ruth to. (pp. 160-161) Sylvie buttons Ruth up in her man’s coat, bottom to top, and turns the wide collar up around her ears. Holding her arms around Ruth’s shoulders, she guides her back to the boat with solicitude,
“as if I were blind, as if I might fall. I could feel the pleasure she took in my dependency and more than once she stooped to look into my face. Her expression was intent and absorbed. … I was angry that she had left me for so long, and that she did not ask pardon or explain, and that by abandoning me she had assumed the power to bestow such a richness of grace. For in fact I wore her coat like a beatitude, and her arms around me were as heartening as mercy, and I would say nothing that might make her loosen her grasp or take one step away.” (p. 161)
This is a lovely passage about Sylvie’s bestowal of maternal grace and care on Ruth. She makes sure that she will not fall, the way a mother would a toddler. Ruth stays curled up and in the dark while under Sylvie’s coat and strong embrace. They return to the boat and Ruth sees that it is evening. Recall the three-syllable pronunciation Sylvie uses. The water appears a translucent gray. Ruth curls up in the bottom of the boat, and rests on her arms. Continuing the conceit, Sylvie climbs in and settles herself with a foot on either side of Ruth.
“I lay like a seed in a husk. The immense water thunked and thudded beneath my head, and I felt that our survival was owed to our slightness, that we danced through ruinous currents as dry leaves do, and were not capsized because the ruin we rode upon was meant for greater things.
* * *
“…I, the nub, the sleeping germ, should swell and expand. … And given that it is in the nature of water to fill and force to repletion and bursting, my skull would bulge preposterously and my back would hunch against the sky and my vastness would press my cheek hard and immovably against my knee. Then, presumably, would come parturition in some form, though my first birth had hardly deserved the name, and why should I hope for more from the second? The only true birth would be a final one, which would free us from watery darkness and the thought of watery darkness, but could such a birth be imagined? What is thought, after all, what is dreaming, but swim and flow, and the images they seem to animate? The images are the worst of it. It would be terrible to stand outside in the dark and watch a woman in a lighted room studying her face in a window, and to throw a stone at her, shattering the glass, and then to watch the window knit itself up again and the bright bits of lip and throat and hair piece themselves seamlessly again into that unknown, indifferent woman. … And here we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement. (pp.162-163)
And suddenly we find water is not, or is no longer, an obscuring membrane, but a nurturing essence in which our thoughts will remain constant. Water has been a reflecting element until now, particularly for those who don’t share Ruth and Sylvie’s insights. Ruth finds assurance in this affinity, for she has staked her claim to the hidden, to the recondite realm of unseen force and eddy. She has accepted darkness into her own body, her own house, and water has given her a new life, birthed with the help of Sylvie. Sylvie is more mother than midwife here; her care and solicitude are truly maternal. Mark the seamless rapid flight in the text, from describing the physical riding in the rowboat to the esoteric metaphysical discussion of birth, of the seed expanding and bursting its husk, her back arching against the sky. Robinson requires that we keep up, stay in tune to what’s happening. This is a passage you don’t want to miss; close attention pays the careful reader off well, with insight, image, and lovely reverberant prose.
In the midst of these thoughts, Ruth thinks, “… it must have been my mother’s plan to rupture this bright surface, to sail beneath it into very blackness, but here she was, wherever my eyes fell, and behind my eyes, whole and in fragments, a thousand images of one gesture, never dispelled but rising always, inevitably, like a drowned woman.” (p. 163) And so Ruth recovers the “swim and flow” of her mother, true images, of which Ruth is the expert, gaining the comfort and company, since she knows it so well.
The remaining chapters deal with the authorities—there is official alarm over Ruth’s extended truancy from school, and concern about Sylvie’s apparently neglectful guardianship. To outside observers, Ruth’s and Sylvie’s behavior is erratic, and the state must decide whether to adopt Ruth and remove her from Sylvie’s care and influence. The house of course, is a ghastly thing, where about a dozen cats hunt the birds that occupy the house, and leave wings on the carpet, and half-eaten heads on the couch where the neighbor ladies sit to deliver casseroles and commiseration.
Robinson’s final, soaring, triumphant stroke carries our mentor and pupil out of society’s reach and “off the grid,” in today’s parlance. Ruth has suffered abandonment of tragic proportions. But she has applied her aptitude for deep observation and arrives at a place where she knows she can compensate for it; she can recall her mother and grandmother with enough accuracy that their loss no longer stings. In their symbolic unprecedented march, they rise above water in the darkness and free themselves from the earthly circuit of schools and households and the “troublesome possibility of success, recognition, advancement.” (p. 13) While figuratively chanting her mantra of consciousness and memory, Ruth winnows her existence down to essentials and finds deliverance from the Earth-bound plane, and she and Sylvie disappear and leave Fingerbone to imagine they are lost. As Sylvie and Ruth march in triumph over the lake on the railroad bridge, Ruth relates (p. 215):
“Something happened, something so memorable that when I think back to the crossing of the bridge, one moment bulges like the belly of a lens and all the others are at the peripheries and diminished. Was it only that the wind rose suddenly, so that we had to cower and lean against it like blind women groping their way along a wall? or did we really hear some sound too loud to be heard, some word so true that we did not understand it, but merely felt it pour through our nerves like darkness or water?”
Basso Continuo 