This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home [1 ed.] 9789004302235, 9789004296633

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This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead and Home

Dialogue Executive Series Editor Henry Veggian (unc Chapel Hill) Editorial Board Manisha Basu (University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana) Petra Dierkes-Thrun (Stanford University) Jennifer Keating-Miller (Carnegie Mellon University) Jason Stevens (University of Pittsburgh, Fellow) Richard Purcell (Carnegie Mellon University) Thomas Reinert (unc Chapel Hill) Founding Editor Michael J. Meyer† (DePaul University, Chicago)

VOLUME 19

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/dial

This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead and Home Edited by

Jason W. Stevens

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Albert Seger, Passage to Sandpoint. Copyright 2014 Albert Seger. www.alsegerphoto.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data This life, this world : new essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead and Home / edited by Jason W. Stevens. pages cm. -- (Dialogue ; Volume 19) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-29663-3 (pbk. : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-30223-5 (e-book) 1. Robinson, Marilynne--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Christian fiction, American--History and criticism. I. Stevens, Jason W., 1975- editor. PS3568.O3125Z88 2015 813’.54--dc23 2015027737

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1574-9630 isbn 978-90-04-29663-3 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-30223-5 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes and De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Acknowledgments vii Author Biographies viii Marilynne Robinson: A Chronology xi Jason Stevens Introduction 1 Jason Stevens Housekeeping, Wordsworth, and the Sublimity of Unsurrendered Wilderness 24 Jonathan Arac and Susan Balée At Home with Transience: Reconfiguring Female Characters of the American West in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping 38 Corina Crisu Religion, Literature, and the Environment in the Work of Marilynne Robinson 59 George B. Handley Becoming a Creature of Artful Existence: Theological Perception and Ecological Design in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead 91 Chad Wriglesworth Sentimentality and Grace: Marilynne Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Prodigal Son Narratives 131 Rachel B. Griffis In the Face of Mystery: Soteriological Symbolism in Gilead and Home 148 Mark S.M. Scott Marilynne Robinson’s Merging of Medicine and Literature: Therapeutic Journaling as Balm in Gilead 171 Janella Moy

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The Privilege of Loneliness, the Kindness of Home: “Felt Experience” in the Writing of Marilynne Robinson 190 Carolyn Allen “Jack Boughton has a Wife and a Child”: Generative Blackness in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home 212 Yumi Pak Robinson and Updike: Houses, Domesticity, and the Numinous Quotidian 237 James Schiff An Interview with Marilynne Robinson 254 Jason Stevens Selected Bibliography 271 Index 282

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Henry Veggian for inviting me to join the editorial board for Rodopi’s Dialogue Series and for encouraging me to develop a volume on Marilynne Robinson. My students in the Spring 2014 seminar that I ran on Updike and Robinson at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, gave me ample inspiration. Marilynne Robinson, her assistant Margaret McInnis, the office of Robinson’s literary agent Ellen Levine, and  Deborah L. West of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop were graciously coo­perative. Marilynne Robinson’s former colleague Katie Welch of Westfield State University kindly consented to speak with me over the phone, and the English Departments of Westfield, Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, provided helpful information on Robinson’s years there. The Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and especially its director Jonathan Arac, gave me a warmly supportive academic hearth as I completed assembling the volume and writing the Introduction and Chronology in the fall of 2014. The contributors of the essays were a pleasure in correspondence, receptive to suggestions and always enthusiastic about the idea of devoting a full book to Robinson’s work. Mark S.M. Scott and Susan Balée, in particular, were delightful raconteurs. Most of all, I would like to thank my beloved wife Rita for her understanding and wit through my long nights of editing and gorging on scholarship.

Author Biographies Jonathan Arac is Mellon Professor of English and Founding Director of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Author of five books and editor of five volumes of original essays by many hands, he has served on the boundary 2 masthead since 1979, and from 2002 until 2012 he chaired the Advisory Committee for the Successful Societies Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. In spring 2014 he taught as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Naples, Italy, “Orientale” campus. His next book will be Against Americanistics, and he is exploring the “Age of the Novel” in the United States. Susan Balée has published hundreds of reviews and dozens of essays about American and British literature in journals ranging from the Women’s Review of Books to The Weekly Standard. She appears on the National Endowment for the Arts’ audio program devoted to Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and she published the first biography of Flannery O’Connor for Chelsea House in 1994. She regularly contributes to The Hudson Review, and her illustrated memoir of several months in Italy appears in the Fall 2014 issue. Corina Crisu a Lecturer at the University of Bucharest and a freelance writer in the uk—does research in the field of American and Comparative Literature. A recipient of prestigious grants (a Soros-Chevening Scholarship at Oxford University and a Fulbright Fellowship at Oregon State University), she has published on Christian Haller, Rose Tremain, and Black Postmodernism. Her essay, “Transgressing Racial Borders through Self-Sacrifice: Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson before Dying,” is forthcoming in The Carnival of Death: Perceptions of Death in Europe and the Americas, eds. Ricarda Vidal and Maria Jose Blanco (Berghahn, 2014). She is also a poet and her poems have appeared in international anthologies and magazines. George B. Handley is Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities and Associate Dean of the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University. He is the author most recently of New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott (University of Georgia Press 2007). His new book project, From Chaos to Cosmos: Literature as Ecotheology, features treatments of ecotheology in novels by Marilynne Robinson, William Faulkner, Alejo Carpentier, Cormac McCarthy, and others.

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Chad Wriglesworth is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Iowa, where he specialized in twentieth-century American literature with an emphasis in religious thought and environmental studies. He recently edited Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. Some of his other publications appear in journals such as Literature and Theology, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Western American Literature. He also serves on the editorial board for The Raymond Carver Review. Rachel B. Griffis is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Baylor University, where she also teaches freshman composition and American literature. She is a Lilly Graduate Fellow and has forthcoming essays on Louisa May Alcott and Zora Neale Hurston. Mark S.M. Scott is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Thorneloe University in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University through the Committee on the Study of Religion and his M.A.R. (Theology) from Yale Divinity School. He is the author of Journey Back to God: Origen on the Problem of Evil (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Pathways in Theodicy: An Introduction to the Problem of Evil (Fortress Press, 2015). Janella D. Moy is a doctoral candidate and instructor in the English department at Saint Louis University studying 20th Century American Literature with an emphasis in 19th Century Romanticism and Spirituality. Her current dissertation research investigates the use of spiritual rhetoric in women’s utopian fiction of the 1980s and 90s. Moy completed a Master of Arts Degree in Literature and a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Teaching of Writing from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (siue) in 2008. Her research interests include scriptotherapy, bibliotherapy, and women’s writing. Carolyn Allen Professor of English at the University of Washington, is the author of Following Djuna (Indiana University Press 1996), a reading of Djuna Barnes and her influence on contemporary women writers; co-editor of three volumes of feminist thinking from the University of Chicago Press; and past editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She grew up in Marilynne Robinson’s old haunts around Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

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Yumi Pak is Assistant Professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino. During the 2013–2014 academic year, she held an appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Her publications include “An Oracular Swan Song?: American Literary Modernism, Modernity, and the Trope of Lynching in Jean Toomer’s Cane” in Race and Displacement: Nation, Migration, and Identity in the Twenty-First Century (University of Alabama Press 2013). Her research is situated in the interdisciplinary space between comparative Black literatures, performance studies, and queers of color critique. James Schiff is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author or editor of five books on contemporary American fiction, including John Updike Revisited and Updike in Cincinnati. His work has appeared in American Literature, Critique, Studies in American Fiction, and elsewhere. He is also a regular reviewer of books for newspapers, magazines, and journals, and he serves as the editor of the John Updike Review as well as a consulting editor of Critique and Philip Roth Studies. Jason Stevens has taught at Harvard University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and he has been a fellow of the National Humanities Center (Durham, nc). His work focuses on 20th century American literature and U.S. cultural and intellectual history. His first book was God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Harvard University Press 2010). His writings have also appeared in boundary 2, American Literature, Literature/Film Quarterly, and The Immanent Frame. In 2014-2015, he is a fellow at the Center for the Humanities, University of Pittsburgh, where is completing a book project on American film noir and making preparations for the international conference, “Protestantism on Screen” (Wittenberg, June 2015), of which he is co-sponsor.

Marilynne Robinson: A Chronology Jason Stevens Childhood Born Marilynne Summers (November 26, 1943) in Sandpoint, Idaho on the shores of Pend Oreille Lake, which is crossed by a long railroad bridge. The lake and the bridge will figure prominently as symbols in Housekeeping. She and her brother David are the fourth generation in Idaho, where their great-grandparents settled and where their grandparents were ranchers. Father, John J. Summers, works for a lumber company. Mother, Ellen Harris, is a homemaker. Marilynne is raised Presbyterian. After moving around several small towns in Idaho, family settles in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, near Spokane. Robinson starts writing poetry as a child while David, a future professor of art history, decides to paint. Makes first attempt to read Moby-Dick at age nine. The book will have a profound influence on her first novel Housekeeping. Over thirty-five years later, while teaching Moby-Dick at the Iowa Writers Workshop, she is led by Melville’s engagement with Calvinism to read The Institutes, which begins her immersion in Reformed theology. 1958–1962 Attends Coeur d’Alene High School. Reading in her formative years includes: Shakespeare, the Bible, Walden, The Little House on the Prairie, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the collected works of Poe, Melville, and Dickens; classical Greek and Roman literature, history books about heroes like Oliver Cromwell. 1962–1966 Attends Pembroke College, the former women’s college at Brown University. Majors in American literature, with a focus on the 19th century. Becomes interested in Congregationalism through the study of American classics, including especially the Transcendentalists. Takes Creative Writing with American novelist John Hawkes, who encourages her experiments with extended metaphor. Graduates (A.B., English, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa). 1967–1977 Marries Fred Robinson with whom she has two children, Joseph and James. She and her husband will divorce in 1989.

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Attends graduate school in English, the University of Washington, Seattle, wa; M.A. 1968, Ph.D. 1977. Writes dissertation on Shakespeare’s Henry vi, Part ii and the historiographical traditions behind it. Settles in New England with her family, 1970. Begins writing pieces of what will become her first novel, Housekeeping, while finishing her dissertation. Places the scraps in a sideboard in her dining room. Upon completing her dissertation, she assembles the scraps and discovers that they actually cohere in mood and sense of place. While living in a farmhouse in France and teaching on exchange at the Univer­ sité de Rennes 2, Haute-Bretagne, she begins writing Housekeeping with a sense that she is creating a whole work of fiction. Later describes her process as an act of recovering memories of her childhood in Idaho, specifically its landscapes. 1978 Finishes Housekeeping at her home in Northampton, ma. From beginning to end, the manuscript ends up taking fourteen months to write. Assumes that the book will be un-publishable and that only her family members will read it. 1979 Teaches English composition part-time at Westfield State College (now Westfield State University) for one semester. Ellen Levine, who remains Robinson’s literary agent to this day, represents the manuscript of Housekeeping to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who agree to publish it. 1980–1982 Analole Broyard’s review of Housekeeping (1980) in The New York Times (January 7, 1981) garners attention for a novel that Robinson feared would receive none. Housekeeping wins the Hemingway/PEN Foundation Award for First Fiction (1981); the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the Academy of American Arts and Letters (1982); becomes finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Later included in The New York Times “Books of the Century” and listed by the Guardian Observer as one of the 100 greatest novels ever written. 1983 Attends the PEN conference in Denmark during the fall. Delivers a lecture to the meeting of the Fulbright alumni in Copenhagen and gives lectures and seminars in Lund and Stockholm, Vienna and Graz, Salzburg, and Dijon.

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Visits for a year as teaching fellow at the University of Kent, starting at the beginning of the academic year. 1984–1985 Visiting Professor of English at Amherst College, teaching English 90: Writing Fiction, in the spring semester of academic year 1984–85. Invited back to teach the course again in both the fall and spring semesters of 1985–86. Teaches literature courses at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Publishes an article drawing on materials she had collected while in England: “Bad News from Britain.” Harper’s Magazine (February 1985): 65–72. The article decries the ecological damage caused by the Sellafield Nuclear Reprocessing Plant on Britain’s east coast. The topic will become the basis for her first booklength work of non-fiction, Mother Country. 1986 Publishes the short story “Connie Bronson” in The Paris Review. Written while she was in college, it is her sole original work of fiction published between Housekeeping and Gilead twenty-four years later. 1987–1988 Columbia Pictures’ Housekeeping, filmed in Canada (Alberta and British Columbia) and directed by Bill Forsyth (a Scotsman), starring Christine Lahti as Sylvie, is released to positive reviews, though Robinson is displeased by the movie’s alteration of her novel’s ending. 1989 Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution becomes a finalist for the National Book Award. After being successfully sued for libel by Greenpeace in British court, Robinson refuses to retract the statements in Mother Country alleging that Greenpeace was both duplicitous and inept with regard to its coverage of Britain’s nuclear waste dumping into the sea. Book is banned from sale in the uk. Appears on the bbc tv show “Bookmark” to discuss Mother Country with a representative of British Nuclear Fuels and Eric Fersht of Greenpeace usa. (June 1989). Gives address, “My Western Roots,” for the 24th Annual Conference of the Western Literature Association (October) at the University of Idaho, Coeur d’Alene, during the state’s centennial. Participates in the New York State Writer’s Institute at Skidmore College. She will return in 1990 and 1991.

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Begins teaching at the Iowa Writer’s workshop in 1989 as a visiting faculty member. Moves to Iowa knowing nothing about the state. Plans to stay at the workshop for only two years, but her commitment stretches to twenty-six years and counting. 1990 Receives a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. During the tenure of the award Robinson gives a public talk, “The Second Errand into the Wilderness: Abolition and the Cultural Origins of Midwest,” part of a colloquium, Making History, co-sponsored by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation and the University of Iowa Library, Iowa City, ia. This talk is later collected as “McGuffey and the Abolitionists” in The Death of Adam. 1991 Becomes a permanent faculty member of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Joins Congregational United Church of Christ, Iowa City, where she has served as a deacon and occasionally preached. 1992–1997 Publishes non-fiction essays and reviews, many of them reflecting her discovery of John Calvin’s theology and the liberal religious history of America. Also engages in (and precipitates) debates over the legacy of Darwinism. Several of these pieces will later be collected. 1998–2003 Publishes The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998); awarded the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvoel Award for the Art of the Essay (1999). Receives the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998). Gives up the last three years of the five-year stipend in order to return to the classroom. Housekeeping becomes the first book chosen for the “Idaho Reads” project in 2001. Begins writing Gilead after a 2001 Christmas trip to Provincetown, ma. The voice of John Ames comes to her alone in a hotel room suffused by light from the sea, or what Robinson calls “Emily Dickinson light.” The book is completed within eighteen months. 2004 Publishes second novel Gilead. Wins National Book Critics Circle Award (2004); Unitarian Universalist Association’s Frederic G. Melcher Book Award (2004); Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2005); the English-Speaking Union’s Ambassador

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Book Award (2005); the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion (2006), awarded jointly by the University of Louisville and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Gilead is later named one of The New York Times’ Best Novels of the Last Twenty-five Years. 2005 Named F. Wendell Miller Professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a recognition for her contributions to American letters and for her skills as a teacher and mentor. 2006 Robinson gives the talk “On ‘Beauty’” for the Portland Arts and Lectures series, a program of Oregon’s Literary Arts center. 2007 Awarded Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, from Amherst College during Commencement. Gives the address, “Waiting to Be Remembered.” 2008 Publishes Home, a companion novel to Gilead. Wins the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction (2008); the Orange Prize, United Kingdom (2009); becomes a finalist for the National Book Award. Interviewed for the Art of Fiction series in The Paris Review (Fall). Wins the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature. A planned film adaptation of Gilead falls through when Paul Newman, set to star as Reverend John Ames, dies at the age of 83. 2009 Holds a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale University. 2010 The Terry lectures become her second essay collection, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. Inducted into the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. 2011 Gives the tenth annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford (May). The title of her talk is “Where are we? What are we doing here? Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist.”

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Gives the lecture “Open Wide Thy Hand: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism” on the occasion of receiving Princeton Theological Seminary’s annual Abraham Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life. The lecture is later published in her collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books. Awarded Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from Oxford University during Encaenia. Gives the keynote address, “The Workshop as Phenomenon,” at the 75th Anniversary Reunion of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Receives an honorary degree from the College of the Holy Cross and gives the principal address to its year’s graduates during the college’s Commencement ceremonies. Short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize. Donates Papers to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The papers, now part of the Yale Collection of American Literature, include notebooks and drafts of Housekeeping, Mother Country, The Death of Adam, Gilead, and Home as well as unpublished fiction. 2012 Publishes second essay collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays. In a review for the Anglican newspaper, Church Times, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams calls Robinson’s voice “a mighty plea for reasonableness.” Gives the address, “Casting Out Fear,” at the biennial Festival of Faith and Writing, Calvin College. Awarded Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from alma mater Brown University during Commencement. 2013 Honored with the National Humanities Medal (2012) in a ceremony at the White House officiated by President Obama. Short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize. Awarded Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from the University of Notre Dame during the Commencement. Awarded Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, from the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee during Easter Convocation. Also delivered the Convocation Address. Participates as a keynote speaker in the conference, “The Soul,” sponsored by the Centre of Theology and Philosophy, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. 28 June—1 July. The subject of the conference is the theory of mind, pre- and post- Descartes.

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Receives the third annual Park Kyung-ni literary prize at the Toji Foundation of Culture in Wonju, Gangwon Province, South Korea. 2014 Gives the Fourth Annual Judith Davidson Moyers Women of Spirit Lecture at Union Theological Seminary. The talk is titled “The Spiritual Battles that Rage at America’s Heart.” Lila, a companion novel to Gilead and Home, is published in October and becomes a finalist for the National Book Award. Robinson delivers the Avenali Lecture at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the University of California, Berkeley. The title of her talk is “Shakespeare: the Question of Audience.” Robinson gives the Lana Schwebel Memorial Lecture in Religion and Literature at Yale University. The title of her talk is “The Givenness of Things.” 2015 Lila wins the National Book Critics Circle Award. Robinson is named recipient of Religion and the Arts Award from the American Academy of Religion. Robinson states that the Gilead saga will likely be a quartet of novels; occasion is her featured appearance in “The Writing Lives” series sponsored by Columbia University’s Heyman Center for the Humanities (March 30).

Introduction Jason Stevens “For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing sermons, as I was often enough.”1 John Ames, the seventy-six year old reverend of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, analogizes two processes that have consumed much of his waking life. For the long-tenured pastor of his Congregational church, writing and prayer have been vocational commitments, leaving the accumulated residual of some “sixty-seven thousand five hundred pages” in sermons, the equivalent of “two hundred twenty-five books,” he estimates, stuffed in the boxes of his attic. More significant to Ames than the daunting productivity they have yielded, the processes of writing and prayer are modes of communion, of listening and address, which remind him of the contingency of human speech. For a man who depends so much on the efficacy of his words, Ames’s testimony in Gilead frequently turns to the finitude of language. One of his climactic gestures in the novel will be to burn those thousands of pages of sermons. The boundedness of human speech, its colorations by accidents of place and idiom, its imperfect registers across spatio-temporal differences, across the uniqueness of individual subjectivities and the gap of youth and age, bears on Ames’s mind since he is composing a long diary-cum-letter addressed to the seven-year-old son Robert, the blessing of a late-life marriage, whom he will never engage face to face as an adult. Remarkably, Ames finds in his predicament occasions for exuberant speech rather than the paralysis of language. Indeed, he is in the position that one of Robinson’s esteemed contemporaries, Annie Dillard, commends to authors: “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would 1 Gilead 19. Robinson has likened her own practice of writing to prayer. In an interview ­conducted by Paul Elie, for example, she remarks that writing, like prayer, is “a form of selfexamination: what it is that I live with.” Elsewhere, as a student of New England literature, she has singled out the Puritans’ habit of prayer as generative of their writing culture: “[T]he reform movement that came out of Puritanism…was based on things, like mass literacy, which were peculiarities of that civilization…. We have what the Puritans wrote, at least some fragment of it, and their diaries and other texts testify to their incredible habits of prayerfulness. They felt that their lives were basically addressed to God who was their primary interlocutor.” See “A Discussion: ‘The New Puritanism’ Reconsidered,” 205–206. See also Robinson’s specific gloss on the quotation from Gilead in her interview with npr’s Terry Gross, “Fresh Air: with Marilynne Robinson.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004302235_002

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die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality” (The Writing Life 13). One essential aspect of his life that Ames conveys to Robert, in the very performance of the letter, is his awareness of the aesthetic potential that inheres in speech even when it threatens to fray as communication.2 The novel’s celebrated language mines the plainest of words—“dust,” “ash,” “fire,” “light,” “water,” “biscuit”—for a plenitude of nuances owing not only to the biblical grain of American prose, as noted by Robert Alter, but also to the surprising associations that Ames kens in everyday acts (Pen of Iron 9–41). For Ames, as for his fictional creator, words are artifacts; yet, dislocated from “idiomatic vernacular” and freshly combined, they can be made to reveal and examine the ripples in experience that we so often sense without pausing long enough to behold their extension.3 Robinson, who names Emerson and Whitman among her heroes, believes that language has innate power to force us from accustomed paths of understanding even when the words chosen are plebeian in their familiarity. The analogy of writing to prayer, presented early in Gilead, helps the reader to comprehend how Ames’s acute awareness of the contingency of speech does not undermine, but sustains and enlivens his pen. The practice of contemplative prayer requires attentive listening; in fact, silence is the greater part of praying than speech. One thinks and utters words sparingly in order to hear the address of the divine.4 The vocative expressions in prayer name a relation to being that obtains in the imago Dei. To conceive of prayer in these terms—analogically, as a kind of conversation that involves hearkening to a “voice” larger than yet corresponding to the self—is to risk becoming seduced by the trope of prosopoeia: the dedoublement and projection of self onto non-self that “hears” the other and makes it “speak” by quieting difference and strangeness.5 For Ames, however, the subject of prayer never accedes to the illusions of prosopoeia because he remains cognizant of the provisional, symbolic and metaphorical, character of what he speaks and what he hears in listening for/to God. Writing as Ames and Robinson conceive it similarly evolves out of a reciprocal dialogue in which the author gratefully receives back the whispered address of another that can never be completed or transposed. The writer’s kindred stranger, in this case, is not 2 Here I echo language from Robinson’s essay, “Language Is Smarter Than We Are.” 3 Robinson quoted in Schaub 236. 4 On contemplative (as opposed to liturgical) prayer, see Spoto xix–xxvi, 20–25, 38–45, 116, 183, 190. 5 On the seductions and illusions of prosopoeia, see de Man.

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only the intuited subjectivity of an eventual reader, but “reality” in its bidding envelope of mystery (Schaub 239). The residuum of this dialogue, the utterances that the author commits to paper, returns an impression of the textures and apertures in existence, which tease author and audience into further, fascinated thought. Like the man whose prayer is sustained by a prior belief that his inward dialogue resonates with the whole of creation, the writer keeps angling for words that will suffice because he has faith that the affinities sensed by his imagination disclose an already existing relatedness: “You feel that you are with someone…. And there’s an intimacy in it. That’s the truth” (Gilead 19). The reverend enacts an attitude to writing that Robinson has made the crux of her literary, theological, and democratic project, which is now more thirty years in the public eye and showing no lagging interest from a fervent audience of peers. When Robinson attended the White House in 2013, she had the opportunity to meet the most high profile of her devotees. President Obama, who stated that Robinson’s writings have “fundamentally changed [him]…for the better,” bestowed on her the National Humanities Medal, adding yet another distinction to a fêted career.6 Her first three novels—Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), and Home (2008)—garnered, among other honors, the Hemingway/pen Foundation Award, the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Orange Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her four books of nonfiction, themselves honored with prize nominations and, in the case of The Death of Adam, with the pen/Diamonstein-Spielvoel Award, have raised her profile as a topical commentator, attracting compliment for her sobriety from the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.7 She has been the recipient of honorary degrees and lectureships from such institutions as Yale, Amherst, Notre Dame, and Oxford. With her work translated in thirty languages, including Arabic and Persian, Robinson’s readership is also growing internationally. In 2012, she was awarded the Park Kyung-ni literary prize at the Toji Foundation of Culture in Wonju, South Korea, where she spoke to an audience of laypersons and academics. In English, she has been the subject of multitudinous reviews, essays, book chapters, and special issues of journals. Until the present volume, however, her work has not been the primary subject of a single book spanning her career. This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home arrives at an auspicious time, after the publication of the 6 For the quotation, see Mason. 7 See the Author Chronology for details.

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author’s latest award-winning novel, Lila, and just before her new book The Givenness of Things, announced for October 2015. The collection takes as its primary focus the author’s first three novels, but it also encompasses readings of her non-fiction. As the first book devoted entirely to Robinson, This Life, this World is designed to familiarize readers with existing criticism on the author, to move scholarly dialogue onto additional theoretical grounds and into more streams of literary history, and to create a resource that will help critics to situate future extensions of Robinson’s oeuvre. An interdisciplinary group, our contributors bring to their subject a diversity of perspectives—Romanticism, ecocriticism, medicine and literature, religion and literature, theology, American Studies, critical race theory, and feminist and gender studies—that reflects the amplitude of Robinson’s art and thought. Beginning with pieces on Housekeeping, the essays have been arranged to follow the evolution of Robinson’s work as well as its recursive character; essays that appear later in the volume also call back to the first novel. The book concludes with a written interview that Robinson consented to do for this volume, and the questions give her an opportunity to respond to some of the ways that academics and reviewers have framed her work or theorized about topics of direct interest to her. The remarks that follow are intended to supplement the essays, the interview, and the author chronology (also prepared for this collection) by giving a narrative overview of Robinson’s literary career and limning the significance of each contributor’s intervention in the growing scholarship on our subject. Along the way I suggest some lines of critical agreement and debate, but readers will undoubtedly discern others. Robinson’s debut novel Housekeeping (1980) is set in a fictional place suffused with personal recollection. The town of “Fingerbone, Idaho,” between mountains and water, closely resembles Sandpoint, Idaho, on Lake Pend Oreille, where Robinson was born. Robinson’s compositional process started literally from scraps, pieces of paper on which she had experimented writing analogies; a suitable character and a narrative voice came later. John Hawkes, in a creative writing course at Brown University, had defended Robinson’s taste for periodic sentences, high rhetoric, and extended metaphors.8 Though an admirer of Hemingway, she was bored by the minimalism that had descended from (and, in Robinson’s estimation, degraded) his style.9 Once she sensed that her many 8 On the genesis of the novel, as well as Robinson’s class with John Hawkes, see Bartos and Jacobson 15–16, 19–20. 9 For representative statements, see, in addition to “Language Is Smarter Than We Are,” her favorable review of Raymond Carver, “Marriage and Other Astonishing Bonds,” and Schaub 236–237.

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bits of analogies actually coalesced into a mood and interior landscape, Robinson began to craft a novel written from the voice of narrator Ruth Stone. “My name is Ruth,” she introduces herself, in echo of Moby-Dick’s opening line, “Call me Ishmael.” The simple declarative, as in Melville’s masterpiece, does not hint at the extraordinary lyric performance that awaits the reader. As the narrative’s center of consciousness, Ruth locates Robinson’s stylized prose in a reflective mind linked to a fictional biography that the character’s narration makes emblematic.10 The present time of the narration is unspecified, as is Ruth’s age. For some years a nomad who has moved around the United States and British Columbia by railroad car, she tells the story of her childhood and adolescence, which unfolded in the wake of a tragedy memorialized, and then ignored, by the community of Fingerbone. A train accident over a vast, icy, unnamed lake claimed the lives of most of the riders, including Ruth’s grandfather Edmund Foster. Thirteen years later, Ruth’s suicidal mother Helen Stone sailed her car off a cliff into “the blackest depth” of the same lake, leaving Ruth and her younger sister Lucille orphans (Housekeeping 22). When their aunt Sylvie Foster arrives to care for them, having uprooted herself from Fingerbone sixteen years ago, she brings the girls intimations of a life open to possibilities, but entailing the surrender of much that civilization holds necessary. Each of the three principals— Ruth, Lucille, and Sylvie—oscillates between the pull of wilderness and culture, transience and domesticity. Lucille eventually succumbs to one part of her nature, Ruth and Sylvie to another.11 Each choice brings with it pain. For Ruth, transience is not only freedom of movement. It is also the state of things in their mutability, erosion, displacement, and dying. Her poetry calls from a place of loss. She has a heightened awareness of the ultimate homelessness of all existence that Sylvie and Lucille also restlessly feel. The metaphoric contrast between the Foster house and the brackish lake is keyed to Ruth’s metaphysical speculations: is the universe like the lived-in house, seemingly in dis­ array but having an underlying order and place for everything, so that even what is lost can eventually be rediscovered? or is it like the black lake, impossible to plumb, fluxing, in which things alive and dead sink and disperse, perhaps 10

11

The first person narrator of Robinson’s short story, “Connie Bronson,” written while the author was in college, has some of Ruth’s traits, but she has none of her virtuosity with metaphor or her yen for metaphysical speculation. The story features a dark river, fear of drowning, and tales of lost children. It was eventually published in The Paris Review several years after Housekeeping debuted. See Author Chronology for details. In her essay for this volume, Carolyn Allen identifies Anatole Broyard’s review of Housekeeping as the first criticism to write about transience as one of Robinson’s significant themes.

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never to return? As a symbol of the abyss, the lake is twinned with the wilderness, its deep recesses and echoes and traces of things vanished.12 In their essay for this volume, Jonathan Arac and Susan Balée read Ruth’s interiorized landscapes through the aesthetic of the sublime. Moreover, they make an innovative connection between Housekeeping and the work of William Wordsworth, a source of comparison that Robinson’s own allusions in later work suggest but that scholars have so far overlooked. One of the essay’s achievements is that it makes us hear again the grief as well as the majesty in Wordsworth’s poetry, while also encouraging us to listen for Robinson’s dissonant variations on his theme of recuperation. For Arac and Balée, the sublime in Housekeeping is more intensely consonant with melancholy than fear; it is a formal means of mediating profound bereavement and awesome absence. In contrast to Wordsworth’s poetic personae, Ruth’s perception of the sublime13 tempts her to renounce human companionship, an enticement from which she is saved by her merging with Sylvie. In addition to being a work that revisits dialectics of Romanticism, House­ keeping is now regarded as a feminist classic and an important New Western novel.14 In her essay for this volume, Corina Crisu revisits, and expands on, the ways that these approaches to reading the novel have informed each other. From youth, Robinson was aware of the mythic view of the West as well as the reality of those who lived there. She grew up in the fifties, when the popularity of the Western, in movies, television, and radio, was at its zenith; she has shared her fondness for the cowboy hero as a cultural icon, as an embodiment of honor, dandyish hybridity, and egalitarian spirit.15 Yet, having been raised in a 12

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The film of the novel, Housekeeping (1987), directed by Bill Forsyth, substitutes Alberta and British Columbia, Canada, for Sandpoint, Idaho. Though well-received, it is far from a definitive adaptation. One can only speculate what Terence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, Tree of Life), in full possession of his talents, might accomplish with this novel, particularly its internalization of landscapes remembered and whispered. Consistent with Romantic theory in the vein of Wordsworth and early Coleridge, the sublime is an aspect of Ruth’s subjectivity in correspondence with the wilderness rather than a quality inhering in the landscape itself. For a definition of New Western literature, see the introduction to the collection, Old West-New West, in which Robinson’s essay, “My Western Roots,” appears. “My Western Roots” (170–171); Robinson reflects on the cowboy hero and tracks some changes in the icon’s values from its classic phase to the darkness of “the [Clint] Eastwood period” in “Hearing Silence: Western Myth Reconsidered” (143–147). Remembering her childhood in the second essay, she says, without condescension, “Yet it seemed to me that everything that I knew about the West I learned from the movies. The West was the hero of so many movies” (138).

Introduction

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“matriarchal” family in the Far West, she has also bucked at the ignorance in the representation of “[t]he West as the place of John Wayne.”16 As she stated elsewhere: “My one great objection to the American hero was that he was inevitably male—in decayed forms, egregiously male” (“Western Roots” 170– 171). Hence, Robinson “created a female hero, of sorts, also an outsider and a stranger”: Sylvie, triggerless and earthbound, yet a counterpart to the classic cowboy hero all the same, a substantive revision rather than a repudiation (171). Robinson’s staging of her encounter with Western archetypes has raised questions. No one believes that she is simply inverting the genre’s gender identities after the fashion of period Westerns like Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead (1995), which places female characters into conventionally ­masculine roles. Worth debating, however, is the extent to which she is selectively amplifying aspects of the Western hero, such as his melancholy and vagrancy, that Ruth pictures in Sylvie, and to what extent she is overturning aspects of the mythic hero to introduce modes of seeing fostered by women’s lives. Crisu stresses the second, explaining why Robinson differentiates the destinies  of Ruth and Sylvie from those of John Wayne and his saddle chums. Complementarily to Tony Magnana, who has argued that in Housekeeping Robinson is forging a counter-memory from an untold history, that of women in the Far West, Crisu theorizes that Robinson is modeling a form of female subjectivity that cannot be contained by the gendered oppositions encoded in the symbolic conflict of frontier settlement and wilderness.17 Drawing on Martha Ravits’s path-breaking 1989 essay, Crisu also shows that Robinson channels American Renaissance sources in crafting Ruth and Sylvie.18 In so doing, Crisu makes Robinson’s case that writing about the American West can be part of a cultural conversation that does not compartmentalize the former as regional literature or relegate it only to popular mythology. A twenty-four year gap intervened between Housekeeping and Robinson’s second novel Gilead (2004), which would soon be followed by its companion Home (2008). While Robinson published almost no fiction in the interim, she was hardly dormant. These years saw her become a faculty member at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and an essayist of renown. Looking back, one can see that in 16 17 18

Robinson describes her family as having been matriarchal (Schaub 233). Allusion to John Wayne is the interviewer’s characterization, to which Robinson assents (Schaub 233). Magagna, “Erased by Space, Ignored by History: Place and Gender in Marilynne Robinson’s West.” Ravits, “Extending the American Range.” The term, “American Renaissance,” comes from F.O. Matthiessen’s classic study, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941).

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her non-fiction Robinson was exploring the intellectual foundations of modernity—to have her “own mind, not a mind that had been stashed with someone else’s shorthand”—assaying ideas and writing about bedrock matters that would find their ways into the fiction of the last decade.19 One of those concerns, nascent already in Housekeeping, was ecology. Her most controversial book to date, and the one she has called her most important, Mother Country (1989) exposed the culpability of the British government in the operation of a nuclear re-processing plant at Sellafield, which has dumped tons of toxic waste into the ocean. Although the book remains banned in Great Britain to this day because of a libel suit by Greenpeace, ecocritics in the humanities have given Mother Country appreciable attention. In his essay for this volume, George Handley pairs  Mother Country with Housekeeping, examining in each text Robinson’s wise  departures from the dualisms that often skew environmental activism. Specifically, Handley praises Robinson for resisting the tendency to idealize Nature as a repository of innocent otherness while devaluing the work of culture that is also necessary for human flourishing. He locates her ability to value both Nature and culture in a profound regard for the preciousness of what is impermanent. An extension of Handley’s discussion might take as additional support the reasons why Ruth, almost singularly in Housekeeping, empathizes with society’s most vulnerable: the poor, the unhoused, the placeless. Fingerbone’s benevolent Christian churches, “obedient to Biblical injunction,” do the good work of charity, but they are deficient in compassion, their solicitude having become a matter of habit and social grace. These routinized gestures inure them to the pang of mortal perishability, the earthly destiny of becoming “unhoused,” that the town’s vagrants in their exposure and frailty bring to the residents’ creeping awareness (Housekeeping 182). In Ruth’s lucidity, we see perhaps the matrix of Robinson’s later attacks on both austerity ideology and anti-environmentalism, and on the support that each receives in the u.s. from Christian fundamentalisms. This interim period between Housekeeping and Gilead was also marked by Robinson’s increasing interests in matters of history and theology, the latter involving a return to the foundational texts of her own Reformed tradition. With John Updike’s passing, she has become the most high profile Protestant novelist in the United States and, in the face of what she has condemned as America’s fear of the intellectual content of religion, an intimidatingly wellread proponent of theological literacy.20 With the publication of The Death of 19 20

Quotation from Elie. One of the negative effects of the “popularization of religion” in the 20th century that Robinson has deplored is the “fear of the intellectual content of religion,” a fear that she says was much less present in the nineteenth century. See Elie.

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Adam (1998), its arguments enforced by two subsequent collections and numerous occasional essays and invited lectures, she has emerged as a leading broker in discussions of religion and science, Christianity and ecology, liberalism and the Bible. The rarity of her position should not be underestimated in an age that has long since seen the passing of lionized public theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.21 In the discourse of professional literary studies as well, her taste for theological rigor and her avowed belief have made Robinson a bracingly eccentric presence. To return for a moment to the analogy with which I began, modern authors before Robinson have likened their work to a religious calling or spiritual practice. Like Ames, Kafka once described writing as “a form of prayer.”22 Yet Robinson’s recourse to this comparison, underwritten by Christian belief, seems more than an attestation of her craft. With maverick indifference, the statement shunts deconstructive initiatives in the humanities that Robinson, herself a literature professor, surely knows by contiguity if not close study.23 It is true, as Amy Hungerford has noted in Postmodern Belief, that Robinson’s yoking of religious faith and literary imagination is less atypical when viewed against developments in American letters since wwii, which have seen major authors and some influential critics affirm “faith in faith,” faith in the incantatory-visionary empowerment of religious experience or the will to belief as an essential stimulant to literary imagining.24 However, even against the background of this development, as 21 22

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Robinson calls Tillich and Niebuhr honorable public intellectuals of their time, but says that they have had no successors. See Elie. Gunnars 1–17. Quotation from Kafka 3. Kafka source unspecified in Gunnars, but the quotation appears in Franz Kafka, Dearest Father: Stories and Other Essays. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. New York: Shocken Books, 1954. (312). I am aware that Derrida’s thought has also been a wellspring for postmodern theologians, such as Thomas Altizer, Jean Luc Marion, and John Caputo. I am referring in my text to the more established use of deconstruction in the humanities to tease out contradictions in Western metaphysics and Western monotheisms that these same systems have covered over in order to preserve their structures of meaning. Deconstructive maneuvers and playful inventions have had renovating roles in theological projects like those mentioned above, which have also drawn on Derrida’s later writings concerning forgiveness, responsibility, and the messianic. However, Derrida in English departments generally has been deployed as agent of secular reason. Even when his thought is tilted against the transcendentalisms of Enlightenment, this is understood to be part of the ongoing task of making reason more worldly. The phrase “faith in faith” is from Hungerford, Postmodern Belief (3ff), where she borrows it from Will Herberg’s Cold War sociological classic Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955). On criticism’s positive re-appraisal of the power of religious inclinations in the literary, see Hungerford 45–51.

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Hungerford herself sees, Robinson is set apart by her Calvinism: a tradition, by reputation, known for ferocious invective, internal contention, and legendary gloom. That reputation bears the imprint of nineteenth-century liberal Protes­ tantism. Despite monumental acts of recovery by Perry Miller, John T. McNeill, and H. Richard Niebuhr (as well as the Barthian neo-orthodoxy that Niebuhr helped to import to the u.s.), Calvinism continues to be tarred with the rhetoric of its Victorian opponents: arbitrary, barbaric, dogmatic, abstract, irrational, amoral.25 In literary study as well, where “the contribution of Calvinism to American literature has long been understood,” its influence, frequently, has been “tracked adversely. American literature germinates, thrives, then flowers as it sheds the dead husk of Calvinism in which it had been entombed” (Davis 242). Twentieth-century u.s. authors of Calvinist rearing, such as Ellen Glasgow and Peter de Vries, have written celebrated novels—Vein of Iron (1935) and The Blood of the Lamb (1961), respectively—that illustrate why they repudiated their forebears’ sanctity. Robinson has made it her task to rescue both Calvinism and John Calvin himself from what she considers a legacy of gross distortion, presenting in “Jean Cauvin” (the French she adopts for defamiliarization) a Renaissance humanist, in the Reformed tradition daring experimentation with egalitarian ideals, such as universal literacy and public education, and in ­writers like Emily Dickinson habits of awareness ingrained by the very piety the poet questions.26 Most persuasively, in her next two novels, Gilead and Home, Robinson places Calvinism in the humanizing context of the family and the domestic.27 The essays in this volume by Rachel B. Griffis and Mark S.M. Scott directly engage with Robinson’s interventions in an American literary climate that has long been anti-Calvinist, even when it assumed (until the last fifty years) the 25

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Davis 148–153. These stereotypes, reinforced in the twentieth century by H.L. Mencken, among others, are so strong that they have colored pictures of the American past in other national letters. See, for example, Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), with its oppressive theocratic state of Gilead (ironically enough) headquartered in puritan New England. Robinson links Emily Dickinson’s “individualism” with Calvin’s phenomenology in Fay (49). On the Renaissance side of Calvin’s thought, including his theatricality, to which Robinson is keen, see William Bouwsma. John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. On Calvin’s “theatrical perspective” (169–174). “Calvinism wrapped up in family rather than abstraction appears more genuinely human and, thus, more acceptable” (Davis 270).

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cultural hegemony of Christianity. One of the most culturally powerful weapons nineteenth-century liberals wielded against Calvinism was the novel. Contrasting Gilead and Home with two representative Victorian antiCalvinist novels, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale (1822) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing (1859), Griffis reveals Robinson to be a shrewd critic of the liberal sentimentalization of theology described by such scholars as Ann Douglas and Mary G. De Jong. The four novels share the motif of the Prodigal Son, figured in each text as a wayward child who is grappling with the meaning of salvation and maturation into adulthood. The three authors use the motif for opposing ends: Sedgwick and Stowe to assail doctrines of human depravity and divine election, and Robinson to show the succor a family can derive from belief in the justness and mercy of divine sovereignty. Reminding us how the conflict over America’s religious direction was dramatized in fictions about family, Griffis’s essay places Robinson into dialogue with Victorian sources heretofore overlooked by scholars, who have tended to focus on nineteenth century authors that Robinson herself has named as her antecedents.28 Writing from the vantage of systematic theology, Scott also turns in Gilead and Home to the Prodigal Son, but focuses on its theological function in Robinson’s fiction. Noting that the New Testament parable is the locus classicus of the doctrine of predestination, Scott reads the prodigal in the novels as “a soteriological symbol” through which Robinson probes the most controversial of Calvinist doctrines. Scott provides a needed breadth and rigor that has been missing in most accounts of Robinson’s re-visioning of the parable. He not only considers predestination against the background of early Christian thought, Augustine, and the Reformation, but also finds correlates in the work of twentieth century Christian thinkers for the questions with which Robinson’s characters struggle intellectually and existentially. Scott discovers in Robinson a willingness to query the soundness of the doctrine of the double predestination even as she affirms the elusive subtlety of divine grace. His essay concludes with a penetrating meditation on the priorities of storytelling versus those of theology that students of religion and literature should appreciate. Gilead and Home not only bring to Robinson’s fiction her years of immersion in Reformed theology, but also her encounter with the Mid-west, where she migrated and has lived since joining the faculty of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1989. In contrast to Housekeeping, which is set in the mountains 28

These antecedents include Poe, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, and the Transcendentalists.

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of the Pacific Northwest that Robinson knew intimately as a child, the Iowa plains of her next two novels emerge from displacement, research, and discovered affinity: “I wanted to know what I was seeing, because every landscape has a history.”29 One of the many aspects of the region that called to her was its radical past, its settlement by Christians with “gallant” (a favorite adjective of Robinson’s) commitments to human equality. In the existence of “wonderful little colleges, like Oberlin and Grinnell and so on, which were explicitly religious establishments in the first instance and were established in order to promote women’s rights, antislavery, universal literacy,” Robinson saw monuments to a history that had been lost in America’s “great amnesia.”30 This cultural forgetting, which “deprives” democratic citizens of “the hope that they might learn” from what is most aspirational and generous in history,31 she views as part and parcel of the country’s pervasive mood of “nostalgia and reaction.” In a key line from The Death of Adam, she confronts her American reader with the statement, “we want the past back, but we don’t know what it was.”32 In Gilead especially, she seeks to lift this amnesia, in the process linking the sensibilities and ideals of her New England literary heroes to the memory of the Midwest.33 Told exclusively in the voice of John Ames, Gilead, at its most accessible level, is the story of a father’s love for his son. It has the novelty of being one of the few stories in American literature about a father-son relationship told from the vantage of the parent (Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich also comes to mind). This parent, moreover, is addressing his son across the gulf of death, as Ames anticipates that Robert, a child at the time of the composition, will only come to the letter’s pages years after the writer is dust. Ames’s letter is also reaching across death in the direction of his own past, to those biological and spiritual fathers who preceded him in the land and witnessed the Civil War, and those, like his best friend and fellow minister “Old Boughton,” who have weathered the turbulence of two world wars, the onset of  the Cold War, and the Civil Rights struggle. While the events Ames recalls implicate multiple communities, the 29 30 31 32 33

Robinson quoted in Abernethy. Robinson quoted in Abernethy. See also Robinson’s essay, “A Great Amnesia.” Lila is dedicated to the state of Iowa. “A Great Amnesia” 21. This quotation and the previous from The Death of Adam (206). She also manages to capture typical Mid-Western idioms in Ames’s voice. For example, at the conclusion of one of the novel’s most somberly beautiful tableaus, the tearing down, in the rain and soot, of a lightning-struck church, Ames meditates on the nature of personal experience and how we assign meaning to it over time. However, he does not veer into the language of philosophical abstraction. Offering the adage, “Strange are the uses of adversity,” he punctuates it with the plain and direct, “That’s a fact” (Gilead 95).

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setting of the novel throughout is the titular Gilead (modeled after Tabor, Iowa), its evocative name recalling prophetic texts of the Old Testament as well as the black spiritual.34 The novel is the second of Robinson’s fictions to be placed in a remote small town, a fabled topos in American literature and especially rich in associations for the Mid-West given the canonical status of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920). In the nineteen-fifties, when Gilead’s living characters are together, the region’s reputation nationally was at its nadir, and the negative images of Anderson’s Winesburg and Lewis’s Gopher Prairie—upending the Midwestern pastoral and showing its townsfolk to be isolationist, backwoods, xenophobic, and socially conservative—seemed to define its outward identity much more than the nostalgic rural images of the region that would come to dominate in popularity by the nineteen-seventies.35 “At a low point of self-esteem,” going through a rapid outward migration, “Mid-western towns had lost so many of their young people and so much of their vigor [by 1960] that they had little left to give” (Sturbridge 65–68). Gilead is a barren town from which many of the young seem to have moved on; Ames describes it as looking like “whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more” (Gilead 247). Yet, he is able to affirm, in the last leaves of his letter, “I love this town.” His devotion, and Robinson’s, is not based on the cultivation of nostalgia—the iconography of the Midwest as a quaint, innocent refuge of Protestant values at America’s physical core—but on an historical imagination that sees in “the ruins of old courage” an embarrassment to the complacencies of the present and a challenge, for those who remember the town’s heroic past, to recover their forebears’ prophetic fire: “it is all an ember now, and the good Lord will surely someday breathe it into flame again” (246). Gilead’s participation in the Underground Railroad and Ames’s grandfather’s refusal to reconcile with the nation’s compromises after the Civil War, for examples, gain renewed brilliance as the travails of Ames’s godson Jack Boughton and the suffering of Jack’s common-law black wife and their child surface in the novel’s last third. In choosing a minister to act as the seat of the town’s memory and its moral self-accounting, Robinson alludes to clergy who founded abolitionist towns like Tabor. This choice of protagonist, as some of the novel’s original reviewers

34 35

Jeremiah 8:22, 46: 2, 11 and 22:6; “There is a Balm in Gilead” (author and date of origin uncertain). Ames begins writing his letter in 1956. He is 76 years old when he starts writing to his son, and he notes that he has turned 77 during the course of composing the letter; see Gilead 9, 186.

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noted, also posed a potential narrative liability.36 Protestant preachers in modern American literature comprise a menagerie of lechers, adulterers, hypocrites, wilting fools, and knaves.37 It is a gallery, moreover, to which many Midwestern authors have contributed durable representations.38 John Ames, by contrast, is “that most difficult narrator from a novelist’s point of view, a truly good and virtuous man, and occasionally you may wish he possessed a bit more malice, avarice or lust—or just an intriguing unreliability” (Wood). Janella D. Moy’s essay for this volume helps to explain the psychological interest Robinson generates in this potentially flat characterization. Approaching Gilead through the field of medicine and literature, Moy likens Ames’s long letter to a form of journaling that not only records Ames’s reminiscences for posterity, but also serves a therapeutic function for the writer. Moy situates Ames’s text within literary history, namely spiritual autobiography and Puritan diaries,39 and within contemporary theories of writing as therapy, which she helpfully supplements with reader-response criticism. Ames cannot anticipate how his intended reader, his son Robert as an adult, will someday react to the contents of the letter, so he is forced to see himself through the eyes of another whose understanding he can only hope for and not presume. This ­situation, in Moy’s reading, is salutary because it turns the writing into a process that is valuable to the author for occasioning a place to objectify and evaluate his own thoughts and emotions. The interest of Gilead’s narrative, then, inheres not only in the drama of the past that Ames recalls—the tunneling of escaped  slaves, the grandfather’s involvement in Bleeding Kansas, the embittering conflict between the grandfather and his pacifist son (Ames’s father), the town’s grief during wwi—but equally in the dynamic movement of the day-to-day entries of the journal itself, which show Ames reacting to previously unexpressed, inaccessible feelings dislodged by the task of putting 36 37 38

39

Wood, “Acts of Devotion”; Meaney, “In God’s Creation.” For additional discussion of this topic, see Schmidt, esp. 120–121. For an intensively researched study that focuses on the figure of the lecherous minister but ranges widely across other pusillanimous reverends, see Morey 2–5. A few of the more well known Midwestern examples include William Dean Howells (The Leatherwood Bible), Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology), Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio), Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy), Sinclair Lewis (Elmer Gantry), and Peter de Vries (The Mackerel Plaza). Robert Alter has also called attention to the influence of the Puritan diary mode in the novel, but he does so by attending to the novel’s prose, noting its resemblance to the qualities of the King James translation that were venerated by the Puritans. He also notes Robinson’s innovations; for example, the novel’s “use of [biblical] parataxis for introspection.” See Pen of Iron 141, 163–170. This is the most perceptive analysis of the novel’s style.

Introduction

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his consciousness into verbal material. Crucially, Moy is also able to demonstrate how Ames’s beliefs in sinfulness and forgiveness help him to receive the healing benefit of the writing process, for they foster in him self-probing habits of mind that his composition exercises. As he writes the novel’s last lines, the reverend enjoys the fullness of God’s grace because he has been able to work through the corralled anger and hardness he had long felt toward his father and toward his godson Jack Boughton. Ending on the word “sleep,” Gilead comes to a close with the cessation of Ames’ writing, a period punctuation mark followed by clean space. The clear indication of death seems like a gentle leave-taking; the author, having experienced a catharsis that his writing self interprets as a blessing, has gladly released the text to futurity, any worry for its reception having been annulled. In addition to the drama of the past and the indirect plot structure of Ames’s healing, Gilead is also a “philosophical novel” that takes the reader into the intellectual life of the protagonist (Hungerford 117). As an object of reflection, history in Gilead is tragic, the human striving for justice imperfect, halting, and thwarted; history affords Ames a measure of optimism, but of a dystopian cast. In the beauty of the natural world and the stars, however, Ames is able to discern the evidence of God’s goodness, which gives him moments of both solace and delight. In the spirit of Calvin, history does not bless the contemplative mind as nature does.40 Chad Wrigelsworth’s essay for this volume develops the novel’s mental discourse on “creation,” which has a double sense: the existing natural world in which God’s redemptive activity is ongoing, and the aesthetic quality of human perception. A complement to George Handley’s piece, which focuses chiefly on Housekeeping and Mother Country, Wrigelsworth’s essay moves expansively outward from Ames’s musings about the universe and mankind’s place in it to the philosophical contexts that inform and abut Robinson’s non-fiction commentaries on scientific inquiry in the fields of ecological design and cosmology. Employing Robinson’s text in a polemic that assails ecocriticism for its historic hostility to Christian thought (a history given an accounting in his text), Wrigelsworth contrasts Gilead’s discourse to that of “materialist monism”; this he charges with blinkering activists to available resources for imagining our ethical responsibilities to the globe.41 Through interpretive readings of Gilead that lean toward Ames’s fascination with planets and the motion, patterns, and design of the universe, Wrigelsworth elaborates one of Ames’s central ideas, that beauty is “the signature of God in creation,”

40 41

On Calvin’s contemplation of history versus nature, see Schreiner 37, 113. The term is Wrigelsworth’s rather than Robinson’s, though he explains its applicability.

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eliciting wonder and gratitude.42 Although his essay touches on Housekeeping only cursorily, Wrigelsworth’s readings of Gilead’s imagery also have the advantage of pointing up how differently nature is rendered in the earlier novel, with its fearsome impressions of barely “bridled” waters threatening a rickety civilization.43 Robinson’s ecological vision is capacious enough that it can regard nature with both love and trembling, imagined through the aesthetic of the beautiful as well as the sublime. Gilead has attributes of an historical novel and a novel of ideas, but its companion novel, Home, is more intimately scaled.44 Drawing together two characters from the previously published book, Jack Boughton and his sister Glory, it is the story of “a friendship between a brother and sister,” a relationship not often explored in fiction.45 Glory, a character silently drawn in Gilead and so familiarly viewed by Ames as to be almost overlooked, has actually returned home quite reluctantly to care for her declining father, Robert Boughton. Beginning with the ruefully funny line, “‘Home to stay, Glory! Yes!’ her father said, and her heart sank,” the novel immediately establishes the daughter’s thankless situation and the ambiguity of “home” as a source of both comfort and regret. Glory’s forlornness will be alleviated by the arrival of Jack, of her three brothers the one to whom she, the little sister of all her siblings, felt the closest. First encountered in Gilead as a broken man, a wanderer with a secreted past, Jack’s actions and speech are more plentifully represented in Home, but he remains a character narrated mise en abyme. Laconic and socially apprehensive, perhaps especially among those who watched him grow up, Jack hints at many undisclosed stories, and his deepest secret is that he has had a mixed-race child with a black schoolteacher, Della Miles. For readers of Gilead, this fact will already be established; Glory will discover Della’s race only in the novel’s closing pages, after Jack has left for whereabouts unknown. It is a mark of Robinson’s skill that in spite of the 42 43

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Robinson quoted in Abernethy 2009. Wrigelsworth’s essay should also be read alongside Andrew Brower Latz’s excellent piece, “Creation in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson.” Literature & Theology: An International Journal Of Religion, Theory, And Culture 25.3 (September 2011): 283–296. Latz deals with the specifically Calvinist underpinnings of creation in Gilead while contrasting it to the disorder of nature in the earlier Housekeeping. On Calvin’s metaphor of “the bridle,” see Schreiner 30, 104, 106–107, 113, 121. On God restraining the waters 22–30, 81. Robinson has stated that Home should not be considered a sequel to Gilead since the present-day events of the two novels transpire concurrently. Hence, I have adopted the non-sequential term, “companion.” Robinson gives this description in Elie. She adds that her own close relationship with her brother David was relevant to writing of the novel.

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uncertainty that Jack creates within the narrative, and in himself and his family, the reader is able to discern how brother and sister still commune with each other, and not only through the memory of their childhoods. As Robinson has said of the three women in Housekeeping, the siblings in Home represent “options that have been lost” to the other, in keeping with her recurring idea that “we are more plural than we realize.”46 Though Home is a return to characters and a setting introduced before, some of its fictional techniques are a departure. Whereas Gilead and House­ keeping are each narrated in the first person by their protagonists, Home is told in the third person limited omniscient, with frequent focalization to Glory’s point of view and resort to free indirect discourse. Choosing not to adopt Glory’s narrative voice, Robinson is able to experiment with dialogue extensively for the first time.47 In keeping with her long-standing criticisms of contemporary American writing for assuming that language “reflects, or should reflect, the cultural level of its period and subject,” characters’ conversations in Home are free of slang and popular cultural references.48 Glory, Jack, their family and acquaintances read magazines (Life, Ladies Home Journal) and contemporary fiction, and they watch television; however, the style of these texts and media do not infiltrate their speech. They do not allude to, parody, or ironically quote it, and, refreshingly, they speak with none of the cynical candor of today’s mass culture. Dialogue is earnest. Characters do not talk past each other at cross-purposes; there is a struggle to make contact on both sides, even though each may fall short. Robinson proves to be adept at using silence during conversational lulls for expressive purposes as well as telltale dramatic ­gestures; Jack’s embarrassed raising of his hand to his face, for example. He  anticipates being misunderstood, and, hence, he is both transparent (in his insecurity and need) and mysterious (in his alienation). His speech, selfdeprecating and excessively polite, is fittingly “soft.” Robinson uses very simple, commonplace verb tags, hardly varying from “said,” to introduce characters’ speech acts. Instead, she attends to the pitch and timbre of the characters’ voices to convey the intonation of what they say (and do not quite say). Carolyn Allen, in an essay for this volume that connects Home to House­ keeping rather than Gilead, attends precisely to the “felt experiences” that lay 46

47 48

Quotations, referring to Housekeeping, from remarks Robinson made March 6, 2014 at the Plymouth Church (Lawrence, ks) in partnership with the Lawrenceville Public Library and the “Read Across Lawrence” program. “So much of the novel is dialogue. I was really surprised. I kept thinking, I’ve got to stop doing this—it’s just one dialogue scene after another” (Fay 51). Quotation from “Language is Smarter Than We Are.”

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behind characters’ dialogue as well as the resonant commonplaces that dot their lives and verbal exchanges. Allen examines the types of emotions, feelings, and affects that connect and separate characters in the domestic household. While Allen sets her discussion in relation to the affective turn in the humanities, she does not adopt any one of these theories as an entry into the fiction. Rather, she reads Robinson herself as an intricate thinker about emotion and mind in her essays, and, taking Robinson’s phrase “felt experience” as her central hermeneutic term, interprets Housekeeping and Home comparatively. In the former, Ruth turns away from domestic habitation because she finds in Sylvie an intimacy that does not insist on self-exposure or self-betrayal, but instead vitally sustains loneliness, a privileged state in the novel. Allen distinguishes the many facets of “loneliness” in Housekeeping, and she argues that Robinson departs from much of the psychiatric literature on the subject by showing how it is essential to Ruth’s self-awareness and pleasure in her environment. Turning to Home, in which much more of the action is housebound, Allen argues that loneliness becomes more symptomatic of conflicts with social expectations, including those of the family unit. However, this loneliness is somewhat assuaged by seemingly commonplace gestures of “kindness” that ease family members, even Jack to some measure, into sharing their frailties. In the juxtaposition of the two novels, Allen thus gives us a sense of the emotional medley that characters in Robinson’s fictions bring to the idea of “home”: the desire for preserved inwardness, the pressure to be vulnerable and to bear others’ vulnerability, and the relieving expectation of routines and gestures that can be counted on to mediate between self and family. Allen reads the novel’s ending in which Della and young Robert appear in Gilead49 as redemptive, an inkling of the restoration of family from exile, despite Jack’s departure and Old Boughton’s slipping life. Yumi Pak, in her essay for this volume, is more skeptical. The black wife and mixed-race child’s brief stop at the Boughton family property moves Glory to a beatific vision of her future in which Jack’s son will someday return, affirming her choice to remain in Gilead as a custodian of the home to which all of her far-flung ­siblings can safely come back when needed. Pak, contrarily, dwells not on the hoped-for future reunion, but on the long history that lies behind, envelopes, and endangers Della and young Robert. In Robinson’s rendering of that history, Pak finds mostly evasions. Gilead reminds us of the powerful witness of

49

Not to be confused with John Ames’s son Robby. Each parent, John Ames and Jack Boughton, have named an offspring after Old Boughton (Robert Boughton), who is Ames’s dearest friend and Jack’s father.

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abolitionism and includes, as “a voice heard in darkness,” John Brown,50 but it makes no reference to the great nineteenth-century controversy between proslavery and anti-slavery Christians.51 Home, like its predecessor, contains numerous allusions to the Civil Rights struggle, but the events, while meant to underscore social sins, mainly limn the subtext of Jack’s depression and help to make his conscience known.52 Building on the criticism of Christopher Douglas, who asks of Gilead, “Why is this Christian slavery missing?,”53 Pak finds that in both novels Robinson occludes the wider entanglements of racism in the construction of American identity. Pak argues that the appearance of Della and Jack’s son at the close of Home only underscores how this novel and its predecessor are chiefly stories about the mending of bonds between white fathers and white sons, to which the largely unwritten story of Jack’s ­relationship to young Robert is ancillary. Moreover, Pak says that Robinson’s 50

Quotation in Fay 52. Robinson has said that her image of John Brown is shaped by William E.B. Du Bois’s 1909 biography. 51 In “Who Was Oberlin?,” from When I Was a Child I Read Books, Robinson rightly criticizes Steven Spielberg’s Amistad for its disparaging portrayal of Lewis Tappan. She then alludes to Christian pro-slavery: “Abolitionism did have its roots in religion… [but] equally impassioned religion was also deployed against it.” The terrible fact of Christian justification for chattel slavery was repeatedly condemned in abolitionist literature, slave narratives, the sermons of liberal evangelicals, and in the writings of Stowe, Melville, Twain, and the Transcendentalists, among others. Robinson is well versed in this literature. Pak’s essay does not question Robinson’s knowledge or her sincerity, but the value of her fictional choices for opening up alternative ways of telling the American past. 52 Many of the dates mentioned in Gilead coincide with important stages in the Civil Rights era, and these allusions become important as we learn of the town Gilead’s history and of Boughton’s son’s secrets. 1952, Presidential Election of Eisenhower, who was a quietist on Civil Rights, favoring gradualism, states: “I don’t believe you can change the hearts of men with laws or decisions.” 1954, Brown versus the Board of Education declares segregation unconstitutional. 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott happens. 1957, the year immediately following the entry of Ames’s letter: Martin Luther King, Jr. forms the sclc (Southern Christian Leadership Conference). “Sit-in” demonstrations, protesting Jim Crow segregation policies, are held in the South. Federal troops enforce the 1954 Court ruling in Little Rock, Arkansas. The Civil Rights Commission is set up to study why blacks are not voting. Home includes additional references to the Civil Rights struggle, including the murder of Emmett Till and televised coverage of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted from December 1955 to December 1956. 53 Douglas, “Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.”

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absenting of Della’s family and of Robert—as physical presences as well as subjectivities and narrative voices—make them available as symbols that serve primarily to refract the memories and psychic dislocations of white characters or to occasion the growth in the white characters’ understanding of one another. Just as Robinson, according to Douglas, homogenizes Christian history by effacing its pro-slavery record, she also, according to Pak, gives a benign family narrative in which black history signifies national trauma and provokes instances of bravery and confession, but is never allowed to disrupt a story in which whites work to recover their past and make it cohere for their spiritual edification. Black history can only haunt the Ames and Boughtons as they learn to forgive each other while circling around the great hush of Jack’s interracial affair. Pak’s essay will surely generate debate between those who will feel that Robinson has already satisfied the critique made here by genealogically linking Della’s birth family and Jack’s, and those who will hold with Pak that Robinson is providing an idealized version of a white Christian reformist past in which black agents and black voices are slighted. Ranging across Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home, James Schiff’s essay, the final one in this volume, compares these works to the oeuvre of the prolific John Updike, who “loomed large” in Robinson’s youth.54 An expert on Updike and a sensitive reader of Robinson, Schiff finds provocative commonalities between the two authors. These are not limited to their Protestantism or their shared reverence for theologian Karl Barth. Updike and Robinson are each master realists who manage to imbue the ordinary with a sense of the otherworldly, the transcendent. Updike is more influenced by post-modernism than Robinson, more apt to play games with his readers, sometimes interposing fantasy or introducing Romantic irony. Nonetheless, he shares with Robinson a love for the mundane. They each lavish rapturous prose on things so customary as to go unnoted. Instead of glossing over the everyday details of our social lives, our habits, our bodies, our small intimacies, they find their characters’ being in those details. In one of his most surprising associations, Schiff also considers each author’s handling of a close group of women turned against insular communities in the novels The Witches of Eastwick and Housekeeping. The New England coven in Updike’s story is more potent and dangerous, capable of summoning chthonic forces in Nature, but each member ironically returns to more conventional domestic destinies by the end of the tale. Inwardly channeling their impressions of Nature rather than magically directing its energies, Ruth and Sylvie ultimately make a decisive break from their society, 54

Quotation from Robinson in the interview that closes this volume.

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ceremonialized with the shocking act of setting their family home afire. Operating outside of the Gothic genre, which entails punishment for trans­ gression,55 Robinson is less interested in the consequences of rebellion, which is a Faustian gambit for Updike’s heroines. She is more curious to rove along the mental and social horizons of women who have abandoned all claims to public existence, with its protections as well as its constraints. In returning us to the tension within Robinson’s fiction between domesticity and transience, Schiff provides a fitting place for other scholars to extend the conversation begun here to Lila. Having already garnered acclaimed as this book goes to press, Robinson’s latest, like Home, plucks a heroine from the margins of a prior novel. Reverend Ames’s wife Lila, in Gilead and Home described rather than heard but for a few pregnant exchanges,56 is granted her own narrative point of view and with it her memories, tragedies, and dreams. As described in a review written with insight and care, this story of the love that burgeons between Lila and her elderly husband amidst the difficulties posed by both of their personal histories makes a thematic arc back through Robinson’s previous three fictions: Lila reaches even further back [than Gilead]…offering a bridge between Robinson’s fiction of the past decade and her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), the haunting tale of two sisters—and three generations of the women in their family—that heralded a startling new voice, and then a long silence. Housekeeping gave us Sylvie, a drifter who eventually enlists her young niece in a vagrant life; Lila is another incarnation of the uprooted woman for whom home offers scant comfort…. While House­ keeping left Sylvie wandering, Lila settles—however uneasily—into the rhythms of an anchored life.57 55

The Witches of Eastwick (1984) calls back to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. See also Updike’s contemporized “Scarlett Letter Trilogy”: A Month of Sundays (1974), Roger’s Version (1986), S. (1988). 56 See Gilead (152– 153, 199–200); Home (181–183, 189, 226–227). See also the physical description of the character, which suggests a “former worldliness,” 160. Lila shows a clear affinity to Jack Boughton as well as a belief in the possibility of his salvation; the novel that now bears her name portrays her own years of wandering, solitude, and affliction. She grapples with both Calvinist doctrines and basic Christian teachings, as Jack does. Though she reads the Bible to gain knowledge, Lila resists the passages about sin (and non-belief as sin), because they seem to say that her beloved Doll will never gain the peace of heaven. 57 Jamison, “The Power of Grace.” For a recent essay on Lila, which focuses on Robinson’s conception of the human, see Roxana Robinson, “Bringing the Wind Inside.” The Nation (January 26, 2015): 27–30. Published at The Nation on-line under the title “Faith and Suspicion: On Marilynne Robinson’s Lila.”

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As with Glory and Jack Boughton in Home, Lila is about a character who would not believe that her story warrants telling, and, yet, with her most extensive reliance yet on free indirect style, Robinson still manages to make much of the narrative sound as if it were written from Lila’s sensibility. Additionally, the novel affords a glimpse of evangelical revivalism that expands Robinson’s Protestant world beyond the Reformed tradition, and it introduces a new character, Doll, an adoptive mother and itinerant laborer whose presence hearkens back to Depression-era worker novels and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. If the nineteen-thirties are “the forgotten decade” in the American Century, then here, too, Robinson endeavors to lift our cultural amnesia. Lila also benefits from the comic tempering of Lila and Ames’s courtship and marriage; humor is one of Robinson’s unnoted strengths, running through all of her fiction, and a great essay, in the vein perhaps of Ralph C. Wood’s work on Updike and Percy, should one day be devoted to the comic voice of Housekeeping and the Gilead trilogy. “This life, this world,” sighs Lila’s husband Reverend Ames in Gilead. For all of Robinson’s desire to make us aware of the numinous in our lives, it is her sensitivity to the secular and the finite, the broken and the errant, that makes her fiction sing rather than preach. Sometimes the song is woeful, at other times pensive, and at still others hymnal—even ecstatic. Each novel contains all notes. Whether Robinson continues to map the lives of the Ames and Boughtons, transforming Gilead into a Midwestern equivalent of William Faulkner’s Jefferson County, leaves this fictional landscape for another altogether, or returns to writing principally nonfiction, we hope that this collection of new scholarship will be a compelling reference point for understanding one of the most indelible literary voices of our time. Works Cited Abernethy, Bob. Religion and Ethics Newsweekly PBS (September 18, 2009). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014. Alter, Robert. Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Bartos, Eileen and Carolyn Jacobson. “Mostly on Mother Country.” The Iowa Review 22:1 (Winter 1992): 8–21. Davis, Thomas., ed. John Calvin’s American Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as Defacement.” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (December 1979): 919–930. Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Douglas, Christopher. “Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Novel: A Forum On Fiction 44.3 (Fall 2011): 333–353.

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Elie, Paul. “The Resurrection of the Ordinary,” Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs; Georgetown University (April 6, 2009). n. pag. Web. 17 Sept. 2014. Fay, Sarah. “Marilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction No. 198.” Paris Review 186 (Fall 2008): 37–66. Gunnars, Kristjana. Stranger at the Door: Writers and the Act of Writing. Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004. Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Jamison, Leslie. “The Power of Grace.” The Atlantic (September 17, 2014). n. pag. Web. 27 Sept 2014. Mason, Wyatt. “The Revelations of Marilynne Robinson,” The New York Times. October 1, 2014. n. pag. Web. 10 October 2014. Meaney, Thomas. “In God’s Creation.” Commentary 119. 6 (June 2005): 81–84. Morey, Ann-Janine. Religion and Sexuality in American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. ———. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. ———. “Connie Bronson.” The Paris Review 100 (Summer-Fall, 1986): 294–302. ———. “Language is Smarter Than We Are.” About Books Column, New York Times (January 11, 1987): 8. ———. “Marriage and Other Astonishing Bonds.” Review of Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From. New York Times (May 15, 1988): 1, 35, 40–41. ———. “My Western Roots” in Old West-New West: Centennial Essays. ed. Barbara Meldum. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1993. (165–172). ———. “A Discussion: ‘The New Puritanism’ Reconsidered” Salmagundi 106/107 (Spring—Summer 1995): 194–256. ———. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. ———. “A Great Amnesia.” Harper’s Magazine (May 2008): 17–21. Schaub, Thomas Hill. “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Contemporary Literature 35:2. (Summer 1994): 231–251. Schmidt, D.W. “In the Name of the Father: Male voice, Feminist Authorship, and the Reader in Gilead.” Renascence 66.2 (Spring 2014): 119–130. Schreiner, Susan E. The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1991. Spoto, Donald. In Silence: Why We Pray. New York: Viking, 2004. Sturbridge, James. The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1989. Wood, James. “Acts of Devotion” (November 28, 2004). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014. Wood, Ralph C. The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith & Comic Vision in Four American Novelists. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.

Housekeeping, Wordsworth, and the Sublimity of Unsurrendered Wilderness Jonathan Arac and Susan Balée Abstract In this essay, we use consonances between Wordsworth and Robinson to focus her accomplishments and illuminate her emphases. Wordsworth tells the growth of a poet’s mind, Robinson the growth of a wanderer’s, yet both are “fostered alike by beauty and by fear.” “Beauty” signals one aesthetic, but “fear” cues a different set of references, those of the sublime, an aesthetic based not on what pleases but on what challenges human comprehension and even threatens human life. As we shall demonstrate, Robinson’s version of the sublime is not Wordsworth’s, though it begins on common ground.

If you read only Marilynne Robinson’s deeply reasoned, finely argued non-­ fiction, such as the much-quoted and reprinted “Surrendering Wilderness,” you would be certain that she believes civilization must triumph over nature, or our idea of it, for humans to survive: Every environmental problem is a human problem. Civilization is the ecology being lost. We can do nothing that matters if we cannot encourage its rehabilitation…. I think we must surrender the idea of wilderness, accept the fact that the consequences of human presence in the world are universal and ineluctable, and invest our care and hope in civilization.1 Yet her first major work of fiction, Housekeeping, takes the opposite viewpoint. It repeatedly envisions the death of civilization, the extirpation of human settlements from the earth. And it seems to propose this eschatological vision as the basis for a human life that is unsettled, transient, wandering. As the novel ends, civilization persists, but that is not where the novel places its weight. Railroads, for example, by book’s end, serve only to convey vagrants. Robinson’s head may rule her essays, but her heart generates this great novel. In Housekeeping, wilderness wins and civilization merely lingers, hanging on by a finger, or what’s left of it—a finger bone. In her imagined Idaho town, the citizens fear death by drowning: “one is always aware of the lake in 1 Marilynne Robinson, “Surrendering Wilderness,” 64.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004302235_003

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Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below” (Housekeeping 9). Memories of Noah’s flood rise around their ankles every spring as cellars fill with water and “when the ground is plowed in the spring, cut and laid open, what exhales from the furrows but that same, sharp, watery smell.” Throughout this poetic, elegiac novel, the dark, cold, corpse-hoarding lake exerts its pull on all the inhabitants of the hapless town named for a human appendage. The death of Adam, were Michelangelo to depict it, might focus new attention on that divine touch, as finger to finger becomes finger to finger bone. For readers, the first time we take in the town’s name, we absorb the story’s essence. We have been given knowledge, but do not grasp it until much later. This landscape forms the mind of Ruth, the novel’s wandering narrator, who relates the story of her family and how she came to choose the life of transience with her aunt Sylvie over the ordinary life of “the other world” (123) that claims her sister Lucille. The eleven chapters of Housekeeping, like the fourteen books of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (first published 1850), recount the growth of the narrator’s mind. Robinson’s way of representing herself in her essays and interviews means that readers generally discuss her work in relation to the great writers of the American Renaissance (especially Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Dickinson). Yet Robinson surely knows Wordsworth. She makes Dove Cottage, where he lived with his sister Dorothy, the point of familiar reference by which to enter her horrifying account of massive, toxic nuclear pollution in Mother Country, her next book after Housekeeping, and she also makes Wordsworth’s Lake District crucial in “Surrendering Wilderness.”2 In this essay, we use consonances between Wordsworth and Robinson to focus her accomplishments and illuminate her emphases. Wordsworth tells the growth of a poet’s mind, Robinson the growth of a wanderer’s, yet both are “fostered alike by beauty and by fear.”3 “Beauty” signals one aesthetic, but “fear” cues a different set of references, those of the sublime, an aesthetic based not on what pleases but on what challenges human comprehension and even threatens human life.4 As we shall demonstrate, her version of the sublime is not Wordsworth’s, though it begins on common ground. 2 Mother Country 3. Robinson offers in this work a strong critique of English culture over many centuries of history; the us comes off well by contrast. This may help to explain why not only critics but also Robinson herself so emphasize her American literary forebears. Nonetheless, imaginative power does not always follow political lines, and the American Renaissance writers so crucial to Robinson themselves knew Wordsworth well. 3 The Prelude (1850) Book 1 (302). 4 For references to major recent scholarly works on the sublime, see Jonathan Arac, “The Media of Sublimity,” Chapter 2 in Impure Worlds, esp. note 1. (175).

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Wordsworth’s particular relevance to readers of Housekeeping springs from the landscape of the Lake Country. Like the world of Fingerbone, it is all stony heights and watery depths. Both books keenly register the fragile, porous boundaries that distinguish the elements from each other, except when they do not. Here is a moment from Wordsworth that blends sky and water, as we will note repeatedly in Robinson: [T]hen, the calm And dead still water lay upon my mind Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, Never before so beautiful, sank down Into my heart and held me like a dream! (2:170–74) Wordsworth’s childhood experiences take place in a world shaped like that of Fingerbone, with a deep lake at its core. In its depths the lake harbors corpses; in winter its gleaming attracts ice-skaters; and come summer its liquid possibilities tempt adventurers to steal rowboats for nocturnal ventures limned with terror. Wordsworth’s lake experiences, like Ruth’s, make him aware of something beyond everyday human civilization. Like Ruth, Wordsworth finds his most powerful experiences arise when vision is baffled and he must rely on sound alone. He finds “sublimer joy” when he walks alone and feels: [W]hate’er there is of power in sound To breathe an elevated mood, by form Or image unprofaned: and I would stand If the night blackened with a coming storm Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are The ghostly language of the ancient earth Or make their dim abode in distant winds. Thence did I drink the visionary power. (2:302–11) Even indoors, Ruth finds that her Aunt Sylvie’s way of serving dinner late, and not turning the lights on, creates a deeply moving strangeness: “Darkness began to fill the room,” and the children “listened to the crickets and nighthawks, which were always unnaturally loud then…perhaps because one sense is shield for the others and we had lost our sight” (86). In the middle of the book, Ruth and Lucille must spend the night alone in the woods by the lakeside. Ruth wakes up “in absolute darkness” inside their makeshift shelter, and when she makes her way outside, encounters “darkness no less absolute”:

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“There was no moon. In fact, there appeared to be no sky.” Instead she finds a soundscape: “singular, isolated lake sounds, placeless and disembodied, and very near my ears, like sounds in a dream. There were lisps and titters, and the sounds of stealthy approach—the sense of a disturbing intention, its enacting inexplicably deferred” (115). Lucille resists, but Ruth accepts, that “all our human boundaries were overrun.” Wordsworth finds joy in recalling such moments of blind hearing, but Ruth seems only to feel the “chastening” (a word important to Robinson but significantly rare in Wordsworth’s vocabulary of discipline). Robinson’s sublime does not resemble the humanistically reassuring form of Kant, for whom the ­sublime proves the mind’s power, but rather that of Edmund Burke. Burke’s sublime conjures the realm of darkness and dispossession, elements that force a human being to confront death.5 Wordsworth, too, has moments like this: “I heard among the solitary hills/Low breathings coming after me, and sounds/ Of undistinguishable motion” (1:322–24). After he returns the stolen rowboat, his “brain”: Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts There hung a darkness, call it solitude Or blank desertion; no familiar objects Of hourly objects, images of trees, Of sea or sky. No familiar shapes Remained…no colours of green fields; But huge and mighty forms that do not live Like living men, moved slowly through the mind By day, and were a trouble to my dreams. (1:391–400) A third sense of sublime in critical usage derives from the ancient Greek treatise ascribed to Longinus, “On the Sublime.” In this sense, the sublime refers simply to the greatest moments in literature, which in especially powerful works loom up and overwhelm you. In such works, the sublime moments may form a discontinuous pattern somewhat athwart those of the work’s theme or plot. Both Robinson and Wordsworth have written such works, and this essay

5 See the authoritative English translation and commentary: Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment 1790 (128–159); and Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), effectively abridged in Gerald W. Chapman, ed., Literary Criticism in England: 1660–1800 (332–354).

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offers citations that may prove fruitful for further investigation beyond this first sketch. The first sentence of Housekeeping, “My name is Ruth,” summons to mind not only the Biblical figure who chose to stay with her mother-in-law in the alien corn, but the opening line of Moby-Dick, “Call me Ishmael.”6 This novel, too, will be the story of a battle fought and lost against a leviathan of a landscape. Clearly Robinson’s sympathies lie with Ruth and Aunt Sylvie. Ruth controls the narrative, and the last words belong to her manifesto of transience. Lucille and her grandmother, the “Foster” of both the girls and the believer in houses well kept, disappear from the story, leaving Ruth to wander with Sylvie at novel’s end. Ruth delivers the first and the last word because she is one of the transient souls who recognize the brevity of human time on earth, and that the game of ‘civilization,’ permanence, and continuity represented by the society of the town—and on a micro level, its families—are mere sand bags deployed against an epic flood. Nothing so insubstantial can hold off the torrent. Nevertheless, as Ruth reports, “five serene, eventless years lulled my grandmother into forgetting what she should never have forgotten” (13). She should never have forgotten that neither serenity nor security endures. Tragedy always comes next. God in Genesis unknits the human lives he made, unraveling and scattering and sinking them, and in the same way, Robinson revels in images of dissolution. Consider her account of Ruth’s grandfather Edmund Foster, whose “mortal and professional careers ended in a spectacular derailment”: “The train… had pulled more than halfway across the bridge when the engine nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid off of it into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock” (5–6). The aquatic skills of the long-tailed weasel mark the insider’s knowledge here, where readers might expect the familiar otter. The train, the icon of triumphant human progress, is reduced to a mean little varmint, and the weasel at least can deal with the water, which the train cannot. It is perpetually cold in Fingerbone, and no one ever seems to learn from past tragedies. Soon after the train’s derailment, boys begin to jump off the bridge into the icy water, mocking or mimicking the disaster: “When the sun rose, clouds soaked up the light like a stain. It became colder. The sun rose higher, and the sky grew bright as tin. The surface of the lake was very still. As the boys’ feet struck the water, there was a slight sound of rupture…. By evening the lake there had sealed itself over” (7–8). It is quite astonishing to find 6 Robinson told Thomas Schaub: “The book I admire most in the world is Moby-Dick, after the Bible of course.” See “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson” 234–235.

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this reversed value, where light does not cleanse but is itself a stain—darkness being the pristine condition, reconfirmed by the evening’s sealing. Ruth’s grandmother raises her girls, lulled into a sense of security by their quiet obedience and five years without another tragedy: “The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself…[and] the dear ordinary had healed as seamlessly as an image on water” (15). Yet nothing is more transient than images on water, as John Keats recalled in his epitaph. Against the dark side of the sublime—the terrifying crowd of mountains ringing the town; the black lake at the center of the settlement, filled with its dead—the novel sets the possible “resurrection of the ordinary.” In Wordsworth, too, the ordinary connects to the peaks of experience as well as the flats. “It was, in truth, an ordinary sight,” the poet says of “a naked pool,” a “beacon on the summit,” and “a girl, who bore a pitcher on her head,” but each produces in the poet’s young self a “visionary dreariness” (12:249–56). To her fatherless girls, the grandmother is so familiar that she is disregarded: “[she] was constant as daylight, and she would be unremarked as daylight, just to watch the calm inwardness of their faces” (19). All her girls are destined to leave her, but Ruth and Lucille’s mother returns after seven and a half years. She arrives when her mother is not home and parks her daughters on the porch with their suitcases. Then she drives off a cliff into the lake, another casualty of the water’s dark pull. The grandmother fosters her granddaughters, but does not care to learn about their mother’s life during the seven years of wandering. Ruth remembers it and the songs she associates with her mother, “Sparrow in the Treetop” and “Good Night, Irene.”7 Both songs talk about broken relationships, but the second (and far better known), voices the desire to commit suicide by drowning: Sometimes I live in the country Sometimes I live in town Sometimes I take a great notion To jump into the river and drown. This is the song that Ruth associates with her mother, a song that will be named five more times in this slender novel. In the last moments of the book’s turning point, Sylvie and Ruth sing it over and over as they wait on their sinking rowboat for the midnight train to cross the bridge above them. The grandmother dies after five years of serenity with her orphaned granddaughters, and her chosen successors appear. These two spinsters, her sistersin-law, provide the novel most of its humor. The old ladies are unused to 7 These songs, along with the novel Not as a Stranger, date the book’s major action in the 1950s.

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children, unused to living in a house (they have come from a hotel in Spokane), unused to the brutal weather in Idaho. Lily and Nona arrive during a hard winter, when several houses in Fingerbone collapse beneath the snow. While the great-aunts fear their roof will cave in too, the girls escape the house to the frozen lake. They skate and sled, joined by a frolicking pack of dogs that steal mittens and chase skittering chunks of ice. The girls skate “giddily far from shore,” and from this distant vantage point, “the town itself seemed a negligible thing.” The mountains that stood up behind it were covered with snow and hidden in the white sky, and the lake was sealed and hidden, yet their eclipse had not made the town more prominent. Indeed, where we were we could feel the reach of the lake far behind us, and far beyond us on either side, in a spacious silence that seemed to ring like glass. (34) Wordsworth’s ice-skating echoes the girls’ in its ringing sounds: All shod with steel, We hiss’d along the polish’d ice… [T]he precipices rang aloud, The leafless trees, and every icy crag Tinkled like iron, while the distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound. (1:433–443) The girls are often the last to leave the lake and “as we glided across the ice toward Fingerbone, we would become aware of the darkness too close to us, like a presence in a dream.” The lights of the houses in town comfort them, even as they imagine the possibility of their collapse, “snuffing every light…and then bitter darkness would step nearer” (35). The old aunts, longing to return to their old and comfortable life, decide to find Sylvie, the grandmother’s namesake, and have her take over the children and her mother’s house. Sylvie arrives on a cold day in early spring. Despite the snow, she wears a dress and loafers without socks or stockings. Her hands are gloveless and red from the cold; her hair is wet. She tells the girls how fun it is to travel on trains, “especially in the passenger cars,” making clear to readers her transient, hobo status. Soon after her arrival, the town experiences a near-epic flood. It seems that Sylvie brings with her the forces of unhousing. Even their house, built on the higher ground on the outskirts of Fingerbone, no longer escapes the rising water, but joins the others “like so many spilled and foundered arks.” All three inhabitants have to wear boots on the first floor, and Ruth observes, “if we

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opened or closed a door, a wave swept through the house, and chairs tottered, and bottles and pots clinked and clunked in the bottoms of the kitchen cabinets” (62). Fingerbone, we are not surprised to learn, “was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather.” Spring continues and one “afternoon was loud with the giant miseries of the lake,” as the ice cracks in the sun. This upheaval in the ancient landscape engenders awe and fear in the inhabitants of Fingerbone, especially as it is personified in Ruth’s narrative: The clashes and groans from the lake continued unabated, dreadful at night, and the sound of the night wind in the mountains was like one long indrawn breath. Downstairs, the flood bumped and fumbled like a blind man in a strange house, but outside it hissed and trickled, like the pressure of water against your eardrums, and like the sounds you hear in the moment before you faint. (66) During these early days of Sylvie’s tenure, the girls remain a united front. They both hate school and start to skip; they spend a week hanging out at the lake. “We felt small in the landscape, and out of place…. We sat on the beach, just above the place where the water wet it, and sorted stones…. The lake was full of quiet waves, and smelled cold, and smelled of fish” (79–80). Then Sylvie, still an outsider in Fingerbone, appears on the beach. She does not see the girls, and when she walks toward the train bridge, they follow her. She climbs out on the bridge, walks about fifty feet over the water, and then notices the girls and returns. When Lucille questions her about it, Sylvie says that she did it just to feel what it was like. The answer is not good enough for Lucille: “If you fell in, everyone would think you did it on purpose…. Even us” (82). This is the moment when the girls realize, “clearly our aunt was not a stable person,” and it is also the moment when Lucille begins to turn away from her aunt, and then from her sister. Sylvie leads Ruth more and more often to the lake, while Lucille commits herself to teen life in the town. The girls can tell they are with an adult who does not really know how to take care of them. They do not eat until dark (and do not turn the kitchen light on) and do not have to go to bed until late. All this, however, doesn’t seem fun but “like a freedom to which we never became accustomed.” The girls, too old for dolls, nevertheless take them into the garden and play out “intricate, urgent dramas of entrapment and escape.” The mountains cast long shadows, the nights are chill, the wind “quenching the warmth out of the air before the light was gone, raising the hairs on our arms and necks with its smell of frost and water and deep shade” (86).

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Sylvie moves into the bedroom once inhabited by her mother, the girls’ grandmother. Lucille and Sylvie find a missionary brochure in a drawer there, doubtless given to their grandmother by Molly, the daughter who became a missionary to China. The line, “I will make you fishers of men” entrances Ruth, who imagines the net that would pull up all the dead entombed in the watery depths of the lake (91–92). However, it is Sylvie who married a man named Fisher, and he left her only his name. Nothing ever rises back from the waters of Fingerbone, but Wordsworth’s Lake Country works differently: Twilight was coming on, yet through the gloom Appeared distinctly on the opposite shore A heap of garments, as if left by one Who might have there been bathing. Long I watched, But no one owned them… At last, the dead man, ‘mid that beauteous scene Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright Rose, with his ghastly face. (5:435–50) For Ruth such a scene keeps replaying in fantasy, as she and Sylvie try to find their way back home after a night out on the lake in their stolen rowboat. Ruth wonders if her mother had hoped by her suicide to “rupture the bright surface” of the lake and “sail beneath it into very blackness.” But for Ruth, left behind, “here she was, wherever my eyes fell, and behind my eyes, whole and in fragments, a thousand images…rising always, inevitably, like a drowned woman” (163). Wordsworth lost his mother at about the same age as Ruth, but he finds in nature the love, discipline, and support that he needs, so his song, despite its scary moments, proves joyous. Throughout Housekeeping, Ruth feels her abandonment. This fundamental condition articulates her narrative, and its strongest moments confirm her loss. Yet in Sylvie, she does find a companion. Ruth grows comfortable with Sylvie’s oddities, though Lucille starts searching for a way to escape. Ruth says of her younger sister, “She was of the common persuasion. Time that had not come yet—an anomaly in itself—had the fiercest reality for her.” Ruth, like her aunt, instead recognizes the perishability of everything and everyone. She lives in the moment. Wordsworth’s “spots of time” may be revisited for their revivifying power, but Ruth’s recounted memories are not founts of renewal so much as mile markers on a long road. The girls spend another spring skipping school and roaming: “the woods themselves disturbed us. We liked the little clearings…. But the deep woods are as dark and stiff and full of their own odors as the parlor of an old house. We would walk among those great legs, hearing the enthralled and incessant

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murmurings far above our heads, like children at a funeral” (98). Afraid or not, Ruth tells us, “I went to the woods for the woods’ own sake while, increasingly, Lucille seemed to be enduring a banishment there” (99). In their last summer together in Fingerbone, the girls go fishing at the lake. On this occasion, right in the middle of the book, Robinson describes the landscape surrounding them: “The mountains, grayed and flattened by distance, looked like remnants of a broken dam, or like the broken lip of an iron pot, just at a simmer, endlessly distilling water into light” (112). Realizing that they have stayed too long and must spend the night there, the girls make a shelter out of driftwood and fir limbs, only to have the roof fall twice (just as their aunts had earlier feared happening to their house) in the course of a long, cold, dark night. The girls’ “ruined stronghold” and the terrors of the night’s sounds, already discussed, bring Ruth to the epiphany that everything human is perishable, whereas Lucille, being of a common persuasion, denies this dark reality. When Ruth observes the next morning that it does not seem to be growing lighter, Lucille, true to the spark of light in her name, asserts: “It will” (117). Lucille begins sewing new clothes from patterns and tries to interest Ruth in the town and their fellow schoolgirls. When Ruth will not join her, Lucille explains that it is time for them to have new friends. Ruth understands the irony of this, for neither has ever had a friend: “We had spent our lives watching and listening with the constant, sharp attention of children lost in the dark. It seemed that we were bewilderingly lost in a landscape that, with any light at all, would be wholly familiar” (130). Lucille begins to live apart from her sister and aunt, even though they still occupy the same house. Sylvie is sad, and Ruth sits with her at dinner, noticing her hands, which: “would caress each other in a slow gesture of warming. Bones, bones I thought, in a fine sheath of flesh like Sunday gloves” (137). These hands to Ruth’s mind echo the name of the town, and soon after Ruth notices them, Sylvie asks if she would like to come with her to see an abandoned settlement on the other side of the lake. Before they go, Lucille has left them, to live with Miss Royce, the home economics teacher. They leave early on a cold morning—it is never warm in Fingerbone. “The grass was blue with frost. The road was so cold it rang as I stepped on it” (144). Sylvie, who has already stolen a rowboat once, finds it again and tells Ruth to ignore the man throwing stones at them as she rows the craft away from shore. Half-frozen in the boat, Ruth imagines it spinning in circles, “drawn down into the darker world, where other sounds would pour into our ears until we seemed to find songs in them, and the sight of water would invade our eyes, and the taste of water would invade our bowels and unstring our bones, and we would know the seasons and customs of the place as if there were no others” (150).

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Once she rows them to the abandoned settlement beside a cliff face, Sylvie reveals that she has imagined the lives of the lost settlers, especially the children, so intensely that they have come alive for her. She tells Ruth that she hopes to lure them out with marshmallows. It is bitterly cold in the abandoned settlement. The landscape is again forbidding and sublime: The mountains that walled the valley were too close, the one upon the other. The rampages of glaciers in their eons of slow violence had left the landscape in a great disorder. Out from the cleft or valley the mountains made spilled a lap of spongy earth, overgrown with brush. We walked up it along the deep, pebbly bed left by the run-off and the rain, and there we came upon the place Sylvie had told me about, stunted orchard and lilacs and stone doorstep and fallen house, all white with a brine of frost. (150–151) In this environment Ruth recognizes that loneliness has unhinged her aunt: “Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house.” Without her sister, she can feel, as Sylvie does, that the woods are peopled with the spirits of lost children, unsusceptible to the cold. Made aware of her flesh by the freezing air, Ruth goes to one of the fallen houses and tries to build a fire in its cellar. Digging in the wrecked house, she feels the folly of settling down. Marilynne Robinson, who favors civilization in her essays, presents its pointlessness in this, her first, powerful work of fiction: “It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall…. Let them come unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart. It was no shelter now, it only kept me here alone” (159). At last Sylvie returns for her niece, and they board the rowboat for home. “It was evening. The sky glowed like a candled egg” (161). Yet instead of rowing them home, Sylvie takes them across the lake to the bridge, the place where Ruth’s family derailed when her grandfather’s train veered into the lake. Before they get there, Ruth’s thoughts continue in their eschatological vein. She again imagines the boat capsizing and herself sinking down into the lake as both her grandfather and her mother did before her: “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?” Sylvie rows them to the pilings of the bridge, and as they wait for the train to come, they both begin to hum, and then to sing “Irene,” the song with a suicide by drowning at its center. When the train finally comes, the pilings tremble and Sylvie stands up to watch it pass. Then she obeys when Ruth begs her to sit down, but she tells her niece that there is nothing to fear in the lake. She puts her hand into the freezing

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water and observes: “The lake must be full of people…. I’ve heard stories all my life…. You can bet there were a lot of people on the train nobody knew about” (168). Sylvie is thinking of other transients who, like herself, rode hidden in the freight cars. Their wandering did not save them. Fingerbone may be “chastened…by an awareness that the whole of human history had happened elsewhere” (62), yet in this novel it stands for all human civilization: violent, shallowly rooted, threatened with diaspora, threaded by transients. The homeless make the townspeople fearful, for they embody the impermanence of human life. The locals want to save Ruth from transience, specifically from Sylvie the transient. But the transients, as Ruth imagines them, are not afraid to know what the civilizers refuse to acknowledge: “The sorrow is that every soul is put out of house. Fingerbone lived always among the dispossessed.” Fingerbone reflects the ills of civilization, and one of its positive byproducts: “if Fingerbone was remarkable for anything besides loneliness and murder, it was for religious zeal of the purest and rarest kind” (182). Yet in this novel, that zeal gives Ruth no comfort. What Jesus is to the believer and nature to Wordsworth, nothing is to her. Everything perishes, Robinson says again and again. Following a reference to Vesuvius (183), the next page alludes to Noah making his ark and telling his neighbors that all houses are useless, and foundations for them “worse than useless,” a statement that puts the prophet into a dubious situation: “that sad and outcast state of revelation where one begins to feel superior to one’s neighbors.” The possible selfcriticism here allows us to feel irony in Ruth’s self-representation. Grief sensitizes her to civilization’s costs, but it also estranges her from the web of human community. God troubled the waters and summoned a flood to rid the earth of the wicked. All water still has the taste of blood and hair. For Ruth, however, drowning does not punish sin; had her mother lived, chosen not to drown, “she would have remained untransfigured” and, hence, unlikely to pervade her daughter’s thoughts and dreams (198). The sublime consciousness of loss, which transfigures the dead but also overwhelms the survivor, comes from broken connections and inconsolable yearning. Sylvie and Ruth, who are now each other’s only intimacy, set the house on fire and run. The fire goes out, but they walk over the bridge to the other side of the lake, leaving the townspeople to assume that they have drowned. Though they will now haunt Fingerbone’s memory, Sylvie and Ruth have forestalled the loss of each other. The enduring house makes an important contrast to Wordsworth, for whom the shards of buildings figure deeply in rural landscape—the “ruined cottage” of Wordsworth’s Excursion, the abandoned sheepfold of “Michael.” Despite this difference, and despite, too, the quite different affects we have discerned in

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Wordsworth and Robinson as they make use of the sublime, Robinson shares with Wordsworth a radical conviction that underlies much of the centurieslong impulse in the arts that we call realism. As Wordsworth put it to the political leader Charles James Fox, he wrote some of his best poems with the intention to show that “men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply.”8 Robinson’s commitment to a similar view gives this novel of the fifties an ambiance that many readers connect to the Depression-era thirties. Sylvie and Ruth sound like characters out of Woody Guthrie: “We come with the dust and we go with the wind” (“Pastures of Plenty”). The critic William Hazlitt found in Wordsworth’s poetry the values of the French Revolution, a poetry based on the rights of man, “a principle of sheer humanity, on pure nature void of art,” because the topics of his early works were “a mixed rabble of idle apprentices and Botany Bay convicts, female vagrants, gypsies, meek daughters in the family of Christ, of idiot boys and mad mothers.”9 In the same spirit, Robinson gives her narration to a tall, awkward, middleaged homeless person, who would make many of us uncomfortable in a bus station, and Robinson doubles the radicalism by making the person a woman. Indeed, the novel features almost all women. Lucille no less than Ruth chooses an older woman to take her into the next phase of life. These communities of women have a utopian dimension, and they hasten the end by stopping reproduction. Here Robinson refigures a pattern in Wordsworth of women left alone, such as Margaret in The Excursion Book 1 or Isabel in “Michael.” Robinson also closely echoes some of Wordsworth’s challenge to the economically based social theory of his time. He gave poetic space to “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” a wandering figure that Utilitarians and other political economists would have chased off the roads and into poorhouses (a topic crucial to Robinson in Mother Country). So too, at her novel’s end, Robinson’s narrator-protagonist and her companion aunt are the creatures most loathed in much neoliberal discussion of social policy: they are free-riders. But in this novel Robinson, like Wordsworth, sets the most important calculus in the heart. Their feelings for each other count for more than civilization’s bookkeeping. The story ends with Ruth recounting her and Sylvie’s afterlife as fellow transients. Ruth never tries to contact Lucille, but imagines her in different places. After envisioning Lucille first in the old house in Fingerbone looking “fiercely neat, stalemating the forces of ruin,” Ruth abandons that unlikely scenario and pictures her sister instead at a restaurant table in Boston, willing herself not to think of those who are absent. Like Wordsworth in The Prelude or Ishmael in 8 See Wordsworth, letter to Charles James Fox, January 14, 1801. (315). 9 See Hazlitt, “On the Modern Poets.”

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Moby-Dick, the sublime in Housekeeping arises from orphanhood and abandonment. The novel ends with a marvelous, skewed line: “she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie” (219). Its poetic deflation and ironic inversion make it marvelous. Lucille, as always, denies reality. She consciously, fiercely, does not wait, yet she always waits, because the sublimity of loss overpowers denial. Works Cited Arac, Jonathan. “The Media of Sublimity,” chapter 2 in Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Ed. James T. Boulton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993. Hazlitt, William. “On the Modern Poets” in Lectures on the English Poets (1818). London: George Bell and Sons, 1894. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment 1790. Ed. Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping (1980). New York: Picador, 1981. Robinson, Marilynne. Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. Robinson, Marilynne. “Surrendering Wilderness,” Wilson Quarterly 22.4 (Autumn, 1998): 60–64. Schaub, Thomas. “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson,” Contemporary Literature 35.2 (1994). Wordsworth, William. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805. Ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850). Ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.

At Home with Transience: Reconfiguring Female Characters of the American West in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping Corina Crisu Abstract In Housekeeping, Robinson uses literary, philosophical, and religious sources to incorporate her heroines in a palimpsest novel about the American West. She challenges masculine archetypes of stories about the frontier, thus opening possibilities for imagining female identities outside the gender constraints of the popular Western. Through her characters Ruth Stone and her aunt Sylvie, Robinson enters the literature of the West into a cultural dialogue about freedom, self-making, and domesticity that is inclusive of major nineteenth century American authors.



A Palimpsest Novel

In Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, the transience of the female characters subverts concepts about women’s identity that literary and filmic canons have institutionalized. My essay will focus on the novel’s challenge to one of the most culturally influential of these canons: the American Western. Robinson writes in and against this tradition. Her novel reconsiders female characters of the American West in a double process that displaces the genre’s androcentric bias and repositions women’s roles in this canon.1 Robinson’s deep familiarity with the American Renaissance helps her to find a language appropriate to her heroines, who express a sensibility different from that of the masculine archetypes who have peopled the fictional West. From Owen Wister’s The Virginian to John Ford movies, these archetypes have also framed perceptions of what is possible for female identities on the frontier culture. In Housekeeping, Robinson dislodges these archetypes and opens possibilities for her heroines Sylvie and Ruth.

1 Martha Ravits’s analysis of Housekeeping points to the novel’s double task of responding to the “mainstream of native patriarchal literature and to the swelling current of writing— British and American—by and about women” (644).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004302235_004

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Constructing a world that has “the feeling of femaleness about it,” the novel correlates the American West with women’s experience, almost to the exclusion of male characters in the novel (Robinson, in Schaub 231).2 Robinson associates with female protagonists the themes of loneliness and adventure that have been explored in connection with male frontier heroes. Her protagonists, the orphaned girl, Ruth, and her adoptive mother, Sylvie, are transients endowed with polytropic identities revealed by their nomadism and escape from social restrictions.3 Sylvie who comes to Fingerbone clad as a roving spirit in makeshift garb, rejects refinement and eloquence. Ruth, her niece, is laconic in public, keeping her (profound) thoughts and feelings within herself. Each possesses further attributes typically associated with heroes of the American West—physical and mental mobility, freedom and nonconformity—but as female characters who find themselves at odds with their community.4 The female character, who is more usually represented as “an accessory for the male’s heroic adventure” or as the “feminine side of the hero,” embarks in Housekeeping on a personal quest where knowledge is achieved through (self) exploration (Campbell 116).5 In an interview with Thomas Schaub, Robinson talks about the mythology of the American West, which she counts part of her heritage. She stresses that the myths of the old West, the stuff of classic frontier stories, emphasize the image of the male protagonist at the same time as they distort or exclude female figures (231). Two interrelated questions arise here: Does Robinson simply confer upon her female characters the attributes of male heroes? And how does she redefine the Western American Weltanschauung with a focus on women’s existence? Robinson offers answers in her fiction by constructing female characters whose transience becomes a way of maintaining family relations and female bonding. She does not simply adopt the pattern of the Western in which the hero’s self-revelation and transformation is related to his 2 In Housekeeping, the author populates her fictional world mostly with female characters (except for the grandfather, the owner of a boat, the sheriff, and Helen’s and Sylvie’s abstract husbands). 3 In Greek, poly + trepo means “to turn in a variety of directions.” The polytropic identity presupposes not only existential mobility, but also the ability to turn away or deviate from a central axis, i.e. from social, religious and moral standards. 4 For classic discussions of the male hero in Westerns, see Slotkin, Smith, Tompkins, and Wright. 5 James Maguire suggests that “whether they are seen as New American Eves or as female versions of traditional male American heroes or as victims of abandonment, Ruth and Sylvie achieve self-reliance, not needing or seeking male assistance, but bearing no ill will toward men, either” (254).

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essential need to change places, go into the wilderness, and escape from “social entanglements” (Tompkins 4). Unlike the characters in classic Westerns, Robinson’s do not try to dominate their natural or social milieu.6 For them, achieving freedom does not imply the opportunity for conquest, for solitary display of power, and for revenge by settling unresolved disputes. In their case, being uprooted and placeless become ways of maintaining their close relationship, away from a society that sees only the surface—their “erratic” behavior— and does not realize the importance of family relations or what a “terrible thing” it is “to break up a family” (190). Moreover, the depth of Robinson’s novel does not simply come from the writer’s ability to create atypical women who act in atypical ways. Housekeeping is not so much about plot and action as it is about intuition, feeling, and the power of language to convey the unsaid. If Westerns imply that “reality is material, not spiritual,” and their tough, taciturn heroes repress strong emotions to show off their “integrity and authenticity,”7 then Robinson’s novel reveals the world’s mysterious, spiritual nature, and her meditative, self-effacing characters make us “feel reality on a set of nerves not quite [our] own” (Robinson 2012, 6). Her characters reconsider reality in order “to acknowledge that there are really thousands of different ways of thinking about things” (Robinson, in Schaub 242).8 In order to create these extraordinary characters, Robinson purposefully uses literary, philosophical, and religious9 sources, incorporating them in a palimpsest novel about the American West. Robinson layers Housekeeping with key themes and motifs of nineteenth century American authors. She has stated that one of her intentions is to show to the broad American audience that “the West is not intellectually crippling.” Not only does it have a cultural specificity of its 6 Sheila Ruzychi O’Brien demonstrates that Robinson “builds on the foundation of traditional fiction and film Westerns, creating protagonists who are outsiders, yet she makes her central characters female drifters who do not try to dominate other characters or their environment” (173). 7 The pattern remains unchanged from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as Jane Tompkins cogently argues (6, 126). 8 Housekeeping is written in accordance with Robinson’s idea of an archetypal pattern in American writing in which characters “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” (Robinson, in Hedrick 6). 9 Housekeeping contains many biblical allusions: the story of Ruth, the fall from Paradise, the Great Flood, the story of Noah and the image of Lot’s wife.

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own, it can also be part of a “cultural conversation” inclusive of such authors as such as Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Dickinson (1993, 165).10 A special merit of Robinson’s novel is its double affiliation to both the optimistic and the pessimistic traditions of the American Renaissance.11 Robinson makes use of all these double influences, re-inscribing women’s existence from an innovative perspective. Robinson admits that she wrote Housekeeping, a book with and about women, as a counterpart to Melville’s Moby-Dick, a novel dominated almost exclusively by male characters (in Schaub 234).12 Both Moby-Dick and Housekeeping function as Bildungsromans with their similar and deeply rooted themes of the quest, and Ruth’s growth brings her into awed contact with the variety and flux of the natural world, as Ishamel’s journey brings him.13 Drawing upon what Matthiessen calls “the optative mood,” Robinson mines the works of Emerson and Thoreau for their original concepts of experience, nature, independence and personal truth.14 Singular experience, which is the key to the Emersonian philosophical view, becomes a leitmotif in Housekeeping. Ruth’s deviation from the Procustean patterns of society exemplifies the Transcendentalists’ belief in the power of the individual. At the same time, Margaret Fuller’s avant la lettre feminist views are echoed in Housekeeping, where we see the same effort to create “a feminine mythology,” to find the vocabulary to translate women’s existence in a world of masculine words and actions (Showalter 32). Like Fuller, Robinson acknowledges her debt to her male literary ancestors, while simultaneously realizing the difficulty of the “act of sexual translation,” of rethinking masculine concepts and inventing a female language that lays stress on feeling and intuition (Douglas 266). Along with these nineteenth century authors, Robinson identifies Emily Dickinson as one of her guiding influences. The “terrible revelation” of the 10

11

12 13

14

In an interview, Robinson remarks the existence of “a rupture in the conversation of this culture,” since “all sorts of things that were brought up in the early conversation were dropped without being resolved,” and “nothing of comparable interest has taken their place” (in Hedrick 1). Even if F.O. Matthiessen did not include Emily Dickinson as part of his American Renaissance, we shall later take her into account in the analysis, as Dickinson is extremely relevant to Robinson’s construction of female subjectivity. In the interview with Thomas Schaub, Robinson maintains: “The book I admire most in the world is Moby-Dick, after the Bible, of course” (234). I do not mean to suggest that in Ruth Robinson simply gives Ishmael a feminine guise. I agree with Dana A. Heller, who argues: “the reinvention of Melville’s Ishmael wrests power from the father’s sphere and affirms identity in a voice that is at once distinctly American and distinctly female” (96). On the optative mood in Ruth’s narration, see Tyndall and Ribkoff.

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world’s strangeness enthralls both authors (Robinson 1984, 30).15 Housekeeping resonates with motifs present in Dickinson’s poetry: the obsession with home and the escape from it, the movement on several existential and metaphoric levels, the seductive power of loneliness and its positive overtones, the refiguration of loss and emptiness as inner growth and fulfillment. To borrow from Allen Tate, both authors master the world by rejecting it. Both of them rethink the meanings of “home” and “travel.” Dickinson manages to change an allegoric prison into a friend, the repressive patriarchal home into a free space for her quest and woman’s passive role into a spiritual voyage. In the same way, Robinson destabilizes binary oppositions by rendering “home” and “vagrancy” as fictional concepts that can be made and unmade without necessarily excluding each other.16 It is important to notice that Robinson does more than just appropriate the nineteenth century American authors’ conceptual framework. She is not only fascinated by their use of ideas, but also by their understanding of language and consciousness. In a 1984 New York Times Book Review, she points out: “Nothing in literature appeals to me more than the rigor with which they fasten on problems of language and consciousness—bending form to their purposes, ransacking ordinary speech and common experience…in the act of finding what will suffice” (30). What she admires most in their work is their capacity to use language to “refresh things,” to fabricate new models of understanding reality. Hence, when she writes, she focuses both on the story and on the writing process: “What I was doing was testing my method, finding what I could make it yield” (in Schaub 241). Through her experimentation with the narrator Ruth’s voice, Robinson makes the reader see the world “afresh” in Housekeeping. The next section argues that Robinson gives Ruth an unusual family background in order to ­prepare the terrain for the fluid, mobile identity that the character will later assume. The last part of the article analyzes Ruth’s quest in terms of personal growth and revelation by connecting the novel with the Transcendental­ ists’ views and with Dickinson’s poetry. The last part also points out that Housekeeping is written in accordance with Robinson’s model of “an ideal book” that does not only draw on the works of an outstanding tradition but also “galvanizes all the resources that novels have, the first being language, 15

16

From Dickinson’s “passion of making novel orders of disparate things,” Robinson learns that the conventional “House of Prose” may be changed into a “House of Possibility,” one of “imaginative, epistemological freedom” (Weisbuch 5). Smyth cogently notices: “To posit the home as a continent to be escaped—or, in other words, to posit home as an opposition to vagrancy—is to continue defining vagrancy in domestic terms” (283).

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what languages sounds like and how it’s able to create simulations of experience in the reader” (Robinson, in Schaub 235).

Reimagining the Frontier Family: Bonds of Affinity and Matrilineal Descent

Robinson has no anxiety of influence. The intertextual beginning of the novel (“My name is Ruth”) not only echoes Moby-Dick’s opening (“Call me Ishmael”), but also evokes the powerful model of female displacement present in the Biblical story of Ruth.17 In the Bible, Ruth and her mother-in-law, Naomi, appear as “examples of loyalty, friendship and commitment—to God and to each other.”18 The key verse contains Ruth’s faithful vow to Naomi, in spite of the fact that she is a Moabite and a stranger to her: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God” (King James Version, Book of Ruth, 1.16).19 Housekeeping reverses the ending of the biblical story of Ruth by adapting a convention familiar from the American Western. Though Housekeeping has points in common with the Old Testament story, Robinson leaves it open-­ ended.20 In the Bible, Ruth leaves behind her homeless status in order to be 17

Ruth’s and Naomi’s story is underscored by loss, as both women are homeless and their beloved ones have recently died. Naomi has lost her sons, while her daughters-in-law (Ruth and Or’pah) have lost their husbands. With no sons to take care of her, Naomi’s position as a widow in the ancient world was precarious, since widows had no means of support and they were almost always poverty stricken. Still, Naomi’s attitude shows selflessness and care for her daughters-in-law. While she decides to move to her native country, Israel, she urges Ruth and Or’pah to remain in Moab and get remarried in order to start their lives anew. In spite of the advice given by her mother-in-law, Ruth begs Naomi to take her to Bethlehem. 18 See Life Application Bible. New International Version. Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1991. (422). 19 As Nehama Aschkenasy remarks, “Ruth makes it clear that in choosing to return with Naomi she has not only made a decision about the person with whom she wants to stay, but also about the faith that she wishes to adopt. In her dialogue with Naomi, Ruth also starts a dialogue with Naomi’s God” (116). 20 As a substitute for a mother, Sylvie serves also as an initiator for Ruth, just as Naomi does for Ruth in the biblical story. While Ruth remains faithful to her surrogate mother, Ruth’s sister, Lucille, reenacts the departure of Or’pah, the other daughter-in-law. Rebecca Painter notices that Robinson’s characters “embody nuanced variations on biblical roles,” underlining that “such characters deepen our appreciation of the mystery of grace as they exhibit striking dimensions of loyalty as well as prodigality” (330).

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the wife of one of the most important men in the Jewish community, thus securing a place for both herself and her mother-in-law Naomi. Contrastingly, in Housekeeping, the initially settled existence of Ruth and Sylvie ends abruptly when they depart from Fingerbone and become permanent wanderers. The two women enter into the pattern of classic Western traveling pairs, though Robinson alters the implications of the migration and the bond. As Leslie Fiedler long ago observed, the cowboy and his sidekick are popular culture’s counterparts to the fraternal twosomes in canonical American fiction, such as Natty Bumpo and Chingachgook (342). These pairings, which are relations of affinity, challenge the notion that family consists of biological kin and in-laws by marriage.21 However, the freedom these male heroes enjoy to make their own spiritual connections is premised on the forswearing of women. The heroes may defend women, restoring them to their homes and their betrothed, but they keep no company with them for long. Sylvie and Ruth are female characters who not only wish to choose their own filiations and where they will sojourn together, but also wish to drift for reasons that have nothing to do with protecting the domesticity of others. Indeed, they set the three-generational Foster home afire so that no one can live there. In Housekeeping the emotional attachment between Ruth and Sylvie can only survive outside the traditional family that cowboy heroes defend, and for which they often secretly yearn, in the classic Western. Robinson speaks in her article “The Way We Work, The Way We Live” of the impossibility of imposing a strict definition on such an “elusive” concept as family (1998, 823, b). In Housekeeping, the notion of family is labile and always sliding away from the model of the nuclear, patriarchal family. The succession of women who take care of Ruth and Lucille can be seen as part of a matrilineal clan that excludes male figures. From the very beginning of the novel, Ruth starts unfolding her memories, initiating a retrospective narrative placed in a vague illo tempore, a story of growing up raised by women: “I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher” (3). Nancy Chodorow’s idea that “mothering can be shared by several people” is present here, where several relatives take care of the two sisters, making us fully reconsider the domestic sphere (75). Traditional notions of family and mothering are dislocated, as the biological mother is replaced by a number of surrogates. Motherhood appears

21

See also Ravits on the male pair (protagonist and surrogate father) in classic American literature, 659.

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as a flexible concept that can be socially and personally constructed, suggesting that a family implies emotional (not necessarily biological) attachment.22 As the story unfolds, Ruth becomes engaged in a process of searching for her lost mother, “a feminized quest towards a self-naming or self-mapping” (Heller 93). For Ruth, memory is associated with a sense of loss, while recollection represents an attempt to restore the loss through a therapeutic process of anamnesis.23 Looking closely at her family’s history, blowing the dust off its past figures, Ruth illuminates disjointed parts of her genealogy, which she attempts to place together in an endless search for her roots.24 We find out about Ruth’s grandfather, one of the few male characters in the novel. Edmund Foster is a watchman with the railroad, his life being symbolically connected with the transient identity that his granddaughter will later adopt. He leaves the flat perspective of his “sod house” in the Middle West25 and moves to Fingerbone, Idaho, a place that seduces him through its mountains. When he first arrives in Fingerbone, he reaches a world that he has already imagined and copied in his drawings—a realm endowed with an ideal status. He loves the heights, but, ironically, his death in a train accident is a descent into the depths. Years later, in a journey over the same lake, Ruth meditates upon the imprint her grandfather’s travel has left on her destiny: the aweinspiring heights painted by her grandfather offer an ultimate model of understanding the world and a starting point for her quest. He is, as Tony Magagna points out, a questing frontiersman, though he is not simply “the 22

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Robinson remarks: “One’s family are those toward whom one feels loyalty, and obligation, and/or from whom one derives identity, and/or to whom one gives identity, and/or with whom one shares habits, tastes, stories, customs, memories. This definition allows for families of circumstance and affinity as well as kinship, and it allows also for the existence of people who are incapable of family, though they may have parents and siblings and spouses and children” (Robinson 1998, 823, b). Ruth’s name has a number of connotations, as Maggie Galehouse observes: “The word ruth dates back to Middle English and was used to denote ‘passion, contrition, sorrow, or regret’ (the only form of the word in common language was “ruthless”)” (120). Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson observes that the memory-laden Ruth is interested in the past, whereas the forward-planning Lucille is preoccupied with the future; in her turn, Sylvie, through storytelling and constant changes of location, is focused on the present (23). The ambivalence of the sod house as both house and tomb connects it to the world of the living and that of the dead. Moreover, the house is connected with an element representing the absolute—the horizon—placed in contrast with what is insignificant and earthly. Its paradox appears in the fact that its closeness to the earth also means proximity to the transcendent sphere.

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prototypical western man” (355). For Edmund, the landscape becomes a spiritual apex existing inside his mind and aesthetically altering his home rather than a territory that he must forever traverse or conquer while foregoing a house and family. His experiment in marrying a frontier spirit, with its customary reticence and lonesomeness, to a life of domesticity and dependents is unsuccessful. The balance Edward seeks, of connection and freedom, seems to require an altogether different way of conceiving both closeness and selfhood. In her own quest for this balance, Ruth will abandon domesticity altogether and live exposed to the landscape, with the maternal surrogate Sylvie as her boon companion. In Housekeeping, the image of the traditional family is subverted not only by excluding the male cowboy heroes, but also by creating different versions of surrogate mothers. Placing Sylvie in loco parentis, Robinson challenges the image of the stable mother who, in the Western, dedicates herself to the civilizing mission of settling the frontier, of maintaining the integrity of civilization’s outposts against the wilderness and wild enemies. This mother trains her daughters for self-sacrifice and awaits the return of her brothers and sons from the range, from the hunt, or from savage war.26 She is the handmaiden to history, as it is enacted by others. Though the landscape of Housekeeping is often foreboding and physically threatening, none of the mother figures in the novel satisfactorily accept their mission as members of civilization’s advanced guard or their maternal task of raising women hearty enough to stand fast for courageous men. Instead, as Thomas Foster observes, they correspond to the three generations of women differentiated by Julia Kristeva. The girl’s mother illustrates the type of Kristeva’s first generation, who suffers from “an entry into history made on masculine terms, an appropriation of the detached position of the male subject” (Foster 88). The girls’ mother discards traditional feminine or maternal features as she plays the role of a mother estranged from her own children.27 The second type is represented by the grandmother, who “performs a narrative function equivalent to the rejection of official history that 26

27

Consider, for example, the celebrated opening shot of John Ford’s iconic The Searchers (1956). Beginning in darkness that is illuminated by sunlight, a settler wife/mother swings open the door to her homestead, revealing the frontier stretched before her and, within it, riding, the figure of a man who is returning from years of war and Indian fighting. Helen’s name sends the reader to the ancient Greek heroine, who was so famous for her beauty that she was transformed into an abstraction. Ruth perceives this abstract, remote quality of her mother, who always ignores her and is ready to converse with an invisible presence. In addition, Helen’s distant attitude towards her daughters is symbolically reflected by her married name: Stone.

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characterizes the second movement in Kristeva’s model” (Foster 88). She is the most stable character in the novel, since she has spent most of her life in Fingerbone. She is the embodiment of “the Victorian image of the quiet, obedient mother” that populates stories of the frontier (Bernard 14). Nevertheless, she has a complex personality, revealed by the tension between her actual deeds and her inner thoughts. Even if her existence is circumscribed to the domestic sphere and her daily gestures enact rituals of the ordinary, her thoughts are always elsewhere, in the realm of the lost ones. Finally, the third generation, embodied in Housekeeping by Sylvie, combines the attitudes of the first and the second types. She has a composite personality, as she resembles both the girls’ mother and grandmother.28 Thus, in Sylvie, Robinson offers an alternative model of motherhood. In a double process of displacement and replacement, Ruth gradually reshapes her representation of her mother, dislocating her memory and replacing it with Sylvie’s image. Nancy Chodorow points out that “the infant comes to define itself as a person through its relationship” to the mother, “by internalizing the most important aspects of their relationship” (78). For Ruth, who no longer has a biological mother, Sylvie becomes a mother figure and a mediator who shapes her view of the world. Sylvie enters the novel wearing a mysterious aura.29 Her first words are symbolically addressed to her dead mother in a note that stresses her itinerant status: “Dear mother, I may still be reached c/o Lost Hills Hotel, Billings, Montana. Write soon. I hope you are well. S” (39). The destination where she wants to be reached, Lost Hills Hotel, suggests her elusiveness and evokes an outlaw hideout. Ruth’s first impression of Sylvie associates her with the transient world: “Sylvie had her coat on and appeared to be very transient” (51). Suggestively, her favorite means of transportation is the train. For Sylvie, the homeless drifter, the train provides an itinerant refuge as well as a space of 28

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Sylvie’s presence in the novel is prefigured in the conversation between the two aunts, Lily and Nona, who also act as surrogate mothers. A peculiar couple, the aunts can be seen as one entity, a flat, one-dimensional character, a parody of the middle class image of spinsterhood. Their hilarious dialogue functions as an ancient Greek chorus, bringing in the perspective of the commonsensical mind and the gossip circulating in the town about such a strange family. Thus, they create a horizon of expectation upon which Sylvie’s sketchy portrait is projected before her appearance in the story. Their disapproving attitude defines Sylvie as a childless woman, a transient and a migrant worker: “‘Well, how about the little one, Sylvie?’ There was a clucking of tongues. ‘At least she doesn’t have children’. ‘So far as we know, at least’. ‘An itinerant’. ‘A drifter’” (31). Sylvie’s name is also significant: from the Latin silva, “forest, wood,” it draws our attention to her close relationship to nature.

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effacement where she does not have to claim any social status among the fluctuant community of passengers.30 Robinson envisions Sylvie as “an unredeemed transient” who transforms Ruth into a transient as well. The girl’s remarks refer to Sylvie’s paradoxical desire to assume a maternal role while not giving up her way of living: “Clearly our aunt was not a stable person” (82); “It seemed to me that if  she  could remain transient here, she would not have to leave” (103). Moreover, just like her sister, Sylvie is married to an abstract person whom she never mentions: “She had simply chosen not to act married,” Ruth avows, “though she had a marriage of sufficient legal standing to have changed her name” (43). Sylvie undermines the image of a mother who dominates her children, or is dominated by them, as she does not see herself as a “victim” or “unfree woman” (Rich, in Bassin, 236). Tension results from the clash between the children’s preconceived idea of motherhood and Sylvie’s intriguing attitude, between the institution of motherhood and Sylvie’s experience of mothering. Not only does the model of the patriarchal family disintegrate, but also the stable configuration of the house, which seems to be shaken by the transient condition of its inhabitant. Sylvie’s nature lays its imprint on the building whose permeable structure is evident in the trespassing of the boundaries between the inside and the outside.31 Parallel to nature’s invasion of the interior space is an “opening up of the outside to the inside” (Meese 59). Ruth eloquently describes how darkness acquires an initiating function as it effaces all differences, making possible an exchange between the human and natural world: Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude. We had crickets in the pantry, squirrels in the eaves, sparrows in the attic. Lucille and I stepped through the door from sheer night to sheer night (99). 30

31

As Joanne Hall notes, Sylvie is a female hobo, a homeless person “who defies categorization,” who “becomes the ‘othered’ other occupying the margins of a marginalized subculture” (45). A number of critics have emphasized Sylvie’s itinerant nature in connection with a flexible notion of space. Paula Geyh observes that “Housekeeping both explores the centrality of the space of the house in the construction of feminine subjectivity and attempts to imagine a new transient subjectivity which is located in a place outside all patriarchal structures” (Geyh’s italics, 104). In the same direction, Dana Heller compares Sylvie’s “flexibility and fluidity of ego boundaries” with the permeable boundaries of the house (98).

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As a demarcation between the inside and the outside, the window has a symbolic function. At night, when the room is brightly lit, the window is a mirror (a narcissistic instrument of self-reflection). On the contrary, when the room is dark, the window is no longer a boundary but an instrument of communication with the natural world. In the dark, the limits of perception are expanded as the eye does not meet its own projection and plunges into the outside space. In this almost mystical “bright darkness,” Ruth feels the closeness of nature and its creatures. As John Gatta observes, “Sylvie’s approach to housekeeping reflects her sense of a universal ‘ecology’ (that is, a great household) in which humans inhabit common space with the rest of Creation” (221). The most powerful example of the invasion of a culturally mapped territory by the natural world appears in the episode of the flood. The waters change the configuration of the house and trespass the boundaries between the realms of the living and the dead. In the midst of this transformation of the known world, Ruth experiences a cathartic impression; she becomes aware of the mutability of all existent things and meditates on the biblical motif of vanitas vanitatum, reconsidering its fatalistic meaning: Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. So shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon and finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on, just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground (73). This image suggests that there is a sense of permanence in transience. Although things remain where they have always been, they are forever changed by our passage. The way the spirit “fingers the tangible,” such objects as “shoes” and “hassocks,” is the only testimony of its passage through the world. In these symbols of “the dear ordinary,” the earthly and the transcendent spheres make contact. In this light, the name of the town—Fingerbone—becomes important as it points to the relationship between the spirit and the earthly objects. The representation of the fingerbone binds the world of the living with that of the dead. Disclosing the mutability of the world of flesh and bones, the fingerbone is a memento mori, a way of remembering the change inherent in all things. The fictional world that Robinson creates seems to be made of fingerbones: those of the dead people lying at the bottom of her textual universe and those of the characters who take hold of the novel. The fingerbone stands for a relic, a remnant of a past existence made visible to the reader—the only testimony that has survived the flood of time.

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To create female characters who can embrace mutability of the wild landscape, Robinson subverts the image of the settler wife or homesteader family. Sylvie, for example, prefers houses without solid boundaries. “Home” is therefore expanded into a flexible concept, operating on multiple levels of significance. As “home” can be translated into its opposite and the spatial meanings of sameness and otherness overlap, Robinson’s characters are “unhoused,” taken out of their ordinary condition. In this way, the American West is reenvisioned as a topos of the female outcast where the familiar notion of “housekeeping” is ironically placed under a question mark.

“Unhoused” Female Characters

According to Lindsey Tucker, there is an inter-connection between the idea of movement in women’s writing and their attempts to escape both thematic and generic restraints: “When women do write subversive texts, when they do manage escapes from imprisoning, male-identified narrative models, from genre, even from mimesis itself, their discourses often have as a central concern the problem of movement” (4). In Housekeeping, Robinson expands the boundaries of the American Western by creating female characters whose wandering existence indicates an inner fluidity and an ability to explore new psychological and geographical zones. The frontier in Housekeeping is not simply a geographical limit, “but the urge to move beyond conventional social patterns, beyond the dichotomy of urban and rural experience, beyond domestic concerns and physical boundaries into metaphysics” (Ravits 646). Robinson succeeds in moving beyond thematic and generic restrictions by using ideas from nineteenth century authors and incorporating them into her novel about the American West. Either explicitly or implicitly, Emerson, Thoreau and Dickinson are “blessedly unavoidable” in Housekeeping (Robinson 1993). Robinson employs the nineteenth century authors’ method to en-vision and re-vision reality. Her main character speculates, thinks via associations and links various aspects of existence by means of an “emotional logic” (Robinson, in Schaub 242). Ruth’s logic is not exclusive and does not function according to a disjunctive pattern (“either/or”), but to a conjunctive model (“and-and”) that connects disparate things (Miroiu 11).32 Her narrative has

32

As the Latin etymology of the word “speculum” (meaning “mirror”) suggests, Ruth is the one who holds a mirror up to diverse parts of reality, which interrelate and reflect each other.

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the poetic quality of melting together—by means of paradox and analogy— different, if not divergent, aspects of existence. Robinson thus illustrates in Housekeeping the idea that women can possess a philosophical discourse of their own, one that draws upon nineteenth century antecedents in fresh, unexpected and insightful ways. Similarly to nineteenth century American authors, Robinson crosses the boundaries of the ordinary by articulating the quest in terms of inner growth and individual development. One may argue that her main character seems to know that personal accomplishment is achieved only in solitude, away from the society where “Transaction—is assisted/By no Countenance” (Dickinson, poem no. 750). Ruth’s depth of perception feeds on silence and invisibility. She is both character and secret witness who considers herself privileged to watch while the others are unaware of her presence. As the narrator, she tries to find ways of voicing what is unsayable about her itinerant existence. Dickinson’s withdrawal from the public scene and her intense preoccupation with herself are also central in Robinson’s novel where notions of loss, despair and self-deprivation are transfigured into ways of fulfillment and selfempowerment. The author exemplifies in Ruth the personification of the private self, placing her in contrast with Lucille, the representation of the public self, the settled personality who abides by social rules. Suggestively, Ruth does not feel at home within the restrictive boundaries of school. She has a “cold, visceral dread of school” (77), where she refuses the company of others. The  principal’s words addressed to Ruth—“You’re going to have to learn to speak for yourself, and think for yourself, that’s for sure” (135)—lay stress on the importance of speech as a means of social integration and personal fulfillment. In contrast, Ruth’s elusiveness functions as a way of resistance to patriarchy, of refusing to assume a role in this system and of endowing silence and solitude with positive meanings. Effacement acquires a privileged status in Housekeeping, where personal growth is seen as an inner achievement accomplished in loneliness, “Through the solitary prowess/Of a Silent Life,” as Dickinson wrote in poem no. 750. Under Sylvie’s guidance, Ruth starts leading a secluded life. Their simple living and self-sufficiency point to the necessity of escaping society and the petty things that it entails. Their implicit declaration of independence resonates deeply with Emerson’s and Thoreau’s ideas of self-reliance, individual freedom and criticism of social conformity. Like the transcendentalists, Robinson’s characters advocate the benefits of a simplified lifestyle and the importance of a deep communion with nature. Even at home, Sylvie’s “camping” and her Spartan way of living, refusing any comfort, reveal an existence reduced to the bare necessities.

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Following in Thoreau’s footsteps, the characters go to the woods to experience “only the essential facts of life,” and the escape into nature becomes a voyage of spiritual discovery (Thoreau 72). The precarious shelter—the abandoned homestead—that they discover near the lake seems to be a diminished copy of Thoreau’s Walden Pond cabin. As in Walden, Robinson creates an inbetween topography, a space that is neither real (i.e. Massachusetts or Idaho), nor ideal (i.e. Virgil’s Arcadia). In this Thoreauvian space, Ruth accepts that her physical and mental boundaries can be overrun in a sympathetic communication with the surroundings. In Sylvie’s company, Ruth begins to perceive a secret world located beyond the normal limits of understanding while she passes through practices of initiation that presuppose inner transformation and renewal.33 At this climactic moment, the girl’s self-discovery is acutely related to her quest for family roots, mostly for her lost mother.34 Disoriented, taken away from everything that is familiar, Ruth begins her meditation upon the nature of human bonds and realizes that having a close connection with someone is a means of protection, of “housing” the self and shielding oneself from the invisible: Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them… Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire. I have been, so to speak, turned out of the house now long enough to have observed this in myself. Now there was neither threshold nor sill between me and these cold, solitary children who almost breathed against my cheek and almost touched my hair (154). Ruth’s thoughts refer to her lack of protection when confronted with the ­children—unknown messengers of the ineffable world. Attempting to establish 33

34

Discussing the symbolism of death and rebirth, Susan Rosowski stresses that Robinson extends “the metaphor of birth” and argues that the scene at the lake is a “birth meditation” (183). Martha Ravits suggests that Ruth’s “quest and choice is always for the missing mother.” Ravits compares Ruth’s search for her mother with such heroes as Ishmael, Huck Finn, and Isaac McCaslin, who “undertook the struggle for maturity by choosing surrogate fathers” (648). Roberta Rubenstein describes Ruth’s initiation as an inversion of the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. If, in the ancient story, the mother Demeter is searching for her daughter Persephone, then in Housekeeping, it is the daughter who is looking for her lost mother. Since the seducer, Hades or Pluto, is absent, the author excludes the male figure but preserves the imagery of death.

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contact with these children, Ruth engages in a game with their unseen presence, but amusement and recreation give way to meditation. Since the function of play is “stepping out of common reality into a higher order” (Huizinga 13), Ruth’s search for the invisible children can be interpreted as a limit experience situated at the border between the known and the unknown.35 As in Dickinson’s poem, “Our journey had advanced,” Ruth arrives “to that odd Fork in Being’s Road—/Eternity—by Term—” (poem no. 615). Playing with the invisible children becomes a pretext for revealing the elusive nature of the sacred, an allegorical way to evoke a reality that eludes words, an “attempt to make inroads on the vast terrain of what cannot be said” (Robinson 2012, 20). This insight into the unsayable leads Ruth to cleave more closely to Sylvie, necessitating their eventual renunciation of Fingerbone and the Foster home. They remain permanent transients, truly faithful to their itinerant condition.36 In addition to the drifting cowboy-sidekick pairs mentioned earlier, there is in Sylvie’s absconding with Ruth perhaps an echo and inversion of the ending of classic Westerns like Shane and The Searchers, in which the hero, a gunslinger or an avenger, enters a community as a transient and leaves as one.37 His individualistic violence, even if it proves necessary to righting injustice, excludes him from the community he defends, and, thus, his exit from the settlement or town affirms the value of lawful civilization, exemplified in Westerns by the sheriff who stays put to maintain the peace. In the case of Sylvie, she is choosing to leave the town because it would do emotional violence to her and Ruth both by forcing them into pro-social roles. The sheriff and the honorable citizens of the shallow-rooted Fingerbone cannot understand Ruth’s and Sylvie’s asocial behavior, as well as Ruth’s recognition of Sylvie as a mother figure and her desire to remain with Sylvie. Rather than cry “Come back!” as little Joey Starrett does to the departing hero Shane, young Ruth follows Sylvie out of valley so that they do not succumb to roles that belie their individuality and force them to choose against their mutual bond. 35

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The motif of playing with the invisible will be repeated by Ruth’s game in the orchard. She experiences a state of physical apathy, which shows that her spirit has internalized the knowledge acquired during the initiation trip. Ruth’s act of playing reenacts Huizinga’s idea that any game is an act of freedom, “a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition of its own” (Homo Ludens 8). The etymology of the word “transience,” from Latin transire, “to pass by, to go across,” is also relevant here since it suggests that movement is a form of mediation. The Searchers (Dir. John Ford, 1956) was adapted from the 1954 novel by Western author Alan Le May. Shane (Dir. George Stevens, 1953) was adapted from Jack Schaefer’s classic 1949 novel.

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When the two female characters return to Fingerbone, they refuse to resume their former existence, and, in a purgative act, they set fire to their house.38 The  destruction of the house and the characters’ hurried departure stage a double escape from the boundaries of society and from the limitations of their own home. Ruth’s remark—“Now truly we were cast out to wander and there was an end to housekeeping”—implies that they assume their transient position also as a result of society’s attitude towards them.39 Their refusal to be socially integrated and their adoption of a migrant existence are motivated by their desire not to be separated; the novel advocates the paradoxical idea that female kinship can be preserved through movement. Ruth’s and Sylvie’s itinerant existence places in a new perspective “Dickinson’s analogy of wandering without an established home” (Gardner 11). The act of crossing the bridge marks their entrance into the world of invisibility. Their passage over the bridge could be understood as perpetual transience, disquieting madness or even ghostly death.40 The author leaves the novel open-ended. What is clear by Housekeeping’s end is that domesticity and vagrancy are no longer opposite notions. “Home” becomes a concept that works in absentia as it can be projected upon the space of “otherness,” whereas vagrancy may expose that “travelling is a fool’s paradise,” and that all “journeys discover to us the indifference of all places” (Emerson 150). As Paula Geyh affirms, the characters’ options “do not appear to be limited to either vagrancy or inscription within the household,” so that “the feminine subjectivity might be constituted…by an interaction between the two” (120). At the end of the novel, Ruth and Sylvie inhabit marginal social locations, being outcasts who could be arrested for “increasing erratic behavior” (213), and Lucille becomes isolated even in the privacy of her own home and in the midst of social establishment. Yet Ruth discovers an interaction between the 38

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In her article on the novel, Christine Caver sees Ruth and Sylvie as two characters cast out and marginalized by society, arguing that “Housekeeping offers a damning critique of contemporary social structures by suggesting that as a culture we have not evolved much since Gilman’s unnamed narrator tore the wallpaper off the walls and Edna Pontellier walked into the sea.” Caver goes on to observe that “in Housekeeping’s world, as at the turn of the century, the alternatives for women who long to escape from an abusive or repressive system are situated somewhere between madness and death” (113–14). Being marginal characters, Ruth and Sylvie occupy what Kristeva called “the position of  the abject,” “that which has been cast off because it disrupts identity, system and order” (26). Thomas Foster argues that this “proleptic anticipation of the narrator’s death” can also be found in Emily Dickinson’s poem, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died,” “a poem Ruth was required to recite in school and which she remembers as one of the few events interrupting the tedium of her time there” (97).

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two states they separately inhabit. She describes how she and Sylvie’s “unredeemed” transience becomes meaningful through their repeated return to an imaginary home, and then reconsiders Lucille, recognizing that her sister is only superficially the stereotypical fifties housewife. In the last scene in the book, Ruth imagines Lucille in a restaurant in Boston, a sort of El Dorado bearing the attributes of a dreamlike place. Ruth thinks of Lucille and her figurative gesture of completing a circle of water on the table—an act that can be interpreted as an allusion to her circumscribed existence and also to her desire to reconnect the broken family ties. The vision in the sentence, constructed through an accumulation of negations, reveals Lucille’s attitude of effacement from the company of others while her full attention is focused on Ruth and Sylvie, in a perpetual meditation upon their fate: No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie (219). In this light, the ironic title of the novel places a question mark next to women’s condition as keepers of the house, drawing our attention in the opposite direction, to the “unhousing” of female characters in situations that vivify their “uniqueness” as women (Margaret Hall 29). Through her novel’s palimpsestic layering, Robinson thus proposes new versions of American Western female characters. For these women, transience comes to represent not only physical and geographical mobility but also a deeper understanding of the world that becomes possible only when mental and psychological limits are crossed. Perceiving “the visionary quality of all experience,” they travel in search of new ways of being, assuming greater social and existential risks than the frontiersmen whose stories Housekeeping supplants.41 * A version of this paper was published in How Far Is America from Here? (Selected Proceedings of the First World Congress of the International American Studies Association), edited by Theo D’Haen, Paul Giles, Djelal Kadir, and Lois Parkinson Zamora. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005: 415–40. I would like to thank Rodopi for permission to republish an updated, revised version of my paper in consultation with this volume’s editor, Jason Stevens, who kindly helped me with insightful ideas to further develop the connections between Housekeeping and the American Western genre. 41

Robinson in Fay 49.

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Works Cited Aschkenasy, Nehama. “Language as Female Empowerment in Ruth.” Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story. Ed. Judith A. Kates and Gail Twersky Reimer. New York: Ballantine, 1994. (111–124). Bassin, Donna, Margaret Honey, Meryle Mahrer Kaplan, eds. Representations of Motherhood. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Bernard, Jessie. The Future of Motherhood. New York: Dial, 1974. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. Caver, Christine. “Nothing Left to Lose: Housekeeping’s Strange Freedoms.” American Literature 68:1 (1996): 111–137. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978. Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1951. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. London: Papermac, 1997. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Wise and Co. Publishers, 1929. Fay, Sarah. “Marilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction No. 198.” The Paris Review 186 (Fall 2008): 37–66. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962. Foster, Thomas. “History, Critical Theory, and Women’s Social Practices: ‘Women’s Time’ and Housekeeping.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14.1 (1988): 73–99. Galehouse, Maggie. “Their Own Private Idaho: Transience in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 41.1 (Spring 2000): 117–131. Gardner, Thomas. “Enlarging Loneliness: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping as a Reading of Emily Dickinson.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 10.1 (2001): 9–33. Gatta, John. Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (219–224). Geyh, Paula E. “Burning Down the House? Domestic Space and Feminine Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature XXXIV 1 (1993): 103–122. Hall, Joanne. “The Wanderer Contained: Issues of ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’ in Relation to Hard Gray’s Little Orphan Annie and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Critical Survey 18.3 (2006): 37–50. Hall, Margaret C. UnliberatedWoman. Difficulties and Limitations in Changing Self. Washington and London: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation, 1979. Hedrick, Tace. “On Influence and Appropriation.” Iowa Review 22.1 (1992): 1–7.

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Heller, Dana A. The Feminization of the Quest Romance. Radical Departures. Austin: University of Texas, 1990. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950. Jung, C.G., Kerényi, C. Essays on a Science of Mythology. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Macpherson, Heidi Slettedahl. Women’s Movement: Escape as Transgression in North American Feminist Fiction. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2000. Magagna, Tony R. “Erased by Space, Ignored by History: Place and Gender in Marilynne Robinson’s West.” Western American Literature 43.4 (Winter 2009): 345–371. Maguire, James H. “Marilynne Robinson.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 206. Twentieth Century American Western Writers, First Series. Ed. Richard Cracroft. Detroit: A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, 1999. (251–260). Matthiessen, F.O. RenaissanceAmerican. Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. London: Oxford University Press, 1941. Meese, Elizabeth A. Crossing the Double Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Kent: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1993. Miroiu, Mihaela. Convenio. Despre natura, femei si morala/Convenio. About Nature, Women, and Morals. Bucharest: Alternative, 1996. O’Brien, Sheila Ruzychi. “Housekeeping: New West Novel, Old West Film.” Old West— New West. Centennial Essays. Ed. Barbara Meldrum Howard. Moscow and Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1993. (173–183). Painter, Rebecca M. “Loyalty meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (2010): 321–333. Pratt, Annis, Barbara White, Andrea Loewenstein, and Mary Wyer. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Ravits, Martha. “Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” American Literature 61.4 (December 1989): 644–666. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born. New York: Norton, 1976. Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980. ———. “My Western Roots” in Old West—New West. Centennial Essays. Ed. Barbara Meldrum Howard. Moscow and Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1993. (165–172). ———. “Hearing Silence: Western Myth Reconsidered” in The True Subject: Writers on Life and Craft. eds. Jane Smiley and Kurt Brown. Graywolf Press, 1993. (135–151). ———. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. 245–254 (a). ———. “The Way We Work, the Way We Live.” Christian Century 115.24 (1998): 823–833 (b). ———. When I Was a Child I Read Books. London: Virago Press, 2012.

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Rosowski, Susan J. Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity and the West in American Literature. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. (177–193). Rubenstein, Roberta. Boundaries of the Self, chapter “Transformations of the Ordinary.” Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois, 1987. (211–239). Schaub, Thomas. “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Contemporary Literature XXXV 2 (1994): 231–249. Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. ———. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. Smyth, Jacqui. “Sheltered Vagrancy in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Critique 40. 3 (1999): 281–292. Tate, Allen. “Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson. A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. R.B. Sewall. Englewood Cliffs, 1963. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 2nd edition. Ed. William Rossi. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992. Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Tucker, Lindsey. Textual Escap(e)ades. Mobility, Maternity, and Textuality in Contemporary Fiction by Women. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1994. Tyndall, Paul and Fred Ribkoff. “Loss, Longing, and the Optative Mode in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: on the Spiritual Value of Ruth’s Wandering Narrative.” Renascence 66.2 (Spring 2014): 87–102. Weisbuch, Robert. Emily Dickinson’s Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Wright, Will. Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Religion, Literature, and the Environment in the Work of Marilynne Robinson George B. Handley Abstract Robinson’s Housekeeping follows the interdependencies of humanity and nature that ecology implies to their most profound conclusions. The novel is an expression of how an ecologically-centered culture brings us to the edge of nihilism and thus renders metaphysical faith necessary if we are to choose meaningful action. Anticipating Robinson’s two-pronged criticisms in her non-fiction, the novel assails civilization for its intolerance and fear of ecology—for its own denial of human biology—but it also recognizes the dangers of environmental advocacy based on a dichotomous embrace of nature as civilization’s opposite. To mediate, Housekeeping offers an understanding of the need for a metaphysics of tolerance, forbearance, and humility in the face of humanity’s ambiguous and liminal position between the animal and spiritual dimensions of experience.

Marilynne Robinson’s 1989 book Mother Country provides a trenchant critique of England’s dumping of nuclear waste into the sea at the Sellafield Nuclear Processing Plant, a fact of significant environmental and social devastation. She is not one to choose her topics lightly or to write quickly, but the book is not well known either in the United States or in England.1 This is perhaps because the book challenges assumptions about what it means to be moral politically, environmentally, and socially. Robinson describes a long British history of cultivating an official morality toward the poor that has depended on their continued existence and suffering. She diagnoses that this is not merely a case of a divided nation but rather of a kind of strange co-dependence between a social ill and its supposed political cures, what she calls a kind of “moral aphasia” (Mother Country 193). In a review of the book and in an independent review of Sellafield’s actions, British scientist M.F. Perutz agrees with the government-sponsored studies that acknowledge the pool of plutonium off shore yet dispute that plutonium has anything to do with the high rates of cancer among citizens living in the area, especially the high rates of leukemia among the region’s children. Robinson responded by referring to 1 In a personal communication with this author, Robinson noted that among all of her publications, Mother Country was the book of which she was most proud.

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a report by the Environmental Committee that was intended to dispel fears about the dangers posed by plutonium to children: The report says there was discussion to the effect that “the only way in which incontrovertible evidence could be obtained of the effects of ingestion of contaminated shellfish on the human system was by finding a group which has never eaten shellfish, such as children.” Clearly the committee that is talking about the health effects of ingesting plutonium, in a setting where ill-health in children is the issue at hand. The implication of this discussion is that children are sheltered from the effects of contamination, even though the occasion and the starting point for all these inquiries is precisely the rate of leukemia deaths among Cumbrian children. When I described these reports in Mother Country, I interpreted them as an exercise in denial. I am not yet ready to retire the phrase “moral aphasia.” (1990) Robinson concludes: Doctors do not use the effects of atomic testing to discount the risk of x-rays to unborn children, and it is no more appropriate to use them to discount the importance of dumping plutonium into a populated environment, and into a sea from which fish are taken by many countries. This is especially true when the contamination is done in the course of producing weapons materials liable to being put to uses that will make Sellafield catastrophic by the most indulgent standard. (1990). Robinson, in other words, has uncovered the frail and immoral logic of those who wish to choose risk over caution, especially risk to those most vulnerable. While Steven Pinker is optimistic that human beings are evolving away from a more bloody and violent past and that death rates have dropped dramatically in warfare, other commentators on contemporary history are more skeptical. Rob Nixon, for example, notes the “slow violence” of nuclear waste, pollution, landmines, depleted uranium, climate change, and other disasters that leave consequences rarely measured or accounted for politically or legally.2 Those most vulnerable to this “slow violence” are the poor, the young, and the elderly; in other words, they are largely those who are deemed expendable by

2 See Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. New York: Viking Books, 2011; and Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

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those who count the dead or account for environmental degradation in the very short term. We can confidently say that moral aphasia prevails when hard and “objective” reasoning fails to account for invisible forms of violence but then concludes that there is no risk of such violence or that it simply does not exist. Robinson’s critique provides one example from England of the kind of monsters modern thought produces: a kind of reasoning that can only confirm and act on that which it already presupposes. She questions why “our education produces an acculturated blindness which precludes our taking in available, unambiguous information if it is contrary to our assumptions” (Mother 27). In addition to intending to uncover the environmental sins of England, she remains focused on the greater moral responsibility to “break down some of the structures of thinking that make reality invisible to us” (32). According to Robinson, the contradiction of a welfare state developed over centuries of British history that systematically creates poverty and suffering that it then routinely decries is responsible now for a culture that has elevated the art of pastoral praise even while it allows dumping plutonium waste that endangers England’s rural beauty and its own citizens, not to mention the commons of the ocean itself.3 Underscoring the irrationality of this scenario, she writes: 3 The book’s claims remain controversial in England and largely denied. Because Greenpeace successfully filed a libel suit against the book for its criticism of Greenpeace’s failure to censure the extent of England’s dumping and because Robinson refused to retract her claims, the book is essentially banned in England. In a review of an earlier version of my research on Robinson’s environmentalism, ecocritic Greg Garrard noted: “There was not, nor is there, a ‘pool of plutonium’ off the English coast—even according to the Irish government, which campaigned against emissions throughout the 1960s and 1970s—and Greenpeace certainly did not ignore the problem, as they showed in their successful libel action against Robinson. If Robinson is averse to ensuring the accuracy of her own work, those who cite or publish it might consider doing so; Google helps. The most egregious and baffling claim, especially from natives of a country that boasts a welfare system that would delight a social Darwinist, is that ‘England’s welfare system systematically creates poverty and suffering that it then routinely decries’” (32–33). It is curious why a critique coming from citizens of the United States should be disqualified on the basis of the U.S. welfare system, since neither Robinson nor I indicate that we prefer the U.S. welfare system, let alone social Darwinism. Google helps, of course, but so do libraries and so does reading the evidence Robinson herself provides. As Robinson has argued, what “all the plant’s defenders ever dispute…is the importance of the plutonium contamination of Britain’s coast, not the fact of it” (1990). And this claim of its relative unimportance is not sustained by the research. I find no indication that Greenpeace successfully demonstrated that Robinson’s claims were not based in fact. It is strange that a literary critic like Garrard, well versed in post-structuralism, would find it illogical to claim that a massively bureaucratic society, English or otherwise, intensely interested in its imperial

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For thirty years a pool of plutonium has been forming off the English coast. The tide is highly radioactive and will become more so. The government inspects the plant and approves the emissions from it. The government considers the plant poorly maintained and managed, and is bringing pressure to lower emissions. The government is expanding the plant and developing another one in Scotland. Foreign wastes enter the country at Dover and are transported by rail through London. (209) Sympathetic to Marx’s deep economic criticisms of capitalism, Robinson offers what might be considered a morally inflected criticism of the “refinements of life made possible by privacy and amenity” that have rendered degradation invisible within the public sphere of official memory and morality (89). Environmental degradation, for Robinson, is a profound moral failing that ignores the well-being of the whole of the social network. That England is now polluting its own backyard is merely the coming home to roost of the logic of social erasure that began with enclosure,4 as critiqued by Raymond Williams, and, as Robert Marzec has additionally suggested, led English colonialism to disguise its exploitation of resources in the language of Western refinement. Despite these similarities, Robinson’s is a form of environmentalism that has not sat well with environmentalists. In an interview with this author, Robinson explains why: I’m profoundly critical of the environmental movement. Not because I have any problem with the idea that the environment needs to be rescued, but in the sense that I think that they [environmental activists] have been stunningly ineffective and in many cases a major part of the image, might have a tendency, witting or unwitting, to produce the very conditions it ostensibly is designed to eliminate. In an interview with this author, Robinson further identified the hypocrisy of the refusal of the British branch of Greenpeace to distribute in the United States any of its information about England’s nuclear dumping and to claim that they had “scored a ban” on all nuclear dumping in England. Robinson claims that what they sued Robinson for and demanded that she excise from her book were passages that “reflected badly on Greenpeace” (Handley Interview 116). 4 Enclosure refers to the period of English history in the 18th and 19th centuries when acts of parliament consolidated open fields, or commons, into more clearly delineated and restricted areas of private property, thus driving up the value of the land. This limited the common rights of the peasantry who under earlier open field system rights had access to land held by private owners.

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problem…. I am who I am, and I write about landscape and the human investment in landscape and vice versa, I mean the investment of soul, because I want to make people love where they are. I think that the best defense, the best sort of on-the-ground defense for any landscape is to have people love it, and any landscape deserves that. handley and larsen 114, 116–117.

These comments belie the complexity of her own argument, however. Whereas Wallace Stegner once warned, “we may love a place and still be dangerous to it,” Robinson moves us further in the realm of moral and theological reasoning when she raises an even more tragic prospect: we may be dangerous to a place precisely because we love it (55). Among its many disclosures, Mother Country reveals the co-dependency of violent practices and public affections for land, which might in this sense be considered a kind of imperial nostalgia; she implies that love is particularly dangerous when people abdicate their own individual experiences and responsibilities of judgment because they rely on the “right” rhetoric or institutions to do the work of judgment for them. This over-reliance on others’ judgments, of course, leads to the worst of environmental consequences because it separates the science of ecology from what we consider to be the “environment,” usually with a heavy dose of indifference toward the former and a loud and pronounced affection for the latter. This ecological indifference is usually because in its implications of interdependence, collective responsibility, and uncertainty, ecology erodes our sense of radical autonomy and disrupts the illusions of what we imagine are our limited and discrete spheres of responsibility. It is significant, however, that Robinson nevertheless believes in the palliative effect of experientially informed love of landscape, what she insists is a kind of religious “investment of soul.” In an essay entitled “Wilderness,” she identifies a similar pattern of denial and contradiction in her native home in the West (Robinson was born in upper-state Idaho), where the love of remote wild lands often goes hand-in-glove with wanton abuse. Love for land, Robinson nevertheless insists, is indispensable as long as it accomplishes precisely the opposite of what it sets out to do; instead of possessing, love must dispossess. While it is a quality of judgment that centers the self, love won’t achieve its full effect until it has decentered the self and caused a suspension of judgment; until, in other words, it has caused suffering: “all love is in great part affliction. My bond with my native landscape was an unnamable yearning, to be at home in it, to be chastened and acceptable, to be present in it as if I were not present at all” (“Wilderness” 246). This soulful love is clearly, then, a moral risk because it threatens to dissipate the self and undermine the foundations of identity as it opens the self to the self-chastening and self-doubting experience of awe that nature provides.

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William Cronon has offered a well-known post-structural critique of how wilderness protections have promoted conceptions of distant and exotic western locales that actually makes lands in western states convenient targets for massive environmental destruction. Similarly, Robinson criticizes how easily the veneration of wilderness areas in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, especially beloved by those who have been “chastened” by their struggles to settle and survive, has allowed the United States to transform what Robinson reminds us are often universally revered spaces into nuclear testing and dumping ground.5 “We have all behaved,” she writes, “as if there were a place where actions would not have consequences” (246). But Robinson goes beyond Cronon’s post-structural argument to suggest an ontological shallowness to wilderness advocacy. We tend toward discourses and postures of moral certainty that belie our inherently ambivalent position vis-à-vis the physical facts of our existence. For Robinson, England’s Sellafield problem is just one example of how culture historically has worked as a mask: “the universality of selfdeceptive and self-destructive behavior is what must impress us finally” (251). Why else, she asks, would we find such a persistent pattern of cultures asserting “the sovereign privilege of destroying what we would go to any lengths to defend”? (248). Her point is not, of course, that we shouldn’t protect nature from the ravages of civilization or that we should use such contradictions or difficulties as an excuse to be indifferent, but she raises the difficult question of how to engage in such a labor with sufficient moral certitude. She concludes the essay advocating a rare and difficult humility that she suggests is essential to the morality of knowing and acting in the world, a humility that our environments of home should inspire: I think we are desperately in need of a new, chastened, self-distrusting vision of the world, an austere vision that can postpone the outdoor pleasures of cherishing exotica, and the first world pleasures of assuming we exist to teach reasonableness to the less fortunate, and the debilitating pleasures of imagining that our own impulses are reliably good…. Every environmental problem is a human problem. Civilization is the ecology being lost. We can do nothing that matters if we cannot encourage its rehabilitation. (253–254) 5 The fact that locals in these western states have sometimes strongly advocated for the extraction of fossil fuels or even the dumping of nuclear waste, even at the expense of their own health, would suggest that it is not merely the geographical remove at which wilderness areas lie that explains this tendency to imagine a morally free space. It is perhaps the psychological remove at which so many environmental crises lie from our moral center of being.

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Robinson’s remarks have provoked criticism from environmentalists. David Orr, a well-known environmental activist and insightful scholar, reacted harshly to Robinson’s advocacy of self-distrust, asking, “Are we to take no joy in the creation or find no solace or refuge in a few wild places? Who among us imagines their impulses to be reliably good? Would she confine us to shopping malls and a kind of indoor, air-conditioned introspection?” (189). (Living as I do in the thick of the wilderness debate in Utah, I can think of not a few atv users, not to mention their suv-driving, mountain biking counterparts who believe their impulses to be reliably good, but I digress.) If the idea of wilderness should be discarded or revised, he suggests with further irony: “The recognition that governments sometimes use less-populated areas for military purposes hardly constitutes a reason to fill up what’s left of Idaho with shopping malls and freeways.” Orr’s criticisms, I think, are a symptom of the shorter-term pressures of ideological and political battles over the protection of land and resources that demand epistemologies of moral certitude. Jeremiads of moral certitude are, not surprisingly, common in environmental thought, especially when we consider the high stakes and the formidable confidence and power of those who wage war against nature. If environmentalism does not have room for this kind of profound self-questioning that is necessary to moral judgment, however, it is fair to question the relevance of literature to the global environmental crisis. Ecocritics have long argued that stories matter because they shape our values, inform our sense of our humanness, and by indirection shape our environmental behavior. Nevertheless, literature remains largely irrelevant to the political realm where policy is determined. I would suggest that literature is proving inadequate to the task of shaping political behavior not because it isn’t political enough but because in its insistent exploitation of metaphor, it relies on a patient suspension of disbelief that in the politics of environmentalism— pro- or anti- —is woefully inadequate. Of course, literature can and does grow political in response to these pressures, but if Robinson is to be believed, this would impoverish literature, and more importantly it would impoverish the culture from which our environmental behavior emerges. Literature is inadequate, in other words, because civilization itself is inadequate; we don’t inhabit a civilization that values self-distrust or seeks self-chastening. Literature is not the only casualty of our impatience with incertitude. The inherent contingencies of science are flatly ignored in the political and cultural battles between the two great reliable certainties of contemporary culture: objective science and universal religion. The implication here is quite profound: to the degree that it remains resistant to the claims of science and other secular epistemologies, religion calcifies in its claims of absolute

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knowledge and simultaneously turns its attention away from this world. Its relevance to a worldly ethics is dependent upon its openness to secular knowledges, even while its value in addressing global climate change is precisely its willingness to speak in the imperative tense. Philosopher of science Michel Serres in his important work The Natural Contract would prefer an imperative that is nevertheless contingent, waiting upon and open to the findings of secular knowledge; global climate change requires an imagination of the planetary and the universal and interconnected contingencies of all life, which is what he believes “a diligent religion of the world” can provide. If overrun entirely by the facts of science and by the authoritarianism of the indicative, religion will lose its imperative force. It must retain its special place as an intermediary discourse between a totalizing claim on all knowledge and the limited sciences of man, and Serres is hopeful it will play this role in relationship to the global crisis of climate change as long as it can resist the temptation to lay claim to certitude.6 It would seem that the secular, for that matter, must loosen its own grip on claims of absolute certitude in its judgment of matters of metaphysics. This does not require that we return to a society in which religion is the queen of sciences but that we cultivate one in which different ways of knowing—the secular and the sacred, the physical and metaphysical, the indicative and the imperative—are brought together in a collective dialogue in the interest of our common survival. It is painfully obvious—even if frequently ignored—that the collectivity that is required for the human population to extricate itself from the problems posed by global climate change is more radical and more important than the particular claims of any one political party, religious belief, or scientific view. The uncertainties of the new world (dis)order of global climate change present an opportunity to return us to the sometimes frightening responsibility of our freedom. Of course, uncertainty and chaos often breed a more entrenched rhetoric of certitude, but ecocriticism can point us toward the contingencies of our biological existence in deep time in order to facilitate a more ethical reading of the world. 6 It is certainly apparent that institutionalized religion is undergoing one of the more significant transitions in religious history in its collective response to the global environmental crisis. Since the 1967 publication of Lynn White’s important critique of the Judeo-Christian tradition’s neglect of environmental care, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” theologians and church leaders have become increasingly engaged in articulating the theological grounds for this kind of “religion of the world.” See, for examples, Gottlieb, Cobb, Teilhard de Chardin, Haught, Polkinghorne, Berry, and the Fall 2008 edition of the Journal of Religion and Society devoted to “Religion and the Environment.”

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In this sense, literature’s inadequacy—its indirection and ambiguities—can become its strength. Jonathan Bate has argued that “[e]cocriticism does have a contribution to make to green politics, as postcolonial and feminist reading contribute to race and gender politics, but its true importance may be more phenomenological than political” (75). The poetics of the literary, then, can function as a kind of moral imagination. Octavio Paz argues that literature’s relevance is found in the very workings of metaphor to hold in meaningful relationship unlike things, without collapsing their differences, and that this imaginative capacity, which he links to the concept of caritas, is essential to the survival of the planet. Paz argues: “the immense, stupid, and suicidal waste of natural resources must come to an immediate end if the human species wishes to survive on this earth” (Other 156). For Paz, society has been handed over to a market that simply “does not know how to choose. Its censorship is not ideological; it has no ideas” (144). The correction for this problem, paradoxically, is not the dogma of ideas but a metaphorical imagination sufficient to overcome our “aesthetic impoverishment.” The market flattens the ambiguity of our strange human kinship with and yet difference from the natural world into a simple sameness in which nature is merely an extension of all human activity or a mere backdrop to it. So to prevent the end of history, Paz insists that literature must help us to exercise our imaginative freedom to judge values and to establish relationships between the physical world and humanity without collapsing their differences. Aesthetic experience foregoes the certainty of knowing or the need for control even as it stimulates the imagination of a totality. He explains: “the operative mode of poetic thought is imagining, and imagination consists, essentially, of the ability to place contrary or divergent realities in relationship. All poetic forms and all linguistic figures have one thing in common: they seek and often find, hidden relationships. In the most extreme cases, they unite opposites” (158). He calls these relationships “buried realities” that are “restor[ed] to life” through the poetic imagination. While Paz’s statement that poetry mnemonically recovers lost truths from the past is a pretension, the glance of this poetics is essentially to the future. Paz hopes for a freedom from and defiance against a positivism that can only believe in historical or biological determinism; his earth-saving metaphysics is a suspension of disbelief in—which is not a denial of—biological fact. I use the term “metaphysics” not to denote an essentialized transcendence but rather to indicate a kind of pointing to and feeling after what human ­consciousness means in relationship to the biological facts of life. I concur with Conor Cunningham and others who have insisted that even a stipulation that matter is the base reality of all existence makes a metaphysical claim. Cunningham, quoting John Peterson, notes: “‘If matter is the ultimate

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substrate and is identified with some actual thing, then all differences within matter must come from something besides matter’. Consequently, the materialist must admit that his description is metaphysical; it tacitly invokes something that transcends what is basic at the level of immanence, or the merely physical. The only other option is to deny all change, just as one must, it seems, deny objects themselves…. [in such denial] we find it impossible to provide a metaphysics that can notice real difference” (267–268). To speak in qualitative terms about reality is to engage the risks of metaphysics, to speak above and beyond what the material world determines or dictates as ontology. Miguel de Unamuno insists: “What has value for us, and even more, reality for us, is the differential, which is the qualitative; pure, undifferentiated quantity is something that might as well not exist as far as we are concerned, for it does not act” (257). And herein lies the challenge for any consideration of the relevance of literature, science, or religion in relationship to our biology: they are various methods for investigating the qualities of our belonging in the physical world even though they implicitly or explicitly denote the reasons for our human separation and difference. Robinson’s environmental imagination is consistent with most environmental thought in that she concurs that environmental degradation stems from a false separation of the human and the natural. The advances of civilization falsely suggest that human beings are not themselves natural and that the environment, as the word implies, is merely that which surrounds us but not in fact part of our own bloodstreams, skin cells, and minds. In a recent interview, she explained her philosophy of landscape: There’s probably nothing stranger than the fact that we exist on a planet. Very odd. Who does not feel the oddness of this? I mean, stop and think about where we actually are in the larger sense. It seems to me as if every local landscape is a version of the cosmic mystery, that it is very strange that we’re here, and that it is very strange that we are what we are. In a certain sense the mystery of the physical reality of the human being is expressed in any individual case by the mystery of a present landscape. The landscape is ours in the sense that it is the landscape that we query. So, we’re created in the fact of ourselves answering to a particular sense of amazement. handley and larsen 114

Robinson raises here the question of a paradox at the heart of the environmentalist quest for reunion and re-harmonization with nature. If our humanity is probed and forged in the moment of answering to amazement, to the extent

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that we refuse to “query” the landscape, as she puts it, we create a culture and civilization founded on a denial of the amazement nature inspires. We lose “aesthetic pleasure in the human presence as a thing to be looked at and contemplated, at the same time we cease to enjoy human act and gesture, which civilization has always before found to be beautiful even when it was also grievous or terrible, as the epics and tragedies and the grandest novels testify” (Death of Adam, “Introduction” 27). However, unless we can accept the profound paradox that confronting our biological commonality with the world delineates our difference, culture becomes a denial of both nature and our humanity. She explains: I think that human beings feel strange in their circumstance. One of the ways that they have of hiding from human reality is to create artificial environments. Look at people from Babylon forward; when people have power they create an artificial environment around themselves that can suggest to them that they’re immune from the consequences of being mortal. And palaces, all these things, are monuments to this impulse. And as we have created a more technological civilization and one that is simply more profuse in its products, we can do more and more to artificialize our environment to the point that we have no idea where we are by looking at what surrounds us. “Radiant” 114

So either we experience amazement in the natural world and thus simultaneously recognize and express our human otherness or we construct a world that we then deny our hand in making and thus erase both our naturalness and our humanity. It is not an easy set of choices. Stefan Mattessich insists that the realm of the spirit or of the metaphysical in Robinson’s novel Housekeeping— this space of amazement and radical disorientation—lays the ground for its own potential undoing; the metaphysical is rendered necessary by the confrontation with the physical but is then simultaneously questioned or divided by the perpetually uncertain and unstable space it occupies. Robinson, he concludes, “might not be in control of her subject, which is precisely the impossibility of such control, and even when its name is spirit” (65). That nature is this site of our metaphysical possibility might not be exactly a modern idea, but to also suggest that it is simultaneously the grounds of our metaphysical doubt and uncertainty means that the metaphysical probing into the nature of physical life lies at the very core of our moral challenges and possibilities. If Robinson is a neo-romantic, as her declared love of the transcendentalists might imply, she is nevertheless also willing to allow nature to challenge the

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very foundations of her romantic affections. When Whitman reflected on what he called the “strange chemistry” of natural regeneration, he felt that it implied something wonderful, something akin to but perhaps superior and more universal than sectarian notions of eternal life. For this reason, he famously wrote “to die is different than anyone supposed, and luckier.” Whitman came close to understanding ecological process, but what ultimately drew him away were the more existentially frightening and ethically complicated implications of nature’s indifference toward death and human distinction. He hoped we might flee from the artificiality of culture and thus confront the bottom line: all flesh will die and regenerate and thus all life is radically equal and interconnected by a great whole. But if natural law makes no distinctions between life forms and their various stages of decay and regeneration, he couldn’t explain why we should continue to insist on or believe in the value of human difference. Whitman had a hard enough time accepting his own implication that all human beings were radically equal, but he closed the door on the more frightening prospect of the equality of all life.7 The “radical democracy” of nature, in other words, has dark implications, as Cunningham notes, since it eliminates personhood: “if there’s no person, and if Darwinism is a universal theory, a universal acid, then it’s worth asking what we are really getting so upset about: ‘eat, take, steal, consume all you want; yet at the same time there is no you that is doing the consuming, and moreover, you have no legitimate protest in not being consumed’” (420). In other words, evolutionary theory, understood in a totalizing fashion and without recourse to metaphysics, offers a very pronounced metaphysics of its own, summarized in the extra-scientific aphorism, “Nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution.”8 Which if true implies that human personhood, morality, and imagination as free and undetermined by mechanical laws are obliterated, rendering environmental degradation as meaningless as it is to a fundamentalist awaiting the rapture. If we wish to worry ourselves and worry others about environmental degradation, beyond mere self-interest in survival, we must admit to our reliance on at least some modest claims to human exceptionalism. Deep Ecology has run its course, allowing us to see the problems biocentrism poses: if we don’t insist on our human difference, why should human suffering and injustice bother us? In  other words, what Romanticism recoiled from but which Robinson confronts more directly is the possibility that the radical equality of ecological process also implies a materialist nihilism. Biocentrism is really, in the words .

7 For more on Whitman and ecology, see Killingsworth and Handley. 8 Attributed to evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975).

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Mattessich uses to describe the ontological implications of Housekeeping, “a flirtation with nothingness” (72). Only a metaphysics aware of and responsive to the facts of biology will be adequate to the problems we face. Moreover, we should not pretend that such a cosmology is given by the nature of reality. It is chosen and imagined, as much as anything else, which means it is a world that we wish to inhabit. This is the dream and hope of a biocentric literary imagination; it rises from the ashes of nothingness with a coherence and beauty that signifies the possibility of human belonging in a world subject to change, death, and chaos.

Housekeeping and the Metaphysics of Ecology

Robinson’s novel Housekeeping follows the interdependencies that ecology implies to their most profound conclusions, most notably the point at which a  renunciation of absolute certitude is necessary. It is only in the context of such dissolution of the knowing and acting self that the hope for transcendent possibility obtains its greatest meaning and value. Because it renounces ­knowledge but embraces hope, the novel is an expression of how an ecologically-centered culture brings us to the edge of nihilism and thus renders metaphysical faith necessary if we are to choose meaningful action. If David Orr were familiar with Robinson’s novel, Housekeeping, it is doubtful he would have launched into his environmentalist criticism of Robinson. No critic of the novel has ever noted that she seems nostalgic for more shopping malls in Idaho. Orr is disappointed that Robinson implies that “we ought to solve human problems first. Whether environmental problems and human problems might be related, Robinson does not say” (189). The novel, however, consistently inaugurates an imagination of profound confluence between nature and culture and explores what it would mean for culture to establish a more profound equilibrium with ecological process. It is fair to say, however, that it does not offer the usual warm and comforting pastoral vision of what such harmony portends. In other words, the novel criticizes civilization for its intolerance and fear of ecology—for its own denial of human biology—but it also recognizes the dangers of advocacy based on a dichotomous embrace of nature as civilization’s opposite. Housekeeping offers an understanding of the need for a metaphysics of tolerance, forbearance, and humility in the face of humanity’s ambiguous and liminal position between the animal and spiritual dimensions of experience. Robinson’s ecology functions simultaneously as a site of memory and the continuity of human difference, on the one hand, and forgetting and the end of human difference on the other. In this duplicitous function, water, land, and

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plant life serve to provide a rich and ambiguous sense of place in the West. While natural landmarks serve to root her characters in the land, they simultaneously open them up to vistas of otherness that are never fully assimilated. It is important to recognize just how unsettling ecology is, in this sense, to a rooted and historical sense of place; deep ecological vision creates a radically detached sense of awe in the face of natural regeneration. The novel commemorates the loss of home even as it seeks to reenact its rediscovery, which would suggest that if Jonathan Bate is correct in arguing that “art is the place of exile where we grieve for our lost home on the earth” (73), our human condition would appear to be even more tragic than Bate seems to realize: the work of human consciousness is always to remember and commemorate—in the retroactive and delayed mode of representation—what we have already lost, to arrive late to our state of embeddedness in the world, as if we had already departed. In his Eighth Elegy, the poet Rilke described this as always being “spectators, always, everywhere,/facing all this, never the beyond… Who has turned us around like this, so that/whatever we do, we find ourselves in the attitude/of someone going away? …so we live, forever taking our leave”(The Essential Rilke 129). The only balm for our tragedy is that art attempts to found civilization on an acknowledgement of the limits of our perceptions of the world, which are really just little worlds of our own making. To acknowledge this is cause for humility, but also for faith, if we are to believe that we do not need to renounce the possibility of meaning and wholeness beyond the earth’s unpredictable and indifferent changeability. Any other kind of environmental politics, the novel implies, will be profoundly counterproductive. Mattessich describes, with characteristic accuracy, the depths to which Robinson is willing to go to make this point: “[the novel] is about the space of this unknowing and the risk that goes with living there: a splitting of the self felt in its displaced boundary or as its moral, even physical implication in the world, and at a register of existential catastrophe” (60). Ruth’s grandfather lived on the plains in the Midwest in a “house dug out of the ground, with windows just at earth level and just at eye level, so that from without, the house was a mere mound, no more a human stronghold than a grave, and from within, the perfect horizontality of the world in that place foreshortened the view so severely that the horizon seemed to circumscribe the sod house and nothing more” (3). The liminality of the house does not fully distinguish human space from its environment (and thus suggests the death of Edmund’s human difference). Significantly, this lack of distinction drives the young boy outward in search of a more clearly delineated horizon line and separation from his surroundings. His desire for separation in turn leads to the  creation of another order of difference: amateur artistic

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representations of the landscape. In order to escape his embedded naturalism he paints scenes of imaginary mountains drawn from travel literature and fantasy; art here becomes imaginative procreation as opposed to empirical mimeticism. The irony is that these fantastical mountains fuel the fires of desire for their materialization, even though his home among the real mountains of Idaho only reinvites the problem of human self-erasure in a landscape of innumerable mountains. What the naked exposure of the landscape reveals is not the definitive delineation or solidity of the objective world but rather the “puzzling margins” that are exposed by the shifting forms of the world as a result of its ecological history in deep time (4). The mountains and the lake are not what they have always been, even if the shallowness of human memory cannot reach back far enough in time to recall its myriad changes. This elusive quality of nature is true not only because of changes brought about by human history, but because of the lake’s ecology. The home is at once above the water level of an old lake and also vulnerable to rising water tables below the ground. The built environment here can never definitively establish its solidity and invulnerability to the transmogrifications of nature. Just as her grandfather’s childhood home vacillated on the horizon line of the plains, Ruth’s place is both above and below water, solid and fluid, and outside and inside of the bounds of ecological time. What also allows Ruth to imagine the contours of these “puzzling margins” is the loss of her grandfather, her mother, and all human forbearers in the lake. Human death and suffering, although experienced as incommensurable and always as a setting apart of the self and of the human community, become commensurable with the sense of nature’s deep time. This perception of deep time creates the conditions of the self’s dissolution in the physical world, symbolized in the water, a sign of nature’s “puzzling margins” as the place also of lost human memory. There are, for example, three lakes: the ancient lake of groundwater “which is smothered and nameless and altogether black” below the surface of the soil; Fingerbone Lake, “the lake of charts and photographs;” and the lake that is formed in the spring by runoff from the mountains. There is even a fourth lake, “the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains” (9). Ruth’s grandfather was buried, along with an entire train on which he worked, in Fingerbone Lake one evening when it tragically derailed from an overpassing bridge into the icy water below. People left the town because the “wind smelled of it, and they could taste it in the drinking water” (9). Ruth later pushes this idea to its limits, claiming that because of Noah’s flood all of the earth’s lakes “taste a bit of blood and hair” (193). All that remains of the suffering that has come before is

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“a certain pungency and savor in the water, and in the breath of creeks and lakes, which, however sad and wild, are clearly human” (193). If Noah’s flood was a kind of planetary baptism to give humanity a new beginning, the implication here is that the newness is a ruse. The flood was a baptism in human history, not unlike what we now understand by the term Anthropocene; we can no longer find spaces on the planet unaffected by human economy. Humanity is never Adam, beginning for the first time, but beginning yet again, seeking to make the world again, not ex nihilo but from the fragments of the past. The paradox is that knowledge of the ubiquity of the human story is gained by the human imagining of an ecological perspective of deep time, by the paradox of a human biocentric imagination. In other words, the environmental quest to naturalize human experience results in the humanization of nature, presumably the great environmental sin. This resulting ambiguity of “human nature” is the unspoken truth of experience: society lies subaqueous as it were, immersed both womblike and tomblike in natural history. The uncanny continuity and discontinuity suggested here animates the world. The animation of the world, as Unamuno insists, cannot and should not be separated from the human desire to see it animated. In other words, its animation is not a givenness but a function of undecidability: is Nature a continuation or discontinuation of human meaning? “Imagination,” writes Unamuno, “which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything, and even makes it like man. And man’s task is to supernaturalize Nature, that is, to make it divine by humanizing it, by helping it assume consciousness, in short. Reason, on the other hand, mechanizes or materializes everything” (166). Aesthetic experience with the natural world perpetually signifies this ambiguity: nature is the experience of the end and the realization of the beginning of human difference. The ambiguity of a humanized nature is also a naturalized humanity. What it means then to “imitate” nature and divide subject from object is perhaps as ambiguous as looking through a glass darkly. It means that in looking at nature, we are staring into both a mirror and a window, perpetually confused about where we begin and where we end. This has important implications for what it means to remember the past and what it means to have a sense of place. Edouard Glissant argues that we are tempted by a kind of territorialism by which by the “sacred root” of genealogy stakes its claim on the past and on a particular place. But this is in contrast to what happens in the experience of  diaspora whereby populations develop a more detached sense of place that is facilitated by an aesthetic, rather than an economic, experience of the earth. For both Glissant and Robinson, the genealogical impulse is central to

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civilization’s yearning for permanence and its intolerance of nature’s threat of human oblivion. Even the grandfather briefly flirts with the confidence that with enough ingenuity and craft, he can “build things that might be considered permanent” (47). Later Ruth notes: “the appearance of relative solidity in my grandmother’s house was deceptive” (158). The sensation of imminent change and human abandonment of domestic spaces is both the ontological fact and the ecological rule of existence. For this reason, Ruth learns that “it is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall” (159). This “fall” into ecological dissipation is the broadest implication of the fact of human mortality. The death of the grandfather inaugurates the girls’ suffered succession of deaths and abandonments: “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” (13). Once Ruth’s aunt Sylvie takes over the housekeeping, the house becomes this space of balanced liminality between culture and nature, between the human and the more-than-human: “she preferred [the house] sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude. We had crickets in the pantry, squirrels in the eaves, sparrows in the attic” (99). Sylvie’s housekeeping is an embrace of radical interdependency with nature, which is akin to how Glissant defines ecology as political. This embrace of our ecology, however, cannot remain static and still produce social meaning. Being embedded in ecology radically equalizes human relations and inaugurates a crisis for the community to insist on discriminating ethically about human values: Who will keep the children safe? Should not human loss warrant suffering or compassion? In other words, although offering a vision of what human experience might be in its most profoundly ecological sense, Robinson’s narrative of Sylvie’s extravagances hardly offers a comforting and viable model of ecological harmony and balance; instead it opens up a new possibility of existential terror.9 Without economic pursuit and the possibility of constructing an artificial world that would protect them 9 I am in agreement here with Christine Caver’s claim that the novel’s apparent rejection of patriarchal structures does not result in a viable alternative of “freedom and choice” as many feminist critiques have suggested (112). Instead it results in a kind of “social death” and thus suggests not simply an invalidation of patriarchy but a “damning critique of contemporary social structures” (113). Ruth’s experience is one of considerable trauma and loss and her impressively articulate voice, so starkly different from her almost silent social persona, is a representation of “speaking the unspeakable” (117). I simply want to take this argument to its ecological conclusion: what is unspeakable is not only human suffering but what it might mean to accept our naturalized humanity.

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at least partially from the ravages of nature, Sylvie and the girls lie open in an undifferentiated state of ecological being; nature’s capacity to regenerate and transform the meaning of death means that it acts as both mnemonic repository and amnesiac abyss of human experience. This absolute negation of human value is only possible, of course, in a mode of housekeeping like Sylvie’s where “human boundaries were overrun” (119). Her inability to keep house distinct from the elements from which it is made seems preferable to the artificiality of a sometimes patriarchal and socially segregated society and suggests a kind of cultural dynamic that is more attuned to the rhythms of natural change. However, her ecological politics ultimately leads to perpetual exposure to physical risk and homelessness. Sylvie won’t cave in to the artificialities of social or economic expectation, but her mothering proves directionless and without order altogether; it is, again to invoke the words of Mattessich, “a flirtation with nothingness” (72). Robinson emphasizes that the liminality between nature and culture is the particular realm of orphaned people who live in spaces off the maps of history: the rural, provincial, and the disparaged, people who Mother Country and her essay “Wilderness” suggest bear the brunt of civilization’s moral aphasia: “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” (62). Ruth sees that water itself is a perpetual sign of “the accumulated past, which vanishes, but does not vanish, which perishes and remains…. [the home of] those who were never found and never missed, who were uncommemorated, whose deaths were not remarked, nor their begettings” (172). As Mattessich argues, the constant making and unmaking of human difference that the lake and nature stimulate results in a self that “becomes pure sensorium, less a ‘thing’ than a displaced or differential rate of change in a fluid and fluctuating field of force” (69). The lake signifies the repository of memories and this onto-ecological reality that civilization cannot contain or tolerate. Ruth understands it as her reality, but the suggestion is that everyone else in the settled and civilized world is merely in denial. But if nature is the ground zero of human meaning because of the way it dissolves the human story into fluid, perpetually transforming physical form, it is therefore perpetually historicized by the metaphysical yearnings of human memory. The lake reminds Ruth of human death and loss, and, thus, like Proust’s madeleine cakes, the richly abundant water and other natural phenomena of this enclosed Idaho valley stimulate the senses and awaken the characters to an echo of the past and turn them fully to an apprehension of the human present/presence. The surface of the lake, as both mirror and window,

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comes to signify this paradoxical duality. After reading an old obituary about her grandmother, Ruth dreams she is walking across the frozen surface of the lake, which 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. (41) The undifferentiated past as a radical annulment of human difference inaugurates the human duality of being in-but-not-of the world, and of death as rebirth and birth as death. The living mind’s capacity to access this netherworld of the dead and to comprehend our natural destiny as biological beings is limited but maybe more importantly enabled by embodiment itself. The novel seems to suggest that as long as we are alive and conscious, we are separated from that which we are: part of the undifferentiated stuff of the physical world. Robinson’s theology emerges as the hope that our capacity to contemplate ourselves in the reflections of water and of the natural world provides a metaphysical hint that we are also more than bodies. To argue, as many materialist atheists do, that the world is merely and only material is, as Conor Cunningham argues, a monist stance. Just as biology is not the sum of human experience, thought or consciousness alone is not sufficient to sustain or to delimit our humanity. Ruth narrates: “And here we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections on water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement. They mock us with their seeming slightness. If they were more substantial—if they had weight and took up space—they would sink or be carried away in the general flux” (163). In other words, as feeble and transient as human memories are, and as contingent as any poem or painting might be as an ordering of the world, the weakness and insufficiency of the human imagination signals our human difference and the basis both for our hope and our tragedy. What Robinson describes here, however, isn’t the activity of the insub­ stantial mind in relation to a substantial world. It is instead the fact of an internally divided ontology in human experience. Mattessich writes that the novel “thinks the metaphysics that persist in every denial of metaphysics” which is also to say that it thinks the denial of the world that persists in every assertion of human spiritual transcendence. If we are to map culture—in all its

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self-reflexive activity—onto such assertions and to map nature—in all of physical givenness—onto such denials, it means that we can no longer think of nature and culture as adequate categories of difference. The more intently we focus on understanding the reality of the physical world, we can only recapture through the poetic work of figurative representation what we see and experience, just as the Impressionists were left with piles of painted canvases as they eventually discovered the mediated and delayed nature of all conscious perception. Art, philosophy, and religion cannot exist apart from biology. As we come to understand the workings of the world that appears to render us undifferentiated in the long past, scientific objectivity too will appear increasingly artificial in its rhetorical stance as objective and apart; Serres’s diligent religion of the world, on the other hand, would embrace heaven and earth because it stems from and thinks about the fact that our biological experience creates the conditions for performative judgment; morality would begin to speak in the imperative tense but always rhetorically and figuratively, blurring the facile distinctions between science, religion, and art. Mattessich insists that while Robinson’s “mode of description is naturalist in its attunement to simple phenomena, …this does not change with the overlay of a second mode, the miraculous, which works so seamlessly in her language because it heightens what is familiar” (63). This surfeiting of the physical spills over into the miraculous as a result of a poetic perception of physical form that renders the world metaphysical: “Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and 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 fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable” (116). Memory, reflection, imagination, then, are no more insubstantial than the physical world itself and its law of decay and transformation; culture and nature are conflated. Perhaps it had been the dream of positivism to escape our mythopoetic nature, just as it has perhaps been the dream of the impressionist to see nakedly, adamically, purely, only to discover again and always that we are temporal, cultural perceivers of the world and, thus, that the world, no matter how intense our desire to absent ourselves from seeing, will always be something of our own making. When nature and culture are conflated, the metaphysical and the physical can no longer be assumed to remain in separate spheres or in some kind of essentialized opposition. The thingness of things becomes paradoxical evidence of their place in a kind of whole cloth of existence. Otherwise, we cannot make distinctions between things at all, arriving at what Conor Cunningham calls

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“a radicalized democracy, the very flatlining of reality,” not unlike Whitman’s democratic naturalism, which is perhaps why Whitman flirted with the possibility that there was, perhaps, no evil. Robinson’s ecotheology means that these yearnings of memory foreshadow the reunion of all things, the restitution for which our human longings serve as metaphors, what Robinson calls the “law of completion” (92). This is her own kind of imagined teleology toward which all figural language points: “What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?” (92). Unlike the environmentalist and fundamentalist apocalyptic teleologies in which the ends of natural and human history coincide, this sense of finality is always immanent and hence dependent on a slippage, a puzzling margin, between natural and human time. It is the uncanny sensation of their similarity that gives shape to the hope Ruth expresses and that explains the particular paradox of beauty, as Kant famously argued, that feels both personal and transcendent. In the meantime before the final resurrection, what we have are small resurrections that occur in the form of artistic yearnings, like those of the amateur painter and grandfather, Edmund, that wish to aestheticize, hold, and commemorate beauty. That is not to say that Robinson ever asserts the ontological reality of the final resurrection, but it is at least apparent that her theology of art relies upon its possibility if art is to maintain any sustainable meaning in light of the flux of things. In other words, if one were to insist that a theology is rendered inevitable by the very nature of things, as if to insist that God exists because he has to, then such a claim undermines the very freedom and indeterminacy in which theology obtains meaning. But to insist on this freedom and indeterminacy as the space in which a theology becomes possible is to insist that theology is also not necessary. Robinson’s wager is that the very meaning produced by a literary cosmos is proof, not of the existence of God per se, but of the vitality of imagining God’s possibility. To insist on literature’s performance of such a world as a brave but merely existentialist gesture against the backdrop of chaos is to forget that even chaos too must be imagined, humanly so. In other words, God’s inexistence is no more determined by the nature of things than God’s existence. The universe does not demand one ontology over any other; instead, we must assume ownership of the ontologies we imagine and test them against lived experience for any lasting resonance. Besides, as Derek Walcott has expressed, the thought of death is as terrifying as the thought of infinity. Since both imply a radical transformation and extension of our selves into infinite space, they threaten our experience as selves, selves who, like Robinson’s characters, gather life as we go, hoping to “keep” a house, an oikos, a habitat, against the threat of perpetual flux. Edmund’s artistic impulse that began as a crude fantasy matures into a focused mimetic attention on the particularities and fragments that remain of

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the substantial world that is fading and dying around him. He has aestheticized the world and aestheticized death, rendering the world a text. He is obsessed with collecting and attentively observing the little things, “rare things [that] grew out of ants’ nests and bear dung and the flesh of perished animals…. The rising of the spring stirred a serious, mystical excitement in him…. He would pick up eggshells, a bird’s wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp’s nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention…. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them” (16–17). The “as if” constructions render the world doubly metaphorized: the world as if it were a text, and the human lover of the earth as if he could translate its meaning. The anthropomorphizing of the world, then, is a metamorphosis, a conscious taking of things out of the undifferentiated chaos of fluctuating matter. For Robinson, all artistic impulses, all attachments to things, to memories, and to the particulars of the earth are encompassed in the fundamental human impulse to preserve the dead. It is perhaps tragic, in a biocentric sense, that we persist in such denials of our biology. Yet to argue that relinquishing ourselves to the flat-lining of all life, as implied in biocentrism or in a “nothing-makes-sense-except-in-the-light-of-evolution” philosophy, will help us to achieve a higher ethics is an absurdity, since no ethics can emerge from such a philosophy. We are tragic creatures, both because we feel ourselves separate from the world that gives us life and because we cannot entirely escape this separation. To bury the dead, to commemorate them as separate from, even if buried in, the earth, is a function of the human mind’s insistence on its difference from biology. We work hard at “refusing to hand [our loved ones] over to the indifference of teeming mother earth,” says Unamuno. “Man is an animal that preserves his dead” (46). So if this attachment to the beloved who die and dissipate seems a denial of biology, it is also the only means by which the whole world can come to seem precious to us. If environmental care possesses us, we should not disparage or seek to overcome this human capacity to generate value. In these moments of gathering, Edmund paradoxically becomes more solitary, as a self-conscious world-maker, and yet this solitude, Robinson suggests, must be the grounds of communion: “all the same it was then that [his wife] loved him best, as a soul all unaccompanied, like her own” (17). This acceptance of the mutual solitude of their companionship suggests a tenuous balance that resembles Paz’s poetic conception of the meaning of charity: a holding together of two unrelated things in a meaningful relationship in which differences are not collapsed, the same kind of balance needed between the human and the more-than-human world. This is an attention to what Robinson calls “the resurrection of the ordinary” (18). Edmund’s wife learns in his absence

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to be engaged in similar focus on the transfigurations of the substantial, a focus that does not even seem to rely upon springtime changes: “What I have seen, what I have seen” she thinks to herself, “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” (19). Such attentiveness is not only empirically observant of physical change but it begins to imagine, almost in transcendent fashion, an ecological reality beyond the surface of things where all lies in the context of deep time and dynamic change, framed by the hope of wholeness and restitution. The result is an experience of wonderful estrangement, facilitated by a self-distrusting human awareness of how easily one can disrupt the balance. Throughout the novel, Ruth, Sylvie, and others continue the hoarding and collecting, as if human desire merely wants to stop the dissipation of the present into the amnesiac abyss of an unremembered past, buried in the very stuff of nature. The human mind, according to Unamuno, expends its energy by “seek[ing] to congeal the flowing stream into blocks of ice. It seeks to arrest the flow” (100). Unlike the propensities of Robinson’s Babylon, however, this human desire is not in denial of biology but is here characterized by loving attention to physical life sustained by human difference. The ecocritical paradox, then, is that loving nature cannot be separated from but is indeed dependent upon a love of humankind. What Robinson calls the “flotsam” of human experience is the common household objects that are illuminated by memory and love because of the story of death and loss they seem to tell. In cherishing them we exercise the imagination on behalf of the hope of reunion. And yet human memory appears destined to end up in oblivion in lakes and other natural repositories of experience, just as the dead fragments of nature are merely temporarily rescued from their destiny as so much soil. In the context of deep time, a species is no greater a temporary organization of cell matter than a dead bone found in the woods, and there is no reason for us to call it as such, evaluate it, study it, let alone cherish it, except as a very human act of defiant resistance to the fact of all life’s origin and ending in the nihil. Creation is ex nihilo, then, but only as the nihil of undifferentiated matter, since life forms are temporary and contingent organizations that announce momentary differentiation against the background of chaos. For this reason, Robinson does not distinguish between these human mementos and remnants of nature—bones, eggshells, flowers— because both demonstrate the oxymoron of “the life of perished things” (124). Things are beautiful to us not only because nature renders them new but because they also seem familiar. Perished things, common objects, obtain this luminescence and resurrection because of the workings of memory—a small

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resurrection of the ordinary empowered by human desire—but because memory is fragmented and dissipating, we hold onto things out of desperation and awareness of loss. Robinson suggests an anthropocentric and ontological rule that we should not pretend we can break: nature would not be dear to us if it weren’t for the human story it asks us to forget. To love, then, invites suffering. We might love nature as only humans can but we love because and in spite of the promise of the dissipation of individuality nature offers. Thus Robinson can assert with seeming contradiction that human desires for wholeness, expressed through cherishing lost things, are a foreshadowing of the fact that “the world will be made whole.” In Keatsian fashion, she writes: “to crave and to have are as alike as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it” (152). Attentiveness is a kind of affection, which returns us to Robinson’s argument about the sustainable power of love. Affections born of aesthetic pleasure in our physical condition provide these little transformations of the ordinary—the ordinary and more easily disparaged places and peoples and objects that are found in relative isolation from the motions of modernity. Aesthetic experiences are pleasures and not merely satisfied animal appetites, of course, and in them we find our strangeness on earth and homelessness in the body. Ultimately the continual search for whole and complete belonging in the physical world proves to be an endless search that repeatedly expands the boundaries of being; the search itself becomes a source of metaphysical resistance to biological flatlining. Once nature’s laws of death and regeneration are allowed to rule the roost, all the retention of human specialness that is the fruit of family relations and of family housekeeping fails. At that point, as Ruth notes, “even the illusions of perimeters fail when families are separated” (198). The paradox, in ecological terms, is that human belonging in the physical world—the longed for harmony which we hope will prove sustainable once and for all—would seem to signify the end of civilization, since it eventually runs counter to the impulses of housekeeping, family bonds, and even the idea of community. Biocentrism eventually runs us headlong into dissipation, fragmentation, and loss. I say this because we certainly can’t conclude, as Orr seems to have, that Robinson is nostalgic for suburban sprawl, more urban superficiality, or greater distance from nature. Robinson’s nature is imbued with too much of a sense of holiness to agree with Orr or believe that she sees nature merely as a tomb. But neither does it seem to be the case that she can accept the logical conclusion that striking ecological balance requires some facile abdication of human difference. Nature is not merely a womb. We are surrounded by the likelihood of missteps; “living,” as Mattessich writes, is “a

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matter of constitutive error, or errancy, of missing (if also seeking) oneself in the very ordinary movement of time” (84). Robinson’s is a tragic understanding of the human condition that suggests the need for metaphysical forbearance. This entrapment is precisely what civilization cannot tolerate and seeks instead to prematurely collapse into an easier and more binary set of choices. If heaven is the desired other sphere, then the earth is a mere way-station, its destiny irrelevant to ours, and we are ontological “pilgrims” on our way out. This logic is perhaps the reason why some ecocritics have criticized the despair over our earthly state that lies at the heart of Christian belief and that is seemingly incompatible with environmental ethics. Robinson reminds us, however, that if we insist that the earth is our only home and therefore that human and natural histories are indistinguishable, then we provide little reason to act in the interest of a different future than that signified by the imminent collapse of the planet’s ecosystems. Once the system is contaminated by the humanization of nature, all that is left to do is to enjoy the ride and embrace the ecological logic of our own decay and dissipation into the stuff of the world. Christine Caver argues that Ruth’s obsession with death as a kind of “true birth” “captures the paradox of her life: she cannot imagine ever being free from the ‘watery darkness’ that filters her perception of the world and thus is drawn to the death that would literalize her perception. The escape from rigid borders into liquidity is in no way an unproblematic liberation in this novel” (126). I wish to agree with Caver but with one important caveat regarding nature’s duplicity. The pursuit of ecology as the promise of human continuity intimates nature’s little resurrections, the “life of perished things,” even though it also appears to lead to social death. The physical ambiguously stands as a symbol of the metaphysical even as it offers itself as its opposition. And the language Robinson invokes in the persona of Ruth speaks the very language of the lake, including the reasons for hope in the “law of completion” and the hope of continuity facing the very abyss of nihilism. The novel’s ending suggests that we have been reading a communication that “now occurs in the realm of imagination” (Caver 132). In other words, the language of ecology, although a language naturalized by virtue of following our biology to its most muted conclusions, is simultaneously spiritualized in the form of our imagination, poetically holding at bay the end of meaning in an act of faith. Literature here does not shape our ecological imagination; it is our ecological language. In the vocabulary of ecocriticism, then, if literature is inadequate to shape political behavior, that is because it is no more inadequate than nature itself in its perpetual reminders of our biological being, reminders we seem to refuse to hear and heed. If a culture cannot interpret the otherness of nature nor fruitfully perform judgment in response to its dynamic transformations

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and unpredictability, how can it be expected to respond to literature that reenacts the phenomenology of nature’s paradoxes? If we can’t believe in our human capacity, however imperfect, to imagine nature through a kind of belated retrodiction, why have any hope in civilization at all?10 A belief in the special role of literature to inform more sustainable living must show its true colors: it is an expression of hope in civilization, not nature, over and against the tragic human condition. That is nothing of which we should be ashamed; it is deeply ethical and important work to find the grounds for such hope. It is disappointing, to say the least, that culture continues to operate according to “moral aphasia,” teaching us values that we contradict with regularity and even intentionality. Maybe not since Matthew Arnold has anyone posited without at least some degree of healthy skepticism that good texts will always lead to good lives. But this is no reason to lose hope in civilization. Literature’s weakness may be its strength if we remember that we are not what we read. Just as we are not determined by what we read, so too are we not determined by environment. The environment’s unpredictability and ultimate unknowability disable its own determinism, leaving us in the puzzling margins of our own human freedom; despite our biology and despite what we are doing to change the climate we remain free to imagine and choose hope, just as we are free, of course, to choose death. It may be too that we are always choosing both, even choosing death precisely in our fierce devotions to life and remaining dangerous to the places we love. That is perhaps why Robinson believes civilization can only be aided by a foundational ethic of self-distrust; it may not be an ethic that provides immediate answers, let alone viable solutions in the immediate and exigent space of politics. But it can be political and move us toward greater potential for sustainability if it at least keeps our fickle will clear and present to us and if it can nevertheless find metaphysical hope and stimulate performative judgment to guide us through and not around uncertainty. Robinson’s metaphors ask us to suspend disbelief enough to allow the possibility that we can be both strangers and uncannily at home on the earth, that our destiny both depends on and remains independent of the planet. If we reject this as too facilely supernatural or too contradictory, we run the risk of rejecting our own agency. It behooves us to explain what recourse we have if we no longer believe that art or science can order the forces of nature in such a way as to enact “an evolution toward some unspecified union with the forces with nature” (Kirkby 92). Why should such disbelief avoid nihilistic conclusions? 10

I borrow the term “retrodiction” from biogeography, where it refers to “the use of the possibly distorted information about the present day as a means to extrapolate to the truth of the long past” (Perfit 73).

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Only by tolerating these ambiguities, a tolerance we might call a necessary faith, can we hope to obtain the substance of things hoped for but not yet seen, especially if what we hope for is greater and more sustainable belonging on this earth. Conclusion Historical consciousness and human moral choice become apparent to us in an account of the becoming of the world, of a world always and still subject to change, to choice and well as to chance, and therefore one to which we are answerable. Our answerability emerges because it is a world of our making, both in the sense that we imagine it and that we play a role in shaping it. Robinson has been very critical of the pretension of pure objectivity because it simply obviates human responsibilities for the world. Hers is a world not so much divided by the two cultures of science and the humanities but by objectivity and subjectivity. Indeed, it is hardly the case that science is unified on the question of its utter reliability, or the potential perfect knowability of the world. Considering what we are discovering in quantum physics about the impossibility of predictability and localization in sub-atomic as well as astronomical spheres and considering the extraordinary outpouring of scientifically literate and sophisticated theology over the past century, it is unscientific to ignore the non-deterministic dimensions of physical law and the poetic and imaginative capacities such dimensions then require of human observers. Moreover, considering how many scholars in the humanities seem inclined toward a scientific and objective form of analysis and maintain stiff opposition to any recognition of the exceptionalism and the aesthetic dimensions of human artistic endeavors, it is similarly self-contradictory for those presumably highly invested in defining and protecting the nature of human freedom to argue in such a way as to render it unnecessary. Religionists defend themselves against the claims of empirical objectivity of science with an empirical objectivity of their own making. In short, it is as if we have focused all of our attention on the most vocal forms of polarization in religion and science and failed to see these as feuds among siblings in the objectivist family. As Robinson astutely describes it, The defenders of “religion” have made religion seem foolish while r­ endering it mute in the face of a prolonged and highly effective assault on the poor [might we add also on creation itself?]. The defenders of ­“science” have imputed objectivity and rigor to an account of reality

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whose origins and consequences are indisputably economic, social, and political. Creationism is the best thing that could have happened to Darwinism, the caricature of religion that has seemed to justify Darwinist contempt for the whole of religion. Death of Adam 40

And for all intents and purposes, she argues that atheist Darwinism’s denial of free will, its material explanation for everything from human consciousness and the brain to art has been the best thing to happen to creationism. What creationism and what Conor Cunningham calls Ultra-Darwinism have both failed to acknowledge is the incommensurability between the claims of ontology made by their respective epistemologies and the continuing elusiveness of the individual human personality that resists the facile reductionism of their epistemologies. Dogmatic secularism and dogmatic religious thought are both characterized by what Robinson aptly calls a “hermeneutics of condescension” (Absence 14). We gather important theological and artistic insights into this problem in Robinson’s fascinating articulation of John Calvin’s thought. In this passage, note how the question of God’s involvement in human life, even in the particulars of human imagination, rely on, rather than deny, the very cosmogony evolutionary science is telling: We feel we know certain things about the physical universe. It is inconceivably vast, it is expanding, and its rate of expansion is accelerating. How do we compare the energy that drives the universe to the energy expended in the striking of a match?… That the striking of a match amounts to virtually nothing in the roar of the universe, comparatively speaking, does not in any way lessen its reality or change its nature. And in fact the energy the match stores and releases, like the mind that contrived it and the hand that holds it, all express that cosmic energy, though how and why we cannot say. We do not bother ourselves with these problems of incommensurability, or relationship, though we routinely assume that such imponderables surround us on every side. It is as if the world of daily life existed without reference to those seas of space/time which we know in fact contain it altogether. Only the grandest religious thought has even attempted to create a wholly integrated model of reality, typically employing the language of myth or epic to assert human meaning in the context of a dauntingly nonhuman universe. We moderns have abandoned the effort, and for us that seems to serve as an equivalent to solving the problem…. The Creator is, by [Calvin’s] reckoning, utterly greater

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than any conception we can form of his creation, and at the same time free, present, just, loving, and intimately attentive to fallen humankind, collectively and one by one. It is as if we were to find a tender solicitude toward us in the fact that the great energy that rips galaxies apart also animates our slightest thoughts. It is as if we were to propose that that great energy only exists to make possible our miraculously delicate participation in it. (Preface to John Calvin xvi) This analogy is particularly powerful because it emphatically insists on itself as a figure of speech even as it attempts to make an ontological argument. “It is as if” she repeats, even as she then attempts to postulate what is, which is more akin to suggesting what might be, or what we can at least not definitively deny. She suggests that to deny the possibility of God’s participation in our imagination is as illogical as it would be to deny the first law of thermodynamics simply because making sense of that law in the broadest context of the entirety of the physical universe requires analogies and other figures of speech just to be able to leap across the problem of incommensurability between the particular and minute and the general and the vast. For Robinson, what, ultimately, is irreducible and perhaps almost impossible to generalize, at least without the inevitable risk of judgment and of figurative language, is the “experience and testimony of the individual mind” or what she also calls “the felt life of the mind” (Absence 22, 35). She has more recently insisted that the “locus of the human mystery is the perception of this world” and that this felt experience of human perception constitutes the “soul” (When I Was a Child 9). The difficulty of assessing this subjectivity of experience, indeed its incommensurability with the universe, is that it can only be assessed by individual minds and that it is perpetually and fluidly moving through experience, gathering, sifting, forgetting, and remembering. Conscious experience is the seat of the arts, the thing that the arts bear witness of in all of its embeddedness in particular bodies in particular places and times. No amount of objective probing can properly account for the “beauty and strangeness of the individual soul,” a spiritual entity which Robinson tellingly defines phenomenologically as “the world as perceived in the course of a human life, of the mind as it exists in time” (Absence 35). As is evident in her assertion of Calvin’s theology and in her fiction itself, the arts are the seat of the human soul, the substance of our human spirituality. However we might want to define the limits of the arts’ power of transcendence, the reach of artistic expression is fundamentally spiritual work. As George Steiner puts it, “there is aesthetic creation because there is creation—the core of our being is a response to the facticity of substance and our strange relationship to it” (201). Robinson believes that the spirituality of humankind, if it lies

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anywhere, is contained or made in the process of answering to the facticity of our substance, as we try to transform this “thing” we are into something connected with others, with everything. Biologically speaking, of course, we know we belong to everything but that fact is belied by our conscious experience, which allows us to see ourselves apart, even apart from our embodied self. The process of sifting memory in the activity of the conscious mind is a poetic process of taking up the chaos and detritus of lived experience and granting it a kind of unity, a cosmological quality that grants to consciousness the awareness that we are both in flux but founded, as individuals, by a principle of unity. For this reason, Robinson insists that the answer to our awareness of ourselves as such is a yearning for communication: “Each of us lives intensely within herself or himself, continuously assimilating past and present experience to a narrative and vision that are unique in every case yet profoundly communicable, whence the arts” (Absence 132). We are, in other words, always in the business of making cosmoi and testing them against the cosmos itself, of seeking connection and communication between the solitude of individual experience and the collective whole in which that experience takes its place. Robinson sees in this capacity to test our imagined and felt reality against the fabric of a cosmos “coherent enough to be experienced by us as complete in itself…divine Providence intent on making a human habitation within the wild roar of the cosmos” (When I Was a Child 10). The hope that Robinson’s work embodies is the hope of transcendence, of communicability, of some claim, however tenuous or temporarily suspended, that we are conjoined with the universe. Works Cited Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Caver, Christine. “Nothing Left to Lose: Housekeeping’s Strange Freedoms.” American Literature. 68.1 (1996): 111–137. Cobb, Jr., John B. A Christian Natural Theology. Louisville: Westminster Knox Press, 2007. Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995. (69–90). Garrard, Greg. “Ecocriticism.” The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. 19:1 (2011): 46–82. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Gottlieb, Roger., ed. This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment. New York: Routledge, 2003.

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Handley, George. New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Handley, George and Lance Larsen. “The Radiant Astonishment of Existence: Two Interviews with Marilynne Robinson, March 20, 2004 and February 9, 2007.” Literature and Belief. 27.2 (2007): 113–143. Haught, John. Christianity and Science: Toward a Theology of Nature. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008. Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. Kirkby, Joan. “Is There Life After Art: The Metaphysics of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” American Literature. 5.1 (1986): 91–109. Marzec, Robert P. An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Mattessich, Stefan. “Drifting Decision and the Decision to Drift: The Question of Spirit in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Differences 19.3 (2008): 58–89. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Orr, David. The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Paz, Octavio. The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. Perfit, Michael R. and Ernest E. Williams. “Geological Constraints and Biological Retrodictions in the Evolution of the Caribbean Sea and its Islands” in Biogeography of the West Indies Past, Present, and Future. Ed. Charles A. Woods. Gainesville, FL: Sandhill Crane Press, Inc., 1989. (47–102). Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking Adult, 2011. Polkinghorne, John. The God of Hope and the End of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Essential Rilke. Sel. and Trans. Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann. New York: The Ecco Press, 2000. Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness From the Modern Myth of the Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. ———. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. New York: Picador, 2005. ———. Housekeeping. New York: Picador, 2004. ———. Mother Country. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989. ———. “Mother Country: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books (November 23, 1990). n. pag. Web 27 Oct. 2013. ———. “Preface” to John Calvin: Steward of God’s Covenant. Eds. John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. (ix–xxvii).

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———. When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012. Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Stegner, Wallace. Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. New York: Random House, 1992. Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2008. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/. n. pag. Web 27 Oct. 2013.

Becoming a Creature of Artful Existence: Theological Perception and Ecological Design in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Chad Wriglesworth Abstract Taking as its focus Gilead, this essay explores the importance of Marilynne Robinson’s theocentric engagements with natural science, cosmology, and environmental thought. John Ames artfully responds in his writing to manifestations of God’s spoken and renewing address within creation. The voice of God, which emerges as breathwind-spirit throughout the novel, is a vital force of immanence that Ames’s mind perceives to be woven within the unfolding ecological and cosmological patterns that he has encountered and participated within throughout his life. The essay argues that Robinson challenges misconceptions about Judeo-Christian thought that have prevailed in the environmental humanities and led to the unjust neglect of religion as a resource for ecological awareness and activism.

When not writing novels like Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), or an occasional essay on Western intellectual history, Marilynne Robinson might well be found thumbing through the latest issue of Scientific American, checking out an allbut-forgotten theological treatise from a university library, or pondering the design of the universe through a moonlit window in Iowa City. Her essays gathered in The Death of Adam (1998) and When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012) delve into topics ranging from misunderstandings of Calvinism and Darwinism, to the generosity of nineteenth-century abolitionists, and even to the meaning of Edgar Allan Poe’s obscure prose poem on cosmology titled Eureka (1848). But these essays are far more than private ruminations about the past. They are also  the workings of a mind that is exceedingly public. In recent years, Robinson has given the Dwight H. Terry Lectures on religion and science at Yale University1 and engaged some of America’s most provocative minds in the arts and sciences. One only need listen to her exchange with translator Robert Alter on the metaphysical nuances of ancient Hebrew poetry, or a conversation with physicist and astronomer Marcelo Gleiser on the expansive nature of 1 These lectures were published as Absence of Mind (2010).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004302235_006

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the cosmos, to sense that Robinson has become an important bridge between the recently contentious fields of religion and science.2 In a time when reductive methods of scientific inquiry are attempting to extract ideas about God from public life even as conservative Christians are waging ideological wars of their own, Robinson, who sees no reason to separate the two disciplines, takes a rational and intuitive posture that calls readers—whether confessional, atheist, or agnostic—to pause and “acknowledge some small fragment of the mystery we are” (Absence 135). Given Robinson’s broad commitment to both religion and science, it should be no surprise that John Ames, the Congregationalist minister and narrator of Gilead, is a liberally minded intellectual whose perception is finely tuned to the design and patterns of the universe. Near the beginning of the novel, for example, after Ames finds himself swept into an interconnected series of memories about water, sunlight, soil, and laughter carried on human breath, the narrator offers readers a bit of understated wisdom: “This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it” (28). Indeed, some of the most arresting moments in Gilead emerge as Ames muses over the planet, its creatures, and the patterns of creation. Such meditations, among others, include a memory from childhood about baptizing cats, thoughts about an icy white moon set against a night sky, reflections about his wife and son blowing bubbles in a yard, and a flashback to a moment in time when an Iowa prairie seemed to catch fire in a storm of fireflies. In every case, it is Ames’s sense of theological perception and his attention to the communicative design of the universe that calls readers to consider how the human mind, and all of creation, is woven within “the mesh” or “fabric” of an expansive universe that is initiated and continually renewed by the address of God (Morton 28–33, Fay 64). In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton convincingly replaces the category of a purified and static conception of “Nature” with an all-encompassing expression of evolutionary entanglement called “the mesh” (28), something resembling—but really quite different from—what Robinson refers to as “the whole fabric of reality” (Fay 64). Morton is rightly suspicious of environmental 2 Robert Alter and Marilynne Robinson, “Robert Alter and Marilynne Robinson: The Psalms.” 92Y: Cultural Institution and Community Center (December 17, 2007); Krista Tippett, “Marilynne Robinson and Marcelo Gleiser: The Mystery We Are.” On Being: with Krista Tippett (January 2, 2014). The conversation between Robinson and Alter is a digital recording (no transcript is available). https://soundcloud.com/92y/the-psalms. The conversation between Robinson and Gleiser is available as a podcast hosted by Krista Tippett. A transcript and digital recording is available at http://www.onbeing.org/program/the-mystery-we-are/4910.

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writers who blindly privilege “sunny” and communal depictions of nature that are “holistic, hearty, and ‘healthy’” even as they simultaneously bracket out potentially darker realities such as sickness, introversion, irony, and fragmentation. In response, Morton calls for a poststructuralist version of ecological thought that “must include darkness as well as light, negativity as well as positivity” (16). His mesh theory stresses “the interconnectedness of all living and nonliving things,” but resists ideas about unification and coherence, largely under the authority of biological materialism, which claims that the universe has no “design” or “intelligence,” unless ecological design is posited to be a purposeless evolutionary process of selection, variation, and adaptation (28, 43). Morton theorizes that the mesh interpenetrates “our social, psychic, and scientific domains” in ways that are adaptive and expansive, but fails to move beyond a common materialist position that sets up religion as an oppositional force to science (28). Religion is presented as a static and antiquated container of beliefs and practices that stand against evolutionary processes of mutation and emergence. The totalizing “mesh isn’t static,” as Morton explains, but religion is somehow cast as a cultural framework that leads to faith in a “static background,” an ideal and fixed form of Nature—and implicitly God— that never existed (30, 61). Morton’s mesh is presented as “a truly wonderful fact,” but it is actually an expression of materialized divinity that comes with its own set of religious practices.3 Like renderings of many ancient gods, the infinite mesh has “no definite background and therefore no definite foreground” (28, see 30). It simply is. Yet it is not transcendent. In the mesh, Morton states “[t]here is no beyond, no depth, and no comforting background. No Being, only beings” (119). Morton cultivates space for religious practice in the mesh, but strictly on materialist terms within a closed system of reality. Mediation is held up as a social practice that is “part of nontheistic ‘spirituality’ and politics,” which leads dwellers in the mesh to “‘the point of not being able to conceive of anything but things’” (127),4 while art—no longer concerned with questions of immanence and transcendence—participates within an evolutionary process “which at bottom is vague and purposeless” (44). Morton speculates, with some trepidation, that as cultures come to terms with the radical and darker

3 Morton writes, “[…] if there is no Nature, perhaps there is a non-Nature, a world of interlocking machines, or a world where all was one and therefore God—pantheism, or philosopher Arne Naess’s deep ecological version” (76). 4 Morton is quoting Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. (103). The word “spirituality” is from Agamben, as is the second long phrase.

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sides of ecology within the mesh, they may revert to creeds and confessions and “be tempted to freeze it [ecological thought] into religion” (135). Morton makes numerous assumptions about ecological design in regard to religious thought, most notably, Christianity: that from Christian perspectives harmony does not include discord, that science demands the exclusion of ancient manifestations of divinity, and that theological conceptions of coherence require the absence of evolutionary change. These assertions fail to acknowledge ongoing and less reductive conversations between Christianity and science in which Robinson herself has been involved.5 From a theological perspective, Morton’s frozen model of religion is not the same thing as existence: participating in a creation that has its being within the address of a God who is. For this reason my interest in Morton’s mesh theory is highly contingent. Sharing none of his core assumptions of pure materialism, I do use his central term with one primary assumption: if the totalizing mesh is truly allencompassing, it will adapt and undercut the reductive tendencies of a solely materialist rendering of the universe, creating space for religious thought within “the whole fabric of reality” (Fay 64). By the latter, I include the JudeoChristian claim that “Nature” is not a category of idealized purity, a phenomenon of random incoherence, or a materialist ideology that attempts to silence divinity, but a relational and communicative creation that is thoughtfully brought into being and renewed by the breath-wind-spirit of God.6 My interest in maneuvering between religious and scientific thought is partly indebted to Marilynne Robinson’s critical and hospitable way of thinking about the two disciplines, as well as my agreement with her that “[t]he usversus-them mentality is a terrible corruption of the whole culture” (Fay 48). 5 See, for example, Jürgen Moltmann, Ethics of Hope. Minneapolis, mn: Fortress Press, 2012. (109–162); Marcelo Gleiser, A Tear at the Edge of Creation; theologians ranging from Steven Bouma-Prediger to Celia Deane-Drummond; the interdisciplinary projects of environmental scientist Calvin DeWitt; and the work of theoretical physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne. 6 Many philologists and theologians have explored the fact that in ancient languages the words for breath, wind, and spirit are deeply interconnected. This is the case, for example, in Hebrew (ruach), Greek (pneuma), and Latin (spiritus). Across these languages, and others, the word for breath-wind-spirit is also commonly associated with concepts such as vitality, animation, mindfulness, life force, consciousness, or the soul. For purposes of this essay, I am particularly interested in the way ancient Hebrew writers rendered God’s breath-wind-spirit (ruach; see Alter 3 and Robinson’s Home, 215) as a manifestation of the address of God. I am also curious about the cultural and ecological reverberations that arise when that summons is dismissed by scientific positivism. For more on this see the following: Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. London: Faber and Faber, 1957; Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. New York: McGraw-Hill, Co., 1964. (79–82); Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. New York: Routledge, 1982; and Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2009.

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When it comes to reconciling oppositional models in classical physics and quantum theory, for example, Robinson suggests: “If different systems don’t merge in a comprehensible way, that’s a flaw in our comprehension and not a flaw in one system or the other” (Fay 47). We know the unknowable imperfectly. Our perception is limited. While Robinson touches upon these scientific and religious ideas seamlessly in her novels, much of her fictional meditation on these concepts goes unnoticed by literary critics. There are several essays published on the significance of religion in her novels, but there is still much to say about how and why she integrates science and theology into fiction. Investigations into her ecological and cosmological perspectives are even more difficult to find. George B.Handley, one of the few critics to discuss the importance of ecology in Robinson’s work, rightly observes that she “is an intriguing case for ecocriticism,” largely because she writes with profound environmental commitment, but, as a respectable intellectual, does not accommodate shallow rhetoric or “facile assumptions about what it means to be moral politically, environmentally, and socially” (Handley 496). This essay takes in the full complexity of Robinson’s intellectual vision, combining as it does ideas about ecology, theology, cosmology, and scientific materialism, by engaging with her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Gilead. Structurally, I begin by suggesting that environmental literary critics have ­overlooked Robinson’s work because their discourse is stuck within an illinformed and reactionary stance against Christianity that Robinson’s work on theology and ecological design does not endorse or participate within. I go on to suggest that Robinson’s theocentric approach to creation, evident in Gilead’s attention to God’s breath-wind-spirit and the significance of fire in regard to consciousness, points to an enlivening sense of the artistry woven within existence. As John Ames responds aesthetically to the design of the universe, he discovers a continuing source of vitality in his old age, one the stems from his perception of God’s immanence. Finally, I then move through several planetary and cosmological passages in the novel, focusing on Ames’s attentive responses to the patterns and movements of the universe and how these scenes provide leverage for Robinson’s critique of versions of scientific materialism that attempt to erase the human soul and silence the address of God in the cosmos.

Absence of Christian Thought: Modern Environmentalism and the Emergence of Ecological Design

The fact that critical discussions of Robinson’s fiction are nearly absent from conversations in environmental literary criticism may be disheartening, but

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this is in no way shocking.7 Scholars working within the environmental humanities are rooted within an intellectual inheritance that holds Christianity culpable for modern ecological demise, which, expectedly, causes the tradition to be marginalized, misunderstood, or most often avoided altogether. When a pressing sense of environmental anxiety emerged in the 1960s and 70s, JudeoChristian thought became a cultural scapegoat that carried much of the blame for generations of exploitation. Lynn White, Jr.’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (1967), first published in Science, went on to become a founding text for ecocritics.8 Sweeping across time and space while distilling two thousand years of scientific, cultural, and religious history, White’s essay concludes that “Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt” for Western culture’s ecological destruction because it is “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen” (12, 9). Two years later, the incompatibility of Christianity and modern environmentalism was stated more forcefully by landscape architect Ian L. McHarg in Design with Nature (1969). McHarg, echoing White, claimed that the “roots” of Judaism emerged in the ancient world as a “declaration of war on nature,” a way of being that was somehow “absorbed unchanged into Christianity” and then carried into modernity as a “license for those who would increase radioactivity, create canals and harbors with atomic bombs, employ poisons without constraint, or give consent to the bulldozer mentality” (26). These representative arguments, although now dated and almost absurdly reductive, established an ideological pattern within the nascent stages of modern environmentalism. Truth be told, many ecocritics still work from these claims. Christianity, for the most part, continues to be viewed as “an obstacle to the envisioned harmony” of environmentalism (B. Taylor 165), something like a cultural virus or a sociobiological “meme” that has selfishly infected and transformed an otherwise altruistic Western culture into an anthropocentric enterprise of cultural domination and ecological exploitation (Dawkins, Selfish 192).9 7 In 1993, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (asle) founded the journal isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, which is considered to be the leading journal in the field of literary approaches to environmental studies. It is worth noting that the journal has not yet published an article on Marilynne Robinson’s work. 8 White’s essay is the first document included in the seminal collection The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996). The essay continues to be anthologized and regularly cited by ecocritics working at the intersections of religion, literature, and environmental studies. 9 In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins coins the word “meme” to describe “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” that he deliberately puns against the word “gene” (192). He posits that cultural thought and practices are shaped in the same way that genes are transmitted through the body: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from

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More recent investigations into environmental demise have certainly broadened the scope of accusatory rhetoric, yet for most critics within the environmental humanities, Christianity remains a nagging cultural obstacle on the path to enlightenment. One only need look to Carloyn Merchant’s Reinventing Eden (2003) and Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought (2010) to see how Christianity is caught up in the totalizing sweep of historical and ideological critique. For Merchant, an environmental historian whose work focuses primarily on the past, Christianity provides a malleable narrative that justifies colonization, westward expansion, gender inequality, and environmental exploitation in an attempt to recover a lost state of Eden (5–6). Morton, a progressive theorist whose work looks primarily to the future, sees no place for Christianity in “the mesh,” a version of ecological thought that attempts to eliminate a purified conception of “Nature” that never actually existed (28). In a closed and materialist universe, Morton ambivalently states that humans will one day worship at the altars of “hyperobjects,” radioactive forces and chemical compounds like plutonium and Styrofoam, “the ultimate spiritual substances” made to outlive the modernity that spawned them into existence (132). He acknowledges that “Christianity isn’t ready for hyperobjects” because these entangled substances are viewed to be “the demonic inversion of the sacred substances of religion” (130, 132). While it may be difficult to imagine anyone—Christian or otherwise—bowing down to plutonium or Styrofoam as something “irresistible, like true love” (135), the real reason that Christians reject Morton’s model of the universe has little to do with hyperobjects. Rather, it is because the mesh attempts to silence the immanent address of God in existence. Morton’s thought may critique sentimental assertions about ecology and open discussions about the porous lines between sentient life and the non-living; however, when it comes to engaging Christianity on new terms, the mesh tells the same old story as other versions of modern ecological thought. As environmentalists of the nineteen-sixties and seventies attempted to cure the earth of Christianity’s ills, many still recognized religion to be of central importance; however, as Jim Dodge observes, the “spiritual wisdom” and practices of this era were rarely “Christian-based or noticeably monotheistic” (369–370). Instead, more often than not, spiritual identities were grounded in the intrinsic value of Earth itself, as adaptations of what Bron Taylor calls “dark green religion” (10). These included indigenous rituals, Eastern philosophies, body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (192). Dawkins uses this idea to suggest that tenets of Christianity are a series of problematic cultural practices within a “god meme” that have been passed down through the ages (197–198).

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and variations of polytheism and animism that Christianity had supposedly suppressed (see L. White 10, Dodge 369–370, B. Taylor 11). Activists found guidance in Native Americans like Vine Deloria, Jr., who characterized Christianity as “the chief evil ever to have been loosed on the planet” (146), or esteemed prophets of conservation such as John Muir and Aldo Leopold, both of whom had already replaced versions of Christianity with expressions of faith grounded in the earth itself. Roderick Frazier Nash, author of Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), described Muir’s Calvinistic upbringing as one of the “formidable obstacles” (123) he was forced to overcome in order to find “baptism in Nature’s warm heart” (Muir 63), while Leopold, a foundational voice in modern environmental thought, opened A Sand County Almanac (1949) by stating that “conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land” (viii). While intellectuals and activists of the nineteen-sixties and seventies held Christianity responsible for various forms of environmental destruction, investigations into the cosmos and the emerging field of ecological design provided a new and ancient location for religious affections to reside. In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Ursula K. Heise explains how the Apollo space program led to a monumental shift in environmental consciousness, brought about by “new imaging technologies [that] enabled humans to perceive their own planet as a whole from outer space for the first time” (20). The cosmos, of course, had long been the mythic home of many gods. However, when Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who orbited the earth in 1961, returned home to report that God was absent from the heavens, questions about the existence of divinity were supposedly settled for scientists. Yet one could argue contrarily that the images of space captured during the Apollo missions became “icons of environmentalism” that rendered all such claims about a godless universe inconclusive (Heise 22). The earth shown in these images was intoxicatingly beautiful and seemingly worthy of worship. “Earthrise,” the first and most famous image of our planet taken by crew members of Apollo 8 (1968), inverted human perception by showing Earth rising above the moon from a lunar perspective. A few years later, the iconic “Blue Planet” (1972) taken during Apollo 17 framed the earth alone in space “[s]et against a black background like a precious jewel in a case of velvet” (Heise 22). Here space is largely bracketed out, so that the image focuses on the swirls and patterns of a planet that appears to be fixed and autonomous. As Heise observes, with Earth captured floating alone in space, viewers saw their home as an object of aesthetic complexity and frailty, “as single entity, united, limited, and delicately beautiful” (22). Seeing Earth as a work of free-standing art in images like “Earthrise” and “Blue Planet” generated a dramatic influx of public and scholarly inquiry into

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the ecological design and rhythms of the planet. The 1970s evolved into a period of intellectual inquiry grounded in models of spheres, closed systems, and impulses to harmonize individual parts of human existence within the patterns of a coherent planetary whole. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog (1968) and the organizers of Earth Day (1970) used images of the solitary earth to celebrate its independence and to question our human responsibilities to it. Scientist James E. Lovelock posited the Gaia Hypothesis (1972), which viewed Earth as a single and exceedingly complex ecosystem, whose living atmosphere, soils, watersheds, and sunlight are harmonized to sustain a common planetary life. Sim Van der Ryn, a designer of the San Francisco Integral Urban House (1969) and Christopher Alexander, author of A Pattern Language (1977), drew from theories such as Benoit B. Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1977) to integrate the geometric patterns and scales of natural forms into the emerging field of sustainable architecture. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson considered the relationship between ecological systems and the evolution of human consciousness in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), while poets and essayists Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry pondered cyclical patterns and energy pathways in Turtle Island (1974) and A Continuous Harmony (1972), respectively. Notably, it was also during this time that literary critic William Rueckert wrote an experimental article on the relationship between ecology and the rhythmic patterns of poetry, calling the new horizon of inquiry “ecocriticism.”10 By the time environmental literary criticism emerged in the 1980s and 90s, an intellectual inheritance that stressed the incompatibility between Chris­ tianity and environmentalism was firmly established, but so was a worshipful affection for Earth. With Western religious traditions marginalized from ecological thought, the forms of the planet proved capable of absorbing human reverence for something beyond the self within a closed system of materialism. Sim Van der Ryn, co-author of Ecological Design (1996), describes his own path toward enlightenment using a typological pattern of religious conversion that is nothing short of evangelical. He recalls how his Jewish childhood was marked by a rejection of “formal religion, […] and later the worship of Progress and an unquestioning faith in materialist mechanistic science and technology” (Design 124). After many years of disillusionment and intellectual wandering, Van der Ryn discovered monistic perennial philosophy and located his “faith in the possibility of human culture and consciousness” that is moving toward a state of expanding “ecological intelligence” that will lead cultures to “compassion for 10

William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” Iowa Review 9.1 (Winter 1978): 71–86; reprinted in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996).

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everything that is alive and changing” (Design 125, 127). In Van der Ryn’s assessment, the animating force, or “soul of the living world,” does not reside within a creator, but is a latent energy waiting to be “reborn” within the earth and ourselves (Design 127).11 David Orr’s The Nature of Design (2002) provides a more heavy-handed example of ways that environmental thinkers have marginalized JudeoChristian thought, even as they continue to repurpose biblical language on strictly materialist terms.12 When it comes to matters of religion and spirituality, Orr claims that “[o]ur choice is not whether we are religious or not as atheists would have it, but whether the object of our worship is authentic or not” (24). In order to validate Earth as the “authentic” object of worship, Orr recycles the language of Christianity and preaches against the “deadly sins” of the modern world, all of which are viral enemies to “health” and the “heritage” of Earthbased enlightenment (9, 5). Orr accommodates Christian thought, but only on materialist terms that are ideologically quite thin. When speaking of the JudeoChristian creation narrative, for example, he asks: “Who are we? Conceived in the image of God? Perhaps. But for the time being the most that can be said with assurance is that, in an evolutionary perspective, humans are precocious and unruly newcomers with a highly uncertain future” (27). In Orr’s profession of faith, which sniffs out the fall of humanity on evolutionary terms alone, the planet is our object of worship and the practice of integrating principles of “ecological design intelligence” our missional call to reengage the earth in “competent reverence” (5, 4). He writes: [Ecological design] is anchored in the faith that the world is not random but purposeful and stitched together from top to bottom by a common set of rules. It is grounded in the belief that we are part of the larger order 11

12

Van der Ryn notes the importance of several ancient spiritual traditions that teach humans about their interconnectedness within “the flow of the universe.” He includes Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabbalah, and Gnosticism, but Judeo-Christian thought is noticeably absent from his list (Design 125). Orr, of course, is by no means the first or last environmental writer to work within the language and narrative structures of the Bible. Lawrence Buell and Greg Garrard, in particular, have effectively traced how ecocritical discourse is preoccupied with pastoral writing, the jeremiad, wilderness writing, and apocalyptic literature. According to Buell, this makes ecocriticism “an emergent discourse […] with very ancient roots” (2). In a similar way, Garrard states that although the modern environmental movement has tried to distance itself from Christianity, it has also relied on “pre-existing ways of imagining the place of humans in nature that may be traced back to such sources as Genesis and Revelation, the first and last books of the Bible” (2).

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of things and that we have an ancient obligation to act harmoniously within those larger patterns. It grows from the awareness that we do not live by bread alone and that the effort to build a sustainable world must begin by designing one that first nourishes the human spirit. (29–30) Here the order and patterns of ecological design, which all of creation lives, moves, and breathes within, are not “entangled” (Morton 28), but viewed within a closed system of monism that piously insists that nature can be separated from the ills of culture in order to maintain a harmonious design of sustainability. More important, within this limited circle the earth is not “grounded” within the address of a creator (Orr 30). Or, to follow the implications of Orr’s displaced scriptural allusion more directly, while Jesus may have once stated that “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God,” in this revised creed the divine address is silenced and replaced by reverence for a planet that can be restructured so that it alone feeds and “nourishes the human spirit” (Matt 4:4, esv; Orr 30). No wonder, then, that Marilynne Robinson’s overtly theocentric vision of the universe has been passed over by scholars in the environmental humanities. There are, of course, other factors that have caused her work to be overlooked. For starters, Robinson openly states that she is “profoundly critical of the environmental movement. Not because [she has] any problem with the idea that the environment needs to be rescued, but in the sense that they [environmental activists] have been stunningly ineffective and in many cases a major part of the problem” (Handley and Larsen 114–115).13 In contrast to many environmentally-minded intellectuals, Robinson sees no value in the work of leading activist organizations like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Nature Conservancy: There is no environmental group whose methods or priorities I consider useful. Zero. Right across the board. And this is very, very disturbing to me. For one thing, the most important issues are not even in the conversation. Somehow or other people have been content to believe that you could save the whale without saving the sea. I mean the fact is that ­horrible depredations have occurred, are occurring, and we’re just told to  stop using spray or other ridiculous minor things that won’t add twenty  minutes to the world’s life while these other things continue. People are so eager to attribute good-guy, lone-ranger qualities to these 13

The first set of brackets inside the quotation is mine, while second pair appears in cited source.

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organizations—it doesn’t occur to people to be critical of them or to doubt them, and it doesn’t seem terribly polite when anyone tries to raise questions. schaub 248–249

In order to grasp the reason for this sharp critique, it is important to have some knowledge of Robinson’s personal struggles with Greenpeace, one of the most powerful, outspoken, and controlling environmentalist organizations in the world. In 1989, Robinson published Mother Country, an investigation into the ­disposal of toxic waste into the ocean by England’s Sellafield Nuclear Process­ ing Plant. It is a book that Robinson still calls the most important thing she has  ever written.14 However, shortly after its publication, she was sued by Greenpeace regarding a claim that the organization distributed false information about its role in chartering legislation to stop the disposal of toxic waste at sea. According to Robinson, the practice of waste disposal was not only still happening, but Greenpeace was also fully aware of it. Moreover, information about the dumping was purportedly being withheld from the United States’ branch of the organization, leading to omissions about global health that created “a completely false model of the state of the world” (Schaub 249). When Robinson’s findings were published in Mother Country, a British court ruling that prevents the distribution of potentially libelous materials suppressed her research and the book went out of print in England. While the experiences with Greenpeace certainly slanted Robinson’s view of environmental organizations toward the negative, her deeper quarrel with activist groups stems from the fact that they—much like the New Atheist d­ istributors of “parascientific thought” she addresses in Absence of Mind—attempt to regulate thought and position themselves as authorities above social critique (Absence 41). The public approaches environmental organizations with misdirected piety, taking their missional claims to be truthful and in the best interest of social and ecological reform. This is not always the case. In recent years, one only need look to the practices of Sierra Club, an organization that took millions of dollars of undisclosed money from oil investors, while also speaking in favor of increasing consumptions 14

In an interview with Sarah Fay, Robinson states: “If I could only have written one book, that [Mother Country] would have to be the book” (60). In addition, George Handley states that in his personal communication with Robinson, she “noted that among all of her publications, Mother Country was the book of which she was most proud” (Handley 518 n.1).

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of natural gas as an  alternative to mining coal, which Sierra Club—like their monetary oil ­supporters—ardently campaigned against (Krauss B1). In another case, the Nature Conservancy was recently investigated “for allegedly selling land to trustees, making loans to employees, and receiving money from the sale of land to federal and state governments” (Wolverton 51). Yet, even these egregious acts do not address the fundamental point of difference between Robinson and the normative stance of the majority of modern environmentalists. It is Robinson’s theological perspective of being relationally accountable to something more than the self or an act of environmental legislation or the autonomous Earth, that ultimately distances her work from a strictly evolutionary, materialist, or instrumental approach to environmentalism. As theologian Rowan Williams states, when it comes to matters of ecological design and environmental stewardship, Christians are called to respond to creation as the work of the creator, “not simply a pattern that we admire, but an ordered life in which we can have a share” (Faith 177). The earth is not a free-standing planet of anonymity, but a source of vitality brought into being by the address of God. Or, to use Robinson’s language, the world we inhabit is a disclosure that “expresses the ultimate” (Schaub 249). From this perspective, our systematic “undoing” of creation is not merely an offense against Earth or a mismanagement of natural resources to be reined in by new legislation, but also something that Robinson calls “a ­blasphemy, an atrocious crime of the most cosmic proportions” (Schaub 249). Ongoing acts of environmental destruction— much like extreme versions of ­scientific materialism—are premeditated and willful attempts to silence the ­life-giving address of God and the relational dimensions of creation that proceed from it. Christianity, as expressed in Robinson’s Gilead, is not a celebration of ­rampant anthropocentrism as environmentalists have long suggested, but an artistic exploration into the attentive life of John Ames, a narrator, who, along with the rest of universe, participates in a theocentric vision15 of 15

I am not positioning theocentrism against anthropocentrism in order to refute the common accusation that Christianity is a human-focused religion. I am, however, stressing that Christianity is a creator and creation centric religion and that human creatures participate within it. Theocentric perception recognizes creation, including the self, as a communicative gift from God within existence. Rowan Williams, who considers the problem of anthropocentrism from a theological perspective, suggests that attempts to generate thought from a post-human perspective is a denial of creaturely giftedness, our capacity to think and reflect within creation. In an essay on Christianity and ecology he aptly states: “Yes, this is in a sense an anthropocentric perspective; what other could we intelligibly have, after all?” (Faith 183). The theocentric focus of Judeo-Christian thought

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­creation in rhythmic dialogue of call and response, manifestation and proclamation (see Ricoeur 48–67). In God and Creation (1985) Jürgen Moltmann explains the theocentric vision of Judeo-Christian theology as well as the charges of anthropocentrism that still haunt the tradition from within and beyond: According to the anthropocentric world view, heaven and earth were made for the sake of human beings, and the human being is the crown of creation; and this is certainly what is claimed by both its supporters and its critics as ‘biblical tradition’. But it is unbiblical; for according to the biblical Jewish and Christian traditions, God created the world for his glory, out of love; and the crown of creation is not the human being; it is the sabbath. (31) From a theocentric perspective, it is the “summons” of God in creation that calls us to respond to manifestations of God with artistic proclamation and lived practice (Williams, On Christian 74). However, within a culture that complicity or deliberately celebrates scientific positivism as the dominant means of knowing and being-­in-the-world—regardless of public avowal of religious belief or lack thereof—the irreducible soul, brought into being by God’s spirit filled address, will seem  irrelevant and fictitious. The consequences extend beyond any particular religious communities. When communicative lines between creator and creatures are severed and rendered useless, human and  ecological value is no longer perceived to be inherently “good” as an in regard to creation might be new to some critics in the environmental humanities, but such conversations have circulated through contemporary theology for at least thirty years. Those curious about Christianity, environmental thought, and practice should consult the work of A Rocha (est. 1983), an international Christian organization that sponsors numerous field centers committed to theological inquiry, scientific research, environmental education, community building and sustainable agriculture. In addition, see the following works on the topic: Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation (1985); Loren Wilkinson, ed. Earthkeeping in the Nineties: Stewardship of Creation. Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 1991; Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis, mn: Fortress Press, 1993; Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith. Minneapolis, mn: Fortress Press, 2002; Norman Wirzba, The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007; N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope. New York: HarperOne, 2008; Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry. Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 2011; and Jonathan Wilson, God’s Good World: Reclaiming the Doctrine of Creation. Grand Rapids, mi: Baker Academic, 2013.

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expression of divine disclosure (see Genesis 1), but caught within a closed ­system of secular materialism where meaning is measured within the fluctuating market of human desire and political will. The response to materialism presented in Gilead is theocentric but not positioned as something antithetical to versions of Western humanism. In numerous essays, Robinson speaks of theologian John Calvin as a humanist who believed that all of “humankind is made in the image of God” and that each person is a bearer of “incandescent divinity,” a sacred essence from God that “shines forth” not an attribute of “Christians only, but is inherent and also manifest in all human beings as such” (“Preface” xv). John Ames is shaped by Calvin’s thought, but he also gleans wisdom from Ludwig Feuerbach, “a famous atheist” who “is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody” (Gilead 24). This quality of lived tension that circulates through Ames’s way of being is something increasingly scarce in contemporary American culture, where secular humanists can bracket out mystery from material existence, even as religious communities resort to “tribalism, resentment, or fear” (When I Was 141). Robinson, who has carefully surveyed this intellectual landscape, laments: What used to be meant by ‘humanism’, that old romance of the self, the idea that the self is to be refined by exposure to things that are wonderful and difficult and imbued with what was called the human spirit, once an object of unquestioned veneration, has ended. DEATH OF ADAM 8

As an artist and essayist, Robinson has made it clear that the loss of robust humanistic dialogue is a cornerstone of societal existence that needs to be r­ ecovered: “I miss civilization, and I want it back” (Death of Adam 4).16 When it comes to matters of environmental thought and practice, a healthy tension between religious traditions and versions of secular humanism might begin with a proper acknowledgement of human limits as well as an acknowledgement that 16

A number of theological and literary scholars are cultivating meaningful dialogue between traditions of humanism and religious thought. David Klemm and Robert Schweiker, for example, have stressed the importance of locating and living out an expression of “theological humanism,” a broad but also highly particularized way “to think about the human project that circumvents usual options rooted in political, religious, economic, or technological powers” (11). John McClure’s Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007; and Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 2010, are only two of many works in literary studies that point out the problem of interpreting American culture within a binary that attempts to divide sacred and secular thought.

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humans—like the earth—are not autonomous, but existing within a living framework of mutual interdependence. Those working within religious traditions will undoubtedly include the presence of divinity or a creator within this ecological design, yet even for the pure materialist there might be space to embrace Charles Taylor’s claim that “just because we no longer believe in the doctrines of the Great Chain of Being, we don’t need to see ourselves as set in a universe that we can consider simply as a source of raw materials for our projects. We may still need to see ourselves as part of a larger order that can make claims on us” (Malaise 89). Through the fictional life of John Ames, a narrator whose senses are tuned to the communicative language of God in creation, Robinson’s artistry shows readers what a theocentric and transformative way of being-in-the-world might still look like, but without prescribing or insisting upon it. Paul Ricoeur, whose theoretical insights are highly compatible with Robinson’s artistic vision, describes the subtle role that literature continues to play in the evolution of human consciousness and larger cultures: Through fiction and poetry new possibilities of being-in-the-world are opened up within everyday reality. Fiction and poetry intend being, but not through the modality of givenness, but rather through the modality of possibility. And in this way everyday reality is metamorphosed by means of what we would call the imaginative variations that literature works on the real. (43) In Gilead, Robinson’s work of theocentric fiction, John Ames’s recognition and response to the creator’s address is the primary means by which creational value is affirmed and disclosed to readers as a new reality of being. Creation matters because it exists as the creator’s generous address. Imagining water, for example, Ames states that before serving any utilitarian function the element “has a significance in itself, as water” and was possibly “made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash” (23, 28). The same standard is applied to humans. People are worthy because they exist as God’s sacred disclosure. When Ames considers “the gift” of his own “physical particularity,” he playfully states, “I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly” (69, 56). This same way of being is extended to John and Lila Ames’s young son when Ames tells the boy that as a parent “[y]ou see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us” (136). Indeed, throughout the entire novel, Ames circuitously reminds readers that “[e]xistence is the essential thing and the holy thing” for “God is the Author of Existence” (189, 178). Yet, as acknowledged by Ames, even

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this sort of language and philosophical musing cannot fully measure or grasp the ineffable quality of God’s existence.17 Ames’s artistic responses to the particularities of existence throughout the universe are shaped by personal experiences, Judeo-Christian scriptures, and the integrative vision of confessional theologians (Augustine of Hippo, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth), atheist and transcendentalist philosophers (Ludwig Feuerbach and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and the metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert. Augustine, in particular, who wrote extensively on creation and the primary forces of earth, air, water, and fire— the same elements revisited by scholars and practitioners of ecological design—understood the earth to be a manifestation of God’s infinite wisdom, the work of one who “arranged all things according to measure, number, and weight” (Wisd. 11:21, Augustine 276). His thought is cued to Genesis, in which God’s breath sweeps over “a formless void and darkness” and brings existence and order into being through divine address (Gen 1:2, nrsv). That summoning breath calls light into being, directs waterways, and brings every creaturely form and host into existence. Almost two thousand years later, the historical durability of considering primordial elements as stemming from the voice of God remains evident in the work of Ricoeur, who writes of “manifestation”—a form of divine address—as something often linked to ancient forces such as “sky, earth, air, water, fire” (52). “Proclamation,” the response to these elements that have their being in God, allows human and non-human creatures to become participants in a communicative pattern of call and response, where creaturely artistry is offered as a reply to the ancient and new address of God in creation (48). This communicative rhythm is the work of the breathing soul that recognizes and answers the mind of God.

The Fiery Summons of God: Creator, Creatures, and Consciousness

Throughout Gilead, John Ames muses over the meaning of primordial ­elements such as water, sunlight, soil and air—but it is fire—theologically interpreted as the animating breath-wind-spirit of God, that ignites Ames’s mind and enables 17

Robinson, through John Ames, makes this important clarifying observation about the existence of God: “[I]f God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There’s a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence. That is clearly a source of confusion. Another term would be needed to describe a state or quality of which we can have no experience whatever, to which existence as we know it can bear only the slightest likeness or affinity” (178–179).

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him to recognize and respond to God’s voice in creation. Biblical interpreters of the Genesis creation narrative have formed Ames’s theological sense for the animating vitality disclosed in the breath of God. For Augustine and Calvin, the breath of God, manifested as a given and irreducible flame, is the source of consciousness that provides humans with mindfulness and a soul capable of considering the forms of creation and the cosmos. Calvin describes the human soul as something both beautiful and limited, “irradiated with a beam of divine light, so that it is never left utterly devoid of some small flame, or rather spark, though not such as to enable it to comprehend God” (Calvin 169). At various times, Ames perceives “a kind of incandescence” residing in humans, other creatures, and the land itself (Gilead 44, see also 72, 247). This spark is the flame of consciousness that Ames encounters in the human faces he meets and remembers so often in Gilead. Near the beginning of the novel, for example, Ames encounters “two young fellows on the street” who work at the town garage (Gilead 5). Ames recognizes the two men, but describes them as “not churchgoing […] just decent rascally young fellows” who are telling jokes while “propped against the garage wall in the sunshine.” At first glance, the memory seems to be uneventful, but when Ames recalls the two men “lighting up their cigarettes” (5), the tone of Robinson’s writing radiates with sparks of fire and laughter. In this passage as elsewhere, categories of “religious and not religious” (Fay 45) are not particularly helpful, for, like Calvin, Robinson sees the flame of divinity stoked in all of humanity. The moment of recognition takes place within a scene of “wicked” laughing and “joking,” destabilizing any shallow assumptions about sacred and secular boundaries: They’re always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don’t know why they don’t catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent. (5) This scene of two gasoline soaked garage workers whose bodies might catch fire in radiant sunlight is, like many others throughout Gilead, dense with imagery of fire manifested as human consciousness. The imagery is theologically grounded in Genesis, where human mindfulness is presented as God’s breath, the sacred fire that animates the body. In the Hebrew account of creation, the first human

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creature is called adam, literally meaning “from the soil” (Alter 8). Hebrew scholar Robert Alter retains the emphasis of humanity, while also stressing earthiness, by translating the creature as “humus from the soil” (8, n.7) that is architecturally fashioned (yatsar) by God, who “works as a craftsman” (7, n.4). In this version of creation, after the first body was formed from the earth, the creator “blew into [adam’s] nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living creature” (Alter 8; see Gen. 2:7). When the human creature is called into existence by God’s breath-wind-spirit, the Hebrew narrative suggests that consciousness and the potential for human response emerges; or, as Rowan Williams eloquently puts it, in the address of God there “is a summons, a call which establishes the very possibility of an answer” (On Christian Theology 68). In Robinson’s theocentric vision of creation, participatory responses to the creator are not bound to humanity alone. Indeed, throughout Gilead, much like the creation account in Genesis, sparks of divine address—transmitted as the breath of God—extend beyond human creatures and permeate all of creation. Jürgen Moltmann, in God in Creation, describes the interconnectedness between God’s addressing spirit and material forms created by it in the following way: From the continual inflow of the divine Spirit (ruach) created things are formed (bara’). They exist in the Spirit, and they are ‘renewed’ (hadash) through the Spirit. This presupposes that God always creates through and in the power of his Spirit, and that the presence of his Spirit therefore conditions the potentiality and realities of his creation. The further assumption is that this Spirit is poured out on everything that exists, and that the Spirit preserves it, makes it live and renews it. (10) On some occasions Robinson is quite playful with the responses that nonhuman creatures offer their creator. The beloved cat Soapy, for example, a creature affectionately described by Ames as “a very unremarkable animal” and a “poor beast” (Gilead 52, 9), is said to be the descendant of a stray cat named “Sparkle,” perhaps a carrier of that ancient spark of vitality (22–23). Soapy is a participant that exists within God’s procreative language so much so that Robinson often blurs categorical lines between humans and this non-human creature that shares in the same breath of God.18 At one point, Robinson 18

As many theologians have noted, the human creature is not formed on the seventh day of creation for that day is reserved as the Sabbath. The human creature is created on the sixth day, the same day as the other creatures and beasts of the earth (see Genesis 1: 24–31).

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describes an afternoon when Soapy and Ames’s son have “joined” Ames in his study. With that fusing verb in place, Robinson goes on to describe the presence and positioning of both creatures using language and parallel syntax that is both precise and interchangeable. Ames remembers: You and the cat have joined me in my study. Soapy is on my lap and you are on your belly on the floor in a square of sunlight, drawing airplanes. Half an hour ago you were on my lap and Soapy was on her belly in the square of sunlight. (54) In another scene, Robinson weaves the identities of Soapy and the estranged Jack Boughton together, when both return to Gilead after periods of significant absence. The narrative sequence is set in motion when Ames states that Jack, his godson and namesake (John Ames Boughton), “paid a call” (91). Throughout the novel, Jack is described as an errant but good-spirited soul, one who lives out the biblical parables of the “lost sheep, the lost coin. The prodigal son, not to put too fine a point on it” (73). After establishing the wayward patterns of Jack, Robinson pulls Soapy into the scene when she describes the cat as a creature “who packs her bags every so often and takes off for parts unknown” bringing worry to those who love her (92). In the exact moment that Ames’s boy finds Soapy and brings her home with ears “flattened back” (92), Jack reluctantly returns to Gilead as well. The identities of Jack and the cat coalesce again when Ames states that the “lost sheep of a cat, Soapy, once more back from perdition for the time being” has brought about “general rejoicing,” a phrase equally appropriate for the return of Jack, the novel’s prodigal son (93, see Luke 15: 11–32). Robinson uses Soapy to stress ways that nonhuman creatures are participants within the fold of God’s divine address; however, the cat’s value is not contingent upon its comparative relation to humans, but rather in the merit of a cat being a cat, a creature existing within God’s creation. Soapy does what cats are called to do. She wanders in and out of scenes packing sausages and hot dogs as a “descendant of endless generations of vermin eaters” (185, 93) and is often found napping in patches of sunlight (51, 54, 104). In these moments of rest, Soapy still experiences the fullness and glory of God’s creation. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, the effect of God’s creation is often sensed as “glory” (kavod), a word that carries connotations of immense light and weight that can be seen and felt in the fullness of creation (Ryken, Wilhoit and Longman 330– 331). The ancient Hebrew psalmist, for example, once declared that the whole earth is full of God’s glory (Ps. 72:19). Moreover, when the people of Israel completed God’s temple under the reign of Solomon, the fullness of God entered

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the building and “the priests could not stand to minister […] for the glory of the LORD filled the house of God” (2 Chron. 5:14, esv). Thousands of years later, much like the ancient Hebrew writers, Robinson describes the immeasurable glory of a summer afternoon bearing down on all of creation, which causes Ames to sense “the feeling of a weight of light—pressing the damp out of the grass and pressing the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor and burdening even the trees a little as a late snow would do” (51). In this scene all of creation feels the presence of the creator, including “Old Soapy,” the distant offspring of Sparkle, who is “plastered to the sidewalk” (51–52) while taking an afternoon nap under what C.S. Lewis once called the “weight or burden of glory” (10). On other occasions, Ames catches a glimpse of the flame of creation and essence of glory embedded within the Iowa prairies. At the breaking of dawn, for example, he recalls watching “light flood over the land and everything [would] turn radiant at once,” perhaps as on the first breaking of creation when the hosts of heaven began to “sing and shout” in response to all that had come to pass (246). Such exuberance is not limited to the day, but is also memorably revealed when an evening sky becomes lit with sparks of fireflies. These lights of illuminating glory appeared while Ames was studying scripture with his lifelong friend and neighbor, “Old Boughton.” In a moment of responsive recognition, the two men stepped out on the porch and Boughton, who was preparing for the return of his wayward son, Jack, quoted the book of Job saying, “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward” (72, see Job 5:7). Years later, with the light of his own body fading like a spent firefly, Ames considers how the entire earth, animated by the breath of God’s address, will one day participate in a resurrection of renewed vitality. Recalling that distant evening with Boughton, who is also nearing death, Ames remembers the allusion to “sparks” from the book of Job, as well as his lifelong affection for fireflies: And really, it was that night as if the earth were smoldering. Well, it was, and it is. An old fire will make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this planet. I believe the same metaphor may describe the human individual, as well. Perhaps Gilead. Perhaps civilization. Prod a little and the sparks will fly. (72) In this memory, the primordial world that was animated by the first address of God in Genesis remains part of the animating world that still is.19 Time is 19

For more on this conception of time in relation to Christian thought, see Charles Taylor’s discussion of “gathered time” in A Secular Age 56–59.

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rendered timeless and the world—like the Book of Common Prayer (1549) professes—is a never ending disclosure of what Rowan Williams calls God’s “solidarity in creatureliness”: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end” (On Christian 76, Common Prayer). Fittingly, images of a smoldering universe return with quiet resurgence in the closing moments of the novel, when Ames considers an ending to a story that will not be the final chapter for his body or the earth. For now, his weakening frame will draw down to “an ember,” yet he knows that “the good Lord will surely someday breathe it into flame again” (246). This analogy to a glowing ember alludes to the creation narrative of Genesis, where the human creature is not presented as a dualistic construction of body and soul, but as a single creature composed of the earth and the address of God. As Wendell Berry explains: God did not make a body and put a soul into it, like a letter into an envelope. He formed man of dust; then, by breathing His breath into it, He made the dust live. The dust, formed as man and made to live, did not embody a soul; it became a soul. ‘Soul’ here refers to the whole creature. Humanity is thus presented to us, in Adam, not as a creature of two discrete parts temporarily glued together but as a single mystery. (106) This dormant ember also points to the hope of bodily resurrection and the restoration of the earth envisioned in the book of Revelation.20 Ames, who lives in the hope of the resurrection patterned in the life of Jesus—the second Adam who lived among the earth’s creatures—gives himself over to the ground “as a last wild gesture of love” (247). Fused in the hope of the restored earth and the sacredness of lives lived before him, Ames will reside with the entire planet’s spent forms and creatures to “smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence” (247). John Ames’s responsive way of being in a world called into existence by God may seem quaint or unimaginable to many postmodern readers. Yet the intellectual climate Robinson describes in her essays on religion and  science address the cultural consequences that arise when reductive materialism renders the soul absent from human consciousness. In an essay  titled  “Freedom of Thought,” for example, Robinson considers the 20

Several Christian theologians have stressed that “a new heaven and a new earth” proclaimed in the book of Revelation (21:1, esv) does not imply the destruction of this earth. By contrast, the new earth is the transformation and restoration of this earth. For more on this see previously mentioned works by N.T. Wright, Jürgen Moltmann, Hans Boersma, and Jonathan Wilson.

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r­amifications of a culture that removes the idea of a God-breathed soul from its discourse, or even worse, reduces the soul to a mechanistic device that ­calculates salvation, or monitors moral success and failure like an experiment in religious behaviorism that even B.F. Skinner might admire. As Robinson states: Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word ‘soul’, and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought and to every humane pursuit. In contemporary religious circles, souls, if they are mentioned at all, tend to be spoken of as saved or lost, having answered some set of divine expectations or failed to answer them, having arrived at some crucial realization or failed to arrive at it. So the soul, the masterpiece of creation, is more or less reduced to a token signifying cosmic acceptance or rejection, having little or nothing to do with that miraculous thing, the felt experience of life, except insofar as life offers distractions or temptation. When I Was 8

When the soul is lost, both figuratively and literally, the human subject no longer knows itself as the creator’s expression—an existence good in and of itself. The subject then substitutes the joy and freedom of existing through God with an array of ideological projects that can inscribe value upon creatures either within the closed system of materialism or within impoverished religious vocabularies like those Robinson has criticized on the Protestant political Right.21 In both spaces, the human form—along with all of creation—becomes objectified and used for schemes of will to power that measure creation’s worth on conditional terms rather than on the merit of being created and sustained by a mindful creator. Interestingly, Robinson compares the soul, “the masterpiece of creation,” to something that exceeds the complexity of galaxies in the cosmos. Describing how she once read “that there are more neurons in the human brain than there are stars in the Milky Way” (When I Was 8), she then describes reading numerous accounts about the brain being “the most complex object known to exist in the universe,” with the mind—not identical with the brain—considered by scientists to be “more mysterious still” (8). Given this elegance and complexity, the mind, Robinson suspects, requires a name that sets it apart within “the ontological run of things” and in her assessment the word 21

See Robinson’s essay “Wondrous Love” in When I Was a Child I Read Books.

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“‘soul’ would do nicely” (8). John Ames possesses this irreducible sense of mind. He recognizes and proclaims his existence within a relational God who brings all of creation to fruition through a summoning address. For this reason, Ames’s digressions into the design of the universe are by no means random. Through these attentive and proclaiming acts of thinking and writing, which Ames compares to something that “has always felt like praying” (Gilead 19), he becomes a creature of artful existence, a mindful soul whose thoughts revel in the manifestations of an expanding universe that comes into being through a roaring whisper that is still “hovering” (Alter 3, n.2) throughout the cosmos.

The Roar of the Cosmos: Planetary Musings and Celestial Consequences

When Marilynne Robinson was an undergraduate at Pembroke College, a philosophy professor assigned Jonathan Edwards’s The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, a work that clearly made a revelatory impact on how she would later approach ideas about cosmology, theological perception, and the unfolding of time in Gilead.22 In one section of Edwards’s argument, the theologian discusses the interplay between God’s creative will and our limited perception of created forms. Edwards, an eighteenth-century Congregationalist minister, writes within the framework of creatio ex nihilo, positing God’s creation of the universe from nothing but divine fiat.23 From there, however, the argument becomes quite speculative and intricate. Rather than speaking of 22

23

Robinson’s most extensive discussion of this treatise appears in her recent essay, “Jonathan Edwards in a New Light.” Here Robinson recalls reading Edwards for the first time and the process of being “liberated” from dominant expressions of intellectual determinism by his “glorious footnote on moonlight” (14). For further discussion of this reading see the essay “Freedom of Thought” in When I Was a Child I Read Books and interviews conducted with Hedrick and Fay. Unfortunately, Edwards’s intellectual legacy is often reduced to the image of an ill-spirited minister who once preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741). Ecocritcs curious about the complexity of Edwards’s ecological vision might want to consult Belden C. Lane’s Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011; and John Gatta’s Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. For more on this tradition in Judeo-Christian theology and its appearance in Robinson’s fiction, see Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation, 86–93; and Andrew Latz, “Creation in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson.” Literature and Theology 25.3 (2011): 283–296.

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creation as a one-time event, Edwards perceives the universe to be arbitrarily and continuously renewed by God’s sovereign will. From this perspective, God does not speak “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3, esv) only once, but continues to renew the design of the universe through an ongoing address. The miracle of creation is not only that something happened in a primordial past, but also that we continue to exist in the present. In order to illustrate the concept of a continually renewed universe, Edwards offers what Robinson calls “a gorgeous footnote,” a lengthy cosmological illustration about humanity’s limited perception of moonlight as it is reflected from the sun (When I Was 5). From a human perspective, our earthbound and finite point-of-view cannot fully witness how sunlight travels across the cosmos to illuminate the face of the moon. We see imperfectly, assuming the static nature of moonlight, when, in fact, the source of its glow is in motion and “constant flux” (Edwards 224). As Edwards explains, “[t]he lucid colour or brightness of the moon, as we look steadfastly upon it, seems to be a permanent thing, as though it were perfectly the same brightness continued. But indeed it is an effect produced every moment. It ceases, and is renewed, in each successive point of time; and so becomes altogether a new effect at each instant” (224). Working within this same relationship of cause and effect, as well as the finite perception of humans, Edwards extends the analogy by suggesting that the entire universe is held together in an “arbitrary constitution” that is dependent upon and proceeding from God’s “divine wisdom” and desire to renew all things (224). As Edwards explains: In this sense, the whole course of nature, with all that belongs to it, all its laws and methods, constancy and regularity, continuance and proceeding, is an arbitrary constitution. […] For it does not at all necessarily follow, that because there was sound, or light, or colour, or resistance, or gravity, or thought, or consciousness, or any other dependent thing the last moment, that therefore there shall be the like at the next. All dependent existence whatsoever is in a constant flux, ever passing and returning; renewed every moment, as the colours of bodies are every moment renewed by the light that shines upon them; and all is constantly proceeding from God, as light from the sun. (224) From this perspective of ecological design, which releases Earth and the cosmos from the fixity and autonomy rendered in the “Blue Planet” (1972), creation emanates and moves—both then and now—from God’s voice. The order, laws, and regularities appear to be permanent, but are actually the effects and variations that stem from a divine commitment to address and sustain the

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universe. Material patterns are certainly present and observable,24 but they, like moonlight and every created form, are in a state of flux, existing only as an expression of God’s expansive will and desire to create. John Ames, the Congregationalist minister of Gilead, is equally captivated by the theological implications of planetary motion and the observable patterns within a universe created and renewed by the address of God. At one point in the novel, Ames reflects upon an extended “dark time” of loneliness, when fried egg sandwiches, pots of coffee, and a radio announcer’s voice became a ritualistic means of making it through his own moonlit nights (Gilead 44). Over the course of many years, while watching the night sky and listening to countless baseball games, Ames recalls how patterns of the cosmos occasionally seemed to overlap and cohere with the rotations and movements of baseball innings that were also being transmitted to him from afar. In such moments, Ames’s mind recognized the effects of what Thomas Berry calls “a discipline that holds the energies of the universe in the creative pattern of their activities” (51). One night in particular, while listening as the Cubs played in Cincinnati, “a full moon” was set “icy white in a blue sky” and Ames began to consider the motion and course of the moon in regard to a spiraling baseball (Gilead 45). He felt a kinship between the turning of his mind and the objects themselves, knowing that “the moon actually moves, in a spiral, because while it orbits the earth it also follows the orbit of the earth around the sun” (45). These revelatory insights on cosmological design came few and far between for John Ames because immense loneliness skewed his perception. When remembering the years of prolonged darkness, after his first wife and child passed on in childbirth (Gilead 17), Ames experienced time as a sluggish void. He remembers: The time passed so strangely, as if every winter were the same winter, and every spring the same spring. And there was baseball. I listened to thousands of baseball games, I suppose. Sometimes I could just make out half a play, and then static, and then a crowd roaring, a flat little sound, almost static itself, like that empty sound in a seashell. It felt good to me to imagine it, like working out some intricate riddle in my mind, planetary motion. If the ball is drifting toward left field and there are runners on

24

Edwards’s personal writings on nature are a witness to his interest in the theological dimensions of ecological design. See, for example, Perry Miller’s edited collection of Edwards’s notes and reflections titled Images or Shadows of Divine Things. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.

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first and third, then—moving the runners and the catcher and the shortstop in my mind. I loved to do that, I can’t explain why. (44) Robinson, enacting the emotional condition of Ames’s circumstances in her prose, does present the unfolding of time and motion “strangely,” but it is in no way fixed. It is more like an “intricate riddle” or series of patterns within “a fractal universe” that emit variations of motion and self-similar design (Gilead 44, When I Was 49). The prose, in fact, weaves interconnected layers of patterns. Seasons and days pass cyclically and unrecognizably slow, like the turning of thousands of leisurely paced baseball innings. Radio “static” is overtaken by the sound of roaring fans, whose voices reach Ames “as a flat little sound, almost static itself.” In moments of observable action and causality, a struck baseball is sent “drifting” through a celestial field that resembles space. Defensive players rotate positions, energies are released from apparent stasis, and Ames’s mind is sent spinning into a state of “planetary motion” that he loves to experience, but “can’t explain why” (44). Notably, Ames intuits patterns of ecological design both visually and acoustically, in this case rendered through sound from a radio and a seashell on his desk. While listening to the baseball game, an announcer’s voice cuts out intermittently, transmitting a “static” and “roaring” noise that Ames compares to “that empty sound in a seashell” (Gilead 44). At first glance, the repetition of “static” seems to merely signify breaks in the radio transmission, which get conflated with the voices of “roaring” fans; however, like the game of baseball itself, the words here are at “play” with grammatical and symbolic resonance (44). For example, as if reaching back to Edwards’s observations on the apparent permanence of light cast against the moon, the repetition of “static” here suggests an illusion of stasis, alluding to the seemingly fixed state of Ames’s lonely condition, but by extension, also to the apparent fixity of the moon and the iconic “Blue Planet,” what Carl Sagan once called “a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark” (7). The words of this passage, like the universe they describe, are in no way stationary, but are caught up in an adaptive interpretive process where meanings emerge, decay, and shift. When the word “static” brushes against “roaring,” the register of linguistic meaning shifts and emerges to suggest a current of static or stored electricity, the potential for a pre-existing energy to flow out from its source. Robinson, of course, is working in fictional prose, yet the language and ideas packed within this passage are highly compatible with theories of cosmological design suggested by astronomer and physicist Marcelo Gleiser, author of A Tear at the Edge of Creation (2010). Gleiser describes the expanding and asymmetrical universe using the language of “flux” as well as “static truth,” hovering, in a sense, between

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words used by Jonathan Edwards and Robinson.25 In a conversation with Robinson, Gleiser explains the changing of the universe in the following way: When we look at the whole universe, it is expanding, it’s growing, it’s changing in time. And so to me I look at things much more as a state of flux, you know, of becoming, of transformation, as something that has some static truth behind it. Let’s put it that way. And so the notion that we as humans could come up with a final answer to the mystery of nature it’s pushing things a little too far for our capabilities. Tippett

The idea of a stored or “static truth” as a potential flow of energy becomes equally expansive and potent when transferred from astrophysics to theological models that attempt to describe the ongoing address of God. Evolutionary biologists tend to sidestep the voice of God by writing about divine existence using a reductive watchmaker analogy, an Enlightenment proof for the existence of God introduced by William Paley in Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802). The argument compares the intricate workings of a watch to a complex universe crafted by an intelligent designer; however, the model also suggests that once the watch is set into motion, its creator stands apart from the work in a state of ambivalence, supposedly like an objective and rational scientist. Creation, once set into intelligent motion, operates freely, without divine engagement. This analogy, which to borrow a phrase from John Ames, has “been put to crude uses” (Gilead 150), makes a straw man for Richard Dawkins in his provocatively titled The Blind Watchmaker (1986). Dawkins, a well-known practitioner of New Atheism and the “parascientific thought” (Absence 41) with which Robinson contends, works from a solely materialist perspective, which he couches as the only possibility for an objective scientist. Dawkins insists that the complexity of natural selection renders the idea of an intelligent designer void and mute. He states that any watchmaker who would create the randomness of ­evolutionary biology would have to be blind and his “creation” an accidental 25

It is worth noting that Gleiser rejects the idea of a theory of unification or “Oneness” on the positivist grounds that we cannot measure the moving world or capture it in a state of stasis or perfection that would verify its unity (A Tear xiii–xiv). He also discusses the limits and possibilities of studying a moving universe with artificial models. In a conversation with Marilynne Robinson, Gleiser states that physicists and cosmologists are “trying to make models, which are never the whole truth of nature. That is a fundamental point. Every model is a lie, but some models explain more than others” (Tippett).

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mishap. In contrast to Gleiser, who approaches the asymmetrical aspects of ecological and cosmological design with tact and humility, Dawkins markets his hypothesis, as Morton does his theory of “the mesh,” as a verified “fact” (Morton 28). As an alternative to the watchmaker analogy, Rowan Williams, much like Jonathan Edwards and Marilynne Robinson, offers a tentative and incomplete model for the existence of God’s address that insists “creation is going on now” (Tokens 34). Williams and Robinson both acknowledge the impossibility of creating a model or expressions of language that will fully capture and observe God’s activity in the moving world.26 Williams echoes the concerns of John Ames, who states that “creating proofs from experience of any sort is like building a ladder to the moon. It seems that it should be possible, until you stop to consider the nature of the problem.” Ames advises that proofs “are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent […] because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp” (179). With a healthy dose of humility, Williams proceeds into his analogy concerning the ongoing address of God, acknowledging that his model—limited by finite perception and the frailty of metaphor—is likely to be as problematic as “the watchmaker image” (Tokens 35). Nevertheless, Williams writes: […] think about an electric light burning. The electric current causes the light to shine, but that doesn’t mean that the electric power is something that was around only at the moment you put the switch on, so that the light itself is a rather distant result. On the contrary, the light is shining here and now because the electric current is flowing here and now. In the same way, it is the ‘current’ of divine activity that is here and now making us real. Tokens 35

Interestingly, this analogy to electrical current is worked out in Gilead, where manifestations of God’s address emerge as sacred effects, channels of communicative transmission moving within a universe charged by God’s linguistic current. Indeed, when Ames describes the role that water plays in baptism, he describes it as “an electrical connection” (63), an exchange that takes place, allowing a minister to feel and respond to the sacredness of existence, “of really knowing a creature, […] really feeling its mysterious life and your own 26

It is worth noting that Rowan Williams has written an essay on Robinson’s fiction titled, “Native Speakers: Identity, Grace, and Homecoming.” Christianity and Literature 61.6 (Autumn 2011): 7–18.

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mysterious life at the same time” (23). Baptism is not proof of anything, but is an act of proclamation, a response to a mystery and manifestation disclosed by God. As Ames states, baptism “doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that” (23). Rowan Williams’s thought is also echoed in Gilead’s acoustic metaphor concerning the static sound of the seashell. In Ames’s darkest days of loneliness, when the voice of a radio announcer became indiscernible—cutting out like the voice of some distant god—the language of nature persisted with patterns and forms that spoke to him like an “empty” sound of a seashell. The irony here is that large shells are by no means silent, but charged with acoustic “roaring,” a word that Robinson has elsewhere used to describe mysterious manifestations “within the wild roar of the cosmos” (When I Was 10, see also “Preface” xvi). In an essay titled “Changing the Myths We Live By” from Faith in the Public Square, Williams describes creation as an unfolding communicative exchange between God and creation: The Christian believes that creation exists because God speaks: in both Hebrew and Christian Scripture, the Word of God is the foundation of everything. In Eastern Christian thought especially, this theme was developed in some depth, drawing out the implication that creation is itself an act of communication, a form of language. Creation is an address, an action that expresses an intelligence and asks for intelligent response. FAITH 177

Within this model of ecological design, a relational interplay is at work, a process of address and response that is partly communicated through the language of creation. Hearing and responding to divinity, according to Williams, is a matter of “being in ‘tune’ with the relation of the physical universe to God,” an assertion that is dependent on matters of perception and definitions of the soul that Robinson has said much about (Faith 177). Like Williams, Robinson’s sense of theological perception is rooted in the idea that the human soul, or conscious mind, responds to God through its capacity to perceive and consider the universe as an expression of God’s address. In The Death of Adam, for example, she describes the ancient act of myth making, which has evolved into forms of modern storytelling,27 as “an effective response to some exigency of being” that is communicatively engaged through “the relationship between the mind and the cosmos” (3). 27

For more on this topic, see Richard Kearney’s On Stories. New York: Routledge, 2002. (3–14).

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The problem is that a reductive and materialist interpretation of God and the soul that “sheers off the contemplative side of faith” (Absence 9) ultimately does away with the I-Thou relationship, severing the communicative channels of exchange between the self and the “wholly other” that is both transcendent and immanent (see Otto 25–30, Barth 37). Without God to address the sensory endowed subject, there is nothing for the soul to consider or perceive. Without a soul that perceives and contemplates the wholly other, there is no human creature for God to address. A brief comparison of the resonance located in the seashell from Gilead and uses of shells as foundational images in ecological design illustrates the difference between an overtly materialist engagement with the universe and a sense of theological perception that is tuned to the address of God. In the field of ecological design, seashells provide a pattern and scale to be mimetically replicated by designers ranging from architects, poets, visual artists, and software engineers. Sim Van der Ryn and Christopher Alexander, key thinkers in architecture and ecological design, both note the self-replicating patterns of seashells as part of the geometry of fractals, objects in nature that exhibit self-similar patterns while also containing irregularities that catalyze transformation. For Van der Ryn, in particular, the replicating pattern of a spiraling nautilus shell provides a visual model for mapping culture as something that co-evolves with human consciousness, culture, and ecology. Beginning with the smallest hypothesized material form, a quark, as the innermost part of the shell, Van der Ryn uses the outward emergence and growth of the spiraling object to metaphorically chart cultural growth and the fullness of human consciousness that we are supposedly evolving toward. Through replicating patterns of emergence, the scale of the shell is compounded to illustrate holistic design and the coherence of mind and nature, beginning from the innermost quark, moving outward to cells—to the earth—and eventually to the universe (Design 144–145). Returning to Gilead, it is surely not by chance that Robinson has interjected a seashell into a passage of narrative spirals, patterns of replication, and shifting states of consciousness. The shell, much like the cosmos Ames meditates upon, becomes a material witness to the voice of God’s expansive big bang that was and is voiced through the universe from the deepest galaxy all the way down to the smallest “fragment” of mind residing in human consciousness (Absence 135). Upon hearing the “roar” of static transmitted to him from miles away, Ames associates the sound with a material source, “that big shell” on his desk that was given to him by his neighbors (Gilead 45). The sound, now linked to a specific object, prods Ames to remember a couplet he once wrote, a meditation on the shell’s design and material origin. The fragment of the poem reads:

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Open the scroll of conch and find the text That lies behind the priestly susurrus. (45) Here the spiraling shell is both a wind instrument (one with sacred uses in several religions) and, metaphorically, an ancient scroll with text impressed inside its rolls. As an object from the sea hewn into a cultural artifact, it offers a material witness to the past without instating a materialist reading of ecological design. The latter would trace the beginning of culture and human consciousness back to a hypothesized quark, whereas Ames’s couplet tells us to listen for the “susurrus” in nature that cannot communicate to us if we attend to the materiality of nature alone. Seen only as the former hull of a rooted mollusk, a seashell elicits no aesthetic pleasure and bears no message. To imagine the spiral shape as a scroll to be unraveled for the words it contains, one must first hearken to a whispering that has no observable source in the shell’s projections. In converting the shell into a conch, moreover, humans give artistic voice to what the sound of God’s breath, moving through nature, stirs in them. When Ames’s mind imaginatively unrolls the shell in his couplet, he hears the breath-wind-spirit of God disclosed at creation (Alter 3, n.2). The address here is cast in the present tense, which is imaginatively consistent with the Hebrew creation narrative that emphasizes sound and perpetual recreation in the present. In the King James translation of the Bible, Genesis 1:1 is rendered as “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” implying that creation was a single sequence of perfected events. However, several modern translations such as Robert Alter’s Genesis: Translation and Commentary and The Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures, translate the verb phrase as “when God began to create,” emphasizing an initiated event that continues to be disclosed (Alter 3, Tanakh 3). In both translations the verb attached to God’s breath-wind-spirit (ruach) is also actively translated as “hovering” or “sweeping,” rather than the past tense “moved” (see Alter 3, Tanakh 3, Gen. 1:1, kjv). Moreover, in a provocative footnote, which rivals that of Jonathan Edwards’s thoughts on moonlight, Alter states that the verb describing the action of God’s breath also appears in ancient Hebrew to enact “an eagle fluttering over its young” (Alter 3, n.2). As in Gilead’s acoustics, this “hovering” breath evokes not only an ongoing and rhythmic act, but also a rustling sound or voice, the “susurrus” before a material beginning that continues to be heard across the whispering “roar” of an expansive cosmos (Gilead 44–45). John Ames’s response to creation as an address from God suggests that human creatures, created in the image of God (see Gen. 1:27), are also creative participants and shapers within the unfolding and expanding universe. This concept is put into motion in another one of Ames’s planetary reflections, a

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fragmentary digression on the “celestial consequences” of “worldly endeavors” (9). In this passage, Ames remembers a moment when he witnessed something like a scaled down version of the cosmos coming into being before his eyes: I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping in the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world. Gilead 9

Looking through the lens of an upper-room window, Ames sees the effects of something expansive being created, the “celestial consequences” and beauty of “worldly endeavors” floating past his gaze. This sense of perception is akin to what Frank White calls the “Overview Effect,” the way in which a change in elevation—most notably experienced by astronauts—can lead to a shift in perception and consciousness that causes a viewer to recognize the universe as a series of parts within a whole (4–5). Looking down from above, Ames follows the path of an “effulgence of bubbles rising” from the ground, drifting as spheres and planetary forms “through the branches, even above the trees.” Notably, the motion of this miniature cosmos is spoken into being by the breath of his wife and child “blowing bubbles” and the language here hovers between verb tenses, slipping into the “gathered time” (C. Taylor, Secular 56) of past and present states of creation. The scene features expansive images of birth, emergence, and the ecological design of patterns set within similar patterns. The presence of the “dragonfly” in the passage evokes thoughts about the “hovering” wings of God’s breathwind-spirit in Genesis, and readers encounter “Soapy” the sleepy cat again, this time playing in soap bubbles. More importantly, Ames’s wife, dressed in “blue,” is bringing “fat and wobbly” bubbles of “dragonfly blue” into being alongside a child she once bore into existence, when she, like the “wobbly” bubbles themselves, was about to “burst” from the same life giving condition. Increasing the

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scale of birth from the earth to the cosmos, the vibrant colors of “red” and “blue,” set within the fragility of wobbly forms, is reminiscent of the colorful stars and nebulae clouds seen through the eye of the Hubble Space Telescope.28 This tool that traces new galaxies emerging throughout the cosmos was named after Edwin Hubble, the cosmologist whose theoretical observations were, as Robinson states, “understood to imply the universe is expanding,” which consequently gave rise to a scientific theory of cataclysmic “genesis” that was just “as abrupt as Genesis says it was” (Absence 13). At first glance, drawing a comparison between a cosmos of wobbly bubbles and the stirrings of nebulae clouds witnessed from a second story window might seem like an absurd avenue of interpretation. Yet, this passage from Gilead is quite similar to a model that astronomer and physicist Marcelo Gleiser uses when he describes our universe as “a bubble of space that burst into existence from a sea of nothingness” (3). Gleiser explains how several modern theories about material beginnings posit that somewhere in the vast universe “there exists a quantum nothingness, a bubbly foam of prototype universes called the ‘multiverse’ or the ‘megaverse’” (4). At random points, progeny becomes possible and “the cosmic froth bubbles of space spring forth—baby universes” (4). Most of these bubbles shrink back to nothingness, yet when a proper balance between gravity and matter is aligned, creation takes place out of nothing, “creatio ex nihilo” (3). As Gleiser states, “[t]ime starts ticking when a bubble bursts into existence and begins to evolve, that is, when there is change to be accounted for” (4). Even with theories of a bubbling cosmos loosely intact, there is no scale or model to adequately compare wobbly soap bubbles and the complexity of emerging nebulae. However, when it comes to matters of energy and material expansion, Robinson insists that these forces and phenomenon—although drastically different in both scale and grandeur—are both still real manifestations brought into being by variations of time and energy disclosed by an intelligent mind. For example, in the Preface to John Calvin: Steward of God’s Covenant, she compares the striking of a match to “the roar of the universe” (xvi), and suggests that although the two may be radically different in scale, both are profound effects communicated from the same source of mind. She writes: How do we compare the energy that drives the universe to the energy expended in the striking of a match? There is no way to state any proportion 28

See, for example, the colorful images of galaxies, stars, and nebulae coming into being and decaying at nasa’s website: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/.

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between them, in scale or duration. The second term could only be vanishingly small, set against the first, and assuming that the greater energy could by any means be quantified. That the striking of a match amount to virtually nothing in the roar of the universe, comparatively speaking, does not in any way lessen its reality or change its nature. And in fact the energy the match stores and releases, like the mind that contrived it and the hand that holds it, all express that cosmic energy, though how and why we cannot say. (xvi) Robinson’s use of “mind” here is slippery and ambiguous, suggesting perhaps, that in contrast to a cultural biologist like Morton, who insists that the world is  “monstrous and mutating, strangely strange all the way down and all the way through” (Ecological Thought 61), the universe we inhabit is, in fact, energized by an equally infinite and immanent presence of mind all the way down and all through way through, although exactly “how and why we cannot say” (“Preface” xvi). Returning to Gilead, the “celestial consequences” of a mother and child blowing bubbles into the air of an expanding universe may seem to be quite small. However, for Ames, who watches the life giving scene unfold from the frame of an upper window, the “effulgence of bubbles” and joyful laughter is “very lovely,” a scaled down version of the “red” and “blue” patterns of emergence that one might witness through a telescopic lens of drastically compounded power and height. Following the analogy of the struck match and roaring cosmos a bit further, the breath that speaks both bubbles and nebulae into existence comes from the same “mind that contrived it” (“Preface” xvi), which, again, produces a staggering array of patterns moving within similar patterns. The procreative act of “blowing bubbles” (Gilead 9) by mother and son still participates within the animating breath-wind-spirit (ruach, Alter 3, n.2) that was “hovering” over the universe and blown into the human creature. This breath that once moved over the formless void is not static and still, but still animates the hands of mother and child, forms a barrage of bubbles, moves the instincts of Soapy the cat, and stirs colorful nebulae clouds into being. In spite of this harmonious reading of patterns, Ames’s perception of the immanence of God’s address in existence does not posit the absence of discord and asymmetry, but instead acknowledges the co-mingling of pain and beauty, sorrow and joy, loneliness and community, as well as the living and dead that move within the particularities of a coherent and evolving universe. Ames’s life bears witness to these complexities and as a man now “dying into the life that [he] has loved rather than falling irrevocably away from it,” his meditations consider the tensions inherent within a creation with many apparent

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contradictions (Wiman 36). Ames is no stranger to the loneliness that has spanned “most of [his] life” and when considering the meaning of this condition he turns to images of cosmological hosts to describe the intricate layers of distance and intimacy that stretch across time and space (Gilead 44). Early in the novel, Ames tells about making a childhood trip to Kansas with his father to visit the grave of his grandfather (Gilead 9–15). When Ames discusses the multi-generational journey for the first time, readers sense the wounds of distance set between these characters, the reality, that as Ames says, “[a] man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension” (7). Indeed, as the novel unfolds, we find people passing through Gilead like “planets […] sloughed from the same star” (198), moving in close proximity, but animated by their own distinct “gift[s] of physical particularity” and ways of being (69). These individuals, moving like hosts throughout the cosmos, appear to be fixed and autonomous, but they actually exist within “the mesh” or “whole fabric of all reality” that moves and changes in a state of constant flux (Morton 28, Fay 64). Ames encounters the truth of motion and interconnectedness while standing at his grandfather’s grave in Kansas. In that moment, the boy becomes momentarily disoriented by the movements of the universe, and he catches a glimpse of something both ordinary and rare: At first I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just going over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was a full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. Gilead 14

The sun and moon—seemingly timeless markers of day and night, life and death—touch over the living and deceased bodies in this graveyard that hums with the “palpable currents” of God’s relational and expansive address. This event, both mundane and miraculous, awakens Ames’s young sense of theological perception and makes him sensitive to the design and complexities the universe. As a child he suspected that the cosmological event was brought into being by the ardent prayer of his father at the graveside, or that the light surrounding them was a smoldering manifestation of the “glory that [his] grandfather had somehow emanated out of his parched repose” (48). Years later, however, Ames realizes that when his father spoke of how “the sun

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and moon aligned themselves” that day, he believed that the event happened without special reference to anyone or anything in particular (48). For Ames’s father, a man who never talked about “visions or miracles, except the ones in the Bible,” the arbitrary moment was “beautiful” (48, 15) but little more than a random flicker of time that “everybody in Kansas saw” right along with them (48). Notably, this appeal to strict rationalism did not silence the language of creation communicated to Ames’s father for as the two travelers continued down the road, Ames remembered that his father also “had to stop and wipe his eyes” when talking about the moment shared between them (49). This passage of intimacy and cosmological distance, where sun and moon briefly connect across vast spaces, speaks volumes about the apparent distance between people, as well as disciplines such as science, religion, and literature. At times, when wandering through a university campus, the intellectual space between fields can make each department appear to be an autonomous planet within a cosmos of competing ways of knowing. Occasionally, we might cross paths. But, for the most part, we keep our distance. We go about our business celebrating irony and fragmentation, and attempt to cope with spaces set between people, places, and disciplines in spite of our increased connectivity, the realities of globalization, and our professed commitments to interdisciplinary studies. What Robinson calls us to is something more immediate and transformative: “to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm” (Gilead 246). Understandably, this type of acknowledgement can be easily sloughed off as something sentimental or nostalgic. However, within a moving and changing universe guided by an irreducible mind that draws all things together, we would be wise to remember the insights of Lila Ames, a quiet and keen observer, who speaks the truth about any ideology that might seek to bind and isolate us through a fixed model of stasis: “Everything can change” (153). Works Cited Alter, Robert. Genesis: Translation and Commentary. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1996. Alter, Robert and Marilynne Robinson. “Robert Alter and Marilynne Robinson: The Psalms.” 92Y: Cultural Institution and Community Center. Digital Recording. (December 17, 2007). Web 12 Sept. 2014. Augustine. Trans. and Intro. Mary T. Clark. Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1984.

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Barth, Karl. The Humanity of God. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960. Berry, Thomas. The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future. New York: Bell Tower Press, 1999. Berry, Wendell. Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Henry Beveridge. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008. Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1986. ———. The Selfish Gene. 1976. 30th Anniversary Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Deloria,Vine, Jr. For This Land: Writings on Religion in America. New York: Routledge, 1999. Dodge, Jim. “Living by Life: Some Bioregional Theory and Practice.” 1981. In Debating the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader. Eds. John S. Dryzek and David Schlosberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (365–373). Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. Ed. Edward Hickman. Vol. I. Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974. Fay, Sarah. “Marilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction No. 198.” Paris Review 186 (2008): 37–66. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 2011. Gleiser, Marcelo. A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe. New York: Free Press, 2010. Handley, George B. “The Metaphysics of Ecology in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Modern Fiction Studies 55.3 (2009): 496–521. Handley, George and Lance Larsen. “The Radiant Astonishment of Existence: Two Interviews with Marilynne Robinson, March 20, 2004, and February 9, 2007.” Literature and Belief 27.2 (2007): 113–143. Hedrick, Tace and Marilynne Robinson, “On Influence and Appropriation.” The Iowa Review 22.1 (1992): 1–7. Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Klemm, David E. and William Schweiker. Religion and the Human Future: An Essay on Theological Humanism. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Krauss, Clifford. “Trouble With the Top Man.” The New York Times (26 April 2012): B1. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949.

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Lewis, C.S. The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses. New York: Macmillan Co., 1949. McHarg, Ian L. Design with Nature. Garden City, NY: The Natural History Press, 1969. Merchant, Carolyn, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York: Routledge, 2003. Moltmann, Jürgen. God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God. 1985. Trans. Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Muir, John. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. Boston Houghton and Mifflin Co., 1913. Nash, Roderick Frazier. Wilderness and the American Mind. 1967. 4th edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Orr, David W. The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. 1923. Trans. J.W. Harvey. London: Oxford University Press, 1958. Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. ——— The Death of Adam. 1998. New York: Picador, 2005. ———. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. ———. “Preface.” John Calvin: Steward of God’s Covenant. Eds. John F. Thorton and Susan B. Varenne. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. (ix–xxvii). ———. When I Was a Child I Read Books. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. ———. “Jonathan Edwards in a New Light.” Humanities 35.6 (November/December 2014): 14–17, 45. Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Ed. Mark I. Wallace Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995. Ryken, Leland, James C. Wilhoit and Tremper Longman III, eds. Dictionary of Biblical Imagery. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998. Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. New York: Random House, 1994. Schaub, Thomas and Marilynne Robinson. “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Contemporary Literature 35.2 (1994): 231–251. The Jewish Bible: Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. The New Jewish Publication Society Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text. Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985. Taylor, Bron. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

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———. The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, ON: Anansi Press, 1991. Tippett, Krista. “The Mystery We Are: Marilynne Robinson and Marcelo Gleiser.” On Being: with Krista Tippett. Podcast and Transcript. (January 2, 2014). n. pag. Web 11 Aug. 2014. Van der Ryn, Sim and Stuart Cowan. Ecological Design. 1996. Tenth Anniversary Edition. Washington DC: Island Press, 2007. Van der Ryn, Sim. Design for Life: The Architecture of Sim Van der Ryn. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2005. White, Frank. The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. 1987. 2nd edition. Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1998. White, Lynn, Jr. “The Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” 1967. In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996. 3–14. Wiman, Christian. My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Williams, Rowan. On Christian Theology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000. ———. Faith in the Public Square. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. ———. Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007. Wolverton, Brad. “Environmental Group Makes Changes in Board Policies.” The Chronicle of Philanthropy (18 March 2004): 51.

Sentimentality and Grace: Marilynne Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Prodigal Son Narratives Rachel B. Griffis Abstract Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), each set in the 1950s, engage with the heritage of Calvinism in American life. My essay places these companion novels in dialogue with two representative anti-Calvinist novels of the Victorian era: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale (1822) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing (1859). The ways that these three writers portray the story of the prodigal son— Robinson’s Jack Boughton, Stowe’s Aaron Burr and James Marvyn, and Sedgwick’s David Wilson—demonstrate fundamental differences in what they believe about human nature, justice, and God’s grace. Robinson’s Calvinism is tough-minded, but Victorian sentimentalism attenuates the deep, abiding comforts of God’s sovereignty.

Initially inspired by Sir Walter Scott, American writers have written historical novels that allow them to comment on the present by way of examining the past. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), each set in the 1950s, continue the tradition started by James Fenimore Cooper and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and further developed by writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sedgwick and Stowe in particular concern themselves with matters significant to Robinson, especially the heritage of Calvinism in American life. In A New-England Tale (1822), Sedgwick grapples with America’s Calvinist heritage and concludes that milder forms of Christianity like Quakerism or Methodism are more compatible with American values than her forbears’ faith. Calvinist doctrines like predestination and total depravity prove substantial stumbling blocks to her characters, and they must abandon these harsh traditions in order to be both American and religious. Stowe, too, confronts predestination in The Minister’s Wooing (1859), a novel that depicts the pain and anxiety caused by the impossibility of knowing whether a deceased loved one was part of the elect or damned for eternity.1 1 Though Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale and Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing are the two nineteenth century texts that this essay studies in depth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1869) is another example of a text by a woman that takes Calvinism to task. Like The Minister’s Wooing, Phelps demonstrates that living with uncertainty regarding a deceased

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In Robinson’s novels, the questions that preoccupy Calvinism’s heirs have not changed. Jack Boughton asks John Ames if “some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition,” and at the end of Home, Glory and old Boughton plummet into a harrowing state of mourning when Jack leaves (Gilead 150). Their reaction stems from their inconsolable feeling of uncertainty; they do not know if they will see him again, they have doubts about his physical and mental well-being, and at least according to Boughton, he demonstrates no discernible signs that he has been summoned by God’s irresistible grace. Glory and Boughton’s grief is just as poignant as that of the characters in Stowe’s novel who mourn for James Marvyn, a young man who was thought dead prior to demonstrating the signs of conversion. Yet Robinson stays within the Calvinist fold, both in her fiction and otherwise, which is not true of her predecessors.2 The ways that these three writers portray the story of the prodigal son—Robinson’s Jack Boughton, Stowe’s Aaron Burr and James Marvyn, and Sedgwick’s David Wilson—demonstrate fundamental differences in what they believe about human nature, justice, and God’s grace. Influenced by eighteenth century ideologies regarding the moral sense of human beings, Sedgwick and Stowe use the prodigal son narrative to show that Calvinism is incompatible with Enlightenment-inflected theories of moral sentiments and humane reason. They show that the human uncertainty of divine election, a human being’s inability to participate in his own salvation, and the irrelevance of one’s feelings to moral conduct—all staples of traditional Calvinism as well as early Puritanism in America—lead to moral irresponsibility, depression, and mental or spiritual paralysis. Through the sentimental tradition that they helped to forge in Victorian America, Sedgwick and Stowe debunk Calvinism and demonstrate its harm to the human psyche as well as its detrimental effects on nation-building. Robinson, in contrast, re-envisions the prodigal son narrative without Sedgwick’s and Stowe’s sentimentality. In her portrayal of the parable, the sentimental novel’s narrative logic and philosophical perspective are the unworthy rival of a full,  humanistic Calvinism that is animated by the mystery of divine grace. loved one’s status in the afterlife is unbearable and unreasonable. By the end of the novel, Phelps’s female characters have effectively softened the views of a Calvinist minister, who declares, regarding an unfeeling sermon on the afterlife, “I shall never preach this again” (220). 2 Sedgwick joined the Unitarian church in 1821. Stowe’s change in religious affiliation is more complicated because her husband was often employed by colleges from the Calvinist tradition, either Presbyterian or Congregational (Kimball 112). She started attending an Episcopal church in 1864.

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In  Gilead and Home, Robinson rescues grace from nineteenth century dilutions by writers like Sedgwick and Stowe and presents this theological concept neither as inhumane nor unreasonable. In fact, Robinson’s novels do not consider the qualities of humaneness or reasonableness as appropriate ones with which to measure the divine. Rather, for Robinson’s characters, grace is both stern and loving, and ultimately, an incomprehensible gift. There is perhaps no debate more provocative in the scholastic community committed to the study of American women writers than Jane Tompkins’s indictment, articulated in Sensational Designs (1985), of Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (1977).3 While many scholars continue to take issue with Douglas’s book, her claim that nineteenth century women and clergy are responsible for the development of “an anti-intellectual sentimentalism” that replaced the Calvinism of the American Puritans is difficult to dispute (13). Admittedly, scholars like Tompkins have shown that “anti-intellectual” is a misleading descriptor for nineteenth century women writers when their work is considered for its social dimensions. Tompkins goes so far as to argue that sentimental writers “offer[ed] a critique of American society far more devastating than any delivered by better-known critics such as Hawthorne and Melville” (124). While Tompkins’s reading of nineteenth century women is valuable because it shows how this body of writing pertains to nineteenth century reform ideologies, her argument takes for granted monumental changes in American Christianity. What American religion lost when it traded its Calvinist heritage for nineteenth century sentimentality, in the words of Douglas, was “a toughness, a sternness, an intellectual rigor” (18). Nothing Tompkins or her successors have written accounts for the losses in the nineteenth century that Douglas powerfully documents. Instead, they tend to surpass this declension as unworthy of scholarly study and instead emphasize the social and political dimensions of nineteenth century American women writers as if these dimensions were independent of the writers’ struggles to define (in some cases, re-define) their relationship to Reformed Protestantism.

3 Critics have since begun to view Douglas and Tompkins in less polarized terms. Mary G. De Jong, in her recent study of sentimentality in the American nineteenth century, is a fine example of a non-polarized perspective on Douglas and Tompkins (5). David S. Reynolds’s Faith in Fiction is also an important work that follows Douglas, as he refutes her claim “that a strong, masculine Calvinism gave way to a shrinkingly feminine liberalism” and argues that instead, many writers who opposed Calvinism were critical of it because it “created a timid languor and listlessness” (109). In his analysis of Sedgwick, he suggests that her female characters “become increasingly heroic and self-sufficient” (52).

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Sedgwick and Stowe are both examples of the loss of “toughness,” “sternness,” and “intellectual rigor” that Douglas states were qualities of early American Christianity. Both writers were influenced by sentimentality as they processed and expressed religious belief in their fiction stylistically and philosophically. Sentimentality is most often understood as a preference for emotion over the mind, as Leo Braudy asserts, “the sentimental novel strives to imitate feeling rather than intellect” (5). Though helpful, this definition does not take into account the eighteenth century roots of sentimentality and the philosophical assumptions underlying most works in this genre. Herbert Ross Brown’s description of the “sentimental formula” is more complete: [It is] a simple equation resting upon a belief in the spontaneous goodness and benevolence of man’s original instincts. It could point to what passed for philosophical justification in the admired writings of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Adam Smith. It was informed throughout with a moral purpose to which all its other elements were subordinated. (176) Sentimental fiction’s emphasis on the “benevolence of man’s original instincts” is particularly important to an understanding of Sedgwick’s and Stowe’s critiques of Calvinism, for they show that Calvinism must be rejected for a religion that has more faith in human goodness and therefore takes human feelings seriously in determining right and wrong. To use Stowe’s famous phrase from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, many women writers in the nineteenth century advocated alternatives to Calvinism because this religious tradition does not “feel right” (624).4 Historically, Calvinism has often required its adherents to suspend their reason and feelings, to accept inequalities, and to yield to an incomprehensible authority. Sedgwick and Stowe, therefore, both employ sentimentality in their iterations of the prodigal son story to react against the Calvinism of their ancestors, focusing specifically on the issue of human agency and the difficulty of living with uncertainty.

4 Near the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe speaks to her readers about what they can do to aid the cause of abolition: “There is one thing that every individual can do,—they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race” (624).

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Agency and Certainty: Sedgwick’s and Stowe’s Prodigal Sons

Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale contrasts a Calvinist family with characters who practice milder forms of Christianity in order to demonstrate the disastrous effects of the Calvinist perspective on human nature, agency, and virtue. As this novel was written in the wake of Sedgwick’s own conversion to Unitarianism, she wrote it out of her “desire to help others escape from the chains which she had broken” (Dewey 151). The image of breaking chains is congruent with the thought of William Ellery Channing, the father of Unitarianism, who states that his religion “began as a protest against the rejection of reason,” to which he adds, “against mental slavery” (435). Sedgwick, in turn, explores the enslaving effects of Calvinism in the religious upbringings of the Wilson children and the heroine of A New-England Tale, Jane Elton. Under the influence of her mother’s “pure and gentle spirit” and the practical virtues of Mary Hull, her domestic servant who is Methodist, Jane is the recipient of an education that forms both her sentiments and actions (12).5 For Jane, godliness is attainable through good works, a nurturing environment, and wholesome habits. Mrs. Wilson, on the contrary, insists on the innate sinfulness of human nature and the impossibility of justifying oneself before God on account of good works. She rules her family “according to ‘the letter,’ but the ‘spirit that giveth life’ [is] not there” (24). Jane, who is the product of her mother and Mary Hull, contributes to society while Mrs. Wilson raises irresponsible citizens who are detrimental to the republic. The Wilson children, consequently, are selfish, dishonest, and manipulative. The daughters, Elvira and Martha, read books that they are told not to read and go to dances from which they are forbidden. They plagiarize their papers, abscond with rakish men, and marry tavern keepers and foreigners. David, the novel’s type of the prodigal son, similarly leads a reckless life. He steals money from his mother and allows Jane to take the blame for it. He is a gambler, a spendthrift, and worst of all, a seducer who impregnates a young woman and abandons her. While Jane’s religious upbringing has taught her that she will be formed by her influences, experiences, and choices, the Wilson children have 5 As Carla R. Ritter notes, Jane Elton “is clearly a Unitarian at heart” (100). The heroine of A New-England Tale thus expresses religious sentiments congruent with the author’s, but Sedgwick also portrays Methodism in a sympathetic light and as a positive alternative to Calvinism along with Unitarianism and Quakerism. It is likely that Sedgwick portrayed Methodism sympathetically because this form of Christianity counters some of the tenets of Calvinism to which Sedgwick was opposed, such as the doctrine of limited atonement and the doctrine of irresistible grace (Noll 278–279).

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been taught about the depravity of human nature and the evilness of the human heart. Therefore, Jane takes responsibility for her choices and believes in the ability to improve herself through good habits and influences while the Wilsons relinquish responsibility for their lives because they assume no agency in effecting their own virtue or salvation. At the end of the novel, David demonstrates the disastrous results of Calvinist beliefs regarding human nature and human agency in letter to his mother: “If you taught me truly, I have only acted out the nature totally depraved (your own words,) that [God] gave to me, and I am not to blame for it” (155). In this passage, Sedgwick illustrates Channing’s critique of Calvinism, specifically his conclusion that total depravity and divine election “give excuses to the bad” (89). He also lambasts the idea of “God’s irresistible agency,” a doctrine that he believes “subvert[s] our responsibility,” “make[s] men machines,” and “cast[s] on God the blame of all evil deeds” (94). For Sedgwick, Calvinism not only deals poorly with the prodigal son, but also helps to produce him along with the moral and political problems that his remorseless behavior poses to the young republic. She therefore eschews Calvinism in her fiction in favor of other forms of Christianity such as Methodism, Quakerism, and Unitarianism. These traditions, which grant more agency to human beings in matters of virtue and salvation, better align with American notions of freedom and individual responsibility.6 As Emily VanDette notes, “Calvinist doctrine has no place in the raising of republican nations and families, because it precludes the concept of free will, a central tenet of democracy. Effective parenting/governance involves teaching children/citizens to become self-determining, a rationalist-inspired value fundamentally at odds with Sedgwick’s depiction of Calvinist predetermination” (55). Consequently, Sedgwick represents the rejection of Calvinism as an indispensable part of the country’s future progress. While Sedgwick criticizes Calvinism for subtracting a human’s agency to choose virtue or salvation, Stowe builds upon Sedgwick’s objections to Cal­ vinism by adding that Calvinism requires Christians to live with the uncertainty 6 Although American Christians at the beginning of the nineteenth century believed, like their predecessors, that humans were sinful and needed salvation, “they were much more likely than before to hold that the human will was an active, necessary, and determinative participant in the reception of divine grace” (Noll 231). When representing the Methodist tradition specifically, Sedgwick portrays the doctrine of perfection as another way to grant human beings more agency than Calvinism had formerly. While Mrs. Wilson says that Mary Hull is “indulging” in the “soul-destroying” doctrine of perfection, the narrator of A New-England Tale describes Mary’s life as “a commentary on the precepts of the Gospel” (25). As Noll reports, Methodists “held that it was possible by God’s grace for Christian believers to become perfectly sanctified,” which was a great affront to traditional Calvinists (335).

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of one’s salvation. She represents this uncertainty and the inability to choose belief as humanly impossible in The Minister’s Wooing, which includes two prodigal sons: James Marvyn and a fictionalized version of Jonathan Edwards’s grandson, Aaron Burr, Jr. Both of these men, like the Wilson children, view conversion as something that cannot be accomplished by an act of the will. James’s backstory is proof of this mindset. Having been gifted with a nature decidedly different from that of his Christian siblings, James is a strong-willed, active child who spends his days getting into mischief and avoiding his lessons. The narrator tells us that he “yawned over books, and cut out moulds for running anchors when he should have been thinking of his columns of words in four syllables” (65). In the present time of the novel, when James is a young man, these behaviors and attitudes continue to characterize him, as in this brief scene: “He held the little Bible in his hand as if it were some amulet charmed by the touch of a superior being; but when he strove to read it, his thoughts wandered, and he shut it, troubled and unsatisfied” (79). According to James and the characters who surround him, it is not in his nature to be converted for the kingdom of Christ. If he were destined to become a Christian, he would have more aptitude for conventional Christian behavior, like study and Bible reading. Aaron Burr, who was not only Edwards’s grandson but also an accused conspirator against the u.s. government, gives the same reason for his lack of faith. “Unfortunately, our intellectual beliefs are not subject to the control of our will,” he tells the novel’s heroine Mary Scudder when she encourages him to persevere in the faith of his fathers.7 He continues, “I have examined, and the examination has, I regret to say, not had the effect you would desire” (277). Like Sedgwick, Stowe critiques Calvinist teachings for discouraging human participation in matters of virtue or salvation.8 In a religious tradition where 7 Aware of Burr’s accused conspiracy against the u.s. government, Stowe, in the same manner as Sedgwick, indicts Calvinism for raising irresponsible citizens for the republic. 8 In her depiction of the Wilson children’s many sins and Jane’s virtue, Sedgwick takes issue with the Calvinist notion that sanctification is obtained by God’s grace alone and not by good works or human effort. Additionally, Sedgwick demonstrates her objections to the Calvinist understanding of sanctification through her sympathetic portrayal of the Methodist Mary Hull, as the Westminster Confession of Faith opposes the Methodist doctrine of perfection by asserting that sanctification is “imperfect in this life; there abideth still some remnants of corruption in every part” (Williamson 149). In The Minister’s Wooing, Stowe specifically takes issue with the Calvinist concept of irresistible grace, which expresses that humans cannot turn to God, or gain salvation, by their own means. The Westminster Confession states about salvation: “This effectual call is God’s free and special grace alone, not from any thing at all foreseen in man; who is altogether passive therein, until, being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call, and to embrace the grace offered and conveyed in it” (Williamson 115).

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individuals cannot choose “the straight and narrow” but must be converted by God’s irresistible grace alone, men like David Wilson and Aaron Burr seduce innocent women and leave destruction in their wake because they cannot choose otherwise. Furthermore, an unbearable feeling of grief and uncertainty cloaks men like James Marvyn who actually want to be converted but cannot find sufficient evidence within their natures to prove their conversion, both to themselves and to others. When he leaves—unconverted—for an expedition at sea and is later thought dead, his mother is nearly driven insane by the possibility that he died unconverted and perished into the everlasting flames of hell. A similar situation in Stowe’s life was the impetus for The Minister’s Wooing, which impacts this very scene.9 Although Stowe succumbs to evangelical conventions by returning James Marvyn to his family and the arms of Mary Scudder, putting him through a conversion experience that would satisfy the most rigid judge, the Calvinism of her main characters is not the brand of Christianity she wishes to endorse in this novel. The author gives Mary Scudder the piety and sisterly affection she hopes will influence her readers, but the character who exudes the religious beliefs Stowe wishes to impress on her audience are modeled by the black slave, Candace. When Dr. Hopkins tries to instruct Candace in the doctrine of total depravity, she remarks, “I didn’t do dat ar’, for one, I knows. I’s got good mem’ry,—allers knows what I does,—nebber did eat dat ar’ apple,—nebber eat a bit ob him” (82). Moreover, when Mrs. Marvyn delves into grief-induced sickness and madness after the supposed death of her son, Candace announces, “I’m clar Mass’r James is one o’ de ‘lect [the Elect] and I’m clar dar’s consid’able more o’ de ‘lect dan people tink” (202). The beginning of her statement, “I’m clar,” demonstrates an alternative to the harrowing uncertainty of traditional Calvinist beliefs. It does not make sense for Christ to have died for a few elect people, Candace asserts. Additionally, she implies that the Holy Spirit could accomplish the work of conversion without the person in question demonstrating all the appropriate signs. Further evidence that Stowe unquestionably prefers Candace’s beliefs over any other character appears when Virginie parses difficult theological questions regarding God’s goodness in the midst of suffering and concludes, “I try Candace’s way” (207). For Stowe, and for her characters, “Candace’s way” is a form of Christianity that, influenced by the philosophical assumptions of sentimentality, does not require its followers to live in uncertainty regarding their salvation. It is a religion that, in contrast

9 In 1822, Stowe’s sister lost her fiancé, who had not demonstrated the signs of conversion, when he drowned at sea, an event that was incredibly difficult for the Beecher family (Harris vii).

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to Calvinism, can be defined by its clarity and reasonableness and thus better aligns with one’s feelings.10 Sentimentality characterizes both Sedgwick’s and Stowe’s portrayals of prodigal sons whose behaviors result from Calvinism in America. To use, again, Stowe’s phrase from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Calvinism that creates prodigals like David Wilson, James Marvyn, and Aaron Burr does not feel right. Jane Elton’s perspective, which rejects the idea of a predetermined nature, emphasizes the efficacy of good influence, and believes in human ability to affect virtue, better appeals to readers’ feelings than the Wilson’s deterministic worldview. Jane exudes confidence in the moral sense of human beings and appeals to the audience’s reason, through their emotions, by demonstrating the absurdity of Calvinist thinking along with the deleterious effects of its ideas on the human mind, heart, and behavior. The Wilsons are, in nearly every way, dehumanized by their Calvinism. Similarly, Stowe’s sentimentality asks readers to feel the pain and injustices associated with Calvinism and to turn those feelings into judgments. For example, when James Marvyn is pronounced dead, the Calvinist belief system nearly drives Mrs. Marvyn insane with its harshness. Readers are subsequently expected to feel pity for Mrs. Marvyn and to move from those feelings to the reasonable assertion, as articulated by Candace, that “Jesus didn’t die for nothin’” (202). Readers should, as Virginie does, “try Candace’s way” because it agrees with their sentiments.

Grace and Mystery: Robinson’s Prodigal Sons

While her American predecessors are critical of Calvinism for depriving Christians of agency and certainty, Robinson recasts the Calvinist doctrines of limited atonement and total depravity through the concepts of grace and mystery that speak to the very issues against which Sedgwick and Stowe struggled. Robinson presents divine grace as the foremost mover and she represents uncertainty not as madness-inducing, but as a mystery that can bring 10

For a description of the conventions of conversion narratives, see Brauer or Caldwell (Brauer 233; Caldwell 1–2). Although Stowe took issue with many aspects of Calvinism, Charles H. Foster acknowledges that her characters “said both yes and no to Calvinism,” which is evident in the way that Candace debunks Calvinist beliefs while other sympathetic characters, such as Mary Scudder, accept them (Rungless Ladder 111). For a more recent nuanced view of Stowe’s attitude toward Calvinism, see Peter J. Thuesen’s essay, in which he asserts that for Stowe, Calvinism “was synonymous with the sober, virtuous Yankee yeoman” (“Geneva’s Crystalline Clarity” 226).

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peace to troubled minds. In Gilead, the Reverend John Ames accepts a level of mystery in his understanding of two prodigal sons: his brother Edward and his godson Jack. From Ames’s very first story about Edward, he confides that he is uncertain about the state of his brother’s soul—the question of all questions for a Christian. As Ames describes Edward as a precocious child and ultimately “Herr Doktor” who returns from Germany a non-believer, he hesitates to accept his brother’s self-definition as an atheist: “That’s what he claimed to be, at any rate” (25). Later, Ames describes a game of catch between himself and Edward that resulted in a sublime moment wherein Edward poured a glass of water over his head and recited Psalm 133. Recalling this episode, Ames describes Edward’s salvation as a mystery by writing, “after that day I did feel pretty much at ease about the state of his soul. Though I am not competent to judge” (64). At first glance, this childhood memory may appear very similar to the one in which Candace announces that James Marvyn was one of the elect even though he had not demonstrated the signs of conversion. This scene does not exude certainty; rather, it contains a feeling of peace that follows the mystery of God’s grace. Ames conveys that salvation is a mystery only known to God, and the idea that a self-proclaimed atheist may belong to God is neither certain nor impossible. It is the mystery of it, the not knowing as well as the inability to judge, that gives Ames the freedom to feel “pretty much at ease” about his brother’s salvation. When one relies on the grace of God to enact salvation and neither the prodigal’s confession nor a demonstration of faith, a situation that may appear hopeless is actually never completely devoid of hope. The idea that God’s grace is a mystery that allows one to hope in a seemingly impossible situation is what Robinson conveys at the end of Home as Glory is energized by the hope that one day Jack’s son will come to her house, sit on her porch, and answer the prayers of his father. Although Robinson does not portray uncertainty in as negative a light as Stowe, the mystery of God’s grace is nevertheless a burden for the prodigal and for those who love him. Like James Marvyn and Aaron Burr, Robinson’s Jack Boughton craves another nature. He craves the assurance of Christian belief, if only for his father’s sake, yet he cannot will himself to believe. Because he has not been gifted with belief, he regrets that he is a “sort of proof” of predestination (Home 225). Similarly, Jack understands his misdemeanors as a child as part of his predetermined nature when he reflects on them. He tells Glory, “all my offenses were laid to a defect of character,” and “I have no quarrel with that” (202). Although Jack relates his predetermined nature in a mild and accepting manner, the scene is tinged with his pain at not being able to understand himself as well as the pain of remembering the seemingly senseless grief he caused

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his family during childhood. This grief is just as poignant for the family of the prodigals. For example, in the wake of Edward Ames’s rejection of Christianity, John Ames’s mother warns him “If you ever spoke to your father that way, it would kill him” (27). Similarly, when Edward refuses to bless a meal, his mother weeps while his father retreats to “the attic or woodshed, in some hidden, quiet place” where he is “down on his knees, wondering to the Lord what it was that was being asked of him” (27). Robinson’s portrayal of the Boughton family’s grief over Jack is even more intense than the situation between Edward Ames and his father. The entirety of Home is devoted to exploring this particular kind of sorrow, as Glory describes, “They were so afraid they would lose him, and then they had lost him, and that was the story of their family, no matter how warm and fruitful and robust it might have appeared to the outside world” (66). Or, as Boughton puts it in a conversation with Jack: My life became your life, like lighting one candle from another. Isn’t that a mystery? […] And yet you always did the opposite of what I hoped for, the exact opposite. So I tried not to hope for anything at all, except that we wouldn’t lose you. So of course we did. That was the one hope I couldn’t put aside. (116). Glory and Boughton’s expressions of grief in these passages are just as real and distressing as Mary Scudder’s or Mrs. Marvyn’s grief over the loss of James at sea. Robinson, however, did not write Gilead and Home to challenge Calvinism, as did Sedgwick in A New-England Tale and Stowe in The Minister’s Wooing. Instead, Robinson’s revision of the nineteenth century fictionalization of the prodigal son parable not only affirms Calvin’s loving God, but also portrays sentimentality as Calvinism’s nemesis, as an antidote to grace and mystery. Using old Robert Boughton as the preeminent expression of divine grace, Robinson demonstrates that her (and her character’s) version of Christianity does not always feel right. Boughton’s love is anything but sentimental. He is often unpleasant. He scolds Jack, expresses his disappointment to his son’s guiltridden ears, and he prioritizes Jack’s concerns over Glory’s though she too is marred by her past. As Robinson says in an interview about the biblical prodigal son story, “whom God loves he loves, and no choice the erring son makes or fails to make changes that” (Painter 489). In other words, God’s grace is neither reasonable nor comprehensible. Neither does it align with human sentiments, according to Sedgwick and Stowe. Despite Jack’s consistent prodigality, Boughton’s love for him never subsides.

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John Ames of Gilead expresses what perhaps could pass as the sentimental perspective on Boughton’s and Jack’s relationship when he admits his difficulty accepting the demonstration of divine grace it expresses: “there is an absolute disjunction between our Father’s love and our deserving. Still, when I see this same disjunction between human parents and children, it always irritates me a little” (73). The sentimental perspective, which prioritizes both reason and feelings, is incompatible with Calvinism because it requires its adherents to live with a God who “loves whom he loves,” even if it makes no sense and even if it does not feel right. As a result, writers such as Sedgwick and Stowe have written stories that debunk this unreasonable brand of Christianity by casting the concept of irresistible grace as cruel because it drives men like David Wilson and Aaron Burr into immoral behaviors. Similarly, they cast the mystery of God’s ways as unacceptable because it deprives women such as Mrs. Marvyn of the comfort they need following the death of loved ones. Critics who have written about the prodigal son story in Gilead and Home also want to make the story more sentimental and thus more consistent with the perspectives of Sedgwick and Stowe. For example, Rebecca M. Painter argues that the best examples of grace in the novels extend from Jack to his father and from Glory to Jack (337). Aligning herself with reviewers Simon Baker and James Wood, Painter and others tend to see Boughton’s sternness, his unequal treatment of Glory and Jack, and his multiple chastisements of his reprobate son as evidence of his own selfishness and his inability to extend forgiveness and grace to the person who most needs it.11 They prefer to see the Christian God in characters who are nicer to one another, whose words and actions better agree with their sentiments because it is less unsettling to see Jack or Glory as the emblematic loving father of the prodigal rather than the cantankerous Boughton. This interpretation is not only misguided but also demonstrates twenty-first century biases against certain aspects of Christianity, such as the notion of God’s wrath or anger.12 Contemporary believers and nonbelievers alike are resistant to embracing the paradox of God’s wrath and love.  This resistance is one of the reasons that Congregationalist Jonathan 11

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In his review “Homeward Bound,” Baker asserts that Boughton “cannot forgive Jack for anything: forgiveness is merely a doctrine he aligns himself to in conversation.” Like Baker, Wood argues that Boughton “is a fierce, stern, vain old man, who wants to forgive his son and cannot” (“Homecoming” 78). For example, in early 2013, the Presbyterian Committee on Congregational Song removed a hymn titled “In Christ Alone” from a new hymnal after the authors of the song refused to change a line that referred to “the wrath of God” being satisfied by Christ’s death on the cross (Smietana “Presbyterians”).

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Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) is known in mainstream culture as an example of a repugnant form of Calvinism, before Christianity had become more humane with the aid of nineteenth century Christians like Sedgwick and Stowe. Yet this sermon brims with God’s grace just as much as God’s wrath, for it communicates that there is no depth of sin from which God cannot save a person even as it stresses no height of piety can save someone not summoned by God. As Edwards says, “God hath had it on his heart to show to angels and men, both how excellent his love is, and also how terrible his wrath is” (100–101).13 Yet contemporary difficulties with accepting the paradox of God’s love and wrath preclude many readers from seeing the loving concept of grace in Edwards’s sermon as well as in Boughton’s approach to his son.14 Characters in Gilead and Home, however, recognize the parallels between the Christian God and Boughton, particularly John Ames. When he hears of Jack’s intentions to return to Gilead, Ames reflects, “He is not the eldest or the youngest or the best or the bravest, only the most beloved. […] [Boughton] has some fine children, yet it always seemed this was the one on whom he truly set his heart. The lost sheep, the lost coin. The prodigal son” (Gilead 72–73). In addition to explicitly viewing his friend Boughton as representative of God and Jack as the prodigal son, Ames sees himself as the older brother in the biblical parable who struggles to accept the mystery of divine grace and love, which appears unreasonable to him as it did to Sedgwick and Stowe. Although Ames is supposed to be a second father to Jack, who is both Ames’s namesake and godson, he struggles, until the very end, with the bitterness of the older brother. As quoted above, he is “irritat[ed]” by having to witness the “absolute disjunction between our Father’s love and our deserving” in Jack’s and Boughton’s relationship (73). Like the older brother in the biblical story, Ames’s stance toward Jack is almost always defensive. He wants to keep his wife and child 13

14

For issues of space, a discussion of Robinson and Jonathan Edwards has not been included here, though these novels clearly explore Edwards’s impact on American religion. Edwards’s thought is present in Ames’s writing, especially in his statement that “it is religious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer” (Gilead 145). At the same time, the character named after Edwards in Gilead succumbs to Feuerbach and German Higher Criticism, which could suggest that Edwards’s attempts to defend Christianity in the Age of Reason end in atheism. As Perry Miller asserts, “Edwards is a great modern in his refusal to confess that the eternal world is an utter mystery” (237). Furthermore, “he could criticize the Enlightenment because he was enlightened” (Miller 238). While criticism of Boughton’s complacency regarding the Civil Rights struggle is welldeserved, his love for Jack and the grace he extends to his prodigal son is nevertheless representative of the Christian God.

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from Jack, worrying that Jack intends to manipulate them after Ames’s death. He disinters Jack’s past sins when Jack attends his church and finds himself the subject of the sermon. At one point, he announces, “I don’t forgive him. I wouldn’t know where to begin” (164). Despite Ames’s struggle with being the self-righteous older brother who cannot stand to see grace extended to so unworthy a recipient, he is gifted at the eleventh hour with the grace already within Boughton and shared abundantly with the prodigal. He receives a second chance to bless Jack and then delivers the most explicit and profound expression of divine grace that appears in Robinson’s work, as he finally speaks about Jack from his position as a father and not as a jealous older brother: I can tell you this, that if I’d married some rosy dame and she had given me ten children and they had each given me ten grandchildren, I’d leave them all, on Christmas Eve, on the coldest night of the world, and walk a thousand miles just for the sight of your face […] And old Boughton, if he could stand up out of his chair, out of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, would abandon all those handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having. If Boughton could be himself, he would utterly pardon every transgression, past, present, and to come, whether or not it was a transgression in fact or his to pardon. He would be that extravagant. (237–238) This passage epitomizes Robinson’s Calvinism and her challenges to nineteenth century writers like Sedgwick and Stowe who dilute the beauty and mystery of divine grace in Reformed theology by making Christianity more clear, reasonable, and comprehensible as well as more open to human participation in the efficacy of salvation. Sentimentality, which emphasizes feeling right, cannot adequately speak to the Calvinist conception of grace or  recognize a moment of it, for grace, as a Presbyterian like Boughton or Congregationalist like Ames conceive it, is incomprehensible. It is pure mystery; it simultaneously emphasizes God’s sternness and God’s love. Following this passage, Ames demarcates sentimentality and grace. Having represented God as a man who would leave his faithful children on Christmas Eve to pursue the one who least deserves his love, Ames explicitly places himself in the prodigal son story as one of the faithful children whom the father

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leaves. He writes of himself, “I was the good son,” “the one who never left his father’s house,” and “one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained” (238). To this inequality or injustice that is the bane of the older brother, and that feels wrong to the sentimentalist, Ames responds, “And that’s alright. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be” (238). Far from emphasizing the injustice of God’s grace, both in terms of its restraint regarding the older brother and its extravagance regarding the prodigal, as nineteenth century writers were prone to do, Robinson provides her readers with a picture of grace that does not quite make sense, that does not necessarily feel right. Though Ames takes on the role of the older brother in the prodigal son story, a sinfulness that permeates nearly all of his reflections on his namesake until the very end, Glory accepts her father’s love for Jack even though she is closest to the actual domestic position of the older brother in the original story. She has remained in the faith of her father, even though she recognizes the “spiritual complacency” of his church, and she is the child who has been home caring for Boughton when Jack returns (Home 111). However, she appears to struggle with none of the classic behaviors of the older brother.15 She admits to Jack, willingly and without bitterness, that their father “always loved you more than any of us” (Home 136). She faithfully cares for both her father and brother through the domestic work for which she has limited aptitude and even less love. She subordinates her needs to those of others, especially Jack’s, even though she, like Jack, has returned home with deep wounds. Boughton even recognizes that she too is suffering when he tells Jack, “I know Glory got her feelings hurt something terrible. Terrible” (Home 90). Despite Boughton’s recognition of Glory’s suffering, he continues to privilege Jack’s needs, and Glory not only accepts Boughton’s favoritism, but also views her brother’s problems as more imminent and more important than her own. Glory follows her father’s example of grace by subordinating her needs to her less deserving brother and thus corrects the response of the older brother in the biblical parable, yet she is arguably the most sentimental character in  both Gilead and Home. Her family “always said about her”: “Glory, you take  things too much to heart” (Home 14). “She wept easily,” and during her 15

Glory does, however, recognize the injustice: that she had been home caring for her father and upon Jack’s arrival, Boughton immediately prefers Jack’s care over his daughter’s. Even though she ultimately accepts the situation, Glory wonders, “What right did he have to take over the house this way?” (67). Nevertheless, she embodies a biblical representation of service and strength, wherein the first is last and the last is first. Glory is, as Jennifer L. Holberg asserts, “the real presence of God to her family” (“Courage to See It” 293).

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childhood, her siblings made a game of reading sad stories to her for the purpose of evoking emotion (15). The token phrase associated with her was “tears […] Ah, tears” (15). Although Robinson’s depiction of the Christian God and his mysterious ways could not be expressed using the “sentimental formula,” Glory demonstrates that feelings as well as experiences that grate against one’s sense of reason are indeed essential to human experience (Brown 176). Human feelings and reason, however, do not form the basis of reality for Robinson’s exemplary characters. They suspend their sense of justice or their desires to “feel right” and, instead, they submit to what John Ames calls the “incomprehensible reality” of God’s love and his involvement in ordinary human lives (Gilead 238). Therefore, Ames accepts the notion that “the rejoicing” for him “in heaven will be comparatively restrained,” and Glory accepts that her father’s love for Jack is greater than his love for herself and her more deserving siblings (Gilead 238). Differing from Sedgwick’s and Stowe’s characters, Ames’s and Glory’s observations are hard truths, but they yield to them because they both live with openness to the incomprehensible. Works Cited Baker, Simon. “Homeward Bound.” Review of Home by Marilynne Robinson. The Observer (October 4, 2008). n. pag. Web. 17 Mar. 2014. Braudy, Leo. “The Form of the Sentimental Novel.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 7.1 (1973): 5–13. Brauer, Jerald C. “Conversion: From Puritanism to Revivalism.” The Journal of Religion 58.3 (1978): 227–243. Brown, Herbert Ross. The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789–1860. Durham: Duke University Press, 1940. Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Channing, William Ellery. Selected Writings. Ed. David Robinson. New York: Paulist Press, 1985. De Jong, Mary G. Introduction. Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices. Ed. Mary De Jong. Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. (1–12). Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741. A Jonathan Edwards Reader. Ed. John E. Smith, et. al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. (89–105). Foster, Charles H. The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1954.

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Harris, Susan K. Introduction. The Minister’s Wooing. New York: Penguin, 1999. (vii–xxiii). Holberg, Jennifer L. “‘The Courage to See It’: Toward an Understanding of Glory.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (2010): 283–300. Kimball, Gayle. The Religious Ideas of Harriet Beecher Stowe: Her Gospel of Womanhood. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982. Miller, Perry. Jonathan Edwards. New York: William Sloan, 1949. Noll, Mark. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Painter, Rebecca M. “Further Thoughts on a Prodigal Son Who Cannot Come Home, on Loneliness and Grace: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Christianity and Literature 58.3 (2009): 485–492. ———. “Loyalty Meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (2010): 321–340. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Gates Ajar. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1869. Reynolds, David S. Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Ritter, Carla R. Insurrection behind the Veil: Religious Heterodoxy in Sedgwick, Child and Stowe. Dissertation: Temple U, 1999. ProQuest. Web. 26 Nov. 2012. Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Picador, 2004. ———. Home. New York: Picador, 2008. Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. A New-England Tale; or, Sketches of New-England Character and Manners. 1822. Ed. Victoria Clements. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Smietana, Bob. “Presbyterians’ Decision to Drop Hymn Stirs Debate.” USA Today (August 5, 2013). n. pag. Web. 17 Mar. 2014. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. New York: Penguin, 1986. ———. The Minister’s Wooing. 1859. New York: Penguin, 1999. Thuesen, Peter J. “Geneva’s Crystalline Clarity: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Max Weber on Calvinism and the American Character.” John Calvin’s American Legacy. Ed. Thomas J. Davis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. (219–237). Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Van Dette, Emily. “‘It should be a family thing’: Family, Nation, and Republicanism in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale and The Linwoods.” American Transcendental Quarterly 19.1 (2005): 51–74. Williamson, G.I. The Westminster Confession of Faith. 2nd edition. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2004. Wood, James. “The Homecoming: A Prodigal Son Returns in Marilynne Robinson’s Third Novel.” Review of Home by Marilynne Robinson. The New Yorker 84.27 (Sept. 2008): 76–78.

In the Face of Mystery: Soteriological Symbolism in Gilead and Home Mark S.M. Scott* Abstract Robinson redeploys the story of the Prodigal Son through the troubled life of Jack Boughton. Robinson’s American retelling of the classic parable, however, does not simply transpose the story from first-century Palestine to twentieth-century Iowa. Instead, she refracts it through the soteriological prism of Calvinism, particularly the doctrine of double-predestination, and situates it within an American historical and existential context. In my essay, I argue that Jack Boughton’s spiritual turmoil personalizes an abstract theological doctrine, giving a face and a name to the mystery of salvation. Jack’s quest for spiritual direction and his strained relationships with his family, friends, and himself function as a literary mediation on the reach of divine grace, which simultaneously reinscribes and problematizes Robinson’s Calvinism. Jack is a mystery to himself and others, and his inability to find peace suggests his damnation, at least in his own theological estimation, even as his love for his wife and son and his family’s love for him hold out hope for his ultimate redemption. Mystery, then, tempers the cold edge of the doctrine of double-predestination in the novels.

“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” jeremiah 8:22

In Gilead and Home, Marilynne Robinson redeploys the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32) through the troubled life of Jack Boughton. Robinson’s retelling of the classic tale, however, does not simply transpose the story from first-century Palestine to mid-twentieth-century Iowa.1 Instead, she refracts it through the soteriological prism of Calvinism, particularly the doctrine of

* I wish to thank Jason Stevens for introducing me to Robinson’s works and for his expert editorial guidance. I also wish to thank Ariel Morrison for her assistance on earlier drafts. 1 Robinson accepts the characterization of Gilead and Home as literary explorations of “the depth and breadth of Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son” (Painter 487). She also discusses its connection to the question of predestination (489).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004302235_008

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­ redestination, and situates it within an American historical, theological, and p existential context.2 In my essay, I argue that Jack Boughton embodies the problem of double-predestination, and that his spiritual turmoil personalizes an impersonal and abstract doctrine, giving it a face and a name. The complex theological, relational, and emotional interplay between Jack and his family serves as a literary meditation on the mystery of salvation.3 To himself and others, Jack is a mystery, and his inability to find inner peace indicates his state of perdition, at least in his own theological estimation, even as his love for his wife and son and his family’s abiding love for him intimates the possibility—or hope—of redemption. Mystery, then, tempers the cold edge of the doctrine of double-predestination in the two books,4 which function as “literary or novelistic theology” (Latz 284). Theologically, the novels turn on Jack’s seemingly congenital experience of estrangement from God, his family, and himself. Jack returns home after twenty years of wandering only to discover that home still does not exist for him. As the beloved prodigal son of a pious Presbyterian family, he draws others into his spiritual orbit only to push them away, often despite his best intentions. Jack’s vagabond existence exacerbates the tension between himself and his family, and their ultimate collision tests the limits of love and the possibilities of grace. In their attempt to help Jack find his way home—a multivalent soteriological and existential concept in the narrative—his friends and family must confront their own spiritual identities and theological presuppositions, and their strained interactions reveal different facets of the mystery of grace. We begin with Jack, the theological center of Gilead and Home, and then trace the novels’ soteriological spokes from him to the constellation of characters who figure into his quest for inner peace, and who collectively reveal the difficulties and dynamics of grace.

2 On Robinson’s Calvinism and its bearing on Gilead, see Leise. 3 Robinson discusses her theological perspective on the parable as it relates to the prodigal of her novels: “I really see this as a parable about grace, not forgiveness, since the father runs to meet his son and embraces him before the son can even ask to be forgiven. Or it is about love, which is probably a synonym for grace. The prodigal can leave his old life behind him. Jack brings his to Gilead—in the form of loss and loneliness and also hope, and a painful and precious secret” (Painter 488). 4 Our “culture and society” has lost, Robinson bemoans, “the sense of mystery” that enables us to see the sacredness and mystery of the ordinary people and places around us (Painter 488). For Robinson, “the most modest and ordinary aspects of life” disclose mysteries, if we have the spiritual eyes to see them (485). Jack crystalizes her keen sense of mystery in the novels.

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Jack Boughton as the Prodigal Son

John Ames, the elderly godfather and namesake of John Ames Boughton (“Jack”), explicitly identifies Jack as the prodigal son of his family: “The lost sheep, the lost coin. The prodigal son, not to put too fine a point on it” (Gilead 73). As a Congregationalist minister, Ames instinctively draws on biblical analogies to describe Jack’s desolate lifestyle. He culls these images from three parables in Luke’s Gospel: the lost sheep (15:4–7), the lost coin (15:8–10), and the lost son (15:11–32). The third of these “parables about the lost”5 has become the locus classicus for theological reflection on divine grace. In the story, the younger of two sons demands his inheritance, squanders it in desolate living abroad, suffers impoverishment, and, after “coming to his senses,” returns home to beg for his father’s forgiveness, without any expectation of reinstatement. Seeing him from afar, his father rushes to embrace him, celebrates his return, and welcomes him back into the family, while his older brother stands aloof, unwilling to join the celebration and refusing to acknowledge him as his brother. He resents the extravagance of the father’s love for his disgraceful younger brother, who does not deserve the honors the father bestows upon him. The family drama, then, illustrates the theological drama of God’s love for the wayward soul.6 At bottom, the parable of the lost son in Luke 15 explores the dynamics of acceptance and rejection. Miroslav Volf, professor of systematic theology at Yale Divinity School and famous for his theology of reconciliation, analyzes these dynamics in Exclusion and Embrace: “It was the profound and singularly fecund story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32) that originally triggered the idea for a ‘theology of embrace’” (Volf 156). Volf helpfully connects the theological and relational aspects of the story, which Robinson dramatizes in her retelling of the tale through the principal characters in the novels. Volf’s theological exegesis of the older brother’s verbal and spatial distancing from the younger brother illuminates John Ames’s “exclusion” of Jack before he adopts Robert Boughton’s posture of grace. Near the end of the story, after the father pleads with him to join the celebration, the older brother obstinately refuses: “But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him” (15:30 italics mine). Volf notes the rejection and resentment that underlies the older brother’s abstention from 5 See the section title and chapter divisions for Luke 15:1–32 in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 106. 6 For a spiritual reflection on the parable of the lost son, mediated through Rembrandt’s depiction of the son’s return, see Nouwen.

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the festivities: “The older brother did not like the music and dance around the prodigal’s return. He was angry and would not come in (v. 28). The spatial distancing was an outward sign of inner inclusion. The prodigal is no longer his brother; he is ‘this son of yours’ (v. 30)… The younger brother has become a ‘non-brother’ because he was not the brother he should have been” (Volf 161). The older brother’s self-righteousness and bitterness blinds him to the joy of grace, a blindness that Ames suffers from in Gilead until he finally, at the end, participates in Boughton’s celebration of Jack’s return, and sees him through the eyes of grace rather than the eyes of bitterness and suspicion. While the narrative arc of Gilead and Home does not simply replicate the parable, it nonetheless provides the basic theological template for the novels, as we will discuss below. Jack does not straightforwardly correspond to the prodigal son: they are not exact literary equivalents. Instead, the parable operates as a loose paradigm for Jack’s waywardness, a biblical framework for Jack and his family to interpret his place in their world of Protestant piety. Despite the structural parallels between Jack and the prodigal son, their stories diverge in crucial ways. Jack’s father, for instance, falters in his posture of grace toward him in the end, unlike the father of the parable. Jack’s brother Teddy welcomes him back with open arms, in stark contrast to the brother of the parable. Finally, Jack leaves home again, while the prodigal presumably stays after his return. These disparities aside, the parable shapes the story and serves as a salutary interpretive lens for analyzing the spiritual and theological crisis at the core of the narrative. Even as a child, Jack senses his alienation from his own family, as if they inhabit different worlds: “Sometimes it seems as though I’m in one universe and you’re in another. All of you” (Home 267). His father notes his “heavyheartedness” as a child (Home 115). In a sense, Jack left home long before his twentyyear absence from the family house. Despite the constant love and support of his parents and siblings, he has always felt like an outsider, like a foreigner in his own family: “When I was a kid I used to wish I lived here. I used to wish I could just walk in the door like the rest of you did and, you know, sit down at the table and do my homework or something” (Home 276).7 Sometimes he would experience the urge to participate in the pious family fun, but something always held him back.8 Jack’s eventual departure from his family simply

7 Cf. Home 323. 8 “Such a wonderful family they were! And Jack, if he was there at all, looked on and smiled and took no part in any of it” (Robinson, Home, 7). Ames describes the Boughton family life as “blindingly beautiful” (Gilead, 65).

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externalizes his deep internal sense of estrangement, which, theologically, arouses a deeper suspicion of his possible damnation, a prospect Jack seriously entertains, but his family refuses to countenance. In his adolescence, Jack acquires a reputation for hooliganism, much to the chagrin of his family. At age “ten or twelve” Jack sets fire to Ames’s mailbox, takes a stolen car on a joyride, and pulls various pranks on Ames (Gilead 180– 182). Later, when he is “fifteen or sixteen,” Jack pilfers random items from Ames, including his Greek New Testament, reading glasses, a penknife and, most disconcertingly, a picture of his deceased wife, only to return them later, for no apparent reason (Gilead 182–183). He wreaks havoc simply for his own amusement, not monetary gain. Many in Gilead overlook his deviant behavior out of respect for his father, but Jack continues to be unruly. His delinquency, Glory notes, “cast a shadow over their household,” for which his siblings compensate by their impeccably good behavior (Home 6).9 His father’s discipline, instruction, and intervention do not alter Jack’s collision course with misery. His destructiveness and inveterate maleficence escalates from trivial offenses in Gilead to serious criminal infractions elsewhere (Gilead 183). During college, Jack’s transgressions reach a breaking point, and one tragic incident forever wounds his family. To their shock and disgrace, he impregnates Annie Wheeler, a “very young,” poor white girl (Gilead 156–160; Home 56, 276). To make matters worse, he shirks his responsibility to her and their child, abandoning them when he returns to college. His insensitivity and irresponsibility “stunned” and “winded” his father, who sought to care for the child in his stead (Home 7). It seals Jack’s experience of estrangement: “That last time I spoke to him, before I left, I knew I had done something he couldn’t forgive. He thought he could. He said he had, but he’s a terrible liar. It shocked me that I could hurt him so badly. It scared me” (Home 277). Jack’s callousness and his father’s outrage confirm his sense of reprobation, a spiritual state of exclusion from the divine grace that places him beyond the reach of his father, the paragon of forgiveness, and outside of his family’s sense of decency. Having lost all integrity, he leaves the family home, not to return for twenty long years. For two decades Jack’s moral degradation and haplessness worsen. He drinks heavily, gambles, womanizes, and even ends up in prison for reasons we never learn (Home 290). When he finally finds love, after considerable time has passed since the scandal with Annie and the death of their unnamed child together, it is doomed because of internal and external factors. Internally, Jack

9 There are eight Boughton children, four boys and four girls: Luke, Dan, Jack, Theodore (Teddy), Hope, Faith, Grace (Gracie), and Glory (Gilead, 65; Home, 10, 14, 70–71, 312).

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is unable to support financially his black “wife” Della and their son Robert Boughton Miles (Gilead 228). Moreover, his in-laws disapprove of him because of his questionable character. Externally, as a bi-racial couple in the mid-50s, they are subject to social discrimination, which complicates his employment and their living arrangements (Gilead 229). Jack returns home in a desperate attempt to salvage his family life. His “wildest hopes” (Home 107) are to “make a life” (Home 208) in Gilead with his family, but he must get sober, secure employment, and find allies to facilitate their relocation (Gilead 229–231). His hopes are never realized. Jack’s homecoming, then, comes at a point of emotional turmoil and spiritual impoverishment. Unable to keep himself or his family together, he returns home in search of stability. In an unexpected letter to his father, Jack announces his plans, but its terse, impersonal tone reflects his state of estrangement.10 His father notes, with a hint of rebuke, that “[h]e might have been writing to a stranger” (Home 27). When Jack finally arrives in Gilead, he behaves as a stranger in the house from the moment he stands tentatively at the back porch until the moment he leaves, never to return (Home 30). He does not wish to impose on them. He asks permission for household items, and he never settles into his old room. When he greets his father, he extends his hand like a stranger, only to receive his embrace (Home 32). And, despite Glory’s efforts to make him feel welcome, to feel at home, he continues to act like a stranger until Home’s end (Home 37–38). His secret loft symbolizes his estrangement, as Glory muses: “And then that hiding place he had made, comforting himself in concealment as he had always done. Or hiding his loneliness, or making his estrangement literal, visible. It was something a boy might do, that old game of hiding in the loft” (Home 300). Jack manifests his enduring sense of estrangement in three subtle, nonverbal ways. First, he frequently covers his face, specifically his eyes, with his hand when he feels shame or guilt.11 Second, he smiles or laughs in awkward situations (Home 41, 57, 222). Often, he combines these two gestures (Home 263). Those both externalize his internal state of alienation. When he covers his face, he closes himself off from others, concealing his sense of shame, and  retreats into his feelings of regret or despair. When he smiles wryly or laughs, he conveys the irony of his paradoxical existence. His impeccable manners, pastoral demeanor, and theological proclivities clash with his miscreant 10 11

“Dear Father, I will be coming to Gilead in a week or two. I will stay for a while if that is not inconvenient. Respectfully, Jack” (Home 24). “Then he put his hand to his face, his eyes. It was dark, but I could recognize that gesture. He has made it his whole life, I believe” (Gilead 195; Cf., Gilead 218, 230; Home 41, 170).

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behavior and atheistic or agnostic outlook. Through the novels, he displays the external, superficial qualities of the elect while feeling and often acting reprobate, often despite his better intentions. As the “black sheep, the ne’er-do-well” of the family, he creates an absurd, almost humorous, contrast, a disparity he expresses with his elusive, sardonic smile and ironic, bitter laugh (Home 69).12 Finally, he looks askew at people (Gilead 226). Glory remembers the “estrangement of his gaze” (Home 85). His eyes do not directly meet hers until the end, after they bond in their mutual despondency.13 Moreover, Jack mirrors his spiritual and emotional displacement from his family with his physical displacement. In his younger years, he would leave the house and wander through the town, often causing mischief, although he later confessed he was never as far away as they thought (Home, 276).14 His sanctuary was the defunct barn next to the house, a fitting abode for a boy who felt adjacent to his family, not a part of it. In his early twenties Jack left Gilead, ostensibly to spare his father the embarrassment and heartache of his depravity.15 When he returns twenty years later at the age of forty-three, he retreats once again to the barn, spending hours in it working on the DeSoto. He transforms the “fabled space” in the loft into his private bedroom, replete with a make-shift tent, books, flashlight, food, bedding, and a photograph of the river (Home 285). In that place of solitude, he finds respite from the pressure of spending time in the house where he feels like an outsider, with people who are strangers to him, after his long absence from the family (Home 125).

“It’s All Grace”: The Boughton Family

Robert (“Old”) Boughton, Gilead’s august Presbyterian minister, internalizes the role of the patient father of the prodigal, ever vigilant, ever ready to welcome Jack home with open arms. Robert’s life-long “posture of grace” (Home 45) readies him for Jack’s eventual return, even after Jack misses his mother’s funeral (Home 58, 289) and fails to make contact for so long that he might have 12

His bitter laugh contrasts with the laughter of joy, which Jack rarely experiences. We catch a glimpse of it when he plays catch with Ames’s son Robby, who was roughly the same age as his own son: “Jack laughed, very kind laughter that she had not heard for decades if she had ever heard it” (Home 199). 13 “It was the first time he had looked at her directly” (Home 302). 14 Cf. Home 323. 15 “I stayed away from this town for a long time. As a courtesy to my father, mainly” (Gilead 218). Cf. Home 166.

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been dead, for all the family knew (Home 23).16 When Jack finally arrives home after an unexplained absence of twenty years, Old Boughton is overcome with joy: “Ah, here you are! I knew you would come, yes!” (Home 31). He repeats the refrain “Yes!” several times (Home 43, 63, 183), perhaps as a subtle allusion to Karl Barth’s depiction of divine election as the “Yes” of God,17 which signals Jack’s double acceptance by his earthly and Heavenly Father. Boughton expresses his internalization of the role of the prodigal’s father in his prayer before their first dinner with Jack, where he speaks, very deliberately and homiletically, about the Father’s unfailing love, “whose joy it is to welcome us home” after our weary travels, and whose mantle of magnanimity Boughton self-­ consciously assumes (Home 41). Like the prodigal’s father, he does not hear out any apologies and extends to him exuberant welcome (Home 41). The mantle, however, ultimately proves too heavy for Old Boughton, despite his best intentions. He buckles under the strain of his age and the weight of Jack’s absence and many wrongdoings. The years of waiting and wondering and worrying have taken their toll, and he begins to falter: “Maybe I’m finding out I’m not such a good man as I thought I was. Now that I don’t have the strength—patience takes a lot out of you. Hope, too” (Home 274). By the end, after a lifetime of concern, Boughton has no more grace to give. He loses the capacity to “stay in character,” as it were. Jack extends his hand to his father in farewell before departing, but Boughton does not grasp it: “The old man drew his own hand into his lap and turned away. ‘Tired of it!’ he said” (Home 317). In the end, he is unable to sustain the posture of grace, which reveals the limitations of human grace and also the impact of old age on one’s personality. As Ames says: “He isn’t himself” (Gilead 29). Jack’s younger brother by fourteen months, Theodore (“Teddy”), embodies his father’s altruism. Old Boughton, a pastor, heals souls; his son Teddy, a physician, heals bodies. Although he is Jack’s brother, Teddy reflects the characteristics of the father in the parable, not the older brother. In college, Teddy jeopardizes his career by cheating for Jack, taking his exam in his stead, to prevent him from failing out of college (Home 173, 277). When they finally reunite Teddy affirms their relationship despite the years of separation and anxiety for him: “I’m your brother, Jack!…. Can we shake hands at least?” (Home 257). Like the father in the parable, Teddy takes the initiative (Home 257, 262, 264). Also, like the father, he remains vigilant for him. Teddy travels to St. Louis six times 16 17

“For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” (Luke 15:24). According to Karl Barth, God says “Yes to what He created” (Church Dogmatics iii.1.1) and “Yes” to what, or who, he redeems: “Grace is a powerful Yes spoken to the one to whom it is addressed” (Church Dogmatics iv.1.2).

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to find Jack, even as recently as two years prior to their reunion: “Sometimes I’d just get the feeling I had to see you again, and I’d take off for St. Louis… Looking for you was sort of the next best thing to finding you. It made me feel like we were still brothers, I suppose” (Home 258). Teddy never gives up on him. When Old Boughton hears Teddy and Jack talking in the kitchen, he begins to cry, and then sob. “It’s been hard, Teddy. I knew it would be. But it’s been very hard!…. I’m so old!” (Home 259). Confessing his inability to bear the burden of grace any longer, Robert passes the mantle to Teddy, who has already shared it with his father for years, unbeknownst to him. Teddy and his father work in tandem to extend grace to Jack, and together they play the paternal role to the prodigal, until age and emotional attrition catch up to Old Boughton.18 “Jesus never had to be old,” he says, signaling his recognition of his failure to maintain a spirit of welcome to Jack (Gilead, 236; Home 313). Teddy, however, continues his care and welcome: “‘I suspect I’ll never see you again. In this life. I’d say take care of yourself, but I’m afraid you won’t do that, either. Well, never hesitate—’ He held out his hand. When Jack took it, he touched his shoulder, then embraced him” (Home 268). Teddy gives the embrace his father withholds as Jack leaves for good, and leaves them heartbroken once again. Finally, Glory superlatively embodies the characteristics of the prodigal’s father in the parable, despite her gender, since the character models a theological paradigm of divine grace rather than a literal reenactment. Like the father of the story, she exemplifies unconditional love and unflagging welcome. She never gives up on him, and she dons a posture of grace that enables her to forgive him for his waywardness after he exhausts the grace of his father and many others. Their bond of desolation and hope transcends words, but exists palpably between them in their mutual deference, tenderness, and vulnerability. Jack abandons her just before his father dies and the rest of his brothers and sisters—all strangers to him—return to Gilead (Home 125). “This is really your masterpiece,” she chastises, but not without forgiveness, which never wavers (Gilead 240; Home 303). Touchingly and tragically, Jack’s wife and son arrive two days after he departs from Gilead, and Glory extends her warm welcome to them also: “But I can’t tell you how glad he’d have been to see you. Both of you. It would have been wonderful” (Home 321). Glory decides to keep the house in Gilead for Jack as a museum or monument of hope because of his unspoken love of it (Home 18

Robinson comments on Boughton’s frustration in the novels: “Boughton is restless with the awareness that in many senses his fatherhood has ended, and that he can only see and feel the sorrows of these children of his” (Painter, “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson” 486).

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299).19 It holds a complicated magnetism for him—even the barn, with its memories of loneliness and despair—that she wants to preserve as a place he might at least remember as the near site of hope. If peace never finds him or him it, at least it can stand as a testament to their love for him and all that he loved. One day, Glory muses, his son will return, curious to know more about his father, and himself. She will wait there for him, ready to extend the welcome and love she gave to his father: “She thought, Maybe this Robert will come back someday,” and he will think “Yes, the barn is still there, yes, the lilacs, even the pot of petunias. This was my father’s house. And I will think, He is young. He cannot know that my whole life has come down to this moment” (Home 325). Glory, the unspoken heroine of the story, is the exemplar and ­personification of grace.

Blessing the Beloved: Reverend John Ames and Lila Ames

Robert Boughton makes John Ames the godfather and namesake of his third son, “John Ames Boughton” (Gilead 72). Glory thinks of Ames as her father’s “alter ego,” his other self, a designation that creates the expectation that they will share the same disposition toward his beloved son Jack (Home 5). As we discover, however, they do not, at least not always.20 Robert surprises Ames by asking him to christen his baby and then announces his name, with teary eyes, as John Ames Boughton (Gilead 187–188).21 Ames accepts the role of spiritual mentor, “the father of his soul,” as Boughton dubs him, but fails to live up to the honorific office (Gilead 123). From his christening until Jack shares his secret, Ames struggles with intense ambivalence about him. In a riveting reversal and reworking of the parable of the prodigal son, Ames transitions from the role of the prodigal’s resentful older brother to the role of his rejoicing father, eager to bless and welcome him. Ames reminisces that when he christened Jack, he “froze” with unexpected grief. The ceremony and its significance awoke his longing for his wife Louisa and daughter Rebecca (Angelina), both of whom died during childbirth (Gilead 17–18). Rather than embrace the child as his own, in a spiritual sense, he 19 20

21

“I’ve thought about this place. Sometimes I’ve even talked about it” (Home 104). “She hoped old Ames had indeed gazed down upon him [Jack playing baseball with Ames’s son, Robby]. He might have seen him as his father did, for once” (Home 199). Cf. Gilead 154, 230. “He is the beloved child of my oldest and dearest friend, who gave him to me, so to speak, to compensate for my own childlessness” (Gilead 155).

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recoiled at the prospect of spiritual surrogacy. “This is not my child,” he thought to himself, to his surprise (Gilead 188). Sometimes he worried, foolishly, he later admits, that his bitter state of mind withheld the blessing from Jack that perhaps inadvertently contributed to his state of perdition. Spiritually, he claims him as his son, but emotionally, they remain distant: “I have never been able to warm to him, never” (Gilead 188). Ames’s failure to live up to the role of the godfather and spiritual mentor of Jack, the beloved son of his best friend, weighs heavily on him. In the letter to his son that comprises the text of Gilead, Ames confesses his failure to display a posture of grace toward Jack, whose misdeeds more often than not aroused his ire rather than his mercy. Over the years, it pained him to witness Robert’s suffering because of Jack’s delinquency and departure from their lives. At times, Ames felt utter contempt toward Jack for his impregnation and abandonment of the young girl and their daughter, especially since he longed for the very family life Jack callously discards. Ames has failed to apply his own preaching on the parable of the prodigal son to his relationship with Jack: “I don’t forgive him. I wouldn’t know where to begin” (Gilead 164). Ames expresses his resentment obliquely and unintentionally when he says to Robert Boughton: “I understand that boy of yours is coming home” (Home 28). Significantly, Ames does not say, “that boy of ours,” to affirm their shared love for him and their shared joy at his long-awaited return. Instead, Ames distances himself verbally, as in the story of the prodigal son when the resentful older brother refers to his brother as “this son of yours,” which indicates his fraternal rejection of him and his inability to embrace his sibling with the extravagant love of their father. Similarly, Ames conveys his rejection and resentment of Jack as “not his,” as estranged. Jack’s presence disrupts Ames’s spiritual equanimity. Still harboring the resentment of the older brother, he cannot forgive the pain Jack has inflicted on the Boughtons over the years. Several times, Ames notes with wonder the physical resemblance between Jack and his father, which only heightens their moral dissimilarity (Gilead 91, 93).22 Their juxtaposition is a source of frustration for him: “It has been one of the great irritations of my life, seeing the two of them together” (Gilead 120). One Sunday Jack attends Ames’s church looking for solace, and Ames falters in the crucial moment, to the fury of Glory and the deep disappointment of Boughton: “Who better than Jack’s second father, his father’s second self, to say the words of welcome and comfort he could not say? It never occurred to him that Ames would not speak to the boy 22

“This Jack Boughton could be his father, to look at him” (Gilead 103).

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as if from his own heart” (Home 212). Ames turns to prayer to correct his inward posture and outward disposition toward him, a posture and disposition of suspicion, not grace: “I must be gracious. My only role is to be gracious” (Gilead 123). Prayer, however, does not seem to work, and he grows increasingly suspicious and disdainful of him (Gilead 125). Jack’s presence troubles Ames, whose lingering hostility toward him, like that of the older brother in the parable, prevents his participation in the celebration and joy of Jack’s return (Gilead 186). The turning point in Ames’s spiritual relation to Jack occurs when the latter confides to Ames about his painful secrets: his wife, Della, and their son Robert Boughton Miles, and their struggle to survive as a family in St. Louis (Gilead 228). Once Jack shares his dilemma and asks for advice, Ames’s disposition toward him instantly alters from fraternal suspicion and resentment to pastoral and parental acceptance and concern. Their solidarity in suffering becomes a profound point of identification between them: both fathers of young boys named Robert, both struggling with the present and future reality of their separation from them. Once Ames views Jack through the eyes of grace and through Jack’s pain of separation, it recasts Jack’s interactions with Lila and Ames’s son Robby. Jack’s attention to them reveals his longing not for them, but for his own absent family, the very longing that Jack and the Boughtons triggered in him years before. It is at this moment that Ames transforms from the resentful older brother to the loving father, ready to accept him with open arms. Once Jack clarifies his situation, Ames finally and fully perceives his hidden “beauty,” and all his former angst and apprehension disappear (Gilead 232).23 Ames seeks only to bless and to help Jack now. He offers him a modest sum of money to assist with travel expenses, an amount more symbolic than substantive. Jack initially refuses the gift, misreading his intentions, but later accepts half (Gilead 236). In Gilead’s most poignant exchange, Ames happens upon Jack on his way out of town, and he blesses him with the priestly benediction24 and then with his own earnest words: “Lord, bless John Ames Boughton, this beloved son and brother and husband and father” (Gilead 241). It is Ames’s defining moment: “Well, anyway, I told him it was an honor to bless him. And that was also absolutely true. In fact I’d have gone through seminary and

23

24

The same beauty his father sees: “You see something beautiful in a child, and you almost live for it, you feel as though you would die for it, but it isn’t yours to keep or to protect” (Home 294–295). Numbers 6:25–26.

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ordination and all the years intervening for that one moment” (Gilead 242).25 Finally standing in for Jack’s father, who can no longer bear the burden of grace, Ames sends Jack out of town with their love, and promises to say goodbye to his father for him: “So I said to him [Robert] in his sleep, I blessed that boy of yours for you. I still feel the weight of his brow on my hand. I said, I love him as much as you meant me to. So certain of your prayers are finally answered, old fellow. And mine too, mine too” (Gilead 244). When Jack arrives in town, Ames refers to him as “that boy of yours” as the resentful older brother of the parable (Home 28). When Jack leaves town, Ames employs the same expression, but now as the father of the parable, after he learns to love him “as much as you meant me to,” that is, to love him as his own. As Ames slowly internalizes the role of father that age and health force Boughton to abdicate, “that boy of yours” becomes “that boy of ours” and, even more, “my boy.” Finally, Lila, the wife of Ames in his twilight years, shares a special bond with Jack that worries Ames at first, until he realizes its romantic benignity. Soteriologically, Lila functions as a counterpoint or mirror-image to Jack, that is, as the prodigal who finally finds her way home. Roughly cotemporaneous with Jack, she bonds with him over their similar experiences of hard times: “But I sense a kind of understanding between them” (Gilead 180). She shares some of the details of her past life with Jack, and blesses him: “‘Well’, she said, and her voice was very gentle, ‘well, Jack, bless your heart’” (Gilead 199–200). During an emotionally charged conversation about predestination, Lila chimes in, uncharacteristically, and offers Jack hope as one who has experienced loneliness and estrangement: “A person can change. Everything can change” (Gilead 153). Lila, even before Ames, blesses the beloved Jack. Her hopefulness contrasts with Jack’s despair, as her conversion contrasts with his state of spiritual exile. She joins the collective effort to help Jack find spiritual solace.

Predestination Personified: Jack and the Mystery of Salvation

Lurking in the background of the basic narrative of Jack’s estrangement and his family’s posture of grace is the doctrine of predestination, specifically the doctrine of double-predestination, which states that God elects some to salvation and condemns others to perdition before birth. Although affirmed, in 25

Robinson comments on this moment, despite her reservation about interpreting her own work: “[T]he blessing Ames gives Jack is an act of recognition that blesses Ames, too, He is profoundly moved that he has had the occasion to do it, that Jack accepted it, wanted it” (Painter 490).

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various forms, by Paul, Augustine, Luther, and others, the doctrine receives its classic expression in John Calvin: “We call predestination God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others.”26 In the stringently Protestant theological context of Gilead and Home, Calvin’s theology carries special import, so naturally Jack internalizes it even though he does not claim to believe it. Jack initiates a discussion on predestination with Ames and his father, despite their aversion to the topic and Glory’s worry that it will end in conflict. In Gilead, we view the conversation from the perspective of Ames (Gilead 149–153). In Home, we view it from the perspective of Glory (Home 219–229). When superimposed, they reveal the central theological dilemma of both novels: Jack’s soteriological status. Despite his pious upbringing, loving family, extensive knowledge of the Bible, and desire to change, he seems unable to escape the path of destruction he set for himself. Is Jack damned? Does he embody the dark side of predestination? Jack’s flippancy about his state of “perdition” (Home 119, 278) conceals an uneasy worry about its possibility, so he enlists the help of the two people best qualified to address his consternation about the state of his soul. Jack earnestly and expressly presses Ames and Robert for their “views on the doctrine of predestination” (Home 219). He frames the question specifically as the problem of double-predestination: “Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?” (Gilead 150; Home 219). Later in the conversation he sharpens the question further: “My question is, are there people who are simply born evil, live evil lives, and then go to hell?” (Gilead 151; Home 225). Jack does not seem to ask disingenuously, but seriously (Gilead 150; Home 220). Ames first points out the ambiguity of scripture on the question and then, feeling irritated, refuses to probe into it any further: “I’m not going to force some theory on a mystery and make foolishness of it, just because that is what people who talk about it normally do” (Gilead 152; Home 226). Robert too puzzles over the tension between “the mystery of predestination” and the “mystery of salvation,” without drawing any conclusions (Gilead 152; Home 227). For both, the question falls into the category of mystery, which resists logical schematization or rational explication. 26

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 2 (926). John Hick comments on the severity of Calvin’s construal of predestination vis-à-vis Augustine: “Calvin’s is almost as extreme and uncompromising as a doctrine of predestination can be. It goes beyond Augustine’s teaching in explicitly attributing reprobation as well as salvation to the positive decree of God” (121).

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Jack worries, however, that he might personify double-predestination: “I’ve wondered from time to time if I might not be an instance of predestination. A sort of proof. If I may not experience predestination in my own person” (Home 225).27 His godfather and father reject his suspicion outright. They focus on the mystery of divine grace and the open arms of the Father, who does not ask to be understood, but embraced. Jack need only open his arms, as Robert exhorts him: “You ought to let the Lord decide what you deserve…nobody deserves anything, good or bad. It’s all grace. If you accepted that, you might be able to relax a little” (Home 271). Jack’s response illustrates his troubled mindset: “Somehow I have never felt that grace was intended for me, particularly” (Home 271). He does not pinpoint the reason for his sense of spiritual alienation because it does not arise from a particular experience or epiphany, but from a vague intuition, precisely the kind of inexplicable existential estrangement the doctrine of damnation implies.

Despair and Hope

By the end of his time in Gilead, Jack slides into despair. He confides to Ames that he has not had any “religious conviction” since he was a small child (Gilead 169), although he does not self-identify as an atheist, but as a skeptic: “I am in a state of categorical unbelief. I don’t even believe God doesn’t exist” (Gilead 220). Nevertheless, he feels the “absence of grace” in his life (Gilead 170), and increasingly despairs over the condition of his soul, the state of his life, and, mostly pointedly, his inability to keep his family together. Jack explains his sense of nothingness, and his despair, to Glory: “I really am nothing…. Nothing, with a body. I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble. This is a mystery, I believe” (Home 288–289). Jack manifests despair in his suicide attempt and his departure from Gilead. He becomes “sick” and “tired” of himself to the point that he tries to end his existence in the barn, his oasis of solitude (Home 172, 257). He stuffs his shirt and socks into the tailpipe of the DeSoto, only to forget the key, thus foiling his attempt to asphyxiate himself with carbon monoxide, despite his efforts 27 Cf. Gilead 151, 170. Robinson elaborates on Jack’s troubled theological self-consciousness in an interview: “Jack sees it [the grace of predestination] from the other side, of course. He can never answer to the faith and the virtuousness he sees in his family (and Della’s family! as if his weren’t enough) and he feels that the course of his life is determined, tending always toward ‘perdition’” (Painter 489).

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to jerry-rig the engine, before passing out, drunk (Home 243–244, 278). The next morning Glory finds him after a frantic search, cleans him up, and hides him from his father, but the damage had been done. He leaves town soon after, convinced he has lost his family and his ability to find happiness in the world (Gilead 236). Jack confounds himself and others.28 Mystery pervades not only his actions, but also his entire existence: “And I don’t know why I am [a sinful man]. There’s no pleasure in it” (Home 224). Later, he reiterates his confusion over his prodigal ways to his father: “I don’t know why I am what I am. I’d have been like you if I could” (Home 293). It is as if Jack feels constrained to engineer his own destruction. In a rare moment of intimacy and transparency, he expresses his regret that he was never able to believe and behave like a Boughton: “I do wish to God I were religious, Teddy. That’s the Lord’s truth” (Home 266). Even an outsider like Ames sees the mystery of his existence—“My point is that he was always a mystery” (Gilead 184)—and as a mystery, he defies comprehension. Jack’s despair and the dark mystery of his existence, however, do not doom him to damnation in the novels. Love gives grounds for hope: his family’s love for him and his love for them. Jack is the object of the family’s love, although he never receives it subjectively. Ames says Jack was always the most beloved in the family.29 They love him with the singular love of the lost sheep. They favor him, Ames explains, as one might favor a wound (Gilead 238). Glory links their spiritual destinies, intimating that their eternal felicity depends on Jack’s: “She thought, If I or my father or any Boughton has ever stirred the Lord’s compassion, then Jack will be all right. Because perdition for him would be perdition for every one of us” (Home 316). They hope their love will help him to find his way home, and if it does not, they hope their fidelity will redound to him, bringing him ultimately into the Boughton circle of grace, to complete it. Their love and hope, styled after the open arms of the prodigal’s father, give reason for hope, and reason for thinking that love will find a way, somehow, even when Jack has given up on himself. Moreover, Jack’s love for his family, albeit often concealed and veiled, gives grounds for hope. During his time back home, Jack attentively cares for his father, and when his condition deteriorates, he calls Teddy to inform him, an awkward and difficult task. When his father talks about the things he left undone on earth, and how his mother might react to the unfinished business of Jack’s

28 29

Ames describes Jack as a “great mystery” to his father (Gilead 243). “He is not the eldest or the youngest or the best or the bravest, only the most beloved” (Gilead 72). Cf. Gilead 155.

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soul, Jack says to him, deeply: “I hope you will give her my love” (Home 297). Just before he departs from Gilead, Jack bends down and kisses his father’s brow, a gesture of the love he failed to express to him in life (Home 317). Jack’s special bond with Glory, which goes mostly unspoken, also displays the familial intimacy that always eludes him because he always resists it. Most significantly, and secretly, Jack’s love for his wife and child, and his desire for their well-being, even if it means his painful departure from their lives, infuses his life with hope— hope that they will find blessing and peace in this life, even if he does not.30

Theological Fragments: Meditations on Mystery

If Jack’s story invites reflection on the mystery of salvation, how might I, a Christian theologian, respond to his question about the doctrine double-­ predestination? In other words, how might I contribute to the combustible conversation Jack initiated on the porch of the Boughton family home? I would turn to the crucial conversation about salvation that is repeated in both novels, with variations of perspective. Ames’s impassioned invocation of mystery would serve as a salutary entry point: “I’m not going to force some theory on a mystery and make foolishness of it, just because that is what people who talk about it normally do” (Gilead 152; Home 226). I would agree with Ames that divine mysteries resist conceptual schematization and systematization. As a mystery, the doctrine of predestination defies exhaustive logical explication, which immediately casts doubt on the concept of double-presentation as a dangerous and dubious attempt to over-theorize divine sovereignty. More­ over, I would link the doctrine of predestination to the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of Christ, which also exceed our noetic and imaginative capacities. Just as we are unable to apprehend the unity and plurality of God and the coexistence of the humanity and divinity of Christ, so we cannot comprehend the interrelationship between divine sovereignty and human freedom. Mysteries, I would continue, exist in the gap between theological truths that seem to run parallel or even at cross-purposes. They strain against our logical and imaginative capacities because of their resistance to rational reduction or resolution. When we attempt to solve mysteries, we force false theological disjunctions between truths that are complementary, not contradictory, which collapses what must be kept in creative, productive, and perpetual tension. God is one, but exists as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: one God, three 30

“She’s a fine woman. He’s a fine boy. I’m a lucky man” (Gilead 219). Cf. Gilead 228–229.

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Persons. Christ is both human and divine: one Person, two natures. Problems arise when we privilege one side of the theological equation over the other: leaning toward either side obscures or attenuates the reality of the other. Most theological heresies are simply a matter of over-emphasis: the stress on divine unity (the oneness of God) at the expense of divine plurality (the threeness of God), or vice versa; the stress on the humanity of Christ at the expense of his divinity, or vice versa. Historically, the category of mystery has been applied primarily to the Trinity and Christology. These have been the locus of reflection on mystery, and both relate to God’s engagement with humanity. I would add the classic binary between predestination and freedom as another aspect of the mystery of God’s relation to salvation history, and would apply the same theological strategy of harmonization. Thus, God both predestines our lives and invites us to respond to the gospel. These are not necessarily antithetical or incompatible. To attempt to penetrate into the mind of God—to decipher how God interweaves the threads of our lives into the grand tapestry of God’s providential arrangement of the cosmos—would be as absurd and futile as to attempt to penetrate into the inner divine experience of unity and plurality and to try to explicate the precise dynamic between the divinity and humanity of the incarnate Christ. Mysteries call for theological restraint and reserve, not hasty reduction or resolution for the sake of simplicity or comprehensibility. They challenge us to replace theological binaries—either/or antitheses—with the both/and dynamism exemplified by the first four ecumenical creeds: God as one and many (Nicaea, Constantinople), Christ as God and man (Ephesus, Chalcedon). In my view, the mystery of salvation would benefit from a similar creedal strategy of harmonization whereby both sides of the mystery are paradoxically affirmed without an exact exposition of their interrelationship. We might call this a specifically Chalcedonian theological strategy, since the Chalcedonian Definition of Faith (451) famously juxtaposes the two natures of Christ “unconfusedly, unalterably, undividedly, inseparably” without any further specification on the nature of their interrelationship beyond the imperative to preserve the integrity of each within the incarnation of Christ.31 Similarly, we might affirm

31

“The Council of Chalcedon’s ‘Definition of Faith’,” in The Christological Controversy (159). The Council upholds both natures, confessing that “the difference of the natures is not destroyed because of the union, but on the contrary, the character of each nature is preserved and comes together in one person and one hypostasis, not divided or torn into two persons” (159).

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the integrity of predestination and human freedom within the mystery of salvation without theoretical explication beyond the soteriological axiom of the divine origin and giftedness of salvation (i.e., humans cannot earn salvation: it is by grace through faith, Ephesians 2:8). A creedal strategy of harmonization would retain the opacity of mystery through the establishment of general parameters for authorized, orthodox theological discourse on the mystery of salvation that intentionally obviate theoretical overreach. Does mystery, in the end, preclude the possibility of theology? Does it render conversation “useless,” as Ames suggests (Home 226)? No, I would argue. It calls for care and caution, but it does not foreclose theological discourse. Given the finite, flawed, and fallen state of human reason and language, all theology will fall short of God, but that impediment does not absolve us of responsibility for rigorous reflection. We must speak, but our words cannot reach the ineffable divine summit they strive to express, as Gregory the Great reminds us: “stammering, we echo the heights of God as best we can.”32 The transcendence of divine mystery entails the tentative status of theology: when we see God face to face in the beatific vision, we will think and talk about him in a deeper way (1 Cor. 13:12; 1 John 3:2). Still, though partial and provisional, theology must speak of God and God’s relationship to humanity as lucidly, rationally, and precisely as possible, always in a spirit of humility, as Augustine says: “What does anyone who speaks of you really say? Yet woe betide those who fail to speak, while the chatterboxes go on saying nothing.”33 To Jack, then, I would say that as we think through these issues, we should always keep in mind the inadequacies of our thoughts and words to reach “the heights of God.” Theology operates in the amorphous zone between knowing and unknowing, speaking and silence, revelation and concealment, and the already/not yet nature of salvation history. Moreover, I would invoke Gregory of Nazianzus’s instructions on the rules of theological etiquette. Gregory cautions against ill-advised, ill-timed, and inappropriate theological debate: Discussion of theology is not for everyone, I tell you, not for everyone—it is no such inexpensive or effortless pursuit. Nor, I would add, is it for every occasion, or every audience; neither are all its aspects open to inquiry. It must be reserved for certain occasions, for certain audiences,

32

Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job 5.36, pl 75.715, famously quoted by Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 4, a. 1, ad. 1. See Davies and Leftow, eds. Thomas Aquinas 45. 33 Augustine, Confessions, i.4.4, in Rotelle, ed., The Confessions (2nd Edition) 41.

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and certain limits must be observed. It is not for all people, but only for those who have been tested and have found a sound footing in study, and, more importantly, have undergone, or at the very least are undergoing, purification of body and soul. For one who is not pure to lay hold of pure things is dangerous, just as it is for weak eyes to look at the sun’s brightness.34 We should not enter into theological debate lightly or casually. It is “no such easy” enterprise, he insists. Not all people are equipped for it, not all audiences are receptive to it, and not all topics are admissible. Before engaging in theological discourse, we should ask ourselves: Are we qualified? Is it productive? Is it edifying? Is it admissible? As the Teacher says, there is a time and place for everything under the sun (Ecclesiastes 3:1). Perhaps a pleasant evening in Gilead with aged and ailing ministers still adjusting to Jack’s return might not have been the ideal time for theological speculation, especially when it touches on an extremely sensitive and personal topic. And perhaps Jack is not yet in the right spiritual condition to even ask the question. Finally, I would discuss the optimal existential disposition to assume in the face of mystery. Divine mystery, I would suggest to Jack, should inspire joy and wonder, not alarm or bewilderment. It invites us into it not as a problem to be solved, but as a reality to be experienced. I would steer Jack, then, in the direction of Christian spirituality rather than systematic theology, with a view to transformation rather than speculation. I would say to him: “Jack, you won’t find peace through an extensive, exhaustive analysis of the doctrine of predestination. It’s a tangled web that the greatest minds in the history of Christianity have not been able to untangle. You’ll only find peace if you open your heart to the love of God extended to you in the love of your family, Christ’s forgiveness of your sins, and the hope he offers to you. Listen to the wisdom of your father. He speaks the truth when he says to you ‘it’s all grace’.” (Home 271). That might be a fruitful starting point for a conversation about the possibilities of grace, even amid despair, which has always been the site of its most profound manifestations.

Conclusion: Faces in Theology

Robinson’s sublime theological craftsmanship in Gilead and Home invites reflection from the vantage point of theology, particularly on the question of 34

Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 27.3 in On God and Christ 26–27.

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soteriology. In this essay, I have detailed the biblical and theological valences of the story of Jack Boughton’s spiritual turmoil.35 I have argued that the parable of the prodigal son underpins the narrative as its hypotext and gives us the best heuristic lens for interpreting the central characters as they relate to Jack. Moreover, I have further suggested that the doctrine of predestination, particularly double-predestination, inflects the theological imaginary of the story, especially for Jack, who internalizes it and, in the process, embodies it, in all its complexity. Finally, I contend that the narrative ultimately subverts the doctrine of double-predestination by underscoring the mystery of salvation, the extravagance of grace, and the power of love to give hope to lost souls, which foregrounds the lessons from the parable of the prodigal son, rather than the systems of theology.36 Systems often overreach, whereas stories draw us into the realities they describe. Theologically, Gilead and Home offer creative entry points into deeper discussions of grace and predestination, and yield several constructive theological insights. First, they caution against over-systemization. Systematic theology, when it ranges too far outside the limits of reason and the imaginaries of scripture, in this case the parable of the prodigal son, obscures the mystery of God.37 Ames advocates theological humility in the face of the

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Other theological threads that others might take up from Gilead and Home include sacramental theology, mysticism, denominationalism, ecumenism, apologetics, theodicy, and sacred space, to name only a few. Robinson seems to endorse this conclusion in her response to a question about her personal view on predestination, and how it relates to Jack: “I really feel that there has to be something we don’t understand about being, time, causality, something that would allow us a richer sense of alternatives than is offered by free will and predestination, both of which are very problematic notions from a theological point of view… Very few readers seem to find Jack beyond their compassion. On what grounds do so many of them assume that he would be beyond God’s compassion, or his love? I think I let him be available to understanding in other terms [than the binary of free will and predestination]” (Painter 489). Robinson does not see grace and predestination as necessarily antithetical, and shows how the parable of the prodigal son, which emphasizes divine grace, could underwrite the doctrine of predestination: “I don’t know if he did this, but Calvin could have made a predestination argument on the basis of the prodigal son—which tells us that whom God loves he loves, and no choice the erring son makes or fails to make changes that. So with the dutiful brother—everything that belongs to his father is also his. Each of the sons in his own way is disappointing enough, neither gives any sign of love toward the loving father, but both of them have the status of son, and that is all that matters. Seen from that side, predestination is grace in a very radical form” (Painter 489).

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mystery of God’s grace. Rigid theological systems, in their attempt to explicate divine reality, run the risk of distortion and misrepresentation.38 Second, Jack’s spiritual plight personalizes an abstract doctrine, giving it a face and a name—Jack: beloved son and brother and husband and father (Gilead 241)—that underscore the existential implications of theological speculation.39 People inhabit the theological constructs they create and internalize, as Jack does, when he wonders if he instantiates the doctrine of double predestination (Home 225). The story reminds theologians of the emotional, psychological, and inter-personal implications of doctrine, which calls for greater sensitivity and attentiveness to the intersections between theology and lived experience.40 Finally, Gilead and Home promote reflection on the relationship between doctrine and faith. Doctrine externalizes the mysteries of grace, while faith internalizes them. Doctrine demystifies, while faith embraces mystery. Ames and Robert, the two doyens of grace in the novels, try to emphasize faith over doctrine. “It was Coleridge,” Ames remarks, “who said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine” (Gilead, 179). Recalling his conversation with Jack about predestination, Ames clarifies a point he wished he had conveyed better: that grace is not a doctrine to expound, but a gift to receive: “[D]octrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief” (Gilead 239–240). God does not ask Jack to comprehend the mysteries of salvation or the relationship between free will and predestination, Ames exhorts, but to enter into the divine embrace and to live in hope, a fundamental soteriological point famously expressed by Jesus in the parable of the prodigal son, and beautifully retold by Robinson in Gilead and Home.

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It would take a fuller discussion, however, to give the doctrine of double-predestination an equitable theological hearing. Robinson’s fictional engagement with it prejudices her readers against it precisely because of the narrative’s reliance on the parable of the prodigal son over the theological interpretations of Calvin and others who espouse the doctrine, with perhaps more subtlety than Robinson could convey through a literary medium. “On the contrary, it [Gilead, and by extension, Home] offers something like a test of such ideas [predestination] by imagining how they affect human life, and this is an extremely important contribution given theology’s tendency to slip away from the concrete and towards the abstract” (Latz 284). I have not attempted to present my own views on predestination in this essay, which would require a more extensive, technical discussion. Instead, I explore Robinson’s creative engagement with soteriological themes in Gilead and Home, and note the ways her fiction might contribute theological reflection on these questions.

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Works Cited Augustine. The Confessions (2nd Edition). Trans. Maria Boulding. New York: New City Press, 2012 [reprint, 1997]. Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics. 4 vols. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–1975. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 2. Ed. John T. McNeill. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. The Library of Christian Classics Volume XXI. Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1960. Davies, Brian and Brian Leftow, eds. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae Questions on God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Gregory of Nazianzus. On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius. Trans. Lionel Wickham and Frederick Williams. New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 [reprint: 1966]. Latz, Andrew Brower. “Creation in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson.” Literature & Theology 25.3 (2011): 283–296. Leise, Christopher. “‘That Little Incandescence’: Reading the Fragmentary and John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Studies in the Novel 41.3 (2009): 348–367. Metzger, Bruce M. and Roland E. Murphy. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Norris, Jr., Richard A., trans. The Christological Controversy. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1980. Nouwen, Henri J.M. The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming. New York: Image Books, 1994. Painter, Rebecca M. “Special Feature: Further Thoughts on A Prodigal Son Who Cannot Come Home, on Loneliness and Grace: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Christianity and Literature 58.3 (2009): 485–492. Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Picador, 2004. ———. Home. New York: Picador, 2008. Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.

Marilynne Robinson’s Merging of Medicine and Literature: Therapeutic Journaling as Balm in Gilead Janella Moy Abstract In Gilead, writing proves to be a therapeutic process that brings its protagonist peace and a sense of well-being. John Ames is an avid writer and elderly preacher who is crafting a letter to his son in the form of an intimate journal. A close examination of Ames’s journal reveals the protagonist’s own emerging awareness that he is being changed by his writing. This essay considers how Ames’s journal writing closely resembles the kinds of writing therapy adopted by medical practitioners. Robinson shows how her protagonist heals himself, in effect, through his private literary exertions, unburdening himself of his past and any further need to write. So eased, he can prepare himself for the world to come.

In the novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s protagonist and narrator is an elderly preacher who confides that he has spent most of his life writing. Faced with his imminent death, Reverend John Ames is composing an intimate journal for his young son, and the contents of this journal, written over several months, comprise the text of the novel. What begins as a compiling of family history soon takes on aspects of the confessional as unresolved problems from the preacher’s past start to surface in his life. Ames’s journaling becomes the perfect vehicle for his own revelatory enlightenment since it allows contemplation of himself through his writing. The changes in Ames’s writing as well as his growing cognition regarding his own past behaviors reveal a man in turmoil, writing of a war within himself and hoping to win self-forgiveness before his imminent death. Writing proves to be a therapeutic and spiritually edifying process that brings Ames peace and a sense of wellbeing. I argue that a close examination of Ames’s journal reveals his emerging awareness that his writing and thinking processes are changing. Initially, these alterations move from issues in the distant past to an intense focus on the present, and increasingly to the arrival of his adversary, Jack Boughton. In a telling moment early in the text, Ames deliberates on the unforeseen rhetorical transformations occurring in this text: “I don’t write the way I do for the pulpit…. I do try to write the way I think.

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But of course that changes as soon as I put it into words” (Gilead 28–9). These alterations reflect Ames’s struggle to understand his own failings as well as his successful path to achieving forgiveness. In short, this paper will consider how Ames’s journaling, much like the writing therapy adopted by the medical sciences, allows the preacher to move from a state of angst over his past wrongs and unfulfilled relationships to a place of contentment with himself and life. Furthermore, the act of writing permits Ames to leave behind a memoir for his son while letting go of his past and his need to write in preparation for the next world. Alice Brand in Therapy in Writing identifies the early connections between writing and medicine crafted by the ancient Greeks. From the worship of Apollo—the Greek god of literature and the healing arts—to Aristotle’s use of the medical term katharsis in Poetics, in which he claims that viewing a tragedy provides the subject with a release of negative emotions much like the purgation of the human body of harmful fluids, the Greeks have found the written arts to be of medical importance to humans (7). Most significantly, this ancient concept of using language as a means for attaining emotional release and comfort is directly tied to today’s use of writing as a remedy for deeply seated emotional issues. Certainly the use of writing for individual catharsis and spiritual awakening can be noted in Augustine’s Confessions (397–398 ad), referenced by Ames, in which Augustine uses writing as a means of acknowledging his sins, professing his faith, affirming his self-revelations, and praising God. The art of confessing or the act of contrition, whether on paper or in church, became a practice for relieving the tortured soul, as the Christian subject sought absolution of sins and emotional healing. The use of literature and writing for medical and therapeutic purposes has been practiced in America since the eighteenth century. Following the moral treatment trend developed in Europe, such physicians as Dr. Benjamin Rush and Dr. John Minson Galt ii prescribed the reading of newspapers and fiction for their patients in mental institutions.1 Clinicians prescribed 1 Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of America’s Founding Fathers and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, worked at Pennsylvania Hospital and introduced literature as an ancillary treatment for his patients suffering from mental disturbances. See Weimerkirch, “Benjamin Rush” 511. Rush advised reading novels and the poetry of William Cowper as a cure for melancholia. Dr. John Minson Galt ii was superintendent of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, va. Galt encouraged his patients to write and publish their own poems and articles (Weimerkirch 523). Reading materials provided for patients in nineteenth century American asylums included the Bible, fiction, and a variety of periodicals, newspapers, and other non-fiction texts. According to John Minson Galt ii, “[t]he staple of American asylum libraries consisted of history, biography, travels, reviews, and writers such as Sir Walter Scott,

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reading through hospital libraries post World War I as a relaxation technique for war-traumatized soldiers recovering from mental and physical trauma.2 The development of writing for therapeutic purposes evolved from the p ­ sychoanalytic therapies burgeoning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Physicians like Sigmund Freud recognized the deeply suppressed need in their emotionally disturbed patients to express traumatic memories. As a result of Freud’s research, psychotherapists initiated therapies that encouraged “recovering traumatic memories through free association and talk therapy” (Lepore 2002, 3–4). Research by clinical psychologists in the nineteen fifties showed that patients could better express their troubles through writing as opposed to talking.3 By the midseventies, journal writing, biographies, and diaries became the mainstay of therapeutic ­communication, which touted its strength as proffering “selfvalidation and self-help.”4 Psychological studies in the eighties and nineties provided evidence that assigning writing for patients to “confront deeply personal issues…[could] promote physical health, subjective well-being, Miss Edgeworth, and Mrs. Sherwood” (Weimerkirch 521). Patient-produced journals included “The Opal at Utica, The Illuminator at Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, the Asylum Gazette at New Hampshire Asylum for the Insane, the Asylum Journal at Vermont Asylum for the Insane, and The Pearl at Friends Asylum” (Weimerkirch 523). 2 Reading materials supplied for injured soldiers and veterans of wwi at Army Hospitals across the United States were meant to satisfy a wide range of interests. “Narratives and clear analyses of the war were provided for soldiers wishing to remain abreast of the war abroad as well as French culture and language books to help soldiers prepare for their possible return to posts overseas. Libraries also maintained a general collection of adventure novels, fiction, poetry, drama, biography, philosophy, travel, business, and introductory readers.” See Wyeth, “Library Service in a Base Hospital” (1918), 1153. 3 Mazza, Poetry Therapy 12. D.J. Farber (1953) and Albert Ellis (1955) conducted research and determined that writing therapy had positive health benefits for clients. See D.J. Farber, “Written Communication in Psychotherapy,” Psychiatry 16 (1953): 365–374; Albert Ellis, “New Approaches to Psychotherapy Techniques,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 11(1955): 207–260. Ellis’s work with Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (rebt) utilized various writing techniques to help his patients understand the source of their emotional turmoil and how to control the associated damaging feelings. For more information on rebt, see Albert Ellis and W. Dryden, The Practice of Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy. 2nd edition. New York: Springer Publishing, 2007. 4 Brand, Therapy in Writing, 26. A large number of studies conducted in the seventies examined the effects of writing when used in group therapy: L.A. Buck and A. Kramer, “Poetry as a Means of Group Facilitation,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 14.1 (Winter 1974): 57–71; G. Schloss, Psychopoetry. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1976. See further: Brand, Therapy in Writing 20.

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and selected adaptive behaviors.”5 Medical research performed at the start of the twenty-first century and continuing to the present time connects improvement in mental and physical health to personal journaling (Ullrich 244). Today, writing therapy is mainstream; it is used as a form of self-help therapy (see the “self-help” sections of bookstores and libraries) as well as a therapeutic tool prescribed and monitored by health professionals. The rigorous research of writing therapy since the nineteen eighties has provided important insights into the varied benefits of said treatment as well as the means by which these positive effects occur. James W. Pennebaker, a key figure in the history and development of writing therapy, has focused his studies on expressive writing, the communicating of personal feelings, and the effects of writing on a variety of populations.6 In 1993, Pennebaker determined that “constructing a coherent story works in concert with the expression of negative emotions in therapeutic writing” (Booth and Petrie 168). At that time, therapeutic writing was thought to function by creating for the author a “sense of coherence and the ability to find meaning in the events of life,” which was then “linked to positive immune and health outcomes” (Booth and Petrie 169). Today it is widely accepted by the psychiatric community that writing helps people “integrate upsetting events into the flow of their lives” (Booth and Petrie 168). Furthermore, the most recent findings indicate that an individual’s written expression in a coherent narrative activates multiple processes involving cognition, the reorganization of traumatic memories, and possibly the extinction of negative feelings (Baike and Wilhelm 341). Therefore, the salubrious results that follow from writing therapy appear to be the combined effects of multiple factors “rather than being accounted for by any single factor” (Pennebaker 139). My decision to incorporate writing therapy and its associated theories as the lens for this essay is based on the person of Reverend Ames in Gilead and his initial tenuous emotional state. Through such a lens, this fictional account

5 James Pennebaker, “Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process,” Psychological Science 8.3 (May 1997): 162. Several psychological research studies have examined the physiological, behavioral, and/or physical responses to writing therapy: M.E. Francis and James Pennebaker, “Putting Stress into Words: The Impact of Writing on Physiological, Absentee, and Self-Reported Emotional Well-Being Measures,” American Journal of Health Promotion 6 (1992): 280–287; M.A. Greenberg and A.A. Stone, “Emotional Disclosure About Traumas and Its Relation to Health: Effects of Previous Disclosure and Trauma Severity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63 (1992): 75–84. 6 James W. Pennebaker is the Regents Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts for the Psychology Dept. at the University of Texas, Austin. He is considered a pioneer of writing therapy and his research dates back to the 1980s.

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provides insight into the ways Ames moves from his state of turmoil to a peaceful reconciliation with his imminent fate. In many ways Ames serves as a perfect candidate for therapeutic writing, and his journal, which reads like a case study of the multiple attributes achieved through putting one’s traumatic experiences on paper, offers insights into the emotional, physical, and even spiritual benefits Ames acquires through this therapy. Furthermore, this essay seeks to reaffirm the underrated practice of picking up a book or pen for healthful benefits. Too often, medical practitioners and patients alike seek medicinal solutions to problems that can be addressed through less invasive but more personal means. In sum, embedded in this novel is an exemplary personal narrative depicting the trauma of aging and dying as well as the satisfaction achieved through the release of past traumas and the acceptance of one’s future. Confronted with multiple psychological dilemmas, Reverend John Ames’s journaling becomes a form of therapeutic writing and a means for his spiritual growth. As the novel begins, Ames, who has a terminal heart condition, is compiling this journal to “write his son’s begats” and tell the boy “things [he] might never have thought to tell [him]” had he brought him up “in the usual companionable way” (Gilead 9, 102). Initially, Ames writes from the position of a storyteller and a family historian, consistent with his initial purpose of leaving behind a memoir of sorts to be read by his son as an adult. In these introductory portions, Ames relates his long history of writing, noting the large number of sermons, prayers, and funerals he has composed in his forty-five years of preaching. These sermons represent Ames’s “whole life’s work” (18). Presumably the primary work of which Ames speaks is his service to God, but as the elderly pastor elaborates on his sermons and the years he has spent alone following his first wife’s death, it becomes apparent that the act of writing itself is significant to Ames. He takes great care and pride in the production of his texts. His sermons are composed intricately in “small hand” (19) and painstakingly written out “word for word” (18). He conveys that his writing is done in the “deepest hope and conviction” and that he always tries to “say what [is] true” (19). Ames stresses his aim of veracity repeatedly in the journal as he examines his relationships with his family and friends. More importantly, however, his concentration on the integrity of his feelings requires a specific focus on facts and details (logos) in the writing rather than emotions (pathos) and suppositions. This emphasis on logos seems to give way to more emotive writing in the second half of the journal.7 Ames’s newly acquired 7 An emphasis on logos is in keeping with communication studies on elderly men showing a shift from factual reporting in the early stages of journaling to evaluation and finally expression of emotions. See further, Caplan et al., “Telling It Like It Is” 243.

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focus on pathos, which I will discuss in more depth later, results in the geriatric man’s shift in focus from the external analepsis of his youth or the backward gaze to time before the narrative begins, to the discussions with himself and others in the present. Ames also has much to say regarding the amount and value of his writing. In a contemplative moment, Ames makes note of his long labor having produced the equivalent of “two hundred twenty-five books, which [he claims] puts [him] up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity” (Gilead 19).8 One can conjecture from these statements, which reflect upon the great effort encompassed in his work, that Ames sees his writing as more than the vehicle for relating God’s word to his congregation. The text that he has in hand and will yet produce signifies him, and it will eventually be a surrogate for his voice and reference to his moral character long after he is dead and buried. As an extension of himself, Ames’s writing to his son is an intimate portrayal of the preacher’s hopes, fears, and dreams. The personal journal differs from his sermons and prayers in that these texts, although written with his dead wife and congregation in mind and focusing on religious truth and hope, do not focus on Ames’s life in particular. A compelling comparison between Ames and Augustine comes in the form of their necessity to narrate their lives. Peter Brown in Augustine of Hippo: A Biography claims: “The Confessions [are] an act  of therapy”(165); “Only a very profound, inner reason would have led [Augustine] to write a book such as the Confessions [as] he was entering middle age…a good time for writing an autobiography” (163). According to Kenneth Steinhauser, Augustine’s need to record the events of his life as well as his spiritual growth comes from his feeling of entrapment between “a sense of ennui or dissatisfaction (taedium vivendi) and a fear of death (moriendi metus).”9 These unsettled emotions lead Augustine on a “search for identity” and a desire to “know his true self,” which is accomplished through the composition of his Confessions (24). Like Augustine, Ames, too, is at a crossroads in his life and feeling the weariness of aging and the anxiety brought on by his impending death. In comparing himself to Augustine, Ames is noting his similar purpose for composing his journal, the search for his true self, and the significance of 8 Augustine of Hippo (354–430), a bishop of the ancient Roman Catholic Church, is best known for his Confessions (397  ad), a spiritual autobiography, and for The City of God (426 ad), his theological masterwork. John Calvin (1509–1564) is a French theologian who left the Roman Catholic Church and developed the Reformed theology known as Calvinism. His seminal text is Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536). 9 Steinhauser, “The Literary Unity of the Confessions.” 24. In this quote, Steinhauser is referencing Augustine’s Confessions 4.6.11.

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his writing as a genre of Christian edification: the spiritual biography. His writing, for example, is “a record of his life” (41). Pastor Ames’s realizations about the significance of his writing help to ­clarify why a man whose life is grounded in text of his own creation and who uses writing to understand and help others comprehend religion and ideas about God will be inclined to use this same method for attaining a clearer selfknowledge. The entrenched Calvinist roots of Ames’s family as well as his own religious fervor have guided the preacher to create his own autobiography in search of a solution to confronting his fear of dying.10 As a Christian, Ames understands that to “live blessedly forever” one must have “double knowledgeknowledge of God and of oneself” (Perkins 4). In a manner much like Augustine, Ames questions not only his past relationships with others, both non-believers and Christians, but, more importantly, he questions how his present self and his childhood self, himself as a young man and as an adult, are related in the providential design of divine grace. Ames’s journal becomes in essence his evangelical narrative in which he can “laye open his sinne and make it knowne” (Perkins 322). For if Ames can closely examine himself and the course of his life through an “act of self-interpretation,” he may find what many who write religious narratives seek: “conversion, a transformation of the individual by God’s grace” (Hindmarsh 34). If the process of “conversion [i]s not merely a moment in one’s life, but the key to interpreting the meaning of one’s life from beginning to end,” then Ames may be creating a text that will not only bring him peace, but will make a worthy text representing his better self (Hindmarsh 322). According to George Gusdorf, the primary purpose of writing therapy is to help one address past problems and come to accept

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The Puritan practice of spiritual journal writing or keeping diaries is widely documented. In particular, Puritans were recommended to conduct spiritual self-examination and introspection through daily journaling. Bruce Hindmarsh provides an excellent history of spiritual autobiography and the Puritan religious experience. “According to English Puritans, Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye, the English Protestants were renowned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the conversion narratives” (Evangelist Conversion Narrative 33). See further, Tom Webster, “Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality,” The Historical Journal 39 (1996): 33–56; Isaac Ambrose, Media: The Middle Things, 1649. Printed for Archibald Ingram, James Dechman, John Hamilton, and John Glasford in Glasgow, 1737 (49–50). Accessed from Hathi Trust Digital Library at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/dul1.ark:/13960/t7xk9589c; John Beadle, The Journal or Diary of a Thankful Christian (London: Printed by E. Coats for Thomas Parkhurst, 1656), b 2- b 5. Accessed from Princeton Theologic Seminary Library Online at https:// archive.org/stream/journalor00bead#page/n7/mode/2up.

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oneself in the present by comparing what one is to what one has been.11 Therefore, it would seem that creating a written evangelical autobiography may, in theory, produce positive effects similar to those recorded in writing therapy. Furthermore, the close examination of the self that naturally occurs in therapeutic writing lends itself to a deeper understanding of one’s beliefs and values, which is also a requirement of religious autobiography. Ames gradually comes to the realization that a better understanding of his life is necessary and will require intense self-examination. Near the beginning of the text, the pastor deliberates on how well one can know a thing or another person. Speaking of his father he notes, “you can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it” (Gilead 7). Broaching this issue of not knowing his father and his father not really knowing him is a starting point for Ames’s inner search for understanding of those he loves as well as himself. Much  of the first half of the journal reflects Ames attempts to scrutinize or explain his father’s actions both to his reader and to himself. However, towards the middle of the journal, Ames moves from examining his father’s actions to analyzing his own. In a revelatory moment, Ames, contemplating how best to work through his inner conflict over his godson Jack, assumes the role of counselor in his journal. Putting his thoughts into writing the preacher queries, “What would I say if I came to myself for counsel” (Gilead 140). He determines, “if I put my thinking down on paper, perhaps I can think more rigorously. Where resolution is necessary it must be possible” (140). This significant statement highlights Ames’s growing awareness of some previously buried emotional conflicts in his life that are suddenly appearing in the journal. Soon after his introductory lighthearted entry expressing a desire to write the son’s begats, the long-term problems between fathers and sons in his family start to surface and lead to a particular issue of Ames’s own unresolved anger with and fear of his godson and namesake, Jack. As a man who, in the process of writing a journal that covers much of his life’s history, discovers unresolved conflicts between him and his own (dead) father as well as between him and his godson (namesake), writing will become the most accessible means he has for seeking resolution. An elderly and dying man with a “self-directed tendency to write, who [is] experiencing some inner turmoil, who need[s] to disclose a particular memory of a stressful experience” Ames fits the clinical profile of the therapeutic writer.12 11 12

George Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limitations of Autobiography,” in Hindmarsh.5. Gillie Bolton, Writing Cures 14. Bolton has researched the therapeutic benefits of writing and written several texts on the subject. See further, Bolton, The Therapeutic Potential of Creative Writing. London: Jessica Kingsley, 1999; Bolton, The Writer’s Key. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2014.

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As the journal continues, Ames draws deeper connections between himself and the act of writing, furthering the idea that the preacher may be using composition as a means for both comfort and escape amidst the pain of existence. Following the death of his first young wife, Louisa, and of their infant daughter, Ames used writing as a way of escaping society—getting off to himself where he could brood. His journal notes that he would often “work over” his sermons repeatedly “to keep himself occupied” so that his parishioners, finding him writing, would leave him alone (18). Writing was and is his means to access solitude and be productive. This same writing has also worked as a way of attaining emotional comfort, for in his solitude Ames has found “balm for [his] loneliness” (Gilead 18). In Ames’s own words, “writing has always felt like praying, even when [he] wasn’t writing prayers” (19). One form of spirituality Ames seeks through his writing is a closer connection to God, which may be furthered by reflection upon his relationship to God. For example, when Ames considers Calvin’s metaphor that people are actors and God is their audience, he wonders: “How well do we understand our role?” He then asks whether people ever consider “how God might actually enjoy us…. I believe that we think about that far too little.” He realizes his own recent “great failure” to achieve an acceptable performance in God’s eyes regarding his treatment of Jack (124). By examining his relationship to God in this manner, Ames admits his failings and determines to make improvements in his life. In addition to more writing about his problems, the preacher says, “more prayer is called for, clearly” (125). He also admits that in composing the letter for his son, the process “makes [him] feel [he is] with someone”; one might rightly assume that this “someone” is his son (19). To his reader and son he proclaims, “I feel I am with you now” (19). Thus, writing a journal and composing prayers, in which he is creating conversations with both his son and God, work in unison to ease Ames’s feelings of loneliness. Ames’s insights into praying and writing, key components of his spiritual life and his means of seeking and receiving inner solace, closely resemble what Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk, calls contemplative or centering prayer.13 13

Centering or contemplative prayer “teaches one how to relate to the unloading of the unconscious via repeated consent to God in faith” (Frenette 33). Keating states that many  of his ideas on contemplative practice originated with the studies of Thomas Merton. David Frenette discussing Keating’s spiritual journey states that “contemplative practice is always grounded in the context of a theory of the human condition and the spiritual journey” (29). See more information on Keating’s contemplative and spiritual practices in Thomas Keating, et al. Spirituality, Contemplation, and Transformation: Writings on Centering Prayer. Brooklyn: Lantern, 2008.

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Through the process of prayer, transformation can occur, and “the unconscious emotional pain of a lifetime” can be healed, while faith in God is deepened (Frenette 32–33).The use of prayer or focused writing to address the problems in one’s life can provide the author with emotional relief through the confronting of the issues and cognitive processing of the events. For a believer in God such as Ames, Christ becomes the “Divine Therapist who…breaks up blocked wounds in the psyche, [allowing] psychological garbage [to be] released from the unconscious into awareness” (Frenette 32–33). The end result of this con­ templative practice is the “healing and transformative action of God” (34). Certainly, the ultimate goal for Ames is to end his inner turmoil and reach a place of peace. Although Ames’s initial intention for composing his journal is to communicate his innermost thoughts to his adult son from beyond the grave, the text ultimately provides an outlet for the dying pastor’s emotions. Journaling, a common method used in writing therapy, provides “a means for recording personal thoughts, daily experiences, and evolving insights…. [It also] evokes conversations with self, another person or even an imagined person” (Heimstra 20). Through these imagined (textual) conversations, which involve dialoguing, thinking through problems and imagining proper responses, one may achieve a new and clearer understanding of self. As a means of warding off loneliness, the journal does serve as a constant and reliable companion to Ames. Likewise, at points in the journal, we also see Ames attempting to read his own text from the perspective of a knowledgeable, unbiased reader in addition to his son in adulthood. Ames prompts questions and gives replies to himself in a conversational manner that is meant to elicit some form of truth or information that he cannot immediately see. In one such moment, the pastor deliberates whether he should tell Lila and his young son about his fears of Jack Boughton hurting them. In this selection, Ames situates himself as Moriturus (one who is about to die) in a conversation with himself: Question: What is it you fear most, Moriturus? Answer: I, Moriturus, fear leaving my wife and child unknowingly in the sway of a man of extremely questionable character. Question: What makes you think his contact with them or his influence upon them will be considerable enough to be damaging to them? Gilead 140

Ames does not immediately answer this last question but, rather, waits until his next journal entry, allowing time for contemplation before he replies that his fear stems from jealousy of Jack sitting next to his wife and son in church: they

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“look[ed] like a handsome young family” (Gilead 141). He admits that his “evil heart rose within [him], the old covetise” (141). He also acknowledges that he is thankful that he “thought that through” (141). We see here the move from a focus on logos, the facts of the situation, to an examination or realization of pathos, the emotions that drive the pastor’s fear of Jack. For Ames this proves to be a transformative moment because he makes a startlingly honest appraisal of himself and awakens to the baseness of his emotions. This awakening is achieved through the pastor’s rereading and contemplation of his journal. According to Celia Hunt, “becoming a reader of oneself helps the author to clarify the part of oneself from which one writes, the part that is hurt and sad, that is characterized by the fear of not being heard” (“Reading Ourselves” 41). Hunt describes the above separation as a “splitting of one’s self into the reader self and the writer self” (41). This split “allows one to see oneself from multiple perspectives…and gives less powerful parts of the self a voice” (41). As a result, both “critic and writer are put into dialogue with one another on more equal terms” (41). Ames’s dialogue with himself leads to identifying his fears and biases in relation to Jack as if seeing the situation through another man’s eyes. Likewise, Ames is grateful for the clearer vision, is glad to have not acted in haste, and admits that he does not want to be old. This revelation from a dying man will help him move past his regret and prepare for the inevitable. More importantly, thinking about his audience and his self in relation to the text force the pastor to re-think what he writes. The pastor’s daily journal entries provide him with an imagined reader, who is his son. This imagined reader or narratee, the son, is actually a seven-year old character in the present time of the text, and, as such, the father writes directly to him and anticipates the boy’s response. However, the “intended audience” for these journal entries differs; it is Ames’s son as a grown man. The old pastor has no way of knowing this reader personally. He can imagine what the grown son may be like, he has hopes for how his son will turn out, but as a reader of this journal years in the future, the adult son serves as a potential critic of his father’s life and writings. Just as Ames critiques his own father’s letters and admits to burning some of them, Ames’s own son may find fault with him. Therefore the adult son becomes an “intended reader”14 for whom the journal is composed, but whose actual response cannot be known. The son’s unattainable reaction adds to the pastor’s need to explain his actions thoroughly and reexamine his stance on difficult situations such as his mistrust of Jack, whom he knows his young son 14

Wolfgang Iser’s “intended reader” in reader-response criticism is the reader the author envisions when he produces his text. See Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins up, 1978.

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adores. Ames is forced to see himself through the eyes of someone he does not really know, making him reassess his text and not assume that the reader thinks as he does. Moreover, having the ability to reread his journal allows Ames the chance to think about what he has written, to decide if it is something he wants his son to read later, and to determine if his thoughts are valid. The author’s self-therapy is facilitated by his prudent attempts at self-assessment and evaluation. Colin Lago explains that “writing forces contemplation over the topic at hand,” which enables the “writer’s self, as depicted by the writing process, …to be more understood and aware through the process of the reader’s empathetic understanding (where both reading and writing functions are housed within the one person).”15 This ability to review one’s writing without fear of outside judgment or condemnation is crucial to the therapeutic process. Speaking metaphorically, Lago compares “the writing itself [to] a holding container, a psychological holding station as it were. The person can later remove the writings or leave them there. Psychologically, though, the writer experience[s] the relief that the thoughts and feelings have expressed through writing and therefore do not require…obsessive mulling over, an avoidance or denial” (100). Ames’s journal does, in fact, become a “psychological holding station” for the dying man’s multitudinous thoughts about his youth, the unresolved dilemmas between his grandfather and father as well as his father and himself, the fears of leaving his son and current wife, and his one major regret, being unable to forgive his godson, Jack. In this “container,” Ames can write about, think about, and deal with his unspoken fears. Likewise, he can achieve feelings of relief by writing about discomforting issues such as his first wife’s death and his hatred of Jack’s behaviors as a young man. Following his Moriturus dialogue and when reading over previous journal entries, Ames becomes aware that he has “evaded what for [him] is the central question. That is: How he should deal with these fears [he] has that Jack will do [his family] harm?” (190). Although neither the answer nor the resolution immediately follow this query, they are retained in the holding container for continued reference and future deliberation, eventually leading Ames to a place of understanding, grace, and forgiveness. Initially, Ames anticipates that journal writing will come easily to him and be just another form of sermon writing—an extension of his clerical self. But he soon discovers that in writing this narrative, a text that is recording much of his life’s story as well as his deepest feelings, his writing style has necessarily 15

Lago, “When I Think I Write” in Bolton, Writing Cures, 95,100. Lago has a long employment history of counseling college students. He has written several books on counseling youth in addition to his co-editing of Writing Cures.

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changed. In addition to much of the text being in first person and vacillating between past to present tense, Ames notices “the care it costs [him] not to use certain words more than [he] ought…[like] the word ‘just’…and [he is] inclined to overuse the word ‘old’” (Gilead 28). He becomes overly conscious of the way he is writing, noting, “I don’t write the way I do for the pulpit,” though he adds, “I do try to write the way I think…but it changes as soon as I put it into words” (29). This sudden intense focus on his writing style draws attention to language and textual changes that would not have been noticeable to an outsider. Ames as a reader of himself is becoming critical of every aspect of his text. He is no longer concerned with just the appearance or truth of his words; he is now concerned with showing an overexuberance for fondly held things like “old Boughton” or the “sun that just shown” (28). He notes things that are dear to his heart and things that “exist in excess” of themselves, which underlines his wish to write what he feels in his journal in spite of the interposition of his old sermon writing habits (28). Still, the journal allows space for the emotional Ames—whose “innermost life” is not recorded in “those old boxes of sermons” stored in the attic, but lives and breathes on his pages (41). Topics not normally broached in Ames sermons, and not even discussed with his old friend, Boughten, or his young wife, Lila, suddenly emerge in the text and signal the pastor’s inner turmoil. The revealing of difficult issues in the text is one of the central purposes of therapeutic writing. Psychiatric counselor Kate Thompson notes that “[w]riting can express material which is previously unexpressed or access previously inaccessible material, allowing it to come to the surface…. Paradoxically, a tightly structured task (such as journaling or letter writing), can circumvent the defenses and allow some surprising realization to come to the surface” (“Journal Therapy” 73). Initially, Ames recalls his tenuous relationship with his father. He notes that his “father was a man who acted from principle…he acted from faithfulness to the truth as he saw it. But something in the way he went about it made him disappointing…[and Ames] know[s] for a fact that [he] disappointed [his father]” (Gilead 7). At first this seems like an odd statement—a strange, sad revelation in a narrative about family. And yet, as the journal continues and the deep wounds of the past between Ames’s and his father surface, one understands that the disclosure of disappointment between family members allows Ames to open up and purge himself of the years of anger and misunderstanding that stood between this son and father. The pain of these unfulfilled and strained family relationships is expressed most clearly through Ames’s own frustration, fear, and misunderstanding of his own godson, Jack. He admits that he has yet to come to terms with Boughton’s heartfelt wishes for Jack to be his namesake and for Ames to be second father to the boy.

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Laura Tanner states that Ames, “haunted by [this] past of uncommunicative fathers and emotionally damaged sons, turns from the world to the pen in an attempt to salvage what matters for his little boy through a journal filled with history, reflection, and knowledge” (“Looking Back From the Grave” 227). More importantly, it is in the act of writing that Ames finds his own salvation. From the moment in his journal that Ames discovers Jack is returning home, the text itself starts to churn with heated, uncontrolled language expressing previously untold fears and loathing that are directed at Jack, but also the previously unacknowledged conflict between fathers and sons. Upon hearing that Jack has returned to Gilead, Ames relates, “I don’t know how one boy could have caused so much disappointment without ever giving anyone grounds for hope” (Gilead 72). The palpable disappointment soon boils over into hatred when Jack actually appears at Ames’s home a few days later. Within a few lines before he begins his warnings, Ames voices his fear of Jack, noting that his “impulse is strong to warn [Lila and his son] against Jack Boughton” (125). Even after an internal dialogue that reveals his own jealousy toward Jack, Ames is still unprepared to forgive Jack’s past wrongs, though these feelings almost surface repeatedly in his journal. Not surprisingly, Ames’s own problems with his father continue to arise in the text after meetings with Jack, suggesting a connection between problematic father-son relationships. Finally, Ames feels compelled to disclose the story of Jack’s illegitimate child, with the disclaimer that if he feels the information he relates is untrue, he “can just destroy these pages.” (155). He even confesses, “[I] cannot forgive [Jack]. I wouldn’t know where to begin” (164). But ultimately Ames discovers that he is wrong. His writing has given him a place to contemplate the wrongs of his own father and his father’s father—incommunicability and an inability to forgive—and he begins to realize that he no longer wishes to repeat the cycle of these wrongs with his godson. Ames admits that his own father “threw him back on himself and on the Lord,” but he will do better by John Ames Boughton (236). Forgiveness, the place where real healing begins for Ames, comes sixty pages and several journal entries later. As Rebecca Painter reveals, “before forgiveness can occur, the part more capable of self-discernment needs to reexamine old forms of certainty. Loyalty, in other words, must be to truth rather than self” (“Loyalty Meets Prodigality” 328). Ames, who up to this point has shown a strong loyalty to his own fears of Jack, is suddenly aware of his own short sightedness. Once Jack announces himself a father and common law husband of a black woman, Ames starts to see the changes in his namesake, and he lets go of the “bitterness he felt becoming Jack’s godfather” (Painter 329). The anger Ames has felt all these years is a complex mix of disappointment in his own father, pain in losing his own wife and daughter, as well as a

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misreading of Jack when he was a child, a lonely boy who actually needed Ames. For a man who has prided himself on writing the truth, Ames comes to see that his past ideas of Jack were shrouded in misconceptions. Hearing Jack express sorrow over losing his wife, Della, and son, Robbie, Ames feels a sympathy born out of his own similar experience: the death of his first wife, Louisa, and their daughter, Angeline. Furthermore, Ames sees that Jack “seemed lonely” (Gilead 183) growing up in Gilead, and he admits that as a preacher and the boy’s godfather, he “feel[s] a burden of guilt toward his…namesake. I have never been able to warm up to him” (188). The pastor realizes he has neglected his duty to Jack as both a godfather and as a minister. Ames begins to deliberate on his past actions toward Jack through his text, which provides a place for his “dialogue” and forces him to make “a call to reaction,” by addressing a situation that until now has been buried and ignored (Shannon and Bochen xiii). According to Jennell Charles, journaling allows for the “discover[y] of new insights about ourselves…and to be able to connect these insights with previously learned knowledge” (“Journaling” 183). Moreover, these insights may provide a “place to dump the trash of our jealousies and resentment, which frequently block [our] ability to attend to [our] needs and the needs of others” (“Journaling” 183). In an act of Christian faith and fatherly love, Ames blesses his godson, calling him “beloved son and brother and husband and father” (Gilead 241). The realization that writing has helped him to achieve a better understanding of Jack and his own self leads Ames to a place of comprehension and contentment. He recognizes his own past fears emerging from his own difficult familial relationships, and he now acknowledges his jealousy and unfounded fears of Jack. Resolution for Ames comes as a result of releasing his fear and allowing himself to feel love and compassion for his godson. Ames is finally able to perform the role he should have played throughout the boy’s life, and this permits him to end his journal on a note of spiritual fulfillment. Resolution through journaling, however, is not always so assured as it seems to be for Ames. One does not often get the chance to make up for past wrongs by addressing an adversary and/or one’s fears face to face. The old pastor is fortunate to be able to write out his dilemma, to deliberate on both his adversary’s motives as well as his own, and to determine the right action, which will bring the greatest reward to all. In many cases of writing therapy, as is the case between Ames and his deceased father, one cannot confront the person face to face. Ames is unable to stand up to his father for creating in his youngest son a sense of abandonment, which Ames keenly felt upon his father deserting both the Gilead church and Ames for a move to Florida. However, the use of textual entries in which Ames expresses the disappointment that he felt toward his

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father and the long-term effect of those feelings gives Ames a release of the pent up anger and regret. When the pastor recalls how his father left Gilead to follow Edward, the oldest son, returning only to tell John (Ames) to leave Gilead, Ames is angry. He deeply feels his father’s lack of loyalty to his profession as a pastor and to Gilead. Furthermore, Ames writhes at the memory of his father belittling his son’s loyalty to the old church and town. In a vitriolic moment Ames descries his father’s actions: “he thought he could excuse me from [his] loyalties as if they were loyalty to him” and not to God (Gilead 235). Ames admits the pain he felt upon understanding that his father saw this kind of loyalty as incompetence. This exchange between father and son leaves Ames in “loneliness” and “darkness” for many years: “It was as if a cold wind swept over me…and the wind blew for years and years” (237). Ames is able to admit, “it cost him a good deal of sorrow, but [he] learned from it” (237). Through facing his grievances with young Boughton and his father John, Ames has learned to forgive his own past wrongs. Finally at peace with himself and his choice to live his own life, Ames can let go of the painful past and the latent anger toward his father. These benefits of writing therapy are the result of active interrogation of self and the text. Coming to the close of his life and to the conclusion of his storytelling, Ames determines that it is time to “put an end to all this writing” (Gilead 238). In addition to relinquishing his fear and anger toward Jack, Ames has come to terms with his own father’s negligence. The examination of fathers and sons has brought Ames to a new place of understanding. He now sees that his own father felt the need to track the elder “prodigal” son, just as old Boughton will always favor his younger son, Jack. With the issues of sons and fathers sufficiently broached and critiqued, endings seem to fall in place. Jack is leaving. Boughton is dying. Ames himself is not long for the world. Yet, ironically, he finds that his journal has done the unthinkable; this man of words, who has spent much of his life subsumed in his solitary world of books and sermons, has “been drawn back into the world in the course of his writing. The expression of death [he] began with reads like a kind of youthfulness” (138–39). The dread of leaving his son has been replaced by a pleasant wonder at the beauty in the world and the goodness of grace. With his troubles behind him, Ames now writes of revelations that are made visible if only one is willing and ready to see them: “the world shining like transfiguration” (245). The preacher, now relieved of his psychological pain and fears as a result of his journal writing, can see the world anew, for he himself has been transfigured. The question he poses to his readers at the end of his career of writing certainly illuminates Ames’s weighty undertaking at the sunset of his life. He queries: “who would have the courage to see [such a transfiguration]?” (245). The answer, left to

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the reader, seems obvious. Although few people achieve or even attempt true self-scrutiny, John Ames has had the courage to face himself and his past through a series of journal entries that constitute not only the therapeutic process through which he attains freedom from his past, but also constitute the record of the spiritual path that leads to his ultimate forgiveness, self-­ fulfillment, and peace. Works Cited Baikie, Karen and Kay Wilhelm. “Emotional and Physical Health Benefits of Expressive Writing.” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 11 (2005): 338–346. Bolton, Gillie, et al. Writing Cures: An Introductory Handbook of Writing in Counseling and Therapy. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004. Booth, Roger and Keith Petrie. “Emotional Expression and Health Changes: Can We Identify Biological Pathways” in The Writing Cure: How Expressive Writing Promotes Health and Emotional Well-Being. Ed. Stephen Lepore and Joshua M. Smyth. Washington d.c.: American Psychological Association Press, 2002. (157–175). Brand, Alice, et al. Therapy in Writing: A Psycho-Educational Enterprise. Lexington: d.c. Heath and Co, 1980. Brown, Robert. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1967. Caplan, Scott E., Beth J. Haslett, and Brant R. Burleson. “Telling It Like It Is: The Adaptive Function of Narratives in Coping with Loss in Later Life.” Health Communication 17.3 (2005): 233–251. Charles, Jennell. “Journaling: Creating Space for ‘I’.” Creative Nursing 16.4 (2010): 180–184. Condon, Matthew G. “The Unnamed and the Defaced: The Limits of Rhetoric in Augustine’s Confessions.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69.1 (March 2001): 43–63. Crothers, Samuel McCord. “A Literary Clinic.” Atlantic Monthly 118.3 (September 1916): 291–301. Frenette, David. “Three Contemplative Waves.” in Spirtuality, Contemplation, and Transformation: Writings on Centering Prayer. Eds. Thomas Keating et al. Brooklyn: Lantern, 2008. (9–55). Hiemstra, Roger. “Uses and Benefits of Journal Writing.” New Directions for Adult Continuing Education 90 (Summer 2001): 19–26. Hindmarsh, Bruce. The Evangelical Conversion Narrative. Oxford: Oxford up, 2005. Hunt, Celia. “Reading Ourselves: Imagining the Reader in the Writing Process” in Writing Cures: An Introductory Handbook of Writing in Counseling and Therapy. eds. Gillie Bolton et al. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004. (35–43).

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Keating, Thomas, et al. Spirituality, Contemplation, and Transformation: Writings on Centering Prayer. Brooklyn: Lantern, 2008. Kellman, Julia. “A Place for Healing: a Hospital Art Class, Writing, and a Researcher’s Task.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 42.3 (Fall 2008): 106–121. Lago, Colin. “When I Write, I Think: The Uses of Personal Writing by International Students” in Writing Cures: An Introductory Handbook of Writing in Counseling and Therapy. Eds. Gillie Bolton et al. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004. 95–105. Lepore, Stephen, and Joshua M. Smyth. The Writing Cure: How Expressive Writing Promotes Health and Emotional Well-Being. Washington d.c.: American Psycho­ logical Association Press, 2002. Malchiodi, Cathy A. Expressive Therapies. The Guilford Press: New York, 2005. Matthews, Gareth B. “Inner Dialogue in Augustine and Anselm.” Poetics Today 28.2 (Summer 2007): 283–302. Mazza, Nicholas. Poetry Therapy: Theory and Practice. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2003. Norman, S.A., M.A. Lumley, and J.A. Dooley, et al. “For Whom Does It Work? Moderators of the Effects of Written Emotional Disclosure in a Randomized Trial Among Women with Chronic Pelvic Pain.” Psychosomatic Medicine 66 (2004): 174–183. Painter, Rebecca. “Loyalty Meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction.” Christianity and Literature 59. 2 (Winter 2010): 321–340. Pennebaker, James W. “Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process.” Psychological Science 8.3 (May 1997): 162–166. Pennebaker, James W. “Theories, Therapies, and Taxpayers: On the Complexities of the Expressive Writing Paradigm.” Clinical Psychology 11 (2004): 138–142. Perkins, William. A Golden Chaine or The Description of Theologie. London: University of Cambridge Press, 1612. Proquest. Web. 10 March 2014. Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2004. Shannon, William H. and Christine M. Bochen. Introduction. Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. (vii–xiv). Smyth, J.M., A. Stone, A. Hurewitz, and A. Kaell. “Effects of Writing About Stressful Experiences on Symptom Reduction in patients with Asthma or Rheumatoid Arthritis.” jama 281.14 (April 1999): 1304–1309. Steinhauser, Kenneth. “The Literary Unity of the Confessions” in Augustine: From Rhetoric to Theologian. Ed. Joanne McWilliam. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992. (15–30). Tanner, Laura E. “Looking Back From the Grave: Sensory Perception and the Anticipation of Absence in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Contemporary Literature. 48. 2 (2007): 227–252.

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Thompson, Kate. “Journal Therapy Writing as a Therapeutic Tool” in Writing Cures: An Introductory Handbook of Writing in Counseling and Therapy. Eds. Gillie Bolton et al., New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004. (72–84). Ullrich, Phillip and Susan Lutegendorf. “Journaling About Stressful Events: Effects of Cognitive Processing and Emotional Expression.” Annals of Behavioral Medicine. 24.3 (2002): 244–250. Weimerkirch, Philip J. “Benjamin Rush and John Minson Galt, ii: Pioneers of Bibliotherapy in America.” Bull Med Library Association. 53.4 (Oct 1965): 510–526. Wyeth, Ola M. “Library Service in a Base Hospital.” The American Journal of Nursing. 18.12 (Sep. 1918): 1151–1154.

The Privilege of Loneliness, the Kindness of Home: “Felt Experience” in the Writing of Marilynne Robinson Carolyn Allen* Abstract My essay takes home and housekeeping as related tropes through which to follow the archeology of Robinson’s thinking about the ambiguities of home, the complications of filial exchange, and the resonances of affective habitations. I take as context for my literary reading Robinson’s thinking on emotion and mind as it develops in her essays, often in contrast to the valuations of other recent writers on affect theory and theory of mind. I read the home as a site of affective interchange with particular attention to loneliness, kindness, and forgiveness, three “felt experiences” that ground and trouble the families in both Housekeeping and Home. Robinson’s attention to the solitary and the transient in the earlier novel gives way to the domesticity, kindness and caretaking of Home, but loneliness remains as “the one great prerequisite for depth, and for truthfulness.”

When a writer’s earliest novel is called Housekeeping and her latest, Home, it is difficult not to think of their relation, even when they are published almost 30 year apart and a book closely attuned to Home intervenes between them. What follows takes “home” and “housekeeping” as related tropes through which to trace the archeology of Robinson’s thinking (to borrow a phrase she uses in” When I Was a Child I Read Books”) about the ambiguities of home, the complications of family exchange, and the resonances of affective habitations (93). Robinson might not wish to be referred to as a theorist of affect, given her recent arguments against what she calls “parascience,” in Absence of Mind and elsewhere, but her interest in “felt experience” shines through her novels.1 She has spoken of her “profound respect for fiction as thought” (La Force, “A Teacher and her Student”), and I take as a context for my literary reading Robinson’s thinking on emotion as it develops in her essays and interviews, with particular

* I wish to thank Kelley Craig and Jan Bianchi for helpful conversations about Home. 1 The phrase occurs in several of her writings. See especially “the felt experience of thought” in “Thinking Again” (Absence 114) and “the felt experience of life” in “Freedom of Thought” (When I Was a Child 8).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004302235_010

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attention to loneliness and kindness, two felt experiences that ground and trouble the families in both Housekeeping and Home. I will argue that Robinson’s attention to the transient and the solitary in the earlier novel gives way to the domesticity, kindness, and caretaking of Home, but that loneliness remains as “the one great prerequisite for depth, and for truthfulness” (Painter 492). Although the relations of Jack to his father and of them both to the Ames household are crucial to Home (and to Gilead), I will focus particularly on the siblings in the two novels. Glory has not had much critical attention, and for arguments about affect and emotion, it would be difficult to skirt a character who is in tears for much of the novel. In writing about Robinson’s attention to emotional narratives, I have chosen to use as my central hermeneutic her term “felt experience” rather than either “affect” or “emotion,” though those terms will necessarily appear as well. Scholars disagree about the meaning and discursive functions of these terms, and their discussions are inflected not only by historical and cultural difference, but also by varying disciplinary “homes” and terms of argument. “Affect,” having leapt old boundaries among the neurological sciences, psychology and psychoanalysis, entered critical theory in the humanities primarily through the work of Eve Sedgwick in her attention to 1960’s psychologist Silvan Tomkins, and Brian Massumi in his interest in Deleuze and Guattari (and their antecedents). Affect, for these theorists, maintains its earlier connection to the body’s physiological responses, but especially in the work of Massumi it is a pre-personal phenomenon: autonomic, transmissible, non-conscious and anti-intentional. Emotion, on the other hand, is “owned,” individual, and may be conscious or unconscious.2 Beginning around the millennium with the “affective turn” in the humanities, “affect” as a critical rubric began to appear frequently in studies

2 A full discussion of the differences between affect and emotion, even when restricted to their recent use in the humanities, is beyond the scope of this essay. See Woodward’s introduction for a useful summary of some of these critical debates in recent cultural studies. For other recent book-length cultural and literary studies in the field, see among others, Terada, Ngai, Flatley, Ahmed, and Berlant. For a critique of new work in neurobiology and affect as studies from other disciplines enter critical exchanges in the humanities, see Leys. Although her objections follow different lines of inquiry, some of them are resonant with Robinson’s critique of “parascience” in Absence of Mind. “Affect” is now the more frequently used term in the humanities. For representation of psychological states in fictional character, “affect,” with its attention to surfaces, emphasizes the linguistic construction of the text. However, its currency may result also from its history in the hard sciences, which makes it free from any possible association with “feminized” sentiment. Some critics have opted for “feelings” as the term of choice in this terrain. See especially Terada.

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of sociopolitical public life and popular culture. Not surprisingly, given its grounding in physicality, affect in literary studies appears especially in accounts of actual readers and audiences rather than in arguments about textual representation.3 “Emotion” in literary analysis usually refers to a character’s represented subjective feelings in response to external or internal encounters. Other disciplines, especially philosophy and the psychological social sciences, continue to argue about “what emotions really are,” to use the title of philosopher Paul Griffiths’s recent book. Representation of affect, in its older sense of individual bodily response, appears infrequently in Housekeeping, perhaps because its first-person narration focuses on Ruth’s interior subjectivity and not on physical responses that a narrative on-looker might have noted. Home, on the other hand, is full of Glory’s tears; a few of Jack’s repeated gestural responses appear as well, though neither affect is depicted in detail. Even Glory is not sure what makes her weep so often. Yet Robinson’s representation of intricate patterns of psychic life and interrelatedness, her attention to commonplace emotional exchanges that seem ordinary enough in themselves, are crucial to the novel’s narrative. Most often these emotions are not what theorists refer to as “basic emotions”—fear, joy, surprise, anger, and others of short duration that register especially in facial expression. Rather, they are, as Robinson refers to them, “felt experiences” of daily life that carry with them a range of emotional and bodily responses. On their complexities, both novels turn.4

The Privilege of Loneliness

In the otherwise different plots of these novels, unforeseen circumstances bring characters together and then move them apart. Thus, both involve transience as a thematic; Housekeeping’s Sylvie makes drifting from place to place a center of her life, but Jack, too spends his years away from Gilead in a variety of 3 For the use of “affect” in book-length literary studies of readers and audiences, see especially Flatley and Thrailkill. 4 “Felt experience” is of course a linguistically and culturally constructed concept for Robinson. In her brief columns in the New York Times in the late 1980s, for example, she alludes to the inadequacy of public discourse (as well as academic critical theory) not only for “ordinary purposes,” but also for expression of inward experience. See especially “Let’s Not Talk Down to Ourselves.” For a discussion of Robinson’s thinking about the separation between contemporary uses of public language and realms of private experience, see Schaub.

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places.5 In the earlier novel, absent a home by choice and thus not usually subject to any kind of housekeeping, Sylvie arrives to live with Ruth and Lucille, bringing with her a hobo’s history and the serenity of solitude. As critics have pointed out, transience also figures in the way that the lake, leaves, soil, and other specimens of the natural world move in and out of the Fingerbone house. Since the town features railroad service, transients known and unknown to Sylvie occasionally pass through town. But the novel also presents a less straightforward version of moving back and forth. During the time that Sylvie, Ruth, and Lucille live in Fingerbone, they engage in a kind of transience of emotion. All individual emotions in and out of fiction are transient, of course; I use this term to suggest that the affective bonds among the three main characters shift back and forth as the novel moves forward and that these unstable connections ground the meditations on felt experience at the heart of the book. Obviously, too, emotions of all kinds, even the most painful, can create bonds; I am interested in ways in which Ruth’s growing identification with Sylvie permits her to move from loneliness, conventionally defined, to the meditative inwardness that illuminates her narration. Through Ruth, Robinson recasts traditional thinking about loneliness and being alone, and figures instead a character inhabiting what she calls in other contexts, “lonesomeness.” Transience begins when Sylvie the wanderer comes to look after the young sisters and continues, as what is at first a hesitant threesome become pairs whose emotional allegiances shift as the story moves forward. Sylvie arrives as a singular presence, and Lucille and Ruth bond as sisters separate from Sylvie as they remember the mother whom they’ve lost to suicide. They are bound both by their memories of Helen and their fear that Sylvie, the closest thing they have to a surrogate mother, might also leave them. The affective connection, however, is never seamless. Even in the memories of their mother they cannot agree on what color her hair was, or whether she was a suicide or an accident 5 Anatole Broyard, in the early review that helped make Housekeeping’s reputation, declares transience as the subject of the novel and almost all subsequent commentators have discussed it as a thematic. For particularly useful understandings, see Galehouse, Aldrich, Burke, and Smith. Robinson’s 2014 novel, Lila, also extends her thinking on homelessness since Reverend Ames’s second wife, Lila, who appears both in Gilead and in Home, was a wanderer before she settles in Gilead. Most critics also mention various emotions in Housekeeping as a given, but generally do not focus particularly on them. For exceptions, see Gardner on loneliness in the context of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and McDermott on nostalgia especially in the context of Svetlana Boym’s work. For readings with particular reference to theoretical interests other than affect, see especially Foster (Kristeva’s “women’s time”), Caver (some Lacan and studies of trauma), and Ryan (deconstruction).

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victim. Lucille’s mother is best described as an “orderly, vigorous and sensible” person, whereas Ruth’s parent is a gently indifferent woman who “would have liked to have been even more alone” (Housekeeping 109). Increasingly, Lucille is drawn to the conventions of small-town life, especially as these conventions are played out and enforced at school. She gradually withdraws from her life with Ruth and spends more and more time away from their ramshackle house on the hill above town. Her frustrated attempt to sew an appropriately stylish outfit and her decision to go live with her home economics teacher mark both her attraction to convention, especially the conventionally feminine, and her longing to fit in, to be something other than one of the motherless sisters who lives with an itinerant aunt. The rhythm of the novel’s movement has Lucille and Ruth first constituting a “we,” who try to adjust to Sylvie’s version of care-taking, then growing apart as Lucille comes to hate “everything that had to do with transience” (103). Lucille’s desire to make Ruth acceptable in appearance finds expression especially in her attention to dress and her critical comments on Ruth’s unconventional demeanor. Her early shift toward the life she wishes to have begins when she tears the sequins off the fanciful slippers Sylvie has bought. After she burns the materials for the much-wanted dress, she continues to sew at school. When she gathers with her friends, she has just the right look for fitting in. Slowly she withdraws from her sister and gives up on her aunt. At the same time, she never gives up entirely on her connection to Ruth. As she comes to see Sylvie as socially unacceptable to those around her, she strains to bring her sister to her point of view about an aunt who is quite comfortable lying on a park bench with a newspaper over her head. Hers is a struggle both to reject Sylvie’s itinerant ways and to maintain Ruth’s affection. Increasingly, she blames Sylvie for her growing separation from Ruth. She pleads for Ruth to leave since “‘[t]hat’s Sylvie’s house now’” (Housekeeping 123). She goes to live with Mrs. Royce when she finds Sylvie lying in her place in bed next to Ruth. She is despondent when Ruth returns bedraggled in Sylvie’s coat. What began as sisters joined in loss becomes a separation so acute that Ruth recalls not having a sister anymore (140). Lucille’s gradual affective shift away from her bond with her sister appears in her actions and in brief moments of dialogue as Ruth, the novel’s retrospective narrator, “recalls” them.6 Ruth’s account of her own emotional transience moves 6 Whether Ruth tells the story of her shifting bonds with Lucille and Sylvie from her adult life as a transient or from beyond the grave has received some critical attention. See for example, Caver and Ryan. It is a question Robinson leaves open. When asked about it in an interview, Robinson responded that “[f]iction can do whatever it wants to do” (Vorda, 172). Finally, part of what gives the novel its lyrical power is the introspective quality of Ruth’s voice, not the “place” from which it comes.

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the familial narrative forward, but more importantly for the novel’s contribution to thinking on felt experience, slows it down. As the narrative voice, she records Louise’s separation, marked by the trajectory of their starting out as a “we,” then their taking different paths that gradually results in Ruth’s identification with Sylvie so that the earlier bond with Lucille shifts to a “we” with Sylvie: “For that summer Lucille was still loyal to us. And if we were her chief problem, we were her only refuge” (Housekeeping 109). The transient composition of “we” is all the more striking given the novel’s focus on “I.” By convention, any triad suggests one who is, however temporarily, on the outside. At any given moment, that might be Lucille or Ruth or Sylvie. In the novel’s affective narrative, such singularity plays out so that Lucille comes more and more to value her privacy, whereas Ruth often muses about loneliness and Sylvie takes pleasure in her many moments of solitude. This nexus of relationship of privacy/loneliness/solitude centers the novel’s meditation on the varying felt experiences of aloneness. Lucille’s need for privacy, for the freedom of separation from a kind of “housekeeping” she cannot understand, intensifies when she is unable to convince Ruth to abandon Sylvie and leave with her. Once she moves to Mrs. Royce’s and begins to hang out with her school friends, that need is no longer apparent. Ruth, on the other hand, as she feels her difference both from Lucille and from other children, increasingly thinks about the nature of loneliness. Early in the novel she describes retrospectively her grandparents as “unaccompanied souls,” and imagines her grandmother’s particular loneliness: “[S]he would feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child. It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water” (18). The sentence’s tropes and its repetition both of words and of grammatical structures, contribute to the lyricism for which the novel is justly famous. At the same time, the sentence begins to suggest Robinson’s thinking on loneliness in Housekeeping and more generally. However sharply it is experienced, it is seldom a negative emotion; rather it is often the source of interior knowledge and insight. In contrast, the psychological literature on loneliness often stresses its unpleasant nature. It is a frightening, “dreaded, though familiar feeling,” and people will frequently do whatever they can to avoid it, as Lori Baum notes in her introduction to a recent collection of essays on loneliness (Willock 1). Similarly, in another such introduction, Ann Rokach implicates researchers in describing social perceptions of loneliness: “There is a stigma to being lonely. The public and therefore us [sic] researchers seem to not look favorably on anyone who admits to suffer its pain… Loneliness carries a significant social stigma, as lack of friendship and social ties are socially undesirable, and the social perceptions of lonely people are generally unfavorable” (“Loneliness Updated” 1).

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Well-known researchers often use what they term a deficiency model to characterize loneliness. It is “the unpleasant experience that occurs when the network of a person’s social relations is deficient in some important way” (Perlman and Peplau, 31).7 Earlier commentators, though they differ in their approaches, discuss the ubiquity of loneliness and its connection to depressive illness, to use Melanie Klein’s language. In her last published essay (1963), Klein investigates the source of loneliness and finds it, not surprisingly, in the infant’s “psychotic anxieties” as it struggles to defeat its insecurities (“Sense of Loneliness” 300). Clark Moustakas, in a 1961 book for general readers often cited by later psychologists, recognizes the anxiety and terror of loneliness, but writes at greater length about “existential” loneliness as a state of human existence, and he concludes by recognizing its life-affirming power: “So I say, let there be loneliness, for where there is loneliness there is also sensitivity, and where there is sensitivity, there is awareness, recognition and promise” (Loneliness 103). Robinson, too, writes of loneliness as a human condition providing important self-knowledge. She is clear on her own attraction to being alone, and she believes that the state she calls “lonesomeness” is a feature more generally of the western United States where she grew up. In the title piece from her most recent collection of essays, “When I Was a Child I Read Books” (first published in 1993), Robinson expands at some length on lonesomeness, solitude, loneliness, and the outsider as a figure.8 In considering why “lonesome” as a word should have such positive resonances for her, she begins with her own felt experience in the solitude of the woods: “I remember when I was a child at Coolin or Sagle or Talache, walking into the woods by myself and feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that made my hair prickle…. “[M]y solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place” (88).9 She recalls too, “[t]he word ‘lonesome’ 7 The psychological literature on loneliness is by now quite large, though several commentators note that it is a relatively young area of study in the discipline. For scholarship that helped establish the field see especially Weiss’s book Loneliness and Fromm-Reichmann’s essay “Loneliness.” 8 The essay was first published with an only very slightly different format, as “My Western Roots.” Page numbers cited are from “When I Was a Child.” That this relatively early essay should be the title of her most recent collection highlights the importance of her Idaho childhood in the meditations on solitude and the nature of being alone that are crucial in different ways to Housekeeping and to Home. 9 Her formulation both contributes to recent work on affect that, following Silvan Tomkins, stresses bodily surfaces and motions, and is reminiscent of the work of William James, a philosopher Robinson much admires, who emphasizes bodily feeling rather than evaluation or cognition in his definition of emotion.

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spoken in tones that let me know the privilege attached to it, the kind of democratic privilege that comes with simple deserving” (89).10 For her, loneliness is not a contemporary pathology resulting in maladjustment and depression, but instead, like mourning, melancholy, and regret, a “high sentiment” reminiscent of the Victorians and of psalmists and early English poets: “I learned to assume that loneliness should be in part pleasure, sensitizing and clarifying, and that it is even a truer bond among people than any kind of proximity…. [W]hen I see a man or a woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another being clearly” (89). In a more recent interview she comments that “loneliness is the encounter with oneself—who can be great or terrible company, but who does ask all the essential questions. There is a tendency to think of loneliness as a symptom, a sign that life has gone wrong. But it is never only that. I sometimes think it is the one great prerequisite for depth and for truthfulness” (Painter 492). Like Klein, she regards loneliness as a pervasive, inward phenomenon, not necessarily attached to the absence of others, but unlike her, she finds it a source of strength, whereas Klein in her essay plumbs its sources and writes about how to overcome them. In the essay “When I Was a Child” and in her interviews, Robinson’s con­ versational voice presents her thinking on loneliness straightforwardly. In Housekeeping, the indirection of the metaphoric language provides a space for the reader to imagine loneliness as an emotional state more nuanced than that often presented in the psychological literature. Although Sylvie’s stories sometimes involve lonely people in bus stations, it is Ruth’s meditative thinking that extends the complications of loneliness. During the visit to the mountain valley where Sylvie leaves her alone for a time, Ruth imagines a series of scenes that allow her to think about how loneliness pervades her life. I focus on her mountain valley visit here not only because it is crucial to the novel’s thinking on loneliness, but also because it is a strong example of how Robinson writes about felt experience more generally. The movement in the scene’s language from sensory perception to philosophical consideration and back again characterizes both Ruth’s consciousness and Housekeeping as a fiction of thought. Before they go to the valley, Sylvie has already identified it as a place Ruth must visit. Once Lucille moves out of the house, Ruth begins to wander with Sylvie who becomes from time to time a like self and a potential second mother. When they leave the house to row to the valley, they are not constrained by

10

Her language here reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s similar phrase, “the privilege of loneliness,” in Mrs. Dalloway (1925). For the quotation, see Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Urban Romantics, 2012. (116).

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having to be home at a certain time to meet Lucille. Ruth identifies herself with Sylvie: “We are the same,” and at the same time says of Sylvie, “She could as well be my mother” (Housekeeping 145).11 Her identification and her longing shape the scene and much of the novel to follow. When they arrive at the valley, Ruth calls up Carthage, strewn with salt, and imagines a garden where salt prisms blossom into water drops. The next sentence extends the image by moving away from the visual trope to philosophical observations: “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 anything so utterly as when we lack it? … [W]hatever 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” (152–3). The movement from need to imagined having, from longing to the sweetest of tastings, from lack to sensory knowledge premises loneliness on loss, but adds as well Robinson’s sense that loneliness through loss is never only painful; it is also creative and sustaining. Indeed, in the next paragraph Ruth imagines how, had the valley snow as well as ice, she would have built a snow woman, a version of Lot’s wife, surrounded by forgiving children, and “she would be more than mother to them, she so calm, so still, and they such wild and orphan things” (153). The language suggests too, that loneliness stems both from what has been lost in the past, and also from longing, the expectation that something not yet present may someday come to be.12 It seems to her that her “life is composed entirely of expectation,” perhaps because her mother’s leaving established in her “the habit of waiting and expectation which makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain” (166, 214). If loneliness is made from absence, longing for future fulfillment also creates a hole in the center of the present. The turn to the dream of a mother in the valley marks one source of Ruth’s loss and her longing. However, it is not the only source. With Sylvie off wandering, Ruth returns to the edge of the lake. Whistling and throwing stones to counter her fear that the lonely, wild children of the woods might be just behind her, she thinks of Lucille. Without her sister or a friend, she is missing

11 12

For a detailed psychoanalytic account of Ruth’s identification with Sylvie, see Caver. Though loneliness most often includes in its definition the sense of loss, some scholarly considerations of it may also point to the importance of expectation. See especially the cognitive model of discrepancy, summarized in Rokach’s introduction, 10–12.

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the smugness of “one solid human bond” that “lonely people covet and admire” (Housekeeping 154). She moves to the ruined house where she knows Sylvie will find her and from her reverie about the unsheltered people of Fingerbone’s past, she shifts suddenly to take up lonely people in bus stations, perhaps those from Sylvie’s tales, people who have stories about why they are alone when they should not be. Ruth thinks of them as liars “[b]ecause, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery” (157). She does not say here what it is a discovery of, but it separates one from others and perhaps also gives rise to anger, since “unsheltered people are angry in their hearts” (158). Then, because “when one is idle and alone, the embarrassments of loneliness are almost endlessly compounded,” she begins to clear away the fallen house’s debris as she imagines herself the rescuer of the lost children. She identifies with those children as well and at the end of the scene turns from thinking of the children back again to her mother: “She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense but not perished, not perished” (160). Ruth’s meditation on loneliness in this scene extends the affective range of its purview. It brings into play not only the earlier moment’s conception of it as loss, expectation, and creativity, but also its accompanying sense of fear, anger, and even embarrassment. Ruth is often lonely, but it is in those moments that she imagines most vividly. Through her imagination, loneliness as a complicated state of being filled with disparate, competing emotions emerges even more strongly in the novel than it does in Robinson’s essays and interviews. If loneliness is an absolute discovery, Robinson’s portrayal of Sylvie suggests what that discovery might be. In “When I Was a Child,” Robinson comments both on the power of loneliness, and on “lonesomeness” as a state of “radical singularity, one’s greatest dignity and privilege” from which one might understand “the sacred poetry in strangeness, silence, and otherness “(90).13 The lonesome figure is an outsider; Robinson creates Sylvie as a female version of  the outsider as American hero: “[T]o the degree that she has not taken the  impress of society she expresses the fact that human nature is replete with nameless possibilities and, by implication, that the world is accessible to new ways of understanding” (92). Sylvie, the lonesome outsider, the transient, the drifter, does not need Lucille’s privacy and does not feel much of Ruth’s loneliness (and when she does, she usually doesn’t mind), because she moves

13

Robinson’s discussion of “lonesome” as a positive state of being resonates with that of Kevin Lewis, who discusses the spiritual dimensions of the term in Lonesome.

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through the world inhabiting the pleasure of interior solitude. Only when the worried citizens of Fingerbone arrive to assess Ruth’s safety does she begin a frantic housekeeping of the conventional sort so that she and Ruth might stay together and Lucille might even be enticed home. Finally, though, she and Ruth must leave, and leave the house with its “forgotten sorrows and incipient dreams” behind (209). Not only do they not want to keep the house, they do their best to burn it down. In the last two sections of the novel, transients Sylvie and Ruth move together from place to place as a “we,” but also as their own separate lonesome selves. The night they leave Fingerbone Ruth says that they were “almost like a single person” (209). Yet earlier that same night Ruth hides from Sylvie in the orchard and feels herself “breaking the tethers of need, one by one” (204). She is beginning the transition from the lonely child whose felt experiences are the subject of the story to the lonesome adult who recounts them. Ruth the storyteller gives us her memories, her dreams, her fantasies as well as her family history. All those sentences beginning, “Imagine,” or, “Say that,” mark the voice of a character who has learned to be comfortably alone, and who has used her aloneness to ask the essential questions. By the end of the novel, Ruth and Sylvie, with no permanent house to keep, have formed an alternative family that, rhetorically at least, includes Lucille because she is the subject of Ruth’s final imagining.14 She sees her sister in a café, perhaps in Boston, not thinking at all about Ruth and her aunt (even as she performs the very Sylvie-like act of stowing some crackers), and yet, in the much-commented-upon final sentence, always thinking of them: “No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope and always for me and Sylvie” (219). In her two other more recent novels, Robinson once again thinks about the nature of family; the (in)attention to housekeeping shifts to the ambivalences of both a house and a home. Gilead (2004) and Home (2008) are companion fictions that take place at the same time with the same set of characters occupying the same narrative world. Robinson suggests they may be read together 14

On the opening pages of her essay, “Family” (da 87–107), Robinson is careful to define family: “[O]ne’s family are those toward whom one feels loyalty and obligation, and/or from whom one derives identity, and/or to whom one gives identity, and/or with whom one shares habits, tastes, stories, customs, circumstances, memories. This definition allows for families of circumstances and affinity as well as kinship” (87).

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or apart and reviewers of Home often discuss them together.15 But Home also resonates with Housekeeping, not only because of its reminiscent title, but also because its family, like that of the much earlier novel, enacts an intricate performance of affectual ties among two siblings and their parent. Sylvie, of course, is a stand-in rather than an actual parent who thinks of Ruth as her sister rather than her child, and Reverend Robert Boughton, the elderly irascible father of Jack and Glory in Home, receives more care than he can provide. The emotional transience of Housekeeping becomes in Home a desire for recognition, and loneliness gives way at least in part to kindness. Jack, like Sylvie in some ways, is ever the outsider while Glory, like Ruth, observes with care the family life around her. These resonances are never repetitions, however; the two novels read very differently and the fantasies of their concluding passages image different versions of how families might be constituted.16

The Kindness of Home

Both Housekeeping and Gilead have first-person narrators, so Home reads differently in part because it is cast in the third person.17 While Housekeeping presents Ruth’s lyric interiority, Home is full of conversational exchanges. It, too, is a fiction of thought, with Glory’s as the perceiving and reporting consciousness. Moving between free indirect discourse and what James Wood calls “unidentified free indirect style,” Glory’s thinking concentrates on Jack’s relation to his father and to his neighbor, Reverend Ames, and on her own shifting connections to her brother.18 He centers what action there is, but she

15 16

17 18

Robinson has said that she “wanted Home to be a freestanding book. I didn’t want it to be a sequel. I wanted it to be true that you could pick up either book first” (Fay 50). Though widely reviewed, Home has not yet had the extended critical commentary it warrants. The essays that are most germane to mine are Holberg’s “‘The Courage to See It’” and Tanner’s “Uncomfortable Furniture.” Holberg, in discussing some of the Christian implications of the novel, notes that Glory has been over-looked in reviewers’ attention to Jack as a character. Tanner reads the text’s positioning of the reader through its narrative structure as a critique of the story’s presentation of domesticity’s limits. Robinson once speculated that she might not ever write in a voice other than first-person, but that the best third-person narrations “break all the rules” (Flynn, 92). Wood, 24. He uses that term to indicate the language of an unspecified narrator whose formulations are similar to the ones that might be used by the inhabitants of Gilead. He is speaking of language that is close to that of the free indirect style, but is not obviously the internalized speech or thinking of a third-person character.

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is largely the narrative’s center of consciousness.19 Unlike in Housekeeping, where Ruth’s first-person imaginings, meditations, dreams, and memories allow immediate access to her emotional world, Home’s narration is more restrained, and thus in keeping with Glory’s role in her family as the seemingly steady sibling who has arrived home to take her unmarried woman’s place as daughter, sister, and caretaker at a time of crisis. From the opening sentence forward, however, it is clear that Glory too, in her often quiet way, must contend with her own critical upheaval: “‘Home to stay, Glory! Yes!’ her father said, and her heart sank.” That question of who might be home to stay at the novel’s conclusion drives the novel’s exterior plot, but the interior story has everything to do with the sinking hearts of all the Boughtons. The family figures of Home draw together and move apart in a delicate dance that is often intimate, but never quite intimacy. Reverend Boughton ages visibly in the course of the novel; Jack and Glory care for him as best they can as they try to sort out their pasts and imagine their futures. Since Glory is the narrative’s perceiving consciousness, her interior struggles are much more directly visible in the text than Jack’s, though his are the subject of what action there is. Their closeness grows, but their bonding is incomplete and insufficient to keep Jack in Gilead. Though Jack, like Sylvie, is a wanderer, the emotional transience of Home has a different pattern than the one in Housekeeping. Allegiances in the Boughton family do not follow sequential trajectories as they do when Ruth and Lucille grow apart and then Ruth and Sylvie grow closer. Rather, Jack and Glory play out their doubts and hesitations, moving together and apart, unable to overcome their shared past and haunted by Jack’s ongoing reputation as the “scoundrel brother.”20 Within these transient moments of closeness, Home continues the resonances of loneliness begun in Housekeeping. In an interview with Robinson, Rebecca Painter comments that Jack and Glory are “two of the loneliest 19

20

As in some of Virginia Woolf’s novels, notably Mrs. Dalloway, it is often difficult to know from sentence to sentence what is in the character’s head and what is part of a more distanced non-participatory narrator’s commentary. Just as it is difficult not to think of Home with regard to Housekeeping because of their resonant titles, so it is also hard not to think of Robinson’s novel in connection to Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home. That novel, again set in the nineteen fifties, also has as its main figures a brother and a sister; the brother, like Jack, is an outsider who lives with a painful past. The force of “home” is much more community-based, as least for Cee, the sister in Morrison’s book. Nevertheless, the ending, like Robinson’s, embraces a sense of home ambivalently. In the last sentence, Cee calls out to her brother, “Let’s go home,” but the question of whether he can find such a place given his traumatic memories of his Korean War experiences is left open.

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c­haracters in recent literature” (“Further Thoughts” 491), and Robinson acknowledges that Jack brings both loneliness and a sense of loss when he returns to Gilead (488). But the nature of loneliness shifts from its ultimate privilege in Housekeeping as lonesomeness. In Jack, loneliness manifests as secrecy and especially estrangement. Unlike Sylvie, he is an outsider with ambivalence. He is a mystery to himself and has always felt apart from his family and from Gilead at large. As a child he steals little things that are not of much importance to him; as a young man he abandons both the girl and the child he fathered with her. As an adult he is a transient who drinks too much and is in and out of jails and prison too. He arrives in Gilead after a long absence, full of secrets and the continuing estrangement that marked his youth. Despite his background, his family loves him, fears his loss, and encircles his “unnamed absence.” In this way, he may be said to be something like the “presence in absence” that Robinson discusses in “Imagination and Community” from When I Was a Child I Read Books. She is speaking of Jesus’s leave-taking from the supper at Emmaus; she goes on to say: “Presence is a great mystery, and presence in absence, which Jesus promised and has epitomized, is at a human scale, a great reality for all of us in the course of ordinary life” (20–21). Jack’s presence in absence describes the power of his place in his family even when he is away. In fact, Robinson’s rhetorical questions that just precede her reference to Jesus’s leave-taking might be said to anticipate the novel’s narrative. She is speaking of how writers must, even if they would prefer not to, deal with the temporal reality of their characters’ lives, even movements as small as walking through a door. She continues: “This is not to say that books could not be written about walking through a door—away from what? Toward what? Leaving what wake of consequence? Creating what stir of displacement ?” (20). Her questions could be said to suggest the plot of Jack’s story. He is an outsider, perhaps by nature, yet he spends his time in the novel’s present trying to be recognized for the man he has become. He considers Gilead a place where he might bring Della and his son to live. As a child, he often separated himself from his family; as an adult, he is more at home in the barn where he has pitched a tent than he is in the family house where his father and sister live. He is haunted by his fear that he may be doomed to perdition and this theological fear gives rise to his questions about predestination. Jack’s loneliness, grounded partly in the absence of Della, as Ruth’s is in the loss of her mother, also results from conflicts of expectation. Jack is caught between his own hope (perhaps “expectation” is too strong a word) that someday he might make a home with Della and their son Robert in Gilead, and those inevitable expectations of his family and, beyond them, those of Gilead’s citizens, that instead he will be the same Jack he has always been, cut off from

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others and never up to much good. His reputation as a ne’er-do-well produces in him feelings of shame, humiliation, and embarrassment, emotions that feed his sense of estrangement. He hopes to make connections with his father, and through him and then through Ames, with Gilead. But though the Boughtons have forgiven many of his previous misdeeds, they cannot free themselves from thinking he will always be on his way to somewhere else. Jack cannot meet their expectations because finally he does not share their social mores. He wants to reconcile with his father, but he is unwilling to lie to him about his religious beliefs; he hopes to bring Della and Robert to live in the town but realizes he cannot because its citizens would not welcome an interracial family. His childhood solitariness, perhaps part of his given nature, becomes social estrangement such that he is a mystery to himself as well as to others. His years with Della, presented largely in stories to Glory, give him glimpses of a life that cannot happen. He disappears from the novel, confirming social and familial expectations while burying his own fragile hope. Glory watches him go and cannot help but think of him in the language of Isaiah, “A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face” (Home 318). In fact, the language of all of Isaiah 53:3 might be said to describe Jack: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not” (emphasis in the original). Finally, however, Jack is, at least in part, a kind of lonesome hero in Robinson’s sense. Especially in his support of the nascent black civil rights movement in conversations with his father, and in his inability to pretend to beliefs he does not have, he preserves a fragile dignity in leaving a town that expects him to be other than who he is.21 Glory’s own loneliness also comes in part from expectations—unvoiced social expectations that she will happily return home at 38 to care for her ailing father, as unmarried daughters are expected to do. While Jack’s inability to meet social expectations produces an interior sense of shame, Glory’s fulfillment of them brings anger and resentment that she usually disguises behind 21

Jack’s defense of events connected to the civil rights movement reads slightly differently for readers who come to Home after reading Gilead and those who haven’t read the earlier book. In Home, the fact that Della is black and that they have a son together is not revealed until late in the narrative. Previous readers of Gilead will have this knowledge, so all of Jack’s comments on issues of race, together with his attention to Ames’s young son, may have a particular poignancy. As an audience, these readers have a privileged place not permitted Glory or Reverend Boughton. Jack shares the secret of Della’s existence with Glory shortly after his return, but he does not trust her enough to reveal her as a black American.

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her prayerful exterior. These moments come mostly in the first part of the novel, and even there she is of course concerned by her father’s growing frailty. Yet she knows that her father considers the world’s great work to be the business of men and that women are unsuitable as clergy since they are of the second rank, so “in the middle of any night it was part of the loneliness she felt, as if the sense that everything could have been otherwise were a palpable darkness” (Home 20). She is angry before Jack arrives home because his delayed arrival upsets her father, and she is angry once he is there because she feels crowded out. When she does express her anger, since she keeps most of it to herself, others are startled. For Gilead, she is the good daughter who cooks and cleans and keeps order in the house. Since she is the perceiving consciousness of the novel, she also plays a role crucial to Robinson—she is a watcher. Robinson writes in her essay, “Psalm 8”: “I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes (Death of Adam 243). In a number of other essays and interviews, especially those of the mid-2000’s, she comments both on herself as a perceiver of the natural world and on her Calvinist understanding of encounter, in which watching and perception are important; there is, she attests, a “visionary quality” to experience (Fay 49). In the opening essay of her most recent collection, she also credits watching as the source of her character creation: “Where does this creature come from? From watching, I suppose. From reading emotional significance in gestures and inflections, as we all do, all the time “(“Freedom of Thought,” When I Was a Child 6). Certainly Glory does watch, noting how Jack seems to feel, how he touches his scar, how he puts his hand to his face. And though Robinson herself connects watching to detachment as a source of perception, Glory as a character is increasingly attached to Jack emotionally, and she sees only partially. As the conveyer of Jack’s story, she often imagines what she doesn’t see, sometimes wrongly.22 Her suspicion, for example, that Jack might be in town drinking when he is actually spending time alone in the barn underlines the staying power of his past actions, even for his family, and contributes to Glory’s sometimes ambivalent feelings toward her brother. She might be said to have, in Robinson’s terms, both a “diurnal” and a “great” mind. That is, she attends pragmatically to the commonplaces of daily life with an aging parent and a perplexing brother, 22

When Robinson talks about “the profound reality” of her family stories as they lived in her imagination, she connects that experience with the power of first-person narration (Flynn 79). One feature of Home’s shifting between Glory’s free indirect discourse and unidentified free indirect style is to indicate how Glory has absorbed and filled in Gilead’s sense of Jack’s reprobate past.

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but she also “dreams, and remembers and associates” (Handley and Larsen 119). In her interior loneliness, she stands apart, watches, and sometimes misconstrues; in her ability to intuit and remember Jack’s own loneliness, she empathizes. She frequently is invisible both to Jack and to her father as she goes about cleaning and, especially, cooking. Paradoxically, the invisibility which gives her the power to watch and empathize becomes another source of her anger. Too often she is referred to as “poor Glory,” or “poor Pigtails,” or “Gloria Dolorosa” by others. At the same time, however, as the perceiving consciousness of the novel, her memories and her inward struggle with her feelings about Jack are as central to the narrative as Jack’s own. If Ruth’s dreams and imaginings occupy her in a way that dailiness does not in Housekeeping, Glory’s diurnal mind must help Jack “sort things out” and make him presentable to others. The emotional exchanges of the novel turn on the nuances of the Boughtons’s daily lives. The tension between Jack and his father is most visible, but the connections between Glory and Jack complicate the more foregrounded family dynamics. Glory and Jack are drawn together in part because they are able to share with each other secrets that they cannot share with others. Glory has been jilted by her boyfriend, who turns out to be married; Jack has a black lover and a mixed-race son. Glory’s abandonment humiliates her, even as she still remembers its pleasures. Jack’s family is a source of comfort, but he cannot escape the feeling that he may be predestined to bring pain to those immediately around him. These shared secrets come to bind them, but in order to trust each other enough to share them in the first place, they must begin in ordinary, everyday interactions. Robinson has said that the commonplace is not only undervalued, but sacred, and her attention to it is even more apparent in Home than it is in Housekeeping (Handley and Larsen 142). Take, for example, “kindness,” a word so familiar as to be discursively invisible. Yet it occurs over and over in the novel, in speech and in act. In Jack’s and Glory’s conversations, it first seems to fulfill its function as a phatic expression providing a friendly overlay in stilted exchanges. As the story moves forward, however, partially through the force of repetition it calls increasing attention to itself until finally, as Jack says in a difficult conversation with his father, “It’s the only thing that counts” (Home 275). In their recent psychological account of kindness, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor sketch its history in Western thought and lament its status in contemporary culture as something too often viewed as sentimental or impossible given, for example, neurobiology’s declaration of “the selfish gene.”23 23

The term is Richard Dawkins’s; Robinson argues against his work and that of some other neurobiologists in a number of essays. See especially “The Strange History of Altruism” (Absence 31–75).

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They note that kindness has been critiqued as a form of narcissism or disguised aggression. Rather, it ought to be seen as a pleasure, one that “opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we both long for and dread” (12). Their description of kindness as “the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself” resonates with Robinson’s portrayal of Glory and Jack as willing to make themselves vulnerable to each other through their sharing of secrets (8). In its connection to “kindred,” ideas of kindness are integral to the novel’s thinking about family. Robinson occasionally uses the idea of kindness ironically or plays with the notion of kindness as a perfunctory description of expected behavior, as when she writes, “Her good, kind, and jovial siblings were good, kind, and jovial consciously and visibly” 6). But Glory’s acts of kindness, her coming to understand Jack’s vulnerability in the face of his reserve, mark her strength as a character, while Jack’s acknowledgements, “That was kind,” or “you’re so kind,” or, it “was kind of you,” take on some of the complexity of his character. “Kindness” appears early in the novel before Jack returns home, when the narrator describes the elder Boughtons’s experience with truth: “Experience had taught them that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness” (Home 17). So already the reader, or more likely the critic who is not reading for the first time and thus is aware of how often repetitions of “kind” and “kindness” occur, is put on notice. Shortly after, Glory muses on another turn of Jack’s politeness: “It was so unfailing as to be impersonal, or at least to have no reference to any particular kindness, as if he had trained himself to note the mere fact of kindness, however slight any instance of it might be” (46). Indeed, Jack is wont to use “kind” descriptively as a courtesy, and Glory knows that being courteous is part of his distancing strategy, his outsider’s way of withholding his vulnerability. As Jack and Glory grow closer and more vulnerable to each other, Jack’s response seems to include his sense that Glory’s acts of kindness are undeserved. His reluctance to accept them comes from the sense of personal shame over abandoning his daughter that grips him throughout the novel. He calls himself a scoundrel, and Glory kisses him in kindness. In a discussion of his daughter he refers to his shame, and Glory can chide him without giving up on him. Why? “Because I’m your sister. That’s reason enough,” to which he replies, “Thank you. That’s very kind” (150). As in this exchange, “kind” comes increasingly to resonate with its connection to kin, so that the two terms seem almost interchangeable; “That was kind of you,” might be heard as, “That was kin of you.”24 The connection with 24

Hamlet’s famous description of Claudius as “more than kin but less than kind” uses such play too, with the pun on “kind” as suggesting both “natural” and “kind” in the modern

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family is sometimes explicit, as when Jack asks Glory if she would be kind to Della and she replies that she would be a sister to her (106–7). Again in the last pages when Della comes to Gilead, she comments on how kind her sister had been to drive. There is also this exchange between Della and Glory: “[Jack] always said in his letters how kind you were to him. I want to think you for that.” “He was kind to me, too.” Della nodded. “He is kind.” Reading the connection between kin and kindness allows this exchange to refer to the presence of Jack’s two families. Yet family and home are never unproblematic in the novel. From childhood, Jack lives his life as much as he can outside the house. When he returns, he retreats to his tent home in the barn because he cannot bear to be with his birth family too long at a time. His last exchange with his father ends badly. At the same time, he is unable finally to count on Gilead as a place where he can live with Della and his son as his new family because, despite its abolitionist history (detailed in Gilead), it is not a safe place for an interracial family. Conversely, Glory, who never wanted to stay in the Boughton house and is often unhappy there even after, and sometimes on account of, Jack’s return, still remains after he leaves and imagines herself there as she ages. She has given up her dream of a house with babies and her fiancé to live instead in “the oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent” (Home 102). Later she muses, “Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile?” (282). If in popular u.s. consciousness, “home” is the place where they have to take you in, if it is where the heart is, if it sings of sweet things, in Robinson’s novel it is largely a place of a remembered past; in its present, it does not fulfill any of these popularly expected promises. For Glory, it is a distant fantasy where she can protect her children; for Jack, the tent in the barn where he can be alone is more of a home than the house and the town where he cannot stay. He knows the evangelical hymn “Softly and Tenderly” invites “ye who are weary come home,” but his family home in Gilead is unsafe for Della and his son. But what of the future? Strikingly, both Housekeeping and Home end with an imagined

sense. Possible Early Modern English pronunciation may have emphasized the connection with “kin” in sounding “kind” as “kinned.” For this last point, I thank Professor Collette Moore (personal communication).

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scene of life to come. In both endings, a woman imagines a future reunion. In Housekeeping, there is no longer a home and Ruthie’s fantasy of Lucille is cast as a double negative, what Lucille will not see, a gathering that will not happen even while Lucille will always have Ruthie and Sylvie in her mind. In Home, Glory imagines Jack’s son coming home, as Jack could not. Glory will be old, but she will be there. Robert might be there, but he will not (yet) venture past the porch. Still, for Glory his presence hints at a future of possibilities. There could be a house filled, yes, with the ever-present family relics, but also with the fragrance of domesticity. As a home it could bring, however tentatively, the restoration of family even in Jack’s absence. The Boughtons would be invented again, with the presence of a mixed-race son, a sign of healing in a social world made possible by kindness and the knowledge of loneliness. Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. ———. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Aldrich, Marcia. “The Poetics of Transience in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Essays in Literature. 16.1 (1989): 127–140. Anghel, Corina. “Reconfiguring Female Characters of the American West: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping” in How Far Is American from Here? Eds. Theo D’Haen, et.al. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2005. (415–440). Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Broyard, Anatole. Review of Housekeeping. New York Times (January 7, 1981). n. pag. Web May 1 2014. Burke, William. “Border Crossings in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Modern Fiction Studies 37.4 (1991): 716–724. Caver, Christine. “Nothing Left to Lose: Housekeeping’s Strange Freedoms.” American Literature 68.1 (1996): 111–137. Fay, Sarah. “Marilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction No. 198.” Paris Review 50.186 (2008): 37–66. Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Flynn, Sarah, Thomas King and Adam O’Conner Rodriguez. “A Conversation with Marilynne Robinson.” Willow Springs 58 (Fall 2006): 77–95. Foster, Thomas. “History, Critical Theory, and Women’s Social Practices: ‘Women’s Time’ and Housekeeping. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14.1 (1988): 73–99. Frie, Roger. “The Lived Experience of Loneliness: An existential-phenomenological perspective. Willock et.al. 2012 (29–37).

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Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda. “Loneliness.” Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes 22 (1959): 1–15. Flynn, Sarah et al. “A Conversation with Marilynne Robinson, April 24, 2006.” Willow Springs 58 (Fall 2006): 77–95. Galehouse, Maggie. “Their Own Private Idaho: Transience in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 41.1. (2000): 117–137. Gardner, Thomas. “Enlarging Loneliness: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping as a Reading of Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson Journal 10.1 (2001): 9–33. Griffiths, Paul E. What Emotions Really Are. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Handley, George and Lance Larsen. “The Radiant Astonishment of Existence: Two Interviews with Marilynne Robinson, March 20, 2004 and February 9, 2007.” Literature and Belief 23.2: 114–143. Holberg, Jennifer. “‘The Courage to See It’: Toward an Understanding of Glory.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (Winter, 2010): 283–300. Holy Bible. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing. n. d. Conformable to the Authorized King James version. Klein, Melanie. “On the Sense of Loneliness” (1963) in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963. New York: The Free Press, 1975. (300–313). La Force, Thessaly. “A Teacher and her Student: Marilyn Robinson on Staying Out of Trouble.” Vice: The Definitive Guide to Enlightening Information, 20.6 n.d. Web. 30 Aug. 2014. Lewis, Kevin. Lonesome: The Spiritual Meanings of American Solitude, London and New York: I.B Taurus, 2009. Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 424–472. McDermott, Sinead. “Future-Perfect: Gender, Nostalgia, and the Not Yet Presented in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Journal of Gender Studies 13.3 (2004): 261–270. Massumi, Brian. Parables of the Virtual. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Morrison, Toni. Home. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2012. Moustakas, Clark. Loneliness. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1961. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Painter, Rebecca. “Further Thoughts on a Prodigal Son Who Cannot Come Home, on Loneliness and Grace: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Christianity and Literature (Winter 2010): 485–492. Perlman, Danel and Letitia Anne Peplau. “Towards a Social Psychology of Loneliness” in Personal Relationships in Disorder. Eds. Steven Duck and Robin Gilmour. London: Academic Press, 1981. (31–56). Phillips, Adam and Barbara Taylor. On Kindness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Ravits, Martha. “Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” American Literature 61.4 (1989): 644–666.

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Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind. The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. ———. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. ———. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. ———. Home. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. ———. Housekeeping. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. ———. “Let’s Not Talk Down to Ourselves.” New York Times (April 5, 1987): 11. ———. “My Western Roots.” Old West—New West: Centennial Essays. Barbara Howard Meldrum, ed. Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press, 1993. ———. When I Was a Child I Read Books. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Rokach, Ami, ed. Loneliness Updated. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Ryan, Judith. The Novel After Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Sedgwick, Eve and Adam Frank, eds. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. ———. Touching Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Smyth, Jacqui. “Sheltered Vagrancy in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Critique 40.3 (1999): 281–292. Schaub, Thomas. “Faltering Dreams: Marilynne Robinson and the Politics of Contemporary American Fiction” in Traditions, Voices and Dreams: The American Novel since the 1960’s. Ed. Melvin Friedman and Ben Siegel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. (298–321). Tanner Laura. “Uncomfortable Furniture: Inhabiting Domestic and Narrative Space in Marilynne Robinson’s Home. Contemporary Women’s Writing 7. (March 2013): 35–53. Terada, Rai. Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the ‘Death of the Subject’. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Thrailkill, Jane. Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body and Emotion in American Literary Realism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Vorda, Allan. “A Life of Perished Things: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson” in Face to Face: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists. Houston: Rice University Press, 1993. (153–184). Weiss, Robert S Loneliness: The experience of emotional and social isolation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973. Willock, Brent, Lori C. Baum and Rebecca Coleman Curtis, eds. Loneliness and Longing. New York and London: Routledge, 2102. Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Woodward, Kathleen. Statistical Panic. Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

“Jack Boughton Has a Wife and a Child”: Generative Blackness in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home Yumi Pak Abstract Robinson focuses the action of Gilead and Home in the small town of Gilead during the Civil Rights Era even as she relegates black history and black voices to her novels’ peripheries. Blackness nonetheless lurks and frays at the edges of both narratives, at the edges of memory, remaining simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible in both John Ames’s and Glory Boughton’s remembering of the past. In this essay, I use Robinson’s companion novels to illuminate the ways in which American society’s representation of black bodies and subjectivities makes possible ways of remembering and retelling Blackness that affirm kinship between white fathers and sons and make lineage transpire between them. Robinson is not blameless of this representational strategy. She is attentive to the ways in which and the reasons why Blackness is made absent in the town of Gilead; she does not address, however, how she also utilizes that absent presence to affix genealogy to Jack and Ames, or even Jack and his biological father, but never Jack and his son.

At the end of his seventy-six years, John Ames, the narrator in Marilynne Robinson’s much-lauded novel, Gilead (2004), ruminates on the lessons that he learned as a child, a married man, a student and a preacher in order to parse together meaningful “begats,” something more than genealogy, to leave his young son. Ames struggles to think through what is worth leaving behind, recorded on paper, and what he prefers to be left unknown. “And what else should I tell you?” he muses, after listing the names of his father and grandfather, his mother and grandmother. What unfurls from this question is the narrative of a life, the telling of memories that winds through both Gilead and its companion volume, Home (2008). While the latter differs from its predecessor in that it is not a confessional, epistolary first-person narrative, both novels pivot on the key figure of John (Jack) Ames Boughton, the prodigal son who vanishes after impregnating a girl of lower socioeconomic standing whom he has no desire to marry. In Gilead he is introduced as a scoundrel vis-à-vis the exacting eye of Ames, his godfather and father’s closest friend and confidant; in Home, we see him through the oft exasperated but always loving gaze of his sister, Glory Boughton. His confession to Ames toward the end of Gilead—that he has a © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/9789004302235_011

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Black1 wife and mixed-race child—is made flesh in Home as both his wife and child appear in town; what becomes evident through this confession and appearance is how Blackness lurks and frays at the edges of both the novel and the eponymous town, at the edges of memory and history, remaining simultaneously invisible and hypervisible in both Ames’s and Glory’s representations of past and present. In other words, Black bodies perform in spectacular visual fashion but also, as seen through Ames’s recollection of his grandfather’s ties to John Brown (and not free Blacks or Black slaves themselves), only attain articulation through the words, memories, mediations and interventions of white characters. If Gilead and Home are both narrated from the vantage point of 1956, the novels’ temporal setting nips at the heels of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. In focusing her narratives at this particular historical moment, how does Robinson define the status of Blackness in the United States? Moreover, what are the stakes of such a definition? In this essay, I propose a reading of Jack Boughton, his son and his father figures as providing potential answers to these questions. Although Home features a female protagonist, both it and Gilead are ultimately novels about what fathers leave to their sons, and how the pasts of the fathers imbricate and overlap into the futures of their male progeny. During his belated return home to the small town of Gilead, Iowa, where he had imagined the possibility of making a home for his interracial family, Jack notes that Blacks, who once worshipped at “a Negro church” there, are no longer present even at the town’s peripheries (Gilead 171). This absence of race not only marks the absence of Black bodies and communities in Gilead, but also the impossibility of a particular kind of kinship and community for Black sons.2 1 In this essay, I capitalize “Black” because as with other disenfranchised racial and ethnic designations in the United States, it deserves and requires proper-noun status and naming. I also capitalize “Black” and “Blackness” to draw attention to the historically persistent and political moves to affirm subjectivity and self-determination made by Black-identifying individuals and communities in the United States in the face of genocidal and structural violence. As Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us, “Naming is how I make my presence known, how I assert who and what I am and want to be known as. Naming myself is a survival tactic” (Anzaldúa 164). 2 Although Jack’s son is mixed-race, it is critical to remain attentive to the ways in which racial quantifying was used as a means of enacting and justifying Jim Crow laws prior to 1956, and the de facto segregation that continued afterward. Considering that the novels take place only two years after the landmark case of Brown v Board, Jack’s son is likely racially coded as Black in Tennessee. If, as Adrian Piper states, “[a]ccuracy was never their purpose” in enforcing the one-drop rule, we see how racial markers are more about the anxieties surrounding a protecting of whiteness and all the powers that accrue to it, and less about visual (and other) forms of identification (Piper 28).

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I read Robinson’s work as assigning blame for this impossibility on longstanding historical prejudices (as evidenced in such characters as Robert Boughton) that do not allow interracial spaces for white fathers and Black sons. At the same time, both Gilead and Home also reveal the service provided by the figures of the white father and Black son; what lies at the heart of this relationship is not the resolution between these two archetypes. Rather, Blackness serves as the literal matter and figurative marker that allows for lineage to pass from white fathers to white sons. The remembering and retelling of Blackness, whether through the recollection of the past or the characters’ contemporaneous lives, clarifies the potential future between white fathers and white sons. Through Robinson’s representational choices as much as the exigencies of the characters’ time and place, the Ames and Boughton generations maintain the coherence of their consanguinity by making Blackness absent and present as needed: embodied in occasional, spectacular appearances while always being available as narrative or symbolic material. That is to say, the physical violence of eradicating Blackness, coupled with the psychic violence of expropriating Blackness as a ghostly presence to be used at will, is what has allowed for the continuation of white genealogy. Robinson’s novels oppose white racist violence and oppression, but in the ways that they reflect on the past through particular family ties, they extenuate, even further, a genealogical project that is premised on denial. Before the publication of the 2005 Pulitzer prize-winning Gilead, Houghton Mifflin published Robinson’s The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998). In “Wilderness,” the essay that closes the volume, she discusses the issue of environmentalism and the ways in which mankind bears the onus of stewardship over the planet. In admonishing those who she deems are responsible for eradicating this type of topography—for she argues that the geographical place and imaginary space of wilderness is what permits environmental atrocities to occur in the first place—she charges that “[d]enial is clearly a huge factor in history. It seems to me analogous to a fractal, or a virus, in the way it self-replicates, and in the way its varieties are the grand strategy of persistence” (249). I am interested in Robinson’s connection between denial and history, for as precisely as she is able to pinpoint this relationship in her discussion of environmentalism, she has opened herself up to criticism from other scholars for enacting a similar kind of denial when she elaborates on other topics, including Darwinism, Calvinism and—most importantly to my own work—the relationship between Christianity and slavery. In his article, “Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Mari­ lynne Robinson’s Gilead,” Christopher Douglas states that by constituting ­history through narratives of normative and homogenous kinship, Robinson

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does American religious history a grave injustice. Recounting the historical Christian justification for chattel slavery in the United States, Douglas reminds us that “the great divide within American Christendom in the nineteenth century was not between Christian violent resistance to slavery and Christian pacifist resistance to slavery. The divide was actually between Christian abolitionism and what Frederick Douglass called ‘Christian slavery’” and that readers cannot see “a glimpse of this historical Christian support for slavery in Robinson’s Gilead. Why is this Christian slavery missing?” (Douglas 335, 337). The question at hand is two-fold: why does Robinson not address the existence of Christian slavery, when she does acknowledge the existence of Christian resistance to the institution? Moreover, what comes to light in her enactment of this erasure? Douglas contends that it is precisely through making history a personal narrative that Robinson is able to obscure the entanglement between Christianity—to which Ames and Robert Boughton have each devoted their respective careers—and slavery. The paternal history which feeds into Ames’s letter to his son tells of a radical abolition movement epitomized by the figure of John Brown, an acquaintance of his grandfather. Ames’s father is born in Kansas because his grandfather “had come there from Maine to help Free Soilers establish the right to vote, because the constitution was going to be voted on that would decide whether Kansas entered the union slave or free” (Gilead 75–76). With the platform that slavery should not extend into the Western territories, Free Soilers were determined to establish themselves as a political party and individuals concerned with the welfare of Blacks in the United States. It is unsurprising, then, that a man involved in such activities was in conversation and alliance with Brown. Moreover, Ames recounts his father telling him of his grandfather’s disappearances (one of which is most likely to Pottawatomie, the site of the 1856 massacre) and of his fierce belief that abolitionism was a movement that, if need be, should rely on violent means—even war—that merited Christian justification. In contrast, Ames presents his father as relying on peace as the default, as one who believes, “‘[m] y hopes are in peace, and I am not disappointed. Because peace is its own reward. Peace is its own justification’” (84). Douglas argues that this conflict between father and son obscures how Christianity has both solidified and contested the systematic juridical violence enacted upon enslaved bodies because of and in order to justify their enslaved status. This is not to claim that Gilead or Home are failed historical novels that misrepresent the institution of slavery. However, what is glaringly missing in both texts is an analysis of how the institution of slavery and the subsequent racializing of Blackness have shored up the boundaries of freedom and whiteness.

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In  Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom, Russ Castronovo utilizes the term “genealogy” and argues that in its most restrictive sense, “genealogy works doubly: it incorporates many daily acts into the historical record, but it ultimately makes this inclusive gesture in order to exclude those persons it deems non-historical,” limiting the definitions of legitimacy (Castronovo 11). In expanding the term of genealogy to incorporate parricide, Castrononovo, to whom I will return later, is interested in the literary representations of the father-son metaphor which “rewrites the single history of the nation as a more diverse, contradictory, and conflicted set of experiences” (25). As Douglas, Castronovo, and others argue, the history of slavery and Blackness in the United States is the history of exclusion and expulsion, the history of an investment in the nation defined as Christian and white. To individualize history and genealogy, then, is to empty the terms of their structural powers of systematic enforcement. From this vantage point, Robinson’s statements regarding Ruth, a character in her first novel, Housekeeping, become selfindicting: “[s]he’s not interested in history; she’s interested in an absoluteness of experience…. In a sense, she is too surrounded by her own tradition to be aware of it” (Pinsker 126). While Robinson does at times connect the quotidian manifestations of racist thought in Gilead and Home to her characters’ denial of history, the authorial denial present is one which does not account for the necessity of Blackness to regenerate itself—through either a physical Black presence or its haunted and haunting psychic remnants—in order for white lineage, kinship, and genealogy to transpire.

“‘It’s an Enviable Thing, to be able to Receive your Identity from your Father’”3

In Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy, Diana Fuss considers the role of elegy, the role of the last words in the literature of death. While elaborating upon the connections between poetry and death, Fuss writes, [i]ts powers of consolation extended to the act of dying itself, providing final words of solace both to watchers and their dying charge… Last word poems thus look either backward or forward, capturing the dual temporality of the deathbed itself, poised on the threshold between two worlds. Fuss 11, 12

3 Gilead 168.

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Although Ames’s journal to his son is not a poem, it is a last words narrative that he expects his son will read at a future date. Thus Fuss’s words ring true for the purpose behind the journal: to offer consolation that a life mattered, and that this life will continue to matter. Moreover, the temporal moment, “the dual temporality” wherein Ames is “poised on the threshold between two worlds,” is in Gilead a threshold between three—the past, the present and the future; Ames clearly states for his son, “If you’re a grown man when you read this—it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then—I’ll have been gone a long time” (Gilead 3). His voice is one that figuratively speaks from beyond the grave, for although he writes in his now—several months in 1956—the intended audience for the narrative is one who never arrives within the parameters of the text: his son, years after the extinguishing of his father’s mortal coil. I draw attention to the split nature of temporality here since it illuminates a key concept in Robinson’s work, that there is something at all, something more than, to be left from father to son. Unlike Laura E. Tanner, who claims “[t]he cultural force of Robinson’s text…stems not only from its lyrical rendering of quotidian experience but from its powerful unveiling of how dying shapes the sensory and psychological dynamics of human perception,” I argue that the dying voice itself is shaped by the not-yet-arrived figure of Ames’s son in the future (“Looking Back from the Grave” 228). Whether it is a name or a vocation (Ames’s father and grandfather, both named John Ames, were preachers) or a shared history, the direct line between fathers and sons seems to remain intact. As Jack says to Ames, “‘[i]t is an enviable thing, to be able to receive your identity from your father’” (Gilead 168). Ames has no reason to guess at the hidden meaning behind Jack’s words, and, taking it as a slight upon his chosen profession, responds defensively.4 It is apparent, however, that Jack recognizes Ames’s desire to leave something behind in order to be remembered by someone who does not yet exist in the future sense. As evinced by Ames’s marginalia in his well-worn copy of Louis Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity—“There are some notes of mine in the margins of the book which I hope you will find useful”—and by his desire that his son “could have known [him] in [his] strength,” Robinson’s novel reverberates with the father’s wish to die having left something behind worthy of being witnessed by his son when he grows into a man (27, 94). At the same time, however, what troubles Ames’s legacy for his son is that although he attempts to connect his

4 It should be noted, too, that at this point Robinson’s readers are also unaware of Jack’s wife and son, so we too read along the same lines as Ames.

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personal memories to larger histories, he is not always entirely successful in doing so. In much the same way as Douglas points to the erasure of the “conservative cultural politics of the postwar Christian revival” in Gilead as “crucially entail[ing] a will not to learn its genealogy in the actual Christian support for slavery in America,” I see the “transformation of the learning of history and culture into a kind of memory to be recalled or repressed” as indicative of how Blackness troubles temporality in Robinson’s works (Douglas 340, 342). For Douglas, Robinson’s unwillingness to confront the complicated nexus of support and disavowal for slavery that exists within Christianity feeds into her insistence on the narrative being codified as “memory,” as opposed to “history.” This is not to argue that memory and history do not share a relationship—in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for example, one sees how collective memory is history in both the figure of Beloved and the structuring of the last pages of the novel—but rather that in the imaginary world of Gilead and Home, the receiving of an identity from a father is emptied of historical and political contradictions and tensions. Robinson reminds her readers that history means vastly different things: “the temporal past, the past inherited as culture, the recorded past, the past interpreted. The true past is veiled in mystery, to the extent that it can be said to exist at all” (“McGuffey and the Abolitionists” 126). Yet does not the “true past” find its “true” present in the absence of Blackness in Gilead? What does it mean for white male identity to be linked to personal memory and to Ames’s interpretations of the past, rather than to a history that would grapple with why Blackness has been occluded from the town? What I read in Ames’s letter to his son is Robinson’s analysis of a split temporality that approaches the unavoidable reality of death. Yet as Castronovo argues in his analysis of slave narratives, “slaves had no claim upon the masculine ordering of time, rectilinear, originary, and historical” (204). We see this unmooring elasticity of time in numerous slave narratives, neo-slave narratives and other forms of Black literature;5 one such example occurs in Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, where he describes the working day for a slave: “‘Tumble up! Tumble up, and to work, work,’ is the cry; and, now, from twelve o’clock (mid-day) till dark, the human cattle are in motion… So goes one day, and so comes and goes another’” (Douglass 79). There is no set time 5 Steve McQueen’s 2013 adaptation of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) is a more recent and visual example of this unmooring of time. During Northup’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) enslavement, McQueen punctuates scenes with large, expansive shots of the sky made murky with sunset and pale with sunlight. We as the viewers are never sure of how much time has passed, be it days, weeks, months or years, and instead are left to mark time through the representations of fungibility and violence on screen.

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for Douglass and other slaves to stop work: it begins when it is light enough for them to see, and the only respite is during the night which is “shortened at both ends” (77). Thus time for the slave is never settled but rather exists through a power structure that deems him/her “human cattle.” Temporality serves to underscore the status of chattel, not human, and this “time of slavery,” as Saidiya Hartman terms it, continues into the present moment as “the relation between the past and the present, the horizon of loss, the extant legacy of slavery, the antimonies of redemption…and irreparability” (Hartman 759). In other words, if Ames’s split temporality is one which clouds his life because of his knowledge that it will soon end, Blackness is defined by “disparate temporalities of unfreedom,” and that genealogy, that which marks both temporality and lineage, has always been (pre)occupied with disavowing Blackness in order to maintain its own narrative of nationhood and liberty (763). In order to flesh out this troubling absence of Blackness, I begin with Ames’s statement that “John Ames Boughton is my son. If there is any truth at all in anything I believe, that is true also. By ‘my son’ I mean another self, a more cherished self. That language isn’t sufficient, but for the moment it is the best I can do” (Gilead 189). Although they are not biologically related, Ames and Jack share a paternal kinship since the latter, named after the former, has been made his godson by Robert Boughton, who feared that Ames would never have children of his own. Because of Jack’s middle-age (as opposed to his biological son’s youth), this is a son with whom Ames can communicate through an adult speech,6 emphasizing Ames’s position on Fuss’s “threshold.” Fuss writes that for the dying, “[w]riting is dying, a way to experience, over and over again, one’s own sudden, inexplicable disappearance” (Fuss 410). The act of writing, for Ames, is a persistent reminder of his straddling of three worlds—past, present, and the future where he will no longer be. While it is not my intention to argue that Ames’s relationships with his wife or Robert Boughton are not critical to Ames’s temporal moment in the present, I contend that it is his two sons—one bestowed upon him through friendship, one given through birth and both sharing a language of cherishing—who dislocate Ames from his anchoring in the present and resituate him as one who exists in the separations between past, present, and future. It is through imagining a future for one son that Ames

6 Of course, Ames is also able to communicate with others in the novel: his young son, his wife, and Boughton. At the same time, however, as I am arguing, the son with whom Ames is most in conversation with is his young son in the future, the one who has not yet arrived, the adult son. While Jack does not represent Ames’s young son in the future, he does stand in as the one who is old enough to understand Ames’s rebukes and remonstrations.

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remembers the past of another, and in doing so, we see him as existing on a threshold of temporal uncertainty. Through his reluctance to speak to Jack, and even in his scripting of ulterior motives7 onto Jack’s body, Ames is able to depart from his interior—the dying, the writing—and move outward and forward. After Jack attends one of his sermons, Ames furiously writes, “[w]hile I was standing there in the pulpit, the thought came to me that I was looking back from the grave and there he was, sitting beside you, grinning up at me—This is not doing me any good at all. I’d better pray” (Gilead 185). What troubles Ames in this passage is his insistent (and mistaken) belief that Jack intends to usurp his place in the family once he is dead, and his insecurity disrupts his effort to narrate a tranquil journey toward death. Instead, he stands at the pulpit and, in an almost dreamlike sequence, imagines himself after his death: he sees himself looking “back” from the grave, sees Jack sitting next to his son in the moment being remembered and then brings us to the moment of the writing through the em-dash. The visible pause, as he decides to give up on his writing for the time being and instead pray, ends the section, and in the next line, Robinson has Ames waking up the next morning “to the smell of pancakes, which [he] dearly love[s]” (185). Although a small detail, the olfactory nature of his aliveness, his awakening and smelling something he “dearly love[s],” indicates that although he straddles the threshold between past, present and future, in this moment he is drawn back into the present. In other words, one of Jack’s critical functions is that through his very presence in Gilead, he reminds Ames of his precarious balancing on the threshold between life and death. Yet Jack’s ultimate purpose in Ames’s life only comes to light when reveals why he has returned to Gilead. Before this revelation, for the first time in over two hundred pages, the narrative breaks; in a book without chapters, the readers encounter a blank page. On the next page, the first sentence reads, starkly, “Jack 7 The reasons for Ames’s suspicions occur in small moments in Gilead. One such moment is during a conversation when the other participants think he is asleep, and he overhears Jack say, “‘[w]hy, I thank you for that, Lila’” (Gilead 200). This is the first instance of Ames’s wife being called by name, and Jack is the one to utter it. In deft fashion, Robinson alerts her readers to a kind of intimacy that might be shared between Jack and Lila, or one that might be presumed by only Jack. In any case, it is enough to persuade some readers that while there is not anything of a clandestine nature occurring between Ames’s wife and his godson, there is a certain level of closeness that, at this moment, Ames is unable to comprehend. Robinson also provides a scene in Home where, much to Ames’s discomfort, Jack insists on a creating a centerpiece of sweet peas for “Mrs. Ames” during dinner (Home 182). Arguably, this closeness is borne from an understanding of grief—Lila’s from her husband’s impending death and Jack’s from his forced separation from his wife and child.

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Boughton has a wife and a child” (Gilead 217).8 As Jack tells the story of his relationship with Della and their common-law marriage, he takes over as narrator from Ames, who falls silent as Jack explains his forced separation from Della and their child. Structurally speaking, this brief section of the text is the only place where another character is allowed to speak at great length. Jack confides in Ames that he had moved his wife and child into a mixed neighborhood in St. Louis but that his boss had spotted them together in a park. Jack states that following an altercation, “‘I arranged to put my family on the bus to Memphis, rented the house. Gave the dog to a neighbor. And when I had sorted that out as well as I could, I came here, thinking I might find some way to live with my family here, I mean my wife and son’” (229). His return to Gilead is predicated on his desire to see if this town in Iowa, “‘the shining star of radicalism,’” might be a suitable place for him to bring his family, and he gives voice to his greatest wish (220). As he tells Ames, “‘I would like him [my father] to know that I finally have something I can be proud of’”: his son, who is named Robert Boughton Miles (229). We learn, too, in Home, that John Ames has named his own young son after his closest friend—Robert Boughton Ames. The repeated usage of the two names—John Ames and Robert Boughton—in Gilead and Home speaks to what Glory labels her “father’s pride, his strongest instinct, and his chief source of satisfaction, frustration, and anxiety,” which is “[f]ealty to kin, actual and imagined, and the protection of them, possible or not” (Home 236). John Ames, the third in his family to bear his name, has named his son Robert in order to return the favor that his friend, Robert Boughton, did him by naming his son John. That son, who is called Jack, in turn names his son Robert Boughton after his own father, but the original intention was for the child to be named after himself: “‘[Della’s father] knew my full name because that is what Della wanted to call the baby’” (Gilead 228). His son also carries a different surname from that of his own and his godfather’s. While seemingly a minute detail, it gestures toward the multiple ways in which Jack and his son are separated from each other, in name and in location. Although Jack has spent twenty years away from his parents and siblings, he has always carried the names of the Ames and Boughton families with him; he is reminded, in his very naming, of both his father and godfather. In contrast, his son, Robert Boughton Miles, does not share in this naming, for although he is named after his paternal grandfather, he is disconnected from his own father; he does not share Jack’s “full name.”

8 The reader does not know if Ames has started a new notebook, but at the very least Robinson’s structural choice to break the narrative her after an absolute adherence to a journal format beforehand indicates that Ames has both literally and figuratively turned over a new leaf.

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Historically, this speaks to the long-standing cultural tradition of mixedrace children of Black slave women and white slave owners being unable to claim their paternal heritage through name or fortune. As with the practice of partus sequitur ventrem, which resulted in the reproduction of property for slave owners (in that their children with Black slave women were considered chattel and not subjects), what passes down in the figure of the mixed-race Robert Boughton Miles is the lineage and identity of his mother. One of the most critical aspects of the slave narratives, Castronovo argues, is that their writers lay claim to a patriarchal history of the American Revolution to justify the actions of Black slaves and freedmen; their reasons for doing so become more apparent when we consider that the “slave child followed no history of a father’s rights and duties of citizenship” but instead followed a matriarchal lineage of enslaved status (Castronovo 201). Jack’s son follows in this trajectory; his racial status is dictated through his mother and he does not share in the Boughton family name. Furthermore, in contrast to the antebellum period, Jack cannot even lay claim to his son as property, as that which belongs to him. While Robinson does elaborate on this separation between Black son and white father as being caused by the oftentimes social if not outright legal impossibility of them co-existing in a space in her later novel, Home, what she does not theorize is how Robert Boughton Miles is situated in both novels as the figure through which Jack, his white father, is able to maneuver a reconciliation with both Ames and his own biological father. As a result of what comes to light in this moment of confession, Ames is able to leave something to both of his sons. To Jack, Ames is allowed to give his blessing: [a]nd he took his hat off and set it on his knee and closed his eyes and lowered his head, almost rested it against my hand, and I did bless him to the limit of my powers, whatever they are, repeating the benediction from Numbers, of course—“The Lord make His face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.” Nothing could be more beautiful than that, or more expressive of my feelings, certainly, or more sufficient, for that matter. Then, when he didn’t open his eyes or lift up his head, I said, “Lord, bless John Ames Boughton, this beloved son and brother and husband and father.” Gilead 241

Robinson’s dictum, as evidenced through Glory’s earlier statement, is that those who come before pass on their fealty and protection to those who come after.

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Elsewhere Robinson emphasizes this point when she writes, “one’s family are those toward whom one feels loyalty and obligation, and/or from whom one derives identity, and/or to whom one gives identity, and/or with whom one shares habits, tastes, stories, customs, memories” (“Family” 87). While Ames is not Jack’s biological father, Glory states that Ames is “her father’s alter ego, in whom he had confided so long and so utterly that he was a second father to them all” (Home 5). Ames himself wishes that “Boughton could have seen how his boy received his benediction, how he bowed his head…. It is almost as I felt his hand on my hand” (Gilead 243, italics mine). Robinson’s unclear pronoun—his benediction can mean Jack receiving his benediction, and it can also mean Jack receiving his father’s benediction through Ames—gestures toward the fatherly role played by two different men.9 Thus, Ames’s disappointment and anger in Jack is transformed after his confession into a forgiving acceptance; his use of their shared name—John Ames—is uttered as a blessing rather than a curse. In blessing Jack with peace, that which is most “expressive of [his] feelings,” Ames is also able to discover what he intends to leave his biological son. In the aftermath of Jack’s departure from Gilead, Ames decides that he will ask his wife “to have those old sermons of [his] burned. The deacons could arrange it. There are enough to make a good fire” and muses, “I’m thinking here of hot dogs and marshmallows, something to celebrate the first snow” (Gilead 245). This returns us toward the opening of the novel, where Ames mulls over his sermons and his practice of writing them out: “[t]here are boxes of them in the attic, a few recent years of them in stacks in the closet…. Pretty nearly my whole life’s work is in those boxes, which is an amazing thing to reflect on…. They are a record of my life, after all” (18, 41). Ames is at a loss as to what to do with these boxes and originally intends to burn them to save himself embarrassment. Yet, at the end of the novel, Ames instead thinks of leaving the boxes as kindling for his son’s enjoyment. He realizes that the measure of his life lies not only—if at all—in the sermons that lie quietly in shelved boxes, but in his son. This realization gives credence to his statement: “Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined. I’m about to put on imperishability. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye” (53). The existence 9 This moment mirrors, too, Ames’s own benediction and communion from his father: he remembers standing in the wreckage of a Baptist church, his father “kneeling down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his had, feeding [him] biscuit from his scorched hand” (Gilead 95). This scene also functions as a reminder of the ties between fathers and sons, which transmit grace from the former to the latter. One cannot ignore, of course, the Christian implications of these relationships between fathers and sons, namely in the ultimate configurations of the relationships between the Father and the Son, and God and His children.

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that matters is not his; rather, it is the existence of his son to relish in “something to celebrate the first snow.” Jack’s wife and child, the figures of Blackness in Gilead and Home, are necessary for the continuation of kinship between white fathers and sons; at the same time, however, their absence is also necessary for the orchestration of  a genealogical line “between the origin and successive generations” that “remained intact and unquestioned” (Castronovo 13). While it is true that Robert Boughton draws his hand and face away from Jack’s goodbye, earlier they affirm their relationship to one another when Boughton asks of his son, “‘[y]ou’ve never had a name for me. Not one you’d call to my face. Why is that?’” Jack admits that he felt he “‘didn’t deserve to speak to [him] the way the others did’.” To this confession in their moment of parting, Boughton sorrowfully replies, “‘[o]h!…. That was what I waited for. That was what I wanted’” (Home 311). In addition to the blessing given by Ames, the vulnerability exhibited in this admission establishes the fundamental paternal ties between Boughton and Jack. While Jack never called him “papa” or “father” as his siblings did, instead relying on the formality of “sir,” we learn that this is a decision propelled by his feeling of unworthiness; Boughton wanted nothing more than for Jack to accept and name him as his father. The reconciliation of Jack with his father through his “second father”10 depends on Robinson’s gesture toward a Black family and its history that lie outside the narrative’s representation. Only Jack’s grief for his wife and child makes possible Ames’s acceptance of his godson. Jack is able to prove his mettle as a father, “somehow elegant and brave,” thereby linking him to both of his fathers, by disclosing the truth and showing Ames a photo of himself and his family (Gilead 239). Ames, his fury at having lost his first child while Jack simply abandoned his to squalor and death, fumes earlier, “[t]hat one man should lose his child and the next man should just squander his fatherhood as if it were nothing” (164). Through this revelation, however, Ames is able to understand why Jack returned, and why he must 10

It is interesting to note, however, that Jack does call Ames by a more familiar name. When he comes to call, he says, “‘How are you doing, Papa?’” (Gilead 91). Whether Jack uses the nomenclature sardonically or earnestly, Ames is clearly uncomfortable with this as he bluntly records, “I have never felt he was fond of me” (91). Yet when Jack calls him Papa again, toward the end of his time in Gilead as described in Home, Ames reacts differently. Jack tells Glory, “‘I called him Papa, and this time I think it may even have pleased him a little…. I told him almost everything, and when I was done he said, “You are a good man.” Imagine that’” (Home 308). It is because of his son (and perhaps because of Ames’s own family legacy of abolitionism) that Jack approaches Ames, and it precisely because of his son that Jack is able to call Ames Papa and bestow the title with love and filiation.

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leave; thus he offers him his blessing. Yet the wife and child who are so critical in Jack’s transformation and struggle remain unseen in Gilead. The lack of reconciliation between Jack and his son is shown through the bodies of Della and Robert Boughton Miles in Home; as I will address later, here their physical presence, as opposed to their eventual photographic revelation in the earlier novel, comes at the conclusion of Robinson indicting Robert Boughton for his racism, eleven years before Loving v. Virginia (1967). In the wake of Jack’s departure from Gilead, Della and their son arrive too late; when Glory realizes who they are, she gives Robert the framed photograph of a river from Jack’s room and thinks, [M]aybe this Robert will come back someday…. He will talk to me a little while, too shy to tell me why he has come, and then he will thank me and leave, walking backward a few steps, thinking, Yes, the barn is still there, yes, the lilacs, even the pot of petunias. This was my father’s house. And I will think, He is young. He cannot know that my whole life has come down to this moment. That he has answered his father’s prayers. Home 324–325

In similar fashion to Ames’s imagining of his future son, raised in his absence, Glory imagines her nephew returning to her after having lived the entirety of his life without his father, and without her. Although it is tempting to read the second to last line of the novel—“That he has answered his father’s prayers”— as indicative of a connection between Jack and his son, I argue that in contrast to Boughton’s and Ames’s resolutions with their sons, this hoped-for resolution is doubtful; when Glory imagines Robert returning in the future, she invites him “onto the porch” (324).11 Reminiscent of Della’s unwillingness to enter the

11

It is true that Glory originally invites Della into the house, but her invitation is met with refusal. For Della, her unwillingness to enter the house can be read as two-fold. First, and perhaps more basically, although she knows Jack, she does not know Glory or their father and does not know whether she and her son will be treated with kindness or contempt. Second, as she tells Glory, “‘we have to get back down to Missouri before dark. Especially the way things are now’” (321). Two years after Brown v. Board, one year after Emmett Till’s gruesome murder in Money, Mississippi, Della’s caution speaks to the conditions facing Black families in the United States, particularly the South; to be out at night, after dark, is to invite danger. In a sense, Glory’s desire to know her sister-in-law and nephew—and even perhaps Della’s reciprocal desire—lose importance in the face of the real and immediate dangers of violence that are present in Missouri and elsewhere for Della and Robert.

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house, even though Glory knows that “it would have answered a longing of Jack’s if he could even imagine that their spirits had crossed through that strange old house,” the imagined future embodiment of Jack’s son cannot cross into the building (323). Even in the future, Glory is unable to invite Robert inside; this seems to indicate a fundamental divide between Jack and his son, one so wide that it persists into the future. Whereas the two young boys in both novels—John Ames’s son and Jack Boughton’s son—share the name of Robert, the former stands to receive his father’s wisdom, his lineage, whereas the latter stands in search of his father. Robinson critiques this inequity insofar that she also critiques Robert Boughton for his backward views. Elsewhere, she has argued that the United States is mired in the “notion with a brutal history that a homogenous country is more peaceful and stable and, in a very deep sense, more satisfying than one with a complex and mingled population like ours” (“Imagination and Community” 25). Robinson clearly disavows such a notion and instead urges her readers to recognize that such a “complex and mingled population like ours” is something that lends strength. At the same time, however, Robinson sets forth Blackness in Gilead and Home as the means of reconnecting (or bringing to light unsaid connections between) white fathers and sons; Blackness cannot cross the breach that divides white fathers from their Black sons (and, we can assume, Black fathers from their Black sons). Rather, Blackness functions to mediate Jack’s relationships with his father(s), a point which Robinson does not address. Sharing in Douglas’s charge that Robinson foregoes history in favor of memory to the detriment of the former, at this juncture, I turn toward her usage of the trope of Blackness in order to illuminate how it establishes white kinship while constantly being relegated to the edges of familial belonging.

“‘I Think We Had All Better Just Keep to Ourselves’”12

Prior to the appearance of Della and Robert at the end of Home, and indeed, prior even to the specific references that Jack makes in regards to Emmett Till, W.E.B. Du Bois and other key figures in American history, Blackness first appears through moments of blackening—darkening through soot, dirt, etc.—in Gilead at pivotal moments of self-recognition for Ames. I do not argue that the blackening of white characters is the same as having Black characters in the novels, nor am I suggesting that these moments are akin to 12

Home 147.

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blackface performance. I do not agree, either, with a reading of Jack Boughton’s treatment at the hands of his father and others as “evok[ing] racism against many African Americans” (Petit 40). Rather, I wish to suggest that this blackening of white characters is evocative of the traces of Blackness that remain in Gilead, the remnants of a community long burned out of town. In much the same way that Douglas points out the inescapable reality of the Christian support for slavery, I direct my attention to the presence of Black individuals and communities in Gilead who are no longer present, but make themselves known. When writing about his grandfather, Ames states that one of the reasons he left for Kansas was the fire at “the Negro church. It wasn’t a big fire— someone heaped brush against the back wall and put a match to it, and someone else saw the smoke and put the flames out with a shovel” (Gilead 36). The fire creates the beginning of the exodus for Black families, and Robinson’s language indicates that the fire was deliberately set. Although it is not a big fire, it echoes a belief voiced by Robert Boughton and shared by many: “‘So much bad blood. I think we had all better just keep to ourselves’” (Home 147). Boughton’s comment raises the question of de facto segregation, and the belief that harmonious coexistence is possible only within the maintenance of racial boundaries. To return briefly to Douglas, who writes that “the advantage of treating history as a kind of memory is the formation of a liberal white Christian identity that ‘forgets’ about the complexity of actual Christian history,” what becomes pressing in Boughton’s statement about segregation is not only the tension between himself and Jack (who cannot disclose his wife and son to his father for precisely these kinds of beliefs), but the tension between the Christianity that Robinson sets forth in Gilead and “the complexity of actual Christian history” that becomes more clear in Home (Douglas 143). What does it mean for Boughton, himself a religious man, to believe in segregation? What does it mean for Christianity to have been used as a justification for not only slavery, but for staunch anti-Civil Rights rhetoric during the 1950s and 1960s? While Douglas’s article critiques Robinson’s strategy of relying on memory (as opposed to history) to curtail some of Christianity’s more complex and perhaps uglier moments in Gilead, I find it critical to evaluate how and why she situates Home outside the realm of memory and within the reaches of history. I argue that because the narrative structure no longer belongs to Ames, and because most readers are privy to Jack’s secret and the urgency with which he is seeking a home for his wife and child, Blackness becomes more pressing in the later novel: it is made flesh through Della and Robert, and its absent presence elsewhere in the text speaks to the larger history that Jack has experienced and feels, acutely, as the father of a mixed-race child, a Black son.

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The blackening of white characters is mentioned almost dispassionately, and they serve to remind the readers of the lack of a Black community in Ames’s temporal moment in Gilead as well as to navigate moments of introspection. In one particular instance, Ames recollects walking by two young men “propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They’re always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don’t know why they don’t catch fire themselves” (Gilead 5). He notes their laughter and its abrupt ending when they see him approach, and he thinks wistfully, “I feel like telling them, I appreciate a joke as much as anybody. There have been many occasions in my life when I have wanted to say that. But it’s not a thing people are willing to accept. They want you to be a little bit apart” (5). The figures of these two young men, “black with grease,” prompt Ames to reflect on his impending death as it relates to the life he has lived. He explicitly draws the connection between the laughter stopping because he is dying, and his memories of laughter stopping around him because of his ministry. The linkage between life and death then lead to the first grand narration of his life in the narrative: “My mother’s father was a preacher, and my father’s father was, too, and his father before him, and before that, nobody knows, but I wouldn’t hesitate to guess. That life was second nature to them, just as it is to me” (6). While the two young men are not Black, their standing against the garage wall propels the narrative backward and allows Ames to link himself to his paternal history, one shared through blood and profession. The memories of the burned down Negro church, of Ames’s grandfather’s connections to John Brown, speak to what Toni Morrison calls an “Africanist presence” in American literature and history. In sum, Morrison argues that the birth of American literature depended on the presence of Blackness to define itself against, and that “Americanness” itself, or “characteristics of our national literature,” are not “separate from and unaccountable to this presence” (Morrison 5). In a seminal passage, she writes that particular readings of literary study assume that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States,” and wonders if the central characteristics of American literature “are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence” (5). The concept of “Americanness” as being in response to a “dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence” is both literally and figuratively seen in Gilead, the former when Ames remembers a story about a town near Gilead (or Gilead itself) being born in entanglement with the history of slavery, and the latter in the ghostly presence of Blackness which haunts Ames’s journal entire through the

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moments of blackening and the resultant reiterations of lineage between fathers and sons (Gilead 58–63). Furthermore, the presence of Blackness has consistently occupied an uneasy seat in American genealogy. As Morrison argues that white American authors were constantly grappling with this Africanist presence, Castronovo states that in Christian slavery—that which Robinson does not discuss in her novels—“the founding fathers became identified with biblical patriarchs, wisely overseeing their property” (Castronovo 32). All precautions were taken to exclude Blackness from an American genealogy, or, if incorporated at all, it was done on terms that often stripped Black authors’ “discursive independence” (78).13 What he calls the “fundamental contradiction,” that “ideas of freedom originat[e] in the conditions of slavery,” is a contradiction that carries forward from 1865, in the works of authors including Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and others (40). The physical Black body, no longer enslaved but still lynched, brutalized, segregated and expelled, is the vessel through which whiteness learns to read itself as not lynched, brutalized, segregated and expelled. What Robinson’s work reveals, however, is that when the physical body is  absent, the psychic traces of Blackness oftentimes disrupt a commitment to  “remembering unhistorically” (111). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery Gordon argues for the presence and practice of haunting as producing knowledge that bleeds into the present and future. She writes, [i]f haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has 13

Examples include slave narratives’ always requiring a sympathetic white editor’s preface or the system of patronage during the Harlem Renaissance and the purported compliment of admiring how much a Black author’s work is in the tradition of white authors who came before him/her. In other words, Blackness is always vetted through whiteness to see if it merits inclusion within national memory.

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happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition. gordon 8

I quote at length as Gordon’s analysis of haunting is precisely what I believe is projected through the blackening present in Ames’s memories. The greasecovered men, or, to use another example, Ames’s father in the aftermath of a church fire, kneeling while “[h]is hands and his face were black with ash—he looked charred, like one of the old martyrs,” gesture toward “something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there” and leads to “a transformative recognition” (Gilead 102). The parallels between this church fire, set by a lightning strike, and the earlier fire at the Negro church, set by human hand, cannot be ignored. The one which occurs earlier leads to both Ames’s grandfather and the Black community leaving; the one which occurs later leads to Ames’s father “feeding [him] biscuit from his scorched hand” (95). The former is a literal erasing of Blackness, and the latter relies on Ames’s father being charred, scorched, covered in soot, before he can hand his son a piece of biscuit, a communion of sorts that solidifies both kinship and occupational affiliation. This moment is the “dense site” of remembering, of a sense of belonging to one another. Gordon’s use of “haunting” as noun, adjective and verb—and here I am also thinking of Suzan-Lori Parks’s definition of a “ghost” as “someone else’s pulse”— are more explicit in Home, and Robinson’s narrative voice through Glory allows for more direction references to the cultural events unfolding in 1956 (Parks 12). Freed from Ames’s ruminations, Home shifts instead to Glory’s observations of Jack. Early during his return home, she walks into Jack’s bedroom to find him reading a book. “‘W.E.B. Du Bois,’ he said. ‘Have you heard of him?’ ‘Well, yes, I’ve heard of him. I thought he was a Communist’” (Home 47). If one is to assume that the text he is reading is The Souls of Black Folk, it is impossible to ignore the ways in which Du Bois’s influential text speaks of Blackness in the United States. Akin to Morrison, he writes, “Your country? How came it yours?… Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song…the gift of sweat and brawn…a gift of the Spirit… Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation” (Du Bois 186–187). The claim here that Blackness—both as haunting presence and as community—has always been present in the United States, is part and parcel of the nation itself. In Jack’s reinsertion into his family home, we see in his family the refusal (or, in Glory’s case, the inability) to accept this truth—his father a staunch supporter of racial segregation, his sister’s misreading of Black

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history. What is critical in my analysis of Robinson’s work is also the way in which Robinson’s denial of the complexity of Christian history in Gilead bleeds into Home as a denial within her characters of how Blackness is necessary for generating white lineage. Jack’s familial secret, one that he reveals only to Ames and that Glory ­ascertains by the end of Home, is “spectacular,” a term I borrow from Jacqueline Goldsby. In her analysis of lynching, she explains why she differentiates between “spectacular” and “spectacle,” stating that the visible violence of lynching, or its “spectacle,” “made certain cultural developments and tensions visible [‘spectacular’] for Americans to confront” (Goldsby 6). Although Goldsby writes on the nineteenth century, long before Robinson’s textual situating in 1956, Jack’s invocation of Emmett Till in light of his father’s refusal to acknowledge the need for civil unrest in the face of structural racism reminds us that lynching is not a crime relegated to the past.14 Jack’s wife and son are similarly both invisible and hypervisible, secretive and spectacular, as they propel the narrative forward into an unknown future by pulling the historical trauma of violence, chattel slavery, segregation and lynching into the present. As Ames teeters on the threshold between the past, present and future, Della and Robert exist on the brink where “history was not only the past: it was the past and it was also the present” (Kincaid 138–139). If Ames embodies a memory that exists distinct from history, Della and Robert embody a memory that cannot exist distinct from history. Here, Blackness carries the onus of history, of collective memory. The Black body—as evidenced through Emmett Till—is made to bear the burden of witness, to speak from beyond death. In Home, Black bodies—through the scenes Jack, Boughton and Glory see on television of police “pushing the black crowd back with dogs, turning fire hoses on them” (Home 97), through Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, through Della and Robert’s appearance at the novel’s conclusion—are the figures which haunt the novel, that bear the burden of ensuring that the narrative progresses through their absence, through Jack’s silence. Again, Blackness is much more materially present in Home than in Gilead, and Jack’s conversations with his father grow increasingly tense as, in his remarks, Boughton exemplifies the inability to see the difference in status quo for Blacks and whites. For example, Jack says, “‘I’ve known a good many Negroes who are more respectable than I am,’” and his father replies, “‘I don’t know where you get such a terrible opinion of yourself, Jack” (Home 155). In this

14

Indeed, Goldsby’s analysis hinges upon her argument that lynching both propels America’s move into modernity and is carried with it, and that modernity is not characterized by violence, but rather defined as.

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moment, although Jack intends to be complementary, we see a utilization of a “good many Negroes” as mere comparison, and in Boughton’s response, the comparison is not even admissible: Jack’s comparison that there are those who are both Black and better than him is for his father an unthinkable possibility. Furthermore, in their discussion of Emmett Till, Boughton interrupts to say, “‘parents have a responsibility…. They bring children into a dangerous world, and they should do what they have to do to keep them safe’” (156). Robinson sets forth Robert Boughton as someone who believes, mistakenly in the maxim of “‘[l]ive by the sword and die by the sword,’” and when Jack protests that the protests in Montgomery are actually non-violent, his father responds, “‘But they provoke violence. It’s all provocation’” (204). Here, Robinson shows us the folly of a character who is unable to grasp the historical unfoldings that have led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the practice of civil disobedience. Boughton’s belief is that one cannot live a life of provoking violence without expecting violent retribution. What he ignores, of course, are the myriad ways in which Black bodies and communities have always been made to suffer in the United States. Jack cannot articulate to his father the ways in which racialization and racism alters the meaning of this statement for him. I borrow the terms and ideas from critical race studies scholars including Du Bois, Frantz Fanon and others who discuss the ways in which under paradigms of white supremacy and antiblackness, particular negative connotations are scripted onto the bodies of racialized others in order to justify the maintenance of power and the wielding of force and violence. In as much as Jack (and Boughton) benefits from white privilege, his son does not.15 The picture that he shows to Ames shows himself, “a colored woman, and a light-skinned colored boy,” and we can assume that Robert is read as Black (Gilead 219). While the elder Boughton can bemoan his son’s

15

This may be one of the many reasons why Della’s father opposes her relationship with Jack: although I do not address it here, the history of sexual violence and rape committed against Black women by white men—during chattel slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and onward—is one of which her father cannot be ignorant. When Jack protests, “‘I only want to assure you that my friendship with your daughter has been entirely honorable,’” the reverend rebukes him: “‘If you were an honorable man, you would leave her alone’” (Gilead 224). Whereas Jack’s father sees segregation as necessary for maintaining order, Della’s father is certainly aware that social order has been maintained through sexual violence committed on the Black female body. More than just a disapproval of Jack’s atheism, I read Della’s father’s inability to condone their relationship as indicative of his awareness that his daughter carries in her body a national history, one that cannot be easily forgotten.

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impetuous and careless nature as causing him grief—and Ames can commit his memories to writing as enough history to pass down to his biological son— Jack and Della are fully aware that they cannot protect their son from the lynch mobs, Jim Crow laws, and the dogs set loose upon those practicing civil disobedience in the South.16 In short, they cannot protect their son from the weight of history that he bears as a Black child. These markers of Black experience that appear in Home serve to highlight the different viewpoints between Jack and his father; at the same time, I argue that they ultimately work to codify the tension between them to bring about a resolution through the symbol of the home. As Jack resolves to leave, he and his father have a final confrontation, one which circles around the sin that Boughton and John Ames have never been able to condone: Jack’s abandonment of the girl he impregnated, and the subsequent death of his child. Boughton declares that “‘[a]ll of them call it home, but they never stay’” (Home 296). In light of his father’s pain, Jack stands still, expecting rebuke after rebuke, but instead he hears his father’s gentle voice: “‘There’s some money you’ll each get a share of, and some for the Ames boy. It’s not much. I know Glory will be glad to see you if you ever feel like coming home again’” (296). While the resolution is not a traditional one in which the father and son are able to resolve their differences, it does hold out a promise of hope, the promise of a shared space that Jack will always be able to access. As stated earlier, this shared space is not available for Jack’s son, Robert; although he possesses a name in common with his paternal grandfather, even in Glory’s imaginings, the future Robert does not enter the Boughton house and remains a stranger at the threshold. Furthermore, it is critical to note that one reason given for his and Della’s not entering the house at the end of Home is that they wish “to hurry, to escape the dangers of nightfall”—all of the dangers Jack brings up in discussions with his father (323). These details are evocative of what Saidiya Hartman calls “the crisis of homelessness”: despite the fact that her analysis focuses on the impossible return to Africa for members of the  Black diaspora, her prescient argument of Blackness as the paradoxical nature of realizing one’s status as homeless through the search for one’s home 16

In similar fashion, Glory misreads a conversation with Jack when he discusses the desegregation of Major League Baseball. As he states that he and Della have had discussions on this topic, in which racism is writ large, Glory laughs, “‘Here I’ve been wasting my time worrying about radioactive fallout. About strontium 90’. He said, ‘Believe me, she worries about that, too’” (Home 200). Jack’s meaning is clear to readers who understand the coded nature of his statement—that as a Black woman and mother, Della has an additional concern that she will never be able to put to the side.

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is necessary to understand Robert’s condition, one which his father can never alleviate (Hartman 764). The irrefutable truth of a white father and his Black son in both Robinson’s novels and in American history lies in the irreconcilable nature of the former’s home and the latter’s homelessness; the white father will always possess one—a psychic space to call home, if not a physical place itself—whereas the Black son is in search of one. In this way, Jack is allowed to maintain a conduit to his father that he is not given with his son. No matter that Jack loves his son, and that his son, “[h]is little boy touching that tree, just to touch it,” loves him (Home 323). While Robinson illuminates that love is enough to keep Jack Boughton within the graces of his father and second father, beloved by both, she also shows that it is not enough to keep him with his Black wife and son in the face of individual prejudices (as epitomized by his father) and racism writ large. Yet what she does not address is how both the absence of Black bodies in Gilead, as well as their continuous haunting presence, speak to how Blackness is used in her novels: as means of reaffirming a genealogy that pivots on memory, not history, a genealogy that strives to engender white kinship through an ignoring of the Africanist presence. Conclusion In Robinson’s Gilead and Home, the absence of Blackness and its materialization only at the conclusion of the latter volume are not only indicative of its disappearance from Kansas within the novels. While Douglas admits that the “Africanist presences in Gilead are treated seriously and with respect” and “they are a crucial presence this novel cannot do without,” I end my essay arguing that it is precisely the fact that neither novel can do without Blackness that testifies to Della, Robert, and the repeated instances of blackening as necessary agents in the continuance of an exclusionary white kinship. In Gilead, Robinson focuses on Robert Boughton Miles as the means through which Jack achieves his blessing; in Home, she is more attentive to the ways in which Blackness is made to bear the brunt of historical violence in the 1950s. It is no accident that Jack departs Gilead before Della and Robert arrive to look for him. On one hand, this ending speaks to Jack’s nomadic nature; on the other hand, however, it speaks to the impossibility of their reunion, both in Robinson’s fictional world as well as the larger world outside of the novel. Jack returns to Gilead to assess if he can bring his family there, in the promise of “the shining star of radicalism.” Yet the irony in setting the novels in “the shining star of radicalism,” in the searching of a safe place to create a home, is that neither is made open to Jack’s son or his wife. While kept out of an ordering of temporality and the narrative

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of genealogy, Della and Robert Boughton Miles exist to buttress the white characters’ access to both. What is undeniable, however, is that much like the unnamed narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who sees how “‘the purest white that can be found’” is made by mixing black paint into white, Blackness is consumed by a national narrative only insofar as to make it coherent and complete. Robinson is attentive to the ways in which and the reasons why Blackness is made absent in the town of Gilead; what she does not address, however, is how she also utilizes that very absent presence to affix genealogy to Jack and Ames, or even Jack and his biological father, but never Jack and his son. Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. “To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana.” The Anzaldúa Reader. Ed. AnaLouise Keating. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. (163–175). Castronovo, Russ. Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Douglas, Christopher. “Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Novel 44.3 (2011): 333–353. Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Bantam Books, 1989. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage International, 1995. Fuss, Diana. Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy. Durham: Duke UP, 2013. Goldsby, Jacqueline. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Hartman, Saidiya. “The Time of Slavery.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4 (2002): 757–777. Kincaid, Jamaica. The Autobiography of My Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Parks, Suzan-Lori. “From Elements of Style” in The America Play and Other Works. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995. (6–18). Petit, Susan. “Living in Different Universes: Autism and Race in Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 46.2 (2013): 39–54. Pinsker, Sanford. Conversations with Contemporary American Writers. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1985.

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Piper, Adrian. “Passing for White, Passing for Black.” Adrianpiper.com (1991): 1–30. Web. 7 March 2014. Robinson, Marilynne. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998. ———. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. ———. Home. New York: Picador, 2008. ———. Housekeeping. New York: Picador, 1981. ———. When I Was a Child I Read Books. New York: Picador, 2012. Tanner, Laura E. “‘Looking Back from the Grave’: Sensory Perception and the Anticipation of Absence in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Contemporary Literature 48.2 (2007): 227–252.

Robinson and Updike: Houses, Domesticity, and the Numinous Quotidian James Schiff Abstract In this exploratory essay, I examine Robinson’s and Updike’s shared interests in the domestic and the mundane, in Christian theology and the life of ministers, and in the development of prose styles that combine realism and a sense of transcendence. I conclude with three brief points of textual comparison between the authors, the first two highlighting differences, and the third revealing a substantive convergence. The first comparison pertains to the two authors’ respective efforts, in A Month of Sundays and Gilead, to compose a novel limning the personal reflections of a Protestant minister. Robinson’s Housekeeping and Updike’s Witches of Eastwick provide a second point of textual comparison, showing the notable differences in their depiction of a close network of women. For the third point of comparison, I turn to Updike’s 1990 short story, “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” and Robinson’s Home, in which the imaginative visions of the two authors converge most closely, each giving home a substantive weight and central importance.

At first glance, Marilynne Robinson and John Updike seem a strange pairing. Updike was prolific and voluble, publishing sixty-five volumes, more than one book per year, including not only novels but more than a thousand short stories, poems, reviews, and essays. Martin Amis once referred to him as “a psychotic Santa of volubility,” and David Foster Wallace claims a young female reader complained, “Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?” (12, 52). In contrast, Robinson for decades was known primarily as the author of a single distinguished and peculiar novel marked, among other things, by its reticence. As for his fiction, Updike was chock full of male sexual desire, explicit in his description of the body while limning philandering protagonists driven by erotic urgings. Roger Lambert of Updike’s Roger’s Version creates graphic pornographic fantasies about his wife and her ostensible young lover. In contrast, sexuality is seldom mentioned in Robinson’s novels, at least directly, and there is good mannered tact when discussing transgressive behavior. In Robinson’s fiction, we have virtually no idea what kind of sexual thoughts occur to Glory Boughton (Home) or Ruth (Housekeeping). There are other notable differences between the two writers: Robinson’s mothers are absent,

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Updike’s are domineering; heterosexual coupling is a point of focus in Updike while the failures of coupling generally take place offstage in Robinson, keeping the focus instead on the larger family. It is hardly surprising, then, that Updike, who has been studied alongside a range of other writers (Hawthorne, Howells, James, Salinger, Cheever, and Roth) has not previously been linked to Robinson, who is most often associated with canonical nineteenth century American writers, such as Melville, Emerson, and Dickinson. Yet, upon closer scrutiny, significant points of similarity emerge between Robinson and Updike, such that it becomes worthwhile to explore these overlooked similarities and pursue a comparative analysis of writing that has spoken to very different audiences. First, both writers are immensely interested in the home, family, and domestic quotidian. Most of the scenes in Robinson’s first three novels, two of which carry explicitly domestic titles (Housekeeping, Home), revolve around a single household and depict the evolving daily relationships between those who reside within. For Updike, who also titled a novel Home (it was his first full-length novel, though never published),1 the depiction of the American quotidian domestic was a life-long project. As he explained, “[s]omething quite intricate and fierce occurs in homes, and it seems to me without doubt worthwhile to examine what it is” (Howard 11). Updike’s objective, as he put it, was “to give the mundane its beautiful due” (The Early Stories xv). In comparison to other writers, relatively little happens in the fiction of Robinson and Updike, and what does happen largely involves familial relationships. In addition, both Robinson and Updike have a deep and ranging interest in religion, particularly Christianity, which figures prominently in their work. Both authors have written novels that purport to be the diaries or reflections of a minister: Updike’s A Month of Sundays and Robinson’s Gilead; both have composed essays on theology and theologians (Kierkegaard and Barth for Updike; Calvin and Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Robinson); and both have depicted the ways in which God’s presence can be felt in daily domestic life. Through their interest in both the quotidian and divine, Robinson and Updike proffer a mode of writing that separates their work from that of so many contemporaries, such as Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen, and George Saunders. Finally, Robinson and Updike are recognized as major stylists, each having developed a singular mode of expression particularly well-suited to depicting 1 Updike completed a draft of a six-hundred page autobiographical novel, titled Home, in 1956. The novel was rejected in 1957 by Harper & Brothers, his initial publisher, and he quickly began work on The Poorhouse Fair (1959), which would become his first published novel.

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the domestic quotidian. As realists, both are attentive to the textures and beauty of the visual world, and both have a tendency to imbue characters, places, and moments with transcendence, as if divinely endowed. Yet there are clear differences. Whereas Updike’s prose, marked by his ability to see with unusual clarity and precision, is lushly descriptive, performative, and profuse, Robinson’s writing is plainer, sparer, and more reticent. With his reliance on complex imagery and metaphorical, baroque language, Updike’s style strives to imitate the rich exuberance of creation. So startling was his ability to limn reality that Whitney Balliett exclaimed in 1960, “Updike frequently gives the impression that he has six or seven senses, all of them operating at full strength” (222). Though Robinson’s style is less conspicuous, it quietly achieves as much. One must simply be more patient to bear witness. As A.O. Scott writes, Robinson “is somehow able to infuse what can sound like dowdy, common words—words like courtesy and kindness, shame and forgiveness, transgression and grace—with a startling measure of their old luster and gravity” (17). Robinson’s style is largely dependent on the use of relatively plain language. As Verlyn Kinkenborg writes of Gilead, “[i]t feels as though Marilynne Robinson rounded up the most ordinary words in the English language and herded them into a single corral, where she could sort them and newly dignify them by turning them into the thoughts of this quiet old man.” In her use of basic AngloSaxon words as well as her rhythms and tone, Robinson’s writing, like that of, say, Reynolds Price, shares much with the Bible, and through her “habit of using metaphor as a form of revelation,” she borrows from those nineteenthcentury writers she so admires, Emerson and Melville (Wood 11). Through such influences, voice figures prominently in Robinson’s fiction; as Mark O’Connell writes, “[h]er voice is at once sad and ecstatic, conversationally fluent and formally precise. And it doesn’t feel like a performance or a feint. It doesn’t feel like Beckett’s version of vanity. It feels like wisdom.” In contrast, Updike’s writing is less about voice and more about visual precision and beauty. As for other stylistic differences, Updike, with his abiding interest in American culture, particularly as experienced from the inside and center, as in the Rabbit novels, rather than from the margins, was more likely to infuse his fiction with language, song lyrics, slogans, products, television programs, and names from popular American culture. Updike’s novels are laden with cultural materials, such that we are aware of Rabbit’s views on the falling dollar and rising yen, the whereabouts of the Dalai Lama, and the opec-induced gasoline shortage. Though Robinson, like Updike, addresses current political events, e.g., in Home through television coverage of racial conflict and discussion of nuclear armament, her treatment of culture is much more tangential, with her

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work taking place farther from the center of cultural activity. In 1987 Robinson expressed her distaste for the easy familiarity of “[t]he day-to-day outpouring of words from television, the radio and the press” (“Let’s Not Talk Down to Ourselves”), and declared, “Whole fictions are now made of stringing together brand names, media phrases and minor expletives, the idea being, apparently, that these amount to a demonstration of how reduced people actually are” (“Language Is Smarter than We Are”). It is unlikely that she had Updike in mind with her criticism—if anything she appears to have admired his writing, as demonstrated in her review that same year of his short story collection Trust Me. Yet, whereas Updike sought, particularly in the Rabbit novels, to integrate the language, thinking, and rhythms of popular culture within his rather sophisticated prose style, Robinson believed that fiction demands “a remystification of language” and was more drawn to the cultural margins, where Ruth and Sylvie of Housekeeping reside (“Language Is Smarter than We Are”). As good a place as any to begin this comparative study is with their two early canonical novels, Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960) and Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980), each of which amplifies the importance of house and home in American literature. In Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction, Marilyn Chandler writers, “[o]ur literature reiterates with remarkable consistency the centrality of the house in American cultural life and imagination. In many of our major novels a house stands at stage center as a unifying symbolic structure that represents and defines the relationships of the central characters” (1). Consider, for instance, the cabin in Thoreau’s Walden or Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gatsby’s West Egg mansion in The Great Gatsby, and Poe’s crumbling dwelling in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Houses figure prominently in the fiction of Robinson and Updike, though of the two authors, Updike designed and constructed far more fictional houses, e.g., a poorhouse for seniors (The Poorhouse Fair), his iconic, autobiographical sandstone farmhouse (multiple short stories, Of the Farm), the marshy saltbox houses of New England (Couples), Daryl Van Horne’s old Lenox mansion (The Witches of Eastwick), Rabbit Angstrom’s Florida condominium (Rabbit at Rest), Hope Chafetz’s rustic Vermont home and studio (Seek My Face). Robinson’s fictional houses—the Foster house in Fingerbone, the Ames’s and Boughtons’s homes in Gilead—are less visually detailed and vary less from one to the other, though they, too, hold prominence in her fiction, particularly in shaping character and tone. A house, of course, can reflect psychologically upon those who reside within. The sunken living room and swagger of the Murketts’s house in Rabbit Is Rich, particularly as seen through Rabbit’s eyes, reflect Webb’s status as a master of consumerism, just as the Foster home in Housekeeping, with its hoarded clutter and flooded floors, reflects the psychological nonconformity of its inhabitants. The home can also

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hold religious importance. As Chandler writes, “the biblical notion of the ‘world’ as the devil’s domain reinforced the idea that the home was a place of protection where one could be ‘in the world but not of it’” (8). The houses of Robinson and Updike are often numinous, with the presence of God pushing through the surface, providing light and hope. In both Rabbit, Run and Housekeeping, home is important, though neither protagonist feels good about or comfortable within their home. A house, of course, can be restrictive: “Enclosure in a house and in the structures of town or city life runs counter to the inherent romanticism of some of our most deeply held collective values: autonomy, self-determination, mobility” (Chandler 4). In Rabbit, Run, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a 26-year-old salesman and former high school basketball star, finds himself married with a child and another on the way. In contrast to his high school years when he was the darling of the crowds, his life now feels second rate. The renewal he experiences during a pickup basketball game that opens the novel dissolves as soon as he returns to the clutter of his Mt. Judge apartment, where his pregnant wife Janice is drinking old-fashioneds while watching the Mouseketeers on television. Feeling trapped by his domestic situation, Rabbit gets into his car and drives away. Yet he does not know where to go and, unlike the characters in, say, Kerouac’s On the Road, discovers almost immediately that a rambling, carefree life on the road is not what he desires. So he turns around and, instinctively, heads home. Yet he does not return to his wife. As revealed later through an epiphany that he experiences on the golf course, Rabbit desires something more, a kind of physical transcendence, such as he experiences when hitting a golf ball far into the distant sky. Unlike those prototypical American male protagonists, like Huck Finn, who run from domesticity and “light out for the territory,” Rabbit simply runs from one domestic situation to another: he abandons his wife and child only to set up house in the Summer Street apartment of Ruth Leonard, a local call girl. Running back and forth between these two women and apartments—as Updike explained, he envisioned the novel as operating in a zig-zag pattern (“One Big Interview” 499)—Rabbit seeks comfort in motion. His dilemma is not that he wishes to run but cannot, but rather that he does not really know where to go, so he follows his instincts, which drive him, conversely, away from as well as back toward his home. The novel concludes ambiguously on the streets with Rabbit lacking a clear sense of purpose and running into the night. As Updike has written elsewhere, his characters are often looking for a better domestic situation, a home more attractive than their own. In fact, early in Rabbit, Run, just before impulsively leaving town, Rabbit espies his son Nelson being fed dinner in Rabbit’s parents’ house, at which point the narrator tells us, “Harry’s boy is being fed, this home is happier than his” (21).

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Housekeeping is more concerned with home as a physical place, in that its narrator Ruth and her younger sister Lucille, orphaned after their mother’s suicide (she drives her car off a cliff), grow up in a house that has been home to several generations of elders. Abandoned and traumatized from an early age, the girls are raised by a succession of female relatives who drift in and out of their lives. Men are absent from the household. While the girls are antisocial and highly dependent upon one another, they live in a house that does not function as a conventional home. Aunt Sylvie, the last in a line of poorlyequipped familial guardians to the girls, has lived as a transient and by her nature resists traditional notions of housekeeping. Though she attempts to build a home for the girls, the house becomes a kind of peculiarity with its asocial inhabitants living amidst hoarded clutter: newspapers and cans stacked to the ceiling, nesting birds and hordes of cats, remnants of dead swallows and sparrows and, during flood season, several feet of standing water on the floors. Like Rabbit, Ruth and Lucille, as well as Sylvie, wish to escape a home that is not functioning well. Yet Robinson’s three women have different desires than Rabbit. In fact, their individual desires vary considerably, leading them in opposite directions. The more conventional Lucille, eager for relations with society, moves in with her home economics teacher. Ruth, however, follows Sylvie by moving deeper and deeper into communion with the natural world surrounding the lake that geographically marks their town. Increasingly, she spends more of her days and nights on the lake, in the woods, and under the stars. Eventually, she and Sylvie burn down their house, which proves a burden to them, and begin drifting, living a life of vagrancy and homelessness. Uninterested in traditional concepts of housekeeping as well as resistant to social constructs of marriage, motherhood, and community, they find sustenance by hopping trains and sleeping on park benches. As Chandler writes, “[Housekeeping] challenges us to reimagine the American dream of home ownership,” as the house holds little to no value to its owners (306). At this early point in their publishing careers, Robinson and Updike essentially created outlaw protagonists: characters who are unwilling or unable to live with societal conventions and expectations. While Rabbit is more aggressive, Ruth more timid and passive, each clearly believes there is another way to live. The difference, perhaps, is that Rabbit continues to exist within the more conventional social framework, whereas Ruth, more of a loner and outsider, is drawn to the margins. Even in rebellion, Rabbit remains a social creature who needs others, particularly women. Drawn to America’s center, Updike was interested in the social and domestic lives of relatively ordinary middle-class characters, such as Rabbit. As Robinson wrote in her review of Trust Me, “Mr. Updike has claimed a wide terrain for his own by writing about our world

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as if it were home to him” (45). In contrast, Robinson, at least in her first novel, follows in a tradition of American writers (e.g., Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Twain) drawn more to isolated characters (hermits, exiles, eccentrics, expatriates) who reside outside the dominant social realm. As the two writers age, their attitudes toward home evolve. In many respects Housekeeping and Rabbit, Run are the more rebellious novels of younger writers. By the latter two Rabbit novels (Rabbit Is Rich, 1981; Rabbit at Rest, 1990) and Robinson’s subsequent two novels (Gilead, 2004; Home, 2008), each writer has adopted a different attitude toward home. During the first two Rabbit novels, the eponymous hero lives amidst domestic chaos. In Rabbit, Run he moves haphazardly between two women and domestic arrangements. In Rabbit Redux (1971) his wife Janice has moved out of their house to live with another man, Charlie Stavros, while Rabbit, now more of a homebody, takes in a runaway teenage drug addict and a black militant; in retaliation, Rabbit’s neighbors burn down his house. As he settles into middle age, however, in the third and fourth novels, Rabbit’s life stabilizes and his domestic arrangement becomes more comfortable. In Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit, now 46, remains married to Janice, and his life is going better than ever: he oversees his wife’s family automobile dealership and is making good money; has a circle of friends and has joined the local country club; feels healthy and alive while others are dying; and is surrounded domestically by women, which he enjoys. Yet Rabbit, who has been living for years in the home of his mother-in-law, Bess Springer, desires a house of his own. In addition, he continues to envy the households of others, particularly that of Webb Murkett, who has an attractive young wife, Cindy, as well as a desirable home with an elaborate guest bathroom, a sunken living room, and “a cellar full of expensive power tools” (254). In middle-age Rabbit has become increasingly domestic as well as materialistic: his drive to consume and possess is what now provides the hope of transcending mortality. What he mostly wants, though, beyond a daughter (his biological daughter drowned in Run) and sleeping with Cindy Murkett, is a home of his own. In what must be one of contemporary American fiction’s happiest endings, Rabbit gets most of what he wants in Rabbit Is Rich: in the novel’s final scene he and Janice have just moved into a home of their own and, as he sits in “his silvery-pink wing chair” in front of the televised Super Bowl, his newborn granddaughter is deposited on his lap—the only note tempering his pleasure is that the baby’s arrival also suggests he is closer to death (423). Robinson’s next two novels signal a significant change from Housekeeping. While Ruth and Sylvie were drawn to the outdoors and a transient existence on the road, more than two decades later her fiction moves indoors and her characters’ attitudes toward domesticity become more traditional and accepting.

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In Home, two nearly middle-aged children, Glory and Jack Boughton, have each suffered recent disappointment in their efforts to establish their own families: Glory was jilted by her fiancé; the secretive, disreputable Jack has become alienated from his common law wife and son. Without other options, both return to the home in which they were raised. Once the site of familial bustle generated by active parents and their seven children, the Boughton home is now mostly quiet, inhabited only by their aging father, a retired Presbyterian minister. Unlike the unkempt, neglected home of Housekeeping, the Boughton homestead is conventional, maintained, and marked by ordered rituals involving meals, cleaning, and visitors. Not all of the characters, however, view the house similarly. For its owner, Reverend Boughton, the house “embodied…the general blessedness of his life” and stands “as if it were an old wife, beautiful for every comfort it had offered, every grace, through all the long years” (3). Yet for his 38-year-old daughter Glory, who has moved home in secret disgrace, the “staunch and upright house” seems “abandoned” and “heartbroken” as well as “oppressive” with its “plum-colored drapes” and carpet and its “clutter of knickknacks” (4, 40). Like her brother Jack, Glory would prefer to be elsewhere, particularly in a home of her own. In spite of their reluctance to be there, the home serves as a source of renewal, familiarity, and comfort—the place, according to Glory and Jack, where you can “come when you need help” (Home 316). While awkwardness, silence, and tension color their initial exchanges, Glory and Jack eventually begin to share information, shed personal secrets, and care for one another. Glory confesses to Jack she never actually married and that her fiancé, unbeknownst to her, was already married; Jack explains how he spent time in prison and has a son. When Jack goes on a drinking binge, holing up in his private shanty (a secret hiding place he constructed in their barn loft—a home within the home) and almost killing himself, Glory takes charge, cleaning him up, removing traces of his near suicide attempt, and restoring order. Being home together in their childhood home allows Glory and Jack to recount their familial past, explain themselves to one another, and develop a deeper bond. Yet the Boughton home is marked by reticence and unbridgeable gaps. As Sarah Churchwell writes, “Home is a novel of secrets, and a secretive novel: the three Boughtons withhold most of what they are thinking and feeling from  each other, as they reside uneasily under the same roof” (“A Man of Sorrows” 6). Jack, in particular, is remote and remains a mystery to his family. Communication, whether among family members or with outsiders, can be strained and awkward. Letters sent to and from the Boughton home, mostly between Jack and Della, tend to go undelivered, while others are burned. In his effort to understand the highly enigmatic Jack, close family friend Reverend

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John Ames, in Gilead, outlines a position that seemingly articulates Robinson’s understanding of human nature: “In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence” (Gilead 197). Loneliness and aloneness figure so much more deeply in Robinson than Updike. Updike’s characters rarely find themselves alone and are seldom lonely. Rabbit is often surrounded by family and friends and, when alone, remains so curious about the world that loneliness is never an issue. Updike’s characters are typically part of a domestic arrangement, and though they may be unsettled by turmoil and uncertainty—most often, a failing marriage— they are seldom alone in their distress. In Updike’s “Gesturing,” a short story that features a separated husband living alone in Boston, the protagonist Richard Maple has the luxury of being able to confide in two women. Further, he finds bachelorhood delightfully curious, since it affords such unexpected pleasures as walking home from the Laundromat “in the dark hugging to himself clean clothes hot as fresh bread” (Early Stories 804). Consider as well Updike’s autobiographical essay, “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington,” in which the author finds himself alone, walking the streets of his former hometown. So fully absorbed is he in his environment, which triggers an abundance of memories, that he hardly seems alone. In contrast, Robinson and her characters gravitate toward solitude and find benefits therein. Ruth is often alone by choice, as are Glory and Jack, as well as Reverend Ames. As Robinson writes, “I think loneliness is the encounter with oneself…. There is a tendency to think of loneliness as a symptom, a sign that life has gone wrong. But it is never only that. I sometimes think it is the one great prerequisite for depth, and for truthfulness” (Painter 492). The time, perhaps, in which Updike’s characters are most alone is childhood and old age. Many of Updike’s early short stories feature an only child living in a small home, often a farmhouse miles from town and other children, with parents and grandparents. The world the child knows is mostly colored by these larger than life adults: the domineering mother, guiding her son toward a career in the arts; the humorous, gregarious teacher/father, much beloved by others though a frequent source of embarrassment to his son; the grandfather whose tendency is to examine the world for God’s fingerprints. The child, however, will not be alone for long. It is clear, early on, that Updike’s protagonists are planning their escape from home; their interest in art, romance, and the city will lead them away. As Updike’s career progressed beyond the early stories and novels, his fiction—the short stories of The Music School (1966) and Couples (1968)—turned toward documenting young married life, coupling, adultery, separation and divorce. Whereas Robinson’s characters have adult

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relationships and romances, her attention, in contrast to that of Updike, is on their familial relationships; nothing seems to carry the same weight as family, which provides, in her own words, “a sort of compact of mutual loyalty, organized around the hope of giving rich, human meaning to the lives of its members” (The Death of Adam 88). This is certainly true in both Home and Gilead. It is the family “from whom one derives identity, and/or to whom one gives identity, and/or with whom one shares habits, tastes, stories, customs, memories” (The Death of Adam, 87). In addition, as Glory’s father says, “It is in family that we most often feel the grace of God, His faithfulness” (Home 183). For both Robinson and Updike, the home and family are tied to the quotidian and divine. The genius of the Rabbit novels is that Updike composed nearly two thousand pages of compelling narrative from mundane material: Rabbit interacting with family and friends, Rabbit thinking about his life while driving through town listening to the car radio, Rabbit pondering death. An extended scene from Rabbit Is Rich, in which Rabbit finds himself in the Murketts’s guest bathroom, illustrates this point; here, Updike spends nearly three full pages describing the physical contents of the space: The bathroom, though, enchants him, with its little enamelled dishes of rosebud-shaped soap, its furry blue toilet seat cover, and its dazzling mirror rimmed with naked light bulbs like actors have in their dressing rooms. Everything in here that doesn’t shine is tinted and scented. The toilet paper, very dulcet, is printed with old comic strips, each piece a panel. Poor Popeye, eating shit instead of spinach. And the towels have W and M and L for Lucinda…. Harry wonders if this downstairs bathroom is ever used by the Murketts and their rather pasty-looking little kids or is set up primarily for guests. Certain mysterious artifacts in it—a big sort of sugar bowl,…; an egg-shaped jar a third full of lavender crystalline salts; and a kind of tiny milkman’s carrier of what he takes to be bath oils;…–all seem put there, on the set of open shelves hung on two black dowels between the bathtub and the toilet, for exhibit more than use. (255–56) To an uninitiated reader, the passage may seem pointless or gratuitous; however, one of Updike’s objectives in this novel is to reveal the extent to which consumerism drives culture. The Angstroms and Murketts surround themselves with domestic possessions to boost their egos and mask realities about death. The guest bathroom is designed to impress guests, and while a bathroom is used primarily for one central purpose, the voiding of bodily waste, so many of the objects contained within are meant to disguise or sanitize that

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purpose. What the passage best reveals about Updike, though, is his overwhelming desire to limn the physical objects of the world. Updike’s descriptive style, however, does not simply inventory possessions. It can also startle in its beauty and vision, such as in his description of a dog’s death in the short story, “The Deaths of Distant Friends.” Here, Updike’s narrator describes the death, from a heart attack, of his golden retriever Canute, whose body was discovered on the marshes (this same passage was quoted by Robinson in her 1987 review of Trust Me): “The thunderbolt had hit my former pet by moonlight, his heart full of marshy joy and his stomach fat with garbage, and he had lain for days with ruffling fur while the tides went in and out. The image makes me happy, like the sight of a sail popping full of wind and tugging its boat swiftly out from shore” (161–62). As Robinson explains in her review, “The passage is, altogether, a virtuoso’s laughing demonstration that gorgeousness inheres in anything” (1). Robinson, too, relies on good writing over plot and action. Home and Gilead resemble the Rabbit novels in regard to how little happens. As A.O. Scott writes, Most of what might be called the action in Home consists of the movements of a few characters—Glory, her father and her brother Jack— around their grand old house, from kitchen to living room, from garden to porch. They speak with sometimes strained politeness as they busy themselves with mundane domestic tasks. But those quotidian facts of what Glory thinks of as “difficult, ordinary life” feel, in Robinson’s hand, like vessels of the terrible, the sublime, the miraculous. (“Return of the Prodigal Son” 17) In Gilead, which reads at times like a meditative essay, even less happens. Gilead reflects the attempt by Reverend Ames, an elderly Congregationalist pastor who is dying, to provide an account of his life for his seven-year-old son, who will have few memories of his father. In spite of hardship and personal failings, Ames uses much of his ink to describe the small, personal moments of pleasure and beauty he has experienced, such as watching, through his window, his son and wife blowing bubbles: “Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely…that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world” (9). Robinson and Updike are able to sustain our attention through what could otherwise be less than stimulating narrative because they are master stylists. Yet other factors figure as well. First, both believe in the literary significance of

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the inner life. As Amy Hungerford writes, in Robinson’s novels “ordinary people have rich and complicated interior lives,…they embody a silent discourse of thought that, if we knew its voice, would astonish us” (Postmodern Belief 114). It is, of course, the interiority of Reverend Ames and Rabbit that draws us in. Second, both authors express an openness to a world beyond the physical. As Robinson explains, “ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there were two sides to your encounter with the world. You don’t simply perceive something that is statically present, but in fact there is a visionary quality to all experience. It means something because it is addressed to you” (Fay 49). Many scenes from Gilead and Home have a kind of “visionary quality,” such as when Reverend Ames, in Gilead, recalls watching on his way to church a young couple strolling: On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth…it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing…. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it. (27–28) Robinson elevates the mundane and suggests something beyond this world. The quotidian becomes startling in its beauty, and through memorable description, particularly of water, a sense of wonder emerges as well as a suggestion of the divine. As O’Connell writes, “For Robinson, water is more than just a metaphor for God. It is itself a divine presence, a form of immanence that creates and sustains life…and remains mysterious no matter how familiar it might seem to us” (“The First Church of Marilynne Robinson”). Whereas writers have long found signs of God’s presence in Nature— Robinson detects it in water; others see it in landscapes, a blade of grass, mountain peaks, or a night sky—Updike locates the divine in more domestic places: “there is a color, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm. A wordless reassurance these things are pressing to give” (“A Dogwood Tree” 186). Updike’s style, as it builds through an accumulation of details and images, works to replicate the abundance of  God’s world. As he explains, “My own style seemed to me a groping and e­ lemental attempt to approximate the complexity of envisioned phenomena” (SelfConsciousness 103). Through metaphor, complex imagery, baroque language,

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and carefully detailed description of the material world, Updike’s style expresses the pattern of interconnection that the author believes is behind all creation. Updike sees manifestations of the divine in the everyday tangible, with God’s presence revealed through human sexuality, inanimate objects, craftsmanship and art, and even mundane games.2 Consider this declaration from Reverend Thomas Marshfield of A Month of Sundays: But it was, somehow, and my descriptive zeal flags, in the furniture I awoke among, and learned to walk among, and fell asleep amid—it was the moldings of the doorways and the sashes of the windows and the turnings of the balusters—it was the carpets each furry strand of which partook in a pattern and the ceilings whose random cracks and faint discolorations I would never grow to reach, that convinced me, that told me, God was, and was here, even as the furnace came on, and breathed gaseous warmth upon my bare, buttonshoed legs. Someone invisible had cared to make these things. (22–23) Elsewhere, Marshfield explains how he finds God operating beneath the surface of golf and poker games. “[A] power greater than myself” (181), he writes, allows him to hole a 7-iron shot, and he later describes, during a poker game, “watching the breath of the Lord play across the surface of the cards” (196). Marshfield, of course, is not reliable. Given his subversive, comic tendencies and need to perform with language, one cannot always be sure whether he truly means what he says. Yet there seems little doubt that for Marshfield the physical world is transparent and that through careful observation we can “dissolve the veneer our animal murk puts upon things, and empathize with God’s workmanship” (191). As in so much of Updike’s writing, God’s presence can be detected, whether in furniture moldings and window sashes, in light that bathes certain objects and characters, or in the energy and confidence that animate his figures toward grandeur. In conclusion, consider three brief points of textual comparison between Robinson and Updike, the first two highlighting differences, and the third revealing a substantive convergence. The first comparison pertains to the two authors’ respective efforts, in A Month of Sundays and Gilead, to compose a novel limning the personal reflections of a Protestant minister. In A Month of Sundays, Updike’s promiscuous Reverend Marshfield, exiled from his home in Massachusetts to an Arizona motel for ministers-gone-astray, preaches, jokes, 2 See Schiff for more on God’s presence in Updike’s fiction.

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confesses, and puns in a series of daily written entries which are sexually explicit and playfully subversive. For Marshfield, talk and writing are associated with sexual energy, while silence suggests solitude and abstinence. Of his minister father, Marshfield writes: “On Saturdays he would type—ejaculations of clatter after long foreplay of silent agony” (18); and of his mother, “I see that my mother’s singing voice was, for me, her sex;…. I equate noise with vitality;… silence, chastity, and death fascinate me with one face” (20). Marshfield takes issue not only with silence but goodness, which he loathes, particularly as manifested by his father-in-law: “The Doctor Reverend Wesley Augustus Chillingworth,” a dignified academic whose ethics course at the divinity school “epitomized everything I hated about academic religion; its safe and complacent faithlessness, its empty difficulty, its transformation of the tombstones of the passionate dead into a set of hurdles for the living to leap on their way to an underpaid antique profession” (50). With his Barthian resistance to ethics, Marshfield favors feeling good (desire) to being good (ethics), and one imagines he would feel a similar resistance to Robinson’s Reverend Ames, who is also marked by his inherent goodness. As James Wood writes, “Robinson’s pastor is…a truly good and virtuous man, and occasionally you may wish he possessed a bit more malice, avarice or lust—or just an intriguing unreliability” (10). Ames, too, would have had problems with Marshfield. Continually frustrated by the antics of Jack Boughton, Ames would have been even more vexed by Marshfield’s reckless behavior and self-indulgence. In spite of their mutual appreciation for Karl Barth, Reverends Marshfield and Ames could not be more different in temperament, voice, behavior, and tone. Similarly, Robinson’s Housekeeping and Updike’s Witches of Eastwick, which provide a second point of textual comparison, are notably different in their depiction of a close network of women. In Housekeeping, Ruth and Sylvie, living together under the same roof without any men present, are asocial and passively rebellious; eager to fly under the social radar, they avoid the trappings of conventional domestic existence. In contrast, the three divorced women in Updike’s Witches are vocal, strong, proactive, and openly rebellious. Liberated and empowered by splitting with their husbands and taking lovers, the coven of witches have re-appropriated their lives and gained artistic and creative powers. While similarities exist between the alliances of women from each novel—e.g., all have become strengthened by aligning themselves with nature—the differences are more apparent. Housekeeping again is marked by calm, aloneness, and reticence; Witches is replete with sex, romance, magic, artistic energy, and talk— the words and gossip shared by the three women and their male counterpart, Daryl Van Horne, literally carry the novel. Ironically, while the energized rebelliousness of the coven of Witches is conspicuous and forceful, the three women

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ultimately return to more conventional roles within society and take up with new husbands; in contrast, Lucy and Sylvie of Housekeeping, whose rebellion is quieter, do not return to society but cut their ties by becoming transients. Yet these differences, however striking, between volubility and reticence, active and passive rebellion, sexual desire and ostensible chastity, may be more superficial than substantive. At their core, Robinson and Updike are surprisingly similar, as perhaps best seen through this third and final point of comparison: Updike’s 1990 short story, “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” and Robinson’s Home. In this highly autobiographical story, which claimed the annual O. Henry Prize, Updike’s protagonist Joey Robinson recounts the history, following his mother’s death, of the sandstone farmhouse where he lived for five years as a teenager. The house is where his mother was born, died, and spent most of her life. A familiar house to Updike readers, it stands, perhaps, as the most iconic dwelling in his oeuvre: Updike lived in such a house, in Plowville, pa, with his mother, father, and grandparents and has often written about the experience. For Joey’s as well as Updike’s mother, the house and farm were paradise, yet for Joey, who speaks for Updike, the house was an embarrassment. Joey hated being in the country, isolated and many miles from town, and he dreaded the pollens and house dust which triggered his allergies and asthma. In contrast to the snug warm feeling he had when his family resided in town, the farmhouse is damp, cold, cramped, and far from the “girls in long pleated skirts and fuzzy sweaters and bobby socks, who belonged to…civilization” (424). Following high school, Joey left the house for good and returned only for occasional visits, spending his adult life in Manhattan apartments. After his mother’s death, though, he returns to find the sandstone farmhouse filled not only with familiar physical objects and souvenirs but stacked cases of cat food, magazines, junk mail, and plastic bags. Joey cleans and empties the house, yet it remains filled with memories of their lives together. By the story’s conclusion, Joey has locked up the farmhouse with hopes of selling it in spring, yet realizes, in spite of his lifelong desire to escape its cramped dampness, that “[h]e had always wanted to be where the action was, and what action there was, it turned out, had been back there” at the house (446). Perhaps more than any other Updike story, “A Sandstone Farmhouse” is a testament to the inescapable importance of family and home. Robinson’s Home functions similarly for Glory and her brother Jack, who have spent the bulk of their adult lives elsewhere but now find themselves back in Gilead at the family homestead. Like Joey, Glory and Jack have had a love/hate relationship with their home, running away from it yet being pulled back by its force as well as its comfort. As Robinson’s narrator writes of the Boughton children, “Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile” (282).

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The imaginative visions of Robinson and Updike converge most closely in Home and “A Sandstone Farmhouse,” where home carries a substantive weight and central importance. Serving as the core site of one’s identity as well as a storehouse of memories, the home exerts a strong sense of push and pull: characters escape only to be drawn back. A subtle distinction, however, can be discerned through the protagonists’ future plans for their family home. Though this distinction applies specifically to these two works of fiction, it may hint at a larger difference between Robinson, whose novels increasingly reveal the persistence and tangibility of home, and Updike, whose writings posit home nostalgically as a place from which an escape has already been made. Though troubled by nightmares that she will inherit the Boughton family homestead, which is what will happen, Robinson’s Glory accepts that responsibility and seems likely to spend her remaining years in Gilead. Updike’s Joey, however, plans to put the sandstone farmhouse on the market. While gender and cultural history (Robinson’s novel is set nearly a half century prior to Updike’s story) afford Updike’s male character more options and freedom than Robinson’s heroine, a slight difference between the characters, as well as the writers, may be detected. For Updike’s Joey, home is a place that is gone, existing only in nostalgic memory, which makes it more desirable; for Robinson’s Glory, home remains more persistently tangible and available, which is perhaps why it is also more burdensome. Works Cited Amis, Martin. “Magnanimous in a Big Way.” Review of Odd Jobs, by John Updike. New York Times Book Review (December 10, 1991): 12. Balliett, Whitney. “The American Expression.” Review of Rabbit, Run, by John Updike. New Yorker (November 5, 1960): 222–24. Chandler, Marilyn. Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1991. Churchwell, Sarah. “A Man of Sorrows.” Review of Home, by Marilynne Robinson. The Guardian (October 4, 2008): 6. Fay, Sarah. “Marilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction No. 198.” The Paris Review 186 (Fall 2008): 37–66. Howard, Jane. “Can a Nice Novelist Finish First? (1966).” Conversations with John Updike. Ed. James Plath. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. (9–17). Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “Considering the Plainness of Marilynne Robinson’s Novel Gilead.” New York Times (January 2, 2005): C8.

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O’Connell, Mark. “The First Church of Marilynne Robinson.” New Yorker. n. pag. Web May 30 2012. Painter, Rebecca M. “Further Thoughts on A Prodigal Son Who Cannot Come Home, on Loneliness and Grace: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Christianity and Literature 58.3 (Spring 2009): 485–92. Robinson, Marilynne. “At Play in the Backyard of the Psyche.” Review of Trust Me, by John Updike. New York Times Book Review (April 26 1987): 1, 44–1,45. ———. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. New York: Picador, 1998. ———. Gilead. New York: Picador, 2004. ———. Home. New York: Picador, 2008. ———. Housekeeping. New York: Picador, 1980. ———. “Language Is Smarter Than We Are.” New York Times Book Review 11 January 1987: 8. ———. “Let’s Not Talk Down to Ourselves.” New York Times Book Review 5 April 1987: 11. Schiff, James. “The Pocket Nothing Else Will Fill: Updike’s Domestic God” in John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace. Ed. James Yerkes. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. (50–63). Scott, A.O. “Return of the Prodigal Son.” Review of Home, by Marilynne Robinson. New York Times (September 21, 2008): 16–17. Updike, John. Collected Later Stories. Ed. Christopher Carduff. New York: Library of America, 2013. ———. “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood.” Assorted Prose. New York: Knopf, 1965. (151–87). ———. The Early Stories 1953–1975. New York: Knopf, 2003. ———. A Month of Sundays. New York: Knopf, 1975. ———. “One Big Interview.” Picked-Up Pieces. New York: Knopf, 1976. (491–519). ———. Rabbit, Run. 1960. New York: Ballantine, 1996. ———. Rabbit Is Rich. 1981. New York: Ballantine, 1996. ———. “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington.” Self-Consciousness. New York: Knopf, 1989. (3–41). ———. Trust Me. New York: Knopf, 1987. Wallace, David Foster. “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think.” Review of Toward the End of Time. In Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. New York: Back Bay, 2006. (51–59). Wood, James. “Acts of Devotion.” Review of Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. New York Times Book Review (November 28, 2004): 1, 10–11.

An Interview with Marilynne Robinson Jason Stevens Abstract The interview proceeds according to a four-part structure: (1) questions that address a few of the major critical approaches that have responded to Robinson’s work, (2) questions that ask Robinson to expand on the treatment of gender and sexuality in her fiction, (3) questions that concern 19th century American literary genres and potential areas of dialogue with Robinson’s literary projects past and present, (4) questions that solicit Robinson’s opinions on active debates over the place of religion in modern life, in American history, and in contemporary fiction.

In June 2014 I contacted Marilynne Robinson requesting that she do a written interview keyed to this volume. She kindly consented. Once she received the questions, she returned her responses in September 2014. I have not edited her remarks. They appear here as I received them. Stevens: Scholars have claimed you for the literary traditions of New England as well as the West and the Midwest. Where is the meeting point between these traditions in your understanding? How has each spoken to the other in your writing? Robinson: Since I am interested in 19th century American history, I am very aware of the diffusion of New England culture through the Midwest and the West, always changed by the specifics of time and place. The very important model of the intentional community, a society based on collaboration, the realization of shared beliefs about what is good and to be desired, comes from the early history of Massachusetts and New England generally. The South was settled on the conventional pattern of European colonization. Capital and population flowed into an agriculture with known economic value in European markets. New England was settled in the first place by groups moved by religious loyalties and by the desire to create or restore a way of life that would be answerable to their beliefs—economic viability came later. The settlers of the Middle West often repeated this pattern—Lawrence, Kansas is a good example, one of many. The flow of population into the West became especially important after the Civil War, and except for religious groups like the Mormons it was influenced less by ideas of community, more by Thoreauvian or Whitmanesque visions of an autonomous life in nature—and perhaps influenced as well by the disillusionments of the War, and the excitements of what must have seemed

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almost another New World. In any case, there are elements of New England influence running through the history and culture of all these regions. In the matter of community versus autonomy, they are often in conflict, one seeming conformist to its critics, and the other, ungenerous. Each has its poetry. Stevens: Conversing with theories of “affect” in literary studies, Carolyn Allen devotes her essay in this volume to “felt experience” in Housekeeping and Home. She notes that even when it is accompanied by anguish, loneliness in your fiction is never depressing.1 In marked contrast to the psychological literature on loneliness that views it as a disease or an impairment, you privilege it as a source for some of your characters’ most profound acts. Reverend Ames in Gilead, for example, uses his private journaling to speak to his son across the gulf of time, to reconcile with his father, to uncover his hardness toward his godson, and to prepare himself to give the blessing that distills his life’s purpose. As another one of our contributors states, “[t]he preacher, now relieved of his psychological pain and fears as a result of his journal writing, can see the world anew, for he himself has been transfigured.”2 Why do you think that we have come to pathologize loneliness? In the lectures collected in Absence of Mind, you blame “parasciences” for helping to undermine our belief in the value of introspection and reflective solitude. What other cultural factors may be contributing to our inability to finely discriminate and weigh the aspects of inward experience? Robinson: Frankly, I cannot imagine that I could find the richness and pleasure I do find in loneliness if I were not religious. This is not to say religion is necessary if one is to enjoy loneliness, only that in my case my consciousness has formed itself around certain givens—that existence is profoundly meaningful, and that it endlessly rewards observation and reflection for this reason. Loneliness is a radical experience of self. Or soul. A great privilege, and a way to learn about humanity at the closest possible range. We tend to pathologize whatever we can’t account for, whatever falls outside a certain conceptual vocabulary. Consciousness as a phenomenon eludes scientific understanding, and consciousness as experience involves a sense of self that present vocabulary effectively disallows. A mind can enjoy consciousness, even extremes of consciousness, like loneliness, in the same way that it can enjoy (since enjoying is a phenomenon of mind) physical vigor, even 1 “The Privilege of Loneliness, the Kindness of Home: “Felt Experience’ in the Writing of Marilynne Robinson,” appearing in this volume. 2 Quotation from Janella Moy, “Marilynne Robinson’s Merging of Medicine and Literature: Therapeutic Journaling as Balm in Gilead,” appearing this volume.

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extreme exertion. Any scientist will say the brain is physical, so this should be no surprise. We are told that a basic motive, beyond survival though helpful to it, is to be optimally situated in a human group. This makes loneliness a symptom of failure, with the implication that happiness in all cases is a product of relationship and acceptance. It is an assumption that embitters a great part of the experience of a great many people, creating pathologies of anxiety and self-doubt, and that puts unrealistic, even merciless, pressures on relationships, which are seldom as deeply sustaining as they are said to be. On these grounds relationships are often undervalued, even abandoned in the hope of finding better, and stabilizing ethics, of loyalty or obligation, for example, lose meaning. I know conservatives claim these values, but I haven’t noticed that they are especially inclined to demonstrate them in their behavior, so I do not acknowledge any title to them on the part of any group. Stevens: Ecocriticism, the study of literature and the natural world for sources of environmental ethics, has been drawn to your work, most especially Housekeeping and Mother Country.3 George Handley, an eminent ecocritic and contributor to this volume, uses your work to criticize deficiencies in the ecological imagination, namely a tendency to dualize culture and Nature, human and non-human. Do you agree that these dualisms obscure the negative effects of environmental abuse on populations, and disproportionately on poorer ones? If I might ask a further sub-question, are you pleased that your work has attracted attention from ecocriticism? Robinson: I am very happy to know that critics who concern themselves with environmental issues look at my books from this point of view, especially Mother Country, a difficult book to write for a great many reasons, which has been more or less ignored by other readers. It did persuade me that the cost in human well being as a part of the calculations that go into economic decisions can be valued at almost nothing. And this has meant that depredations of the human environment can survive cost/benefit analysis, though a rational accounting would find the cost staggering and the “benefits” not worthy of the name. Americans have very fixed ideas—that government owned industries like British nuclear waste reprocessing will not be fiercely profit-driven, for example, or that a national health service like Britain’s will have accessible and transparent health statistics. Assumptions by themselves make us blind to environmental enormities, industries that are disasters in their routine functioning, without error, without accident. We have not been given any sense of 3 “Religion, Literature, and the Environment in the Work of Marilynne Robinson,” appearing in this volume. See also Chad Wrigelsworth, “Becoming a Creature of Artful Existence: Theolo­ gical Perception and Ecological Design in Gilead.”

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the actual state of the global environment. American Greenpeace was no help to me in writing the book, though I did find interesting their pamphlets claiming to have “scored a ban” on sea dumping of nuclear waste—a ban honored in the breach every single day as they surely knew. British Greenpeace sued me for damaging their reputation, though I grieve at my failure to have done so. My efforts might have had more success if they had not succeeded in having the British edition banned and pulped. Be that as it may. Toxic waste from rich countries is dumped in poor countries and so on. These stories do emerge from time to time, implying to the citizens of rich countries that their own lives are valued. But it all comes to the same thing. Abuse of the natural environment involves contempt for the health and life of human beings, in sub-Saharan Africa or coastal Europe. Statistics that do not reflect this are not to be believed, as a matter of common sense. We have factored ourselves out of the inventories of species made to reckon damage, no doubt because evidence of health consequences for human beings as well as cetaceans and amphibians would have inevitable economic and political consequences. Many good things would come with our re-learning profound respect for our very unique species, not in the gross but life by life. None would be better than the protection of air, water, earth and sea. Stevens: Since the publication of Housekeeping, the novel has been the subject of numerous commentaries that have expanded upon the book’s apparent feminist markers. Reviewing this literature, the scholar Christine Caver observes that a number of these readings have sounded notes of “joyous liberation” over the book’s conclusion, finding it a heroic climax to your rewriting of “doomed female quest romances from the past.”4 Like Caver, I have always been challenged by Ruth and Sylvie’s embrace of nomadism and the former’s leaning into wild Nature to escape civilization’s illusions. The novel seems too plangent for the triumphal notes that some critics have sounded over Ruth and Sylvie’s radical choice to live as invisible persons. Here I am reminded of a statement from your introduction to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: “Society is natural in the sense that it makes Nature habitable.”5 Do you believe that commentators on Housekeeping who set Ruth and Sylvie heroically against Fingerbone and the social world beyond it are too starkly equating Nature with liberation and civilization with patriarchal oppression? Are they guilty of what you have called (again, in the 4 Caver, “Nothing Left to Lose” 112. See Selected Bibliography for complete citation. Corina Crisu, in her essay for this volume, “At Home with Transience: Reconfiguring Female Characters in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” addresses the history of feminist commentary on Housekeeping. 5 See Selected Bibliography for complete citation. xix.

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Chopin piece): “the habit of assuming that feminism must always take conflict between individualist women and social expectations as its primary subject”? Robinson: I grew up in a place where stepping out of society was one option, not often chosen but live all the same. I did wander in the woods, and I had endless fantasies about disappearing into them, wonderful, engrossing fantasies. It was a way of understanding lives that were mythic there, the lives of settlers and Indians. Of course it had its edges, its perils. Its gloom, in fact. All wonderful.6 I really did not associate happiness with society, though I satisfied all the expectations, so far as I know. The attraction of wilderness really need not have anything to do with the rejection of civilization. It is sufficient unto itself. Fingerbone feels the same pull Ruthie does. I always thought of  Housekeeping as a song, never as a sociological or psychological model. I wanted to give the place a music that would evoke its atmosphere—which has more to do with vastness and emptiness than with the lives lived on its edges. I don’t even consider Sylvie, Ruth and Lucille fully distinct characters. They are a suite of impulses—yearnings, regrets, loyalties, intentions—that could occur together in one mind. I thought of them in this way as I wrote it, because I was disturbed by the flatness of most fictional characters. Stevens: This past semester I had the pleasure of teaching your fiction along with several other recent authors’. The students said that they were impressed by the ease with which you in particular moved between the perspectives of male and female characters without attributing distinctly different motives, values, or perceptions to them based on their genders. How would you respond to Virginia Woolf’s idea that genius authors have androgynous imaginations? Robinson: I have not had any problem writing male characters that men experience as male. I have no theory about this, or about the problems other writers encounter. Since Sophocles at least men have created female characters successfully. I fail to see why women should not do the equivalent. To see it as a problem seems to be to assume some imaginative disability in them. I am too good a feminist to have much patience with that idea. Stevens: Fiction, like the rest of our culture, has become very voluble on the subject of sexuality, making it central to the construction of characters’ depths, if not the key to their self-fulfillment and self-knowledge. In your novels, there is obviously sex happening: adults fall in love, illicit relationships go on, children are born in marriages and outside of them. However, I think it is fair to say 6 Compare Jonathan Arac and Susan Balée’s discussion of the sublime in Ruth’s imagining, “Housekeeping, Wordsworth, and the Sublimity of Unsurrendered Wilderness,” appearing in this volume.

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that you are more restrained touching the subjects of sex (intercourse) and sexuality (desire, attraction, erotic response) than some of your contemporaries. Ruth and her sister go through puberty in Housekeeping, but nowhere does Ruth mention having any sexual awareness. One might say that Ruth’s silence on this matter is appropriate to her consciousness since she longs to be excarnated. Yet the relationships in Home offers several opportunities for exploring passion and physical intimacy: Jack’s affair with Annie, Della and Jack’s common law marriage, Glory’s failed romance with a adulterous man (it is never clear whether that relationship was consummated). Other writers would have exploited these opportunities by delving into characters’ sensuous experience and longing. In offering this observation, I don’t mean to imply that your novels suffer from omission. I would appreciate it, however, if you could comment on your choice of narrative emphasis and how it reflects your sense of where sex and sexuality factor in human happiness and the goods of life. When do you think it is aesthetically justified for an author to write about sex and sexuality? Robinson: I’m sure if I ever felt a sex scene was called for in a fiction of mine I’d provide it with one. In many novels these scenes seem arbitrary, obligatory, the guild mark of the serious writer. And they are highly conventionalized, which means that they in fact do very little in the way of characterization. I suppose it is obvious from what I have said above that to my mind the weight of self-fulfillment and self-knowledge is both greater and differently distributed than the assumptions about sexuality you describe would imply. So my emphasis is inevitably different. Stevens: You have many times praised 19th century American literature for its capacity to use metaphor to grasp the “emblematic” nature of experience.7 One aspect of this tradition that seems to have had less impact on your imagination is the Gothic, concerned with Faustian heroes, radical evil, and the corruptibility of man. I suppose if there is any trace of the Gothic in your fiction it would Ruth’s awareness of the ambiguity of Nature’s surfaces: the cosmos seems less like a home than like the black lake, containing mystery and death. Yet the lake never seems to conceal some sort of conspiracy against man, as the white whale, for example, strikes Ahab in Moby-Dick. Could Ruth remotely be considered a type of Faustian heroine? You do write about sinfulness, but rarely if ever does it evoke metaphysical terror. The closest that you approach this frisson is in Gilead when Ames recalls 7 Quoted from Interview with Thomas Schaub, 1994. See Selected Bibliography for complete citation.

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the aftermath of the unsolved murder that occurred in town when he was a child; the incident and the town’s uneasy reaction evoke the story of Cain, though in this case there is no visibly marked killer to absorb God’s curse. Elsewhere in the novel and its successor Home, the problem of sin is represented, on the one hand, through subtle explorations of familial mistrust and love’s withholding; on the other hand, through characters’ varied responses to the historic injustice of racism. Some of the greatest treatments of race in American literature—Light in August, Invisible Man, Beloved, among others—have built upon Gothic conventions, but in contrast to these, you choose instead to imply violence instead of dramatizing it and to make the bloody past a spur to forgiveness and hope rather than a haunted place in your characters’ psyches. Is the Gothic simply less compelling to you as a literary mode than other aspects of 19th century literature? Robinson: This is an interesting question for which I really wish I had an answer. There is a kind of dualism in the Gothic mode that I guess I find too easy. For the concept of evil in any sense to be meaningful to me it has to be embedded in the complexity of things. To appraise evil honestly there has to be a humility of perspective. To epitomize it in beings and actions is not quite honest. I think one reason horror movies become increasingly horrible is the felt need to put the utter refusal of compassion to the villain on acceptable grounds by making him purely and utterly evil—thereby freeing the hero to carry out horrible revenge. The old Gothic had roots in old enormities and had recourse to folkloric accounts of them in terms of vampires, werewolves, zombies and so on. As a strain in deep cultural memory, if it is authentic, this is interesting, even darkly informative. The commercialization of it—no. Ruthie’s lake and woods are dark and dangerous, and enchanting on these grounds as well as others. It is relative to a human presence that they are dark and dangerous, not in themselves, of course. And relative to a human presence that they are hauntingly beautiful. If one is Faustian on the grounds that one makes deep and urgent inquiry into the nature of things, I  would say God gives us eyes and a mind in the hope that we will all be Faustians. Stevens: There is a strong anti-Calvinist vein in 19th century American literature, expressed, for examples, in the novels of Catherine Sedgwick (A New England Tale), Harriet Beecher Stowe (The Minister’s Wooing), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (The Gate Ajar), Sylvester Judd (Margaret), and Lydia Maria Child (Hobomok). These novelists conceived literature as a civic project for envisioning a democratic republic, a project for which you have expressed admiration. However, they portray major points of Calvinism, as known from the Westminster Confession and the writings of Jonathan Edwards and

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William Ames, as inimical to republican values and virtuous spiritual development. Rachel Griffis, in this volume, demonstrates that Sedgwick and Stowe use the Parable of the Prodigal Son—which you brilliantly mine for its biblical and theological valences in Gilead and Home—to overturn Calvinism.8 Through stories about parents (or step-parents) and children, Stowe and Sedgwick attack Calvinism for denigrating human agency, depriving people of hope, costing them loss of faith, promoting elitism, and fostering human vanity and self-righteousness. Do you believe that anti-Calvinist writers were guilty of not reading widely or deeply enough in the tradition they attacked? Are they fairly responding to religious misuses of Calvinism in the New World? Robinson: There is a great diversity of definition of the terms of Christianity among its various traditions. I have said that I did not have an especially strong religious upbringing and that I came to theology on my own, more or less. When I did come to it, however, I realized that I was brought up in an atmosphere that was in fact Calvinist. One consequence of this was that the understanding of sin—a word I very seldom heard, though the concept was familiar enough—gave it so broad a meaning, and made it so relativized by circumstance, that it was simply a condition to be assumed, as well of one person as the next, as well of oneself as anyone else. One person might steal, another harbor resentment, another commit adultery. These were all grave as violations of the will of God, their seriousness in any case known only to God, who is aware of circumstances and ready to be gracious. To suppose oneself to be without sin was a great sin. All this seems very biblical to me, and in any case it is very Calvinist. Sinfulness is a state of being, not a set of particular acts that can be isolated and numbered. In the matter of Civil Rights, people who saw the struggle on television and wished things would just quiet down and get back to normal vastly outnumbered those who actively tried to suppress the movement. Yet they were fully as instrumental in suppressing civil rights as the segregationists in the streets, in the fact of indifference to justice, which for the Prophets and Calvin is a very grave sin. I think there is a danger of exculpation of society at large in the tendency to isolate evil in those who are most directly its agents. This is valuable, too, of course. But entrenched social evil has vast numbers of collaborators. In the prophetic tradition, indifference is not a synonym for innocence, but for guilt. So let us say that Jack’s sins are socially acknowledged as sins, while those of his society are not yet acknowledged.

8 “Sentimentality and Grace: Marilynne Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Prodigal Son Narratives,” appearing in this volume.

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The distinction that seems so readily available between the transgressor and the “good people” is false, and only Jack can begin to understand this.9 In a Catholic society those who take exception to the prevailing order criticize Catholicism, often in terms of its failure to live up to its own best impulses. So with Islam, so with Calvinism. It is important to remember that Calvinist New England—the South was Anglican and Anabaptist—was in many ways the most liberal society in the world in its time. If one were to compare the legal status of women, the levels of literacy and so on with the South or with Britain and Europe the differences would be very strikingly in New England’s favor. And of course it began to rid itself of slavery as soon as independence from Britain, the great slave trader of the period, was realized. The fact that gloomy illiberalism is associated with this region, when the South and Europe grew very rich on a vast trade in human souls, when Catholics and non-­ Anglican Protestants were denied basic civil rights in Britain, and when in Europe the Inquisition was up and running, simply shows what nonsense received history can be. Since political liberalism was something of a novelty then, the traditions of the culture may indeed have constrained social advances. But there were two models for republican government in the world at the time, Holland and Geneva, both Calvinist. No doubt there were criticisms to be made if reforms were to advance. But the impulses toward social reform were Calvinist. Again, compare Europe in the period, and the American South. Stevens: If I may continue with the topic of Calvinism, one of our essay contributors, Mark S.M. Scott, has argued that Gilead and Home make us see Jack’s life in light of divine mystery that subverts the doctrine of double-predestination. I understand if you are reluctant to interpret your own work, but since Jack’s quandary has received so much attention in the critical literature, I’d like to press you a bit further on the soteriological issue that haunts him. Is it fair to say that you are prompting readers to think about the limits of theology as a human discourse? Can theology do harm if it overreaches and becomes too systematic? Did Calvinists, in this corner of Reformed thinking at least, become guilty of such overreaching; i.e. did they force a resolution to the problem of predestination that fails to harmonize the integrity of human freedom and the divine origin of salvation? Your very choice of a storytelling mode seems itself to resist the thrust toward resolution and reduction that can afflict logic in

9 In Home, Jack is disturbed by his Presbyterian father’s complacent reaction to the Civil Rights struggle. Yumi Pak, in this volume, finds Robinson’s handling of race and racism in the novel faulty, though on non-theological grounds. See “‘Jack Boughton has a wife and a child’: Generative Blackness in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.”

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many domains, not excluding theology; as our contributor puts it: “Systems often overreach, whereas stories draw us into the realities they describe.”10 Robinson: No one knows what time is, no one knows what causality is. This is the state of those questions, scientifically speaking. In the absence of any useful way to think about either of them, I feel I would simply be repeating an ancient error if I were to put together any sort of teleology, predestination or some alternative, on the basis of the commonsense understanding of time and causality, which is all we have. Quantum entanglement raises profound mysteries around both of them. Determinist arguments in theology have traditionally been based on Scriptural references to election in some form, of which there are many. The Reformation position has been that “good works” that are meant or hoped to put God under obligation are corrupted in the fact that they misunderstand the nature of God and of the human relationship to him. One should do the will of God for the love of God, who acts justly, graciously and freely. It isn’t hard to find analogs in human behavior, the friend who is considerate out of love and the friend who is considerate in the hope of future favors. Predestination puts every impulse toward manipulation out of play. And it makes moot the notion that the spiritual status of anyone in the eyes of God can be judged by earthly appearances. At the time of the Reformation it was fairly common for the wealthy to give money so that great numbers of prayers and masses would be said for their souls, this to enhance their places in the afterlife. Predestination—which went back at least to Augustine, by the way— in Reformation thinking precluded this kind of seeking of advantage on the part of the rich. It was a corrective against practices in need of correction, and it brought attention to the fact that human worth and merit are profoundly complicated things, that our sense of justice is terribly flawed, and that God’s knowledge of us may be infinitely unlike our knowledge of ourselves. That said, we lack the conceptual terms to make a useful approach to the question, and so has everyone since Augustine. Stevens: In the last two decades, the classic secularization thesis (as formulated by Max Weber, among others) has come under fire in the humanities and the social sciences. According to the critiques of this thesis, modernization does not, as classically predicted, require the decline of religion in the sense of its privatization or its discrediting by the rationalization/disenchantment of the world. Would you go so far as to say that secularization is a “failed” historical process?

10

Mark S.M. Scott, “In the Face of Mystery: Soteriological Symbolism in Gilead and Home,” appearing in this volume.

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Rather than being a “failure,” is secularization simply uneven in its effects? Even when religion flourishes in modernity, is it not transformed by its contact with secular thought and practices? Does Christianity in the United States today, for example, mean the same thing as it did even a hundred years ago, much less under ancient conditions? Robinson: I think it is again necessary to stop and think about what is meant by the word. If increasingly diverse societies create larger civic spaces where no specific religious identity is asserted, they are doing this to allow for the equal flourishing of a variety of religious cultures. This has been characteristic of much of this country through most of its history, and we have—no doubt partly for this reason—various, vigorous and harmonious religions. Secularism that is the denial of the value of religion, or outright suppression of it as in the former Soviet Union, is another thing altogether. This old theory does not take this great difference into account. It was first of all the Puritans who put no creches in their commons, no crosses on their churches. This was often misread as secularism, when the reasons for it were wholly religious. Max Weber is no hero of mine. He was one in a great movement toward slovenly generalization. Weber died in 1920, when the great dynasties of Europe were still falling, the Continent was in ashes, and the Russian Revolution dominated the news. He’d have lived most of his life before electric light. The “modern” world of his experience could provide as little basis for projecting the future as any present time will do. Why we cling to these notions I don’t know. In any case, history demonstrates the human tropism toward religion, and we’re all human still. Absolutely everything is transformed by the passage of time. I just wrote an essay that suggested that modern audiences are not sensitive to the importance of servants in Shakespeare because we have lost a sense of the importance of the Servant as a theologically resonant role and presence. This loss, a consequence of positive social change, still has to have changed our understanding of Christianity as well. Shakespeare lived in a period of outrageous violence on the part of the powerful, and amazingly this seems not to have jarred seriously with their notions of Christian behavior. I would say that the religion is complex enough, and its texts and images are powerful enough, that it persists as itself through extreme differences in cultural and historical interpretation. Stevens: You have spoken quite favorably of secularism as a positive for democracy and for the practice of religion. Some critics of the secularization thesis argue that secularism is not only a blinkered modern worldview, but also itself a powerful and intolerant theology that is erected on Western religious foundations (some would say specifically “Protestant” foundations). This is a view of secularism that is not only articulated by religious fundamentalisms and

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European conservative political theology, but also, increasingly, by parts of academia that identify with the political Left. How would you respond to this view? Robinson: I would have to have a long talk with exponents of this view to know exactly what they mean by secularism and its variants. Secularism as anti-clericalism arose in France and flourished gaudily during the French Revolution. That is to say, it arose and has persisted very strongly in a culture that is historically Catholic. During the same period Protestantism in England surged, especially in the form of Methodism, and America experienced its Great Awakenings. Atheistic secularism emerged in the Russian Revolution and persisted in a culture that is historically Orthodox. That Protestant influence lay behind either seems to me most unlikely. Then there was the imposed secularism of Maoist China, which I believe was fundamentally Confucian. I really don’t know where these theories come from. They do sound important, though, and they have been influential, I’ll grant that. Stevens: In a widely cited academic book from a few years ago, Partial Faiths, author John McClure discusses religion and spirituality in contemporary fiction, focusing particularly on the oeuvres of Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, and Louise Erdrich. McClure argues that contemporary fiction rejects both secularism and fundamentalism, instead offering “a simultaneous reassertion and weakening of religiosity.” He means that these fictions endorse spiritual searching: trying out religions, making partial conversions, hybridizing different traditions, and seeking ways to re-enchant the world. McClure says that “the strategy of perhaps” allows these writers and their characters to entertain a world in which a plurality of faiths might make sense.11 Partial Faiths does not address Gilead and was published before Home. I think that those novels would have complicated McClure’s thesis. Both of them contain major characters whose faith is firmly grounded in a long-standing and literate theological tradition. The Ames men, Old Boughton, and Glory do not hold their faith unquestioningly; the novels show us the existential side of belief. However, they do not embrace weak theology, experiment with religions, make noncommittal conversions, or practice syncretic spirituality. Even Jack Boughton, the most doubtful character in the texts, is framing his questions using the terminology of Calvinism and citing relevant biblical texts. Do you see yourself as an exception among contemporary writers for asking your readers to engage with a “strong” form of religiosity?

11

John McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. Athens, ga: University of Georgia Press, 2007. (14).

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Robinson: I think these writers want to give expression to a sense of sacredness in being that precedes and also exists beside more formal and ritualized expressions of it. St. Paul quotes Greek pagan poetry to Athenians to convey his understanding of God, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” Aquinas made great use of Aristotle. Calvin quotes freely from pagan philosophers, and from Roman Catholic theologians as well. The middle ages were much influenced by Jewish and Islamic scholars. The idea that one system of belief must categorically exclude others seems to me to have arisen about when people stopped reading and teaching theology. Our idea of what a “strong theology” would look like or mean is really the result of speculation colored by more than a little condescension. The great theologians themselves, from Paul onward, were much interested in the inarticulable every religion tries to find words for. Solomon built his Temple on the model of pagan temples, enlisting their artisans. This should tell us something about his thoughts on the religious sensibilities of Tyre and Sidon. I find my “strong theology” extraordinarily beautiful, and I love all the thought and learnedness, and the great seriousness, I find in it. That said, the choices these other writers make are interesting and very fruitful. A movement back toward the sense of sacredness is more likely than sectarianism to refresh our sense of the meaning of religion and theology as well. Stevens: In her study of American literature since 1960, Postmodern Belief, Amy Hungerford calls you exceptional for investing your fiction with extended passages showing the main character’s contemplation of belief. She argues that Gilead is reminiscent of the type of philosophical novels that Saul Bellow wrote in the 1950s and 1960s (Herzog, for instance), except that John Ames presupposes the meaningfulness of dogma and ritual that elicit his speculations. Highlighting your attention to involved, internal reflection on doctrine, Hungerford says that you move in the opposite direction of dominant trends in the social sciences; these trends have de-emphasized belief-as-thought and said that belief is not definitive of religious experience, a notion said to be derived from Protestant influence. You have described your rapture in “religious experience,” calling it “the most profound, most aesthetically instructive, most thought-liberating” that you have ever had, including within it “the universe of religious thought and art and music… [the felt] rightness of religious insights and obligations.”12 Do you believe that it is misleading to relegate ­contemplation of belief to a minor portion of religion? How does thinking about one’s beliefs support the senses of “obligation” and “liberation”? I am

12

Interview with Rebecca Painter, 2009, 486. See Selected Bibliography for complete citation.

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addressing you, of course, as a Protestant, but do you think that what you have  described of your own life and depicted in Ames is generalizable to other faiths? Robinson: Again, the word “belief” is a problem. Very often it has meant doctrinal belief—in the presence of the actual body and blood of Christ in the consecrated host, for example. Or that, among the Persons of the Trinity, the Son proceeded from the Father. These are not Protestant dogmas, and the thought that has developed around them is not Protestant. I am not sure what is meant by the word “Protestant,” either. It is the largest religious category in the United States and Northern Europe, significant in much of Asia, growing in Latin America, and yet it is treated as if it were marginal and exotic. It has always been diverse, and there are no doubt sects who have taken positions on tenets like these, as there are sects to which they seem to be attempts overstep the limited human capacity for understanding and final definition. Mainline Protestantism encourages reflection on experience of every kind on the assumption that it is profoundly meaningful—consider the heavens, consider the lilies of the field. Belief is taken to change and develop in the course of a life spent reflecting. I don’t think religion exists in the abstract, defined by more or less intrinsic thought content. The Protestant tradition I have lived with is a great stimulus to thought, invaluable in this, for my purposes. These great questions are really splendid things, vast and luminous spaces, and much brilliant work has been devoted to them. I assume they are accessible to anyone, and that they are a gift of grace. Contemporary social sciences have trouble dealing with thought and inwardness, with the distinctive subjectivity of individuals, in all areas, so it is hardly to be expected that they would grant it much place in religion. Stevens: Christian fiction had a major boom in the last two decades, with the sales of The Left Behind series and its dvd adaptations highlighting the market. Examples of Christian fiction include not only the now overexposed genre of apocalyptic thrillers, but also romances, Westerns, novelizations of Bible stories, and historical novels. Some of these genres, of course, are older than Lew Wallace’s Ben-hur, but the activity in this market has been attracting more attention from academics, not to mention major store chains like Wal-mart. Do you have an opinion on any of this fiction? Can you comment on its strategy of broadening the appeal of religious fiction by blending Biblical messages with popular story-telling modes? Catholic convert Graham Greene managed to write crime, espionage, and adventure novels that were aesthetically well wrought and theologically speculative. G.K. Chesterton created the witty Father Brown detective stories. Do you see any potential in the present wave of Christian fiction?

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Robinson: In the kind of literature you describe, no. These are exploitations of a tradition to which they contribute nothing. In fact they make Christianity look like nonsense. Ben-Hur, by the way, deserves more credit than to be listed here. It has a Christian perspective, but its hero is a very noble Jewish man who does not abandon his Judaism to convert to Christianity, though his life is blessed by its intersection with Christ. In a period during which anti-Semitism was rising in Europe—above the chronic levels that were usual—it was a very striking book, unique in its treatment of its subject, and the most popular book in the u.s. between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone With the Wind. Lew Wallace dealt fictionally with the theological question of the relation of Christianity with the older faith, and he did it thoughtfully, irenically. Perhaps he spared this country the prevalence of negative Jewish stereotypes that colored attitudes elsewhere. Stevens: The late John Updike (1932–2009) was for four decades the most acclaimed Protestant author in the U.S. His faith, though different from yours denominationally,13 was also very much part of his fiction and his public profile, for which he occasionally met controversy.14 Is he a writer to which you have paid attention? If so, has he been an influence on your work in any way? Or a contemporary whom you esteem? Do you have any thoughts as to why you have encountered less resistance from critics who found Updike’s faith or its literary expression distasteful or complacent?15 Robinson: John Updike loomed large in my youth, and I read some of his books and especially admired his short fiction. His career was clearly not much impeded by whatever objections his religious themes aroused. Religion is so ancient an element in narratives of every kind that an affinity between the two should not really seem so remarkable to anyone. For writers with a religious habit of thought, fiction has always been an occasion to explore reality in these terms. In this sense they write for themselves, and are not greatly concerned

13 14

15

Robinson is a Congregationalist. Updike was reared Lutheran, but, subsequent to his return to Christian belief in 1955, worshipped Episcopalian. For example, Robinson’s Gilead and Home won praise from famed literary critic and reviewer James Wood, who is known for his case that firm religious belief is bad for the art of the novel. “Fiction asks us to judge its reality; religion asserts its reality,” Wood states in The Broken Estate, which includes his negative assessment, “John Updike’s Complacent God.” The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. New York: Picador, 2010. (xxi). For further examples of critics who have quarreled with Updike’s Christianity, see William Pritchard’s study, John Updike: America’s Man of Letters. i, 196–197, 217–219, 229, 309–311. Updike scholar James Schiff compares the two authors in his essay for this volume, “Robinson and Updike: Houses, Domesticity, and the Numinous Quotidian.”

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with pleasing every critic. I suppose the cultural climate has changed. Perhaps in the last few decades religion has receded so far as an element in fiction that it has a certain newness when it does appear. Stevens: Scholars such as Paul Giles, Jenny Franchot, and Tracy Fessenden have written eloquently about the Catholic presence in American literature, pointing out that it represents a kind of counter-tradition to the dominant Protestant and post-Protestant character of the American canon. Giles, for instance, has argued that “Catholic realism” diverges from the transcendental otherworldliness and yearning for perfectibility that runs through the American romance (influenced, he says, by the Puritans and their descendants). Catholic realism, instead, invests the mundane world, most especially social bonds, with sacramental value. Do agree that the works of American Catholic authors—Kate Chopin, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, J. F, Powers, to name but a few—constitute a counter-tradition to the canon? What inspiration have you found in American Catholic fictions? Robinson: Accidents of history, including the English Civil War and persecution in France, delivered a good many Puritans to these shores very early in the colonial period. Their culture as it had developed in Europe and England made them attach extraordinary importance to the written and printed word. That they were dominant in the early period was a matter of demographics—others came later. They produced a remarkable literature in fairly short order, not otherworldly, as I see it, but full of a sense that this world is suffused with meaning. The relationship of Ishmael and Queequeg is explicitly sacramental. There are such marked differences of time and circumstance between the Puritans and the Catholic writers you name, all of whom are relative moderns, that it would be difficult to compare them directly. The modern period everywhere defined itself by contradistinction to the received past. I have learned from all the good writers I have read, without special awareness of their denominations, if any.

Selected Bibliography Fiction ———. Housekeeping. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. ———. “Connie Bronson.” The Paris Review 100 (Summer–Fall, 1986): 294–302. ———. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. ———. Home. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. ———. Lila. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Nonfiction ———. The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. ———. Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. ———. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. ———. When I Was a Child, I Read Books. New York: Macmillan, 2012.

Essays ———. “The Hum Inside the Skull—A Symposium.” New York Times Review (May 13, 1984): 30. ———. “Writers and the Nostalgic Fallacy.” New York Times Review (October 13, 1985): 1, 34–35. ———. “Bad News from Britain.” Harper’s Magazine (February 1985): 65–72. ———. “Language is Smarter Than We Are.” About Books Column, New York Times (January 11, 1987): 8. ———. “Beyond the Pale with Edgar Allan Poe.” About Books Column, New York Times (February 8, 1987): 11. ———. “A Nasty, Empty, Dangerous Word.” About Books Column, New York Times (March 15, 1987): 10–11. ———. “Let’s Not Talk Down to Ourselves.” About Books Column, New York Times. (April 5, 1987): 11. ———. “At Play in the Backyard of the Psyche.” Review of John Updike, Trust Me. New York Times (April 26, 1987): 1, 44–45.

272

Selected Bibliography

———. “Marriage and Other Astonishing Bonds.” Review of Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From. New York Times (May 15, 1988): 1, 35, 40–41. ———. “Introduction” (1988). Kate Chopin. The Awakening. Bantam Classic, 2003 reissue. (vi–xxi). ———. “The Guilt She Left Behind” Review of Joyce Carol Oates, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. New York Times (April 22, 1990): 7, 9. ———. “When I Was a Child” The Brick Reader. eds. Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1991. A version of this essay also appeared as “My Western Roots” and the title essay of When I Was a Child I Read Books. ———. “My Western Roots” in Old West-New West: Centennial Essays. Ed. Barbara Meldum. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1993. (165–172). Reprinted as the title essay in When I Was a Child I Read Books. ———. “Hearing Silence: Western Myth Reconsidered” in The True Subject: Writers on Life and Craft. Eds. Jane Smiley and Kurt Brown. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1993. (135–151). ———. “Puritans and Prigs: An Anatomy of Zealotry.” Salmagundi.101/102 (Winter– Spring 1994): 36–54. Appears, slightly modified, as “Puritans and Prigs” in The Death of Adam. ———. “The Fate of Ideas: Consequences of Darwinism.” Salmagundi. 114–115 (Winter– Spring 1994): 13–14. Appears, slightly modified, as “Darwinism” in The Death of Adam. ———. Contribution to the symposium, “A Discussion: ‘The New Puritanism’ Reconsidered” (First Roundtable Panel: Robert Boyers, Rochelle Gurstein, Andrew Delbanco, Marilynne Robinson, James Miller, Alexander Nehamas) Salmagundi 106/107 (Spring–Summer 1995): 194–256. ———. “Modern Victorians: Dressing Politics in the Costume of History.” [Review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Demoralization of Society] Harper’s Magazine (July 1995): 72–77. ———. “On twentieth century reality.” Brick: A Literary Journal 55 (Fall 1996): 41–46. ———. “Gospels” in Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives. Ed. David Rosenberg. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. (133–150). Reprinted in as “Psalm Eight” in The Death of Adam. ———. “Walking with Christ in Gethsemane” in Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith. Ed. Susan Bergman. San Francisco: 1996. (155–168). Reprinted as “Dietrich Bonhoeffer” in The Death of Adam. ———. “Surrendering Wilderness.” Wilson Quarterly 22.4 (Autumn, 1998): 60–64. Reprinted as “Wilderness” in The Death of Adam and The Wilderness Debate Rages On. ———. “The Way We Work, The Way We Live.” Christian Century 115 (1998): 823–831. ———. “Delivering Darwin II: Signs of Struggle,” Salmagundi 118/119 (1998): 319–327. A response to Terence Diggory, “Delivering Darwin I: A Reply to Marilynne

Selected Bibliography

273

Robinson,” same issue. 311–318. Diggory’s essay, in return, was addressed to Robinson’s 1997 essay, “Consequences of Darwinism.” ———. “The Fate of Ideas: Moses.” Salmagundi 121/122 (1999): 23–46. Reprinted in Brick: A Literary Journal. 64 (Spring 2000): 31–44. ———. “Heresies and Real Presences.” Salmagundi 135/136 (Summer/Fall 2002): 30. ———. “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion,” Social Research 71:1 (Spring 2004): 29–38. Reprinted in the 2005 Picador edition of The Death of Adam. ———. “Freed.” Review of Stephen Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall, and Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains. New York Times (January 9, 2005). n. pag. Web. 29 Sept. 2014. ———. “Hysterical scientism: The ecstasy of Richard Dawkins.” Review of The God Delusion. Harper’s Magazine (November 2006): 84, 86. ———. “Onward, Christian Liberals.” American Scholar 75.2 (Spring 2006): 42–51. ———. “Hallowed Be Your Name” in Getting on Message: Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel. Ed. Peter Laarman. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. (1–12). ———. “Foreword.” John Calvin: Selections from His Writings. Ed. Emilie Griffin. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2006. (v–ix). ———. “Preface.” John Calvin: Steward of God’s Covenant. Eds. John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. (ix–xxvii). ———. “No Other Gods.” Theology Today 63 (2007): 425–432. ———. “Waiting to Be Remembered.” Amherst Magazine (Summer 2007). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014. ———. “That Highest Candle.” Review of Harold Bloom’s American Religious Poems. Poetry 190.2 (May 2007): 130. ——— and John Polkinghorne. “More is Dreamt of in Your Theologies” in The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World. Eds. Bob Abernethy and William Bole. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. (31–36). ———. “Wilderness” in The Wilderness Debate Rages On: Continuing the Great New Wilderness Debate. Eds. Michael P. Nelson and J. Baird Callicott Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008. (563–570). ———. “A Great Amnesia.” Harper’s Magazine (May 2008): 17–21. ———. “Calvinism as Metaphysics.” Toronto Journal of Theology 25/2 (Fall, 2009): 179. ———. “Risk the Game: On William James.” The Nation (December 13, 2010): 11–15. ———. “Wondrous Love.” Christianity and Literature 59:2 (Winter 2010): 203–215. Reprinted in When I Was a Child I Read Books. ———. “Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist.” The Nation (November 28, 2011): 27–35. Adapted from the essay “Austerity as Ideology” in When I Was a Child I Read Books.

274

Selected Bibliography

———. “What We May Be” [a reflection on the 400th anniversary of The King James Bible] in The Best Spiritual Writing 2013. Ed. Philip Zaleski. London: Penguin, 2012. (186–189). ———. “Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (February 12, 2012). n. pag. Web. 20 Sept. 2014. ———. “A Common Faith.” Guernica (March 1, 2012). n. pag. Web. 20 Sept. 2014. ———. “Imagination and Community: What Holds Us Together.” Commonweal 139.5 (March 9, 2012): 9–15. Excerpted from “Imagination and Community” in When I Was a Child I Read Books. ———. “Cosmology.” Brick: A Literary Journal 89 (Summer 2012): 50–64. Also printed in When I Was a Child I Read Books. ———. “Foreword” to William Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text. New York: Modern Library, 2012. (ix–xxi). ———. “Jonathan Edwards in a New Light.” HUMANITIES 35.6 (November/December 2014): 14–17, 45. ———. “On ‘Beauty’.” The World Split Open: Great Authors on How and Why We Write. Portland, OR: Tin House Books 2014. (121–139). ———. “On Edgar Allen Poe.” New York Review of Books (February 15, 2015). n. pag. Web. 6 July 2015. ———. “Higher Learning” in The Brown Reader: 50 Writers Remember College Hill. Ed. Judy Sternlight. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. (89–92).

Interviews Abernethy, Bob. Religion and Ethics Newsweekly PBS (March 18, 2005). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014. ———. Religion and Ethics Newsweekly PBS (September 18, 2009). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014. Bailey, Sarah Pulliam. “Q&A: Marilynne Robinson on Guns, Gay Marriage and Calvinism.” Religion News Service (Wednesday, May 14, 2014) n. pag. Web. 20 Sept. 2014. Barra, Allen. “Marilynne Robinson’s Small, Rich Body of Work.” The Atlantic (May 16, 2012). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014. Bartos, Eileen and Carolyn Jacobson. “Mostly on Mother Country.” The Iowa Review 22:1 (Winter 1992): 8–21. Bendis, Debra. “A pastoral voice: An interview with Marilynne Robinson.” The Christian Century. 123.7 (April 4, 2006): 32. (4 p). Brockes, Emma. “A Life in Writing: Marilynne Robinson.” The Guardian 29 (May 2009). n. pag. Web. 2 May 2013. Elie, Paul. “Marilynne Robinson: The Resurrection of the Ordinary.” Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs; Georgetown University (April 6, 2009). n. pag. Web. 17 Sept. 2014.

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Fassler, Joe. “Marilynne Robinson on Democracy, Reading, and Religion in America.” The Atlantic (May 16, 2012). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014. Fay, Sarah. “Marilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction No. 198.” Paris Review 186 (Fall 2008): 37–66. Flynn, Sara, Thomas King and Adam Rodriguez. “A Conversation with Marilynne Robinson.” Willow Springs 58 (Fall 2006): 77–95. Gardner, Thomas. “Keeping Perception Nimble: Marilynne Robinson, Narrative Calvinist.” Christianity Today 54.2 (February 2010): 32–33. Gritz, Jennie Rothenberg. “Gilead’s Balm.” The Atlantic (December 2004). n. pag. Web. 11 September 2014. Gross, Terry. “Fresh Air: with Marilynne Robinson.” NPR (February 8, 2005). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014. Handley, George and Lance Larsen. “The Radiant Astonishment of Existence: Two Interviews with Marilynne Robinson, March 20, 2004 and February 9, 2007.” Literature and Belief 27.2 (February 9, 2007): 113–143. Hedrick, Tace. “On Influence and Appropriation.” The Iowa Review 22:1 (Winter 1992): 1–7. Johnson, Sarah. “An Intensifier of Experience” in The Very Telling: Conversations with American Writers. Ed. Sarah Johnson. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2006. (181–186). Kirch, Claire. “At Home with Marilynne Robinson.” Publishers Weekly 255.28 (July 14, 2008): 22. Larson, Brannon Clark. “The Midwest Liberals: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Sonora Review 55/56 (October 2008). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014. Magazine Staff. “Talking with Marilynne Robinson.” The Nation (January 26, 2015): 30–33. Mason, Wyatt. “The Revelations of Marilynne Robinson.” The New York Times. (October 1, 2014). n. pag. Web. 10 October 2014. Neary, Lynn. “Marilynne Robinson, at ‘Home’ in the Heartland.” NPR (September 20, 2008). Web. 11 Aug. 2014. O’Connell, Nicholas. At the Field’s End: Interviews with Pacific Northwest Writers. Revised and Expanded Edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998. (243–254). Painter, Rebecca M. “Further Thoughts on a Prodigal Son Who Cannot Come Home, on Loneliness and Grace: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Christianity and Literature 58. 3 (Spring 2009): 485–492. ———. “On the Responsibility of Churches to Safeguard and Promote the Spirit of Democracy, the Potential of the Humanities, and Other Thoughts —an Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Renascence 66.2 (Spring 2014): 151–160. Pinsker, Sanford. Conversations with Contemporary American Writers. Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi, 1985. (118–127). Schaub, Thomas Hill. “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Contemporary Literature 35:2. (Summer 1994): 231–251.

276

Selected Bibliography

Silverblatt, Michael. An Interview with Marilynne Robinson. Brick: A Literary Journal. 75 (Summer 2005): 104–110. Stewart, Jon. The Daily Show. Comedy Central (July 8, 2010). [Promoting Absence of Mind]. Tippett, Krista. “Marilynne Robinson and Marcelo Gleiser: The Mystery We Are.” On Being: with Krista Tippett. Podcast and Transcript. (January 2, 2014). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014. Vorda, Allan. “A Life of Perished Things: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson” in Face to Face: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists. Houston: Rice University Press, 1993. (153–184). Voss, Anne E. “Portrait of Marilynne Robinson.” The Iowa Review 22:1. (Winter 1992): 21–28. Wroe, Martin. “A minister of the word.” Church Times (Jun 20, 2012). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014.



Secondary Sources on Housekeeping

Aldrich, Marcia. “The Poetics of Transience: Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Essays in Literature 16.1 (1989): 127–140. Anghel, Corina. “Reconfiguring Female Characters of the American West: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping” in How Far Is America from Here? Eds. Theo D’Haen, Paul Giles, Djelal Kadir, and Lois Parkinson Zamora. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005. (415–440). Bergthaller, Hannes. “Like a Ship to be Tossed: Emersonian Environmentalism and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping” in Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism. Eds. Fiona Becket and Terry Gifford. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. (75–97). Broyard, Anatole. Review of Housekeeping. New York Times (January 7, 1981). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014. Burke, William M. “Border Crossings in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 37.4 (Winter 1991): 716–724. Caver, Christine. “Nothing Left to Lose: Housekeeping’s Strange Freedoms.” American Literature 68.1 (1996): 111–137. Champagne, Rosaria. “Women’s History and Housekeeping: Memory, Representation, and Reinscription.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 20.3–4 (1992): 321–329. Chandler, Marilyn. Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction. Oakland: University of California Press, 1991. (292–307). Foster, Thomas. “History, Critical Theory, and Women’s Social Practices: ‘Women’s Time’ and Housekeeping” in Contemporary American Women Writers: Gender, Class, Ethnicity. Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora. London: Longman, 1998. (67–86). Galehouse, Maggie. “Their Own Private Idaho: Transience in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 41.1 (Spring 2000): 117–131.

Selected Bibliography

277

Gardner, Thomas. “Enlarging Loneliness: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping as a Reading of Emily Dickinson.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 10.1 (2001): 9–33. ———. A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (47–69). Gatta, John. Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (219–224). Geyh, Paula E. “Burning Down the House? Domestic Space and Feminine Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature XXXIV 1 (1993): 103–122. Greiner, Donald. Women Without Men: Female Bonding and the American Novel of the 1980s. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. (66–81). Hall, Joanne. “The Wanderer Contained: Issues of ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’ in Relation to Hard Gray’s Little Orphan Annie and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Critical Survey 18.3 (2006): 37–50. Handley, George B. “The Metaphysics of Ecology in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 55.3 (Fall 2009): 496–521. Hartshorne, Sarah D. “Lake Fingerbone and Walden Pond: A Commentary on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Modern Language Studies 20:3 (1990): 50–57. Hedrick, Tace. “‘The Perimeters of Our Wandering Are Nowhere’: Breaching the Domestic in Housekeeping.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40.2 (Winter 1999): 137–151. Heller, Dana. The Feminization of the Quest Romance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. (93–104). Kaivola, Karen. “The Pleasures and Perils of Merging: Female Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 34 (1993): 670–690. King, Kristin. “Resurfacing of The Deeps: Semiotic Balance in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Studies in the Novel 28.4 (1996): 565–580. Klaver, Elizabeth. “Hobo Time and Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Housekeeping’” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 43.1 (April 1, 2010): 27–43. Kirkby, Joan. “Is There Life After Art? The Metaphysics of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5.1 (1986): 91–109. Lassner, Phyllis. “Escaping the Mirror of Sameness: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” in Motherpuzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature. ed. Mickey Perlman. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. (49–58). Latz, Andrew Brower. “Creation in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson.” Literature & Theology: An International Journal of Religion, Theory, And Culture 25.3 (September 2011): 283–296. Lin, Su-ying. “Loss and Desire: Mother-Daughter Relations in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Studies in Language And Literature 106 (June 9, 2000): 203–226. Magagna, Tony. “Erased by Space, Ignored by History: Place and Gender in Marilynne Robinson’s West.” Western American Literature 43.4 (Winter 2009): 345–371.

278

Selected Bibliography

Mallon, Anne-Marie. “Sojourning Women: Homelessness and Transcendence in Housekeeping.” Critique: Studies In Contemporary Fiction 30.2 (Winter 1989): 95–105. Mattessich, Stefan. “Drifting Decision and the Decision to Drift: The Question of Spirit in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Differences 19.3 (2008): 58–89. McDermott, Sinead. “Future-Perfect: Gender, Nostalgia, and the Not Yet Presented in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Journal of Gender Studies 13.3 (November 2004): 259–270. Meyerowitz, Rael. “‘Ruthlessness Gives Way to Ruth’: Mothering and Mourning in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Psychoanalytic Review 87.2 (April 2000): 189–226. Mile, Sian. “Femme Foetal: The Construction/Deconstruction of Female Subjectivity in Housekeeping, Or Nothing Gained.” Genders 8 (July 1990): 129–136. Morley, Ann-Janine. Religion and Sexuality in American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. (204–205, 223–224, 226–227, 229, 232–234). O’Brien, Sheila Ruzycki. “Housekeeping: New West Novel, Old West Film” in Old WestNew West: Centennial Essays. Ed. Barbara Howard Meldrum. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1993. (173–183). Orr, David W. “The Not so Great Wilderness Debate… Continued” in The Wilderness Debate Rages On. Ibid. 423–434. [Contains Response to Robinson’s “Wilderness”]. Reprinted from Orr, David. The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention. New York: OUP, 2004. (187–197). Ravits, Martha. “Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping” in American Literature 61.4 (1989): 644–666. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Two Forms of Adaptation: Housekeeping and Naked Lunch” in Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000. (206–220). Rosowski, Susan J. Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity and the West in American Literature. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. (177–193). Ryan, Judith. The Novel After Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. (60–67). Schaub, Thomas. “Lingering Hopes, Faltering Dreams: Marilynne Robinson and the Politics of Contemporary American Fiction” in Traditions, Voices, and Dreams: The American Novel since the 1960s. Eds. Melvin J. Friedman and Ben Siegel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. (298–321). Smyth, Jacqui. “Sheltered Vagrancy in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Critique: Studies In Contemporary Fiction 40.3 (Spring 1999): 281–291. Stolls, Amy and David Kipen, Mela Kirkpatrick, Dan Brady, and Erika Koss; Deborah Galyan; Dana Gioia, Susan Balée, Jim White, Pico Iyer, Bret Lott, Aimee Mann. “The Big Read: Housekeeping.” An on-line Reader’s Guide and Teacher’s Guide, with audio media featuring readings by Annette Bening, prepared with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts. http://www.neabigread.org/books/housekeeping/.

Selected Bibliography

279

Tanner, Laura. Lost Bodies: Between the Borders of Life and Death. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. (92–106). Toles, George. “‘Sighs Too Deep for Words’: Mysteries of Need in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal Of American Literature, Culture, And Theory 47.4 (Winter 1991): 137–156. Tyndall, Paul and Fred Ribkoff. “Loss, Longing, and the Optative Mode in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: on the Spiritual Value of Ruth’s Wandering Narrative.” Renascence 66.2 (Spring 2014): 87–102. Walker, Karen. “Autonomous, but Not Alone: The Reappropriation of Female Community in The Women of Brewster Place and Housekeeping.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 6.1 (2012): 56–73. Wesley, Marilyn C. Secret Journeys: The Trope of Women’s Travel in American Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. (81–96).

Secondary Sources on Gilead and Home Alter, Robert. Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. (141, 163–170). Bailey, Lisa M. Siefker. “Fraught with Fire: Race and Theology in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (Winter 2010): 265–280. Capo, Beth. “Midwestern History and Memory in Robinson’s Gilead.” Midamerica: The Yearbook of The Society For The Study Of Midwestern Literature 34 (2007): 79–86. Davis, Thomas., ed. John Calvin’s American Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. (7–8, 13, 267–270). ———. “The Death of Adam, the Resurrection of Calvin: Marilynne Robinson’s Alternative to an American Ideograph” in Strict, Sober, and Scriptural: Collective Memories of John Calvin, 1800–2000. Eds. Joan de Neit, Herman Paul, and Bart Wallet. Leiden: Brill, 2009. (357–384). Douglas, Christopher. “Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Novel: A Forum On Fiction 44.3 (Fall 2011): 333–353. Deresiewicz, William. “Homing Patterns: Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction.” The Nation (Oct. 13 2008): 25–30. Elie, Paul. “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” The New York Times (December 19, 2012). Web. n. pag. 20 Sept. 2014. Evans, Justin. “Subjectivity and the Possibility of Change in the Novels of Marilynne Robinson.” Renascence 66.2 (Spring 2014): 131–150. Ferguson, Robert. Alone in America: The Stories that Matter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. (201–231). Haddox, Thomas F. Hard Sayings: The Rhetoric of Christian Orthodoxy in Late Modern Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013. (161–203).

280

Selected Bibliography

Hesselink, I. John. “Marilynne Robinson: Calvinian.” Perspectives 26. 3 (2011): 13–17. Hobbs, June Hadden. “Burial, Baptism, and Baseball: Typology and Memorialization in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (Winter 2010): 241–262. Holberg, Jennifer L. “‘The Courage to See It’: Toward an Understanding of Glory.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (Winter 2010): 283–300. Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. 113–121. LaMascus, Scott R. “Marilynne Robinson.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (Winter 2010): 197–340. Latz, Andrew Brower. “Creation in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson. Literature & Theology: An International Journal of Religion, Theory, And Culture 25.3 (September 2011): 283–296. Leah, Gordon. “‘A Person Can Change’: Grace, Forgiveness and Sonship In Marilynne Robinson’s Novel Gilead.” Evangelical Quarterly 80.1 (2008): 53–58. Lear, Jonathan. “Not At Home In Gilead.” Raritan 32.1 (2012): 34–52. Leise, Christopher. “‘That Little Incandescence’: Reading the Fragmentary and John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Studies In The Novel 41.3 (Fall 2009): 348–367. Long, Robert. “Christian, not conservative: why Marilynne Robinson’s literary—and liberal—Calvinism appeals.” The American Conservative. 12.5 (Sept–Oct, 2013): 23–25. Malik, Kenan. “‘People Power’.” New Humanist 129.1 (2014): 42–46. New, Lisa. New England Beyond Criticism: In Defense of America’s First Literature. London: Wiley-Blackwell. 2014. (265–278). Park, Haein. “The Face of the Other: Suffering, Kenosis, and a Hermeneutics of love in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Renascence 66.2 (Spring 2014): 103–118. Painter, Rebecca. “Loyalty Meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (Winter 2010): 321–340. Petit, Susan. “Finding Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Man’ in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (Winter 2010): 301–318. ———. “Names in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” Names 58.3 (Sep. 2010): 139–149. ———. “Living in Different Universes: Autism and Race in Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 46.2 (June 2013): 39–54. Schmidt, D.W. “In the Name of the Father: Male voice, Feminist Authorship, and the Reader in Gilead.” Renascence 66.2 (Spring 2014): 119–130. Shy, Todd. “Religion and Marilynne Robinson.” Salmagundi (Summer–Fall 2007): 155– 156, 251–264.

Selected Bibliography

281

Tanner, Laura. “‘Looking Back from the Grave’: Sensory Perception and the Anticipation of Absence in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Contemporary Literature 48.2 (Summer 2007): 227–252. ———. “Uncomfortable Furniture: Inhabiting Domestic and Narrative Space in Marilynne Robinson’s Home.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 7.1 (2013): 35–53. Vander Weele, Michael. “Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and the Difficult Gift of Human Exchange.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (Winter 2010): 217–239. Williams, Rowan. “Native Speakers: Identity, Grace, and Homecoming.” Christianity and Literature 61.6 (Autumn 2011), 7–18. Wood, James. “Acts of Devotion” [Review of Gilead] (November 28, 2004). n. pag. Web. 11 Aug. 2014. ———. “The Homecoming: A Prodigal Son Returns in Marilynne Robinson’s Third Novel.” [Review of Home by Marilynne Robinson] The New Yorker 84.27 (Sept. 2008): 76–78.



Dissertations on Robinson’s Oeuvre

Engebretsen, Alexander John. “The Dear Ordinary”: The Novels of Marilynne Robinson. City University of New York, 2013. Schmidt, Daniel W. Rewriting the American Picaresque: Patterns of Movement in the Novels of Erica Jong, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson. Southern Illinois University. Carbondale, IL. 1993.

Index Abolitionism xiv, 13, 19, 134n, 208, 215, 218, 224n Adoption (of orphans) 22, 29–30, 39, 37, 221–222, 224–226, 233–235 Affect 18, 35, 190–193, 196n American Renaissance 7, 25, 38, 41 Anderson, Sherwood Winesburg, Ohio 13, 14n38 Atwood, Margaret Handmaid’s Tale, The 10n25 Augustine of Hippo 11, 107, 108 Confessions, The 166n33, 172, 176, 177 Divine Mystery, on 166 Predestination, on 161, 263 Barth, Karl 10, 20, 107, 121, 155, 238, 250 Berry, Wendell 99, 112 Ben-hur, A Tale of the Christ 267, 268 Bible, The xi, 9, 21n56, 28n, 41n12, 43, 127, 137, 161, 172n literature, as 14n39, 100, 100n12, 239, 267 cosmology in 122–124 prodigal son parable in interpreted theologically 11, 148–151, 168–169, 186, 212, 261 fictional retellings of 11, 131, 132, 134–137, 139–145, 148–151,157–158 Bildungsroman 41 Book of Common Prayer 112 Brown, John 19, 213, 215 Calvin, John xiv, 10, 86–87, 105, 107, 124, 161, 161n, 168n37, 169n38, 176n8 Calvinism xi, 10, 11, 91, 131–139, 141–144, 148, 149n, 176n, 214, 260–262, 265 Carver, Raymond 4n9 Catholicism 262, 265, 266 literature and 269 Civil Rights 12, 19, 19n52, 143n14, 204, 212, 227, 261, 262 Chalcedonian Definition of Faith 165 Chesterton, G. K. 267 Christianity 9, 11, 94, 95, 96–100, 103–104, 131–136, 138, 141–144, 167, 169, 261, 264, 268 slavery and 12, 19, 19n51, 20, 214–215, 218, 227

See also Augustine, Chalcedonian Definition, Calvinism, Catholicism, Jesus Christ, Protestantism; Robinson: religious beliefs of; Updike: Christianity of Chodorow, Nancy 44, 47 Chopin, Kate 269 The Awakening 257, 259 Cooper, Fenimore 133 Leatherstocking Tales 44 Cosmology 15, 79, 88, 91–93, 95, 98, 108, 113–116, 120–127 Creation(ism) 15, 16n43, 49, 81, 85, 86, 87, 91, 94, 95, 100, 103, 104, 106–127, 249 Darwinism xiv, 61n, 70, 86, 91, 214 Dawkins, Richard 96n9, 97n, 118–119, 206n Deloria, Vine, Jr. 98 Derrida, Jacques 9n de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard 66n de Vries, Peter 10, 14n Dickinson, Emily xi, xiv, 10, 25, 28n, 41–42, 50, 53, 54, 193n, 238, 243 Douglass, Frederick 215, 218, 219, 229 My Bondage and My Freeedom 218 Domesticity Housekeeping, in 5, 18, 20, 44–46, 54–55, 75, 190, 237–252 Gilead, in 10, 20, 190, 237–252 Home, in 10, 18, 20, 190, 201n16, 206–209, 237–252 Lila, in 22 Donne, John 107 Du Bois, William 19n50, 226, 230, 232 The Souls of Black Folk 231 Ecological writing/eco-criticism 8, 9, 15, 59, 61n, 62–71, 66n, 77–79, 82–86, 91–103, 96n8, 100n12, 103n–104n, 256–257 Edwards, Jonathan 107, 114–115, 116n, 117, 118, 119, 122, 137, 143, 261 Elegy 5–6, 32, 35, 37, 72, 216 Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man 235 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 2, 25, 41, 50, 51, 54, 107, 238, 239

283

Index Faulkner, William viii, 22 Faust myth 21, 259, 260 Feminism 6–7, 41–42, 50–51, 54–55, 257–258 Ford, John 38 Fuller, Margaret 41 Gaia Hypothesis 99 Glasgow, Ellen 10 Glissant, Edouard 74, 75 Gone with the Wind (novel) 268 Gothic literature 21, 259–260 Great Depression, the 22, 36 Greenpeace xiii, 8, 61n3, 62n3, 101–102, 257 Greene, Graham 267 Gregory the Great 166 Gregory of Nanzianzus 166 Guthrie, Woody “Pastures of Plenty” 36 Hawkes, John xi, 4 Hazlitt, William 36 Hemingway, Ernest xii, 3, 4 Herbert, George 107 Houses (literary motif) Housekeeping, in 5, 28, 31, 34, 35, 45n25, 48–49, 50, 52, 54–55 Gilead & Home, in 199, 200, 203, 205, 208, 209, 225–26, 225n11, 233, 240–41 Housekeeping (film) xiii, 6n12 Islam 262, 266 Jesus Christ 35, 101, 112, 139, 148, 156, 169, 203 Kafka, Franz 9 Keating, Thomas 179–180 Keats, John 29, 82 Kerouac, Jack On the Road 241 Klein, Melanie 196, 197 Kristeva, Julia 46–47, 54n39, 193n5 Left Behind series 267, 268 Leopold, Aldo 98 Lewis, Sinclair Elmer Gantry 14n38 Main Street 13 Longinus 27

American Midwest xiv, 12, 72, 254 regional image of 13, 14 idioms of 12n33 Malick, Terence 6 Melville, Hermann 11n28, 19n51, 25, 133, 238, 239, 243 Moby Dick xi, 5, 41 Moltmann, Jürgen 94n5, 104, 109, 112n20, 114n23 Morrison, Toni 228, 229, 230, 265 Beloved 218 Home 202n20 Muir, John 98 Multiculturalism 214–215 Narrative pov 17, 21, 201–202, 259 New England xiii, 10n25, 12, 20, 240, 254–255, 262 Niebuhr, Reinhold 9, 9n21 Nomads (Hobos) 5, 21, 24, 30, 35–36, 39, 40n6, 47, 48n30, 51–54, 193–194, 199–200, 234, 244, 257 Orr, David 65, 100–101, 105n Paley, William Natural Theology 118 Parascience 190, 191n, 255 Paz, Octavio 67, 68 Pennebaker, James W. 174 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart Gates Ajar, The 131n–132n, 260 Pinker, Steven 60 Poe, Edgar Allan xi, 11n Eureka 91 “Fall of the House of Usher, The” 240 Preachers, in fiction 14 Predestination 11, 131, 135–146, 148–149, 160–169, 203, 262–263. See also Augustine, Calvin, Calvinism Price, Reynolds 239 Protestantism 13, 20, 22, 113, 139n, 151, 161, 177n, 266–267. See also Calvinism fiction and 8, 14, 133–139, 249, 267–269. See sentimentality reform and xv, 10, 262 secularism and 265–266 Puritans 10n25, 132, 133, 264, 269 spiritual writing of 1n, 14, 177n

284 Realism 20, 36, 237, 239–240, 269 Rilke, Rainer Maria 72 Robinson, Marilynne education of xi–xii environmentalism of xiii, 8, 256–257. See Robinson: Mother Country & Robinson: Death of Adam: “Wilderness” family origins of xi liberalism of xv, 9, 262 literary influences on xi, 1n, 214n39, 25, 28, 39–42, 177, 177n, 238, 254–255, 259–260, 268–269 prose style of 2, 4–5, 12n33, 14n39, 17, 182–183, 239–240 religious beliefs of xi, xiv, 8–10, 11, 86–88, 92, 103, 105–106, 132, 133, 149n3, 149n4, 168n36, 168n37, 169n38, 238, 261, 263, 266, 267 teaching career of xii–xiii, xiv, xv Works of Fiction by: “Connie Bronson” xiii, 5n10 Housekeeping 4–7, 216, 237, 238, 255 compared to Home (Robinson) 17–18, 190, 191, 192, 206, 208–209, 244 compared to Lila 21 compared to Rabbit, Run 240–243 composition and reception of xii, xiv, 3 contrasted to both Gilead and Home 11–12, 16n43 contrasted to Home 202–203 contrasted to Witches of Eastwick 20–21, 250–251 ecological imagination and 8, 59, 71, 72–77, 79–83, 256 feminism of 257–258 frontier myth and 38–55. See also the American Western motherhood in 46–48 loneliness in 192–195, 197–200, 201–202, 203 sublimity of 6, 24–37 See also domesticity, houses, nomads; Robinson: prose style; transience; Updike. Gilead 7, 8, 14n39, 21, 21n56, 22, 193n5, 204n, 220n, 239, 243, 247, 248, 259–260, 265, 266, 268

Index compared to Home (Robinson) 11, 12, 191, 200–201, 246 compared to A Month of Sundays 238, 249–250 composition and reception of xii, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii contrasted to Home 17, 201, 224n contrasted to Housekeeping 11–12, 16n43 contrasted to sentimental Protestant fiction 11, 131–133, 140, 141–143, 143n13, 145–146, 261. See also sentimentality. ecological imagination in 15–16, 91, 92, 95, 103, 105, 106, 107–108, 107n, 109–112, 114, 116–117, 118, 119–124, 125–127 fatherhood in 12, 141–146, 221–226, 223n, 224n 233–234 loneliness in 245, 255 Midwest in 11–12, 12n33, 13. See also American Midwest prayer in 1–3 race and racism treated in 19–20, 19n52, 212–224, 226–235, 232n, 261–262. See also Christianity and slavery self-writing in 14–15, 171–172, 174–187. See also Puritans: spiritual writing of soteriology in 148–164, 167–169, 261–262 See also domesticity; Calvinism; Bible: prodigal son parable; predestination; Robinson: prose style; Updike. Home 7, 16, 21n56, 201n15, 201n16, 202n20, 204n, 205n, 220n, 237, 238, 239, 243, 247, 259, 260 compared to Gilead 10, 12, 191, 200–201, 246 compared to Housekeeping  17–18, 190, 191, 192, 201, 206, 208–209, 244 compared to Lila 22 compared to Updike: “A Sandstone Farmhouse” 251–252 composition and reception of xv, xvi, xvii, 3 contrasted to Gilead 17, 201, 204n21, 224n contrasted to Housekeeping 11–12, 16n43, 17, 201–203, 243–244

Index Robinson, Marilynne (contd.) contrasted to sentimental Protestant fiction 131–133, 140, 141–143, 143n13, 145–146, 261. See also sentimentality fatherhood in 141–146 loneliness in 201, 202–209, 244–245, 255, race and racism treated in 19–20, 19n52, 212–216, 218, 221, 222–223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 230–235, 233n, 261–262. See also Christianity and slavery soteriology in 148–149, 151–164, 166, 167–169, 261–262 See also domesticity; Calvinism; Bible: prodigal son parable; predestination; Robinson: prose style; Updike Lila xvii, 4, 12n30, 21, 21n56, 21n57, 22, 193n Works of Nonfiction by: Absence of Mind (collected essays) xv, 91n, 102, 190, 191n, 255 “Strange History of Altrusim, The” 206n “Thinking Again” 190n Awakening, The (Introduction) 257, 259 Death of Adam, The (collected essays) xiv, xvi, 3, 12, 69, 86, 91, 120, 214, 246 “Darwinism” 40 “Family” 200n, 223 “McGuffey and the Abolitionists” “Psalm 8” 205 “Who Was Oberlin?” 19n51 “Wilderness” (aka “Surrendering Wilderness”) 24, 25, 63, 76, 214 “Hearing Silence” (in The True Gift) 6n15 John Calvin: Steward of God’s Covenant (Preface) 86–87, 105, 124 Mother Country xiii, xvi, 8, 25, 25n2, 36, 59–63, 61n–62n, 76, 102, 102n, 103, 256–257 When I Was a Child I Read Books (collected essays) xvi, 87, 88, 91, 114n22, 190, 203 “Freedom of Thought” 112, 190n, 205 “Imagination and Community” 203, 206 “When I Was a Child I Read Books” (aka “My Western Roots”) xiii, 6n14, 196, 196n8, 197, 199

285 Uncollected Essays by: “Great Amnesia, A” 12 “Language is Smarter Than We Are” 2n2, 4n9, 17, 240 “Let’s Not Talk Down to Ourselves” 192n4, 240 “Marriage and Other Astonishing Bonds” 4n9 “Teacher and Her Student, A” 190 “Way We Work, the Way We Live, The” 44 Romanticism. See Hazlitt, Keats, Whitman, Wordsworth Sagan, Carl 117 Sandpoint, Iowa xi, 4, 6n12 Scott, A. O. 239, 247 Scott, Sir Walter 131, 172n Searchers, The 46n26, 52 Secularization 263–264 Secularism 86, 264–265 Sellafield Nuclear Reprocessing Plant xiii, 8, 59–60, 64, 102 Sedgwick, Catherine Maria 137n8, 139, 143, 144, 146 New England Tale, A 11, 131, 135–136, 135n, 136n, 141, 142, 260–261 Sentimentality 133–139, 141–142, 145 Sexuality 9, 237–238, 249, 258–259 Shakespeare xi, xii, 264 Shane (film) 53, 53n37 Slavery 12, 19, 19n51, 20, 214–215, 216, 218–219, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232n, 262. See Christianity and Snyder, Gary 99 Stegner, Wallace 63 Steiner, George 87 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 132n2, 133, 134, 138n, 142, 143, 144 Minister’s Wooing, The 131–132, 136–139, 136n8, 139n, 140, 141, 146, 260–261 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 134, 134n, 139 Taylor, Charles 111n, 123 Thoreau, Henry David 25, 41, 50, 51, 52, 243, 254 Walden xi, 52, 240 Till, Emmett 19n52, 213, 225n, 226, 231, 232 Tillich, Paul 9, 9n21

286 Transience Housekeeping, in 5, 5n11, 8, 21, 24, 25, 28–29, 35, 38, 39, 43–44, 45, 47–49, 53–55, 72–74, 192–195 Home, in 201, 202 Lila, in 21, 193n Twelve Years a Slave (film) 218n Unamuno, Miguel de 68, 74, 80, 81 Updike, John 20, 22, 245–246 Christianity of 238, 248–249 Works by Couples 240, 245 “Deaths of Distant Friends, The” 247 “Gesturing” 245 Month of Sundays, A 21n55, 237, 238, 249 Of the Farm 240 Poorhouse Fair, The 240 Rabbit tetralogy 12, 240, 241, 242, 243, 246 Roger’s Version 21n55, 237 “Sandstone Farmhouse, A” 237, 251–252 Self-consciousness 248 Seek My Face 240 “Soft Spring at Shillington, A” 245 Trust Me 240, 243, 247

Index Witches of Eastwick, The 21n55, 237, 240, 250–251 Volf, Miroslav 150–151 Weber, Max 263–264 Western, the American 6–7, 6n15, 38–40, 43–44, 46, 46n26, 50, 53, 55 Whitman, Walt 2, 11n, 70, 79, 254 Williams, Raymond 62 Williams, Rowan (Archbishop of Canterbury) xvi, 3, 103, 103n, 109, 112, 119, 120 Wilderness xiv, 5, 6, 7, 24–37, 40, 46, 63–65, 76, 98, 214, 257–258 Wister, Owen 38 Wood, James 142, 201, 250, 268n14 Woolf, Virginia 258 Mrs. Dalloway 197n, 202n19 Wordsworth, William 6, 35, 36 Works by: Excursion, The 35, 36 “Michael” 35, 36 “Old Cumberland Beggar, The” 36 Prelude, The 25, 26, 27, 30, 32, 36