Marilynne Robinson 9781526134660

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Marilynne Robinson

CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN AND CANADIAN WRITERS

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series editors Nahem Yousaf and Sharon Monteith Also available Cormac McCarthy: A complexity theory of literature lydia r. cooper Crossing borders and queering citizenship: Civic reading practice in contemporary American and Canadian writing zalfa feghali The quiet contemporary American novel rachel sykes Sara Paretsky: Detective fiction as trauma literature cynthia s. hamilton Making home: Orphanhood, kinship, and cultural memory in contemporary American novels maria holmgren troy, elizabeth kella, helena wahlstrom Thomas Pynchon simon malpas and andrew taylor Jonathan Lethem james peacock Mark Z Danielewski edited by joe bray and alison gibbons Louise Erdrich david stirrup Passing into the present: Contemporary American fiction of racial and gender passing sinéad moynihan Paul Auster mark brown Douglas Coupland andrew tate Philip Roth david brauner

Marilynne Robinson Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Edited by

Rachel Sykes, Anna Maguire Elliott, Jennifer Daly

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 3465 3  hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Series editors’ foreword

This innovative series reflects the breadth and diversity of writing over the last thirty years, and provides critical evaluations of established, emerging and critically neglected writers – mixing the canonical with the unexpected. It explores notions of the contemporary and analyses current and developing modes of representation with a focus on individual writers and their work. The series seeks to reflect both the growing body of academic research in the field, and the increasing prevalence of contemporary American and Canadian fiction on programmes of study in institutions of higher education around the world. Central to the series is a concern that each book should argue a stimulating thesis, rather than provide an introductory survey, and that each contemporary writer will be examined across the trajectory of their literary production. A variety of critical tools and literary and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged to illuminate the ways in which a particular writer contributes to, and helps readers rethink, the North American literary and cultural landscape in a global context. Central to debates about the field of contemporary fiction is its role in interrogating ideas of national exceptionalism and transnationalism. This series matches the multivocality of contemporary writing with wide-ranging and detailed analysis. Contributors examine the drama of the nation from the perspectives of writers who are members of established and new immigrant groups, writers who consider themselves on the nation’s margins as well as those who chronicle middle America. National labels are the subject of vociferous debate and including American and Canadian writers in the same series is not to flatten the differences between them but to acknowledge that literary traditions and tensions are cross-cultural and that North

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Series editors’ foreword

American writers often explore and expose precisely these tensions. The series recognises that situating a writer in a cultural context involves a multiplicity of influences, social and geo-political, artistic and theoretical, and that contemporary fiction defies easy categorisation. For example, it examines writers who invigorate the genres in which they have made their mark alongside writers whose aesthetic goal is to subvert the idea of genre altogether. The challenge of defining the roles of writers and assessing their reception by reading communities is central to the aims of the series. Overall, Contemporary American and Canadian Writers aims to begin to represent something of the diversity of contemporary writing and seeks to engage students and scholars in stimulating debates about the contemporary and about fiction. Nahem Yousaf Sharon Monteith

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To our families, and our pets

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Contents

List of contributors p. xi Acknowledgements xv Introduction – Rachel Sykes, Jennifer Daly, and Anna Maguire Elliott Robinson in context: a critical conversation – Sarah Churchwell, Richard H. King, Bridget Bennett

1 10

Part I:  Writing, form, and style 1 ‘It might be better to burn them’: archive fever and the Gilead novels of Marilynne Robinson – Daniel Robert King 47 2 ‘One day she would tell him what she knew’: disturbance of the epistemological conventions of the marriage plot in Lila – Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo 68 3 Robinson’s triumphs of style – Jack Baker 86 Part II:  Gender and environment 4 The female orphan and an ecofeminist ethic-of-care in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Lila – Anna Maguire Elliott 5 ‘Souls all unaccompanied’: enacting feminine alterity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping – Makayla C. Steiner

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x Contents 6 The domestic geographies of grief: bereavement, time, and home spaces in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Home – Lucy Clarke

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Part III:  Imagined histories: race, religion, and rights 7 Domesticating political feeling, affect, and memory in Marilynne Robinson’s Home – Christopher Lloyd 8 ‘Onward Christian liberals’: Marilynne Robinson’s essays and the crisis of mainline Protestantism – Alex Engebretson 9 Presence in absence: the spectre of race in Gilead and Home – Emily Hammerton-Barry

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Part IV:  Robinson and her contemporaries 10 ‘Everything can change’: civil rights, civil war, and radical transformation in Home and Gilead – Tessa Roynon 11 ‘A great admirer of American education’: Robinson as professor and defender of ‘America’s best idea’ – Steve Gronert Ellerhoff and Kathryn E. Engebretson 12 Acknowledging a numinous ordinary: Marilynne Robinson and Stanley Cavell – Paul Jenner Epilogue – ‘A little different every time’: accumulation and repetition in Jack – Rachel Sykes

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247 268

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Index 298

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List of contributors

Jack Baker is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University and an Honorary Fellow in the Department of English at Durham University, where he completed a PhD on the impersonal modes of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. He has published essays on Pound, Stevens, Wassily Kandinsky, and Geoffrey Hill, and is working on a book about beauty and consolation in modernist poetry. Bridget Bennett is Professor of American Literature and Culture in the School of English, University of Leeds. Her research interests include a focus on representations of home in American culture, the focus of her monograph in progress Dangerous Domesticities. Related publications include “‘The Silence Surrounding the Hut’: Invisible Slaves and Vanished Indians in Wieland’” which was awarded the 2019 Arthur Miller Prize. She is currently working on a research project titled “The Dissenting Atlantic: Archives and Unquiet Libraries, 1776–1865”, which is supported by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She previously studied at the University of Seville and completed funded research in American literature at Cornell University. Her current research explores contemporary American women’s life-writing. Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the author of Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream, Careless People:

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Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby, and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Lucy Clarke completed a PhD on the literature of Marilynne Robinson and grief, focusing on the ways Robinson elevates the felt experience of grief to a place of high sentiment. She is particularly interested in the ways in which Robinson’s work challenges received wisdom about bereavement and might fruitfully expand ways to think about loss. Prior to commencing her PhD, she was an English teacher in the FE sector and a mentor for refugee children. She is now a mum and a yoga teacher. Jennifer Daly holds a PhD in American Literature from Trinity College Dublin. She edited a collection of essays on Richard Yates, Richard Yates and the Flawed American Dream (McFarland 2017) and was guest editor of a special issue of the Irish Journal of American Studies on the writing of Marilynne Robinson. Alex Engebretson is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Baylor University. His book, Understanding Marilynne Robinson, was published by The University of South Carolina Press. Kathryn E. Engebretson is an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on social studies, gender equity, and the amplification of women’s voices and experiences in educational settings. Her work has been published in Gender and Education, The Journal of Social Studies Research, and Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue. Steve Gronert Ellerhoff holds a PhD from the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. His books include Mole and Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. He has co-edited critical collections on George Saunders and Ray Bradbury’s Elliott Family stories. His next scholarly work is Jung and the Mythology of Star Wars. Emily Hammerton-Barry is currently completing her PhD on The Spectre of Race in American Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sheffield. A freelance filmmaker and photographer as well as an academic, her teaching and research interests focus on applying an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to political representation within contemporary literature and visual media.



List of contributors

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Paul Jenner is a Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. His research focuses on philosophy and literature, and his most recent publication appears in the collection Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination. His current research focuses on Marilynne Robinson, Stanley Cavell, and David Foster Wallace. Daniel Robert King is currently a Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Derby. His research interests lie in archival studies and the role of literary editing in the production of twentieth century literature. His first book, Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution was published in 2018 and his work has previously appeared in Open Library of Humanities, The International Journal of Comic Art, Literature and Medicine, and Comparative American Studies. Richard H. King is Professor Emeritus in American intellectual history at Nottingham University. His most recent book Arendt and America was published in 2015. He has also written on the history of race and racism in the US in Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (2004) and Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (1992). He has also been chair of the British Association of American Studies and has edited books on Obama and African American political culture, on modern Southern culture, and on Hannah Arendt and history. He is interested in the relationship between politics and ethics and also between literature and morality. Christopher Lloyd is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the author of two monographs, including Corporeal Legacies in the US South: Memory and Embodiment in Contemporary Culture (2018), co-editor of three journal special issues, and author of numerous articles on twenty-first-century US literature and culture. He is co-editing a forthcoming book on affect and pedagogy in literary studies, and writing a third monograph on queer nonhumans. Anna Maguire Elliott holds a PhD in American Literature from the University of Sussex. Her research interests are in domesticity and the environment in American women’s writing. She has taught English at the University of Sussex and at Binghamton University, USA. Most recently, she has completed a collaborative article on domestic space and dementia carers, published in Home Cultures. Tessa Roynon is the founding Librarian at the Swan School, Oxford. Prior to that she taught Literature in English at the University of

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Oxford, primarily as a research fellow at the Rothermere American Institute. Her most recent book is The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction (2021), which examines allusions to ancient Greek and Roman traditions in works by Cather, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Ellison, Morrison, Roth, and Robinson. Other publications include Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition (2013 – winner of the Toni Morrison Society book prize in 2015) and The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison (2012). Makayla C. Steiner is a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa. She was awarded the Huston Diehl Dissertation fellowship in 2019–20. Her intellectual interests are concentrated in contemporary American religious writing, Jewish-American literature, Native and African American literatures, and Postsecular studies. She has published essays in Literature and Belief, Resources for American Literary Study, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. Further work on Marilynne Robinson and an essay on Cormac McCarthy’s postsecular faith are forthcoming in Religion and Literature and a special issue of Intégrité, respectively. Rachel Sykes is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham. They are the author of The Quiet Contemporary American Novel (2018) and have published work on Marilynne Robinson in Critique, Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literature, and Dictionary of Literary Biography. Their current work focuses on the politics of confession in contemporary American culture. They have recently published articles on the function of ‘oversharing’ in contemporary American culture (Signs), representations of Hillary Clinton in US satire and melodrama (Journal of American Studies), and the confessional dynamics of Taylor Swift, Lana del Rey, and Beyoncé (Routledge Companion of Music and Literature).

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Acknowledgements

The inspiration for this collection arose from a one-day symposium on Robinson’s writing, organised by the editors in 2016. The range of scholarship shared on that day showed us how much interest there was in taking that work further, and we thank everyone who participated for their part in the book you now hold in your hands. The editors would like to thank those who supported the initial symposium: Frances Banks, Nahem Yousaf, and Sharon Monteith at Nottingham Trent University and the British Association for American Studies and the Irish Association for American Studies who provided funding and vital encouragement. We would also like to thank Nahem and Sharon for their enthusiastic support of this volume and for their essential help in getting it to print. Most importantly, we would like to thank each of the contributors for the passion, enthusiasm, and patience they have shown as we shepherded this project to a conclusion. And, finally, we would like to thank each other for being a good team – this wouldn’t have happened without each other.

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Introduction Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Rachel Sykes, Jennifer Daly, and Anna Maguire Elliot

A prolific essayist, teacher, and public speaker, Marilynne Summers Robinson is best known for a quartet of historical novels set in the small fictional town of Gilead, Iowa: Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020).1 Since the publication of her debut novel Housekeeping in 1980, critics celebrate Robinson as a singular author of American historical fiction. Yet, as this collection hopes to demonstrate, she is an author who challenges rather than sanctions convention, highlighting the exclusionary ways in which history is written and remembered and retelling similar stories from different perspectives to address issues as diverse as abolitionism and segregation, the relationship between science and faith, and predestination and grace, sex work and gender politics, and the state of political thought in the contemporary United States. Robinson is similarly unconventional in her approach to a writing career. In a 2016 lecture published as “Our Public Conversation: How America Talks About Itself” (2018), Robinson makes the following observation about her public image: Recently I read a brief overview of myself and my work, an article on the Internet. It said that if someone were bioengineered to personify unhipness, the result would be Marilynne Robinson. The writer listed the qualities that have earned me this distinction – I am in my seventies, I was born in Idaho, I live in Iowa, I teach in a public university, and I am a self-professed Calvinist. Ah, well. I will only grow older, I am happy in Iowa, and my religion is my religion. That I was born in Idaho will be true forever. (135)

As she acknowledges, Robinson has always been slightly out of step with literary trends, if also at ease with the role she has carved out

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for herself. She was 37 years old when Housekeeping was published and took 24 years to publish her next novel, Gilead. What is often interpreted as a literary silence was an intense period of writing, reading, and teaching. In the years between Housekeeping and Gilead, Robinson became an influential figure at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and secured a reputation for nonfiction through publication of two diverse and controversial volumes that she often refers to as her most important works: Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989) and The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998). Since Gilead, the rate at which Robinson has published fiction has been astonishing, with a fourth Gilead novel released in 2020, as Rachel Sykes discusses in the Epilogue to this collection. Marilynne Robinson analyses the growing significance and contrasting ‘unhipness’ of Robinson’s work, suggesting new and exciting ways forward for Robinson scholarship. As editors, one rationale for putting together this collection was our suspicion that despite winning major international literary prizes for each of her novels, the central themes and settings of the author’s work are often read as old fashioned and that Robinson is rarely considered a contemporary novelist.2 The grounding of her fiction in the primarily rural Pacific North- and Midwest of the United States and the infusion of her Christian faith into her fiction and nonfiction can be – and has been – read as regressive or nostalgic. However, her fiction and nonfiction engage with the rural as a marginalised site of modernity. Robinson’s novels often focus on constructions of race and gender in the context of the pastoral and the challenges and failures of white allyship aligned with civil rights causes. Her essays also fiercely and more directly critique the conservative politics of the neoliberal university, nuclear power and the governmental dumping of nuclear waste, issues of American democracy and the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, and the state of political thought in the contemporary United States. Read for the breadth and contemporaneity of her preoccupations, Robinson’s writing reveals a profound and sustained engagement with present-day issues across a broad spectrum of social concerns and academic disciplines. She issues a challenge to readers to think more about what religious or rural writing might be with characteristic and measured care. Marilynne Robinson therefore situates the critical

Introduction 3 acclaim for Robinson’s fiction – and her status as one of very few women writers whose work is always highly anticipated – against a rigorous and critical analysis of how her historical fiction responds to the politics of the present.

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Robinson now In a very contemporary way, this collection began online, during a Twitter conversation about Robinson’s fourth novel, Lila, which touched on religion, sex, domesticity, and the implications of reading the novel’s depiction of the Californian dust bowl as a postapocalyptic wasteland.3 Introducing three Early Career Researchers who were all reading and studying Robinson, the conversation highlighted a critical like-mindedness that led to a symposium on Robinson, organised by the editors and held at Nottingham Trent University in June 2016. We saw our intervention as clear: for a best-selling novelist who has received a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award, and a National Medal for the Humanities, and who – at the time of our symposium – was being interviewed by President Barack Obama, Robinson had been the subject of comparatively little sustained scholarship. Extant scholarship tended to have a theological focus and while Robinson’s religiosity makes this work very necessary, critical analysis continues to neglect the wider secular and, indeed, popular impact she enjoys as a writer and public figure. Marilynne Robinson seeks to redress that imbalance, not least because Robinson is an increasingly vocal cultural and political commentator. The period in which we compiled this collection saw an obvious and symbolic deepening of divisions in the American political and cultural landscape. Having issued our call for papers in August 2016, the essays that follow were all written and edited between the election of Donald Trump as 45th President of the United States and the inauguration of his successor, Joe Biden, in January 2021. Robinson initially interpreted Trump’s victory – which saw him lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College – as a glitch in an otherwise sound process of American democracy. In an interview with the Guardian, she described the election as a ‘bizarre thing’ but emphasised that ‘our system is not broken’ and might be fixed (McCrum). She suggested that the result might reinvigorate

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the political system: ‘Trump has brought us to a state where we will have to do a lot of very basic thinking about how our society goes on from this point. […] People will try all kinds of things, and will recover a sense of possibility.’ As Steve Gronert Ellerhoff and Kathryn E. Engebretson suggest in their essay in this collection, optimism and faith in American democracy runs through Robinson’s fiction and her nonfiction, often linked to a valorisation of the American university as a site of public good.4 By the time our contributors submitted their essays, however, Robinson’s positivity had already dulled: I don’t feel that I know what we will leave to history. In this country, as the world knows, we have an administration and majority party that seems actively hostile to books and ideas. On the other hand, we have a lucid, fervent articulation of humane values in opposition to them. Either could be an important part of our legacy. (“Books Blog”)

Like many moderate Democrats, Robinson’s faith in ‘fair’ intellectual debate and a mutual respect between opposing political sides – represented by Reverends Ames and Boughton in Gilead and Home – seems increasingly diminished. Her growing concern for American democracy has meant that despite – or perhaps because of – retiring from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in May 2016, she devotes more time to political writing and public conversation. In February 2018, Robinson published What Are We Doing Here?, a collection of public lectures written to expose what she described as the ‘essential ways we share false assumptions’ (1). With more sustained attention to the present than ever before, Robinson describes a widespread intellectual cynicism, highlighting a lack of intellectual rigour in arguments on the right and left of the political spectrum and calling for a re-examination of what she had previously assumed were shared American values of ‘wisdom, courage, generosity, personal dignity’ (4). Therefore, this collection is published at a transitional moment in Robinson’s career. As we prepared the final manuscript, Jack was published to divisive reviews. Some critics praised its completely uncynical ‘Calvinist romance’ (Perry), arguing that Jack gracefully concluded the Gilead quartet through common themes of redemption, predestination, morality, and earthly desire. Others turned on the author for writing ‘brilliant’ but ‘extremely boring novels’ (Walton)

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Introduction 5 that tell the same eventless story over and over again. For Robinson’s avid readership, Jack provides a backstory for the eponymous Jack Boughton – the antagonist of both Gilead and Home – by exploring how he contemplates his redemption through ‘[a]nother theological question, how one human being can mean so much to another’ (Robinson Jack 300). Beginning eight years prior to the events of Gilead and Home, Robinson finally centres themes of racial segregation, the civil rights movement, and white apathy that remained at the margins of her previous novels, and which Christopher Lloyd, Tessa Roynon, and Emily Hammerton-Barry examine in this collection. More explicitly rooted in an examination of American racism, while giving more – though not total – attention to the Black communities excluded from Gilead, Jack provides a vital and confirmatory link between Robinson’s determinedly historical fiction and a present political moment in which, she contends, ‘very irresponsible people’ court fascism to gain political power while ‘vast crowds’ convening at Black Lives Matter protests give her ‘grounds for hope’ (Coman).

New perspectives on Marilynne Robinson In a speech honouring her retirement from the University of Iowa, former president Barack Obama suggested that Robinson’s work embodies ‘the notion that, ultimately, we are all connected, that we can speak to each other across the void’ (The University of Iowa Center for Advancement). Our hope is that this collection gathers essays that ‘speak to each other’ in similar ways, even when they adopt radically different lenses or critical approaches. Because all four novels in the Gilead quartet pivot around two families and their relationships in the same rural town, essays inevitably touch on similar themes and topics, something that Robinson makes unavoidable.5 The dialogue presented here between critics and across essays demonstrates new ways of reading the complexities in Robinson’s work for how it reflects the contemporary through the historical, the political in the domestic, and the collective through the particular. The collection begins with three short contributions by Sarah Churchwell, Richard H. King, and Bridget Bennett. “Robinson in Context” reflects each scholar’s different position on the contemporary

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resonances in Robinson’s writing. Beginning with an examination of the wider historical context for the Gilead novels, Sarah Churchwell considers their key concepts of justice and charity in relation to the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Richard H. King addresses Robinson’s theological and philosophical ideas, especially of goodness and grace, drawing on historical parallels and ‘real differences’ between the Gilead novels and the work of fellow Christian writer, Flannery O’Connor. Finally, in a discussion of home and its ‘varied iterations’, Bridget Bennett dissects Robinson’s ‘conservative’ reputation through her conception of the home, discussing how the often-political nature of her books tends to be overlooked by scholars. Part I: ‘Writing, Form, and Style’ unpacks the stylistic and formal innovations of Robinson’s prose. Building on Bridget Bennett’s discussion, Daniel King in Chapter 1 draws on contemporary critical debates around literary and historical archives to examine the creation and destruction of written histories in the Gilead novels. Focusing particularly on Gilead, King draws on critical thinker Jacques Derrida, and literary critics Helen Freshwater and Janine Utell, to examine what Derrida calls mal d’archive, represented by Ames’s competing desires to write and burn his papers. Challenging critical association of the domestic with the conservative, in Chapter 2 Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo expands on the ‘marriage plot’ in Lila to counter those critics who interpret Lila’s role as epistemically and theologically inferior to that of her husband Ames. Jack Baker in Chapter 3 then focuses on rhythm and vision in Housekeeping and Gilead to argue that Robinson’s ‘highly stylised and visionary passages’ register aesthetic and conceptual coherences through ‘patterns of sense and suggestion’. All three essays in this section engage critical perceptions or misconceptions to reanimate analysis of Robinson’s literary technique, with a particular focus on narrative, plot, and style. Part II: ‘Gender and Environment’ intervenes in a particularly vibrant and growing area of Robinson scholarship. Anna Maguire Elliott in Chapter 4 tackles the breach between Robinson’s first and fourth novels, Housekeeping and Lila, arguing that Robinson uses the figure of the orphan to explore the tension between American self-reliance and a feminist ethic-of-care. Makayla Steiner in Chapter 5 argues for a reappraisal of Emmanuel Levinas, who feminist thinkers

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Introduction 7 often interpret as a ‘patriarchal philosopher’. Drawing particularly on Housekeeping’s all-female environment, Steiner unpacks how Robinson’s characters support and complicate the lived efficacy of a Levinasian feminine ‘alterity’ as they attempt to create a welcoming home for two young orphans. Lucy Clarke explores the relationship between domesticity and grief in Chapter 6, with reference to psychologist Leeat Granek, to read domestic spaces and states of homelessness in Housekeeping and Home as enactments of loss and prolonged suffering. Read together, the essays in this section interrogate Robinson’s portrayal of gender roles, particularly motherhood, and how through characters, particularly Ruth Stone and Lila Dahl, Robinson quietly dismantles and remodels restrictive gender categories but without suggesting a radical break from them. Part III: ‘Imagined Histories’ explores the intersection of the personal and the national, with a particular focus on fictionalising American racism. Christopher Lloyd in Chapter 7 discusses the relationship between memory, race, and nation in Home, arguing that Robinson uses affect to disrupt the space of home and nation from within. Alex Engebretson steps away from Robinson’s fiction in Chapter 8 to consider how her essays illuminate her perspective on the Protestant mainline church, linking explorations of her Christian faith to a desire to defend, renew, and diversify the racial and gender politics of the church. To conclude this section, in Chapter 9 Emily Hammerton-Barry explores a politics of racial absence by focusing on the spectral in Gilead and Home and suggests that Robinson’s novels feature a narrative ‘haunting’ that critiques whiteness and white anxiety about ‘race’. Different in several compelling ways, these essays draw attention to the significance of identity and memory in the writing of shared histories by focusing on the role of intimate emotions, anxieties, and religious beliefs and their role in shaping notions of a collective American identity in Robinson’s writing. Part IV puts Robinson in conversation with other contemporary writers and cultural institutions. Tessa Roynon in Chapter 10 reads Home and Gilead within an African American literary context, considering parallels to the work of other visionary authors, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. Steve Gronert Ellerhoff and Kathryn E. Engebretson provide an incisive and timely analysis of Robinson’s role at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in Chapter 11, considering the

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university as a force in her work and the important legacy of her role as an educator of future writers. In Chapter 12, Paul Jenner juxtaposes the inheritance of transcendentalism in Robinson’s work with the philosophical retrieval of Emerson and Thoreau in the writing of Stanley Cavell, suggesting that by mounting a ‘conversation of the ordinary’ both authors give decisive voice to transcendentalist thought. This final part highlights Robinson’s significant contribution to broader American conversations about ethics, environment, and nation, emphasising her position as a contemporary author whose work should be read in wider contemporary critical and writerly contexts. The issues that define this collection situate Robinson’s relevance to the current environment and the importance of reading her amongst and against her contemporaries.

Notes 1 Throughout the collection, all authors refer to the Gilead trilogy – Gilead, Home, and Lila – because the existence of Jack was only confirmed in early 2020. The epilogue for this collection offers a brief reading of Jack and bridges this gap. 2 Housekeeping won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel in 1982; Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2004; Home won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2009; and Lila was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014. Robinson herself was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2012, the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2016, and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2016, among numerous other accolades. 3 The conversation was the first of a now ongoing series of online book discussions hosted by US Studies Online: www.baas.ac.uk/usso/bookhourtuesday-25th-november-marilynne-robinsons-lila/. (Accessed21/8/2021.) 4 Robinson’s faith in democracy shines through her conversations with Obama in November 2015, when she described being on the ‘losing’ side of an election as a worthwhile and ‘meaningful vote’ for American institutions (“President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa”). Robinson expressed her interest in engaging in another presidential conversation with Donald Trump: ‘when all is said and done, he is a human being and it would be sort of interesting just simply to talk with him’ (Allardice). 5 For more on the importance of narrative sequence and ‘simultaneity’ in the first three Gilead novels, see: Rachel Sykes, ‘Those Same Trees:

Introduction 9 Narrative Sequence and Simultaneity in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Novels’, Irish Journal of American Studies, Summer 2017, http://ijas.iaas.ie/ issue-6-rachel-sykes/.

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Works cited Allardice, L. “Marilynne Robinson: ‘Obama was very gentlemanly … I’d like to get a look at Trump.’” The Guardian, 6 July 2018. www.theguardian.com/ books/2018/jul/06/marilynne-robinson-interview-barack-obama-donaldtrump-writer-theologian. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) “Books Blog: Marilynne Robinson.” The Guardian, 26 January 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/live/2018/jan/23/marilynnerobinson-webchat-post-your-questions-now. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Coman, Julian. “Marilynne Robinson: America still has a democratic soul.” The Guardian, 26 September 2020. www.theguardian.com/books/2020/ sep/26/marilynne-robinson-author-gilead-interview-barack-obama-jackamerica. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) McCrum, Robert. “From Marilynne Robinson to Richard Ford, six writers in search of Trump’s America.” The Guardian, 15 January 2017. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/15/writers-in-search-of-trumpsamerica-marilynne-robinson-richard-ford-walter-mosley-lionel-shriver. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Perry, Sarah. “Jack by Marilynne Robinson review – a Calvinist romance.” The Guardian, 25 September 2020. www.theguardian.com/books/2020/ sep/25/jack-by-marilynne-robinson-review-a-calvinist-romance. (Accessed 21/06/2021). “President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation - II.” The New York Review of Books, 19 November 2015. www.nybooks.com/ articles/2015/11/19/president-obama-marilynne-robinson-conversation-2/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Robinson, Marilynne. Jack. Virago, 2020. —— What Are We Doing Here? Virago, 2018. The University of Iowa Center for Advancement. “President Obama Retirement Message for Marilynne Robinson.” YouTube, Interview with Barack Obama, 13 December 2016. Walton, James. “Jack by Marilynne Robinson review.” The Times, 2 October 2020. www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jack-by-marilynne-robinson-reviewf5hszwb0j. (Accessed 21/06/2021.)

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Robinson in context: a critical conversation

The contributions in this section were originally presented as part of a roundtable discussion at the Marilynne Robinson Symposium at Nottingham Trent University in 2016. As a result of the wideranging conversation sparked among delegates, the editors invited the speakers to summarise their contributions for inclusion in this collection.

I.  Cultural amnesia, dark prophecies, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels

Sarah Churchwell Despite regularly being hailed by critics for their ‘timeless’ quality, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead books can be read as a particularised history of the American Midwest, an effort to recover what she views as a lost political and moral national project.1 My background for this reading is Robinson’s essay “McGuffey and the Abolitionists” from The Death of Adam (1998), which I would suggest lays out quite explicitly the historical argument that the Gilead novels dramatise more implicitly and subtly. The three – to date – Gilead novels chart the strange transformation of the ‘heartland’ of America from a nineteenth-century radical, utopian project for racial justice to a twentieth-century byword for reflexive conservatism, quiescent racism, and casuistically justified greed. Reviews of the novels seemed startlingly oblivious to this subtext, accusing Robinson of nostalgic apoliticism. They were all

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but uniformly read as exquisite depictions of timeless small-town America, as celebrations of America’s own exceptionalist, sentimental vision; most readers embraced this vision, others objected to it, but they all read John Ames, in particular, as ‘serene’, ‘gentle, modest, loving, and above all good’, in the words of the New Yorker’s James Wood. I want to suggest that both the praise and censure derive from a peculiarly superficial reading of the novels, not from the novels themselves. In particular, it seems clear that John Ames has a difficult, painful epiphany at the end of Gilead (2004) that renders him a classic unreliable narrator, casting into doubt many of his earlier interpretations of his world. John Ames is good, yes, or he tries to be. But he is not, Robinson makes clear, right. Reviewers routinely object to the failings of Robinson’s characters as if they are failings she shares or admires. Criticising Gilead, Tessa Hadley objects in the London Review of Books that ‘Ames’s mere acquiescence to the existence of Jack’s mixed-race child can’t stand all by itself for a significant engagement against injustice’. Robinson would surely be the first to agree; she nowhere suggests that Ames’s ‘acquiescence’ is any kind of engagement against injustice; her point would seem rather to be precisely the inadequacy of Ames’s response, his final realisation of his own failure to engage against the injustice he has always thought he deplored. When A. O. Scott, reviewing Home (2008), writes in similarly dismissive terms in the New York Times, ‘if one old minister leans toward Eisenhower in the coming election while his “alter ego” prefers Stevenson, that seems more a matter of temperament and habit than a sign of serious ideological division’, he is similarly missing the point. Robinson is underscoring the irony of the transformation of the ‘party of Lincoln’ from radical abolitionists in 1856 to the complacently conservative, reflexively tribal Republicans of 1956 – and, by extension, of today. A century after the moral republicanism of the party of Lincoln, Republicans had ceased to be the radical party fighting for a Utopian vision of social justice and had become the socially conservative party that it remains: it is that precise century that the story arc of Gilead traces, from the battles of ‘Bleeding Kansas’ in 1856 to the civil rights movements in 1956. Both Hadley’s and Scott’s inability to see serious ideological divisions in the history Robinson tells are themselves symptomatic of the same historical amnesia that Robinson’s novels are exposing.

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This is not to say that there is no historical amnesia in these novels; it is, rather, to say that such refusal of the political present as the books depict is represented as a blindness on the part of the characters. This is perhaps most true of Robert Boughton in Home, but it also fairly describes John Ames for much – but crucially not all – of Gilead. It is Ames’s gradual acknowledgment of his own failures of historical memory and moral engagement, which Robinson implies are representative more generally of regional Midwestern and national failures of historical memory, that I want to consider here. Robinson is not eulogising the comforts of Gilead; it is worth remembering that in scripture Gilead, although a place of refuge, is also an object of prophetic denunciation. It comes as little surprise that a writer as Bible steeped as Marilynne Robinson has an imagination that produces stories that work on the level of allegory and parable. That both Gilead and Home rework the parable of the Prodigal Son has been much remarked upon, but there are other parables at work in these novels. Our secular literary culture seems unskilled at reading them, even when Robinson tells us how; biblical illiteracy may be another aspect of the cultural amnesia exposed by the Gilead books. In Home, Glory Boughton reads the 78th Psalm over and over: ‘I will open my mouth in a parable,’ it says, ‘I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us’ (King James Version, Ps. 78.2–3). In an interview discussing Lila (2014), Robinson made clear that Lila Ames’s fascination with the Book of Ezekiel was also a parable: ‘when she reads the passage in Ezekiel,’ Robinson said, ‘about the baby inexplicably cast out and by chance taken up by a passing stranger, she sees herself and her circumstance even further acknowledged. This is the parable of her own life’ (“Interview with Marilynne Robinson”). Robinson went on to add: It should be said that the books of the prophets ponder calamity, of which ancient Israel had its share. As monotheists, their writers must assume that God caused or permitted their suffering and that it therefore must have had an ethical meaning, usually God’s chastening their abuse of the poor. But the insistence in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and all the great prophets is that God is faithful and loving, not finally judgmental. Read on from the passage that fascinates Lila and you will find that it is a parable of an endless readiness to forgive.

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‘The dark sayings of old’ offers an image of cultural recovery, reframing old parables and prophecies as a way of reading modern America. Surely the hortative is worth remarking as well: Robinson is encouraging us to read on, using Bible texts as indices, literally pointers, indicating her meanings. In other words, she uses parables not only didactically, but also hermeneutically: the parable does exegetical as well as diagetical work. Robinson’s invocation of Ezekiel is both indicative and instructive. The biblical story of Ezekiel is told in three parts: first, stories about the sin of Judah; second, punishment of the neighbours; and third, prophecies of hope and redemption. It is possible, without belabouring the comparison, to see each of the first three Gilead novels as roughly equivalent to each part of Ezekiel. First, John Ames tells a story of America’s moral failures in Gilead, a story of which he is only half-aware until the very end. Second, in Home, Robinson shows the betrayal of covenants among Ames’s neighbours in the town, particularly the Boughtons’ betrayals and self-betrayals. And third, in Lila, she offers her readers a redemption that we may well not have earned. In particular, Ezekiel 16, which Lila reads obsessively, is known colloquially as ‘the Parable of the Faithless Bride’. As John Ames explains to Lila, the story stands as a parable for Jerusalem’s moral failures in God’s eyes, its ingratitude and, in modern terms, its selling out (figured in the King James Version as ‘whoredom’). This parable could easily be read by critics of America – including, or especially, Americans disappointed by the nation’s moral failures – as an allegory for America’s betrayal of its own moral and ethical foundations, for its failures to know its own history. God berates Jerusalem for forgetting its own past, choosing instead only to build beautiful shrines to itself: And in all thine abominations and thy whoredoms thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, when thou wast naked and bare, and wast polluted in thy blood. And it came to pass after all thy wickedness (woe, woe unto thee! saith the Lord God); That thou hast also built unto thee an eminent place, and hast made thee an high place in every street. Thou hast built thy high place at every head of the way, and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredoms. (King James Version Ezek. 16.22–25)

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The Faithless Bride becomes a parable for America losing faith in its own stated principles, its ethical claims weighed against its manifest bad faith. In addition to thinking in parables, Robinson also has, I think, a somewhat allegorical imagination, which again is not surprising for anyone so immersed in scripture. If we approach the Gilead books allegorically, we might see another familiar triptych that they could be said to represent: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three — but the greatest of these is charity’ (King James Version 1 Cor. 13.13). It’s hardly a stretch to see the Gilead novels framed that way: Gilead is self-evidently a novel about faith. Religious faith, to be sure, but the tension between John Ames and Jack Boughton also concerns good faith and bad: it is about ethics, compassion, forgiveness, honesty, loyalty, treachery – all of which could be said to raise questions of good faith. Ames’s ‘begats’ is not only a personal record, but a political one, in which Robinson teaches America the history of our forgotten moral lineage. Robinson’s Christian and moral principles continually return the Gilead novels to democratic principles of social justice: both seem to be articles of faith. If Gilead is about faith, Home concerns hope and thus must also be about despair. The histories of Glory and Jack continually return to questions of hope: hope in redemption, hope in other people, but also national hopes, our hope that America itself will provide hope, that it will be a sanctuary for hope. And Home ends on what I read as an image of false hope, as Glory imagines a mixed-race child redeeming America. Reading Gilead in 2004, it seemed to me at the time a clear rebuke of a presidential election that had just been fought in the so-called battleground states of the Midwest, asking whether the region’s conservative opposition to gay marriage would hand the election to the Republicans. Robinson was offering a salutary reminder that only a few decades earlier the same region had been hostile to mixed-race marriages, despite the prior fact of what Robinson describes in “McGuffey” as ‘the cultural colonization of the Middle West by abolitionists’ fighting against slavery in states from Ohio to Iowa – the same states that were the subject of electoral scrutiny in 2004 for their presumptive conservatism (Death of Adam 137). In 2008, by the same token, when first reading Home it was hard not to see in Glory’s hopes for the child Robert Boughton

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the symbolism of Barack Obama as an American ‘messiah’, widely hailed as the great mixed-race hope who would redeem the nation. If this is correct, then Glory’s dream of the future is a fantasy, always already repudiated by the reality into which the novel was published. The ending of Home thus also served as a dark prophecy in 2008: that Obama’s presidency alone would not suffice to bring America to an understanding of its own racial history and moral lineage. We need not credit Robinson with imagining the improbable success of Donald Trump in 2016 to observe that the 2008 ending of Home seems to cast doubt on the triumphalism of the ‘post-race America’ that so many were predicting in the wake of Obama’s win. Trump’s subsequent road to the White House on the back of race-baiting, ‘alt-right’, coded promises of a restoration of white supremacy – his slogan ‘America First’, for example, was also a slogan for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s – made all too clear the emptiness of that hope. After faith and hope comes charity, in Lila. The plot of Lila is driven by acts of charity. Material charity, such as the sharing of comforts and shelter, certainly features heavily in the novel; but the narration also reflects on sympathetic or moral charity, on the importance of giving others the benefit of the doubt, of being charitable in our judgements. And if this quasi-allegorical reading is correct, then it creates a cumulative moral arc to all three novels. Ultimately, the lesson the three Gilead novels enjoin is the biblical one: that of faith, hope, and charity, the greatest is charity, a lesson that is consistent with the moral tenor and plot arcs of all three novels. To these generalised, and generalising readings, let me now add some specificity by bringing in another ‘indexical’ intertext, this time a historical and secular one, but one which Robinson makes much of and almost all her readers ignored, with the notable exception of Jonathan Lear in his fine essay “Not at Home in Gilead”. Both Gilead and Home stage a debate so pivotal that it constitutes the only scene that Robinson recreates in detail in both novels. It is the debate over predestination, precipitated by a Ladies Home Journal article from 1948 that Jack asks John Ames’s opinion about. Ames gets defensive, flaring up to vindicate Christianity and dismissing the article as poorly argued. It is a real article, as it happens, called “God and the American People” written by Lincoln Barnett, and

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it is not poorly argued. The article is in fact a carefully evidenced, intelligent, robust examination of the hypocrisies underpinning Americans’ claims about their own religious attitudes in 1948. The editors commissioned a Gallup poll to measure ‘the extent to which Americans consciously associate religion with their conduct’. The survey thus posed questions to respondents in terms of their ‘conscience’, asking if they tried to lead a good life, if they believed they fulfilled the Ten Commandments in their treatment of their fellow citizens, and so on. The Americans polled in 1948 all comfortably reported the correct attitudes. To give just one example: 80% of those surveyed said they were certain that they could love their neighbour as themselves if their neighbour happened to be of a different race. After reporting these complacent responses, Barnett angrily disputes them: These figures are dramatically incompatible with the facts of American behavior as revealed on every level of existence today […] It is openly repudiated in such other aspects of American life as labor conflict, anti-Semitism, and the inequality and discrimination to which racial minorities like the Negroes, Mexicans and Nisei are subjected […] If four fifths of American people love members of another race, how explain the humiliation that is visited on the American Negro? How explain the denial to him of the very lowest run of social justice – equality of opportunity? How explain segregation in the armed forces and in the nation’s capital and all the other forms of disinheritance that are imposed upon him by white Americans in contempt and pride? (236–237)

Only a few words later, Barnett singles out for particular censure white ministers who ‘tone down sermons because they fear their own congregations. And sometimes they are very slow to discover where their conscience lies. The Jim Crow churches are vivid examples of this. A Jim Crow church is a denial of Christianity’ (237). Although Ames admits the article is ‘interesting’, he also thinks some of its interpretations ‘fraudulent’ and finds it ‘self-righteous’, while overlooking the simple fact that Gilead had a Jim Crow church, the burning of which constitutes one of his narrative’s central memories (Gilead 162, 167, 166). He denies the truth of what this article tells him: that his complicity with Jim Crow segregation in Gilead was a betrayal of the Christianity he thinks he holds so dear. Jack Boughton tries to point it out, reminding Ames: ‘I thought he

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made the point in here somewhere that Americans’ treatment of the Negro indicated a lack of religious seriousness’ (167). Ames does not yet know that Jack has secretly married an African American woman, and has come home to Gilead to try to find a place they can live together, but he does not acknowledge Jack’s observation; his silence is symptomatic. A few sentences later, Robinson offers the reader another hint that Ames’s perspective is not necessarily to be trusted: ‘I conceal my motives from myself pretty effectively sometimes’, he admits (168). When the pastor of the church flees Gilead with his flock for Chicago, he brings Ames some lilies, which he replants at his church. Comparing slaves to ‘the lilies of the field’, who flourish without human care because they are cared for by God – like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) who just ‘growed’ (Stowe 356) – was a common paternalistic depiction of slavery during the antebellum period. At once sentimental and dismissive, the phrase implied that slaves frolicked in a pastoral idyll, careless because without cares. By the civil rights era, the phrase had become a familiar shorthand for the question of racial responsibility and agency. It is within this pointed context that Robinson has Ames wonder if he should tell his church that those lilies have ‘some significance’: ‘I didn’t know the Negro pastor well myself, but he said his father knew my grandfather. He told me they were sorry to leave, because this town had once meant a great deal to them’ (Gilead 42). Why doesn’t Ames know the pastor well, in a town so tiny and so religious? Why doesn’t he understand that what the town meant to the African Americans is the same thing it meant to his grandfather: a sanctuary from racial injustice? By no coincidence, it is also a sermon based on the text of ‘the lilies of the field’ that precipitates the violent break between Ames’s father and grandfather. Ames’s father, whose pacifism has, Robinson suggests, devolved into passivity, gives a sermon during Reconstruction on the lilies of the field – an implicit case for political quietism, for acquiescence to an unjust status quo. The implication is that he is abnegating responsibility for Black citizens in the wake of the Civil War and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. His father, the fiery abolitionist, stalks out of the church in outrage at hearing a sermon from his own son that is a coded apologia for the rise of Jim Crow – or at least a refusal to engage actively with its sins. It is this rupture that

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divides our narrator’s family; but not until the end of the novel does the story come full circle, with the revelation that his namesake Jack Boughton has married a Black woman but they cannot find anywhere to live together in peace. That is the ‘significance’ of the lilies that Ames fails to recognise; for Robinson, they form another parable. At the end of the Ladies Home Journal article that Ames rejects, Barnett declares that the survey: suggests specifically that the weakness of America’s position stems from the self-satisfaction of its people, who assume that they are quite as virtuous as anyone can be and love their fellow men as much as anyone should, and thus mistake their partial and incomplete achievements for absolute and unconditional success. And this, in the perspective of the Bible, is sin. (240)

Barnett goes on to point out that Luther called ‘man’s final sin […] his unwillingness to admit he is a sinner’. And it is this sin of which John Ames is as guilty as anyone in the Gilead novels, as he realises in the final hours of his life: ‘I woke up this morning thinking this town might as well be standing on the absolute floor of hell for all the truth there is in it, and the fault is mine as much as anyone’s’ (Gilead 266). This technique is characteristic of Robinson’s exegetical approach to intertextuality: the intertexts can act as exegetical frames, if we bother pursuing them, but they also function as the sources of ‘prophecies’ that the fiction dramatises, if not necessarily ‘fulfilling’ in the typological sense. Rather, the history of the ‘begats’ that John Ames shares with his son – his notional reader – becomes a history of America’s begats, a national history as genealogy, a chain of consequences begetting consequences. Both John Ames and Robert Boughton fail to admit that they are sinners too; that Jack is not the only sinner on the porch. And their failure stems from self-satisfaction, as Lila tries to make clear to Ames after the debate. ‘Maybe some people aren’t so comfortable with themselves’, she tells him, and Ames recognises it for the ‘rebuke’ it is (175). Even as Ames sees the rebuke, however, Gilead’s reviewers remained blind to the fact that Ames is not merely failing to see his own failures, he is teetering close to hypocrisy, assuming that he loves his fellow men as much as anyone should. In fact, Robinson clearly implies, he should love – and care for – his fellow men a

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great deal better than he does, as exemplified by his ungenerous, suspicious approach to Jack Boughton. And all of this, again, functions as an allegory for America’s complacent belief in its own virtues and exceptionalism. This is why, I take it, that Robinson ends with Ames’s epiphanic turn to King Lear. John Ames’s final words – and the final words of Gilead – are the words that Lear famously speaks on the heath when he calls the Fool ‘houseless poverty’. Telling the Fool to seek shelter from the storm, Lear adds, ‘I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep’. which is what John Ames says as the book finishes, and he presumably dies. Lear’s very next lines offer the play’s great shift into compassion, into a sense of responsibility based not on duty but on empathy, on care. Lear realises that it is his responsibility to be his brother’s keeper, to care for his fool: Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, … Oh, I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just. (3.4.28–36)

Ames dies in the midst of epiphany, his final thoughts framing the terrible realisation that he has taken too little care of his town, his flock, the poor naked wretches. But he has also taken too little active care of the town’s legacy of racial justice that he has himself been recounting. He took pride in it, but he did not act to protect it, because he did not act to protect the African Americans in Gilead from arson, from being harassed out of the town that was founded to protect them, ‘the bold ramparts meant to shelter’ the hope that ‘a harmless life could be lived here unmolested’ (276–277). Instead of making Gilead a sanctuary, Ames treated his Black neighbours like the lilies of the field, as if because God would care for them, he need not. Ames becomes in this reading if not quite an allegorical figure, then certainly a symbolic one, a representative everyman, the white American who continually returns to the Civil War as a kind of a genesis myth, slavery as the nation’s ‘original sin’, while blinding himself to the obvious role it has played in his own life – that to ask what it means to be your brother’s ‘keeper’ takes on

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a different, and far more sinister, valence in a country defined by slavery. This seems a playing out of the distinction Robinson made in a 2015 lecture between a Christian identity and a Christian ethic. In making that argument Robinson rightly noted that in America today a Christian identity is strongly associated with the old Southern Confederacy. A Christian ethic, by contrast, would be characterised by the discomfort that she finds in her theology, an uncertainty that is salutary, that resists complacency. That uncertainty is the backbone of the Gilead novels, of faith, hope, and charity, and I think resists the strain of sentimentality that occasionally creeps in, and not only in relation to ideas of nationhood. Also cutting against that sentimentality is the trenchancy of Robinson’s view that ‘discomfort’ is what is needed to reform the commonweal, that to be ‘unaccommodated’, as Lear is, and as Robinson says Lila is, creates the foundation for the ethical compassion and sense of justice she seeks, and for which she continually strives to hold America to account. In her trenchant essay “Facing Reality” in The Death of Adam, Robinson insists that ‘it is drastically wrong’ to treat ‘a palliative as if it were a cure’ (83). Instead, she suggests, we should find comfort in a ‘compassionate imagination’ that might help alleviate the burdens of human suffering. That compassionate imagination is at the heart of her fictional project. Our awareness of constant failure may uphold America’s sense of exceptionalism; but it also holds us accountable to that sense. If we claim exceptionalism, we must live up to its standards. And it is worth recalling in this context that even the foundational ‘exceptionalist’ text, John Winthrop’s famous image of America as a ‘city on the hill’, was not, as it is usually now read, an expression of arrogant faith in the inherent supremacy of the American experiment. On the contrary, Winthrop said: we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all professors for God’s sake; we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to



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be turned into Curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land where we are going. (10)

For Winthrop, America was like a city on the hill because all eyes would be upon it; the nation would be a moral exemplum not because Winthrop assumed that it would naturally be more moral than other places, but because its fate would be read as a parable for the fate of Christian nations. Winthrop’s emphasis is upon the constant possibility of failure: all eyes will be upon America because it is singular, not because it is superior. Similarly, Robinson does not, I take it, presume the stability of justice or democracy as categories; nothing in these novels suggest that they are fixed or achievable or knowable. Another way of putting this would be to say that the Gilead novels are seeking to understand the ‘begats’ of the Civil War, and of American history. It did not beget democracy or social justice, but it might beget a democratic ethic, or in Robinson’s terms a Christian ethic, that understands the difference between ethics and identity. But to do that, these novels suggest, America must stop accommodating itself to the betrayal of its own values, and begin the hard work of recognising how unaccommodated, and unaccommodating, it has become.

II.  History, theology, and ethics in Marilynne Robinson’s work

Richard H. King If one thing is certain, it is the centrality of Marilynne Robinson’s Christian faith to an understanding of her fiction and her thought. Also of great importance are the ethical implications of that faith as expressed in the lives of the characters of the Gilead trilogy. In what follows, I focus on the religious/theological dimension of Robinson’s work as a way of resisting our contemporary tendency to politicise all issues, particularly, perhaps, in secular academic discourse. The religious dimension all too often gets dismissed as a smokescreen for ‘real’ issues having to do with, say, power and interests. With that, I also want to examine the Christian ethic which makes Robinson’s characters sensitive to both public and private

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moral issues. I begin by looking briefly at the way Robinson establishes a kind of history of the ordinary within which her characters ‘live and move and have their being’ (King James Version Acts 17:28). For this, I primarily use Robinson’s fiction and thought as each respond to the other without reflecting the other in an exact way.2 Robinson’s focus falls upon the ordinary and everyday where we see God’s presence in the world. Her religious thinking might be called a theology of the ordinary. Within the life of the Gilead trilogy, Reverend John Ames’s main mode of expression is the spoken sermon, the genre central to the Calvinist origins of her faith and to Protestantism generally. From this perspective the text of Gilead (2004) might be read as a series of sermons or one long sermon in the form of a series of letters from an ageing minister, John Ames, to his young son, Robby, whom he will never know as an adult. In fact, one of the big questions facing Ames (b. 1880) in Gilead is whether to have his much younger wife, Lila, throw away the sermons he has filed away over the years. Generally, then, the spoken word preserved in written form is central to the faith Robinson explores in her fiction. As a minister, John Ames has lifelong experience as a public speaker. But, strangely enough, readers never hear him sermonise in the Gilead novels. Even Sunday worship and mid-week prayer meetings remain off-stage and are only mentioned obliquely. Public speech of a political sort is generally absent. Only when Ames and his old friend and neighbour, Reverend Robert Boughton, talk in private about the history of denominational rivalry between Ames, a Congregationalist, and Boughton, a Presbyterian, does Robinson give a hint of the once explosive political history of denominational differences in Iowa. Readers also learn of the great historical importance of the Quakers in the town of Gilead, since their pacifism moderated the fire-eating militancy of abolitionist Christians like Ames’s grandfather, a man who rode with John Brown and remained committed to his legacy. All of this is part of the rich and complex history of the Midwest where, during the crisis of the Union and afterwards, religion and politics were inseparable. The politics you adhered to reflected the God you prayed to (Robinson Death of Adam 126–149). The post-Civil War history of the white South has often been understood in terms of decline, but Robinson thematises a northern sense of declension hovering over the trilogy’s present. A crucial

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dimension, particularly of the first two novels, is the slow emergence of a nagging sense of loss of a heroic public past and the difficulty of acting in the present so as to redeem that past. What Ames learns from the life of his godson, Jack Boughton, is the presence of the past in the present. Expressed somewhat differently, the historical judgement Robinson brings to bear is that it is not only the ‘white South’ that ‘lost’ the war; white citizens of the North also lost it. They have misplaced its importance, literally, and conveniently, forgotten what it was about. This is the backdrop to the single most poignant moment of the trilogy – when Jack realises that he simply cannot bring his Black wife and their young son to live in his former home in Gilead. His godfather, Ames, comes to realise the full shame of this, but can only reflect on it in the letter he is writing to his son in Gilead, rather than directly asking Jack’s pardon. He cannot speak to his friend Robert – Jack’s father – about it either. It is all, somehow, unspeakable. In Home (2008), Old Boughton and Jack watch television news coverage of the outbreak of racial conflict in the mid-1950s South. They tiptoe around the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the campus riot that exploded when a prospective Black student, Autherine Lucy, was the first African American enrolled at the University of Alabama in 1956.3 But what disturbs the father in all this is what he perceives as the lack of civility on the part of Black protestors. They are, he thinks, in too much of a hurry and need to earn white respect in order to deserve integration into the larger, i.e. white, society. For his part, Jack only mutters dissent under his breath, but he is clearly distressed at the limits of his father’s empathy. In this context, it is no wonder he cannot bring his Black wife, Della, and their son back to Gilead. It is no longer home, if it ever was. Thus, we might say that Robinson’s fiction holds up a mirror of criticism as well as a mirror of understanding to this waning Protestant culture of mid-century America. Yet, we should not patronise the two elderly ministers as racial reactionaries and small-town provincials out of their intellectual and moral depth. In seminary, they studied such classics of modern Protestant theology such as Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), which challenged the supernatural claims of religion and profoundly influenced Karl Marx’s critique of religion. Feuerbach’s work was also part of the intellectual

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underpinnings of the Higher (Historical) Criticism of the Bible developed in Germany, where, as Ames recounts, his older brother, Edward, lost his faith while studying theology. Like Robinson, Ames and Boughton are well-versed in the theology of German-Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, and the writings of German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Sifton and Stern).4 In the wake of World War I, Barth’s neo-orthodox theology rejected the complacency of liberal Christianity, which too easily assumed God’s active involvement in history on the side of what right-thinking Christians, especially progressives, believed was the right side. Barth’s subsequent emphasis fell on God’s distance from any specific political or worldly causes. The chastened, rather sceptical, liberalism of American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was often identified with neo-orthodoxy, which became one of the dominant theological positions at Protestant seminaries in the United States after World War II (McCarraher). Readers of American literature know that American writing is replete with take-downs of ministers and men of the cloth. But Robinson’s duo in the Gilead trilogy are the furthest thing from Sinclair Lewis’s evangelist, Elmer Gantry, William Faulkner’s dreamy Confederate divine, Gail Hightower, or Harry Crews’s fornicating and hard-drinking southern revivalists. Ames and Boughton would have run miles to escape the clutches of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority of the 1970s and 1980s; nor, I suspect, would either man have welcomed Billy Graham to town in the 1950s. They might have attended Union Theological Seminary in New York or the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. They still read the liberal weekly, The Nation, and probably the liberal Christian Century, too. Their politics are vague, but John Ames does say that he will probably vote for the Republican candidate, Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, who stood much further toward the centre than the Republicans of six decades later. Overall, their religious faith and witness reflected the profile of the educated Protestant clergy in the last period of the golden age of Protestant theology. The ‘death of God’ theology, Harvey Cox’s The Secular City (1965) and Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God (1963) were waiting in the wings of the 1960s, ready to define a new set of issues for what Bonhoeffer once referred to as the ‘world come of age’. It was a long way from the world of John Brown.

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In her essays, Robinson expresses a deep suspicion of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur 32) which informs some modern Protestant theology and is descended from the Higher Criticism. She dislikes not only its reductionist attempt to undermine the spiritual and the transcendent side of Christianity, but also its attempt to loosen the close connection between Christianity and Judaism, the Old and the New Testaments. More broadly, she is suspicious of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud insofar as they supply ammunition to the traditions that seek to demythologise Christianity. In fact, demythologisation is a hermeneutic position developed by German theologian, Rudolf Bultmann, in the inter-war years of the twentieth century. Generally, Robinson’s resistance to the demythologisation of Christianity also reflects an anti-modernist strand in her thinking about Christianity. Robinson’s goal is to emphasise the importance of the ‘reform’ tradition of the Reformation and this has led her to answer back to the easy – she would probably say lazy – dismissals of John Calvin and Calvinism among contemporary theologians and historians of the Reformation (Sitman). This tradition of the Reformation has been much stronger in American religious history via the influence of England and Scotland than the Lutheran tradition brought to America by immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. Even then, though American religious historians may emphasise the importance of the Puritan origins of New England, a contemporary defence of Calvinism is hardly a task many theological liberals have embraced. For example, Robinson challenges one of the giants of modern scholarship and social thought, Max Weber, whose Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05) has considerable relevance to the history of American capitalism as well as to the history of Puritanism in America. She claims that Weber ‘associated Calvinism’ with ‘joyless ascetic acquisitiveness’, and therefore rendered Calvinist ‘theology of no account’ (Death of Adam 23–24). But Robinson’s Weber will barely be recognisable to other scholars who know Weber as a figure who wrestled heroically with the theology and ethics of reform Christianity as a youth and certainly did not see Calvinist theology as being ‘of no account’ in the sense of trivial. She makes Weber a champion of a glib anti-Puritanism, a German version of H. L. Mencken without his sense of humour. Robinson’s larger point

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– that the spirit that permeates our understanding of modern history leads us to ‘read it as a record of cynicism and manipulation’ (27) – is one worth considering, but Max Weber is a bad example with whom to make this point. Robinson also objects to the way that the modern Higher Criticism has sought to ‘work the New Testament free from the Old’ (Givenness of Things 165). She is hostile to the idea that Christianity incorporates, and thereby transcends, its Jewish origins. On this reading, God’s covenant is now with the Christian Church, not the children of Israel. She also links this radical sundering of the Old and New Testaments in modern Protestantism with early heresies such Marcionism and Gnosticism. More seriously, some extreme forms of this Protestantism have pushed Christianity toward a kind of metaphysical anti-Judaism, even to anti-Semitism (Nirenberg). Finally, then, Robinson refuses to draw a stark contrast between the supposedly primitive, jealous Yahweh of the Old Testament and the God of love in the New Testament. What she treasures most about the Old Testament – and causes her to defend it so tenaciously – is its claim that human beings are made ‘in the image of God’. Note that this Old Testament dimension is intended to directly challenge Feuerbach’s point that God is a complex projection of human traits; that humans create God. It should be obvious by now that, in respect to her Christianity, Marilynne Robinson means it. She is no mere cultural Christian. Among her literary contemporaries, living and dead, she has been more insistent in her faith than the Catholic Walker Percy or her fellow Protestant, John Updike, even though the latter was also an avid reader, albeit more dilettantish, of Karl Barth’s neo-orthodox theology. However, this leads her to engage in some special pleading – aka casuistry – of her own. To her credit, she continually wrestles in her essays and fiction with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. In Home, when Jack Boughton argues the issue of predestination and theodicy with his father and Ames, it is the latter’s voice that generally sounds closest to the positions she puts forth in her essays. For instance, she claims that predestination is in fact implicit in all forms of Christianity, not just Calvinism, thus implying that most Christians refuse to face the hard truth of the doctrine. At other moments, she suspends judgement by asserting that the whole question of predestination involves ‘an inquiry beyond human capacity’

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(Givenness of Things 192) With admirable candour and humility, she also writes: ‘I can propose no solution, however tentative, to the problem of evil’ (188). More evasively, she contends that the doctrine of ‘[h]uman depravity’ is really ‘directed against the casuistical enumeration of sins’ and the tendency to ‘assign them different degrees of seriousness’ (Death of Adam 155), as though the meaning of sin had to do with mere spiritual strategies. Finally, at times, she throws up her hands in exasperation at the idea that a loving God would act like THAT toward his creation: ‘Is it conceivable that the God of the Bible would shackle himself to the worst consequences of our worst behavior?’ (Givenness of Things 216). Robinson’s overall position, then, is that ‘faith is given by God’ and is thus ‘a gift’ (190). Faith, in turn, is enabled by grace, which is for her ‘an alleviation’ as well as also a ‘gift’ (199). The place she assigns Christ in her theology assumes that Christ ‘is also implicit, present in humankind, before he, in the Incarnation, became present among them’ (208). That is, God too suffered the trials of human existence and his self-sacrifice was an affirmation of the goodness of creation. She repeatedly stresses that the crucifixion identifies Jesus Christ with the humble, the humiliated, and the wretched of the earth. Think here, as Jack Miles has suggested, of crucifixion as a legal form of lynching – and perhaps also lynching as a secular crucifixion. As an analyst of the New Testament as a literary text, Miles sees the promise at the heart of the Christian narrative to be that ‘the apparent loser may be the real winner unrecognised’, a decidedly Robinsonian angle (4), though Robinson has harsh things to say about Miles’s literary rendering of the meaning of Christ. Also, while Miles sees the crucifixion as God’s attempt to rectify the mistakes in the creation, Robinson holds to the notion that Christ’s crucifixion is a sign of God’s forgiveness and thus is a gift to humanity. Despite her Calvinism, her overall view of human nature is a positive one: though we act and do evil, we are nevertheless part of a magnificent creation, redeemable and capable of good. Finally, in contrast with classical or contemporary secular ethics, Robinson’s Christian ethics do not identify being good with being fully human or being at home in the world. This means that she rejects the idea that we should think and act in accordance with natural law. Rather, being good is something we must struggle to become, as it were, ‘Christian ethics go steadfastly against the grain

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of what we consider human nature’ (Givenness of Things 104). Yet to say that Jesus was a man is not to say that he was ‘only a man’, if we take this to mean something inadequate (271). Robinson’s depiction of both Jack Boughton and Lila Ames reflects this complex sense of what it means to be human. For instance, Jack is the biggest sinner in Gilead. The younger man has built a life on disappointing others and himself. His own self-judgement is that ‘I really am nothing […] nothing with a body’ (Home 288–289). He is a prodigal who returns home, only to leave again. Yet Jack is clearly proud when he tells his sister Glory how Ames has called him a ‘good man’ (308). This acknowledgement from his godfather is something he has always sought. But though Robinson believes that Christian goodness is possible, she is scathing about the concern with our Christian identity. To cultivate such an identity is a prideful sort of self-identification, one that ‘appeals to a constellation of the worst human impulses’ and is more destructive than ‘tribalism’ because it ‘assumes a more virtuous us …’ (Givenness of Things 104). It is, Robinson adds crushingly, ‘for Christ to decide who the Christians are’ (105). What finally does Robinson see as the foundation of ethics? As already mentioned, Robinson understands the Old Testament’s essential message to be that ‘human beings share his image’ and this leads her to ask, ‘Do we have any other secure basis for belief in universal human dignity?’ (170). We first encounter her involvement with this question early in Gilead when Ames writes to Robby ‘I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face. Boughton and I have talked about that too. It has something to do with incarnation …’. Ames adds, ‘Any human face is a claim on you’ (Gilead 75). The biblical underpinnings of this line of thought are found in the great acknowledgement/recognition theme sounded in 1st Corinthians 13:12: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known (King James Version).

This emphasis upon the face can also be found in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and runs counter to Jean-Paul Sartre’s assumption that the ‘gaze’ of the other turns us into a thing, an ‘it’ not a ‘thou’. Levinas’s claim is that a face makes someone free rather than

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imprisoning him or her. Certainly, Robinson stands close to this position. Finally, these references to recent Continental ethical thought make the important point that Robinson asks her readers to take seriously the kind of Christian encounters reflected in the various recognitions and acknowledgments that dot her fictional world. As I began by emphasising, there is no simple, one-to-one relationship between her essays and her fiction and we should not move too easily back and forth between them. It is not quite right to say that they interrogate each other, but their co-presence to us means that, as we read the fiction and then the essays, or vice versa, our reading of each is enriched by the other.

III.  The many homes of Marilynne Robinson

Bridget Bennett Marilynne Robinson’s indebtedness to history is apparent in all her work. Her novels are – and feel – rooted in the past. First, and most obviously, Housekeeping (1980) has an unspecified post-Depression era setting. The recurrence of popular songs such as ‘Irene’, ‘Love Letters Straight from your Heart’, and ‘Cottage for Sale’, all loved – and sung – by the narrator’s mother Helen, help readers to situate the novel in the decade following 1945. The action of Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014) chiefly takes place in the period around 1956, when the first novel opens. Each looks back through history, using the lens of family and genealogies produced out of the relationship between the familial and national. Robinson invokes specific events such as John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry (Gilead) and the consequence of the Wall Street Crash (Lila) to give contexts to the lives of her characters. The present day of each novel is therefore derived from a profoundly consequential past, in ways that are continually foregrounded. Second, while her ‘quiet’ narrative aesthetic corresponds to one current novelistic trend, it is entirely at odds with another tendency that represents noise as the governing motif of contemporary US experience (Sykes). This means that although her novels are contemporary, they do not seem to belong to the dominant zeitgeist.

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Finally, and most importantly to what will follow, Robinson’s fiction draws upon a literary genealogy that includes key nineteenth-century forbears. Starting with a discussion of her avowed indebtedness to nineteenth-century literature, my contribution examines the way that Robinson’s work engages with this legacy and brings it into the present. It identifies two interconnected features of her writing: her use of metaphor and focus on home. Tracing both throughout her oeuvre, it also locates her writing within the context of a set of contemporaries to see the ways she is profoundly linked to our own time. In this way, it argues for new possibilities of reading Robinson not only in line with her predecessors but also in conjunction with modern and contemporary writers such as James Baldwin, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Robinson is not only an extraordinarily successful novelist but also a Christian thinker and polemical essayist whose writings have received both positive and negative attention, particularly from environmentalists and scientists. A number of prominent figures have taken up the challenge of paying serious attention to her wideranging intellectual projects. Probably her most famous reader is Barack Obama, who conducted a public conversation with her in Iowa in September 2015, subsequently published in two parts in the New York Review of Books. Obama especially admired a quality of attention to the ordinary in her work, located as belonging to the domestic and noting that ‘part of my connection to your books, I think, is an appreciation for – without romanticizing Middle America or small-town America – that sense of homespun virtues’ (“President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa”). Obama’s identification of the ‘homespun’ as a source of moral worth particularly associated with a politics of the local and everyday reminds us that just as home is a key physical location in Robinson’s fiction, values associated with the domestic are also central to interpreting her work. This recognition shows the way the human subject is at the heart of all her writing: she consistently insists upon the relationship between Christianity and human value. During a wide-ranging interview with Thomas Schaub, Robinson specifically notes the ways in which the work of Melville, Dickinson, and Thoreau influenced her development as a novelist. These writers were profoundly linked to an emerging democratic culture in America; almost exactly one hundred years before the setting of the Gilead

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trilogy, debates with fundamental consequences for the United States were taking place with a particular urgency. Slavery, civil rights, the responsibilities of engaged citizenship, democracy, and nationhood were all under scrutiny. Newspapers, journals, essays, and public meetings were the sites in which current events were debated with real seriousness. Emerson was an enthusiastic participant in lyceum and print culture and his lectures helped to spread his doctrines of civic responsibility and self-reliance. Robinson is an active and engaged author in the manner of Emerson. Like him, she expresses an optimism about human potentiality through a vocabulary shaped by a deep knowledge of the Bible and Christian theology. The fact that she shares this engagement with the broader culture within which she is situated challenges the feeling that her novels are not fully situated in the present. In other words, though her fiction is set historically in the past, this does not mean that it is not also richly located in the politics of the contemporary. Robinson’s comments on her forebears’ methods and their impact on her work are complex and revealing. She expresses a particular interest in metaphor. Early in the same interview she argues that ‘anything you can do with language that works justifies itself, and anything is fair, anything is open, including long metaphorical passages that at first don’t appear to be going anywhere’ (235). A little later she returns to a discussion of metaphor, telling Schaub, ‘I was particularly impressed with the use of metaphor in the great ones […] the way they used metaphor was a highly legitimate strategy for real epistemological questions to be dealt with in fiction and poetry’ (239). Reflecting on the impulse behind Housekeeping, she links it to the trilogy of Melville, Dickinson, and Thoreau. First, she notes ‘the feeling that there was something to the idea of experience as emblematic’ and, second, she admires their insistence that ‘reality is all of a piece’ (239). Her acknowledgement of the power of metaphor as a strategic writing tool is important to engaging with the ways she appropriates it within her own work. She does this so successfully that it becomes one of her writing’s defining qualities. Indeed, the narrative strategy she outlined as her aim when writing Housekeeping is based on a nineteenth-century model of extended metaphor. She uses metaphorical passages to apprehend and describe reality through a process of analogy. These have a ‘signature quality’ (239) and allow knowledge to be produced by,

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and in consequence of, language that has both beauty and intellectual weightiness. Certainly, Robinson’s prose is characterised by meditative passages and moments of precise, often religiously inflected observation: many of these intense moments are articulated through metaphors of home. In Robinson’s work, home is an expansive and generative category. It encompasses theology, domestic ideology, ideas of comfort and belonging. Scholars have recognised the way Robinson’s novels use metaphor to describe ‘emblematic’ experience. Powerful and allusive metaphorical language also shapes her nonfiction in ways that have not yet had sufficient acknowledgement. A richly varied idea of home is at the centre of all of Robinson’s work. It is, to borrow once again from her own words, ‘the genetic strand that opens a whole genealogy’ (239). This description uses an analogical method of reflecting on reality. The word genealogy can be usefully extended both to encompass the intellectual lineage that shaped her development as an author, essayist, and public intellectual and to suggest her body of work – or ‘begats’ to use a word invoked by John Ames at the start of Gilead (9). Recognising this in turn allows for a new mapping of one of the key thematic relationships between her diverse outputs, a critical lacuna to date, despite the attention her fiction has been given.5 One reason for the way that this particular connection between parts of her oeuvre has been under-explored is that her readers belong to different, and not always overlapping, constituencies. While the bulk of Robinson’s readers encounter her writing through her critically lauded novels, another group is more concerned with her theological essays, reading her novels in order to further engage with her religious thought. Critics have almost invariably divided up in similar ways, reading her fiction and nonfiction more or less apart from each other. Though Robinson appears fully at home in each of the arenas in which she makes her public interventions, it seems that her readers are not. This general – though not universal – critical oversight offers an opportunity for new readings. Metaphors of home create a ‘signature quality’ throughout her entire oeuvre. Conceptually speaking, home seems at once intuitive, universal, and stable. It suggests relations and bonds between the material and the affective, adding weight to both as they are brought to bear upon each other. Home is thus much more than the sum of its

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parts. While a house is a material structure, it is also the stuff out of which a home might be fashioned. Imaginative and emotional work can transform it in ways that can be felt, or experienced, yet also be difficult to name or pin down. It is both a location – though not necessarily a single one – and an affective and imaginative category. As a term it is expansive, used metaphorically to encompass what it means to be comfortable ‘at home’ as well as to feel unsettled or uncomfortable ‘not at home’. As I have argued elsewhere, since it is ‘constituted through the imagination’, home can be both a ‘site and object of desire, but […] apparently paradoxically […] a space of exclusion and management’ (Bennett, Carroll, and Mackay 4). This means that it can involve coercion and violence, which are often gendered and raced. Issues of exile, marginalisation, and homelessness have also been the subject of work in which contestations about home and ownership – whether in terms of property rights or larger political arguments about borders and belonging – have been significant. Robinson does not represent houses as forms of collateral but as places of refuge and possibility. Yet they can also act as locations of restriction and restraint: after all, her first novel ends with the deliberate burning down and escape from a house. Robinson’s ecologies and economies of home encompass the theological, the political in its broadest sense, experiential, imaginative, and affective. Each of these is important to understanding her intellectual concerns and the powerful narrative possibilities of using metaphors of home in her writing. Each metaphor, for example, has connections to ideas of self and other which inform the construction of her characters. Additionally, the sense of home as a crucial site of identity formation, belonging, and responsibility is central to debates about ecology, catastrophe, democracy, warfare, fear, and identity politics. These concerns are at the heart of Robinson’s most polemical essays, from her early book Mother Country: Britain, The Nuclear State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989) onwards. The emotion associated with home is important in all her work, particularly when it is put to political use. She is a vocal opponent of neoliberal assumptions of value that come from calibrations of the fiscal in which the house-as-home is part of a portfolio of assets that can be precisely measured. The home has been at the heart of global crisis, its significance clear as both a material structure and an abstraction that can be used to indicate economic and psychic

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events in the life of the family. A return to intimacy, to home, and the domestic has therefore become a common focus for cultural texts like Robinson’s, challenging the primacy of the so-called ‘noisy’ contemporary novels. The imminent possibility of repossession and its impact on a set of interlinking familial and social relationships and subjectivities was also a staple of nineteenth-century fiction, the period at which the home increasingly becomes, paradoxically, both a financial asset and a liability for many more people than it had in the past. For in the economic crises or panics from the early national period to the end of the nineteenth century, the home was often precisely what was at stake. This was one of the critical ways in which market crisis had its impact on the lives of Americans, especially middle-class homeowners, as Andrew Lawson and Jessica Lepler have argued. At the same time, since the culture of home and domesticity was also reaching its apotheosis, metaphorical language relating to the home and to the domestic was a profoundly important literary resource for nineteenth-century writers. Thus, the rise and significance of domestic ideology in the nineteenth century made using metaphors of home an efficacious way of speaking to a wide public in a way audiences found recognisable and engaging. Invocations of home, variously defined, were powerful within public discourse: they offered ways of reflecting on subjects as diverse as the intimate and familial to public affairs and national crises. Probably the single outstanding example is Abraham Lincoln’s celebrated 1858 “House Divided” speech. His prophetic, biblically derived language underwrites the moral and political case he carefully lays out, challenging the extension of slavery in the United States. Meanwhile, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) brings together practical methods of housekeeping with philosophical modes of reflecting on lived experience. He laments the paucity of modern life that keeps many families living in rented accommodation: ‘though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter’ (44). Emily Dickinson’s poetry repeatedly uses metaphors of houses and domestic interiors to reflect upon complex psychological states. As she writes, ‘One need not be a chamber – to be haunted –/ One need not be a House’ (9). Whitman instead represents a richly imagined national scene in which the ordinary and domestic has

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extraordinary potential to bring together individuals in intimate and caring relationships: ‘The little one sleeps in its cradle, / I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand’ (195). Without exception, each of Robinson’s novels centres on a family home. They all reflect upon complex questions of absence and presence, of leaving and returning, of gaining and losing a home. Take, for instance, this extended example from Housekeeping which suggests home’s rich possibilities. Ruth and her aunt Sylvie, a drifter who cares for her after her mother’s suicide, visit an abandoned homestead. Sylvie then vanishes, leaving Ruth entirely alone. At this point in the novel, her sister Lucille has already moved out of their Fingerbone house to live with her home economics teacher. Most of Ruth’s known relatives are dead, or absent, except for Sylvie. Her inadequacies as a home-maker are repeatedly exposed, yet for Ruth she represents a final possibility of achieving some kind of settled dwelling place. When Sylvie also disappears, leaving Ruth alone in the ruined building, Ruth imagines that the ruins contain children or their bodies and that she will uncover them. But when Sylvie fails to reappear, she starts to wish she could join the ghostly, missing children. Willing her own death, she envisages her body as a house tethering her to the material world: ‘I thought, let them unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart. It was no shelter now, it only kept me here alone and I would rather be with them’ (159). Robinson’s insistent use of metaphors of home in this passage create Ruth’s complex reality. Home is comfort but also loneliness, and terror, tied both to dwelling and being. Robinson captures the paradoxical situation of desire for and repudiation of home already brilliantly invoked by Melville in a passage in Moby Dick (1851) on the enigmatic figure of Bulkington. He repeatedly heads out to sea on perilous voyages, leaving home behind: Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is the ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. (116)

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Bulkington’s perpetual transience results in his untimely death. Despite knowing the dangers of the sea, he continually embarks upon whaling voyages, leaving home behind him and being literally unhoused. A number of critics have noted the importance of metaphors of house and home within Robinson’s fiction. Critical readings of Housekeeping have especially allied metaphors of house and home to female subjectivity and engagement with environmental concerns. Maggie Galehouse argues that ‘[w]ithout demonizing domesticity or disregarding the mostly female community she depicts, Robinson creates a new landscape for twentieth-century heroines’ (119); Paula Geyh focuses on the way ‘feminine subjectivity both constitutes itself and is constituted either through or in opposition to the space of the “house” or the “home”’ (104); George Handley argues that the novel ‘commemorates loss of home even as it seeks to reenact its rediscovery’ (508). In contrast to these three readings, Karen Kaivola finds the novel’s ‘insistence on the inclusion of opposing truths’ (675) frustratingly limits the emancipatory possibilities of the novel. The attention that her first novel gives to home is extended, albeit in distinct ways, in all her fiction. With regard to her later, connected, novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, attention to habits and rituals of being at home, to patterns of community and family, and to inclusions and exclusions characterise each of their plots and contexts. These are brought together most obviously in Gilead itself. John Ames recounts in his letter to his young son that people near to death would ask him to tell them what it was like: ‘I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I’d walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not’ (4). The disparity between his optimistic message and the solitude of his own domestic life is poignantly and unsentimentally set out, showing that Ames epitomises his own theological message about this world being an unhomely place. Yet as the novel goes on, and Ames moves from lonely bereavement into a fulfilling second marriage late in life, his experience changes. His earlier, idealised description of home bears a close relation to Robinson’s description of heaven in a 2010 essay “Wondrous Love” though she shows that contemporary life often falls short. The Christian heaven, she writes, is ‘an ultimate home

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where sorrow ends and error is forgotten’ (215). In her essay “Imagination and Community” (2012), she returns to a focus on a different kind of home, firmly located in this world but modelled on an idea of the next. She advocates for an empathetic home environment that develops the best kinds of human values, arguing that the domestic circumstances in which we are raised contributes to our ethical and political impulses for good and for bad. Home, then, is the locus for value systems that shape societies. This claim, with its emphasis on a set of influences that emanate from the home, is as important to Gilead as her metaphorical linking of home with heaven. Late in Gilead, with the revelation of Jack Boughton’s interracial relationship and mixed-race child, Jack asks whether, as he puts it, ‘I might find some way to live with my family here, I mean with my wife and son’ (261). The novel ends inconclusively, but Home takes this question up once more, showing that this will be impossible in a town in which the best ethical impulses towards the other have been buried beneath racist prejudice. The town’s radical past has ossified into a conservative and inward-looking present. This kind of social commentary recurs throughout Robinson’s writing. In “Imagination and Community”, she argues that the ‘shrinking of imaginative identification which allows such things as shared humanity to be forgotten always begins at home’ (31). Her pinpointing of the best kinds of human relationships as a series of small redemptive or beautiful acts between a mutually respectful group aiming to live together harmoniously is consistent with her understanding of an afterlife described by this metaphor of ‘ultimate home’. But it also envisages this as an extension of a view of human experience premised on having been cast out of this home and always engaging in the anxious and stubborn desire to return. This results in a sense that transience is the natural condition of earthly life. Transience is also one of the most important themes in Housekeeping, articulated in the opening of Chapter Ten in an extended passage about Cain and Abel: ‘God troubled the waters where He saw His face, and Cain became his children and their children and theirs, and a thousand generations, and all of them transients’ (193). Robinson insists on the importance of a liberal politics that acknowledges the necessity of fully inhabiting the world as a temporary home, ethically and robustly, and shaping it by engaging in acts of

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grace at local levels. Such actions create a kind of universal homeliness. Furthermore, she expresses a deep identification, evident also in the expressive prose of her novels, with the way writers such as Whitman articulated a profound respect for others and for the everyday. This ethical impulse towards the other is central to all her work and to her discussions of national politics. She argues that it was negatively and influentially undermined by the political and cultural assumptions of Modernist writers such as Eliot and Pound. Their elevation of high cultural and elitist values over the inclusive and democratic urges – the ‘homespun’ as Obama calls it – championed by Whitman, in particular, has had a detrimental legacy in assumptions of value and in habits of thought (Schaub and Robinson 237). As Robinson argues in a 2016 essay in Harper’s Magazine, an appreciation of generous impulses includes remembering that two of the major institutions that contributed to a galvanising culture of citizenship in the nineteenth century were public universities and public libraries (“Save Our Public Universities”). Yet access to both was contingent on privileges of whiteness and – often – masculinity that circumscribed the very definition of what constituted citizenship and access. This can be an under-acknowledged element in her essays, in part due to a prose style that often makes important points in oblique and understated ways. When she notes that Whitman’s work is evidence for the fact that the literature of the mid-century period is underpinned by the conviction that ‘people are mysterious and profoundly worthy of respect, under almost all circumstances’ she immediately added the significant caveat that ‘of course there’s the great anomaly of slavery itself, which ran very much in the opposite direction but was nevertheless more characteristic of the world at that time than was any custom of mutual respect’ (Schaub and Robinson 238). The avowal that slavery was ‘more characteristic of the world’ than the ethos of Whitman’s work suggests is easy to miss. Indeed, it seems on first reading to be problematically restrained. Yet such a mode of expression is absolutely consistent with the systematic yet understated moral rigour of Robinson’s position. Her politics are not set out as a form of grandstanding, but thread their way insistently through her writing to ground it ethically. It can take diligence and patience for the reader to recognise the deep earnestness of such sentences. Here it is indicated by way she makes

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the self-evidence of the caveat impossible to miss by the use of her corrective: ‘of course’. Like her, the nineteenth-century ‘great ones’ Robinson admires believed that culture matters and that it is fundamentally political. This recognition helps frame Robinson as a contemporary writer who continues to engage with the challenging racial aftermath of the nineteenth century, including the ongoing consequences of slavery. In this context, her work bears an under-recognised relationship to the writing of a constellation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century figures who take the politics of race as a central concern. What kinds of provocations, affinities, or reflections might be produced by reading Gilead in relation to other epistolary texts written for much-loved male children, such as James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015)? How does bell hooks’s relocation to Kentucky after a lifetime away – described with such eloquence and emotion in Belonging: A Culture of Place (1990) – correspond to Jack Boughton’s fictional situation in Home? hooks describes moving to Berea, a town containing a college ‘founded in 1858 by a visionary abolitionist who believed in freedom for everyone, women and men’ (222) so that she can build a progressive life close to her remaining family. She notes that however radical a town’s history might be, racial hostility lives on in the present, writing, ‘I have made my porch a small everyday place of antiracist resistance, a place where I practice the etiquette of civility. I and my two sisters, who live nearby, sit on the porch. We wave at all the passersby, mostly white folks who do not acknowledge our presence’ (150). She makes an activist life into an everyday home-based form of work and, like Robinson, expresses herself in language in which fruitful dwelling is central. Her porch is simultaneously a place of activist labour and shelter. It opens both into the interior of her house and outwards, into public space and nature, and ‘invites one to be still – to hear divine voices speak’ (152). What each of these writers have in common is their engagement with deep beliefs regarding human dignity. Like Robinson, Morrison and hooks use the home as a kind of index for social attitudes: as hooks writes, ‘[h]ome was the place where the me of me mattered. Home was the place I longed for, it was not where I lived’ (215). Recognising that racism perniciously pervades the everyday lives of

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individuals leads to strategies of resistance and opposition that hooks describes throughout her work. These rely on the possibility of individual transformation and include her relocation to Kentucky, in other words, to home. Meanwhile, Morrison’s post-racial location, a ‘world-in-which-race-does-not-matter’ (3), is what she simply calls ‘Home’. In this definition, home is not a material site but is writing itself, something she can create and shape. These contemporary writers, like the figures Robinson expressed her admiration for in the interview with Schaub, all have an understanding of the importance of a shared culture and of the relationship between the intimate and the public. Reading her metaphors of home with an understanding of these connections opens up new relationships with past and present writers as well as continuities between and across her own work. Understood this way, home is, indeed, the ‘genetic strand that opens a whole genealogy’ (Schaub and Robinson 239).

Notes 1 See, for example: ‘Gilead has an eerily timeless feel’ (Gwinn); ‘Readers may also be surprised, after Gilead’s timeless quality, to find themselves in a novel very much of its time’ (Skurnick); ‘There are many remarkable things about Robinson’s fiction. The quality of timelessness about her novels, for one’ (Deshpande). 2 I borrow this formulation from Robinson about a related matter: ‘the presence of Christ in nameless humanity’ is ‘not a solution but a response’ to the problem of ‘evil’ (Givenness of Things 196). 3 Lucy was the first African American student to attend the University of Alabama, but she was suspended after three days and expelled later that year. It wasn’t until 1963 that students Vivian Malone and James Hood enrolled, remained, and later graduated from the university. 4 Both Barth and Bonhoeffer were staunch anti-Nazis and involved in founding the anti-Nazi Confessing Church in Germany. Eventually, Bonhoeffer was executed for his involvement in the failed conspiracy to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944. 5 To some degree this is changing now. A 2014 article by Aaron Mauro is exemplary in this regard noting that ‘metaphor is bound to fundamental problems within the home and is necessary for a robust critique of … structures of debt’ (155).



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Works cited Barnett, Lincoln. “God and the American People.” Ladies Home Journal, November 1948, pp. 228–240. The Bible. Authorized King James Version, Oxford University Press, 1998. Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Romans. Oxford University Press, 1968. Bennett, Bridget; Carroll, Hamilton; Mackay, Ruth. “Imagining the Place of Home.” Leeds University, 1 September 2012, Web PDF, pp. 1–73. https://homecrisisandtheimagination.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/ imagining_the_place_of_home_research_review.pdf. (Accessed 10/6/2020.) Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Fortress Press, 2015. Bultmann, Rudolf. Kerygma and Myth. Harper Collins, 2000. Cox, Harvey. The Secular City. Princeton University Press, 1965, reprinted 2013. Deshpande, Shashi. “Amazing Grace.” Review of Lila. The Indian Express, 3 January 2015, indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/amazing-grace-4/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Edited by R. W. Franklin. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Galehouse, Maggie. “Their Own Private Idaho: Transcience in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 41.1 (2000): 117–137. Geyh, Paula E. “Burning Down the House? Domestic Space and Feminine Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 34.1 (1993): 103–122. Gwinn, Mary Ann. “Home: Marilynne Robinson Revisits Gilead with Profound Results.” Seattle Times, 9 October 2008, www.seattletimes.com/ entertainment/books/home-marilynne-robinson-revisits-gilead-withprofound-results/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Hadley, Tessa. “An Attic Full of Sermons.” Review of Home. London Review of Books, 21 April 2005, www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n08/tessa-hadley/ an-attic-full-of-sermons. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Handley, George B. “The Metaphysics of Ecology in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Modern Fiction Studies 55.3 (2009): 496–521. hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. Routledge, 2009. Kaivola, Karen. “The Pleasures and Perils of Merging: Female Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 34.4 (1993): 670–690. Lawson, Andrew. Downwardly Mobile: The Changing Fortunes of American Realism. Oxford University Press, 2012. Lepler, Jessica. The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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Mauro, Aaron. “Ordinary Happiness: Marilynne Robinson’s Tragic Economies of Debt and Forgiveness.” Symploke 22.1–2 (2014): 149–166. McCarraher, Eugene. Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought. Cornell University Press, 2000. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick or, The Whale. Introduced by Andrew Debanco with notes by Tom Quirk. Penguin Books, 1992. Miles, Jack. Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. Vintage, 2002. Morrison, Toni. “Home.” In The House that Race Built. Vintage Books, 1998, pp. 3–12. Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking. W.W. Norton and Co., 2013. Obama, Barack and Robinson, Marilynne. “President Obama and Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa.” New York Review of Books, 5 November 2015 www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/11/05/president-obamamarilynne-robinson-conversation/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Yale University Press, 1970. Robinson, John. Honest to God. SCM Press: 1963. Robinson, Marilynne. The Death of Adam. Picador, 2005. —— Gilead. Virago, 2006. —— The Givenness of Things. Virago, 2015. —— Home. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. —— Housekeeping. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1981. —— “Imagination and Community.” When I was a Child I Read Books. London: Virago, 2012, pp. 19–33. —— “Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Goodreads, 8 October 2014, www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/983.Marilynne_Robinson. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) —— “Save our Public Universities: In Defense of America’s Best Idea.” Harper’s Magazine, March 2016, pp. 29–37. —— “Wondrous Love.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (2010): 203–215. Schaub, Thomas and Robinson, Marilynne. “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Contemporary Literature 35. 2 (1994): 231–251. Scott, A. O. “Return of the Prodigal Son.” Review of Home. New York Times, 19 September 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/books/review/ Scott-t.html. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Oxford University Press, 1988. Sifton, Elisabeth and Fritz Stern. No Ordinary Men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi: Resisters Against Hitler in Church and State. New York Review Books Collections, 2013. Sitman, Matthew. “Saving Calvinism from Cliches: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Commonweal, 20 October 2017, www. commonwealmagazine.org/saving-calvin. (Accessed 21/06/2021.)

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Skurnick, Lizzie. “A Prodigal Comes ‘Home’ – As Does The Author.” NPR, 19 September 2008, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId= 94730165. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly. Edited by Ann Douglas. Penguin, 1986. Sykes, Rachel. “Reading for Quiet in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Novels.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 58.2 (2014): 108–120. Thoreau, David Henry. The Variorum Walden. Annotated and with an introduction by Walter Harding. Twayne Books, 1962. Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Notes and Selection by Justin Kaplan. Library Classics of the United States, 1982. Wood, James. “The Homecoming.” The New Yorker, 8 September 2008, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/09/08/the-homecoming. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Winthrop, John. The Journal of John Winthrop: 1630–1649. Edited by Richard S. Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996.

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Part I

Writing, form, and style

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1 ‘It might be better to burn them’: archive fever and the Gilead novels of Marilynne Robinson Daniel Robert King

Previous scholarship on Marilynne Robinson’s fiction has drawn attention to the significance of homes and home-spaces for her characters, and to the importance of truth and truth-telling in her work.1 Yet, so far, these two important strands of criticism have not come together. Through its close examination of the houses and home-spaces that Robinson depicts in her novels, this essay seeks to bridge that gap. To do so, I deploy three Derridean terms, ‘archive fever’, ‘logocentrism’, and ‘disambiguation’. The first of these critical concepts allows for a clear and developed unpacking of Robinson’s home-spaces as archives, ‘storehouses of meaning’ in Derridean terms, and the fears that Robinson’s characters encounter with reference to these ‘storehouses’. The second term allows for an understanding of the struggles of Robinson’s characters within and against what Derrida terms ‘the “literal” meaning […] given to writing: a sign signifying a signifier itself signifying an eternal verity’ (Of Grammatology, 15). Understanding the ‘eternal verity’ of what is represented by the written word, the logos, and moreover the unchanging nature of that logos in writing explains the terror that many of Robinson’s characters encounter when contemplating the records of their lives.2 This leads to my third critical term, ‘disambiguation.’ Again, I draw this from Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967), and especially his examination of writing’s ‘univocality, clarity, [and] precision’ (227). These are aspects of the written word that Derrida identifies as ‘positive when they avoid trouble, ambiguity, hypocrisy, and the dissimulation of the original spoken word’ but ‘negative when they chill the expression of passion’ (227). So it is

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for Robinson’s characters. The univocality and precision offered by the written word embodied by their archives is appealing in its ability to preserve memory clearly and precisely, but threatening in its ability to fix them in one position, and to privilege unassailably one unambiguous version of their lives. This essay begins by situating itself in reference to existing work on Robinson’s houses and the ways in which these readings can be developed through Derridean understandings of houses as archives. Robinson’s first novel Housekeeping (1980) is central to this section, not just as a critical early work in the Robinsonian oeuvre, but also as a work in which her understanding and depiction of houses and housebound archives is formulated and articulated in a way that will underpin her later novels. The work of Maggie Galehouse and Paula E. Geyh forms an important point of departure for this first section, especially their conception of Robinson’s houses as both sites of the construction and enforcement of female subjectivity and of the means and modes of resistance to, and rejection of, this construction. A second section discusses John Ames and his struggles with an anxiety, in Gilead (2004), that stems from an inability to do away with his faith in the truth-telling and self-preserving nature of the written words of the archive of sermons that is stored in his home, combined with a fear of the flattening and disambiguating nature of the ‘eternal verity’ of this very archive.3 In this section, my reading is enriched by an engagement with the work of Christopher Douglas and Betty Mensch, whose explorations of the way in which Ames’s faith in the self-preserving and truth-telling power of the written word is matched only by his frustration with the limitations of that same form of recording and communicating. Ames’s struggle between an unshakable faith in and essential fear of a final ‘eternal verity’ embodied in the written record of his sermons stands in direct contrast to the attitude of his younger wife Lila, who rejects the existence of this final totalising truth and actively seeks to escape from written historical records and the places they are kept, preferring the self-preservation that she finds in the oral stories people tell about her. Lila’s is a strategy and response that will be discussed in the final section of the essay, alongside a character analysis of Glory Boughton, the daughter of Ames’s oldest friend, Reverend Robert Boughton. Glory, who returns to Gilead to look after her ageing father and the family house in which he lives, plays

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a central role in the novel Home (2008), as she seems to combine Ames’s and Lila’s approaches: retaining a faith in the home-archive as a site of truth-telling and self-preservation, but also seeking to bolster and humanise its fixed, historical record with her own, living stories and recollections that complicate rather than reject or fear any final, historical truth. Overall, this essay argues that Robinson’s fiction positions the home-archive as an important site of self-preservation in the face of loss and posits a concomitant understanding of those same houses and archives as repressive, obliterating spaces that threaten the very ambiguity that keeps her characters alive. This archival selfpreservation only comes about as a direct result of the assumption of the truth-value of these housebound archives, yet this very truthvalue is what threatens Robinson’s characters with obliteration. It is through a Derridean examination of Robinson’s depiction of the homes of Fingerbone and Gilead that this essay examines this critical struggle.

Keeping house in Housekeeping The idea that Robinson’s houses are rich and important terrain is not an original one. In this section, and following Bridget Bennett’s examination of the term in an earlier contribution to this collection, I examine the roots of Robinson’s conception of houses as storehouses of meaning through a reading of her first novel Housekeeping. As Paula E. Geyh argues, from her earliest work Robinson ‘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’ (104). On first reading, Geyh’s position may seem a contradictory one. Why does society need a new and transient subjectivity if the house already provides a space for the construction of feminine identity? Geyh herself observes that ‘[t]he house in modern society has generally been conceived of as female, domestic space, and its close associations with the maternal can be seen in much of the literature on the house’ (106). However, for Robinson, this coding has never been so simple. In her exploration of Robinson’s houses, Geyh invokes Mieke Bal’s articulation of the prevailing patriarchal concept of ‘the house as

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female space, as literally the proper ‘place’ for women, [… and] simultaneously […] the site for the reproduction of the patriarchal family’ (104). Seen through this lens, the house becomes a place where women’s roles, and the limitations imposed on them, are reproduced under the overarching auspices of masculine authority. To be kept in a house, or to keep house, is to be imprisoned in the ‘father-house’, a place ‘where the settled subject is constituted’ through the imposition and deliberate reproduction of existing codes of behaviour (105). In Geyh’s words: This housekeeping has its corollary in the maintenance of the self. The boundaries of the contained, unitary self require ‘keeping’ as well, the constant process of separating self from other, of thinking of oneself as an individual while simultaneously matching one’s identity with an imagined ideal. (110)

To keep house, to keep oneself within a house, thus becomes a kind of self-maintenance, a way of constituting and maintaining one’s identity. However, it is carried out in line with predetermined social ideals reinforced and stored up within the space of the house itself. The house is therefore not a neutral territory, but rather a space where existing social expectations and rules of normative behaviour are stored, imposed, and assigned a truth-value: a storehouse of laws where the self is constituted, but only ever in reference to this pre-existing ‘imagined ideal’. The theme of the house not as a storing-place of female autonomy and power but instead of social ideals that are handed down and enforced is picked up by other critics of Housekeeping. Maggie Galehouse draws comparisons between the biblical Ruth, who adopts the social and religious beliefs of the people with whom she makes her home, and Robinson’s Ruth who, when she ‘decides to stay with Sylvie, […] also assumes Sylvie’s hobo faith, committing entirely to Sylvie’s world-view’ (122). Galehouse also invokes Rosaria Champagne’s reading of Ruth and Sylvie’s exile from Fingerbone, especially her observation that: [T]he townspeople of Fingerbone banish Ruth and Sylvie from their family home because they fail to read and follow the social prescriptions for female domesticity; that is, they refuse to read the social text which polices and maintains the boundaries that separate private and public conduct and discourse for women. (123)

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Galehouse’s conception of Ruth’s identity as being dependent on where and with whom she makes her home, combined with Champagne’s understanding of social texts as determining one’s place in society, underpins my understanding of Robinson’s homes as storehouses of meaning. Houses, for Robinson’s characters, become the primary site of identity construction and enforcement. They construct and enforce the roles played by their occupants, their social meaning, and the social expectations that are enforced upon them. Moreover, Robinson’s houses are literal storehouses in which the collections of objects, books, papers, and home-making magazines from which these roles – mother, carer, and literal home-maker in the case of Sylvie – are drawn and preserved. It is in the home that characters in Robinson’s fiction become legible to their communities, where their meaning is pinned down, and where any slipperiness of meaning is replaced by a fixed and predetermined certainty drawn from the social texts that they store and maintain. A question worth asking, however, is why, if the home and the social texts that it contains and reproduces are so powerfully influential, the people of Fingerbone feel compelled to police this transfer of social norms and values? Surely the space of the house, the roles that inhabitants of houses are obliged to fulfil, and the rules, ideas, and proscriptions that the books and magazines stored within these houses contain, accomplish such conformity on their behalf? Galehouse, however, argues differently, that ‘[t]he violence in repose under the surface of Fingerbone, along with the town’s predisposition to flood and burn, reveals its inherent instability’ (127). Galehouse points out the vulnerability of the house to being overwhelmed by rampant natural forces in Robinson’s work. Geyh goes further, arguing that these same natural forces should be inducted into a process that she calls ‘unhousing […] the physical and symbolic dissolution of the house through the actions of the transient subject in conjunction with the natural forces of fire and water’ (112). It is in this ‘unhousing’ and acceptance of transience, both in physical location and social meaning, that Robinson poses a clear rejection of the ‘eternal verity’ of the written word, and which I argue the settled people of Fingerbone fear and guard against. The house as a storehouse of meaning is therefore powerful in Robinson’s work, but also vulnerable. Indeed, it is vulnerable not only to fire and flood but also to a revelation of the transience of the supposed

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‘eternal verity’ that its social texts represent. It is this fear that prompts the community, through the actions of the Sheriff, the schoolmistress, and other authority figures, to actively guard against Sylvie’s radically destabilising, unhousing influence. Sylvie and Ruth know that they cannot survive pinned down by the disambiguating expectations and rules of the homes of Fingerbone, and so choose to destroy their house and all the objects it contains. In doing so they finally and irrevocably sever any faith they may have had in the ‘eternal verity’ of the archive and the self-preservation that its certainty represents. They choose to burn their house to avoid leaving it and ‘its relics to be pawed and sorted and parceled out among the needy and parsimonious of Fingerbone […] the blank light of Judgement falling upon you suddenly’ (Robinson Housekeeping 209). They will not be read or judged, even after departing. They will not leave relics to ‘confirm’ the community’s thoughts about them, even if this means leaving behind the possibility of being remembered. They will leave no trace, no evidence of the social texts that pass between them, nor will they eternally fix those texts. The horror that Sylvie and Ruth flee is becoming legible to the people of Fingerbone; becoming subject to a single, unambiguous, and seemingly eternally true version of themselves and a social meaning that is fixed and can be apprehended in its totality. In the act of burning their house and the archive of objects it contains, the women forever cut themselves off from the ordering and keeping of the stuff of history, choosing a life on the road with no fixed attachments and no recorded histories. Geyh’s archival ‘father-house’ and its disambiguating, binding force haunts Ruth and Sylvie, obliging them to destroy this storehouse of ‘social texts’ and to replace it with a useful and vital ambiguity away from any assumption of a final and immutable truth about the world and their place in it. This is an ambiguousness that even Robinson’s authorial voice preserves, because in Housekeeping she does not record the details of Sylvie and Ruth’s life or movements after they leave Fingerbone.

Ames and archive fever Compared to the ambivalent, ambiguous Sylvie, Reverend John Ames is surprisingly forthright about his reason for composing his

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near three-hundred-page letter to his son in Gilead. Ames writes that he ‘meant to leave you a reasonably candid testament to [his] better self’ and yet readers may question Ames’s motivations (230). One of the key reasons that he feels compelled to write his letter is the existence of a second, potentially much more candid, testament of his life and work embodied in the boxes of old sermons stored in his attic, a very literal store of social texts that he describes as ‘a record of my life, after all, a sort of foretaste of the last judgement’ (46). For Ames at least, the truth-value, the ‘eternal verity’ of the record contained in the boxes of sermons is a power that can supersede all the memories that he will leave behind to his son. For all his writing’s flaws, the sermons Ames leaves represent a powerful, authoritative, and above all unchanging form of truth-telling, one over which his death removes all control. Christopher Douglas draws parallels between Ames’s worries about the totalising power of the written archive he leaves and Calvinist logocentrism. Due to his faith in the ability of writing to tell and preserve the truth, Ames is unable to finally do away with what Derrida calls ‘the proximity of a present logos’, the written word as the nearest lasting signifier of an ‘eternal verity’ and to disregard or destroy his sermons as unimportant, failed attempts at clear and truthful communication (Of Grammatology 15). It is this proximity between the written word and a final, unchanging, and preservative truth that finally underpins Ames’s understanding of writing as ‘a sign signifying […] an eternal verity’, the final truth that lies in the archive of sermons he leaves behind. However, it is also the assumption of a relationship between writing and an ultimate and unchanging ‘truth’ that drives Ames’s concerns over an apocalyptic – in its all-revealing, revelatory meaning – ‘last judgement’ of him and his life that might stem from a reading of the sermons. Ames’s fear mirrors Ruth’s terror of ‘the blank light of Judgement’ falling on her as a result of what she leaves behind in Fingerbone (Robinson Housekeeping 209). Ames and Ruth both fear a final, unanswerable, and unchanging summing up of their lives through a reading of the relics that they leave behind. Yet all is not lost. For Laura Tanner, Ames’s concerns about his sermons and the explicatory letter with which he accompanies them are part of what she calls ‘Ames’s anticipation of his own loss of agency’, which ‘results in [Ames’s] agonized perception of a world which, no matter how

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intently he directs his gaze upon it, no longer belongs to him’ (244). Ames’s obsession with how his son will remember him is part of his faith in the self-preserving nature of existing social structures and in the truth-value of sources and stores of social meaning, especially written ones. This faith leads to ‘a reimagined future in which individual attitudes, social spaces, and cultural boundaries mitigate rather than exaggerate the burden of consciousness in the face of loss’ (251). For Tanner’s Ames, at least, there remains a hope that in the power of the house, and the written social texts that it contains, there is the possibility of some sort of self-preservation in the face of looming mortality. Betty Mensch, by contrast, is less optimistic. ‘Language,’ Mensch writes, ‘rooted in custom, is in Gilead also a sign of separation; its artificial conventionality shapes experience and thereby distances people from “direct” access to themselves, to others, or to the world’ (239). In contrast to Tanner, Mensch sees language, whether written or spoken, as an obstacle to understanding, due to its close associations with convention, quotation, existing social norms and power dynamics: ‘in a world of mutual incomprehension, Ames struggles to communicate: writing is like prayer’ (240). For all his struggles, however, Ames retains an unshakable faith in the proximity of writing to Derrida’s ‘eternal verity’. It is through this debate between the usefulness of convention and social texts as self-preserving in the face of adversity and loss, and the disambiguating and limiting nature of the very truth-value of those same social texts, that I enter the critical discussion. Derrida’s “Archive Fever” (1995) is one of the most influential examinations of social texts as storehouses: ‘[A]rchive’ refers to the arkhe in the nomological sense, to the arkhe of the commandment. [… T]he meaning of ‘archive,’ its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded. (9)

The archive, for Derrida, is a storehouse of authority, a place where those with power reside, and from where they exert their power. Derrida reinforces this reading of archival space when he assesses that the aim of the archive is to: coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive,



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there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret […] The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together. (10)

So, the archive, by its origin, is a place of preservation, for bringing together, collating, and putting-into-order, one that, by its very design, removes ambiguity and heterogeneity in favour of authority and an assumed unchanging truthfulness. ‘Remember this’ orders the archive and, moreover, ‘remember it in this way’. Theorists of the archive have built on Derrida’s ideas. As Jeanine Utell argues of Joyce’s archive, ‘[i]n origin comes birth, in preservation comes power. […] Derrida allows us to theorize the archive as both a site of power and of possibility’ (53). But where does that power lie? For Utell, once their papers have been consigned to the archive, the subjects are dead and buried and the archivist, the academic, and the researcher, the ‘crypt keepers’ as Utell calls them, deploy the power of the archive, co-opting their subjects’ authority over the stories of their own lives by establishing the assumed final truth, empowered by the authority of the archive (54). The result of this final and absolute handing-over of authority is the fear and the dread of the subject at having their papers archived. Here readers can think back to the fears of Sylvie and Ruth about the contents of their house being ‘pawed over’ by the people of Fingerbone in order to render them and their social positions fixed and legible (Robinson Housekeeping 209). The cosignatory assumption of the completeness, fixity, and truthfulness of the written record the archive contains is the source from which it draws its power. This is the power of ‘the seemingly recoverable past’ represented by the archive (Freshwater 732), and a conception of it that draws upon the popular and critical conception of the archive as a place ‘firmly established as a symbol of truth, plausibility, and authenticity’, the place most proximate to Derrida’s ‘eternal verity’ (730). The seemingly total plausibility of the archive and its contents is what gives an archival researcher the ability and authority to challenge existing narratives surrounding the material with which they deal, undermining or directly challenging the authority even of the person whose material it originally was. The result of the transfer of power from the author, whose work lies in the archive, to the researcher, who examines the corpus held

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there, leads to what Derrida terms ‘archive fever’. According to Derrida, it is his fear of being inaccurately remembered, and of having that particular recovery of the past consecrated by the authority and assumed truth-value of the archive, that may have led Freud to destroy some of his records. ‘We will always wonder what,’ Derrida writes ‘in this mal d’archive, he may have burned […] without a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash’ (“Archive Fever” 62). Whether or not Freud edited his archive in this way cannot be known by those who pick over its materials. However, Derrida argues that it is likely, virtually certain, that Freud, his estate, his publisher, or the ‘natural’ loss of material to the simple march of time, have exerted some editorial influence on the archive and the material it contains. The fact that readers cannot know what was removed from his archive allows Freud, even from beyond the grave, to destabilise the archive’s logocentric authority. This image of wilful destabilisation leads Derrida to the greater realisation that no archive exists ‘without an outside, without things that are not there, things that have unintentionally been lost or intentionally destroyed’ (19). No archive is complete, and no such thing is even remotely possible. Archives of even the most scrupulous of subjects will be missing some materials due to one factor or another, be that manuscripts lost at train stations, papers lost in fires, or material which has simply disintegrated over the years. For some authors, this very uncertainty is the thing that gives them hope, which allows them to overcome their hesitancy about their work being archived. This kind of strategic undermining of the archive can be seen in Utell’s discussion of James Joyce’s consignation of his papers to not one but several archives: There is poetic justice in the fact that after he died, his papers were sent to all the great libraries of the world: Yale, Buffalo, Cornell, Tulsa, the British Library, the National Library of Ireland. Notoriously difficult to pin down, Joyce refuses to be archived; a lemure, he wanders, rejecting a proper burial. (54)

The scattering of his archive, and thus the authority that may lie within it, is an idea that Utell develops into an understanding of Joyce as ‘never conceding his authority by never conceding that he has any authority’ (55). The scattered or denied archive, for some of Robinson’s characters, is either an aspiration or how they choose

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to live their lives. Some, like Lila, reject fixed, written records of themselves in favour of the uncertainties of a series of memories and oral stories that are open to direct and equal challenge by others. Others simply leave no written archive, like the Reverend Boughton, who delivers his sermons from memory, even failing to ‘keep his notes’, much to Ames’s dismay (Robinson Gilead 46). This refusal to record denies those that follow such counter-archival subjects the ability to talk authoritatively about them by their very refusal to talk authoritatively about themselves. This scattering, however, is not the strategy adopted by the Reverend Ames. Although Ames seems to be suffering from the same ‘archive fever’ that Derrida imagines plaguing Freud, the strategy that he adopts in addressing this fear is quite different. Despite recurring fantasies of doing so, instead of destroying the parts of his archive that he is worried about, the boxes of sermons that he has come to see as damning and irrefutable evidence of a wasted or ineffectual life, Ames effectively does the opposite. In his long letter to his young son, rather than attempt to excise material from his archive, Ames instead makes his son aware of what has been lost. Rather than scatter or destroy his archive, Ames seeks to undermine it and its disambiguating authority by extending rather than abridging the written record of his life he leaves behind him, and reminding his son of the outside that surrounds every archive.

The testament of John Ames It is worth considering exactly what kind of archive John Ames leaves, because it is not a conventional one by any means. The archives that Utell and Freshwater discuss may be scattered like Joyce’s or damaged like Freud’s, but they have all been, in one way or another, preserved and ordered by archivists. By comparison, the ‘boxes’ of sermons that Ames leaves, some in an attic and some ‘more recent’ caches in cupboards, more accurately resemble random assortments of detritus (Robinson Gilead 21). For Ames, however, this material still holds power as the kind of written record for whose truth-telling abilities he holds respect. Indeed, Ames worries that these records, dissembled though they may be, will still overwhelm the memories he will leave to his son, and even Ames’s

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conception of himself. He ponders the ‘terrible thought’ of going back through the old sermons, a thought that is ‘terrible’ due to his worry that they ‘might seem foolish and dull’ (46). This pile of old papers may be able to contradict even Ames’s memories of the power and effectiveness of his own life, such is the truth-telling power of the written archive. With this conception of the archive, in whatever form it might appear, as hopefully preserving and worryingly, and finally, truthtelling, Ames’s recurring refrain of ‘looking back over what I have written’ becomes all the more telling (39). Ames is deeply concerned about what he has written, even including the letter that constitutes Gilead. His continuous reviewing of his ‘testament’ speaks most plainly of his respect for the truth-telling power of the written word. Through constant review, Ames repeatedly ‘looks back’ at the past, revising memories of events that he wishes to pass on to his son. Indeed, Ames ‘looks back’ to realise ‘how young [his] father must have been’ when Ames and his father went looking for Ames’s grandfather’s gravesite (10). He does so again when he worries that he is describing his grandfather as ‘simply an eccentric’ to his son, when he ‘knew that his eccentricities were thwarted passion, that he was full of anger […] and that the tremors of old age were in some part the tremors of pent grief’ (39). Most tellingly, Ames’s first use of this phrase is when he encounters his son, ‘trying to figure a way to fix a broken crayon […] it seemed to me that you were looking back through life, back through troubles I pray you’ll never have, asking me to kindly explain myself’ (39). It is this image of his son looking back at him from the future that motivates Ames to try and explain himself, to try and put things ‘right’, as he sees them. It is this judgemental and all-powerful backward-looking gaze of the reader of the written record that motivates Ames’s letter. Initially, Ames’s concern may seem to be a frustration with the failings of his sermons as examples of clear communication: ‘Here I was, a pastor of souls, hundreds of them over the years, and I hope I was speaking to them, not only to myself, as it seems to me sometimes when I look back. I still wake up at night, thinking, That’s what I should have said! or That’s what he meant!’ (46). However, it is his worries about the ability of the written archive to finally and authoritatively confirm these fears, and to reveal his sermons as ineffectual attempts at communication, that causes Ames

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to envy his friend Robert Boughton. Boughton preaches sermons that ‘were remarkable, but he never wrote them out. He didn’t even keep his notes’ (46). In the void left by Boughton’s lack of a written archive, Ames is free to remember his friend’s sermons as remarkable, precisely because no contradictory evidence of their nature exists. The statement ‘Boughton’s sermons were remarkable’ is much easier to make, and to have believed, when there is no body of written evidence against which future generations can test it. The envy that Ames feels toward this aspect of Boughton’s legacy reveals the depths of his archive fever. Even Ames seems to realise that his standing in the community and in the collective memory of Gilead is secure. Ames writes to his son that his reputation is ‘largely the creature of the kindly imaginings of my flock, whom I chose not to disillusion’ (45). Moreover, it is this concern for his legacy, the way in which he will be remembered by his flock, that Ames offers as a reason why he cannot have his congregation destroy his papers. In doing so he fears disillusioning them of their impression that he is a man to look up to; the kind of preacher to whom, even as ‘a very young man’, they would go to for advice (1). The truthtelling power of the written word, it seems, threatens to overwhelm even this degree of social reverence, with the written archive and its assumed power to tell the truth appearing here as one of the few forces capable of undermining the special social status afforded to Gilead’s clergy. It is this worry of unanswerable disillusionment, in his son, in his old congregation, in everyone he has ever met, that motivates Ames’s fantasies of destroying his papers. Late in Gilead, Ames imagines having the sermons burned while he is still alive, an event he imagines as almost celebratory: I’ll just ask your mother to have those old sermons of mine burned. The deacons could arrange it. There are enough to make a good fire. I’m thinking here of hot dogs and marshmallows, something to celebrate the first snow. Of course she can set any by that she might want to keep, but I don’t want her to waste much effort on them. They mattered or they didn’t and that is the end of it. (280)

Ames knows this is fantasy. He realises that he will never destroy or scatter his archive: he is too attached to it, and too invested in the loss-mitigation and self-preservation that the truth-telling power

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of the social texts in his attic represent to finally do away with them. His apparent disdain for his sermons is directly contradicted in his statement that ‘[t]here is not a word in those sermons that I didn’t mean when I wrote it’ (46). The sermons, for Ames, are an accurate, truthful reflection of the past, an authentic record of what he said at the time, leaving him unwilling to destroy them and keen to make his son aware of their value. He cannot choose to obliterate his younger self or any other written record. He cannot face doing what Derrida imagines Freud doing and removing material from the record because his respect for the self-preserving and truth-telling aspects of writing is too great. This is a lesson that Ames has learned from his father. Despite being ‘disgusted’ by them, Ames’s father can still only bring himself to bury, and then dig up, rather than burn his own father’s sermons. Respect for historical relics and the preservation of the memories that they represent is also why Ames, despite not being able to read the water-ruined text, hangs on to his grandfather’s battered ‘Greek testament’ (89). Ames’s answer to the double-bind of reverence for the selfpreserving aspects of his archive and his fear of its disambiguating force is revealed in the one thing that Ames is keenest to impress on his son: the existence of the one sermon that he did burn. This was the sermon Ames wrote about the Spanish flu which ravaged the United States between 1918 and 1920, in which he: said, or […] meant to say, that these deaths were rescuing foolish young men from the consequences of their own ignorance and courage, that the Lord was gathering them in before they could go off and commit murder against their brothers. And I said that their deaths were a sign and a warning to the rest of us that the desire for war would bring the consequences of war, because there is no ocean big enough to protect us when we decide to hammer our ploughshares into swords and our pruning hooks into spears, in contempt of the will and the grace of God. (47–48)

Ames burned this sermon the night before he planned to preach it, despite it being ‘the only sermon [he] wouldn’t mind answering for in the next world’ (48). He burned it, he tells his son, because he ‘knew that the only people at church would be a few old women who were already as sad and apprehensive as they could stand to be and no more approving of the war than I was’ (48–49). The revelation of the burned sermon is the closest Ames ever comes to

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questioning the authority and truth-telling value of his archive. In the absence of this sermon, even, or perhaps especially, as a sermon that he never delivered but planned and wrote, Ames worries that if his son reads the ‘true’ historical record that his archive of sermons presumably represents, he will remember him only as a cautious and ineffectual country pastor. It is disappointment that Ames fears. He fears that, shorn of his one foray into politics, his son will be disappointed in a father who was afraid to defend even his pacifism from his pulpit. One irony here is that Ames most likely does not have to worry about his son remembering his father as a toothless and ineffectual country priest, not if he talks to Jack Boughton. In Gilead, Ames describes one Sunday when he ‘departed from his text a little more than […] ordinarily’ to speak about Hagar and Ishmael, the rejected handmaiden and son of the patriarch Abraham (146). During this sermon on the un-Christianity of cruelty to children, Ames looks at young Jack Boughton to see his friend’s son ‘[w]hite as a sheet, and grinning’ (148). Ames, while realising that Jack was offended by the topic of his sermon, nevertheless decides that ‘it was considerable egotism on his part to take my words as directed only at him’ rather than the congregation of Gilead at large (149). Jack, as readers are told in Gilead’s partner novel, Home, did take this sermon personally, reporting to his sister that ‘I think I was aghast. [Ames’s] intention, no doubt. To appal me, that is, to turn me white, as I’m sure he did. Whiter’ (Robinson Home 215). The differing versions of this event, general and coincidental according to Ames, pointed and deliberate according to Jack, are left equally valid by competing testimonies. However, that this extemporisation is another artefact that does not exist in Ames’s written archival records beyond his letter to his son – he went off-script to deliver it after all – is further evidence of the destabilising effect of the testimony of Ames’s letter on the fixity and truth-telling power of his archive, even as the testimony itself reveals its own instability and unreliability. Ames’s decision to reinsert into his letter something that never made it into his archive reasserts his own control over the historical narrative, or at least forces readers to question the verity of different written histories. Unable to finally do away with the concept of an unchanging historical ‘truth’, in writing his letter and preserving his archive of sermons Ames presents two contradictory signifiers to his son, both of which have equal claim to proximity to the historical

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verity in which Ames cannot finally shake his belief. This strategy represents Ames’s grappling with the archive, asserting his letter, and letters generally, as social texts with the same truth-telling power as any other in the archival storehouse Ames will inevitably leave. The total destruction or dissolution of his archive is, for all his posturing in that direction, too much for Ames, he cannot overcome his deeply held reverence for the truth-value that they represent. What he chooses instead is a more subtle but still significant complicating of his archive, which maintains its self-preservational qualities. Instead of destroying his archive – and robbing his son of the version of his self-preserved therein – Ames instead undermines the authority of the archive as a disambiguating social text by making his son aware of the limitations of the archive he leaves behind. Ames may not have the commitment of Freud or the energy of Joyce, but he is able, in the very deliberate gesture of a lengthy, complex, contradictory, but ultimately reasonably candid testament to wrest away at least some measure of its disambiguating historical power.

Lila and Glory: counter and complementary testimonies Ames’s careful efforts to simultaneously preserve and destabilise his archive are not the only ways that Robinson problematises Gilead’s housebound social texts. Lila goes further than Ames dares by choosing to be forgotten, even rejecting her baptism by Ames and the place in the eternal – and eternally truthful – Book of Life that the reverend explains will follow from it. ‘I washed the baptism off me. So that’s done with. That must be what I wanted. Now, if I ever found Doll […] at least she would recognize me’ (Robinson Lila 21–22). What looks to Ames like the oblivion of being forgotten is for Lila the rejection of a fixed and written socially defined memory. Instead, Lila favours the act of remaining recognisable to her own people, to the mutable and ephemeral memories that they have of her while she and they live, even if memories are unstable and temporary. In this way, Lila rejects altogether Ames’s faith in a final, ultimate truth. In the third Gilead novel, Lila (2014), Robinson shows the eponymous Lila consistently rejecting the fixity of salvation, records,



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and social texts, preferring the flexibility and transience that has enabled her to survive her life so far. The only material loss she regrets is that of the shawl in which she was rescued by her caretaker Doll as a child, which Doane, their associate, burns after failing to recognise its significance: She was sorry there was nothing left of that shawl. […] He didn’t know what it was, why they kept it. It was useless, except for the use they made of it, remembering together. There wasn’t much that felt worse than losing that shawl. (134)

It is a literal memento; Lila says she and Doll would use the shawl to ‘remember together’ the story of their lives, without ever writing it down or fixing it in any way, preferring the useful and vitally alive retelling of stories. In contrast to Ames’s voluminous archive of sermons that he fetishises and dreads, Lila’s memories are interpreted and reinterpreted stories and testimonies that can be told and retold without one version ever claiming authority over another. It is this storytelling tradition which provides Lila with the contextual building blocks of her identity, which can survive even the destruction by fire that Ames fears so much for his own archival record, and which Sylvie and Ruth use to confound the expectations of Fingerbone. With no written archive to disturb or undermine, Lila is able to maintain her own identity and independence away from the controlling social texts of Derrida’s more conventional notion of archival storehouses of meaning. This is an independence that she is clearly desperate to maintain, even at the cost of its relics. Instead, she prefers the stories and oral histories of the people in her life as a self-preserving force. A similar, though significantly different, strategy is adopted by Glory Boughton in Home. Glory’s engagement with the unconventional but self-preserving social texts of the contents of her father’s house hints at a third way between Ames’s subtle destabilising of a written archive and Lila’s wholesale rejection of a final and eternal truth. Glory does destroy letters, both by water and by fire. She burns returned love letters for her brother and flushes her own love letters down a storm drain. This destruction demonstrates a willingness to eliminate potentially hurtful historical artefacts rather than keeping a ‘true’ archive of the past that goes beyond that of Ames. However, the strategy only carries her so far. Glory is inevitably

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caught up in another storehouse of meaning, one built by herself, by her father and by her siblings: the house she inherits. Toward the end of Home, Glory realises that she must maintain her father’s house exactly as it is, so that her brothers and her sisters can return to it and remember their lives there. The house and its contents become an archive through the self-preservational nature of the artefacts that Glory watches over. At the novel’s end she sees herself, not without some horror, as the keeper of all the history that the house represents, waiting for Jack’s mixed-race son to return to the family home and make ‘[a]ll that keeping and saving their father had done […] providence indeed’ and to allow ‘new love […to] transform all the old love and make its relics wonderful’ (Robinson Home 337). This is an ambiguous ending. Glory finds herself trapped by the house and the role as its keeper that her family has assigned her, but she is also there to keep the history it represents alive. Moreover, the house and its relics cannot speak for themselves in the way that a written archive can. Glory’s is not a conventional archive of truth-telling social texts, but nor can it countermand the version of history that Glory will choose to present to her nephew. It becomes, paradoxically, both a prison and a seat of power for Glory. As the keeper of this unusual but undeniable storehouse of meaning, she finds herself both in charge of its narrative and unable to leave it or change it in any way. There is, of course, an element of fantasy to this role Glory imagines for herself. The backdrop of the civil rights era is a constant presence in Gilead, Home, and Lila, but Glory’s only nod to the social, inherited prejudices that Jack’s son will face should he come searching for his ancestral home is that ‘young men are rarely cautious’, before the equally socially constructed ideas of a ‘civil and Southern’ young man who is ‘especially polite to older women’ takes over her imagination of this future meeting (338). However, even in this fantasy, the testimony Glory must provide is critical to understanding this domestic space, even as that same space provides the only context in which that testimony, and Glory herself, makes any sense.

Conclusion What Robinson offers in the written, oral, and reported testimonies that characterise her work is an examination of different modes of

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resistance to the flattening, disambiguating forces of truth-telling in her ‘storehouses’ of social texts, and examples of struggles against the historical forces that seek to define her characters. There are several strategies that Robinson uses. The first is elision. Readers never know what becomes of Sylvie and Ruth after they leave Fingerbone, or what Glory’s fiancé wrote to her in his love letters, or what Jack wrote to Della, or what mental or spiritual break creates the only dividing section in Gilead, a blankness that spreads across three pages (Robinson Gilead 245–247). What this elision might hint at, and what other absences or excisions might exist in Ames’s letter without our knowledge, readers are left to wonder, to insert their own interpretations into spaces in the testimony that Ames and Robinson’s other characters leave behind. The authority of Robinson’s characters and texts is not absolute. Ames’s testament is only ‘reasonably’ candid, after all, and he is at times, and by his own admission, a very unreliable narrator (230). To attempt, or even to claim, to include everything would simply make the text another kind of archive, an entrapping truth-telling force that her characters would struggle to escape. The second and most prominent technique is destabilisation. An archive of social texts, in its function as a truth-teller and role-definer, is a seat of power. I do not mean to argue that Robinson totally rejects the archive or argues for its destruction but rather that storehouses, and the meaning that they contain for her characters, should not be the sole authority on a story or a life. This is why Robinson presents three different, and often contradictory, accounts of the same few days in 1956. One need only think of the differing opinions of Ames’s apparently off-the-cuff sermon on Hagar and Ishmael or the different suppositions about Jack Boughton’s motivations for returning to Gilead, for evidence of the limitations Robinson places on the accuracy of the testimony of her characters. But this is the point. Robinson’s work, and especially her welcoming of ambiguity can be read as an attempt to solve the problem of archive fever. Robinson demonstrates the same faith in the preservational power of writing with which Ames wrestles. However, in her welcoming, even celebrating, of ambiguity and multiplicity she similarly avoids the kind of disambiguating, flattening assumptions of eternal verity that Sylvie and Ruth flee Fingerbone to avoid. There is no assumption or assertion of a final, flattening authority, only a wish to preserve.

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Notes 1 The major focus of this essay will be: Paula Geyh’s “Burning down the House? Domestic Space and Feminine Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping”, Maggie Galehouse’s ‘Their Own Private Idaho: Transience in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping” on Robinson’s houses, Christopher Douglas’s “Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead”, and Betty Mensch’s “Jonathan Edwards, Gilead, and the Problem of ‘Tradition’” on Robinson and truth-telling. 2 Derrida outlines his conception of logocentrism in Of Grammatology in his “Exergue”. Here Derrida explains logocentrism as ‘the concept of writing in a world where the phoneticisation of writing must dissimulate its own history as it is produced’. In other words, in a logocentric world, language functions as the representation of a truth. Under this system, in order for language to function as this reliable, truthful means of communication it must, at all times, conceal its own constructed nature and appear as close as possible to the ‘eternal verity’ it signifies (3, emphasis in the original). 3 This is an anxiety that I explore in terms of Derrida’s ‘archive fever’. It is an anxiety about the record individuals leave behind us that Derrida argues originates in the death drive, and which ‘works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own “proper” traces – which consequently cannot properly be called “proper”’ (“Archive Fever” 14, emphasis in the original). For my purposes here, anxiety around the archive of written material individuals leave behind stems from a fear of death. Despite a clear wish to be remembered, the living are anxious about the loss of control over how they will be remembered, leading to the fantasy of being forgotten by destroying all traces of ourselves, or at least seeking to discredit our archive as the only true and ‘proper’ record of our lives.

Works cited Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9–63. —— Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. 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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Freshwater, Helen. “The Allure of the Archive.” Poetics Today 24.3 (2003): 729–758. Galehouse, Maggie. “Their Own Private Idaho: Transience in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 41.1 (Spring 2000): 117–137. Geyh, Paula E. “Burning down the House? Domestic Space and Feminine Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 34.1 (Spring 1993): 103–122. Mensch, Betty. “Review: Jonathan Edwards, Gilead, and the Problem of ‘Tradition’.” Journal of Law and Religion 21.1 (2005/2006): 221–241. Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. Virago, 2005 [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005]. —— Home. Virago, 2009 [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008]. —— Housekeeping. Faber and Faber, 2005 [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980]. —— Lila. Virago, 2015 [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014]. Tanner, Laura E. “‘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. Utell, Jeanine. “The Archivist, the Archaeologist, and the Amateur: Reading Joyce at the Rosenbach.” Journal of Modern Literature 31.2 (Winter 2008): 53–65.

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2 ‘One day she would tell him what she knew’: disturbance of the epistemological conventions of the marriage plot in Lila Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo

The marriage plot is a subgenre of the Bildungsroman that is particularly pervasive in women’s coming-of-age stories. It depicts moral and spiritual development happening later in life than the traditionally male Bildungsroman, which follows a young adolescent who ‘begins with a sense of self, which with outside guidance and the help of mentors would be expected to develop to its fullest potential’ (Labovitz 3). In the case of the marriage plot, the protagonists tend to be young adult women rather than early adolescent boys and their development takes place via marriage or – as in novels like Pride and Prejudice (1813) – results in marriage. This variation is explored in depth by Elaine Hoffman Baruch who observes that ‘women […] have turned to marriage to achieve the goals of romantic individualism, those of increased knowledge, enhancement of feeling and experience’ (340). The relationship between epistemology and power therefore underlies much of the genre. In this context, I argue that Marilynne Robinson’s 2014 novel Lila offers an important interruption to and re-examination of the marriage plot. Far from the young ingénue on which the genre typically focuses, Lila comes to marriage later in life and after many difficult experiences, which leave her with existential questions about human existence. Lila and her husband Ames’s radically different experiences and subjectivities enable them to educate and seek answers to those questions together, breaking with the generic convention in which women develop vicariously through and in a subordinate position to their husbands. In this essay, I explore the ways in which Lila – as a Bildungsroman written through the perspective of a

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female protagonist most likely in her mid-30s, who lives most of her life on the margins – comments on that society. I argue that Robinson draws on the pillars of America’s cultural, intellectual, and spiritual inheritance – including transcendentalism and biblical mythology – in ways that create space for the articulation of women’s experience in the American literary and philosophical landscape. As part of the Gilead trilogy, critics tend to read Lila as both secondary and inferior to Gilead (2004), a kind of addendum or supplement of less significance than its prequel. Antony Domestico claims that ‘Lila makes for less pleasurable reading than either Gilead or Home’ and ‘makes you realize how much Ames edited out of his own account’ (17). The relationship between Lila and Ames is predominantly read as one that allows his grace and virtue to shine through; in Lila, readers see him forgive her wayward past and bring her to God through baptism and their union. Gerald T. Cobb asserts that ‘in Ames’ plainspoken, deeply reflective Christian perspective Lila finds healing and hope’ (42). Sam Sacks provides a similar description of the novel: ‘Ames, the gentle, white-haired widower, offers the solace and forgiveness of Christianity (and Lila offers him the chance for the family he was deprived of when his wife and baby died in childbirth four decades before)’. Vivian Hughbanks even describes Ames as a ‘sort of Adam, whom Robinson provides for Lila, [who] gives her names for her experience, such as Welter and Existence. These help her make sense of the world around her, and her place in it.’ Such readings ignore the nuances in Lila, aligning the novel with the traditional marriage plot and interpreting Lila’s character as epistemologically and theologically inferior to her husband. By contrast, I argue that Lila is more ambiguous and complex than existing analyses suggest, with the character’s voice independent of and equal to that of her husband. While Robinson responds to the marriage plot with nuance and ambivalence, avoiding the gendered teleology implicit in some nineteenth-century iterations of the genre, the novel was published after the marriage plot and the patriarchal history of marriage as an institution had been problematised. The intervention posed by Lila into discourses about marriage is therefore best understood by situating the novel within the history of the genre of the marriage plot and the debates about the politics of marriage in modern and contemporary American culture.

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The marriage plot In women’s Bildungsroman, marriage is often presented as the main objective of a woman’s existence: a set of obligations to be fulfilled, a teleological destiny, or literally the end of a woman’s story – at least, the part worth writing. Baruch describes marriage as the ‘most striking characteristic’ of novels of female development (335). Indeed, until the mid-twentieth century the marriage plot was so prevalent that it was demanded not only by genre conventions, but also by readers and publishers. Writing about Little Women (1869) – which Eve Kornfeld and Susan Jackson describe as ‘the first well-known American novel written specifically for and about adolescent girls’ (69) – Louisa May Alcott complained that ‘girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only aim and end of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo off to Laurie to please anyone’ (qtd in Alberghene and Clark 180). Yet, Alcott did eventually ‘marry Jo off’, even if not to Laurie. Throughout the twentieth century, as marriage started to happen later in life, the genre of women’s Bildungsroman broke away from engaging with the institution directly. In their rejection of generic tropes, however, texts influenced by twentieth and twenty-first-century feminism continue to depict the marriage plot’s lasting literary, sociological, and psychological effects. Examples including Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (1946), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), Bobbie Anne Mason’s In Country (1989), and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot (2011) no longer replicate the tropes of the traditional marriage plot, but remain concerned with its legacy and the burden of marriage as a generically predetermined, teleological expectation. This fatalistic reading of marriage has its roots in feminist philosophy. In Right Wing Women (1983), the controversial radical feminist Andrea Dworkin argues that marriage is a form of ‘organized prostitution’ (183) that some women submit themselves to because it provides more security than traditional sex work. Dworkin claims that these two are the only avenues that patriarchal society makes available to women because men view women as vehicles for sex and childbearing alone. She states that ‘[m]en hate intelligence in women’ (37) and so in order to get married, women must renounce any goals of intellectual, emotional, or sexual development or autonomy, going so far as to argue that ‘no honest woman can live

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in marriage: no woman honest in her will to be free. Marriage delivers her body to another to use’ (61). The hostility towards marriage in twentieth-century feminist thought – evidenced in striking terms by Dworkin but shared by other prominent figures like Kate Millett and Jessie Bernard – stands in stark contrast to the idealised and romantic notions of marriage represented in many nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictions. Baruch, for instance, argues that while economics is a significant factor, many women in fiction are shown to desire marriage precisely because of the access it may provide them to develop intellectually. She claims that: ‘the heroine longs for a marriage that will increase her knowledge, often in some wide experiential sense’ (335–336). This romanticised notion of marriage as a facilitator rather than an inhibitor of intellectual development is pernicious in the marriage plot, where women are granted access to knowledge and, indeed, the world through the intermediaries of their husbands: ‘whereas a traditional sign of manhood lies in the hero’s ability to give up guides, the test of womanhood has resided in the heroine’s ability to find a mentor’ (338). Baruch’s work therefore contrasts dramatically with Dworkin’s notion of marriage as limiting women’s intellectual development. ‘Left alone,’ Dworkin writes, ‘in a private world of isolation, intellect does not develop unless it has a private cultivator: a teacher, a father of intellect, for instance. But the intellect in the female must not exceed that of the teacher – or the female will be rebuked and denied’ (50). Indeed, it is because of the stagnated dynamic Dworkin describes that the woman protagonist of the marriage plot typically marries an older, more worldly, and more educated suitor; one who can act as mentor as well as husband and whose superior intellect will ultimately restrict the level of education available to his wife.

Lila’s epistemology and the value of plural knowledges A number of critics apply this restrictive model of the marriage plot to Lila and read Ames as Lila’s intellectual and spiritual guide, ‘helping her make sense of the world around her, and her place in it’ (Hughbanks). On the contrary, I argue that Lila’s relationship with her husband undermines his epistemological and hermeneutical

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assumptions, rather than hers. While Lila learns through the course of their relationship, through independent reading and their shared conversations, Ames learns in equal measure; perhaps most importantly, both parties are aware of this happening. For most of her life, Lila is itinerant; she works on the road with very limited education. She is initially concerned about seeming ignorant to Ames because the intersection of her working-class and gender identity leaves Lila epistemologically disadvantaged, with the forms of knowledge and experience to which she has access dismissed by people with more social power. As a result, she assumes her own knowledge is significantly inferior to others – in particular, to that of the well-read Ames – and imagines that the philosophical and theological questions she entertains have answers that others with greater knowledge already know. If she ‘used to be afraid she was the only one in the world who couldn’t make sense of things’ (178–179), Ames – as a preacher – is a figure of authority in whom the people of the town of Gilead place a great deal of trust and respect. Because of his position, Lila almost immediately trusts him too, speaking about her inquietude while they are still strangers: ‘I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do’ (28). In this respect, she is reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn – hero of the quintessential American Bildungsroman – who is ‘aware of his base social position and lack of book learning’ and thus ‘woefully concluded that the disturbing discrepancies he noticed between proclaimed standards of conduct and the behaviour of the individuals who proclaimed them could probably be explained by those who possessed the learning he lacked’ (Ziff 113). In her initial questions to Ames, Lila evokes Finn’s speech, his lack of education, self-doubt, and, most importantly, his moral and epistemic independence which is derived from lived experience rather than an academic education. It is notable that in response to Lila’s question about the ‘the way’ things happen, Ames writes her a letter, explaining that he cannot answer her, but adding ‘thank you for asking it. I may be learning something from the attempt’ (Robinson Lila 77). Ames expresses feelings of inadequacy in the face of her curiosity: ‘I must seem like a fool to you […] You must think I’ve never given a moment’s thought to anything’ (101). At times, she does interpret his preaching negatively – ‘just an old man saying something he’d

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said so many times he probably didn’t hear it himself’ (74) – and Ames is equally aware that his knowledge is limited by a sheltered life in Gilead. He is attracted to Lila – at least in part – because she has access to experiences and knowledge greatly removed from his own. He tells her: ‘I know you have things to tell me, maybe hundreds of things that I would never have known. Things I would never have understood’ and confesses that this is one of the reasons he eventually marries her (128). Throughout the novel, Ames therefore learns from Lila’s insights on his field of study. He repeatedly asks for Lila’s thoughts on the passages of scripture she studies, taking interest in her radically different perspective. A passage that he interprets as ‘figurative […] [p]oetry and parables,’ she insists is ‘true […]. It’s something I know about’ (128). Acceptance and even joy in their different experiences mean that Ames and Lila expand each other’s understanding of the world, contrary to the rationale of the traditional marriage plot. Moreover, as Lila gains confidence in her interpretive capacities and the value of different forms of knowledge, she breaks the generic demands said to define the institution of marriage by Dworkin and Hoffman by undermining the mentor/mentee dynamic. The final sentence of the novel is ‘One day she would tell him what she knew’ (261) and she repeatedly fantasises about telling Ames some of her most difficult and socially unacceptable decisions, wondering ‘what would he understand if she did tell him?’ (138). Lila is therefore centrally concerned with the interplays of epistemology and power as the tension between Ames’s institutionally recognised, reified, academic knowledge and Lila’s marginalised, anecdotal, and often discredited knowledge is dramatised. Put another way, Lila possesses what Michel Foucault calls ‘subjugated knowledges’ or ‘le savouir des gens’ (82), a phrase that refers to the kind of plural, local knowledges that Jean-Francois Lyotard legitimises in his social theories. The exchanges between Lila and Ames not only highlight how these forms of knowledge are linked to power through class and gender, but also question and undermine the inherent hierarchy in which knowledge is deployed. There are multiple instances in which the value of plural knowledges is affirmed in Lila. The main character’s only year at school is the first record of her exposure to epistemological marginalisation, when the other children ‘laugh at her, because they were town children’

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(118). The implied higher class of the children Lila meets links them to specific forms of knowledge and Lila interiorises the power dynamic that holds the town children’s knowledge as superior: ‘These things had a kind of importance about them that Lila had never even heard of before. She’d thought the world was just hayfields and cornfields and apple orchards. The people who owned them and the people who didn’t’ (118). It is only later in life – and after she meets Ames – that Lila realises that her self-conceptualisation has been affected by her marginalised status and in this way Robinson’s refusal to present one kind of knowledge as objectively true is a political act. As Jane Flax points out: ‘If there is no objective basis for distinguishing between true and false beliefs, then it seems that power alone will determine the outcome of competing truth claims’ (42). The defence of the validity of Lila’s knowledge is therefore central to the novel’s exploration of the relationship between claims to universality and power.

Knowledge, power, and language The gendered generic demand that the woman protagonist of the marriage plot be epistemologically inferior to her husband is an iteration of power on several fronts. In Power/Knowledge (1980), Foucault asserts that: ‘there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse’ (93). The generic conventions of the marriage plot not only mimic the situation of women, they also normalise it by reinforcing the power hierarchy explicit between man and wife. This manifests as both gendered and classed power, which can be seen in the trope of the protagonist’s need to marry above her class. John Frow argues that genres actively generate and shape knowledge of the world; [and that] generically shaped knowledges are bound up with the exercise of power, where power is understood as being exercised in discourse [so that] far from being merely ‘stylistic’ devices, genres create effects of reality and truth, authority and plausibility, which are central to the different ways the world is understood. (2)

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While the traditional marriage plot can be read through the frameworks provided by Foucault and Frow – as a discourse that exercises patriarchal power by constructing women and the working class as intellectually inferior and bestowing authority on men and the upper class – in Lila, Robinson presents a marital dynamic that disturbs the reality and truth effects that such plots have been imposing for generations, thereby enacting a crucial feminist politics. Lila is also hermeneutically marginalised. Miranda Fricker defines hermeneutical injustice as ‘the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalisation’ (158). Lila’s class and gender place her in a social position where she has large linguistic gaps that impede her from articulating her experiences. She asserts that she has never had a name for pelicans ‘because they had nothing to do with getting by’, and that for a long time she ‘didn’t know that words had letters, or that there were other names for seasons than planting and haying’ (Robinson Lila 143, 10). Initially, Lila sees language acquisition as little use; just a way to signify things she already knows and understands. When she begins learning to read, she feels the exercise ‘told her what she’d have known anyway’ (42). Yet, her struggles with literacy are what lead her to read the Bible, from which ‘she copied words, because she wasn’t sure how to spell them, and this was a way to learn’ (43). She realises that language conditions the way she experiences the world, asking herself ‘did she feel annoyance before she had a name for it? Would she have felt the right to it?’ (112). Indeed, the more her linguistic resources grow, the more aware she becomes of lacunae and their significance: ‘it had begun to seem to her that if she had more words she might understand things better’ (113). While her acquisition of linguistic resources allows her to articulate questions for Ames, these resources are also what invoke and inform the episodic memories that she recalls in relation to certain biblical passages. Soon, Lila finds that the Bible provides a language that can articulate her own difficult history, though she ‘never expected to find so many things she already knew about written down in a book’ (176). Interestingly, and again contrary to the traditional mentor/mentee relationship, Lila’s religiously innocent perspective enables her to challenge the interpretative authority Boughton and Ames have as preachers. Her relationship to religion is a difficult

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one. While somewhat mistrustful of the power implicit in the Church – and remembering that ‘Doane said they did things in churches to make people believe what they told them’ – she passively accepts initiation into Ames’s congregation, initially because she feels ‘she had to get through her life one way or another. No reason not to take any comfort the world seemed to offer her’ (33, 24). Lila allows Ames to baptise her and takes pleasure in the notion of a resurrection in which she may be reunited with Doll. This feeling lasts only until she has a discussion with Boughton and Ames about the Last Judgement and is horrified by the image of ‘souls just out of their graves having to answer for lives most of them never understood in the first place’ and the idea that ‘souls might be lost forever because of things they did not know, or understand, or believe’ (101, 21). She begins to realise that the Church’s claims to theological authority are an exercise of power that enables it to control behaviour and imposes totalising identities – dividing people into those worthy of salvation and those who are not. Lila rejects the veracity of such knowledge, questioning whether or not ‘the old men knew anything about the Good Lord. If there was a Good Lord’ (17). This leads to greater hermeneutical and theological self-reliance; when Ames tries to impose his theological interpretation on her reading, insisting that ‘God loved Israel’, for example, she is seemingly uninterested and rejects his offer to ‘explain’, telling him: ‘Don’t worry about it. I got my own thoughts’ (125, 132). Despite Ames ‘worr[ying] over her reading the Bible just at that place’, Lila becomes fixated on the Book of Ezekiel, particularly on an allegorical passage in which a baby (Israel) is cast out to die, only to be saved by an older man (God), who raises the child into a woman and marries her (125). The woman goes on to sleep with other men, acts which God describes as ‘prostitution’ and punishes by stripping her naked and casting her into the street to be abused until his anger has passed. Ames tries to dissuade Lila from reading Ezekiel because it is ‘sad’ and ‘difficult’ (124, 125). But she finds it compelling due to her experiences: the story of a neglected baby taken in and raised by a stranger, who then engages in sex work, mirrors her own almost exactly and the representation of a story like hers in such a respected text allows her to work through shame towards a kind of validation. Lila is compelled by the Bible as a book that records loneliness, pain, and suffering in a way that she

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understands and that links her itinerant, working-class, and difficult life to respect and recognition. Further proof that Lila’s interest in the Bible lies in personal connections occurs when she shifts her attention to the Book of Job – assuming it to be a book about work – only to find out ‘it was a man’s name, so it was pronounced differently, and this made her a good deal less interested in it’ (171). The Bible and Lila’s past mutually determine each other’s signification in the novel. Lila questions the morality underlying Ames’s and Boughton’s theological beliefs, as well as the grounds on which these morals are built; she points out that she ‘worked in a whorehouse’ and questions the virtue of keeping the Sabbath, asking ‘who wouldn’t take work when there was work to be done?’ (89, 21). Her lived experience of the difficulties and exigencies involved in being a woman and working class afford Lila a particular perspective on morality; she is able to recognise that the theological and moral certainty of both preachers stems from privilege that protects them from having to make the very decisions on which they pass judgement. Neither Boughton nor Ames has ever been faced with the economic imperative to take whatever work is given – even if that work is prostitution – and as Lila points out to Ames ‘you don’t have to think about hell because probly nobody you know going to end up there’ (102). Lila’s disturbance of Ames’s moral as well as theological beliefs echoes Robinson’s assertion that ‘[h]uman existence is so complex and so volatile that there is never any fixed solution. There is never any fixed understanding. Everything requires moral scrutiny over again’ (Robinson “A Sense of Obligation” 108). While Lila reads the Bible to better interpret herself, the comparison between her experiences and the biblical passages quoted in the novel colours the way both function, showing that knowledge and understanding – even of a text that constitutes a cultural pillar of her society – are not fixed. They can – and should – be re-evaluated, as should the social structures that stem from them. The relationship between texts, narratives, and cultural knowledge is explored by Lyotard, who asserts that ‘what is transmitted through these narratives is the set of pragmatic rules that constitutes the social bond’ (21). He claims that a culture’s narratives ‘allow the society in which they are told, on the one hand, to define its criteria of competence and, on the other, to evaluate according to those criteria what is performed or can be performed within it’ (19–20).

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However, Lyotard’s analysis treats narratives as if they were a straightforward fact, possessing a fixed meaning with which to establish such pragmatic rules and criteria of competence. The way narratives function in Lila suggests otherwise: the meaning of a narrative is deferred to the particular culture or individual that interprets it and to other narratives with which it is juxtaposed. This symbiotic relationship puts both in a state of flux. Lila’s story and her awareness of its position in a narrative landscape draws on generic tropes for signification and is itself a commentary on the marriage plot and the American Bildungsroman. In this way, Robinson’s evocation of generic conventions in Lila is productive, highlighting the politics of representation and subverting the cultural knowledge implicit in the marriage plot.

Narrative, class, and cultural approval Narratives are made central to the constitution of cultural knowledge and individual identity through Lila’s relationship to cinema: ‘She went to the movies … she was dreaming some stranger’s dream, everybody in there dreaming one dream together’ (Robinson Lila 208). Lila’s knowledge of the cinema displays an awareness of how popular narratives gain collective significance and homogenise a national cultural imagination. Unlike her experience of reading the Bible, what Lila enjoys about the cinema is ‘seeing what she had never seen anywhere before, and mostly believing it’ (209). Film is an aspirational medium for her, showing an idealised version of the way things could be, rather than the way they are. Lila recognises that certain narrative forms bestow legitimacy on experience and make their subjects worthy of validation and societal respect. She observes that ‘everybody in the audience would sigh and weep and laugh for those beautiful ghosts in that unreachable place where people lived lives strangers could care about’ (240). This relationship with cinema is a factor in the constitution of Lila’s identity and desires; indeed, there are several points at which this narrative knowledge determines Lila’s decision-making. Her resolution to work in a brothel comes after Doll dies and Lila is left orphaned and alone for the second time in the novel, at which point she reflects that ‘[i]t might have been because for once she felt almost like

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somebody with something to say about herself, a girl with such an ordinary kind of trouble that there would be a bus ticket ready and a suitcase, a place to go because there was no place else to go’ (179). The language Robinson uses suggests that Lila’s decision is conditioned by generic expectations and the desire for the security of a familiar narrative. Likewise, Lila’s pleasure in her marriage comes at least in part from her awareness that it is worthy of cultural approval. She fantasises about the way that others might see her married life, imagining that ‘[t]hose women [from the cinema] would say oh, and ah, when the curtains stirred and let white light into the pale room’ (241). Both influences stem from the trope of the fallen woman and its interaction with traditions of the marriage plot. These are noticeably not discourses that coexist in a single character: the fallen woman does not typically go on to be happily married and, typically, she is poetic punishment for women’s ‘deviant’ behaviour, hence serving as what Lyotard would call a negative model of integration. The marriage plot, on the other hand, is typically written as the reward for women’s socially sanctioned behaviour, functioning as a positive model of integration. The combination of the tropes – particularly in the order they are presented in Lila – disrupts the association of each to punishment or reward, dismantling the didactic gendered morality and cultural knowledge that accompanies them. Narratives of femininity and propriety are invoked and interrogated throughout the novel and Robinson pays particular attention to how versions of femininity intersect with class. Lila rejects notions of middle-class feminine propriety, expressing resentment at having to stay at a hotel during her engagement to Ames. Early in the novel, she muses: ‘[h]ere I am walking along the road all alone smoking a cig. They got hard names for women who do that kind of thing. I got to do it more often’ (51). She knows that she does not fulfil expectations of the type of woman that Ames should marry: ‘People were still surprised at him, that he had married her’ (19). Ames is aware that Lila’s class complicates their relationship; he tries to make clear that ‘every courtesy owed to him [i]s owed to her also, now that she [i]s his wife’ (107). He makes subtle attempts to change her behaviour and lifestyle, telling her that there is ‘no need to go out looking for ironing to do’ (107). The generic conventions of the marriage plot present upward class mobility as one of the

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desired goals of marriage; however, Lila displays discomfort with the identity that is imposed on her, asserting ‘I don’t want to be no preacher’s wife’ against external pressure to change her behaviour (85). In passages like this, her discomfort with what is generically presented as a reward is clear. In one episode, the advice of a church lady is followed immediately by a recollection of Lila’s time at the brothel: ’just as well not to chew your fingernails, dear. […] one of the girls in St. Louis had trimmed her nails and painted them’ (124). The proximity of these episodes invites comparison; Lila’s identity is expected to adapt to suit the men in her life. The enforcement of a middle-class femininity defies the liberating, empowering, or romantic rhetoric with which class mobility in marriage is generally presented. Unlike in the aforementioned trope of the marriage plot – where marriage is an economic opportunity for women – Robinson highlights how marriage to someone with more money means that Lila’s behaviour is expected to change to maintain the status quo. While Lila is initially at the bottom of the class ladder in Gilead – working for the church ladies at will – she is expected to embrace a higher power position because of her marriage to preserve the class and power dynamics implicit in society. Lila’s rejection of gendered and classed expectations undermines the cultural ‘knowledge’ of class hierarchy and gendered propriety. The same ‘knowledge’ – typically upheld by the generic conventions of the Bildungsroman and marriage plot – is also challenged by the invocation of the traditionally masculinist discourse of transcendentalism, which Robinson uses in Lila to decidedly feminist ends. This influence is perhaps unsurprising: transcendentalist philosophies run throughout Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping (1980), and Robinson’s familiarity with transcendentalist ideas is often noted by critics of her work (Hartshorne 52). In Lila, the protagonist’s epistemic, theological, and moral development specifically echoes the values articulated by Emerson on independent thought: ‘A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his’ (Essays 30). Indeed, Lila’s rejection of an exterior morality or propriety in favour of her own moral compass – iterated when she states ‘If I’m crazy, I may as well do what I feel like doing’ (Robinson Lila 27) – is evocative of Emerson’s affirmation that ‘if

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I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil’ (Essays 33). Lila therefore resembles the traditionally masculine figure of the independent, free-thinking, and self-reliant individual, despite being lower class and female. Of course, Emerson’s comparison of ‘the American hero to the plain old Adam – the simple genuine self against the whole world’ is also a trope in American Bildungsroman (Journals 141). The Genesis allegory Emerson uses is complicated when reimagined in a woman protagonist. As noted above, it is Ames and not Lila who is compared to Adam in criticism on the novel; Vivian Hughbanks describes Ames as a ‘sort of Adam, whom Robinson provides for Lila, [who] gives her names for her experience’. Yet, in her work on the ‘feminine Bildungsroman’, Baruch notes: ‘the only woman within the Western corpus of beliefs who sought knowledge directly without the intermediary of a man, the figure who could be the prototype of the feminine rite of passage, is Eve’ (356). In the Bible, Eve’s plight for knowledge is considered sinful and her wish for intellectual development is punished. Lila can therefore be read as both the Eve of the ‘feminine Bildungsroman’ and an Emersonian Adam. By having her protagonist evade punishment of any sort, Robinson rejects conservative Christian conceptions of Eve’s pursuit of knowledge as sinful, endowing Lila with the moral innocence afforded to men.

The marriage plot and self-reliance In the marriage plot, women tend either to give up their identity to become a wife or only gain access to ideas, the world, and their own intellectual development solely through the medium of their husband. This positions women in stark opposition to the Emersonian ideal of the self-reliant male protagonist, which I argue structures the traditional American Bildungsroman. To feminist readers, this kind of plot might read as a failure; as the protagonists’ sovereignty being corrupted by patriarchal force. While this argument holds validity in the sense that marriage remains seen as the inevitable – or at the very least desirable – end to all women’s narratives, to accept both things as mutually exclusive and privilege one over the other is to reify the traditionally masculinist values of the Bildungsroman and

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accept extremely limited terms of what constitutes development, desirable or successful initiation, and eventual independence. In Lila, Robinson instead presents interdependence through various pairings of characters. Lila’s development from childhood into adulthood is heavily influenced by her identification with Doll, as reflected in the choosing of her name. Lacking any knowledge of her legal surname, Lila identifies as ‘Lila Dahl’, with ‘Dahl’ a phonetic spelling of her pronunciation of Doll’s name. Describing her relationship with Doll, she says that ‘they would laugh because of all the things they knew and nobody else did’ (79). The idea of shared knowledge as a kind of intimacy is echoed in other relationships throughout the novel, such as that of Doane and Marcelle: ‘There was an endless, pleasant joke between them that excluded everybody else’ (75). Lila’s growing intimacy with Ames is similarly accompanied by her growing desire and ability to share knowledge with him. Importantly, these relationships do not uphold the hierarchy and dependence implicit in the traditional marriage plot, but present more egalitarian micro-communities that counteract ‘the damn loneliness’ (85) of living on the margins of society and knowledge. The relationship dynamics represented throughout Lila also highlight how masculinist conceptions of ‘self-reliance’ and ‘independence’ are privileged positions. To have the implicit support and acceptance of the community – and the choice of when and how to participate in it – is not a privilege afforded to individuals like Lila, Doll, and Doane. Yet, somewhat contradictorily, intimate relationships create the opportunity for self-reliance in Lila, where the opposition of marriage and freedom is very much present, if debated. Lila and Doll’s itinerant lifestyle, their minimal material possessions, and the novel’s romanticisation of their communion with nature has obvious transcendentalist influences, mirroring Thoreau’s record of his life in Walden (1854). So, too, does the isolated cabin in which Lila lives in Gilead before marrying Ames. Lila finds it difficult to let go of aspects of her life that connect her to nature for the domesticity of married life: ‘she still liked to eat a carrot right out of the ground, but she knew that wasn’t what people did, so she was careful about it’ (Robinson Lila 16). She sees domesticity as a threat to what she enjoys about itinerancy: ‘In that quiet house she was afraid she might forget’ about the ‘wildness

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of things’ (106). Her embrace of nature and wildness – and her rejection of settled culture and domesticity – is reminiscent of Robinson’s earlier novel, Housekeeping. As Maggie Galehouse describes, the protagonists of Housekeeping are not ‘defined in relation to husband, home, or vocation, they are cast in bas-relief against the American landscape that houses their transience’ (135–136). I maintain that the comparison to Housekeeping is a sinister one. In Robinson’s first novel, Ruth, the protagonist, has two central woman role models; of these, one chooses transience and the other domesticity, an act that ultimately results in her suicide. Domesticity and the stasis that accompanies it are conceptualised as dangerous within the transcendentalist philosophy that permeates Robinson’s work, similar to the ways in which Emerson claims that ‘People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled, is there any hope for them’ (Essays 178). A similar relationship between nature, womanhood, self-reliance, and freedom is repeated in Lila where Robinson’s invocation of transcendentalism establishes the philosophical basis of the discomfort Lila feels about the domesticity and stasis often implicit in marriage. Despite her love for Ames, therefore, Lila fantasises about leaving him and returning to her itinerant life. She decides to stay only when she discovers she is pregnant and, even then, ‘two or three times she had even thought of stealing him away to the woods or off down the road so she could have him to herself and let him know about that other life’ (Robinson Lila 16). She fantasises about life after Ames’s death when she and her son can ‘just wander a while. We’ll be nowhere, and it will be all right. I have friends there’ (352). Rather than subscribe to generic convention and the marriage plot’s ‘happily ever after’, there is a sense in Lila that marriage is a state from which spiritual and intellectual lessons can be gained, but that life with Ames in Gilead is just another chapter in Lila’s life, a phase in her transient identity and neither a determining conclusion nor a reward. In all these ways, then, Lila is an unusual instantiation of the marriage plot. Drawing on the American canon of Bildungsroman and transcendental philosophy – and recognising how the marriage plot typically upholds financial, class-based, and legal oppressions within a gendered paradigm – in this novel, Robinson rejects the

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knowledge/power dynamic of traditional marriage narratives, as well as narratives of gendered virtue, class hierarchy, and domesticity. Still, Robinson does not reject marriage entirely; she recognises it as a social space in which mutual education and human interdependence can flourish. Marriage is not presented as a poetic reward for Lila’s behaviour or as the fulfilment of her teleological destiny. Lila’s desire for freedom and transience, her rejection of the American middle-class, settled Midwestern life and domesticity, and the novel’s embracing of her knowledge and experience are all supported by the generic conventions of the American Bildungsroman and the discourses that inform it. Robinson disturbs the gender essentialism implicit in the Bildungsroman and the marriage plot and, in Lila, reimagines the potential of women’s development and the value of their experience in the American imagination.

Works cited Alberghene, Janice M., and Beverly Lyon Clark. Little Women and the Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays. Garland, 1999. Baruch, E. H. “The Feminine Bildungsroman: Education through Marriage.” Massachusetts Review 22 (1981): 335–357. Cobb, Gerald T. “Painful blessings.” America 212.17 (2015): 42. Domestico, Antony. “Blessings in Disguise: The Unfashionable Genius of Marilynne Robinson.” Commonweal 141.18 (2014): 12–17. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females. Women’s Press, 1983. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays. Dutton, 1971. —— The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Volume 4 (1832–1834). Edited by Alfred R. Ferguson. Harvard University Press, 1963. Flax, Jane. “Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory.” Feminism/Postmodernism. Edited by Linda Nicholson. Routledge, 1990. 39–62. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper. Pantheon Books, 1980. Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press, 2007. Frow, John. Genre. Routledge, 2006.

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Galehouse, Maggie. “Their Own Private Idaho: Transience in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping” Contemporary Literature 41.1 (2000): 117–137. Hartshorne, Sarah D. “Lake Fingerbone and Walden Pond: A Commentary on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Modern Language Studies 20.3 (1990): 50–57. Hughbanks, Vivian. “Book Review: Lila by Marilynne Robinson.” UWIRE Text, 12 October 2014, p. 1. Kornfeld, E. and Jackson, S. “The Female Bildungsroman in NineteenthCentury America: Parameters of a Vision.” Journal of American Culture 10 (1987): 69–75. Labovitz, Esther Kleinbord. The Myth of the Heroine: The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century: Dorothy Richardson, Simone De Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, Christa Wolf. P. Lang, 1986. Lyotard, Jean-François. “Excerpts from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.” A Postmodern Reader. Edited by Linda Hutcheon and Joseph P. Natoli. State University of New York Press, 1993. 71–90. Robinson, Marilynne. Lila. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. —— “A Sense of Obligation: Marilynne Robinson on Religion, History, Language and the Importance of Moral Scrutiny.” The Nation 300.14 (2015): 108. Sacks, Sam. “REVIEW – Autumn Books: A Magdalene of the Midwest.” Wall Street Journal (2014): 11. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Amazon Classics, 2017. Ziff, Larzer. All-American Boy. University of Texas Press, 2012.

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Jack Baker

Style is a coercive facility. Its seductions can become entrapments, against which spirited readers are apt to rebel. The ascendant ideologies of contemporary criticism make a particular fetish of dissent: even a writer of Marilynne Robinson’s uncanny gifts is not immune from the hermeneutics of suspicion. But style also complicates more traditional inquiries, shaping formal, evaluative, and even moral judgements. A common charge against Dickens, whose moral candour prefigures Robinson’s, has been that his style creates illegitimate emotional demands: expressive force trumps intellectual substance.1 D. H. Lawrence, one of few predecessors with Robinson’s ability to charge landscapes with lyrical and spiritual significance, has also been dismissed because of these very intensities. T. S. Eliot’s curt assessment was that Lawrence possessed ‘a capacity for profound intuition – intuition from which he commonly drew the wrong conclusions’ (After Strange Gods 58). These are reductive judgements, but they license the salutary reflection that style is sometimes treated less as a central agent of narrative and more as a distracting decoration – an artful veil drawn over the essential lineaments of plot, principle, and theme. What composes a style: aesthetic flourishes, sustained ‘voices’ or tones, presiding narrative modes? The term connotes all of these and more. But Robinson’s prose is especially notable for lyric energies and figurative depth. This essay ventures a preliminary judgement of her style, grouping its inquiries under three headings. The first, ‘Rhythm and vision’, frames an account of the aphoristic textures of Housekeeping (1980). The second, ‘Language as possibility’,

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measures the rich subtexts of Gilead (2004) against the attitudes to language disclosed in Robinson’s nonfiction. And the third, ‘Style as narrative device’, outlines a connection between the lyric and episodic cruces of Robinson’s novels and their wider narrative architecture. These foci are somewhat misaligned with recent scholarship on Robinson, which tends to concentrate on the major social and political preoccupations of her work: religion, race, gender, and regionalism. But a consideration of the textures of Robinson’s prose is timely because the aesthetic of her fiction tacitly rebukes the ideological and doctrinaire thinking to which even literary critics are sometimes prone.

Rhythm and vision Housekeeping’s tale of alienation, deprivation, and loss, in which the dead have all gone into a world of water, is told with a lyrical grace that transcends the squalor of the protagonist’s surroundings. Ruth’s inexhaustible observations, both physical and metaphysical, register mimetically, in poetic prose, a heightened awareness of the soul to which the more prosaic intelligence – Lucille – is closed. That perceptive consciousness allows Ruth to preserve the intuition of a blessedness that would otherwise be lost. Robinson describes the genesis of Housekeeping in an interview with Sarah Fay in The Paris Review: ‘I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson. When I entered the Ph.D. program, I started writing these metaphors down just to get the feeling of writing in that voice. After I finished my dissertation, I read through the stack of metaphors and they cohered in a way that I hadn’t expected.’ To describe these coherences as rhythmic is straightaway to acknowledge that rhythm in Robinson’s fiction takes many forms: of the body in motion; of day and night; of ritual chores; and of the changing seasons. But prose rhythms also supply crucial delineations so that moments of keen insight or heightened sensory perception become indivisible from the dense poetic textures of her prose. What is implied by ‘poetic textures’? Critics have often considered it unwise to conflate our experience of poetry with our expectations of prose. Writing his introduction to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

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in 1936, Eliot is at pains to distinguish even the finest prose from the heightened musical patterns of verse and grumbles that ‘most contemporary novels are not really “written.” They obtain what reality they have largely from an accurate rendering of the noises that human beings currently make in their daily simple needs of communication’ (Nightwood 2). Nor are later scholars, even those less grudging than Eliot about the capacities of prose, eager to adopt poetic terminologies. In his influential study The Other Harmony of Prose, Paul Baum emphasises the greater rhythmic flexibility of the prose sentence over the verse line, and argues, for instance, that that natural preponderance of unstressed syllables in prose ‘makes for a kind of swiftness [ . . .] which is almost beyond the range of verse’ (93). Salutatory as these monitions may be, Robinson’s prose is in key respects irreducibly poetic – and not only in the vaguer senses of conjuring vivid images, or being pleasing to the ear. Several passages in Housekeeping flirt with metre, particularly at times of heightened emotional intensity. And, just as the sound-patterns of Robinson’s prose match the precision of verse, so her imagery achieves a subtlety and metaphorical depth that might more usually be associated with poetry. Where readers might expect to find a language of denotation, appropriate to a narrative sequence, often we find a language of connotation, which grounds Ruth’s figurative insights in the tactile particulars of the natural world: Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water – peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing – the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries. (Housekeeping 152)

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There is a profusion of literary echoes: Keats’s grape bursting on the palate fine; Marvell’s vegetable love; Eliot’s salt smell renewing the savour of the sandy earth – each one an aesthetic intimation of a spiritual need. Robinson confidently calls up great spirits of Western literature to confirm her insights. And when she relinquishes the luminous image of salt, she embarks on a beautifully cadenced sequence of imaginative thought. An ornate flourish – ‘For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires’ – prefigures and gathers authority from the chaste, clear diction of ‘To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.’ That steady truth is immediately confirmed in the extravagant sweep of the tripartite rhetorical question: ‘For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?’ As Robinson writes in her essay on Psalm 8, ‘A question is more spacious than a statement, far better suited to expressing wonder’ (The Death of Adam 240). Wonder gains a spiritual dimension in ‘a foreshadowing – the world will be made whole’; and wholeness made flesh in the recall to being of Ruth’s mother, Helen [Foster], who ‘fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries’. The longed-for touch of the hair – endemic in Robinson – is initially anonymous, until the precise detail of the wild strawberries, eaten before Helen’s suicide, and already instanced as a symbol of resurrection in the novel, calls up the lost mother as a real presence, warm as Hermione. It is a critical commonplace that prose rhythms should be discrete. In an essay on “Style”, Walter Pater remarks of Dryden’s prose that it is ‘vitiated, all unconsciously, by many a scanning line’ (7). In Housekeeping, Robinson presents an intriguing exception to this rule; while her sentences are often syntactically intricate, the ghost of pentameter lingers in short, aphoristic phrases: The water shone more brilliantly than the sky, and while we watched, a tall elm tree fell slowly across the road. (62) The afternoon was loud with the giant miseries of the lake, and the sun shone on, and the flood was the almost flawless mirror of a cloudless sky, fat with brimming and very calm. (63) I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. (116)

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Readers are used to carefully wrought prose, in which the stresses fall naturally upon significant words. But these sentences seem additionally meticulous, in that their syntax and lexis are accommodated to an iambic pattern. The first example, with minor elisions, scans almost perfectly. The second, more supple and elaborate, affords nonetheless an iambic flourish in the ‘almost flawless mirror of a cloudless sky’. The third, like the first, enacts a quickened sensibility through its poised and alternating stresses. Of course, these correlations are not perfect: to count and apportion stresses in this way is to court the immediate objection that prose rhythms are too supple and variable to be represented solely by stressed and unstressed syllables, or by metrical feet. There have been attempts formally to codify prose rhythms, involving formulae that attempt to account for myriad variations in intonation and stress, but it is fair to say that none of these ingenious theories has gained widespread acceptance. In any case, even the most assiduous technical descriptions of rhythm are mere approximations, and I am not for a moment suggesting that a sing-song metrical structure obtrudes itself upon the reader when they first encounter sentences such as those above. But, in showing how passages of Robinson’s prose can be assimilated to familiar prosodic patterns, I am suggesting that her sentences are rhythmically stylised to an extent unusual in prose fiction. Indeed, the immanence in the natural world of what is desired, evident to Ruth but not to Lucille, is conveyed by a rhythm in the prose as compelling as Lawrence’s in The Rainbow (1915). The constant and reliable poise of the benevolent grandmother, Mrs Sylvia Foster, who broods like the Holy Ghost over her own daughters, is evoked in repeated phrases and cadences: And now, to comfort herself, my grandmother would not reflect on the unkindness of her children, or of children in general. … She was then a magisterial woman not only because of her height and her large, sharp face, not only because of her upbringing, but also because it suited her purpose to be what she seemed to be so that her children would never be startled or surprised, and to take on all the postures and vestments of matron, to differentiate her life from theirs, so that her children would never feel intruded upon. Her love for them was utter and equal, her government of them generous and absolute. She was as constant as daylight, and she would be as

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unremarked as daylight, just to watch the calm inwardness of their faces. What was it like. One evening one summer she went out to the garden. The earth in the rows was light and soft as cinders, pale clay yellow, and the trees and plants were ripe, ordinary green and full of comfortable rustlings. And above the pale earth and bright trees the sky was the dark blue of ashes. As she knelt in the rows she heard the hollyhocks thump against the shed wall. She felt the hair lifted from her neck by a swift, watery wind, and she saw the trees fill with wind and heard their trunks creak like masts. She burrowed her hand under a potato plant and felt gingerly for the new potatoes in their dry net of roots, smooth as eggs. She put them in her apron and walked back to the house thinking, What have I seen, what have I seen. The earth and the sky and the garden not as they always are. And she saw her daughters’ faces not as they always were, or as other people’s were, and she was quiet and aloof and watchful, not to startle the strangeness away. She had never taught them to be kind to her. (Housekeeping 18–19)

In the third sentence, as the two syllables of ‘utter’ balance ‘equal’, so the three of ‘absolute’ confirm ‘generous’, while the sentence as a whole pivots steadily on the caesura of the comma, enacting the stable dependability of Mrs Foster’s care. To similar effect, in the second sentence, the six syllables of ‘feel intruded upon’ that follow the second instance of ‘so that her children would never’ balance the six of ‘be startled or surprised’ that follow the first. The precisely repeated cadences in this long sentence emphasise the constancy of the grandmother’s solicitude and carry readers in rhythmic security to the full stop. But ‘[w]hat was it like’ is a question, ‘suited to expressing wonder’. After the evocation of an Eden-like garden of green plants and ‘comfortable rustlings’, the ‘thump’ of the hollyhocks suddenly suggests a heightened perception, and the ominous ‘She felt the hair lifted from her neck by a swift, watery wind, and she saw the trees fill with wind and heard their trunks creak like masts’ introduces a chill of trepidation, a threat of movement and change, not altogether allayed by the satisfying smoothness of the potatoes. The hint of the numinous in the quotidian is created in the swift accretion of sensory actions and perceptions – she knelt; she heard; she felt; she saw; she burrowed; she put; she saw – followed by the calm attentiveness of Mrs Foster’s ruminations, her alert and patient waiting. Finally, the way she saves the negative capability of her

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children is recalled, grounding the transcendental flights of the long paragraph in a simple statement of disinterested love: ‘She had never taught them to be kind to her.’ Robinson freely admits that she is prepared to sacrifice realism for form. In an early essay on “Writers and the Nostalgic Fallacy” (1985), she observes: ‘When I wrote Housekeeping [. . .] I made a world remote enough to allow me to choose and control the language out of which the story was made’ (34). This raises further questions about the particular design of Robinson’s rhythmic inventions. When critics draw attention to rhythm in passages of prose fiction, they are most often preoccupied with purely mimetic effects. Consider, for instance, Rudyard Kipling’s evocation of space and movement in the short story “Kaa’s Hunting” (1893): He turned twice or thrice in a big circle, weaving his head from right to left. Then he began making loops and figures of eight with his body, and soft, oozy triangles that melted into squares and five sided figures, and coiled mounds, never resting, never hurrying, and never stopping his slow humming song. It grew darker and darker, till at last the dragging, shifting coils disappeared, but they could hear the rustle of the scales. (61)

These sentences are a masterpiece of pacing and control. Not only do the accumulating clauses and subject rhymes enact the bewitching symmetries being described, but the lengthening participial phrases of the second sentence create the impression of an irresistible force, the energy of which is finally dissipated in a sibilant diminuendo: ‘the rustle of the scales’. The rhythmical effects are obviously at the service of Kipling’s fantastical imagery, and they amplify Kaa’s function as an esoteric symbol of emancipated power. The snake epitomises a dark potentiality that, disturbing as it is, readers register as an ineluctable component of human nature. As I have argued, Robinson is also capable of such mimetic effects. But often, her rhythmic emphases do more than mimic the external world. They imply a state of heightened consciousness, in which Ruth’s insights assume a vatic, impersonal authority: It might have been this house that peopled all these mountains. When it broke it might have cast them invisibly into the wind like spores, thousands from one drab husk, or millions, for there was no reason to believe that anyone ever had heard all the tales of unsheltered folk



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that were in these mountains, or that anyone ever would. And that is perhaps why, when they saw me alone, they would practically tug at my sleeve. (Housekeeping 158)

In this visionary passage, Ruth has come upon an abandoned homestead that symbolises, in its picturesque and eerie ruin, the erosion of the American dream. But Ruth, a child, is not invested in the obvious historical symbolism; she responds intuitively and urgently to the imagined lives of the house’s actual occupants. Robinson conjures enormous figurative richness from a demotic and largely monosyllabic lexis, and here rhythm as dictated by syntax becomes an important concern. The accumulating clauses of the second sentence enact a temporary expansion of consciousness; the obtrusive repetitions suggest a scope of vision that exceeds conventional mensuration: ‘all these mountains’; ‘all the tails’; ‘thousands’; ‘millions’; ‘anyone ever had’; ‘anyone ever would’. This teeming multiplicity swiftly contracts to a single, idiosyncratic image which casts the ghostly presences as strangely intimate, even protective. And only in the final clause does the subjunctive mood cede to the indicative, as the sentence is hastened to a close by obviously dactylic rhythms: ‘practically tug at my sleeve’. Housekeeping eschews didactic language, which might invest a perception with certainties that would be premature, superficial, or unearned. Instead, the novel persuades through subjective and spontaneous insights. Time and again, Robinson’s sentences achieve a clinching emphasis that is more aesthetic than logical. In Ruth’s chthonic vision, readers are never directly told that the ghosts she senses are benign, or that her feeling of kinship with these forgotten spirits stands in poignant contrast to her alienation from society. Yet, somehow, readers possess these insights, because their vision is enriched by the vivid particularities of Robinson’s prose.

Language as possibility Insofar as Robinson has risked defining her own attitudes to language, those attitudes are defiantly romantic. Her essay, “Language is Smarter than We Are” (1987), argues that ‘language accommodates to every demand that is made of it, not like a tool, but like an intelligence,

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being as if designed to synthesize, assimilate, contrive’. In its rejection of instrumental terminology – ‘not like a tool’ – this description credits language with a sovereign force and so complicates the intellectual agency of those caught in the web of words. Intention and effect are easily estranged: a danger that informs many of the stylistic contrasts between Housekeeping and Gilead, the novel that followed Robinson’s lengthy break from fiction. In a measured review of Gilead, Tessa Hadley argues that ‘the problem with the novel is that the quantity of rumination is disproportionate to the embodiment. In Housekeeping, Ruthie’s voice, arriving unexplained out of an unspecified future, had an openness and poetic range which worked effectively like authorial omniscience. Down in the detail and rhythm of Ames’s language, however, Robinson has limited what we can see’ (Hadley 20). It is certainly true that Ames’s sentiments seem, at times, curiously embattled: All best forgotten, my father used to say. He didn’t like mention of those times, and that did cause some hard feelings between him and his father. I’ve read up on those events considerably, and I’ve decided that my father was right. And that’s just as well, because people have forgotten. (Gilead 86)

The meandering circularity of the phrases between ‘[a]ll best forgotten’ and ‘people have forgotten’ enacts Ames’s timid shying from the hard facts that shaped the hard feelings he describes. By the time readers arrive at the second instance of ‘forgotten’, the word has changed its meaning: a deliberate disregard has become a permanent loss. The conjunctions connecting successive clauses add to the grammatical illusion of contingent logic, even though the information given suggests that Ames read rather to confirm than to investigate his comforting preconceptions: ‘I’ve read up on those events considerably.’ These abstract, generalising phrases seem at odds with the usual precision and immediacy of Robinson’s prose, and might at first incline us to agree with Hadley, that Ames’s persona limits Robinson’s creative gifts. Yet Ames’s apparent limitations as narrator are themselves a kind of narrative artifice, as his hesitations, euphemisms, and omissions deliberately alert readers to underlying tensions in the novel. Gilead’s rich historical subtext, which ties the conflicts of the American Civil War to the persistent divisions of race and class in

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the novel’s mid-twentieth-century present, is rendered obliquely. The conflict between Ames’s grandfather – a man of action and moral certainty, and a committed abolitionist – and father, who is given to caution and compromise, provides an historical and emotional context for the moral cruces that have shaped Ames’s own life. In recounting his vexed relationship with his wayward godson, Jack Boughton, Ames wavers between principle and atavism, obligation and resentment. The trials of the past inform the dilemmas of the present but offer no simple resolutions. Indeed, Gilead’s intermingled tenses gesture to a precarity beyond Ames’s immediate anxieties – the very occasion of the novel is an accident of fate: I’m trying to make the best of our situation. That is, I’m trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way. (116)

The narrative is torn: even as Ames attempts to transmit that which ‘is strong and lovely in my mind’ (110), that his son might be forearmed against the challenges of life, he faces a reckoning for his own behaviour in the face of past challenges. Uncertainty infuses Ames’s attempts to describe his own feelings, which make certain statements more revealing than perhaps even he intends. Of particular moment are his anxieties over the very act of writing. At times, he weighs words with almost suspicious care, as if language were an untrustworthy vessel for his innermost thoughts, and might reveal an unsponsored version of the truth: In writing this, I notice the care it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word ‘just.’ I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened . . . when it’s used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. (32)

As readers become gradually attuned to the pitch of Ames’s voice, we are, of course, increasingly aware that he is not a reliable narrator – a realisation with profound moral implications. Here, what appears at first to be a fastidious reservation about colloquialisms in fact betrays a deep unease about the justness of Ames’s own actions: he wishes that ‘just’ were a word he had every right to use. This is another reminder that the integuments of Robinson’s style are not incidental to narrative, but can charge ostensibly peripheral events with a weight of meaning.

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‘Not like a tool, but like an intelligence’ (Robinson “Language is Smarter Than We Are”): Gilead offers ample evidence to support the ideal of a wisdom somehow latent in language, as Ames’s equivocations often gesture to truths of which he himself seems only partially aware. But the credo need not be an invitation to perennial scepticism, whereby all statements are somehow self-deceiving, or misprision is inevitable. Though Ames falls short – who could not? – of the high ideals that he invokes, it does not follow that his lyrical articulation of those ideals cannot be deeply moving, or that his moral disposition is finally held up to censure or ridicule. Quite the reverse. In “Psalm Eight”, Robinson outlines a religious sensibility – anticipating Ames’s – less concerned with the doctrinal intricacies of scripture than with its ‘evocation and portraiture … meant to achieve likeness rather than precision, in the manner of art’ (Death of Adam 241). The mysterious power of religious allegory clearly animates Robinson – ‘These narratives seize their occasion’ – yet it is worth observing that the idiosyncratic ethics she derives from scripture have analogues outside religious writing. “Psalm Eight” laments a jejune worldliness and impatience for simple explanations: ‘the restlessness which … nearly overthrew my better self’ (231). Similarly, in Culture and Anarchy (1869), Matthew Arnold describes a ‘best self’ which connects individuals in their deepest integrity: By our everyday selves … we are separate, personal, at war; we are only safe from one another’s tyranny when no one has any power; and this safety, in its turn, cannot save us from anarchy. And when, therefore, anarchy presents itself as a danger to us, we know not where to turn. But by our best self we are united, impersonal, at harmony. We are in no peril from giving authority to this, because it is the truest friend we all of us can have; and when anarchy is a danger to us, to this authority we may turn with sure trust. (95)

So much of this is applicable to Ames’s sensibility: his failures of spirit are only failures by the light of his ‘best self’; he feels the immanence of a redemptive order beyond his immediate cares. Arnold’s own complex religious attitudes – rejecting supernatural occurrences, but deeply attuned to the power of scripture and ritual – offer an intriguing foil for Robinson’s enigmatic protagonist. Ames,

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too, is more interested in the poetry of life than in abstract philosophic questioning. He reports uneasy conversations with his atheist brother, and, elsewhere, evinces an impatience with doctrinal questions: ‘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 173). Though a daunting weight of experience separates the weary reflections in Gilead from the viridity of Ruth’s insights in Housekeeping, Ames retains an appetite for wonder: The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. 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. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. (27–28)

Robert Alter observes of Gilead that ‘In those passages … devoted to narrative report, one sees a strong affiliation with the paratactic forward march of biblical prose’ (163). It is natural that Ames should be steeped in the rhythms of the King James Bible, just as it is natural that Ruth, in Housekeeping, should speak at times with an elemental simplicity. In the passage above, the coordinating conjunctions effect precisely the ‘paratactic forward march’ that Alter divines. What is remarkable is that these suggestive rhythms, compounded by images freighted with an overt religious symbolism, do not become ponderous, but evoke instead a quickened sensibility. In an inversion of the solemnising demands of sacred ritual, the spirit of baptism is projected onto an irreducible and spontaneous experience. Ames registers the beautiful image as being ‘like something from a myth’, and this revealing lack of specificity from one so learned functions as a covert recognition of how singular is the experience, and how vital the consolation it affords. In these and other visionary passages, Ames’s language is no longer cowed by allusion and deadening association, but translates old certainties into newly imagined possibilities.

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Style as narrative device The lyric intensities licensed by Robinson’s style have several implications for the wider structure of her narratives. Whereas it is a critical commonplace in discussions of poetry that form and meaning should be inseparable, it is perhaps more common to approach the ‘style’, themes, and narrative architecture of a novel as related but not coextensive. The local intensifications of metaphor and poetic artifice may enrich a storyline, but rarely do they dictate its course. Yet Robinson’s elusive and richly figurative chronicles, which attend less to linear temporal sequences than to the crucial spots of time in her characters’ experiences, resist easy categorisation. Future scholars will, no doubt, reflect extensively on Robinson’s position in the landscape of modern fiction. In the meantime, it may be opportune to draw a brief comparison with the techniques of two near-contemporaries, W. G. Sebald and Jonathan Buckley. In his ethereal 2011 novel Austerlitz, Sebald pursues a recursive pattern of reminiscences that closely recall Ruth’s impressionistic recollections. Historical idiosyncrasies and moments of epiphanic realisation feature in his writing as tokens of reliable certainty, as if to compensate for the disorienting and intractable chaos of life. Buckley, too, is a connoisseur of chaos, in the sense that he is reluctant to impose upon his narratives a set of false, unearned, or premature coherences. In accounting for his own narrative style, which ‘proceeds by juxtaposition rather than by linear progression’ (“My Novel is a Mirrored Room”), Buckley invokes the theories of the philosopher Galen Strawson. In Strawson’s terms: I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves. (123)

Strawson’s rejection of the time-bound, ‘diachronic self’ is equally appropriate to Robinson’s episodic narratives. As I have argued,

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the stylised rhythms of Housekeeping afford a distinction between mere itemising description and the figurative richness of Ruth’s perceptions. The novel is less a prosaic and accretive account of childhood than a syncretic evocation of awakened consciousness. Readers recall Ruth’s poignant question, ‘What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?’ By contrast, Ames’s attempts to ‘story himself’ – to rationalise, and so excuse, past indiscretions – results in the routine falsification of experience, though Gilead, too, affords flashes of redemptive insight. In Absence of Mind (2010), Robinson expounds upon the ideal of a selfhood deriving not from everyday circumstance, but from epiphanies: I am hungry, I am comfortable, I am a singer, I am a cook. The abrupt descent into particularity in every statement of this kind, Being itself made an auxiliary to some momentary accident of being, may only startle in the dark of night, when the intuition comes that there is no proportion between the great given of existence and the narrow vessel of circumstance into which it is inevitably forced. (110–111)

In his Lectures on Literature (1980), Vladimir Nabokov argues that a striking proportion of great works align with the following sequence: ‘magic, story, lesson’ (6). The reader is enticed by beauty, led on by narrative, and finally graced with wisdom. But in Robinson’s work, the notion of a didactic ‘lesson’ that could confidently be drawn from the metaphysical density of her prose is fanciful. Rather, lyric epiphanies and the episodic narrative patterns that they compose are central to Robinson’s distinctive achievement, as she shows how whole lives can be shaped by a simple object, a casual gesture, or turn of phrase. To return to her essay on “Psalm Eight”, ‘time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded’ (244). It is finally through metaphorical suggestion, rather than through narrative elaboration, that Robinson charges elemental occurrences with feelings so intense and haunting.

Notes 1 Arthur Clayborough, for instance, deprecates the ‘deliberate disproportion between subject matter and style’ in Dickens’ work (242).

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Works cited Alter, Robert. Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. Princeton University Press, 2010. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. Edited by John Dover Wilson. Cambridge University Press, 1969. Baum, Paul Franklin. The Other Harmony of Prose: An Essay in English Prose Rhythm.: Duke University Press, 1952. Buckley, Jonathan. “My Novel is a Mirrored Room.” The Guardian, 13 October 2015. www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/13/jonathanbuckley-novel-the-river-is-the-river. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Clayborough, Arthur. The Grotesque in English Literature. Clarendon Press, 1967. Eliot, T. S. After Strange Gods: A Primer in Modern Heresy. Faber and Faber, 1934. —— “Introduction” to Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. 1936. Faber, 1990. 1–7. Hadley, Tessa. “An Attic Full of Sermons [Review of Gilead]”. London Review of Books 27.8 (2005): 19–20. Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book. Macmillan, 1896. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. Edited by Fredson Bowers, introduction by John Updike. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980. Pater, Walter. Appreciations. Macmillan, 1907. Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. Yale University Press, 2010. —— The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Houghton Mifflin, 1998. —— Gilead. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. —— Housekeeping. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. —— Interview with Sarah Fay. “The Art of Fiction No. 198.” The Paris Review. No. 186, Fall 2008. www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5863/ the-art-of-fiction-no-198-marilynne-robinson. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) —— “Language is Smarter than We Are,” New York Times, 11 January 1987. www.nytimes.com/1987/01/11/books/about-books-language-issmarter-than-we-are.html. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) —— “Writers and the Nostalgic Fallacy,” New York Times, 13 October 1985, 34. Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. Introduction James Wood. Translated by Anthea Bell. Penguin, 2011. Strawson, Galen. The Subject of Experience. Oxford University Press, 2017.

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Part II

Gender and environment

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4 The female orphan and an ecofeminist ethic-of-care in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Lila Anna Maguire Elliott

Critics have repeatedly noted references to nineteenth-century literature in Marilynne Robinson’s writing; as Martha Ravits explains, her work adapts ‘American literary romanticism and nineteenth-century prototypes to twentieth-century womanhood’ (645). This criticism has tended to focus on allusions to transcendentalist writing in Robinson’s fiction and, in particular, her revision of a male American myth of individualism.1 However, while Robinson’s work explores an Emersonian model of self-reliance, of the individual freed from social constraints, her writing reveals a concurrent concern for the conflicting ties of kinship and home. This roots Robinson’s work within another nineteenth-century literary tradition: that of the domestic novel.2 In this essay, I argue that locating her work in this female tradition offers insight into her exploration of selfreliance and its relationship to an ethic-of-care, further elucidating Robinson’s contemporary feminist concerns. I consider her use of the female orphan, a central trope of the domestic novel, in Housekeeping (1980) and Lila (2014), and suggest that in these texts Robinson develops an ecofeminist ethic-of-care for the environment that extends from an earlier, didactic tradition within women’s writing. The female orphan was especially important to nineteenth-century women writers in her embodiment of the complex relationship between female autonomy and the caring relationships of home. The orphan was divided between an assertion of her independence, as she made her own way in the world, and an emphasis on a missing family and dependence on others for assistance. In both

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Housekeeping and Lila, Robinson similarly employs the trope, as her female protagonists develop self-reliance and struggle to form and maintain caring relationships to others. Read within this tradition, Robinson emphasises the continuing problem that the ethic-of-care represents for feminists, offering an alternative ethical model for relationships with others but continuing the association of women with caring roles based within the home. By contrast, Emerson conceived of self-reliance as an individual call to solitude, deeply connected to the American landscape, and obtained by removal from society. The nineteenth-century orphaned heroine, while developing the skills necessary for her independence, could not so easily escape the network of caring relationships at home. Housekeeping and Lila use the trope of the female orphan to question the place of care in relation to an autonomy located in the natural world, exploring ecofeminist concerns about the human relationship to the environment that seek to reposition the concept of care. These novels ask how, and whether, an Emersonian, solitary connection to the landscape might be reconciled with a wider network of care, which recognises human interdependence with each other as well as the wider, natural world.

The literary orphan and the ethic-of-care The nineteenth century, as Nina Auerbach explains, was as an era of ‘orphan worship’ in the English novel, from Dickens to Eliot to Thackeray to the Brontës (Auerbach 411; Mills 227; Peters 24). Although mortality rates were high, and a significant number of children were without parents, the orphan also made a useful literary trope: ‘the primary metaphor for the dispossessed, detached self’ but also ‘an emblem of human transformative potentiality’: a representation of an independent selfhood, simultaneously containing the potential for growth and change (Auerbach 395; Gilead 86). These traits appealed particularly to American writers and in a ‘golden age’ of American adoption literature, from Huckleberry Finn to Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), the orphan became representative of a separation from the history and traditions of the European father/mother land and marked the exploration of an American individualism (Singley 81; see also Irr 385).

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Influenced especially by Jane Eyre (1847), the female orphan became a central feature of the nineteenth-century American domestic novel, featuring in texts such as Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854) (Baym 30; Showalter Jury 88–89; Tropp Trensky 408). The orphan offered a socially sanctioned path to female independence: they ‘could be shown making decisions, negotiating the world, and exploring paths traditionally barred to middle-class girls’ (Reynolds and Humble 27). The orphan also allowed an exploration of an ideal of American womanhood, providing models of young women learning practical skills and earning a living rather than relying on wealthy or aristocratic connections. This translated to a significant dilemma at the heart of the domestic novel: the orphan offered a permissible opportunity to explore female autonomy, but she was, simultaneously, a figure of dependence. Networks of caring relationships underpinned and made possible the orphan’s independence, but they also represented the responsibilities of care from which she was trying to escape. The tension between caring relationships formed primarily within the home and female self-reliance marked a critical dilemma for nineteenth-century writers exploring new possibilities for female independence. Moreover, this has remained an important question in contemporary feminist thought in relation to care. In In a Different Voice (1982), the psychologist Carol Gilligan identified an ethic-ofcare within moral reasoning that prioritised a responsibility for others. She did not claim that this ‘different voice’ was gendered and was careful to note that this voice was found in men as well as women. However, her work is often read in this way; as Mary Jean Larrabee explains, ‘[f]eminist critics, in particular, have worried about the undesirable implications concerning her focus on the “womanly virtues” that have traditionally been used to keep women in the “private” sphere’ (Gilligan 2; Larrabee 5; Tronto 82). The valuing of a ‘different voice’, founded in a principle of caring for others, risked associating women primarily with a set of values that reinforced the idea of their ‘natural’ place within the home. This ethic-of-care was thus seen as limiting, and in conflict with models of female autonomy. Nevertheless, as Joan Tronto explains, feminists have revisited the ethic-of-care as a model for moral reasoning. While the concepts

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of ‘caring about’ and ‘taking care of’ have been problematically limiting in their historic association with female confinement to caring roles, they also contain an agency that has marked the point of their reclamation (Tronto 106). More problematic is the concept of ‘being cared for’, which has come to represent disempowerment. Disability studies theorists challenge this reading and suggest that ‘being cared for’, or being dependent on others, is fundamental to the human condition (Erevelles 177). Ecofeminists further suggest that the ethic-of-care must be extended beyond an understanding of care simply in human terms. Dependency is key, because ‘an ecofeminist ethic of care is about the mutual interdependence of all life on Earth’ (Swanson 96). This expands the idea of dependence beyond the androcentric: ‘As human beings our dependence on each other is actually a miniscule amount of our overall dependence. We are massively dependent on other animals and of course on our environments in ways that are impossible for us to really even fathom’ (Taylor 113). Dismissing dependence as weakness is therefore to ignore both a reality of human existence and to create an illusory separation between humans and the natural environment. It is at this point in contemporary feminist thought about care that I position Robinson’s writing. In Housekeeping and Lila there is a strong link between the orphan’s isolation and the natural world: in order to become independent, the orphan must adopt an Emersonian self-reliance in the landscape, somewhere beyond domestic space. However, this independence simultaneously demands a rejection of home and the caring relationships formed there. Robinson examines the separation of human and natural worlds and uses the orphan figure to explore a solitary female connection to the landscape. However, these texts suggest a continuing denial of human dependence and consider the consequences of rejecting an ethic-of-care, both to women and to the environment.

Orphanhood and the landscape in Housekeeping Nineteenth-century domesticity reinforced notions of women’s place within the home as separate from the natural world by emphasising interior household space as secure, against a landscape marked by vulnerability and danger. Housekeeping begins with a reiteration of

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this domestic ideal, but gradually deconstructs this binary. As her death approaches, Ruth and Lucille’s grandmother advises them: ‘keep the house. So long as you look after your health, and own the roof above your head, you’re as safe as anyone can be’ (Robinson Housekeeping 27). She teaches them the security of the house and, in opposition to this, Ruth and Lucille state: ‘the woods at night terrified us’ (114). Sarah Hartshorne suggests that Robinson ‘plays on the haunting ballad which is mentioned so often in nineteenthcentury American literature: the “Babes in the Woods”’ (54). The fear of being alone in the woods draws on this mythic fairy tale, as well as others like ‘Hansel and Gretel’. In these morality tales, popular in the nineteenth-century household, the woodland is where an orphan might be stolen by an unstable adult and mothers warn of the dangers of disobeying the expectations of good behaviour set within the home.3 Robinson thus highlights the traditional separation of the domestic ideal from the contrasting, threatening landscape, but also emphasises this dichotomy as fairy tale or enduring myth. Instead, Housekeeping suggests that the separate space of domesticity is a social construction, grounded in a real and unequal socioeconomic framework. Ruth and Lucille increasingly fear the woods at night, and darkness comes to represent an extreme state of orphanhood in the text, which imagines the orphan not simply as outsider but as a racial Other. Their grandmother tells them of their great-grandmother’s friend who: when she looked out her window at night, often saw the ghosts of children crying by the road. These children, who were sky black and stark naked and who danced with the cold and wiped their tears with the backs of their hands and the heels of their hands, furious with hunger, consumed much of the woman’s substance and most of her thoughts. (Robinson Housekeeping 25–26)

This story of orphanhood, passed on through the generations like the ‘Babes in the Woods’ fairy tale, here suggests a more concrete foundation of racially based economic inequality. Haunted with guilt by these ‘sky black’ spectral orphans, their great-grandmother’s friend puts food and blankets out for them, but these are only token gestures of ‘caring for’: a form of care, as Tronto suggests, which is not taken far enough to make a difference (106). Far from helping, this minimalist action makes no improvement to the children’s lives

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and the ghostly figures ‘grew more numerous and came more often’ (Robinson Housekeeping 26). Rather than representing their own moral failure, as in the fairy tales, the haunting presence of these orphans reveals a society that does not provide for its most vulnerable and fails to address racial inequality. The text thus exposes this representation of the secure, comfortable home that is set apart from the outside world as a model of privileged domesticity. Furthermore, it reveals this as a white domestic ideal, which is simultaneously reliant on the oppression and exclusion of racial difference. The novel implies a further cost to privileged domesticity in its depiction of the growing floods experienced in the neighbourhood. Ruth notes: ‘My grandmother always boasted that the floods never reached our house, but that spring, water poured over the thresholds’ (61). Combined with an unusually heavy snowfall, causing the lake to freeze ‘early and long’, the text depicts the extreme weather conditions associated with climate change (33). Like the ghostly orphans, environmental damage is a presence that surrounds and haunts domestic space, implying the dangerous consequences of a domesticity that fails to care for the natural world. The text thus performs an ecofeminist deconstruction, which exposes Western domesticity as fundamentally reliant on the oppression of both human and nonhuman others. The binary opposition of home and landscape gradually dissolves in the novel, and Ruth and Lucille become increasingly associated with the ghostly, ‘sky black’ orphans of their grandmother’s story. As Ruth faces the state intervention that threatens to take her away from Sylvie, she hides amongst the garden trees and imagines a fairy story about herself: Once there was a young girl strolling at night in an orchard. She came to a house she had never seen before […] she walked inside […] Her hair, which was as black as the sky […] Her fingers, which were sky black and so fine and slender that they were only cold […]. She would be transformed by the gross light into a mortal child. And when she stood at the bright window, she would find that the world was gone. (203–204)

Ruth enters the cautionary ‘Babes in the Woods’ fairy tale of her grandmother, finding herself in a ‘melancholy story’, lost and alone (203). In this passage, Ruth internalises the state of orphanhood

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that she associates with the ‘ghost’ children her grandmother described and manifests the ‘sky black’ fingers that point to their racial difference (203). In amongst the dark trees, she is set apart from the security of the house; upon entering, she imagines she will be ‘transformed by the gross light’. This metaphorical return to the dominant lightness of the house suggests a return to the protection of a privileged, white domesticity. However, as she enters the house this image is inverted: she finds that she is alone, and the figures of maternal security – her mother, grandmother, and aunts – are part of the external world that she cannot access. As Stefan Mattessich explains, ‘this “outside” is where its protagonists always are’ (60). The interiority of domestic space therefore disintegrates in the text as Ruth finally understands the idealised security of home as myth. Unable to return to an illusory white domesticity, she finds herself aligned with the figure of the spectral Black orphan, outside in a landscape she must negotiate alone. Robinson explores contrasting models of female self-reliance in response to this destabilised domesticity. During the nineteenth century, the domestic novel provided tales of orphans that both reinforced domestic conventions and simultaneously offered transgression from the moral binaries of the fairy tale orphan. As Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella, and Helena Wahlström observe, Lucille’s development, in particular, references the narrative of the domestic novel (93). She returns to a domestic model of self-reliance, which in the nineteenth century might have suggested the possibility of a sphere of female power, but was nevertheless rooted in the idea of home as a separate space. In order to be rewarded with independence, the nineteenth-century heroine was expected to develop moral values closely related to home, family, and femininity (Nelson 56). In Housekeeping, Lucille declares that, in order to survive orphanhood, ‘We have to improve ourselves!’ but her idea of self-development is founded in conventional domesticity (Robinson Housekeeping 123). She sets about self-educating by learning to sew and she even secures a Home Economics teacher, Miss Royce, as a maternal role model. Lucille is thus ‘adopted’ into a new social family but, as Geyh observes, she symbolically rejoins a framework of patriarchy (Geyh 140; Holmgren Troy, Keller, and Wahlström 98). Unlike Lucille, however, Ruth has learnt how quickly this domestic security can dissolve and finds herself unwilling to learn the skills

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necessary for domestic conformity: ‘indifferent to my clothes and comfortable in my skin, unimproved and without the prospect of improvement’ (Robinson Housekeeping 123). Instead, through Sylvie, Ruth finds a transgressive model of independence that is located in the landscape. Sylvie’s name marks her close relationship to the ‘sylvan’ woods and she represents an exploration of an Emersonian tradition of self-reliance, embodying the idea that ‘[w]hoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist’, rejecting domesticity (Emerson 178; Geyh 114). Like the transcendentalists before her, Sylvie develops a close, individual relationship to the landscape that refuses to conform to the domesticity of the town. As Ravits also suggests, the novel thus ‘demonstrate[s] that the empowering attitude of self-reliance can be claimed by female as well as male protagonists’ (654). Sylvie teaches Ruth self-reliance both by rejecting traditional domesticity and through a process of abandonment, forcing her to confront her orphanhood, and to relocate herself within the broader natural environment. Taking her to a ruined house in the woods, she retells the orphan myth: ‘now and then I’m sure there are children around me […] I tried to catch one once […] Not, you know, trap it, but lure it out with marshmallows’ (Robinson Housekeeping 148). However, it is Ruth who becomes the abandoned child: Sylvie feeds her the marshmallows and she ‘leaves the girl alone to come to terms with her loneliness and thereby achieve the influx of will that brings self-reliance’ (Ravits 654). Considering the mythical orphans, Ruth decides: I knew there were no children trapped in this meagre ruin. They were light and spare and thoroughly used to the cold, and it was almost a joke to them to be cast out into the woods, even if their eyes were gone and their feet were broken. It is better to have nothing, for at last even our bones will fall. (Robinson Housekeeping 159)

In this version of the myth, unlike the story of her great-grandmother’s friend, the orphans have escaped from the ruins of domesticity and adapted to the harsh environment. Ruth’s reinterpretation of the orphan myth represents a more positive vision of a self-reliance that is not dependent on the home and suggests a freer, more integrated relationship with the landscape. It implies, further, an affiliation between her and the Black orphans of the story. Nevertheless, their

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racial identity in this passage has also become ‘light’, hinting at a model of self-reliance similarly rooted in whiteness. The text suggests that the difficulty with this model of self-reliance is that it is primarily individualistic and demands a separation from the ethic-of-care for the orphan. Psychoanalysts Kenneth Gordon and Paul Sherr state that the trope of orphanhood is used in literature to explore the separation-individuation stage of development at adolescence: ‘The adolescent who undergoes a psychic loss of his parents is not unlike the bereaved orphan in a novel […] Eventually he may resume contact with his family on an entirely different level, on a person-to-person rather than parent-to-child level’ (539). Ravits suggests that Ruth undergoes a rite of passage that allows her to form a ‘kinship’ with Sylvie, who will then claim her as her foster mother as they depart into a transient life together (663). However, Ruth’s move towards individuation is the start of a ‘person-to-person’ relationship with Sylvie, rather than one of care, nurturance, and dependence. Like the imagined orphans in the woods, she becomes ‘thoroughly used to the cold’ as she learns to ‘have nothing’. The novel thus suggests that this self-reliance, grounded in a rejection of materiality, is both a rejection of domesticity and a rejection of material existence. Ruth envisions her flight into the landscape with the orphans: ‘Let them come unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart. It was no shelter now, it only kept me here alone, and I would rather be with them’ (Robinson Housekeeping 159). Ruth’s body is now the ‘house’, the symbol of domesticity that must be torn down, freeing her spirit into the landscape with the other orphans. In her rejection of her material embodiment, Ruth asserts her spiritual autonomy and challenges the concept of human difference from the natural world. As George Handley suggests, Ruth ‘embrace[s] a radical interdependency with nature’ as she imagines her body eroding like the landscape around her (510). Her recognition that ‘at last even our bones will fall’, in this ruined house, a signifier of previous lives, transcends the domestic and reveals the human ‘biological existence in deep time’, as part of a constantly decaying world (Handley 502). While this represents a more integrated relationship with the natural environment, Ruth notably makes a worrying association of female autonomy with death: her female body must be destroyed in order to gain her spiritual freedom and

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interdependence with nature. Ruth’s imagined escape from her body similarly appears to allow her to embrace her kinship with the Black orphan children, transcending the physicality of race. Nevertheless, her reimagining of the ‘lightness’ of these orphans intimates that her rejection of materiality is also an erasure of blackness. Housekeeping thus advocates a model of self-reliance for women that is free from the traditional conventions of domesticity, rooted in a recognition of the shared biology between humans and the nonhuman world. However, the text remains implicitly critical of this autonomous relationship to nature in both its loss of caring relationships and its erasure of subjectivity, which Robinson explores further in Lila.

Lila and the dangers of self-reliance Despite being separate works, written over 30 years apart, Housekeeping and Lila call for a comparative reading because of their shared thematic concern with female transience and domesticity. Lila resumes, symbolically, where Housekeeping ends and there is a narrative circularity when the books are read together as the protagonists move towards transience and return to domesticity. In Lila, Robinson revisits the questions that Housekeeping leaves unanswered, asking how the orphan, symbol of female self-reliance, might rejoin and participate in the community. Like Housekeeping, Lila is the story of an orphan taken in by a substitute mother: the whereabouts of Lila’s parents is unclear, and she is a neglected child when Doll assumes care of her. In an interview, Robinson suggests a strong parallel between the two adoptive mother figures in these novels: ‘It’s clearly true that Sylvie and Doll are sisters’ (“A Conversation with Marilynne Robinson” 30). Just as Sylvie teaches Ruth, so Doll teaches Lila the importance of a selfreliance founded on female transience as she instructs Lila to reject the materialism of the home: ‘Don’t want what you don’t need and you’ll be fine’ (Robinson Lila 92). Noticeably reminiscent of Ruth’s ‘it is better to have nothing’, Doll teaches Lila what she herself has come to learn: that need can be reduced, and that emotional dependence on others is limiting. Like Ruth, Lila becomes self-reliant through a process of abandonment. When work dries up, Doll leaves to look for other income and after four days Lila is left on the church steps:

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‘that’s where you ended up if you were an orphan’ (52). Lila is forced to face her orphanhood and ‘after that she couldn’t love Doll like she did all those years […] One way or another, it comes out the same. Can’t trust nobody’ (69). As for Ruth, this moment represents a separation-individuation stage of development for Lila and transforms her relationship with Doll to person-to-person. Like Ruth’s, Lila’s journey to self-reliance also involves a dissolution of the boundary between human and natural worlds, acknowledging their interdependence. As she is carried away by Doll, it feels ‘as if she were carried along in the wind’, and her transience becomes increasingly embedded in the natural world (5). As she travels alone and stays on the outskirts of Gilead, she is drawn repeatedly to the river: ‘She sat on the bank, damp and chilly, smelling the river and barely hearing the sound of it, hidden in the dark, not because she thought anyone would be there, but because she always liked the feeling that no one could see her even when she knew she was alone’ (20). Here, Lila learns an isolation from others that again recalls an Emersonian ideal of self-reliance: ‘a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature’ (Emerson 185). Rather than being afraid at night, Lila discovers a biocentric vision similar to Ruth’s, in which her human difference from the landscape is erased. Lila’s immersion into the natural world stands in marked contrast to the environmental damage that forms the backdrop to her childhood. Lila and Doll join Doane and his people looking for work during the Dust Bowl: ‘after the dust began to blow to the south and west, and the people who would have been working those farms began to drift’ (Robinson Lila 108). A separation from the environment, of extensive deep ploughing, ignoring the ecology of the land, and severe drought has resulted in dust storms and economic hardship. Robinson sets Lila’s Emersonian self-reliance in contrast to this, as she does with Ruth and Sylvie in Housekeeping. However, she extends this ecofeminist analysis further, to consider the question of female subjectivity. The novel suggests, as ecofeminist Greta Gaard observes, that environmental damage ‘exacerbates pressures on marginalised people first’ (24), highlighting the struggles of labourers looking to work with or on the land. Furthermore, in its focus on Doll and Lila, the text suggests: ‘women are indeed the ones most severely affected by climate change and natural disasters, but their vulnerability is

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not innate; rather it is the result of inequities produced through gendered social roles, discrimination, and poverty’ (Gaard 23). Doll and Lila are limited in the work to which they are permitted access, and Doll has further caring responsibilities for Lila. In its focus on Doll’s abandonment of Lila and their later difficulties, the text thus confronts a gendered difference in the impact of environmental damage. However, in Lila, Robinson does not simply hold up Emersonian self-reliance as a model for greater female autonomy and respect for the environment. The text instead interrogates self-reliance and considers the consequences of its repression of human dependency. Whereas Sylvie and Ruth are left roaming in their life of transience as Housekeeping ends, Doll and Lila represent this life taken to its conclusion. As Doll ages and is less able to labour, she becomes more reliant on Lila, and this sense of her dependence prompts Doll to separate from her. She sends Lila to an old man to see if he will marry her, and he tells Lila: ‘She said she couldn’t take care of you anymore’ (Robinson Lila 115). But Lila observes: ‘By then she was helping Doll, not being taken care of by her, and that was one of the reasons Doll wanted to be rid of her’ (115). The narrative thus unfolds Doll’s developing dependence on Lila, which stands in contrast to her teachings of self-reliance. During an altercation with Lila’s biological family, Doll stabs and kills a man. She claims to be protecting Lila but can’t bring herself to give any details about her family, instead insisting: ‘I’m the only ma you ever had’ (173). Rather than emphasising Lila’s need of Doll as mother, however, this incident reveals her own emotional dependence on Lila, frightened at the prospect of losing her. Instead of acknowledging this need to Lila, this encounter furthers Doll’s detachment, believing Lila will be better alone. When Lila comes to see her at the jail, Doll denies their connection, saying: ‘I don’t know you’ (181). Although she claims her actions will protect Lila from the members of her biological family, this denial of Lila marks Doll’s final separation from her. Doll’s dogged insistence on her self-reliance and her denial of her need for Lila is finally revealed as an integral part of her own downfall. Doll escapes, ‘los[ing] herself in the woods or in the cornfields’, severing herself from her dependence on Lila and

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simultaneously freeing Lila from their relationship (138). However, this is not a transition to the romantic itinerancy of a character like Sylvie, as Doll struggles to manage alone in her old age. In the Emersonian model of self-reliance, there is no space in the natural environment for dependence: ‘Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself’ (Emerson 191). It is this Emersonian landscape that Lila encounters in her search for Doll in the cornfields: ‘thrashing around, scared to death, the stalks so close and so high overhead that she couldn’t tell where she was’ and then there is snow, ‘hours of it’ (Robinson Lila 155). This landscape is marked by extensive corn farming and extreme weather and is a heightened metaphor for Doll’s vulnerability as an older woman in the face of environmental damage. Lila can only dream of her dead body lying in a field: ‘Maybe critters been at it. You wouldn’t dare touch it, it would fall to pieces’ (139). Robinson thus reveals that in pursuing self-reliance and failing to recognise her own dependency, Doll is left entirely apart from the daughter who would love and care for her, and she faces only an isolated death. Through Doll, Robinson emphasises that, as Taylor suggests: ‘Care and needing care are sites that rather than trying to avoid, we need to be radically attentive to’ (124). The text therefore exposes Doll’s model of Emersonian self-reliance, and by implication Sylvie’s, as fundamentally reliant on the continuous denial of the importance of care for, and from, others.

Dependence and the search for a new domesticity Nevertheless, Robinson reveals the presence of these caring relationships, despite their denial and suppression, and suggests their transformative potential. Whereas Sylvie’s character in Housekeeping is representative of the figure of the aunt in the nineteenth-century domestic novel, accepting responsibility for an orphan reluctantly, out of duty rather than love, Doll represents the nineteenth-century caregiver won over by love for the helpless child (Nelson 60–61). Lila’s story is a parallel orphan myth to the fairy tales told in Housekeeping as Doll, whose facial scar recalls the ugliness of the

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witch, steals Lila and takes her into the dark woods at night. However, whereas Ruth inverts the myth to imagine the self-reliance of the orphans in the woods, here the stereotype of the witch is reversed, as Doll rescues Lila from her dangerous family. Despite her transient, independent characteristics, Doll is thus signalled, more strongly than Sylvie, as a significant symbol of love and care. Following her loss of Doll, and despite her protests that ‘being beholden was the one thing she could not stand’, Lila searches for the sense of dependence on others suggestive of a loving relationship (Robinson Lila 40). At the whorehouse in St Louis, the brothel’s madam, Mrs., locks the girls’ most treasured possessions in the credenza, allowing them to see them only when they behave as she demands. Lila’s choice to hand over her one valued possession, Doll’s knife, reveals her longing to feel this dependence.4 She thinks: ‘Well, she’s got me now. And what sense did that make. But she felt that way, and it gave her a kind of ease’ (191–192). Although Mrs. uses emotional need to manipulate the girls in her care, Lila longs for any kind of emotional dependence in order to feel loved. It seems that Doll, who has modelled independence and emphasised the centrality of self-reliance, has, through her acts of care, taught her the opposite: ‘Ugly old Doll. Who had said to her, Live. Not once, but every time she washed and mended for her, mothered her as if she were a child someone could want’ (47). Doll’s lessons in survival, in learning self-care, have conversely taught Lila the value of dependence and love. As Taylor explains: ‘Dependency is real […] we all exist along its spectrum. The challenge is to understand dependency not simply as negative and certainly not as unnatural, but rather as an integral part of being alive’ (113). This is the transition that Lila must make: to understand ‘being cared for’ not as powerlessness, but as a fundamental part of her existence. Lila’s story completes the narrative established in Housekeeping as she relearns trust, care, and dependence, particularly in her love of John Ames. Tronto suggests that: ‘we need to stop talking about “woman’s morality” and start talking instead about a care ethic that includes the values traditionally associated with women’ (103). In Lila, while Robinson explores the concept of care through Lila and Doll, it is significant that she also does so through Ames, challenging both the association of care solely with women, and suggesting that

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‘essentialist notions that naturalise women’s nurturing capabilities and responsibilities are problematic’ (Abbruzzese and Wekerle 140). Ames’s religious role is not presented as an authoritative position of power; instead, he is as lonely as Lila, having lost his first wife and child. For Lila, his loneliness is the ‘one thing she understood about him’, and it is this vulnerability that equalises their positions because their need of each other is shown to be interdependent (Robinson Lila 18). By depicting Ames’s care for Lila, as well as the care of neighbours who provide clothes, food, and practical support for both Ames and Lila, the text explores an ecofeminist model which, as Mary Phillips suggests, is ‘a way of reconceptualising relationships that does not rely on “feminine” maternal models but which stresses a “feminist” approach to connection, embodiment and emotion’ (470). In the nineteenth-century domestic novel, the orphan improves herself, but her transformation is also a catalyst for the moral and spiritual regeneration of those around her (Nelson; Sutliff Sanders). Robinson similarly extends the ethic-of-care in Lila from a dyadic to a communal relationship. When Lila disappears, the stability of their relationship is challenged, but rather than assuming the worst of her, based on her past, Ames listens to Lila’s explanation that she has tried to help an orphaned boy. A chain of trust develops: the orphaned boy grudgingly accepts help from Lila, Lila trusts Ames with the truth about her actions, and Ames believes Lila’s explanation. When he hears of her help, he replies: ‘I did know you. I do know you’ (Robinson Lila 168). This acknowledgment contrasts with Doll’s ‘I don’t know you’ as Ames accepts and supports Lila, and this chain of dependence strengthens their relationship. Gordon and Sherr suggest that the process of individuation is not one of complete separation but in fact involves a return to family and community: for the adolescent, the idea of being isolated is a ‘fantasy of being a “special case”’, and maturation marks the point of this realisation, following which he or she ‘is able to become a grown-up member of the human community’ (539). This marks a symbolic coming-of-age for Lila, mirroring the domestic novel’s narrative as she rejects the concept of her separation and learns both to ‘care for’ and to be a care-receiver as part of a broader web of support. Robinson develops this ecofeminist understanding of care, as Lila’s transition into human interdependence is extended to her relationship

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with the landscape, and she discovers a greater harmony with the natural world. Ames baptises her by the river, and they confirm their betrothal immediately afterwards. During these two central narrative moments, they are surrounded by a bounteous, pastoral landscape: ‘the two of them walked across the meadow, through the daisies and the sunflowers, through an ash grove and into another fallow field. There were brambles along the farther side, weighed down with berries’ (Robinson Lila 88). The descriptions of the landscape here push beyond a pathetic fallacy that reflects their happiness: they use the river water for the baptism, pick the sunflowers as a token of love, and eat the berries, representing their complete immersion into, and spiritual connection to, the landscape. Lila and Ames’s riverside baptism and betrothal marks the point at which human love, religious faith, and harmony with the natural world combine to form a shared moment of complete interdependence. Lila’s discovery of a home and family marks a positive ending to the orphan’s plight and echoes the nineteenth-century domestic novel’s didactic ending, in which self-reliance and spiritual faith are rewarded with love and security. However, Lila presents neither an uncomplicated return to domesticity nor an unproblematic human integration with the natural world. Instead, the vulnerability of different human subjectivities remains central at the end of the novel, as it is made clear that Lila, Ames, and their newborn son face fragile, uncertain futures. Lila’s age difference from Ames means she is likely to face his loss: ‘She couldn’t lean her whole weight on any of this when she knew she would have to live on after it’ (255). As she looks at her son, we are told: ‘That is how it is. Lila had borne a child into a world where a wind could rise that would take him from her arms as if there were no strength in them at all. Pity us, yes, but we are brave, she thought’ (261). Interdependence is revealed as a fragile web, which can be torn at any moment: humans can die or leave, just as the natural environment can ravage and destroy, rather than shelter. However, it is a ‘brave’ self-reliance that marks the ability to survive the severing of these connections and thus, for Robinson, dependence and self-reliance ultimately sit alongside each other. In the didactic tradition of the nineteenth-century domestic novel, the trope of the female orphan was often used to consider both the position of women and a social, moral issue such as abolition or

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temperance. Robinson transfigures this nineteenth-century female narrative to a contemporary, ecofeminist concern for the environment. In doing so, she both reclaims an American, matrilineal literary tradition, and considers the continuing relevance of the ethic-of-care to the human relationship to the American landscape. When read together, Housekeeping and Lila use the trope of the female orphan, as in the nineteenth century, to examine an alternative model of independence for women. In Housekeeping, Robinson dismisses the traditional domestic ideal as modelled by Lucille, which demands restriction and separation within the domestic sphere, and, through Ruth, she instead claims the legacy of Emersonian self-reliance for American women. However, in these novels Robinson advances a critique of the denial of care in this model, particularly its repression of human and ecological interdependence. The backdrop of environmental damage in these texts suggests the inadequacy of a primarily individualised relationship to the natural world. Moreover, Lila stresses that a lack of care for the environment results in consequences that disproportionately impact the most vulnerable in society, particularly women and children. Instead, and especially in Lila, Robinson extricates from domesticity the ‘different voice’ rooted in an ethic-of-care, from which the nineteenth-century orphan created her network of sympathy, and she extends this to suggest the importance of interdependence, which encourages a greater inclusivity. In Lila, Robinson examines and repositions the concept of dependence, emphasising the importance of human interconnection and, furthermore, our reliance on the natural world. This perspective is primarily ecofeminist in its deconstruction of a Western domesticity that maintains its separate status through a devaluation of both the natural world and of female autonomy. However, ecofeminism, as Mary Phillips explains, also has an important aim ‘as a social, political and moral resource from which to motivate action’ (469). Although Robinson exposes a white domestic ideal founded on the exclusion of a racial Other, both novels avoid an explicit engagement with the reintegration of this figure, and thus struggle to escape from the domestic novel’s racial terms. Furthermore, Lila’s return to the private sphere of home also falls short of this movement towards wider socio-political action. The danger here is, as Deane Curtin observes: ‘if not politicised, an ethic of care can be used to privatise the moral interests of women’

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(66). The concept of care can easily be returned to the realm of the ‘feminine’, remaining trapped in the interior and separate space of domesticity. For this reason, Sherilyn MacGregor is sceptical about the usefulness of an ecofeminist ethic-of-care, suggesting ‘there will always be risks for feminists in adopting the discourse of care’ (79). While Robinson’s subtle and metaphorical novels leave her open to the critique of political obfuscation, however, her work suggests that the price to pay for ignoring the significance of care is high, both in human and in environmental terms. For Robinson, care for the environment begins with an Emersonian, solitary respect for the natural world, but it must be expanded to a broader sense of the human community. In “Surrendering Wilderness”, she explains the importance of establishing a human ethic-of-care in order to be able to extend this to the natural world: ‘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’ (64). To care about the environment, she suggests, is inseparable from caring about the action of humans, and a moral ethic-of-care is thus central to family, nation, and to the preservation of our broader ecosystem.

Notes 1 See Ravits for an exploration of Robinson’s relationship to nineteenthcentury male writers, Thomas Schaub’s interview with Robinson for the influence of Emerson in particular (Schaub 240), and Maria Holmgren Troy, Elizabeth Kella, and Helena Wahlström for discussion of Robinson’s revision of the myths of the American Adam and Western hero. 2 Holmgren et al.’s Making Home (2014) is one of the few books to note Robinson’s intertextual engagement with the domestic novel, through the character of Lucille in Housekeeping. 3 Virginia A. Walter states that Randolph Caldecott’s picture book of Babes in the Woods in 1879 was particularly popular in nineteenth-century households. 4 The fetishised object as the symbol of the lost mother, as the knife becomes, is also a feature of the nineteenth-century domestic novel; see Barbara J. McGuire re. the lock of the mother’s hair. Such objects were often imbued with a power that would resolve narrative dilemmas and



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convey the true character of the orphan to others, much as the knife reveals Lila’s love of Doll to Ames.

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Works cited Abbruzzese, Teresa V. and Gerda R. Wekerle. “Gendered Spaces of Activism in Exurbia: Politicising an Ethic of Care from the Household to the Region.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32.2 (2011): 140–169. “A Conversation with Marilynne Robinson.” The Nation, 7 January 2015, www.thenation.com/article/conversation-marilynne-robinson/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Auerbach, Nina. “Incarnations of the Orphan.” English Literary History 42.3 (1975): 395–419. Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America 1820–70. 2nd Edn. University of Illinois Press, 1993. Curtin, Deane. “Toward an Ecological Ethic of Care.” Hypatia 6.1 (1991): 60–74. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” Nature and Selected Essays. Edited by Larzer Ziff. Penguin Books, 2003. 175–203. Erevelles, Nirmala. Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Gaard, Greta. “Ecofeminism and Climate Change.” Women’s Studies International Forum 49 (2015): 20–33. Geyh, Paula E. “Burning Down the House? Domestic Space and Feminine Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 34.1 (1993): 103–122. Gilead, Sarah. “Trollope’s Orphans and the ‘Power of Adequate Performance’.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21.1 (1985): 86–105. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press, 1982. Gordon, Kenneth H. and Paul C. Sherr. “The Adolescent Orphan in Literature: A Bibliography for the Study of the Adolescent.” American Psychoanalytic Association Meeting. New York, December 1973. 537–541. Handley, George B. “The Metaphysics of Ecology in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 55.3 (2009): 496–521. Holmgren Troy, Maria, Elizabeth Kella, and Helena Wahlström. Making Home: Orphanhood, Kinship and Cultural Memory in Contemporary American Novels. Manchester University Press, 2014. Hartshorne, Sarah D. “Lake Fingerbone and Walden Pond: A Commentary on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Modern Language Studies 20.3 (1990): 50–57.

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Irr, Caren. “Literature and Adoption: Themes, Theses, Questions.” American Literary History 26.2 (2014): 385–395. Larrabee, Mary Jeanne. “Gender and Moral Development: A Challenge for Feminist Theory.” An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Mary Jeanne Larrabee. Routledge, 1993. 3–16. MacGregor, Sherilyn. “From Care to Citizenship: Calling Ecofeminism Back to Politics.” Ethics & the Environment 9.1 (2004): 56–84. Mattessich, Stefan. “Drifting Decision and the Decision to Drift: The Question of Spirit in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 19.5 (2008): 59–89. McGuire, Barbara J. “The Orphan’s Grief: Transformational Tears and the Maternal Fetish in Mary Jane Holmes’s Dora Deane, or the East-India Uncle.” Legacy 15.2 (1998): 171–187. Mills, Claudia. “Children in Search of a Family: Orphan Novels Through the Century.” Children’s Literature in Education 18.4 (1987): 227–239. Nelson, Claudia. “Drying the Orphan’s Tear: Changing Representations of the Dependent Child in America, 1870–1930.” Children’s Literature 29 (2001): 52–70. Peters, Laura. Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire. Manchester University Press, 2000. Phillips, Mary. “Embodied Care and Planet Earth: Ecofeminism, Maternalism and Postmaternalism.” Australian Feminist Studies 31:90 (2016): 468–485. Ravits, Martha. “Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” American Literature 61.4 (1989): 644–666. Reynolds, Kimberley and Nicola Humble. Victorian Heroines: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. Faber and Faber Limited, 1991. —— Lila. Virago Press, 2014. —— “Surrendering Wilderness.” The Wilson Quarterly 22.4 (1998): 60–64. Schaub, Thomas and Marilynne Robinson. “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Contemporary Literature 35.2 (1994): 231–251. Showalter, Elaine. A Jury of Her Peers: Celebrating American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. Vintage Books, 2010. Singley, Carol J. “Teaching American Literature: The Centrality of Adoption.” Modern Language Studies 34.1–2 (2004): 76–83. Sutliff Sanders, Joe. “Spinning Sympathy: Orphan Girl Novels and the Sentimental Tradition.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 33.1 (2008): 46–61. Swanson, Lori J. “A Feminist Ethic That Binds Us to Mother Earth.” Ethics & the Environment 20.2 (2015): 83–103. Taylor, Sunaura. “Interdependent Animals: A Feminist Disability Ethic-ofCare.” Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the



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Earth. Edited by Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 109–126. Tronto, Joan. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge, 2009. Tropp Trensky, Anne. “The Saintly Child in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction.” Prospects 1 (1976): 389–413. Walter, Virginia A. “Hansel and Gretel as Abandoned Children.” Children’s Literature in Education 23.4 (1992): 203–214.

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5 ‘Souls all unaccompanied’: enacting feminine alterity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping Makayla C. Steiner

Perhaps the most contested, most misunderstood concept in Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of ethics is that of feminine alterity and its role in creating a hospitable dwelling. Levinas has been criticised by feminist thinkers for his complex and occasionally contradictory comments on the feminine, notably by Simone de Beauvoir who lambasted him as a patriarchal thinker who disparaged women by situating them as ‘Other’ to men. Others, including Luce Irigaray, have admired his philosophy in general while expressing concern over the lack of attention to feminine subjectivity.1 Still others have questioned whether Levinasian ethics apply to women as well as men. Feminist scholars have attempted to shift the conversation to more nuanced perspectives, but feminine alterity remains an elusive and enigmatic concept, and a site of consternation for those invested in Levinasian ethics. One of the significant oversights of these criticisms is that they interpret feminine alterity as opposite to a masculine self, which, while accurate in many Western representations of femininity, is not necessarily the case in Levinasian philosophy. Levinas does not speak of the feminine in terms of opposition to the masculine but rather describes feminine alterity as that which makes ethical behaviour possible. It is difference, perhaps complementary, which functions to create an intimate interiority, a hospitable dwelling. ‘The feminine,’ as Claire Elise Katz explains, ‘is not the pure event; rather, it makes this pure event possible’ (49). I would add that feminine alterity, like the ethical response to the Other, is contingent on time, circumstance, and individual need. Contrary to early feminist concerns, Levinas has not established feminine alterity as inferior or

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discriminatory; rather, he posits the feminine as the very lynchpin by which the world is made habitable, even holy.2 Levinas’s insistence that his philosophy is to be lived, and not merely intellectualised, complicates any effort at conceptual mastery of feminine alterity because the very nature of the feminine as alterity presupposes the inability to measure or totalise it. Consequently, it is more productive to observe the strengths and weaknesses of the process by which feminine alterity creates a habitable dwelling not by testing it against alternative philosophical or theoretical perspectives, but against the density of lived experience of women, in fact, as embodied in a novel about women’s lives and relationships. There are few contemporary novels that fit this description as neatly as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980). The novel is particularly suited as a test case for the functions and limits of feminine alterity because it highlights various methods by which feminine alterity functions to welcome the lonely and make the home a place of refuge, while also illuminating its theoretical limits. This essay will review several key characteristics of feminine alterity as explicated by Levinas and Jacques Derrida before considering the ways in which Robinson’s characters both support and complicate the efficacy of feminine alterity as a welcoming force with the power to create habitable dwellings and eradicate the lack perpetuated by solitude. Finally, it will demonstrate how the novel is the best enactment of feminine alterity functioning to create a hospitable habitation where ethical behaviour – what Levinas sometimes calls holiness – becomes possible.

Functions of feminine alterity To understand how feminine alterity functions in Housekeeping, a general comprehension of the fundamental definitions and characteristics of the Levinasian feminine is necessary, beginning with Levinas’s concept of recollection. In Totality and Infinity (1961), Levinas explains that ‘[r]ecollection refers to a welcome’ (155) and further describes it as ‘a coming to oneself, a retreat home with oneself as in a land of refuge, which answers to a hospitality, an expectancy, a human welcome’ (156). In other words, recollection is a process by which one returns home, to a place of rest and

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familiarity that assumes the presence of another person. For recollection to answer to a human welcome, the possibility of human welcome must precede recollection. In the essay “A Word of Welcome” (1996), Derrida contends that the concept of welcome ‘operates everywhere in order to speak of the first gesture in the direction of the Other’ (25). Though the word ‘gesture’ is not entirely satisfactory for Derrida, it does represent an original motion – that which precedes even the face and that which he describes as ‘a first language’ (25). This silent language of movement, or gesture, in preceding the face of the Other also precedes the ethical. The ethical presupposes ‘welcome’, and Levinas names woman as ‘the other whose presence is discreetly an absence, with which is accomplished the primary hospitable welcome’ (Totality and Infinity 155). Furthermore, he claims: ‘The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation’ (155, emphasis mine). Thus, recollection – this gathering of oneself to a safe, familiar place – can only be fully enacted in the context of feminine welcome. Another misconception in need of clarification is the nature of the feminine as a mysterious essence in the home. By identifying ‘woman’ as the ‘condition for recollection’, Levinas does not automatically assume the physical presence of a female person. Feminine alterity is not discernible, knowable, or visible. For Levinas, feminine alterity is ‘a silent language’, ‘an understanding without words’, and ‘an expression in secret’ (Derrida 155). When Levinas does occasionally refer to the feminine being – which confuses critics and adherents alike – he does so in the Heideggerian sense, where being means existence and is not equated with physicality.3 If Levinas intended feminine alterity to signify a literal, embodied woman, and if the woman is the condition for recollection and for the interiority of the home, his philosophy would be enormously problematised by homes that lack female residents. Levinas, however, describes the woman as ‘the other whose presence is discreetly an absence’ (Derrida 155), indicating that the sense of the feminine exists in every home, as well as beyond embodiment. This can only be consistently the case if we read feminine alterity principally as an intangible, invisible, silent presence. This description of feminine alterity has led to interpretations of the feminine as a negative space. Even Derrida suggests that Levinas appears to describe it as ‘a series of lacks’ (Levinas “Judaism and



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the Feminine” 36). On the contrary; one of the central purposes of feminine alterity is to eradicate lack that is caused by solitude and rationality. In “Judaism and the Feminine” (1963), Levinas explains this purpose with unusual clarity. He writes that ‘the ontological function of the feminine’ is: To light eyes that are blind, to restore to equilibrium, and so overcome an alienation which ultimately results from the very virility of the universal and all-conquering logos that stalks the very shadows that could have sheltered it, should be […] the vocation of the one “who does not conquer.” Woman does not simply come to someone deprived of companionship to keep him company. She answers to a solitude inside this privation […] For the inevitable uprooting of thought, which dominates the world, to return to the peace and ease of being at home, the strange flow of gentleness must enter into the geometry of infinite and cold space. Its name is woman. (33)

If the feminine is an answer to solitude, it must be totally concentrated on the Other, therefore shying away from the light so as not to become the centre of focus. This is critical to the feminine ability to ease the suffering of being alone in the world by making the host a guest in their own home. This process of becoming a host-madeguest makes the home a place of refuge and asylum instead of a possession. Derrida explains the process as follows: The welcoming hôte who considers himself the owner of the place, is in truth a hôte received in his own home. He receives the hospitality that he offers in his own home; he receives it from his own home— which, in the end, does not belong to him. The hôte as host is a guest. The dwelling opens itself to itself, to its “essence” without essence, as a “land of asylum or refuge.” The one who welcomes is first welcomed in his own home. The one who invites is invited by the one whom he invites. The one who receives is received, receiving hospitality in what he takes to be his own home. (41–42)

Though the explanation sounds cyclical and slightly redundant, Derrida is trying to draw attention to the fact that there is in the home an always already feminine alterity present that is the welcome par excellence. The host believes that ‘he’ owns the home; that it belongs to ‘him’. However, feminine alterity precedes the host, insofar as ‘his’ emergence into the world is through the feminine, which welcomes in such a way that the host then desires to be hospitable.

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In so doing, the feminine makes the host a guest – a stranger in their own home. This process dispossesses the host of the home as something they own and transforms it into a dwelling wherein they receive the very hospitality they intended to give. Levinas explains this in greater detail: The home that founds possessions is not a possession in the same sense as the moveable goods it can collect and keep. It is possessed because it already and henceforth is hospitable for its owner. This refers to its essential interiority, and to the inhabitant that inhabits it before every inhabitant, the welcoming one par excellence, welcoming in itself – the feminine being. (Totality and Infinity 157)

The feminine presence changes the nature of possession because its welcoming creates a hospitable space, which then allows for the owner-guest to offer hospitality to others. If such were not the case, the host’s hospitality could not be truly focused on the other. It would be an offering that ultimately prioritised the host by drawing attention to what they owned. ‘Welcome to my home, please have some of my food, please sleep on my sofa.’ In this scenario, even though the host is being kind and polite, the emphasis is still on them and what they can offer. However, if the host is a guest in their home – and owns it only in the sense that it is a hospitable place for them – the sentence might look somewhat different: ‘Welcome to this home. Please have some of this food. Please sleep on this sofa.’ The semantic difference is critical: for the host to be truly hospitable and ethical the focus cannot be on the material possessions as belonging to them, but must focus on what they have to offer as they prioritised the Other guest. The role of feminine alterity in prioritising the Other is relevant not only to dwelling in homes made of earthly material, but also – and more importantly – to dwelling in the psychological and emotional spaces ‘housed’ by the body. As Christine Wilson observes, ‘[h] abitability emerges […] when space fulfils the subject’s psychological, emotional, and social needs. It goes beyond traditional ideas of home that rely heavily on feelings of personal comfort, security, and stability and incorporates the inherent flux and conflict in the way that subjects relate to space’ (299). For feminine alterity to fulfil its distinct obligation to answer to solitude it must offer a uniquely human space conducive to physical, social, psychological,

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and emotional welcoming. Derrida describes the atmosphere of this space as ‘a place of non-light’ (39). Significantly, he does not describe it as a place of darkness – while the mystery of feminine alterity is not fully knowable, neither is it entirely opaque. Just as the face is not a plastic image, the feminine is a ‘mode of being that consists in slipping away from the light’ (Derrida 40). Though the tendency to characterise the feminine as mysterious has invited criticism from Levinas’s feminist peers, it has also prevented readings of feminine alterity as formulaic. As Katz explains: ‘The mystery of which he speaks is not the mystery of simply being feminine, as is found, for example, in chivalry or literature. Rather, it is the mystery of the other, a mystery that accompanies all manifestations of alterity. The feminine slips away from the light – from comprehension – as does the Other’ (40–41). The mysterious nature of feminine alterity is critical to its ability to form habitable dwellings even if it does not always succeed. The very incomprehensibility of the feminine is what provides the flexibility necessary to make a variety of people with varying needs, personalities, and histories feel at home. In practical application, however, the process is complicated by the unpredictability and unknowability of Otherness. For the women in Housekeeping, the process of creating and dwelling in a hospitable space is constantly interrupted by conflicting understandings of what it means to feel safe at home. Such conflicts complicate – and threaten to unravel – the quiet, mysterious, unassuming gentleness of feminine alterity that haunts both the novel generally, and the women who struggle to foster habitable dwellings for themselves and the others for whom they care.

Inhabiting a hospitable home Housekeeping has long been read as a feminist version of the traditionally male American Bildungsroman. Scholars have paid careful attention to its nineteenth-century literary influences, and much attention has been given to the feminist possibilities of the text (Bohannan; Foster; Fowler; Geyh; Kaivola; McDermott; Ryan). They are not entirely wrong, for in opening with Ruth’s matrilineal genealogy, Housekeeping immediately establishes itself as a novel of women. However, as Tate Hedrick observes, ‘Robinson’s text does not, at

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least overtly, take up feminist concerns with writing or with female subjectivity’ (138). Nor is it simply, as Martha Ravits claims, ‘an “enduring recognition of the mother-daughter passion” – and the endless consequences of its disruption’ (647). Above all, Housekeeping is a meditation on the loneliness and isolation attendant to the fracturing of a family. While not directly mentioned in the novel, feminine alterity is clearly at work in the efforts of Sylvia Foster, and later her daughter Sylvie, to make home a place of refuge and asylum for the children orphaned as a result of unexpected death, suicide, and abandonment. The novel offers several interpretations of how feminine alterity functions to create a hospitable dwelling where ethical behaviour is a possibility. The first is enacted in Sylvia Foster’s dedication to habits of good housekeeping. Though Edmund Foster built the house on Fingerbone Lake, it is evident that Sylvia is its owner and that the physical space of the home is of utmost importance to her sense of safety. After her husband’s death, she frequently reminds her daughters of the house’s value: ‘“Sell the orchards,” she would say, looking grave and wise, “but keep the house. So long as you look after your health, and own the roof above your head, you’re as safe as anyone can be”’ (Robinson 27). In addition to the importance Sylvia places on the house as an edifice, she is concerned with the material atmosphere necessary to maintaining an orderly and comfortable home. Ruth describes her grandmother as a woman who: had always known a thousand ways to circle [her daughters] all around with what must have seemed like grace. She knew a thousand songs. Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce. In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she put them in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon. Her children slept on starched sheets under layers of quilts, and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails filled with wind. (11–12)

Unfortunately, however much she intended to make her home a warm and comfortable space, Sylvia’s meticulous housekeeping does not ensure healthy family life. Sylvia’s matronly consistency denies the sense of mystery that would create a truly habitable space for her daughters, one that would allow them to fully grieve their father’s

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death. Ruth describes the years following the tragic accident that sent Edmund Foster’s train to the bottom of Fingerbone Lake as ‘serene, eventless years [that] lulled my grandmother into forgetting what she never should have forgotten’ (13). While Sylvia managed to create an almost perfectly hospitable refuge for her daughters, and later for her orphaned granddaughters, she was not able to create a space of psychological and emotional refuge. The ‘perfect quiet’ that ‘settled into their house after the death of their father’ (15) is not the ‘silent language’ or the ‘understanding without words’ unique to feminine alterity, but rather a symptom of emotional imprisonment. Because their mother never speaks of the event that ‘had troubled the very medium of their lives’ (15), Sylvia’s daughters do not feel at liberty to mention it either, and therefore suffer their father’s haunting absence alone. If Sylvia Foster enacts the material functions of feminine alterity in the home, her daughter, Sylvie, enacts its intangible functions. In fact, it is tempting to read Sylvie as feminine alterity incarnate. Robinson’s terminology when introducing Sylvie mirrors Levinas’s description of the feminine almost verbatim.4 She writes: ‘Sylvie came into the kitchen […] with a quiet that seemed compounded of gentleness, and stealth and self-effacement’ (45). Though Ruth and Lucille initially anticipate that Sylvie will be a predictable replacement for their mother, it quickly becomes evident that Sylvie will not be so easily defined. Like the Levinasian feminine, Sylvie is difficult to define because she constantly slips away from the light. ‘An itinerant’, ‘A migrant worker’, and ‘A drifter’, Sylvie is most comfortable dwelling in the shadows and on the margins of experience (31). She chooses to dwell in her mother’s old bedroom, which ‘was not a bright room, but in summer it was full of the smell of grass and earth and blossoms or fruit, and the sound of bees’ (89). Here again Robinson mirrors Levinasian language through use of the negative. In this room Sylvie literally dwells, as Levinas might say, in a place of ‘non-light’ that blurs the boundaries between indoor and outdoor sensory experiences. Additionally, she wanders in and out of the house, unannounced, and resists using unnatural light. Her nontraditional approach to ‘keeping house’ and her unpredictable disappearances unsettle her nieces almost as much as her obsession with the lake in which both her father and sister drowned. The fear Ruth and Lucille experience each time Sylvie goes missing is palpable,

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and at one point Ruth resorts to physical violence in an attempt to ensure that Sylvie is actually present: I reached into her pocket and brought out a cold hand […] I reached up and touched her cheek and her nose. A nerve jumped in the lid of her eye, but she did not move. Then I drew back my arm and hit her across the middle. The blow landed among the folds of her coat with a dull whump. She laughed. “Why did you do that? “Well, why won’t you talk?” (72)

Though the girls find Sylvie’s unorthodox methods and her silence disconcerting, her nonchalance regarding their own whereabouts is what solidifies their opinion that Sylvie ‘was not a stable person’ (82). This is, by all definitions of the word, absolutely true. Sylvie is not stable, because stability falls into the realm of the knowable and the predictable. The feminine alterity that guides Sylvie’s efforts to make her nieces feel safe and at home is precisely an alterity – a difference, or otherness – to traditional interpretations of the role of woman as ‘home maker’, and it belongs to the realm of the infinite. It is useless to expect the feminine to be stable, since the other – the guest to be welcomed – is not a stable entity either. For this reason, Sylvie unapologetically ignores the practices her mother and the women in town deem critical to creating a welcoming home. Sylvie takes an unusual approach to housekeeping not because, as Christine Wilson argues, ‘she suffers from a number of fundamental misunderstandings about what it means to keep a house’ (304), but because she believes that if a woman is comfortable in her own skin, she can be comfortable in whatever earthly dwelling she inhabits. Therefore, she prioritises responding gently and with care to her nieces over sweeping and mopping and making the bed. In so doing, she creates the possibility for what Levinas calls an ‘attitude of holiness’. He explains, ‘The concern for the other breaches concern for the self. This is what I call holiness. Our humanity consists in being able to recognise this priority of the other’ (“Interview with François Poirié” 47). Sylvie’s inattention to traditional housekeeping allows her the time and space to be attentive to her nieces’ emotional needs. She enacts what Levinas describes as ‘a reversal of the normal order of things, the natural order of things’ (47). Though this reversal, this focus on the intangible needs of others, makes holiness a possibility,

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it does not guarantee it. Indeed, in this instance the mystery and modesty that allows the feminine to offer each individual guest or stranger a welcome tailored to his or her need is the very thing that eventually drives Lucille to abandon her aunt and her only sister. Sylvie’s attention to the quiet and intangible needs of others comes at the expense of recognising the role of material comforts in creating a welcoming dwelling. As a result, Sylvie only partially succeeds in maintaining a hospitable habitation for the orphans left in her care, just as her mother before her had done. Like so many who have grappled unsuccessfully with the mysterious complexities of feminine alterity, Lucille attempts to assuage her own sense of discomfort by demanding that Sylvie and Ruth adapt themselves to her worldview. In one memorable scene, she literally illuminates the disorder of their lives by turning on the kitchen light. Ruth recounts: The window went black and the cluttered kitchen leaped, so it seemed, into being, as remote from what had gone before as this world from the primal darkness. We saw that we ate from plates that came in detergent boxes, and we drank from jelly glasses […] Lucille had startled us all, flooding the room so suddenly with light, exposing heaps of pots and dishes […] A great shadow of soot loomed up the wall and across the ceiling above the stove, and the stove pipe and the cupboard tops were thickly felted with dust […] In the light we were startled and uncomfortable. Lucille yanked the chain again, so hard that the little bell at the end of it struck the ceiling, and then we sat uncomfortably in exaggerated darkness. (Robinson 100–101)

This scene sheds light on one of the most vexing paradoxes of feminine alterity: in the moment it opens to the possibility of welcome and holiness, it also opens to the possibility of violence. Levinas defines violence as that which forces people to ‘play roles in which they no longer recognise themselves’ (Totality and Infinity 21). And in this case, the feminine alterity that influences Sylvie’s approach to her nieces inadvertently edges Lucille into isolation and emotional abandonment even as it answers to Ruth’s solitude. Like Ruth, Lucille has experienced the trauma attendant to abandonment, suicide, and death. Unlike Ruth, her method of coping involves ordering her physical surroundings in an effort to balance the emotional and psychological vertigo instigated by such trauma. It makes sense, then, that Lucille views good housekeeping as the material expression of psychological and emotional stability. Though

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this is not always true, as evidenced by the emotional turmoil among Sylvia Foster’s daughters despite their orderly home environment, it is not unreasonable for Lucille to expect Sylvie – her primary caretaker – to be at least minimally attentive to the physical comfort of their home. Regrettably, Lucille’s festering frustration with the dystopia of ‘Sylvie’s house’ (Robinson 123), in which she feels alone and misunderstood, results in the pivotal act in which she literally forces Sylvie out of her ‘place of non-light’. This moment not only puts all three women in roles in which they do not recognise themselves, but also brings them to an impasse penetrable only to the extent that someone will adapt, or leave, which is what Lucille eventually chooses to do. Lucille’s abandonment of Ruth is not instantaneous. It is first an emotional abandonment that mirrors the typical process by which one sibling matures more quickly than another. Ruth’s efforts to conform to Lucille’s increasingly rigid expectations, however, are eventually rendered useless, and the separation becomes more permanent. Ruth relates that at school she ‘saw [Lucille] often, but she avoided me. She became one of a group of girls who ate lunch in the Home Economics room […] Lunches were terrible […] It was a relief to go to Latin class, where I had a familiar place in a human group, alphabetically assigned’ (136). As Lucille transitions into polite society, Ruth sequesters herself in the isolation of schoolwork. Her solitude is finalised upon Lucille’s abrupt decision to move in with her Home Economics teacher. ‘Miss Royce gave her the spare room’, recounts Ruth. ‘In effect, she adopted her, and I had no sister after that night’ (140). It is at this point, when Ruth is left completely alone, that Sylvie enacts the feminine responsibility to answer to solitude.

Answering to solitude Prior to Lucille’s departure Ruth does not experience the burden of solitude and is ‘indifferent to [her] clothes and comfortable in [her] skin, unimproved and without the prospect of improvement’ (123). However, with Lucille gone Ruth becomes the most isolated and solitary character in the novel, and almost immediately recognises the sharp discomforts of loneliness. ‘Having a sister or friend is like

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sitting at night in a lighted house’, writes Robinson. ‘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’ (154). Ruth is in many ways comparable to Sylvie, but she struggles to make friends or, as her school principal points out, to think for herself, where Sylvie is friendly to whomever she encounters and seems to live entirely independent from other peoples’ opinions. Ruth’s tendency to avoid social interaction suggests that she lacks the ability to be comfortable in her own skin. Sylvie answers to Ruth’s solitude not merely by keeping her company but by allowing her to fully experience the weight of solitude and thereby learn the importance of having someone else for whom to care. Immediately after Lucille moves out, Sylvie takes Ruth on an outing to the lake. Under the guise of looking for children that inhabit the wooded area around the lake, Sylvie takes Ruth into the wilderness near the lake, and disappears. Ruth tries not to panic when she realises, ‘Sylvie was gone. She had left without a word, or a sound. I thought she must be teasing, perhaps watching me from the woods. I pretended not to know I was alone’ (153). After searching various places near the lake, Ruth returns to the cellar hole to wait. With the increasing awareness of her unbearable solitude, Ruth starts working feverishly, imagining she is searching for children who might be trapped under the cellar hole. Finally, she admits, ‘despite the stories I made up to myself, I knew there were no children trapped in this meager ruin […] Sylvie is nowhere’ (159). At this point Ruth experiences what Levinas claims is ‘the first shock of human psychism, its first pulsation […] a search for alterity’ (“Interview with François Poirié” 57). Failing to find that alterity – which she would have felt had Sylvie been near, or at least had her whereabouts been known – causes Ruth the unexpectedly bitter sense of suffering ‘a being closed up within oneself’ experiences (57). The desire to rid herself of such suffering leads Ruth to a near breakdown, as she aches to escape her body entirely. ‘Let them come unhouse me of this flesh,’ she laments, ‘and pry this house apart. It was not shelter now, it only kept me here alone, and I would rather be with them, if only to see them, even if they turned away from me’ (Robinson 159). What Ruth experiences is the desperate need each individual has for welcome. Sylvie has the capacity to

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offer welcome, but she clearly has the power to deny it too, and that recognition complicates Sylvie’s efforts to make Ruth feel at home again. Still, the process by which Sylvie attempts to answer to Ruth’s solitude demonstrates key aspects of feminine alterity at work, including its silence and ‘understanding without words’ (Levinas Totality and Infinity 155). While Sylvie is aware that Ruth has experienced a degree of trauma at having been left alone, Sylvie does not speak to her but simply puts her hand on Ruth’s back, looks into her face, wraps the girl under her coat, and hums a comforting tune. Ruth remembers: when we got up to leave, Sylvie slipped her coat off and put it on me […] I could feel the pleasure she took in my dependency, and more than once she stooped to look into my face. Her expression was intent and absorbed. There was nothing of distance or civility in it […] I was angry that […] she did not ask pardon or explain [… but] I wore her coat like beatitude, and her arms around me were as heartening as mercy. (Robinson 160–161)

Levinas’s feminine alterity is at work in this moment. It influences Sylvie’s silence and instinctive response to Ruth’s need for human welcome and company and prompts the tendency to repeatedly look into Ruth’s face with an expression that is not distant or civil – meaning it was close and familiar – and the simple act of giving Ruth her coat. These actions are the expressions of holiness possible only within human behaviour. Levinas’s insistence that ‘there is holiness, in being occupied with someone other before being occupied with oneself, in watching over someone other, in responding to someone other before responding to oneself’ (“Interview with François Poirié” 54–55) is supported by the fact that in spite of her anger at being left alone, Ruth experiences Sylvie’s generosity as mercy. Sylvie’s ability to extend such mercy is an effect of her own identity as an abandoned child. Before taking Ruth home, Sylvie stops to wait for an evening train. She focuses so intently on the approaching train that she completely ignores Ruth’s repeated attempts to address her by name. Her failure to respond causes Ruth to wonder who “Sylvie” really is – is she the unconventional aunt? Or is she another version of Ruth’s mother, Helen? She muses, ‘the faceless shape in front of me could as well be Helen herself as Sylvie. I spoke to her

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by the name Sylvie, and she did not answer. Then how was one to know? And if she were Helen in my sight, how could she not be Helen in fact?’ (Robinson 166–167). Whether caused by exhaustion, concern, or unspoken desire, Ruth’s conflation of Helen, her mother, with Sylvie emphasises the centrality of absent presences in both Ruth’s and Sylvie’s experience. Housekeeping is full of absent presences, most significantly Ruth’s mother and grandfather, both of whom have drowned in Fingerbone Lake. Despite the difference in circumstance – Helen’s drowning was a suicide, whereas Edmund’s was presumably an accident – Ruth and Sylvie both struggle to find closure. ‘That’s how it is with family’, remarks Sylvie. ‘You feel them the most when they’re gone’ (185). Though physically absent, these family members are ever present in Sylvie’s and Ruth’s memories and imagination. The pain associated with their memories helps foster an intimacy between Ruth and Sylvie, as Ruth comes to recognise the intensity with which Sylvie wishes to keep her: Sylvie did not want to lose me. She did not want me to grow gigantic and multiple, so that I seemed to fill the whole house, and she did not wish me to turn subtle and miscible, so that I could pass through the membranes that separate dream and dream. She did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be. For she could regard me without strong emotion – a familiar shape, a familiar face, a familiar silence. She could forget I was in the room … even while I sat beside her – this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all. But if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing. (195)

Sylvie is uncharacteristically emphatic that families should not be separated. In her experience, the only thing that can truly eradicate lack in any individual’s life is to be near to someone else physically and emotionally. Home can only be a refuge if there is someone to welcome and be welcomed into it. When ‘someone’ is absent, whether as a result of death or decision, no one can escape the memory of their presence. For this reason, even after their hasty exile from Fingerbone, Ruth and Sylvie think of Lucille. Likewise, Lucille – who has left the last two members of her family to live a more stable life – will forever be haunted by Sylvie and Ruth, even if, as Ruth suggests, ‘no one watching […] could know her thoughts are thronged

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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). Though Sylvie and Ruth remain together, their mutual devotion cannot fully compensate for the lack shaped by Lucille’s absence. Levinas argues that ‘solitude is a lack’ (“Interview with François Poirié” 57), the result of fragmentation and isolation, and while feminine alterity manages to provide opportunities for each character to feel at home in the world, it does not ensure a welcome dwelling for any of them because it is not capable of filling their lack. As long as the characters are separated – physically and emotionally – they are not fully at home in the world. However, to end the analysis on this admittedly dreary note would fail to credit Robinson for the one area in which feminine alterity is most successfully enacted in the novel: through language and imagery of the narrative itself.

Writing feminine alterity Both Levinas and Derrida emphasise the importance of silence in feminine alterity. Derrida adamantly insists that this silent language is a uniquely ‘human language’ (37), and in Housekeeping, the ‘silent comings and goings of the feminine being whose footsteps reverberate the secret depths of being’ (Totality and Infinity 156) take place in Robinson’s language and textual imagery, and ultimately function to create what we might call a ‘textual dwelling’ where holiness is made possible as the one reading becomes concerned with the lives and deaths of other people. Much of the plot seems to take place in a shadowy deluge, among descriptions of ghostliness, dawn, dusk, cold, and other places of ‘non-light’. Descriptions of vibrant colour and light are limited, and often wedged between bleaker explanations of ordinary events. In one example Robinson writes: ‘After four days of rain the sun appeared in a white sky, febrile and dazzling […] The water shone more brilliantly than the sky, and while we watched, a tall elm tree fell slowly across the road. From crown to root, half of it vanished in the brilliant light’ (62). This beautiful portrayal of the town post-flood, which begins ‘After four days of rain’, is immediately followed by a caveat: ‘Fingerbone was never an impressive town.

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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). The unpredictable juxtaposition of images gives the text a mysterious quality by which feminine alterity can begin the process of recollection, gathering, and welcome without drawing undue attention to itself, making the one reading feel at home in the story, instead of an outsider looking in. The language within which feminine alterity functions to welcome also creates a sense of hopefulness for restoration in a story that seems to negate the possibility of such hope. Robinson achieves this, in part, by various allusions to biblical history, complemented with religious and scientific metaphors. In one example, Robinson describes a net that: ‘If it swept the whole floor of heaven, it must, finally, sweep the black floor of Fingerbone, too’ gathering all the people and material possessions lost there (91). In such a sweeping, she writes: ‘There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbours and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole’ (92, emphasis mine). To further emphasise the need for restoration and gathering, Robinson offers a contemplation of memory and the Christian notion of resurrection: God Himself was pulled after us into the vortex we made when we fell, or so the story goes. And while He was on earth He mended families … [When he died,] He was so sharply lacked and so powerfully remembered that his friends felt Him beside them as they walked along the road […] There is so little to remember of anyone […] But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfil itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long. (194–195)

Such passages persuade readers to consider the novel’s serious questions regarding the complexity inherent to family relationships, the limits of responsibility for others, and the necessity of restoration and gathering while refraining from directing them to any particular judgement. As Karen Kaivola observes, ‘acceptance both of Ruth and Sylvie’s radical difference as transients and of Lucille and the town’s conventionality situates readers in unsettling territories where

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contradictory perspectives meet’ (670). In such territory one must answer to the otherness of each character, without doing violence to any. In other words, one must be good to all of them. Levinas once described alterity as ‘nonindifference’, suggesting that ‘in language there is the possibility of expressing in a didactic manner this paradoxical relation of love, which is not simply the fact that I know someone […] but the sociality irreducible to knowledge which is the essential moment of love. Practically, this goodness, this nonindifference to the death of the other, this kindness, is precisely the very perfection of love’ (“Interview with François Poirié” 58). In Housekeeping, Robinson creates no villains, and she manages to do via language that which her characters fail to do in practice: adhere to the feminine ability to accept the ‘Otherness’ of each character, and offer everyone a habitable place of welcome. Her writing is nonindifferent to Lucille, just as it is nonindifferent to Sylvie and to Ruth. Robinson refuses to privilege any character above the other, and her language acknowledges the complexity, nuance, and value of each perspective and experience without judgement. Her language, in presenting the narrative and describing the emotional responses of characters, demonstrates a love that Levinas defines as ‘the proximity to the other – where the other remains other’ (“Interview” 58). Her approach gently encourages her readers to follow suit: to be nonindifferent to each character, living and dead. Each time this happens, the feminine alterity that slips quietly through the syntax successfully fulfils its role as the essence that makes it possible to love the other.

Notes 1 For a more comprehensive overview of feminist responses to Levinas’s principle of feminine alterity, see Tina Chanter (editor) Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. Penn State University Press, 2001. 2 For example, in the essay “Judaism and the Feminine” Levinas offers an unusually positive reading of female biblical figures. He writes: ‘All the switches along this difficult path, on which the train of messianic history risked being derailed a thousand times, have been supervised and controlled by women. Biblical events would not have progressed as they did had it not been for their watchful lucidity, the firmness of their determination, and their cunning and spirit of sacrifice. But the world

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in which these events unfolded would not have been structured as it was – and as it still is and always will be – without the secret presence, on the edge of invisibility, of these mothers, wives, and daughters; without their silent footsteps in the depths and opacity of reality, drawing the very dimensions of interiority and making the world precisely habitable’ (31). 3 For a more comprehensive discussion of this issue, see Katz. 4 In Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes the alterity particular to the feminine thus: ‘This alterity is situated on another plane than language and nowise represents a truncated, stammering, still elementary language. On the contrary, the discretion of this presence includes all the possibilities of the transcendent relationship with the Other. It is comprehensible and exercises its function of interiorization only on the ground of the full human personality, which, however, in the woman, can be reserved so as to open up the dimension of interiority. And this is a new and irreducible possibility, a delightful lapse in being, and the source of gentleness in itself’ (155).

Works cited Bohannan, Heather. “Questioning Tradition: Spiritual Transformation and Images in Women’s Narratives and Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson.” Western Folklore 51.1 (1992): 65–79. Derrida, Jacques. “A Word of Welcome.” Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford University Press, 1999. Foster, Thomas. “History, Critical Theory, and Women’s Social Practices: ‘Women’s Time’ and Housekeeping.” Signs 14.1 (1988): 73–99. Fowler, Julianne. “Family Narrative and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: Reading and Writing Beyond Boundaries.” ETD collection for University of Nebraska – Lincoln. 1995. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/ AAI9536615. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Geyh, Paula E. “Burning Down the House? Domestic Space and Feminine Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 34.1 (1993): 103–122. Hedrick, Tace. “The Perimeters of Our Wandering Are Nowhere: Breaching the Domestic in Housekeeping.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40.2 (1999): 137–151. Kaivola, Karen. “The Pleasures and Perils of Merging: Female Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 34.4 (1993): 670–690.

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Katz, Claire Elise. Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine. Indiana University Press, 2003. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Interview with François Poirié.” Is it Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Edited by Jill Robbins. Stanford University Press, 2001. 23–83. —— “Judaism and the Feminine.” Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by Seán Hand. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. 30–38. —— Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne University Press, 1969. McDermott, Sinead. “Future-perfect: Gender, Nostalgia, and the Not Yet Presented in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Journal of Gender Studies 13.3 (2004): 259–270. Ravits, Martha. “Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” American Literature 61.4 (1989): 644–666. Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. Picador, 1980. Ryan, Maureen. “Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: The Subversive Narrative and the New American Eve.” South Atlantic Review 56.1 (1991): 79–86. Wilson, Christine. “Delinquent Housekeeping: Transforming the Regulations of Keeping House.” Legacy 25.2 (2008): 299–310.

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6 The domestic geographies of grief: bereavement, time, and home spaces in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Home Lucy Clarke Academic research on grief in the West is a twentieth-century phenomenon, originating with the publication of Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia”. Until recently, and largely because of Freud’s influence, scholarship on the topic has been conducted almost exclusively in the ‘psy-’ and cognate disciplines. Claims for interdisciplinarity in grief scholarship are exaggerated to the extent that a majority of work is nondialogic. In particular, very little of the bereavement research undertaken in the psy- and social scientific disciplines impinges on literary studies – which continues to favour psychoanalytic or poststructuralist approaches to loss – and literary critical research, as well as literary texts, are rarely if ever referred to in mainstream bereavement literature.1 Against this tradition, I suggest that Marilynne Robinson’s fiction posits a highly legitimate, though under-recognised, source of emotional epistemology about the felt realities of grief. Freud had not been bereaved when he wrote his seminal essay. His speculations relied, he openly admitted, on ‘conjecture’ (255). Despite his awareness of the limitations of his research – and later experiences of loss which defied the terms of his own early model – the core ideas of Freud’s essay continue to form the basis of the ‘dominant model’ of grief which has underpinned and limited both academic and popular conceptions of how people respond to bereavement ever since (Walter 7). This model has constrained many of the ways bereavement, grief, and mourning have been re-conceptualised in the Western imagination and yet it relies on what has consistently been found to be ‘uncritical acceptance’ of fundamentally ‘erroneous

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assumptions’ or ‘myths’ (Breen and O’Connor 202; Wortman and Silver 357). Amongst these are the presumption that grief is amenable to measurement, that it ends, and, if it persists or remains absent, that it can be treated and overcome like an illness. Most pervasively, grief continues to be viewed as a temporal experience or process that occurs in stages. Scholars and bereaved people often argue that this does not reflect the lived experience of bereavement. Sociologist Neil Small emphasises that the experience of bereavement actually ‘fractures the sequential experience of time’ and thus makes timereliant grief models particularly ‘inappropriate’ (40). He and others have long sought a discourse which de-pathologises prolonged and varied reactions to bereavement and which posits grief as a valid emotional epistemology in its own right; one which is fundamental to human experience and which privileges the ‘poetics of loss’ over and above the confining limits of existing theories of bereavement (42). Robinson’s fiction is one source of such a poetics. Despite her focus on death, and widespread critical engagement with her novels as ‘emotional narratives’, it is still relatively unusual to consider Marilynne Robinson’s fictions as narratives of grief (Allen 191).2 Yet, Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014) are all concerned with human lives that are repeatedly touched by bereavement. One way in which Robinson explores this most fundamental aspect of life is via her extended metaphorical renderings of houses and home spaces – domestic metaphors that she uses repeatedly across her novels to ritualise and spatialise time and loss. This essay explores aspects of these metaphors – and the contribution they make to knowledge about grief – in relation to the domestic acts of two relatively under-examined female characters, Sylvia Foster and Glory Boughton, in Robinson’s first and third novels, Housekeeping and Home. While there is arguably no limit to experiences of grief in Robinson’s novels, each book takes place in a spatially compact mise en scene. Little of the narrative occurs beyond the immediate locale of a single-family home in a small fictional town. Housekeeping explores the life of narrator Ruth Stone and her sister Lucille after the drowning of their grandfather, the suicide of their mother, and the death of their grandmother. The house in Housekeeping is ‘at the edge of town, on a little hill’, the family ‘a little apart’ (5, 74). The

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novel charts the years after narrator Ruth’s mother commits suicide having left her children on the stoop of their grandmother Sylvia’s house. In Home, adult children Glory and Jack Boughton return to nurse their dying father in his last months. Narrative focus ‘rarely venture[s] beyond the porch’ of the ‘virtually uninhabited’ old family house of the dying patriarch that cocoons him, Glory and Jack for the entirety of the novel (4, 14). Within and in relation to these home spaces, Robinson’s characters enact their lives and ritualise loss.

Grief as a ‘timespace’ Robinson’s representations of domestic space have often been divisive to feminist critics. Paula Geyh’s early essay interprets the house in Housekeeping as ‘the ideology of the patriarchal family made concrete’, the family home a ‘father-house’ built by the grandfather to house his wife (109, 105). The motif of transience – embodied in the figure of eccentric housekeeper Aunt Sylvie and her flight from the house with Ruth – has been repeatedly read as a form of ‘escape’ from and ‘rejection’ of traditionally gendered modes of domesticity (Tanner 36). More recently, feminist scholars describe the relationship between Glory – the focalising consciousness in Home – and her decision to remain in her father’s house at the end of the novel as evidence of a ‘disturbing gender politics’ (Phillips 169; Tanner 36). Tanner reads the novel’s geography as ultimately ‘uncomfortable’ for both character and readers and as problematically ‘circumscribed’ for female protagonist Glory (35, 37). I argue that Robinson’s tropes of the house/home are more metaphorically spacious and symbolically resonant than these critics have found, especially when viewed as spaces for the ritual enactment of grief. Robinson’s houses can be read as what cultural geographer Mike Crang calls ‘timespaces’ (202). According to Crang, the interrelatedness of time and space in this metaphorical category can be used to free up and pluralise what ‘time’ means and vice versa (202). Bakhtin identifies a similar category that he calls the chronotope, which he argues is more expressive than traditional metaphor because of how it interweaves time and space. In the expression of a literary

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chronotope, ‘[t]ime thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible’ and ‘space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time’ (15). Crang and Bakhtin provide a rich interpretive framework for considering Robinson’s domestic realms as places and metaphors for forms of grief which do not end. This is thickened when Robinson’s home spaces are viewed in terms of ritual. By setting her houses, their denizens, and their domestic actions apart from local towns and other people, Robinson strongly invokes the iconography of the symbolic anthropological study of ritual archetype. This draws on a long tradition of reading marginal and domestic timespaces and actions – in both secular and religious traditions – as sacred.3 In anthropology and ritual studies, the performance of ritual has long been recognised as having both spatial and temporal dimensions, and for early twentieth-century anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep the house is a particularly helpful metaphor for spatialising time. In examining rites of passage, the house metaphor conveys for Van Gennep the potent interconnectedness of space, time, and ritual with sacred qualities that he described as ‘magicoreligious’ (15). Van Gennep classifies three phases of any rite of passage or major life change: ‘rites of separation’, ‘transition rites’, and ‘rites of incorporation’, alternatively known as preliminal, liminal, and postliminal (Kimball vii; Van Gennep 11, 21). His attention is repeatedly drawn to manifestations of the ritual space and time of the figurative passage as a ‘pivoting of sacredness’, which he stresses are made operative in the spatial act and ‘magico-religious aspect of crossing frontiers’ (16, 13, 18, 15). In the domestic sphere, these take physical form as thresholds such as a ‘beam, threshold [or] vestibule’ (19). In the mid-1960s, Victor Turner theorised Van Gennep’s work by focusing in particular on the middle phase of a rite of passage and the metaphorical potency of what he termed the ‘betwixt and between’ (Forest 93). He theorises this phase as occurring in a ‘rift […] in time’ but also in terms of spatial symbolism (Grimes 126). Like Van Gennep, Turner is repeatedly drawn to the ways in which liminal thresholds perpetuated as metaphors of the ‘sacred’ by being ‘set apart’ (Dramas 241). Turner also re-figures the first phases of rites as ones of ‘seclusion’ as well as separation (Forest 98). Typically, in the groups he studies, they took the form of ‘seclusion lodge or camp’ where those entering a rite of passage such as puberty or

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bereavement were ‘set aside from the main arenas of social life’ often in a ‘sacred place of concealment’ (Dramas 232). Despite the origins of Van Gennep and Turner’s work in the study of ritual including funeral and death rites, the categories they made available have not been used to explore or articulate descriptions of prolonged grief in contemporary literary studies of bereavement. Their work is also conspicuous in its absence from the psy-disciplinary study of grief. I apply them here to Robinson’s novels, where houses function as seclusion spaces filled with liminal thresholds, but also as markers of the ultimate liminality of prolonged experiences of sorrow in grief which are repeatedly presented as both ordinary and sacred.

Sacred timespaces in Housekeeping The openings of Housekeeping and Home impress upon Robinson’s reader the interconnectedness of family, loss, and the domestic realm. Each house is presented as a ritual timespace of bereavement, a Turnerian ‘seclusion lodge’ for inhabitants who have been repeatedly bereaved and for whom grief is an experience that lasts as long as life. Housekeeping starts with narrator Ruth linking her female lineage and family history of death and abandonment with the home. While her relatives are described as having ‘died’, ‘escaped this world’, or ‘fled’, Ruth points out that ‘through all these generations of elders we lived in one house, my grandmother’s house’ (3). Home opens literally on the threshold of the family home with dying Reverend Robert Boughton opening the door to his returning daughter and declaring, ‘Home to stay, Glory! Yes!’ (3). For the old man, it is a ‘good house’ with a ‘gracious heart’, while for Glory, it seems both ‘abandoned’ and ‘heartbroken’ (3, 4). The family house in Housekeeping is located at the edges of the town of Fingerbone, ‘a meager and difficult place’, a place ‘chastened by an outsize landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere’ (178, 62). Tony R. Magagna suggests that Robinson reflects a ‘common theme of western experience’ by figuring Fingerbone as a ‘hinterland’, a ‘no-place’ at the ‘center of nowhere’ (357). He also draws attention to the ‘[t]ales of tragedy and exodus,

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of violence and disaster’ that ‘haunt’ and map the liminal ‘landscape of loss that encompasses Fingerbone’ (359). In Magagna’s analysis, the ‘legacy of loss’ and the ‘[u]nremarked stories’ of bereaved and abandoned women who bear the ‘brunt of the labor and of the loss’ are dominant themes of the novel (360, 359, 361). However, by focusing on transience, Magagna demotes the activities of ‘housekeeping’ to merely ‘socialised’ acts ‘contained in the patriarchal structures of the home and society’, missing an opportunity to scrutinise how the landscape of loss is initially subtly charted within the family house (360). The home in Housekeeping is a looming presence. The ‘rambling house’ is a Thoreauvian self-build constructed by the grandfather who, knowing ‘nothing whatever of carpentry’, built it with its ‘fenestration […] random’ and its ‘corners out of square’ (28, 74). It is presented early in the novel in terms of its interior: as the private seclusion space for grandmother Sylvia’s cumulative bereavements, the house is figured from the outset as a domestic timespace that indexes loss. When grandfather Edmund dies, the emphasis is placed on the behaviours and routines of Sylvia’s daughters, their interconnectedness with their mother’s body, and enactment of her domestic tasks. Molly, Helen, and Sylvie are repeatedly described using verbs in active connection with their mother; they ‘hover’ around her and ‘follow […] her through the house’; they ‘pull fringe off the rug’ and ‘pleat [the] hem’ (10–11). When she sits down to mend, they ‘settle themselves around her […] their heads propped against her knees on the chair’ (10). Each act is intimate and vital, physically entangled with the props of the home and family. With these descriptions Robinson invokes a type of domestic temporality that Dana Luciano calls the ‘time out of time’ created by the ‘affectionately shaped task-orientation’ of mothering that she argues was popular among certain middle-class, white-authored, sentimental domestic literatures of the nineteenth century (126). Luciano describes this as a ‘sense of time’ that was outside the linear because it attended to ‘other human tides’ (126). Analogously, Turner positions this conception of time beyond just the nineteenth-century, explaining that while ‘all rituals […] may be said to possess “temporal structure”,’ the experience of the ritual body within a seclusion space is always, paradoxically, a timeless condition, ‘an eternal now’

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(Dramas 238, 239). To describe the uniquely liminal situation of ‘peculiar unity’ for a group created within a seclusion space, Turner coined the term ‘communitas’ and wrote, ‘it is in liminality that communitas emerges’ (Forest 99, 100; Dramas 232). As bereaved narrator Ruth describes it, the children’s responses to Sylvia’s tasks are all linked to the time ‘[a]fter their father’s death’ and in the house (Robinson Housekeeping 10, emphasis mine). Their experiences can therefore be read as examples of the ‘peculiar unity’ of communitas forged by Sylvia and the girls in grief (Forest 95).

Grief and Robinson’s pre-twentieth-century temporalities Robinson’s first novel is famously allusive, drawing especially on nineteenth-century literary traditions. Emily Dickinson is a direct influence on her evocations of domesticity and death. Robinson has said: ‘The use of household objects in the book – the idea of ruined and faded spaces, and the idea of the sacramental quality of eating together, and the effect on the household of a death having physically occurred there, with its consequences – I think of those as Dickinson’ (Hedrick 7). Robinson’s description of Dickinson’s influence on domestic architecture in Housekeeping calls on a temporality that Luciano argues was a feature of a ‘pronounced nineteenth-century attention to grief and mourning’ that occurred in America (2). She stresses that it was ‘the grieving body’ in this era which functioned as ‘an instrument of affective time-keeping’, lending the pain of grief a temporality that was slower in pace, one which emphasised the humanness of bereavement and reflected a view that grief is something to be ‘cherished’ (5, 2). Robinson’s early depictions of the home after Edmund’s death fuse Sylvia’s feeling body and her multiple experiences of loss in communitas, in ways which echo this nonlinear approach to grief time and accentuate its vitality. The pressing physicality of her daughters is emphasised as an index of the timespace they inhabit: they ‘lean’ and look and ‘cluster […] about her’, reminding Sylvia of when they breastfed (Robinson Housekeeping 11). The bodies of her children responding to her body throw Sylvia back in time to their infancy and, in loss, to Sylvia’s memories of that era of

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intimate physical encounter after birth. Robinson writes, ‘[n]ever’ since then ‘had she been so aware of their hair, their softness, breathiness’ (11). This vivid ‘fleshy’ memory is inseparable from the sense of pre-twentieth-century time that Robinson evokes and that Luciano figures as sacred and Sabbath-like. Luciano explains: ‘Grief’s time moved, like Sundays, at a different pace from ordinary time: it was slower, more capacious, almost spatialized, enabling contradictory feelings (pain and pleasure) to be indulged at once and without traumatic contradiction’ (6). During narrator Ruth’s re-interpretation of Sylvia’s reflections on the slow, capacious time after Edmund’s death, this pain-pleasure is suggested as she ‘dwell[s]’, to use Luciano’s phrase, ‘within the sensuality of deep feeling’ emphasised by proximity and tactility (21). Here Sylvia is ‘filled’ with a ‘strange elation, the same pleasure she had felt when any one of her daughters, as a sucking child, had fastened her eyes on her face and reached for her other breast, her hair, her lips, hungry to touch’ (11). Sylvia’s own routines emphatically focus on domestic care and nourishment, offered up as they ‘always’ have been as ‘a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace’; her ‘bread was tender and her jelly was tart […] she made cookies and applesauce’ (11–12). Experiences within the house are figured as recurring ceremonial acts implying the interconnectedness of time, food, the physical body, and intimacy. Robinson writes, ‘When suppertime came, they would follow their mother into the kitchen, set the table, lift the lids off the pans. And then they would sit around the table and eat together, Molly and Helen fastidious, Sylvie with milk on her lip’ (11). With the suicide of her daughter Helen – and the arrival of her grandchildren Ruth and Lucille – time, for Sylvia, maintains a millennial, Sabbath-like quality and the measure of the domestic; it also – and ironically – becomes more fragile as Robinson thickens representation. The pleasures of the domestic give way to experiences that are more uncertain and vulnerable. Robinson characterises the time after both bereavements as almost identical blocks of five years, literalising Turner’s idea that in communitas ‘every day is, in a sense, the same day, writ large or repeated’ (Dramas 239). Time is liberated from constraint as it resists teleology and notions of progression, but the sacramental quality of domestic rituals as measures of this time both heighten

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and deepen the measure of loss. The ‘five serene, eventless years’ after Edmund’s death are described as a time during which Sylvia and her daughters were ‘cut free from the troublesome possibility of success, recognition, advancement’ (Robinson Housekeeping 13). The arrival of Ruth and Lucille brings about a repeat ‘five years’ during which, Ruth explains, Sylvia ‘cared for us like someone reliving a long day in a dream’ (24). ‘[B]affled by the awareness that this present had passed already’, Sylvia’s second liminal period is marked again by quiet, cyclical repetitions where temporality is, to quote Luciano, ‘collective’, ‘repetitive’, and ‘reflective’ rather than linear, inseparable from domestic space and quotidian ritual (24). Their lives are dictated by human tides presented in terms of cycles and seasons rather than linearity, days ‘sp[i]n off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time’ and the ‘whited shoes and braided hair and fried chicken and turned back bedclothes’ of her tragically bereaved daughters are echoed identically in the ‘whited shoes and braided hair and turned back bedclothes’ of her bereaved granddaughters (Robinson Housekeeping 13, 24–25). The increased fragility of Sylvia after Helen’s death is also given domestic shape in light not of Edmund’s death, but of the departure of her daughters that followed his death. It is this loss that leaves her to a kind of ‘loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud’, a human tide far removed from modernity’s clock time (18). Ruth imagines and remembers the loss of Sylvia’s daughters in terms which are measured instead by Sylvia’s reflective memory of the tangible, repetitive daily realities of the domestic: ‘Sylvie took her coffee with two lumps of sugar, Helen liked her toast dark, and Molly took hers without butter […] Molly changed the beds, Sylvie peeled the vegetables, Helen washed the dishes […] time and space and light grew still’ (15). The anxiety that she might now lose her granddaughters interrupts her domestic repetitions and the slow time of grief. Ruth reflects, ‘it must have seemed to her that she had returned to relive this day because it was here that something had been lost or forgotten’ (24). Between Ruth’s descriptions of each act of whiting shoes and braiding hair she inserts Sylvia’s imagined memory that she ‘suddenly feared and remembered that the children had somehow disappeared, every one’ (25). The actions of Sylvia’s housekeeping are not just figured then as ‘acts of proper

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domesticity’, as Magagna suggests, but as actual measure of the ‘brunt’ and ‘labour’ of loss (360). In this, the domestic act also reveals its limitations. For Ruth: ‘it must have seemed, too, that she had only the frailest tools for the most urgent uses. Once, she told us, she dreamed that she had seen a baby fall from an airplane and had tried to catch it in her apron, and once that she had tried to fish a baby out of a well with a tea strainer’ (Robinson Housekeeping 25–26). Ruth’s speculations imply that Sylvia’s instruction that she and Lucille ‘keep the house’ because if you ‘own the roof over your head you’re as safe as anyone can be’, belie a greater truth about the illusion of domestic security and the inadequacy of domestic props to protect from the loneliness of inevitable bereavement (27).

Home, Glory, grief, and the baby In Home, it is Glory Boughton who enacts the majority of the tiny domestic gestures of home that mark and measure grief-time. Despite critical preoccupation with the novel’s sadness, the centrality of bereavement to the text has barely been discussed. From the outset, however, the claustrophobia and disrepair of the family house can be seen to figure not only for the disappointments of Glory and her brother – or for Jack’s 20-year absence – but for other cumulative family losses including their mother’s death, the impending death of Boughton, and, most pertinently, the ever-resonating death and abandonment of Jack’s illegitimate child. In this sense, the novel has as much in common with Housekeeping as it does with its partner novel Gilead. Critics often comment on the uncomfortable timespace of Home. Laura Tanner describes the setting as ‘narrowly confined’ and the pace ‘achingly slow’ (37). Malcolm Jones describes the ‘action’ as ‘contained’ in the kitchen or garden, joking that the three characters just ‘talk, talk, talk for more than 300 pages and say [and do] pretty much the same things over and over’ (“Marilynne Robinson’s New Novel”). Siobhan Phillips points out, however, that there is ‘profundity’ to the ‘homeliness’ of the repetitive domestic tasks that make up the care of the house and the dying man, accompanied as they are by awkward, freighted silences and painful verbal

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encounters (175). She writes: ‘full as it is of people turning pancakes, washing shirts, boiling chickens, and sweeping floors,’ Robinson’s attention to detail is evidence of the ‘twinned aesthetic and ethical gravity’ of her writing (158, 163). Thus, the micro-coordinates of the awkward emotional topology of ‘everyday actions’ within the home are presented as painful, yet ethically profound (158). It is here that she articulates grief. The Boughton home is presented as failing but prevailing: ‘Boughtons, who kept everything, had kept their land, their empty barn, their useless woodshed, their unpruned orchard and horseless pasture’ (Robinson Home 8). Critics often under-read the breadth of the metaphoric function of the house by overlooking the centrality of grief for the family. Tanner, for example, argues that the ‘immutable’ furniture inside and outside the house assumes a ‘primarily nostalgic function’ in the novel such that ‘big crowded furniture’ overwhelms the ‘lived bodies’ of Glory, Jack, and Boughton with the consequence of expelling the ‘pleasures of the phenomenological present’ both for character and reader (38). This focus on pleasure as the central aspect of lived experience denies the place that the more complex phenomenology of sorrow has for Robinson’s characters, sorrow that is figured via the house and its ‘empty’, ‘useless’, ‘unpruned’, and ‘immutable’ features. As such, the still, the empty, and the immutable are, in fact, alive with meaning in Home. Geographer Tim Ingold has coined the phrase a ‘dwelling perspective’ to describe a ‘phenomenology of dwelling’ whereby ‘the world continually comes into being around the inhabitant’ of a space (153). Robinson’s text offers up a valuable epistemology of grief when the Boughton family dwelling is viewed as a space in which repeated and perpetual losses keep ‘coming into being’. In particular, Glory and her dying father still grieve the death of the child that Jack fathered illegitimately and abandoned when he was a teen, and the 20-year absence of Jack that the birth of the baby caused. Jack suffers too. His suffering is life-long, but it is presented in the diegetic present of the novels as a form of inexhaustible grief at his forced separation from his African American common-law wife Della and their child Robert. In addition to actual and impending bereavements, the weight of loss on the family is compounded by the emotional intensity of the return of Jack whose absence has been a source of deep mourning figured as ‘all that

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waiting’ for his family (Robinson Home 307). This period is repeatedly referred to as a liminal era during which time nobody knew whether Jack was ‘alive or dead’ and the family experienced pronounced and prolonged ‘grief’ and ‘sorrow’ as a result (126, 307). With Jack’s return, relief of that sorrow is only fleeting and rather than alleviating the family’s pain, Jack’s arrival initiates another liminal era – the duration of the novel – that ultimately exacerbates suffering. This is repeatedly made concrete by the emphasis on Glory and Jack waiting around in the ‘useless woodshed’, the ‘hallway’, and the ‘oppressive’ dining room, a ‘place of solemn and perpetual evening’ (53, 8, 37, 41). As agent of the majority of ‘domestic gestures’, and focalising consciousness of the novel, it is Glory who measures and bears the brunt of the family’s tragic, domestic micro- drama and Glory who offers the novel’s ‘dwelling perspective’. All but absent from criticism so far is the extent to which the birth and death of Jack’s nameless child is a source of deep ‘grief’ for Glory and Reverend Boughton (19). The enactment of this bereavement in the family home is depicted through the focalisation of Glory’s memories of the past but, on return to the house, simultaneously sets in motion a different temporal reality in the diegetic present. Initially, the many, often subtle, allusions to the baby are integrated into the descriptions of the exterior of the domineering house and the loss of the large family it once housed. Jack’s long absence from the family home is revealed to be a direct consequence of his baby’s birth and is figured as a mourning period for the dwindled family that were left behind in the diegetic past: adolescent Glory and her parents – just three of a family of ten. The now ‘disheveled’ Boughton home is linked with a lost time when the family home was ‘in its prime’ (4), defined by the ‘fruitfulness of their household’ (4). Pieced together across fragments of reminiscence, however, the impact of Jack’s fathering and abandoning his daughter emerges and is often figured as the desolation of grief-time made real in the dark interior of the house in stark contrast to those fruitful years. His departure after the baby’s birth is described swiftly, domestically and liminally: after ‘a quiet talk behind a closed door’ with his father, ‘twenty years passed’ (59–60). The result is an era that extends the initial mourning period by years and which Glory describes as ‘those other years […] those tense years only she and her mother and father had lived through’,

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an era of lingering grief for the diminished family (56, emphasis mine). It is figured explicitly as a period of interior bereavement during which time ‘her mother stayed in her room’, when ‘no lights were put on’, and when Glory waited in isolation in the ‘dark parlour’ eating pieces of dry toast (60). As for Sylvia in Housekeeping, bereavement is a source of emotional ambivalence and a fusion of liminal times for Glory, but unlike the depictions of Sylvia, for Glory this is novel-length. Time, to quote Crang, is ‘pluralized’ in Home by the space of the house in which past and present merge (202). Glory notes: ‘The past was a very fine thing, in its place. But her returning now, to stay, as her father had said, had turned memory portentous. To have it overrun its bounds this way and become present and possibly future too – they all knew this was a thing to be regretted’ (Robinson Home 8). Gradually, the house’s interior, its ‘old books’ and ‘overfurnished rooms’, meld with memories and fuller recollections of the time of the baby’s birth, her short life, and her death; a time during which isolation and alienation within the family home was experienced by Glory as silence, solitude, and loss, but a time nonetheless figured as deeply meaningful. Glory’s experience of bereavement brings the strange vitality of a death in the past into life in the present: ‘It was being home that made her remember’ (19). ‘[B]eing alone in all that silence’ in the house recalls the other silent time of her adolescence when, ‘in a suddenly quiet house’, her siblings moved away and Jack’s baby was born; the time when ‘everything happened’ (18, 35, emphasis mine). The silence in the house becomes a vehicle for the time of the baby’s birth and death and as such communicates the tenor of the loss incurred by the baby’s foreshortened life. The time is thus figured as a vital time of ‘everything’, the emotional kernel of Glory’s life experience, and the simultaneously potent grief of silent, endless nothing. Critics usually focus on Glory’s representation in relation to her father and to her brother, but it is Robinson’s subtle depiction of the baby’s life and death that most strikingly maps the emotional geography of Glory’s relationship with the house in tiny, domestic gestures. The first allusion to the baby is buried amongst a list of domestic activities and reveries that Glory pursues ‘[w]ithin weeks of her return’ (13). Robinson lists the quotidian as a developing integration of father’s need and daughter’s care, infused with the

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poignancy of Glory’s memories of her childhood presented as inseparable from the birth of the baby: Every day she swept and straightened – light work, since the house was virtually uninhabited. She did what little her father required to make him comfortable. Sometimes she listened to the […] big old radio […] she sat beside it while she read. She even thought of taking up needlework. She might try knitting again, bigger, simpler things. Her first attempts were a baby sweater and bonnet. Nothing had come of that. It had alarmed her mother though. (14)

This first reference to the baby can go unnoticed, but by returning later to the image of knitting, Robinson’s subtle reference gains resonance as index of loss. When Glory’s memories next return to knitting it is part of her reflection on the ‘deep secret’ that she and her parents withheld from her siblings but religiously maintained: ‘Her father told her with tears in his eyes that the three of them could alleviate Jack’s guilt and also his shame by making the very best of the situation. So she took up knitting […] They were at work on a great rescue’ (73). The rescue never takes place. Glory’s memories are evoked by the sadness of the dark old family house and the house full of ‘[b]roken things, rusted things’ where the baby lived, but which in turn remind her of her brief joy in that era (308). Silence and solitude are always merged with Glory’s secret joy at the arrival of the baby and the ‘feelings’ that her ‘naïve’ young self privately considered a baby ‘a fairly delightful thing’ (19, 17). Repeatedly, the baby’s birth and short, precarious life are associated with Glory feeling ‘happy’, an emotion that is always shadowed by her parents’ ‘misery’ and ‘sorrow’, the ‘depths’ of her father’s ‘grief’ and the tragedy of the baby’s subsequent death (19, 16–18, 58). Again, Robinson lends these emotions a temporal quality and emphasises grief time’s duration and dilation: ‘Those years of her late childhood, when she felt so necessary, when she was so sure things would come right if only enough effort was given to making them come right – those years stayed with her as if they had been the whole of her life […] It embarrassed her to remember how happy she had been, those three bitter, urgent years until it all ended’ (73). Later, it becomes clear that the prolonged time of Glory’s private grief – the three bitter, urgent years that feel like the whole of her life – suffuses the space in which the house resides as much as the house itself. Although secretive about her reasons, she

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says to Jack, ‘I hate this town […] Because it reminds me of when I was happy’ (137). Glory’s losses condense in timespace toward the end of the novel when it becomes clear that she will remain in her father’s house forever. This revelation proceeds to merge her pain with that of her father and her brother, and in turn alters the ‘shape and textures’ of what Luciano calls grief time’s ‘flow’ (2). In an angry outburst that reveals his own suffering at the death of Jack’s daughter and the recurring and endless loss of Jack, Boughton compares the inefficacy of his love for his doomed son to a death. He states, ‘there is only more grief, more sorrow […] It’s like watching a child die in your arms […] Which I have done’ (308). By conflating the death of a baby with the grief he continues to feel for Jack, Boughton conveys the accumulation of grief’s density over time in the present continuous experience of ‘watching a child die’. Fusing his ‘grief’ and ‘sorrow’ with her experience of bereavement, Boughton gives lie to the idea that grief time ends, instead levelling at Glory the accusatory question, ‘[h]ave you put it aside?’ before stressing his ongoing fear that she ‘never would get over’ the baby’s death (308). The novel ends with Boughton leaving ‘the house to Glory’ (309). This is followed by the brief, devastating, and tragically belated visit of Jack’s family, just days after Jack has given up hope of reuniting with them and has left town again for good. Glory’s distress at her brother’s going has already been described as a ‘dread[ed] absence’ which ‘made her life seem intolerably long’ (329). Robinson makes the tragedy of Glory’s suffering one of persistent, but ethically vivid temporality with the novel’s final lines, a dream that Jack’s living child, Robert, will one day come again: He is Jack’s son […] He will be curious about the place, though his curiosity will not override his good manners. […] he will thank me and leave, walking backwards 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. The Lord is wonderful. (339, emphasis mine)

For scholars attentive to Home’s depictions of gender and race, the ending of Robinson’s third novel is unsettling. Glory’s self-sacrificial act can be read as inherently gendered, while her approach to the

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unlikelihood of Jack’s mixed-race son wishing to return to the inhospitable home of his father seems both naïve and politically passive. As a depiction of the prolonged sorrow of grief, however, the resonance of this ending has a profound and ethical vitality. Here Robinson blends the proleptic present tense of Glory’s dream with declarative and repetitive future tense use of the auxiliary verb ‘will’ to evoke the non-teleological and pluralising qualities of the life-time that is both the ‘flow’ of grief time and the endless projected ‘coming into being’ of Glory as a consequence of her cumulative bereavements. Robinson at once stretches this grief time to Glory’s ‘whole life’ and distils it into an imagined and prayerfully anticipated – though implicitly never realised – future ‘moment’ on the porch of the house when her life-long experience of sorrow might, though probably will not, end.

Reimagining grief For Turner, as for Van Gennep, the liminal was implicitly a temporary state and, though ‘ambiguous’, he held that the ‘passage’ was inevitably ‘consummated’ (Forest 94; Ritual Process 95). Historian of religion C. W. Bynum uses and simultaneously critiques Turner’s metaphorical application of liminality, arguing that this assumption of completion is a ‘fundamental limitation’ in Turner’s otherwise valuable work (32). She argues that his ideas provide language ‘for which scholars have long needed terms’, but simultaneously ‘describe the stories and symbols of men better than those of women’ (32). In Bynum’s argument, this limitation of Turner’s work ‘misrepresents’ and thus ‘speaks less fully to the complexity of human experience’, both male and female (28, 50). Bynum’s work re-presents the value of nonteleological ways of considering ritual experience and liminality, reinterpreting the liminal as an experiential category that rather implies ‘continuity’ and which renders assumptions of telos effectively redundant (32). In a similar way, Robinson’s representations of prolonged sorrow in grief do away with the notion of temporal limits on suffering, rendering some liminal states perpetual, though critically not pathological. The effect of this is to re-present grief as a profound and often ongoing part of life, something that the dominant model and its heritage have failed adequately to recognise.

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In his introduction to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), John Stillgoe argues that the house is a ‘metaphor for humanness’ (xxxxvi). The dominant discourse of bereavement appears to have lost a sense of grief’s humanness. Grief is still too much the exclusive domain of nondialogic scientific and social scientific scholarship. As such, scholars still too readily focus on assessment, measurement, and alleviation of what are considered to be abnormal or pathological reactions to bereavement, denying the complexity of loss and inadequately mapping the reality of grief in ways that might help the bereaved. Robinson reimagines grief. Her representations of grief’s timespaces are textured metaphors for the inherent outsideness and alienation of human grief, the vitality of bereavement, its open-endedness and potentiality, its sorrow and its sanctity. By focusing on the sacramental and ceremonious acts of the everyday domestic lives of her characters in their homes, she stresses the expansive and potentially timeless and limitless terrain of the interior, ordinary, human world of grief and actively intervenes in the contemporary discourse on loss.

Notes 1 For an exception to this in psychiatric literature, see Colin Murray Parkes “Grief: Lessons from the Past, Visions for the Future.” Death Studies 26.5 (2002): 367–385, in which the author uses literary history to trace responses to bereavement. For the only literary critic to draw extensively on psychological models of bereavement, see the work of Harold K. Bush Jr, notably Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and Nineteenth-century Authors. University of Alabama Press, 2016. 2 For readings of grief and or mourning in Housekeeping, see Rael Meyerowitz, “‘Ruthlessness Gives Way To Ruth’: Mothering and Mourning in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Psychoanalytic Review 87.2 (2000): 189–226; Laura E. Tanner, “Images of Grief in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” Lost Bodies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death. Cornell University Press, 2006. 92–106; Paul Tyndall 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 (2014): 87–102. For readings of grief in Gilead, see Laura E. Tanner, “‘Looking back from the grave’: Sensory

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Perception and the Anticipation of Absence in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Contemporary Literature XLVIII.2 (2007): 228–252. For the only reading of grief in Home, see Susan Petit, “Mourning Glory: Grief and Grieving in Robinson’s Home.” Pacific Coast Philology 51.1 (2016): 88–106. 3 According to the OED and from the old French sacrer and the Latin sacrare, the etymology of sacred includes amongst its meanings ‘[d] edicated, set apart, exclusively appropriated to some person or some special purpose’ (‘Sacred’).

Works cited Allen, Carolyn. “The Privilege of Loneliness, the Kindness of Home: ‘Felt Experience’ in the writing of Marilynne Robinson.” This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead and Home. Brill/Rodopi, 2016. 190–211. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Towards a Historical Poetics.” Narrative Dynamic: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure and Frames. Edited by Brian Richardson. Ohio State University Press, 2002. 15–24. Breen, Lauren J. and Moira O’Connor. “The Fundamental Paradox in the Grief Literature: A Critical Reflection.” Omega 55.3 (2007): 199–218. Bynum, C. W. “Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality.” Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. Zone Books, 1991. 27–51. Crang, Mike. “Rhythms of the City: Temporalised Space and Motion.” Timespace: Geographies of Temporality. Edited by Jon May, Nigel Thrift. Routledge. 187–207. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works. Translated by James Strachey. Vintage, 2001. 237–258. Grimes, Ronald. Beginnings in Ritual Studies. Ritual Studies International, 2010. Hedrick, Tace. “On Influence and Appropriation.” Interview with Marilynne Robinson. The Iowa Review 22.1 (1992): 1–7. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, 2000.

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Jones, Malcolm. “Marilynne Robinson’s New Novel.” Newsweek, 11 September 2008, www.newsweek.com/marilynne-robinsons-new-novel-88729. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Luciano, Dana. Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in NineteenthCentury America, Sexual Cultures. New York University Press, 2007. Kimball, Solon T. “Introduction.” Rites of Passage, Arnold Van Gennep. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960. v–xx. Magagna, Tony R. “Erased by Space, Ignored by History: Place and Gender in Marilynne Robinson’s West.” Western American Literature 43.3 (2009): 345–371. Phillips, Siobhan. “Fiction in Review.” Yale Review 97.2 (2009): 158–175. Robinson, Marilynne. Home. London: Virago, 2008. —— Housekeeping. London: Picador, 1980. ‘Sacred’, Oxford English Dictionary Online, www.oed.com/view/Entry/16955 6?redirectedFrom=sacred#eid. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Small, Neil. “Theories of Grief: A Critical Review.” Grief, Mourning and the Death Ritual. Edited by Jenny Hockey, Jeanne Katz, and Neil Small. Open University Press, 2001. 19–48. Stillgoe, John. Foreword. The Poetics of Space, by Gaston Bachelard, Beacon Press, 1958; reprinted 1994. Tanner, Laura E. “Uncomfortable Furniture: Inhabiting Domestic and Narrative Space in Marilynne Robinson’s Home.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 7.1 (2013): 35–53. Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Cornell University Press, 1974. —— The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell University Press, 1967. —— The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine De Gruyter, 1969. Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Translated by M. B Vizedom and G. L. Caffee. Routledge & Kegan and Paul, 1960. Walter, Tony. “A New Model of Grief: Bereavement and Biography.” Mortality 1 (1996): 7–25. Wortman, Camille, and Roxanne Silver. “The Myths of Coping with Loss.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 57.3 (1989): 349–357.

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Part III

Imagined histories: race, religion, and rights

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7 Domesticating political feeling, affect, and memory in Marilynne Robinson’s Home Christopher Lloyd

After returning to her childhood house to look after her dying father, Glory Boughton, the central character of Marilynne Robinson’s Home (2008), ruminates on its meanings and significances: ‘What does it mean to come home?’ (106). In the past, Glory ‘dreamed of a real home for herself and the babies,’ that would be ‘different from this good and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle’ (107). The way in which Robinson’s adjectives slide from good to oppressive highlights the fusion of complex emotions at the heart of Glory’s relationship to the home; that it is a tabernacle underscores the role of religion in the novel too. Glory’s dreamed dwelling is forever out of reach: ‘She knew […] that she would never open a door on that home, never cross that threshold […] Ah well’ (107). This impossible home – which Glory here imagines in purely physical terms – haunts the reality of her father’s abode for the rest of the novel. Her final sigh of resignation – ‘Ah well’ – also illustrates the dominant tone of sadness that inflects the book. Home shifts in idiom from Gilead (2004), infused by greater feelings of sorrow; as Sarah Churchwell writes, Home is ‘one of the saddest books [she…] ever loved’ (“A Man of Sorrows”). This essay expands on Churchwell’s statement, following the ways in which emotion, especially sadness, circulates through the rooms of a quiet Iowan home in the mid-twentieth century. While the home is a near-universal fixture in the cultural imaginary, in Robinson’s writing it often signifies the familial, social, and cultural spaces of the United States. Indeed, Robinson uses the largely negative affects and feelings that are activated in her characters and mediated by

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the family home to probe relations between memory, race, and nation. I argue that the centrality of domesticated feeling in this novel is politicised, not least in the relation between national memory, community memory, and the specific memories of the Boughton family. While readers might call the Gilead trilogy historical fiction, this essay also sees Home as a work of cultural memory; a remediation of the mid-twentieth century in the American Midwest.1 Memories at once held back and acknowledged in the novel are deeply entangled with familial strife and national racism. These memories finally intertwine when Jack Boughton returns ‘home’ and agitates a range of uncomfortable and – as I argue – sad affects amongst the residents of Gilead, created by Jack’s childhood and adulthood tribulations, as well as his engagement in the burgeoning civil rights movement. From this basis, Home explores the ways in which personal emotions like sadness affectively charge the home-space of the Boughtons, rooting these emotions in both personal and national conflicts. If critics have argued that the racial politics of the mid-twentieth-century United States are often cast to the side or background in Robinson’s novels, I intervene in that discussion with close textual attention to issues of remembrance and feeling.

Sadness and ordinary affect in Home Home is a book about people returning to a place that they call ‘home’. Reverend Robert Boughton is dying and his children, Glory and Jack, come back to see him. Jack, as introduced in Gilead, is a prodigal son, estranged from the rest of the family. As a child, and throughout his youth, Jack is set apart from his siblings, and when he gets a young girl in the town pregnant, scandal sticks to him. His life in Gilead is for Glory: ‘[a] decade of betrayals, minor and major’ (6). At the beginning of Home, Jack finally returns after separating from his wife, Della, who is Black, and child, Robert, in St Louis. The powerful emotions that Jack elicits and circulates on his return are compounded and underlined by Glory’s own confusion about being back in Gilead. When Jack sends a letter about visiting, Glory thinks, ‘He had better have a good reason for rousing these overwhelming emotions in his father’ (24–25). Yet, Robinson makes clear that the rousing of emotions is not a straightforward process.

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Affect does not lie dormant until it is triggered; it is the constant processing of forces between people, places, things, and situations. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg suggest that affect has no clear origin, but ‘arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon’ (1). Affect is ‘found in those intensities that pass body to body […], in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves’. In short, ‘affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations’. Its multivalent and multidimensional qualities are central to its tangibility as well as its immateriality. The study of affect has long extended from the psychological sciences into the humanities. More particularly, queer theory presses upon questions of how affect functions, what it can do, what its role in public and private spheres might be, and what thinking through it may do for changing queer people’s places in the world. Eve Sedgwick (2003), Sara Ahmed (2004), Heather Love (2007), and Ann Cvetkovich (2003) examine a range of queer affects from sadness and shame to happiness and trauma; Kathleen Stewart (2008), Sianne Ngai (2005), and Lauren Berlant (2011) ask how affect and feeling structure personal and public spaces. Of course, critique of affect theory also calls into question a supposed separation of affect from critical knowledge. As Ruth Leys argues, ‘affects must be viewed as independent of, and in an important sense prior to, ideology – that is, prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs’ (437). As she says more pointedly, affect studies has a ‘commitment to the idea that there is a disjunction or gap between the subject’s affective processes and his or her cognition or knowledge of the objects that caused them’ (450). For Leys, the biggest problem with affect is its extension beyond immediate comprehension or logic; this gap is – in her argument – something that prohibits full understanding or cognitive mastery. Yet, affect is a ‘flux that is always in context – immanent – and thus draws on a situational ethics and therefore on the social and spatial milieu. Infused with power, grounded in place and located bodies, affect is viscerally political’ (Park, Davidson, and Shields 5). For these authors – as for many other affect theorists – affect is central to politics because it works so consistently in,

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through, and on bodies as well, within particular spaces and locations. Reading the affects of Home involves examining the multiple ways in which intensities, capacities, resonances, feelings, and immersions structure the novel. I follow Carolyn Allen’s essay “The Privilege of Loneliness, the Kindness of Home” (2015) in thinking about the emotions and affects that move through Robinson’s fiction. For Allen, ‘loneliness and kindness’ dominate the author’s work, but this essay will trace the dynamics of sadness more particularly. Allen uses Robinson’s term ‘felt experience’ rather than affect or emotion, but I want to attend to how emotions and affects structure and agitate Home. She argues that Robinson’s ‘representation of intricate patterns of psychic life and interrelatedness’ and ‘her attention to commonplace emotional exchanges’ are central to the Gilead novels (192). For Allen, these are not ‘what theorists refer to as “basic emotions”’ like ‘fear, joy, surprise, anger’ but ‘“felt experiences” of daily life that carry with them a range of emotional and bodily responses’ (192). However, I would suggest that the theory of affect has a different way of addressing these so-called ‘basic emotions’ in a manner suited to Robinson’s nuanced and writerly style, which Rachel Sykes has called ‘quiet’. Quietness, for Sykes, is not simply a representational strategy chosen by Robinson, but a larger literary tendency found in contemporary American fiction. The depiction of ‘quiet people, locations, and states’ is perhaps a response to both the ‘loudness’ of the modern world and the seeming necessity of fiction to declare audibly its relevance in it. The three Gilead novels, Sykes argues, are ‘quiet in aesthetically similar ways’, re-presenting the same characters from ‘unanimously quiet perspectives’ (109, 112). Each book has the volume turned to different dials: Home is louder than Gilead because ‘the narrative takes place outside of consciousness’ and because the novel’s quietness ‘is troubled by negative affect, anxiety and anger’ (113). This essay will examine those affects further, but it will also complement Sykes’s pertinent description of the ‘quiet’ aesthetic with a ‘sad’ one because although a very common feeling, sadness is also under-theorised in literary criticism. The quietness of sadness can also be framed by Kathleen Stewart’s conception of ‘ordinary affects’. Stewart examines those ‘varied,

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surging capacities’ of affect ‘that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergencies’ (1–2). Affect is often ordinary because it just ‘happen[s]’ in ‘impulses, sensations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating […] in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in publics and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something’. In short, ‘[o]rdinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of. They give circuits and flows the forms of a life’ (Stewart 2). For Stewart, these affects begin somewhere ‘outside’ in the public realm, but structure and inhere in domestic or personal realms. The sadness that Home depicts is therefore entangled with affects that are not necessarily outside or inside, but that are produced in the mediations between these spaces. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Sara Ahmed similarly explores the way in which emotions move in and through bodies and spaces, ‘examining how they “stick” as well as move’ to claim that ‘[i]f emotions are shaped by contact with objects, rather than being caused by objects, then emotions are not simply “in” the subject or the object’ (4, 6). For Ahmed, emotions emerge through contact rather than originating in a particular thing or person: they ‘involve (re)actions or relations of “towardness” or “awayness” in relation to such objects’ (8). Ahmed’s orientational description of emotions reconceptualises ‘how we respond to objects and others’ but also how ‘the “I” and the “we” are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others’ (10). Emotions create and sustain externality and internality by figuring and shaping our sense of self or other; they are not inside ‘the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects’ (10). If, as Ahmed argues, it is ‘the objects of emotion that circulate, rather than emotion as such’, then ‘emotions can move through the movement or the circulation of objects’. In short, ‘objects become sticky, or saturated with affect, as sites of personal and social tension’ (11). Home is, then, a ‘sticky’ novel where spaces, objects, and subjects are saturated with a range of emotions and affects, especially sadness. Following Ahmed, affects – namely the sadness which makes Glory cry, Jack attempt suicide, their father to become angry and confused – do

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not begin with Jack and his ostensible misdeeds. Rather, the novel shows that the stickiness of affect was there from the start.

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Glory and the unhomely Boughton home Before thinking more about Jack’s impact on his sister, father, and home, it is worth exploring Glory’s relationship to the book’s title. The opening of Home contextualises my reading of memory, sadness, and the home-space in Robinson’s writing, when it begins: ‘“Home to stay, Glory! Yes!” her father said, and her heart sank’ (3). The sadness of this opening line sets in motion a range of uncomfortable but ordinary affects in the Boughton house. This space – while clearly fraught for Glory – is conceived otherwise by her father. For much of the book, Glory is someone for whom crying is an instinctual and consistent response to scenarios and conversations; as Allen suggests, ‘for arguments about affect and emotion, it would be difficult to skirt a character who is in tears for much of the novel’ (191). While the novel is told in the third person, it is heavily focalised through Glory’s perspective, and free indirect discourse dominates. ‘The house,’ the narrator confides, ‘embodied for [Robert] the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable’ (3). The various significances of the home, then, come into view within the first pages: for Glory, being at home is a return to something from her past, and for her father it is a substantiation or proof of everything he sees as blessed in a religious sense. Robinson carefully traces the ways in which Glory’s thoughts and feelings about the house shift throughout the novel. At the beginning of Home, Glory asks herself: ‘Why should this staunch and upright house seem to her so abandoned? So heartbroken?’ (4). These questions may be projections of Glory’s fragile state of mind – or of her dying father’s – but while Glory is indisputably ‘heartbroken’, it is worth taking seriously the idea that the house might be too. The stickiness of feeling that Ahmed argues for, and the ordinariness of affect that circulates within private spaces, may account for the ways in which the Boughton house is a charged site of feeling. On her return to Gilead, Glory is also aware of how the town itself has both changed and remained static. ‘The town seemed different to her, now that she had returned there to live,’ she thinks,

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principally because she is used to it being a ‘scene of nostalgic memory’ (7). It is not so much that Gilead is different, but that her relation – or orientation – to it has shifted. Indeed, the affective structures of nostalgia typically keep the past fixed. Glory thinks: ‘The past was a very fine thing, in its place’ (8). Memory studies, however, has drawn attention to how the past is brought bursting into the present through remembrance. If the past is kept in its place – and is thus ‘fine’ – then surely forgetting has occurred. Glory’s return to Gilead ‘turned memory portentous. To have it overrun its bounds this way and become present and possibly future, too’ is a ‘thing to be regretted’ (8). This spilling over of memory – especially memory that has become estranged, as I investigate below – is caught up in the webs of ordinary affect that saturate the Boughton home. Frequently, Glory moves in moments of remembrance and thoughtfulness. She recollects Jack’s laugh and contemplates ‘What a strange thing to remember. It came with being home’ (14); she notes that ‘I will have to remember not to be angry’ and that when Jack does appear, ‘he was so much like the brother of her memory’ – that is, disappointing (29, 32). Reflections on memory – even of the future, ‘I will have to remember’ – ground Glory in the meanings of the past and present simultaneously. The affects and feelings which are sticky with memory – and become stuck to and around Glory – are connected to the Boughton home and its unhomeliness. Here I borrow from Freud’s oft-cited definition of the ‘uncanny’ in his essay of 1919. The uncanny is a translation of the German word unheimlich which means, among other things, ‘unhomely’. Though the approximation in English is not exact, in this essay Freud is very interested in the origins and definitions of unheimlich. He quotes pages of dictionary excerpts, in which heimlich can mean that which is ‘belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate’ but also that which is ‘[c]oncealed, kept from sight’ (222–223). Freud glosses this rich semantic gathering: ‘among its different shades of meaning the word “heimlich” exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, “unheimlich.” What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich’ (224). The entwined nature of heimlich and unheimlich – approximately homely and unhomely – is central to Freud’s conception of the uncanny. Freud is interested in the ‘qualities of feeling’ – or affects – related to ‘what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror’, but the

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uncanny is principally ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (219–220). In short, ‘the uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression’ (241). In this way, the uncanny is that which has become estranged because of repression; it is familiar – so homely that it is simultaneously unfamiliar and unhomely. Home is similarly concerned with how the feelings associated with the uncanny – not only fear and horror, but also a range of quieter affects – circulate in and through the Boughton home. Indeed, Glory articulates an uncanny feeling about the home. Early on, she ruminates that ‘she has sometimes seen a man on the street and thought, No, that isn’t Jack’ and yet ‘something about him’ still reminds Glory of her brother (39). The uncanny feeling of seeing someone who looks just like a family member is compounded by Jack’s strangeness in the home on his return. ‘I need a little while to get used to this place’ he admits; ‘I am a stranger in a strange land’; while sitting in the family car, he says ‘[m]y home away from home’ (48, 96, 118). Jack is always estranged from the family home, even when he is in it, but the affects that stick to the house and to Jack also circulate around objects. Indoors there is an ‘uncanny persistence of half-forgotten objects’ (54), some of which are relegated to the attic: ‘the limbo of things that had been displaced from current use but were not in the strict sense useless’ (97). Glory even finds herself thinking: ‘He makes me feel like a stranger in my own house. But this isn’t my house’ (46). Collapsing the sense of the house as doubly estranged by Jack and by her own return, Glory figures the uncanny affects of home as conflicted and contradictory.

Jack and political affect Robinson makes clear that the emotions which emerge from a relationship to Jack are rooted in his childhood and being born into an uncomfortable and sad home-space. As Glory reflects, ‘he always did act as though the house was not quite his, nor the family, for that matter’ (53). However, while Jack – and Robinson – tease out the theological implications of predestination and sin, the novel

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seems to suggest that the home itself is a source of much discomfort for him.2 The other Boughtons do not seem to understand Jack’s relationship to the place and his father says resignedly: ‘I just never knew another child who didn’t feel at home in the house where he was born’ (120). By the end of the novel, Jack is more honest about his feelings and tells Glory: ‘I’ve thought about this place so many times. 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’ (287). The sadness of this sentiment – Glory cries for much of the conversation – is underlined by discovering that Jack was never so far away from the house as everyone thought. Indeed, the uncanniness here emerges because Jack has been so close to and entwined in the Boughton home, all the while feeling its otherness. As a child Jack would disappear and wonder if the family would notice his absence. Yet he admits that he was only ever in the barn next to the house: ‘I was usually closer to home than [their father] thought I was’ (288). This issue of proximity – away from home, but close to it – means that Jack’s experience of home can only be one of estrangement. Instead, he makes makeshift dwellings, like the space in the barn loft: ‘It seemed almost domestic,’ Glory thinks as she peers into it, ‘and yet there was a potency of loneliness about it’ (297). That loneliness also chimes loudly as a present and pressing affect within the home: ‘There was a ringing loneliness in the house with Jack always away somewhere’ (247). In substantiating emotion and feeling, Robinson gives texture to the negative affects that prop up the walls of this otherwise quiet Iowan house. The sadness that Jack feels – and that sticks to him – also has political and agitative affects. This section examines how the feelings domesticated in Home reach outwards into the whole family and the larger nation in the novel’s present moment of 1956. While Glory is quiet – ‘a state abided rather than enjoyed’ (Sykes 113) – Jack is frequently silent or absent. His emotional state, while not fully explored by the narrator – whose focalisation lingers on Glory – is frequently sad. He does not cry like Glory, but late in the novel admits to his sister: ‘I think I tell you my sad stories to see if they really are sad. And sure enough, the tears start, and I can relax about it’ (288). It is as though Glory’s processing of the emotions and affects that come from Jack’s stories and memories is a substitute for her brother’s. Jack has been through so much that he cannot

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even tell if these events are sad or not. In her essay “Givenness”, Robinson argues that ‘human emotion is conditioned profoundly by culture and society and one’s individual history of interaction with them both, in other words, by being human’ (“Givenness” 76). Jack’s particular life experiences in mid-twentieth-century America shape the realms of emotion he has access to and can articulate. The personal memories, too, which seem to haunt and structure Jack’s life are part of a larger aesthetic that Robinson explores in other novels. In Gilead, for example, Laura Tanner argues, ‘the narrative simultaneously returns the reader to the textured details of memory that continue to escape the text’s symbolic hold. Memory […] not only proceeds from emotion and sensory perception but remains inextricable from them’ (229). For Tanner, the memories investigated by Robinson’s novels are bound up with feelings and affects, and cannot always be fully grasped by the narrative style. This may even account for the ways in which Jack’s memories are held back and never fully revealed by the narrator. Key memories in Home that obtrude through the family’s quietness are often related to race. For Susan Petit, the Gilead ‘books are clearly concerned with the evils arising from American slavery and the failure of Reconstruction’ (119). While they are set in rural Iowa, Gilead ‘reflects American history and attitudes’ more broadly, ‘including a desire to forget or rewrite disturbing events in the past’. An essay by Yumi Pak, contrarily, finds Gilead and Home problematic in their depictions of race and argues that: ‘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 Ames’s and Glory’s representations of past and present’ (213). In other words, ‘Black bodies perform in spectacular fashion’ but ‘only attain articulation through the words, memories, mediations and interventions of white characters’. Pak levels a critique at the world of the Gilead novels – the structural, and repressed, racism that is central to the town and nation’s very being – and Robinson’s representational strategies. In Pak’s reasoning, blackness comes to underline and enable white – male – genealogies and the whiteness of the Boughton line is then propped up by a blackness that is forever deferred. But Pak also argues that Robinson’s refusal to include Christian apologies for slavery – either instead of or alongside the Christian abolitionism that the Boughtons/Ameses

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relate to – is a kind of historical rewriting or amnesia. Racial tension, for Pak, sustains the Gilead novels in ways that are explicit and implicit. My argument – while not contradictory of Pak’s – complements and also questions it. Jack’s return to the Boughton home does not just spark affects and memories that have lain dormant or unprovoked, but also raises larger national questions about race relations and the fight for civil rights. Key moments in American history – the Montgomery bus boycott and the murder of Emmett Till – puncture the ‘quiet’ but already agitated domestic spaces of Gilead. Indeed, the feelings of sadness that Jack provokes in himself and his family are charged by anger and frustration when he watches television reports or reads newspaper articles about current race relations, protests, and police brutality. As the separated husband of a Black woman and father of a mixed-race son, the feelings evoked by these events are understandable and pertinent. The first of these moments relates to a news report that Jack sees on the new television which he and Glory buy for the house. ‘Is that Montgomery?’ Glory asks him, as they watch ‘silently fulminating authorities and the Negro crowds’ (100). In images that are now ingrained in American cultural memory, the siblings see ‘white police with riot sticks […] pushing and dragging black demonstrators. There were dogs’ (101). Their father, keenly – and dubiously – ignorant of racial conflict in his country, assures them that, ‘In six months nobody will remember a thing about it.’ Jack replies, ‘[s]ome people will probably remember it’, referring both to people of colour affected by racist violence and perhaps, by extension, to the novel’s readers (101). Robert refutes Jack by noting that the McCarthy trials quickly faded from public memory. When Jack and Glory watch police ‘pushing the black crowd with dogs, turning fire hoses on them’, Jack’s exclamation of ‘Jesus Christ’ angers and upsets his father (102). For Jack, as for Robinson’s readers, ‘images of African American bodies violated by the instruments of segregation and white supremacy – water, rope, dogs, fire, batons – were and are immediately powerful and morally legible’ (Romine 150). Robinson clearly directs readers to recognise and recall the events that are happening contemporaneously to the novel’s action in 1956. The cultural memory-work that Home engages is an attempt to situate what sometimes feels like an ahistorical trilogy into a particular

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moment of the American past. Indeed, readers might ask why Robinson picks this aspect of the past to explore in the twenty-first century. As a contemporary reader – located in an era of #BlackLivesMatter, protests in Ferguson, the Flint water crisis, growing awareness of police brutality, and many other racial tensions – I am aware of the ways that this mid-twentieth-century moment is not too dissimilar from our own. Yet, Robert’s opinion is, in a sense, consigned to a dying America by Robinson, embodied as it is in his dying and weary frame. Jack understands that racial conflicts are desperately important in his present moment of the 1950s. But even if Jack may represent the future of American civil rights movement – or at least the growing awareness of white privilege and anti-Black racism – as Pak argues, blackness is consigned to the past or is ‘off-screen’ for much of the Gilead books. ‘Blackness,’ Pak argues, ‘carries the onus of history, of collective memory’, rather than being embodied in the novels (231). After the events in Montgomery depicted in Home, there are further references to moments of Black history that Jack and his father understand oppositionally. Jack’s reference to the ‘colored woman [who] wants to go to the University of Alabama’ is met with disapproval by his father: Black people ‘need to improve themselves’, he says (162). Referring to Autherine Lucy’s initially successful enrolment into the university – she was suspended after three days – this moment in Home further unsettles and destabilises the quietness of the Iowan home, using figures from Black history to puncture the seemingly detached world of the rural Midwest. Another figure of Black memory that arises in the Boughton home is Emmett Till. The murder of Till in 1955 continues to linger in cultural memory. As many scholars have pointed out, remembrance of Till appears in many different texts to address the history of lynching and racism in the South particularly.3 Till is a kind of locus for memories of racist violence. Referring to Till, Robert says: ‘Wasn’t he the negro fellow that – attacked the white woman?’ Of course, Till did not attack anyone – and he didn’t ‘wolf-whistle’ at a white woman in Mississippi, the purported ‘reason’ for his murder – and Robert’s racist misunderstanding of Black struggle and persecution is telling. He is old and dying and his sense that he has ‘another memory’ of the Till trial feeds into a larger national amnesia about racist violence (163). Myisha Priest argues that Till’s body has been so contested – debated, remediated, photographed, exhumed,

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re-buried – that it ‘functions, not as a site for remembering him but a battleground, a red record of disjunctures and discontinuities’ (4). Robinson’s invocation of Till – in this litany of historical events that are at the edges of Home’s narrative but may be central to its politics – further contributes to this contestation. Shortly after the conversation about Till, and once Jack has played some hymns on the piano to assuage the tension that has stuck to the family, his father asks to see Jack’s hand. Pointing to where a splinter had recently punctured the skin, his father says: ‘There will be a mark there’ (165). Talking symbolically about the mark or trace that Jack has imprinted upon the Boughton family, in addition to the mark of Black history that is a splinter in the American corpus, Robert is aware of how feelings linger. Yet, as Pak again argues, Jack has a mixed-race child and a Black wife, whose presence – at least until the end of the book – is entirely consigned to memory and storytelling. Blackness – like the African Americans who were once run out of Gilead, following the burning down of their church – is cast outside the world of the novel almost entirely. Critique like Pak’s suggests that Robinson utilises blackness as a backdrop to the Boughton story. The murder of Till, for example, only registers textually at the end of the novel, when Della tells Glory that they should not stay too long in Gilead: ‘we have to get back down to Missouri before dark. Especially the way things are now’ (334). The threat of racial violence and terror is present for the African American characters, but neither Glory nor the narrator comment or respond to this. The ‘continuous haunting presence’ and ‘absence of Black bodies in Gilead’ are not entirely addressed by Robinson or her narrator (Pak 234). Whether the sadness and affective landscapes that Jack sustains in the family home have political ends is open for debate. As such, the final moments of Home, after Jack has left and Glory meets Della for the first time, can be read in various ways that point to the complex role of race and memory in the novel, which look both to the past and the future.

Memories of the future Home ends with what seems like a memory from the future. After Glory meets Della and her son, Robert, she imagines a prospective

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moment in time when this mixed-race boy will return to the Boughton home. Shifting to the present tense, Glory imagines Robert being kind to her, despite not knowing who she is: ‘He is Jack’s son, and Southerners are especially polite to older women.’ Glory thinks ‘He will be curious about the place’ and that she 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’ (338–339). Proleptically, Glory is ‘remembering’ a moment of calm and resolution, a final homecoming that will neatly tie together family bonds and conclude a kind of Boughton cycle. Each child of the family returns to this house, but perhaps they also must leave; except for Glory, who Pak assesses 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’ (226). The possibility of a future without the racial tensions of the present – and the potential idealism invested in Jack’s son who might just return to Gilead – could be read another way. As Petit argues, the ‘future is now in the hands of the women, Lila and Della, who presumably will need to raise their sons on their own, and Glory, who as a teacher may be able to do what Ames should have done, which is to show others how to live up to the town’s original commitment to racial freedom and even equality’ (134). For Petit, the genealogies of womanhood – which Pak would suggest are sidelined for white male lineages throughout the trilogy – offer something like a redemptive vision of what is to come. Glory tells her brother before he leaves that ‘If you ever need to come home, I’ll be here. Call first, just to be sure. No, you won’t have to do that. I’ll be here’ (330). Glory is resigned to this house – to its physical, spiritual, and emotional walls – but the promise of a future is still possible. Glory does not think that Jack will come back to Gilead, let alone this house, but she is optimistic about the idea nonetheless. Her final lines, ‘[t]he Lord is wonderful’ (339), refer to the imagined homecoming of young Robert, but how far the characters, and readers, can put faith in this sentiment is to be debated. Indeed, to return to the political stakes of affect, feeling, or emotion – that is, the way they move in and through bodies and places – readers must question whether Glory or Jack’s feelings ultimately foster concrete or productive ends. While Glory’s ‘future memory’ and Jack’s investment in racial politics are well-meaning and clearly

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benevolent, can feelings alone do anything? Locked into their private worlds, privileges, and social milieu, can feeling sad really accomplish social change? Wishful thinking is fine for white characters, but it cannot help any Black Americans in a tangible way. While I do not want to push aside these questions – letting them stand as ongoing queries is this essay’s intention – it is also worth thinking about how Home’s ‘domesticated’ politics are remarkable in and of themselves. Sadness dominates Home, and it is an emotion or affect with strong and sturdy bonds. What might be thought of as an ‘ordinary’ or ‘basic’ feeling is, in Robinson’s hands, one of the most profound and political ways to reflect on ideas of family and nation. In casting a melancholy gaze upon the past, Robinson’s Gilead trilogy reframes and mediates the United States’ complex and troubling past, particularly with regards to race. While the Boughtons cannot do anything active, their passivity is important to represent and understand. Though its political scope may leave readers wanting, Home nonetheless opens up an Iowan home to forces and feelings about race, family, and nation that cannot be contained or ignored. The home-spaces of Robinson’s novel require readers to dwell on twentieth-century America as it is ruptured and troubled from within. Home quietly and emotively disturbs domestic and public spaces in very open-ended ways.

Notes 1 By cultural memory, I mean the ways in which the past is recollected through cultural forms and texts, whether they be books, films, monuments, or other means. I thus follow scholars such as Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (2009, 2011) and many others, who focus on cultural memory’s inherent complexity, fluidity, and (re)mediation rather than fixity. As Marita Sturken argues, cultural memory is that which is ‘shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural products and imbued with historical meaning’ (3). Recent works in an African American context extend this work of cultural memory – not always in this lexicon, however – into particularly racialised histories, texts, locales, and traditions. See, for instance: Salamishah Tillet (2012) and Juanita Brown (2015). 2 Many articles about Robinson have discussed the theological implications and underpinnings of her novels – her nonfiction is important here

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too – but a useful consideration of belief and predestination, especially as they intersect with the religious implications of home, can be found in Amy Hungerford’s Postmodern Belief (2010). See chapter five, “The Literary Practice of Belief”, in particular. 3 See, for example, Harriet Pollack and Christopher Metress (2008), Scott Romine (2008), Thadious Davis (2011), Rebecca Mark (2008), and Dora Apel (2004).

Works cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004. Allen, Carolyn. “The Privilege of Loneliness, the Kindness of Home: ‘Felt Experience’ in the Writing of Marilynne Robinson.” This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home. Edited by Jason W. Stevens. Brill, 2015. 190–211. Apel, Dora. Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. Duke Rutgers University Press, 2004. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke Rutgers University Press, 2011. —— The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Duke University Press, 1997. Brown, Kimberly Juanita. The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary. Duke University Press, 2015. Churchwell, Sarah. “A Man of Sorrows.” The Guardian, 4 October 2008, www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/04/fiction. (Accessed 4/9/2020.) Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke University Press, 2003. Davis, Thadious M. Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region and Literature. University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Translated by Sara B. Young. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Walter de Gruyter, 2009. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII. Edited by James Strachey. Vintage, 1994. 219–252. Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” The Affect Theory Reader, Duke University Press, 2010. 1–25. Hungerford, Amy. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton University Press, 2010. Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011): 434–472.

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Love, Heather K. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Harvard University Press, 2007. Mark, Rebecca. “Mourning Emmett: ‘One Long Expansive Moment.’” The Southern Literary Journal 40.2 (2008): 121–137. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005. Pak, Yumi, “‘Jack Boughton Has a Wife and a Child’: Generative Blackness in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home. Edited by Jason W. Stevens. Brill, 2015. 212–236. Park, Ondine, Tonya K. Davidson, and Rob Shields. “Introduction.” Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope. Edited by Davidson, Park, and Shields. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011. 1–15. Petit, Susan. “Field of Deferred Dreams: Baseball and Historical Amnesia in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 37.4 (2012): 119–137. Pollack, Harriet, and Christopher Metress (eds). Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination. Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Priest, Myisha. “‘The Nightmare is Not Cured’: Emmett Till and American Healing.” American Quarterly 62.1 (2010): 1–24. Robinson, Marilynne. Home. 2008. Virago, 2009. —— The Givenness of Things: Essays. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2015. Romine, Scott. The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press, 2007. Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Forgetting. University of California Press, 1997. Sykes, Rachel. “Reading for Quiet in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Novels.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 58.2 (2017): 108–120. 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. Tillet, Salamishah. Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. Duke University Press, 2012.

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8 ‘Onward Christian liberals’: Marilynne Robinson’s essays and the crisis of mainline Protestantism Alex Engebretson

If Marilynne Robinson did not write fiction, her essays – collected in the volumes Mother Country (1989), The Death of Adam (1998), Absence of Mind (2010), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), The Givenness of Things (2015), and What Are We Doing Here? (2018) – would place her among the foremost practitioners of this demanding form. Yet her fiction has received the majority of scholarly attention, particularly Housekeeping (1980), which has more scholarship devoted to it than any of Robinson’s other works. When the essays are considered, they are read as supplements to the fiction, as scaffolding for interpretation. Occasionally, they are analysed for their political, scientific, and theological content, as in the volume A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson (2016).1 With their circuitous forms and trenchant statements, Robinson’s essays merit more critical attention, not only to their content but also to their context, because they were written against, and therefore capture, many important tensions in contemporary American life. This essay takes up one such tension within American Protestantism. It goes by the phrase ‘mainline decline’. Something of a cliché of contemporary church history, ‘mainline decline’ nevertheless describes a real demographic shift after 1970 away from liberal ‘mainline’ Protestant churches towards conservative evangelical churches. As a life-long mainline Protestant, Robinson has experienced this shift and written extensively about it. Among other things, she is the representative voice of mainline Protestantism in contemporary US intellectual culture.2 This essay therefore moves away from studies of Robinson’s engagement with Christianity that centre on questions

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of belief, theology, or biblical imagery. While these studies have been illuminating, few have mentioned Robinson’s relationship to the institution of the church. This institutional context – her personal affiliation with the Protestant mainline church – opens the essays to new analysis. Specifically, I seek to clarify Robinson’s imagination of her own denomination, her perspective on the American church, and her positions on contemporary religious and political debates, and argue that her imagination is formed and influenced by her position within the liberal Protestant church. When placed in this institutional context, the essays become occasions to diagnose, repair, and reinvigorate the Protestant mainline, a historic American institution she perceives to be damaged and largely misunderstood. Robinson seeks to strengthen her church in two primary ways: by defining its identity against evangelicalism and by recommending a return to tradition.

Imagining the mainline Publication of The Death of Adam in 1998 changed Robinson’s public identity. For the first time, as demonstrated by the essay “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion”, she presents herself as explicitly religious: I am a Christian. This ought not to startle anyone. It is likely to be demographically true of an American of European ancestry. I have a strong attachment to the Scriptures, and to the theology, music, and art Christianity has inspired. My most inward thoughts and ponderings are formed by the narratives and traditions of Christianity. I expect them to engage me on my deathbed. (261)

Robinson wastes little time in this essay to particularising her Christian identity: ‘I am a mainline Protestant, a.k.a. a liberal Protestant […] I do not by any means wear my religion on my sleeve. I am extremely reluctant to talk about it all, chiefly because my belief does not readily reduce itself to simple statement’ (261). While it continues to be a matter of speculation what Robinson truly believes, her institutional affiliation is uncontroversial. She repeatedly and publicly identifies herself with ‘the old mainline’ (Givenness of Things 159).

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When Robinson uses the term ‘mainline’, she is referring to a group of seven churches, often referred to as the ‘Seven Sisters’ of American Protestantism: the Congregational Church (now part of the United Church of Christ; Robinson’s denomination), the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, the American Baptist Convention, and the Disciples of Christ.3 As church historian Jason S. Lantzer explains: ‘These denominations represent a diverse Reformation Era heritage, have traditionally exhibited differing theological and liturgical emphasis and preferences, and, since the nineteenth century have been the dominant cultural representatives of how and where the majority of American Christians, the largest faith tradition in the United States, worships’ (1). From the nineteenth century to around the 1960s, the mainline churches occupied a place of power, prestige, and influence in American life. Their theology tends to be liberal; they promote an ethical focus, a positive attitude toward human nature, the privileging of individual experience, and the acknowledgement of history as a condition for truth. It is a theology sceptical of dogmatism, orthodoxy, and certainty, one more open to mystery, uncertainty, and individual autonomy.4 Most importantly for Robinson’s essays, these churches have a long history of association with progressive political reform. Since the Second Great Awakening (roughly 1790–1840), the mainline churches ‘became places where the rights of women were discussed, where efforts were launched to reform prisons and asylums, where initiatives were started to create a system of free, public schools, where alcohol was openly condemned, and where slavery (at least in the North) was openly blasted as an abomination against both God and man’ (Lantzer 21). In the twentieth century, the Seven Sisters were the home of what came to be known as the Social Gospel, whose ‘adherents included both politically liberal and conservative Christians who believed that each sinner needed to find salvation but that laws could redeem all society from sin’ (39). The Social Gospel inspired a host of reform movements: laws for child welfare, public health, laws against houses of prostitution, the temperance movement, and the civil rights movement. The mainline churches were instrumental in transforming American politics, society, and culture, supporting and inspiring change from Abolitionism to the Progressive Era to the Great Society.



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Robinson views her own institution as advancing a critique of a model of salvation that emphasises an emotionally ecstatic conversion experience. The problem with such models, she claims, is not so much the emotional or experiential aspect, but that it is understood to provide a secure basis for salvation – and for judging others’ salvific status: Many of my nineteenth-century American heroes passed through the alembic of what they, like Edwards, called conversion, this qualitative leap in religious intensity and commitment that typically changed solidly pious Presbyterians or Methodists or Congregationalists into Congregationalists or Methodists or Presbyterians capable of prodigies of selflessness and discipline and generosity. I am and am not of their tradition, a mainline Protestant who has a vested interest in believing they overstated the importance of these singular, threshold experiences, and who takes it to be true that the grace of God works as it will, even gradually, patiently, quietly. (Givenness of Things 74)

The liberal church rejects such a model, which for Robinson signals a return to tradition. As she writes in her 2006 essay, “Onward, Christian Liberals”: ‘The liberal criticism, rejection of the idea that one could be securely persuaded of one’s own salvation and could even apply a fairly objective standard to the state of others’ souls, was in fact a return to Calvinism and its insistence on the utter freedom of God’ (44). She repeats this line of argument in a later essay: The religious monoculture we seem to be tending toward now is not a neutral averaging of the particularities of all the major traditions. It is very much marked by its cultural moment, when the whole focus is on “personal salvation,” on “accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior.” Theologically speaking, the cosmos has contracted severely. The simple, central, urgent pressure to step over the line that separates the saved from the unsaved, and after this the right, even the obligation, to turn and judge that great sinful world the redeemed have left behind – this is what I see as the essential nature of the emerging Christianity. Those who have crossed this line can be outrageously forgiving of one another and themselves, and very cruel in their denunciations of anyone else. And no, this is not Calvinism. Calvin would have called it salvations by works, which for him was anathema. (Givenness of Things 102)

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This theological emphasis on salvation – what theologians call soteriology – plays a large role in Robinson’s imagination of mainline identity as well as her critique of contemporary evangelicalism. Robinson also cites the tradition of progressive politics as a distinguishing mark of the mainline: The Second Great Awakening […] was strongly focused on slavery and its abolition, and also on the education of women […] in its main thrust it was profoundly progressive and reformist. It addressed inequality – of black and white, women and men, wealthy and poor – as a social sin to be overcome, especially through greatly increased access to education. (“Onward” 45)

Toward the end of the essay, she also asks: ‘What has personal holiness to do with politics and economics? Everything, from the liberal Protestant point of view. They are the means by which our poor and orphaned and our strangers can be sustained in real freedom, and graciously, as God requires’ (51). For Robinson, the mainline has a ‘liberal’ – in the American sense – or ‘progressive’ political identity. It has its origins in Abolitionism and progressive education, and continues today as a voice for racial and gender equality. Robinson has spent her entire life in the mainline. Her childhood was spent in the Presbyterian church and she later changed to the United Church of Christ (Congregationalists): ‘I have shifted allegiances the doctrinal and demographic inch that separates Presbyterians from Congregationalists’ (Death of Adam 231). While it is true that doctrinally and demographically Presbyterians and Congregationalists are nearly identical, it is worth speculating why Robinson switched denominations. Political affinity is one possibility. Robinson rightly considers the United Church of Christ (UCC) to be among the most politically liberal. Indeed, after 1970, the UCC ‘would become a leading voice for radical social causes’ including aiding Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in their boycott against the Nestlé Corporation, campaigning against South African apartheid, calling for the repeal of laws against abortion, and ‘the UCC became the first, and for a long time the only, denomination to support gay rights, with the ordination of William Johnson in 1971’ (Bendroth 184–185). Robinson celebrates this progressive tradition: ‘My denomination blessed the unions of same-sex couples



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until the minute it could instead perform their marriages’ (Givenness of Things 162).

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Imagining the mainline decline Robinson’s tenure as a mainline congregant has overlapped with the mainline’s decline. There has been a long-term demographic decline for mainline churches since the 1960s. Between 1960 and 1997, ‘the Presbyterian Church (USA) has suffered a net decline of about 500,000; the Episcopal Church a decline of 700,000; the United Church of Christ (which incorporates most of the Congregationalists) a decline of 800,000; the Disciples of Christ a decline of 900,000; and the United Methodist Church a decline of over two million members’ (Noll 177). Today, as Lantzer notes, mainline churches do not represent the majority of American Christians. As of 2009, the Seven Sisters had a total membership of 21.2 million, while the Roman Catholic Church is by far the largest American church with 67.1 million members.5 As a result, there has been a decline in the status and influence of the mainline churches. Explaining the origins of this decline has produced a cottage industry of ‘mainline decline’ theories. The most conventional thesis emphasises doctrine and theology.6 At some point in the early to mid-twentieth century, the churches began to liberalise doctrine and theology in order to be more welcoming and respectable to the wider culture. This prompted many Christians to exit the mainline for churches considered more ‘conservative’ or ‘orthodox’. Easily the most famous theory of this dynamic is in Dean M. Kelley’s controversial book, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (1972). Kelley’s argument concerns the relative levels of ‘strictness’ of conservative and liberal churches. Sociologist Dean R. Hoge explains: Kelley argued that the mainline denominations have lost members because they have become weak as religious bodies. Strong religions provide clear-cut, compelling answers to questions concerning the meaning of life, mobilize their members’ energies for shared purposes, require a distinctive code of conduct, and discipline their members for failure to live up to it. Weak religions allow a diversity of theological viewpoints, do not and cannot command much of their members’ time or effort, promote few if any distinctive rules of conduct, and

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discipline no one for violating them. In short, strong religions foster a level of commitment that binds members to the group; weak religions have low levels of commitment and are unable to resist influences that lower it even further. (“Mainline Churches: The Real Reason for Decline”)

Kelley’s theory has been qualified and expanded, but never fully repudiated, even by empirical researchers. It therefore remains one of the most influential descriptions of the causes of mainline decline. Robinson is interested in the reasons for mainline decline and her interventions into this debate differ considerably from the conventional theories. She primarily blames the mainline for its own decline. A prominent theme is that churches have not educated themselves in their own tradition: ‘The mainline churches, which are the liberal churches, in putting down the burden of educating their congregations in their own thought and history, have left them inarticulate’ (Givenness of Things 104). Elsewhere, she cites ‘the rise in this country of a culture of Christianity that does not encourage thought. I intend this as a criticism not only of the so-called fundamentalists but, more particularly, of the mainline churches, which have fairly assiduously culled out all traces of the depth and learnedness that were for so long among their greatest contributions to American life’ (“Onward” 42–43). Without a healthy respect for cultural tradition, Robinson views the mainline as having lost profundity of thought and the ability to publicly articulate its identity. This scepticism toward tradition encompasses an attitude toward biblical interpretation: ‘On the liberal side we have a long retreat from Scripture and tradition. Scripture so primitive, theology so elitist, everything between so middlebrow […] liberal American Christianity has been agonizing over mythic elements in Scripture, taking the crudest interpretations as the ones most liable to be correct’ (Givenness of Things 164). Robinson is critical of the liberal church’s insistence on taking German ‘higher criticism’ of the Bible as authoritative: ‘It is liberal Christianity that – very perversely, in my view – defers to this old German scholarship’ (167). Her thesis is clear: the mainline cannot grow and nourish itself without educating itself in its own traditions. The only way to do that is to cultivate a respectful dialogue with the past. This reengagement with tradition will prove one of Robinson’s most important ideas for renewing the declining fortunes of the Seven Sisters.



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The evangelical other

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The problem of decline is not simply one of loss. For Robinson, the problem lies in what has replaced the mainline as America’s dominant Protestant tradition, the rise of ‘fundamentalism’: The example of coercion I have offered, the standing invitation to sacrifice one’s metaphysics to one’s sense of comme il faut, has had the effect of marginalizing the liberal churches and elevating fundamentalism to the status of essential Christianity. The consequences of handing over the whole of Christianity to one momentarily influential fringe is clearly borne out in the silencing of social criticism and the collapse of social reform, both traditionally championed by American mainline churches, as no one seems any longer to remember. (Death of Adam 262)

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the social criticism and reform on the Christian left has been silenced. This is because the most vociferous champions of religious social reform since the 1970s have come from the Religious Right. Robinson refers to this tradition under several names and phrases: ‘fundamentalist’, ‘neo-fundamentalist’, ‘those lately bold and robust big churches’, or simply ‘these arms-bearing folk’. Curiously, she does not often refer to this tradition as ‘evangelicalism’, as widely used in church history and contemporary US political discourse.7 It is only since the 1970s that the term ‘evangelical’ came to be associated with a US political ideology, what is now known as the ‘Religious Right’. Robinson’s essays bear witness to this shift in cultural power away from the mainline and toward the evangelicals, offering a multi-pronged critique of this conservative Christian religious, social, and political movement. The effect of her critique is to establish the space and boundaries of mainline identity, thereby presenting her church as a moral alternative to evangelicalism. In his study of contemporary literature within the context of the ‘conservative Christian resurgence’, Christopher Douglas summarises the social, cultural, and political significance of the Religious Right since the 1970s: Conservative Christians reshaped the political and moral landscape of the nation […] by making universal claims within the culture wars, from questions of gender roles and sexuality, the Cold War and the

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War on Terror, science and health education, race and immigration, economic policy and the welfare state, and indeed the meaning of America and America in the world. Conservative Christians in general believe that communism, pornography, abortion, premarital sex, evolution, homosexual acts and homosexual marriage, and anthropogenic climate change were wrong or untrue. Conversely, they argued that school prayer, traditional gender roles, creationism, abstinence-only sex education, and the untold Christian history of the nation were morally right and factually correct. (6)

Douglas captures the major tendencies of what came to be called the Religious Right, tendencies that Marilynne Robinson has witnessed and criticised for most of her career. She offers a similar list of political positions in a moment of distancing between herself and her church from evangelical associations: I am a Christian. There are any number of things a statement of this kind might mean and not mean, the tradition and its history being so complex. To my utter chagrin, at this moment in America it can be taken to mean that I look favorably on the death penalty, that I object to food stamps or Medicaid, that I expect marriage equality to unknit the social fabric and bring down wrath, even that I believe Christianity itself to be imperiled by a sinister media cabal. It pains me to have to say in many settings that these are all things I object to strenuously on religious grounds, having read those Gospels. Persons of my ilk, the old mainline, typically do object just as strenuously, and on these same grounds. But they are unaccountably quiet about it. And here we have a great part of the reason that these gun-toting resenters of the poor and of the stranger can claim and occupy a major citadel of the culture almost unchallenged. (Givenness of Things 159)

The Religious Right is a constant in her essays and though she shares the identity of ‘Christian’ with evangelicals, she attempts to persuade her educated, secular readership of the distance between ‘the old mainline’ and ‘these gun-toting resenters of the poor and stranger’.8 The division between ‘liberal’ or ‘mainline’ and evangelicals or ‘fundamentalists’ is essential to Robinson’s imagination of contemporary American church history. Her rhetoric often turns on an us-versus-them opposition. There is ‘the old mainline’ against ‘guntoting resenters of the poor and of the stranger’ (159). There are ‘the mainline traditions […] relative to the so-called fundamentalists’

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(106–107). She writes of social coercion, which has ‘the effect of marginalizing the liberal churches and elevating fundamentalism to the status of essential Christianity’ (Death of Adam 262). If one of the purposes of these essays is to persuade readers of the moral superiority of the mainline, then Robinson must establish her church’s identity. One of the ways she does this is by using a counterpoising rhetoric, privileging and bordering-off the mainline from an encroaching evangelical other. This opposition between evangelicals and liberals is not entirely imaginative projection on Robinson’s part. She is in good company with historians and sociologists, who arrive at similar topographies of contemporary Protestantism. In American Grace (2012), sociologists Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell use the term ‘evangelical’ and contrast it against ‘mainline Protestantism’, defining both traditions by denomination (602–603 n16). Another pair of sociologists, Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout, use the term ‘Conservative Christian’ against ‘Mainline Protestant’, defining them both against other traditions such as African American Protestantism (8). It must be said these categories are imprecise and conceal the considerable diversity of American religious and political orientations.9 Nevertheless, sociologists continue to use them as they name important divisions within American religious life and Marilynne Robinson’s critique of the Religious Right, with its opposition between evangelical and mainline, rests on relatively firm empirical and historical ground. Robinson’s most common characterisation of the Religious Right is of a movement blind to the traditional Judeo-Christian ethic of care for the poor and vulnerable. From her perspective, the mainline promotes the value of equality and a social justice ethic, while ‘the movement we are seeing now is notably devoid of interest in equality. Indeed, it passionately supports a government whose policies have created a sharp rise in the rate of poverty. For a self-declared Christian movement it shows startlingly little sense of responsibility for the vulnerable in society’ (“Onward” 45). Evangelicals tend to privilege certain ‘sins’ over issues of poverty. She writes, ‘I wouldn’t mind hearing the word “sin” once in a while. If the word is spoken now it is likely to be in one of those lately bold and robust big churches who are obsessed with sins Jesus never mentioned at all’ (Givenness

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of Things 100–101). The Religious Right’s call to ‘the return to traditional values seems to them to mean […] a bracing and punitive severity toward the vulnerable among us’ (When I Was a Child xi). Robinson’s imagination of the liberal church as the church of social justice against the callousness of evangelicalism is the starting place for her deeper critiques of the Religious Right, which concern national history and secularism. Robinson sees the evangelical imagination of American history as flawed on two counts. It is flawed in its understanding of national decline: ‘I differ from these self-declared patriots not only in the assumption that God loves the nations equally and that his grace is meant for all of them but also in my belief that the United States of America has done many things right’ (When I Was a Child 137). According to Robinson, many of the things the US has done ‘right’, including abolitionism, have been influenced by the Protestant mainline churches. The other flaw concerns the rhetoric about America returning to a ‘Christian nation’: It turns out, by their reckoning, that the country they call the greatest on earth has spent most of its history acting against its own (great) nature, and that the enhancements of life it has provided for the generality of its people […] have made its citizens weak and dependent. How the greatest nation on earth maintains this exalted status while burdened with a population these patriots do not like or respect is an interesting question, certainly. In any case, the return to traditional values seems to them to mean, together with a bracing and punitive severity toward the vulnerable among us, the establishment of a kind of religious monoculture we have never had and our institutions have never encouraged. (xi)

The phrase ‘religious monoculture’ also appears in The Givenness of Things: ‘The religious monoculture we seem to be tending toward now is not a neutral averaging of the particularities of all the major traditions’ (102). Robinson argues for religious pluralism, which she rightly claims marks US history from its origins, against what she sees as the evangelical desire for a unified religious culture. If the mainline is to establish its difference from evangelicalism, then the idea of a religious monoculture, where traditional denominational boundaries are dissolved, should be resisted. Robinson is also critical of the evangelical political imagination that views Christianity as locked into combat against ‘secularism’.

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Her critique of the evangelical fear of an encroaching secularism and its desire for a religious monoculture align with such religious organisations as Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU). Such organisations on the Religious Left, heavily associated with the mainline churches, have forcibly worked against the evangelical desire to break down the church–state divide.10 Robinson, too, believes that this Jeffersonian ‘wall of separation’ is best for the nation and its religious life. Since the secularity of the state is one of the conditions for religious freedom, Robinson senses the irony of the Religious Right’s attitude: ‘Movements that present themselves as religiously motivated have now begun to regard the state as aggressively secular, and as enforcing secularism, precisely in maintaining institutional distance that was meant in the first instance to protect religious freedom’ (Givenness of Things 93). She seeks to distance herself from this ‘recent vogue for feeling culturally embattled’ (98). This feeling in part stems from how conservative Christians experienced modernity. Douglas writes, ‘Conservative Christians themselves experienced modernity as a secular, aggressive intrusion making claims on them and their children and destroying the nation’s moral fabric’ (7). They would often point to the Supreme Court decision that legalised abortion – Roe v. Wade – ‘because it combined the ways in which judicial overreach, lax sexual morality, and a society that placed more value on individual liberty than human life seemed to characterize a changing America’ (Douglas 7). Robinson has little sympathy: These people see an onrush of secularism intent on driving religion to the margins, maybe over the edge, and for the sake of Christianity they want to enlist society itself in its defense. They want politicians to make statements of faith, and when merchants hang out their seasonal signs and banners they want them to say something much more specific than ‘Happy Holidays.’ They say that the Founders meant to establish freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. (When I Was a Child 134–135)

Robinson does not deny the positive Christian influence on society, yet she is uncomfortable with those ‘who think that the majority religious tradition in the country, by virtue of its being the majority tradition, ought to be asserted very forcefully as an intrinsic part of our national identity’ (134–135). Robinson aligns herself and,

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by association, her church with the traditional division between church and the secular state. Besides Christianity, she writes, ‘I have other loyalties that are important to me, to secularism, for example. To political democracy’ (Givenness of Things 159). These three main points – harm to the poor, the problematic ideas of decline and a ‘Christian nation’, and the posture of defence against secularism – are complemented by other smaller criticisms, such as the Religious Right’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. This ‘resurgence of Christianity […] has brought a harshness, a bitterness, a crudeness, and a high-handedness into the public sphere that are only to be compared to the politics, or the collapse of politics, in the period before the Civil War. Its self-righteousness fuels the damnedest things – I use the word advisedly – notably the acquisition of homicidal weapons’ (Givenness of Things 103). There is also the matter of biblical interpretation: ‘I am moving, reluctantly, toward the conclusion that these Christians, if they read their Bibles, are not much impressed by what they find here’ (158). If Robinson is opposed to ‘these’ Christians, she does so with a degree of ambivalence, for she knows how it must appear to outsiders: I must assume that those who disagree with my understanding of Christianity are Christians all the same, that we are members of one household. I confess that from time to time I find this difficult. This difficulty may be owed in part to the fact that I have reason to believe they would not extend this courtesy to me. So it is with these conflicts in which we are so tediously entrapped, these frictions and disputes that have brought discredit to the faith we claim, and that resemble much too closely our approach to other faiths, to our further discredit. (When I Was a Child 132–133)

Despite how it may appear, Robinson does not relent from her disavowal of this conservative Christian movement. Her presentation of evangelicals, a politically diverse population, runs the risk of caricature. At times, her off-handed comments about ‘these Christians’ seem analogous to President Barack Obama’s infamous gaff, that frustrated, small-town Pennsylvania voters ‘cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them’ (Seelye and Zeleny). Robinson risks this form of simplification in part because, by the act of criticism, she clears a space, defines boundaries, and makes



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intelligible the identity of the mainline churches. Simply put, the mainline is not evangelical and not associated with the Religious Right. By defining her tradition against the evangelical other, she imagines what makes the mainline distinctive and how it might rehabilitate itself.

Renewing the mainline Since Robinson believes the path of renewal exists within the mainline, she rejects the idea of looking to evangelicals or fundamentalists for ideas. She writes of an article that ‘concluded by quoting a professor in a mainline seminary to the effect that they spent a great deal of their time trying to adapt the methods of the fundamentalists to their own purposes. This I do truly believe. I would expect this to be the case for the next few decades, so that they and fundamentalism can lose the interest of the populace together’ (Givenness of Things 106–107). The path forward is not toward evangelicalism, nor is it toward a rejection of the past and an embrace of theological ‘modernism’, as we shall see in her criticism of Bishop Shelby Spong. What the mainline needs is a coherent identity, rooted in a cultural tradition of ‘liberality’. One of the main points of analysis of Robinson’s diagnosis of mainline decline is a denial of cultural tradition: ‘The division between the liberals and the evangelicals is often treated as falling between the not really and the really religious, the dilettante Christians and those adhering to the true faith. This is the fault of the liberals in large part, because they have neglected their own tradition, or have abandoned it in fear that distinctiveness might scuttle ecumenism’ (“Onward” 47). This neglect or abandonment has left her church bereft of the power and confidence that comes from cultural tradition. This may sound like a conservative argument – and it is to an extent. Robinson is challenging a powerful bias against history and tradition within the liberal churches. Unlike evangelicals, the mainline has been far more willing to abandon tradition for theological innovation, liturgical relevance, and ecumenicalism. This has led to rootlessness, the effect of which is a diminishment of the cultural and political force of the mainline.

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One of the historical sources Robinson insists the mainline should recover is Calvinism. In her humanistic rendering of Calvinism, this much maligned Protestant tradition contains seeds of replenishment: When I say Calvinism has faded, I am speaking of the uncoerced abandonment by the so-called mainline churches of their own origins, theology, culture, and tradition. I have spent most of my life in Presbyterian and Congregational churches, and I was well into middle age before I made the connection of these traditions with Calvin, though I had heard any number of times in other contexts about the all-pervading influence of this theology. What has taken the place of Calvinism in the mainline churches? With all due respect, not much. I apologize. There are countless good souls in the mainline churches. No other tradition interests or attracts me. But through the whole of my experience I have had the sense that these churches were backpedaling, were evading, at last very effectively, the influence cultural history would have given them. (Givenness of Things 100–101)

Here Robinson imagines the mainline as having forfeited the rich theological heritage of Calvinism for ‘not much’. The affect is one of loss, lament. This passage helps us understand one of Robinson’s motivations for returning to Calvinism again and again in her essays, namely for the cultural benefit and refreshment of the mainline churches. Robinson’s understanding of Calvinist theology is complex and idiosyncratic, yet she often emphasises ethical themes that are compatible with liberal theology. Indeed, the concept of ‘liberal’ and ‘liberality’ are key points of emphasis in her presentation of Calvin, concepts which a liberal Protestant audience would likely receive positively. She often quotes Calvin at length, framing the quotation to highlight its ethical content: ‘In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin establishes a profound theological basis for liberality, openhandedness’ (When I Was a Child 77). In the essay, “Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism”, she writes: There is clearly a feeling abroad that God smiled on our beginnings, and that we should return to them as we can. If we really did attempt to return to them, we would find Moses as well as Christ, Calvin, and his legions of intellectual heirs. And we would find a recurrent, passionate insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, on being kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful, and enjoying the great

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blessings God has promised to liberality to the poor. These phrases are all Edwards’s and there are many more like them. Calvin says, in a sermon on Deuteronomy 15, ‘[A]s God bestoweth his benefites upon us, let us beware that wee acknowledge it towards him, by doing good to our neighbors whome he offereth unto us, so as wee neither exempt ourselves from their want, nor seclude them form our abundance, but gently make them partakers with us, as folke that are linked together in an inseparable bond.’ From the depths of my heart, I say, Amen. (77)

The progressive politics of the liberal churches, of seeking justice for the poor and vulnerable, have become theologically weakened over time. For Robinson, strengthening these politics requires a rich understanding of the ethic of ‘liberality’, an understanding rooted in cultural tradition. In returning to Calvin, Robinson risks appearing ‘conservative’, though she does so to preserve the ethics that underlay a progressive politics of social justice. With her respectful attitude toward history, Robinson stands opposed to those, like Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, who seek to abandon history and dissolve core tenants of traditional Christianity. Her lacerating critique of Spong’s book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die (1998), reveals her scepticism toward certain forms of theological ‘modernism’, Robinson is especially critical of Spong’s representation of the Hebrew Bible: It is entirely appropriate for Christians to come to whatever terms they must with the difficulties of their own sacred narrative, their own mythopoesis. But the Old Testament is another matter. It is not in the same sense theirs, and if they refuse to grant it its terms, or to give it their respectful attention, then it is not theirs in any sense at all. When Bishop Spong says, ‘The Jewish God in the Hebrew scriptures was assumed to hate anyone that the nation of Israel hated,’ he offers no evidence of the truth of his harshly negative remark. (When I Was a Child 99)

Here again, Robinson’s critique of Spong is consistent with the tradition of her church, since it is the Presbyterians and Congregationalists who have traditionally given equal emphasis to the Old and New Testaments. As she implies, Spong’s disrespect toward the Hebrew Bible borders on anti-Semitic, and his argument that the Old Testament is outmoded is based on a crude understanding of

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the biblical text. The renewal of the mainline does not lie with theological modernism and John Shelby Spong. ‘The [United Church of Christ] as a denomination was in ‘grave danger,’ historian Charles Hambrick-Stowe wrote, of ‘unrooted ahistorical idiosyncrasy’ and ‘sect-like isolation’ from the rest of the Christian world’ (qtd in Bendroth 192). Robinson’s essays seek to tentatively address these issues. Rather than offering a comprehensive programme for mainline renewal, the essays gesture toward a path for shoring up the identity of the liberal churches, and point the way toward the richest possibilities available in cultural history.

Onward, Christian liberals Perhaps it is odd that Robinson persists in being a church-going Christian. Left-wing reform movements in recent years, such as feminism or the LGBTQ+ movement, are largely secular affairs. So, if it is social justice that Robinson desires, would she not be better off abandoning the liberal church for the humanist left? If she is tired of being associated with the Religious Right, would not it be simpler to drop her Christian identity? There are many bitter moments in the essays having to do with these tensions: ‘I still see the best impulses of the country expressed in its politics, and its worst impulses as well, the worst abetted by self-declared Christians’ (Givenness of Things 103). If Christianity has contributed to the injustices Robinson decries, why not move into a political tradition with fewer historical burdens? The obvious answer for Robinson’s continued association with Christianity is that she personally believes it is true. The more interesting answer is that Christianity, as embodied by the Protestant mainline, offers an alternative vision of political justice. Robinson implies the cultural sources of the secular left – say Mill for liberals and Marx for socialists – are impoverished when separated from their ancient religious sources. She wants to maintain the tradition of couching social reform movements in religious terms, such as the biblical language of ‘liberality’. The reforms once championed by the liberal churches, and the quest for justice embodied in religious language and tradition, is a political tradition she believes America needs.

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Robinson’s essays need to be taken seriously by literary scholars because they take up key themes in American intellectual life. Along with her interviews, the essays are the best supplementary texts for understanding her fiction, as well as important contributions to US intellectual history and the history of the essay form. This essay has argued that an important context for interpreting the essays is her strong association with mainline Protestantism and that many of her essays are concerned, explicitly or implicitly, with imagining and defending the identity of the liberal churches. They are also occasions for diagnosing problems and gesturing toward strategies for the church’s renewal. Whatever the fate of the historic Seven Sisters of American Protestantism, whether further decline or rejuvenation, these churches do have a strong representative in US intellectual culture, so long as Marilynne Robinson continues to write essays.

Notes 1 See also Chapter 6, “The Essays”, in Alex Engebretson’s Understanding Marilynne Robinson, South Carolina Press (2017). 2 To avoid repetition, I shall also refer to the mainline churches as the ‘liberal’ churches or as the ‘Seven Sisters’ of American Protestantism. 3 This characterisation of the mainline is indebted to Jason S. Lantzer’s Mainline Christianity: The Past and Future of America’s Majority Faith (2012). 4 This summary of liberal theology is indebted to Paul Rasor’s Faith Without Certainty: Liberal Theology in the 21st Century (2005). 5 ‘According to the 77th Annual Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches in 2009, the Seven Sisters had a total membership of around 21.2 million (with the largest denomination being the United Methodist Church at 7.9 million members). By comparison, the Roman Catholic Church claimed a membership of 67.1 million; making it the largest church in the nation. The Southern Baptist Convention, the second largest denomination in the survey, had a membership of 16.2 million. Simply put, the Seven Sisters, from a numerical standpoint, are no longer the majority denominations, and thus no longer the face of American Christianity’ (Lantzer 1–2). 6 Examples of this argument may be found in Dean M. Kelley’s Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, Harper & Row (1972); Thomas

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C. Reeves’s The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity, Free Press (1996); Dave Shiflett’s Exodus: Why American are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity, Sentinel (2005). 7 Of course, Robinson probably knows that ‘evangelical’ has a rich history in Protestantism, and she may wish to preserve its historical, theological meaning, i.e., for sects that prioritise the ‘gospel’ over the ‘law’. 8 One of the questions historians and sociologists have attempted to answer is which group or groups comprise the Religious Right. Historian George M. Marsden uses the phrase ‘Religious Right’ to include: ‘cultural conservatives from other heritages such as Roman Catholics and Mormons. The Protestant part of this coalition has often been referred to, especially by those who do not appreciate the internal divisions within conversionist Christianity, as simply “evangelical,” or sometimes as simply “fundamentalist.” It would be more accurate to say that the Religious Right as a political movement has attracted many [previously] separatist fundamentalists and “fundamentalistic” evangelicals’ (234–235). Therefore, it is not entirely accurate to interchange the terms ‘Religious Right’ and ‘evangelical’, since the political movement is made of groups of conservatives from other faith traditions. Yet, for the purposes of discussing Robinson’s engagement with this movement, the evangelical element of this coalition should be emphasised, since they are the target of her critique. 9 As Douglas notes, church denomination does not necessarily correlate with political orientation. Putnam and Campbell cite the 2004 election of George W. Bush as an example, wherein only 73% of white ‘evangelicals’ voted for him, leaving a substantial number of voters against him. There are political liberals spread across many different denominations, including Democratic-voting ‘evangelicals’. 10 ‘Part of this dynamic has to do with who makes up the Religious Left. In the main, it finds its home in the denominations of the Seven Sisters, where alliances of modernists and moderates have largely held sway within denominational hierarchies since the 1930s. It was this alliance that allowed the attempted recasting of Christianity in the 1960s and 1970s, and it is this group of Christians who are most worried about conservative churches being engaged in politics’ (Lantzer 78).

Works cited Bendroth, Margaret. The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

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Douglas, Christopher. If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right. Cornell University Press, 2016. Greeley, Andrew and Michael Hout. The Truth about Conservative Christians: What They Think and What They Believe. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Hoge, Dean. “Mainline Churches: The Real Reason for Decline.” First Things, March 1993. www.firstthings.com/article/1993/03/mainlinechurches-the-real-reason-for-decline/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Lantzer, Jason. Mainline Christianity: The Past and Future of America’s Majority Faith. New York University Press, 2012. Mariotti, Shannon L., and Joseph H. Lane Jr (eds). A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson. University Press of Kentucky, 2016. Marsden, George. Fundamentalism and American Culture. Oxford University Press, 2006. Noll, Mark. The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity. Eerdmans, 2002. Putnam, Robert and David Campbell. American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us. Simon and Schuster, 2012. Rasor, Paul. Faith Without Certainty: Liberal Theology in the 21st Century. Skinner House Books, 2005. Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. Yale University Press, 2010. —— The Death of Adam. Picador, 1998; Houghton Mifflin, 1998. —— The Givenness of Things: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. —— Housekeeping. Faber, 1980; reprinted 2005. —— Mother Country: Britain, The Nuclear State, and Nuclear Pollution. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. —— “Onward, Christian Liberals: Faith Is Not about Piety or Personal Salvation, but about Helping Those in Need.” The American Scholar 75.2 (2006): 42+. Rpt. in The Best American Essays 2007. Editor David Foster Wallace. Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 210–220. —— What Are We Doing Here?: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. —— When I Was a Child I Read Books. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Seelye, Katharine and Jeff Zeleny. “On the Defensive, Obama Calls His Words Ill-Chosen.” The New York Times, 13 April 2008. www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/us/politics/13campaign.html. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Spong, John Shelby. Why Christianity Must Change or Die. HarperOne, 1998.

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Presence in absence: the spectre of race in Gilead and Home Emily Hammerton-Barry

In the narratives of Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), companion pieces both set in the fictive town of Gilead in 1956, the spectre of race haunts America. In Gilead, generational tensions in Reverend John Ames’s paternal line are shown to be interlinked with historic, racial contexts: through evasive retelling of his past, Ames unwittingly exposes his own racial blindness in the build up to the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which contrasts with his grandfather’s active role opposing the racist institution of slavery as a soldier in the American Civil War. Ames’s tale is therefore infused with the history of racial conflict and cultural amnesia in the American Midwest and culminates in the revelation that his long-forsaken godson and namesake, Jack – John Ames Boughton – has a common-law marriage with Della, a Black woman, and a mixed-race son, Robert. Home, which is also set in 1956, recounts the same narrative events from the perspective of Glory, Jack’s sister, and follows more closely the internal family tensions surrounding Jack’s troubled youth and the ethical conflict between Jack and his religious father and sister who, until the final pages of the novel, also blindly ignore the plight of the Black community in America. As the narrative’s quotidian surface bubbles with the political undercurrent of the emerging tensions of the civil rights movement, prodigal son Jack is revealed to be the force of ethical redemption, unwilling to succumb to the racist unseeing of the elderly preachers, Reverend Ames, and his father, Reverend Boughton. This essay argues that the figure of Jack’s wife, Della, is fundamental to both Gilead and Home. Although she hardly enters the

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narrative, Della’s presence and significance are indirectly felt throughout both novels; as I argue, she is spectral, with her absence taking on a profound, paradoxical visibility where the unsaid and the unseen become the implicit kernel around which characters’ conflicts unfold. Race emerges as a spectre in both novels; as a narrative haunting that manifests as a constant psychic anxiety within Robinson’s white characters and by the constructed tangible and ghostly absence of the marginalised Black community that is hinted at throughout Gilead and Home. The largely unvoiced tension of America’s racial history that haunts both novels climaxes with the appearance of Della, who is mentioned in Gilead and appears in person at the end of Home, standing in both novels as the embodiment of previously hidden racial conflicts and inter-racial relations. Through reference to Jacques Derrida’s work on spectrality, this essay reads the first two Gilead novels in the context of critical whiteness studies, arguing that Della’s absent presence and Ames’s narration of Gilead allow Robinson to deconstruct the idea of whiteness in the American Midwest, and beyond.

The spectral turn and critical whiteness studies The early 1990s saw the emergence of a ‘spectral turn’ in critical thinking as theorists engaged repeatedly with the image of ghosts, spirits, and spectres.1 Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993) is often regarded as a major catalyst in the movement towards the theoretical development of spectro-politics.2 For Derrida, the spectre is a revenant force perpetually threatening to return and disrupt the present. The question of the ghost is ‘wide-ranging’ in Derrida’s theory and his hauntology ‘an alternative ontology [that] renders all being and meaning ghostly’ (Coughlan 2; Peeren 11). In these theories, ghostliness becomes another word for otherness. The ghost – located in the boundary between the living and the dead – opens up a liminal space for dialogue through which progress might be made possible, to ‘live better […] and more justly’; as Derrida argues, ‘It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it’ (xviii, xix). This spectral conversation constructs a ‘being-withspectres [that] would also be […] a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations’ (xix). Derrida therefore produces a duality that

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associates spectrality ‘both with the powerful systemic forces […] that partake of the ghost’s ungraspability and its power to disturb and disjoint, and with the dispossessed subjects these systems produce’ (Peeren 17). Indeed, Derrida’s spectral conversation engages the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, or political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. (Derrida xix)

The ethical argument behind Derrida’s spectrality, then, is to find ‘a different, better way to relate to the other’ (Peeren 26). Finding a way to speak with, be with, and accommodate the ghost is ‘doing justice to the other’ (Coughlan 4). Esther Peeren has developed Derrida’s understanding of the spectre as the haunting call of social justice, by evolving the ethical understanding of this spectral conversation to encompass not only the already dead and those who are not yet born, but also ‘living ghosts’, the dispossessed and socially marginalised communities whose present othering frequently figures them in a position of social death (14).3 Peeren’s concept of living ghosts is not intended to conjure the image of a zombie figure, but to refer to the social death that is experienced by marginalised communities through the constructed process of social exile. Peeren expands Derrida’s analysis by inviting readers to ‘look through the eyes of the ghost as well as the haunted’ and consider the complex effect metaphors of haunting have on living people whose experiences and lives are frequently imagined through association with spectrality and social exclusion (32). The spectral invokes the ghostly vision of the oppressed as a disempowered ‘other’, not granted access to fully embodied social existence and, conversely, conjuring an understanding of social resistance which ‘allows the vulnerable ghost to struggle against the spectralizing systems by which it is produced as invisible and irrelevant’ as the ghost comes to ‘haunt[…] its conjurer’ (20). In this way, the spectre, as a powerful revenant whose invisibility becomes a hidden force, is capable of instilling fear through its invocation of possible social justice and revolution to come. As a work of literary analysis, this essay follows Derrida and Peeren’s theories of haunting but is not limited by them when considering the various ways in which differing racial hauntings find expression

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in Gilead and Home. A Derridean spectre is visible in the haunting of white characters of Robinson’s novels through the constant return of unresolved historical conflict stemming from the systemic racist persecution and oppression of African American communities. As David Coughlan has noted in his analysis of Robinson’s novels, ‘accommodating the ghost’ in Robinson often demonstrates ‘the difficulty in accommodating race’ (177). In Gilead, the spectre of race haunts the novel primarily through the psychological turmoil experienced by its white narrator, Reverend Ames, as he exposes his own failure to confront racism throughout his life, actions, and community. In Home, the spectre of American racism, which haunts the novel in a Derridean sense, also and ultimately manifests as an embodied haunting, when Della and Jack’s young son, Robert, appear as ‘living ghosts’ at the end of the novel. Della and her son not only haunt both novels, but when they appear they also invoke the Black community who, by Ames’s account, were forced to leave Gilead when ‘someone heaped brush against the back wall [of their church] and put a match to it’ (Gilead 41). Through a subtle deconstruction of white identity that is exposed through conspicuous absences, silences, and evasions, Robinson inverts the narrative focus of her novels, decentring the previously dominant perspectives of her white characters and exposing the marginalisation of Black communities existing beyond the pages. Across two novels, she therefore enacts a spectral conversation between the living, the dead, and the living dead, with this ethical dialogue unveiling and challenging America’s history of racial injustice. The importance of critical whiteness studies has been recognised by K. E. Supriya who argues that by placing disproportionate emphasis on the construction of blackness post-structuralists have ironically reinforced the image of blackness as ‘other’. As such, post-structuralists have rendered invisible the construction of whiteness, enabling whiteness to be figured as the assumed essential and normative identity (Supriya 129–130). Supriya’s critique sits in accordance with Toni Morrison’s suggestion in Playing in the Dark (1992) that ‘[d]eep within the word “American” is its association with race’ (47). Literary constructions of white, male psyches – like Reverend Ames’s in Gilead – are also racially formed through the subjugation of nonwhite personae (17). Understanding Robinson’s interaction with race as a critical engagement with the formation of whiteness, the ways in

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which race and racism haunt small-town America in Robinson’s novels becomes evident. Morrison, for instance, critiques white novelists for ‘playing in the dark’ by elevating white characters through epiphanic moments that subjugate the Africanist personae to a position of inferiority (52). Robinson’s spectral portrayal of Black people in Gilead and Home figures them mostly absent enablers of epiphanic moments in her white characters. For Morrison, this might similarly be read as ‘playing in the dark’ problematically. Arguably, however, Robinson’s novels also self-consciously perform the critical work of ‘disrupting darkness’ (91) that Morrison demands, as epiphanic moments in both Gilead and Home ultimately work to deconstruct whiteness by exposing the flawed narrations and unknowingly racist perceptions of her characters. The spectral absence of Black characters in both novels functions not as a mystifying feature, but rather as an intentional presence in itself, used by Robinson to highlight America’s history of racial erasure. As I argue, Robinson subverts this trope to unveil the social construction of racial absence and make visible how it is enabled and perpetuated by acts of white violence and social silence. Thus, in turning her social gaze predominantly on her own white community, Robinson seeks to expose white accountability and complicity in racism in her novels.4

Forgotten radicalisms and racisms in the American Midwest Robinson’s portrayal of the Midwest is deeply permeated by its racial and historical significance. Addressing the importance of the historical and geographical setting for Gilead and Home, she writes: I set [the novels] in 1956 because that is just on the cusp of the Civil Rights movement. […] I became a sort of student of the history of Iowa because when I came here no-one could tell me anything about the place […] I found this wonderful history of early settlement by abolitionists who created very interesting little towns […] In any case, I found all of this enormously interesting in itself and then twice as interesting in the fact that it’s forgotten, that a huge formative period in history can be lost. So that in 1956 you have people encountering as if for the first time things that were already understood and resolved in many parts of the country before the Civil War […] In the Middle West, […] the issues of racial equality had already been worked through and the fact that this could be forgotten, that there could be cultural amnesia of that profound degree, is something that one has to be



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aware of in order to understand the present tendencies of any culture. (Englander)

What is at stake, then, in reimagining the landscape of Iowa in the Civil War from the perspective of those on the cusp of the civil rights movement, is the ability to remember history and to learn from it. Jack Boughton explains his desire to return home as being connected to a desire for radicalism: ‘Now I’m home again in Iowa, the shining star of radicalism. It is the desire of the tattered moth for the shining star that has brought me home, little sister’ (Home 219). Although this comment is only understood in hindsight, the radicalism Jack speaks of recalls the important role that Iowans played in the abolition of slavery in the United States. Jack’s desire to return to the shining star of radicalism is a desperate attempt to seek safety and equality for his Black partner and their child, with Robinson drawing a parallel between Iowa’s past and his present-day consciousness of Iowa’s ‘radical’ history. If Derrida tells of a constant spectral presence that will forever haunt the pages of history as an ethical reminder of inherited injustices, then Robinson’s fiction can be read as a prism through which the interplay of memory and amnesia are refracted and retold through the generations. Lending a spectral quality to her work, the unresolved past repeatedly returns to haunt and disrupt the present of the narratives of Gilead and Home, deconstructing the political mythologies of the Midwest in the process. The conspicuous construction of certain absences in Robinson’s fiction renders their nonpresence hermeneutically central and their elucidation can further our understanding of Robinson’s fiction and wider worldview. In an explicit discussion of the significance of absence in her nonfiction she writes: ‘Presence is a great mystery, and presence in absence, […] is at a human scale, a great reality for us all in the course of ordinary life. I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community’ (When I Was a Child 43). Here, Robinson maps out an understanding of ‘presence in absence’ that can be applied as an interpretative pathway in her fiction. The afferent flow of meaning in her fiction, whereby the marginal subtext of the novels moves subtly into central focus, is key to tracing the centripetal movement of narrative within Robinson’s writing. In various ways, Robinson encourages readers not just to read against the grain of her text but to interpret the unsaid, unseen, and unspoken as presences in her narratives, paradoxically apparent through the conspicuousness of their absence.

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Indeed, through a particularly quiet writing style, and a sustained attention to the everyday, Robinson’s fiction privileges a quotidian aesthetic over an overtly polemical approach to the political. Narrative concerns, for instance, about the unnoticed and the invisible are imbued with deeper significance by Ames’s attentive focus on the beauty of experience. Ames’s attention to the light and shade of everyday living stands in stark contrast to the inattentiveness he displays towards the social and racial tensions in his community. His privileging of ephemeral observations also cast a light on the ordinary moments of existence that lend them sublimity: There’s a shimmer of light on a child’s hair in the sunlight. There are rainbow colours in it, tiny soft beams […] I’ve thought from time to time it was the best thing in life, that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them, or the humour of it. ‘The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart.’ That’s a fact. (Gilead 60)

Ames’s narrative thus evokes an atmosphere of tranquillity which lends a peaceful quality to his painting of Gilead, so that when the outside world ruptures his vision, the peace Ames describes is exposed as one reliant upon a delusional unseeing or refusal to see such ‘sparks fly’ (82). The deep attentiveness that Ames shows towards the aesthetic and spiritual detail of his world laces his narrative with a supra-sensual aura whereby the reader experiences an almost textual synaesthesia. For Ames, light takes on a ‘feeling of weight’ (59); a heightened awareness of his environment exaggerates his sensory perception so that to Ames, even the trees ‘smell’ and ‘sound different at night’. In the absence of light, the senses radiate beyond the boundaries of reality, enabling Ames to envision himself in the dwindling days of his life in perpetual affinity with his natural environment, experiencing epiphanies of the everyday rather than the more obvious political significance of his surroundings. The social unrest that punctures the narrative of Gilead and Home – the latter of which was written as a companion piece to Gilead, offering an alternative, third-person viewpoint to Ames’s first-person vision – thus subtly illuminates the blindness and fallibility of Ames’s narrative perspective. As with the shallow depth of field of a large aperture, so Ames’s unusually perceptive focus on the details immediately in front of him is enhanced, and he seems comparably less able to keep wider social details and contexts in focus.

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Ames’s personal myopia has political implications in Gilead. As everyday epiphanies function as mirages, Ames’s focus on the sublime beauty of what he perceives in his home landscape is revealed to be the mythic vision of a white man who made the decision to look away from the oppression he is implicated in. Ames’s placing of value on quotidian observations over social struggles can thus be read as a political ‘unseeing’, a making invisible which evocatively mirrors the whitewashing of American history and the constructed absence of Black Americans. As Michael Taussig argues, ‘invisible things are not necessarily “not-there” […] certain absences are so stressed […] so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose, like neighbourhoods that are defined by the population held away from them’ (4). Race therefore haunts the novels not as an unintentionally conspicuous absence, but as a constructed absence aimed precisely at deconstructing the image of a historically white American landscape as myth by exposing how the Black population is kept away. In the structuring of these two novels, Robinson encourages us to see the absence of explicit discussion of race as a meticulously constructed absence, which highlights a society’s capacity to forget. In Gilead, the presence of racism is further perceived in the significant absences and evasions of Ames’s memory. Ames depicts his grandfather as ‘afire with old certainties’ and unable to ‘bear all the patience that was required of him by the peace’ and the ‘forgetfulness that had settled over everything’ (Gilead 36). The amnesiac slumber of the landscape that Ames perceives in his home environment positions his grandfather as a radical outsider; ‘out of joint’ with the time and place he inhabits in his final years. Robinson points us away from a simplistic acceptance of Ames’s position when later the assumed ‘peace’ he imagines is called into question. As Ames describes the motivations for his grandfather’s decision to leave Gilead, he initially puts it down to his grandfather’s feeling ‘terribly lonely’ before adding almost as an afterthought, ‘it was that and the fire at the Negro Church’, an admission he quickly moves to minimise: ‘it wasn’t a big fire’ (41). This reduction is swiftly followed by an aside in parentheses explaining that ‘([…] by then it [the Black population of Gilead] was down to three or four families […] I didn’t know the Negro pastor well myself, but he said his father knew my grandfather. He told me they were sorry

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to leave, because this town had once meant a great deal to them)’ (42). A notable depopulation of the Black community in the area is brought on by persecution and exclusion, something Ames does not choose to question or interrogate further. The visible bracketing off and limited attention paid to such a stark act of racial violence and intimidation further punctures Ames’s utopian vision of a peaceful, undisturbed Gilead. Siefker Bailey is sympathetic with Ames’s unseeing, suggesting that he knows ‘the fire was a serious wrong, but no one in Gilead could imagine the depth of pain it caused the families’ (268). Arguably, however, it is precisely his failure to imagine that Robinson interrogates. As Lee Spinks argues, many critics have not recognised that Ames’s fallible narration: conceals a significant failure of ethical imagination linked in turn to an unresolved historical question of justice and responsibility. Crucially, this ethical failure occurs in relation to an act of racial exclusion – the incineration of Gilead’s solitary black church and the subsequent dispersal of its congregation. (146)

The restful hometown of Ames’s imagined experience is exposed as being dependent on his personal decision to blindly ignore conflict around him and the presumed peace in Gilead is a veil that conveniently diminishes the social tensions plainly evident within the community. It is Ames, then, not his grandfather, who is trapped in an amnesiac state, out of joint not with his time, but with its perception.5 The act of forgetting and eliding memory, both personal and collective, is a consciously constructed ‘presence in absence’ in Gilead. The argument that Ames’s father makes that the evils of the Civil War should be forgotten, which Ames largely agrees with, is one that brings with it a decision to collectively forget the important political lessons of the racial conflict it included. Gilead thus reflects a spectral vision of a present haunted by the return of the ghosts of unresolved historical conflict. Reading the novel as ‘an act of national and cultural recovery [that resurrects] powerful ghosts to remind America of a forgotten moral lineage’, Sarah Churchwell sees a similarly haunting racial significance in Robinson’s fiction. For Churchwell, Gilead shows a pastor who comes to realise ‘he has failed to be his brother’s keeper […] an irony that reverberates throughout the novel’ until finally Ames admits that a ‘mixed race

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family cannot hope for security in Gilead’, forcing him to ‘acknowledge his own failure in racial and social justice’. The haunting presence of unresolved racial injustices imprinted on the present mirrors Derrida’s spectral invocation of justice which demands that individuals participate in a politics of memory and inheritance by engaging with the repeatedly returning ghosts of our past. Robinson’s poetics of unspoken absence and quiet evasion then enable us to interrogate the process of racial erasure in her narratives.

Familial hauntings The familial conflicts that become a repeated, haunting presence in Ames’s present can also be read as a psychic staging of American racial conflict. This tension unfolds in a remembered dialectical interplay between the antagonistic views of Ames’s father and grandfather. Where Ames’s father espouses an ardently pacifist position, Ames’s grandfather endorses the use of principled violence to gain racial equality during and after the American Civil War. The familial tensions around racial conflict in the Civil War provide a poignant parallel that foregrounds the socio-historic context of the novel’s setting on the brink of the burgeoning civil rights movement. Ames’s memories of conflict within his family – which largely seem to be ‘about’ race and racial equality – paints a vision of a town haunted by Civil War racism and many ghostly reminders of continued inequality. In Derrida’s reading of Marx, the spectre will not present itself to ‘anyone in person but will strike a series of blows to be deciphered’ (99). This metaphor of the explosive political potential of the spectre invoking resistance and protest can also be read in Robinson’s fiction. Ames recalls a memory of watching fireflies with his lifelong friend, Reverend Boughton, on the porch: Finally Boughton said, ‘Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.’ 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 is 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. (Gilead 81–82)

The vision of fire settling in on itself, always promising the potential rekindling of its sparks, mirrors the image of a spectre haunting

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amnesiac-ridden eras with the promise of future political reawakenings. This evocative image of human fires waiting to rekindle recurs throughout the narrative. When Ames and his father discover the final resting place of their grandfather, who comes to embody calls for racial justice in the novel, Ames, in a rare moment of honest insight on this matter, recognises: ‘It was the most natural thing in the world that my grandfather’s grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire’ (57). The grandfather who himself is repeatedly haunted by visions of Jesus appearing before him as a slave ‘bound in chains’ (56) hears the spectral call for the pursuit of racial justice and, in turn, returns to haunt Ames’s memories, embodying the spectre himself. Although the implication is never made explicitly, through the recurring motif of smothered fire Robinson constructs the spectral reminder of the quiet embers waiting to be reignited. Indeed, to Ames’s mind, his grandfather becomes the fire itself when he attends a baseball game in a show of solidarity and support for the star Black player, Bud Fowler: Whenever he put his finger in [the bag of licorice], it rattled with the trembling of his hand, and the sound was just like the sound of fire. I noticed this at the time, and it seemed natural to me. I also more or less assumed that the thunder and the lightning that day were Creation tipping its hat to him, as if to say, ‘Glad to see you here in the stands, Reverend.’ (Gilead 53)

Robinson creates an implicit connection between the spectacle of fire and racial struggle as an image of spectral haunting, expanding the metaphor still further by directly connecting the image of the politically infused fire and storm to the significance of absence: […] that afternoon when nothing flew through the air, no one slid or drifted or tagged[…] It seems to me that the storm had put an end to it, as if it were a fire to be put out, an eruption into this world of an alarming kind of nullity. ‘There was a silence in heaven for about half an hour’ […] Null. That word has real power. (54)

Through interconnected imagery, then, a direct link is made that interweaves ideas of racism, absence, and underlying social unrest in both novels. As Spinks argues, this passage reveals a brief moment of ‘visionary intuition’ in Ames, ‘which binds the outrage of the church fire to the “nullity” of any response which fails to recognise

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within it the trace of a collective historical trauma’ (157). In this way, the political pulse of the novel materialises through a combined absence and subtext that portray Gilead as a narrative haunted by this reminder of racial injustice. In her illustration of the racial significance of Robinson’s baseball allusions, Susan Petit reads Home and Gilead as portrayals of how prejudice stems from an absence of racial diversity. Petit argues that despite the characters being almost ‘all Caucasian’, the novels ‘are clearly concerned with the evils arising from American slavery and […] the sort of white racism that exists in the absence of other races and takes the form of indifference to the consequences of prejudice’ (119). Arguably, it is not simply that Robinson’s novels reveal how prejudice stems from an absence of racial diversity so much as the inverse. The novels reveal that the lack of racial diversity in the landscape of Gilead is caused by racial prejudice and persecution: it is the burning of the church that leads to the final exodus of the Black community from Gilead. Such prejudice and indifference is, then, ironically embodied in the novels by the pious characters of Reverend Ames and Reverend Boughton. Indeed it is Jack – who to Ames appears irredeemably tarnished – who becomes the figure of redemption, despite his apparent rejection of his father’s faith. In Home, Jack is returned figure of absence marked by ‘strategies of evasion and places of concealment’, who possesses the greatest ability to see those who are forcibly absented and whose plight is deliberately made invisible or ignored (63). From his perception of Glory’s loneliness after their elder sister leaves home, to his explicit anger and frustration at the oppression, persecution, and erasure of African American communities, it is through Jack’s eyes that readers see the political world operating beyond the boundaries of the reverends’ sheltered and blinkered viewpoints. In Home, the conflicts between Jack and his dying father, with whom he is trying to reconcile, revolve around the politics of race. The significance of the undertones and subtle allusions to racial conflict are felt in Jack’s uncharacteristic inability to restrain his reactions in front of his father. The emotional tensions of the novel arise as the spectre of race appears, most visibly when the family buy a television, which brings images of racial conflict into the previously sheltered environment of the home. Reverend Boughton,

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after witnessing the televised brutal treatment of Black demonstrators by white police, responds with indifference: ‘There’s no reason to let that sort of trouble upset you. In six months nobody will remember a thing about it’ (101). Boughton’s statement is met by Jack’s rebuke: ‘Some people will probably remember it’ (101). It contrasts starkly with Jack’s horror at the televised images: ‘[…] the Dogs. The fire hoses. Fire hoses. They were kids -’ (103). Jack’s response betrays the determined ignorance of his father who chooses to ignore the television and the protests completely. This narrative turbulence recurs whenever the subject of race returns. Across Gilead and Home, the reverends Ames and Boughton are characterised by a decision to ignore racial suffering, exemplified most visibly in the discussion of an article that Jack locates for both preachers to read. While they choose to focus on other aspects, its key criticism is that ‘American Christianity was called into question by our treatment of the Negro’ (Home 227). This aspect of the article is not discussed until Jack intervenes and forces the reverends’ attention on the issue. Intriguingly, his father’s dismissal of the subject reveals a subconscious awareness of his social blindness, albeit with little obvious remorse for the consequences: ‘I don’t believe in calling anyone’s religion into question because he has certain failings. A blind spot or two’ (227). A comparison of the lengthy treatment of this conversation in Home, with Ames’s very brief recollection of it in Gilead, exposes Ames’s similar unwillingness to honestly confront the subject. Ames’s telling of the story reveals a notable reduction of the discussion and, to readers of both novels, is a clear misremembering of events. Robinson therefore juxtaposes two narrative accounts to raise epistemological questions of how truth and history are told and remembered, with failure to perceive and act in the face of injustice exposed as an ethical blindness and hypocrisy.

Critique and the absence of Della The political consequences of racially constructed silencing and invisibility are made visible by the novels’ repeated allusions to the civil rights movement. Yet, although both novels critique racism, neither text revolves around the experience of Black characters.6 As I argue, Robinson constructs her analysis of racism in Home and

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Gilead as a critique of whiteness; in doing so, she exposes the accountability and liability of her white protagonists and through them reveals the racial conflicts that define the American democratic project. Still, the interrogation of whiteness does not entirely shield her narrative from criticism. Briallen Hopper observes that, in Home, Robinson conflates the peaceful protests of the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott with the civil disorder that took place in Birmingham in 1963, a serious and acutely ironic mistake in a novel which calls on America to confront its racial problems and remember its progressive history.7 Robinson, like her characters it seems, has either failed to pay close enough attention to history, or conflated two independently significant events. Although historically inaccurate in terms of the timeline of events, this scene still demonstrates important political purpose and significance. The dialectical staging of the conflict between Jack and his father, Reverend Boughton, when they bear witness to the televised violence of police attacks on young African American protestors, shows how racist oppression is institutionally enforced through state violence and media broadcast, demonstrated further, perhaps, by Robinson’s confusion of events that took place seven years apart. In doing so, Robinson, whose novels just precede the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality as well as the vocal reemergence of white supremacist ideology under President Donald Trump, makes visible the racism that continues to haunt contemporary America and its many institutions. Robinson’s representation of the politics of race is also most powerfully felt through the gradual emergence of Jack’s personal experience of the laws of ‘miscegenation’. Just as the grandfather figure in Gilead ripples through time in Ames’s haunted memories, so in Home it is in the very construction of Della as absent that makes her effect most potent. As a marginalised figure in the text, Della can be read as symbolic of the erasure of her community from the American Midwest. Della’s absent presence is initially felt through her redemptive and emotional impact on Jack. His allusions to W. E. B. Dubois, jazz music, and his reawakened interest in piano and reading are a result of the ‘influence of a good woman’ (122). The personal and cultural qualities of Della as an individual, as well as the Black community to which she belongs, are felt through Jack as visible, positive, and inspirational forces. As the narrative focus

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builds around the mysterious enigma of Jack’s life, Della’s presence is continually felt through the effect of her absence. Waiting ‘every day[…] for the mail’ (53) or for a phone call, Jack’s character is represented as concerned with Della and the racial politics of the outside world she inhabits, beyond the boundaries of small-town Gilead. Della’s absence caused by exclusion nevertheless does not limit her solely to marginal significance in the pages of the narrative. Rather, it is around the significance of her absent presence that the narrative conflicts of Home implicitly unfurl. In reading Della as a spectral character whose centrality is ensured through her marginality, Robinson’s hermeneutic invitation to the reader is revealed. The text locates its significance precisely through the highlighting of apparent marginalia: it is in an understanding of that which is unsaid and unseen that readers feel the poignancy of Home. As in Gilead, the racial conflict at the heart of Home appears through a palpable ‘presence in absence’, with marginal noises disrupting the quiet peace of the narrative flow, building to an effective forte when, in the final moments of the novel, a Black voice finally pierces the narrative landscape with the appearance of Della and Robert, as Jack’s wife and son. Once embodied, the effect of Della’s existence is felt as narrative relief, finally making visible and audible her otherwise enigmatic, spectral presence. After such suspense, her appearance as a ‘living ghost’ at the novel’s climax confirms her significance as the narrative crux, tying together the personal and political concerns of Robinson’s characters in this novel. Indeed, Della’s appearance at the end of Home produces an epiphanic moment wherein Jack’s sister, Glory, recognises the consequences of her own ignorance. Where previously she had responded to Jack’s horror at police violence towards Black protesters by parroting her father’s disregard, ‘none of that will be a problem if you stay here’ (103), distancing both herself and her hometown from the suffering of the Black community and any social responsibility to effect change, Della’s appearance forces her to ethical realisation. Finally pushed into a position of empathy, she asks herself ‘how would [Della] forgive this, that she felt she had to come into Gilead as if it were a foreign and hostile country?’ (338). For readers of both novels who follow Ames’s unconscious retelling of the persecution that led to the erasure of Black families in Gilead, Glory’s announcement that ‘there were no colored people in Gilead’ is realised as the political consequences of a constructed racial erasure (332).

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Originally set up as a space of racial refuge during the Civil War, Gilead is powerfully exposed as having been transformed into a space of racial exclusion, a historical distortion made visible through Della’s felt ‘presence in absence’ and ultimately in the unwelcome fear and alienation she feels at her eventual arrival. Not wanting to ‘tak[e] any chances’, Della disappears back across the borders of Gilead as quickly as she arrives, amplifying her spectral absence once again as the ephemeral marginality of her existence passes beyond the novel’s boundaries and leaving an unresolved silence for the reader (335). Glory’s final imagined vision of hope – that ‘Maybe [Jack’s son, Robert] will come back someday’ – confirms the importance of their embodied appearance: ‘He is young. He cannot know that my whole life has come down to this moment’ (338–339). As Glory imagines her life’s significance in the return of Jack’s son to the hometown of his father, bringing back Jack’s elliptical presence through his son, so the novel’s meaning is found in the dream of this final image. The familial reunification imagined by Glory can be read as hope for the embodied return of the Black community, with Robert’s return uniting Glory with her family and Jack’s young son with his patrilineal family and his father’s Midwestern heritage. By prefacing the image with the conditional ‘maybe’ and Glory’s explanation that his return would be an act of bravery – ‘young men are rarely cautious’ (338) – Robinson resists a utopian vision of definitive symbolic unity, opening up a space for dreams while reminding readers that the present, not just the past, reality must be altered for that future to exist. Robinson’s politics of ‘deferred dreams’ have also been the subject of critique (Petit 133). In his analysis of Robinson’s fictional debut, Housekeeping (1980), Thomas Schaub positions Robinson within a liberal, Christian tradition that advocates for a separation between art and politics and thus argues that Robinson attempts to divorce her literature from the material, to create ‘a universal experience that transcends history’ (317). Coughlan and Hopper have similarly dismissed Robinson’s work politically, arguing in their readings of Home that Robinson not only fails to remember Montgomery but in doing so, fails to provide a vision of successful political, collective action. This failing, Hopper argues, is the product of Robinson’s ‘individualistic theology’ which has led to a religious idealisation that finds ‘meaning and beauty in suffering and deprivation’ and thus

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reflects ‘the aesthetics and theology of resignation’ (6–7). Coughlan further acknowledges that the apparition of Della at the end of both Home and Gilead ‘confirms that these [novels] also ask to be read politically’ (179). However, he argues that, for Robinson, ‘racial reconciliation […] can only be achieved by the grace of God’ and not through human, collective action, effectively consigning the possibility of social progress to the afterlife (180). While some Christian communities and individuals do hold such beliefs, Robinson’s understanding of her self-confessed political liberalism is complex and her politics not easily reduced to such assertions. Notably wary of being politically misrepresented in interviews, Robinson nevertheless has repeatedly advocated for material social change. When asked explicitly if she considered herself a radical, Robinson gave an affirmative response akin to Bernie Sanders’s radical vision of democratic socialism: I consider myself a radical more or less in the sense that Bernie Sanders considers himself one – i.e., I am old enough to remember that we were not always like this. If radicalism means going back to roots, we have very strong roots for things that are done to benefit society […] I want to return to the legitimacy of the idea of the general welfare, which the Supreme Court has approved under Roosevelt. (Schulson)

In another interview, discussing her friendship with Barack Obama, Robinson criticised the hierarchical image of top-down political agency, arguing that political progress is the result of collective action that develops into social change: ‘This idea of the transformative leader, I think that Obama is smarter than that. He knows that change is incremental and that it is collective’ (Lydon). Robinson’s advocacy of left-wing albeit not ‘revolutionary’ politics, is nevertheless reflective of a more radical position than Coughlan, Hopper, or Schaub acknowledge. This is particularly evidenced by Robinson’s explicit alignment with the radical position of Sanders, a politician on the left of the Democratic Party and by her own critique of capitalism.8 Certainly, such grounded political beliefs rooted in an understanding of collective social change do not easily cohere with an analysis that Robinson possesses an ideological and theological position that ‘the future is in God’s hands’ (Coughlan 180), or that suffering on Earth should be endured until spiritual recompense in the afterlife, as Coughlan and Hopper both argue.

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It cannot be argued that Robinson’s novels provide a revolutionary blueprint, yet by using her novels to critique racism and advocate for white accountability, Robinson’s novels do effectively advocate for social change. Robinson’s ending in Home is an image of ‘deferred dreams’ (Petit 133), but it provides an ambiguous and optimistic vision of a political future. While racial justice is not achieved in the pages of Robinson’s novels, it is hoped for as a material ambition for social progress. According to Susan Sontag, ‘[s]ilence points to its own transcendence – to a speech beyond silence’ (18). In a similar way, Robinson’s construction of the spectre of race through absence fertilises ground for conversation, an opening of dialogue with the ghost that would facilitate the social progress envisioned at the end of Gilead and Home. Robinson’s novels therefore perform a radical act of remembrance that deconstructs the presumed whiteness of the American Midwest and explores the very fact of historical amnesia. As I argue, Robinson draws attention to the relationship between past and present, making relevant and visible forgotten political truths; this is itself a radical act. Read in this way, her novels become an effective ‘call to action’ for the reader, an opening of a dialogue with ghosts as a movement towards racial justice. Demystifying the social construction of racial erasure in the Midwest, Robinson makes visible what is otherwise politically invisible in her novels, each ending in an optimistic invocation to the next generation to take the baton of progress forward. As an exorcism of false historical witness and racial mythologies of the Midwest, Gilead and Home participate in and construct radical action through a reawakening of the spectre, a being-with-spectres that rekindles radical conversation and political memory. Robinson invites readers to ask which spectres they elect to ignore, and who is confined to the margins of their existence. In the dialectical interplay of history and mythology, she makes visible not only racial absence, but the conditions that create and perpetuate such erasure.

Notes 1 According to Peeren, ‘the term “spectral turn” was introduced in 2002 by Roger Luckhurst who considers Derrida’s 1993 Spectres de Marx (translated as Specters of Marx) its catalyst (Peeren 10–11).

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2 The term spectro-politics is referred to by Maria Del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren in their introduction to The Spectralities Reader (2013), who note that Derrida was one of a number of theorists who capitalised on the rich theoretical potential of the ghostly figure in the 1990s. 3 Peterson suggests a distinction between spectrality and social death, arguing that all existence must recognise itself as belonging to ontology, a being that is innately defined through and by death, the spectral thus haunts all existence. For Peterson, it is only through the process of social marginalisation the marginalised ‘other’ becomes ‘doubly ghosted’ by social death (10); thus, he argues ‘for an African American, this may mean that one’s lived experience is one of both being a specter (in the generalizable sense) and a spook (to invoke the familiar racist trope of utter disembodiment)’ (10). David Coughlan initially promotes Peterson’s analysis, but later posits that Peterson may be wrong in his analysis of double ghosting: ‘to be socially dead is in some sense to be unghosted, the dead as such do not haunt, but the spook is already haunting’ (177). I will be adopting Peeren’s spectro-political understanding that conceives of the need for a spectral consideration of the living dead, i.e. the socially marginalised communities whose exclusion from hegemonic existence in society has produced a state of social death. 4 See Shirley Jordan’s Broken Silences (1993) for a series of interviews about the difficulties of racial conversation and representation between Black and white women authors. 5 Notably, the evasive and elliptical nature of Ames’s retelling of his family’s historical encounters with race mirrors absences that can be seen in actual, nonfiction accounts by white Americans of their own family histories. As Tim Wise has noted in his attempt to address his own experience of whiteness: ‘It has always fascinated me how families like mine have sought to address the owning of other human beings. Because it is impossible to ignore the subject altogether, those descended from slave owners opt instead to rationalize or smooth over the unpleasantness, so as to maintain the convenient fictions about our families to which we have so often become tethered’ (11–12). His cousin’s account of their family’s slave ownership is given ‘in the matter-of-fact style befitting those who are trying to be honest without confronting the implications of their honesty. Say it simply, say it quickly, and move on to something more appetizing’ (12). 6 This essay focuses on the first two Gilead novels, but this is equally true of the third, Lila (2014). 7 As Hopper writes, ‘neither the police attacks nor the media events happened in 1956. […] Robinson simply made a mistake.’ It is also important to note that the Montgomery Bus Boycott, although peaceful on the part



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of protesters, was violently policed, a point which Coughlan has noted (179). 8 See Bill Moyers, “Marilynne Robinson on Faith, Capitalism and Democracy” and Marilynne Robinson, “Culture After The Credit Crunch” for evidence of Robinson’s anti-capitalist stance.

Works cited Blanco, María Del Pilar and Esther Peeren. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Coughlan, David. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Churchwell, Sarah. “Marilynne Robinson’s Lila – A Great Achievement in US Fiction.” The Guardian, 7 November 2014, www.theguardian. com/books/2014/nov/07/marilynne-robinson-lila-great-achievementcontemporary-us-fiction-gilead. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning & The New International. Translation Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 1994. Englander, Julie. “Live from Prairie Lights.” Iowa Public Radio. Interview, 2004, http://iwp.info-science.uiowa.edu/~iwp/Audio/Livefrom/ROBINSON_MARILYNNE_2004/ROBINSON_MARILYNNE_2004-128.mp3. (Accessed 21/6/2021.) Hopper, Briallen. “Marilynne Robinson in Montgomery.” Religion and Politics: Fit For Polite Company 1–8. 22 December 2014. http:// religionandpolitics.org/2014/12/22/marilynne-robinson-in-montgomery/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Jordan, Shirley M. Broken Silences: Interviews With Black and White Women Writers. Rutgers University Press, 1993. Lydon, Christopher. “Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” 26 January 2017. http://lithub.com/marilynne-robinson-on-what-were-losing-in-presidentobama/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992. Moyers, Bill, “Marilynne Robinson on Faith, Capitalism and Democracy.” Video Interview, 17 October 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh_ BMgJWdwI. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Peeren, Esther. “Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor.” The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 1–33.

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Peterson, Christopher. Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Petit, Susan. “Field of Deferred Dreams: Baseball and Historical Amnesia in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” MELUS 37.4 (2012): 119–137. Robinson, Marilynne. “Culture After The Credit Crunch.” The Guardian, 16 March 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/16/culture-creditcrunch-marilynne-robinson. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) —— Gilead. 2004. Virago - Little, Brown, 2009. —— Home. 2008. Virago - Little, Brown, 2009. —— Housekeeping. 1980. Faber & Faber, 2005. —— When I Was A Child I Read Books: Essays. Centre Point Large Print edn. Center Point, 2013. Schaub, Thomas. “Lingering Hopes, Faltering Dreams: Marilynne Robinson and the Politics of Contemporary American Fiction.” Traditions, Voices, and Dreams: The American Novel since the 1960s. Editors Melvin J. Friedman and Ben Siegel. Associated University Presses, 1995. 298–322. Schulson, Michael. “Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Salon, 1 March 2016, www.salon.com/2016/01/03/marilynne_robinson_talks_religion_ fear_and_the_american_spirit_the_left_at_a_basic_level_lost_courage_ because_they_dont_know_how_to_deal_with_the_proclaimed_religiosity_ of_the_other_si/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Siefker Bailey, Lisa M. “Fraught with Fire: Race and Theology in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Christianity and Literature. 59.2 (2010): 265–280. Sontag, Susan. Styles of Radical Will. 4th edn. Secker and Warburg, 1969. Spinks, Lee. “‘The House of Your Church Is Burning’: Race and Responsibility in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Journal of American Studies, 51.1 (2017): 141–162. Supriya, K. E. “White Difference: Cultural Constructions of White Identity.” Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity. Editors Thomas Nakayama and Judith N. Martin. Sage Publications, 1999. 129–149. Taussig, Michael. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. University of Chicago Press, 1987. Wise, Tim. White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. 3rd edn. Soft Skull Press, 2011.

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Part IV

Robinson and her contemporaries

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10 ‘Everything can change’: civil rights, civil war, and radical transformation in Home and Gilead Tessa Roynon

Towards the beginning of Housekeeping (1980), Ruth recalls her grandmother’s tale about a woman that her great grandmother had known. ‘When she looked out her window at night,’ the grandmother recounted, this woman ‘often saw the ghosts of children crying by the road’ (25). These children ‘were sky black and stark naked’, they ‘danced with the cold’, they ‘wiped their tears with the backs of their hands and the heels of their hands’, and they were ‘furious with hunger’ (25). Although neither Ruth nor Robinson’s first novel as a whole express any overt concern with America’s racial politics, it is arguable that these homeless, hungry, distraught, and furious Black children haunt and prowl both Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). This essay argues that Home and Gilead are much more radical and much less compromised on the subject of race and civil rights in America than prevailing scholarly readings suggest. In focusing exclusively on Robinson’s intervention in racial dynamics, my discussion differs from extant criticism that treats the subject of race in Robinson’s work comparatively, either alongside or as a subset of other issues.1 Building on Alex Zamalin and Daniel Skinner’s useful elucidation of the ‘models for action against racial injustice’ within Gilead (91), my focus is on the conception in these texts of a transformed racial landscape as at once urgently needed and eminently possible. Gilead and Home operate within at least four time periods at once – the 1850s (the decade of significant pre-Civil War abolitionist activism); 1956 (the year in which both novels are set and in which the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama took place); 2004 and

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2008 (the years of the novels’ respective publication, which saw the emergence of Barack Obama and his first presidential election victory); and the year(s) in which the reader reads the texts.2 One constant that unifies the novels’ interactions with the racial landscape of each temporality is the unambivalent implication not just that change is necessary, but also that it is viable. My contention is that Robinson should be read not in contradistinction to African American authors such as Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison, but as a participant or collaborator in their radical re-formations of American culture. While critics Christopher Douglas and Yumi Pak separately read Gilead and Home as a kind of negative fulfilment of Morrisonian critique – particularly with regard to ‘Africanism’, a pitfall to which they suggest Robinson succumbs – I argue that Robinson’s work has much in common with that of her African American nearcontemporary.3 Like Morrison’s, Robinson’s fiction is invested in dismantling dominant historical narratives about race and re-vising the past; in illuminating strategic cultural fabrications, blindnesses, and silences on the subject, and in envisioning an alternative future. Scholars have made surprisingly little of the fact that in 2008 both Robinson and Morrison published novels entitled Home, both of which are set in the 1950s, and both of which are centrally concerned with the virulent racism and the incipient civil rights movement of that decade. While these novels differ from each other in obvious ways – not least because one foregrounds two European American families in Gilead, Iowa, and the other an African American brother and sister in Lotus, Georgia – they both suggest that America must undergo profound transformation if it is to be a true ‘home’, a place in which racial equality is made real. In her argument that Gilead and Home do not enable Black agency or kinship, but that instead blackness is therein appropriated to bolster white father–son relationships and genealogies, Yumi Pak writes that ‘Blackness lurks and frays at the edges of both the novel[s] and the eponymous town, at the edges of memory and history’ (213). To my mind, this description of ‘lurking’ and ‘fraying’ is exactly right, but while Pak perceives this Black marginality to be problematic, I contend that it is the source and not the negation of the texts’ radical intervention on race. While Morrison writes memorably in her Nobel Prize lecture of the indisputable power of ‘what moves at the margin’ (“Nobel” 206), Robinson engages this

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power in her writing: the liminality or visible absence of Black people in the town of Gilead, and so in both novels, is precisely the white novelist’s central concern. Pak – rightly – points out that Robinson ‘relegates black history and black voices to her novels’ peripheries’ (212). Yet in representing white society’s relegation of that history and those voices, it is arguable that Robinson protests rather than endorses that marginalising impulse. In the first part of this essay, I explore how, in Home, Robinson subtly but uncompromisingly insists that it is not the African American individual who should adapt in order to merit inclusion or to feel ‘at home’. Instead, it is the dominant culture, whether family or community or nation, that must change to accommodate diversity. In this insistence – while of course writing a kind of fiction that is very different from Morrison’s – Robinson fulfils the demands that Morrison sets out for her own work in a 1997 essay that she also entitled “Home”. There, invoking the time-honoured affinities between the concepts of ‘house’, ‘nation’, and ‘novel’, Morrison declares that in order to envision through her fiction ‘a-world-in-which-racedoes-not-matter’ she needs to ‘make a radical distinction between the metaphor of house and the metaphor of home’ and to ‘transform this [racial] house completely’ (5). Morrison’s implication is that a new or transformed type of novel will be transformative – that a changed fictional exploration of American experience will re-envision the dominant culture as ‘an open house, grounded, yet generous in its supply of windows and doors’ (“Home” 4). Robinson’s narrative strategies include Black silence and Black absence, in contrast, but in unequivocally combining protest with visionary hope, Robinson’s Home enacts exactly the transformative process Morrison describes.4 In the second part of this discussion, I turn back to Gilead. I read John Ames’s piecemeal biography of his abolitionist grandfather as a series of encounters with what Homi Bhabha – in his paradigmshifting essay, “The World and the Home” (1992) – conceptualises as ‘the unhomely’ (144). In Bhabha’s definition, these ‘unhomely moments’ – playing on Freud’s ‘uncanny’ – are those that relate ‘the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence’ (144). Such a relationship, I contend, describes exactly the experience and predicament of Gilead’s narrator: he is profoundly ambivalent about and troubled by all that his grandfather stood for, and therefore by his own inactivism

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in the face of continuing racial inequality. As Elizabeth Abele argues, it is through the troubled ruefulness of Ames in Gilead that Robinson shows how the radical vision of the fictional grandfather’s leader, John Brown, ‘refuses to be forgotten’. Like the unhoused Black children who fleetingly appear in Housekeeping – and who implicitly knock on the door in Robinson’s later novels – and like Morrison’s unquiet ghost, Beloved, that Bhabha himself discusses (144), the unhomely and ‘unreposeful’ ghost of Ames’s grandfather forces the preacher and thereby Robinson’s readers to re-encounter a past that should, and could, dramatically alter the present (Gilead 57). In a review of Home, Sarah Churchwell asserts that both that novel and Gilead ‘ask what has become of the civil war, and civil rights, other than complacency and amnesia’, and that Home ‘brings Gilead’s subterranean racial story to the surface even as Jack’s father, the Reverend Boughton, refuses to see it’. It is her subsequent insight that is a central focus in this essay, though, and in part responsible for my decision to analyse the later novel before its predecessor. ‘Robinson gives her readers the same chance to overlook the story that is right in front of them,’ Churchwell writes, ‘a story about being your brother’s keeper.’ It is far easier to overlook – or to refuse to see – the importance of race in Home if you don’t know, or have forgotten, the ‘reveal’ at the end of Gilead: that Della is Black, and Jack’s and her son is mixed race. But it is the very easiness of that oversight that gives the 2008 novel its clout.5 Taking up Churchwell’s implicit gauntlet, I tackle head on the paradox within these two novels that in order to state unequivocally the centrality of race, Robinson apparently relegates it to the margins. The reader’s all-too-ready blindness, indifference to, or complicity in that relegation is very much the author’s point.

Reading race in Home In response to the TV footage of white racists in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Robert Boughton declares: ‘that colored people […] need to improve themselves […] if they want to be accepted’ (Home 163).6 Robinson herein exposes the regrettably tenacious assumption within dominant American culture that the pressure should be on Black Americans to change themselves to fit ‘mainstream’ America, rather than on

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‘mainstream’ America to change itself to make a home for Black citizens. Novels such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Morrison’s Jazz (1992) depict the inevitably destructive effects of this impulse: both Ellison’s unnamed protagonist and Morrison’s Joe Trace express a weariness with their long and fruitless quests for a viable Black identity in a relentlessly racist United States. Having tried out a range of different ‘selves’, for example, the invisible man opts for life underground, while Joe declares resignedly that he has ‘changed once too often’, and laments that he has ‘been a New Negro all his life’ (Jazz 129). In light of views such as Robert Boughton’s – and of experiences endured by characters such as the invisible man and Joe Trace – Robinson’s decision to eschew the depiction of Black agency and the exploration of Black consciousness in both Home and Gilead can be read as a subversive ploy rather than as a regrettable and compromised omission. Douglas states that Gilead is ‘not about African Americans as agents and thinkers’ (335), while Pak laments the fact that ‘Black bodies’ in Robinson’s texts ‘only attain articulation through the words, memories, mediations and interventions of white characters’ (213). As Peggy Phelan has theorised in Unmarked (1993), however, visibility does not straightforwardly equal power; Invisible Man and Jazz explore the pitfalls of assuming that it does. By eschewing Black agency and consciousness, Robinson strategically avoids the whole vexed question of what viable Black identities could and should be like. Instead, in a move that is arguably profoundly freeing, she takes Black agency, consciousness, and identity for granted or as a ‘given’. A genuine, absolute invisibility or absence of Black characters or history would of course be a fascistic falsification or erasure, but this is not what her novels depict. Her texts’ focus on the racism of white indifference and apathy, combined with the liminal Black shadows or presences, constitutes a canny and provocative act of literary resistance. In Home, when Jack first observes scenes from the Montgomery bus boycott on a television that he watches through the hardware store’s window (99), unrest and violence of any kind feel impossibly far away from apparently peaceful Gilead. Yet just as Jack and Glory bring a television and the conflicts it broadcasts into the Boughtons’ house, Robinson slowly reveals the racial prejudices of Robert Boughton and so gradually illuminates the political struggles

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within their home and hometown. In doing so, she narrativises what Morrison has described as ‘the inwardness of the outside, the interiority of the “othered”, the personal that is always embedded in the public’ (“Home” 12). Robinson constructs Boughton as a character who consistently ‘others’ nonwhite people but who does not for one moment consider that the burdens that weigh upon him could possibly have anything to do with racial politics. Black people function in his consciousness only as the catalyst to stereotypically racist complaints about ‘bad blood’ (153), ‘commotion’ (163), and ‘provocation’ (214). As far as he is aware, it is not America’s race problems that trouble him; ‘news of turbulence’ in general makes him ‘nod off’ (161). While Boughton is tortured by his son’s prolonged physical absence, and his emotional and spiritual absences when physically present, it does not occur to him that racial injustice may be a key factor in Jack’s sense of alienation, estrangement, and despair. Indeed, it is only Jack himself who is aware, until the novel’s end, that in that household the apparently ‘external’ issue of race has come ‘inside’; an apparently ‘public’ issue has become personal, brought well and truly home. To his father, to Glory, and for the novel’s readers, Jack presents as perpetually burdened and anguished by guilty secrets that can only be guessed at. But when the revelation about Della and young Robert’s identity is coupled with old Boughton’s hostility to racial equality, readers realise not only the true source of Jack’s anguish but also that it is he who must struggle to forgive his father, rather than the other way around. And just as readers come to realise the ‘provocation’ that Boughton’s racism causes within the family home, Glory in turn must confront, through Della and her family’s fears, the fact that ‘worn, modest, countrified Gilead, Gilead of the sunflowers’ is to many of her fellow Americans ‘a foreign and hostile country’ (338). Robinson writes with mild irony that all the Boughton children – as young, college-educated adults – experience a dutifully modernist sense of ‘exile’, ‘angst’, and ‘anomie’ within their own family home (294). But through Della’s fleeting visit and rapid departure, Glory realises the implications of an alienation and inhospitableness that are of an entirely different order. The apparently pastoral anti-pastoral that is ‘Gilead of the sunflowers’ recalls the bleak, racially pessimistic ending of Morrison’s The Bluest Eye where, from the 1940s, a mentally ill and alienated

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Pecola passes her days ‘among the garbage and the sunflowers’ on the edge of a larger but no more hospitable Midwestern town: Lorain, Ohio (164). For readers who are attentive, Robinson punctuates Home with uncompromising reminders of the harsh realities of the racial violence and injustice of that decade – realities that Morrison contrastingly places in the foreground and the centre of her own novel, Home. Although it is only in Gilead that Robinson references the arson attack on the local Black church, in Robinson’s Home Jack makes a point of raising historical events with his father, such as the murder of Emmett Till and violent resistance to the integration of the University of Alabama, and discusses discrimination against Black baseball players with Glory.7 All too easily, readers who are preoccupied by the relationship between Jack and his father are drawn into Robert Boughton’s willed indifference to these matters: his authoritative and revered role in the household almost persuades readers not to balk at his expressed view that the agitation in Montgomery won’t have ‘any consequences’ (Home 192); or that Till’s parents should have gone to greater effort to keep him safe (163). Through some readers’ own tolerance of Boughton’s reactionary views – a tolerance that might feel like kindness because it is encouraged by his age, his physical frailty, and his woundedness about Jack – Robinson reveals the facility of complicity in racism and the way that apparently noble motives can lead to inaction in the face of injustice.8

Reading history for the seeds of change At the same time, Robinson half-buries the seeds of potential positive change. These include brief invocations of inspirational game-changers from the past, such as Abraham Lincoln (who graces a pair of bookends), W. E. B. Du Bois (whom both Jack and Glory are reading in Home), and the abolitionist grandfather of Ames (of whom much more is learned in Gilead). Although Boughton assures Jack that Ames is ‘pretty embarrassed’ by his grandfather, describes him as ‘crazy’ and asserts that old settler families ceased to revere him when they realised ‘the world had changed and maybe they should reconsider’, it is clear even in a brief passage that Jack is heartened and sustained by Ames’s account of that ancestor and his vision of

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‘Jesus as a slave in chains’ (Home 213). Jack’s own direct connection between the nineteenth-century Midwestern abolitionists and the 1956 resistance in Montgomery is the essence of Robinson’s point, in the Gilead–Home pairing, about the radical potential of ‘forgotten history’ being ‘brought to mind again’ (“Amnesia” 17).9 Moreover, Robinson has Jack engage with racial injustice beyond the national borders of the United States: when reading to his father from Something of Value, the 1955 novel by Robert Ruark about the Mau Mau uprising against British colonial rule in 1950s Kenya, Jack mentions that he is ‘interested in Africa’ (Home 152). Although critics who find Robinson’s racial politics problematic in these texts have thus far themselves overlooked this moment, it is highly significant that Jack connects the American civil rights movement to anti-colonial independence movements in Africa. In drawing attention to the transnational nature of political resistance, Robinson mirrors the work of theorists and historians who have illuminated this connectedness and the ways it has been concealed.10 Jack’s continual wondering about the doctrine of predestination speaks not just of his interest in whether he himself can change, but also to the possibility or impossibility of national, political, historical change. Lila Ames’s outspoken conviction that ‘a person can change, everything can change’ is one of the few phrases directly replicated from Gilead in Home (Gilead 174–175; Home 238). It presumably heartens Jack not just in terms of the state of his own soul, but also in terms of the struggle for civil rights and the possibility of a future shared with Della. In addition to the explicit references to Du Bois or to Tuscaloosa, Robinson embeds hidden hints, through cultural allusions that require patient unravelling, about the viability of the kinds of changes Jack longs for. For example, when Jack is supposed to be playing hymns after the Sunday dinner with the Ameses, he suddenly breaks into the Etta James song, ‘I want a Sunday kind of love’ (Home 198). As one of the most famous and popular mixedrace singers of the twentieth century, James and her song here symbolically affirm inter-racial love. Later in the novel, in a very different tenor, Jack adapts the prophet Jeremiah’s declaration about the possibility – or impossibility – of change: ‘Can an Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil’ (King James Version, Ezekiel 13.23). Jack wryly adapts these lines to comment despairingly on himself – and his father’s preoccupation with their Scottish ancestry: ‘Can

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the Scotsman change his skin or the leopard his spots?’ (Home 289). Jack implies that he does indeed possess the capacity for selftransformation, in that he was ‘all right’ when he was ‘with Della’ (289). Yet this quotation also brings to mind Thomas Dixon’s white supremacist novel of 1902, The Leopard’s Spots, the first in Dixon’s so-called Ku Klux Klan trilogy that included The Clansman (1905 – adapted for D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation) and The Traitor (1907). Dixon uses the biblical quotation in his novel’s title to imply that, as a leopard cannot change his spots, racial difference is somehow ‘natural’ and fixed, and therefore racial segregation is somehow both inevitable and desirable. Through Jack’s referencing and revising both the biblical lines and Dixon’s use of them, as well as through his racially mixed family, Robinson challenges both the racism that Dixon’s text constitutes, and the Reconstruction era that gave rise to it. Home, then, insists on radical hope both in spite of and because of its uncompromising revelations about racial politics in the town of Gilead and in the Boughtons’s home. Despite the gradual exposure of Boughton’s racism, despite the gradual revelation of Gilead’s amnesiac indifference to racial politics and its exclusionary hostility to Black people, Robinson insists that Glory’s imagining of Robert Miles Boughton’s return to their home is not an impossible fantasy. ‘Maybe’ young Robert will one day make another visit; perhaps next time he will even cross the threshold. It is striking that she thinks about this not in the conditional tense, but in the definite future tense expressive of great optimism: ‘he will talk to me a little while, […] then he will thank me and leave, […] thinking […] This was my father’s house’ (Home 338–339). Maybe that boy or his mother will one day identify with the speaker who stands outside a half-recognised home in Morrison’s lyrics for the 1992 song, “Whose House is This”: Whose house is this? Whose night keeps out the light In here? Say, who owns this house? It is not mine. … This house is strange. Its shadows lie. Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key? (Bhabha 141; Morrison Home np)11

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The lyrics’ combination of estrangement and tentative belonging encapsulate the transforming present and transformed future that Robinson envisions at the end of Home.

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Reading race in Gilead Towards the end of Gilead, Ames interrupts his transcription of his conversation with Jack about Della and their son to reflect on how Jack’s father might react to learning that she is ‘colored’ (248). ‘The fact is,’ Ames muses, ‘I don’t know how Boughton would take all this. It surprised me to realize that. I think it is an issue we never discussed in all our years of discussing everything. It just didn’t come up’ (251). This aside is less interesting for what it reveals about Boughton’s prejudiced strategies of denial and avoidance than for the ways in which it epitomises Ames’s own conflictedness and lack of self-reflection about racial politics. Ames cannot even bring himself to write the words ‘race’ or ‘intermarriage’, relying instead on the euphemisms: ‘this’ and ‘it’. His avowed surprise at realising he has never discussed relationships between Black and white people with Boughton reflects a partial self-awareness about his unresolved stance on race and is symptomatic of the numerous half-truths/ half-self-deceptions that recur throughout his letter to his son, and hence throughout this novel. Ames presents himself to his son as someone whose frequent declarations of being at peace – with his current family situation; with Boughton and Boughton’s children; with his parishioners; with his ancestors; and with America’s past and present politics – are more wishful or aspirational than fully realised. While he strives to write as someone who has achieved an untroubled serenity in old age, and who is now in possession of wise unshakeable convictions that might be passed down generations, his letter configures his self as a work in progress, as a person still wrestling with challenges and ambiguities, and as one still coming to new realisations and recognitions. This is particularly evident in his thinking, and his feeling, about America’s racial dynamics, and about the part played by his family and by himself within local and national race conflicts. Despite assertions of calmness about his divergence from his grandfather’s radical stance, the abolitionist ancestor will not be appeased,

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silenced, or banished. Instead, he insistently crops up in Ames’s memory and dreams, and troubles his grandson’s attempts to be at peace with his own life choices. Robinson stages his reappearances in a series of Bhabha-esque ‘unhomely moments’, and the imagery of a house and/or home that undergirds her whole fictional project resonates significantly within these ‘uncanny’ encounters. When interviewing Robinson in 2015, Jason Stevens contrasts rather than allies her work with William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) as well as Invisible Man and Beloved. He suggests to Robinson that while their authors represent racial conflict as ‘a haunted place in characters’ psyches’, deploying Gothic conventions to do so, her work eschews this strategy (260). While Robinson implicitly agrees – or at least half agrees – with Stevens in her reply, I contend that the opposite is true: Ames and the town of Gilead are possessed by unappeased agitators from America’s past in ways that make Gilead similar to – not different from – the works of Faulkner, Ellison, and Morrison.12 The living Reverend John Ames, his father, and his grandfather each repeatedly embody or experience moments that articulate the relationship between ‘the ambivalences of a personal, psychic history’ and ‘the wider disjunctions of political existence’ (Bhabha 144). Ames’s grandfather constitutes these through actions, while his son and grandson experience them through their inability either to forget his actions or to reconcile themselves wholly to the very different course of their own lives. The way Ames tells the story of his grandfather’s life in nonchronological fragments is indicative of his ancestor’s disruptive and discomforting force in the narrator’s consciousness. The first thing readers are told about Grandfather Ames – à propos of the epic journey to his grave – is his late-in-life return to Kansas; the second thing is that he fought in the Civil War. Readers may not perceive his unshakeable commitment to racial justice – which is arguably his defining characteristic – until learning that one factor in his abandonment of Gilead was ‘the fire at the Negro church’ (Gilead 40). This memory leads the letter-writing Ames to record that the Black congregation subsequently left Gilead for Chicago, and that a ‘soda fountain’ stands where their church had been (41). It is no accident that Robinson replaces the church with a soda fountain, a facility that – in other locations – became iconic as a site of anti-segregation sit-ins in the civil rights movement.13 This

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short passage, then, epitomises the ways in which Ames cannot help but connect his grandfather’s cause with the contemporaneous civil rights agenda, and cannot stop himself from thinking about both. The inseparability of personal and political conflictedness continuously makes itself felt, even though Ames will never say so in as many words. What Ames does say, in many words and quite often, is that he is at peace with his father’s divergent path from his grandfather’s radicalism, and with his own decision to follow in his father’s footsteps. However, his declarations on this subject are wholly unconvincing: his prose in these moments is alternately flat or ambiguous, to the extent that he unwittingly reveals himself, in these very passages, to be as ‘unreposeful’ as the grandfather he tries to contain (57). About the ‘Bleeding Kansas’ conflicts of the 1850s, for example, he writes: ‘All best forgotten, my father used to say […] I’ve read up on those events, and I’ve decided my father was right. And that’s just as well, because people have forgotten’ (86). Ames’s lack of conviction is tangible here, not least when he claims that ‘it’s hard to find time to think about Kansas’ (86). In this text alone, he can barely get Kansas off his mind. Towards the end of the novel, he cannot keep self-doubting irony out of his voice. ‘I myself was a good son, so to speak,’ he claims, ‘the one who never left his father’s house, even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge’ (272). And he is almost shocked to recall that when his father assures him he would have no vision comparable to his grandfather’s of Jesus in rankling chains, that the Lord ‘would not come to him with his sorrows’, he remembers that he ‘took comfort in the assurance’ (56). ‘This is a remarkable thing to consider’, he now reflects; his regret at the easily placated conscience of his younger self is audible in this understatement (56). As he does with the spoken words of Jack, Ames displays extraordinary powers of recall regarding his grandfather’s speech. The confident quotations of apparently recollected speech raise Faulknerian questions about the reliability of this narrator, and about the likeliness of his projecting his own anxieties about the present onto his reconstructions of the past. When he recollects his grandfather asserting the Lord instructing him to ‘go home and be old’, and his mother insisting to her father-in-law that ‘you are at home’, Ames

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may be recalling the general uncanny or unhomely presence that his ancestor constituted within the household of his childhood (111). Highly symbolic memories suggest that the years of his youth were punctuated by his parents’ futile attempts to accommodate this unhomeliness: his mother washing his grandfather’s stained and rumpled shirts to smooth, white ‘marble busts’ before burying them (91–92); or the subversive Fourth of July speech his grandfather gave; or the dream in which his grandfather – either still alive or as a ghost – douses himself and Boughton with river water. These half-buried recollections connect thematically with his retelling of his grandfather’s parable about the horse that gets stuck in the tunnel built in the small abolitionist town. The level of detail in the retelling – it lasts for more than six pages – makes this tale very much the letter-writer’s own. The folkloric and gently caricaturing story of the town which must move to escape its own handiwork – the tunnel – one in which half-burial is both literally and symbolically key, has itself, like Jack’s interest in the Mau Mau in Home, been nearly buried by critics. The anecdote in part borrows from the trickster tales of African American tradition, for example those by Charles Chesnutt in which Black characters gain the comparative advantage over foolish white characters.14 In Robinson’s/Ames’s tale, the alreadyescaped former slave escapes the eccentric abolitionists at his earliest opportunity. Primarily, however, this tale is surely a parable that laments a community’s losing sight of its roots, its old spirit, self, or convictions. The town feels obliged to relocate itself physically to a new piece of land, and the semi-filled-in tunnel becomes ‘a kind of creek bed’, pleasantly pastoral with its grass and flowers, attracting picnickers who were oblivious to the trials of their abolitionist forebears (Gilead 71). The story thus laments Midwestern amnesia about the region’s radical past, and simultaneously expresses a nostalgia for the time when Iowa truly was, in Jack’s now-ironic quotation of Ulysses S. Grant, ‘the shining star of radicalism’ (Home 219).15 Ames writes wryly of ‘the hard work to undo all the hard work’ that was required of the townsfolk in their attempts to fill in or cover up their tunnel (Gilead 71). Yet Robinson creates for her readers a critical perspective on Ames here. If she explicitly strives in her nonfiction to reconnect us with the proud but forgotten history of social reform in the nineteenth-century Midwest, here

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she implicitly challenges the way that recent conservatism in that region has worked hard to half-bury the former hard work of radicalism.16 Both Ames and his father are partly implicated in this process. In the novel, however, Robinson also makes the crucial point that despite the starkness of racial injustice, neither the historical practice of resistance to racism, nor the most efficacious way to continue it in the present and the future, is straightforward. She conveys this primarily through one definitively ‘unhomely’ object: the grandfather’s pistol that causes Ames’s father so much anguish. Through Ames’s recounting how his father first buries, then unburies, and then throws into the river his father’s gun, and though the narrator’s recalling his father’s account of his distress on realising his grandfather had killed a US soldier while fighting for John Brown, Robinson shows that both violence and nonviolence are complicated. She does not wholly sanction the violent methods practised and advocated by Ames’s single-minded grandfather, and by no means wholly condemns Ames’s pacifist father who is appalled by what he believes to be his father’s warmongering from the pulpit. Although the narrator’s heart and soul seem uncontrollably attracted to his grandfather’s position, there is significant symbolism in the abolitionist hero losing one eye in the Civil War. With faint echoes of both the Homeric Cyclops and the one-eyed communist, Brother Jack, in Ellison’s Invisible Man, Robinson suggests that a wholly unified vision and ideological commitment might too easily become partial-sightedness. Robinson does not seek to resolve the impasse between the perspectives of the grandfather and his descendants, except through her inclusion of discernible (although not obvious) potential for connection and exchange between the opposing points of view. For example, Ames’s father’s unmotivating sermon on the text ‘Consider the lilies’ is somewhat redeemed if readers recall the detail that, some years later, the Black minister who is decamping to Chicago gives Ames some lilies that had grown around their church and which are still flourishing now outside his own (Gilead 95). In a less peaceful but perhaps no less reconciliatory symbol, when Ames’s father takes his then-young son to help pull down the Baptist church that has burned, the rained-upon ash turns the working men ‘black and filthy’, and the biscuit that Ames accepts from his father is covered in soot (108). While the reader might infer a disrespectful



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‘blackening up’ in these details, almost akin to blackface, they offer themselves to an alternative reading which looks to a future communion with African American churches. Ames’s earnest tone certainly gives more weight to the latter interpretation.

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Abolition, conservative Christianity, and the Midwest There are also grounds to take issue with or to complicate the specific and influential argument of the critic Christopher Douglas, who in a 2011 article reads Gilead as conservative rather than resistant on the issue of race. Douglas accuses Robinson of ‘unlearned history’ for failing to depict ‘Christian slavery’ – defenders of slavery who not only professed the Christian faith but deployed it in their attempts to legitimise slavery – in her representation of nineteenthcentury America (333; 335).17 For several reasons, however, Robinson’s narrative choices in this regard can be read as nuanced and subversive rather than compromised. First and foremost, according to her implied position in interviews such as her 2015 “Conversation” with Obama and essays such as “Who was Oberlin?” (2012) or “A Great Amnesia” (2008), she writes against the reality of contemporary racially prejudiced white Christian conservatism in the Midwest, a movement that has inherited much from ‘Christian slavery’. She also writes to counter the stereotyping assumption that there are and were no other dimensions to or contrasting positions within the whole of Midwestern history. The received wisdom about racist Midwestern conservatism is for her a regrettable ‘given’ and is her starting point; the unacknowledged history that she wants to make visible is the one, detailed in “McGuffey and the Abolitionists” (2012) for example, about forgotten radicalism. Second, she does draw attention to the failures and hypocrisies of Christianity in both Gilead and Home through the 1948 article from the Ladies Home Journal, “God and the American people”, that Jack has unearthed and wants discussed (Gilead 162). As Jack points out, the article’s critique of American Christianity includes the deafeningly understated point that ‘Americans’ treatment of the Negro indicated a lack of religious seriousness’ (167).18 Although neither Ames nor Boughton engage with this, it is they through their silence, and not Jack – or the article – who come off badly here.

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A third point in Robinson’s defence is this: moral lapses and character flaws that she has chosen to take issue with – silence, indifference, resignation, avoidance, and apathy – are not easy to convey or to indict in fiction. As Douglas documents, American writers have not been silent on the topic of ‘Christian slavery’: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs in the nineteenth century, and Morrison in the twentieth, are among those who have simultaneously depicted and lambasted it (Douglas 335–336). But if Robinson were to include overt evangelical racists, any characters more outspokenly hypocritical than Boughton, either as slave owners in the nineteenth century or pro-segregationists in the mid-twentieth, she might well overshadow and diminish the egregiousness of the indifference and the apathy that are among her central concerns. Lastly, as she is invested in the radical potential inherent in any common ground that white and Black American Christians might share, she does not effect an unqualified dismissal of Christianity. As Ames observes, ‘[t]he history of the church is very complex, very mingled’ (Gilead 130). In attending primarily to both white radical abolitionists and white inefficacious would-be appeasers, Robinson highlights the nuances in the relationship between the church and racial justice, suggesting that progress may lie not in further denunciation of Christian slavery, but in a fuller recognition of these. While acknowledging the reality of corruption and hypocrisy within Christianity, she suggests that nonetheless it is, or could be, a faith within which the means to reconciliation may lie. Ames is heartened and inspired by Jack’s inter-racial family because it helps him to reconcile himself to his grandfather and his grandfather’s politics. It is only now that Ames sees ‘the beauty there is’ in Jack (265), and only now does he celebrate the fact that the boy’s name is ‘John Ames Boughton’ (276). While Pak reads this as an appropriation of an inter-racial relationship to validate a white father–son bond, Ames’s sudden appreciation of the boy’s name surely articulates his sense that Jack will someday live out the transformative vision of his grandfather, John Ames. For better or worse, Jack – whose name was originally to be that of the historical abolitionist, Theodore Blight Weld – confronts racism with violence just as his grandfather did; he hit his boss when his boss cast aspersions on his relationship. Ames ends his text not with a forgetting of his grandfather, but in several oblique references to him and his

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politics: ‘the old courage’; ‘the lore of old gallantry and hope’; ‘hope deferred’ that is ‘still hope’ (282). Ames’s hope that his son will grow up both ‘useful’ and ‘brave’, in a ‘brave country’, articulates both his implicit regrets about his own political uselessness, and the sense that Jack’s confidences have inspired him to believe that the ‘ember’ of Gilead might yet burn brightly again (282). This image of the ember is not without its ambivalence, just as fire is an ambivalent power throughout the text. Several critics have identified Robinson’s reference to Langston Hughes’s ‘dream deferred’ in Ames’s comment on ‘hope deferred’; as Hughes warns in the poem ‘Harlem’, a dream deferred may all too readily ‘explode’ (145).19 This sinister subtext reminds us that it is Ames himself who, within a few paragraphs of his letter’s opening, recalls seeing two young male mechanics, ‘so black with grease and so strong with gasoline’ that he ‘[doesn’t] know why they don’t catch fire themselves’ (Gilead 6). In its conjuring of bodies doused in petrol and then set alight, Ames’s imagining ominously anticipates the racially motivated violence that continues to characterise American life. This unhomeliest of images haunts the novel’s hopeful ending, just as it does its beginning. Douglas and Pak separately locate within Robinson’s work the problematic strategy of ‘Africanism,’ the phenomenon defined by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark (1992) in which white writers deploy Black characters and/or blackness as surrogates for or symbols of white guilt, passion, despair, and so on.20 This is a misreading of Robinson’s configurations of Black identity and the struggle for racial equality. Her conscious relegation of Black characters to the margins of her texts emphasises the urgent need for the dominant culture to change and draws attention to white America’s complacency and indifference to the marginalisation it perpetuates. In my reading, it reflects a profound authorial commitment to racial justice, not a disregard for it. The way blackness, Black characters, and the ongoing history of anti-racist struggle haunt white characters, trouble their consciences, and disrupt their sense of being at home or at peace, reflects Robinson’s investment in radical change. Morrison points out that white writers who deploy the surrogacy of Africanism deny genuine Black agency and eschew real engagement with race politics. But Robinson does not use race or blackness as a surrogate to explore a different issue: racial politics are racial politics in her

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novels. In this she may be read in contrast to several other white novelists who engage with the history of US race relations and the struggle for civil rights. Whereas Philip Roth in The Human Stain (2000) arguably uses race as a metaphor for sexual passion and moral impurity, and Jeffrey Eugenides in Middlesex (2002) invokes racial inter-mixing as a useful symbol through which to express postmodernism’s double-voicedness, Robinson’s engagement with abolition and civil rights both critiques the nation-wide failure to make genuine racial equality a reality, and suggests that it is not too late for this failure to be transformed. Robinson’s expression of hope or faith in the potential for positive change is strongest at the end of Home, when Glory imagines Robert Miles Boughton and Della returning to the family house. Above all, hope is symbolised when Glory gives to young Robert the photograph of the river that his father likes so much. Throughout Gilead and Home, the river, invested with memories across the years, connotes rebirth and scope for reconciliation on the grounds of shared humanity: ‘They all loved the river, in all generations, Jack too’ (Home 296). Not coincidentally, one of the hymns, originally a spiritual, that he learns to play for the African American choir, “Shall we gather at the river?”, is one his father also loves (93). This detail attests to the river’s importance in Morrison’s terms as ‘a site of memory’, and to the role that memory – or re-remembering of the Midwest’s proudly radical past – must play in the transformation of racial politics.21 ‘Generous hope is embedded in this landscape and in the national landscape, waiting to be remembered’, Robinson insists in her article on “Amnesia” (261). In a lecture delivered eight years later in 2016, she made a statement that further encapsulates the combined racial critique and racial optimism that animate Gilead and Home: ‘America needs to recover the memory of the best that it has done,’ she declared, ‘and then try to do it all better’ (“Our Public” 181).

Notes 1 For readings of Robinson as racially reactionary or conservative, see Douglas; Chodat; and Pak. Essays that discuss race in Robinson’s fiction alongside other issues or themes include those by Petit; Ellis;

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and Bailey. See also Omnus. I wish to thank my colleagues Sally Bayley, Lucy Clarke, and Emily Holman, for many rich conversations about Robinson, including on race. 2 Although these novels form a triptych with Lila, this essay does not address that novel. This is primarily because Lila is set in decades that precede the 1950s–1960s civil rights movement. 3 See Douglas 333–334; Pak 214, 218. 4 Morrison’s vision of ‘home’ as ‘both snug and wide open, with a doorway never needing to be closed’ (“Home” 12) resonates in Grandfather Ames’s predilection for preaching with ‘all the windows’ of his church open, so that another congregation’s singing can be heard (Gilead 114). 5 The sequencing of my discussion is also intended as a supplement or corrective to the several essays that constitute detailed analysis of the varying racial politics depicted in Gilead, but then either omit the treatment of race in Home completely despite being published after it (Bailey; Douglas; Abele); or turn briefly to the later novel as something of an afterthought (Chodat; Omnus; Pak; Zamalin and Skinner). Robinson herself says that Home is not a sequel, and that she ‘wanted it to be true that you could pick up either book first’ (“Art” 50). 6 That Robinson anachronistically references the integration of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa here, which in fact took place in 1963, suggests the importance of race politics in her conception of these novels. She alters historical fact in order to foreground key moments in the history of civil rights in America. 7 Emmett Till was murdered 1955. On the relationship between baseball and race politics in Home and Gilead, see Petit. 8 In a 2015 interview, Robinson equates those who were passive in the civil rights movement with the ‘segregationists in the streets’, and invokes the Calvinist view that ‘indifference to justice […] is a very grave sin’ (Stevens 261). 9 Chodat makes a similar point on 346. 10 See, for example, studies of transnational Black activism by Kelley; Makalani; and Umoren. 11 These words are quoted by Homi Bhabha in his discussion of the ‘unhomely’ (141), and used by Morrison as the epigraph to her novel, Home. To listen to the original song: www.interlude.hk/front/honey-rue/. 12 When Stevens asks Robinson, ‘Is the Gothic less compelling to you as a literary mode than other aspects of 19th century literature?’ Robinson answers, ‘This is an interesting question for which I really wish I had an answer.’ She goes on to say that ‘there is a kind of dualism in the Gothic that I guess I find too easy’, and then outlines some of her reservations about that mode, while never dismissing it completely (260). My own

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sense is that Robinson’s fiction has within it more of the Gothic than her answer, or her perception of her fiction, may allow. Perhaps that is because the Gothic mode is arguably not as ‘dualistic’ and ‘easy’ as her interview answer here implies. 13 On the Greensboro, NC lunch counter sit-ins of 1960, for example, see Tuck 282–283. 14 See, for example, Chesnutt’s 1899 collection, The Conjure Woman. 15 Robinson discusses this phrase, coined by Ulysses S. Grant, in her first “Conversation” with Barack Obama; she points out that Iowa never had either laws against interracial marriage or segregated schools. 16 See Robinson’s essays, “McGuffey and the Abolitionists” and “Who was Oberlin?” 17 Pak’s discussion builds on Douglas’s argument (Pak 214–225). 18 See also Home 226–227. 19 See, for example, Petit 126, 133. On the significance of fire in relation to race in Gilead, see Bailey. 20 Morrison, Playing 12–14. See Douglas 333–334; Pak 214, 218. 21 It is fascinating to compare Robinson’s rhapsodic writing on the river in Home 295–296 with Morrison’s meditation in “The Site of Memory” on the Mississippi River and on water as symbolic in terms of authorial and racial memory (77). Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1919/20) also resonates in Robinson’s words.

Works cited Abele, Elizabeth. “‘His soul is marching on’: Suppressing John Brown in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Irish Journal of American Studies 6 (2017), http://ijas.iaas.ie/issue-6-elizabeth-abele/. Bailey, Lisa M. “Fraught with Fire: Race and Theology in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (2012): 265–280. Bhabha, Homi. “The World and the Home.” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 141–153. Chesnutt, Charles. The Conjure Woman. University of Michigan Press, 1969. Chodat, Robert. “That Horeb, That Kansas: Evolution and the Modernity of Marilynne Robinson.” American Literary History 28.2 (2016): 328–362. Churchwell, Sarah. “A Man of Sorrows.” The Guardian, 4 October 2008, www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/04/fiction. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Dixon, Thomas. The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865–1900. Doubleday, 1902. Douglas, Christopher. “Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 44.3 (2011): 333–353.

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Ellis, Elizabeth A. “Race, Religion and Sentimentalism in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” The Sentimental Mode: Essays in Literature, Film, and Television. Editors Jennifer A. Williamson et al. McFarland, 2014. 175–189. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Vintage, 1995. Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2002. Faulkner, William. Light in August. Vintage, 1991. Hughes, Langston. “Harlem” (“Dream Deferred”). Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 3, Poems 1951–69. University of Missouri Press, 2001. 145. —— “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1, Poems 1926–40. University of Missouri Press, 2001. 36. Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press, 2002. Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939. University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage, 1991. —— The Bluest Eye. Vintage, 1999. —— “Home”. The House that Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain. Editor Wahneema Lubiano. Pantheon, 1997. 3–12. —— Home. Knopf, 2012. —— Jazz. Vintage, 2005. —— “The Nobel Lecture in Literature.” What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. Editor Carolyn Denard. University Press of Mississippi, 2008. 198–208. —— Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992. —— “The Site of Memory.” What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. Editor Carolyn Denard. University Press of Mississippi, 2008. 65–82. —— “Whose House is This?” Lyrics to Honey and Rue (song cycle), composed by André Previn, 2002. Unpublished. Recording at www.interlude.hk/ front/honey-rue/. (Accessed 12/5/2020.) Omnus, Wiebke. “History Remembered: Religion, Violence and ‘the War Against Slavery’.” English Language and Literature 58.3 (2012): 413–425. Pak, Yumi. “‘Jack Boughton Has a Wife and Child’: Generative Blackness in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead and Home. Editor Jason W. Stevens. Brill/Rodopi, 2015. 212–236. Petit, Susan. “Field of Deferred Dreams: Baseball and Historical Amnesia in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” MELUS 37.4 (2012): 119–137. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Psychology Press, 1993.

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“President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa.” New York Review of Books 5 November 2015. www.nybooks.com/ articles/2015/11/05/president-obama-marilynne-robinson-conversation/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Robinson, Marilynne. “The Art of Fiction.” Paris Review 186 (2008): 37–66. —— Gilead. Virago, 2005. —— “A Great Amnesia.” Harpers May 2008, pp. 17–21. —— Home. Virago, 2008. —— Housekeeping. Faber, 2005. —— “McGuffey and the Abolitionists.” The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Picador, 1988. 126–149. —— “Our Public Conversation: How America talks about itself.” What Are We Doing Here?: Essays. Virago, 2018. 135–182. —— “Who was Oberlin?” When I Was a Child I Read Books. Virago, 2012. 165–182. Roth, Philip. The Human Stain. New York: Vintage, 2000. Stevens, Jason W. “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead and Home. Brill/Rodopi, 2015. 254–269. Tuck, Stephen. We Ain’t What We Used to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama. Harvard University Press, 2010. Umoren, Imaobong. Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles. University of California Press, 2018. Zamalin, Alex and Daniel Skinner “Gilead’s Two Models of Action against Racial Injustice.” A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson. Editors Shannon L. Mariotti and Joseph H. Lane Jr. University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 91–112.

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11 ‘A great admirer of American education’: Robinson as professor and defender of ‘America’s best idea’ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff and Kathryn E. Engebretson

Marilynne Robinson’s nonfiction has drawn critical engagement, whether for her writings on Calvinism or her apologia for Oliver Cromwell.1 Yet, as a public intellectual who also worked as a professor, her essayed stance on higher education – peppered throughout essays published between 2013 and 2017 – has been relatively ignored.2 When read with the work of scholars including Nel Noddings and Michael Apple, an interdisciplinary contextualisation of Robinson’s ideas reveals, on the one hand, consilience in her claims of community’s importance and, on the other, warnings against her habit of idealising American universities. In this essay, Robinson’s experience as an academic on short-term contracts and her tenure at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop – by which she made a living, drawing benefits and ultimately an Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System pension – will be considered. Juxtaposing her own words and writings with reflections from those who studied with her and work by the most important educational theorists of the contemporary era, this examination reveals Robinson as teacher and educational leader working at the micro and macro levels of the endeavour called education. While some writers employed at research-intensive universities in the United States may consider teaching to be a necessary evil, an afterthought, or a distraction from the real work of scholarship, Robinson has spoken to the contrary. Her work teaches students with gracious listening, considering broader contexts of geography and history in the writing of American fiction, and, throughout her tenure at Iowa, planning for the Workshop faculty to grow as she

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approached retirement. Naturally, her career is not above critique, but as her role as teacher is put into conversation with the educationalists of today, a portrait emerges of Robinson as a defender of the institution of education in the United States – albeit as a professor who also shows signs of flagging with regard to critical theory and the corrosion of civility in the era of Trumpism.

Robinson’s pedagogy as professor The reputation of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop preceded Robinson’s involvement in what she calls ‘the oldest thing of its kind on the planet’ (What Are We Doing Here? 87). ‘Accepting creative work toward a graduate degree, the MFA as we know it now,’ she points out, ‘was an innovation of the University of Iowa’ (87). Starting in 1991, she worked as one of three full-time faculty, leading workshops for students pursuing MFAs in literary expression and playing a role in selecting applicants to the programme. Most of her tenure played out under Frank Conroy, who acted as director of the Workshop from 1987 until his death in 2005. In After the Program Era (2017), Marija Reiff picks up on Robinson’s praise and emulation of the Protestant beginnings of American universities in her pedagogical approach, arguing her ‘career reflects how the ethos of nineteenthcentury liberal Protestant education informs the creative writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ (17).3 Robinson’s standing as the F. Wendell Miller Professor of Creative Writing would have made her a natural successor to Conroy – she eventually taught there longer than he did – but he was succeeded in 2006 by Lan Samantha Chang, one of Robinson’s former students. The final twelve years of Robinson’s career at the University of Iowa were astonishingly fruitful, seeing her publish three of her four novels and four of her six collections of essays. Robinson retired in 2016 from the only MFA programme boasting more than 40 Pulitzer Prizes from its graduates. Robinson’s views on higher education emerge in essays published in When I was a Child I Read Books (2013), The Givenness of Things (2016), and What Are We Doing Here? (2018). Adapted from lectures she delivered in speaking engagements at other universities, they express the thoughts of an individual deeply invested in

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the ideals and vulnerabilities of American education. Her opinions crossed into explicit political involvement in September 2015, when she participated with President Barack Obama in a conversation published by The New York Review of Books. Obama, who awarded her the 2012 National Humanities Medal, was heading into his final year as President of the United States; Robinson was in her final year at Iowa. She took the opportunity, recorded at the state capitol in Des Moines, to unequivocally praise education in the United States as ‘a triumph of the civilization’ (Givenness 297). A month later, she delivered a Presidential Lecture at Stanford University that she entitled “The American Scholar Now”, echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous lecture, “The American Scholar”, published in 1837. That December she delivered it again at the Englert Theater in Iowa City, retitled “Save our Public Universities: In Defense of America’s Best Idea” and it was published in March 2016 as the cover story in Harper’s Monthly. That she used the occasion of her swan song from academia to defend it speaks to Robinson’s commitment, which, though unflinching, is delivered in writing and speech hand-in-hand with critique. ‘I don’t think there’s anything comparable in history’, she lamented to President Obama. ‘And it has no defenders’ (Givenness 297). This rather gloomy outlook may have something to do with Robinson’s locality as a professor. In Iowa alone, public universities repeatedly saw funding slashed by state-level lawmakers throughout her career. This trend continues: the most recent round of cuts, announced in January 2018, sliced another $19 million off the budgets for Iowa’s three public universities. In turn, the Iowa Board of Regents have consistently hiked tuition costs, which result in the alarming, exponential increase of student loan debt and a barrier of cost to those who would seek degrees. Iowa State University’s former president, Steven Leath, complained about this upon his exit in spring 2017: ‘The way the budget model is is broken’ (CharisCarlson). Robinson’s wariness of lawmakers dead set on cutting funding to public universities is on display in her posturing: [Teachers] are an invaluable community who contribute as much as legislators do to sustaining civilization, and more than legislators do to equipping the people of this country with the capacity for learning and reflection, and the power that comes with that capacity. Lately we have been told and told again that our educators are not preparing

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American youth to be efficient workers. Workers. That language is so common among us now that an extraterrestrial might think we had actually lost the Cold War. (When I was a Child I Read Books 24)

Here we also find what Robinson identifies as the driving ideology held by those who actively work to devalue liberal arts education: economics. Robinson raises the notion that Americans have forsaken their identity as Citizen for that of Taxpayer (What Are We Doing Here? 84). Public institutions rely on public funds and suffer under the combination of income inequity and the denigration of the good that taxes do. They also ail, she contends, because their purpose has been warped into providing ‘in place of education what would better be called training’ (86): ‘The dominant view now is that [universities’] legitimate function is not to prepare people for citizenship in a democracy but to prepare them to be members of a docile though skilled working class’ (94). She takes umbrage at the commonly stated goal of readying students for an entirely imagined future economy, whose parameters are unknown and perhaps disingenuously conceived. The product of a liberal arts education, in her estimation, is an individual capable of seeing through and defying exploitation – the sort of human being that may not make for the best employee in a corporate workplace. ‘Public universities are stigmatized as elitist,’ she argues, ‘because they continue in the work of democratizing privilege, of opening the best thought and the highest art to anyone who wishes to have access to them’ (88). Wealthy executives seeking to reap more wealth for themselves rarely exhibit interest in democratising the privilege they enjoy, as seen in bonuses members of upper management continue to give themselves in astonishing amounts despite slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2008. Though Robinson worked in higher education, her career did not involve conducting research in regard to theorising the vitality of universities. For instance, in terms of Robinson’s assertion that universities exist to educate better citizens, education theorist Michael Apple would warn that this view is idealistic: Rather than interpreting them as ‘the great engines of democracy’ (though there is an element of truth in that), one looks at schools as institutions which are not necessarily or always progressive forces.



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They may perform economic and cultural functions and embody ideological rules that both preserve and enhance an existing set of structural relations. These relations operate at a fundamental level to help some groups and serve as a barrier to others. (62)

Tuition in America is exorbitant when compared with the cost of higher education in many other nations, therefore limiting many people’s access to a degree. And while the US Department of Education admits that: ‘Higher education is a key pathway for social mobility in the United States’, it also found in 2016 that ‘compared to white adults […] the gap in bachelor’s degree attainment has doubled, from 9 to 20 percent for Hispanic residents since 1974 and from 6 to 13 percent for black residents since 1964’ (United States 1). In praising the social and spiritual capital American universities grant to their graduates, Robinson has failed to address where higher education has fallen short in that aim and the fact that access is and has always been disparate. Universities in the United States are, in their enterprise of democratising privilege, nevertheless tied up in the power of privilege, for better and worse. Identifying Robinson’s blind-spots in this respect reveals an idealism that certainly motivated her in her own corner of academia but misrepresents where universities stand today on the national scale. As such, the work of education theorists provides a litmus by which to test Robinson’s personal theories.

Robinson’s locality Robinson’s experience in higher education at a public university in the United States has been hardly typical and remarkably privileged. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is often ranked the premier MFA creative writing programme in the world, being the one all others were modelled upon – or against. While it did, throughout her tenure, embrace diversity and open its doors equitably to student writers across all demographics, it could only do so in small numbers. The two-year residency typically accepts 25 fiction writers and 25 poets a year from a pool assuredly deep in applications: ‘From 2013–2017, 5061 people applied to the Workshop and 135 (2.7%) were admitted. In comparison, Harvard admitted just over 5% of its applicants for the class of 2021’ (Warner). Regarding admission

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requirements, the Workshop’s website stresses the importance of applicants’ submitted work, iterating that they ‘do not look for any particular style of writing, but rather for strong work that shows evidence of talent and individuality’ (‘Graduate Program’). This is headed on the webpage by a photo of Robinson leading a class with a white man and woman and an African American woman facing the camera, advertising both the famed professor emeritus and a combination of gender and racial inclusivity. Despite this, some have criticised the Workshop for its rigid stylistic preference for fiction that has been labelled, perhaps sarcastically, prairie realism. When Kurt Vonnegut, who taught there in the 1960s, spoke in Iowa City in September 2001, he teased then-director Conroy for his often-voiced refusal to read any story submitted for peer critique containing a talking toaster; Vonnegut publicly challenged all students in the Workshop to fill their stories with verbose kitchen appliances. Workshop graduate Eric Bennett wages that the programme ‘flattened literature’. He breaks writing into four styles, claiming the first three were acceptable at the Workshop: ‘lapidary simplicity’, ‘the genuinely and winningly loquacious’, ‘magical realism’, with ‘postmodernism’ falling ‘outside the community of norms’ (Bennett). Bennett lumps Robinson’s styles, in a deferential way, into the first two categories. But he is not finished with her in his criticism of the elite programme: ‘Texts worth reading […] coordinate the personal with the national or international; they embed the instant in the instant’s full context and long history. It’s what […] Jonathan Franzen’s and Marilynne Robinson’s recent novels try to do. But to write like this, you’re going to have to spend some time thinking’ (Bennett). Bennett’s backhanded emphasis seems to reside in those three small words: try to do. But Robinson has made this point: ‘Writers have to think’ is how she began the essay “Diminished Creatures” that she contributed to a Conroy-edited collection of essays by Workshop writers (155). Robinson strives to impart to others the vitality and metaphysical consciousness of fiction. This informed her pedagogy in teaching writing as an art, especially in terms of building spiritual confidence in her students: I have a favorite scientific fact that I always share with my students: The human brain is the most complex object known to exist in the



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universe. By my lights, this makes the human mind and the human person the most interesting entity known to exist in the universe. I say this to my students because I feel their most common problem is also their deepest problem – a tendency to undervalue their own gifts and to find too little in the human beings their fiction seeks to create and the reality it seeks to represent. By means direct and indirect this problem has been educated into them. (When I was a Child I Read Books 144)

She witnessed in many of her students a diminishment of their own worth and potential, often unconsciously self-inflicted, seemingly or legitimately imposed by economic pressures and public attitudes against the value of the humanities. By reframing students’ personal cosmologies in an expansive way, with attention to the healthy wonders of intellectual thought and scientific discovery, Robinson sought to fertilise the souls attending her seminars with positive regard for their own and others’ innate humanity. Her hunch was that such a shift in attitude would play out for the better in their fiction. This endeavour harmonises with the ideas of one of the most influential educational scholars of the twentieth century, Maxine Greene, who championed a similar focus as an educational approach in 1965: The younger [generation’s ability to devote itself against] denial, abstractness, or despair […] is obscure because anything is possible, and because the questions science cannot answer are so ubiquitous in modern life. Nevertheless, our work, our business, goes on. In an important sense, it is the work of searching after truths that are dependable. It is the business of using intelligence to adapt what is discovered by the sciences to the service of mankind. Since the days of Socrates, there has been no more promising ideal than the freeing of the human mind. It is our business now to enlarge its freedom, to strengthen human nerve enough to permit mindfulness to be chosen over bigotry, superstition, wishfulness, and the simplism of antiintellectual ‘common sense.’ (Greene 424–425)

The problems Robinson encountered in the spiritual stability of her students – and the approach to providing students with hopeful footing – are the same that Greene met and used in her career working with students half a century earlier. Robinson emerges not only as one in a lineage of writers of note, but also as a woman educator in a tradition of meaning-making in American education.

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Several of her students in the Workshop attest to the positive effects that her thinking had on them. Ayana Mathis credits Robinson with freeing her from a project that was not coming together: ‘So everyone’s talking, talking, and she very quietly – as though she were in mid-thought – she says, “Well, it is true that the characters are not sufficiently complex to the situation in which you’ve placed them”.’ Mathis laughs at this memory, adding, ‘I shudder to think what the beginning of that thought was. But she was right’ (University of Iowa “Ayana Mathis on Marilynne Robinson and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop”). Thus nudged, Mathis switched gears and began to write her acclaimed novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2012). Not all students of colour have described positive experiences in MFA programmes; Elissa Washuta, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young, Junot Díaz, and David Mura have all written about the difficulties underrepresented people face when pursuing degrees in creative writing in the United States.4 It is in Mathis’s descriptions of their relationship that we see the hallmark of Robinson-as-teacher. Clearly the success Mathis has achieved is her own, but her acknowledgement of Robinson as guide, fellow writer, and teacher suggests the power and import of writing as a skill and craft that an expert educator can influence. Mathis attests to the effect a great teacher can have on one’s own process of individuation. Another former student, C. Kevin Smith, praises Robinson for the psychological focus she imparted: ‘She talked about the value of consulting the places of love and injury and she used the phrase ‘the dense, warm, urgent place in your imagination’. It was so valuable to me to hear a writing teacher talk about going within to those wounded places inside us, where I think a lot of our best material lives’ (University of Iowa “Kevin Smith on Marilynne Robinson and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop”). The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Paul Harding has spoken of her attention to mindfulness and precision: The best kind of writing […] is what she always called interrogative writing, which is you don’t already know what you have to say; you discover it in the process of writing it, so it becomes a kind of discipline of, you know, pursuing revelation. So that when you find these things you know, it kind of precipitates these moments of recognition when you arrive at the true subject of the true image, all that sort of stuff.



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And then you just pass those moments of recognition and delight onto the reader, hopefully. (Finnegan)

From a distance, her pedagogy appears thoroughly traditional in terms of liberal arts, not at all utilitarian. There is, in Robinson’s role as professor to those who celebrate her, an intellectual rigour that is at once creative, intimate, and erudite. In defending the enterprise by which she taught graduate students, Robinson uses a liberal-arts-based rhetoric, invoking not her own contemporaries but figures whose historical swath covers antiquity to modernity: Emerson, de Tocqueville, Frederick Law Olmsted, Kant, Benjamin Disraeli, Plato, Marx, Henry Ford, and Thomas Jefferson. The ease with which she structures thoughts ranging the history of ideas is syntactically Emersonian, showing that Robinson practices the sort of liberal arts education she knowledgably defends.5 This aspect of her personality has also been identified by her admirers. During a visit with postgraduate students at Trinity College, Dublin, in spring 2011 – having just won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Tinkers – Harding shared that studying writing with Robinson was like learning from Moses. Harding’s tone was both comedic and affectionate, his point being one of reverence for her presence, scope, and authority around the workshop table. In turn, Robinson holds Harding up as an example of what is possible when a fiction writer follows his or her creative voice with purposeful disregard for assumptions about what would make a piece of writing profitable. She points to his Pulitzer as proof that sensationalism need not be courted to write a work of value: ‘One of the problems I have is making my students believe that they can write something that satisfies their definition of good, and they don’t have to calculate the market. […] Now that I have the Paul anecdote, they will believe me more’ (Rich). Harding and Mathis both took places as faculty in the Writers’ Workshop. And so the lineage at Iowa, deeply affected by Robinson’s pedigree, has passed to a generation admitted, taught, and even hired by her. For critical pedagogues like Apple and Giroux, this is not simply a coincidence of an increasingly diverse academy (of which it barely is). More likely, the hiring of her former students is a testament to Robinson’s leadership, mentorship, and position of power within the Workshop as a trusted voice with a vested interest in the quality and

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future of the programme – which has an undeniably more diverse faculty than when Robinson arrived decades prior.

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Robinson’s commitments Robinson’s commitment to higher education plays out most obviously in the way she values community. She viewed the Workshop as ‘a little microcosm of democracy’, a place where she and her colleagues could forge a communal identity (Givenness 311). ‘In the United States,’ she asserts, ‘education, especially at the higher levels, is based around powerful models of community’ (When I was a Child I Read Books 23). This identity-affirming community, as she sees it, also extends beyond the local level to the ends of the geographically vast United States: ‘There are literally hundreds of places in this country where an open and committed student can enjoy an education that would be extraordinary by any except the very high standard so many of these institutions do sustain’ (23–24). In human terms, Robinson is correct to frame the MFA as a larger cultural project happening across America. While the Iowa Writers’ Workshop may be an elite programme, making only a dint in terms of the number of student writers it educates, one need only take a step back and acknowledge the altogether common existence of MFA programmes across the United States to see that opportunities abound for those who wish to practise the art at the graduate level.6 This opportunity, however, is not available to all would-be students, who must possess more than openness and commitment in order to attend. While the existence of public universities is surely common, not all are equitably accessible, a serious issue that Robinson fails to acknowledge. Again, idealism clouds Robinson’s view of the fact that many Americans are not given a fair shake at higher education. Robinson’s more immediate commitments have been invested at her local level in good faith. ‘The writers’ workshop is as interesting and civilized a community as I have ever encountered,’ she writes, ‘and it owes the successes of its long history to the fact that it works well as a community’ (31). While working to feed her students’ minds and souls, she has taught with an eye on that unknown but nevertheless real community of people they hope to reach: ‘So long

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as a writer is working below the level of her powers, she is depriving the community of readers of a truly good book’ (32). Again, it is Robinson’s belief that a student writer must aspire to the personal heights of her intellect and good will as they individually manifest in order to bring forth creative work that will provide true benefit to others – a constructive facet of the meaning-making approach to teaching. On this point Robinson is consilient with education scholar Nel Noddings, who notes that ‘a strong community is not necessarily a good one’ while vouching for ‘forms of community based on the primacy of the other [… In] such communities the virtues to be prized will be relational rather than personal […]; trust, good cheer, equality, peace, and compatibility may be more important […] than […] courage, honesty, and industry’ (in Bergman 158). Noddings calls this liberal communitarianism, ‘in which both individual freedom and the common good are valued’ (158). Creative writing students are thus seen as offering, in good will, gifts of written art to each other as well as an imagined, unknown other – the anticipated reader. Reiff notes, ‘Graduates of creative writing programs echo Robinson’s goal of discovering and empathizing with the individuality of others, and they also make it a key component of their works’ (18). This opens a moral dimension to the project of education. For Robinson, the good in educating students at public universities is tied directly to an idealised American democracy: ‘whether and how we educate people is still a direct reflection of the degree of freedom we expect them to have, or want them to have’ (What Are We Doing Here? 88). In the shift to educating college students not for life but for mere jobs, Americans ‘are enacting the strange – and epochal – tendency of Western civilization to impoverish’ (90). We sense that in Robinson’s view, democratising privilege requires access to higher education across distinctions of class, gender, sexuality, disability, religion, and ethnicity – though she does not state this explicitly. The basis here is ethical, and one Noddings has explored in great depth since the 1980s: ‘An education that would be moral must “nurture the ethical ideals of those with whom […] [educators, inside and outside formal schooling] … come in contact”’ (in Bergman 153). As Noddings puts it, ‘what we reveal to a student about himself as an ethical and intellectual being has the power to nurture the ethical ideal or to destroy it’ (155). What is therefore at stake

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in diminishing the significance of a liberal arts degree are America’s ethical ideals, as educators of higher education conceive of them, both individually and at large. In terms of American ethics, anxieties about capitalism are present in Robinson’s warnings of consequences for abandoning a liberal arts education as a national value: ‘We are in the process of disabling our most distinctive achievement – our educational system – in the name of making the country more like itself. […] If we let our universities die back to corporate laboratories and trade schools, we’ll have done something quieter and vastly more destructive’ than the fashioning of ‘trinkets made from fragments of Ming vases that were systematically smashed by Mao’s Red Guard’ (When I was a Child I Read Books 160). Robinson subscribes to a form of American exceptionalism that places the system of higher education at the centre of civic life, not only in the United States but also on the planet: ‘I know from teaching and traveling elsewhere in the world that the role of higher education in this country is very exceptional’ (161). Her experience, however, is anecdotal and fails to embrace the fact that fields of study stretch beyond national borders. There exist colleges and universities of impressive quality and value the world over and, lest anyone forget, the United States is home to scads of for-profit institutes of learning, including the disgraced and defunct Trump University. Kevin Kumashiro, former Dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco, challenges Americans to scrutinise the idea that American schools are broken. He insists they work exceptionally well to achieve what they were designed to achieve: the maintenance of the status quo and the marginalisation of people of colour and other minoritised statuses.7 In the twenty-first century, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has drawn in students and professors who in times past would not have had the opportunity to practise and teach the craft. But, as a rule, is this the case in higher education in the United States? Robinson is astonishingly optimistic in praising American higher education as ‘a triumph of the civilization’ (Givenness 297). Having enjoyed something like a purity of intellectual, pedagogical, and creative freedom in a small, hallowed liberal arts programme at a large university, she seems to have worked outside of the pressures of standards, measurement,

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and the dominant discourse of accountability experienced by the majority of instructors in American higher education. She plumbed this freedom in a seemingly sincere effort to provide insight and optimism for others. ‘We have educated a great many people at great cost,’ she says, ‘But we have been talked out of the kind of pragmatism that would allow us to say: This works’ (What Are We Doing Here? 96). What works, in her estimation, is that ‘American education has provided an array of experience to allow students to discover their talents, their gifts’ in profound numbers (Givenness 112): Historically the United States has educated far more people far more broadly and at far greater length than any other civilization in history, and yet the notion is pervasive and influential that we as Americans are hostile to learning. Our colleges and universities – the greatest in the world by any reckoning – have come to be seen as anomalies because the love of learning that built them by the thousands is no longer considered a national trait, indeed, is considered a thing alien to us, despite such formidable evidence to the contrary. I know from visiting all sorts of institutions everywhere in the country that even the smallest college is a virtual Chautauqua of conversation and performance that binds it, together with its community, into national culture and world culture. (When I was a Child I Read Books 160–161)

With that nod to world culture, what would Robinson make of Brazilian educational scholar Paulo Freire, who iterated in his foundational work The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in Portuguese in 1968, that education is the practice of freedom? Robinson, saying much the same, would likely find an ally in Freire but her scope on that freedom is limited distinctly to a North American exceptionalism. Those with first-hand experience of education at nationally funded universities outside the USA may also find a distasteful ethnocentrism in Robinson’s appraisal of American institutions of higher education above all others. Many American universities are internationally respected, but this does not take away from the fact that there are hundreds of highly respected universities, many being centuries older than the USA, around the world. That she does not give them credit and seems to brush off other nations’ efforts to educate their adult populations will not endear her views to those from other countries who can also say ‘this works’.

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Robinson’s critiques ‘Well, obviously I am very critical of the universities, too’, Robinson tells us. ‘They give prestige to just the kind of thinking that undermines their own existence as humanist institutions’ (What Are We Doing Here? 99). Since the rise at American universities of critical theory in the 1970s, that word – humanist – has become a rather dirty one. There exists a divide along these lines between creative writers and literary scholars teaching in higher education, it being common for English faculties and creative writing faculties to keep separate houses; indeed, at the University of Iowa, the English Department resides in the riverside brick and mortar English & Philosophy Building while the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has, since 1997, taken up in the Dey House, an actual house of Italianate design, atop the flood plain on the other side of campus. Robinson, who concedes she ‘may be blind to the virtues of theory’, expresses personal offense at what she perceives to be the devaluation of the author: ‘It doesn’t really matter what the writer, I in this case, think she means. The critic knows better than I do. That’s just insulting. [… Some] of us are closer to the phenomenon than others’ (Givenness 111). Robinson is correct that authors’ views on their own works hold value. Complete and total disregard for the author, however, is hardly typical of criticism employing theory. By now, theory has become such a mainstay that some scholars have been proclaiming its death for 15 years.8 Its persistence, however, led Robinson to complain in 2015 that the humanities ‘have run for cover to critical theory, which is tortuous and dreary enough to look like a lot of work and impenetrable enough to evade scrutiny’ (What Are We Doing Here? 99). As far as she is concerned, the author is not dead and any theoretical intimations that she may be, amount to fighting words.9 Robinson’s contention, without naming particular schools of thought, imagines literary criticism as a monolith: As a professor of literature, more or less, I have seen scholarly criticism given over to quasi-sociology, or -psychology, or -economic theory, or -anthropology, taking some sort of authority from the imposition of jargon that is either dubious in itself, wholly inappropriate to its subject, or both. This looks to me like the abandonment of literature as such, its reduction to data to be fed into theories. It is only logical in the circumstances that the individual student’s encounter with a



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book should be marginalized in favor of a more knowing construction of its meaning. Nothing is lost except everything that makes literature the preeminent art. (Givenness 110–111)

Robinson is correct again: literature is not data. But do literary critics truly extrude literature through theories like Play-Doh? Certainly some do, but their research is likely to be flagged and argued against. Since she has not provided particulars, we are left wondering specifically which literary theories she has engaged with and a good many scholars of literature, mirroring her own offence, would be equally affronted by her characterisation of what they do in analysing texts; if they have failed her, it appears to be chiefly a case of chronic misunderstanding. Robinson, not at all alone in this prejudice, is a participant in the tribal differences that are playing out between professors of English and professors of creative writing. Those with a foot in both camps, who can and do publish fiction and criticism, can vouch for the enrichment of critical and creative hybridity. Robinson, best known as a writer of fiction, exhibits an astonishing capacity for critical engagement. She is poised to champion the idea that professors need not be compartmentalised into a single discipline or write in a single form, and yet her framing of critical theory as a threat to the art of literature stands as a strawman. In another vein, Robinson does not invoke STEM by acronym in her defence of the liberal arts, but its hold on the utilitarian marketing of higher education is under scrutiny when she says the ‘association of math and science with efficiency is stuck so solidly in the American brain that it is never questioned, and we are stripping down our educational system in deference to it’ (Givenness 117). She sounds a clarion call ‘to reconsider the pressure, amounting sometimes to hostility, that has lately been brought to bear on our educational culture at every level, particularly in the humanities and the arts’ (When I was a Child I Read Books 25). Educational theorist Michael Apple correlates what he calls ‘high status knowledge’ learned in universities with an economy that has been shaped so as to not be fair to all people, arguing ‘[schools] enhance and give legitimacy to particular types of cultural resources which are related to unequal economic forms’ (34). In Apple’s view, technical knowledge that is deemed both measurable and profitable has long been prioritised

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at the university level at the expense of knowledge gained through ethics and the humanities, which by their nature do not cleanly conform to the quantifying dictates of those demanding ‘results’: This […] clarifies some of the reasons schools and curricula seem to be organized toward university life in terms of the dominance of subject centered curricula and the relative prestige given to differing curricula areas. This relationship between economic structure and high status knowledge might also explain some of the large disparities we see in levels of funding for curricular innovations in technical areas and, say, the arts. (35)

Robinson’s manner of countering this phenomenon is to convince her fellow Americans that their universities were founded – not on science, technology, engineering, and math – but on progressive theology: ‘The intellectual model for […] most of the older schools in America […] was a religious tradition that loved the soul and the mind and was meant to encourage the exploration and refinement of both of them’ (When I was a Child I Read Books 24). By invoking soul and mind, two of the most mysteriously unquantifiable aspects of life, she strikes back at the numbers crowd with reverence for the study of consciousness and life itself. She also takes issue with rebranding higher education for the purposes of competitiveness and economic gain: ‘The assumption current now, that the test of a university is its success in vaulting graduates unto upper tiers of wealth and status’ (What Are We Doing Here? 99). Indeed, the competitiveness Robinson opposes is present in the US Department of Education’s mission statement: ‘to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access’ (United States 1). ‘Our imagined future economy will supposedly require workers trained in math and science’, she says, taking aim once again at how a phantasmic future economy is affecting reality at universities. ‘But the fact is that those workers who are our competitors are “efficient” because their labor is cheap’ (Givenness 117). From Robinson’s perspective, competing with foreign economies is an American obsession that has abscessed into pathological anxiety: ‘Our cult of competition does not […] permit the thought that our response to the economic rise of India or China or Brazil might properly be to say: Good for them’ (What Are We Doing Here? 98). This collective

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inability to wish other countries well, fed by the urge to dominate the global economy, is a problem she sees playing out in the way American universities are shifting their commitments. One of her most salient points with regard to this tension is drawing attention to the fact that the United States has been a wealthy nation for a long time and for much of that time its universities were educating young people humanistically. Her sense is that if that system was so successful for so long, focused as it traditionally was on mind and soul, scrapping it in favour of skills-based programmes that appear to be profitable today may turn out to be an irrevocable failure for American higher education – and American democracy. Taken together, Robinson’s arguments for the value of higher education in America reveal a professor who remains devoted to the liberal arts on the basis of her belief that they foster unequalled opportunities for intellectual and spiritual growth that benefit the individual and society at large. And yet the election of Donald Trump seems to have affected Robinson as much as it has the rest of the world. In a short piece meditating on Trump’s first year in office, entitled “Year One: Rhetoric & Responsibility”, she opposes the President as ‘garish’ and lays some of the blame for America’s growing divisiveness at the feet of universities. Only once does she mention universities’ ‘splendid potential’, whereas two years previously, in conversation with President Obama, she struck a more optimistic tone: ‘[You] hear all this stuff about how the system is failing and we have to pull it limb from limb, and the rest of it. And you think, have you walked through the door? Have you listened to what people say? Have you taught in a foreign university?’ (Givenness 297). Her diagnosis of the problem of vapid, acrimonious discourse in November 2017 points at collective intellectual apathy: ‘A substantial part of the American public seems to have lost interest in ideas, therefore in substantive controversy’ (“Year One”). Robinson blames elitism, once again identifying, curiously, ‘theory’ as ‘deeply harmful in that it wastes time and teaches students to think and write badly, to master as they can the terms and assumptions of twaddle’ (“Year One”). Her exasperation extends to the bold claim that critical theory helps nobody contributing to civil discourse: ‘When we have grave public issues to debate, post-deconstructionism is no help at all. This is not the case because only an elite is fluent in it, but because no one is fluent in it’ (“Year One”). Her facetious

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crosspollination of poststructuralism and deconstruction lands like a schoolyard taunt, rather uncharacteristic of the intellectually formidable Robinson. It also insults socially conscious and constructive work being done by scholars working within those frameworks. Meanwhile, she remains egregiously silent on known problems: the lack of access to higher education for historically underrepresented populations, the federal government deporting student DREAMers, and monetary disparity returning to a level at which only those with the social and economic capital to get into college can. As such, in witnessing Robinson’s denial of those she deems infected by critical theory, the current era’s divisiveness is on display within her own rhetoric. Robinson baffles in decrying the divisive elite when insisting, ‘This school of criticism deals with class, race, and gender as if these categories were simple, hard-edged, and alldetermining’ (“Year One”). Without evidence or her typical rigour, such proclamations undermine her argument. If Americans have lost interest in ideas, as she says, are universities truly to blame because of a perceived failure of scholars to engage the public? Is Robinson not refusing to engage with their ideas herself when she knocks them aside as ‘twaddle’? In chastising the humanities and social sciences by insisting their critical paradigms are ‘deeply harmful’, her argument smacks of being uninformed, out of touch. Robinson emerges as a traditionalist, squeamish about the past 40 years of intellectual thought, entirely resistant to their potential for enlivening education and civic life in America. As shown, many of her positions dovetail those of critical pedagogues like Michael Apple, Nel Noddings, and Maxine Greene. She is not alone in her concerns about American higher education, but she exhibits a strong resistance to engaging with her contemporaries, preferring the company of the dead. Therefore, considering statements on higher education made since 2013, Robinson embraces an idealised vision of ongoing democratisation of privilege while disregarding economic pressures individual students face. It seems she would try to save ‘America’s Best Idea’ by educating its adult population in the tradition of liberal arts, relying on a precarious faith that its track record of manifesting prosperity would steer the United States and its citizens true no matter what the future brings.



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Notes 1 For more on Robinson’s Calvinism, see I. John Hesselink, “Marilynne Robinson: Distinctive Calvinist,” Perspectives Journal, 1 January 2011, https://perspectivesjournal.org/posts/marilynne-robinson-distinctivecalvinist. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) On her ideas about Cromwell, see Kevin Hargaden, “A Reading from the Book of Drones,” Dublin Review of Books, Issue 102, July 2018, www.drb.ie/essays/a-reading-from-thebook-of-drones. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) 2 This essay examines four collected essays in which Robinson makes statements on higher education: “Imagination and Community” and “The Human Spirit and the Good Society” in When I Was a Child I Read Books; “Decline” in The Givenness of Things, plus the transcript of Robinson’s conversation with President Obama; “The American Scholar Now” in What Are We Doing Here? A fifth, uncollected essay espousing her ideas on universities is incorporated at the conclusion: “Year One: Rhetoric & Responsibility”. 3 In The Program Era (2009), a history of the MFA programme, Mark McGurl fails to even mention Robinson, an oversight given the indelible impact she has had on the most famous programme in the world. 4 See Elissa Washuta, “How Much Indian Was I?, My Fellow Students Asked,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 June 2013, www.chronicle.com/ article/how-much-indian-was-i-my-fellow-students-asked/ (accessed 21/ 06/2021); Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, “The Program Era and the Mainly White Room,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 20 September 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-program-era-and-the-mainlywhite-room/ (accessed 21/06/2021); Junot Díaz, “MFA vs POC”, The New Yorker, 30 April 2014, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mfa-vs-poc (accessed 21/06/2021); David Mura, “The Student of Color in the Typical MFA Program,” Gulf Coast, 21 April 2015, http://gulfcoastmag.org/ online/blog/the-student-of-color-in-the-typical-mfa-program/ (accessed 21/06/2021). 5 Robinson’s emulation of Emerson twins her essays to his in style and approach. Many have noted the pithy, quotable, and (perhaps most importantly) meandering nature of Emerson’s essays. His works can be hard to pin down in a straightforward way, nearly impossible to summarise in short order. His idea of the American scholar allows for an expansive exploration of ideas, essaying becoming an active process of discovery and reflection. Robinson runs with this approach in her nonfiction, often surprising readers with the unexpected connections she makes with exacting erudition.

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6 There are also public universities or colleges in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, meaning that this variety of institution is physically close for virtually all Americans. 7 See Kevin Kumashiro, Troubling Education: Queer Activism and AntiOppressive Pedagogy, Routledge, 2002. 8 See Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, eds, Theory’s Empire, Columbia University Press, 2005. See also Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge, eds, Theory After ‘Theory’, Routledge, 2011. 9 She is not alone among creative writers in this avoidance of criticism. In conversation in March 2017, author and creative writing professor George Saunders said he avoids reading literary criticism out of a superstition that it might negatively affect his private theories on how fiction works. Speaking of critical theory in 1982, novelist N. Scott Momaday, who has professed creative writing and English, said, ‘I think if it were taken seriously it might be a threat [to new writers], but I do not see it as something that will be taken very seriously by very many people very long’ (124).

Works cited Apple, Michael W. Ideology and Curriculum. Taylor & Francis, 2004. Bennett, Eric. “How Iowa Flattened Literature.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 February 2014, www.chronicle.com/article/How-IowaFlattened-Literature/144531. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Bergman, Roger. “Caring for the Ethical Ideal: Nel Noddings on Moral Education.” Journal of Moral Education 33.2 (2007): 149–162. Charis-Carlson, Jeff. “Leath, Students: ‘Broken’ Funding Model Plagues Iowa’s Universities.” Iowa City Press-Citizen, 8 May 2017, www.presscitizen.com/story/news/education/college/2017/05/08/steven-leath-iowaregents-college-funding-model-broken-universities/312990001/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Finnegan, Molly. “Conversation: Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction, Paul Harding.” PBS News Hour, 16 April 2010, www.pbs.org/newshour/ arts/conversation-pulitzer-prize-winner-in-fiction-paul-harding. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) “Graduate Program.” Writers’ Workshop, n.d., writersworkshop.uiowa.edu/ graduate-program/graduate-program. (Accessed 10.5.2020.) Greene, Maxine. “Real Toads and Imaginary Gardens.” Teachers College Record 65.5 (1965): 416–425. Momaday, N. Scott. Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Edited by Matthias Schubnell. University of Mississippi Press, 1997.

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Reiff, Marija. “The Creative Calling.” After the Program Era. Editor Loren Glass. University of Iowa Press, 2016. 11–20. Rich, Motoko. “Mr. Cinderella: From Rejection Notes to the Pulitzer.” The New York Times, 18 April 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/ books/19harding.html. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Robinson, Marilynne. “Diminished Creatures.” The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Edited by Frank Conroy. Harper Collins, 1999. 155–161. —— The Givenness of Things: Essays. Picador, 2016. —— What Are We Doing Here?: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. —— When I was a Child I Read Books. Picador, 2013. —— “Year One: Rhetoric & Responsibility.” New York Review of Books: NYR Daily, 14 November 2017, www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/11/14/ year-one-rhetoric-responsibility. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) United States, Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development. Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education: Key Data Highlights Focusing on Race and Ethnicity and Promising Practices. November 2016, www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/ pubs/advancing-diversity-inclusion.pdf. (Accessed 10/05/2020.) University of Iowa. “Ayana Mathis on Marilynne Robinson and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.” YouTube, 21 September 2016, youtu.be/irhjUC5DD8. (Accessed 10/05/2020.) —— “Kevin Smith on Marilynne Robinson and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.” YouTube, 21 September 2016, youtu.be/j4Pjpv7P1Jk. (Accessed 10/05/2020.) Warner, John. “On Elite Rejection: The Iowa Writers’ Workshop Story.” Inside Higher Ed, 4 August 2017, www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/ elite-rejection-iowa-writers-workshop-story. (Accessed 21/06/2021.)

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Acknowledging a numinous ordinary: Marilynne Robinson and Stanley Cavell Paul Jenner

In what follows I trace productive affinities between arguments and ideas in Marilynne Robinson’s essays and novels and questions of scepticism and the ordinary explored in Stanley Cavell’s philosophical improvisations. At first glance, sufficient broad similarities emerge to encourage reading Cavell alongside Robinson: their shared preoccupations with transcendentalism and with Shakespeare, for instance, or their exceptionalist sounding claims about American culture as neglectful of its intellectual and cultural achievements. It might be felt, however, that my comparison is insufficiently mindful of Robinson’s pronounced frustration with the involution of academic ‘theory’. Writing in 1987, Robinson found theory complicit in ‘the leaching out of public discourse’. She identified ‘a Duke-and-the-Dauphin language of importations and neologisms that satisfies every definition of bad style’ and critics who ‘disallow, in effect, the human situation of fictive expression. For them it is merely a text superadded to all other texts, with every shred of nerve and nightmare factored out so that it is perfectly suited to critical uses, skinned and boned’ (“Let’s Not” 11). The charge is renewed and deepened in a short essay from 2017, with theory’s supposed institutional dominance held significantly responsible for the ‘age of Trump’, its ‘contrived language’ leaving Americans ‘inarticulate in the terms of our own, highly particular civilization, to the point that we cannot sustain a democratic politics’ (“Year One”). Robinson’s remarks about literary theory, of course, are hardly uncontroversial. Even taking them at face value, there are decisive reasons why Cavell should be differentiated from the type of theorist her sketch suggests. Cavell has also questioned theory and his reservations are expressed in, because motivated by, comparable

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terms: an Emersonian emphasis on the commonness and genius of language, insistence on a ‘human situation’ underlying aesthetic and philosophical expression, related consideration of an American difference. Cavell is more a philosopher than a theorist, and Robinson has more time for philosophy. I am thinking here not only of the various philosophers discussed in her essays but also of the tonal influence of Charles Sanders Peirce’s Monist essays upon Gilead (“Higher Learning”). In removing a potential obstacle, I do not mean to exempt Cavell from the questions Robinson raises but rather to identify such questions as shared. A parenthetical and self-confirming moment from Cavell’s autobiography comes to mind: ‘How what has become a lifetime of participation in the modern university allows, if not encourages, a departure from church, political party, club, neighborhood, in their preferred economies of public and private encounters, I should perhaps be able to find occasion to take up’ (Little 342). If Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy might be expected to differ in principle from contrived theoretical jargon, moreover, its deployment in his distinctive continuation of Thoreauvian and Emersonian transcendentalism results in a language, not of importations, but not without risk of involution. Discussing his work’s far from straightforward relationship to paradigms of analytic philosophy and literary theory, and precipitating broader questions about the nature of paradigms and of working within or without them, Cavell noted a ‘standing temptation for American literary theorists’: ‘give up the effort to buy into intellectual currency and settle into the use of a kind of scrip, good for all the essentials the country store has to offer, but worth next to nothing on the international market’. Cavell’s own ‘scrip’, by now well established on the international market, remains attuned to the possibility that such scrip can both ‘comfort’ and ‘imprison’ (“Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy” 200). A core commonality between these two writers, I will suggest, is their humanist resistance to various exclusions of meaningful subjectivity and selfhood. Such exclusion for Robinson is arbitrary rather than necessary since motivated, for instance, not by science but by scientism (raising a further question, posed by both writers, as to what motivates scientism). In an often-repeated formulation, Robinson contends that modern thought lacks a language to acknowledge the human, a language that theism once provided: ‘it

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may be that the convention of ascribing our gifts to a divine source, a convention that comes down from our earliest humanists, gave […] them a language to capture something our truncated philosophies cannot accommodate’ (“What Are We Doing Here?” 32). Theism might still ‘give the world a supple, inclusive language, far more adequate to what we know, less restricted in what we acknowledge, than we have at present’ (33). Science need not discourage such a language since its latest news, she finds, points to inspirational mystery and complexity (‘empirical unknownness, perhaps unknowability’) of the sort foregrounded in Robinson’s Calvinism (‘sacred unknowability’) (“The Beautiful Changes” 130). Cavell’s work on scepticism, meanwhile, has a story to tell about what Robinson describes as ‘our epic power to de-create’, tracking the self’s occlusion in positivism and elsewhere and finding these displacements and their overcoming to be perpetual (“The Divine” 80). Such overcoming is also a matter of language and acknowledgment, the language not now theistic but rather ordinary language itself, supple and inclusive. Ordinary language includes theistic language, of course. Robinson writes that ‘it would help if we reclaimed, or simply borrowed, conceptual language that would allow us to acknowledge that some things are so brilliant they can be understood only as virtuosic acts of mind’ (“Theology For This Moment” 33). For Cavell, it is ordinary language that stands in need of reclamation, the Wittgensteinian task of philosophy to lead words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. As Ruth reflects in Housekeeping (1980), ‘It had never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged’ (200). This work of reclamation is thematised by Cavell in a ‘borrowed’ religious language of transfiguration and conversion. While he shares Robinson’s concern with ‘reauthorizing human experience’, however, this does not take the form of an appeal to ontology (scientific or theistic), and the obstacles he takes Christianity to present to an acknowledgment of human integrity tend to remain obstacles rather than mysteries (“Grace and Beauty” 103).

Transcendentalism, humanism, and pragmatism Robinson and Cavell find a language of acknowledgement in their turn to transcendentalism. Robinson takes Emerson to be proposing

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a ‘new anthropology’: ‘a splendour inherent in human beings that is thwarted and hidden by deprivation of the means to express it, even to realize it in oneself’ (“The American Scholar Now” 83). Cavell’s work on Thoreau and Emerson may be seen as essaying the very thing that Robinson is unable to locate in contemporary thought, a ‘better modernist anthropology’ (“Integrity” 269). A question arises, however, as to whether Cavell’s modernist anthropology, its religious borrowings situated within a naturalist schema, might remain ‘truncated’ for Robinson. Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein in The Claim of Reason (1979) features an epigraph from Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), a source of contention and discussion in Gilead (2004). In the passage from which the epigraph is drawn, Feuerbach identifies himself as ‘nothing but a natural philosopher in the domain of mind’ (xiv). Yes, Cavell finds Thoreau and Emerson to be ‘transcendentalizing the world, tracing the significance of things, deriving truth from fact’, but this is only ‘[s]omething like’ the ‘theologizing of the world’ (Disowning 36). Walden, for Cavell, aspires to and achieves ‘some mode of transcendence’, but this is in competition with ‘what we have known as religion’ (19), while Emerson’s prose internalises ‘the unended quarrel between philosophy and theology’ (“Thinking of Emerson” 131). Then again, some readers of Robinson regard her Calvinism as something of a modernist anthropology in itself, because it is ‘stretched and moulded to humanist purposes’, as Todd Shy has put it (253). For Shy, Robinson’s description of religious experience ‘sounds more like Wittgenstein than the author of The Institutes’, theism become a Wittgensteinian form of life (254). Robinson’s Terry Lectures, collected in Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), suggest that the inability to acknowledge the human is bound up in part with the occlusion from contemporary thought, with its ‘clutch of certitudes’, of a specific notion of human selfhood (Absence xviii). In particular, Robinson’s focus is upon the subjectivity of selfhood as ‘extraordinary individuation’: our unique, solitary experience of inwardness (120). As Robinson observes, ‘It may have been perverse of destiny to array perception across billions of subjectivities, but the fact is central to human life and language and culture, and no philosophy or cognitive science should be allowed to evade it’ (7–8). Robinson finds just this evasion, however, in various strands of modern thought, from Darwin to Freud to Dawkins,

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with their assumption ‘that the experience and testimony of the individual mind is to be explained away from consideration when any rational account is made of the nature of human being and of being altogether’ (22). In Calvin’s writings, the potentially perverse array of isolated subjectivities finds happier articulation as, in Robinson’s words, ‘a metaphysics of startling beauty’: Calvin takes the individualism of Luther, the assertion that every believer is king, priest, and prophet, and develops it into an interpretation of reality centered in the individual perceiver. Mind, memory, senses – the human attributes that according to Calvin makes us an image of God – are attuned to experiencing creation as in effect addressed to us, moment to moment, collectively and one by one’ (John Calvin ix).

Cavell’s philosophy may also be understood as a humanism, invested in notions of the soul and of sensibility, in the humanist ‘romance of the self’ whose demise Robinson laments (Death of Adam 8). It insists too on the permanence and significance of subjectivity, and is thereby at odds with a culture described by Robinson as ‘ceasing to value inward experience’ (“Facing Reality” 84). In the foreword to his first collection of essays, Cavell describes ‘the teaching of philosophy’ as ‘the personal assault upon intellectual complacency, the private evaluation of intellectual conscience’ (Must xxiv). He notes in an early essay, ‘The problem of the critic, as of the artist, is not to discount his subjectivity, but to include it; not to overcome it in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways’ (“Aesthetic Problems” 95). Robinson’s interest in the ‘centrality of the perceiver’, then, is consonant with the centrality of the self in Cavell’s work (When I Was xiii). As might be expected of a philosopher working within the linguistic turn, for whom ‘the given’ is ‘language’, Cavell tends to couch this centrality in terms of voice rather than perception (Disowning 17). He has described his project, for instance, as ‘tracing the exiling of the human voice in philosophy’ (Philosophers 135). Robinson commends William James’ pragmatism in her essays for its phenomenologically stubborn inclusion of individual experience as an inseparable part of ‘the givenness of things’. Robinson’s pragmatism ‘accepts things in their complex and veiled givenness’ (Givenness 80), a striking formulation and one that contests pragmatism’s

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negative association for some with instrumental rationality. Cavell’s relationship to pragmatism is equivocal, pragmatism’s disinclination to indulge epistemological worries pre-empting his core thematic of scepticism. Nonetheless, Cavell echoes Robinson in his praise of James for encouraging ‘restiveness with philosophy’s treatment, or avoidance, or stylization, of human experience’ (Little 423). This avoidance and stylisation is a steady topic and target of Robinson’s essays. “The Sacred, The Human”, for instance, unpicks the stylisation of perception, consciousness, and soul as stimuli and reactions underway in Bertrand Russell’s Religion and Science (1935). Such stylisation may be seen as an instance of what Robinson describes as a ‘tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell’ (When I Was 7). Far from an admission of conservatism, Cavell understands Wittgenstein’s remark in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) that philosophy ‘leaves everything as it is’ (124) as a critique of this tendency and violence. Cavell’s enthusiasm for the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein reflects his sense that their attention to ordinary language not only contested positivism but also allowed philosophy’s avoidance of human experience to become a philosophical topic in itself. If, for Cavell’s Wittgenstein, concepts are directed by interest, the moral is that knowledge is not corrosive but expressive of value. ‘Knowledge, the product of judgement, is not the ground of morality, but is in its origin moral, the precipitate of perpetual evaluations of the world, assessments of our interests and investments in it, of what counts for us, matters to us, or does not’ (Little 448). Cavell’s development of a philosophy of ‘acknowledgement’, I suggest, overlaps in part with Robinson’s repeated calls for a language that will acknowledge the human. In both cases, the term contends that the dead shell of ‘knowledge’ as officially constituted involves the distortion of the living creature. The titles of Cavell’s autobiography (Little Did I Know) and his collection of essays on Shakespeare (Disowning Knowledge) capture his sense of ‘the truth of skepticism, that the human habitation of the world is not assured in what philosophy calls knowledge’ (Disowning 25). Positivism, then, is a shared cause and context for Robinson’s ‘dispelling of inwardness’ and Cavell’s notion of philosophy’s exiling

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of the human voice. Cavell’s practise of philosophy as, in Bernard Williams’ phrase, a humanistic discipline (“Philosophy”), was certainly made difficult by the scientism of logical positivism and its marked influence upon professional philosophy: ‘How it was that American philosophically inclined intellectual life was so vulnerable to this storm of logical positivism remains an open question’ (Little 457). In his retrospective rehearsals of this dominance, Cavell tends to compare logical positivism to poststructuralism in a way one imagines would be congenial to Robinson, with both movements hostile to the ordinary and to voice: In the case both of the reigns of logical positivism and later of poststructuralism, one would like to understand what made the state of, especially, the American academic dispensation so often helplessly, not to say abjectly, vulnerable to each of them – or enraged by them. […] American study of the humanities (and that side of the social sciences) was doubly threatened, to become overwhelmed either by hardening or by softening (by philosophy without philosophy, or by science without science). (Little 450).

‘Philosophy without philosophy’ here condenses a number of concerns, not least the costs of the confident assimilation of philosophy by ‘theory.’ ‘Science without science’, with its implied critique of scientism within philosophy, matches Robinson’s polemic against parascientific literature, ‘a kind of argument that claims the authority of science or highly specialized knowledge, that assumes a protective coloration that allows it to pass for science yet does not practice the self-discipline or self-criticism for which science is distinguished’ (Absence 2). Such literature, with its characteristic reductionisms, is unscientific for Robinson in its very self-certainties. A significant problem with the reductive materialism of neuroscience for Robinson is that matter is no less astonishing, improbable, and mysterious than the self that it would explain away (Givenness 76). Robinson and Cavell have in common an exploration of the human motivations animating reductive scientism. Robinson suggests that the reductionist tendency be seen as a rhetorical ‘posture, an acculturated role or habit’ recurring in fresh guises across intellectual history, reflecting an understandable wish to ‘disburden ourselves of ourselves’ (“The Sacred” 67; “Humanism” 15). This way of characterising reductionism aligns it

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with Cavell’s notion, involving a human wish to overcome or deny the human, of an ‘impulse’ to scepticism. In both cases, the origin of the clash between reductionism and the givenness of things is understood as having more to do with human restlessness than with pressure put on our folkways by scientific knowledge. A tendency to (conceptual, experiential, ethical) self-annulment as manifest in scientism is, Robinson contends, ‘deep and long-standing’ in ‘human and Western consciousness’ and ‘itself a datum to be factored into a consideration of the many ways we are strange’ (“The Sacred” 53; “Theology” 40). In an early discussion of aesthetics and criticism, Cavell notes ‘the force of a fearful scientism, an intellectual chic which is at once intimidating and derivative, and in general the substitution of precision for accuracy’ (“Music Discomposed” 209). This chimes with Robinson’s observation, some decades later, and now in the context of positivism’s ruling out of religious experience, that positivism possesses a prejudicial and ‘very strict principle of selection […] which looks rational to us, being strict’ (Givenness 86). Robinson’s discussions of positivism are less focused on logical positivism, specifically, since they are naturally less invested in the academic context of professional philosophy. Her description of positivism, however, is resonant: ‘for the positivist model of reality humanity itself is not really a given. Indeed, the positivist exclusions of articulate experience, the report we make of ourselves, is as rigorous as its exclusion of theism. This is generally accepted as something objectivity requires, but as strong a case could be made that it is a thing objectivity forbids’ (86). For Cavell and Robinson, albeit in a markedly different, transcendentalist rather than positivist sense, humanity is not really a ‘given’ either, mind ‘unmapped and unbounded’ (“The American Scholar Now” 100). Both writers confront ‘constricted empiricism’ (“Integrity” 264) with ‘transcendental experimentalism’ (Disowning 3). ‘But far be from me,’ writes Emerson, ‘the despair that prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism’ (“Experience” 310). Cavell’s characterisation of this as a ‘prayerful remark’ is apt, capturing a sense in which, for Cavell as for Robinson, the recovery of self from scientism assumes almost in itself the significance of a recovery of theism (“Thinking of Emerson” 126).

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Identity, democracy, and autonomy Robinson’s emphasis, then, is upon identity as an experience of ‘radical uniqueness’ rather than identity as category, ‘membership in a group, through ethnicity or affinity or religion or otherwise’, although she finds the latter dominant in the present: ‘Rather than acknowledging the miraculous privilege of existence as a conscious being,’ identity ‘has reference now to knowing one’s place, culturally and historically speaking. And this is taken to be a good thing’ (When I Was xiii). This distinction or position eventuates in the conjuring of democracy, seen as implicit all along in the metaphysical fact of subjectivity (or subjectivities). This is logical, although the suspicion remains that democracy naturalises itself in this operation as not merely another category but somehow internal to experience itself, as given, raising a question as to the co-articulation of American and human exceptionalism: ‘To identify sacred mystery with every individual experience, every life […] is to arrive at democracy as an ideal’ (xiv). In his autobiography, Cavell notes a similar distinction between identity as category and as experience: ‘I have increasingly found myself emphasizing that no set of subject positions in principle exhausts my subjectivity’ (Little 21). The exhaustion of subjective experience is a central concern for Cavell and takes a variety of forms, encompassing benumbed scepticism, disfiguring attempts to refute scepticism, reiterative conformity, and scientism’s presumptive and narrow stylisation of human experience. Another of the signatures of modern thought that Robinson identifies and questions in Absence of Mind is the notion of a crossed threshold, which ‘asserts that the world of thought, recently or in an identifiable moment in the near past, has undergone epochal change. Some realization has intervened in history with miraculous abruptness and efficiency, and everything is transformed. This is a pattern that recurs very widely in the contemporary world of ideas’ (3). It is a pattern that Cavell tends to both question and reinforce. Certainly, he is resistant to the threshold model implicit in deflationary, positivist attitudes to philosophical problems, which sees them as to be discarded since arising from conceptual errors newly exposed. In part, this reflects Cavell’s interest in philosophical error as meaningful (rather than, to use the positivist term, ‘nonsense’), internal to his detailed excavations of the philosophising self. In The

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Claim of Reason, Cavell writes of having ‘wished to understand philosophy not as a set of problems but as a set of texts’ (3). Far from a philosophical equivalent of the theoretical tendency, decried by Robinson, to leave literary texts skinned and boned, this apparent textualisation aims to identify – drawing here on Robinson’s terms – the ‘human situation’ of philosophical expression, ‘nerve and nightmare’ included. Cavell ascribes to philosophical questioning an expressive reality, has faith that it traces frames of mind and states of the soul rather than epiphenomenal confusions. In contrast to his own interest in scepticism, he notes that ‘Modern (professional) philosophers have on the whole not much interested themselves in describing human life when it is not, or seems not to be, making sense […] In this, philosophy has suffered from the way it has put distance between itself and theology’ (Little 446). This is not to cede philosophical autonomy, since the issue is not so much the distance between philosophy and theology as the way in which it has been conceived. The first specific instance of the threshold model that Robinson provides is a moment from Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo’s The Future of Religion (2002). Although Robinson finds their book ‘good-hearted, even rather joyful’ (5), she raises sharp questions about its broad-brush portrait of intellectual historical change – the arrival of a ‘post-modern condition’ – and its inaccurate, flat characterisation of the nature of faith before this condition. It is interesting to see Robinson engage with Rorty here, not least because of the metaphilosophical differences between Rorty and Cavell. Rorty’s call in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) for a postfoundationalist culture does seem to involve a narrative commitment to a threshold paradigm as sketched by Robinson: ‘before we thought thus, and now, in this age of comprehension, we, or the enlightened among us, think otherwise’ (Absence 5). Within this culture, the epistemological framework and its attendant puzzles are to be consigned to the past as fruitless intellectual historical anomalies. This approach contrasts with Cavell’s endless patience with epistemological issues, newly interpreted and lent a cultural philosophical centrality and portentousness comparable to Heidegger’s treatment of being. Nevertheless, Cavell’s approach to both scepticism and modernism does invoke a version of threshold thinking, characterised as it is

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by some fundamental if broad-brush historical claims of its own. Tracing a genealogy of scepticism from ancient to modern and beyond, for instance, he writes: something further happened to the world, something that not simply challenges the human capacity to know, but, let’s say, mocks the desire to know. It is accordingly a kind of New Fall, or a Second Fall, or a Second Going, of man and woman. Nietzsche called it the death of God. Blanchot, I suppose, calls it the disaster. […] I have for a half a century expressed what happened to the world as the advent of skepticism itself, marking a historical departure of the human, inherently at odds with itself, beyond itself. (Little 528)

In The World Viewed (1971), Cavell described a similar instance of his work’s invocation of a philosophical–historical dimension as involving ‘clouds of history’, an apt formulation capturing the darkness of such claims but also their abstraction (94). Scepticism is presented here as at once inherent to the human – constitutively liminal and ‘at odds with itself’ – and a threshold event – ‘something further happened to the world’. If this threshold event involves modernism, Robinson is less impressed than Cavell as to its depth and portentousness, assumptions about modern thought having ossified for her into ‘a curriculum and a catechism’, a matter of ‘idle cynicism’ untested rather than intellectual scrupulousness or historical necessity (“Integrity” 270). However refined, a threshold model is undeniably present in Cavell’s thought, but further affinities with Robinson emerge here too. In his essay on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957), challenging a received existentialist wisdom or catechism that the play is about meaninglessness, Cavell argues that, ‘in topic and technique,’ Endgame discovers ‘not the failure of meaning but its total, even totalitarian, success – our inability not to mean what we are given to mean’ (“Ending” 117). Robinson has a comparable insight into Raymond Carver’s short stories, questioning the received wisdom implicit in their classification as ‘minimalism’. For Robinson, minimalism is the latest instance of a tendency to interpret the stylistically ‘modern’ as ‘contemplation of, and protest against’ a ‘modern condition’, taken to be ‘an objectively existing thing’: ‘a world leached of pleasure, voided of meaning, spiritually and culturally bankrupt, etc.’ (“Marriage” 1). Echoing Cavell’s claim for Endgame, and finding in Carver’s

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best stories ‘bafflement’ at ‘burdens […] truly mysterious’, Robinson contends that this bafflement ‘does not render an absence of meaning but an awkwardness in the face of meaning, a very different thing’ (“Marriage” 35). While Robinson is arguably more exacting about the reification of cultural–historical markers, Cavell and Robinson share a transcendentalist aversion to picturing the experiencing self as unduly shaped by its contexts or by assumptions about these contexts. Such contexts are seen to be newly at stake in each experience and thought, Cavell’s modernism, for instance, finding the self newly responsible for meaning and its renewal. It will help if you are Shakespeare: ‘If there is an Elizabethan world picture, Shakespeare questions it, so shatters it, as surely as the new science did’ (Disowning 36). In the rebuke of cynicism towards festive gift giving found in Robinson’s essay “Realism”, interestingly, the self’s independence from its contexts involves an affirmation of its very commonness, in aversion not to conformity of practice but of perspective. Freud is also an interesting example here. Robinson’s Freud is a key figure in the dispelling of inwardness from modern thought, with disheartening news about the reports we make of ourselves. Cavell has significantly more time for Freud because, far from dispelling inwardness, psychoanalysis is ‘interested in testimony as to the existence of mind […] modern testimony, testimony acceptable to a modern sensibility, as to psychic reality’ (Contesting Tears 53). Psychoanalysis, somewhat in denial about its proximity to philosophy, reopens the question of philosophy’s relationship to therapy, thereby returning the human voice to philosophy.

Philosophers in American life: Housekeeping I have already begun suggesting that the emphasis in Robinson and in Cavell upon voice, inwardness, and experience is a recognisably transcendentalist motif, and transcendentalism is, of course, a defining influence upon both writers. Cavell’s early work on ordinary language philosophy was always somewhat transcendentalist, its methodological faith in the representativeness of self-consultations as to ‘what we say’ notably Emersonian. Cavell’s first study of transcendentalism, The Senses of Walden (1972), posed the following

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question: ‘Why has America never expressed itself philosophically? Or has it – in the metaphysical riot of its greatest literature?’ The question asserts Cavell’s conviction that Walden possessed the ‘scope and consistency to have established or inspired a tradition of thinking’, a tradition Cavell would inherit (33). Further, the question as to whether America has ‘expressed itself philosophically’ works to foreground philosophical expression as an issue, essaying discourse divergent from disciplinary norms but able to sustain philosophy. This mode would be understood, therefore, as something other than the writing up of results that might be expected of philosophy aligned disciplinarily with science rather than the humanities because, rather than originating from stable meta-philosophical commitments, it would include meta-philosophical questioning within its own progression. In his 1983 lecture, “The Philosopher in American Life”, Cavell suggests that Thoreau and Emerson ‘propose, and embody, a mode of thinking, a mode of conceptual accuracy, as thorough as anything imagined within established philosophy, but invisible to that philosophy because based on an idea of rigor foreign to its establishment’ (14). Cavell’s focus here on the rigour and conceptual accuracy of Emerson and Thoreau, along with his sense of American literature as in metaphysical riot, is well paired with Robinson’s praise, just a year later in a 1984 New York Times symposium, for the ‘old aunts and uncles’ of American literature: the 19th-century Americans – Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson and Poe. Nothing in literature appeals to me more than the rigor with which they fasten on problems of language, of consciousness – bending form to their purposes, ransacking ordinary speech and common experience, rummaging through the exotic and recondite, setting Promethean doubts to hymn tunes, refining popular magazine tales into arabesques, pondering bean fields, celebrating the float and odour of hair, always, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, in the act of finding what will suffice. I think they must have believed everything can be apprehended truly when it is seen in the light of an esthetic understanding appropriate to itself, whence their passion for making novel orders of disparate things. I believe they wished to declare the intrinsic dignity of all experience and to declare the senses bathed in revelation – true, serious revelation, the kind that terrifies. (“The Hum Inside” 30)

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This notion of the senses ‘bathed in revelation’ is a point of intersection in Robinson’s thought between transcendentalism and Calvinism. As she puts it: ‘ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me. One Calvinist notion deeply implanted in me is that there were two sides to your encounter to 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’ (“Art of Fiction” 49). The ordinary becomes numinous but, squaring the Emersonian circle, the numinous also becomes ordinary, which is simply to note that transcendentalism humanises Robinson’s Calvinism: ‘I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us’ (“Psalm Eight” 243). A deep affinity between Cavell and Robinson, then, is that both writers lend a decisive voice to transcendentalism in the conversation of the ordinary. In her essay “Reformation”, Robinson contends that the ‘most persistent and fruitful tradition of American literature from Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens is the meditation on the given, the inexhaustible ordinary. Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James wrote about the subtle and splendid processes of consciousness in this continuous encounter’ (24). Internal to this encounter, and very much Cavell’s topic, is the no less inexhaustible threat to the ordinary posed by scepticism, with its bafflements of language and of consciousness. Cavell makes the case that a once canonical reading of the appeals to the ordinary in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations – that they are motivated by an effort to refute sceptical worries about whether our knowledge of world and others can ever be said to be certain – is misguided. Rather, he suggests that Wittgenstein asks us to see something of the truth of scepticism. As he puts this in his first essay on Emerson, published in 1979 just a year before Robinson’s Housekeeping: ‘It is true that we do not know the existence of the world with certainty; our relation to its existence is deeper – one in which it is accepted, that is to say, received. My favourite way of putting this is to say that existence is to be acknowledged’ (“Thinking of Emerson” 133). Within a disciplinary context tending to prize ‘robust’ realisms, this was a distinctive intervention, figuring Cavell as a philosopher paying as much attention to sensibility

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as to argument or, in Wittgensteinian terms, to the pictures from within which arguments issue, ‘a web of assumptions, pictures, myths, prejudices, cravings, presentiments, intimidations, impositions (all elements of the ordinary)’ (Little 497). Identifying what philosophy ‘calls the ordinary or everyday with what in literature is thematized as the domestic, or marriage’, Cavell thus ‘looks for the cloaking of skepticism in literature as what attacks the domestic, namely in what forms tragedy and melodrama’ (Disowning 29). If scepticism threatens the ordinary, and if the ordinary may be understood as the domestic, then the threats to the ordinary and to the domestic in Housekeeping identify scepticism as one of its main topics. The topic is taken up narratively, of course, although portions of Housekeeping resemble a philosophical or theological – which is perhaps to say, transcendentalist – treatise on perception. Cavell has written of how certain ‘literary works […] show a grasp of the relation of my life to the lives of others that strikes beyond most of what is called philosophy seems to allow itself to know’. This is more than a matter of their knowing ‘intuitively what philosophy responds to conceptually’, since such works ‘also evidently respond conceptually’ (Little 306). Responding to the online classification of Absence of Mind as ‘phenomenology’, meanwhile, Robinson has described Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson and Melville as writing ‘phenomenology before the word’, which is to say doing phenomenology before its codification by or as philosophy (“Realism” 284). Phenomenology before the word, which might precipitate metaphysical riot, echoes the belief Robinson ascribes to her ‘19th-century Americans’: ‘everything can be apprehended truly when it is seen in the light of an aesthetic understanding appropriate to itself, whence their passion for making novel orders of disparate things’. Other than surrealism, it is hard to know what type of aesthetic understanding would be appropriate to the disparate things mentioned in the first chapter of Housekeeping: a ‘suitcase, a seat cushion, and a lettuce’ (6), the only objects retrieved after the ‘spectacular’ (5) train derailment which takes the life of Ruth’s grandfather. These relics – ‘one of them perishable’ (7) – are comparable to the ordinary objects appealed to in philosophical rehearsals of scepticism, in which what would seem to be best case, common sense instances of knowing are opened to a sceptical doubt poised to engulf. ‘When

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I see a tomato,’ writes H. H. Price in his discussion of scepticism, ‘there is much that I can doubt’ (Perception 3). As Cavell describes philosophy in another context: ‘Nothing is wrong; everything is wrong. It is the philosophical moment’ (Conditions 99). Housekeeping’s suitcase, seat cushion, and lettuce are the visible tokens of a disaster otherwise unobserved, a spectacular derailment therefore ‘not, strictly speaking, spectacular’ (5). My analogy here between the nothing and everything being wrong of scepticism and the disaster of a derailment spectacular and unspectacular has obvious limits, but it does point to the association, in Housekeeping and in Cavell’s work on transcendentalism, of epistemological scepticism with questions of abandonment, mourning, and loss: ‘This very evanescence of the world proves its existence to me; it is what vanishes from me’ (“Thinking of Emerson” 127). Abandonment by her mother and sister and the loss of her grandmother colour Ruth’s sense of experience as characterised by constitutive loss, extended in Ruth’s reflections on her grandmother’s loss of and abandonment by her husband and daughters. My mention here of ‘Ruth’s reflections’ is resistant to Shannon Mariotti’s plausible intuition that Housekeeping’s ‘extended meditation’ on Carthage in chapter seven belongs to a ‘new narrative voice in the novel, unnamed but not Ruth’s’ (“The Housekeeper of Homelessness” 30). This dispelling of – Ruth’s – mind seems at odds with the metaphysical democracy distilled in Robinson’s focus on inwardness, and underestimates perhaps the availability of biblical narrative to Ruth. In Cavell’s terms, it also underestimates the ordinariness of philosophy to thought. Housekeeping’s meditations on the ordinary may be considered alongside Cavell’s care not to deny a sense of the necessary openness or vulnerability of the ordinary, words and world, to sceptical repudiation. In a climactic act of housekeeping, a bonfire leads Ruth to the following thought about words and world, as she watches magazines burn: ‘I saw the fiery transfiguration of a dog, and the bowl he ate from, and a baseball team, and a Chevrolet, and many thousands of words. It had never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged, though when I thought about it, it seemed obvious. It was absurd to think that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words’ (200). I aligned this insight earlier with Wittgenstein’s philosophical housekeeping: the task, ongoing for

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Cavell, of bringing words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. Exploring the way ‘our words’, in thinking, ‘get away from our real need, our (everyday) lives’, Cavell describes this as ‘the world’s receding from our words, as the withdrawal of the world’ (“Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy” 196). At this point in the novel, however, housekeeping does not take the form of salvaging words, bringing words back, or holding things in place; words described, notably, as morphing from natural (‘web’) to spiritual (‘transfiguration’). Rather, Sylvie’s housekeeping here, with its ‘stern solvents’ (Housekeeping 85), anticipates sceptical withdrawal from an ordinary, repudiating an alignment of words and world. This is a matter of turning rather than returning words, bringing them ‘back’ to a further ordinary. A memorable and comparable moment of repudiation in Housekeeping finds Lucille emptying a dictionary of its contents: ‘She took the book by each end of its spine and shook it. Scores of flowers and petals fell and drifted from between the pages. Lucille kept shaking until nothing more came, and then she handed the dictionary back to me. “Pinking shears,” she said’ (126). This is Ruth’s second request for definition, the first disclosing five dried pansies, amongst other flowers preserved by her grandfather in his favourite book. Lucille’s dress making is serious business, part of a ‘tense and passionate campaign to naturalize herself’ to ‘the other world’ (95), an ordinary of a ‘time that had not yet come’ but possessed for her of ‘the fiercest reality’ (93). In Ruth’s telling, Lucille resembles their grandmother, both responding to the sense of an absent ordinary with fastidiousness. If the ordinary in Housekeeping is inexhaustible, it is no less baffling for that, its persistence bound up with its very intangibility. Robinson has noted how she does not ‘consider Sylvie, Ruth and Lucille fully distinct characters. They are a suite of impulses – yearnings, regrets, loyalties, intentions – that could occur in one mind’ (“An Interview” 258). As Ruth puts it, ‘in recollection I feel no reluctance to speak of Lucille and myself almost as a single consciousness’ (98). A partial analogy can be drawn here with Cavell’s staging of philosophical scepticism after Wittgenstein, in which scepticism is no longer manifest as an external interlocutor and antagonist – ‘the sceptic’ – but internalised – an ‘impulse’ to scepticism – as a conversation that mind or language has with itself: ‘an argument internal to the individual, or separate, human creature, as it were

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an argument of the self with itself (over its finitude)’ (“The Philosopher in American Life” 5). The analogy informs my sense of the proximity of these two examples from Housekeeping. My aim here is not to align Ruth and Lucille straightforwardly with different steps of an impulse to scepticism, with Lucille representing convention and Ruth its sceptical suspension or denial. Ruth’s narration does not sharply distinguish convention from scepticism but finds their conversation immanent to the ordinary – ‘not a soul there but knew how shallow-rooted the whole town was’ (177) – registered in her imagination of Lucille’s thoughts as ‘thronged by our absence’ (219). Mariotti has argued, persuasively, that Robinson’s fiction and nonfiction: consistently illuminate a democratic value in the paradoxical position of what I will call the housekeeper of homelessness. The figures populating this position exhibit a capacity to recognize the illusory nature of the seemingly firm structures and foundations that surround them – whether those be social norms, conventions, doctrines, houses, or towns. They adopt an attitude of open perception and mindful awareness of the unfathomably mysterious and unknowable world around them, apart from the disciplining and comforting constraints of assumptions and categories (“Housekeeper of Homelessness” 22).

Although wholly in keeping with Robinson’s metaphysics, the stylisation of democracy here as a mindful sensibility rather than an ‘assumption or category’ in itself is arguable. The position or attitude Mariotti explores overlaps with notions of scepticism but, seen in these terms, it is less clear that ‘housekeeping and homelessness […] are starkly opposed to each other at many points in the novel’ (25). In her essay, “Facing Reality”, Robinson writes: ‘If we do still believe in the seriousness of being human, while we have lost the means of acknowledging this belief, even in our thoughts, then profound anxiety, whose origins we would be at a loss to name, seems to me an inevitable consequence. And this may account for the narrowness and the intensity of the fiction that contains us. We are spiritual agoraphobes’ (86). On one reading, the modernist burden of Cavell’s philosophy is to enact an acknowledgement of human seriousness precisely without the broader conviction that meaning, as Robinson puts it, has a ‘larger frame and context than this life in this world’ (84). Certainly, where Robinson writes of ‘a God who

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is mysterious and demanding, with whom one is not easily at peace’ (85), it is the category of the ordinary that tends to gather these attributes in Cavell’s thought. No wonder that Rorty deemed Cavell’s deployment of the ordinary ‘just the latest disguise of the ontos on’, although that ‘just’ lacks patience (“Response” 90). Richard Eldridge describes Cavell’s writing, perceptively, as ‘far more than most traditional Romantic writing […] markedly postreligious and Pelagian. It is as though he thinks that by the very aversiveness, unsettledness, and effort of his writing he could command his own audience and will both the return of the world and his own salvation’ (417). Seen in the light of Robinson’s call for a turn or return to a language that will acknowledge the human, Cavell might appear caught in the narrowness and intensity she finds in the present. Judith Tonning’s argument that Cavell’s account of humans not ‘fully or merely at home in our finitude’ calls for theological ‘supplementation’ is suggestive here: ‘humans both have a real vocation to transcend human nature – the Patristic doctrine of theosis or deification – and are tempted to, but incapable of, fulfilling this vocation by a striving for knowledge independently of a relationship to God (the Catholic doctrine of the Fall)’ (394). Robinson has written of how ‘that central mystery, the ability of the mind to deeply know the physical world, [has] ceased to be acknowledged’ (“Integrity” 256). Cavell’s philosophy of acknowledgement aims to remain responsive to this mysteriousness by pointing to an ineliminable separateness between self and other, words and world. ‘Writer and reader,’ Robinson observes, ‘are only I and you, an urgent need to speak and an urgent need to hear, within the decorum imposed by astonishment that in the whorls of this black explosion there is a silence where things can indeed be said and heard. It is too wonderful and strange, and far too fragile, for all this trifling’ (“Let’s Not” 11). The path in this passage from silence to decorum, itself quite astonishing, indicates a premise and task of what I have described as Cavell’s and Robinson’s resistant humanisms.

Works cited Cavell, Stanley. “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy.” Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge University Press, 1976. 73–96.

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—— The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. 1979. Oxford University Press, 1982. —— Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. Chicago University Press, 1990. —— Contesting Tears: the Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago University Press, 1997. —— Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 1987. —— “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame.” Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge University Press, 1976. 115–162. —— “Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy.” Themes Out of School. Chicago University Press, 1988. 195–234. —— Interview with Charles Stang. Philosophers in Conversation: Interviews form the Harvard Review of Philosophy. Editor S. Phineas Upham. Routledge, 2002. 128–138. —— Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford University Press, 2010. —— “Music Discomposed.” Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge University Press, 1976. 180–212. —— Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. 1969. Cambridge University Press, 1976. —— The Senses of Walden. 1972. Chicago University Press, 1992. —— “The Philosopher in American Life (Toward Thoreau and Emerson).” In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago University Press, 1988. 3–26. —— “Thinking of Emerson.” The Senses of Walden. Chicago University Press, 1992. 123–138. —— The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Viking, 1971. Eldridge, Richard. “Romantic Rebirth in a Secular Age: Cavell’s Aversive Exertions.” Journal of Religion 71.3 (1991): 410–418. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Experience.” Nature and Selected Essays. 1844. Penguin, 2003. 215–311. Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. 1854. Translated by George Eliot. Prometheus, 1989. Mariotti, Shannon L. and Joseph H. Lane Jr, editors. A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson. Kentucky University Press, 2016. Mariotti, Shannon L. “The Housekeeper of Homelessness: The Democratic Ethos of Marilynne Robinson’s Novels and Essays.” A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson. Editors Shannon L. Mariotti and Joseph H. Lane Jr. Kentucky University Press, 2016. 21–55. Price, H. H. Perception. 1932. Methuen, 1973. Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind. Yale University Press, 2010.

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Part IV: Robinson and her contemporaries

—— “The American Scholar Now.” What Are We Doing Here? Virago, 2018. 81–100. —— The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Houghton Mifflin, 1998. —— “The Beautiful Changes.” What Are We Doing Here? Virago, 2018. 127–133. —— “The Divine.” What Are We Doing Here? Virago, 2018. 69–80. —— “Facing Reality.” The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 76–86. —— “Foreword.” John Calvin: Selections from his Writings. HarperCollins, 2006. v–ix. —— Housekeeping. 1980. Faber & Faber, 2015. —— The Givenness of Things. Virago, 2015. —— “Givenness.” The Givenness of Things. Virago, 2015. 73–91. —— “Grace and Beauty.” What Are We Doing Here? Virago, 2018. 101–114. —— “Higher Learning.” Brown Alumni Magazine, November/December 2014, www.brownalumnimagazine.com/content/view/3805/40/index.html. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) —— “The Hum Inside the Skull: A Symposium.” New York Times Book Review, 13 May 1984, p. 30. —— “Humanism.” The Givenness of Things. Virago, 2015. 3–16. —— “Integrity and the Modern Intellectual Tradition.” What Are We Doing Here? Virago, 2018. 255–271. —— “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead and Home. Jason W. Stevens. Brill Rodopi, 2016. 254–271. —— “Let’s Not Talk Down to Ourselves.” New York Times Book Review, 5 April 1987, p. 1. —— “Marilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction No. 198.” Paris Review 186 (2008): 37–66. —— “Marriage and Other Astonishing Bonds.” Review of Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From. New York Times, 15 May 1988, pp. 1, 35, 40–41. —— “Psalm Eight.” The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 227–244. —— “Realism.” The Givenness of Things. Virago, 2015. 273–286. —— “Reformation.” The Givenness of Things. Virago, 2015. 17–30. —— “The Sacred, The Human.” What Are We Doing Here? Virago, 2018. 51–68. —— “Theology for This Moment.” What Are We Doing Here? Virago, 2018. 35–49. —— What Are We Doing Here? Virago, 2018.

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—— “What Are We Doing Here?” What Are We Doing Here? Virago, 2018. 17–34. —— When I was as Child I Read Books. Virago, 2012. —— “Year One: Rhetoric and Responsibility.” NYR Daily. The New York Review of Books, 14 November 2017. www.nybooks.com/ daily/2017/11/14/year-one-rhetoric-responsibility/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, 1979. —— “Response to James Conant.” Rorty and his Critics. Editor Robert Brandom. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000. 342–351. Rorty, Richard and Gianni Vattimo. The Future of Religion. Columbia University Press, 2002. Shy, Todd. “Religion and Marilynne Robinson.” Salmagundi 155/156 (2007): 251–254. Tonning, Judith E. “Acknowledging a Hidden God: A Theological Critique of Stanley Cavell on Scepticism.” The Heythrop Journal 48.3 (2007): 384–405. Williams, Bernard. “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline.” Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline. Princeton, 2006. 180–199. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Basil Blackwell, 1953; reprinted 1986.

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Epilogue ‘A little different every time’: accumulation and repetition in Jack Rachel Sykes

The world of Marilynne Robinson’s fiction is intellectually capacious but temporally small.1 As authors throughout this collection have noted, the action of Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014) takes place sometime around 1956, reaching back to the 1850s through memories inherited by present-day characters. Given Robinson’s knowledge and rich invocation of American history – and the fact that her fiction never passes the winter of 1956–57 – the futurity of her novels is much less discussed. Yet questions of what the United States can and will become, what was imagined of the present from the past, and of the future awaiting rural America are at the heart of Robinson’s work. In the ambiguity of Ruth and Sylvie’s ‘deaths’ in Housekeeping and Ruth’s imagining of how her sister Lucille will grow up (217–218); in the mechanism of Ames’s letter to his son in Gilead; in questions about the second Mrs Ames’s place in heaven in Lila (244); and, perhaps most memorably, in the return of Jack Boughton’s son to Gilead – imagined by his sister Glory at the end of Home (338–339) – the question of what will happen to these families after 1957 is gestured to but never answered. Jack (2020) – the fourth novel in the Gilead series – alters this thesis only slightly. Rather than clarifying what happens after the events of Gilead, partner novels Home and Lila expand on key moments of their predecessor, making the Gilead trilogy – now, a quartet – a novel sequence that retells the central stories of the Ames and Boughton families from different perspectives, rather than a set of prequels or sequels that move the story backwards or forwards

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in time (Sykes 2017). If the Gilead novels tell similar stories four different ways, Robinson remains fascinated by one character – Jack ‘John Ames’ Boughton – a chaotic deus ex machina who appears and disappears in Gilead very suddenly; the central engine or agent of plot. Jack provides context for its protagonist’s eventual return to Gilead: it focuses on his relationship with a young African American schoolteacher, Della Miles, the danger of their courtship in St Louis, and her role in his attempted family reconciliation in Gilead and Home. For Christopher Lloyd, whose essay in this collection considers the links between race, affect, and memory in Home, reading the Gilead novels in sequence deepens each novel’s complexity but it also makes them sadder. Jack is no different. Set around 1950, six years before the start of Gilead, Jack restages discussions of goodness and grace that become sadder knowing the failure of his long hoped for reconciliation with his family in Home.2 Discussions of predestination staged throughout the first three Gilead novels are reanimated in Jack by Della’s Methodist faith, prompting further discussions of whether Jack can ever find ‘salvation by grace alone’ (Robinson Jack 31). Indeed, the very notion of home is returned to in its spiritual and material dimensions as Jack reveals the depth of its protagonist’s wish to ‘go home one last time’ (33), as well as his resignation and grief that his final trip might be the return of his body after death.3 Jack shares most similarities with Lila, a novel that depicts Lila Dahl’s journey from itinerant poverty to an anxious but settled life in Iowa. Neither Lila nor Jack ever feel ‘at home’ in Gilead; they are, as Briallen Hopper argues, ‘damaged, outcast characters’ through whom Robinson interrogates the supposed ‘Midwestern serenity’ of the Ames and Boughton families and foregrounds ‘the disorienting extremes of slavery, racism, alcoholism, prison, poverty, illiteracy’ (2014). Both Lila and Jack detail what happens to their protagonists before the events of Gilead through a closely focalised third-person perspective. They also share the key location of St Louis, Missouri, which is Lila’s final stop before travelling to Iowa and the setting for the majority of Jack. Throughout Lila, Robinson refers to St Louis as a place of ‘pure misery’ (188): Lila arrives there while grieving the loss of her found family, Doll and Doane, and eventually finds work in what she refers to as ‘a whorehouse’ (197). In Jack, St Louis evokes more complicated emotions. It is the city of Jack’s

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romance with Della and of his arrest and incarceration, where he spends the majority of his time drunk, unemployed, and sleeping between cheap guesthouses and graveyards. As Missouri borders Iowa, St Louis is also fairly close to Gilead and the city becomes a place where Jack can live in relative anonymity but receive money from his brother Teddy when he needs it. Unlike small-town Iowa, Jack can turn his life around quickly in St Louis – find a new job, evade loan sharks, move to a different part of the city – with all the privilege of a middle-class white man who is often mistaken for clergy and rarely undermined when he is unknown. The city is notable, then, as both an urban locale – a first as a mainstay in Robinson’s fiction – and as a point of comparison to the supposedly radical Iowa that the Gilead novels first depict and then problematise. Robinson references Ulysses S. Grant’s description of Iowa as a ‘bright Radical star’ (Bergman 134; Dykstra 227) committed to the suffrage of Black Americans twice in Gilead (176, 220), once in Home (210), and one final time in Jack (157).4 The reference appears first as grounds for hope in the progressive politics of the state and second as an ironic disavowal of the apathetic position Gilead’s residents have held towards civil rights since the end of the Civil War. A union city in a union state, St Louis remained segregated well into the twentieth century and interracial marriages were illegal until Loving v. Virginia in 1967. Unlike Iowa, therefore, which eliminated anti-miscegenation legislation in its Territorial Laws when it became a state in 1846, Missouri would not have allowed Jack and Della to live together or marry, a detail that clarifies the desperation with which Jack attempts to reconcile with his family in Gilead and Home. If the Boughtons reconcile, Jack and Della would be allowed to marry in Iowa. Yet, as Glory reflects, the ‘[w] orn, modest, countrified Gilead’ that the Ames and Boughton families experience would be a ‘foreign and hostile country’ to Della, her son, and any person of colour hoping to live there (Home 339). The choice facing Jack and Della – between the illegality of their union in St Louis and the quieter but pernicious racism of rural Iowa – complicates the idea of them ever finding or being at ‘home’. Importantly, by retelling Jack’s life from a third-person perspective more closely aligned with his psyche, Robinson demonstrates major gaps in how Jack perceives his impact on others. In Gilead, readers learn that Jack misses Thanksgiving dinner with Della near the

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beginning of their relationship: ‘I had a couple of drinks before I came and I was later than I intended’ (254). Yet, Jack’s suggestion that he was ‘[t]wo hours late’ (Gilead 254) is woefully inaccurate. When Robinson retells the story in greater detail in Jack, he is a day late, turning up drunk in the middle of the night (62), adding to his reputation as ‘That White Man That Keeps Walking Up and Down the Street All The Time’ (64) in a Black neighbourhood. The way Jack narrates his separation from Della similarly erases the repeated danger he puts her in by pursuing a relationship. In Gilead, Jack tells Ames about a visit he pays to Della’s father in Memphis and his subsequent decision to give her up in order to protect her. In Jack, however, Della is already pregnant when Jack meets her family and it is only when the couple leaves together that the Miles family disowns her. It follows that a major problem with Jack is its protagonist: it often feels hard to care about the eponymous anti-hero as much as Robinson does. Before arriving in Memphis, readers follow Jack on a visit to Chicago, a city he only knows because the mother of his first child left Gilead to live there. This interim trip is important because it brings Jack face to face with the obstacles to his relationship with a Black woman: he is kicked out of a Chicago guest house when his landlady discovers his ‘illegal’ union with Della (272). It also reminds the reader of his negligence as a father and caregiver to ‘that girl’ from Gilead and their dead child, neither of whom he names (142). Readers of Gilead will know that sometime after Jack ends, Della’s family takes her and baby Robert back to Memphis when they find the family ‘in a state of something like destitution’ (Gilead 256). Knowledge of Jack’s repeated negligence of his partners and children makes the final pages of Jack particularly difficult to read: a pregnant Della and a hopeful Jack sit in separate sections of a segregated bus, travelling back to St Louis with their worst days still ahead of them. By extending her readers’ knowledge of Jack Boughton and his failings, Robinson provokes further questions about the centrality of whiteness to the Gilead novels. Read charitably, the absence of care and lack of effective allyship shown by Jack, throughout Jack, might be a comment on the limits of white liberalism. It is Jack, after all, who draws Boughton’s attention to civil unrest in Montgomery in Home and who reminds both Boughton and Ames of

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the racism endemic in their white communities. Nevertheless, Robinson’s expansion of Jack and Della’s relationship reveals his politics to be self-centred, without substantially developing Della, the only major Black character in all four Gilead novels. In Jack, Della appears as an angelically pure and lovely creature: she washes her face in the morning dew and never seems angry or put out by her partner’s behaviour. It is hinted that Della has more depths than Jack acknowledges. In passing, readers learn that she moves from Tennessee, where her family holds a powerful position in the Methodist church, to teach at Sumner, Missouri, the first Black high school west of the Mississippi whose founders were inspired by a minister in St Louis who had to ‘anchor a raft in the middle of the Mississippi River to teach our children at high-school level, because it was illegal to do that in Missouri and in Illinois’ (272). Della is therefore more radical – indeed, she is more interesting – than the text often acknowledges. Although Robinson provides more detail about Sumner in interviews publicising the book (Zhang), Della’s inner life and politics remain important only as context for Jack’s failings. Against Della’s quiet constancy and affection, Jack repeatedly puts her in danger. He walks down her street, drunk, in the middle of the night to sit on her porch, leaves a cat doused in Old Spice in the bushes, and writes love letters that centre her role in his redemption: ‘[t]he thought of you brings peace to my unquiet spirit’ (156). His behaviour is so unsubtle that Della loses her job at Sumner, her housemate, the goodwill of her family, and eventually becomes pregnant within a union that – at least locally – cannot legally result in marriage. Jack consistently highlights his relationship to harm – ‘It’s like I’m in hell. A destructive man in a world where everything can be ruined or broken’ (154) – but he just as consistently describes his relationship with Della as singular and independent of socio-political context. ‘It was as if she had said,’ he muses, ‘We ended the world, don’t you remember? Now it’s just the two of us’ (51). It follows that Jack is a contradictory conclusion to the Gilead series. On the one hand, Robinson uses the same empathetic and elaborately philosophical style to consider Jack’s life in more detail, returning to central concepts of goodness, grace, and predestination against the backdrop of the 1950s and the growing civil rights movement. However, in returning to the problem of the youngest

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Boughton, Robinson never fully examines the other lives excluded from Gilead. The existence of Jack and Della’s son is used to pose moral questions for Ames, Boughton, Glory, Lila, and Jack without investing her Black characters with rounded personalities, inner conflicts, or political and philosophical views of their own. Throughout Jack, Robinson suggests that an individual’s ability to change can be curtailed by a belief in the fatefulness of their own alienation. ‘The way I ruin things,’ Jack tells Della on their second meeting, ‘it’s a little different everytime’ (Jack 32). Yet, concluding the Gilead quartet in this way also suggests the potential for goodness and grace – which is so central to all of Robinson’s fiction – rests on who is granted the privilege of second, third, and fourth chances. For Jack, Robinson’s sympathies seem limitless. But for the reader – after 1,161 pages and four Gilead novels – that interest wears thin.

Notes 1 Fingerbone – the setting for her debut, Housekeeping – is modelled on towns in northern Idaho and western Washington where the author grew up, while Gilead – the location for both Gilead and Home, as well as the abstract focus for Lila – is inspired by Tabor, Iowa, a town with a similarly forgotten history of radicalism located due west of the University of Iowa where Robinson taught for 25 years (Robinson When I Was a Child 162). 2 Like its predecessors, Jack is geographically concrete but temporally abstract. When Ames and Jack have their transformative conversation in the final pages of Gilead, revealing that Jack has a wife and child, Ames guesses that Jack’s son is ‘about five or six’ (249) from a picture he carries with him. Moving back and forth through a period of months from the beginning of Jack’s courtship with Della to the birth of their son, attentive readers might calculate that Jack takes place sometime around 1949–50. Robinson includes even fewer markers of period or politics than Gilead’s oft-cited references to Eisenhower and Home’s more detailed allusions to the civil rights movement. 3 To this end, Jack carries the address of the graveyard at Boughton’s church in his top pocket. 4 Robinson is paraphrasing a speech Grant made in 1865 on the issue of impartial suffrage and extending the vote to Black Americans. The Iowa State Weekly Register wrote that Grant ‘trusted that Iowa, the bright Radical star, would proclaim by its action in November that the



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North is consistent with itself, and willing to voluntarily accept what its Congress had made a necessity in the South’ (qtd in Bergman 134).

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Works cited Bergman, Marvin. Iowa History Reader. University of Iowa Press, 2008. Dykstra, Robert. Bright Radical Star: Black Freedom and White Supremacy on the Hawkeye Frontier. Harvard University Press, 1993. Hopper, Briallen. “Marilynne Robinson in Montgomery.” Religion & Politics 22 December 2014. https://religionandpolitics.org/2014/12/22/ marilynne-robinson-in-montgomery/. (Accessed 21/06/2021.) Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. Virago, 2004. —— Home. Virago, 2008. —— Housekeeping. Faber & Faber, 1980/2005. —— Jack. Virago, 2020. —— Lila. Virago, 2014. —— When I Was a Child, I Read Books: Essays. Virago, 2012. Sykes, Rachel. “If he knew, and if he didn’t: narrative perspective in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels.” Irish Journal of American Studies 6 (2017), http://ijas.iaas.ie/issue-6-rachel-sykes/. Zhang, C. Pam. “West x Midwest Presents: Marilynne Robinson and C Pam Zhang in Conversation.” The Believer. 8 December 2020. https:// believermag.com/logger/west-x-midwest-presents-marilynne-robinsonand-c-pam-zhang-in-conversation/. (Accessed 23/3/2021.)

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Index

Abolitionism 174, 184, 186, 192 adolescence 111, 155 American Midwest 10, 166, 202–203, 206, 215, 219 baptism 62, 69, 97, 118 baseball 212–213, 231 Bildungsroman 68–84 passim, 129 Brown, John 22, 24, 29, 228, 238 Calvin, John 25, 196–197, 272 Calvinism 185, 196, 265n.1, 271, 281 cinema 78–79 citizenship 31, 38, 250 civil rights movement 5, 11, 166, 176, 184, 202, 206, 211, 214, 226, 232, 235, 243n.8, 294, 295n.2 Civil War 17, 19, 21, 94, 194, 202, 206, 207, 210–211, 217, 235, 293 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 30, 39 Confederacy 20 Cromwell, Oliver 247, 265n.2 crucifixion 27 democracy 2–4, 8n.4, 21, 31, 33, 194, 250, 256–257, 263, 276, 283, 285 Derrida, Jacques 47, 53–63 passim, 66n.2, 66n.3, 125–129,

138, 203–204, 207, 211, 220n.2 Dickens, Charles 86, 99n.1, 104 Dickinson, Emily 30–35 passim, 149, 280–282 Eliot, T.S. 38, 86–89, 104 Ellison, Ralph 226, 229, 235, 238 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 31, 80–81, 83, 87, 104, 106, 249, 255, 265n.5, 270–271, 275, 280–282 evangelicalism 183–189 passim, 192, 195 Ezekiel 12–13, 76 Feuerbach, Ludwig 23, 26, 271 Finn, Huckleberry 72, 104 flood 51, 108, 138 Freud, Sigmund 25, 56–57, 60, 62, 143, 171, 227, 271, 279 fundamentalism 189, 191, 195 grace 27, 38, 69, 192, 292, 295 hooks, bell 30, 39 hospitality 125–128 Iowa Writers’ Workshop 2, 4, 247, 251–260 passim

Index 299 Jim Crow 16–17

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Kipling, Rudyard 92 knife 116, 120n.4 Lawrence, D.H. 83–90 Lincoln, Abraham 11, 34, 231 literary theory 268–269 logocentrism 47, 53, 66n.2 loneliness 35, 76, 86, 110, 117, 130, 134, 151–152, 168, 173, 213 Lucy, Autherine 23, 176 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 73, 77–79 Melville, Herman 30–35 passim, 280–282 memory 12, 48, 57, 59, 62, 137, 139, 150–151, 155, 171, 174, 177, 179n.1, 207–211, 219, 235, 242 metaphor 30–37, 87, 98 minimalism 278 Montgomery bus boycott 175, 215, 220n.7, 229 Morrison, Toni 30, 39–40, 205–206, 226–231, 233–235, 240–242, 243n.3 Obama, Barack 5, 8n.4, 15, 30, 38, 194, 218, 226, 249, 263 parable 12–14 phenomenology 153, 282 positivism 270–275 predestination 15, 26, 172, 179n.2, 232, 291, 295 Quakers 22 quiet 29, 133, 151, 168 race 174–175, 202 Reformation 25, 184 Religious Right 189–195, 200n.8 resurrection 76, 89, 139

salvation 62, 76, 184–186 scepticism 188, 197, 273, 276– 278, 281–285 scientism 269, 274–276 Second Great Awakening 184, 186 secularism 192–194 self-reliance 31, 76, 81–83, 103–106, 109–119 ‘Seven Sisters’ 184, 187–188, 199, 199n.5, 200n.10 Shakespeare, William 268, 273, 279 slavery 14, 17, 19, 31, 34, 38–9, 174, 184, 186, 202, 207, 213, 239–240, 291 Social Gospel 184 solitude 36, 104, 125, 127–128, 133–138, 155–156 Spong, Bishop John Shelby 195, 197–198 television 23, 175, 213–214, 229 Thoreau, Henry David 30–34, 82, 148, 271, 280 Till, Emmett 23, 175–177, 231 transcendentalism 69, 80, 83, 268, 279, 281, 283 transience 36–37, 51, 63, 83–84, 112–114, 145, 148 Trump, Donald 3, 8n.4, 15, 215, 263, 268 uncanny 171–172, 227, 235, 237 unhousing 51–52 United Church of Christ 184, 186, 187, 198 water 63, 87–89, 108, 118, 237, 244n.21 Weber, Max 25–26 whiteness 38, 111, 174, 203, 205–206, 215, 219, 220n.5, 294 Whitman, Walt 38, 282 Winthrop, John 20–21 woods 107–116