Understanding Marilynne Robinson 9781611178029, 9781611178036

Citation preview

UNDERSTANDING MARILYNNE ROBINSON

UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE

Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor

UNDERSTANDING

MARILYNNE ROBINSON Alex Engebretson

The University of South Carolina Press

© 2017 University of South Carolina Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.sc.edu/uscpress 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ ISBN 978-1-61117-802-9 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61117-803-6 (ebook) Front cover photograph: © Ulf Andersen www.ulfandersen.photoshelter.com

For Julie

CONTENTS Series Editor’s Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Chapter 1 Understanding Marilynne Robinson Chapter 2 Housekeeping 14 Chapter 3 Gilead 35 Chapter 4 Home 56 Chapter 5 Lila 78 Chapter 6 The Essays 100

Notes 131 Selected Bibliography 135 Index 151

1

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931–2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature. As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, “the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed.” Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers—explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives—and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion. In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli’s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word. Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to the following individuals and institutions: Cornel Bonca, Gerhard Joseph, Anne Humpherys, Nico Israel, Ryan Pederson, the Baylor English Department, Baylor University’s Office of the Provost and the Summer Sabbatical Program committee, Debbie and Roger Engebretson, Ben and Darlene Engebretson, Mike and Josie Permenter, and Linda Permenter. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Julie, for her love, hope, and humor from the beginning to the end of this project.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Marilynne Robinson “Nowadays,” wrote the critic James Wood, “when so many writers are acclaimed as great stylists, it’s hard to make anyone notice when you praise a writer’s prose.” Yet there is “something remarkable about the writing in Gilead” (“Acts of Devotion”). There is the grandfather who “could make me feel as though he had poked me with the stick, just by looking at me” (29). And the cat, trying to escape the embrace of a boy, whose eyes are described as “patiently furious” (90). Wood concludes these stylistic notes with a claim that “Robinson’s words have a spiritual force that’s very rare in contemporary fiction” (“Acts of Devotion”). Perhaps James Wood—and perhaps he alone—would enjoy a volume entirely devoted to the analysis of Marilynne Robinson’s style. Such a volume might be justified from the perspective Wood suggests, namely that her “words” are the source of her value, the “spiritual force” many readers have found in her writing. The link between style and value may be true. Indeed, it is my belief that the relative popularity of Robinson’s fiction has much to do with the music of her prose, what today’s fiction writers are apt to call “voice.” It is arguable that she has done more than any American writer since Hemingway to realize the expressive potential of ordinary words. Yet a volume on style alone is undesirable for obvious reasons; it would be tedious and would exclude much of what is original and interesting in Robinson. In the pages ahead, there will be occasions to notice stylistic features, in particular the evolution of her style from Housekeeping to the later Gilead novels, but these will be brief vistas on our tour through Robinson’s complete works. The theme for now is Robinson’s originality, her difference from other authors of the contemporary moment. Such a topic requires us to leave style behind and shift into the realm of ideas. It is in cultural history, biography,

2

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

politics, aesthetics, and religion that we can begin to uncover the sources of Robinson’s most distinctive qualities. The words “unfashionable” and “contrarian” are often applied to Robinson, and it is easy to see why. No matter one’s political, religious, or aesthetic persuasion, one is likely to find something disagreeable about her opinions and attitudes: she is a woman critical of feminist scholarship; a political progressive and cultural traditionalist; a liberal Protestant who admires John Calvin; an environmentalist who was sued by Greenpeace; a celebrated novelist who has published more essays than fiction; a domestic novelist and novelist of ideas; a critic of modernism and a champion of the American nineteenth century. She once described her “archaic self” as “nothing other than a latter-day pagan whose intuitions were not altogether at odds with, as it happened, Presbyterianism, and so were simply polished to that shape” (Adam 229). The critic Cathleen Schine put it simply: “Marilynne Robinson . . . really is not like any other writer. She really isn’t” (“A Triumph”). A Life, from Idaho to Iowa

She was born Marilynne Summers, in the far-west town of Sandpoint, Idaho. Her father, John J. Summers, worked in the lumber industry along the IdahoWashington border, moving the family often to follow the work, through towns like Coolin, Sagle, and Talache. Since her father was away for long stretches of time, Marilynne spent much of her childhood in the company of her mother, Ellen, and her precocious older brother, David. By her own admission, she was an introverted and bookish child, attempting her first reading of Moby Dick at age nine. Despite the provincialism of her upbringing, she acquired a good education at the public high school in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, which she would later characterize as the acquisition of “odds and ends—Dido pining on her flaming couch, Lewis and Clark mapping the wilderness” (When I Was 87), as well as encounters with Emily Dickinson, Horace, Virgil, Cicero, and, most crucially, the Bible. She wrote poetry as a young girl, mainly of the melancholy variety. “When I was a girl too young to give the matter any thought at all, I used to be overcome by the need to write poetry whenever there was a good storm, that is, heavy rain and wind enough to make the house smell like the woods” (The World 121). Although her family was Presbyterian, religion was more an “inherited intuition than an actual fact” (Fay). Her upbringing and education in the West would mark her as an outsider once she left for the East, where she would discover that “the hardest work in the world—it may in fact be impossible—is to persuade easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling” (When I Was 86).

UNDE RSTA N DI N G M A R I LYNNE R O B I NS O N

3

After graduating from high school in 1962, she followed her brother to Rhode Island, where she attended the women’s college Pembroke, now part of Brown University. She studied English, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century American literature, and absorbed the authors who would profoundly influence her: Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. She had an epiphany in the library one day, which she would later call her “escape”: When I was a sophomore in college, taking a course in American philosophy, I went to the library and read an assigned text, Jonathan Edwards’s Doctrine of Original Sin Defended. There is a long footnote in this daunting treatise that discusses the light of the moon, and how the apparent continuity of the moon’s light is a consequence of its reflecting light that is in fact continuously renewed. This was Edwards’s analogy for the continuous renewal of the world by the will of God, which creates, to our eyes, seeming lawfulness and identity, but which is in fact a continuous free act of God. . . . Edwards’s footnote was my first, best introduction to epistemology and ontology, and my escape—and what a rescue it was—from the contending, tedious determinisms that seem to be all that was on offer to me then. (“Credo” 27) The liberation she experienced through Edwards set her on a journey toward something quite different: an artistic vision she would call a “democratic esthetic” and an intellectual vision she would refer to as a “religious belief in intellectual openness” (“Credo” 27). In addition to pursuing literary studies, she took her first writing workshop with John Hawkes, who, despite his own experimental preferences, gave her favorable feedback and encouraged her to continue writing. After graduating with her B.A. in 1966, she returned to the Pacific Northwest and enrolled in a Ph.D. program in English at the University of Washington. She married, had two sons, and in 1977 completed her dissertation, “A New Look at Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II: Sources, Structure and Meaning.” After earning her Ph.D., she taught for a year at the Université de Haute Bretagne in Rennes. Within a year she had a draft of the manuscript that would become her first novel, Housekeeping. Robinson suspected it was not publishable because of its elevated rhetorical style, extended metaphors, general plotlessness, and gloomy atmosphere. But to her great surprise the first agent who reviewed it decided to represent her, and the first publisher that read the manuscript, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, decided to publish it. The book won immediate praise upon its publication in 1980, becoming a bestseller and

4

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

eventually the basis for a film, released in 1987 and directed by Bill Forsyth. In the coming years, she would publish many essays as well as the short story “Connie Bronson” in The Paris Review (1986), but it would be twenty-four years until she published another novel. In the meantime she went to work as a professor, accepting appointments at Washington University (1983), the University of Kent, in England (1983–1984), the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts (1985), Amherst College (1985–1986), the University of Massachusetts (1987), and the University of Alabama (1988). While at Kent, Robinson became interested in the environmental impact of the British nuclear reprocessing plant located at Sellafield. She wrote an essay for Harper’s magazine that claimed that millions of tons of nuclear materials had been dumped daily into the Irish Sea for more than thirty years. Her outrage at the contamination and at Britain turned into Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution, published in 1989. Although the book was a finalist for the National Book Award’s nonfiction prize and gained a minor reputation within the environmental movement, it remains highly controversial. Robinson’s professional wandering stopped in 1990 when she accepted a position at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, which continues to be her adopted home. Having divorced a year earlier, Robinson found Iowa City a stable place in which to raise her two children, attend services at the Congregational United Church of Christ, and continue with a project she called her “re-education”: It was largely as a consequence of the experience of writing Mother Coun­ try that I began what amounted to an effort to re-educate myself. After all those years of school, I felt there was little I knew that I could trust, and I did not want my books to be one more tributary to the sea of nonsense that really is what most conventional wisdom amounts to. (Fay 210) The product of this re-education was The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Published in 1998, this collection of contrarian-minded essays offered reevaluations of major figures in intellectual history, including Charles Darwin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and John Calvin, as well as incisive inquiries into subjects such as the environment, political correctness, nineteenth-century American abolitionists, and the Puritans. The book was also significant for its overt religious commitment. Robinson pronounces herself a “liberal Protestant,” and this perspective informs many of the essays in the book, which explicitly treat religious themes or build arguments on the basis of the ethical substance of the Bible. Despite the unpopularity of her views and the unconcealed moral seriousness of the book, it was mostly well received by the popular press.1

UNDE RSTA N DI N G M A R I LYNNE R O B I NS O N

5

Since The Death of Adam, Robinson’s reputation has steadily increased. She has become a popular lecturer both in the United States and abroad and a much more visible force in the national literary scene. In 2004 she published her second novel, Gilead, an epistolary work about an aging pastor, which won praise from both the public and prize committees. Many reviewers commented on the twenty-four-year gap between Housekeeping and Gilead, mistaking Robinson’s focus on nonfiction for a literary “silence.” James Wood offered a different account, claiming that Robinson possessed a sensibility that was “sanguine about intermittence” (“Acts of Devotion”). The success of Gilead would begin the most productive period of Robinson’s career, which saw five publications in seven years: Home (2008), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), Lila (2015), and The Givenness of Things (2015). Like Henry James and, more recently, Philip Roth, Marilynne Robinson has experienced a late-career surge in creative energy. As she enters her early seventies, this productivity shows no signs of slowing.2 Toward a “Democratic Esthetic”

Robinson is difficult to place among her contemporary American peers. She does not fit comfortably into any of the main postwar literary traditions, whether the postmodernist aesthetic of John Barth, the minimalist school of Raymond Carver, or the world of many ethnic and racial minority writers such as Toni Morrison or Philip Roth. She is sometimes compared to Cormac McCarthy, perhaps because they share some stylistic tics—antiquated language and King James cadences—and a strong visionary quality. But their similarities end there, as McCarthy’s work expresses a profoundly violent, naturalistic worldview that is opposed to Robinson’s religious sensibility. Flannery O’Connor did possess unfashionable religious views, though her approach to fiction—her irony, flat characterization, and flair for the grotesque—contrasts with Robinson’s approach to religious fiction. In an interview, Robinson distanced herself from O’Connor: “For some reason it is not conventional for serious fiction to treat religious thought respectfully—the influence of Flannery O’Connor has been particularly destructive, I think, though she is considered a religious writer, and she considered herself one” (“A World of Beautiful Souls”). Though Robinson may not have an immediate affinity with many contemporary authors, she did begin her career within the context of the early 1980s, when the ascendant literary trend was Raymond Carver’s minimalism. Minimalism took Hemingway’s spare language and made it sparer, stripping away any hint of lyricism, metaphor, and ornamentation in order to render the bare, blighted reality of Carver’s lower-middle-class characters. As Carver’s style

6

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

moved through major magazines like The New Yorker and filtrated through the university’s M.F.A. programs, it became dominant and spawned a legion of imitators—not including Robinson: Especially in writing that was recent at the time I wrote Housekeeping, there was an almost puritanical assumption abroad, it seemed, that anything but a kind of plain speech or almost reduced speech, reduced language, was somehow dishonest or mannered or artificial in the negative sense. And of course I don’t believe that at all. I think 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. (Schaub, “Interview” 245) The highly rhetorical, metaphorical style of Housekeeping was a response to the “puritanical assumption” of Carver’s minimalism and his followers. It is similar to her objection toward fiction “made of stringing together brand names, media phrases and minor expletives, the idea being, apparently, that these amount to a demonstration of how reduced people actually are, though they are in fact no more than the statement of a notably ungenerous faith” (“Language Is Smarter Than We Are” 3). Robinson offers a more optimistic assessment of ordinary American lives than does Carver’s bleak, enervated perspective. Later in her career, after minimalism had faded from literary fashion, Robinson would change her position on “plain language,” finding “a strong, subtle music in it, which is intimately related to its capacity for meaning” (The World 128). If one had to choose, Robinson’s closest contemporary may be John Updike, the only other major postwar American writer of Protestant sensibilities About his own aesthetic tendency to give detailed attention to the ordinary, Updike wrote, “My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me—to give the mundane its beautiful due” (The Early Stories [New York: Knopf, 2003], xv). In Robinson’s review of Updike’s short story collection Trust Me, she lavished praise on this aspect of his work: “The plainest objects and events bloom in these stories as if they had at last found their proper climate” (“At Play”). Robinson’s praise of Updike’s aestheticism, his idea that “gorgeousness inheres in anything” (“At Play”), has its roots in the Calvinist value of aesthetic perception. Although they differ in what they describe—Updike foregrounds bodies and sex, while these remain in the background for Robinson—together their work testifies to a Protestant mode of attending to everyday life. With his taste for Proust and Nabokov, John Updike was typical of his generation’s admiration for modernism and its descendants. Most postwar authors felt the need to reckon with the innovations of James Joyce, Virginia

UNDE RSTA N DI N G M A R I LYNNE R O B I NS O N

7

Woolf, and Ezra Pound, either rebelling against them or carrying forward their mission to “make it new.” As evidenced by interviews and essays, Marilynne Robinson’s attitude toward modernism is unusually hostile, with the main thrust of her critique directed against modernism’s politics and moral implications. In an early essay, “Writers and the Nostalgic Fallacy,” T. S. Eliot and Pound are singled out for their antiliberal, antidemocratic attitudes: Take courtly and ecclesiastical culture as culture indeed, and modern, mass and democratic influences as anti-culture, create explicit or implicit contrasts—and you have a modernist poem. The Waste Land epitomizes this method, exposing the vulgarity of the lower-class lovers in the boat on the Thames by invoking Shakespeare’s Enobarbus’s North’s Plutarch’s Cleopatra on her barge. (34) For Robinson, The Waste Land is problematic on political grounds, as it privileges the hierarchical past over the democratic present. In a later interview, Robinson addressed the politics of modernism directly: The idea of democracy was something that inspired enthusiasm. But it seems to me that the elitist model of culture just overwhelmed American society in the Twentieth Century. People like Pound and Eliot and so on were the enthusiasts of elitism for years and years and years before anything happened to criticize that view, which was a political view. And they taught the idea that democracy and cultural freedom could not accommodate each other. Eliot wrote about that explicitly, Pound talked about that explicitly, it happened over and over again among modernists, the idea that true culture was being crushed and destroyed by Whitman’s masses. I think it’s ungenerous, fashionable, small-minded thinking that has overwhelmed all the resistance. (237–38) Robinson’s critique is rooted in a narrow, political interpretation of Eliot’s version of modernism. Her project stands with “Whitman’s masses”—a phrase that suggests democracy and American nationalism—against her perception of an encroaching elitist culture propagated by two American expatriates. Whether this is fair to Eliot and Pound is less of a concern than how Robinson imagined them as “other” in order to define her own mode of fiction.3 Robinson’s opposition to modernism is long held and intense. In particular, she is opposed to the emotional and moral qualities usually associated with Eliot’s early verse: anxiety and disappointment. Indeed, a fair characterization of her own work is an anti–Waste Land aesthetic: nationalist and domestic as opposed to internationalist and exilic, an attitude of openness toward history as opposed to a sense of crisis and decline, and stylistic simplicity and

8

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

accessibility rather than difficulty and exclusivity. But to define Robinson’s originality by what she opposes—that she is an “antimodernist”—is not fully satisfying, since it does not account for the elements of modernism she affirms—the ideal of craft and formal unity, for example—and it excludes a positive sense of what she stands for. What Robinson calls her “democratic esthetic” arises from a conversation with three main cultural currents: regionalism, liberal Protestantism, and nineteenth-century American literature. When an interviewer commented that Housekeeping was “in some ways . . . almost a modernist project,” Robinson replied, “I think, though, it’s modernist in the sense that Dickinson is so often a modernist” (in Schaub, “Interview” 239). She has often spoken of her admiration for nineteenth-century American writing, those authors traditionally grouped under the “American Renaissance.” In “The Hum Inside the Skull” she wrote, “If to admire and to be influenced are more or less the same thing, I must be influenced most deeply by the 19th-century Americans—Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson and Poe. . . . I happen to have read these old aunts and uncles at an impressionable age, and so I will always answer to them in my mind” (1). Robinson appropriates two main ideas from these authors, ideas commonly associated with Romanticism. The first is the centrality of consciousness and the second is an exalted, optimistic view of self. For Emerson, Melville, Dickinson, and later writers such as Wallace Stevens and William James, “creeds fall away and consciousness has the character of revelation” (When I Was xiv). These authors “identify sacred mystery with individual experience” (When I Was xiv). Robinson agrees. In returning to these “old aunts and uncles,” Robinson sidesteps modernism to recover and reimagine the strong, deep, optimistic self from the nineteenth century. It is also crucial to Robinson’s identity as a writer that these authors are American. Rightly or wrongly, she is committed to the idea of a nationally defined literary culture, which she self-consciously appropriates and commemorates. The national tradition that Robinson engages is narrowly defined, centered on the writers of New England, beginning with the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards and on to Dickinson, Melville, and Wallace Stevens. As idiosyncratic as Robinson’s project might seem, she actually seeks acceptance into the most traditional and respected literary tradition America has produced. This is accomplished through a “democratic esthetic,” a conception of fiction that is stylistically accessible and that expresses the dignity of ordinary individuals. It is the conceit of all of her fiction, wrote Amy Hungerford, that “ordinary people have rich and complicated interior lives, that they embody a silent discourse of thought that, if we knew its voice, would astonish us”

UNDE RSTA N DI N G M A R I LYNNE R O B I NS O N

9

(Postmodern Belief 114). The focus on “ordinary people,” rather than the rich, powerful, famous, or beautiful, expresses Robinson’s commitment to equality, perhaps the preeminent value across her fiction and essays. The other essential democratic value is individualism, which Robinson locates in her emphasis on “interior lives,” rather than action. From the perspective of the history of the novel, Robinson’s conception of character is entirely mainstream, as it rejects the modernist impulse to dismantle traditional forms. Yet her enthusiasm for democratic values and her desire that her fiction serve those values set her apart from her fellow contemporary writers. In her Introduction to When I Was a Child I Read Books Robinson wrote, “This loyalty to democracy is the American value I fear we are gravely in danger of losing” (xvi). Robinson’s fiction is her response to this anxiety, an attempt to recover the nineteenth century’s optimism about democracy and self. Robinson also belongs to the tradition of regionalist American writing alongside writers like Willa Cather and William Faulkner, who grounded their works in a specific sense of place. The two primary regions are the Mountain West region of Idaho in Housekeeping and the upper Middle West of Iowa in the Gilead books. The meaning of place and the imagination of regional identity are important topics in the chapters ahead. Yet there is another implication of Robinson’s dedication to regionalism, one that relates to her association with the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. It is tempting to make much of this connection between Robinson and the Writers’ Workshop, particularly in light of Mark McGurl’s excellent book, The Program Era. Robinson is one of the most conspicuously successful of the Workshop’s faculty, and all evidence suggests that she identifies herself with the institution and its region. Her epigram to Lila is “To IOWA,” which may refer to the university, the place, or both. The question is whether her career at the Workshop has had an important bearing on her fiction. I believe it has, but only in a limited sense. Robinson can be usefully located within a tradition of Midwestern regionalism that had its origins at the Writers’ Workshop. McGurl wrote, “Opposed equally to a dislocated mass culture and to a deracinated cosmopolitan high culture, regionalism’s celebration of the particularities of place was fundamental to the aesthetic sensibilities imparted at Iowa, and to the continuing power of the injunction to the individual writer, raised among those particularities, to ‘write what you know.’”4 It is easy to find Robinson’s work in McGurl’s description, its celebration of particularity and its rejection of “dislocated mass culture” and “cosmopolitan high culture.” Understood against the background of this institutional history, the Gilead novels can be read as a revival of one of the Workshop’s foundational purposes: to create a vital source of Midwestern regionalism.

10

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

Liberal Calvinism

The influence of regionalism and of the American nineteenth century is among the most distinctive features of Robinson’s democratic aesthetic. The third is Protestantism, which demands more elaboration, since it is the most conspicuous of the three. Robinson’s religious thought could easily fill a volume, for she has written learned essays on theology and theologians, the history of the American church, and the debate between science and religion. These are important topics, discussed in some detail in chapter 6. The task at hand, however, is to grasp the implications of Robinson’s religious identity on her aesthetic practice. She calls herself “a mainline Protestant, a.k.a. a liberal Protestant” (Adam 261)—what does this mean for her fiction? It means that her work shares an atmosphere of feeling and attitude with liberal theology. Liberal theology is a large, complex tradition, but across it there are some widely shared attitudes. According to Paul Rasor’s Faith with­ out Certainty, liberal theology promotes an ethical focus, a positive attitude toward human nature, the privileging of the individual’s experience, and the acknowledgment of history as a condition for truth. Every one of these ideas has an analog to her novels.5 More important, Robinson shares liberal theology’s acceptance of mystery and complexity. The liberal skepticism toward dogmatism, orthodoxy, and certainty and its affirmation of openness, uncertainty, and individual autonomy are deeply congruent with Robinson’s fictional practice: I am not of the school of thought that finds adherence to doctrine synonymous with firmness of faith. On the contrary, I believe that faith in God is a liberation of thought, because thought is an ongoing instruction in things that pertain to God. To test this belief is my fictional practice, the basis for the style and substance of my two novels and the motive behind my non­ fiction. This might seem to some people to be paradoxical, a religious belief in intellectual openness. This would seem like a contradiction in the minds of religion’s detractors and also, apparently, in the minds of a significant number of its adherents. (“Credo” 26–27, my italics) This is the clearest statement of Robinson’s religious intentions, and in its language of openness and freedom it is singularly indebted to liberal theology. The words mystery and complexity, and their underlying ideas, are two of the most common in Robinson’s essays, and they also name two of the fiction’s aesthetic effects. Robinson combines these liberal attitudes with a selective sympathy for orthodox theology: “I do in fact adhere—selectively—to classical tenets of

UNDE RSTA N DI N G M A R I LYNNE R O B I NS O N

11

Christianity, not because I think I ought to but because I find them to be of great value” (“Credo” 28). Her dialog with orthodox Christianity is one reason Robinson remains apart from the literature John McClure called “postsecular,” that of writers like Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison who question the authority of secular rationalism and imagine a new spiritualism.6 Unlike the “postsecular” authors, whose religious affinities are antidogmatic, Robinson remains interested in traditional forms of religion. Her attempt to revive the reputation of John Calvin and the Puritans is an important purpose of her nonfiction, which we discuss in chapter 6. As for Calvin’s relationship to Robinson’s fiction, his influence is obvious in the Gilead novels, as Boughton and Ames are preachers in Calvinist traditions and the theological debates turn on Calvinist dilemmas about free will, predestination, and salvation. Perhaps the influence is most powerful in Robinson’s assumptions about selfhood, for she locates Calvin, alongside Shakespeare, within Early Modern humanism. This is a tradition of the self that she clearly admires. When asked whether she remains “loyal to an old humanism,” she replied, “I don’t even feel it as loyalty—I don’t feel any conflict, any temptations in other directions” (Schaub 244). Though it may seem odd to associate Calvin with a species of thought centered on human beings, for in many ways he was a deeply theocentric thinker, Robinson is drawn to Calvin for his expression of human sanctity, the idea of imago dei. Calvin’s “humanism is expressed precisely in his understanding of the teaching of Genesis, that humankind is made in the image of God” (xv). Her fiction is a vehicle for this Calvinist-humanist vision of selfhood, the self in possession of dignity, inwardness, and holiness. This visionary imagination of human sanctity is rooted in an understanding of God as Creator. Robinson’s understanding of the Genesis creation narrative, even more than the Gospels, underwrites the fiction. “Creation” primarily means that all of reality is sanctified because it has its origins in and is sustained by grace. This emphasis lends her fiction a rooted, this-worldly quality: “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” (243). Transcendence happens here on Earth, since every part of reality, including everyday human experience, radiates sanctity. Robinson’s fiction is notable for its attention to the ordinary. Everywhere it suggests the daily chores and mundane tasks of life have extraordinary meaning, if the right attention is paid to them. It is the idea of Creation and the Protestant assumption that grace cannot be contained by church or sacrament that enable Robinson to produce this quality of tender attention to an ordinary task and to the human form. The near and the common, the sun and the moon, washing dishes, a human face—these are the sources of divine revelation in Robinson’s fiction.

12

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

Last, there is the Bible. In Pen of Iron, Robert Alter wrote that Robinson “is a deeply engaged reader of the Bible—primarily, from what one can infer, in the 1611 translation” (162). The Bible serves as a source of language, narrative material, sacramental imagery, and, as Alter argues, a source of Robinson’s prose style, her affinity, especially in the Gilead novels, of the “paratactic forward march of biblical prose” (163).7 This connection to the Bible is important, but it cannot serve as the sole source of meaning in her texts. Robinson warns against it in her introduction to The Sound and the Fury: “There are perils in interpreting a fiction on the basis of biblical symbols or references, a risk of finding a fixed meaning in these references that denies an appropriate attention to the complexities of the fiction as a whole” (Fury xv–xvi). Robinson’s fiction, too, is more complex than any system of biblical or theological reference. And though her religious consciousness is important to her aesthetics, perhaps even central to them, it cannot alone account for the particularity of her visionary aesthetic. Radiant Domesticity

Because of the twenty-four-year gap between her first two novels, it is tempting to see Robinson’s career as divided between Housekeeping and the Gilead books. Scholars have implicitly affirmed this division, as very few articles bring Housekeeping and the Gilead books into conversation. William Deresiewicz is one of the few critics to challenge this difference, arguing for a thematic continuity between Housekeeping and Home. Both novels, he wrote, are about “existential loneliness” (“Homing Patterns”). While this is true, there are themes that challenge the notion that Robinson’s career is divided into “early” and “late” periods, the most obvious of which is “home.” The label “domestic novelist” might be appropriate for Robinson, since indeed her fiction is concerned with the private sphere of familial relations, the manners and morality of the household. Such a label, however, does not capture the visionary qualities Robinson finds in the domestic. She calls housekeeping “a regime of small kindnesses, which, taken together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental” (When I Was 93). On a metaphysical level, each of the novels assumes that at the center of every human is the need for home, for a place “salubrious, savory, and warm.” Her novels assume the cultural pluralism of contemporary culture, where, in the absence of a shared, traditional culture, it is the task of all people to imagine, search, and find “home” for themselves. Such is the quest of her most vivid characters, Sylvie, Glory, Jack, and Lila, all of whom are outsiders, strangers, exiles who are forced to negotiate the tensions of a newfound domesticity.

UNDE RSTA N DI N G M A R I LYNNE R O B I NS O N

13

Robinson imagines the quest for home primarily in interpersonal terms. The central drama of each of her novels is the slow, painstaking journey toward intimacy between two individuals: Sylvie and Ruth in Housekeeping, Ames and Jack in Gilead, Jack and Glory in Home, Lila and Ames in Lila. Thus, “home” is an ethical concept, a resolution of interpersonal relations, through intimacy, trust, forgiveness, love. Secondarily, “home” takes on an allegorical significance, especially in the Gilead books, which associate finding home with supernatural grace. Whether her characters reject domesticity, feel oppressed by it, reluctantly accept it, or never find it, Robinson has claimed the domestic space and the idea of “home” as the locus of meaning in her fiction. It is this theme of “home” and the interplay of influences—the American nineteenth century, regionalism, and liberal Protestantism—that lend Robinson’s fiction a sense of unity, despite the twenty-four-year gap between Housekeeping and Gilead.

CHAPTER 2

Housekeeping While in graduate school at the University of Washington, Robinson developed the habit of writing metaphors on scraps of paper (Fay 198). Dozing in the library one day, she had a dream of a catastrophic train accident, which she then transcribed into prose. She was proud enough of it to show to her dissertation supervisor, who thought it quite good, and after graduation she took the train-accident piece and the metaphors with her to France, where she taught for a year at the Université de Haute Bretagne in Rennes. Within a year she had a draft of the manuscript that would be Housekeeping, an extraordinarily successful first novel, which remains her most frequently read and assigned. It won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for Best First Novel and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Although many details concerning the book’s origins are missing, the early interviews provide ample understanding of Robinson’s intentions in writing Housekeeping. The first is that it is a novel of spiritual development, one deeply informed by religious traditions. The second is that Housekeeping appropriates and refashions tropes and stylistic tendencies from American Romanticism, primarily the work of Melville, Dickinson, Thoreau, and Emerson. The third is that the book offers a female-centered representation of the American West. Thus, Housekeeping reflects three strong cords of Robinson’s biography: a religious sensibility, a love of nineteenth-century literary culture, and a childhood spent in the Mountain West. Its originality and value lie in Robinson’s ability to channel and project these elements onto a linguistically complex and psychologically compelling narrative.

H OUSE K E E PI N G

15

Portrait of an Ascetic as a Young Woman

The most important statement by Robinson concerning the moral drama of Housekeeping is found in the interview with Thomas Schaub. When asked whether she had read the reviews of her book, which seemed to lack patience with Ruth’s sentiment that “it is better to have nothing,” Robinson replied: [Ruth is] speaking from an old, old tradition, of an attempt to establish an equilibrium, or to establish a sort of freedom through renunciation of the world, in effect. It’s what every prophet in the Bible does. It’s the monastic tradition. If you want to go outside this culture, it’s what Buddhist monks do. She’s not inventing anything. (Schaub, “Interview” 243) She went on to defend Ruth’s choice of renunciation: I think it’s incredibly pedestrian to imagine that [Ruth’s] impulses or her reflections have to be constrained within ideas of well-being that are offered to us by conventions when they’re not taken away. On the one hand, you’re supposed to aspire to well-being, etcetera; at the same time, you’re supposed to be contemptuous of such things; on the one hand they’re considered to be proof that you have competed successfully in the world, and on the other hand they are sneered at as materialism and middle-class complacency. All of this stuff is nonsense. (243) These quotes frame Ruth’s character within the tradition of religious asceticism, whether Western or Eastern. Freedom made through the “renunciation of the world” is ultimately Ruth’s desire. She wants to possess nothing, to live outside the realm of property and law, a desire slowly realized only through the mire of tragic circumstance. Robinson’s ardent defense of Ruth’s asceticism speaks to contemporary culture’s anxiety about such desire, since it falls outside the norms of middle-class, material well-being. Ruth attempts to transcend these positions, to establish an ethics, a way of life, beyond the logic of conventionally defined “well-being.” Ruth’s coming-of-age narrative is a portrait of an ascetic as a young woman. This particular emphasis on Ruth’s spiritual development is often missed by scholars who treat Housekeeping as a bildungsroman. The best and most frequently cited of these scholars is Martha Ravits, whose article “Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping” establishes the standard interpretation along these lines. She wrote:

16

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

In forging a bildungsroman about a female protagonist, Robinson brings a new perspective to bear on the dominant American myth about the developing individual freed from social constraints. Her female adventurer emphasizes the motivations and imperatives of the classic quest and offers fresh testimony about the implications of its outcome—a survival strategy often taken for granted. Repudiation of the domestic sphere by her female quester enlarges the central tradition to include women but leaves them still at the crossroads in a materialistic, patriarchal society. (644) This is a great insight, for clearly Robinson wanted to revise the American myth of freedom from social constraints by symbolically opening it to women. The problem with Ravits’s article is her interpretation of how Ruth develops, and for this she ignores Ruth’s bourgeoning asceticism. “Her quest and choice,” she wrote, “is always for the missing mother” (648–49). Ravits is right to insist on the primacy of the mother-daughter bond and on Ruth’s overwhelming desire to find a surrogate mother. She is also correct in finding Sylvie’s entrance into selfhood paradoxically defined as a disappearance from society. Ruth’s desire for a mother is present from the very beginning. After announcing her name, Ruth delves into the past, telling the story of her family and how they first arrived in Fingerbone. For Ruth, the past is a story of successive catastrophes, deaths, abandonments, and escapes. And, as we find out later, this brief genealogy—a rhetorical trope taken from the Bible—is incomplete, for it omits the most painful event of Ruth’s life: the apparent suicide of her mother, Helen. The denial of Helen makes good psychological sense, since it becomes clear that Ruth is traumatized by this loss, making it too painful to be spoken. Readers of Housekeeping quickly learn to find the presence of Helen’s absence on every page. Indeed, Ruth’s character, her language, her traumatized psychology, her perception of landscape, are impossible to understand apart from the loss of Helen. Ruth is mother haunted, desiring Helen’s return and everything she represents: security, comfort, stability, love, home. If Helen’s return is impossible, then what Ruth needs above all is a surrogate mother, the role Mrs. Sylvia Fisher eventually fills. The centrality of motherdaughter relations is among Housekeeping’s most radical departures from conventional coming-of-age narratives, and it is worth mentioning that there is never a sense in Housekeeping that men are capable of furnishing the love that Ruth lacks. The loss of and the desire for maternal love are the privileged moral experiences. And Robinson explores these experiences paradoxically, through their textual absence and emotional presence. But while Ravits follows the narrative’s slow movement toward intimacy between Ruth and her new mother, Sylvie—a movement Robinson would again

H OUSE K E E PI N G

17

chart between Glory and Jack in Home and Ames and Lila in Lila—she ignores Ruth’s process of worldly renunciation and how Sylvie acts as a teacher in the privations of ascetic life. What Ravits, in reference to Ruth and Sylvie’s abandonment of the house, calls “stoic thrift” (664) is actually a far more radical renunciation. Ravits joins the many readers of Housekeeping who have seen it as a nonreligious or even antireligious text. The critic William Deresiewicz wrote, “The metaphysics at work in Housekeeping does indeed resemble a form of paganism —a gloomy, Northern paganism” (“Homing Patterns”). Several scholars who have focused on the book’s mysticism have complicated this perception by attending to its religious aspects. William Burke argued, “The novel might be fruitfully understood as an unconventional primer on the mystical life” (717). Burke’s religious language of “pilgrimage,” “self-denials,” “spiritual conditioning,” and “mystical life” is wholly missing from the entire Ravits lineage of scholarship. Sonia Gernes has further enhanced Burke’s insights: As the novel progresses, [Robinson’s] characters enter a world of transience and flux that merges with the mystical, and in doing so they pass through the stages of purification, contemplation and mystical union that traditional ascetical theologians such as Evelyn Underhill have cited in describing the mystical experience. (114) The stages of purification, contemplation, and mystical union neatly map onto Ruth’s progress, and the persuasiveness of Burke’s and Gernes’s religious framework for Housekeeping accords with Robinson’s own comments about Ruth’s renunciation of the world. This does not mean that Ravits’s interpretation is null. Rather, combining her strain of scholarship with the relatively minor strain on mysticism offers a more fully realized portrait of the trajectory of Ruth’s development, one that is closer to Robinson’s stated intentions for the novel. Naming her character “Ruth” sets off religious associations right away. Housekeeping begins meekly—“My name is Ruth” (3)—a first sentence whose soft tone belies a forceful, allusive literary gesture. It establishes the biblical book of Ruth as a narrative, symbolic, and characterological template. The name has important associations for Robinson: “I know that simply making the choice of the narrator’s name was important—which was a thing that I did very early—having to do with pity and grief and compassion and also vulnerability. I mean, again, feeding from the Book of Ruth itself rather than just the meaning of the name” (Hedrick 1). This density of allusion is typical of House­ keeping. Its seemingly simplistic sentences prove, upon closer examination, to flower into a multiplicity of meaning and allusion. Robinson’s ambition is

18

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

felt in this first sentence, as she self-consciously constructs a dense, complicated literary artifact, seeking to enlarge her meaning through a relationship with biblical narrative. The better part of the novel takes place when Ruth is an adolescent, but there is one image taken from Ruth’s memory of herself as a young child that points to her ascetic future: I remember sitting under the ironing board, which pulled down from the kitchen wall, while she ironed the parlor curtains and muttered “Robin Adair.” One veil after another fell down around me, starched and white and fragrant, and I had vague dreams of being hidden or cloistered, and watched the electric cord wag, and contemplated my grandmother’s big black shoes, and her legs in their orangy-brown stockings, as contourless, as completely unshaped by muscle as two thick bones. Even then she was old. (26–27) Ruth does not remember a time of maternal affection, of touch or loving gaze, just a moment of “being hidden or cloistered.” Importantly, Ruth’s silent withdrawal, perhaps her defining character trait, carries the spiritual overtones of asceticism implied by the word “cloistered.” So Ruth’s monastic inclination is there from the beginning of her life, though it is clear that the desire for silent retreat arises out of a particular life circumstance, her experience of loss and inconstant maternal affection. It is therefore apt that the first suggestion of Ruth’s asceticism comes at the awareness of her grandmother’s frail body. Ruth’s grandmother never “dies.” She “eschewed awakening,” a linguistic evasion necessary to save Ruth from the pain of recollection (29). Sylvia’s sisters-in-law, Lily and Nona, are “fetched from Spokane and took up housekeeping in Fingerbone” (29). The question prompted by their arrival is whether this pair will provide Ruth and Lucille with some stability of care after the losses of mother and grandmother. This prospect quickly appears dubious. Lily and Nona are not familiar with caring for children, evidenced by their “unpracticed pats and kisses” (29). They cope with the change to new surroundings by emitting a kind of nervous energy between them. Habit is their god: “It seemed then and always to be the elaboration and ornamentation of the consensus between them, which was as intricate and well-tended as a termite castle” (30). As the winter worsens, Lily and Nona become more anxious, and so they begin to formulate a plan of escape. “Sylvie,” they decide, “must come” (43). Sylvie’s name partakes of nature, sylvan, Latin for forest, a resonance echoed in her clothing, the “deep green” of her dress and her brooch with “a bunch of lilies of the valley” (45). The lilies are symbolic of Sylvie’s role as savior, reinforced by her last name, “Fisher,” whose task it is to rescue the girls

H OUSE K E E PI N G

19

from another source of inadequate parental support and to provide a source of love and community for Ruth. Sylvie is the first of Robinson’s “outsider” characters, foreshadowing the figures of Jack Boughton and Lila Ames. She is unencumbered by and unaware of the constraints of Fingerbone society, which she has long since forgone. This status, as savior, as outsider, is reflected in her appearance. When she arrives Ruth notices “her hair was wet, her hands were red and withered from the cold, her feet were bare except for loafers. Her raincoat was so shapeless and oversized that she must have found it on a bench” (45). While her appearance is initially shocking, particularly to Lily and Nona, the book with time affirms Sylvie’s unpreparedness. The transient associations of the bench, the cold hands, and the shapeless raincoat are evidence of a spiritual mode that is able to accommodate otherness and change. Unlike Lily and Nona, Sylvie has learned to live apart from the obsessive need for warmth, clothing, shelter, and food. She is a keen practitioner of the ascetic arts of renunciation. Sylvie’s placing of hands on Ruth and Lucille is a christening of sorts, a ritual gesture welcoming the girls into the house of Sylvie. Her sacred character is solidified when Ruth refers to her as having the “placid modesty of a virgin who has conceived” (49). It is only after Sylvie arrives and begins to model the privations necessary to achieve freedom that Ruth begins her mystical apprenticeship. Instead of staying indoors, Sylvie walks the town, signaling her openness to experience and her disregard for domestic habits and conventions. This makes Lucille and Ruth anxious, since her leave-taking is seen as the first step toward a permanent absence. She is found throwing ice at stray dogs, a behavior that aligns her with the girls’ treatment of the dogs in the previous chapter. Lucille’s concern with material comfort is already apparent in her minor opposition toward Sylvie. It takes the form of concern for Sylvie’s cold hands, saying there is “hand lotion at home” (57). This gesture associates Lucille with a set of values that include comfort, respectability, materialism, and appearances. These are the values implicit in the hand lotion and later find their spatial equivalent in the drug store. Ruth’s silence serves as a tacit affirmation of Sylvie’s disregard for Lucille’s conventional values. Lily and Nona leave for Spokane, and the last phrase— “we and the house were Sylvie’s” (59)—signals the beginning of Sylvie’s rule, the legitimacy of which will be challenged from both within and without the house. If Sylvie’s stay is another beginning, another genesis, then it should be no surprise that a flood arrives soon thereafter. Robinson makes explicit the connection between Housekeeping’s flood and Noah’s. “So at the end of three days the houses and hutches and barns and sheds of Fingerbone were like so many spilled and foundered arks” (61). Ruth calls the flood a “disaster,” but

20

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

perhaps it is also a “theodicy.” In Absence of Mind Robinson mentions the ancient flood narratives: The Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian flood stories are theodicies, certainly among the earliest examples of this interesting genre. Why does catastrophe occur? What does it mean? The nature of the gods and their expectations of and feelings toward human begins are explored in these narratives. (25) The flood of Fingerbone is used for precisely these purposes, an opportunity for Ruth to experience and make meaning of catastrophe. The presence of the flood and its constant threat to the town of Fingerbone force Ruth to confront the question of permanence versus impermanence and whether the desire to preserve even something as fundamental as a home or a city is a desire worth pursuing. Surely the memory of the flood, with its capacity for sudden catastrophe, informs Ruth’s ascetic desire. It is also a first step toward making meaning of her mother’s absence. Helen, of course, is strongly identified with the lake and the element of water. Read in this symbolic light, the flood is a visitation by Helen, an absence whose presence has the power to overrun any boundaries. Sylvie accepts the waters as natural, and the girls stay indoors and play Crazy Eights upstairs, while the lower floor of the house is entirely flooded. The flooded house confronts Ruth with an intense experience of otherness. The house is so absolutely dark that Ruth finds herself “reduced to an intuition, and my sister and my aunt to something less than that” (70). This is yet another step in Ruth’s spiritual progress: acclimating to the dark and the cold, to silence and being unaccompanied. Sylvie’s response is to adapt to the change, to stay inside the flooded house, to play Crazy Eights and cook dinner as if the water weren’t anything unusual. Lucille wants to “find some other people” (66). She begins her turn toward society, while Ruth begins her turn toward Sylvie. Their banishment from the school—“we were cruelly banished from a place where we had no desire to be” (77)—releases them into the severities of nature, the privileged space of spiritual testing and awakening. “The combined effects of cold, tedium, guilt, loneliness, and dread” have the paradoxical effect of “sharpen[ing] our senses wonderfully” (79). This is typical of Housekeeping’s celebration of paradox: in reducing the self, the self is enlarged. As one scholar puts it, “For Plato it is the eye that learns to see in the light; for Robinson it is the darkening of the eye that enlarges perception” (Burke 722). Amy Hungerford, in her lectures on the novel, connected the use of paradox to a “logic of absence,” which she defined as an anorexic aesthetic: “It’s an aesthetic of starving the self into invisibility so that the voice can become present” (Open Yale Courses). Housekeeping embraces the paradoxical, and the idea of an

H OUSE K E E PI N G

21

absent presence is at the center of the novel’s understanding of identity, Helen’s identity and Ruth’s. Chapter 5 ends on a note of separation. Ruth is “content with Sylvie” (92). Lucille has turned away from Sylvie and now faces the community with a “calm, horizontal look of settled purpose with which, from a slowly sinking boat, she might have regarded a not-too-distant shore” (92). The change is rooted in the girls’ opposing attitude toward time, which Robinson captures in their choice of clothes. Ruth accepts Sylvie’s “taste for the fanciful”: sequined velveteen ballet slippers that allow for the seepage of water and mud. She accepts the inevitable decay of physical things. Lucille is the opposite. She “wanted worsted mittens, brown oxfords, red rubber boots” (93). The adjectives convey the solidity that Lucille desires. She wants clothing that curbs or at least delays threatening natural processes, so that she is safe, secure, warm, and comfortable. These differing attitudes toward clothing, the difference between the desire for the aesthetically pleasing fanciful and the utilitarian durable, symbolizes how the three main characters dwell in different registers of time. As Ruth begins to move out of the traumas of the past, Lucille begins to project into the future— “Time that had not come yet—an anomaly in itself—had the fiercest reality for her” (93)—while Sylvie “inhabited a millennial present,” fully accepting of the “deteriorations of things” (94). Other signs of their difference appear. Their sexual maturity is progressing at an uneven rate. Lucille’s “tiny, child-nippled breasts filled her with shame and me with alarm” (97). Lucille’s body expresses her readiness to leave the isolation of Sylvie’s household, to engage with the world of society and sex. But “while [Lucille] became a small woman, I became a towering child” (97). Ruth’s perpetual childlikeness readies her for her fate as celibate ascetic. Lucille makes friends with Rosette Browne, a girl from a respectable family, “through whose eyes she continually imagined she saw” (103). The introduction of Rosette Browne, whom Ruth only hears about and does not see, is the novel’s first significant link to society. And with the introduction of society comes judgment. Ruth describes society as “those demure but absolute arbiters who continually sat in judgment of our lives,” and then she spins the metaphor of judgment into an imaginary trial scene wherein Lucille “tried to approach our judges as an intercessor” (104). Ruth and Lucille take one last journey together into the woods. This extraordinary passage combines the picaresque with naturalistic description. It also has a political resonance. In having two young girls march out into the wilderness to fish and hike and camp, Robinson is again opening up new terrain for women, freeing them from the domestic and allowing them to take part in a kind of adventure narrative traditionally reserved for men. Although

22

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

the girls do not intend to spend the night in the woods, they realize that it has gotten too late for them to turn around and decide to set up a crude shelter beside the lakeshore. Lucille is frightened by the dark; as her name suggests, she is a character desirous of luce or light. Ruth settles in for another transformative experience, one that brings her deeper into the cold, the dark, the other: “I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked” (116). Ruth says, “It seemed to me that there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, memento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace, if only the darkness could be perfect and permanent” (116). This is the ambiguous result of Ruth’s encounter with darkness. Does she desire the “perfect and permanent” darkness, which sounds so much like death? Is this experience to be viewed positively by readers, even though it seems to be the annihilation of consciousness and social relations? Such question begging seems to be the point, since this is a moment of unnamable mystical experience, one that language can never fully accommodate. We are left, like Ruth, in a place of exhilarating uncertainty. Afterward, Lucille begins a pattern of distancing and isolation, until she escapes one night for the home economics teacher’s house. Miss Royce informally adopts her, leaving Ruth with “no sister after that night” (140). Lucille’s flight into conventional life is yet another loss for Ruth, another in the pattern of abandonments that began with her grandfather, her grandmother, Helen, Lily, and Nona. Finally alone with Sylvie, Ruth has undergone the necessary renunciations that will compel her conversion and rebirth. The following day, Sylvie and Ruth journey to the far shore of the lake, a symbolic crossing-over of the space of memory and loss and into a new world. When Sylvie wakes Ruth, she finds herself in a liminal space between sleeping and waking. Even though she follows, she says, “I had given up all sensation to the discomforts of cold and haste and hunger, and crouched far inside myself, still sleeping” (144). Ruth is still an apprentice mystic at this point, still cowering from discomfort, a “long-legged insect bracing itself out of its chrysalis” (147). Disregarding the law of private property, Sylvie “borrows” a boat from the shore, a boat strongly associated with masculinity, for a “burly man in knee boots and black pants and red plaid jacket” (146) yells and throws rocks at the girls as they make their crossing. The boat is taken from men for strictly female purposes: for birth, as in the image when Ruth “crawled under [Sylvie’s] body and out between her legs,” and an image of mother-daughter bonding: “We are the same. She could as well be my mother. I crouched and slept in her very shape like an unborn child” (145–46). Sylvie’s strong rowing and Ruth’s sleepy

H OUSE K E E PI N G

23

passivity comprise a strong analogy to the mother’s work of labor while the fetus awaits the new world. And, like any birth, it will require some work and pain on Ruth’s part. They dock the boat on the far shore, in a landscape made symbolic by its feminine features. “Out from the cleft or valley the mountains made a spilled lap of spongy earth, overgrown with brush” (150). An abandoned cabin is there, and Sylvie speaks of rumors of invisible children, and then she leaves Ruth alone: “Sylvie was gone” (153). This is the final stage of Ruth’s mystical education, the last abandonment she suffers before she embraces the renunciation of the world. It is also the most lavishly written of Robinson’s pages, as Ruth develops metaphors of ruin and resurrection from her Latin textbooks, remembering the city of Carthage sown with salt and imagining one day there “rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and tress of rime and brine” (152). Out of this meditation comes her ascetic solution: 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? (152) As Robinson said in the Schaub interview, “Ruth is not inventing anything.” Keats comes to a similar conclusion in “Ode on Melancholy”: “Ay, in the very temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine, / Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; / His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, / And be among her cloudy trophies hung.”1 Perhaps Ruth’s teacher, Miss Knoll, was reading this poem, she “who was so obese that she wore laceless sneakers and the tongues popped up, and who wept when she read Keats and was ashamed” (88). The moment also recalls a sentiment in Dickinson, another poet Ruth knows, who in poem 745 speaks of “Renunciation—a piercing virtue.”2 It is an ascetic logic, a movement into radical dispossession. As Gernes wrote, “Having recognized the need for radical dispossession, Ruth embraces it, denying comfort to both the senses and the psyche” (159). This is not, however, a renunciation of desire. Desire remains, becoming the only compensation Ruth needs. “Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smoothes our hair, and brings us wild strawberries” (153). Desire, not possession, supplies the need for maternal intimacy (smoothes our hair) and bodily appetite (wild strawberries). This is why, once back on the boat, Ruth and Sylvie exchange utterances of desire—“I wish I had a hamburger” and “I wish I had a piece of pie” (170)—without acting upon

24

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

them, since the two will subsist on desire alone. Given the reality of transience and her circumstance of having been “turned out of house,” without one “solid human bond,” Ruth concludes that “it is better to have nothing” (159). She is prepared to become pure spirit, asking the invisible children to “come unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart” (159). It is at this terrifying point of surrender and self-abandonment, the high point of Ruth’s mystical education, that her old self dies off and she is reborn with Sylvie. Sylvie’s return is marked by a ritual gesture of union. “She opened her coat and closed it around me, bundling me awkwardly against her so that my cheekbone pillowed on her breastbone” (160). This is an obvious maternal image, reminiscent of the paintings of Madonna and Child, and Robinson also embeds these religious associations into the language of the scene. “I was angry that she had left me for so long, and that she did not ask pardon or explain, and that by abandoning me she had assumed the power to bestow such a richness of grace. For in fact I wore her coat like beatitude, and her arms around me were as heartening as mercy, and I would say nothing that might make her loosen her grasp or take one step away” (161). Of this moment, Ravits wrote, “The language of religious redemption formalizes Ruth’s conscious acceptance of Sylvie as adoptive mother” (660). Gernes was closer to Robinson’s stated intentions when she wrote, “Unhoused of her flesh and united bone to bone with Sylvie, Ruth is ready to be invested with the garments of transience, much as a novice in a religious order is invested with a habit which signifies her commitment” (160). Ruth has found a new mother and a new self with Sylvie, and Robinson is not such an unrepentant individualist as to exclude the need for community, however small. But Ruth has also embraced a new ethics, a life of dispossession, transcending law, property, sex, and society. In fact, Ruth has passed so far beyond Lucille that her sister’s words cannot be heard. “It seemed Lucille was talking to me. I think she said that I need not stay with Sylvie. I believe she mentioned my comfort . . . but I could not hear a word she said” (175). The remainder of the novel dramatizes the conflict between Ruth and Sylvie’s ascetic community and the conformist demands of society. Rumors spread throughout Fingerbone of Ruth’s journey across the lake and of her riding the railcar home.3 Well-intentioned church ladies, figures of social pressure, begin to appear at Sylvie’s house with their “casseroles and coffee cakes. They brought me knitted socks and caps and comforters” (179), all of these signs of middle-class well-being, the ethic Ruth and Sylvie have rejected. Ruth does not acknowledge them, for she “spoke only to Sylvie” (183). A traditional education in school has become impossible. Ruth “could not appear to pay attention to the teacher for fear she might call on me and I would suddenly be the center of attention” (188), a great fear as she has already opted for a life of

H OUSE K E E PI N G

25

transient invisibility. And it eventually becomes clear, after successive visits by church ladies and the sheriff, that the possibility of living a truly transcendent, unconventional life does not exist within society. Ruth allows her bitter experience of loss to inform her judgment: “It seemed to me that the fragility of our household was by now so great that the breach was inevitable, and so it was futile to worry whether there was wisdom or sense in any particular scheme to save it. One thing or another would put an end to it soon” (188). Ruth continues her spiritual apprenticeship, testing Sylvie in the orchard— an allusion to Gethsemane—by hiding from her and slipping into momentary absence. Ruth learns “an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort. I felt giddily free and eager. . . . I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one” (204). This is how Ruth achieves her freedom, by “breaking the tethers of need,” which ultimately include the need for permanent shelter. The burning of the house, which is often read as a radical feminist gesture, is perhaps best seen as Ruth and Sylvie’s last act of purgation. The fire is purgatorial, cleansing away the last need for shelter and the last illusion of permanence, so that they are “cast out to wander” as transients (209). The crossing of the bridge is Ruth and Sylvie’s last narrated act, and scholars and readers have always asked whether they are alive or dead. The easy way to answer this question is by appealing to the tradition of mysticism. What Ruth and Sylvie have done is to pass into a state of oneness, where oppositions such as alive/dead, absence/presence, past/present are brought into unity. As Ruth says of another opposition, “I have never distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming” (215). It is impossible to locate them firmly on any one side of these oppositions, because they are on both. Gernes explains that Ruth is drawn toward “what Underhill describes as absolute sensation: ‘a pure feeling-state in which the fragmentary contacts with Reality achieved through the senses are merged in a wholeness of communion which feels and knows all at once, yet in a way which the reason can never understand’” (164). It is a state that can never be understood by language. “All this is fact,” Ruth says, but “fact explains nothing” (217). She imagines Lucille in Boston, “thronged by our absence” (219). At least in Ruth’s imagination, Lucille has chosen the city, accepted the constraints and freedoms of living within the bounds of respectable society. The mistake some readers make is to criticize Lucille for her conventional choice, but the novel does not allow a space for judging whether Lucille’s decision to conform or Ruth’s decision to escape is right or wrong. Judgments are difficult to sustain about a novel more interested in the exploration of moral possibilities than in the stark, black-and-white morality of melodrama.

26

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

The narrative ends with a series of positive negations, rhetorically mimicking the breakdown of oppositions, with Ruth imagining how Lucille “does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie” (219). As Amy Hungerford put it, “reconciliation is the project of Housekeeping . . . the narrative is designed to knit up a broken world into a whole, through simile and analogy, or through the idea that absence produces the present thing through the intensity of longing . . . the human effort, at great cost, is to bridge the gap, draw difference closer, knit up the world” (107–31). Viewing Ruth’s coming of age as an ascetic project has implications for understanding Robinson’s fictional project as a whole. It appears that Robinson’s religious temperament was already in place by the time she wrote Housekeep­ ing, though it had yet to take its definitive doctrinal shape. Thus, Housekeeping is deeply informed by religious traditions without being in any way doctrinally specific. From a religious standpoint, the great change from Housekeeping to Gilead is the move from the ascetic mysticism of Ruth to the specific Protestantism of John Ames. Thinking with the American Renaissance

If Housekeeping borrows from religious traditions for its drama of moral development, it turns to the nineteenth century for its style and its representation of consciousness. Ruth’s subjectivity is defined not by action but primarily by thought. We find her thinking, perceiving, speculating, meditating, and interpreting, processing experience to create knowledge and meaning. It is in this emphasis on consciousness that Housekeeping’s debt to nineteenth-century American authors is most profound. Robinson makes many specific appropriations from individual authors. Melville, for example, is present in Housekeeping’s first sentence. “My name is Ruth” nicely recalls “Call me Ishmael.” And Robinson has said, “The book I admire most in the world is Moby­Dick, after the Bible of course” (Schaub, “Interview” 234). Beyond the obvious allusions, the images of ships and seas, Robinson takes something of the Platonic worldview of Moby­Dick into her novel. As Ruth sits alone in the woods she thinks: “Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked” (116). These lines echo the famous speech by Captain Ahab in which he claims, “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed— there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”4 The difference between Ruth and Ahab in this moment is striking. Ahab’s active, violent, masculine desire to “strike through the mask”—to

H OUSE K E E PI N G

27

penetrate through the realm of appearances in order to destroy the ultimate reality that stands behind—is opposed to Ruth’s essentially passive, meditative willingness to allow the darkness and whatever ultimate reality stands behind it to become coextensive with herself. What they share is an essentially Platonic worldview, the belief that behind the shadows of appearance is the light of reality. Martha Ravits views this as “a reinterpretation of nineteenth-century doctrines. Since the time of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville, our fiction has been replete with heavily symbolic representations. It is not surprising, therefore, that Robinson’s protagonist also should regard the sensible world ‘not as an ultimate reality, but as a system of signs to be deciphered’” (650). There are direct allusions to Dickinson, and the house beside the lake brings to mind Thoreau’s Walden. Sylvie leaves the door and windows open to the “particularities of weather,” making the house available to “wasps and bats and barn swallows,” a trope appropriated from Walden (85). But, perhaps more than any other previous author, Robinson takes the most from Emerson. Emersonian themes and images inform nearly every page of Housekeeping. There is a “radical correspondence,” Emerson wrote, “between visible things and human thoughts.”5 For him, “every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of mind” (32). Thomas Schaub put it this way: “Through Ruth’s habit of analogy, Robinson reproduces the logic of Emerson’s correspondence between natural and spiritual fact, a correspondence revealed by, or ‘in’ the symbolic perception of, the poetic consciousness” (“Lingering Hopes” 311). So the novel’s gloomy atmosphere and menacing landscapes are indebted to the Emersonian idea of correspondence, since Ruth’s subjective mind participates in the constructing reality. This Emersonian mingling of mind and matter is imaged when Ruth remembers finding in the corner of the house some dead leaves along with scraps of paper that read “Powers Meet” and “I think of you.” It is an image of nature and mind—perhaps the two powers meeting— or of self and other, the “I” thinking of “you”—intermingling within a single space. While many scholars have traced this line of influence, they have deemphasized the aspect of this writing that Robinson most values, namely the representation of consciousness. Nearly every time any of these authors is mentioned, Robinson talks about the importance of mind in their work: Nothing in literature appeals to me more than the rigor with which [Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, Poe] fasten on problems of language, of consciousness— . . . 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. (“Hum” 35)

28

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

Again, in a 1989 radio interview with Kay Bonetti, Robinson cited the comingling of the physical and spiritual in Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Jonathan Edwards, saying, “There was an incredibly rapt and precise and tough-minded meditative tradition that has always impressed me” (my emphasis). In a sense, Housekeeping is a revival of this New England meditative tradition, whose last exemplar may be Wallace Stevens. Like Stevens’s poetry, Housekeeping is a narrative that explores but never resolves problems of the relationship between imagination and reality. Robinson also appropriates the nineteenth-century literary habit of metaphor, which has broader epistemological and metaphysical implications: “I was particularly impressed with use of metaphor in all the great ones—Melville, Dickinson, Thoreau. It seemed to me that the way they used metaphor was a highly legitimate strategy for real epistemological questions to be dealt with in fiction and poetry” (Schaub, “Interview” 239). For Robinson, what distinguishes their use of metaphor is the belief that it offers a privileged access to “reality.” Reality is imagined as a unified totality, but since the finite and fallible human mind can never know the whole, a metaphor that is asserted and then collapsed suggests the whole. Robinson is rather dogmatic on the subject of the finitude of the human mind, and she has directed an entire book of criticism, Absence of Mind, toward traditions of modern thought, particularly positivist science, which assumes that human consciousness is capable of grasping all of reality. As she suggests, this conception of metaphor and reality has its origins in Puritan culture, whose writers used analogical thinking as a way to access the divine. Jonathan Edwards’s Images or Shadows of Divine Things is a strong example of this practice. This habit was passed down to Emerson and Dickinson’s antebellum New England, whose secularizing writers used it to access not God but Reality. Ruth is a latter-day embodiment of this tradition, building and collapsing metaphors as a means to understand experience and reality. Feminizing the Lonesome West

The setting of Housekeeping is the small lakeside town of Fingerbone, based primarily on Robinson’s childhood home of Sandpoint, Idaho. As anyone who has read the novel knows, the setting is hardly a setting in the ordinary sense, a backdrop for a more interesting social drama, but functions instead like a vital character, one whose constant fluctuations of weather, sublime mountainous heights, terrifying lake-bottom lows, and violent releases of energy are reported and felt by the narrator, Ruth, with a sublime mixture of awe and terror. We read of the “mountains, uncountable mountains” that leave their “puzzling margins, as between the mountains as they must have been and the mountains as they are now, or between the lake as it once was and the lake as it is now”

H OUSE K E E PI N G

29

(4–5). There are the “rampages of glaciers in their eons of slow violence [that] had left the landscape in a great disorder” (150). It is a place “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere” (62). Another of Housekeeping’s achievements is the way it captures the chaos and otherness of the vast spaces of the West and the implications and meanings of such a brutal, remote place for individuals and communities. Robinson grew up in places much like Fingerbone, and in her essay “When I Was a Child I Read Books” she wrote fondly of her early memories of rural Washington and Idaho: I remember when I was a child at Coolin or Sagle or Talache, walking into the woods by myself and feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that made my hair prickle. I remember kneeling by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs, and thinking, there is only one thing wrong here, which is my own presence, and that is the slightest imaginable intrusion—feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place. (87) A memory such as this must have informed Robinson’s depiction of Ruth, alone in the dark woods, as she “simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones” (116). It is an experience of otherness, not terrifying but sanctifying, made possible by the experience of solitude in nature, a romantic trope if there ever was one, appropriated from Emerson and Thoreau. Robinson wrote: I remember the evenings at my grandparents’ ranch, at Sagle, and how in the daytime we chased the barn cats and swung on the front gate and set off pitchy, bruising avalanches in the wooden shed, and watched my grandmother scatter chicken feed from an apron with huge pockets in it, suffering the fractious contentment of town children rusticated. And then the cows came home and the wind came up and Venus burned through what little remained of the atmosphere and the dark and emptiness stood over the old house like some unsought revelation. (88–89) These memories of her Western childhood, walks in the woods, images of her grandmother, and intuitions of the sacred might easily be extracts from the consciousness of Ruth. It almost goes without saying that Robinson put a great deal of her own experience of the West into her imagining of Fingerbone. The idea of remembering old and fabricating new memories of the place must have

30

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

given her a forceful creative impetus, particularly while writing in France. It is notable that Housekeeping and When I Was a Child I Read Books are really her only two statements about the place; after these she was able to find imaginative possibilities outside her childhood experience. That being said, Robinson has overtly named two lines of motivation for wanting to represent the West. The first came out of her encounter with the East Coast intellectual establishment. When she moved from Idaho to Rhode Island, she found that the New England perception of the West was distorted, clouded by the traditional bias that the East is the home of American intellectual culture. Tony Magagna wrote, “With Fingerbone’s sense of itself as a place outside of meaningful history, Robinson reflects a common theme of Western experience: the West is figured at best as a kind of hinterland where civilization might be possible and at worst as an immense wasteland, unfit for human habitation” (351–52). For Robinson the West is not just a landscape but a culture, and Housekeeping has this cultural politics woven into it, an attempt to claim legitimacy for an intellectual culture that is often ignored in the national imaginary, perhaps especially intended to reorganize the cultural assumptions of an educated East Coast readership. Indeed, it is difficult to think of one other novel that has its setting in the rural West and a budding female intellectual for its protagonist. Robinson also had another, more central argument to make, not about misperceptions about the culture of the West but about the politics of representations about the West. In an interview she said: When I was writing Housekeeping, one of the things that I was aware of it as being was a novel about the West, in the sense that that’s the part of the country where I grew up and my family has lived for a long time. And it’s a part of the country that people in general have a very impoverished imagination of, because it’s been so intensely represented in such reductionist terms all these generations. (Schaub, “Interview” 233) One of the ways she sought to un-impoverish the imagination of the West was to marginalize characters familiar to the art of the West, such as Ruth’s grandfather, the pioneer figure in search of fortune, and to center the narrative on characters not typically found in the art of the West, namely women: When I first started writing Housekeeping I didn’t have in mind that I would suppress male characters to the extent that I did, or exclude them, or whatever I did, but I did think of creating a world that had the feeling of— I don’t know what the word is—femaleness about it to the extent that my experience did, and it wasn’t because I felt that women had been slighted

H OUSE K E E PI N G

31

in that setting but that their presence was ignored in representations of the place. (233) The interviewer then asked, “The West as the place of John Wayne.” And Robinson replied, “Exactly.” Sending Edmund to the bottom of Lake Fingerbone in the first few pages takes Housekeeping’s imagination of the West in a new direction. Robinson’s redefinition of the West to center on female experience and female-female bonds has clear political significance, challenging dominant patriarchical definitions that usually feature some variation on John Wayne’s violent heroics. In a way, the character of Sylvie is Robinson’s answer to the traditional Western hero: My one great objection to the American hero was that he was inevitably male—in decayed forms egregiously male. So I created a female hero, of sorts, also an outsider and stranger. And while Sylvie obviously has her own history, to the degree that she has not taken the impress of society she expresses the fact that human nature is replete with nameless possibilities and, by implication, that the world is accessible to new ways of understanding. (Schaub 92) Circumscribing this feminist political meaning to a question of place is something Robinson intended, and it is clearly then part of the overall purpose and meaning of Housekeeping. It is sufficient for now to say that Robinson’s placing of women in the center of her narrative disrupts the patriarchal tradition of representing the West. There is a tradition of scholarship that has read Housekeeping as a feminist text. Anne-Marie Mallon and Maureen Ryan are the two main proponents of this view, which sees the novel as a celebration of two empowered women that marginalizes the place of men entirely.6 Robinson, in her 1985 introduction to The Awakening, has responded critically to politicized interpretations of literary texts. She wrote: This tendency to read The Awakening as a story of oppression and escape is supported by the perception that the novel is a feminist work and by the habit of assuming that feminism must always take conflict between the individualist women and social expectations as its primary subject. In endowing Edna with a compulsion to discover her self by isolating it from all bonds that seem to her to attenuate her identity, Kate Chopin has given her female protagonist the central role, normally reserved for Man, in a meditation on identity and culture, consciousness and art. This seems to me a higher order of feminism than repeating the story of woman as victim, with its unfortunate tendency to reinforce images we must hope to move beyond. (x)

32

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

This comment almost seems as if Robinson has read The Awakening through the lens of Housekeeping’s reception. Robinson’s book is “feminist” insofar as it too centers on a woman and is a “meditation on identity and culture, consciousness and art.” Which is to say, it is not “feminist” in a political-ideological sense, a literary call for women’s liberation. Many recent scholars agree. Christine Caver represents another tradition in the criticism, seeing the novel as more ambiguous.7 But if scholars trust Robinson’s interviews and essays, then there is a way of combining these views. Mallon and Ryan are correct that Housekeep­ ing is a feminist text if they limit Robinson’s feminist critique not to politics in general but to the politics of representation about the American West. This is fully compatible with Robinson’s views and also symptomatic of the 1970s feminism to which she was exposed. And furthermore it avoids seeing the entire novel as an ideological production, essentially intended to advance the interests of women, when Caver and Wyatt rightly suggest that the novel is far too subtle and ambiguous to be deemed a piece of ideological propaganda. Magagna summarized Robinson’s feminist achievement well when he stated, “Robinson replaces women as independent agents in western history and writes their experiences back into the story of the West” (171). Robinson’s imagination of the West forcefully registers the harshness, hostility, and inhumanity of the landscape. Fingerbone’s landscape is initially conceived by Ruth’s grandfather only as an “open” frontier, promising wealth and adventure, a testing ground for self-reliance. Once the Stone family is settled, it becomes a place of towering otherness, harsh, violent, cold, and radically unstable: There are mountains, uncountable mountains, and where there are not mountains there are hills. . . . It seems there was a time when the dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of puzzling margins, as between the mountains as they must have been and the mountains as they are now, or between the lake as it once was and the lake as it is now. (5) Robinson imagines an undomesticated West, the West of the frontier, whose scale and flux lack the niceties and order necessary for human habitation. This experience of nature untamed almost suggests a metaphysical position, nature not as God’s loving Creation but nature in the heretical Gnostic view, as the source of frustration, evil, and death. However unpromising the actual place of Fingerbone is and however unaccommodating it is to fantasies of freedom and prosperity, the idea of the frontier is never far from Robinson’s conception of the West. While House­ keeping might be read as a counternarrative to frontier mythology, particularly with regard to Edmund, whose train-accident death signals the end of at least

H OUSE K E E PI N G

33

masculine frontier desire, in fact the novel offers a reorientation of the frontier. The frontier is no longer regarded in spatial terms but is a term of consciousness, the space of the mind. As Robinson knows, the frontier is a historically loaded term that has come under considerable scrutiny in recent years. For, as an organizing cultural concept in the early nineteenth century, the frontier gave moral legitimacy to the savage removal of Native populations. Yet Robinson does not want to discard the notion entirely. “The frontier,” she wrote, “was neither a place nor a thing, neither a time nor a historical condition. At the simplest level, it amounted to no more than the movement of European-origin people into a part of the world where they had no business being. . . . The same thing had happened on every continent, save Antarctica” (90). Acknowledging the injustice of the frontier does not mean that it was entirely bad. “By the standards that apply to events of its kind, the Western settlement had a considerable positive content” (91). This positive content includes the ideal of individualism and “a considerable optimism about what people were and what they might become” (92). What scholars have missed in discussions of this theme is how strongly Robinson associates transience with the Western frontier. Openness to change, the bold charging into the new, is what Robinson celebrates about the frontier, and this is manifested in epistemological terms with Ruth and spiritual terms with Sylvie. The frontier means to “dwell in possibility” (657). “Perhaps,” Robinson has said, “it was a misfortune for us that so many interesting ideas were associated with access to a habitable wilderness. The real frontier need never close. Everything, for all purposes, still remains to be done” (92). The West, then, is the space of possibility, of epistemological, moral, political, even metaphysical change. As Martha Ravits put it, “The frontier in this contemporary novel is not a geographic or historic construct but the urge to move beyond conventional social patterns, beyond the dichotomy of urban and rural experience, beyond domestic concerns and physical boundaries into metaphysics” (666). The image of Ruth and Sylvie crossing the bridge at the end of the novel is a metaphor for frontier desire, of stepping into nameless possibility. Housekeeping is Western in one last crucial way: it is a place of small society. It is a place closer to nature than civilization, and so without the cultural and social status of the city. The house in Fingerbone is built atop a hill, so the flood waters do not pose any mortal danger to the girls. This relative safety is a consistent note throughout the novel, as the girls never really have to struggle for material necessities, food, shelter, and clothing. There is no material excess, but there is always enough. This aloofness, this distance from the community suggest the almost total absence of community spirit that characterizes the Fisher family. Their isolation from the fate of the town speaks to the

34

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

individualistic vision that Robinson pursues, a value consist with the mythological ethos of the Far West. For Ruth and Sylvie at least, the community and its conformist values are the supreme threat to individual liberty. Robinson goes to great lengths to place her characters in a situation of maximum freedom from society. It is a tendency of the romance genre to explore such conditions. Henry James’s definition from his preface to The Ameri­ can is useful: The only general attribute of projected romance that I can see, the only one that fits all its cases, is the fact of the kind of experience with which it deals—experience liberated, so to speak; experience disengaged, is embroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it and, if we wish so to put the matter, drag upon it, and operating in a medium which relieves it, in a particular interest, of the inconvenience of a related, a measurable state, a state subject to all our vulgar communities. (33) Certainly Henry James would have seen in Housekeeping evidence of romance, as well as that “rich passion . . . for extremes”8 that he associated with Americans and that Robinson associates with the experience of the West.

CHAPTER 3

Gilead The popular media were quick to recognize Gilead when it was published in 2014. It garnered the most acclaim of any of her books, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critic Circle Award for Fiction. President Barack Obama’s Facebook page listed Gilead as one of his favorite books. Scholars, too, have found their way to this book, though the total body of scholarship remains slim compared to that for Housekeeping. This is in part because of Gilead’s recent publication date, and it may also have to do with the novel’s overt religiosity, which scholars might find off-putting. Nevertheless, religion is an important point of discussion within the scholarship. An entire issue of Christianity and Literature (2009) was devoted to Gilead and Home, and Christopher Douglas’s article in Novel, “Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead,” is one of the most frequently cited critiques. Also notable is Laura Tanner’s “‘Looking Back from the Grave’: Sensory Perception and the Anticipation of Absence in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead,” which steps away from religion and explores aging and perception from a neurological perspective. It seems likely that critical discussion will only grow as more scholars discover the thematic reach of this “fiercely calm” novel (Wood, “Acts of Devotion”). Because Gilead takes the form of a letter, the question of genre seems simple enough, yet scholars have found uses for other categories besides the epistolary, such as the sermon, the jeremiad, the prayer, the journal, and the deathbed epistle.1 The category of confession also usefully applies. According to Northrop Frye, the confession offers “a very personal and subjective account of experiences, beliefs, feelings, ideas, and states of mind, body and soul.”2 It also provides “some theoretical and intellectual interest in religion, politics, or art plays a leading role in the confession” (308). In summation, “The

36

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

confession is. . . . introverted, but intellectualized in content” (308). This definition captures two essential elements of Gilead, its emphasis on subjectivity and its interest in theology and history. Perhaps Amy Hungerford was thinking of these confessional qualities when she wrote, “We can also see that Robinson’s fiction—and especially Gilead—extends an American revival of the philosophical novel initiated by Saul Bellow in the 1950s. Influenced by Thomas Mann and Dostoyevsky, this tradition imagines fiction as a way of taking thought beyond philosophy proper, beyond proposition and argument (while including those things) and into a sense of what it is like to live with and through philosophical —or, in Ames’s case, theological—reflection” (Postmodern Belief 116–17). Robinson may have been attracted to the confession through her readings of the Puritans and their spiritual autobiographies, which attest to the belief that “God was consistent in his dealing with men throughout history, but since he called everyone individually, each saw some aspect of His glory that was hidden from others.”3 Christopher Leise identifies two Puritan texts as models: Anne Bradstreet’s “To My Dear Children” and Thomas Shepard’s Autobiography. Both were “written by parents contemplating their imminent demise to their children as a vehicle for the transmission of spiritual belief.”4 Anne Bradstreet’s intentions in “To My Dear Children” were “to compose some short matters (for what else to call them I know not) and bequeath to you, that when I am no more with you, yet I may be daily in your remembrance (although that is the least in my aim in what I now do), but that you may gain some spiritual advantage by my experience.”5 John Ames’s letter embodies both of these desires, to be remembered and to impart spiritual advantage from his experience. Of course, Gilead is also an epistolary novel. John Ames announces the form from the very beginning, saying, “If you’re a grown man when you read this —it is my intention for this letter that you will read it then—I’ll have been gone a long time” (3). Few contemporary novelists have attempted the epistolary form, and when they have, as John Barth did in Letters (1979), it was appropriated for ironic, parodic play. Robinson’s use of the epistolary has different purposes. It immediately lends Gilead an historical atmosphere, since the handwritten letter is now an outmoded form of communication. And it is also amenable to a loose, digressive narrative structure. Gilead’s structure is fractured into blocks of text that vary in length from a few words to several pages, alternating between short aphoristic statements and long narrative passages. This kind of structure is easily accommodated by the epistolary form since it is not based on multiple actions. The epistolary also encourages an intimate tone, and it is primarily through tone that Robinson establishes the relationship between the reader and Ames.

GI L E A D

37

As for style, Gilead is more restrained and austere than Housekeeping. Its language is simple and direct: “Trees sound different at night, and they smell different, too” (71). There is a tendency to avoid adjectives and specific or scientific names for nouns. Trees are “trees,” not oaks or pines. “The nineteenth century was right,” Robinson wrote. “Ordinary language can do as much as the mind can ask of it, and do it with extraordinary integrity” (The World 124). There is clearly a stylistic revolution that happens between Housekeep­ ing and Gilead, a shift that I argued in the Introduction has much to do with Robinson’s response to Raymond Carver and minimalism. If a plain style felt like confinement and imitation in the early 1980s, it must have felt like liberation and originality in the early 2000s. Robert Alter wrote, “Ames’s language is on the whole American colloquial, an intonation you can pick up in ‘I can’t claim to understand that saying’ and, more clearly, ‘You can know a thing to death’” (Pen 165). Paradoxically, Robinson’s plain style manages to suggest the grandeur of things. By stripping her prose of rhetorical qualities, she evokes the uncanny properties of the prosaic. The pacing of the book is slow and, at times, nearly static. James Wood calls this Gilead’s “processional pace” (“Acts of Devotion” 31). There is little hurry because there is little action, and this allows for the book’s extraordinary rendering of dailiness. The life of a pensive elderly man in a small Midwestern town is going to be experienced as slow. Laura Tanner has connected the slow pacing and the intensity of its focus to its “powerful unveiling of how dying shapes the sensory and psychological dynamics of human perception” (227). The lived experience of dying, according to Tanner, literally slows the experience of time, a claim that she supports with Jean Amery’s On Aging and reference to the work of neuroscientists. Of Fathers and Sons

Gilead is the story of John Ames, a Congregationalist minister living in Gilead, Iowa, in the 1950s. He has recently been diagnosed with a terminal heart condition, and in his remaining days he writes a long letter to his young son, Robby, telling him the history of his family, the books to read, and the morals to live by. It is essentially a story of fathers and sons. There are eight important father-son relationships: Ames and Robby, Ames and Jack, Ames and his father, his father and Edward, his father and his grandfather, Boughton and Jack, Jack and Della’s father, and Jack and Robert Boughton Miles. In the rise and fall of these relationships, the reader is invited to find patterns, among the more obvious of which are the names of characters, a motif Robinson borrows from the Bible.6 John Ames shares his name with

38

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

his father and grandfather, and Jack’s name is John Ames Boughton, suggestive of his spiritual kinship with Ames. Robinson’s approach to the complexities of father-son dynamics is to avoid the typical, Oedipal narrative of the son overcoming the father. Instead, she imagines the relationship as fraught with misunderstanding, yet capable of redemption. Sometimes redemption arrives too late, as in the case of Ames’s father and grandfather. Their relationship ruptures over their differing attitudes toward justice, violence, and biblical interpretation. The grandfather believes in the efficacy of violence to end slavery. He assists John Brown in Kansas and fights for the Union in the Civil War. Ames associates him with John the Baptist, a bloody shirt, a revolver, a Greek New Testament, and a war wound—a missing eye—that seems fitting for his myopic view of justice. Ames’s father rejects his father’s violence, spending his Sundays with the pacifist Quakers rather than in his father’s church. Eventually there is a confrontation. The father says, “I remember when you walked to the pulpit in that shot-up, bloody shirt with that pistol in your belt. And I had a thought as powerful and clear as any revelation. And it was, This has nothing to do with Jesus. Nothing. Nothing” (84–85). Ames coolly reports, “And that was when a chasm truly opened. Not long afterward my grandfather was gone” (85). This separation is typical of Gilead. Almost any father-son pair contains a similar pattern of crisis and disunity. It sometimes takes an elegiac form, as Ames knows he will die before Robby grows old. Others devolve over racial attitudes, such as Jack’s belief that the news of his mixed-race child will devastate his father. Still others are broken over religious belief, as is initially the case for Edward and his father. If there is a theme that unifies many of these conflicts, it is the way that strict adherence to principles contributes to ethical blindness and community failure. The grandfather, for example, nearly impoverishes his family by stealing from them and giving to the poor. Ames writes, “He lacked patience for anything but the plainest interpretations of the starkest commandments, ‘To him who asks, give,’ in particular” (31). The irony of the grandfather’s stealing (enriching the poor while impoverishing his family) contributes to Gilead’s persistent sense of wariness regarding any form of dogmatism, even if the creed is worthy of allegiance, as abolitionism clearly was. Redemption is possible between fathers and sons, but it often takes an ambiguous form. In the first of the long narrative sections, Ames and his father travel to Kansas in search of the grandfather’s grave. For the father, his desire to find the grave and pay respect is his Christian duty, a supreme gesture of forgiveness and reconciliation. “It grieved my father bitterly that the last words he said to his father were very angry words and there could never be any reconciliation between them in this life” (10). For the young John Ames, however,

GI L E A D

39

it is the time he nearly starves to death. The journey is another instance of adherence to principle creating the conditions of harm, though in this case irrevocable harm is avoided. The journey echoes the Exodus narrative—Ames calls it his “desert wanderings” (16)—and alludes to the plague of locusts, for “Everywhere you stepped, little grasshoppers would fly up by the score” (13). Other biblical allusions lend the journey a dark, mythic significance: “Once, when my father was gathering sticks for firewood into my arms, he said we were like Abraham and Isaac on the way to Mount Moriah” (11). They eventually find the grave—“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” (50)—and begin the work of beautifying the gravesite.7 This seems to be all they can do, until the father starts to pray, and as he prays young Ames sees the moon rising in the east at the same time that the sun sets in the west. “Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them” (14). It is at once a visionary moment of resurrection and an ordinary scene of natural beauty. “My father said, ‘I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that’” (15). His aesthetic response suggests a kind of moral reconciliation with the grandfather, even if it is long overdue and impossible to reciprocate. A similar ambiguity haunts the gestures Ames makes toward Jack, the “father-son” pair at the center of the novel. Jack has caused Ames harm in the past, both directly in the form of adolescent pranks and indirectly by his abandonment of his first child. Ames spends a considerable amount of his letter worrying about Jack’s harmful influence on his family after he dies. As he watches Jack play catch with Robby and as he sees Jack sit beside his wife at church, Ames is overcome with jealousy. It is a jealousy as much sexual as it is existential, stemming from the wish to be a young father. Slowly his attitude toward Jack shifts. Ames says, “John Ames Boughton is my son. If there is any truth at all in anything I believe, that is true also. By ‘my son’ I mean another self, a more cherished self. That language isn’t sufficient, but for the moment it is the best I can do” (189). While Ames acknowledges the radical insufficiency of language for representing the relationship, he nevertheless affirms that Jack is his “son” in a spiritual sense. After weeks of Ames’s moral tumult over Jack, it is revealed that Jack is in Gilead to see if it would be a hospitable place for his family to live. He lives with an African American woman, Della, and they have a son together. They desire to live in a place that would tolerate their mixedrace family. Once Ames learns of Jack’s circumstance, he finds it possible to call him “a good man” (231). After Jack concludes that Gilead will not tolerate his family, he decides to leave, but not before Ames catches him at the bus stations and asks to bless

40

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

him. Blessing is important to Gilead, and Ames’s understanding of it is both sacramental and humanistic. He writes, “There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time” (23). To bless Jack would mean to acknowledge his sanctity, and to acknowledge his sanctity would be a gesture of forgiveness. Ames says, “I wish I could put my hand on his brow and calm away all the guilt and regret that is exaggerated or misplaced, or beyond rectification in the terms of this world. Then I could see what I’m actually dealing with” (201). Of course, this is impossible. Ames does not harbor the power of God. Nevertheless, he can bless, placing his hand on Jack’s forehead and reciting a benediction from Numbers. He adds, “Lord, bless John Ames Boughton, this beloved son and brother and husband and father” (241). Jack replies, “Thank you, Reverend,” but his “tone made me think that to him it might have seemed I had named everything I thought he no longer was, when that was absolutely the furthest thing from my meaning, the exact opposite of my meaning” (241–42). It is another ambiguous reconciliation. Ames has blessed and forgiven Jack, and yet Jack shows no evidence of change. He remains a desperate man without any faith, taking flight from those who love him most.8 For all the emphasis on fathers and sons, Gilead does not neglect the roles of mothers or daughters. Ames’s mother is a significant presence, and so too are Glory and Lila, whose characters acquire much more depth in the next two Gilead novels. Perhaps more significant than any of the embodied women are the absent girls, specifically Ames’s daughter, Angeline, and Jack’s daughter, the unnamed “Baby,” another connection between Ames and Jack. These absent daughters exert considerable emotional force on the novel, shaping its undercurrent of grief. In relation to the content of Robinson’s other novels, the uniqueness of Gilead lies with its narrator. John Ames is the book’s great achievement. The gentle warmth of his distinctly Midwestern voice must be a large part of the book’s attraction for readers. Robinson has said, “I found that a voice presented itself to me, which was theological and Iowan” (Hoezee). The sources for the voice are numerous, but Robinson did say, “While I was writing Gilead I was reading Charles Sanders Peirce . . . he has this wonderfully elegant, unpretentious, philosophical voice that doesn’t sound like anyone else. It’s as if he can take on questions of any scale without the slightest bit of self-consciousness about doing it . . . it seemed to me as if reading him fed . . . John Ames”

GI L E A D

41

(“Conversations: Marilynne Robinson”). In channeling Peirce’s nineteenthcentury voice, Robinson developed a quality that set her book apart from those written by the many voices in contemporary fiction that prize hyperactivity and self-consciousness. There is no stronger evidence for Robinson’s commitment to individualism than her use of voice as an index of subjective uniqueness. Yet Gilead advances a socially situated conception of selfhood, a self that always operates within a network of roles and responsibilities, in the family and the community. The epistolary form reflects this social understanding, for a letter presupposes an author and an addressee. The social self is also in keeping with Gilead’s ethical theme of how to live in community and its larger political concerns of race and religion. The conflicts, tensions, and anxieties that accompany encountering the other are at the heart of Gilead. The questions it asks concern the boundaries of these ethical responsibilities: How far should one go to help a neighbor in need? How does one forgive a neighbor for irredeemable harm? The face-toface ethical encounter is often described: “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. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it” (66). Through John Ames’s voice, individualism is affirmed, but the autonomous self is rejected. There is no space for a self that exists apart from others. Through John Ames, Robinson offers a model of selfhood that acknowledges both individuality and interdependence. Another distinguishing mark is the novel’s unfashionable didacticism. Many passages read like brief homilies, and it becomes difficult to remember that the “you” is Ames’s son and not the reader. “Avoid transgression. How’s that for advice” (122). Usually Ames adds a touch of irony by saying “that’s the pulpit speaking,” yet he continues to mount the pulpit again and again. “I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That’s the pulpit speaking, but it’s telling the truth” (91). Other passages combine Ames’s theological language with moral exhortation: “Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave—that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying

42

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

exactly the same thing. But that is the pulpit speaking” (246). The pulpit speaks often in Gilead, and it is this mode of indirect moralizing that may disturb sensibilities shaped by the supposed moral neutrality of modernism. Ames is a voice, an indelible literary creation, and he is a site where a variety of cultural meanings are asserted and contested. James Wood wrote, “Robinson’s pastor is that most difficult narrator from a novelist’s point of view, a truly good and virtuous man, and occasionally you may wish he possessed a bit more malice, avarice or lust—or just an intriguing unreliability” (“Acts of Devotion” 31). While Wood underestimates the degree to which Gilead is “unreliably” narrated, he does acknowledge Ames’s strange subversive power. Within a culture that prefers narratives about antiheroes or severally flawed individuals, Ames’s virtuousness becomes countercultural. It is also true that Robinson does not encourage an easy sympathy with Ames. He is not simply a “good man,” and Ames himself discourages Robby and the reader from believing it. His moral flaws include his tendency toward anger (“If there was one thing I should have learned from them and did not learn, it was to control my temper” [6]), his frustration and lack of forgiveness toward his father (“How could I accept the advice of someone who had such a low estimation of me?” [234]), and his initially uncharitable attitude toward Jack. Ames is not an entirely reliable narrator, especially after we have read Home, where one learns that many of his perceptions are flat wrong. He admits his dishonesty: “I was thinking about the frustrations and the disappointments of life, of which there are a very great many. I haven’t been entirely honest with you about that” (236). All of these flaws are easily forgiven by contemporary readers. But it is Ames’s political blindness about race relations that truly complicates our sympathies. The burning of Gilead’s “Negro church” is a minor detail in Ames’s tale. When Jack mentions the fire, Ames says, “That was a little nuisance fire, and it happened many years ago,” to which Jack replies, “And it has been many years since there was a Negro church” (231). The historical irony is clear: a town founded as an abolitionist stronghold is, in 1956, a place so racist that the entire African American community has fled. Ames is a white man of his time and place, blind to the ironies of race relations, discomforted by the idea of a mixed-race couple (217). In his list of Gilead’s misfortunes—“I was thinking about the things that had happened here just in my lifetime—the droughts and the influenza and the Depression and three terrible wars” (233)—Ames does not mention the flight of African Americans. Although he lives during a time of shifting attitudes toward race, within two years of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, he has little conviction regarding the injustice of racial inequality. Ames seems to be aware of what one critic called his “prophetic

GI L E A D

43

failure” (Mensch 229): “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. . . . It seems to me now we never looked up from the trouble we had just getting by to put the obvious question, that is, to ask what it was the Lord was trying to make us understand. The word ‘preacher’ comes from an old French word, prédicateur, which means prophet. And what is the purpose of a prophet except to find meaning in trouble?” (228). Ames’s failure to “find meaning in trouble” when it comes to the burning of the Negro church, the African American exile from Gilead, and the larger national sin of racial segregation make for a difficult sympathy between Ames and the reader. The 1950s setting allows Robinson to explore fraught race relations as well as important technological changes. Ames is sensitive to what is gained and lost with the introduction of television. TV is not a neutral replacement for the radio. It actually offers a different representation of space. “We have a television now, a gift from the congregation with the specific intent of letting me watch baseball, and I will. But it seems quite two-dimensional beside radio” (126). Technology’s impact on nature may have some unforeseen benefits, such as the presence of telephone wires. “I was trying to remember what birds did before there were telephone wires. It would have been much harder for them to roost in the sunlight, which is a thing they clearly enjoy doing” (165). The book is ambivalent about technological modernity, which may reflect the mindset of an older man, or it may be Robinson’s hopeful response to the inevitable anxieties that surround new technologies. Imagining the Middle West

The racial tensions and technological changes of the 1950s are important, but Gilead is as much about place as it is about time. According to the Hebrew Bible, Gilead is a place of violence. The prophet Hosea says, “Gilead is a city of evildoers, tracked with blood” (Hosea 6:8). He refers to men from Gilead who participated in the assassination of King Pekahiah, chronicled in 2 Kings 15.25. Robinson imports this association into an American context, exploring Gilead’s role in the violence of American abolitionism and the Civil War. In tracing the effects of violence through several generations, she raises questions about whether any good, including the good of abolitionism, is worth the cost of bloodshed. The association of Gilead with violence also contains its opposite meaning, found in the phrase the “balm of Gilead.” The “balm of Gilead” is mentioned throughout the Bible as a metaphor for healing and instruction. A famous African American spiritual says, “There is balm in Gilead / To make the wounded whole // There’s power enough in heaven, / To cure a sin-sick

44

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

soul.” These contradictory meanings, both violence and salvation, are overlaid onto Gilead’s representation of history, war, the Depression, and race relations in the 1950s. The title also serves as a mark of regional identity. In “Who Was Oberlin?” Robinson wrote, “The town of Gilead . . . is modeled on Tabor, in the southwest corner of Iowa. Tabor was founded by a group from Oberlin, including their leader, Reverend John Todd. It was intended to serve, and did serve, as a fallback for John Brown and others during the conflict in Kansas. . . . History has ebbed away from Tabor since then, but it would be difficult to estimate the impact of this one little settlement on American culture and world culture” (When I Was 180). Gilead is a personal history of a small Midwestern town with an abolitionist heritage. Ames’s motivation for reciting its history is in part to respond to his father’s skepticism, that Gilead’s history is full of “old, unhappy far-off things and battles long ago” (235). For the father, and perhaps for most Americans, small Midwestern towns like Gilead seem irrelevant to contemporary culture. Most would not agree that the Middle West has influenced “American culture and world culture.” In popular culture, the state of Iowa might bring to mind the film Field of Dreams, the painting “American Gothic” by Grant Wood, or the state that hosts the first presidential caucuses. But for many who have never lived in Iowa, the state is a kind of cultural and historical blank. This cultural forgetfulness is an opportunity for Robinson to undertake important cultural work. She can imagine the Midwest free from the noise of previous representations. In speaking about her eventual move to Iowa, she explains, “I never expected to live in the Middle West because I had the same prejudices that other people have about the region” (23). She wrote that the Middle West is “a highly distinctive and crucial region which is very generally assumed to have neither culture nor history” (Adam 132). Gilead seeks to correct this assumption, conferring upon the Midwest a distinctive identity by emphasizing its contributions to culture and history, which Robinson neatly characterizes as the region’s “tradition of intellectualism and populism, moral seriousness and cultural progressivism” (147). In imagining Midwestern identity, Robinson had to make critical decisions as to how the region should be presented. It would be a portrait not of the entire region but of only one small community. And the community would be inflected primarily through a single voice: The Middle West is a true mosaic of ethnic communities, each with its own narrative. So I know that my perspective is very limited. Still, because these New Englanders came into the region so early, and because they were intent on realizing important reforms of many kinds, they had a great influence in

GI L E A D

45

a formative period. That was very interesting to me. I have a habit of doing historical research about places where I live. For a while I read a great deal of English and French history to help me understand what I saw in those places. In this case, I found that a voice presented itself to me, which was theological and Iowan. (Hoezee) If history and voice are the primary methods for revising received notions of the Midwest, it is notable that, unlike in Housekeeping, landscape plays a reduced role in Gilead. It is not that there are no landscapes but rather that they lack a distinctive, individuated quality. The descriptions seem aimed at capturing a general atmosphere rather than specific physical detail. “Boughton and I used to sit on the roof of it and look out over the neighbors’ gardens and the fields” (37–38). This rare moment of elevation, when Boughton and Ames are seated on a roof, suggests an opportunity to report the landscape. Instead Ames offers the generic “gardens” and “fields”—nothing on what grew in the gardens or fields or their shape, size, scale, or color. At the close of the novel, there is not a strong sense of the Midwest grounded in natural history or the aesthetics of landscape. This de-emphasizing of landscape makes possible a deeper engagement with the aspects in which Robinson wants to locate regional identity—in cultural achievements, voice, and history. Robinson is not alone among her peers in her historical turn of mind. She is part of a broad literary trend that uses the novel to revise historical understanding. Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and E. L. Doctorow were all, in their very different ways, leading voices in what Linda Hutchean calls “historiographic metafiction.”9 According to Hutchean, these are literary texts that assert an interpretation of the past and are also self-reflexive, meaning they display an awareness that the historical reality being represented is partial or incomplete. While Robinson may disagree with the assumptions of many authors who practice historiographic metafiction, she does believe that historical understanding can only be partial or incomplete. “The true past is veiled in mystery, to the extent that it can be said to exist at all” (Adam 126). In Gilead, Robinson practices her version of this widespread literary impulse by revisiting the clash between free state and slave state leading up to the Civil War, an attempt to revise our historical understanding of American abolitionism. The history of New England abolitionists moving to the Midwest constitutes an important historical backdrop for the novel. Besides the violence of Bleeding Kansas, Robinson is equally attuned to the cultural impact of the colleges the abolitionists founded. Gilead directly refers to Lane Theological Seminary and Oberlin College, both founded by New England Protestants,

46

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

an important feature of what Robinson identifies as the Midwest’s progressive intellectual tradition. These schools not only served as sources for abolitionist pamphlets and ideas but also experimented with racial and gender integration. At the end of her essays on the abolitionists, Robinson calls attention to “the unprejudiced admission of women to Oberlin College, and the unprejudiced admission of blacks to Oberlin College, and the proliferation of schools, especially in the Middle West, meant to promote and to normalize just such reforms” (147). She reminds readers that before the civil rights movement and feminism, the Midwest had already made these progressive achievements. It contains rich traditions of radical reform, which ought to be of enormous value for any reform-minded liberal. This is why Ulysses Grant called Iowa “the shining star of radicalism,” a quote that appears several times in Gilead, often with irony. Robinson believes the critics of abolitionism have maligned this radical tradition. “The inevitability of the association of abolitionism with sick and devious motives and with hypocrisy is very nearly absolute” (178). The irony that Jack and his family cannot move to “the shining star of radicalism” out of fear of racism is a dramatization of the consequences of historical forgetfulness. As Ames sorrowfully says, “These little towns were once the bold ramparts meant to shelter just such peace” (242), the peace of racial harmony. Robinson also opposes another misinterpretation of the Midwest—its perceived intellectual backwardness. The inclusion of high cultural discourse, allusions to poetry, theology, and philosophy, can be read as an important revision of the Midwest as intellectually stultifying. Indeed, John Ames is an intellectual of sorts, a prolific writer—by his estimate the author of “two hundred twenty-five books,” which “puts [him] up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity”—he also knows Greek and Hebrew, quotes John Donne, and reads Ludwig Feuerbach. He is a figure of the Midwestern intellectual, a man deeply engaged with the ideas of his day, including those imported from Europe by Edward. The tension between the perceived cultural backwardness of the Midwest and the cultural forwardness of Europe is dramatized in the relationship between Ames and his brother, Edward, who upon returning home from studying in Germany tells Ames that Gilead is “a backwater—you must be aware of that already. Leaving here is like waking from a trance” (26). For Edward, the Midwest is a space of cultural naiveté and willful illusion, a place untouched by modernity and unaware of global cultural movements. Edward hopes to shake Ames out of his “uncritical piety” and take some of the “Middle West out of [him]” (24). If one wants to discover the “modern,” one takes flight from the Midwest, as Edward does and as many American authors have done, including Eliot, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Hart Crane. In these fictional and

GI L E A D

47

biographical narratives of flight, the Midwest is understood as constrained by conservative, antimodern cultural tendencies, imposing limits on freedom and expression. Gilead revises this tendency. Robinson imagines the Midwest as a space of settlement. John Ames never leaves Iowa, which is Robinson’s way of saying that a perfectly respectable intellectual life can be lived in the Midwest, in places just like Gilead, Iowa. He has “lived seventy-six years, seventy-four of them here in Gilead, Iowa, excepting study at the college and at seminary” (9). Like Ames, Robinson seems content to call Iowa her home. Revelatory Perception

Gilead captures the particularities of a certain time in a certain place through careful descriptions of quotidian life. There are soap bubbles: “I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst” (9). Men working at a garage: “They’re not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes” (5). A cat: “Old Soapy was lying in the sun, plastered to the sidewalk” (52). And a child’s hair: “There’s a shimmer on a child’s hair, in the sunlight. There are rainbow colors in it, tiny, soft beams of just the same colors you can see in the dew sometimes” (52). Robinson gives perception a kind of religious significance, the meaning of which can be fully appreciated only with reference to John Calvin. In the fifth chapter of Calvin’s Institutes he wrote, “Wherever you turn your eyes, there is no portion of the world, however minute, that does not exhibit at least some sparks of beauty, while it is impossible to contemplate the vast and beautiful fabric as it extends around, without being overwhelmed by the immense weight of glory.”10 The words “eyes” and “view” and the metaphor of the mirror appear frequently in his writings. According to Calvin, the Roman Catholic Church did not have the authority to harness the divine in the figure of the Pope or the Real Presence of the Eucharist. The result of this critique was a shift in the locus of the divine, from the visible Church to the visible universe. Calvin considered the perception of the universe, especially the perception of beauty, a sacred communication between the individual and God. This is an aspect of Calvinism that Robinson deeply admires and attempts to embody in her fiction. In her preface to a selection of Calvin’s writings, she states, “The beauty of what we see is burdened with truth. It signifies the power of God and his constant grace toward the human creature. It signifies the address of God to the individual human consciousness. . . . For Calvin, there is great, continuous instruction in perception itself” (xxiii). She adds that “Calvin is intensely

48

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

this-worldly, in fact, and sees the task of the soul as deep perception of the givenness of this world rather than as looking through or beyond it” (“Calvinism as Metaphysics”). For Robinson, the allegorical religious consciousness, in which nature is a screen for a hidden God, is opposed to Calvinist perception. So too is the mystic’s inward, spiritual communion with God. The Calvinist experience of God is an outward, this-worldly experience of perception. In the essay “Freedom of Thought,” she invokes John Calvin’s metaphor that “nature is a shining garment in which God is revealed and concealed” (76). The paradox of God revealed and concealed means that the perception of ordinary life—soap bubbles, a child’s hair—is as sacred as anything that might lie beyond ordinary life. It is perception that sanctifies ordinary life, supercharging the quotidian with holy significance. Within this framework, the “instruction” supplied by perception is superior to the knowledge of intellectual cognition. Robinson believes that the high value placed on perception is a specifically American cultural inheritance. It stems from the Calvinist culture of the early Puritan settlers and was passed down as a habit of mind to such nineteenth-century writers as Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman. She wrote, “They [nineteenth-century writers] struggled with their religious heritage as New England moved from its status as a self-protective refugee population to a people more at ease with the world. Yet there remains in all their work the ravishment, or the shock, of revelatory perception, whether of the sea, or of a slant of light, or of the floods of humanity crossing on the Brooklyn ferry. . . . Behind the aesthetics and the metaphysics of classical American literature, again and again we find the Calvinist soul, universal in its singularity, and full of Calvinist wonder” (xxvi–xxvii). “Revelatory perception” is an apt phrase for the aesthetic effect Robinson seeks in Gilead’s moments of quotidian description. It is debatable, however, whether perception is a specifically American cultural inheritance. Certainly there is a strong European tradition of ecstatic perception with roots in Roman Catholicism, for example, in Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce. The extended description of the quotidian eventually became something of a convention of modernist writing, taken to new extremes of detail in Remembrance of Things Past and Ulysses. Robinson, then, has plenty of company on both sides of the Atlantic, writers who would agree with Ames’s sentiment that “wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see” (245). While the language of perception suggests the sacramental quality of ordinary experience, it also serves to develop character, tone, and theme. A soap bubble is a soap bubble, of course, a point of beauty and therefore, for Robinson, a locus of the sacred. But it is also a metaphor: “I saw a bubble float past

GI L E A D

49

my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping in the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely” (9). The bubble begins as a point of perception, akin to Dickinson’s speaker seeing that “certain slant of light,” and ends with a theological metaphor that “you two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors.” The mother/child/cat exist on the imminent plane of the world, sending bubbles—metaphors of human action, perhaps—floating up to the transcendent plane where they resonate with “celestial consequences.” The soap bubbles are soap bubbles, but they are also metaphors for the interpenetration of the imminent and the eternal. Ames is quite self-conscious about this habit of making metaphors, announcing that the light within light “seems like a metaphor for something.” He wants to put his metaphors to practical use. “I believe I see a place for [these metaphors] in my thoughts on Hagar and Ishmael. Their time in the wilderness seems like a specific moment of divine Providence within the whole providential regime of Creation” (119). Robinson sets perception to work in multiple ways and in doing so carries forward the habit of converting the ordinary into metaphors, a technique learned from Melville, Dickinson, and Emerson and put to use in Housekeeping. By making Ames a writer, Robinson allows a high degree of self-consciousness and self-reflexivity to enter the text. As with so much of contemporary fiction, the reader is made constantly aware that what she is reading is constructed. Ames asks, “What should I record for you?” and “What else should I tell you?” (9). Ames’s letter opens onto the present, so that the reader experiences Ames’s consciousness in the act of finding—finding his intention and finding the meaning of memories and experiences. He knows he is presenting an interpretation of his self to his son, a shadow self, not his essence. Laura Tanner calls this Ames’s attempt to counter “embodied absence with representational presence” (227). This affects his rhetoric, since he wants, above all, for his son to remember him in a positive light. The self he conjures changes depending on the social context: “I don’t write the way I speak. I’m afraid you would think I didn’t know any better. I don’t write the way I do for the pulpit, either, insofar as I can help it. That would be ridiculous, in the circumstances. I do try to write the way I think. But of course that all changes as soon as I put it into words. And the more it does seem to be my thinking, the more pulpitish it sounds, which I guess is inevitable” (28–29). He also knows that he is presenting

50

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

a version of the truth that is subject to further revision. Just as the mind reinterprets memories, Ames reflects on what he has written and offers reinterpretations: “Looking back over what I have written, it seems to me I’ve described my grandfather in his old age as if he were simply an eccentric, and as if we tolerated him and were respectful of him and love him and he loved us. And all that is true. But I believe we knew also that his eccentricities were thwarted passion, that he was full of anger, at us not least, and that the tremors of his old age were in some part the tremors of pent grief” (34). For Ames writing is revision, interpretation is reinterpretation. This resonates with something Robinson wrote in Absence of Mind, that “we do indeed continuously stand apart from ourselves, appraising. Every higher act of the mind, intellectual, aesthetic, or moral, is, paradoxically, also an exercise in self-doubt, self-scrutiny” (116). This certainly applies to Ames, who writes simultaneously for his son and himself. “I realize that for some time I have mainly been worrying to myself, when my intention from the beginning was to speak to you” (202). In this achievement of self-reflexivity, Gilead conjures a complex representation of consciousness and identity. As the sentences move the narrative along, they eventually settle into distinct pools of memory, which Ames returns to in order to plumb for meaning. This repetitive structure creates a kind of narrative layering. There is the moment when Ames’s father feeds him an ashy biscuit: I remember that day in my childhood when I lay under the wagon with the other little children, watching them pull down the ruins of that Baptist church, and my father brought me a piece of biscuit for my lunch, and I crawled out and knelt with him there, in the rain. I remember it as if he broke the break and put a bit of it in my mouth, though I know he didn’t. His hands and his face were black with ash—he looked charred, like one of the old martyrs—and he knelt there in the rain and brought a piece of biscuit out from the inside of his shirt, and he did break it, that’s true, and gave half to me and at the other half himself. (102) Although the memory is recalled in vivid, physical detail, the recollection is flawed. A few pages later we read: “I remember that old Baptist church that my father helped to pull down, all black in the rain, looking ten times as formidable as it would have before the lightning struck. . . . That biscuit ashy from my father’s charred hand. It all means more than I can tell you” (114). The repetition of the scene deepens the mystery of what transpired between father and son. The exact meaning of the sacramental reality it clearly evokes cannot be fully known. The scene also echoes other parts of the text, such as this scene in the church: “When almost everyone had left and the elements were still on the

GI L E A D

51

table and the candles still burning, your mother brought you up the aisle to me and said, ‘You ought to give him some of that.’ You’re too young, of course, but she was completely right. Body of Christ, broken for you. Blood of Christ, shed for you. Your solemn and beautiful child face lifted up to receive these mysteries at my hands” (70). This repetition of communion from his father to Ames, from Ames to Robby, resembles a kind of typology that collapses difference and sustains the same structure and pattern. Gilead works through amplification of imagery, through a technique of layering, increasing the complexity and the density of images. It has a vertical rather than a horizontal movement, a stacking of images rather than a linear plot. Robinson is always careful not to close down meaning but to open it up, since an event remembered always “means more than I can tell you.” Ames ends his letter with hope and resignation. “I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country,” he writes (247). The calls for courage are held in tension with Ames’s lonely circumstances. His father has left Gilead and the faith. And most likely his son will not become a preacher, nor will he stay in Gilead. At seventy-seven years of age, diagnosed with a fatal heart disease, Ames does not have much to look forward to in his mortal life. He thinks about heaven from time to time, but without much success. “I don’t know why I should expect to have any idea of heaven. I could never have imagined this world if I hadn’t spent almost eight decades walking around it” (66). His final words allude to King Lear. It is the scene when Lear stands before a hovel in the middle of a storm and says, “This tempest will not give me leave to ponder / On things would hurt me more” (3.4.25–26). He then implores the Fool to come into the hovel and says, “I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep” (3.4.28). Congregationalism after 9/11

Religion is always a fraught subject, perhaps even more so after the events of 9/11. There may be some temptation to read Gilead as an apology for Christianity, as many of its passages refer to apologetics, how to “defend” or “prove” the faith. But there are problems with this reading. The book’s moral outlook is complex; there are violent, racist Christians and sympathetic, humane atheists. Furthermore, the book repeatedly expresses skepticism about the attempt to “convert” anyone to Christianity, let alone its readers. Gilead does not argue for a Christian worldview so much as it situates Christianity within the tensions of religious pluralism. The novel assumes that there are many available forms of belief and disbelief. We find characters that are Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, atheists, and agnostics and those who do fit into any category. The philosopher Charles Taylor described this religious pluralism, which took place across

52

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

Western culture, as a “nova effect . . . an ever-widening variety of moral/ spiritual options, across the span of the thinkable and perhaps even beyond.”11 Hungerford calls John Ames “a believer profoundly aware of the possibility— even the plausibility—of unbelief” (Postmodern Belief 114). Gilead’s presentation of religion is best considered within the frame of U.S. cultural and political history after 9/11.12 That is, Gilead can be read as a response to anxieties surrounding the nation’s religious-secular divide. Robinson took a major risk in centering her novel on a preacher, potentially alienating a share of her audience, but she did so in part to unsettle dominant narratives about the role of religion in contemporary literature and society. In terms of literary discourse, few postwar authors have placed religion in a positive light, while many have sought to expose its harm and hypocrisies. A particularly violent example is Joyce Carol Oates’s Son of Morning (1978), which features a reverend so consumed with guilt over lust that he takes Jesus’s advice literally and plucks out his right eye in front of the congregation. The negative treatment of religion and religious figures not only applies to authors openly critical of religion but also includes writers who profess faith, like John Updike. In Rabbit, Run (1960), Updike portrays the minister Jack Eccles as morally impotent, unable to help Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. A pair of preachers, Tom Marshfield and Ed Parsley, appear in A Month of Sundays (1974); both are sexually depraved hypocrites. The novel ends with Parsley leaving his wife for a political radical and then blowing himself up while assembling a homemade bomb. In Roger’s Version (1986), Dale Kohler, an idealistic evangelical, seeks to prove the existence of God with the aid of computer modeling, a quest he abandons after being confronted with Professor Myron Kriegman’s naturalistic description of the origins of life. Throughout his long career, Updike’s work registers the ironies of religious professions and the crisis of losing religious belief, finding it difficult to make a positive claim for religious language, thought, and belief. In Displacing the Divine, his book on ministers in American fiction, Douglas Walrath locates the problem of treating religion respectfully to a shift within American culture: Within the more sophisticated, diverse, and secular cultural context that developed during the 1960s and 1970s . . . the plausibility of Christian belief was not something that even popular writers could take for granted. Beginning in the 1970s, Americans in general were less certain that the typical minister was an upright character and unquestioning believer than they were during the 1940s and 1950s. Simply presenting a hero minister whose own experience testified to the reality and efficacy of Christian faith

GI L E A D

53

was no longer sufficient to move sophisticated readers of popular fiction to suspend their disbelief. . . . Popular novelists still created fictional ministers they hoped would seem like real humans to their readers. But to make their fictional divines credible, writers now found it necessary to create entire imaginary worlds where the Christian paradigm was still in place, and then to convince their readers that these imagined worlds mirrored the real world. (285) This helps explain why Robinson placed Ames in the 1950s, a time when Gilead’s religious culture and Ames’s faith would appear credible and believable to today’s audience. Walrath praises Gilead not only for registering the tensions between belief and unbelief within a single family but also for not slipping into nostalgia for a more idyllic past: “What gives Robinson’s novel so much integrity is her clear recognition that neither Ames’ faith nor Gilead is ideal. John Ames is a comic hero only in his season, not for all seasons. Readers may long to appropriate for themselves what appears to be an idyllic faith like Ames’ and live in an idyllic place like Gilead, but Ames knows that, even in the 1950s, neither is idyllic; he and Gilead are already relics from another time. Gilead is clearly a world that was. It is not a world that others can join” (289). By shaping a world prior to the 1960s, Robinson is able to imagine an alternative, comic-heroic view of religion and religious vocations. John Ames is her answer to the many novelists who are hostile to religion, to religious novelists like John Updike who emphasize the decline and loss of religion, and to Flannery O’Connor, who, in Robinson’s opinion, demeans religion through caricature and irony. As Walrath suggests, Gilead was written within a political culture deeply conflicted about the public role of religion. Of course, this is an anxiety as old as the country itself, but more recently it has been intensified by international and domestic events. The late 1970s saw the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the establishment of America’s evangelical “religious right.” The attacks on September 11, 2001, added to an intensification of already existing anxieties, as did the revelation of the Catholic Church’s child sex-abuse scandal. Such events, combined with the polarizing rhetoric of the “evangelical right” and the “secular left,” have resulted in a nation that is divided over religion as never before. Once we situate Gilead within this cultural context, the tension between the secular and the religious reads as a negotiation between religious fundamentalists on one side and rationalist atheists on the other. Ames, who is skeptical of evangelical dogmatic orthodoxy and understands the complexity of the abolitionist legacy, might be seen as a symbol of a privileged form of religious

54

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

identity, the only one truly compatible with the liberal ideals of individualism, freedom of conscience, and social and political life with people of other faiths or no faith at all. In Gilead Robinson claims that the form of religious identity most compatible with liberal democracy is one that exchanges orthodoxy for mystery, closed dogma for open speculation. This tension is given its fullest treatment in the plot with Ames’s brother, Edward, the book’s figure of the twentieth-century intellectual. After a precocious childhood, he leaves Gilead to study abroad in Germany, returning years later a committed atheist. His spiritual transformation is a disaster for the Ames family. Edward is initially exiled from his family, but in the end he wins them over to his secular outlook, leaving the Midwest with his parents to live on the Gulf Coast and abandoning Ames to Gilead. Although the Ames brothers grow apart, there is a moment after Edward returns from Germany where difference breaks down and transcendence seems possible. Throughout Gilead, baseball serves as an image of community, a secular space with the power to unify individuals across different identity markers. Ames attends a baseball game with his grandfather to watch Bud Fowler, the earliest known African American professional baseball player. While that episode focuses on the importance of baseball for race relations, the moment when Ames and Edward play catch briefly unifies two characters with opposing views on religion. As they play, Robinson begins to complicate the neat opposition between them. She has Edward quote Psalm 133 as he pours water over his head in a kind of secular baptism. This throws the comfortable opposition between secularism and religion into question, forcing readers to question the meaning of identity categories. Robinson introduces a hint of mystery, forcing Ames and the reader to question what we really know about Edward. “I thought after that day we would sometimes be able to talk,” Ames reflect. “That did not prove to be the case. All the same, after that day I did feel pretty much at ease about the state of his soul. Though of course I am not competent to judge” (64). The silence between the brothers and Ames’s suspension of judgment suggest the inadequacy of the categories “atheist” and “Christian.” Robinson uses baseball’s power to form temporary communities to interrogate this opposition, ultimately questioning the stability and intelligibility of any such claim of identity. Identity claims can also apply to texts. In this case, Robinson takes a famous piece of secular discourse, Feuerbach’s book The Essence of Christianity, and shows how it yields to both secular and religious meanings. For Edward, Feuerbach’s book marshals the end of belief, while for Ames, Feuerbach results in a strengthened faith. He tells his son, “Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he loves the

GI L E A D

55

world. Of course he thinks that religion could just stand out of the way and let joy exist pure and undisguised. That is his one error, and it is significant. But he is marvelous on the subject of joy, and also on its religious expressions” (24). Ames delights in the irony that The Essence of Christianity can actually strengthen Christian faith, which is why he tells his son, “I’m going to set aside that Feuerbach with the books I will ask your mother to be sure to save for you. I hope you will read it sometime. There is nothing alarming in it, to my mind” (27). In the end he changes his mind and decides to give it to his “spiritual son,” the skeptic Jack Boughton. At their bus station parting, instead of giving Jack a Bible or a book by Karl Barth, Ames brings “along The Essence of Christianity, which I had set on the table by the door, hoping I might have a chance to give it to him” (239). By emphasizing the irony of intention—that the book responsible for making an atheist of Karl Marx and much of the Western intelligentsia can also serve as an apology for the Christian faith—Robinson shows her skepticism toward the essentializing tendency to label a text either religious or secular. The identity of a text depends entirely on its reception, which depends upon the subjectivity of the reader. The same is true of Gilead itself, for it too is available to secular and religious meanings.

CHAPTER 4

Home Instead of twenty-four-year gap between novels, Robinson published Home in 2008, just four years after Gilead. Like all of Robinson’s fiction, the critical reception of Home was positive. A. O. Scott of the New York Times wrote, “It is at once hard and forgiving, bitter and joyful, fanatical and serene. It is a wild, eccentric, radical work of literature that grows out of the broadest, most fertile, most familiar native literary tradition” (“Prodigal”). While Home was nominated for a National Book Award, it did not win any major domestic prizes, making its reception slightly more subdued than that for Gilead. Home did win one major award, the Orange Prize for Fiction, given to the best Anglophone novel by a female author. Home has been called a “companion piece” to Gilead, and reading them side by side reveals the extent to which Gilead’s characters are mired in error and misperception. In Gilead, Ames says of Boughton, “His daughter Glory is home with him now. Her marriage failed, and that is a sad thing” (18). In Home it is understood that Glory never married. Ames, along with Boughton, remains in ignorance about this fact. Ames believes he made a small mistake in delivering the sermon on Hagar and Ishmael. In Home the sermon is the cause of great emotional damage to the entire Boughton family, nearly compromising Ames’s lifelong friendship with Boughton. At the end of Gilead, Jack believes Glory will never forgive him for leaving before his father’s funeral. In Home, she has forgiven him entirely. Many other examples could be added to this list, but in general they all fit this pattern of revealing how subjective knowledge is always in some degree in error. Thus, reading Gilead and Home together creates a form of irony, a doubleness wherein anything a character knows about another is both subjectively true and objectively false. This allows Robinson to imagine social reality in a complex, multifaceted way.

H OME

57

The Style of the Ordinary

One entry point into Home is to consider the many meanings of the “ordinary,” an important concept for understanding the character, language, and ideology of the novel. Interpreted thematically, Glory, Jack, and Boughton confront the repetitions of ordinary life and have differing attitudes toward it, sometimes to celebrate it, mourn it, or escape from it. But the “ordinary” is a concept whose implications move beyond its appearance in Home’s plot and character development. According to the philosopher Charles Taylor, whose Sources of the Self traces the emergence of the ordinary within Western cultural history, an important dimension of modern identity has privileged the ethical ideals of “ordinary life,” what he called the life of labor and reproduction. Sometimes known as the “bourgeois ethic,” it is an ideal that displaced previous notions of the good life, including contemplation, political participation, and the aristocratic honor ethic. This he called, in a phrase that resonates with Robinson’s work, “the affirmation of ordinary life.”1 What is important about Taylor’s discussion for understanding Home is how deeply this “affirmation” is indebted to the Reformation—particularly the Puritans’ interpretation of the Reformation —and so to Robinson’s Protestant ideology. The Reformers’ critique of the medieval Church, their rejection of the idea of sacred times and spaces, of the Church’s mediating role between humans and the divine, and of monastic vocations, made what was once considered “profane life” the only life worth living. Monks and nuns were not “closer” to God because, according to the Reformers, God operated by grace alone and could not be supplicated by works of renunciation. The hierarchy between religious and layperson was compromised: “Thus by the same movement through which the Protestant churches rejected a special order of priesthood in favour of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, they also rejected the special vocation to the monastic life and affirmed the spiritual value of lay life. By denying any special form of life as a privileged locus of the sacred, they were denying the very distinction between sacred and profane and hence affirming their interpenetration” (217, emphasis added). The result is “the affirmation that the fullness of Christian existence was to be found within the activities of this life, in one’s calling and in marriage and the family” (218). It is a major cultural shift best embodied by Martin Luther, who ceased being a monk and married a former nun. The Puritans gave these antihierarchical ideas and the hallowing of ordinary life their most extreme expression, particularly with their notion of “vocation,” God’s specific call for an individual’s labor, no matter how mundane. In

58

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

Home, Glory’s work certainly qualifies as mundane. She was a schoolteacher, a line of work with higher status than what she does at the Boughton home, mostly cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, and gardening. Yet by giving Glory’s ordinary domestic labor so much space in the novel, Robinson suggests its sanctity and value. Taylor summarized this Puritan ideal: “The highest life can no longer be defined by an exalted kind of activity; it all turns on the spirit in which one lives whatever one lives, even the most mundane existence.”2 The Puritan William Perkins put it this way: “Now if we compare worke to worke, there is a difference betwixt washing of dishes, and preaching of the word of God: but as touching to please God none at all.”3 Taylor called this Perkins’s articulation of the “sanctification of the ordinary,” a perfect phrase for the meaning of Glory’s labor, which indeed includes the “washing of dishes.” Glory speaks of the “skills of the ordinary”: “It had somehow never seemed to her that the place had [Jack’s] attention, or it seemed he was attentive to strategies of evasion and places of concealment, never to the skills of the ordinary, dutiful choring that made up most of every life, and was so much the worth and the pride of that life, by local reckoning” (61). The fact that Glory does this expressly for others, out of a spirit of kindness and duty toward her father and brother, qualifies it as a vocation under the Puritan rubric. That this ordinary labor needs to be repeated daily and that Robinson is willing to risk losing the reader’s attention with this repetition seem only to confirm Milton’s Puritan formulation in Paradise Lost, that “To know / That which before us lies in daily life / Is the prime wisdom.”4 Home is selfconsciously a part of this Protestant cultural history, and perhaps the best aesthetic analogy to it is Dutch paintings like those of Vermeer. His genre pictures of domestic scenes doused in numinous light have a quality similar to Robinson’s fiction. Both artists aim to make the everyday radiant and mysterious. A. O. Scott’s review touched on this idea, that the everyday for Robinson has a strange, almost terrifying quality. He wrote, “Most of what might be called the action in Home consists of the movements of a few characters— Glory, her father and her brother Jack—around their grand old house, from kitchen to living room, from garden to porch. They speak with sometimes strained politeness as they busy themselves with mundane domestic tasks. But those quotidian facts of what Glory thinks of as ‘difficult, ordinary life’ feel, in Robinson’s hand, like vessels of the terrible, the sublime, the miraculous” (“Prodigal”). Scott captured one of the effects of Home, how the ordinary functions as a source of “the sublime, the miraculous.” And it is not just the domestic rituals that have this quality but also the very ordinariness of the book’s theme of the Prodigal returning. Scott elaborated this idea by tracing it to Glory’s memory of Psalm 78: “I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter

H OME

59

dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us” (102). The psalm, Scott observed, suggests “that familiar stories and pieces of wisdom can nonetheless be obscure, even sinister or magical, in their lessons and meanings” (“Prodigal”). Here Scott hit on one of Robinson’s subtler intentions: by making the ordinary, the commonplace, and the truism strange again, she can refresh and refashion their meanings and make them speak again in a different culture. Almost no other word is as banal as “home.” But Home gives the word so many different meanings that it is difficult to think about “home” anymore without it radiating a kind of strangeness. Or consider the word “nothing” in its many guises, a key word from King Lear that resonates with Boughton and Jack’s decline. “There’s really nothing like a good dumpling” becomes “I really am nothing. . . . Nothing, with a body” (280, 288); prison is “as congenial a place to be nothing as I could ever hope to find” (289); “nothing I can sustain on my own” (289); “I don’t have anything to lose” (295). Other common words are repeated constantly and given new meanings: “kindness,” “honor,” “weary.” Scott listed others: “She is somehow able to infuse what can sound like dowdy, common words—words like courtesy and kindness, shame and forgiveness, transgression and grace—with a startling measure of their old luster and gravity. Phrases many of us have heard and known since childhood come in her hands to have the depth of dark sayings” (“Prodigal”). Robinson’s use of repetition in diction is also present in her repetition of scenes. Mirroring and juxtaposition of scene creates meaning in Home. The inability of Jack and Boughton to achieve confession and vulnerability (114–16) is immediately countered with a confessional moment between Jack and Glory (117). It not just a stylistic quirk that Home does not have chapter breaks. The juxtaposition of scene after scene, producing meanings and countermeanings, continuities and oppositions, results in the effect of daily-ness, an aesthetic privileging of the rituals of everyday life. As Robinson said in her interview with the Paris Review, “ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me” (Fay). The Meanings of Home

Home explores three very distinct moral worlds, with little overlap between them. As Jack says—and it applies to each of the characters—“I’m in one universe and you’re in another” (267). The patriarch Boughton occupies the place of pride—pride especially in his humility and his belief in the limitlessness of grace and forgiveness. But while Boughton often speaks of grace, he is also an embodiment of the law, a kind of Pharisaical patriarch, whose moral judgments rule over every aspect of behavior.

60

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

Jack, on the other hand, is consumed by irony. There is a doubleness to Jack, a clash between his polished appearance and his anguished interior, that makes him the most intriguing and mysterious character in the book. He is extremely sensitive about how he is perceived by others, attempting to mask the shame that is at the center of his identity. He has spent so much time imagining himself from the perspective of others that the third person has slipped into his speech. “Jack Boughton,” he says, “is in hell over nothing at all” (142). Rowan Williams wrote, “Jack’s irony is, we might say, the wrong kind of attention, an attention to himself in the eyes of others rather than to the act or the word or the relational reality itself” (8). He is Robinson’s most self-divided character, and her association of irony with agony is consistent with her preference, most notably in her essays, for a tone of sincerity, seriousness, and honesty. Where Jack is duplicitous and double, Glory is simple and singular. Her chief motivation is duty. When Jack seems surprised that she goes to church, Glory replies, “Last in, first out. I have to do that. It matters to Papa” (49). Glory’s loyalty to her father informs her piety. Whenever theological issues come up, she quotes her father. Her reading of the Bible in the morning and evening is done “with the thought that her father would be pleased if he knew” (102). Her inner tension is between the duty she feels toward serving her family —toward her Papa—and her personal desire for a happy, independent life, a home of her own. Of course, since Robinson is a novelist and not a moralist, these ideals are constantly coming under strain, even breaking at times. Boughton shows genuine humility, Jack is sincere and vulnerable at times, and Glory does question the burden of duty. Glory’s, Jack’s, and Boughton’s worlds have been relatively established, sealed off from one another by chasms of gender, age, experience, and personal temperament. Yet, they all share what Glory comes to call “destitution.” For her, it is the loss of the hope for a family. For Jack, it is the inability to find home in Gilead. And for Boughton, it is the realization that everything he worked for is being destroyed. The white clapboard church is replaced by a “much costlier building, monumental in style” (49). His mind grows weaker, first in small slippages of memory and awareness, then culminating in spats of hallucination, symptoms of what appears to be dementia. In a summary of his life, Boughton says, “I lost my church” and then “I lost my wife” (296). Robinson insists on the singular loneliness of subjective experience and the rarity of initiating radical change as an adult. In Home, adult loneliness can never be fully transcended but only briefly attenuated in moments of mutual vulnerability. Home begins and ends in Glory’s world. The words that greet her upon her arrival in Gilead prove to be prophetic: “Home to stay, Glory! Yes!” (3). Glory is

H OME

61

indeed “home to stay,” since she will learn she is to inherit the ancestral home, barn and all. “Yes!” is Boughton’s habitual refrain, suggestive of his seemingly inexhaustible capacity for affirmation, his ability to see even the worst, most painful events as convertible into goodness and grace. “Yes!” is the essence of Boughton’s theology and identity, and Home charts the limitations of his affirming openness. To his “Yes!” Glory’s inward response is “Oh, no.” “Dear God, she thought, dear God in heaven. So began and ended all her prayers these days, which were really cries of amazement. How could her father be so frail?” (3). Glory’s homecoming brings a new meaning to the idea of home.5 The feeling is not one of refuge but horror, a confrontation with death made real by her father’s frail body. Home as death or tomb figures in multiple ways: death of her former self, death of her father, death of her family, death of her future. Her surprise at the sight of her father suggests a reversal of expectations. Where she hoped for a new beginning, she discovers the end. As the novel progresses, Boughton’s reveries of the past grow expansive. The narrative tracks a continuous dialectic between past happiness and present desolation, between old and new, with Boughton encaged by the former and Glory confronting the latter. The “glorious parade” of life in the Boughton family has since passed on, leaving behind the “confetti and candy wrappers” of “slight desolation” (4). What remains is a sense of belatedness, that everything beautiful and valuable took place in the past. Boughton speaks of old Gilead and his grandmother gathering purslane (175). He is taking one last look back, but all of those happy memories are tainted by Jack’s absence: “But you were always off somewhere” (175). One might say that the past is Boughton’s home, the place where he retreats whenever he feels strong emotion, a response that may be due to an unnamed brain disease, perhaps Alzheimer’s. His nostalgia, his Depression-era thrift, and his strong emotional association of the house with family, have left the house entirely unchanged. It less resembles a house than a museum—or a mausoleum. Glory watches Jack “put his hand on the shoulder of their mother’s chair, touch the fringe on a lampshade, as if to confirm for himself that the uncanny persistence of half-forgotten objects, all in their old places, was not some trick of the mind. Nothing about that house ever did change, except to fade or scar or wear” (52). To Glory, “it seemed sometimes as if her father must have meant to preserve all this memory, this sheer power of sameness, so that when they came home, or when Jack came home, there would be no need to say anything. In terms of the place, they would all always have known everything” (88). Robinson associates the past with dense materiality, burdensome and unavoidable. Jack’s homecoming is a confrontation with this past, and its absolute immovability suggests Boughton’s desire to cling to the burdens of past transgression

62

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

rather than release and forgive: “He had come to the last inch of his power to forgive, and there was Jack, still far beyond his reach” (56). The Boughton house has always had difficulty with hospitality and the welcoming of difference. This idea is first dramatized in an anecdote about the Boughtons’ Communist neighbors. While Boughton’s welcoming of Glory is uncomplicated—she is family—the welcoming of neighbors who hold radically opposed social, religious, and political views poses an ethical challenge, one analogous to the challenge of Boughton welcoming Jack. “For years a neighbor—they still called him Mr. Trotsky because Luke, home from college, had called him that—planted alfalfa on half of it, and her father sometimes tried to find words for his irritation about this” (8). The Boughtons’ discomfort with otherness is suggested in the name for their neighbors. The “Trotskys” are reduced in all of their complexity to a single, threatening identity. The remembered presence of the Communist neighbors is one of the ways Home opens up to larger political, Cold War meanings: the acquisitive, capitalistic, Protestant Boughtons against the agrarian, agnostic “Trotskys.” The narrator refers to the ground between them as a “battlefield” (9). Glory remembers one of the skirmishes, when the children played fox and geese in the alfalfa field and ruined it. Seeing the opportunity for a heroic “Yes,” Boughton asks the children to apologize, but it doesn’t go as planned. Mrs. Trotsky accuses the children of being greedy for the unused land, and their father tells “his foolish lies again and again while everywhere the poor suffer!” (11). Because their apology is met with rebuke, the children walk away and tell their parents what happened, and the Boughtons “tacitly ceded all claim” to the land, rather than have another confrontation (13). While the anecdote seems like a digression, it serves as a metaphor for Jack’s homecoming. His presence raises the questions of hospitality, neighborliness, and the clash occasioned by religious differences. He too seeks forgiveness and is met with rebuke. It is another confrontation that ends in a kind of prolonged and painful stalemate. In a mirroring of Mrs. Trotsky, Boughton’s desire for justice rather than mercy is partly responsible for his inability to accommodate Jack’s difference. Memories such as these come and go as Glory settles into life with her father. It is a lonely, silent life of cooking, housework, and light diversion, mostly to shield herself from the pain of her former life. Glory is constantly confronted with her status as a Boughton, her identity conceived in terms of her role within the family. Outside Gilead she may be an adult, but within the home she is “the baby of the family” (14). Coming home initiates a kind of infantilizing process for her. “It is as if I had a dream of adult life and woke up from it, still here in my parents’ house” (19). She cries easily and is humiliated by her tears. “She thought how considerate it would have been of nature

H OME

63

to allow the venting of feeling through the palm of a hand or even the sole of a foot” (15). Even though Glory is loyal to her family, fulfilling her pious duty to honor her father, she feels like an outsider. While all the other children have beauty or talent, her defining virtue is that she “took everything to heart” (14). Glory’s tears, which seem to well up on every other page of Home, suggest not only her personal sorrow but also her role as the chief witness of family misery. For much of the novel, she hovers around the condition of mourning. The death of Jack’s child weighs heaviest on her conscience, in part because it was the scene of her father’s “deepest grief,” though this may be a way Glory psychically deflects her own anger toward Jack, since she fantasizes about one day being a mother (18). (Ames’s desire for fatherhood and Glory’s desire for motherhood make Jack’s impregnation and abandonment of his daughter all the more devastating to them.) The repetition of the episode in Gilead and Home reinforces the idea that it is the moment of crisis for the Boughton family, when family unity is forever shattered. Jack’s fall is the book’s core moral atrocity: his selfishness, malice, sexual violence, and careless abandonment result in the entirely wasteful death of an infant. Jack’s guilt and shame force him into a twenty-year exile. And Glory continues to brood about how her father handled the situation: “She had never heard her father say such hard words— the cruelty of it! the arrogance!—and she had never seen him brood and mutter for days at a time, as if he were absorbing the fact that some transgressions are beyond a mere mortal’s capacity to forgive. How often those same hard, necessary words had come to her mind” (18). Like her father, she continues to hold a strong judgment against Jack’s behavior, thinking those same “hard, necessary words” against Jack’s malice and pride. Ironically, since Glory is the youngest child and was still at home throughout the Jack fiasco, her mother and father’s time of grief was a time of singular joy for her. “It embarrassed her to remember how happy she had been, those three bitter, urgent years until it all ended” (70). Through Jack’s fall, Glory was promoted to a place of intimacy and approval by her parents. She became finally visible. Now, with Jack’s return, Glory feels herself cast out, demoted, and her original resentment against Jack returns. Glory was a schoolteacher of English literature, a vocation that came out of specific social and political circumstances. Perhaps she would have gone into the ministry, but that work was denied her by the Church’s patriarchal ideology. “Women were creatures of a second rank, however pious, however beloved, however honored” (20). Robinson is sensitive to the conservative gender politics of 1950s Protestantism, how it routed women from power and relegated them to other fields. She challenges these politics mainly through a subtle irony, allowing Glory, rather than her prideful, stubborn, clerical father, to be the

64

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

exemplar of Christian virtue. It is with a kind of disappointment that Glory takes up teaching “Il Penseroso” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” More important, her background as a reader of texts makes her an excellent reader of people. Writing of Glory’s attentiveness to others and of the importance of a specifically female perception in Home, Messud wrote, “It is Glory whose observations—like John Ames’s in Gilead—capture, in Woolfian moments of being, the beauty of their lives” (“Witnesses”). Glory is the great interpreter of Jack. As she says, “the real text was Jack,” though he pushes her interpretative abilities to their limits (45). One of his glances is described as “mild, unreadable,” and she remains ignorant about much of Jack’s life, in particular the circumstances he confesses to Ames at the end of Gilead. She is deeply sensitive to the behavior of others, what it means, implies, suggests. And she is a great observer and endless interpreter, revising her previous impressions with new behavioral information, never arriving at definite certainties, particularly about Jack, who remains utterly other and strange. In her own meek way, she is analogous to one of Henry James’s central observers, a Winterbourne or Strether, a “central intelligence” through which the narration of Home is focalized. The central drama is between father and son, but it is through an outsider, Glory, that this drama is understood, interpreted, and made meaningful. The narrative eventually moves away from Glory’s internal life when she is thrust into a new role after Jack’s letter arrives. Her feelings toward Jack are complicated. She both desires approval and resents the emotional toll he exacts on her father: “What right do you have! she stormed inwardly, knowing as she did that her father’s only prayers were that Jack would come, and that Jack would stay” (29). It is also possible to read a degree of jealousy into Glory’s protection of her father. She wants Boughton to herself, never admitting the anger that stems from being the dutiful, caring daughter and receiving little of her father’s tender attention, in contrast to his obsessive solicitude for the prodigal Jack. The model daughter, Glory is made to seem invisible, blocked from her father’s loving gaze by the son whose value has always rested in his estrangement and transgressions. Jack arrives in Gilead hung over and unshaven, weary, pale, and thin. Glory describes him as “distant and respectful and tentative” (31). An outsider, Jack is deeply uncomfortable at home, so much so that he asks permission to enter as if he were a stranger, even though, paradoxically, he enters through the kitchen door, a space of familiarity. Neither Glory nor Jack experience home as a space of rest, peace, refuge, hope, or security—at least at first. What they share is the experience of home-loss—betrayal for Glory and domestic crisis for Jack. Glory asks, “Has it ever, ever occurred to you that you are not the only miserable person in this house?” (138). Jack and Glory both occupy a “miserable”

H OME

65

condition—disappointed and disillusioned—and a desire to find some release from that condition. Ironically, it is Glory, the one who strongly believes Gilead can never be home again, who eventually finds home there. And it is Jack, who desires Gilead to be home, who finds his essential homelessness deepened. The relationship between Jack and Glory begins tentatively. She is curious about him, taking note of every gesture, the way he transforms the bedroom. But her curiosity is constrained by Midwestern propriety, her culture’s fierce devotion to individual privacy, the Boughton worship of tact, and also by 1950s gender norms, which prohibit a woman from prying into the life of a man, even if he is her brother. While Glory would like to know everything about Jack, she’s forced by moral conventions to keep verbal exchanges polite and padded with pleasantries: “I brought you some towels.” “Thank you very much. You’re very kind.” “I hope you’re comfortable,” she said. “I am. Thank you.” (36) Robinson’s exploration of Midwestern moral codes in Gilead and Home helps explain her attraction to setting her novels in the recent past. It is not simply that she is interested in American religious cultures, something that would be difficult to represent in contemporary terms without risking the dangers of “relevance,” “immediacy,” or “being topical.” Like many recent novelists —Toni Morrison comes to mind—Robinson prefers settings that establish distance between the reader and the narrative in order to gain the effect of a different, unfamiliar world. The Midwest of the 1950s is another world. It is a quaint culture of porch conversation, church, and board games, untouched by urbanity, eccentricity, or sensuousness. It is a place where little gestures of honor are still obeyed— standing to greet a woman, the privilege of saying grace before meals, certain table manners: “Waiting to speak until they were spoken to, until the meal was finished, out of respect to talk of creeds and synods” (39). Their pride is humility, simplicity, piety, and usefulness. There are no mentions of divorces or infidelities. It is a provincial culture of northern European immigrants, few of whom have any experience with other races, cultures. For Boughton, a trip to Minneapolis is “his closest equivalent to foreign travel” (219). The dominant emotion is a gentle Midwestern stoicism. Easy smiles mask stern interiors. It is a culture that excludes sentimentality, subdues anxiety with propriety, and suppresses the wild, tempestuous emotions of the erotic. Robinson does not judge this culture but rather explores the lives of characters that inhabit it. The moral codes they obey stipulate what can and cannot be said. It is particularly

66

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

strange—and dramatically interesting—that neither Glory nor Boughton feels it is appropriate to ask Jack the most obvious question: Why has he returned home? The code’s mandated silence allows Robinson to slowly inflate the mystery of his presence until it becomes so large that Boughton must violate the code and address it—but only in the most indirect, tactful way. The moral code also allows Robinson to maintain dramatic irony in every exchange of dialog. It gives her what Northrop Frye said all novelists need: “The framework of a stable society” (Anatomy of Criticism 305). Because of the reader’s access to Glory’s consciousness, she always knows that the speakers are concealing their desires behind a mask of conventional propriety and decency. Robinson invites us to contemplate how these characters dwell within these codes, for good and ill, rather than encouraging us to view them as oppressive or repressive. Jack is the master of the moral codes, having perfected the art of Midwestern “kindness.” But the reader has a persistent sense that Jack’s politeness is entirely insincere, the result of mastering a complicated game of appearances. It is a skill he acquired at an early age. “Jack, can you tell me why you have done whatever you did, acted however you did? No, sir. You can’t explain it, Jack? No, sir. That courtesy was his shield and concealment. It was his courage” (64). In fact, he is ironically aware of his own manipulation of appearances. In the letter he writes to Della he “dropped a tear where I had signed my name. It was tap water, really, but the thought is what counts” (122). Robinson shows how codes of morality both embed positive normative values like kindness and are vulnerable to abuse by skilled ironists like Jack, whose appearance of “kindness” blocks any real kindness from being exchanged. Glory notes, with characteristic intelligence, “that thank-you of his. It was so unfailing as to be impersonal, or at least to have no reference to any particular kindness, as if he had trained himself to note the mere fact of kindness, however slight any instance of it might be” (46). Despite Jack’s slender build, quiet habits, and essential hiddenness, he is a huge, overwhelming presence in the house. Glory feels herself being squeezed to the margins—most painfully, the margins of her father’s attention. And she resents it: “What right did [Jack] have to take over the house this way?” (67). In this formulation, Jack is the intruder, the stranger, occupying a space to which he has no right. Glory’s hospitality has the effect of putting herself out of home: “I believe I’ll go out for a little walk” (67). While Jack and Glory have their cautiously polite interactions, Glory spends her solitude brooding. Long passages of interior dialog—Glory’s conversation with herself—begin to appear: “Did she choose to be there, in that house, in Gilead? No, she certainly did not. Her father needed looking after, and she had to be somewhere, like every other human being on earth. What an

H OME

67

embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be. All those years of work and nothing to show for it. But you make the best of things. People respect that” (37). Such passages of interior experience do not dominate the narrative space. Robinson is content to sample Glory’s consciousness in brief revelations, only to return to the realities of action and nature. The next sentence in the passage just quoted is “She went out to the garden,” followed by a description of sun and squash. Home is actually less introspective than either of Robinson’s previous two novels. It is the most other-focused of her books, less concerned with self-knowledge than with the limitations of knowing other people. Glory simply has less time for contemplation than either Ruth or Ames, busy as she is with her role as caretaker and homemaker. Home is woven through with motifs and themes from across the Bible: Jacob and Esau, Cain and Abel, the Last Supper. Glory quotes the prophet Isaiah as she watches Jack leave in a passage that imagines him as a kind of Christfigure: “A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their face” (318). Of course, many allusions about Jack fall outside the Bible. Glory calls his charming, dapper side “Cary Grant,” his darker, criminal side “Raskolnikov” (131). But then Robinson returns to scripture, framing Jack as a “thief,” which has obvious Christian resonances, the thief on the cross and Augustine’s famous theft of the pears in his Confessions. It is a kind of paradigmatic sin within the tradition but also one associated with examples of forgiveness and redemption. Later on, Jack alludes to himself as Lazarus. But is he raised from the dead because he resembles his father—Boughton’s youth resurrected? Or is Jack Lazarus since he’s been “dead” for twenty years spent in exile? Later on, Robinson elaborates on this allusion. “Jack had walked in on a potent thought of himself, like Lazarus with the memory of cerements about him no matter how often he might shave or comb his hair” (240). The stain on his shirt, the splinter in his hand, and his symbolic “cerements” mark his identity with the ideas of “Transgression. Dishonor. Unmet obligation” (240). But more than content, Robinson is also stylistically indebted to the Bible insofar as her prose is reduced, concise, omitting the kinds of surface descriptions that are characteristic of the novel’s realist tradition. Despite Glory’s diligent efforts to cook, garden, and clean, she can never labor enough to erase the past, which is made repeatedly present in the old house. Jack and Boughton cannot achieve harmonious communication, as any mention of the past only conjures up pain. Robinson figures this disjunction in the theme of naming. Jack’s real name is John, and at some point he went by Johnny, then landed forever on Jack. Glory wonders “when did he begin to insist on that name?” (45). The importance of names in Gilead and Home is

68

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

perhaps more directly indebted to the importance of names in the Bible, particularly to those examples of name changes: Abram to Abraham, Saul to Paul. For his father, Jack uses the formal “sir.” “It’s always ‘sir,’ isn’t it? Never Papa. Or Dad. Some of the others call me Dad now, some of the boys do” (90). Of course, when Jack calls him “Dad,” Boughton reacts harshly: “Don’t call me that. . . . I don’t like it at all. Dad. It sounds ridiculous. It’s not even a word” (272). Boughton can’t accept Jack’s name for him, despite its being the name Jack’s brothers use. By disallowing “Dad,” Boughton separates Jack from the rest of his brothers. When Boughton says, “You’ve never had a name for me. Not one you’d call me to my face. Why is that?” Jack replies, “They all seemed wrong when I said them. I didn’t deserve to speak to you the way the others did” (311). The reader knows it is not simply Jack’s fault that all his names for his father fail. He does try them, but they are never welcomed. Boughton’s desire for a name—“That was what I waited for. That was what I wanted” (311)— contains a blindness toward his own refusal of Jack’s attempts at naming. The conflict between Jack and Boughton can be understood as a conflict about loyalty. Boughton’s attempt to understand “why you didn’t love us” is a question of loyalty (273). It is a theme of the Prodigal Son, of course, but it also harkens back to the problem of family loyalty in the Book of Ruth and in Housekeeping, as Ruth and Lucille have to decide whether to be loyal to Sylvie. Boughton’s loyalty is to family; it is his “pride, his strongest instinct” (236). Jack denies this instinct, denies the value of “fealty to kin” all together, a denial embodied in his abandonment of Annie Wheeler and his daughter. Jack is loyal to his family—Della and Robert. That is why he is in Gilead, out of sense of responsibility to find a new home for them. Hungerford wrote, “Jack and Della’s mode of reconciliation—love, loyalty, and the formation of a family— as the revision and, indeed, the redemption of Jack’s earlier encounter with unlikeness: with the poor girl of fourteen whom he impregnates and abandons” (Postmodern Belief 119). Boughton is blind to this because the reality of Jack’s scandal—marriage to a black woman—upsets his middle-class, white, Protestant morality. Boughton’s refusal to acknowledge Jack’s otherness and his dogged, anxious quest to “know” the “real” Jack have the effect of denying Jack his individuality and personhood. Boughton’s blindness to and anxiety around the limitations of knowledge mean that he persists in the illusion that other people are intelligible. Boughton’s epistemological stance is contrasted with Glory’s ethical approach to Jack. Hers is a quest not to “know” or “understand” him but simply to be “kind,” “accepting,” and “generous” through simple domestic deeds: pouring him coffee, ironing his shirts, encouraging him to eat more. Glory’s restraint from judgment is posited as virtue, enabling her to care for

H OME

69

Jack’s basic, material needs and allowing for a flourishing of intimacy between them. The trouble that Robinson finds in this Midwestern culture of wellintentioned do-gooders, always ready for heroic forgiveness, is the dogged persistence of harm. Home offers many examples of this kind of irony. About Boughton: “There was from time to time a tone of rebuke in his voice that overrode the mildness of his intentions” (84). About Annie Wheeler: “She was a hard, proud, unsmiling girl, and she may well have hated them all for their benevolent intentions, which were indeed condescending, reflecting as they did their awareness that her circumstances could be improved, that she might benefit from being gently instructed in the proper care of an infant even though this would involve overruling her mother” (233). Robinson is actually far less interested in the kinds of inevitable suffering that come with old age. Boughton’s frail body is mostly placed off-stage. The reader never sees Glory changing Boughton’s underwear or bathing him. She only mentions that it is “difficult.” The most private, difficult, shameful experiences of caring for a dying parent are left to our imagination. This is because such raw bodily scenes would detract from Robinson’s interest in the ethics of harm and forgiveness. Although this ethical theme dominates Home, Robinson does not neglect the political. Gilead feels isolated from the rest of the country, and the Boughton house is an island within that isolation, but Robinson makes certain that it is a community embedded within the larger community of the nation. In fact, it is Jack’s presence that drags political discourse into the house, as if his outsider status forces Boughton to acknowledge his relationship to wider communities. Their first dinner together begins: “I believe the threat of atomic war is very real!” (42). This Cold War context arrives in Gilead through the media—“Time and Life and Post”—which augments the atmosphere of anxiety and struggle between Boughton and Jack (45). Glory admits to an interest in Marxism, and Jack brings her home a copy of Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Work­ ing Class in England in 1844 (140). Marxist ideas are never really weighed or considered. Rather, they are floated as cultural markers and means for developing character, for example, Jack’s enthusiasm for political and social theory and his wariness around religion. The political context more immediately relevant to Jack, however, is the emerging civil rights movement. Home is an oblique meditation on race in America. Jack’s interest in race relations is immediately apparent. He reads W. E. B. Du Bois, and he is found by Glory standing outside a hardware store watching the TV footage of the bus boycott riots in Montgomery (47). The introduction of television into the Boughton home, with its evening news reporting

70

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

on Montgomery’s police dogs and fire hoses, forces a political confrontation between father and son. Where Jack is appalled, Boughton is indifferent. He says, “There’s no reason to let that sort of trouble upset you. In six months nobody will remember one thing about it” (97). Born and raised in white Gilead, Boughton knows about the plight of American blacks only through the media, which helps construct his point of view. The tragedy of Emmett Till is a vague, mistaken memory: “Wasn’t he the Negro fellow that—attacked the white woman?” (156). After explaining the tragedy, Jack rather passively offers, “We read different newspapers” (156). Behind this mention of the politics of media is Jack’s lived experience with a black woman, the reality that becomes more and more unmentionable as Boughton’s views on race become clearer. In this initial encounter, their conflicting opinions on civil rights never surface. Instead, Boughton clings to Jack’s transgression—his exclamation “Jesus!”—and punishes Jack by refusing his help in standing up. Robinson furthers the theme of race when Jack reads Something of Value, a novel about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, to his father. Boughton shuts down the entire question of racial conflict raised by the novel: “So much bad blood. I think we had all better just keep to ourselves” (147). The comment touches on Jack’s interracial marriage, but instead of talking about that, Boughton naps and mentions that the descriptions of “the elephants were very interesting” (147). Boughton does have opinions about the status of African Americans, but as always he is a proud moralist: ‘“I have nothing against the colored people. I do think they’re going to need to improve themselves, though, if they want to be accepted. I believe that is the only solution’” (155). He views the civil rights movement through his values of order and respectability: “The colored people appear to me to be creating problems and obstacles for themselves with all this—commotion” (156). He is blind to the political dimension of race and to the blatant violations of justice. In case there was any question about Jack’s politics, his remark about discrimination in baseball is telling: “You have to be black to have no chance at all” (200). As with every point of conflict between Jack and Boughton, their differing views on race end in stalemate. When Jack says, “The protest in Montgomery are non-violent,” the old man replies, “But they provoke violence. It’s all provocation” (204). Jack is unable to find home both within his childhood house and in the larger community of Gilead. Jack is a kind of triple exile, a stranger at home, in the community, and, because of his marriage to Della, within the nation-state. If he cannot feel at home with Boughton, perhaps he can feel at home in the wider community, a desire he projects onto Ames’s family, a fathersurrogate. He grew up tormenting Ames, his namesake, so perhaps he can repair that relationship, perhaps he can become his “son.” He decides, in his

H OME

71

ironic, third-person way, that “Jack Boughton might become a Congregationalist” (158). Or at least play baseball with Robby. These hopes are dashed, as we know from Gilead, by Ames’s sermon on Hagar and Ishmael, a text that lit on Ames’s own situation, abandoning his son through his imminent death, but that also illuminates Jack’s original sin, the abandonment of his daughter. It is another example of Robinson’s exploration of the irony of intentions. What is intended as personally healing becomes harmful to another. Glory and Jack commiserate. Boughton falls into despair, having lost his son and now his best friend: “Never since the darkest storms of his retirement had she seen him so morose” (213). If Glory’s spaces are primarily the kitchen and garden, Jack’s becomes the barn, where he spends “a good part of every day in earthy, dank concealment” (87). It is his hiding place, as inaccessible to Glory as his past life. Eventually Glory finds his makeshift home in the barn loft: “The dark little room smelled strongly of whiskey and sweat. It seemed almost domestic, and yet there was a potency of loneliness about it like a dark spirit lurking in it, a soul that had improvised this crude tabernacle to stand in the place of other shelter, flesh” (285). Jack’s space, quarantined from his childhood home, and primitive enough to be an animal’s layer, is as private, dark, and lonely as Jack himself. Glory says the space is “so like shame, so like affliction, that they could hardly be distinguished” (286). Symbolically, Glory has visited Jack’s most private self, and what she finds is another world, “where loneliness and grief are time and weather” (286). The DeSoto comes to represent all the possibilities of redemption— freedom from the past above all. Robinson’s prose grows lyrical as Glory watches the car outside the garage: “It gleamed darkly and demurely, like a ripe plum. Its chrome was polished, hubcaps and grille, and the side walls of the tires were snowy white. There was a preposterous beauty in all that shine that made her laugh” (159). The polish, shine, and beauty of the vehicle are everything Jack wants to internalize, for his stained past to turn snowy white. Yet Glory sees him still as a “visiting dignitary,” a stranger who appears respectable. It is a scene about Jack’s redemptive fantasies as much as it is about Glory’s burgeoning hope, figured in the image of “confetti,” here associated with a ticker tape parade but previously associated with the “slight desolation” of the house, “confetti and candy wrappers left after the passing of some glorious parade” (4). The drive Glory, Jack, and Boughton take begins like freedom, but everywhere there are reminders of Jack’s past and Glory’s disappointment at never having children: “The cows were standing with their calves” (163). As if unconsciously returning to the site of his greatest sin, Jack drives toward “that

72

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

small white house” where his little girl once lived (163). The drive serves as a reminder of the family crisis as well as offering a figuration of Jack’s anguished conscience: any thought, any desire loops back to the scene of guilt. Eventually Jack destroys his creativity on the DeSoto: “All the drunken ineptitude and frustration, his filthy hands, everything he could reach in the engine pried at, pulled loose” (247). It’s a moment of de-creation, linked with his moral lapse in abstaining from alcohol. His desire for reparation and redemption has not been fulfilled. He’s left with booze, a broken vehicle, and a botched suicide attempt, figures for Jack’s fall back into despair, solitude, “perdition.” The core debate around predestination—whether Jack has been cosmically assigned to “perdition”—is possible because of how this particular culture processes the phenomenon of the truant child. Jack knows this, ironically referring to his “hope there’s a minute or two between death and perdition” (119). Belief in God is impossible for Jack, but “perdition is the one thing that always made sense to me. I mean, it has always seemed plausible. On the basis of my experience” (119). It is this that he suspects concerns Boughton the most, the idea that “I’ll always be somewhere in eternity, rotting, or writhing. The poor old devil feels responsible for my soul” (143). The setting allows Robinson to dramatize how people growing up in this particular religious culture map their experience onto theological concepts. Robinson is interested in thinking about how ideas like predestination actually play out in the lives of different individuals, how it can act as both prison-house (Jack) and valuable conundrum (Ames). Jack’s question—“Do you think some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition?” (217)—comes out of his need to understand his own haphazard life—or perhaps it is just provocation on his part, or some combination of both. But Robinson is always careful to leave discussions ambiguous, with the tensions in place, this time predestination balanced by transfiguration. The questions the men pursue on the porch, questions about fathers and sons, justice and forgiveness, predestination and grace, remain unresolved, as if they are discussed only to deepen mystery. It is Lila, the female outsider, who offers a radical possibility, which remains open in the end: “A person can change. Everything can change” (227). Jack seems responsive to Lila’s idea, perhaps because they are both outsiders to Gilead, less at ease in its stiff, Protestant culture. As Jack and Boughton bottom out in grief, Glory finds a qualified liberation from her past. Her kindness toward Jack was not wasted but used for redemptive purposes, hidden from her until now: “Not that she could entirely forget the bitterness of her chagrin, not that she preferred the course her life had taken to the one she had imagined for it. But she did feel she had been rescued from the shame of mere defeat by the good she was able to do her brother” (254). For Robinson, liberation does not suggest an abandonment of the past, a kind

H OME

73

of willful forgetfulness. On the contrary, Glory’s rescue contains the memory “of her chagrin.” Glory’s redemption comes through self-denial. The effort of losing herself in helping Jack has the paradoxical effect of helping herself. In the end, Glory allows herself to return to her dream of home, the house she would buy with her fiancé and fill with simple furniture and children. Because of the good that came from helping Jack, she has the courage to face her past. This act of remembering, “something she had almost forbidden herself to remember” (304), is a means of releasing the past, forgiving her fiancé and her failures. She puts her desire for children to rest—“Let some sleep of oblivion overtake them, finally” (306)—and resigns herself to a new life, in a place others call home, where rumors of her failure to marry will rise and fall, where “she could start teaching again” (308). Jack’s suicide attempt, like his entire trip to Gilead, is another botched effort. He is drunk at the time he stuffs his shirt into the DeSoto tailpipe, and later he does not remember doing so. Freed from the self-preserving effects of rationality, Jack follows his subconscious desire for oblivion—except he forgets the keys. Glory finds him in the garage posing as a transient: “‘Spare a dime, lady?’ He was smiling, a look of raffish, haggard charm, hard, humiliated charm, that stunned her. ‘It’s your brother Jack,’ he said. ‘Your brother Jack without his disguise’” (243). Without his disguise—his ironic masks, his perfect manners—Jack is a poor, homeless, half-drunk stranger. Stripped “naked” before Glory, he wears a jacket without a shirt; it is the moment of absolute vulnerability between them. “Now you know me,” he says, “some other aspects of my character” (250). No one in the family now “knows” Jack as well as Glory does, and what she knows only grieves her. Even though his father remains ignorant of this anticlimax, his anxious speculations nearly kill him: “He was as still as if he had expended all the life that remained to him composing himself to accept this cross” (251). After Jack’s suicide attempt, Glory plays the role of Christ, who summons Jack/Lazarus to take off his clothes and wrap himself in a sheet—what Jack will call his “winding sheet”—asking him to come outside into the light, away from the barn/tomb (245). Again, Glory is the dispenser of grace, and again it is clothing that serves as its metaphor. But what kind of resurrection is this? “There was grief in his expression, a kind of bewilderment. Could he be surprised? Or was it only the shock of finding himself back in the world, with all his defenses ruined and his one friend lost to him?” (250). Glory is dutiful almost to the point of impatience with Jack, and she confronts the reality that she will never know him and that all she can offer is acceptance. It is up to Glory to remove the evidence of Jack’s suicide attempt. Just as she did with Jack’s returned letters from Della, she burns Jack’s socks in a “pyre

74

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

of kindling” (252). It is a symbolic funeral for Jack’s former self, the self that hoped that Gilead might be home. In her simple, diligent way, Glory sets things right, creates “home” in the ruptured Boughton house: “How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant” (252). Robinson loads the fragrance of cooking with meaning that builds continuity between past and present. It is meaning associated with her mother that Glory desires to continue: “That is what her mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what” (252). Glory embodies the specifically feminine work of creating the emotional atmosphere of home. She is mimicking her mother, carrying forward her rituals and traditions and those very same aromas of chicken and dumplings that smelled of restoration. It is among the same domestic habits as when her mother taught her to iron: “Collar, yoke, sleeves—this was the proper order of things, so her mother had said, and she did not depart from it” (177). Robinson suggests that women like Glory, her mother, and Lila are the high priests of the home, honoring the sacred rituals that make a home a place of refuge and redemption: cooking, clothing, cleaning, leaving fresh flowers beside graves. Within a postfeminist context, the celebration of domestic ritual seems regressive. But Robinson’s point is to honor and sanctify women’s lives, lives so “ordinary” and “domestic” that they do not often appear in literature. If they do appear, the house is portrayed as a kind of cage of boredom and repression that women must escape if they are to realize their authentic selves. Robinson counters this familiar trope with an unfamiliar one, setting before us women who find their identities in the rituals and repetitions of the home. This role is hardly minor, simply a matter of dirty dishes and clean bed sheets. For Robinson, women are the conduits of culture, the living link to the civilizing traditions of the past and the sustaining force of the family. Like Lila, who attends the graves of Ames’s first wife and child, as well as Jack’s abandoned, nameless child, Glory embodies the traditional work of ritual mourning and remembering the dead that Robinson associates with femininity. Robinson seems to agree with the ancient intuition that memory, Mnemosyne, was a woman, since honoring memory—as opposed to Boughton’s escape into memory—is a specifically female attribute in Home: “The thought that [Glory] could speak to [Jack and Boughton] in their weary sleep with the memory of comfort lifted her spirits a little” (253). In a culture that habitually honors the high professional achievements of women, Robinson directs attention to less conspicuous forms of female achievement—“sustaining a familial peace” (254), for example, cooking chicken and dumplings—which are no more or

H OME

75

less worthy of respect. As Claire Messud wrote, “Robinson has given life and tender individuality to a type—the pious and devoted spinster daughter— and, in so doing, has honored the complexity of someone formerly invisible” (“Witnesses”). Glory’s cooking, however, does not have the old effect of healing. It does recollect former days, so much so that Boughton is transported to a time when his wife was alive, the first signs of dementia: “I was remarking to your mother about it just the other night. We should not allow this teasing” (280). Glory’s “hope of comforting had not had anything to do with the way things really happen in the world” (281). Toward the end, the narrative tips toward Glory again. She considers her relationship to the community around her, to Gilead, to her and her sibling’s exiles and returns. “Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile?” (282). Glory meditates on “that odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all” (282). The condition of destitution and the hope of restoration are often where Robinson’s imagination drifts. It recalls the moment from Housekeeping when Ruth snaps the last “tethers of need.” Destitution, paradoxically, reveals the need for restoration, just as human imperfection, in Calvinism, reveals the perfection of God. The locus of human exceptionalism is not, for Robinson, in our capacity for autonomous rationality. It is rather in that strange, odd capacity for destitution, the experience of homelessness. In the end, the chasm between Jack and Boughton is unbridgeable, opening ever wider as Boughton’s mind fades away. It is too late for Jack to initiate reconciliation. Jack’s shameful failures in Gilead are nicely summed up by himself: “No one will give me a job, and I’m drinking again, and I recently failed to fire up the DeSoto and sail off to perdition. . . . That I am metaphysically responsible for the floweriest little grave in all Gilead” (278). As a metaphor, Boughton’s inability to recognize Jack reinforces their absolute separateness. Jack is no longer Boughton’s “son.” He is “the fellow” who “plays very well” (292). He is “our friend” (292). Not that Jack’s attempt at reconciliation is sincere. We know he is not “persuaded of the truth of Scripture” and that Boughton wouldn’t care if Jack had “tried to understand” (293–94). Once Boughton realizes that Jack is sitting across from him, he is rhetorically evasive, talking about him as if he were not present. The result is that it is as if Jack had never come

76

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

home: “I was hoping I would be able to tell her that Jack had come home” (297). And in a moral sense, Boughton is right; Jack never comes home, never finds refuge or rescue from his lifelong shame. Their relationship ends in a bitter anticlimax. Jack holds out his hand, the gestural equivalent of “sir,” and Boughton withdraws his hand and says, “Tired of it!” (317). Is the “it” Jack, his leave-taking, or the grief he has caused? Whatever “it” is, it has become impersonal, disassociated from Jack’s name and identity. Both men have crossed the limits of sympathy and have found on the other side the condition of being “bone tired,” as Jack says, from wasted desire (317). As for Glory, she will inherit the house, a prospect that “horrifies” her (298). She says, “This is a nightmare I’ve had a hundred times. The one where all the rest of you go off and begin your lives and I am left in an empty house full of ridiculous furniture and unreadable books, waiting for someone to notice I’m missing and come back for me. And nobody does” (298). Since the house continues to feel like “exile” to Glory, her fear is of abandonment and loneliness. If her siblings have “lives,” she will have death. But it is more than living in the house—it is the responsibility of keeping it the Boughton house, preserving the continuity of its appearance and traditions. In a sense, she is being forced to preserve the family’s identity, since the space of the house contains the memory of the Boughton clan: “She would stay in Gilead and keep the house as it was, the grounds as they were, more or less weedy, more or less unpruned, but essentially the same” (300). Sameness is identity. To introduce difference, whether in the form of furniture or food, would be to destroy the family’s sense of self. Glory will maintain home, be that source of familial help and rescue. She tells Jack before he leaves, “Now you know where to come when you need help” (316). Della arrives two days after Jack leaves, not quite an instance of tragic lateness, since Gilead’s attitudes toward race make it totally unsuitable for Jack and Della. Glory is particularly attuned to Jack’s son, Robert, who appears eager to be reunited with his father, another generation of the same pattern of absent fathers and lost children. There is nothing Glory can do but exchange a few names and numbers and watch Della and Robert drive away. Peaceful old Gilead is no place to be for African Americans, and their presence reveals the town’s violent racism. Robinson devastatingly concludes her theme of race with the line “They had to hurry, to escape the dangers of nightfall” (323). Meanwhile, Glory sits on the porch steps, the space of welcoming and hospitality, and considers the effects of Jack’s final abandonment, his last vanishing into absence. His son will wonder about him, perhaps even seek him out when he gets old enough. Glory imagines him coming to Gilead and, seeing the old house in just the way Jack had described—“Yes, the barn is still there, yes, the

H OME

77

lilacs, even the pot of petunias”—his son will realize, “This was my father’s house” (325). That is, Robert will know he had a father and a history. By maintaining the house, with its Boughton identity, Glory will have preserved Jack’s presence for his son, thus redeeming the harm of Jack’s abandonment. By welcoming an African American child, she will also redeem her community’s unjust and violent racism. As Messud wrote, “She will stay to provide the continuity of family, to provide a home in the world for any Boughton seeking rest.” Glory says, “He cannot know that my whole life has come down to this moment” (325). Of course, this moment is imaginary, a distant possibility kept beyond the book’s narrative time. The inward attitude of hope, manifested within the imagination, is what Robinson ultimately wants to affirm, rather than any material outcome.6 Where the reader might see a domestic catastrophe, Glory persists in the hope that everything will be healed, that all suffering and abandonment and loss lead ultimately to peace, joy, refuge, home. The last sentence—“The Lord is wonderful” (325)—might, in any other novel, feel sentimental. But Glory’s faith is beautifully earned, since it has been thoroughly tested by the brokenness and despair of Home.

CHAPTER 5

Lila Lila is Robinson’s third inquiry into the fictional world of Gilead, Iowa, and perhaps another sign that she has found her literary home, her very own Yoknapatawpha County. This time Jack Boughton is on the periphery, mentioned only toward the end as a notable absence. When Ames says every last Boughton is praying for the child, Lila corrects him: “Except the one” (247). Lila turns away from the father-son dynamics of Gilead and Home to illuminate a minor character through a subjective, inward-looking backstory. The previous Gilead novels give us only a glimpse of Lila, though they offer some clues about her identity. In Gilead, Ames loves her but knows very little about her. She simply appears one day outside church, and his love is instantaneous, and they are married shortly thereafter. Lila does say, “I haven’t lied in years” (199), and she goes on to tell Jack, “I was in St. Louis once. Some of us went there looking for work. . . . No luck” (200). This is a lie, of course, but understandable in light of the work she did find in St. Louis. Home offers further hints of Lila’s worldly past; she plucks her eyebrows and knows little about theology. Taken together, Gilead and Home paint a slight yet intriguing portrait of a mysterious outsider, one who exists on the margins of the character’s and the reader’s perception. Lila brings her into center focus, charging her character with complexity and intrigue. Like the other Gilead novels, Lila is written with a simplicity of language that does not eschew humor or lyricism. It maintains the same degree of moral seriousness, the orientation toward inward experience, and the existential and theological questioning. If the Gilead novels are a “trilogy,” as some have called them, their unity is based not on plot sequence but on overlapping patterns of plot, style, character, and ideas.

LIL A

79

Lila was well received by critics. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In general, the nation’s book reviews were positive. “Gorgeous writing, an absolutely beautiful book,” wrote David L. Ulin for the Los Angeles Times. “This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Robinson, a novelist who can make the most quotidian moments epic because of her ability to peel back the surfaces of ordinary lives . . . [a] profound and deeply rendered novel” (“Grace Shines Through”). Other reviews were mixed, such as Michiko Kakutani’s for the New York Times; she called it “flawed but poignant,” while praising its “lovely, angular prose that has the high loneliness of an old bluegrass tune” (“Woman Caught”). There was a note of anxiety among reviewers about how nonreligious readers should approach such a religious book. Diane Johnson wrote, “It’s courageous of Robinson to write about faith at a time when associations with religion are so often negative and violent” (“Moral of the Story”). Cathleen Schine for the New York Review of Books suggested that “Robinson is able to write so powerfully and engagingly about religion, even for the nonreligious, even now when the discussion of religion has become so debased by fiery fundamentalism on the one hand and fiery atheism on the other, because she writes about questions rather than answers (“Triumph of Love”). Writing for Harper’s, Meghan O’Rourke urged her secular readership to find the merits of Robinson’s faith, which is “bound up in a love of the actual, of the sheer sensuality of existence and its primal patterns, in a way that many of us can enter or understand even if we are not believing Christians” (“Everyday Grace”). A Return to Origins

Lila is a challenge to the idea that Robinson’s career is divided between the early work of Housekeeping and the later Gilead novels. Certainly Lila takes place within the world of Gilead and Home, and many of its moods and moments will be familiar to readers of the Gilead novels. There are moments that could fit into any of the three Gilead novels, as when Ames “noticed a bush glimmering with fireflies. He stepped into the ditch and touched it, and fireflies rose out of it in a cloud of light” (107). Its greatest literary debt, however, is to Robinson’s first novel. To a remarkable degree, Lila serves as a continuation of literary material produced thirty-four years earlier. From the perspective of Robinson’s career, it represents a return to origins, lending the complete works a quality of roundness and continuity. After Gilead’s exploration of the father-son relation and Home’s tripartite perspective, Lila returns to the female-centered world of Housekeeping. Ideas

80

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

of orphanhood and adoption are central, and both novels also share an emphasis on female community and the surrogate mother-daughter bond. Ruth and Lila are shy, lonely orphans who find comfort in the maternal figures of Sylvie and Doll. When Sylvie leaves Ruth alone on the shore of the lake, she returns and “opened her coat and closed it around me, bundling me awkwardly against her so that my cheekbone pillowed on her breastbone” (160). When Doll leaves Lila for four days, she returns and puts “her arms around her, saying, ‘Oh, child, I thought I never was going to find you!’” (53). Housekeeping and Lila both explore the dynamics of absence and presence, abandonment and rescue. Another connection is the centrality of resurrection. Resurrection imagery is strongest in Lila and Housekeeping, since both share the circumstance of orphaned women dreaming of reunion with their mother figures. Ruth thinks, “Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection,” dreaming of her restored mother who “lifted our hair from our napes with her cold hands and gave us strawberries from her purse” (96). Lila imagines a reunion with Doll: “She would tell her, I have married a fine old man. I live in a good house that has plenty of room in it for you, too. You can stay forever, and we’ll work in the garden together. And Doll would laugh and squeeze her hand—‘It come out right, after all! I ain’t dead and you ain’t in some shack just struggling to get by! I had to leave for a time, but I’m back now, I’m resurrected! I been looking everywhere for you, child!’” (96). James Wood wrote, “Behind all of Robinson’s work lies an abiding interest in the question of heavenly restoration” (“Homecoming”). While that is true, it is Lila and Housekeeping that most urgently and overtly explore the implications of heaven. On a granular level, the novels share a network of recurrent images and grammatical structures. There are the lonesome images of standing outside lighted houses. In Housekeeping, Ruth and Lucille “walked the blocks from the lake to our grandmother’s house, jealous to the point of rage of those who were already accustomed to the light and the somnolent warmth of the houses we passed” (35). Lila takes an evening walk, “because then you can see into people’s houses” (196). There are the catastrophic images of houses collapsing. Ruth thinks, “I had heard of a family who lived some distance to the north of the lake who had been snowed in up to the eaves and whose house began to fall” (155). And Lila assures Ames that “Boughton’s roof won’t fall because it’s stronger than you think it is” (237). The novels also share a penchant for sentences that signal the work of imagination or speculation, often beginning with the word “Say,” such as Lila’s, “Say she walked into the water . . .” (67). Many more examples could be added to this list, but they would only serve to advance the same point, namely that Lila, on the micro and the macro levels, reveals Robinson’s ongoing artistic and psychological involvement with Housekeeping.

LIL A

81

The Mind of Lila

The decision to place Lila at the center of the novel has implications for point of view, narrative structure, and characterization. The difficulties involved in choosing a minimally educated central consciousness are not unlike those that preceded Faulkner’s decision to begin The Sound and the Fury with the “idiot” Benjy. In her forward to that novel, Robinson praises Faulkner’s decision to test “his powers against difficulties of his own choice and creation” (Forward ix). “At the very outset,” she wrote, “Faulkner would seem to have deprived himself of elements of narrative that are most essential to it” (Forward ix). The same might be said of choosing Lila. Rather than writing in the first-person voice of the precocious Ruth, Robinson chose to write Lila in the third person, focalized through a character that has one year of formal education. The critic Michiko Kakutani addressed this problem in her review: The novel is powerful and deeply affecting, but also hobbled, at times, by the author’s curious decision to tell the story in the third person, robbing it of the emotional immediacy of Gilead and resulting in occasional passages that seem to condescend to Lila, as an uneducated, almost feral creature. Perhaps Ms. Robinson decided to tell the story in the third person out of concern that such an unlettered girl might not have the language for communicating her state of mind, or perhaps it was difficult to find a voice for Lila that could comfortably address the big existential questions of life while remaining authentic and plain-spoken. (“Woman Caught”) Kakutani is right to address this as an important formal problem, one she feels Robinson did not adequately solve. However, it is difficult to imagine Lila in the first person, simply because an entire novel in Lila’s speech, with its irregular English, would result in the unmistakable perception that Robinson’s attitude toward her character was disrespectful or condescending. Since Robinson’s fiction is intended to lend dignity and respect to ordinary individuals, writing in the first person and risking the appearance of an ironic posture would contradict her purpose. Whether the decision to write in the close third person avoided the effect of condescension is debatable. It seems intended to offer a flexible and respectful presentation of Lila’s speech and state of mind. In terms of structure, Lila plays variations on the Christian spiritual autobiography. Typically, this tradition imagines a four-part structure to human life: the fall into bondage, redemption from bondage, the exodus years of wandering and temptation, and the discovery of the Promised Land. On a broad scale, the novel does conform to this structure. Lila is orphaned and lives in a hostile boardinghouse, she is rescued by Doll, lives as an itinerant worker and prostitute, and finds rest in her marriage to Ames.

82

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

However, a closer examination of the structure reveals Robinson’s hesitation to fully adopt the conventions of spiritual autobiography. One point of contention is that Lila’s lived, felt experience is much messier than the traditional structure allows. Robinson wants to show that grace has been present throughout Lila’s life, not just at the threshold events. Instead of neat, clean divisions between phases of life, usually signaled by public ritual, Lila posits complexity and ambiguity at every moment. Is Doll’s rescue really a kidnapping? Has Lila come home with Ames, or, since he will soon die, is this just another phase in her wandering? Since she is baptized twice and un-baptized once, is Lila “saved”? In raising these questions, Robinson rejects the certainty and assurance that come from the Christian autobiographical tradition, while working within its ordering of experience. The other aspect of structure worth noting is the nonlinear presentation of narrative material. While there is a progressive trajectory—it begins with Lila as a child and ends with her as adult—the events of her life are not presented in a sequential fashion. Robinson is less interested in events than in the meaning of events, their implications and resonances. In other words, Lila foregrounds the operations of consciousness, how the mind makes meaning from memory. This effect is achieved, formally, through the absence of chapter breaks, which suggests the presence of one continuous consciousness. The novel’s attention to the felt experience of time and memory permits a fluid exchange between past and present. Within the Robinson corpus, Lila most often resembles Gilead’s structure in its tendency toward looping, recursive forms. By foregrounding consciousness, Lila advances a psychological view of character formation. The vast majority of Lila represents thinking, and the evolution of Lila’s consciousness is emphasized over any action she takes. She is often found in poses of contemplation: “She sat in the corner on the floor and hugged her knees to her chest and closed her eyes and thought” (108). Since Lila has lived in the present for most of her life, once she is married to Ames she finally has the leisure to meditate and reflect. She tells him, “I guess I have to do that. Sort things out a little. Seems like I don’t even know myself, everything’s so different” (188). The path to self-knowledge and to feeling at home with Ames is through acts of consciousness: memory, imagination, meditation, contemplation, and speculation. The different voices of authority in Lila’s mind—Doll’s voice, Ames’s, the Bible’s, and her own voice—must be internally judged and assessed in order for her to form a coherent self. This privileging of the ruminating mind over the direct presentation of event is perhaps most indebted to Henry James. There are many scenes of a solitary Lila thinking about her past that recall the famous chapter in A Portrait of a Lady where Isabel Archer recounts the events leading to her marriage to Osmond.

LIL A

83

In other moments, memory gives way to imagination and fantasy. Lila continues to entertain fantasies of stealing a child, a compulsion born of a desire to re-enact Doll’s rescue: “That was when Lila started thinking she might just steal a child for herself. Nobody would mind” (201). Other fantasies involve the desire to merge with another mind: “She pretended [Ames] knew some of her thoughts, only some of them, the ones she would like to show him” (45). There are also darker currents, dreams of oblivion and suicide: “No dreams and no thinking. No Gilead” (48); “She thought sometimes that if she decided to do it she could cut off her hand” (83). Robinson’s ambition is to show how an “ordinary” person like Lila, who on the surface appears rough and uneducated, actually experiences the same remarkably complex and contradictory operations of consciousness that all human beings experience. From Suffering to Grace

Lila begins in violence and deprivation. A child sits alone on a boardinghouse stoop, a space between the hostile “they” inside and the darkness beyond. The voices we hear are anonymous and disembodied, expressing exclusion and dehumanized hate: “Shut that thing up or I’ll do it!” (3). These truly hellish conditions leave the reader little room to believe that Lila would be better off staying. Whatever ethical questions surround Doll’s taking Lila, whether it is kidnapping or merciful rescue, Robinson stresses that Lila receives Doll’s act as a deliverance, the first instance in her life of care, love, companionship, belonging, warmth: “Doll may have been the loneliest woman in the world, and she was the loneliest child, and there they were, the two of them together, keeping each other warm in the rain” (5). Doll’s rescue of Lila and the care she subsequently provides are the great salvific force in Lila’s experience. It is through their mystical communion that Lila is brought from suffering to solace. After she is married to Ames, “she just imagined how all of it would seem to Doll—a very good life, a comfortable life that she had because Doll had stolen her, and had taken care of her all those years. She lived for Doll to see” (97). Doll is the primary figure of Lila’s past. Her face, her voice, her actions, and her destiny are primary concerns for Lila, who feels the need to arrive at the significance of the relationship as well as to unravel the moral complexities Doll represents, especially in light of her new life with Ames. Doll is without a past or a people. She has no job, no possessions, and no home. Her speech is brittle and terse. “Don’t matter” is a repeated phrase. Lila will come to wonder what, if anything, matters, given Doll’s insistence on the sufficiency of survival. Though obsolete, the Oxford English Dictionary does include a definition of “doll” that means “To warm moderately; to make tepid; to mull.” This maternal aspect of Doll finds its imagery in her body and especially the shawl. The

84

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

shawl is a kind of sacrament to Lila, a visible reminder of Doll’s scandalous rescue. Doll is also “father,” protective of Lila to the point of violence. Once the shawl is burned away by Duane, Doll’s knife remains—and will remain with Lila as a totem of shame and pride. Doll takes her into the woods, then to an “old woman,” who nurses Lila back to health. At this point, Lila is a sick, traumatized girl, whose experienced absence of maternal care has resulted in the compulsively self-destructive habit of biting her hand. In a scene of initiation into her life with Doll, Lila’s head is washed and her hair is cut, an anticipation of her later baptism (7). From this “old woman” Lila acquires her name, initiating what will be a major theme: names and naming. The old woman says, “I been thinking about ‘Lila.’ I had a sister Lila. Give her a pretty name, maybe she could turn out pretty” (10). Though Lila cannot see herself in the category of “pretty”—“ugly,” a word frequently associated with Doll, is closer to Lila’s self-conception—the name sticks. The mystery of Lila’s “real” name stands for the larger mystery of her origins. She knows neither her birth date nor her parents. She experiences her origins as if she had been created ex nihilio, like the universe of Genesis. As a character, Lila stands in the tradition of the American orphan. Like Huckleberry Finn, she shares some of the major characteristics of the orphan figure: the problematic paternity, the minimal formal education, and the ethic, after Doll, of self-reliance. She is haunted by the mystery of her origins: “No point wondering about that cabin Doll took her from, or who it was that had kept her alive when she was newborn and helpless” (36). Her historical burden is not past ancestors but the absence of an intelligible past. Perhaps Lila’s difference from other orphan figures lies in her positive attitude toward civilization. Huckleberry Finn seeks to resist the “sivilizing” forces of education and domesticity. There is no place for him within society, so he famously “lights out for the territory.” Lila will take the opposite approach, becoming a participant in society through reading, writing, and, eventually, marriage and motherhood. She will undergo several name changes, from Lila to Lila Dahl to Rosie to Lila Ames. One of the implications of this theme is that Robinson imagines names, therefore language, to be a human creation, so that the name itself, or signifier, is essentially arbitrary. Schine’s review comments on this theme: “The arbitrary nature of words, of names, when compared to the essential shuffling along of daily life is an uneasy tremor that runs through the novel” (“A Triumph of Love”). The anxiety or “uneasy tremor” that Schine perceived may reside in her attitude toward the arbitrary rather than the novel’s. The arbitrary, in other contexts, has a very positive connotation for Robinson. She usually associates arbitrariness with the concept of freedom. In her discussion of Jonathan Edwards, she makes this connection in theological terms.

LIL A

85

She wrote of Edwards’s view of original sin: “He is arguing that there is no point in dismissively describing the ascription of Adam’s sin to humankind as arbitrary when the whole of being is arbitrary, always a fresh assertion of God’s will in creation. Within the bounds of His own great constancy, God is free” (“Jonathan Edwards in a New Light”). In her other writings, Robinson lacks the anxiety around the arbitrariness of signifiers that plagues other contemporary authors. There is a calm acceptance that humans created language and are free to change and refine it. Whether it is language or being itself, the arbitrary is where Robinson locates the preserve of liberty. Doll’s rescue—or kidnapping—of Lila moves the girl from the unnamed house to the road and toward her years as a migrant worker in the company of Doane. Doane’s party has many meanings for Lila. It introduces her to her first family, and it results in her first friendship, with Mellie. It is also her first impression of marriage, which is emphasized in the initial naming of the group: “Of course it wasn’t just Doane. There was Arthur with his two boys, and Em and her daughter Mellie, and there was Marcelle. She was Doane’s wife. They were a married couple” (10). Lila is Robinson’s most extensive representation of white rural poverty, though by no means her first. The British poor figure prominently in Mother Country, and poverty is a constant concern across her nonfiction. The themes of race are absent from Lila, an important difference between it and the other Gilead novels. This emphasis on white identity is best reflected by the figure of Mellie, who is described as “a skinny, freckled child with her white brows drawn together and her raggedy white hair flying” (38, my italics). Mellie’s blinding whiteness might stand as a metaphor for Lila’s focus on a specifically white experience of rural poverty. The novel’s historical setting offers Robinson a chance to evoke America’s rural past. The names of food and flowers are specific and evocative: blackstrap molasses, timothy, pone, fatback, “hot fry bread with sugar on it” (64). In many sentences, she seeks to capture the toil and repetition of migrant work: “They got work once pulling the tassels off corn, miserable work at best, out in the field with all the dust and heat and the grasshoppers getting on you and the itchiness of the silk and the edges of the corn leaves rasping against you” (111). Images of dust and dirt not only mark Lila’s shame as an undereducated “field hand” but also serve as an index of historical setting, tracing the 1930’s “dusters” that left “grit drifting around everywhere” (108). In the scenes of her wandering youth, Lila participates in the tropes and traditions of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and other Dust Bowl narratives. It is only after living through the crisis of the Great Depression that Lila acquires a name for it: She “heard about the Crash years after it happened, and

86

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

she had no idea what it was even after she knew what to call it. But it did seem like they gave it the right name. It was like one of those storms you might even sleep through, and then when you wake up in the morning everything’s ruined, or gone” (15). The crisis of Lila’s setting is economic in nature, as it imagines shortages of work, housing, and food on a particular section of society, namely rural, white farm labor. Doane’s community of migrant workers has its basis in economic deprivation and necessity. It is a group forged out of the need to eat, drink, and remain clothed, sheltered, and protected. Unlike Lila‘s depiction of familial relationships, such bonds are fragile and subject to breakdown when economic circumstances change, as they do after the “Crash” and the “hard times” of the 1930s. Membership within the community is contingent upon bodily integrity. Without a healthy body capable of hard labor, it is impossible to share in the collective. Doane tells Arthur’s boys, “Someday you’re going to hurt yourselves so bad you won’t be good for nothing, and then we’ll just leave you lying alongside the road” (55–56). Since there is no social security of any kind, a “hurt” body means abandonment and death. It is this Darwinian world of utility and necessity that Robinson contrasts with the graciousness and civility of town and family life. Within Doane’s company, Lila finds herself on the margins, as she does in each successive community until she reaches the house of John Ames. She is on the margins because of her age, her gender, and her limited capacity to work, but perhaps most of all she is ostracized because of her association with Doll. Together, Doll and Lila form a warm pair within the colder, more impersonal bonds that connect them with Doane: “Marcelle called [Doll and Lila] the cow and her calf” (52). For one year, Doll and Lila spend time in Tammany, Iowa, the period of Lila’s brief education and her first experience of “a real house” (41). Tammany represents Lila’s first experience of civilization and its two graces: education and material comfort: “Lila liked school. She liked sheets and pillowcases” (41). When Doll and Lila return to Doane’s group, they are never fully accepted: “Things were always different after their year in Tammany. It was as if they had been disloyal and were never quite forgiven for it” (42). It is one of the first symptoms of breakdown within the community. The relationship between Doll and Lila also enters into crisis. “Once, Doll went off by herself for a few days, after things started getting bad. When they were looking anywhere for work they must have wandered into a place Doll knew from before, and she had gone off on some business of her own and left Lila behind with the others” (51). In taking Lila, Doll has set off a violent “grudge” in those anonymous personages who want to take Lila back. Doll is placed in the ironic situation of having to abandon Lila in order to rescue her.

LIL A

87

The four-day abandonment is an important episode, for it reveals to Lila the inconstancy and precariousness of Doll’s concern: “So after that she couldn’t love Doll like she did all those years” (69). The lesson of Doll’s abandonment is simple: “Can’t trust nobody” (69). It is the moral she will carry over into all of her future relationships, creating her inability to trust or be vulnerable. The episode also foreshadows Lila’s entrance into Gilead, as she is left on the church steps and is cared for by the town’s preacher. The church stands as a threshold institution, situated on the border of nature and civilization, a primary source of the warmth the novel associates with life in community. Not every character is equally enthusiastic about church: “Doane said they did things in churches to make people believe what they told them” (33). For the migrant community, the camp meeting scenes are nothing more than an economic opportunity, a chance to sell apples to the attendees. It is a rhetorically significant decision by Robinson to place her readers in the perspective of characters that view religion as a hoax and a scam. They help establish a connection to the attitudes of her secular readership, attitudes she would like to challenge. In dramatizing Lila’s positive response to the revival tent meeting, Robinson seeks to provoke her secular audience into an appreciation of a much-lambasted American religious tradition. One need look no further than Mark Twain’s camp meeting in The Adven­ tures of Huckleberry Finn to find a rich strain of skepticism toward American popular religion. It is not that Twain is wrong in finding fraud and injustice there. Ames, too, acknowledges the darker currents within the American church. Lila says, “I knew a man once who said churches tell folks things like that to scare them. . . . So they’ll give them their money” (99). Ames replies, “That happens” (99). But it is not the whole story. At the camp meeting, Lila experiences something that contradicts the skeptical voices around her. She “thought those lamps in the tress were the most beautiful things she had ever seen, and that fiddle was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard, and it didn’t seem right that Doane, who said he hated it all, should send them away while he stayed behind” (66). It is the aesthetic appreciation of liturgy and ritual that draws Lila toward the church. And so she must decide whether to trust her perceptions or the perceptions of another. With the representation of the revival tent meeting, Lila exhibits a more inclusive representation of American religion than the other Gilead novels. The Presbyterian and Congressional strains remain the most prominent, but in Lila they exist in relation to other denominations, such as “the Methodists and the Catholics and the Lutherans” (228). When Lila hitches a ride back to Iowa, it is with a Nazarene. In St. Louis, there are nuns who care for orphans. Other characters have no religious affiliation at all, including Doll. Though Lila does

88

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

suggest the diversity of American religious institutions and identities, its underlying worldview is largely Protestant. The Protestant emphasis is not difficult to locate. There are many allusions to the Bible, and the spiritual emphasis of Protestantism is reflected in Lila’s journey, which is largely an inward one, a matter of assent to a belief. As Hungerford argues, Robinson’s fiction “enacts a Protestant understanding of inner life” (Postmodern Belief 114). Struggling with the idea of resurrection, Lila comes to an acceptance at the end: “In eternity people’s lives could be altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things either. So she decided that she should believe in it, or that she believed in it already” (259, my emphasis). Then there is the celebration of marriage, a historically distinctive Protestant attitude, emerging against the Roman Catholic ideal of celibacy. John Milton called “wedded Love” a “perpetual fountain of domestic sweets,”1 and Lila holds a similarly lofty view. In smaller ways, Lila includes images that seem in tension with the Protestant ethos, namely the traditionally Catholic emphasis on the body. With the conception of a child, the narrator captures the experience of Lila’s changing body: “Now motherhood was forcing itself into Lila’s breasts. They ached with it” (175). There are also glancing moments of physical intimacy between Ames and Lila, which amounts to new terrain for Robinson. The critic Michelle Orange, writing for Book Forum, took up this issue of sex and corporality: “Ames and Lila ‘comfort’ each other, in two sentences that form Lila and its predecessors’ almost impossibly discreet reckoning with sexuality, a considerable feat given Lila’s apparent history as a prostitute, which Ames absorbs without question. In writing otherwise vigorously involved in the nature of the physical world, specifically the connection of its wonders to a divine source, such effacement grows conspicuous. It also creates a rare gap in the author’s endeavor to make numinous in her characters the whole of life” (“Spouse of the Holy”). It is an important gap, even if it may be explained rhetorically as Robinson’s attempt to mark her text as different from the great variety of texts that involve or directly represent sexuality. While Lila’s moments of physical intimacy are quite tame—“lying against the warmth of him” (102)—they do announce the importance of the body, a value less present in the other Gilead novels. Lila and Doll share an almost bodily connection, dramatized in the scene when Doll returns from the knife fight: “When Doll came to her finally, white and trembling, it took Lila a lot of washing even to find her wounds, because she had been hiding all day until it was dark, with her dress loosened so the blood wouldn’t dry the cloth onto the cuts. And the blood wasn’t all hers, either” (136). The blood of Doll and a mysterious man—Lila’s father? uncle? cousin?—comes to symbolize the guilt Lila feels for her association with Doll,

LIL A

89

a guilt that harks back to her remembered origins and cannot be contained, for “the more she tried to wash the blood away, the more of it there was” (174). This sense of guilt comes to be associated with a single object, the knife, toward which Lila negotiates a complex set of meanings. The knife represents Doll’s care and attention as she cuts “Lila’s hair with that knife” (156). It is “Doll’s patience and her dread,” which “were all worked in to that blade” (133). It is associated with evil and temptation: “The knife was like a snake, that it was in its nature to do harm if you trifled with it” (239). Ultimately, it is Lila’s identity: “The knife was the difference between her and anybody else in the world” (239). Lila’s decision about the ultimate fate of the knife, whether to possess or dispossess it, has existential and relational stakes. The questions of who she is and how she relates to Doll are resolved through Lila’s decision about the knife. Once Doll is captured by the sheriff for the murder of Lila’s “father or uncle,” the mystery of Doll’s identity becomes central. Her face has a distinctive mark that makes her both instantly recognizable and at the same time socially illegible: “People would try to figure out that mark. A wound, maybe a scar?” (125). Later on, Lila rehearses her memory of the scar’s origin: “A girl just as crazy as you’re getting to be heated up an iron skillet as hot as she could make it, and then when I come in the kitchen she hit me with it” (199). The detail about the “girl” is suggestive. It may be that Doll acquired her name and her scar while working as a prostitute with other “girls.” This may be the reason Doll insists that Lila never become one. While Doll awaits trial, Robinson builds a number of associations between her and Native Americans. She wrote, “People came to look at her and she looked at them, calm as could be, a proud old savage, that mark like a bloodstain she chose not to wash away” (137, my italics). Doll is “bundled up in an Indian blanket” (179), “proud in her captivity like some old Indian chief” (182). This Native American presence recalls Housekeeping and the “old Indian woman” (171) whose otherness solidifies the bond between Sylvie and Ruth. In Lila, too, the language of Native American identity is shorthand for otherness and inscrutability. It seems that, on one level, Robinson is carrying forward the tradition of white authors who other Native Americans. The complicating detail is that Doll is not associated with “savages” until she is on public display. Depending on how one interprets the point of view, it may be that the Native American association is part of the spectator’s consciousness, a racist fiction shared by the crowd, not by Lila or the author of Lila. In a scene that recalls Peter’s denial of Christ, Doll tells Lila, “I don’t know you” (137). The words are devastating, but their intention may be protective, as Doll knows that Lila’s survival depends on their relationship ending. Doll will not wait for trial, execution, or burial: “She walked away one evening after

90

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

supper, leaning on the cane they had given her, and lost herself in the woods or in the cornfields” (138). Her choice to disappear rather than die allows Robinson to continue to explore the dynamics of absence and presence and of the imagined and actual. Like the bodies that fall into the lake in Housekeeping, Doll’s lost body means that the relation between Lila and Doll will have no closure, no satisfaction derived from the ritualized ending that funerals supply. Doll’s absent body increases her presence for Lila, so much so that, for most of the novel, Doll’s imagined presence outweighs the actual presence of John Ames. Lila is haunted by the dream of finding her: “The hair as stiff as the cloth of the dress, all of it weightless and crumpled in on itself, the way anything is that lies out in a field through a winter. . . . She was afraid to see the face, and the face was hidden, from shame at just lying out in a field like that, or because it was turned away from her, ‘I don’t know you.’” (139). Once married to Ames, Lila wants both to find and to leave Doll. Finding her would be a restoration; leaving her would mean that Doll could continue to hide from judgment, safely hidden from “that Almighty of yours” (139). In the case of Lila’s father or whoever it is Doll has killed, the open casket is not a source of revelation. The body in the wooden box only increases the mystery of Lila’s origins: “She could only imagine him white as he was in that box, whiter at the bone of his nose” (203). The whiteness of her “father” serves as a tabula rasa upon which Lila can project identity and meaning, but she will never know its true essence. People do not get buried in Lila, and even if they do, their identity is not disclosed. She thinks, “What might [her father] have said to her, to Lila?” (203). She will never know. What remains is memory, the medium through which the dead exert their force on the living. Without the protection and maternal care of Doll and given the absence of viable field work, Lila sets off for St. Louis. There her name changes to Rosie and she works as a prostitute and eventually a cleaner of a brothel run by a madam simply called “Mrs.” Robinson locates the significance of St. Louis in a single object: the credenza. It is perhaps the word itself, its Italian roots and its connotations of luxury, that signifies the shabby opulence of the St. Louis whorehouse. It’s a “respectable house,” attended by “gentlemen,” and “girls were supposed to be ladies” (189). The credenza is associated with “a coffin” (183), since Mrs. locks away the girls’ belongings in it, effectively erasing their past. Lila turns over her knife to Mrs., a burial of herself as Lila Dahl and of her life with Doll. If membership in Doane’s community is based on economic necessity, Lila’s new identity as Rosie is built upon a style of gendered performance. Robinson

LIL A

91

strongly suggests the artifice and commodification involved in becoming a “lady”: “Sal and Tilly showed her how to tie her hair up in rags so it would curl. They rinsed it with henna first. Mrs. charged her a quarter for the henna and five dollars for a pair of pink high-heeled shoes that were half worn out but she’d never find any cheaper” (190–91). The most important identity category within the brothel is “pretty”: “In St. Louis they had made a sort of game of it, trying to pretty her up. Everything looked wrong. Just pretend you’re pretty” (34). Lila cannot do this, for “she knew what she looked like, with her big hands and her rangy arms, and her face that had been burned a hundred times, more, and her scorched hair and her eyes the sun had faded” (34). In a house where value and worth are connected to an aesthetic standard of “prettiness,” Lila’s inability to conform places her on the margins. It is not the last time Lila is unsuccessful in her performance of an identity imposed from without. The scenes in St. Louis are notable for being Robinson’s first representation of urban space. She appears to side with the Romantics’ distrust of the city, associating it with moral decay, isolation, and frustrated desire. Lila’s “work” as a prostitute is degrading and exploitative. She is never lonelier than when in St. Louis, telling her unborn child that “there was a time when I just quit talking. . . . I’d go a day, a week, and never say a word, except to myself. To Doll sometimes” (207–8). She falls for a cad named Mack who is manipulative and never returns her affection. The city is imagined in almost exclusively negative terms, offering Lila little in the way of redemption or hope. The one exception is cinema. One of the most important meanings of urban space is the experience of mass visual culture. A number of films are directly alluded to: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Double Indemnity, To Have and Have Not, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lila is more engaged with developments in popular visual culture than any other Robinson novel, so it is important to account for its significance. Robinson divides her engagement with film into movies and moviegoing. Moviegoing, the experience of watching film, is as important as the content of the films themselves. The novel is interested in the question of why people sit in the dark together and watch a flashing screen. It has to do with community and the pleasures of perception: When she was sitting there in the dark, sometimes, when it was crowded, with somebody’s arm or knee brushing against hers, she was dreaming some stranger’s dream, everybody in there dreaming one dream together. Or they were ghosts all gathered in the dark, watching the world, seeing all the scheming and the murder and having no word to say about it, weeping

92

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

with the orphans and having nothing to do for them. And then the dancing and the kissing, and all of the ghosts floating there just inches from a huge, beautiful face, to see the joy rise up in it. Like sparrows watching the sun come up, all of them happy at once, no matter that the light had nothing much to do with them. (209) It may be that Lila finds a degree of escape from the drudgery of her work as a cleaning woman. In another moment she thinks, “She had told herself that she went to the movies just to see people living, because she was curious” (210). Because she is dead in life, the movies offer an escape into a simulation of life. Lila also finds intimacy and belonging in the spectral company of moviegoers. The distance of “watching the world” allows for an experience of pleasure in human joy and tragedy that is impossible outside the aesthetic experience. The tone is positive, even ecstatic. Nevertheless, it remains a “ghostly” experience, disembodied and unreal, a “dream.” This passage suggests the unbridgeable gap between the movies and the real. In other moments, the content of specific films is used to enrich imagery, themes, and motifs, much as Gilead used baseball. A good example is the use of The Picture of Dorian Gray: She’d be thinking how strange it was in that movie Dorian Gray that when the man’s picture turned ugly from all his wickedness, the pants in the picture turned baggy, too. . . . Half the people in the movie were dressed like Fred Astaire and the other half looked like they’d been sleeping in their clothes their whole lives. When that man goes off into the poor part of the city, he turns evil and ends up looking like he’s been sleeping in his clothes. The more he goes there, the worse he is. Warts all over him. . . . She couldn’t remember if the man died in his good clothes and only the rest of him was ugly. Him lying there and the others clucking their tongues. Too bad he happened to have a knife to kill himself with. Then he was too dead to use it to make them stop staring, and that was a shame. (211) This meditation on Dorian Gray touches upon some of the core ideas of Lila: class, deprivation, the shame of poverty, the motif of changing clothes, the knife imagery, and the corrupting force of the city. The significance of film for Lila is not only as a means of gaining community and pleasure but also as a path toward self-reflection and self-knowledge. Even if film helps offset the negatives of the city, Lila soon becomes disenchanted. The old life, which she closely associates with nature, begins to call her back to Iowa: “She was beginning to think now and then about sunshine, and the smell of the air. Trees” (198). After hitching a ride with a chatty

LIL A

93

Nazarene, Lila finds herself wandering rural Iowa, eventually coming upon an abandoned shack outside Gilead. There she will stay, but not for long, “only until the weather turned cold” (27). The shack is the origin for the main plotline, which is the painful integration of Lila into the town of Gilead. She begins in a space of isolation, estrangement, and coldness. She desires, however begrudgingly, community, intimacy, warmth. Through John Ames, Gilead comes to relieve her gnawing sense of isolation: “It was probably loneliness that made her walk the mile or so into town every few days just to look at the houses and stores and the flower gardens” (27). In forming relationships with the townspeople, Lila draws upon her experience in Doane’s company and in the brothel, the communities that solidified her belief that all relationships are rooted in selfish economic exchange. When Lila receives more payment than she earned, she feels she has to correct the balance in order to maintain absolute reciprocity: “They gave her too much for the work she’d done. It didn’t set right” (51). Lila experiences generosity as “wrong,” something that needs to be “righted.” For Robinson, community life is the source of liberality and selflessness. It is in Gilead that the Darwinian logic of selfishness and survival are checked against altruism and charity. When Ames hands Lila an umbrella, she responds, “Don’t need it” (61). “Of course you don’t,” Ames replies. “Take it anyway” (61). It is this excess of goodness beyond the necessary that Lila must confront and gradually accept. The encounter with Gilead also solidifies Lila’s character as a kind of rustic innocent, one who stands outside linguistic, social, and temporal norms. Lila’s outsider status allows Robinson to present ordinary realities such as language and social conduct as strange, arbitrary, and beautiful. Sometimes this has a humorous effect: “[Ames] always helped her with her chair, which amounted to pulling it out from the table a little, then pushing it in again after she sat down. Who in the world could need help with a chair?” (18). Robinson clearly has great affection for the courtesies of civil life, and it is through Lila that she can make the most common gestures seem as strange and wondrous as they were in childhood. Lila comes to Gilead with an almost pagan conception of time, one connected to nature’s seasonal changes: “There was a long time when Lila didn’t know that words had letters, or that there were other names for seasons than planting and haying” (10). With Doane’s group, “They knew what time of the year it was when the timothy bloomed, when the birds were fledging” (21). Once Lila is in Gilead, this pagan time is supplemented by Christian, liturgical time. Sunday becomes the Sabbath. Winter is “Christmas time” (227). Robinson very subtly shows how the change from Lila Dahl to Lila Ames affects her whole being, including her relationship to time.

94

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

In part, Lila is a literacy narrative. Lila’s self-education includes assimilation to “standard” English, something Lila feels she must undertake to better communicate with Ames and belong to the community. There are moments when she corrects herself: “You never told me nothing about your dreams. Anything” (141). There is nothing to indicate that this process is pernicious or that “standard” English represents a kind of violence exacted upon Lila’s crude manner of speech. It is rather another step in the formation of Lila’s consciousness, a move toward further integration into Gilead. For most of the novel, up until the birth of Robby, Lila maintains an ambivalent relationship to the town. She accepts the clothes from Mrs. Graham, “a skirt and two blouses that she said her daughter had left when she moved to Des Moines” (40), a gesture that seems to indicate a new identity as a town citizen. This is complicated by her fantasies of escape, as she saves up enough money for that bus ticket out of town. The voice calling her back to her past life steadily gains strength: “Two or three times she had even had the thought of stealing [her son], carrying 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” (17). Lila prefers withdrawal and flight to confrontation. She is covert, secretive, inclined to steal and hide. Against the impulse toward flight is the inclination to settle. She continues to garden and tend to the graves, activities that suggest perpetuity, preservation, and hope. Lila’s baptism takes place in nature, with a bouquet of wildflowers, a bucket for a basin, and a catfish jumping in the grass. Of course, baptism has its traditional symbolic meaning of rebirth. But this meaning is complicated by the fact of Lila’s multiple baptisms. Robinson remains fascinated with the idea of the sacred and sacraments beyond the institution of the Church. Gilead stages a blessing at a bus stop bench. Lila’s baptism is unsanctioned by congregational witness. Lila tests this idea of whether the sacraments need institutional authority for their efficacy when she attempts to unbaptize herself. Sneaking out of Ames’s house in the early morning, “She put on her old dress, and she went to the river and washed herself in the water of death and loss and whatever else was not regeneration” (103). Ames later informs her that it is impossible to wash away the earlier baptism. But just in case that is not true, Lila is baptized again, this time within the Church. “We have to keep you with us,” Ames says (257). Robinson recognizes the traditional function of baptism as the sacrament essential to salvation. Yet she places equal weight on its humanistic meaning, as the sacrament that acknowledges human dignity. Baptism communicates to Lila that she has sacred worth, value, and dignity, a message at odds with her self-perception of worthlessness, guilt, and shame.

LIL A

95

John Ames stands at the center of Gilead, a civic leader and a visible presence in the public life of the town. Lila’s transition into becoming his wife requires a new sensitivity to appearances, perception, and conduct. Certain behaviors are inappropriate: “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” (16). She has to master the social codes, “so she watched the other wives and did what they did, as well as she could figure it out” (17). Some of these codes seem odd to Lila: “[Ames] couldn’t go up to her room to see for himself because of propriety” (93). And we can hear Lila’s skepticism about whatever it is “propriety” means. If their encounter at church is the first step toward integration, then the impersonal hotel is the second, until Lila finally arrives at John Ames’s house. Initially, the match between Ames and Lila seems impossible. They are different in almost every conceivable way, not only in age but in education, religion, class, and experience. They have different attitudes toward life: “Ames’s life is guided by strict principles that are alien to Lila’s more creaturely relationship to nature” (O’Rourke, “Everyday Grace”). Both of their pasts stand behind them and loom. Lila is shy, fearful of exposure, and reluctant to trust. She does not readily disclose anything about herself or her past. This creates a considerable irony, for the reader knows much more about her than Ames ever will. Their communication is tense, difficult, and fractured. There is almost no rhythm to their conversation, as if both characters, after years of solitude, are learning to speak for the first time. After the marriage, life with Ames does not appear to offer any relief, at least at first. After surveying the house with its cleanliness and plentiful food, Lila thinks, “He’ll ask me to leave and no one will blame him. I won’t blame him. Marriage was supposed to put an end to these miseries” (94). The words “crazy” and “ignorant” recur to Lila: “If I say something ignorant or crazy he’ll start thinking, Old men can be foolish” (94). Ames tries to reassure her: “I’ve never for a moment thought of you as ignorant” (113). But Lila continues to think of herself as “rough and ignorant” (119). She entertains nihilistic thoughts: “What if he turned away from her? It would be nothing” (112). Lila surveys and records the difficulty of intimacy between these two lonely, grief-stricken individuals. The first tentative connections are based on gesture and touch. Lila says, “I ain’t going to talk about it. I’m going to make you a sandwich” (184). Kind gestures move toward gentle touches. “So she came and stood beside him, against him, and touched his hair” (185). Still, there seems to be no end to loneliness: “They’d been married a year, no, almost a year and a half, and he was still just as lonely as ever, and that scared her” (186).

96

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

Lila experiences a division of loyalty—between her past and her present, between Doll and Ames. Her marriage to Ames suggests trust and loyalty, yet she remains inwardly distrustful and despairing. The only way to trust the comfort Ames provides is to bring Doll along with her: “She was stealing [her life], almost, to give it to Doll” (97). She continues to experience the guilt and sense of responsibility she had for Doll, “that if she had minded and married the first old man, maybe Doll would be alive” (120). Her most significant relationship remains an imaginary one with Doll, someone who Lila soon learns is not one of the elect. Lila’s acquisition of theological categories, from Ames, Boughton, and the Bible, begins to inform her understanding of the past. As she struggles with the doctrines of hell, the Last Judgment, and resurrection, she learns that, according to orthodox doctrine, the people of her past are eternally lost. Meghan O’Rourke wrote, “The question animating Lila is how a person might reconcile herself to the idea that many of those she loved were ‘unsaved’” (“Everyday Grace”). Lila experiences this loss acutely: “Well, [Ames] didn’t know Doll and the rest of them. The loneliness that settled over her at the thought that they were lost to her” (100). Just as she attempts to accommodate herself to Ames’s home, she tries to find comfort in a religious tradition, only to discover more difficulty. When she first hears about resurrection, she thinks “The idea was precious to her” (100). Then she hears of the Last Judgment from Boughton, and “Lila hated the thought of resurrection as much as she had ever hated anything” (101). Yet she continues to situate herself within the Protestant tradition, most often in her solitary Bible reading. The long quotations of biblical language, mainly from the Hebrew Bible, add a richly archaic voice to the text, making present ancient history and experience within the novel’s 1950s context. Robinson imagines what it might be like for a person with a very limited education to encounter the Bible for the first time. Lila reads in the book of Ezekiel, “I passed by thee, and saw thee weltering in thy blood,” and she thinks that she “had seen children born. They were just as naked and strange as some bug you would dig up out of the ground” (37). Though Ames later attempts to “correct” Lila’s understanding, saying that the child is Israel and the father is God, Robinson ultimately legitimizes Lila’s interpretation, her individualistic mode of meaning-making. Lila finds a reflection of her experience in the Bible: “She never expected to find so many things she already knew about written down in a book” (176). Robinson tracks Lila’s hermeneutic imagination as she shuttles between the text and her experience, finding patterns, meanings, reverberations. From Ezekiel’s dream vision of “four living creatures” with “the likeness of a man. And

LIL A

97

every one had four faces, and every one of them had four wings” (68), Lila finds that “she had the likeness of a woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it” (68). The same language helps solidify her relationship to the deceased Mrs. Ames and her child, “the likeness of a woman, and in her arms the likeness of a child” (71). Lila gains self-knowledge and perhaps an attenuated sense of isolation from reading scripture. “Strange as all this is,” she reflects, “there might be something to it” (68). There is a side of Lila that begins to find peace with Ames. New habits emerge: “If she met him at the door he put his arms around her. If there was rain on him he still might not even wait to take his coat off first before he kissed her forehead or her cheek, and she liked the coldness and the good smell” (171). She begins to pray, and her first prayer is a simple petition for Ames, to “Let him be” (71). For the first time she is liberated from material necessity, able to explore a burgeoning sense of wonder about the things around her: “You could see pelicans by the hundreds sometimes. . . . She’d seen those birds all her life and never had a name for them, because they had nothing to do with getting by” (143). Another side of Lila pulls her deeper into the past, back to the shack on the outskirts of town, where she encounters a homeless boy. He is a drifter like Lila used to be, so she finds it easy to talk to him, much easier than it is to speak with Ames. The scene reminds the reader that Lila continues to feel most at home on the margins of Gilead. She does not want to abandon Doll or her selfas-drifter. In imitation of Doll wrapping her in the shawl, Lila offers the boy her coat, which he reluctantly accepts at the cost of Lila and her unborn child’s exposure to the Iowa winter. Robinson uses a mixture of gender and generational categories to suggest the boy’s otherness: “She was thinking about that man-boy, crouching under her woman’s coat” (157). The boy is both mature and immature, male and female. His otherness is akin to the Native American language around Doll in captivity. And also like Doll, the boy cannot be saved. What continues to bring Lila and Ames together are their questions. The major theological questions of Lila involve theodicy and providence. She remarks, “I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do” (29). Ames’s response is tentative, “very rough” (222), he says. Though Ames uses theological categories in his response, he also wants to change Lila’s perception about the past and the future: “My meaning here is that you really can’t account for what happens by what has happened in the past, as you understand it anyway, which may be very different from the past itself” (223). Lila is searching her past for a causal link to the present, but Ames asks to her consider whether there is not another way to regard experience: “Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation.

98

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy” (223). Essentially, Ames argues for the mystery of experience: “the greater part of our existence is unknowable by us because it rests with God, who is unknowable” (223). Lila recognizes the inadequacy of the answer: “Near as I can tell, you were wanting to reconcile things by saying they can’t be reconciled” (224). She will never have an answer about “why things happen the way they do.” Ames encourages a different attitude toward experience. Instead of knowledge or understanding of why Lila was orphaned, or why Doll denied her, or why she was put through tremendous deprivation and suffering, it is possible to stop questioning and dwell in mystery. Perhaps it is true “that people have to suffer to really recognize grace when it comes” (129). The final scenes are full of the anxiety and anticipation of childbirth. Lila already fears the loss of the child, for she knows that nature is unpredictable, taking no heed of human life. She is bringing the child into “the wildness of things” (106). Ames also fears enduring a second loss of wife and child, an event he feels, in his old age, he could not bear. Robinson draws upon traditional Nativity imagery, with allusions to Christmas, a miraculous birth, and the dark winter setting. The narrator scarcely mentions the physical aspects of pregnancy. The focus is on Lila’s relationship to her child and her anxiety about whether she and the child will survive the birth. Childbirth is given a sentence: “Then there was a day of pangs and a night of misery, and after that the baby, scrawny and red as a skinned rabbit” (246). More than anything else, the child represents a solidified trust between Ames and Lila. It is the moment that Lila begins to live in the present tense, ceasing to find her only comfort in Doll and the past, at least as long as Ames is alive. “So that other life began” (249). Lila begins to compile memories for the child of his father: “She could tell him how the old man looked standing in the pulpit, his hair pure white, his face all serious and gentle” (252). And she understands the ephemerality of her circumstance, for “one day she and the child would watch them lower John Ames into his grave” (251). After all Lila’s fantasies of escape, it is ironic that Ames will be the first one to leave. Resurrection seems like the only compensation for such inevitable loss. Lila comes to reject the orthodox Christian view that would assign Doll to perdition: Never once had she taken her to be dead, plain and simple. If any scoundrel could be pulled into heaven just to make his mother happy, it couldn’t be

LIL A

99

fair to punish scoundrels who happened to be orphans, or whose mothers didn’t even like them, and who would probably have better excuses for the harm they did than the ones who had somebody caring about them. It couldn’t be fair to punish people for trying to get by, people who were good by their own lights, when it took all the courage they had to be good. . . . Eternity had more of every kind of room in it than this world did. . . . She couldn’t bear to be without them. It was eternity that let her think like that without a bit of shame.” (259) In her essay on Jonathan Edwards, Robinson wrote that the notion of damnation is “profoundly at odds with [Edwards’s] vision of God as absolute love” (“Jonathan Edwards in a New Light”). Lila arrives at a similar skepticism. She believes that eternity can accommodate those who have never heard of God, as well as those like Doll who commit terrible crimes. Lila keeps the knife, since “there was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it” (260). The abandonment of the knife and the guilt associated with it would mean that Lila had disavowed the forgiveness offered her. Lila courageously accepts Doll’s guilt. The novel ends with Lila integrated into community. She has found a home and has a husband and a child. The narrator offers an ordinary description of domesticity: “For now there were geraniums in the windows, and an old man at the kitchen table telling his baby some rhyme he’d known forever” (261). Robinson rejects an ideology of domesticity, wherein the house always stands for oppression, restriction, bondage. She suggests that it is entirely subjective how individuals experience a house. For Sylvie and Ruth, it is oppressive; for Glory, it is associated with death; and for Lila, it is liberation. Symbolically, Lila is a figure of renewal and regeneration, a positive, civilizing force associated with gardening and birth as well as with memory and tradition. She is the conduit of religious tradition, having her son learn the hymns and prayers. Robinson denies the reader a comic ending, for the domestic happiness Lila experiences is only temporary. Ames will die and they will be separated, just as they are presently separated by vast silences. But perhaps “someday,” perhaps under the condition of eternity, Lila “would tell him what she knew” (261). The book ends with the recognition that between people there will always be lonely distances, yet hope remains for an eventual unity.

CHAPTER 6

The Essays Henry James is among those responsible for establishing the model of the novelist-essayist, whose recent exemplars include John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Foster Wallace. When approaching novelists who also write essays, the critical tendency is to treat the nonfiction as secondary or supplementary to the central work of fiction. The culture supports this tendency, endowing fiction with the glow of “creativity” and “imagination,” values perceived as superior to the mundane, literal-mindedness of “journalism.” “Creative nonfiction” cannot match the prestige of the novel. This hierarchy of value is challenged by Marilynne Robinson’s nonfiction. She has devoted as much, if not more, of her intellect and energy into working in a variety of nonfictional genres—essays, lectures, and book reviews—as she has to her fiction. While this work does help us to understand the fiction, Robinson’s essays are remarkable for their independence from her novels, in content and in style. It appears that Robinson’s intention is not for the nonfiction to supplement the fiction but rather for the nonfiction to be an equal and complementary intellectual discipline. In terms of authorial identity, the essays help make the argument that Robinson is as much novelist as essayist, equal parts artist and public intellectual. The two obvious topics for a novelist to write about—her craft and her life—are noticeably minor notes in the essays. Most frequently, the essays are a kind of popular cultural history, whose purpose is to undertake “an archaeology of my own thinking, mainly to attempt an escape from assumptions that would embarrass me if I understood their origins” (When I Was 93). The essays are popular because they are free of the jargon and trappings of traditional scholarship. Instead of presenting herself as an academic authority, she positions herself as an outsider, at liberty to challenge the conventions of academic

T HE E S SAY S

101

style and opinion. Rather than nuancing her ideas and offering subtle opinions, she expresses herself boldly and directly, which often gives the essays a sharp, polemical edge. Her pages are free from the clunky apparatuses of scholarship, the footnotes, endnotes, and congested names of previous scholars. She refuses the posture of an expert writing for an elite audience, presenting herself as a fellow citizen who speaks in a public-minded, accessible rhetoric. One of her constant laments is the “dumbing down” of the culture, evidenced by a discomfort around elevated language. The tone and imagined audience of the nonfiction is Robinson’s attempt at elevating the level of public discourse. The method behind her cultural histories depends upon a fresh reading of primary texts. They address the disparity between what the primary text says and how experts have interpreted them: “If the primary text itself departs too far from the character common wisdom and specialist wisdom (these are typically indistinguishable) have ascribed to it, then clearly some rethinking is in order” (Adam 2). Her training as a Shakespeare scholar undoubtedly prepared for this kind of writing, but it is worth noting how much of the content falls outside her scholarly expertise; particularly striking is her reading in the sciences and economics. In returning to original sources, her essays perform the familiar Emersonian values of self-authority and self-reliance, a trust in her own instincts and interpretations over those of sanctioned authority. Robinson’s other values are consistent throughout the essays. The good is liberal egalitarianism and human dignity, while evil is associated with hierarchy, oppression of the poor, and a denial of human exceptionalism. Oppression of specific identity groups is less a concern than the general coerciveness of public opinion. Conformity is the great moral pressure Robinson combats, “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved” (153). Dogmatically skeptical of the human mind’s ability to grasp absolute Truth, she suggests that there is an idea of what truth looks like. It will always be complex, and it will always admit of larger mystery. The great mistake is simplification: “We have put together among ourselves a rigidly simple account of life in the world” (76). A larger, more complex account of reality is often called for. Though many of her opinions and judgments resemble those of a traditional liberal humanist, what distinguishes Robinson is the conviction that reason and experience alone cannot generate and sustain humane values. The idea of human sanctity and the ethic of social justice have their ultimate source in religious tradition—and this tradition, she believes, ought to be recognized. For it is the Hebrew Bible that “is more insistent than Marx ever was in championing the poor and the oppressed” (129). The values of liberal Protestantism and an interpretation of the Bible that emphasizes human dignity and social justice underwrite every page of her nonfiction. From Mother Country to The

10 2

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

Givenness of Things, there is a gradual strengthening of identification with her religious tradition. Another of her tasks is to give old words new energy, words like “civilization,” “honor,” “wisdom,” “sympathy,” “courtesy,” and “courage.” She wrote, “Suddenly it seems there are too few uses for words like humor, pleasure, and charm; courage, dignity, and graciousness; learnedness, fair-mindedness, openhandedness; loyalty, respect, and good faith” (106). If these words are not entirely dead to contemporary ears, they are either ambiguous or bogged down with a particularly conservative weight. For many the word “civilization” is no longer a high ideal but a way of prettifying the horrors of history. Robinson rejects the contemporary cynicism around moral language, believing that unless we can learn to use these words again, the ideals they point to will be lost. The result would be a culture without the language to affirm or honor anything other than its own ability to criticize. To change the culture’s disrespectful attitude toward history, for example, we need to relearn the word “respect.” Robinson’s solutions to problems, whether interpretative or ethical-political, usually turn on a shift in language. One might say that Robinson is an idealist in the sense that change, social or otherwise, begins with consciousness and language, flowing out from the mind and into the wider culture. Thematically, the essays are diverse. American history, democracy, tolerance, education, environmental ethics, national identity, biblical studies, consciousness, and science are all important topics. In the analysis that follows, I have made two critical decisions: to focus on the collected essays and not the entire corpus of nonfiction and to highlight a few of the lesser themes, namely the revelations of biography and issues of gender. The former are rare since her essays are bookish, more often involved with the experience of words than the experience of life. And the latter are easily overlooked, leading to the possible perception that Robinson is mute on women’s issues, which is far from the case. Race is a notable absence in the essays, a topic that she must feel more comfortable addressing through the subtlety and indirection of fiction. When taken together, the essays and fiction complement each other, approaching different realities through different forms. Certain realities—history, culture, ideas—are best approached through the essay. Others—emotions, intentions, relationships—are better approached through fiction. Robinson views the purpose of fiction as the exploration of subjective and social realities, while the essay is for the expression of judgment and opinion. In terms of form, they owe a stylistic debt to Emerson’s ambulatory essays, whose influence becomes stronger in the later books. The qualities that Robinson finds in the essay— the freedom to be direct, prophetic, moralistic, polemical, and didactic—are qualities her fiction mostly avoids. Her ability to write powerfully within the

T HE E S SAY S

103

novel and the essay forms suggests the roundness of her accomplishment, for very few writers join such a gift for lyricism with such a relish for disputation. Mother Country

Mother Country set the course for the nonfiction in the years to come. Much of Robinson’s characteristic style and concern are there, the mix of tough reasoning, impassioned ethics, and historical perspective. It is perhaps the least read of her nonfiction works, despite the fact that Robinson has said, “If I could only have written one book, that would have been the book” (Fay). Mother Country has its origins in Robinson’s postgraduate travels, first in France, then England, where she taught at the University of Kent from 1983 to 1984. It was there, while vacationing in the English Lake District, that she first encountered Sellafield, the nuclear-waste processing facility, which would become the book’s central subject and symbol. At the outset, Robinson apologizes for the negative, often bitterly ironic tone of the book: “My writing has perhaps taken too much of the stain of my anger and disappointment” (33). The obvious origin for these emotions is the spectacle of pollution and human error that Sellafield presents. But anger and disappointment may also suggest betrayal. One can assume that England held a special promise for Robinson, a hope founded in an appreciation for British history and literary tradition, reflected in her choice of Shakespeare for her dissertation topic. Perhaps it was her dissertation she was thinking of when she remarked, “I feel the worth of my own life diminished by the tedious years I have spent acquiring competence in the arcana of mediocre invention” (32). What may have once been reverence turned to regret and righteous anger. For what she found in England was not the charm of the countryside but a contaminated Irish Sea: “I am angry to the depths of my soul that the earth has been so injured while we were all bemused by supposed monuments of value and intellect, vaults of bogus cultural riches” (32). Mother Country’s mood is that of the disappointed expatriate, one whose expectation of delight in a foreign land is spoiled by moral outrage. When her tenure at Kent expired, Robinson returned to the States and in February 1985 published “Bad News from Britain” in Harper’s Magazine. It establishes the relevant facts: “On the coast of Cumbria, in the English Lake District, there is a nuclear reprocessing plant called Sellafield, formerly Windscale, that daily pumps up to a million gallons of radioactive waste down a mile and half of pipeline, into the Irish Sea. It has done this for thirty-five years” (“Bad News” 65). These facts are confirmed by popular journalism: “Everything factual that I will relate in this article I learned from reading the British press or watching British television” (65). Though the facts of Sellafield are

10 4

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

disturbing, outlined in appalling detail in Part II of Mother Country, the book’s purpose was never simply to repeat the media’s findings. The larger question is how British society could allow such a thing as Sellafield to happen. The argument dilates out from the Cumbrian coast into a critique of British civilization, its history, culture, politics, social order, even literature. The Harper’s Magazine article, also published under the title “The Waste Land” in Granta, points to the ultimate ambition of Mother Country, which is not only to warn Americans of environmental disaster but to expose the ignominy of Britain past and present. Among the more surprising targets of blame are the environmental groups, including Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, and especially Greenpeace. Robinson points to their total failure to warn the public against Sellafield: “If Greenpeace takes exception to the usual accounts of the lethal properties of plutonium—for example, that a particle invisible to the naked eye, if inhaled into the lung, will ultimately cause a cancer—then they should tell us so” (12). Comments such as these led Greenpeace to sue Robinson for libel, a case they eventually won, causing Mother Country to be banned in England. The irony, of course, is that Greenpeace effectively silenced an argument it would no doubt support. Her other targets are more predictable. Modern England is presented as a land of hypocrisy and self-delusion, one that preaches decency and reason, yet practices destruction. Robinson’s bleak portrait is laced with sensational imagery, such as radioactive lambs, and ironic asides: “The Queen might refrain a little from knighting people who have distinguished themselves in the wastedumping line” (18). The intention is to break the American illusion of British respectability: “Americans persist in viewing England” as a nation where capitalism is tempered by social justice and “where profit is no god,” “a non-violent society, a community of goodwill and mutual obligation” (24). This perception conceals the fact that English “babies are poisoned in the womb” (23) by radioactive contamination. Provocative and often hyperbolic, Mother Country’s Introduction frames it as a work of criticism and polemic. It is therefore a mistake to judge the book as a work of conventional scholarship. Its lack of subtlety and qualification, its frequent resort to words such as “any,” “never,” and “most,” as well as its rejection of scholarly disinterestedness for moral commitment, should all be understood as signs that its purpose is not to simply inform but to awaken conscience and provoke action. Mother Country is a political tract. It is also a history, though not a history of Sellafield, as one might expect, but rather a brief history of modern Britain. The historical method was chosen because “such extraordinary behavior [Britain’s dumping toxins into its own environment] cannot have a motive in any usual sense, since it is in no one’s

T HE E S SAY S

105

interest. It has, however, an etiology and a history, in which the institutions which expedite it and the relations it expresses evolve together” (37). This historical perspective frames Sellafield as a symptom of a larger failure of civilization, not simply an isolated blunder. The implicit argument behind the pages of social, cultural, literary, and legal history, much of which comes from a reading of original sources, is that Sellafield is another instance of the British priority of wealth over public welfare. Past and present are linked in their participation in injustice: “Just such a high-handed and unembarrassed claim to dispose of others’ lives as was made by industrialists, by agriculturalists, by slave traders and colonizers . . . is expressed in the conduct of government and industry in Britain today” (88). This is the story Robinson calls “my history of modern England” (30), a comment that speaks to the personal and idiosyncratic aspects of her history as well as to her belief, a constant across all her nonfiction, that history is a primary source of revelation. And yet Mother Country is also a work of criticism, one that makes judgments on the basis of a normative system of values. Robinson’s values are clearly indebted to a nineteenth-century-style populism, one that emphasizes the dignity and worth of ordinary lives: “The most difficult struggle of our civilization has been to find the means to create autonomy for ordinary lives, so that they might not be plundered or disposed of according to the whims of more powerful people” (105). She wrote from the perspective of the “common man,” “ordinary people,” and “working people” (22). She is everywhere hostile to hierarchies, aristocrats, elites, and literary intellectuals, including Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill. Though many of these writers were critical of Britain’s treatment of the poor, their rhetoric, according to Robinson, had the ironic effect of reinforcing the legitimacy of the Poor Laws and class bias. Against the elite’s top-down approach, Robinson juxtaposes a populist rhetoric, often signaled with words like “people” or “the majority”: “Sellafield amounts, in its dinosaur futurism, to a brutal laying of hands on the lives of people: a blunt, unreflecting assertion of power. It is the same unchallenged assertion of economic prerogative that legally immobilized the majority of the British population for five hundred years, so that the cost of relieving their wretchedness, when wretchedness became extreme, could be contained” (42). It is a democratic perspective, she admits, that has lost fervor in recent years. For where there was once “enthusiasm for the common man,” there is now the idea that they represent a “great reservoir of pathology, crudeness, belligerency, vice, and malice” (22). Mother Country is the occasion for a history biased heavily toward the people not the powerful. Ordinary lives, whether they are helped or harmed, is the criterion by which Robinson makes her judgments.

10 6

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

In addition to political convictions, religion, however ill defined and inchoate at this stage in Robinson’s career, acts as another source for her judgments. The language of Christian theology and the Bible slips into the text from time to time, a good example of which is the comparison between “church-administered charity” and Britain’s traditional skepticism of charity: “Conceding everything one must about the hypocrisy and corruption of church-administered charity, the kind prevalent in Europe into this century, still the transaction is sanctified, words of consecration have been said over it, and there is nothing in writ or tradition to suggest that any soul, however disreputable, who comes to the table of charity eats and drinks to his own damnation. In England, however, just such reprobation is believed to follow any undeserved relief” (64). The words “charity,” “sanctified,” “consecration,” “soul,” and “damnation” and the Eucharistic imagery of “table” and “eats and drinks” signal Robinson’s acquaintance with and even approval of such language. In this moment, unlike in her later nonfiction, there is a sense of hesitation in her advocacy of the Church. Read rhetorically, it may be a means of seeming inoffensive to her secular readership, effectively casting her own beliefs in an ambiguous light. Such a motivation might also stand behind her ironic use of biblical language. She wrote, “[Bentham and Owen] dream of creating a circumstance in which profit and happiness will be maximized together, a sort of transfiguration in which the factory system will be revealed in glory” (74, my italics). This trepidatious and coy use of religious language changes in The Death of Adam, where Robinson declares herself an unambiguously Christian author. In Mother Country, she presents a Christian ethics free from Christian identification. It is a book indebted to the Sermon on the Mount and the Hebrew prophets, and yet the religious ideals behind the book’s bias toward the poor, the weak, and the marginal are only implied, never overtly stated. Mother Country’s subtitle, “Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution,” signals another of its major concerns, that of nations and national identity. Mother Country is structured around a contrast between America and England, whose differences are said to be severe. So one reads, “In America, we consider it a crime to contaminate the environment for profit. In Britain, profit is considered a public benefit that justifies any means by which it may be realized, every industry being defensible in the degree that it is profitable” (24). Specifically, Robinson finds the absence of specific rights in the British constitution a major cause for the imbalance of power between institutions and individuals, which is partly responsible for the Sellafield disaster. Mother Country depends on a debatable opposition between “us” and “them,” with very little space for a transnational “we.”

T HE E S SAY S

107

Although there are obvious problems with generalizations about highly complex and diverse nations, Robinson’s polemical intent is to estrange America from Britain, to argue against their cultural companionship. It would be an overstatement to call Mother Country an apology for American exceptionalism—but not much of one. What deficiencies America possesses are often blamed on England, for “given our profound cultural debt to Great Britain, it is no wonder if our policies with regard to the poor are sometimes crude and high-handed” (43). If America is exceptional, she implies, the ground for such a claim lies not in military force or economic growth but in its treatment of the poor and the distribution of wealth. She asks, “Why do the Land Grant Act, the Homestead Act, and the G.I. Bill, three distributions of wealth to the public on a scale never contemplated in Britain, have no status among political events, when the dreary traffic in pittances institutionalized as the British Welfare State is hailed as the advance of socialism?” (102). On the limited grounds of social welfare, Robinson argues for the justice of American capitalism, which is, in her view, more socialist than the British welfare state. In the 1980s, Ronald Regan formulated a rhetoric of American exceptionalism, his famous “shining city on a hill.” Mother Country may be read as channeling and challenging Regan’s optimism about America, redefining the source of hope from “national greatness” to social justice. Mother Country offers some clues as to Robinson’s political thinking during the 1980s. On the relation between government and industry, she is skeptical of the socialist idea that state-controlled industry produces less harm than privatization: “Plutonium manufacture and radioactive waste dumping are enterprises of the British government, and as good a proof as one could wish that government ownership in itself means nothing” (102). Her attitude toward socialism is more complex. On one hand, “the history of socialism is disheartening. It is too strongly associated with repression” (102). Toward Robert Owen, Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw, she is scathing: “Beatrice Webb herself will brood over the well-being of the working poor with a sublime concern that they should not be corrupted by any largesse, public or private, that succors them when their need is not exquisite” (49). However, toward the father of modern socialism, Karl Marx, she is surprisingly generous. This is because “Marx is unread, and the versions of his thinking with which we are wearied are the opportunistic inventions of the sort of persons who love to believe they are brave and dangerous” (27). It is the early humanist Marx, the Marx of “alienation” and “exploitation,” whom Robinson praises: “By capitalist I mean exactly what Marx meant, a system in which a working class is exploited to produce wealth in which they have no share, a system which

10 8

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

considers subsistence an appropriate compensation for the mass of people, and an appropriate condition of life” (74). Marx is also summoned to codify the distinction between America and Britain, “a distinction between capitalism, an economic system in which the working class is wretched and dependent, and its ‘direct anti-thesis,’” which is America (94). Mother Country evokes a particular sensitivity toward women, especially mothers and children. For example, “A law promulgated under King Edward VI provided that if a poor woman gave birth to a child in a parish where she had no settlement, she was to be beaten and imprisoned for six months” (61). “A working-class woman,” she wrote, “worked until she delivered, gave birth in a crowded room, and returned to work a few days afterward. At the end of her ten to sixteen hours, her clothing would be sodden with milk” (85). Though the plight of women is not the main thrust of Robinson’s argument, these examples—and there are many others—amount to a feminist critique of British history. While it was mostly well received, Mother Country did receive the single harshest review of Robinson’s career. M. F. Perutz, the Nobel Prize–winning chemist, wrote a review for the New York Review of Books wherein he took a decidedly scientific approach to the problem of Sellafield. Though he was sympathetic toward Robinson’s ethical case—“Here in Britain we are all criminals” (nybooks.com)—he stood opposed to her use of facts. He wrote, “Robinson’s book abounds with scientific errors and unfounded allegations” (nybooks. com), including the analogy between Sellafield and Chernobyl, her calculation of the incidence of childhood leukemia in the village of Seascale, and her use of journalistic sources. As for the historical side of Mother Country, Perutz cast doubt upon Robinson’s emphasis on cultural attitudes rather than economic forces, as well as her failure “to compare social conditions and attitudes in England to those prevalent throughout Christian Europe at the time” (nybooks.com). His conclusion is damning: “Knowing no science, she has spurned study of the abundant technical literature that would have saved her from her monstrous exaggerations of the dangers presented by Sellafield. . . . She should have stuck to writing novels” (nybooks.com).1 This patronizing tone did not go unremarked in Robinson’s reply, also published in the New York Review. “Mr. Perutz’s argument,” she wrote, was clearly intended “as a daunting and chastening demonstration of the scientific mind in action” (nybooks.com). Her examination of Perutz’s argument resembles the close reading techniques of the New Criticism, exposing the irony that his refutation of Mother Country actually affirms its most urgent claims. Nevertheless, Perutz and Robinson were unable to find common ground on the question of the global impact of Sellafield. This intellectual controversy

T HE E S SAY S

109

foreshadowed conflicts to come, as this would not be the last time Robinson would place herself at the center of the debate between humanist and scientist, American and Briton, man and woman. In spite of criticisms and the libel suit against it, Mother Country maintains its place within the canon of environmental literature, joining other classics of the genre such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It is also a notable product of its time, capturing from an oblique angle how the world appeared to Americans of the late 1980s: the Cold War standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Chernobyl accident, the neoconservative policies of Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher. Today, Sellafield is being decommissioned, a one-hundred-year process whose cost is estimated at fifty billion pounds.2 At the same time, Western nations are again turning toward nuclear power in the hope of finding an efficient and environmentally sound energy source. The Death of Adam

Nine years after Mother Country, Robinson released her second book of nonfiction, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Bringing together new material and previously published essays and speeches, The Death of Adam moves Robinson’s nonfiction in new directions, stylistically and thematically. Unlike Mother Country, with its central focus of Sellafield, The Death of Adam is looser, broader, and more eclectic in subject matter, offering a fuller picture of Robinson’s intellectual interests. Here are many of the subjects that she would engage in the years to come: American history, with an emphasis on American abolitionism, science and Darwinian theory, John Calvin and the Puritans. The tone is different as well, moving away from Mother Country‘s anger and irony and toward what would become her characteristic nonfiction voice: forceful yet calm, with an assured sense of authority. If Mother Country provokes, then Death of Adam reasons, addressing the reader as a mature, educated adult. Robinson presents herself as an unfashionable contrarian, comfortable with tension and paradox. At times she sounds like a brokenhearted traditionalist: “We are suffering a radical moral decline which is destroying the fabric of society, seriously threatening our sense of safety as well as of mutual respect and shared interest” (157). At other times, she evokes a conventional progressive: “Opportunities of every kind should be seized upon to advance the wellbeing of people, especially in assuring them decent wages, free time, privacy, education, and health care” (258). The essays are deeply personal in their choice of topics, yet disinterested in presentation, mostly avoiding the first person. Her nonfiction prose style is exacting and logical; however, she tends to be dissatisfied with easy solutions, preferring to leave questions open and answers

11 0

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

ambiguous. “The prevailing view of things can be assumed to be wrong,” she wrote, “and that its opposite, being its image or shadow, can also be assumed to be wrong” (1). The Death of Adam performs what thinking about human nature or the common good looks like when complexity and paradox are the marks of truth. The title is taken from the last haunting sentence of her essay “Darwinism,” which reads, “It is a thing that bears reflecting upon, how much was destroyed, when modern thought declared the death of Adam” (75). Adam, “whose name means Earth” (62) and who stands as the exemplary figure of humanity, has been lost. It is Robinson’s primary intuition that contemporary Western culture has experienced a diminishment of energy and delight in other human beings: “What used to be meant by ‘humanism,’ that old romance of the self, the idea that the self is to be refined by exposure to things that are wonderful and difficult and imbued with what was called the human spirit, once an object of unquestioned veneration, has ended” (8). The implications of this ending are vast, for education, the arts, religion, ethics, and politics. As Robinson has noted, even our capacity to derive aesthetic pleasure from the human form has diminished: “Human figures decorated lamp stands and soup tureens and the spines of books. Now they seem never to be used decoratively, as things pleasing in themselves. Advertising uses them to part us from our money” (27). The result is the incapacity to see humans as particularly exceptional or significant, a great loss and a potential danger to civilization, according to Robinson. Of course, there seems to be good reason not to delight in humanity after the Holocaust and year after grinding year of living with the threat of nuclear or environmental death. Historical circumstances pose a great difficulty for a renewed humanism. The horrors of the twentieth century are scattered throughout The Death of Adam: “In the twentieth century, ‘scientific’ polices of extermination, undertaken in the case of Stalin to purge society of parasitic or degenerate or recalcitrant elements, and in the case of Hitler to purge it of the weak or defective or, racially speaking, marginally human, have taken horror to new extremes” (70). She wrote about America’s “unconscious perfectionism, which may have taken root among us while Stalinism still seemed full of promise, and to have been refreshed by the palmy days of National Socialism in Germany, by Castro and by Mao” (156). After Castro, Mao, Stalin, and Hitler, the radiant humanisms of the Renaissance, of Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Montaigne, and Michelangelo, appear like relics from a more optimistic age. But history and politics are not solely to blame for this state of affairs. The subtitle points to the prime culprit: “modern thought.” The meaning of this phrase becomes clearer after the first essay, “Darwinism.” One aspect of “modern thought” is the tradition of Anglo-American Darwinists, represented

T HE E S SAY S

111

by the same figures Robinson criticizes in Absence of Mind: Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. (Michel Foucault and other Nieztcheaninspired antihumanists are ignored, perhaps because the Darwinists are more influential within her American popular audience.) “Darwinism” rests upon a distinction between evolution and Darwinism, with the former being “the change that occurs in organisms over time” and the latter being “the interpretation of this phenomenon which claims to refute religion and to imply a personal and social ethic which is, not coincidentally, antithetical to the assumptions imposed and authorized by Judaeo-Christianity” (30–31). Evolution is fact; Darwinism is debatable. Robinson’s critique of Darwinism is that it encourages people to disavow the poor, offers a vision of life as unmitigated competition, and provides the philosophical underpinning for pernicious political ideologies and their adherents, including the “Social Darwinists, the eugenicists, the Imperialists, [and] the Scientific Socialists” (40). This move will become habitual, measuring the ethical and social implications of scientific theory against the standard of Judeo-Christian ethics and anthropology. “Darwinism” is the first instance of Robinson’s ongoing religious critique of scientism. Robinson is not a conventional religious apologist, one who sets forth a series of rational arguments for the belief in God. Her rhetorical strategy consists mainly of juxtaposing visions of reality, pitting traditional religious understanding against the scientific view. In “Darwinism” Robinson goes to lengths to show the poverty and darkness of the Darwinian-NietzcheanFreudian ideas of human nature. She exposes a kind of willful diminishment of the human creature within these traditions and then asks the reader: “Surely there was some wisdom in the old story that we are exceptional among the creatures” (59). The reader is ultimately confronted not with two sets of rational arguments but with two ways of viewing the world, and Robinson asks which is wiser, more beautiful, or closer to ordinary experience: “Genesis tries to describe human exceptionalism, and Darwinism tries to discount it” (62). She poses a humble and humane vision of what family could be—“We could nurture our families, sustain our heritages, and, in the pregnant old phrase, enjoy ourselves. The self, that dear and brief acquaintance, we could entertain with a little of the ceremony it deserves”—and follows it by the harsh, inhuman voice of economics—“It will be objected that we are constrained by the stern economics of widget manufacture” (107). Religion is not something to be reasoned into but something to be lived out as a vision of reality. The other tradition informing her critique of “modern thought” is political liberalism. “I am myself a liberal,” she wrote. “By that I mean I believe society exists to nurture and liberate the human spirit, and that large-mindedness and openhandedness are the means by which these things are to be accomplished”

11 2

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

(258). As in Mother Country, Robinson speaks often of the “poor,” but she tends to place other historically victimized groups—African Americans, the LGBT community—on the margins. While it is true that identity categories are not privileged, Robinson does not ignore women entirely. In writing about the working conditions in nineteenth-century factories, she is especially sensitive to women’s experience: “We tend to forget that women of working age were often pregnant or nursing and often obliged to leave infants and small children untended. Sometimes they gave birth on the factory floor” (93). And her approach to John Calvin might be considered feminist, since she argues that the work of Marguerite de Navarre is an underappreciated influence on Calvin’s theology. Nevertheless, she maintains her distance from the identity-based politics of the New Left, preferring the “Old Left” focus on economics and class. At times she seems openly hostile to multiculturalism. In “Family” she addresses the issue of minorities and acculturation: “I suggest that those groups who feel unvalued are the very groups who are most vulnerable to the effects of the cheapening of labor, least able to control the use of their time. They look for, or are promised, amendment in the correction of images and phrases, in high school multicultural days and inclusive postage stamp issues. Such things can never supply the positive content of any identity” (98). It is through economic concepts such as “labor” that Robinson addresses issues such as diversity. The multicultural New Left seeks to change through “images and phrases,” whereas the Old Left seeks change through economic reform. Her liberalism, however, has its limits. She is ardently anti-utopian, against the “unconscious perfectionism” of today, “the idea that society should produce good people, that is, people suited to life in whatever imagined optimum society, who then stabilize the society in its goodness so that it produces more good people, and so on” (156).3 This is impossible, for “gross error survives every attempt at perfection, and flourishes” (156). As in Mother Country, Robinson is skeptical of government solutions to social problems: “I think we should pause to consider the environmental practices and histories of those same governments” (251). Despite her criticism of state-based solutions, she continues to be enthusiastic about the nation-state. Among her more unfashionable ideas is that there is such a thing as an American identity. For Robinson, “we” and “our” are perfectly acceptable pronouns: “When we take the most conscientious welfare mothers out of their homes and neighborhoods with our work programs, we put them in jobs that do not pay well enough to let them provide good care for their children” (91, my italics). She implores the reader to take up Calvin’s Institutes again, for “we might even have grounds for a new understanding of our tradition” (131). The reader being imagined here is clearly an “American,” a fellow citizen, who shares a common heritage and tradition.

T HE E S SAY S

113

This idea references in large part the country’s shared cultural origins in New England. New England encapsulates many of the progressive moral energies that Robinson wishes to celebrate and possibly recover. “McGuffey and the Abolitionists” returns to early manuals of American education, the New England Primers and the McGuffey readers, which are commonly said to have instilled a recognizably middle-class morality of thrift and conformity. Instead, she finds an egalitarian social ethic inspired by the Old Testament and Calvin. It is the New England tradition of religiously inspired social reform, best embodied by the Abolitionists, that Robinson claims as “our” tradition. Obviously, such claims of national identity are problematic. Not everyone, especially not Southerners, identifies with New England, nor are there many contemporary progressives seeking to affirm their religious origins. There is also the problem of minorities, immigrants, and other marginalized groups that have been traditionally excluded from “our” heritage. Robinson maintains a nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the nation in part because she identifies so strongly with specifically American political and religious traditions. The implication is that identity is local and particular, the product of specific historical and cultural movements, and that the concept of the nation can organize and account for such an identity. However controversial this position is, and whatever the risk of marginalizing segments of her audience, part of Robinson’s difference within the contemporary literary field is her affirmation of the idea of the nation-state. While the nation-state is a controversial term within the academy, religion is perhaps even more so. Nowhere is Robinson more provocative to contemporary liberal sensibilities than in her affirmation of the liberal Protestant tradition. She stands for a tradition of social criticism and social reform, “both traditionally championed by American mainline churches” (262). She clearly has a passion for the outsiders of cultural history, not those excluded by race, gender, or class but those marginalized by religion. She is particularly drawn to figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom secular liberals would immediate distrust because they are religious but who in fact share liberals’ desire for social justice. In other moments, she sides with liberals directly, as in their critique of the religious right: “Their politics and economics align themselves quite precisely with those of their adversaries, who yearn to disburden themselves of the weak, and to unshackle the great creative forces of competition” (40). She asks conservatives not to forget the poor, liberals not to dismiss religion outright. Her approach to John Calvin is primarily to show him as a harbinger of Robinson’s two great moral commitments: human exceptionalism and egalitarian politics. Calvin is reimagined not as the withered crank obsessed with “total depravity” and theocratic rule but as a humanist and an important

11 4

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

contributor to the philosophical underpinnings of liberal democracy. Calvin is a kind of secret Founding Father, for he is a “figure of the greatest historical consequences, especially for our culture” (12). By “our culture,” Robinson means early New England and “its tendency toward relatively popular government” (176). She wrote, “The Declaration of Independence, with its lengthy indictment of George III, is clearly as much a Calvinist as an Enlightenment document” (196). Calvin’s legacy is a political achievement: “relatively popular government, the relatively high status of women, the separation of church and state, what remains of universal schooling, and, while it lasted, liberal higher education, education in the ‘humanities’” (206). Robinson commends Calvin’s theology on the basis of the ethical and political implications of his ideas, just as she critiqued Darwinian ideology on the basis of its. What most impresses Robinson’s is “the writing and social experimentation of John Calvin” (150, my emphasis). The Puritans should be reconsidered, understood not for their “fear or hatred of the body, anxiety about sex, or denigration of women” (124) but for their contributions to democratic politics. Robinson’s is a humanistic faith. She does not write about Christian doctrines of atonement, redemption, salvation, the cross, or resurrection. The emphasis is on Creation, particularly the concept of imago dei, and on Christian ethics: “The Judeo-Christian ethic of charity derives from the assertion that human beings are made in the image of God, that is, that reverence is owed to human beings simply as such, and also that their misery or neglect or destruction is not, for God, a matter of indifference or of merely compassionate interest, but is something in the nature of sacrilege” (47–48). “Sin” for Robinson is something like the refusal to “confer benefit upon one another, to assure one another a worthy condition of life” (173). This is why Genesis, not the Gospels, is the biblical book Robinson most often cites: “To be free of God the Creator is to be free of the religious ethic implied in the Genesis narrative of Creation” (48). It is a deeply this-worldly religion, whose “main work has been to assert and ponder human theomorphism” (241), the idea that humans have the form or likeness of God. Despite the fact that Robinson’s religiosity offends both conservatives and liberals alike, she will continue to wholeheartedly affirm the liberal Protestant tradition in future essay collections. Absence of Mind

Twelve years after The Death of Adam, Robinson gave the Terry Lectures at Yale University, a series of talks that would become Absence of Mind: The Dis­ pelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. The volume contains four essays—“On Human Nature,” “The Strange History of Altruism,” “The Freudian Self,” and “Thinking Again”—which are unified by a single argument:

T HE E S SAY S

115

that writing on human nature that claims scientific authority excludes or vastly diminishes the witness and testimony of the mind. Robinson wrote of the “odd, undeniable power in this defining of humankind by the exclusion of the things that in fact distinguish us as a species,” such as consciousness (37). The essays move through scientific debates—the mind-brain problem, altruism, Freudian theory—to show how subjectivity, memory, perception, experience, inwardness are discounted or marginalized. Without the recognition of mind, Robinson argued, certain intellectual products become irrelevant, namely history, the arts, and religion. She challenged popular scientists and materialists such as Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, Michael Gazzaniga, and Antonio Damasio to formulate a more open conception of reality, one that includes subjective experience and its history of reflection. Absence of Mind is, among other things, Robinson’s most sustained and robust response to the scientific intellectual culture that currently dominates the Anglo-American world. The book was a response to currents in intellectual life after the attacks on 9/11, when religion was again a topic worthy of popular attention. The New Atheists were ascendant. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens each gained large audiences and intellectual influence. Their materialism and atheism carried the authority of science, which was set against the irrationality of religious believers. Instead of disputing their arguments, Robinson addressed the assumptions and implications of a body of literature of which the New Atheism is one recent example. This she named the “parascientific”: “By this phrase I mean a robust, and surprisingly conventional, genre of social or political theory or anthropology that makes its case by proceeding, using the science of its moment, from a genesis of human nature in primordial life to a set of general conclusions about what our nature is and must be, together with the ethical, political, economics and/or philosophic implications to be drawn from these conclusions” (32–33). In calling the seemingly diverse writings of Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker, and others a “surprisingly conventional” genre, Robinson undermined the novelty and originality of their enterprise, exposing the operations of consensus, habit, and approval-seeking. Another criticism is that parascientific literature arrives at a set of “general conclusions” that are not properly scientific, because science, for Robinson, is not the final arbiter of being. To believe that science alone can explain reality is to rehearse nineteenthcentury positivism. Final conclusions about such questions are not possible. Openness and wonder—religious experience—ought to be cultivated in the face of such awe-inspiring questions about the nature of human beings and reality. Science worth its name ought to involve skepticism, rigorous methodology, and continual openness to new evidence. As soon as science “foreclose[s] possibility” (124), it resembles something less like science and more like ideology.

11 6

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

Indeed, ideological commitments are precisely what Robinson finds in parascientific writings. Science is “not a final statement about reality,” as Dawkins or Dennett suggest, “but a highly fruitful mode of inquiry into it” (124). When materialists declare, “Everything is physical,” Robinson replies, “Perhaps we cannot claim to know the nature of the physical” (113). In “closing questions about human nature and the human circumstance” (129), parascientific writing resembles positivist ideology rather than up-to-date science. Modern physics, with its awareness of quantum phenomena and the reality of indeterminacy, plays no part in parascientific models of human nature and motivation. Again and again, Robinson shows how much today’s rationalists partake of a nineteenth-century understanding of what science is, bearing with it the dangerous implications of social Darwinist thinking. Parascientific arguments are old, she claims, and their assumptions have had disastrous social consequences. It is not scientific method that she questions but “a kind of argument that claims the authority of science or highly specialized knowledge” (2). In other words, the book was written against a particular rhetoric of scientific writing, examining why it is that parascientific writing has such persuasive force. She wrote of the “power” of these arguments, the “prestige of the style of thought and argument that has associated itself with science” (24) and “the effective authority that comes with successful popularization” (41). If there is a conflict between religion and science, it takes place on the level of culture and language: “Such great issues, human origins and human nature, have the public as an appropriate theater, since the change they propose is cultural” (3). A cultural debate might sound unsubstantial, but the stakes are very high, since “whoever controls the definition of mind controls the definition of humankind itself, and culture, and history” (32). Besides the neat coinage of “parascientific,” there is also the idea of the “threshold” of modern thought, the notion that “the world of thought, recently or in an identifiable moment in the near past, has undergone epochal change” (3). The effect of the threshold is “a shocking newness that must startle us into painful recognition” (26). The modern experience of religious belief, for example, is to painfully reject it once confronted with Darwinian theory. It is the assumption of the threshold that Robinson rejects. In doing so, she repeats a long-held position, one found in the early essay “Writers and the Nostalgic Fallacy.” For modernists like T. S. Eliot, “Everything has somehow changed disastrously. Consciousness is a nuisance, a fright, a disappointment—this is something new under the sun, the ‘modern condition’” (Times 34). Robinson’s historical consciousness does not allow such an easy demarcation between the modern and the premodern periods. Where Eliot and now parascientific literature find rupture and threshold, Robinson finds continuity and identity.

T HE E S SAY S

117

Absence of Mind affirms Ecclesiastes: there is nothing new under the sun; there is no need to be startled by whatever intellectual or aesthetic trend calls itself “modern.” Absence of Mind carries forward other ideas developed in Mother Country and especially The Death of Adam. The essay “Darwinism” may well have been the seed for many of the criticisms leveled against parascience. There she wrote, “Mind is not a consideration for [Darwin], so this causes him no embarrassment” (35). It also contains an extended treatment of the problem of altruism. The disciplines Absence of Mind covers are also familiar, from the sciences, biblical scholarship, cultural history, sociology, and philosophy to the particular concern around “modern thought.” Rhetorically, the essays deploy many of the same tactics. They historicize, ironize, logically undermine, and juxtapose countervailing visions of reality. Robinson’s argument is largely negative, as it was in Mother Country. She does not assume the task of proving the validity of religious experience and language. In a very few instances she does defend religion, objecting to the charge that religion creates conflict, division, and war. She wrote, “The fact that conflict occurs along national and demographic lines that are sometimes also religious lines cannot be assumed to mean that the issue or motivation of the conflict is religion” (11). However, the emphasis of Absence of Mind falls on a critique of opponents of religion, a move that sets her book apart from the familiar apologist stance. As in The Death of Adam essays, she is most critical of epistemological simplicity and certainty. What has changed between the volumes of nonfiction is the emphasis, from the ethical, social, and political concerns of Mother Country and The Death of Adam to the focus on the self in Absence of Mind. Robinson maintains an exalted view of the self and the experience of consciousness. “The self, the solitary, perceiving, and interpreting locus of anything that can be called experience” is at the center of the cosmos (7). Her early reference to Emerson’s “The American Scholar” is significant, since “Romanticism, or any mode of thought or belief that proposed an intuitive contact with profound reality” (102), has deeply shaped her perspective. Another influence is Protestantism, which de-emphasizes community in favor of the individual’s relation to the divine. The Protestant-Romantic value of the self, along with the mind’s ability to intuit truth, is the vision Robinson defends. Though he is mentioned only a few times, perhaps her greatest ally in defense of a stronger, more confident self is William James. Two notable quotations from James in Absence of Mind are his definition of religion from Varieties of Religious Experience and his notes on subjectivity from the essay “On Some Hegelisms.” James also shares Robinson’s emphasis on the affective side of subjectivity. “Felt life” is a phrase found throughout,

11 8

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

echoing a Jamesian view of the centrality of feeling to experience. James is essential to Robinson’s argument for several reasons. For one, he wrote prior to the elimination of subjectivity from accounts of human nature, what Robinson calls the “positivist purge” (53). James offered an alternative language of psychology to the positivisms of today, one that can accommodate categories such as experience and perception. It is because of James’s openness to experience that he was also open to religious experience—and to mystery. Robinson finds James’s awareness that “unknowability is the first thing about reality that must be acknowledged” (54) a more honest intuition than the thinking of today’s mystery-averse theorists. Robinson should not be read as arguing for a return to James’s nineteenth-century vision of mind, just as she does not argue for a return to Puritan Calvinism in “Puritans and Prigs.” She uses James as another example of how modern thought has reduced and impoverished the language of selfhood. Other intellectual allies include famous atheists such as Bertrand Russell, Auguste Comte, and John Searle, each of whom maintains a space for experience within his theory of consciousness. Russell does not generalize from the brains of ants or apes but “proceeds by introspection, by observation of the processes of his own mind as a means of understanding the human mind” (16). Comte’s intuition about altruism is a useful counterpoint to contemporary advocates of the “selfish gene.” And Searle’s critique of materialist definitions of mind aligns with Robinson’s own. One of the purposes for referring to these thinkers is to show the problem of parascientific assumptions even for those who are not religious. In “Dietrich Bonhoeffer” Robinson praises “the openness of [Bonhoeffer’s] views that he considered Gandhi’s political actions Christlike and wished to learn from him” (Adam 114). She shows a similar openness in her argument’s acceptance and integration of atheist intellectuals. The effect is to complicate the neat opposition between the atheist writers of parascience and religious believers, since many atheists from the past have maintained larger, more generous conceptions of what human nature is. One exception is Sigmund Freud. “The Freudian Self” is a piece of cultural history, placing Freud within the context of early twentieth-century Vienna. Her claim is that Freud invented an “opposing anthropology” to the ones being proposed by the racial nationalists of the time. The result was to universalize “the anxiety and discontent attested to on every side in Europe as the inevitable phylogenetic circumstance of civilized human beings, rather than particularizing it as an effect of historical circumstance” (81). In Robinson’s conception, Freud is a figure localized to a particular time and place, rather than the universal father of the anxious, modern self. Given that the other essays in Absence

T HE E S SAY S

119

of Mind concern contemporary thinkers and culture-makers, it is curious that Robinson decided to write about a historical figure. The reason, in part, is that the contemporary is indebted to the modern, that “little that is contemporary is not also modern” (75). Another answer is that she continues to find Freud’s influence about human nature and motivation prevalent within the culture. In a later essay, “Cosmology,” she wrote of a student who asked, “If you reject Freud, what else is there?” (191). The student “was asking what other model could be found for interpreting human nature.” This troubles Robinson: “If a well-educated woman a third my age has to ask the question, and none of her peers is able to propose an answer, then the authority of Freudianism is clearly undiminished” (191). Freudianism, Robinson argues, continues to be a strong force in today’s culture, prefiguring as it does the undermining of mind in the parascientific writings. Whether the mind is formed by Dawkins memes or by Freud’s patricide, the result is the same: “The self is no longer assumed to be a thing to be approached with optimism, or to be trusted to see anything truly” (xviii). But is there a viable model for a self that can trust its own intuitions? The critic Adam Kirsch points out, “It has been more than two centuries since Kant showed exactly why we cannot treat our intuitions about the world as proofs in the way Robinson seems to desire; yet Kant’s name doesn’t appear in the book” (“Blinded”). It is an important omission. If anything, Robinson seems most comfortable with a pre-Kantian, Cartesian view of the self: “Descartes acknowledges the complexity of thinking, judging, and in his way incorporates the feeling of consciousness and the complexity of it more adequately than most theorists do now” (115). In selecting Descartes as a possible inspiration for a stronger self, Robinson clearly accepts some of the constraints “modern thought” has placed on epistemology. Not once in all of her writings has she advocated a premodern view of mind, taking up a position with, say, Aquinas or Dante, both of whom assume a concord between reason and nature. (All evidence points to Robinson’s aversion toward the Middle Ages.) Robinson’s ideas remain uncomfortably within modernity. It is not clear which of modernity’s epistemological constraints she accepts or rejects. A systematic articulation of Robinson’s view of selfhood clearly lies outside her intention in writing of Absence of Mind. Her concern is that “our conception of the significance of humankind in and for the universe has shrunk to the point that the very idea we ever imagined we might be significant on this scale now seems preposterous” (75). Absence of Mind is content to show the impoverishment of contemporary narratives of selfhood and gesture toward possibly fruitful historical alternatives.

12 0

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

When I Was a Child I Read Books

Breaking the cycle of long gaps between books, When I Was a Child I Read Books came just two years after Absence of Mind. The title, with its emphasis on the first-person singular, suggests a turn toward autobiography, up to then a relatively minor note within Robinson’s public-minded nonfiction. The essay “When I Was a Child” maintains a central place within the volume, offering readers a few resonant glimpses of Robinson’s Mountain West childhood. She presents herself as a lonely child, one deeply responsive to nature, an Emersonian wonderer: “I remember when I was a child at Coolin or Sagle or Talache, walking into the woods by myself and feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that make my hair prickle” (88). Like every Robinson essay, “When I Was a Child” contains multitudes, digressions on Puritan history, Western individualism, the Homestead Act, and the closing of the frontier. It is, simply put, a meditation on the meanings of the West, both personal and political. But a piece of straightforward autobiography this essay is not. The “I” of the title is not the “I” of a memoir. It is the “I” enlightened and enlarged by the experience of reading. The essays are occasioned by and structured around the experience of reading and responding. “Freedom of Thought” considers Robert Frost’s poem “The Oven Bird” and Jonathan Edwards’s Doctrine of Original Sin Defended. “Imagination and Community” begins with the unread books in Robinson’s private library. “Austerity as Ideology” ponders Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech; “Wondrous Love” praises American hymns and critiques Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents; “The Human Spirit and the Good Society” responds to popular media, CNN.com and the New York Times Magazine. “Who Was Oberlin?” mentions Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” and Jeff Sharlet’s The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, and “Cosmology” begins with Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka. There is also constant reference to the Bible. At the very least, these allusions reflect the author herself, her tastes, her fluency in a variety of discourses, and her penchant for genres both popular and scholarly. The book performs the liberal value of open-minded inquiry, the mind unshackled by prejudice and tradition, free to roam. More subtly perhaps, the allusions imply a particular theory of reading. For Robinson, reading is never simply a private pleasure, a solitary experience of aesthetic bliss. It is an experience that moves the individual out into communal concern. Reading leads to ethics and politics. The book’s Introduction refers to Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, a clear inspiration for Robinson. In it Whitman warns against the “savage, wolfish parties” (ix) overwhelming America’s post–Civil War political scene. Always keen

T HE E S SAY S

121

on historical analogies, Robinson finds a similar situation in today’s media culture: “We now live in a political environment characterized by wolfishness and filled with blather” (x). In her survey of America’s civil institutions, she concludes that “our great public education system is being starved and abandoned, and our prisons have declined to levels that disgrace us” (xv). Most troubling of all is the loss of the democratic ideal: “This loyalty to democracy is the American value I fear we are gravely in danger of losing” (xvi). Like Whitman’s in Democratic Vistas, Robinson’s ambition is to assess America’s political, religious, and cultural life in order to reimagine the possibilities of social hope. This volume can be distinguished from the others by the decidedly partisan tone of Robinson’s rhetoric. Conservative Republicans are described as “patriots,” condemned for their “bracing and punitive severity toward the vulnerable among us” and for desiring the “establishment of a kind of religious monoculture” (x–xi). Robinson’s attitudes toward the major political developments of the time—the rise of the Tea Party movement and the Great Recession—are broadly aligned with those of the Democratic Party. In spite of these flares of partisan rhetoric, it would be mistake to read this volume as partisan in substance. Though Robinson may well agree with most of the Democratic Party’s official platform, this fact is largely irrelevant to the intention of the essays, since her approach to politics begins with culture, not with specific policy positions. Her essays are less concerned with specific issues than with a particular set of virtues (courage, hope, and open-handed generosity) and vices (fear, selfishness, and pessimism). Culture is the primary reality, the soil out of which policy grows. Political change begins with a change in political culture. A good example of this cultural emphasis is “Austerity as Ideology,” an analysis of the politics and rhetoric that followed the financial crisis of 2008. Rather than an economic perspective on the so-called Great Recession, Robinson offers a moral critique of fear. It is fear, she argues, that motivates the calls for austerity and the subsequent undermining of liberal principles. “Over the years,” she wrote, “we seem to have become habituated, even addicted, to the notion of radical threat, threat of the kind that can make virtually anything seem expendable if it does not serve an immediate, desperate purpose of selfdefense” (40). This inflated sense of national anxiety, which is then translated into policies of austerity, is what Robinson calls “a new dominance of ideological thinking” (41), that is, thinking unfounded in reality. Fear also damages our ability to maintain liberal social attitudes, the “serene sort of courage that allows us to grant one another real safety, real autonomy, the means to think and act as judgment and conscience dictate” (44–45). For Robinson, the choice is clear: “We can channel and exploit minds and energies, bending them to

12 2

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

use against imagined adversaries,” or we can “let ourselves be—that is, to let ourselves be the reflective, productive creatures we are, unconstrained and uncoerced” (58). The essay makes the case that liberal ideals, such as the belief in the uncoerced individual, can exist only within a particular moral climate, one in which courage and generosity take precedence over fear and anxiety. The word “liberal” is in itself problematic, since it evokes so many conflicting definitions. Robinson seeks to dislodge the word from its current political connotations, redefining “liberal” as it “occurs in contexts that urge an ethics of non-judgmental, nonexclusive generosity” (65). “Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism” is a history of this ethical definition of liberalism, which leads her, curiously enough, to a defense of the law of Moses. The major burden of the argument lies in connecting the social ethic of the Old Testament to Christian liberalism. This task is difficult, claims Robinson, since the Old Testament has become a widely disparaged text. Scholars, both religious and secular, now associate the Old Testament with the “warlike God of Israel,” with the result that “it is usual to see the Old Testament treated as a sort of dead weight on Christianity, if not a positive embarrassment to it, by scholars as well as clergy” (62)—that is, with the important exception of the Calvinist or Reformed tradition, in which the Old Testament is given equal weight with the New. It is this tradition that Robinson asserts is the “fons et origo of Christian liberalism in the modern period, that is, in the period since the Reformation, and this liberalism has had its origins largely in the Old Testament” (64). The statement is controversial, since most narratives of liberal Christianity begin with Friedrich Schleiermacher, not John Calvin. Nevertheless, Robinson pursues her thesis by way of textual analysis, cross-referencing different translations of the Bible, eventually settling on a definition of “liberal” as open-handed generosity (69). From Jonathan Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” to Jonathan Edwards’s “Christian Charity: Or, the Duty of Charity to the Poor, Explained and Enforced,” Robinson outlines an alternative tradition of progressive social thought. Needless to say, she celebrates a tradition markedly different from that espoused today by secular progressives, who increasingly approach politics from a rationalist or technocratic perspective. Robinson claims that what is needed for political change is a culture infused with the spirit of Moses, a culture that celebrates the ethic of generosity found in the Hebrew Bible. Moses is again taken up in “The Fate of Ideas: Moses,” which addresses the “tone of condescension” in recent biblical scholarship. As in “Open Thy Hand Wide,” Robinson seeks to mend the relation between the Old and the New Testaments: “It has been orthodox through most of Christian history to treat the

T HE E S SAY S

123

Old Testament as rigid, benighted, greatly inferior to the Gospels. This error has never been truly rectified” (96). For Christians to have built their religion atop the Jewish faith, only to treat the Hebrew Scriptures with contempt, is not only ironic but a “blatant and illiberal disrespect for another religion” (98). The accusation of illiberality is essential. Though she never accuses any of the scholars of anti-Semitism—she comes very near to implying it—Robinson’s primary ethical concern is with religious tolerance. Group identities, when they are defined against those of other groups, undermine liberal ideals of tolerance and mutual respect. Thus, Robinson critiques those within her own identity groups— Christians and scholars—who continue to define themselves in opposition to the Hebrew Bible. The Episcopal bishop Shelby Spong removes Jesus from the “moral and ethical primitivity which he finds in the Old Testament” (99). Jack Miles in his God: A Biography offers a “dumbed-down pseudo-syncretism, which is put forward as an explanation of the complexity, the Godlikeness, of the God in the Tanakh” (112). Each of these scholars misses what Robinson finds essential, “the absolute biblical imperative of respectful generosity toward the poor and the stranger” (124). It is this emphasis on ethics that may foster an end to Christian hostility toward Judaism and the Hebrew Bible. “Imagination and Community” also concerns problems of religious identity. Problems occur “when the definition of ‘us’ and ‘them’ begin to contract. . . . As they shrink and narrow, they are increasingly inflamed, more dangerous and inhumane” (26). The tension between “us” and “them,” the desire for community without harming the other, is an obvious problem. Robinson’s solution is ultimately a Romantic one: the exercise of imagination, “the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global” (26). This is because “the more generous the scale at which imagination is exerted, the healthier and more humane the community will be” (29–30). The essay is also notable for its confessional moments, in particular the influence of feminism on Robinson’s life: Almost suddenly an expanding field of possibility lay open to women, certainly to me. And almost as suddenly I had reasonable uses to make of my brains and my education. By chance I benefited profoundly from the self-transformation of communities and institutions that have been most central to my life. . . . If I had lived a generation earlier, I might have thought about many of the things that interest me now, but not with the discipline that comes with writing about them or teaching, and not with the rigor that comes with being exposed to response and criticism. (29) Perhaps it is Robinson’s humanism, its skepticism toward gender-based descriptions of identity, that causes her to avoid using the word “feminism” or referring to herself as a “feminist.” Nevertheless, she is clearly aware of her

12 4

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

debt to the women’s movement, acknowledging that her career and intellectual life would have been impossible without it. “Wondrous Love” takes up another facet of religious identity, namely the “old habit of conflict within the household of Christ,” the conflict between liberal and conservative Christianity (132). She wrote, “I must assume that those who disagree with my understanding of Christianity are Christians all the same, that we are member 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” (132). Her strategy seeks not to heal the divide between liberal and conservative but to critique the moral culture of conservatives. She stands vigorously opposed to those who “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” (135). The essay characterizes the religious right as nationalistic, inclined toward fear and proclamations of American decline. They are, she claims, full of “self-induced panics” (137). Her hope is for a Christianity through which different factions can enjoy the sacred narrative free from “tribalism, resentment, or fear” (141). “Wondrous Love” declares Robinson’s loyalty to her liberal identity as well as her judgment against those Christians who have far too often “loved their enemies to death” (129). However, the fact of Christian injustice should be tempered with its contributions to the public good. Taking as her example Jeff Sharlet’s book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Robinson argues that many historians of the liberal-secular persuasion seek “to give an unsavory character to American religion and culture from its beginnings,” “to make meagerness and pathology seem to be our only heritage” (174). The essay “Who Was Oberlin?” offers a correction to this mistake, demonstrating the unique social goods produced by American religion. Citing Johann Friedrich Oberlin and the revivalist Charles Finney, Robinson directs our attention toward figures who were every bit as evangelical as they were social activists. She wrote, “We have no equivalent figure now, though during his lifetime there were many revivalists who were also educators, highly cultured men committed to radical social reform—reform for them meaning legal, political, and social liberation” (171). Certainly the essay intends to correct the error of the secular minded who see no justice coming out of American religion. But it is also directed toward our current religious culture, which has largely sundered social activism from religious conviction. “Who Was Oberlin?” uses the history of abolitionism, perhaps the greatest religiously inspired reform movement in U.S. history, to revive the possibility of restoring the bond between Christian belief and social reform.

T HE E S SAY S

125

Beyond the border of religious dispute, “Freedom of Thought” explores a contemporary culture full of “dreary determinisms,” ideas that constrain and distort the understanding of self, other, and religion. Modern thought, by which she means behaviorism, Freudianism, and Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird,” is full of reductionist tendencies, either reasoning “from a narrow set of interests, say survival and procreation,” or creating “a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and [trying] to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell” (7). As in The Death of Adam and Absence of Mind, Robinson offers the humanities and religion as counterpoints to science, economics, and anthropology: “There is no moment in which, no perspective from which, science as science can regard human life and say that there is a beautiful, terrible mystery in it all, a great pathos. Art, music, and religion tell us that” (15). The inviolability of human conscience and the affirmation of intuition stand opposed to the scientism and determinisms that Robinson believes grip contemporary intellectual life. The critique of scientism continues in “The Human Spirit and the Good Society,” which gathers and quietly dismantles the major discourses responsible for defining human nature. She examines evolutionary psychology and its claim that it is “unnatural for humans to be concerned about total strangers” (145). She then moves to economics, built on “the perfectly rational, utilitymaximizing autonomous individual” (149). Unpacking the assumptions and implications of these very influential descriptions, Robinson finds a debased portrait of human nature: “There is actually some reason to worry about this kind of throwaway scientism, however transparently flawed, because versions of it are everywhere and because, whatever else it is, it is almost always presented as learned hypothesis if not outright ‘information’ about our kind, assumptions about human nature presented as if they were objective truth and a reasonable and necessary basis for understanding reality” (146). Juxtaposed against these views are brighter models from the past. There is John Calvin and his lavish description of the human soul. There is Thomas Jefferson, whose language declares “the human person sacred” (163). As a good historian, Robinson knows there is no straightforward return to a public language inspired by Judeo-Christian assumptions, that all humans are created in the image of God. Her essay is content to show that another tradition exists, one that gives a higher, more capacious view of human nature. “We can learn from our own history that the nature of our species, and our nature as individuals, is an open question” (144). Therefore, “we should cease and desist from reductionist, in effect invidious, characterizations of humankind” (158). Addressing an audience that Robinson imagines has been educated in the reductionist perspective,

12 6

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

“The Human Spirit and the Good Society” attempts a course of re-education in cultural traditions that prize the sanctity of human individuals. The final essay in the collection, “Cosmology,” also concerns a failure of education. It is the so-called New Atheists that Robinson has in mind, the same band of neo-Darwinists she opposed in Absence of Mind. Why have these writers taken such hold of the public imagination? she wonders. Their naturalist perspective attempts “to fold us into great nature by making human complexity accidental or epiphenomenal and by seeing in our capacity to do harm the most natural thing about us” (186). However, “this model of reality does not describe our history or our prospects” (186). Her critique of this model is a call for an open model of reality, one that acknowledges mystery: “We have not escaped, nor have we in any sense diminished, the mystery of our existence. We have only rejected any language that would seem to acknowledge it” (188). Her solution turns on education: “The flourishing of these ideas, of neo-Darwinism in general, would not be possible except in the absence of vigorous and critical study of the humanities” (201). The essay is also notable for its engagement with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Robinson appreciates for the “dark gorgeousness of his mind, and the utter, quite palpable, almost hallucinatory loneliness” of his writings (184). While the force of Poe’s influence on Robinson’s fiction is less pronounced than that of Melville or Dickinson, his presence here does affirm the importance of antebellum American literature in shaping Robinson’s literary consciousness. The Givenness of Things

There is a case to be made that Robinson is not doing much new in this volume. Her opinions on a range of topics, from history to science to religion, have not significantly changed. She rails against the familiar enemies: scientific reductionism, neuroscience, cultural pessimism, hierarchy, the New Atheists, and the evangelical right. And she proposes the familiar answers: mystery, democracy, Christian humanism, generosity, grace. Readers of her essays will not be surprised by sentences that begin, “Calvin says.” And John Calvin is joined by the familiar band of intellectual heroes, including Jonathan Edwards and William James. With all of this overlap from previous collections, perhaps the most urgent question one can ask about The Givenness of Things is what exactly differentiates it from the others. One answer is Shakespeare. Not since her dissertation on Henry VI, Part II has Robinson written on the Bard, which makes the essays “Grace” and “Servanthood” particularly noteworthy. Needless to say, Robinson’s approach to Shakespeare has changed since her graduate school days. Her dissertation was

T HE E S SAY S

127

steeped in New Critical methods, arguing for the value and coherence of the long-neglected Henry VI, Part II, primarily through source study and a close reading of the play’s metaphors and allusions.4 The Shakespeare of Givenness is a theologian of sorts: “Shakespeare, my theologian, never asserts but often proposes that we participate in grace, in the largest sense of the word, as we experience love, in the largest sense of that word” (49). She finds him “turning over a theological problem” in The Tempest, and she unpacks the line “Grace is grace” from Measure for Measure. She claims, “The great scenes of reconciliation that conclude so many of his plays are moments of Shakespearean grace” (223). Of the theological issues most relevant to her fiction, Robinson again contemplates the limits of salvation, the major theological burden of Lila. Her reading of Antony and Cleopatra helps “resolve the anomaly of the implied exclusion of every kind of pagan and infidel from the divine love and grace Christians call salvation” (48). Rather than becoming entangled in the debate over Shakespeare’s religious identity—Catholic or Protestant—Robinson imagines a Shakespeare of religious speculation, whose plays are conceived as experiments in theological possibility. The other new subject is Jesus Christ. Odd as it is, Robinson has never written anything substantial on Jesus, a gap that the essays “Metaphysics” and “Son of Adam, Son of Man” seek to fill. Given her theological emphasis on Creation, it is unsurprising that Robinson prefers “Christ the Creator” (189) to Christ of the cross: “I confess that I struggle to understand the phenomenon of ritual sacrifice, and the Crucifixion when explicated in its terms” (194). For Robinson, “Christ is central ontologically . . . he was in the beginning with God and without him nothing was made that was made” (209). This understanding of Christ is the essential underpinning for Robinson’s Christian humanism. The Incarnation is a statement about the sanctity of humankind. This may be of interest to those concerned with Robinson’s religious imagination, but what value does it have for readers of fiction? I believe it helps explain the source of the sacred in the Gilead books. Everything that participates in being, everything that has existence, is sacred, for it has its origins in and is sustained by Christ. Because of this emphasis on the Christ of Creation, there is a notable absence of passion narratives, dramatizations of bodily suffering and sacrifice. Perhaps John Ames is cautioning against this traditional Catholic trope when he says, “To value suffering in itself can be dangerous and strange” (Gilead 137). The sacramental quality of nature is another feature of her fiction indebted to Robinson’s particular conception of Christ. Taking a wider view of Givenness, it is impossible not to notice the tensions that come with claiming a religious identity in pluralist America. It is

12 8

U ND E R S TA ND ING MAR ILYNNE R OB INS ON

especially complicated for Robinson because she shares an identity with those she entirely disagrees with, addressing an audience that strongly associates the word “Christian” with inimical political forces. It is a difficult rhetorical task, one that requires maintaining her religious identity and affirming her audience’s skepticism toward forms of right-wing political Christianity: “These Christians, if they read their Bibles, are not much impressed by what they find here” (158, my italics). It must be said that Robinson does not imagine an end to the long-standing ecclesial conflict between liberal and evangelical. If anything, these essays imagine little common ground. She never wants the audience to forget that she is a Christian, and neither should readers forget that she is a liberal Protestant, an advocate for the greater project of social justice. In turning to Shakespeare and Jesus, The Givenness of Things breaks new ground. And it is telling that originality takes the form of history, since this is the most historical of Robinson’s nonfiction. Which is not to say that she does not address the contemporary at all—gun control is mentioned several times— but to note that the emphasis falls on the “vivid ghosts” (139) of the past. Unlike previous books, which quote extensively from journalism and scholarship, this volume has little direct engagement with contemporary authors. Instead of quoting from Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, she mentions only “the clutch of atheists who have been active lately” (150). The same is true of the “neuroscientists,” whom she does not identify by name. The effect is the dominance of Robinson’s voice and the voices of the past, those from antiquity and the Early Modern periods. In their denial of contemporary voices and by bringing the past to bear on the present, the essays model the kind of humanistic thinking that Robinson cherishes. Humanist studies is her response to our technocratic moment, which values “creating and mastering technologies that will yield measurable enhancements of material well-being” (3) over the “exploration of the glorious mind” (4). It is not difficult to imagine a fussy Early Modern scholar taking issue with her historical studies, and such a scholar might be right to say that there are reams of scholarship that Robinson ignores. Such a response would certainly miss her purpose, which is not to contribute to a scholarly field but to satisfy her own mind. The discipline of preparing a lecture or writing an essay must serve to order her thinking about a particular matter of interest or concern. The appeal of the essays is Marilynne Robinson’s performance of Marilynne Robinson’s mind, fashioned and formed as it is, with its own peculiar habits and tendencies. The essays may be said to display what Wallace Stevens called “the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.”5 Or what she claimed in The Death of Adam, that “there are other ways of thinking, for which better arguments can be made” (1).

T HE E S SAY S

129

Conclusion

In her essay “Marguerite de Navarre,” Robinson quotes John Calvin’s Insti­ tutes of the Christian Religion on the topic of the divine origins of the human body and soul. It could not simply be “nature,” says Calvin, “such exquisite workmanship in their individual members, from mouth and eyes to their very toenails” (Adam 182). He mentions that “such agile motions of the soul, such excellent faculties, such rare gifts, especially bear upon the face of them a divinity that does not allow itself readily to be hidden” (182). Robinson concludes, “This is humankind in its fallen state. We have today no comparable language for celebrating human gifts and graces, and no comparable awareness of them, or pleasure in them” (184). This is Robinson’s interpretation of our cultural problem—that we seem to have lost a reverence for human beings. Robinson’s project is motivated by humanism, one that takes the form of a search for a new language that will again inspire reverence and awe toward ordinary human beings. After the catastrophes of the twentieth century and the rise of cultural anti-humanisms, whether inspired by Nietzsche or by Darwin, Robinson’s call for hope and optimism toward human beings seems radical indeed. It is my contention that her originality is largely a product of the cultural sources she draws upon, sources that most contemporary authors have rejected as outmoded, namely nineteenth-century America’s privileging of democracy and self, regionalism’s rejection of the cosmopolitan for the local and the particular, and liberal Protestantism’s acceptance of mystery and its call for social justice. From these sources, Robinson has crafted a highly individuated vision, mapping it onto the domestic novel and the archetypical quest for home. Undoubtedly Robinson has influenced the future of American literature, since she taught so many fine young writers at Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. It was perhaps there, in the classroom, that her influence will prove greatest, as she confronted her students with another way of writing novels, perceiving their neighbors, and imagining reality.

NOTES

Chapter 1—Understanding Marilynne Robinson

1. See Roger Kimball, “John Calvin Got a Bad Rap,” New York Times, 7 February 1999. 2. This biographical sketch draws on Joseph Dewey’s “Marilynne Robinson,” in Jay Parini, ed., American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Supplement 21, Scribner Writers Series (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2011), 209–24. 3. Other quotations from interviews can be added to these, such as “It seems to me that for a very long time people have been addicted to low-level, grinding pain for some reason, and I think that this begins with modernism” (Schaub, “Interview” 244). 4. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writ­ ing (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2011), 149. 5. Paul Rasor, Faith without Certainty (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2005), 11–30. To take just one example, Gilead has an ethical focus (the confrontation between Ames and Jack), optimism toward human nature (Ames laments earthly life rather than embracing the afterlife), and historical perspective (the 1950s setting and the abolitionist backstory), and it is narrated in the first-person, thus prizing individual experience. 6. See John McClure, Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007). 7. Alter’s Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible has several useful explications of Robinson’s prose in Gilead and its relationship to the biblical style. See especially pp. 162–70. Chapter 2—Housekeeping

1. John Keats, Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 2007), 195. 2. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas Johnson (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1976), 365. 3. The train-ride home involves the only appearance of an ethnic other in House­ keeping, an “old Indian woman” (171), who is used to solidify the relationship between Ruth and Sylvie. As a symbolic presence of a politically marginal subject, the Native American woman is the only character that can affirm Ruth and Sylvie’s relationship, since it exists outside the bounds of conventional society. Needless to say, this use of the Native American presence is politically problematic. 4. Herman Melville, Moby­Dick or, The Whale (New York: Penguin, 2002), 178. 5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays (New York: Penguin, 2003), 31–32.

13 2

NOT ES T O PAGES 31–61

6. See Mallon’s “Sojourning Women: Homelessness and Transcendence in House­ keeping,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 30 (1989): 95–105, and Ryan’s “Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: The Subversive Narrative and the New American Eve,” South Atlantic Review 56, no. 1 (1991): 79–86. 7. Christine Caver, “Nothing Left to Lose: Housekeeping’s Strange Freedoms,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 69, no. 1 (March 1996): 11–37. 8. Henry James, The Art of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 31. Chapter 3—Gilead

1. A fine discussion of Gilead’s genre can be found in Elizabeth A. Ellis, “Race, Religion and Sentimentalism in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home” (2014). 2. See the chapter “Confessional Literature,” in Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criti­ cism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 3. Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), 2. 4. Anne Bradstreet, The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), 252. 1960–1974. 5. Ibid., 280. 6. This motif is also used to signal changes in identity, much as Saul becomes Paul or Jacob becomes Israel. Once Edward becomes an atheist, he changes his name from Edwards, disassociating himself from Jonathan Edwards. 7. Fire and water are the two major image networks of the novel. For a discussion of this imagery, see Lisa Bailey, “Fraught with Fire: Race and Theology in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead,” Christianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (2010): 265–80. 8. For another perspective on the Ames-Jack relationship, see Jeffrey Gonzalez, who argues that Gilead and Home are “not so much about forgiving Jack . . . nor is either about his redemption; instead, their focus is on how to encounter him ethically” (382). 9. Linda Hutchean, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988). 10. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2007), 59. 11. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 299. 12. For a historical contextualization of Gilead that considers the rise of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity after World War II, see Christopher Douglas, “Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Chapter 4—Home

1. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 2. Ibid., 224. 3. Ibid. 4. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 8 (New York: Penguin, 2000), 192–94. 5. Elizabeth Ellis’s article, “Race, Religion, and Sentimentalism in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home” connects Robinson’s perspective on domesticity to the sentimental tradition of nineteenth-century abolitionist literature. She argues that Gilead and Home “revise the ‘home as haven’ trope by interrogating its limits” (187).

N O T E S T O PA GE S 7 7 – 1 2 8

133

6. Briallen Hopper, in “Marilynne Robinson in Montgomery,” offers a critique of the last scene: “It’s a lovely liberal reverie, and its limits make it even more poignant: even in her wildest dreams, Glory can’t imagine Robert being welcomed into his white father’s childhood home. But Glory does nothing to make even this modest fantasy of a family reunion come true. The dream of Robert’s return is so consoling to her, so meaningful, that for Glory’s emotional purposes, and for the purposes of the novel, it doesn’t much matter whether it actually happens. The mere longing is enough: It feels more satisfying than any real attempt at interracial community or racial justice could ever be. Actual black people need never displace the shy, grateful, undemanding black man of Glory’s dreams.” Chapter 5—Lila

1. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 4 (New York: Penguin, 2000), 760. Chapter 6—The Essays

1. M.F. Perutz, “Is Britain ‘Befouled,’” New York Review of Books, 23 November 1989: 49. 2. Robin McKie, “Sellafield: the most hazardous place in Europe,” Observer, 18 April 2009. 3. Gonzalez connects Robinson anti-utopian thought to suffering: “The necessary existence of suffering means we should ignore utopian thinking that would imagine it either eliminable or unnecessary” (“Ontologies” 378). 4. The dissertation is also valuable for its revelation of many of Robinson’s characteristic intellectual concerns, such as a wariness towards Freud and Darwin (“Evolution did not originate with Darwin, nor was Freud the first to interpret dreams”) and the questioning of reductionism (“When Shakespeare uses the language and imagery of Renaissance or Tudor political theory, there is no reason to imagine that his political thinking begins and ends within the limits of any system or orthodoxy”); “New Look” (31). 5. Wallace Stevens, “Of Modern Poetry,” The Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1964.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works NOVELS

Housekeeping. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1980. Adapted for the screen. Bill Forsyth, screenwriter. Housekeeping. Dir. Bill Forsyth. Prod. Robert F. Colesberry. Original score by Michael Gibbs. With Christine Lahti, Sara Walker, and Andrea Burchill. Columbia Pictures, 1987. 117 min. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. Home. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Lila. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. SHORT STORIES

“Orphans” [an excerpt from Housekeeping]. Harper’s Magazine. February 1981: 59–69. “Connie Bronson.” Paris Review. Summer-Fall 1986. 294–302. “From Housekeeping.” Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers. Ed. Kim Barnes and Mary Clearman Blew. New York: Penguin, 1994. 62–73. “From Housekeeping.” Northwest Passages: A Literary Anthology of the Pacific Northwest from Coyote Tales to Roadside Attractions. Ed. Bruce Barcott. Seattle: Sasquatch, 1994. 255–58. “Housekeeping.” American Post­Modernist Novels. Ipswich, Mass.: Salem Press, 2013. 139–48. “Kansas.” The New Yorker. 13 September 2004. “Jack.” Harper’s Magazine. August 2008: 62–72. “First Chapter: Home.” New York Time Book Review. 19 September 2008. NONFICTION

“A New Look at Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II: Sources, Structure, and Meaning.” Dissertation, University of Washington, 1977. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1977. 22362031. Mother Country: Britain, The Nuclear State, and Nuclear Pollution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. The Death of Adam. New York: Picador, 1998; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. When I Was a Child I Read Books. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. The Givenness of Things: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

13 6

S ELECT ED B IB LIOGR APHY

RECORDINGS

Robinson, Marilynne. Marilynne Robinson Reads Excerpts from House keeping and Mother Country. Cassette. American Prose Library. Columbia, Mo. AAPL 9031, 1989. AUDIOVISUALS

North American Women Writers: Spirit and Society. Sonia Gemes. Dir. Bill Heitz. Prod. Jeff Brenzel and Ray Solley. Florence: Brenzel Publishing, 1993. 170 min. ESSAYS

“The Hum Inside the Skull.” New York Times. 13 May 1984: 35–40. “So Where Does a Writer’s Influences Come From?” Ms. August 1984: 112. “Bad News from Britain.” Harper’s Magazine. February 1985: 65–72. Rpt. as “The Waste Land.” Granta 15 (Spring 1985): 227–42. “Introduction: New England Decorum.” Massachusetts Review 26 (Summer/Autumn 1985): 173–74. Rpt. in Harper’s Magazine. May 1986: 34. “Writers and the Nostalgic Fallacy.” New York Times. 13 October 1985: 34–35. “Update: Sellafield Sea Dumping.” Harper’s Magazine. June 1986: 4–5+. “Sigmund Freud and My Discontent.” Psych Critique 2–3 (1987): 245–54. “Language Is Smarter Than We Are.” New York Times Book Review. 11 January 1987: 8. “Beyond the Pale with Edgar Allan Poe.” New York Times Book Review. 8 February 1987: 11. “A Nasty, Empty, Dangerous Word (Homogeneity).” New York Times Book Review. March 1987: 10–11. “Let’s Not Talk Down to Ourselves.” New York Times Book Review. 5 April 1987: 11. “At Play in the Backyard of the Psyche.” New York Times. 26 April 1987: 1–4. “Culture and Spirit.” AGNI 27 (1988): 98–102. “Introduction.” The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories. By Kate Chopin. New York: Bantam, 1988. vii–xx. Rpt. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University. English Department, 1994. “The First and Second Epistles General of Peter.” Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament. Ed. Alfred Com. New York: Viking, 1990. 305–15. “Mother Country: An Exchange.” With M. F. Perutz. New York Review of Books. 12 April 1990: 50. “Two New Artistic Collaborations for Libraries.” With Richard Nelson. Library Jour­ nal. 15 February 1991: 132. “Hearing Silence: Western Myth Reconsidered.” Northern Lights 8, no. 2 (1992). Rpt. in The True Subject: Writers on Life and Craft. Ed. Kurt Brown. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1993. 135–51. Rpt. in Northern Lights: A Selection of New Writing from the Ameri­ can West. Ed. Deborah Clow and Donald Snow. New York: Vintage, 1994. 49–66. “My Western Roots.” Old West­New West: Centennial Essays. Ed. Barbara Howard Meldrum. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1993. 165–72. “Puritans and Prigs: An Anatomy of Zealotry.” Salmagundi 101–102 (1994): 36–54. “A Discussion: ‘The New Puritanism’ Reconsidered.” With Robert Boyers, Rochelle Gurstein, and Andrew Delbanco. Salmagundi 106–7 (1995): 194–256. “Modern Victorians.” Harper’s Magazine. July 1995: 72. “Gospels: Marilynne Robinson.” Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives. Ed. David Rosenberg. New York: Anchor, 1996. 133–50.

SE L E C T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

137

“Consequences of Darwinism.” Salmagundi 114/115 (1997): 13–47. “Delivering Darwin.” With Terence Diggory. Salmagundi 118/119 (1998): 311–27. “Surrendering Wilderness.” The Wilson Quarterly 22, no. 4 (1998): 60–64. “The Way We Work, the Way We Live.” Christian Century 115, no. 24 (1998): 823. Re­ ligion and Philosophy Collection. “Diminished Creatures.” The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Live from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Ed. Frank Conroy. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. 155–61. “Moses.” Salmagundi 121/122 (1999): 23–46. “The Conservative Devaluation of Value.” Salmagundi 126/127 (2000): 3–44. “Heresies and Real Presences.” Salmagundi 135/136 (2002): 30–60. “Pastoral Letter.” Christian Century 121, no. 23 (2004): 26–29. Religion and Philosophy Collection. “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion.” Harper’s. August 2004. Rpt. in Social Research: An International Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2004): 29–38. “Competition.” Salmagundi 148/149 (2006): 3–15. “Hallowed Be Your Name.” Harper’s Magazine. July 2006: 20–26. Rpt. in Getting on Message: Challenging the Christian Right from the Heart of the Gospel. Ed. Peter Laarman. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. 1–12. “Hysterical Scientism.” Harper’s Magazine. November 2006: 83–88. “Onward, Christian Liberals: Faith Is Not about Piety or Personal Salvation, but about Helping Those in Need.” The American Scholar 75, no. 2 (2006): 42+. Rpt. in The Best American Essays 2007. Ed. David Foster Wallace. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 210–20. “Preface.” John Calvin: Selections from His Writings. Tr. Elsie Anne McKee. Ed. Emilie Griffin. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. ix–xxviii. “Preface.” Steward of God’s Covenant: Selected Writings. By John Calvin. Ed. John F Thornton and Susan B Varenne. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. v–ix. “Baptism: The Touch of Water.” Clergy Journal 84, no. 3 (2008): 21. “Credo.” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 36, no. 2 (2008): 22–23. Rpt. in Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”: A Casebook. Ed. Wilson H. Kimnach, Caleb J. D. Maskell, and Kenneth P. Minkema. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 180–82. “A Great Amnesia.” Harper’s Magazine. May 2008: 17–21. “Parallel Politics.” New York Times. 31 August 2008. “A Prodigal’s Return.” Christian Century 125, no. 18 (2008): 36–38. “Wilderness.” The Wilderness Debate Rages On: Continuing the Great New Wilderness Debate. Ed. Michael P. Nelson and J. Baird Callicott. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. 563–70. “Editorial.” Political Theology. July 2009: 388+. “Calvinism as Metaphysics.” Toronto Journal of Theology 25, no. 2 (2009): 175–86. “Thinking Again: What Do We Mean by Mind?” Commonweal 137, no. 9 (2010): 17+. Rpt. in The Best Spiritual Writing 2012. Ed. Philip Zaleski. New York: Penguin, 2011. 196–208. “Wondrous Love.” Christianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (2010): 202–15. “What We May Be.” Harper’s Magazine. June 2011: 40. “The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible.” New York Times Book Review. 22 December 2011. Rpt. in The Best Spiritual Writing 2013. Ed. Philip Zaleski. New York: Penguin, 2012. 186–89.

13 8

S ELECT ED B IB LIOGR APHY

“Imagination and Community.” Commonweal 139, no. 5 (2012): 9–15. “Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred.” Chronicle Of Higher Education 58, no. 24 (2012): B6–B10. “What Holds Us Together.” Commonweal 139, no. 5 (2012): 9+. “Wisdom and Light.” Christian Century 129, no. 8 (2012): 11–12. “A Common Faith.” Guernica. 1 March 2012. “Forward.” Esther Stories. By Peter Orner. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, 2013. xvii–xix. “Forward.” The Sound and the Fury. By William Faulkner. 1929, 1956. Modern Library Edition. New York: Random House, 2012. ix+. “John Edwards in a New Light.” Humanities 35, no. 6 (2014): 14–45. “Higher Learning.” The Brown Reader: 50 Writers Remember College Hill. Ed. Judy Sternlight. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. 89–92. “On ‘Beauty.’” The World Split Open: Great Authors on How and Why We Write. Portland, Ore.: Tin House Books, 2014. 121–39. “On Housekeeping.” New York Times. 6 November 2014. “On Edgar Allen Poe.” New York Review of Books. 5 February 2015. “More Than Is Dreamt of in Your Theologies.” With John Polkinghorne. The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World. Ed. Bob Abernethy and William Bole. New York: Seven Stories, 2008. 31–36. REVIEWS

“A Long and Wretched Vigil” [a review of On the Perimeter by Caroline Blackwood]. New York Times Book Review. 1 December 1985: 11. “Working to Make Life Prettier” [a review of Vienna Girl by Ingeborg Luterstein]. New York Times Book Review. 11 May 1986: 7. “The Family Game Was Revenge” [a review of A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor]. New York Times Book Review. 19 October 1986: I +. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Peter Taylor. Ed. Hubert H. McAlexander. New York: Hill, 1993. 61–65. “At Play in the Back Yard of the Psyche” [a review of Trust Me; Short Stories by John Updike]. New York Times Book Review. 26 April 1987: 1 +. “Growing Up Thankless” [a review of The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble]. New York Times Book Review. 1 November 1987: 12. “Marriage and Other Astonishing Bonds” [a review of Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories by Raymond Carver]. New York Times Book Review. 15 May 1988: 1, 35+. “A Colony of the Disgruntled” [a review of The High Road by Edna O’Brien]. New York Times Book Review. 20 November 1988: 11. “The Guilt She Left Behind” [a review of Because It ls Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart by Joyce Carol Oates]. New York Times Book Review. 22 April 1990: 7. “The Blue River by Ethan Canin.” Yale Review 80 (1992): 237. “Daughters by Paule Marshall.” Yale Review 80 (1992): 237. “Fiction in Review [Ethan Canin, Paule Marshall, Carolyne See, Ron Hansen, Norman Rush, Anne Tyler, Ward Just, and Angela Carter].” Yale Review 80 (1992): 237–35. “Making History by Carolyn See.” Yale Review 80 (1992): 237. “Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen.” Yale Review 80 (1992): 237. “Mating by Norman Rush.” Yale Review 80 (1992): 237. “Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler.” Yale Review 80 (1992): 237.

SE L E C T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

139

“The Translator by Ward S. Just.” Yale Review 80 (1992): 237. “Wise Children by Angela Carter.” Yale Review 80 (1992): 237. “Louise Edrich’s The Bingo Palace.” Boston Globe. 23 January 1994, sec B: 41. “Though the Heavens May Fall and Bury the Chains: Freed.” New York Times Book Review. 9 January 2005. “The Believer” [a review of A Prayer Journal by Flannery O’Connor]. New York Times Book Review. 15 November 2013. SPEECHES, LECTURES, AND OTHER ORAL PRESENTATIONS

“The New Citizen.” Faith, Values, Women, and Politics Series: How Do We Act for the Common Good? College of St. Catherine. St. Paul, Minn. 11 October 2007. Lecture. “Conversation with St. Kate’s Community about Writing.” College of St. Catherine. St. Paul, Minn. 12 October 2007. Lecture. “The Psalms: A Reading and Conversation with Music.” 92nd Street Y. New York. 17 December 2007. Reading. “Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self.” Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale University. 24 March–2 April 2009. http://www .yale.edu/terrylecture/robinson “Being Here.” 27th Annual Presidential Lecture at The University of Iowa. 14 February 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOhHtnDCypU “The Freedom of a Christian.” Yves Simon Lecture. Lumen Christi Institute. 16 February 2011. http://vimeo.com/20704891 “The Workshop as Phenomenon.” University of Iowa. 9 June 2011. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=QfDDXhn_iXU “What Is Truth, and How Do We Recognize It?” Science and Religion Lecture Series. Congregational United Church of Christ of Iowa City, Iowa. 25 March 2012. 2012 Library of Congress National Book Festival. 9 May 2012. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=-bjv_DSqnog “Christian Humanism in a World Come of Age.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer Lectures. Regent College. Vancouver, British Columbia. 3 May 2014. Robinson, Marilynne, and Peg Boyers. Salmagundi. 5 August 2014. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=hWT7WCil0nA “Reconceiving Realism: The Case for a Deeper Attention.” Albaugh Lecture. Baylor University. 11 September 2014. Lecture. “Shakespeare: The Question of Audience.” Avenali Lecture. Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California at Berkeley. 3 November 2014. Lecture. “The Givenness of Things.” Lana Schwebel Memorial Lecture in Religion and Literature. Yale University. 4 December 2014. Interviews

Auslander, Bonnie. “Author Pleased with Movie of the Novel.”Daily Hamsphire Gazette [Northampton, Mass.]. 5 May 1988: 45. Bachinger, Katrina. Conversation with Marilynne Robinson. Salzburg. Thanksgiving Day, 1982. Bartos, Eileen, and Carolyn Jacobson. “Mostly on Mother Country.” Iowa Review 22, no. 1 (1992): 8–21. Bonetti, Kay. Marilynne Robinson. Minnesota Public Radio. Cassette. American Prose Library. Columbia, Mo. 1989. 83 min.

14 0

S ELECT ED B IB LIOGR APHY

Boyers, Robert. “Talking about American Fiction” [panel discussion with Marilynne Robinson, Russell Banks, Robert Stone, and David Rieft]. Salmagundi 93 (1992): 61–77. Fassler, Joe. “Marilynne Robinson on Democracy, Reading, and Religion in America.” The Atlantic. May 2012. Gordon, Ronni. “Marilynne Robinson.” Union News [Springfield, Mass.]. 10 April 1988. Gourevitch, Philip. “Marilynne Robinson.” The Paris Review Interviews, IV. New York: Picador, 2009. 438–68. Gritz, Jennie Rothenberg. “Gilead’s Balm.” The Atlantic. December 2004. Handley, George. “The Radiant Astonishment of Existence: Two Interviews with Marilynne Robinson, March 20, 2004, and February 9, 2007.” Literature and Belief 27, no. 2 (2007): 113–43. Harwin, Michael. “Marilynne Robinson to Read: Dumping of Plutonium Subject of Book in Progress.” Daily Hamsphire Gazette [Northampton, Mass.]. 16 April 1987: 10. Hedrick, Tace. “On Influence and Appropriation.” Iowa Review 22, no. 1 (1992): 1–7. Hoezee, Scott. “A World of Beautiful Souls: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Perspectives (May 2005). Humphreys, Camilla. “Northampton Woman Surprises with First Novel— ‘Housekeeping.’” Daily Hamsphire Gazette [Northampton, Mass.]. 14 January 1981: 23. Johnson, Sarah Anne. “Marilynne Robinson: An Intensifier of Experience.” The Very Telling: Conversations with American Writers. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2006. 181–86. Mason, Wyatt. “Saying Grace.” New York Times Magazine. 5 October 2014: 24(L). Literature Resource Center. O’Connell, Mark. “The First Church of Marilynne Robinson.” The New Yorker. 30 May 2012. O’Connell, Nicholas. “Marilynne Robinson.” At the Field’s End: Interviews with Twenty Pacific Northwest Writers. Seattle: Madrona Publishers, 1987. 220–30. Painter, Rebecca M. “On the Responsibility of Churches to Safeguard and Promote the Spirit of Democracy, the Potential of the Humanities, and Other Thoughts—an Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 66, no. 2 (2014): 151+. “Further Thoughts on a Prodigal Son Who Cannot Come Home: On Loneliness and Grace: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Christianity and Literature 58, no. 3 (2009):484–92. Paul, Pamela. “Marilynne Robinson.” By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Lit­ erary Life from the New York Times Book Review. New York: Henry Holt, 2014. 144–47. Pinsker, Sandford. “Conversation with Marilynne Robinson.” Conversations with Con­ temporary American Writers. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1985. 119–27. Robinson, Marilynne. “Hum inside the Skull: A Symposium.” New York Times Book Review. 13 May 1984: l+. Robinson, Marilynne. Morning Edition. National Public Radio. 28 November 1987. Robinson, Marilynne. Interview with Tace Herick. Iowa Review 22, no. 1 (1992): 1–7. Robinson, Marilynne. “A Life of Perished Things.” Face to Face: Interviews with Con­ temporary Novelists. Ed. Allan Vorda. Houston: Rice University Press, 1993. 155–83.

SE L E C T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

141

Robinson, Marilynne. Interview with Scott Hoezee. Perspectives May 2005. Robinson, Marilynne. Interview with Thomas Gardner. A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 47–69. Robinson, Marilynne. Interview with Regan Good. The World Within. Portland, Ore.: Tin House Books, 2007. 239–49. Robinson, Marilynne. Interview with Sarah Fay. The Paris Review 186 (2008): 198–215. Robinson, Marilynne. “Conversations: Marilynne Robinson.” Conversations from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 8 October 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7X 5qZ-Qet8 Robinson, Marilynne. Interview with Angela Elam. Kansas City Public Library. 12 May 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THUSTHdbMN0 Robinson, Marilynne. Interview with William Storrar. Center of Theological Inquiry. 13 July 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWkOkfN3VAg Robinson, Marilynne. Interview. The Guardian. 21 May 2012. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=KTVf6ivxim8 Robinson, Marilynne. Interview with Paul Elie. Berkley Center. 5 March 2013. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?y=6t5qvpFhHEQ Robinson, Marilynne. “Conversations: Marilynne Robinson.” 18 April 2013. http:// www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL82E7EB34CAE1DAA4 Robinson, Marilynne. Interview with Robert Long. “Marilynne Robinson on Faith and Conservatism.” The American Conservative. 1 November 2013. Robinson, Marilynne. Interview. Lawrence [Kans.] Public Library. 6 March 2014. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs-ULZk3PLc Robinson, Marilynne. Interview with Sarah Pulliam Bailey. Religion News Service. 8 October 2014. Robinson, Marilynne. “Marilynne Robinson on Faith, Capitalism and Democracy.” Moy­ ers and Company. 17 October 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh_BMgJ WdwI Robinson, Marilynne. “A Conversation with Marilynne Robinson.” The Nation. 6 January 2015. Schaub, Thomas. “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Contemporary Literature 35 (1994): 231–51. Schoen, Stephanie Cooper. “Nuclear Waste Profiteering: Robinson’s New Book Points Finger at England.” Daily Hamsphire Gazette [Northampton, Mass.]. 15 February 1989: 25. Silverblatt, Michael. “Falling to Grace.” Brick 75 (2005): 104–16. Voss, Anne E. “Portrait of Marilynne Robinson.” Iowa Review 22, no. 1 (1992): 21–28. Criticism

Acocella, Joan. “A Note of the Miraculous.” New York Review of Books. 9 June 2005. Acocella, Joan. “Lonesome Road.” The New Yorker. 6 October 2014: 79. Ahmed, Fatema. “Return of the Prodigal.” New Statesman 137, no. 4919 (27 October 2008): 54. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 276. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Aldrich, Marcia. “The Poetics of Transience: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Essays in literature 16 (1989): 127–40. Alter, Robert. “The World through Parataxis.” Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010.

14 2

S ELECT ED B IB LIOGR APHY

Bachinger, Katrina E. “The Tao of Housekeeping: Reconnoitering the Utopian Frontier in Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Feminist Novel.’” In Fur eine offene Literaturwissenschaft: Erkundungen and Eroprobungen am Beispiel US­amerikanischer Texte [Opening Up Literary Criticism: Essays on American Prose and Poetry]. Ed. Leo Truchlar. Salzburg: Neugenbauer, 1986. 14–33. Bailey, Lisa M. Siefker. “Fraught with Fire: Race and Theology in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Christianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (2010): 265–80. Barra, Allen. “Marilynne Robinson’s Small, Rich Body of Work.” The Atlantic. 16 May 2012. Barrett, Laura. “‘[T]he Ungraspable Phantom of Life’: Incompletion and Abjection in Moby­Dick and Housekeeping.” South Atlantic Review 73, no. 3 (2008): 1+. Barrett, Laura. “Frame the Past: Photography and Memory in Housekeeping and The Invention of Solitude.” South Atlantic Review 74, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 87–109. Beck, Stefan. “Exploring the Interior.” New Criterion 29, no. 2 (2010): 75+. Bergthaller, Hannes. “Like a Ship to Be Tossed: Emersonian Environmentalism and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism. Ed. Fiona Becket and Terry Gifford. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2007. 75–97. Bohannan, Heather. “Quest-tioning Tradition: Spiritual Transformation Images in Women’s Narratives and Housekeeping.” Western Folklore 51, no. 1 (1992): 65–79. Booth, Allyson. “To Caption Absent Bones: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Es­ says in Literature 19 (1992): 279–90. Bowler, Maria. “A Brief Theory about Marilynne Robinson.” Commonweal. 8 February 2015. Burke, William. “Border Crossings in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Modern Fiction Studies 37 (1991): 716–24. Cardullo, Bert. “Three Ways to Play House.” Hudson Review 41 (1988): 348–56. Capo, Beth Widmaier. “Midwestern History and Memory in Robinson’s Gilead.” MidAmerica 34 (2007): 79–86. Caver, Christine. “Nothing Left to Lose: Housekeeping’s Strange Freedoms.” Ameri­ can Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography 69, no. 1 (March 1996): 11–37. Champagne, Rosaria. “Women’s History and Housekeeping: Memory, Representation, and Reinscription.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 20 (1992): 321–29. Chandler, Marilyn R. “Housekeeping and Beloved: When Women Come Home.” Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 291–318. Clemens, Lori R. Contemporary Authors. Vol. 116. Detroit: Gale, 1986. 395–96. Davidson, Lale. “Daughters of Eurydice in Absentia: The Feminine Heroic Quest for Presence in Housekeeping.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 4, no. 4 (1991): 19–36. D’Cruz, Doreen. “Desire without a Transcendent Object: Marilynne Robinson’s House­ keeping.” Loving Subjects: Narratives of Female Desire. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. 223–37. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 276. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Deresiewicz, William. “Homing Patterns.” The Nation. 13 October 2008. Dewey, Joseph. “Marilynne Robinson.” American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Supplement 21. Ed. Jay Parini. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2011. 209–24. Scribner Writers Series.

SE L E C T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

143

Doig, Kathering. “Text as Cadaver.” Death in Literature. Ed. Outi Hakola and Sari Kivisto. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. 47–62. Domestico, Anthony. “Blessings in Disguise: The Unfashionable Genius of Marilynne Robinson.” Commonweal 141, no. 18 (2014): 12+. “‘Imagine a Carthage Sown with Salt’: Creeds, Memory, and Vision in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Litera­ ture and Theology 28, no. 1 (2014): 92–109. Dougherty, Carol. “Homecomings and Housekeepings: Homer’s Odyssey and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures: The Journey Home. Ed. Hunter H. Gardner and Sheila Murnaghan. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014. 281–302. Douglas, Christopher. “Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 44, no. 3 (2011): 333–53. Durose, Lisa. “Marilynne Robinson: A Bibliography.” ANQ 10, no. 1 (1997): 31–46. Ellis, Elizabeth A. “Race, Religion and Sentimentalism in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” The Sentimental Mode: Essays in Literature, Film and Television. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2014. 175–89. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. “The Incarnational Vision of Marilynne Robinson: Challenging Sovereign Selves.” Cresset 73, no. 3 (2010): 15–21. Engebretson, Alex. “Midwestern Mysticism: The Place of Religion in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” MidAmerica 39 (2012): 24–35. Esteve, Mary. “Robinson’s Crusoe: Housekeeping and Economic Form.” Contemporary Literature 55, no. 2 (2014): 219–48. Evans, Justin. “Subjectivity and the Possibility of Change in the Novels of Marilynne Robinson.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 66, no. 2 (2014): 131+. Fairlamb, Horace L. “Breaking the Pax Magisteriorum: The New War of Science and Religion.” Symploke 20, no. 1 (2012): 251–75. Ferguson, Robert A. “Don DeLillo and Marilynne Robinson Mourn Loss.” Alone in America: The Stories That Matter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. 201–30. Florby, Gunilla. “Escaping This World: Marilynne Robinson’s Variation on an Old American Motif.” Moderna Sprak 78 (1984): 211–16. Foster, Thomas. “History, Critical Theory, and Women’s Social Practices: ‘Women’s Time’ and Housekeeping.” Signs 14 (1988): 73–99. Rpt. in Feminist Theory in Practice and Process. Ed. Micheline F. O’Barr, Sarah Westphal-Wihl, and Mary Wyer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 221–47. Freeman, John. “Marilynne Robinson.” How to Read a Novelist. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. 290–93. Galehouse, Maggie. “Their Own Private Idaho: Transience in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 41, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 117–37. Gardner, Thomas. “Enlarging Loneliness: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping as a Reading of Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson Journal 10, no. 1 (2001): 9–33. Gatta, John. “The Undomesticated Ecology of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in American from the Puritans to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 219–24. Gernes, Sonia. “Transcendent Women: Uses of the Mystical in Margaret Atwood’s The Cat’s Eye and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Religion and Literature 23 (1991): 143–65. Geyh, Paula E. “Burning Down the House? Domestic Space and Feminine Subjectivity in

14 4

S ELECT ED B IB LIOGR APHY

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 34 (1993): 103–22. Gonzalez, Jeffrey. “Ontologies of Interdependence, the Sacred, and Health Care: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55, no. 4 (2014): 373–88. Gottfried, Amy S. “Beneath a Layer of White: Violence and Nature in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Historical Nightmares and Imaginative Violence in American Women’s Writings. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Greiner, Donald J. Women without Men: Female Bonding and the American Novel of the 1980s. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Haddox, Thomas F. “The Uses of Orthodoxy: Mary Gordon and Marilynne Robinson.” Hard Sayings: The Rhetoric of Christian Orthodoxy in Late Modern Fiction. Colombus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. 161–203. Hall, Joanne. “The Wanderer Contained: Issues of ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’ in Relation to Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Criti­ cal Survey 18, no. 3 (2006): 37–50. Handley, George. “The Metaphysics of Ecology in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeep­ ing.” Modern Fiction Studies 55, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 496–521. Harken, Amy Lignitz, and Lee Hull Moses. Gifts of Gilead. St. Louis, Mo.: Chalice Press, 2005. Hart, Jeffrey. “Gilead: A Rumor of Angels.” The Living Moment: Modernism in a Bro­ ken World. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2012. 99–115. Hartshorne, Sarah. D. “Lake Fingerbone and Walden Pond: A Commentary on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Modern Language Studies 20, no. 3 (1990): 50–57. Hedrick, Tace. “The Perimeters of Our Wandering Are Nowhere: Breaching the Domestic in Housekeeping.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 137–51. Heller, Dana A. “‘Happily at Ease in the Dark’: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” The Feminization of Quest­Romance: Radical Departures. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. 93–104. Hobbs, June Hadden. “Burial, Baptism, and Baseball: Typology and Memorialization in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Christianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 241–62. Holberg, Jennifer. “‘The Courage to See It’: Toward an Understanding of Glory.” Chris­ tianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 283–300. Holmgren Troy, Maria. In the First Person in the House: The House Chronotope in the Four Works by American Women Writers. Uppsala, Sweden: University of Uppsala Press, 1999. 180–201. Hopper, Briallen. “Marilynne Robinson in Montgomery.” Religion and Politics (22 December 2014). http://religionandpolitics.org/2014/12/22/marilynne-robinson-in -montgomery. Accessed October 8, 2016. Hubbard, Stacy Carson. “The Balm in Gilead.” Michigan Quarterly Review 44, no. 3 (2005): 541–44. Hungerford, Amy. “The Literary Practice of Belief: Lived Religion, Marilynne Robinson, Left Behind.” Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010. 107–31. Hungerford, Amy. “The American Novel since 1945.” Open Yale Courses. Yale University. http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-291

SE L E C T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

145

Hunter, Jeffrey W., ed. “Marilynne Robinson.”Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 276. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Inoue, Kazuko. “‘Resurrection of the Ordinary’: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Language and Culture 16 (1989): 143–49. Jamison, Leslie. “The Power of Grace.” The Atlantic. October 2014. Johnson, Diane. “Moral of the Story.” New York Times. 3 October 2014. Kakutani, Michiko. “Woman Caught in the Paradox of Being Adrift and on a Journey.” New York Times. 28 September 2014. Kalfopoulou, Adrianne. A Discussion of the Ideology of the American Dream in the Culture’s Female Discourses: The Untidy House. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. Kaivola, Karen. “The Pleasures and Perils of Merging: Female Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 34 (1993): 670–90. King, Kristin. “Resurfacings of the Deeps: Semiotic Balance in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Studies in the Novel 28, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 565–80. Kirkby, Joan. “Is There Life after Art? The Metaphysics of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5 (1986): 91–109. Kirsch, Adam. “Blinded by Parascience.” Boston Globe. 25 April 2010. Klaver, Elizabeth. “Hobo Time and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 43, no. 1 (2010): 27–43. Kohn, Robert E. Radiance and Secrecy in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. St. Louis, Mo.: Mira Digital Publishing, 2013. Kohn, Robert E. “Secrecy and Radiance in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” Explicator 72, no. 1 (2014): 6–11. Koval, Marta. “Moral Challenges of History in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” “We Search the Past for Our Own Lost Selves”: Representations of Histori­ cal Experience in Recent American Fiction. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013. 219–40. Lake, Christina Bieber. “The Lure of Transhumanism versus the Balm in Gilead: Marilynne Robinson’s Redemptive Alternative.” Prophets of the Posthuman: American Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Ethics of Personhood. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. 168–89. LaMascus, R. Scott. “Toward a Dialogue on Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” Christianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (2010): 197–201. Lassner, Phyllis. “Escaping the Mirror of Sameness: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeep­ ing.” Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature. Ed. Mickey Pearlman. Contributions in Women’s Studies 110. New York: Greenwood, 1989. 49–58. Latz, Andrew Brower. “Creation in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson.” Literature and Theology 25, no. 3 (2011): 283–96. Lawler, Peter. “Tocqueville and Robinson in Defense of the Puritans’ Sunday.” Society 46, no. 5 (2009): 445–51. Religion and Philosophy Collection. Leah, Gordon. “‘A Person Can Change’: Grace, Forgiveness and Sonship in Marilynne Robinson’s Novel Gilead.” Evangelical Quarterly 80, no. 1 (Jan. 2008): 53–58. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 276. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Lear, Jonathan. “Not at Home in Gilead.” Raritan 32, no. 1 (2012): 34–52.

14 6

S ELECT ED B IB LIOGR APHY

Leise, Christopher. “‘That Little Incandescence’: Reading the Fragmentary and John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Studies in the Novel 41, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 348–67. Liscio, Lorraine. “Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: Misreading the Prelude.” English Romanticism and Modern Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Allan Richard Chavkin. New York: AMS Press, 1993. 139–62. Liscio, Lorraine. “Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: From Romance to Kinship.” Unpublished article. Magagna, Tony. “Erased by Space, Ignored by History: Place and Gender in Marilynne Robinson’s West.” Western American Literature 43, no. 4 (2009): 345–71. Maguire, James H. Reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 2003. Mallon, Anne-Marie. “Sojourning Women: Homelessness and Transcendence in House­ keeping.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 30 (1989): 95–105. Mason, Wyatt. “The Revelations of Marilynne Robinson.” New York Times Magazine. 1 October 2014. Maszewska, Jadwiga. “Ecofeminist Themes in Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping.” American Studies in Scandinavia 28 (1995): 63–70. 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, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 59–89. Mauro, Aaron. “Ordinary Happiness: Marilynne Robinson’s Tragic Economies of Debt and Forgiveness.” Symploke 22, no. 1/2 (2015): 149–66, 441. McDermott, Sinead. “Future-Perfect: Gender, Nostalgia, and the Not Yet Presented in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Journal of Gender Studies 13, no. 3 (November 2004): 259–70. Meese, Elizabeth A. “A World of Women: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Cross­ ing the Double­Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. 55–68. Mensch, Betty. “Review: Jonathan Edwards, Gilead, and the Problem of ‘Tradition.’” Journal of Law and Religion 21, no. 1 (2005/2006): 221–41. Messud, Claire. “Witnesses to a Mystery.” New York Review of Books. 10 November 2008. Mile, Sian. “Femme Foetal: The Construction/Destruction of Female Subjectivity in Housekeeping, or Nothing Gained.” Genders 8 (1990): 129–36. Millard, Kenneth. “Lexicon of Love.” Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fic­ tion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. 130–41. Miller, Cheryl. “Simple Gifts.” Claremont Review of Books. Fall 2009: 39+. Miner, Valerie. “Iowa Meditations.” Women’s Review of Books. December 2004: 19. Morddel, Anne. Contemporary Novelists. 4th ed. Ed. D. C. Kirkpatrick. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. 71 1–12. Morddel, Anne. Contemporary Novelists. 5th ed. Ed. Lesley Henderson. Chicago: St. James Press, 1991. 771–72. Moss, Maria. “The Search for Sanctuary: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 49, no. 1 (2004): 79–90. Muhlestein, Daniel. “Transfiguration and Aporia: From Housekeeping to Gilead to Home.” Literature and Belief 28, no. 2 (2008): 62–75. New, Elisa. “Balm for the Prodigal: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” New England

SE L E C T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

147

beyond Criticism: In Defense of America’s First Literature. Chichester, West Sussex; New York: Wiley, 2014. 265–77. Noel, Jacques, and Monique Septon. “Suspect.” Grand Angle 15 (l988): 27–28. O’Brien, Sheila Ruzycki. “Housekeeping in the Western Tradition: Remodeling Tales of Western Travelers.” Women and the Journey: The Female Travel Experience. Ed. Bonnie Frederick and Susan H. McLeod. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1993. 217–34. O’Brien, Sheila Ruzycki. “Housekeeping: New West Novel, Old West Film.” Old West­ New West: Centennial Essays. Ed. Barbara Howard Meldrum. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1993. 173–83. Orange, Michelle. “Spouse of the Holy.” Book Forum. November 2014. O’Rourke, Meghan. “Everyday Grace.” Harper’s Magazine. November 2014: 77–80. Painter, Rebecca. “Loyalty Meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction.” Christianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 321–40. Park, Haein. “Between Memory and History: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Cresset 70, no. 5 (2007): 15–20. Park, Haein. “The Face of the Other: Suffering, Kenosis, and a Hermeneutics of Love in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 66, no. 2 (2014): 103+. Peters, Lanny. “Gilead.” Political Theology 7, no. 4 (2006): 537–38. Petit, Susan. “Names in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” Names 58, no. 3 (2010): 139–49. Petit, Susan. “Finding Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Good Man’ in Marilynne Robinson’s Gil­ ead and Home.” Christianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 301–18. Petit, Susan. “Field of Deferred Dreams: Baseball and Historical Amnesia in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” MELUS 37, no. 4 (2012): 119+. Petit, Susan. “Living in Different Universes: Autism and Race in Robinson’s Gilead and Home.” Mosaic [Winnipeg] 46, no. 2 (2013): 39. Rainwater, Chatherine. “Marilynne Robinson.” Contemporary American Women Fic­ tion Writers: An A­to­Z Guide. Ed. Laurie Champion and Rhonda Austin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. 318–22. Ravits, Martha. “Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeep­ ing.” American Literature 61 (1989): 644–66. Rubenstein, Roberta. “Transformations of the Ordinary: Marilynne Robinson.” Bound­ aries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. 211–30. Ryan, Katy. “Horizons of Grace: Marilynne Robinson and Simone Weil.” Philosophy and Literature 29, no. 2 (October 2005): 349–64. Ryan, Maureen. “Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: The Subversive Narrative and the New American Eve.” South Atlantic Review 56, no. 1 (1991): 79–86. Saltzman, Arthur M. The Novel in the Balance. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Sayers, Valerie. “There Is a Balm.” Commonweal 132, no. 4 (2005): 22–23. Schaub, Thomas. “Lingering Hopes, Faltering Dreams: Marilynne Robinson’s House­ keeping and the Politics of Contemporary Fiction.” Traditions, Voices and Dreams: The American Novel since the 1960s. Ed. Melvin Friedman and Ben Siegel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. 289–321. Schine, Cathleen. “A Triumph of Love.” New York Review of Books. 23 October 2014.

14 8

S ELECT ED B IB LIOGR APHY

Schmidt, D. W. “In the Name of the Father: Male Voice, Feminist Authorship, and the Reader in Gilead.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 66, no. 2 (2014): 119+. Schmidt, Michael. “Blurring Form.” The Novel: A Biography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. 553–71. Scott, A. O. “The Prodigal Returns.” New York Times. 19 September 2008. Shy, Todd. “Religion and Marilynne Robinson.” Salmagundi 155/156 (2007): 251–64. Simpson, Mona. “The Minister’s Tale: Marilynne Robinson’s Long-Awaited Second Novel Is an Almost Otherworldly Book—and Reveals Robinson as a Somewhat Otherworldly Figure Herself.” The Atlantic. December 2004: 135+. Smyth, Jacqui. “Sheltered Vagrancy in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 281–91. Somers, Evelyn. “The Collected Voice: Three Recent Essay Collections of Note.” Mis­ souri Review 37, no. 4 (2014): 188–98. Spohrer, Erika. “Translating from Language to Image in Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping.” Mosaic 34, no. 3 (2001): 55–71. Sprengnether, Madelon. “(M)other Eve: Some Revisions of the Fall in Fiction by Contemporary Women Writers.” Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, I 989. 298–322. Stine, Jean C., Bridget Broderick, and Daniel G. Marowski. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 25. Detroit: Gale, 1983. 386–89. Stout, Andrew C. “‘A Little Willingness to See’: Sacramental Vision in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Gilead.” Religion and the Arts 18, no. 4 (2014): 571–90. Stump, David. “Illusionary Flood Formed for Housekeeping.” American Cinematogra­ pher 69 (1988): 34–41. Tanner, Laura. “Images of Grief in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Lost Bod­ ies: Inhabiting the Borders of Life and Death. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 92–106. Tanner, Laura. “‘Looking Back from the Grave’: Sensory Perception and the Anticipation of Absence in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.” Contemporary Literature 48, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 227–52. Tanner, Laura. “Uncomfortable Furniture Inhabiting Domestic and Narrative Space in Marilynne Robinson’s Home.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 7, no. 1 (2013): 35–53. Thurston, Anne. “Marilynne Robinson and the Fate of Faith.” Studies: An Irish Quar­ terly Review 99, no. 396 (2010): 449–54. Tigchelaar, Jana M. “Those ‘Whose Deaths Were Not Remarked’: Ghostly Other Women in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” The Ghostly and the Ghosted in Literature and Film: Spectral Identities. Ed. Melanie Anderson and Lisa Sloan. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013. 29–43. Toles, George. “‘Sighs Too Deep for Words’: Mysteries of Need in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Ariwna Quarterly 47, no. 4 (1991): 137–56. Tyan, Maureen. “Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: The Subversive Narrative and the New American Eye.” South Atlantic Review 56 (1991): 79–86. Tyndall, Paul, and Fred Ribkoff. “Loss, Longing, and the Optative Mode in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: On the Spiritual Value of Ruth’s Wandering Narrative.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 66, no. 2 (2014): 87+.

SE L E C T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y

149

Ulin, David. “Marilynne Robinson’s Grace Shines through in Lila.” Los Angeles Times. 2 October 2014. Van Dyke, Annette. “Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: A Landscape of Discontent.” The Big Empty: Essays on Western Landscapes as Narrative. Ed. Leonard Engel. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. 147+. Walrath, Douglas. Displacing the Divine. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Walton, Heather. “A World Built on Water: Symbols of the Divine in the Novels of Marilynne Robinson.” Imagining Theology: Women, Writing, and God. London; New York: T. and T. Clark, 2007. 119–34. Weele, Michael Vander. “Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and the Difficult Gift of Human Exchange.” Christianity and Literature 59, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 217–39. Weese, Katherine J. “Narration from Beyond the Grave in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Feminist Narrative and the Supernatural: The Function of Fantastic Devices in Seven Recent Novels. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. 71–86. Weintraub, Aviva. “Freudian Imagery in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology (March 1986): 69–74. Wesley, Marilyn C. “Sisters of the Road: Transience as Theme and Form in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Secret Journeys: The Trope of Women’s Travel in Ameri­ can Literature. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. 81–96. West, Rinda. “Wilderness and Vision: Shadow and the Quest for Identity.” Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. 97–121. Williams, Gary. “Resurrecting Carthage: Housekeeping and Cultural History.” English Language Notes 29, no. 2 (1991): 70–78. Williams, Rowan. “Native Speakers: Identity, Grace, and Homecoming.” Christianity and Literature 61, no. 1 (2011): 7–18. Williamson, Eric Miles. “Marilynne Robinson: America’s Quiet Genius.” Texas Review 31, no. 3/4 (2010): 92–97. Wilson, Christine. “Delinquent Housekeeping: Transforming the Regulation of Keeping House.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 25, no. 2 (2008): 299–310. Wilt, Judith. “Unending Acts of Retrieval in Pearl, Gilead, and The Year of Magical Thinking.” Literature and Belief 31, no. 1 (2011): 1–21. Woelfel, James. “Challengers of Scientism Past and Present: William James and Marilynne Robinson.” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 34, no. 2 (2013): 175–87. Wood, James. “Homecoming.” New Yorker. 8 September 2008. Wood, James. “Acts of Devotion.” New York Times. 28 November 2008: 31–35. Wood, James. “Marilynne Robinson.” The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. 162–70.

INDEX abolitionism, 124, 132n5; and The Death of Adam, 4, 109, 113; and Gilead, 38, 42–46, 53–54, 131n3 Absence of Mind (Robinson), 5; and consciousness, 28, 50, 117–19; and history, 115–19; and modern thought, 28, 116–17, 119; and scientism, 28, 110–11, 114–17, 125–26 Alter, Robert, 12, 37 “Bad News from Britain” (Robinson), 103–4 Barth, John, 36 Bentham, Jeremy, 105 Bonetti, Kay, 28 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 4, 113, 118 Bradstreet, Anne, 36 Burke, William, 17 Calvin, John, 2, 125, 126; and The Death of Adam, 4, 109, 112–14, 129; as influence on Robinson, 6, 10–12, 47–48; Institutes of the Christian Religion, 47, 129 Carlyle, Thomas, 105 Carson, Rachel, 109 Carver, Raymond, 5–6 Castro, Fidel, 110 Cather, Willa, 9 Caver, Christine, 32 Chopin, Kate, 31–32 Christianity and Literature, 35 Churchill, Winston, 120 Comte, Auguste, 118 “Connie Bronson” (Robinson), 4

consciousness: and Absence of Mind, 28, 50, 117–19; and Lila, 82–83, 94, 97–98 Crane, Hart, 46 Damasio, Antonio, 115 Darwin, Charles, 4, 133n4 Darwinian theory, 86, 93, 109–11, 116–17, 126 Dawkins, Richard, 111, 115 Death of Adam, The (Robinson), 4, 109– 10, 112–14, 128; and anti-utopianism, 112, 133n3; and modern thought, 110–12; and religion, 4, 105, 111, 113–14, 117; and scientism, 109–11, 125 Defoe, Daniel, 105 “democratic esthetic,” 3, 8–9 Dennett, Daniel, 111, 115 Deresiewicz, William, 12, 17 Descartes, René, 119 Dickinson, Emily, 23; and Housekeeping, 14, 27, 49; as influence on Robinson, 3, 8, 28 Doctorow, E. L., 45 domesticity, 12–13, 132n5; and Home, 13, 58, 62, 68–69, 74–75, 132n5 Double Indemnity, 91 Douglas, Christopher, 35 Du Bois, W. E. B., 69 Edwards, Jonathan, 99, 122, 126, 132n6; as influence on Robinson, 3, 8, 28, 84–85, 120 Eliot, T. S., 7, 46 Ellis, Elizabeth, 132n5

15 2

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 117, 120; and Housekeeping, 27, 29, 49; as influence on Robinson, 3, 8, 101, 102 Engels, Friedrich, 69 environment, 4, 102, 103–5 Faulkner, William, 9, 81 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 46, 54–55 Fielding, Henry, 105 Finney, Charles, 124 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 46 Forsyth, Bill, 4 Freud, Sigmund, 118–19 Freudian theory, 133n4; and Absence of Mind, 115, 118–19; and The Death of Adam, 111; and When I Was a Child, 120, 125 Friends of the Earth, 104 Frost, Robert, 120, 125 Frye, Northrop, 35–36, 66 Gazzaniga, Michael, 115 Gernes, Sonia, 17, 23–25 Gilead (Robinson), 5, 131n5; and abolitionism, 38, 42–46, 53–54, 131n3; and domesticity, 12–13, 132n5; and father/son dynamic, 37–40, 50–51; genre of, 35–36, 41; and history, 36, 43–46, 131n5; and Home, 56; influences on, 11, 36, 47, 49; intellectualism in, 46–47; naming in, 37–38, 67–68, 132n6; and perception, 42, 47–50, 56; and race relations, 39, 42–46; and regionalism, 9, 40–41, 43–47; and religion, 12, 36, 38–40, 48–55, 127 Givenness of Things, The (Robinson), 5, 126–28 Gonzalez, Jeffrey, 132n8, 133n3 Grant, Ulysses, 46 Greenpeace, 104 Harris, Sam, 115 Hawkes, John, 3 Hemingway, Ernest, 46 history: and Absence of Mind, 115–19; and The Death of Adam, 109, 110; and Gilead, 36, 43–45, 131n5; and The

INDEX

Givenness of Things, 126; and Lila, 85, 96; and Mother Country, 103–5, 108; in Robinson’s works, 1–2, 100–102, 105; and When I Was a Child, 124 Hitchens, Christopher, 115 Hitler, Adolf, 110 Home (Robinson), 5, 42; and abandonment, 61–63, 68, 71, 76–77; and domesticity, 12–13, 58, 62, 68–69, 74–75, 132n5; and moral codes, 59–60, 63, 65–66; naming in, 62, 67–68; ordinary in, 57–59; and parent/child dynamic, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67–68, 70–71, 75–77; past in, 60–62, 70–73; and race relations, 68–70, 76, 133n6; and regionalism, 9, 65–66, 69; and religion, 11, 12, 58–59, 67–68, 71–73, 127 Hopper, Briallen, 133n6 Housekeeping (Robinson), 3–4, 6; and abandonment, 22–25; allusion in, 17–18, 26, 27; and catastrophe, 19–20; and domesticity, 12–13; ethnic other in, 89, 131n3; and female-centered world, 14, 31–32, 79–80; influences on, 14, 26–28, 33; and Lila, 79–80; and loyalty, 68; metaphor in, 28, 32–33; and mother/daughter bond, 16, 18, 22–24, 80; naming in, 17–19, 22; and regionalism, 9, 28–30, 32–33; and religion, 14, 17, 24, 26; and renunciation, 15, 17–19, 23, 24–25, 75; and society, 19–22 humanism, 129 (earlier) Hungerford, Amy, 8; on Gilead, 36, 52; on Home, 68; on Housekeeping, 20, 26; on Lila, 88 Hutchean, Linda, 45 James, Henry, 33, 82, 100 James, William, 117–18, 126 Jefferson, Thomas, 125 Johnson, Diane, 79 Joyce, James, 6 Kakutani, Michiko, 79, 81 Keats, John, 23 Kirsch, Adam, 119

153

INDEX

Lane Theological Seminary, 45–46 Leise, Christopher, 36 Lila (Robinson), 5; and abandonment, 86–87, 89–90; and cinema, 91–92; and community, 86, 93, 94, 99; and consciousness, 82–83, 94, 97–98; and domesticity, 12–13; and Housekeeping, 79–80; influences on, 11, 91; and loneliness, 80, 93, 95, 96; and mother/ daughter bond, 80, 83–84; naming in, 84–86, 90, 93, 97; and poverty, 85–86; and prostitution, 78, 89, 90–91; and regionalism, 9; and religion, 12, 79, 87–88, 94, 96–99, 127; as spiritual autobiography, 81–82 Magagna, Tony, 30, 32 Mallon, Anne-Marie, 31 Mao Tse-tung, 110 Marx, Karl, 107 McCarthy, Cormac, 5 McClure, John, 11 McGurl, Mark, 9 Melville, Herman: and Housekeeping, 14, 26–27, 49; as influence on Robinson, 3, 8, 28 Messud, Claire, 75, 77 Michelangelo, 110 Miles, Jack, 123 Milton, John, 58, 88 minimalism, 5–6, 37 modernism, 2, 7–8, 42, 131n3 modern thought: and Absence of Mind, 28, 116–17, 119; and The Death of Adam, 110–12 Montaigne, Michel de, 110 Morrison, Toni, 11, 45 Mother Country (Robinson), 4, 85, 103–9, 112, 117 naming: in Gilead, 37–38, 67–68, 132n6; in Home, 62, 67–68; in Housekeeping, 17–19, 22; in Lila, 84–86, 90, 93, 97 New Atheists, 115, 126 Oates, Joyce Carol, 52, 100 Oberlin, Johann Friedrich, 124

Oberlin College, 45–46 O’Connor, Flannery, 5, 53 Orange, Michelle, 88 O’Rourke, Meghan, 79, 96 Owen, Robert, 107 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 40–41 Perkins, William, 58 Perutz, M. F., 108 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 91, 92 Pinker, Steven, 111, 115 Poe, Edgar Allan, 8, 120, 126 politics, 1–2, 69–70, 121–22, 124 Pound, Ezra, 7 Protestantism, 6, 13, 26, 129; and The Death of Adam, 4, 113–14; and Home, 57–58, 63, 68, 72; and Lila, 87–88, 96–97; in Robinson’s nonfiction, 101–2, 117, 128; Robinson’s observance of, 2, 8, 10–11 Puritans, 48, 57–58; and The Death of Adam, 4, 109, 114; as influence on Robinson, 8, 11, 36; and When I Was a Child, 120 Pynchon, Thomas, 11, 45 Rasor, Paul, 10 Ravits, Martha, 15–17, 24, 27, 33 Reagan, Ronald, 107, 109 regionalism, 9; and Gilead, 40–41, 43–47; and Home, 65–66, 69; and Housekeeping, 14, 28–30, 32–33 religion, 1–2, 5, 10–11, 100–105; and Absence of Mind, 20, 117; and The Death of Adam, 4, 105, 111, 113–14, 117; and Gilead, 12, 36, 38–40, 48–55, 127; and The Givenness of Things, 126, 127–28; and Home, 12, 58–59, 67–68, 71–73, 127; and Housekeeping, 14–20, 24, 26; and Lila, 12, 79, 87–88, 94, 96–99, 127; and Mother Country, 105– 6; and When I Was a Child, 122–25 Rembrandt, 110 Romanticism, 8, 14, 26–28, 117 Ruark, Robert, 70 Russell, Bertrand, 118 Ryan, Maureen, 31

15 4

Schaub, Thomas, 15, 27 Schine, Cathleen, 2, 79, 84 scientism, 126, 128; and Absence of Mind, 28, 111, 114–16; and The Death of Adam, 109–11, 125 Scott, A. O., 56, 58–59 Searle, John, 118 Sellafield (U.K.) nuclear facility, 4, 103–6, 108, 109 Shakespeare, William, 7, 11, 101, 110, 126–28, 133n4 Sharlet, Jeff, 120, 124 Shaw, George Bernard, 107 Shepard, Thomas, 36 Sierra Club, 104 Spencer, Herbert, 105 Spong, Shelby, 123 Stalin, Joseph, 110 Stevens, Wallace, 8, 28, 128 subjectivity, 36, 115, 117–18 Summers, David, 2, 3 Summers, Ellen, 2 Summers, John J., 2 Tanner, Laura, 35, 49 Taylor, Charles, 51–52, 57, 58

INDEX

Thatcher, Margaret, 109 Thoreau, Henry David: and Housekeeping, 14, 27, 29; as influence on Robinson, 3, 8, 28 Till, Emmett, 70 To Have and Have Not, 91 Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The, 91 Twain, Mark, 84, 87 Ulin, David L., 79 United Kingdom, 4, 103–8 Updike, John, 6–7, 52, 53, 100 Vermeer, Johannes, 58 Wallace, David Foster, 100 Walrath, Douglas, 52–53 Webb, Beatrice, 107 When I Was a Child I Read Books (Robinson), 5, 9, 29, 30, 120–26 Whitman, Walt, 3, 8, 120–21 Williams, Rowan, 60 Wilson, E. O., 115 Winthrop, Jonathan, 122 Wood, James, 1, 5, 37, 42, 80 Woolf, Virginia, 6–7