Housekeeping

“When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.”

The theme of possession and longing are explored in numerous parts throughout the novel. These words describe Sylvia’s view of her husband and her marriage, and it precedes a discussion of a pendant with seahorses that Edmund once gave her that she could barely take her eyes from. In the novel, longing and loss keep love at the center of a person’s mind.

“The years between her husband’s death and her eldest daughter’s leaving home were, in fact, years of almost perfect serenity.”

Unlike her husband, Sylvia is a person of stability. She has no desire to leave her home, and it is said that part of her happiness during these years comes from the fact that she never needs to chase success now that Edmund is gone. She can remain content caring for her home and caring for her children through that housekeeping.

“Indeed, it must have seemed to her that she had returned to relive this day because it was here that something had been lost or forgotten.”

These words describe the confusion Sylvia likely feels as she raises her granddaughters after raising her own three daughters. Her daughters grew up and left her alone, leaving her with no real reason as to how she failed. She always cared for them in the best way she could. Now she has the opportunity to relive those caregiving years with her granddaughters.

“They were, though maiden ladies, of a buxomly maternal appearance that contrasted oddly with their brusque, unpracticed pats and kisses.”

These words describe Lily and Nona, Sylvia’s sisters-in-law who are tasked with caring for Ruthie and Lucille after Sylvia dies. The women come to town intent on fulfilling their obligations, but their unpracticed kisses show that they have no experience in caregiving and are unsuited for it. This foreshadows their later dealings with the girls.

“‘I’ll get you presents,’ she whispered. ‘Tomorrow, maybe.’ She kissed us again and went behind the curtain, into the narrow room.”

Unlike Sylvia, Lily, and Nona, Sylvie is exciting. While the older three women attempt to maintain convention in their caregiving, this is not important to Sylvie. She wants to bring them joy.

“Sylvie’s coat made us think she might be leaving, and we were ready to perform great feats of docility to keep her.”

These words demonstrate the insecurity Ruthie and Lucille feel about their aunt. They have already lost their first two caregivers to death, Helen from death by suicide and Sylvia through old age. They take Sylvie’s penchant for keeping her coat on as a sign that she will leave. Indeed, it is a symbol of her transient nature, but of all their caretakers, she is the one who stays. It takes the children quite some time to become secure in this, however.

“That was the first Lucille or I had heard of the interest of the state in the well-being of children, and we were alarmed. By the light of the candle on the vanity, Sylvie flipped and sorted through her deck of cards, plainly unaware that the black shape of judicial attention stood over us all, as enormous as our shadows.”

The girls have not felt secure that they would be taken care of for quite some time, but they had no idea that they could be taken away from a caregiver or that anyone really cared about their fate. The fact that they are alarmed shows that they want to stay with their aunt. This is an example of an institution coming into their lives by way of child-welfare agencies.

“I found myself reduced to an intuition, and my sister and my aunt to something less than that. I was afraid to put out my hand, for fear it would touch nothing, or to speak, for fear no one would answer. We all stood there silently for a long moment.”

Sylvie, Ruthie, and Lucille are prepared to play cards during the flood, but they must go downstairs to get more heated bricks and some chairs. Darkness is a continuous motif throughout the novel, and here it shows how transient Ruthie feels in her own body, seeing herself as nothing more than an intuition when she can no longer physically identify herself or her environment due to darkness. This is a foreshadowing of the darkness she experiences as she leaves town with Sylvie at the end of the novel.

“Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy.”

These words demonstrate the transient nature of life itself. Nobody is permanent because everybody will eventually succumb to death. This is in contrast to Sylvia’s belief that everything will continue on in the afterlife as predestined from the beginning of a person’s creation.

“We—in recollection I feel no reluctance to speak of Lucille and myself almost as a single consciousness even through the course of that summer, though often enough she was restless and morose—we always stayed in the woods until it was evening, and when it was not bitterly cold we stayed on the shore throwing rocks into the water until it was dark.”

These words start to demonstrate the separation that eventually occurs when Lucille tries to differentiate herself from Ruthie and Sylvie. At this point in their lives, the sisters are still inseparable, and this inseparability emphasizes the break that will soon occur in their relationship. They represent two different paths for women in 20^th-century America.

“It was pleasant when she scolded us for coming in late, for playing in our school clothes, for staying out in the cold without our coats on.”

The fact that the children find scolding pleasant demonstrates that they desire normalcy. They want to be held to the same standards as other children, and they desire boundaries. This reinforces the theme that people desire what they lack.

“The window went black and the cluttered kitchen leaped, so it seemed, into being, as remote from what had gone before as this world from the primal darkness. We saw that we ate from plates that came in detergent boxes, and we drank from jelly glasses. (Sylvie had put her mother’s china in boxes and stacked them in the corner by the stove—in case, she said, we should ever need it.) Lucille had startled us all, flooding the room so suddenly with light, exposing heaps of pots and dishes, the two cupboard doors which had come unhinged and were propped against the boxes of china. The tables and chairs and cupboards and doors had been painted a rich white, layer on layer, year after year, but now the last layer had ripened to the yellow of turning cream. Everywhere the paint was chipped and marred. A great shadow of soot loomed up the wall and across the ceiling above the stove, and the stove pipe and the cupboard tops were thickly felted with dust.”

These words demonstrate Sylvie’s housekeeping. Sylvie generally keeps the lights off, but when Lucille turns them on, the three see the state of disarray in the house that cannot be ignored. Symbolically, it is Lucille who illuminates the room because her inability to ignore the state of the house demonstrates her refusal to live by the standards of her aunt.

“Sylvie suffered in such comparisons, it was true, and yet I was reassured by her sleeping on the lawn, and now and then in the car, and by her interest in all newspapers, irrespective of their dates, and by her pork-and-bean sandwiches. It seemed to me that if she could remain transient here, she would not have to leave.”

These words show Ruthie’s desire for her aunt to stay as well as her deep understanding of the needs of her aunt. While Sylvie’s transient tendencies previously made the girls feel insecure that their aunt would eventually leave, now they provide comfort for Ruthie, as she believes her aunt can satisfy her wanderlust while staying in Fingerbone. It speaks to the theme of housekeeping and transience.

“‘That’s Sylvie’s house now.’ She whispered hissingly and looked wrath. And now I felt her nails, and her glare was more pleading and urgent. ‘We have to improve ourselves!’”

Lucille has come to the realization that she must leave her aunt because she does not want to live her aunt’s lifestyle. She has not yet broken ties with Ruthie as shown by the fact that she uses the word “we.” She also desires for Ruthie to follow after her in her mission of self-improvement.

“I walked after Sylvie down the shore, all at peace, and at ease, and I thought, We are the same. She could as well be my mother. I crouched and slept in her very shape like an unborn child.”

Ruthie is starting to associate more and more with Sylvie. At first she was threatened by her aunt’s wandering nature, but now she is starting to associate with her. She is showing the importance of bonds by saying that she could be her mother.

“Sylvie had bundled into a checkered tablecloth and brought along for lunch—a black banana, a lump of salami with a knife through it, a single yellow chicken wing like an elegant, small gesture of defeat, the bottom fifth of a bag of potato chips. I ripped the cellophane and took out marshmallows to fill my pockets.”

The lunch Sylvie prepares shows her lack of conventionality. She plans a traditional endeavor, a picnic, but she is unable to carry it out in a conventional manner. Her lack of attention and care taken with the food demonstrate how little she cares about the traditional standards of caretaking.

“Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, ‘Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.’ Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.”

Lighted houses, in the novel, represent the comforts of home and family. Ruthie suffers from loneliness, and as such, she feels as if she is outside of these houses. She does not have the luxury or smugness that “one solid human bond” can provide (230).

“Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”

Ruthie describes loneliness as absolute. While she had the constant companionship of her sister through her younger life and had the love of her grandmother and likely of her mother, she still feels that loneliness is her state in life and is her constant companion throughout life. Loneliness is a form of transience here.

“Sylvie put her hand on my back. She had knelt on the grass beside me and I had not noticed. She looked into my face and said nothing at all. She opened her coat and closed it around me, bundling me awkwardly against her so that my cheekbone pillowed on her breastbone. She swayed us to some slow song she did not sing, and I stayed very still against her and hid the awkwardness and discomfort so that she would continue to hold me and sway. My grandmother used to forget that she had stuck straight pins in the bosom of her dress, and she used to hug me much too closely in her arms, and I would be as still against her as I could, because if I squirmed at all she would put me off her lap and muss my hair and turn away.”

These words show the extent that Ruthie would go to in order to feel love and comfort. She desires it so strongly that she is willing to be stuck by pins in order to not let the small moments of affection she experiences be taken from her. This speaks to Ruthie’s character and her desire for companionship.

“The only true birth would be a final one, which would free us from watery darkness and the thought of watery darkness, but could such a birth be imagined?”

Birth and rebirth are discussed at times in the novel, and Ruthie imagines that birth into the afterlife may be the real birth. It is the birth that can free her from the sufferings and lacks in this life. These ideas of birth speak directly to the Christian theology that informs the novel.

“Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and because she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift.”

The importance of these words lies in Sylvie’s burning of many of her accumulated objects when she fears Ruthie will be taken from her. Accumulation as housekeeping shows a lack of understanding of what children need, but because she believes accumulation is important, her burning of her newspapers shows the sacrifice she makes. It also shows a willingness to conform to standards if conforming will help her maintain her guardianship of Ruthie.

“It is a terrible thing to break up a family. If you understand that, you will understand everything that follows. The sheriff knew it as well as anyone, and his face was slack with regret.”

Sylvie is the only family that Ruthie has left, and by many standards, she has failed to provide a proper environment. When Sylvie and Ruthie leave everything behind in order to stay together, they show how they believe the ties that bind family together are of the utmost importance. Home is an idea in this sense.

“For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings.”

Families are important in the novel, but the bonds that bind them are shown to be unbreakable. Even though Edmund dies in an accident long before his granddaughters are born, part of his spirit lives on in Sylvie. Even though Sylvia dies when the girls are young, her penchant for traditionalism lives on in Lucille.