Order 1381350: Executive Summary

HOUSEKEEPING DG3

Andrew Pelayo Oct 31, 2018Oct 31 at 11:56pm Manage Discussion Entry

(Monday, 29)

The author is pondering an alternate reality and not necessarily, what is an actual event. The author trails into a “what if” event in the character’s lives in which in an instance, the characters realize their mother’s suicidal intentions and alter the course of events. I believe the author is shedding light on the fact that the characters chose to alter their reality and resent their upbringing. Ruthie and her sibling are raised by relatives and have a deep seeded history with regard to past deaths in their family and lack of a male authority figure. Ruthie and Lucille are eventually raised by an aunt after their mother’s passing, but only to be exposed to their aunt’s eccentricities and vagrant lifestyle. As the community begins to take notice of the family’s alternate lifestyle, Ruthie and Lucille prefer to burn their home down and hide on the other side of the lake. The author is shedding light on Ruthie and Lucille dictating their own destinies. This story does not bring many questions to mind, just the fact that the characters dictated their own future and preferred not to live in a community that judged their alternate lifestyle. I believe the author was shedding light on an individual’s ability to choose their own lifestyle versus succumbing to society’s perception of what a lifestyle should be.

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o Jason McCarley

Jason McCarley

Nov 1, 2018Nov 1 at 7:36pm

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This is an interesting take on how the characters are reacting to pressure presented by the women in town and the sheriff. The attempt by Ruthie to retreat to an alternate reality where her mother never commits suicide speaks to the reaction she had not only to their tumultuous upbringing, but to the reaction the town had to their unstable aunt. The irresponsible way their aunt lived drew lots of attention by the town's people and that had a major affect on both Ruthie and Lucille, but in drastically different ways. Ultimately Sylvie and Ruth chose to sever their ties with the town and remove themselves from public judgement altogether. I think that Robinson is also making the case that the threat of judgement by the public can have a very dramatic affect on

people, and that not all people have the skills to cope with the scrutiny of the public eye.

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Collapse SubdiscussionAndrew Pelayo

Andrew Pelayo

Nov 2, 2018Nov 2 at 9:53pm

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Unfortunately, at times society's perception of what a "normal" lifestyle should be has an impact on an individual's upbringing and sense of self worth. The judgment from the community seems to have been multiplied and determined Ruthie and Sylvie's path in life and ultimately led to their seclusion from society. Either way, the hope is in the story, they found peace in their solitude.

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Collapse SubdiscussionJason McCarley

Jason McCarley

Nov 4, 2018Nov 4 at 4:28pm

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In Housekeeping, you chose the passages that describes Ruthie's vision of an alternate reality where her mother did not commit suicide. Given that both Ruthie and Lucille took such different paths in life, how do you think Ruthie and Lucille's life would have turned out had their mother never committed suicide?

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Collapse SubdiscussionAndrew Pelayo

Andrew Pelayo

Nov 4, 2018Nov 4 at 11:32pm

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While one person cannot claim that having a specific individual in their life could or could not have a significant impact in their life, a mother’s love could have an impact on a child’s upbringing. There may have been an aloof sense of continuing their existence with chores and day to day activities, but without affection, they may have just “maintained” their existence. There is no true way of knowing the significance of whether a family member’s or members’ departure may have impacted Ruthie or Lucille, but it has to be taken into account when contemplating their state of mind. There is no comparison as to whether the Ruthie or Lucille would have chosen a different path given a different option in life, but the family chain could not be avoided. In this instance, Ruthie and Lucille became dependent on each other versus the family members that “abandoned” them.

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Collapse SubdiscussionJason McCarley

Jason McCarley Nov 1, 2018Nov 1 at 6:47pm

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"Sylvie stood in the door, looking over the lake. 'It's pretty today,' she said. Portly white clouds, bellied like cherubs, sailed across the sky, and the sky and the like were and elegant azure. One can imagine that, at the apex of the Flood, when the globe was a ball of water, come the day of divine relenting, when Noah's wife must have opened the shutters upon a morning designed to reflect an enormous good nature. We can imagine that the Deluge rippled and glistened, and that the clouds, under the altered dispensation, were purely ornamental. True, the waters were full of people-we knew the story from out childhood. The lady at her window might have wished to be with the mothers and uncles, among the dance of bones, since this is hardly a human world, here in the fatuous light, admiring the plump clouds. Looking out at the lake one could believe that the Flood had never ended. If one is lost on the water, and hill is Ararat.

And below is always the accumulated past, which vanishes but does not vanish, which perishes and remains"(172)

This passage is significant because it exemplifies Robinson's point that memory shapes the way her characters feel about public and private spaces, namely Fingerbone and the lake. She illustrates this theme by showing how Ruthie and other characters feel about Fingerbone throughout the novel because of it's history. In this example Robinson compares the feeling that Ruthie has when viewing the lake to that of Noahs wife as she viewed the flood from the Ark. Even though the lake was beautiful the memory of the railroad accident there had tainted it, in the same way that Noahs wife may have been relieved to know that the rains were over with, the waters were full of the people who had died during the flood. She even goes on to say that looking out over the lake she could just imagine that the flood never ended and that the catastrophe that happened there was simply part of that biblical event.

“We had both become conscious of Fingerbone all around us, if not watching, then certainly aware of everything we did. Left to myself I would have shrunk under all this attention. I would have stayed in the house and read with a flashlight under the covers and have ventured out only for Wonder bread and batteries. But Sylvie reacted to her audience with a stage voice and large gestures. She kept saying, ’I don’t know why we didn’t do this months ago,’ loudly, as if she thought there were listeners beyond the firelight, among the apple trees” (200)

This passage is an excellent example of Robinson’s attempt at blurring the lines between public and private spaces. Her comment being that private spaces are never truly private in that they are only deemed private by the constructs of the public world. In this passage Robinson illustrates this theme by showing how the public eye of Fingerbone had permeated the lives of her characters. The people of Fingerbone scrutinized the way Sylvie lived and that affected both Sylvie and Ruthie in different ways. Ruthie remembers that Sylvie often spoke in a way that seemed as if the town’s people were listening in on her. For Ruthie this feeling of public scrutiny caused her to want to retreat further into the solitude of her own mind. In a broader way Robinson is commenting on the erosion of privacy in an increasingly public world. ReplyReply to Comment

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Collapse SubdiscussionKristen Jackson

Kristen Jackson Nov 3, 2018Nov 3 at 10:55am

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Hi Jason and Andrew--You may be the only ones participating in this group, so please just do the best you can with the different aspects of this assignment. You won't have to vote on the best question, since there are only two of you. Reply