55 pages • 1 hour read
Marilynne RobinsonHousekeeping
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
Ruthie remembers her grandfather in the water whenever she drinks water, and she remembers how the water stopped her mother’s breath. She thinks that when people drink from lakes, they think of mothers who lift their children above their heads as they go under, even though they likely know that eventually their children, too, will go under. Families, she believes, “will not be broken” (289). She narrates how Jesus fixed families when he returned Lazarus “to his mother” and gave the centenarian his daughter back (291).
“Sylvie [does] not want to lose” Ruthie, as she [does] not want her to turn into a memory (292). While they are together, Sylvie can allow herself to not pay much attention to Ruthie because of their intimacy. This would be broken if Ruthie were to go away, as Ruthie would magnify in importance. Ruthie thinks about her mother and what would have happened if she had merely come home after taking a drive to the lake. Ruthie and Lucille would have learned to take their mother for granted, Ruthie thinks. They would have watched her grow stranger in the ways that, in her view, all people grow stranger in the areas that they are strange. They would have never known that she went to the lake and came back for them. They would have never known the level of her suffering. Instead, she thinks, the family was broken and “sorrow was released” (296).
Sylvie does not believe she will be able to keep Ruthie after the hearing. The hearing is in a week. The two burn all of their newspapers outside, and they know the whole town knows what they are doing. She tells Ruthie they will get her a nice outfit she can wear to church. Ruthie begins to think that perhaps they will be able to stay together. She wonders if Sylvie’s desire to preserve their family might convince those in power to keep the family intact. She is sure Sylvie will join the PTA, as she already ordered seeds to plant in the spring. She tries to make their lives conform to standards. Sylvie hopes to invite Lucille and Miss Royce to Thanksgiving. Ruthie runs into the orchard, hiding from Sylvie. The sheriff comes while Ruthie is hiding and asks to see her. Sylvie tells him the girl is asleep, and he keeps prodding to go into the room to see her. Finally Sylvie tells him she is outside and that she is hiding. Ruthie comes in, and the sheriff asks her if she will come stay with his family for the night, but she refuses him multiple times.
Chapter 11 Summary
Sylvie and Ruthie set about starting the house on fire, but they find it difficult to burn it down. Ruthie starts to think of her aunt and herself as a single entity. She believes, “now truly we were cast out to wander, and there was an end to housekeeping” (312). They run from the house but think the fire is not large enough to burn down the house, and they realize people will know they were not killed inside the house. People will come in search of them, they think. They decide to cross the train bridge. Sylvie tells Ruthie that drifting is not all that bad. It is so dark on the bridge that Ruthie cannot see her aunt in front of her. Her aunt assures her there will be no train until the morning. Ruthie feels giddy being above the water.
Later, a newspaper writes about the two women perishing in the lake. While Sylvie and Ruthie know that after seven years they cannot be accused of any crime, they also know that they could always be held for what people consider to be erratic behavior. The two continue on their transient lifestyle, and Ruthie continues the narration. Ruthie works jobs at times, and she likes the idea of working at a truck stop. Eventually she always finds, however, that people realize she does not talk about herself, and it is then that she knows she must move on. She wonders when it was that she ceased to be like other people. She considers that it could have been when her mother left, when she crossed the bridge, or at her very conception. Her mother’s death made her accustomed to waiting. This, she says, “makes any present moment most significant for what it does not contain” (320-21).
She explains that she decides it is the crossing of the bridge that made her different. It was terrifying, and she almost fell twice. She explains that they walked on the bridge the entire night and only got to the other side right before the train came through. They got on the train and went first to Seattle before they traveled to other nearby cities. Sometimes the train they are on passes through Fingerbone, and they try to see the house but are unable to from their location. She sometimes imagines her sister there, owning the house now that the other two are presumed dead, and she imagines her fixing it up, but she does not really believe Lucille lives there. She considers going there one day to find out what happened, but she frequently does not look presentable enough. Ruthie does not believe such facts, however, explain much. She thinks about how maybe her sister is in the kitchen with her own daughters. She also imagines a moment in which Lucille looks out the window and the girls see their mother’s face but Lucille knows it is Ruthie’s.
Chapters 10-11 Analysis
There are numerous references to the Bible in the novel, representing Robinson’s Calvinist faith, and as the book comes to an end, the bonds of family are shown to in some ways be Biblical and Christian. To Ruthie, the narrator, these bonds are shown through Jesus reuniting families. This would be an aspect of Jesus’s ministry that Ruthie would be attracted to because of her own family that is broken in all the ways a family can be broken: her father is estranged, her mother and grandparents died, and her sister walked out on her. While Lucille tells Ruthie she can live with her, Ruthie knows that she can never be who Lucille needs because Lucille needs to be respected by those around her, and Ruthie, through her association with Sylvie, has become unacceptable to the townspeople and likely cannot grow in the way she would need. Therefore, the ties that bind families are of prominence to Ruthie specifically because they are what she lacks. Still, bonds exist, and these exist between the appearance and mannerisms of people living on through time. The girls see their mother in their aunt, and eventually Ruthie talks about her sister’s children one day seeing Ruthie in Lucille. Families remain intact, even when they are separated, through the genetics, mannerisms, and personality traits that pass on through the ages.
People are seen through their absence in the novel, and this is represented through the ways that Sylvie can take Ruthie for granted in the novel and the fact that the girls cannot do the same to their mother because she left. Sylvie does not have to pay much attention to Ruthie because she knows she will always be there. What Sylvie worries about, eventually, is Ruthie becoming a memory because then Ruthie will be associated with pain and she will have to pay attention to her. Sylvie does not want this to happen. Because Ruthie is so available, she allows herself to never be seen. The sisters are not able to take Helen for granted, however, and she is not able to live in the background of their lives because loss made her too large: It unleashed her into every aspect of their lives. In such a way, loss is shown to make people permanent because of the suffering their memory causes.
Water symbolizes both constancy and change in the novel, and Ruthie finds escaping town above the water to be exhilarating. Her family ties are all down there in that water and back in the town. She and her aunt have tried to destroy the family home in order to eliminate the possibility of anybody coming to look for them. The bridge Sylvie and Ruthie cross over the water symbolizes them leaving behind all of the past so that they can live a life in the future free from all the social conventions that they have never been able to live up to. Ruthie cannot see her aunt as she crosses the bridge, as she is surrounded by darkness. Darkness has felt more comfortable for her than the light, and as she makes her way across the bridge, she decides to embrace the darkness and to give up the life of a person in a home surrounded by loved ones. As she leaves Fingerbone behind, she leaves behind other lifestyle possibilities and embraces a transient life with her aunt. The novel brings in Women and Housekeeping here, as the two women, having inherited a patriarchal home that does not belong them, now completely perform a kind of transient housekeeping across the world and not in one place. They no longer perform or attempt to perform the housekeeping of traditional 1950s domestic life and instead give it up for a housekeeping of transience. This is contrasted with Lucille’s decisions and Ruthie’s reflections about her at the novel’s end.
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By Marilynne Robinson
