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Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping - Beyond Reason Essay

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Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping - Beyond Reason

Marilynne Robinson gives voice to a realm of consciousness beyond the bounds of reason in her novel Housekeeping. Possibly concealed by the melancholy but gently methodical tone, boundaries and limits of perception are constantly redefined, rediscovered, and reevaluated. Ruth, as the narrator, leads the reader through the sorrowful events and the mundane details of her childhood and adolescence. She attempts to reconcile her experiences, fragmented and unified, past, present, and future, in order to better understand or substantiate the transient life she leads with her aunt Sylvie. Rather than the wooden structure built by Edmund Foster, the house Ruth eventually comes to …show more content…

Ruth is able to perceive each moment as a reference point for past events as well as events to come.

Paradoxes within this invisible rational framework begin to emerge, however. Because human senses are inherently limited and fallible and "memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary," they are highly suspect in providing reliable evidence of rational structure to the progression of thoughts and experiences of any individual or group (53). Order can and will be made from the fragments available in a given situation; it is an extension of the most intense form of human will. "The world will be made whole For to wish a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, the very craving gives it back again" (153) Memory thus houses a great paradox: the ability to create a sense of completeness and the ability to provoke the most profound sense of loss. It is the paradox woven into the nature of memory which moves time forward. "The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted" (192). Based in part on her memories, Ruth begins to consider the idea that in committing suicide, her mother wanted to evoke a less absolute, constantly negotiated existence, "whole and fragment", within her daughters' minds (163).

Rather than attempt to pull herself "into some unseemly shape and slip across into that other world" as her

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