Solace Across the Bridge

"Home is Where the Heart Is." Whether embroidered with red yarn on a small white pillow or painted in some bubbly scene with roses and hearts, this simple phrase finds its way into almost every house. These words strike up, even in the least sentimental person, feelings of warmth, comfort, parents, and small wagging tails. Not every home though, is the perfect structure of stability and refuge. In her novel, "Housekeeping," Marilynne Robinson shares with the reader a world where home is as unsecured as loose rocks on a steep hill. Robinson challenges the established definitions of what a home is by making the inanimate object a dynamic and representative character. She demonstrates this contrast in two strong characters: our narrator Ruth and her sister Lucille. There is a sense of duality in the two characters, a question of how life is defined. Ruth's character is unyieldingly passive and in a world of unrelenting sadness. Her life of constant abandonment leaves her to "...not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort" (Robinson 204). Lucille suffers the same discomforts as Ruth but finds an escape. She chooses to leave her kin for her home economics teacher. In the story, Marilynne Robinson shows that the house is not a structure of wood and nails but what is made out of life.

The story begins with Ruth describing the house that she lives in. Her late grandfather, Edmund Foster, built the house with his own hands. It was unconventional and imperfect from its conception. Ruth offers, "If its fenestration was random, if its corners were out of square, my grandfather had built it himself, knowing nothing whatever of carpentry&...

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...t to, but her upbringing paralleled Ruth's. She was never shown this most intimate of affection herself. Ruth found a fondness in Sylvie and "...could feel the pleasure she took in my dependency...Her expression was intent and absorbed. There was nothing of distance or civility in it" (Robinson 161).

The worlds in which Ruth and Lucille chose to makes their homes were radically different. In a lasting affirmation of her choice of home, Ruth tries to burn the tangible wood, couches, and civilized life to the ground. She and Sylvie both choose vagrancy, dismissing the material house around them. "In the equal light of disinterested scrutiny such things are not themselves. They are transformed into pure object, and are horrible, and must be burned" (Robinson 209). The question is, where and when are the bridges to cross in our own lives?