Over The Fences:Space And Feminine Subjectivities In Housekeeping

Housekeeping(1980)is the debut novel of Marilynne Robinson(1943-),an outstanding female writer in contemporary America.It tells the story of three generations of women in Robinson’s fictional far West town of Fingerbone in the mid-twentieth century,an enclosed town where patriarchal ideology that men hold the authoritative power over women is deeply rooted.House is an essential image throughout the novel,and it is the very place where housekeeping takes place.Houses built by men confine women physically and mentally within the domestic sphere to be a good housekeeper.Henri Lefebvre remarks in his book The Production of Space(1974)that space is not a static container,but a dynamic mold for social relationships.Robinson probes into the constitution of feminine subjectivity in the patriarchal society,where space is treated as a dynamic mechanism with its own realistic orientation in subjectivity construction.This thesis probes into the development of the two potential feminine subjectivities through space of various forms of houses in Housekeeping.The two kinds of feminine subjectivities,settled and transient,traditional and unconventional,are the two different subject positions for the two girls.Lucille is a great master of housekeeping,and she constitutes her settled subjectivity as a good housekeeper within the house built by men,while Ruth follows her aunt Sylvie to burn down the house that confines women physically and mentally and live a life of transience.In the introductory part,there is a brief introduction of Marilynne Robinson and her works,the existing studies on Housekeeping at home and abroad,a brief introduction of spatial criticism and the framework of the thesis.Chapter Two traces the process of housekeeping and the constitution of the settled feminine subjectivity.In the social space of Fingerbone,men are the dominant group who conceives the ideology and knowledge to guide women’s social practice.Women play the role of good housekeepers to maintain the father-houses physically and symbolically,through which the settled subjectivity is constructed and constituted exemplified by Lucille.Chapter three traces the process of house-destroying as a process of dissolving the father-house.Sylvie,a transient subject,is a rebellious figure in the novel.Her eccentric housekeeping is to dissolve the boundary of the father-house physically and symbolically,and destroy the structure of the patriarchal society conceived by men.During the process of house-destroying,Ruth gains her transient subjectivity under the guidance of Sylvie.Chapter four discusses the novel’s ambiguous ending of the imagined homecomings by Ruth.The open ending of Housekeeping neither confines the transient subjects forever in somewhere indeterminate,nor does it exile the transient subjects to death.By constructing narrative grounded in women’s social practices and prefiguring the possibility of social transformation,Robinson echoes the women’s movement at its time.The thesis reaches the conclusion that the options for modern women do not have to be a housekeeper or live a life of transience,since no one can stay within the household all the time or find a utopian place.Only by going over the fences of house and destroying the space conceived by men as a confinement,can women find a new way out.