Friday, March 31, 2017
Housekeeping
Throughout Housekeeping, the differing approaches to 'keeping house' gives insights into their characters.
Throughout the course of the book, Lucille grows from a passive character like Ruth, to a self-determined character who begins to distance herself from her more flighty family. Lucille wishes to assimilate into conventional culture, a marked difference from Sylvie and Ruth, who desire to wander free. It is fitting then that Lucille moves into the home of the home economics teacher-- the teacher who's job it is to literally teach her students about good housekeeping.
Sylvie is a free spirited and flighty transient, who dislikes staying in one place. We see many instances of Sylvie's inability to keep house-- she leaves the windows open, she leaves things to dry in the yard and promptly forgets about it, etc. Throughout the book we see the once clean house degrade into a shell of its former self. In the last chapter, Sylvie uses a broom to help light the house on fire, using something meant to 'keep house' to instead destroy it.
When Sylvie tries to convince the court that she is fit to keep custody of Ruth however, she begins to clean up the house, faking her ability to keep house to seem normal. She seems almost like a different person, with Ruth saying "I had never imagined that Sylvie was capable of haste or urgency". Sylvie becomes paranoid that she's being watched, declaring loudly how well she and Ruth are doing.
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I think the way you separate and organize the ways of each character is very interesting. Each character has a much different approach to everything they do throughout the book, but yet they all stem in the dying wish to "keep the house". Nice post!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Anna. It's also interesting how you don't really mention Ruth and what she's like in your post, but I think it makes sense since we don't learn too much about Ruth despite the book being a first-person narrative.
DeleteI think the image of Sylvie with the broom trying the burn down the house is particularly powerful. She has just started using the broom to keep house as a way to protect Ruth, but quickly realized that that is not the solution to her problems. Instead she burns down the house that she just worked so hard to fix up. Then they flee across the bridge over the lake, both of which have been very powerful symbols for transience throughout the book.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the descent into the final chapters of this book was wild. I remember when Royce, the Home Ec teacher first came and knocked on their door to tell Sylvie what was going on, it was like a rude awakening from this weird, misty dream that the first chunk of the novel had felt like. Also, the broom, like Jake said, it such a particular and strong metaphor that Sylvie uses -- also because of all the details in the very beginning of the book where she sort of uses it but allows lots of things to sneak into the house, like leaves in the corners of rooms. The broom, I suppose, has a sort of sub-arch of its own -- it comes into use, only to be the tool by which the house it takes care of is burnt! How wild!
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