Family narrative and Marilynne Robinson\u27s Housekeeping : Reading and writing beyond boundaries

What disturbs some readers of Housekeeping are the depictions of women and family that are in stark contrast to cherished ideals. The myth challenged by Robinson\u27s novel is a nostalgic myth of family and women as they ought to be or as they used to be, a myth that defines women by their relation to men (wife/husband) and to family (mother/children). This myth defines marriage and family sentimentally, as happy and whole, clinging to an ideal rather than a reality. In place of such myths, Robinson offers a family story that admits the facts of single parents, broken families, homeless women and children. The narrative pattern in Housekeeping mirrors family experience as a repetition of family violence, loneliness, and storytelling. Ruth Stone\u27s family history broadens to include a litany of similar stories of family sorrows, stories told mostly by old women. These storytellers are an interpretive community, discussing and negotiating the truths of women and family. As the reader and as one maker of Robinson\u27s text, I join the interpretive community begun in the novel, and I bring to that community feminist, reader response, and autobiographical literary criticism as frames of interpretation. Weaving together these strands of criticism and family narrative, I am challenged to imagine beyond the tale of Ruth, Sylvie, and Lucille, to the stories and lives of women as they might be without regard to boundaries. As a reader caught in this cycle of tales, I respond to this challenge by erasing the boundaries that would separate reader, writer, and critic by writing my own family stories. By writing essays about my life and family as a natural extension of my critical work on Marilynne Robinson and family narrative, I am participating in a community reading of family that acknowledges that individual voices within families tell different stories and values this storytelling process