“My name is Ruth,” begins Marilynne Robinson’s début novel, Housekeeping. From the first word of the novel the reader is aware that the narrative is first person, and within the first sentence the reader is aware that the first person narration belongs to a woman, who reveals herself to be a young girl living in the small, isolated town of Fingerbone, Idaho. But Ruth’s first person narration differs from many other well recognized and critically acclaimed first person accounts previously written in 20th century America. Ruth does not overuse artificial, fanciful language like Nick Carraway does in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, nor does her narration ever relax into the almost musical, storytelling mode of the narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Ruth’s “I” repeatedly fades into the background at different points throughout the novel, giving the illusion of third person omniscience, when Robinson has made it a point to begin the novel immersed in Ruth’s first person narration. Although its frequent absence causes the reader to be acutely aware of its sporadic presence, Ruth’s transient “I” is not Robinson’s mistake. Instead, it is an intriguing literary experiment that not only redefines omniscience through the perspective of Ruth, but also calls into question the very existence of omniscience in literature. By blurring the boundaries between the first person narrative of a young woman and the imagined omniscient narration that she so easily inhabits, readers are left to question whether or not such omniscience is even possible.
When Ruth’s first person narration does enter the story, it seems awkward and intrusive. Ruth explains her mother’s distant relationship with her grandmother, imagining that, “Perhaps she was so affronted by Helen’s secretive behavior that even now she refused to take notice of it. Perhaps she did not wish to learn by indirection what Helen did not wish to tell her…” (Robinson 20). The “she” Ruth is referring to is her own grandmother, Sylvia, whose name her eventual caretaker and aunt, Sylvie, shares, and Helen is Ruth’s mother. The reader is aware of both relationships, because Ruth has established her family’s matriarchal lineage from the very beginning of the novel. However, most readers expect first person accounts, particularly of children or adolescents, to be more self-focused or reflective, but Ruth’s words read as all knowing, and extremely detached. Given Robinson’s deliberate choice of first person narration, it would seem more natural for Ruth to refer to her grandmother as “my grandmother,” or at least her mother as “my mother” or “Mom,” instead of “Helen.” But Ruth so comfortably occupies the role of detached, omniscient storyteller that this abnormality in first person narration is easily overlooked. It is only startling when Ruth’s “I” interjects into her omniscient style soon after when she says, “if she (Ruth’s grandmother) had asked me, I could have told her that we lived in two rooms…” (20). Ruth’s first person narration appears intrusive here and in other similar moments, because the reader has just attempted to settle into an omniscient storytelling mode. Ruth’s detached storytelling mode both reflects and offers an alternative or an amendment to the third person omniscient narrator most often seen in realist fiction of the 19th century, proposing a different, so far unimagined, voice of omniscience—that of a young woman. Robinson herself suggests, through the absence of the patriarchal line of Ruth’s family that she is using Ruth’s narrative voice to redefine omniscience to include not just men, but also women. The only other explanation of Ruth’s falsely omniscient narrative voice is the lack of omniscience at all—a frightening idea for anyone previously inhabiting the God-like role of omniscience, in reality or in literature.
Ruth’s intermittent “I” is just one technique Robinson employs to redefine and to obliterate the concept of omniscience. While this technique is pervasive throughout the novel, Robinson also utilizes the uncertainty of subjective events to grant Ruth her narrative authority, or possibly to dissuade the reader from the concept of omniscient narrative authority altogether. Robinson begins her refutation of omniscience both simply and unexpectedly. Early in the novel, Ruth’s “I” temporarily disappears, when Ruth remembers how her mother, “…gave them (some strangers) her purse, rolled down the rear windows, started the car, turned the wheel as far to the right as it would go, and roared swerving and sliding across the meadow until the car sailed off the edge of the cliff” (21). No matter the quality of Ruth’s description, it seems unlikely that she could recount the details of her mother’s suicide, which she was not present for, with such accuracy and precision. However, her voice is so detailed in this description that the reader both consciously and unconsciously grants Ruth the narrative authority she needs in order to recount these events. If the reader is still doubtful of Ruth’s narrative authority, there is always the possibility that the two men who helped rescue her mother’s car relayed the story to an adult, perhaps her grandmother, who perhaps then told Ruth and Lucille. But when Ruth says her mother “turned the wheel as far right as it would go,” Ruth proves herself to be unreliable, because there is absolutely no way she could know for certain which direction her mother turned the wheel. However, the reader must accept her account, as it is the only one given, and just as there is nothing to say it is correct, there is nothing to say it is incorrect. Ironically, it is Ruth’s own absence from these events and her mother’s absence from her life, and thus a prevailing sense of uncertainty of past events that grants Ruth her narrative authority. If readers question her authority as a narrator, they are questioning the possibility of omniscience itself.
Perhaps before the reader comes to fully realize the highly imagined and subjective nature of Ruth’s narrative, she will notice the erratic behavior of the girls’ aunt, Sylvie. Not only is Sylvie “sitting in the moonlight… a boundless and luminous evening” (100), blurring the boundaries between the light of the house and the darkness of the night, Ruth herself is constantly blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined, by fantasizing how everything, particularly her mother, would have been. And it is through these abolished boundaries that Ruth establishes her narrative authority. When Ruth sees Sylvie brushing her hair, she is immediately reminded of her mother. She questions, “What was to be made of this? Nothing at all. Why should two estranged sisters think the same thoughts before their mirrors? And how do we know what Helen’s thoughts were? It might not have been until she was on her way to Fingerbone that she decided what she would do, though it was in Seattle that she bought the graham crackers that were to help us wait” (131). Here, Ruth questions her own narrative authority, even with the physical presence of the graham crackers as proof of a preplanned diversion. However, this questioning grounds her authority, strictly and subtly. By questioning herself, and by quietly rejecting her brief proposal that “nothing at all” should be made of her aunt and mother’s similarities before the mirror, her credibility is enhanced to the point of appearing omniscient, although the reader knows she is not. However, if Ruth, this young girl, is capable of achieving such impossible omniscience as reading both the mind of her aunt and mother, then perhaps omniscience is impossible, and poorly explained by imagination at best.
As life in Fingerbone continues to wax and wane with the harsh seasons, Robinson continues her transfiguration of the concept of omniscience through Ruth’s imagination, rather than the presence of factual evidence. Ruth and Sylvie’s journey into the Idaho wilderness is one of the scenes in the novel where Ruth’s “I” appears the most, because she is left alone with her thoughts. Ironically, it is when Ruth slips further into her own imagination and starts to fantasize about the people of the mountains, their broken and abandoned homes, and their children that she slips into a false voice of omniscience. “There was no reason to believe that anyone ever had heard all the tales of unsheltered folk that were in these mountains, or that anyone ever would. And that is perhaps why, when they saw me alone, they would practically tug at my sleeve,” thinks Ruth (157). The “they” Ruth is referring to here are the imaginary children of the mountains who could have been real at some point in the past. Both Ruth and Sylvie are aware of these lives of the past, even if they are invisible. However, Ruth admits to the impossibility of someone knowing all of their stories. It is only when she was alone that they began to “tug at her sleeve,” and reveal themselves to her, as though their absence were the impetus for their presence in Ruth’s imagination, and thus the key to the telling of their stories. Ruth has not only revealed herself to be the closest thing to an omniscient narrator for the children of the mountains, she has also admitted that there are unreachable stories that she must not only make up, but might leave out of her account, simply because she does not know of the existence of such stories. As Ruth deconstructs the abandoned house with her hands, she has simultaneously established and questioned herself as an authority on the stories of the people in the mountains, the various snow crises, and the multiple dilapidated houses. Thus, Ruth places herself on an equal narrative playing field with all others who attempt to recount the stories of people in the mountains—of people in the past.
The most powerful use of Ruth’s imagining the absent is when she rewrites part of the bible at the beginning of chapter ten. Her first person disappears for a while, as she recounts how “all of us as one child will sleep in our mother Eve, hooped in her ribs and staved by her spine” (192). This is an image of complete containment, and Adam has been glossed over, functioning only under the surface and in reference to Eve, much like the “missing” men in the novel. The men in Housekeeping are absent from the story, painted over with Ruth’s imagination, yet still flooding the pages of the novel with their influence, much like Ruth’s grandfather, who lies at the bottom of the lake and reenters the house whenever the lake floods. The idea of housekeeping and the domestic sphere seems appropriately handed over to Ruth to speak about, but Ruth’s false omniscience spans much further than the domestic sphere to which women are confined. By speculating that Cain’s murder of Abel was “a story so sad that even God took notice of it,” and that, “all was purged away (in the flood), and nothing is left of it after so many years but a certain pungency and savor in the water, and in the breath of creeks and lakes, which, however sad and wild, are clearly human” (193), Ruth is inhabiting a role greater than or at least as all knowing as the role of God. The power of her narrative voice grows and is able to take over a role of omniscience similar to God, because she is the one telling the age-old story of human deficiency, and she is not pretending to be all knowing or even offering solutions. She is giving herself her own authority of omniscience as a woman storyteller and grounding her authority through what she was not there to witness, what she never actually did see, what she probably never will see. Therefore, if Ruth is taken seriously on the matters she speaks of throughout the novel, including the details of the past, the lives of those around her, and even God, then no one is to receive more recognition than her.
Much like her Aunt Sylvie, Ruth is a wanderer, a transient woman, both in her lifestyle with Sylvie and in her narrative voice. The ebb and flow of her “I” and the intense imagination of past events mark nothing but a murky boundary between what is for certain and what is merely perception. Sylvie’s eccentricities and her habit of having dinner in the dark and letting stray cats roam the house are nothing compared to Ruth’s blurry narrative style between first person narration and attempted omniscience. And by the conclusion of the novel, Robinson is utilizing both of these tactics in full force. Ruth’s “I” comes and goes, asking the reader to “imagine Lucille in Boston, at a table in a restaurant, waiting for a friend. She is tastefully dressed—wearing say, a tweed suit with a amber scarf…” (218). Ruth’s use of the realistic details to fill in her imagination, in conjunction with her use of the negative mode, become more and more apparent. “I do not flounce in through the door, smoothing the skirts of our oversized coats,” she says, listing off negated future events (218). The reader understands by this point that there is no way to know the size of any potential coats the girls might be wearing, let alone if the event will happen at all. The reader is left only with Ruth’s fantasy account of not meeting her sister in Boston, and it is close to impossible to negate Ruth’s fantasy of what did not happen.
Ruth’s conclusion that, “no one… could know how her (Lucille’s) thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie” is devastating (219). Ruth’s use of negated fantasy demonstrates just how alone inside her imagination she truly is, which begs the question of our own solitude in this world. And yet, despite all of Ruth’s negations, the reader is left with an extremely vivid image of a scene of Lucille waiting in a coffee shop. While this scene does not actually take place, it receives its power from Ruth’s inserted “realistic” details and the precedence of Ruth’s transient “I” successfully impersonating omniscience. Ruth accepts her constant wandering in both her life and her narrative. And if we find ourselves to be like Ruth, restlessly wandering, with feeble attempts at housekeeping, then perhaps we too must flee from the parts of society that reject this freedom. However, I would like to argue that Ruth has not wandered too far, because her words are still available to readers. Through Ruth’s words, Robinson suggests that we are all capable of Ruth’s omniscience in recovering the stories of the past, but through such omniscience is only make-believe, authored by anyone, regardless of age or sex. “Fact explains nothing,” says Ruth, “On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation” (217). It is fact that requires omniscience, as Robinson suggests, and not the stories of people’s lives.
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