Nothing Left to Lose: Housekeeping's Strange FreedomsAuthor(s): Christine CaverSource: American Literature, Vol. 68, No. 1, Write Now: American Literature in the 1980s and1990s (Mar., 1996), pp. 111-137Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2927543Accessed: 23/11/2010 08:34

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Christine Nothing Left to Lose: Housekeeping's Caver Strange Freedoms

lAIhen asked to describe the 1980's remake of The Body Snatchers, the teenaged narrator of In Country replies: "They all got snatched"; "Nobody got saved." Her reply might well serve as an epigraph to Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, whose two teenaged protagonists seem both to get snatched-Lucille by the forces of con- ventionality, Ruth by a signifier of social death.' Critical responses to Robinson's novel, however, usually celebrate it as a narrative of femi- nist freedom.2 My own response is more consistent with the argument made by Jean Wyatt, who argues that "Housekeeping deals with the problem of a disappearing subject."3 While Wyatt's analysis focuses on the effects of such a text on the reader, mine addresses the commu- nicative challenges, the narrative paradox of the literature of trauma: through what kind of narrative strategies might a text effectively com- municate that which renders us speechless? Housekeeping represents the power of traumatic experience to destroy not only language and the illusion of a coherent self capable of agency but also a person's place within a larger community.

Housekeeping depicts two young girls abandoned by a series of care- givers: their father (who leaves), their mother (who commits suicide), their grandmother (who dies), and their two great aunts (who are overwhelmed by the task of caring for the two girls). Traumatized by these successive abandonments, but especially by their mother's sui- cide, Lucille and Ruth develop radically different identities. Lucille, the younger, desires warmth, nourishment, and acceptance by her peers, her neighbors, and her stereotypically traditional high school home economics teacher. By contrast, Ruth's inability to conform to

American Literature, Volume 68, Number 1, March 1996. Copyright C) 1996 by Duke University Press. CCC 0002-9831/96/$1.50.

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the behavioral and discursive conventions for girls in her community results in her eventual flight from both school and community. Judg- ing from the novel's critical reception, Ruth's response-because it seems to signify freedom and choice- appears more desirable to most readers. And yet, it exacts a price. While Lucille's adoption of a tra- ditional female role appears more stifling, Ruth moves into a realm virtually claustrophobic in its limitations: she loses the ability to com- municate with those around her. Lucille maintains the illusion of a self by uncritically adopting the identity and voice of her commu- nity; Ruthie escapes the forces of conventionality but at the cost of a silenced voice and a disappearing body. Only the reader has access to her thoughts.

Why, then, has critical reception of the novel been so generally positive at this historical moment? Housekeeping is, in many ways, a transgressive text that invites feminist readings. Feminist scholars, as producers, consumers, and disseminators of texts that challenge patriarchy and hierarchy, have shown that the novel destabilizes many of the usual oppositional categories (absence and presence, nature and culture, travel and home): the absence of the dead makes them more present than when they were alive in the same room; the leaves from the yard and even the lake trespass the boundaries of home; when Ruthie is at home her thoughts are often elsewhere, yet when traveling with Sylvie her thoughts are at home with Lucille-who may or may not be there. Ruthie's and Sylvie's eventual escape from housekeeping altogether-and from the community which cannot ac- cept their eccentricity-is the text's most radical act. Housekeeping's feminist markers, that is, are almost overabundant.

Dana Heller sees the novel as "more than a feminist alternative to the Huck Finns . . . of American Fiction: the novel is a powerful cele- bration of women's collective history and memory." A "male-dominant tradition of literary forms and themes," she rightly claims, "has privi- leged the myth of male flight and denied female protagonists the experience of 'lighting out' for a feminized territory of self-creation and social fulfillment."4 Yet Housekeeping's conclusion seems less to rewrite the doomed female quest-romances of the past than to ques- tion the ultimate cultural value of that paradigm, at least for women in this society. The kind of joyous liberation some critics find in the char- acters' mobility may apply to Sylvie-though we have no access to her inner thoughts to validate this reading-but by novel's end Ruth

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is obsessed with images of death, coldness, and darkness that make claims about her "social fulfillment" especially dubious. Even early in the novel, Ruthie muses that she and Lucille are "survivors ... among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter ... that only catastrophe made notable" (116).

For all its suggestion of freedom from traditional female identities, this narrative is deeply rooted in the trauma of abandonment, which may better explain its characters' rootlessness and difference than does Robinson's supposed attempt to compose "feminist theory and fiction."5 Indeed, Robinson's introduction to a 1988 edition of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, a novel often celebrated as a feminist proto- type, suggests a certain lack of sympathy on Robinson's part for char- acters who "light out" for the territory. Instead of the stifling social conventionality many readers find in the novel, Robinson believes that "Kate Chopin seems in fact to have created the least onerous situa- tion imaginable for Edna, one leisured and without coercion, ready to accommodate her choices." Of Edna and Leonce's marriage, she re- minds us that "Much has been made of Chopin's saying in this scene that Pontellier looks at his wife as one looks at 'a valuable piece of per- sonal property."' Robinson, however, has a different interpretation of Leonce's gaze: "he is not in the slightest degree possessive or control- ling in his behavior toward her. It is his confidence in the permanence of their relationship that makes him so at ease with her apparent flirta- tion with Robert." And of Edna's eventual and tragic flight, Robinson says, "Society is natural in the sense that it makes nature habitable. Turning from it, Edna finds meaninglessness and death."6

One wonders, then, how Robinson judges the female transients in Housekeeping, who turn from society and find, I argue, social death. Housekeeping endorses neither Fingerbone's socially, spiritually, and intellectually narrow community nor Ruthie's and Lucille's equally unsatisfactory reactions to it. What Housekeeping does show is a dis- spiriting dearth of possible identities and community resources for the "unvalued clutter" that orphaned children and eccentric women constitute in such communities. Read from this perspective, House- keeping offers a damning critique of contemporary social structures by suggesting that as a culture we have not evolved much since Gilman's unnamed narrator tore the wallpaper off the walls and Edna Pontellier walked into the sea. In Housekeeping's world, as at the turn of the cen- tury, the alternatives for women who long to escape from an abusive

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or repressive system are situated somewhere between madness and death. As in the film Thelma and Louise (1991), there is no place of welcome for female buddies who choose to live outside the social law.

Admittedly, feminist textual markers are numerous-fluid bound- aries, escape from tradition, and a pair of female buddies paramount among them. But it remains difficult to understand why so many schol- ars have downplayed the suffocating tone of the novel. In a recent conversation about Housekeeping, a colleague who admires the novel's vision and I discussed our radically different subject positions. She reminisced that as a child growing up in a middle-class neighborhood, she had felt restricted by all the rules of housekeeping-the chores, the injunctions to tidiness and cleanliness, the meals according to a schedule which interfered with her agenda for play. For her-and per- haps for many women readers of Robinson's text-identification with refugees from bourgeois society may hinder their noticing the dis- turbing consequences, according to Housekeeping, of the flight from community. For my colleague, spending a day on the lake with an eccentric aunt, being allowed to play outside until long after dark, being free from chores or regular meals, would have been delights, because she had a safe place to return to; she knew that she would be fed and clothed, that when she invited her friends home no crickets would be in the pantry (99), no half-burned curtain hanging near the sooty wall (101), that her mother would not commit suicide, that no crazy aunt slept on a public bench for all her friends to see (105). I believe that my colleague is still puzzled by my reading of the book, as I am by hers. Perhaps those who are able to disregard the novel's ex- cruciatingly painful portrayal of the world of the abandoned child who becomes the teenaged outsider have never experienced what it is like to be what Anne Lamott calls, "that one kid against the fence" in pub- lic school-the one who "wore strangely scuffed shoes" and whose "lunches were nightmarish in their eccentricity."7 A child's worst fear is being abandoned; a teenager's worst fear, if food and shelter are a given, is being laughed at by peers. The outcast's perception of the well-lit, well-kept houses-which may be a source of resentment to some who actually live in them-is explained by Ruthie, who speaks of being "jealous to the point of rage of those who were already ac- customed to the light and the somnolent warmth of the houses we passed" (35). The lights of the town were for Ruth and Lucille "the only comfort there was in the world"; if all these lights were to be ex-

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tinguished, then "the bitter darkness would step nearer" (35). When I think ,of the different readings of this novel, I am reminded of Paul Valery's claim that "there is no theory that is not a fragment, care- fully prepared, of some autobiography."8 When I read the novel, I hear Ruth's words not as an observer who celebrates her deathly "escape" by overlooking the many ways she tells us that "all unsheltered people are angry" but as one who survived suicidal parents and threats of hunger, homelessness, and isolation (158). What Ruthie's two voices (the all-but-absent public one and the lyrical private one) signify is what I remember: that no one is there in our communities to listen to the stories of such children. If we hear them at all, it is in retro- spect. As Anne Lamott says about that "one kid against the fence," "He almost certainly ended up being a writer."9 Ruthie's voice is a message in a bottle, tossed out from some timeless past: "My name is Ruth," she begins (3). This is her story; she wants us to hear it-if we are out there listening.

"Every descent into silence is the risk of never returning." -Vassar Miller

An understanding of the degree to which trauma damages our ability to speak is helpful in explaining some of the narrative strategies through which unspeakable things are communicated: "When people are exposed to trauma, i.e., a frightening event outside of ordinary human experience, they experience 'speechless terror.' The experi- ence cannot be organized on a linguistic level and this failure to ar- range the memory in words and symbols leaves it to be organized on a somatosensory or iconic level: as somatic sensations, behavioral reenactments, nightmares and flashbacks. [These experiences, there- fore,] cannot be easily translated into the symbolic language neces- sary for linguistic retrieval." 10 The fragmentation of language signifies the survivor's fragmented sense of identity and is a characteristic narrative strategy in literatures of trauma. This "language" of sounds and gestures, broken syntax, somatic disturbances, and eccentric be- havioral characteristics identifies survivor characters as liminal: they are marginalized and silenced figures whose unreadable nature, un- conventional behavior, and discursive inadequacy exclude them from conventional communities."

Conveying speechlessness through language is a particularly chal-

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lenging narrative paradox when the narrator is the character silenced and traumatized, as is Robinson's Ruth. Ruth resolves this paradox- the eloquent representation of speechlessness-through a dual-voiced narrative: she writes her family history by recording sophisticated and lyrical interior monologues yet is barely able to speak to those around her. Her bifurcated narrative enacts what Judith Herman calls the "central dialectic of psychological trauma." This dialectic is ex- perienced by survivors as an oscillation "between feeling numb and reliving the event," causing a "conflict between the will to deny hor- rible events and the will to proclaim them aloud."'2 That Ruthie is trapped within this dialectic is made apparent by her lack of emotional response to her mother's suicide and her obsession with the event.'3 She both feels numb about it and relives it continuously, unable to integrate past and present. With those in her own world, she never discusses the effect her mother's death had on her, and yet she is ob- sessed with it, repeatedly imagining scenarios of death by drowning that she shares with the reader.

Ruth's numbness regarding her mother's suicide is first apparent as a gap in her recounting of her family history: she denies it hap- pened at all in her first two sentences, which only seem to list all those who abandoned her: "My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher [known famil- iarly as Sylvie]" (3). Only later does the reader discover that the most traumatic and violent abandonment of all, the suicide of her mother Helen, is absent.'4 This dissociation of memory sets the tone for the rest of the novel, the everpresent "not said" around which the novel revolves.

When Ruth does tell the story of her mother's suicide, she reports the facts as she knows them but without emotional commentary, as if it were an interesting story that did not concern her personally: "She [Helen] put our suitcases in the screened porch [of our grand- mother's house], and told us to wait quietly. Then she went back to the car and drove north almost to Tyler, where she sailed in Bernice's Ford from the top of a cliff named Whiskey Rock into the blackest depth of the lake" (22). That Ruthie seems at first barely to notice her mother's suicide yet later recalls it again and again demonstrates the central dialectic of trauma. Here is one example of Ruth's obses-

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sive thoughts about her mother, who both is and is not present: "We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released ... sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror, and there is . .. a deathly bitterness in the smell of ponds and ditches" (198). Although her imaginative landscape is dominated by these haunting, repetitive images of her absent/present mother, only the reader has access to them. To those around her within the novel she barely speaks at all. In contrast to her emotionally rich interior monologues, Ruth's clipped speech reveals neither emotion nor imagination, even to the woman who becomes her surrogate mother, Helen's vagabond sister Sylvie:

"Did you have a nice day at school?" [Sylvie asked].... "School was fine," [Ruth answered]. It was terrible [she thought]. I had outgrown my dress, and whenever I ceased to control myself by a conscious effort of will, my feet began to dance or I bit my knuckles or twisted my hair. (187)

"Did you see Lucille?" [Sylvie asked]. "No" [Ruth said]. Yes [she thought]. Lucille was everywhere, but we did not speak. (188)

These conflicting messages-what she says and how she feels, her unemotional words and her anxious body language-are character- istic of those who have experienced the unspeakable. In contrast to Ruth's brief responses to other characters, her narrative to the reader is articulate, even eloquent, as her thoughts about the great-aunts demonstrate. It "was disturbing to have our aunts' fear appear as pre- science," Ruth thinks to herself (65); their conversations "seemed then and always to be the elaboration and ornamentation of the con- sensus between them, which was as intricate and well-tended as a termite castle" (30). Since trauma survivors have difficulty translat- ing their traumatic memories "into the symbolic language necessary for linguistic retrieval,"'15 presenting Ruth as a character with two voices-one distant, public, and monosyllabic; the other intimate, pri- vate, and lyrical-is an elegant narrative solution to the problem of speaking the unspeakable.

Although Ruth's interior voice demonstrates a high level of linguis- tic mastery, her social incompetencies-her discomfort with speak-

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ing, her withdrawal from school, her inability to conform to codes of behavior and discourse-suggest her radical alienation from commu- nity customs. In contrast, Lucille is strongly identified with the con- ventional discourse of her community, demonstrating an understand- ing of and adherence to social rules and expectations. This contrast constitutes yet another dialectic structure in the novel. Characters like Lucille, who identify with a traditional social order, are typically portrayed as conventionally articulate; outsiders are frequently por- trayed as either unable or unwilling to participate in conventional discourse. Narratives of trauma often rely on the dialectic between these opposing realms, with survivors regaining symbolic mastery as they begin to heal and to reconnect with a community.

In Housekeeping, however, the potential dialectic set up by the sis- ters' equally radical responses to their abandonment is truncated. Ruth and Lucille live in worlds between which no communication seems possible. Housekeeping presents two choices for the sisters' futures: Lucille's path might appeal to those with limited intellectual curiosity and a high tolerance for conformity; Ruth's path might attract writers, artists, or other intellectuals-but only those without a need for conversation with a community of peers, without sexual desire, and with a high tolerance for cold, dark, and hunger. A community that allows for some fluidity does not exist here. Overwhelmed by the incomprehensible fact of their mother's violent departure, Ruthie's social identity dissolves, while Lucille's is rigidly defined by her com- munity.

The novel's eleven chapters can be divided into three sections: Ruth's narrative of her family's history and dynamics, which con- veys as much by what she leaves unsaid as by what she records; Ruth's and Lucille's diverging paths after Sylvie's arrival; and Ruth's final transformation as she enters into Sylvie's world. Ruth moves more and more into a wordless realm impossible to locate spatially or temporally,'6 while Lucille is increasingly locked into the conven- tions of Fingerbone. And the reader, who is never allowed to escape Ruthie's preoccupations with death by drowning, is allowed no breath- ing space-never allowed to escape Ruthie's mind.

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"Not because they were afraid": Family History and the Unsaid in Ruth's Detailed Disclosures

The "puzzling margins ... between [Fingerbone's] lake as it once was and the lake as it is now" also characterize the liminality of Ruth's identity (4-5). The lake, as the burial site of both her grandfather and her mother, serves as both metaphor and literal embodiment, as both the emotional and physical site of trauma. And just as the lake literally returns, so the traumas buried there return again and again in Ruth's memory. The lake, moreover, is an apt metaphor for the narrative strategies of a novel that foregrounds undecidability, family trauma, and the fragmentary nature of knowledge: affect remains buried, and even the lake's visible and variable surface serves as much to under- mine as to define borders.

The pattern of physical, emotional, and discursive disconnection among family members is a tradition that Ruth believes extends back at least to her grandfather, Edmund Foster. His death, in a train which falls off the bridge into the lake, was "not altogether unanticipated" by his wife Sylvia, since "sometimes for whole days he would ... speakto [his wife and children] as a very civil man would speak to strangers. And now he had vanished finally" (10). Ruth imagines that this lack of intimacy characterized the relationship between Sylvia and her three daughters as well, for " [a]fter their father's death," she tells us, Molly, Helen, and Sylvie "hovered around [their mother], watched every- thing she did, followed her through the house, got in her way" (10). Ruth explains the children's refusal to let Sylvia out of their sight as follows: "Of course they pressed her and touched her as if she had just returned after an absence. Not because they were afraid she would vanish as their father had done, but because his sudden vanishing had made them aware of her" (12, emphasis mine). At a time when the children might be expected to desire reassurance from their mother because they are afraid of losing her as well, Ruth denies this re- action. It is comforting to believe that such shattering events would not engender fear, that merely saying they were not afraid would make it so. And Ruth's interior monologue-as opposed to her speech-is so controlling and eloquent that readers are invited to identify with her rather than question her interpretive powers.

In one of the rare instances where Ruth expresses a strong emo- tion, it is retrospective. Helen will not discuss the absence of her

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husband-Ruth's father-and when one day she receives a letter from him she immediately shreds it. That letter "was all we knew of our father," Ruth explains, and her response to this memory years later is telling: "At the time I think I felt only curiosity.... And, in fact, I recall the moment now with some astonishment-there was neither doubt nor passion in her destruction of the letter, neither hesitation nor haste- and withfrustration-there was only that letter and never another one, and nothing else from him or about him at all-and with anger-he was presumably our father, and might wish to know what had become of us, and even to intervene" (52, emphasis added). Her hope that her "father ... might wish ... to intervene" suggests Ruth's repressed wish for something different from "Helen's secretive behavior" (20).

Ruth imagines that her grandfather's death was treated in the same way Helen treats her husband's disappearance-with denial and silence. Edmund's disappearance would not be discussed among Sylvia and her three daughters: "Her girls were quiet . .. because the habits of their lives had almost relieved them of the need for speech.... This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father.... The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself" (15, emphasis added). It is possible to read these passages as a model of female freedom; the girls are, after all, seemingly "cut free," perfectly quiet, seamlessly healed from the loss (13).1' At least that is what Ruth's words say. In the context of the literature of trauma, however, there is something disturbing about the secrecy and silence that define Ruth's family. The trauma is buried, like the train, yet re- mains present by its very absence-the unspeakable center of their quiet lives. Their seeming freedom "from the troublesome possibility of success, recognition, advancement" is a description not of serenity but of trauma-induced paralysis, of a family unable to get beyond the shock they cannot speak of-in part because they are unable to speak of it-until, finally, they barely speak at all (13).

This is the household in which Helen, Ruth's and Lucille's mother, was raised. Following Helen's suicide, Grandmother Sylvia is left with another generation to raise; perpetuating the secrecy and silence of their family history, she never asks Ruth and Lucille anything about their life with their mother (19-20). Ruth claims that " [f ] or five years my grandmother cared for us very well" (24). Yet the actual quality of the care their grandmother provides is captured in a passage which

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contrasts Sylvia's attention to material details with her emotional dis- traction and bafflement:

She cared for us like someone reliving a long day in a dream..... she seemed abstracted . . . like one dreaming . . . her attention heightened and at the same time baffled.... She whited shoes and braided hair and fried chicken and turned back bedclothes, and then suddenly feared and remembered that the children had some- how disappeared, every one. How had it happened? How might she have known?... So when she seemed distracted or absent-minded, it was in fact, I think, that she was aware of too many things, having no principle for selecting the more from the less important, and that her awareness could never be diminished, since it was among the things she had thought of as familiar that this disaster had taken shape. (24-25)

Sylvia's dreamlike bafflement-her awareness of "too many things," her inability to select "the more from the less important"-describes the hypervigilance characteristic of some trauma survivors. Kai Erik- son has investigated the effects of trauma on whole communities struck by various kinds of human catastrophes and has discovered that trauma changes the way people attend to their environment: "People stripped of the ability to screen out signs of peril, naturally, are unusually vigilant and unusually anxious.... They evaluate the data of life differently, read signs differently, see omens that the rest of us are for the most part spared.... Once persons who have been visited by trauma begin to look around them, evidence that the world is a place of unremitting danger seems to appear everywhere."'8 Only in retrospect, of course, could Sylvia know "that her three girls would disappear as absolutely as their father had done"-Edmund's death perhaps the first clue in her otherwise "orderly and ordinary life" that hers would be, from then on, a life filled with sudden disappearances that she could not accept, comprehend, or articulate (25).

This heightened awareness of danger, combined with the inability to speak of it, is passed on as a family trait. Ruth and Lucille learn not to speak of their fears first from their own mother (who learned from Sylvia and Edmund), and then from Sylvia herself. When Helen commits suicide, for instance, Sylvia simply "spent a number of days in her bedroom" (23). Sylvia treats the death of her daughter much as

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she did the death of Edmund: with silence and withdrawal. Ruth's nar- rative reflects her own inability to speak of-though she is obsessed with-death. When Sylvia dies five years after Ruth and Lucille arrive, Ruth avoids using the word "death." Instead, she tells us, "my grand- mother ... eschewed awakening" (29). When the great aunts, Lily and Nona, arrive, their "brusque, unpracticed pats and kisses" sug- gest that these new guardians will be no more skilled in the emotional caretaking of children than were Helen or Sylvia (29). They can barely survive the task of having to buy larger shoes for the girls: "Lily and Nona, I think, enjoyed nothing except habit and familiarity," but this "was not to be achieved in Fingerbone," Ruth explains, where "Lucille and I perpetually threatened to cough or outgrow our shoes" (32).

Attempting to find a graceful way to escape the parental respon- sibility foisted upon them so unexpectedly, the great aunts place a message in the "personal-ads section of a newspaper" in an attempt to locate the girls' aunt Sylvie (39). Her whereabouts unknown for sixteen years, Sylvie responds, appropriately enough, from the "Lost Hills Hotel, Billings, Montana" (39). When Lily and Nona return to Spokane, leaving the girls in Sylvie's care, Ruthie's comment fore- shadows Sylvie's possession of both the house and Ruth's fate: "we and the house were Sylvie's" (59).

"Lucille's loyalties were with the other world": Evasions and Illusions of Self

One common result of trauma is social isolation; in the absence of others who mirror different aspects of the self, a survivor's iden- tity as survivor may overshadow all other facets of personality. Sur- vivors often withdraw from relationships, believing that others cannot understand -a perception too often confirmed by the disappearance of friends and even family who do not know what to say or who half- believe that misfortune is contagious. Perhaps most distressing to a survivor of something as shattering as parental suicide is the kind of mythology popularized by Horatio Alger; the currently popular rejoin- der "get over it" is one manifestation of this attitude.19 Yet time alone does not erase such experiences, as anyone who has worked with survivors well knows. A psychiatrist once told me of an eighty-year- old woman who had come to see him. When he asked her why she had decided to enter therapy, she replied, "I'm an orphan." Her par-

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ents had died when she was a child, but seven silent decades had not healed her loss. Narratives of trauma pose a particular challenge: how to convey artistically the intractability of an atemporal phenomenon? Sylvie's presence, as a figure representing the family's traumatic ex- periences in condensed form, is crucial. As an almost silent, shadowy figure, she serves as the textual reminder that traumatic experiences are deeply encoded yet mysterious and difficult to represent symboli- cally. Like the proverbial black sheep that Sylvie represents, traumatic memories fade and surface with distressing unpredictability.

Sylvie's connection to the lake-the literal and metaphorical site of trauma in the novel-is established almost immediately: her re- appearance is closely followed by a disastrous flood that isolates the household from the community, making literal the distance between Sylvie and the conventional world. Ruth's grandmother had always boasted "that the floods never reached our house," but after Sylvie's arrival "water poured over the thresholds and covered the floor to the depth of four inches" (61). Ruth reports that the "afternoon was loud with the giant miseries of the lake" (63). Sylvie, however, as signi- fier of the family's own "giant miseries," is at home with the lake's intrusion into the home. She disappears in the dark, flooded house. Appropriately for a figure signifying the unspeakable, she refuses to speak or move, even when Ruth calls to her: "'Sylvie?' She stood still as an effigy. I reached into her pocket and brought out a cold hand. I opened it and closed it and rubbed it between my hands, but she did not move or speak" (72).

Before Sylvie's arrival, Ruth and Lucille are each other's devoted companions, their relationship the one constant in a string of unex- pected losses. But Sylvie's arrival changes all that. Up to this point, Ruth has often used first person plural pronouns and the plural posses- sive in recording her history with Lucille, saying "that was all we knew of our father," for instance, and including Lucille when she thinks back on "our strange history" together (52, 36, emphasis added); she even refers to Lucille and herself as having almost "a single consciousness" (98). After Sylvie arrives, Ruth intuits Lucille's impending departure and with it her primary reflection of self: "In spring," she explains, "I had begun to sense that Lucille's loyalties were with the other world" (95). This "other world" of conventional community seems to Lucille settled and stable, unlike her home life with Sylvie. Given only two choices-to remain an outcast from the community as a member of

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Sylvie's dirty, cold, and disordered household or to embrace conven- tionality-Lucille chooses structure, the illusion of a self constructed of local values and appearances. Ruth, who is "content with Sylvie," chooses by default (92). Having earlier conflated her consciousness with Lucille's, she evades a separate self once again by remaining in Sylvie's world. She is surprised to notice Lucille's "look of settled pur- pose with which, from a slowly sinking boat, she might have regarded [the community as] a not-too-distant shore" (92). Ruth's analogy sug- gests their metaphoric location since Sylvie's arrival: they are slowly sinking into the site of trauma in this novel, the lake from which Lucille wants to escape.

Neither sister has been provided a safe environment long enough to enjoy the luxury of self-exploration; their energies have been taken up with surviving the loss of one caretaker after another. No one has asked, What would you like to do, to eat, to be? What are your fantasies and dreams, your fears and nightmares? It is not surprising, then, that they do not pursue the pleasures of trying on various identities, searching for a combination that would suit their desires and possi- bilities. Lucille's path is an illusion: she seems to pursue her desires, but she merely adopts the first conventional identity that appears to offer stability. Ruth seems to pursue an exciting and unconventional path, but she merely conflates her consciousness with Sylvie's rather than Lucille's.

These divergent paths are foreshadowed in the sisters' responses to the flood that seeps into the house. Lucille is increasingly distressed by Sylvie's asocial behavior. Sylvie is not disturbed by the natural disaster that leaves them in watery darkness and isolation; she says, "we're fine here" and plays "solitaire" (66). Lucille, however, com- plains, "I want to find some other people," and later adds, "in a very loud voice, 'I'm really tired of this"' (66, 70). The fact that Ruth and Lucille "were now in Sylvie's dream with her" disturbs Lucille far more than Ruth (110). Ruth's passivity is evident in her very lack of complaint; she does not say what she does or does not want, because, as she admits, "I don't know what I think" (105). It is clear, though, that she increasingly identifies with Sylvie and fears another abandon- ment more than she fears Sylvie herself, who Ruth admits is "not a stable person" (82). Ruth wants to ask Sylvie "whether she, too, felt ghostly, as I imagined she must.... I feared and suspected that Sylvie and I were of a kind and waited for her to claim me, but she would

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not" (106). Ruth's admission here anticipates the near future in which Sylvie does claim her, enabling Ruth to pass into the ghostly world of her mother and aunt.

Lucille becomes more and more associated with conventional sym- bolic structures as she prepares to leave Sylvie's house. She begins reading with "rigor [and] hard purpose," committing herself to suc- cess in school (132). She has begun keeping a diary that contains rules for table manners, "lists of exercises she had done and pages she had read" (133). Lucille's diary expresses not a typical teenager's desires but a determination to master convention in an attempt to construct a wall between herself and the eccentricity of Sylvie's household. One night at dinner, which Sylvie insists must be eaten in the dark, Lucille suddenly turns on the kitchen light, and Ruth describes what they now see of Sylvie's housekeeping efforts: "Everywhere the paint was chipped and marred. A great shadow of soot loomed up the wall and across the ceiling above the stove, and the stove pipe and the cupboard tops were thickly felted with dust. Most dispiriting, perhaps, was the curtain on Lucille's side of the table, which had been half consumed by fire once when a birthday cake had been set too close to it. Sylvie had beaten out the flames with a back issue of Good Housekeeping, but she had never replaced the curtain" (101). Besides drawing our atten- tion to Sylvie's (often humorous) indifference to rigid social codes, this passage suggests the difficulty of living outside those codes-par- ticularly for schoolchildren who are perceived as different. Following this episode, Lucille begins demanding balanced meals and "light at suppertime" (102). Meanwhile, Ruth begins to behave and look like Sylvie, adopting new habits such as vacantly "looking out of windows" and tying her hair back with "grocery string" (133).

"Lucille would soon be gone," Ruth realizes, and on the first day of school Lucille leaves early and alone (134). Because they had begun skipping school since Sylvie's arrival that spring, the principal sum- mons them to call for a "change of attitude" (135). Lucille's and Ruth's increasing distance from one another is evident here in their signify- ing practices: Lucille speaks confidently, adopting the tone and values of a school official, while Ruth remains speechless. "You can't really talk to her about practical things," Lucille explains. "They don't mat- ter to her." Even after the principal cautions Ruthie, "You're going to have to learn to speak for yourself, and think for yourself, that's for sure," Lucille replies for her one last time: "She has her own ways"

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(135). Soon after this episode, Lucille leaves home never to return. She walks "to the home of Miss Royce, the Home Economics teacher." "In effect," Ruth writes, "[Miss Royce] adopted her, and I had no sister after that night" (140).2O

"I dreamed that Sylvie was teaching me to walk under water": Ruth's Ontological Transfiguration

Lucille was Ruth's one remaining link to a larger community, and with her departure Ruth's transformation into a creature of Sylvie's world accelerates rapidly. The novel's occult subtext deepens, with increas- ing attention given to Sylvie's otherworldly nature, her preference for coldness and darkness, and her identification with the woods and the lake-characteristics not sufficiently explained by her status as a transient. A 1985 study of children traumatized by parental death speculates about whether "tales of the occult" containing "haunted houses, ghosts, and changelings represent reifications of the objects of traumatic grief."'21

With Lucille gone, Ruth begins to merge with Sylvie. Because Sylvie represents all that this family cannot articulate or resolve, Ruth's complete acceptance of her suggests that she has surrendered her identity to a grief without time, space, or-in the absence of a larger community-the ability to heal. Not only does it become ever more difficult to differentiate Ruth from Sylvie, but at times both are conflated with the dead Helen, contributing to their characteriza- tion as ghostly figures. Drifting on the lake with Sylvie, for example, waiting to hear the train cross over them, Ruth calls Sylvie's name three times; three times Sylvie does not answer. This magical formula underscores the fairy-tale quality of Ruth's relationship with Sylvie; they exist in an unhuman realm with no temporal or spatial reality. As Ruth gazes at Sylvie's dark shape in the boat, she thinks, "the faceless shape in front of me could as well be Helen herself as Sylvie. I spoke to her by the name Sylvie, and she did not answer. Then how was one to know? And if she were Helen in my sight, how could she not be Helen in fact? 'Sylvie!' I said. She did not reply" (166-67). Sylvie complicates these already blurred boundaries by claiming that Ruth is a replica of Helen: "Now I look at Ruthie," she tells a gathering of the town's matrons, "and I see Helen, too" (186) 22 Between Lucille's adoption of a rigid identity defined by community standards and Ruth's attraction

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to Sylvie's evanescence, no dialectic takes place. Upon returning from the lake considerably dishevelled, Ruth and Sylvie see Lucille with her friends: "Lucille was dressed like all the others," Ruth says, but "I modeled my indifference on Sylvie's" (173, 174).

Lucille makes one last attempt to draw Ruth back from Sylvie's world, but Ruth-in a passage which dramatizes the growing gap be- tween them-can no longer understand or even hear the language Lucille speaks. Instead, she drifts into a reverie that again links Sylvie with the lake that has claimed her grandfather and mother, suggest- ing the degree to which Ruth also is drifting without resistance into this realm without light or air:

I was almost asleep, or I was asleep, when Lucille came into the kitchen.... For I dreamed and dreamed, that Sylvie and I were drifting in the dark, and did not know where we were, or that Sylvie knew and would not tell me. I dreamed that the bridge was a chute into the lake and that, one after another, handsome trains slid into the water without even troubling the surface.... I dreamed that Sylvie was teaching me to walk under water...

It seemed Lucille was talking to me.... I am sure that she spoke to me in all sober kindness, but I could not hear a word she said. (174-75, emphasis added)

Having spent the day with Sylvie searching for the "half-wild, lonely children" whom Sylvie imagines to have been abandoned in the woods surrounding the lake, Ruth realizes that she herself has been "turned out of house now long enough to have observed" her envy of " [a] nyone with one solid human bond [which constitutes] the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire" (154). But for Ruth now, without Lucille, "there was neither threshold nor sill between me and these cold, solitary children who almost breathed against my cheek and almost touched my hair" (154). With Lucille gone, the threshold that separates Ruth from the ghostly children of Sylvie's wooded world disappears.

Two final steps remain to enclose Ruthie completely within Sylvie's world: her seeming rebirth as Sylvie's child and the destruction of the symbolic structures still remaining in Ruth's world-her house and the words contained within it. As Sylvie and Ruth settle them- selves into the boat, Sylvie settles "herself with a foot on either side of [Ruth]," who rests between her legs "like a seed in a husk" (161-

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62). But Ruth views her "second" birth with little hope and envisions it grotesquely. What if, Ruth imagines, "the water and I bore the rowboat down to the bottom.... Then, presumably, would come par- turition in some form, though my first birth had hardly deserved that name, and why should I hope for more from the second? The only true birth would be a final one, which would free us from watery darkness and the thought of watery darkness" (162). Ruth's obsession with the only "true birth"-death-captures the paradox of her life: she can- not imagine ever being free from the "watery darkness" that filters her perception of the world and thus is drawn to the death that would literalize her perception. The escape from rigid borders into liquidity is in no way an unproblematic liberation in this novel.

Ruth is unable to escape the image of her mother, "a dreaming woman tucking up her hair" before a mirror, an image now "shat- tered" by Ruth's knowledge of what followed-Helen's drive into the blackness of the lake upon which Ruth now floats (163). "[H] ere she was," Ruth imagines, "wherever my eyes fell, and behind my eyes, whole and in fragments, a thousand images of one gesture, never dispelled but rising always, inevitably, like a drowned woman" (163). Ruth wonders what it would be like to be "drawn down into the darker world" where Edmund, too, lies still "in his Pullman berth" (149-50). Birth usually suggests the beginning of separation between mother and child, but Ruth imagines instead a regression back to oneness with her new mother: "We are the same," Ruth claims; Sylvie "could as well be my mother. I crouched and slept in her very shape like an unborn child" (145) .23

Sometimes Ruth believes she sees Helen "from the side of my eye, and it was she, and not changed, and not perished. She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind . . . but not perished, not per- ished" (160). Ruth's claim that her mother's presence still rings in her head though she no longer hears it is by now a familiar rhetorical habit reflecting the paradoxical dialectic of trauma-denial side by side with obsession. And as if to emphasize Ruth's diminished ability to differ- entiate between Helen and Sylvie, Sylvie reappears suddenly in the midst of Ruth's intense wish to be reunited with her mother (160).

But this time Sylvie seems different. Now, Ruth "could feel the plea- sure she took in my dependency" (161). For once, Sylvie's expression was direct and intent: "There was nothing of distance or civility in it" (161). The explanation for Sylvie's apparent change of attitude seems

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to lie in the fact that in looking at Ruthie now, " [It] was as if she were studying her own face in a mirror" (161, emphasis mine). Only when Ruth's boundaries begin to collapse into Sylvie's can Sylvie feel and demonstrate "such solicitude" (161). Even Ruth's ability to discern which of them is the speaking subject becomes impaired: "I slept be- tween Sylvie's feet, and under the reach of her arms, and sometimes one of us spoke, and sometimes one of us answered" (163) *24

Still, Ruth remains tenuously connected to the ordinary human world, as demonstrated by her discomfort with the cold and lack of nourishment with which Sylvie is so at home. In the boat where Ruth undergoes her symbolic rebirth, she complains, "Aren't you cold, Sylvie?" Ruth is relieved by the thought that soon the sun would be out and it would be "an ordinary world" again (147),25 but Sylvie is quite comfortable and urges her to wait quietly and watch for the ghostly children. Still Ruth complains of being cold and hungry: "Yes, but it's too cold here," she says, and asks, "Where's our lunch?" (151). Sylvie requires neither warmth or nourishment, leaving Ruth to build a fire and roast a marshmallow.

Ruth's repeated complaints about the cold Sylvie disregards sug- gest that her incorporation into Sylvie's world will not be complete until she, too, no longer feels it. What completes this process is Sylvie's burning of the house and all the words within it-Ruth's last link to the symbolic world Lucille has embraced with such determina- tion. This act is set in motion by their transgression of one of Finger- bone's unwritten laws: the sheriff arrives in response to community concerns about Ruth's incipient vagrancy after she and Sylvie return from the lake "in a freight car" (177). When he implicitly threatens to have Ruth taken away from Sylvie's care, Sylvie at first tries to ap- pease him by cleaning out the house and burning its contents-"the entire newspaper and magazine collection ... as well as almanacs and Sears catalogues and telephone books" (200). Sylvie's destruction of texts suggests an escape from all social structure into a realm marked by its lack of language and other human structures. Ruth's metaphoric rebirth as Sylvie's child is an important step in her transformation, but the destruction of language completes the metamorphosis.

As the texts burn, Ruth reminds Sylvie that they should go in be- cause it's cold (202). But by the time all the publications are reduced to "ashes," Ruth has become one of Sylvie's lost children of the for- est, those you can "almost" hear, "almost" see. Ruthie now imagines

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herself as a young girl in a fairy tale, with fingers that "were only cold touch," and with bones "like shafts of ice" (203-04). She then explains the nature of her transfiguration: "I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort. I felt giddily free and eager, as you do in dreams.... I was hungry enough to begin to learn that hunger has its pleasures, and I was hap- pily at ease in the dark, and ... I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one" (204).26 Ruth's insistent references to a dream-like state emphasizes her entrance into Sylvie's realm, a world in which she no longer feels the cold as discomfort because she has broken the "tethers of [human] need." Although she still experiences hunger at this point, she apparently later breaks this human need as well, for long after she and Sylvie have fled from community she tells us she doesn't eat at all. When she takes an occasional job as a waitress, she inevitably has to move on because those around her "begin to ask why I do not eat anything myself," because her "silence seems suddenly remarkable" in the company of those who speak, and because "it is as if I put a chill on the coffee by serving it" (214).

Ruth's avoidance of nourishment, communication, and warmth are so marked by novel's end that she wonders how others can even ask her why she doesn't eat: "What have I to do with these ceremonies of sustenance, of nurturing?" (214). Indeed, Ruthie is now virtually free from any demands of the body. Not only has she lost voice and identity, but her very corporeality is uncertain. If indeed Housekeeping aims to show us a world with entirely fluid boundaries, then its con- clusion supports what I have attempted to demonstrate in situating this novel within the literature of trauma. There must be mediation between the predominantly symbolic and the predominantly semiotic realms: imprisonment in either carries a high, though different, price.

Through their theories of identity formation, Lacan, Kristeva, and Clement have enlarged our understanding of the paradox of the sepa- rate identity. The assumption of identity is, as Lacan points out, analo- gous to donning armor in that it alienates the self from others. Yet without some kind of separate identity the self does not, in a sense, exist at all.27 The spectrum of identity, from fragmented to armored, recalls Kristeva's description of the spectrum of signifying practices, from semiotic to symbolic.28 In The Lives and Legends ofJacques Lacan, Catherine Clement reminds us that the "identity of the subject ... is

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a kind of prosthesis" much like "orthopedic shoes" or "orthopedic de- vices such as crutches-corrective instruments."29 Ruthie lacks "the armour of an alienating identity" and so cannot differentiate between herself and the others to whom she attaches her identity.30 Sylvie has become her "orthopedic" identity.

Following the sheriff's notification that a hearing will be held to de- termine whether Ruth should be separated from Sylvie-in the girl's mind there is "no doubt" she will be taken away (191) -Ruth begins to have the kind of "murderous fantasies" Melanie Klein has observed in children who as yet perceive "no body of [their] own."'31 Ruth's dif- ficulty in determining her boundaries are revealed in her fantasies. She not only links her threatened separation from yet another blood relative with biblical narratives of murder and separation-"Cain mur- dered Abel, and blood cried out from the earth ... Rachel mourned for her children; and King David for Absalom"-but also explains her understanding of the intractability of sudden and violent separations: "The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted" (192).

That for Ruthie separation has come to equal murder is demon- strated by the metaphor employed to portray her escape with Sylvie from Fingerbone-a metaphor long associated with the crossing from the world of the living to the world of the dead-a metaphor strongly suggesting that their flight is into social, if not literal, death:

'One thing we could do,' Sylvie said. Her voice was low and ex- ulting.

'What?' 'Cross the bridge.... Nobody's ever done that. Crossed the

bridge. Not that anybody knows of.... It's not the worst thing, Ruthie, drifting. You'll see. You'll see.' (210)

Sylvie can barely contain her rapture as she tempts Ruthie to join her in a future of drifting, a word associated not only with homelessness but also with surrender to watery currents.

And Ruth does surrender, drawn as she has always been by the lake's dark mysteries. In her journey across the bridge, Ruth senses that, like the stars in their "Babylonian multitudes," she is being "pulled through the dark along the whorls of an enormous vortex" (211). Her reference to Babylon also hints that she and Sylvie are entering a realm of confused languages, where they will no longer be

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able to communicate with the living communities whose perimeters they skim. Years later, Ruth imagines that Lucille dreams of their re- turn, but that Ruth and Sylvie are "talking together in words [Lucille] cannot quite understand. And when we look up and speak to her the words are smothered, and their intervals swelled, and their cadences distended, like sounds in water" (217). Sylvie has apparently taught Ruth not only "to walk under water," but also to speak the language of the lake, a language unintelligible to those on the relative terra firma of community (175).

"I believe it was the crossing of the bridge that changed me finally," Ruth says (215). All communication now occurs in the realm of imagi- nation. She describes every visit back to the world of community as hypothetical: "If Lucille is there, Sylvie and I have stood outside her window a thousand times, and we have thrown the side door open when she was upstairs changing beds, and we have brought in leaves, and flung the curtains and tipped the bud vase, and somehow left the house again before she could run downstairs, leaving behind us a strong smell of lake water" (218, emphasis mine). One now with the novel's tragic site, Ruth intensifies the rhetorical strategy of affirma- tion through denial with the final words of her narrative:

Or imagine Lucille in Boston, at a table in a restaurant, waiting for a friend.... Sylvie and I do not flounce in through the door.... We do not sit down at the table.... My mother, likewise, is not there, [nor] my grandmother [nor] my grandfather.... We are no- where in Boston.... [Lucille] will never find us there, or any trace or sign. We pause nowhere in Boston ... and the perimeters of our wandering are nowhere. No one watching [Lucille] could know how her 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. (218-19, emphasis mine)

Ruthie has used this strategy before in order to tell us what is while claiming the opposite. Given the claim that Ruth and Sylvie now "smell of lake water," the passage that ends the novel strongly suggests that the scene of Ruth's writing may be the bottom of the lake. Surely Lucille does watch, listen, wait, and hope for a sign from her missing sister and aunt, just as Ruth and Sylvie, along with Helen, Sylvia, and Edmund-reunited in their watery atemporal space-watch Lucille. From Ruth's perspective, her whole life has been a series of separa-

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tions, from the separation of birth to the newspaper's explanation for her disappearance with Sylvie-"LAKE CLAIMS TWO" (213). Her claim after crossing the bridge that "[s] ince we are dead, the house would be [Lucille's] now" may not be merely an ironic comment on media unreliability; it may also reinforce Ruth's and Sylvie's ontologi- cally uncertain status-socially, if not literally, dead (217-18).

America has had a long love affair with the outsider. Outsiders de- naturalize our social conventions, illuminating the vulnerabilities and hypocrisy in every social system. They are our shadows, acting out what a Lucille would dare not risk. We take vicarious pleasure in their transgressions. Like Lamott's "kid against the fence," what else could they be but writers, artists, outlaws? They throw our well-tended order into chaos. They write an alternative to official history, add autobiog- raphy to statistics. Since Ruth cannot be accommodated within her own community, she imagines one, reminding us what it is like to be different, to be an abandoned child, and to see one's self "among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter" of society (116). Because she has nothing left to lose, Ruth, like all outsiders, is in a position to com- ment on the limitations of a society whose well-meaning response to perceived child neglect is to call in the law, to separate Ruth from the only family member she has left. We, her imagined community, not the sheriff or the well-meaning church ladies of Fingerbone, hear the disturbing question Thelma and Louise posed again a decade later: how long will it be until women who flee an abusive or repressive system are allowed to escape the last frame alive?

The University of Texas at San Antonio

Notes

I would like to thank Tony Hilfer and Katherine Arens for their helpful com- ments on earlier drafts of this manuscript, and Sharon O'Brien for her insight- ful questions regarding the novel's reception. 1 Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 154,

155; Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (New York: Bantam, 1980). Page references to this edition of Housekeeping will be incorporated parentheti- cally into the body of the text.

2 Dana Heller, for example, views Housekeeping as a revision of the male quest theme in which, this time, the women "determine their own des- tinies" (The Feminization of Quest Romance: Radical Departures [Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990], 97). Rosaria Champagne has discussed the

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novel's refusal of "social prescriptions for female domesticity" ("Wom- en's History and Housekeeping: Memory, Representation, and Reinscrip- tion," Women's Studies 20 [1992], 321). Elizabeth Meese claims that it "characterize[s] women's experience in its own right" (Crossing the Double-Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986], 58). Gary Williams believes it to suggest an intimation of "full vision, a world made whole and reborn" ("Resurrecting Carthage: Housekeeping and Cultural History," English Language Notes 29 [December 1991]: 77). Few critics have viewed Robinson's depiction of female subjectivity as problematic, though Sian Mile suggests that its representations of dissolved boundaries may lead to nothing more than an "amorphous blob" ("Femme Foetal: The Construction/Destruction of Female Subjectivity in Housekeeping, or Nothing Gained," Genders 8 [19901:135).

3 Jean Wyatt, Reconstructing Desire (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990), 82. Wyatt draws on insights I agree to be crucial in under- standing Ruth's psychological dilemma: Lacan's theory of the mirror stage and Kristeva's concept of semiotic and symbolic signifying systems. I refer readers to Wyatt's chapter on Housekeeping for a fuller analysis of the shattered self in Lacan's and Kristeva's terms. My analysis also de- pends upon an understanding of the shattered self's difficult relationship to the symbolic, although my focus is on narrative strategies of literatures of trauma.

4 Heller, 104, 11. 5 Meese, 68. Meese's chapter on Housekeeping concludes that Marilynne

Robinson "sets out to discover the nature of woman distinct from her existence as a male invention or as a function of her role in patriarchally defined institutions" (68).

6 The Awakening and Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin, with an intro- duction by Marilynne Robinson (New York: Bantam, 1988), xii, xiii, xviii.

7 Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 36. 8 Paul Valery, The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (New York: Pantheon

Books, 1958), 58. 9 Lamott, 36. 10 B. A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, "The Intrusive Past: The

Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma," American Imago 48 (winter 1991): 442-43.

11 For an introduction and historical overview of the clinical literature on the effects of trauma, Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992) is an excellent place to start. From another perspec- tive, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and His- tory, by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), examines "the nature and function of testimony, witnessing and mem- ory," particularly with respect to the Holocaust.

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12 Herman, 1. 13 In "Children Traumatized by Witnessing Acts of Personal Violence...

Robert Pynoos and Spencer Eth address the dilemma of the child who is abandoned by a parent who commits suicide (Post-Traumatic Stress Dis- order in Children, ed. Spencer Eth and Robert Pynoos [Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, Inc., 1985]). Such children demonstrate the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including "intrusive images or sounds . .. [p]sychic numbing or affective constriction . .. [and] an unemotional or ... nearly journalistic attitude toward the event" (20). Of parental suicide, they write: "No other single parental act can so painfully accentuate ... the child's dependence and helplessness" (35). These chil- dren are "frightened and angered to think a parent would abandon their care" (36), and the "conspiracy of silence" which typically surrounds a suicide contributes to "chronic difficulties in learning and cognition ... or to an inability to accurately identify one's emotional responses" (39). Their studies show that there are "life-long risks" for such children, including depression and vulnerability to suicidal behavior (39).

14 Her father's departure is also missing from this list, and I will later ad- dress Ruth's one mention of his absence. My focus is on the absent mother, however, since Ruth's obsessive thoughts center around this gap.

15 Van der Kolk and van der Hart, 443. 16 See also Wyatt's discussion of temporal and spatial merging. 17 Meese in fact interprets this passage as such, saying that Robinson "goes

beyond woman's affiliative existence as wife and mother," which allows her "to explore the idea of 'woman' and gender roles in essentially female terms" (59).

18 Kai Erikson, "Notes on Trauma and Community," American Imago 48 (winter 1991): 467.

19 For a finely nuanced analysis of the value and problematics of "survivor discourse" currently prevalent in the media, see Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray's "Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?" Signs:Jour- nal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (1993): 260-345.

20 In her chapter "A World of Women," Meese eloquently explains why a reader's "superficial response" might be to condemn Lucille's choice: "Lucille is the woman coopted by the other side, and, as such, our senti- ments as feminist readers are structured against her. Her weakness inspires her conformity to conventional gender roles for women" (61). I agree that the novel manipulates our sympathies as feminist readers against Lucille, and yet, if we indeed perceive Lucille's choice as coming from "weakness," we do so by overlooking Lucille's fierce will to escape what, from her perspective, is a household lacking not merely conven- tional housekeeping but more basic needs as well-warmth, light, and nourishment. Moreover, as adolescents Ruth and Lucille must rely on

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adults in the community; in the social context Robinson creates, their choices appear to be limited to two: to seek approval from the commu- nity's adults-which means food, warmth, and shelter, as well as confor- mity to sameness-or to stay with Sylvie, endure the town's disapproval, and risk being made wards of the court, a fate Ruth escapes only by fleeing human community altogether. Neither choice appears desirable to me.

21 Spencer Eth and Robert S. Pynoos, "Interaction of Trauma and Grief in Childhood," in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Children, 183.

22 Since in this text we have access only to Ruth's interpretation, Sylvie's thoughts are unknown, and she says very little. What she does say, however, suggests her psychological affiliation with Ruthie: both are oW sessed by past losses, and anticipated separations are linked to traumatic abandonments of the past. When speaking to the townswomen, for ex- ample, Sylvie claims: "Families should stay together. Otherwise things get out of control. My father, you know. I can't even remember what he was like. I mean when he was alive. But ever since, it's Papa here and Papa there, and dreams . . . [ellipsis in original] Like the poor woman with nine children. She was walking the floor the whole night!" (186). Sylvie cannot finish the story of her father-whom she appears to see everywhere, even in her dreams-but trails off, in a revealing metonymic linking, into another narrative of trauma, of the "poor woman with nine children." Her wandering speech (suggesting perhaps an inability to con- centrate) demonstrates how "out of control" things can get when families are violently separated. But perhaps her oddest remark here is that she can't "remember what [Papa] was like. I mean when he was alive." As opposed to ... ?

23 Ruth's difficulty discerning her own boundaries recalls Lacan's theoreti- cal pre-mirror-stage infant, to whom the Other is not Other but the same; the infant needs the Other as a prosthetic device, an extension of self. When Sylvie disappears from Ruth's sight to look for the imaginary chil- dren who live in the woods, Ruth's fear that Sylvie has disappeared from the face of the earth emphasizes her need for the other to validate her own existence: "Sylvie is nowhere," she says, wishing that the ghostly children would "come unhouse me of this flesh" so that she could see her mother again (159). See Wyatt for a more thorough discussion of how the developmental theories of both Lacan and Kristeva apply here.

24 Heller interprets Ruth's metaphorical second birth quite differently, say- ing that Robinson wants to legitimize in this passage "woman's potential to be reborn in a ritual predicated on self-awareness, a ritual that tran- scends the agency of the mother's body and empowers the agency of the self" (102). Yet Ruth's emphasis on her inability to tell the difference between Sylvie and herself and her earlier claim that she and Lucille were almost one consciousness suggest that Ruth has not empowered

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the self but merely exchanged her earlier identification with Lucille for a new identification with Sylvie.

25 See C. J. Feehan, M.D., "Cold Hands and Feet as a Sign of Abusive Ne- glect in Infants and Children," Psychiatry 55 (1992): 302-07. This recent clinical study of "deprivation hands and feet" describes a correlation be- tween cold hands and feet and emotional deprivation in infancy (303). Infants of emotionally unavailable mothers-mothers who spend "less time in visually attending to their infants"-experience "vascular skin changes" which cause their hands and feet to be measurably colder than can be explained by any external factors (306, 304). Throughout Housekeeping Sylvie is described as having icy hands and as averting her gaze-suggesting that she both suffers from and replicates emotional inaccessibility.

26 Heller has taken Ruth's phrase, "happily at ease in the dark," to refer to a "psychic encounter" that is "expressed through the feminization of the questing theme," claiming that "women are the dark world, and when they run from this world, they run from themselves, their visions" (103). Yet to claim that "women are the dark world" relegates women to the inarticulate realm of the semiotic and men to exclusive habitation in the symbolic, a stereotype that the literature of trauma overturns. Both realms have value, but the inability to move out of darkness results in social death; indeed, Ruth's "happily at ease in the dark" can be valorized only by removing it from its larger context. The entire passage explains that Ruth is now "lost to her kind" and that her affect is "giddily free and eager," as in dreams. The dream state is self-reflexive, not requiring actual communication with a community of others; thus Ruth's passage is yet another indication that she is now "free" from the difficult task of being part of the human community.

27 See Jacques Lacan's discussion of the mirror stage in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1-7.

28 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), 21-30.

29 Catherine Clement, The Lives and Legends ofJacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), 90.

30 Lacan, 4. 31 Quoted in Clement, 90.