Housekeeping

Central to the novel is the pull between transience and rootedness. As with the theme of housekeeping, neither transience nor rootedness is shown to be superior to the other. Rather, they are individual goals and desires particular to each individual. It is, again, a question of how much and in what way one embraces the fate bestowed upon oneself. They are shown, however, to be related to family bonds.

Rootedness is shown through the characters of Sylvia, Lucille, and, to some extent, Lily and Nona. Sylvia is the matriarch of the family, and she tends to the home her husband, Edmund, built until her death. She stays in the home even after Edmund dies and her three daughters leave her. She stays in Fingerbone even when the other two widows of the train crash leave. While her daughters do not return to her, she also does not go to them. She remains a fixture in her home and represents traditional values. While none of her daughters demonstrate this same desire for rootedness, her granddaughter, Lucille, does. As Lucille grows up, she starts to move away from her aunt Sylvie’s unconventional lifestyle. She becomes embarrassed by signs of the woman’s transience such as her proclivity to sleep in public at times. While Lucille has close ties to Ruthie for most of their young lives, she leaves even Ruthie behind to gain the stability she has always lacked. This stability is more important to her than even her closest relationship. Lily and Nona represent rootedness in a slightly less stringent manner in the short time they appear in the book. They are willing to leave their home to come care for Ruthie and Lucille, but they are miserable almost from the start and wish to return to their own home, eventually succeeding in this. While their home is not described in detail, it is called a hotel, and as such, demonstrates less rootedness than Sylvia does.

The main characters that espouse wanderlust or transience are Edmund and Sylvie. Edmund is responsible for establishing the family in Fingerbone when he leaves his hometown on a train to head toward the mountains. He spends his life working on the train, demonstrating a lack of desire to stay rooted in one place. He maintains one home, but he travels for his job. Sylvie is a transient at heart. She writes to her mother while the aunts are living in Fingerbone, telling her mother where she is because otherwise her mother might not even know. When she takes up residence in Fingerbone, she keeps her coat on frequently and sleeps with her shoes under her pillow, demonstrating that she is a wanderer at heart. She goes to the train station before telling the girls she will be their guardian, likely as a way of saying goodbye to that lifestyle. One day the girls find her walking across a railway bridge. This association with trains is indicative of her transient spirit.

Sylvie is a kind of pioneer, an emblem of the traditional American spirit of wandering independently and setting up one’s life wherever one wishes. She is a woman, however, and thus the idea is nuanced in a patriarchal world; she does not necessarily end her wandering by setting up a home and staking land the way Edmund, the patriarch, does. Instead she acts in a more capacious manner, not forcing herself on the earth or fate but wandering simply to wander, remaining free-floating and adventurous and moving around the west while it grows upon and throughout her. Her home, as apart from Edmund’s, includes the earth itself. Edmund even built their home on top of a hill to avoid nature, to avoid floods, whereas Sylvie wishes to embrace that nature. Women, in many ways, have to be rooted to the place a man chooses for them, as emblematized by some of the other female characters; they have to be the home’s housekeeper. Edmund sets up roots, a home, after wandering and finding a land of independence. Sylvie, however, represents a feminist alternative that contains this wandering, this American spirit and culture, but that does not assert itself onto the earth.

Ruthie in many ways walks the line between transience and rootedness for much of the novel. In her younger years, like her sister, she craves stability and a guardian. Because of this, she is frequently afraid that her aunt will leave, leaving Ruthie to feel insecure. As she ages, however, she starts to take on many of the characteristics of Sylvie, almost unwittingly becoming more and more like her aunt. Eventually, in order to avoid losing her aunt through the courts, she attempts to burn down her family home to leave town with her aunt. She and her aunt leave Fingerbone over the railway bridge in the dark, and by the end of the novel, Ruthie describes herself as not being presentable enough most days to show back up in Fingerbone. This demonstrates that she has embraced the transient lifestyle to its fullest. What is not fully revealed by the end of the novel is how much of this transience is central to her character from the beginning and how much of it is drawn out through an attachment to her aunt built on a fear of abandonment. Despite the characters’ desires for either freedom or rootedness, they all experience some semblance of both, showing that neither idea is fully possible in this world. The book does not necessarily state that either form of life is better than the other; it simply observes the fates of women in a 20th-century America.