Housekeeping Class Discussion

The topic that was debated most in today’s discussion was probably the issue of whether or not Ruth is dead or alive when she narrates Housekeeping. Both sides of this argument are easily sustained. Lines in the novel such as “The perimeters of our wandering are nowhere” are ambiguous (Robinson 219). This line could be referring of the unrestrained open road for living Ruth and Sylvie or the infinite existence of the afterlife. However, maybe the purpose of the vagueness is to highlight that it does not matter if she is alive or if she is dead. Carolyn summed this up nicely when she said “Ruthie is nothing”. Ms. Parrish asked, "Did crossing the bridge give Ruthie and Sylvie liberation or death"? Well, is death not a form of liberation? Either away Sylvie and Ruth escaped Fingerbone and the pressures of society. Robinsons’s purposeful lack of clarity unites freedom and the afterlife.
I also think it is interesting that the book never mentions the characters being able to see across the bridge. Ruth and Sylvie can see across the lake and travel across. They can see the middle when they find Sylvie “[peering] cautiously over the side” (81). But what is directly beyond the isolation of Fingerbone is not mentioned, almost as if it does not exist. Even on the front cover the bridge is visible until it hits a cloud of fog that obscures the view of the world beyond (see below).





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The reader can imagine Ruth and Sylvie simply fading way into nothingness, like transient people or ghostly figures. Robinson blurs the lines of many seeming contradictions. She says, “All this is fact. Fact explains nothing” (217). Her ambiguity is intended and it explains how not everything is easily defined and the only things that hold steadfast are love and the desire for freedom. Perhaps, this extends to as far as the hero of the novel. Is it Ruth or Lucille? Whose actions are justified? All we know is that when Ruth and Sylvie walk into the fog of the bridge all they have is each other and the hope for a release from their troubled pasts. Ruth and Sylvie still have love and freedom, whether they live or die, whether they are hero or coward, these things break through all the uncertainty.