In Robinson’s novels, women are both homeless and imprisoned in the domestic sphere.
In Housekeeping, by means of turning off lights and burning down the house, Sylvie breaks the boundary between inside and outside. Sylvie and Ruth needs to leave their home after the townspeople arrange a hearing aiming to help Ruth find a new home away from Sylvie.
Though they seem to lose their home, they actually regain a sense of home by staying together. In Gilead, Glory, who is well educated, can reorganize her domestic decorations, manage domestic tasks well and positively face her society.
I also think why Sylvie simplifies the procedure for managing the kitchen and cooking meals. Sylvie may not want to spend too much time on housekeeping because she prefers seeking spiritual growth in Nature. The narrator Ruth says, “[Sylvie seems] to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a worldful of darkness. […] She [prefers] it [sinks] in the very element it [is] meant to exclude. We [have crickets in the pantry, squirrels in the eaves, sparrows in the attic” (Robinson, Housekeeping 1980: 99). That is, Sylvie likes the light in domestic space to be relatively darker so lights between the outside and the inside are not that different. In addition, Ruth points out, “For herself Sylvie [stashes]
saltines in her pockets, which she [eats] as she [walks] in the evening” (Robinson, Housekeeping 1980: 102). In other words, as Lucille insists they eat meat and vegetables with the light on in the kitchen, Sylvie still wants to follow her instinct staying with nature.
Like Kate Chopin’s Edna, Robinson’s female characters, Sylvie and Ruth, seek
additional space in which to live; at the same time, the social norm oppresses, and demonizes them. Sylvie, Ruth and Lucille have an untypical family structure, so they will confront the social pressure in the school. Sylvie, therefore, offers the two sisters some space and time to go through this challenge. To begin with, Ruth and Lucille are silent and clever students in school, having average performance so no teachers provide them with special instruction.
Going to school every day, Ruth and Lucille feel that their school hours are so long that they do not feel lively or awakened in their academic life. Occasionally, some slight embarrassing occasions wake them up such as checking whether one’s nails are trimmed, or reciting onomatopoeia words in poems. For Ruth, staying in the school, she feels spiritually cold and uneasy.
The misunderstanding over Lucille seeming to cheat in the history exam pushes Ruth and Lucille to skip classes. Under the psychological pressure, Lucille does not think she can go back to school, so she and Ruth together go for drifting near the lake, when they should be in school, until they go home in the evening. As they stop going to school for a week, they feel cold and bored, wandering at the lake. They are also lonely and scared, knowing that they are lying and skipping classes. Then, they see Sylvie also is at the lake. On seeing Sylvie, they expect someone to come to the lake to find them so they can go back to school. However, they find out that Sylvie does not come to the lake for seeking them but for her own wandering and thus she does not even notice them, who now feel a bit angry. The adult Sylvie does not go after them; rather Ruth and Lucille follow Sylvie and stare at Sylvie until Sylvie finds them from her own world of meditation.
In her own spiritual search, Sylvie seems to have offered Ruth and Lucille time and space to find their spiritual peace at the lake and at home. First, Sylvie does not scold Ruth and Lucille when she sees them at the lake. She greets them with a smile, saying that she believes there is still one hour for the teachers in school to end the classes. Second, Sylvie
lives downstairs in the grandmother’s room, whereas Ruth and Lucille live on the second floor in their own room. Sylvie and the sisters live in the same house but on different floors.
By doing so, Sylvie gives the sisters space, reducing pressure.
The ambiguous ending of Ruth’s narration indicates the fact that Robinson offers a positive and unique view of women’s mobility—readers are not sure whether Ruth is dead or stays alive, and this design shows that Robinson leaves readers a sense of surreal impression.
As Gilbert has pointed out, both Chopin and Robinson romanticize those female characters’
stories of realistic everyday domestic tragedies from a woman’s perspective: Edna commits suicide in the end, and she is described as the broken-winged bird; Ruth, following Sylvie, burns their house, crosses the bridge, and lives a vagrant life. Close to Chopin’s characters, Robinson’s female characters face the tension that the society intervenes in their domestic life.
Instead of death, Sylvie and Ruth choose to run away assuming that they are already dead.
Those female characters pursue exceptional space to live in while at the same time social norms pressure and demonize them.
Meanwhile, Glory in Gilead receives a higher education, and supports herself independently without social intervention. On breaking up with her fiancé, Glory cannot immediately return to school, for she feels uncertain whether she is in possession of good personal characteristics. Returning home, she receives her old papa’s wholehearted love.
Then, Jack (her brother) gradually changes his attitudes towards Glory from strangeness to acceptance. She understands that she will be capable of maintaining a family and teaching a class. With such positive energy and hope, she dares to deal with the future challenges in social space in which uncertainty exists. Glory is unique because she considers being a housekeeper as well as a high school English teacher after she regains her confidence from Jack’s special reliance and trust.
Petit’s “Field of Deferred Dreams” shows that “returning home” is always the theme in
baseball fiction. As an illustration, Glory is the one who succeeds in returning home, “Glory’s home is life” (2012: 132). By developing Glory’s examples, I hope to explain how Petit criticizes Robinson’s metaphor of “returning home” in Home. Let me stress that Glory returns home and then regains life energy during the process of caring for her old father and her elder brother Jack with love and consideration.
Glory experiences many life transformations in the novel. At the first stage, deciding to quit her teaching job for marriage, she then finds out that she will not get married. Yet she still leaves the school and goes home. At the second stage, as she arrives at home, her old father immediately welcomes and whole-heartedly accepts her. She does not feel that she is under any pressure at home. Her old father supports her decision to come home to stay.
Considering that her old father lives alone then, she takes care of her father and they rely on each other warmly. At the third stage, her elder brother Jack unexpectedly comes home after he was out of communication for twenty years. In the beginning, he interacts with Glory and their old father tentatively. Staying alone in his room, he does not live as he is like at his own home but rather at a boarding house. Glory keeps her brother’s uneasiness in mind, so she makes a welcome dinner for Jack. Like Jack, Glory also leaves home and then returns home.
She hopes to comfort her brother’s tired and broken heart so Jack feels her sincere warmth as his family and biggest support will not enclose him and deny further communication.
These three stages describe how Glory returns to the home and then becomes energetic and confident again. In conclusion, I think Petit wants to point out that home is tremendously vital for people because they will experience critical moments of life such as death and life at home. The characteristics of warm homes include family relationships with good communication and common memories at home. Such relationships are important for people so people can face the challenge of death and regain a new life. In Glory’s case, she regains the courage to teach because she understands that she is able to help her family communicate
with each other.
Robinson’s redefinition of family describes how family members stay together in their founded homes, and their unique life-styles. Robinson gives women more hopes and support by managing between domestic space and outside space with intimate family unit as companions. In Housekeeping, Ruth and Sylvie rely on each other and are independent from their town people and living like vagrants. In Home, Glory, who takes care of her old father and her brother Jack from daily details to spiritual gatherings, tries breaking the existing routines and changing the decoration in their home. In Gilead, Lila and Ames both bestow upon their son Christian life principles in the event that their son has to face the death of his family members one day.
Chapter Three
Spiritual Meditations in Outside Spaces
In Chapter One, I have mentioned women’s roles in the 19th century American literary history. In the early 19th century, Beecher promoted Domestic Science as an academic science and study field. In the introduction of The American Woman’s Home, Beecher reveals that family members do not respect domestic labor so she aims to make it a profession, which has the characteristics of authority. While men gain respect in public space, women who professionally accomplish domestic work can receive appreciation, too. Then, in Gilman’s
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” the woman seeks domestic privacy and spiritual space at home, expecting her husband respects her own will. In The Awakening, Chopin emphasizes how the woman living in the environment rich in material need has dull spiritual life, so the woman finally chooses to pursue her independence, free from social confinement, listening to her inner voice. In The House of Mirth, Wharton stresses how the woman pursues individuality, and her protagonist does not get married when she suffers from the social and financial pressure. Responding to the 19th century literary tradition, Robinson’s works create various female characters, playing roles of caregivers mostly at home in limited social space.
In Chapter Two, I have discussed how Robinson reflected American women’s lives in the mid-20th century in her novels such as Housekeeping, Gilead and Home. Robinson reexamines how traditional female roles change at home, how unconventional female caregivers suffer from the domestic pressure, and how women use modern invention of machines to replace labor. Saving time and physical strength, women pay attention to spiritual communication among family members and offer each other sufficient spiritual space. Robinson proposes how women have a chance to manage between home and public work. In her works, Robinson’s female characters are unique because they can live through the social pressure and form an intimate family unit. Robinson’s female characters may not
be capable of doing perfect housework but Robinson notices that housekeeping is not the only method for connecting family members. Robinson shows how it is important for family members to understand and care about each other. This warm attitude makes family members stay together.
In this chapter, I will deal with three points, as follows: wild solitude, religious traditions, and religion and family. Robinson’s characters tend to gravitate toward outdoor spaces.
Robinson points out two kinds of outside spaces: natural space and social space. Natural environments such as the lake and the river offer women characters chances to meditate in their solitude. Natural space is broad when social space is full of interpersonal interaction.
Some of Robinson’s women characters express their spiritual reflections in the neighboring gathering. Robinson’s women characters strive to break boundaries between inside and outside space through unique independent solitude in the wild. Robinson provides her women characters with a new mobility that they wander in the wild with their intimate family members. In the meanwhile, Robinson reveals how her women characters spiritually learn by themselves, so they reduce their desire and gradually feel peaceful and gain a broader worldview.