Example research essay topic: Housekeeping By Marilynne Robinson - 1,270 words

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HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson Many women in our culture have learned everything about how to run a household, but very little about their own inner nature. Increasing numbers of women find that living culturally standardized roles of housekeeper, wife, and mother is not enough for them. The novel Housekeeping explores the different feelings connected with the word housekeeping such as aloneness, loneliness, hope, and love. Author Robinson masterfully delves into the nuances of these elements and infuses the characters with the characteristic of housekeeping both literally and figuratively in each of the characters lives.

In the story, as the characters create their dreams, they draw on the events of their daily life and on all the forms and energies available to them from the collective unconscious that they all share. Thus, this story is not only the main characters inner creation, but is also an expression of themes that have been important to all people in all times and all places. Even if the families explored in the story are dysfunctional and aberrant, the way the author expounds on their actions and behavior makes them come to life, making us commiserate with their hopes and aspirations. Even the descriptions of the atmosphere the characters are in deserve a more focused attention as it not only sets the mood of the scene but drives home a point about the characters own rigidness and stiffness as the author pens, Buttercups are the materialization of the humid yellow light one finds in such places...

but the deep woods are as dark and stiff and as full of their own odours as the parlor of an old house. " Ruthie tells the story as she and her sister Lucille are orphaned after their mother drives a friends car off a cliff into a lake. Ruthie and Lucille are then raised by their grandmother but she eventually dies too. Two aunts, Lily and Nona, take on this role of caring for Lucille and Ruthie. They are often reminded about the sacrifice that they had to make in giving up their cherished lifestyle and home, just to be with the girls. But they are not up to this task for long, so they entice Sylvie, another aunt, to do the unfinished task of caring for the girls. Until this time we see all women characters in the story and this is perhaps one reason why the author entitles the story as Housekeeping, though the word possesses emblems of a more serious and responsible kind of housekeeping women do.

Sylvie is a major character here, extending influence not only to the two girls but to the other characters in the story. She has been separated from the rest of her family and is a transient traveler all over the country. She exhibits traits of gentleness and lightness, assuming her own ideas about events and things. She fills up the house with all kinds of collections such as empty tin cans and newspapers things she need housekeeping on herself in the process, too. The author pens, Why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

Here, alas, we see the wisdom of the author as she questions the different fragments of feelings and unfinished businesses that needed tying up in the end, surely, the essence of significant housekeeping. The deep understanding and appreciation of these ingredients help each one release themselves from the grip of their earliest caretakers and to see the world with their own eye, to learn to love themselves. Sylvie, even if she was tasked to take care of the girls, needed to make her own housekeeping. Sylvie has trouble with reasoning and logical thoughts, having no awareness of time. It is quite different from the rest although she seemed not bothered by it at all. Yet even if she behaves as erratic as is seen in the story, she has a softness and loving kindness to her that endears her to the people around her, and ultimately to the readers.

When the sheriff of Fingerbone thus, tries to remove Ruthie, there is resistance from the others. Changes happen in their lives as Lucille leaves to live with one of her teachers. Ruthie reacts saying, I had no sister after that. But change is not simple. The characters find themselves either yielding to the wishes of someone else or responding to the wishes of someone from their past, someone they have made part of them. Thus, the author gave the name Housekeeping to this because of the literal sense of housekeeping that they had to do, transferring from one place to another, disposing the trash and litter properly and also in a more symbolic sense, addressing the litter in their own lives.

We see the characters have accepted standards of behavior that are actually at odds with their spirit. So, on the conscious, expressed level or deeper, there may be conflict in even the intention to change. After the death of Edmund Foster, the women of the family find themselves isolated from the male influence. This had a tremendous impact on the womens lives and greatly influenced the move of Sylvie and Helen to reject their husbands completely. The author expounds on the idea that most of us accept ourselves in the sense that we know ourselves and understand, at some level, that we are what we are largely because we chose to be or felt we had to be.

Yet, people judge, condemn, and generally make themselves miserable. The whole process may, in itself, be part of what people believe they are and must be which was largely the effect of the isolation of these characters. We find as we read along that Ruthie retains the feeling of aloneness together with her sister as author writes that these two sisters had spent our lives watching and listening with the constant sharp attention of children lost in the dark. It seemed that we were bewilderingly lost in a landscape that, with any light at all, would be wholly unfamiliar. " We get an insight into their dilemma and become convinced all the more that happiness is a function of our relationship with ourselves. The characters in Housekeeping needed to make sure why a person wants to change and examine, as part of the housekeeping, is the implicit self-condemnation in these aspirations; make clear that the change in itself may not result in happiness; be ever mindful of the changing nature of intentions and the ever-present danger of their use in the service of self-hatred, as what may have happened to their mother who committed suicide. For the author, the act of housekeeping needed a clearer focus on exactly what was happening.

It is a psychologically separating act in itself. The minute one does this, she is in charge of her life. One is ready for real housekeeping. Even if one experiences pain, one has himself. Noticing ones behavior and inner processes interferes with the free reign he permits the unpleasantness when he operates automatically and unthinkingly. In the end, housekeeping happens to the characters just by their mere noticing of the randomness of their thought processes, the inconsistencies, the irrationalities, the confusion, the pain, the grief because in so doing, they reclaim their lives.

WORK CITED Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1980.

Research essay sample on Housekeeping By Marilynne Robinson