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Chapter 10
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Housekeeping, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Women and Sisterhood
Transience and Impermanence
Memory
Abandonment and Loss
Nature
Summary
Analysis
After the sheriff leaves, Sylvie and Ruth turn out the lights and work together to burn the house down. They have difficulty doing so, as the house is dank and damp, but they move through its rooms like “unhuman spirits” lighting on fire anything that will burn. Sylvie and Ruth know that they must leave, but also know that they cannot leave the house to be pawed through and parceled out. They know that Ruth will not be allowed to stay, and that Sylvie won’t stay without Ruth—they have been “cast out to wander, and there [is at last] an end to housekeeping.”
Sylvie and Ruth are faced with an impossible decision as the novel speeds to a close. To stay behind in Fingerbone means certain separation for them, and to leave together but keep the house intact means that strangers and enemies would descend upon the house and defile the Foster family’s ancestral home, laying claim to its contents. Sylvie and Ruth choose to burn it, attempting to put an end to the cycle of women taking up housekeeping there and preserve the house as they love and remember it.
Themes
Having set fire to the curtains and sofas and rugs, Sylvie hurries Ruth out of the house when they hear the whistle of an approaching train. They run into the orchard and through the garden towards the tracks, but as they come through the trees they find they’ve missed the train. They hear the windows of the house begin to pop and shatter, and can make out a neighbor shouting. Sylvie becomes overcome with panic, knowing that soon the authorities will come looking for them. Sylvie suggests there is only one thing to do: walk across the bridge over the lake on foot. Ruth agrees that they should go. Sylvie tells Ruth that she’ll find that drifting isn’t “the worst thing.”
Ruth, in spite of the hesitations she seems to have, agrees to run away with Sylvie and embark on a life of transience and impermanence. Sylvie is excited by the prospect of conscripting Ruth to such a life, and of having a friend and companion to navigate the world with.
Themes
As the two of them make their way across the bridge over the lake, Ruth worries that a trail will come and crush them, but Sylvie insists there isn’t another one until morning. Ruth relaxes and begins to feel giddy and strange. She imagines the house burning down, and its contents smoldering and shattering. Though curious about what the blaze must look like, she does not turn around to check if she can see the fire.
Ruth’s inability to turn around and check on whether the house has burned down or not shows that she wants to preserve the house as it is in her memory. In refusing to look back, she is dooming herself to a life of uncertainty but also creating a sense of possibility and hope: as long as she doesn’t look at the house, she won’t know what happened to it, and can forever remember it as her beloved (albeit strange) childhood home.
Themes
Ruth writes from the present day. Sylvie has, for years, kept a neatly folded newspaper clipping pinned to the underside of her coat’s lapel; it reads “LAKE CLAIMS TWO,” and describes Sylvie and Ruth’s attempt to burn the house down—and their subsequent, supposed death in the lake at the foot of Fingerbone. It has been many years since Ruth and Sylvie fled, and in all that time, they have never contacted Lucille. Even after seven years passed—the time frame during which Sylvie claimed the authorities could still “get you”—they made no effort to get in touch. Ruth writes that she and Sylvie are drifters—now that they have their feet on that path, “it is hard to imagine another one.”
Ruth and Sylvie originally allowed the world to believe they were dead out of a desire to avoid trouble with the law. Even after a long period of time has passed, though, they refuse to contact Lucille because they are set in their ways and uncertain of what reconnecting with her might look like. Robinson shows why transient people sometimes stay transient: fear of being rejected or alienated by the lives they’ve left behind.
Themes
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Sylvie and Ruth go everywhere together, but never stay anywhere for long. Ruth occasionally takes jobs in restaurants or shops or movie theaters, but Ruth always begins feeling conspicuous and disconnected within a short time, and they move on. Ruth wonders when she became “so unlike other people”—she is unsure of whether it happened when she followed Sylvie across the bridge above the lake, or when Helen abandoned her, or perhaps even at her own conception (an event to which she was “unconsenting”).
Ruth’s life is full of questions. Despite her companionship with Sylvie, she feels isolated and confused as to the reasons behind the socially deviant choices she’s made. Ruth has known for a long time that she is different from “normal” people, but she still can’t understand why. She tries to pinpoint the moment she became so strange and othered, but cannot, and this too is a lonely feeling.
Themes
Ruth remembers a moment on the treacherous walk across the bridge when she and Sylvie heard “some sound too loud to be heard, some word so true [they] did not understand it.” She has trouble to this day discerning whether the moment was real or imagined—she does not, and has never, “distinguished readily between thinking and dreaming.”
This remembered moment gestures at the supernatural or sublime. Because it is an old memory, it is impossible to tell whether Ruth is remembering the moment as it occurred, or injecting some sense of fate or doom into it—her memory, she admits, is fallible and changeable.
Themes
After leaving Fingerbone, Sylvie and Ruth traversed the Pacific Northwest hoping to “elude discovery.” They have been many places together, but “are not travelers”—they rarely go anywhere out of desire to be there, and instead move around the country based on where they can find shelter with friends. Occasionally, riding the train through Fingerbone on their way somewhere else, they try to catch a glimpse of the old house. Though they can never quite see it, Ruth imagines that someone is living there, keeping up with the garden and maintaining the orchard. Ruth occasionally imagines Lucille has taken up housekeeping, but knows that she’s probably gone to the city. Sylvie once tried to find a listing for her in Boston but was unable to. Ruth tells herself that one day, when she is “feeling presentable,” she will go into Fingerbone and make some inquiries.
Despite the close bond Ruth has long felt with Sylvie, she now admits that what tethers them together is circumstance and habit rather than true devotion to one another. Whereas as a child all Ruth wanted was Sylvie’s attention, devotion, and commitment, she now finds herself distracted in adulthood by thoughts of the world and the people she left behind, like her sister. She longs to return, but it seems as if she never will—the unknown is too great.
Themes
Ruth cannot explain why she never does get off the train in Fingerbone and go to see her grandmother Sylvia’s house. She wants to “expel [her vision of] poor Lucille” who, in her imagination, has “waited there in a fury of righteousness” for years. She imagines Lucille waiting and waiting for Sylvie and Ruth to return, and wonders whether Lucille has had daughters of her own who look out the “black window” at night, wondering what their mother is always staring out at.
Ruth’s childhood was defined by her relationships to inscrutable, unknowable women—women who kept secrets, women who abandoned her, women who could never love her fully because of the weights of their own respective pasts. Now, Ruth finds herself almost praying that Lucille is the one missing her, since Ruth was always the one doing the missing as a girl.
Themes
Ruth sometimes imagines Lucille in Boston, “tastefully dressed” and waiting at a table in a restaurant for a friend to arrive and meet her. Ruth imagines that no one looking at the prim, stoic Lucille could ever know that although she moves through the world in an ordinary way, betraying no melancholy or sadness, “her thoughts are thronged by [Ruth and Sylvie’s] absence,” or that she waits and hopes “always” for their return.
Ruth imagines her sister as pining unendingly for her and Sylvie. The melancholy of the book’s final lines is deep and total: whether Ruth’s vision is true and Lucille’s life has been calibrated by the loss of Ruth and Sylvie, or whether it is false and Lucille has moved on entirely, never stopping to think of her long-lost aunt and sister, the feelings of loss and longing Ruth holds within her are intense and inescapable.
Themes
