Housekeeping

by

Marilynne Robinson

Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother Character Analysis

Ruth and Lucille’s mother. A quiet and mysterious woman who married a man named Reginald Stone in a haste, and yet separated from him so soon after having her girls that neither of them remember the man who is technically their father. For reasons unknown and never explained, Helen brings the girls one day when they’re very young to Fingerbone, where she deposits them on their grandmother’s porch and then drives a car borrowed from her neighbor back in Spokane, Bernice, straight into the lake which claimed her father Edmund’s life years ago. Helen’s suicide is the book’s inciting incident, and yet the girls never learn much about who their mother was, what she was really like, or what plagued her and drove her to take her own life. The girls are never particularly emotional when it comes to remembrances of their mother, but over time, Ruth begins to remember her as cold and distant while Lucille remembers her as loving, doting, and kind.

Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother Quotes in Housekeeping

The Housekeeping quotes below are all either spoken by Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother or refer to Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Women and Sisterhood Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

Now and then Molly searched Sylvie’s room for unreturned library books. Occasionally Helen made a batch of cookies. It was Sylvie who brought in bouquets of flowers. This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father. That event had troubled the very medium of their lives. Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean. The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself, and if the calm that followed it was not greater than the calm that came before it, it had seemed so. And the dear ordinary had healed as seamlessly as an image on water.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother, Sylvia Foster, Edmund Foster, Molly Foster
Related Symbols: The Lake
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

We had planned to try Sylvie, but perhaps because Sylvie had her coat on and appeared so very transient, Lucille did not wait till we knew her better, as we had agreed to do.

“Oh, she was nice,” Sylvie said. “She was pretty.”

“But what was she like?”

“She was good in school.”

Lucille sighed.

“It’s hard to describe someone you know so well.”

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher (speaker), Lucille Stone (speaker), Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 51
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Altogether [the snowwoman’s] figure suggested a woman standing in a cold wind. It seemed that we had conjured a presence. We took off our coats and hats and worked about her in silence. […] We hoped the lady would stand long enough to freeze, but in fact while we were stamping the gray snow all smooth around her, her head pitched over and smashed on the ground. This accident cost her a forearm and a breast. We made a new snowball for a head, but it crushed her eaten neck, and under the weight of it a shoulder dropped away. We went inside for lunch, and when we came out again, she was a dog-yellowed stump in which neither of us would admit any interest.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Lucille Stone , Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Lucille’s mother was orderly, vigorous, and sensible, a widow (more than I ever knew or she could prove) who was killed in an accident. My mother presided over a life so strictly simple and circumscribed that it could not have made any significant demands on her attention. She tended us with a gentle indifference that made me feel she would have liked to have been even more alone—she was the abandoner, and not the one abandoned.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Lucille Stone , Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:

“I was a baby, lying on my back, yelling, and then someone came and started wrapping me up in blankets. She put them all over my face, so I couldn’t breathe. She was singing and holding me, and it was sort of nice, but I could tell she was trying to smother me.” Lucille shuddered.

“Do you know who it was?”

“Who?”

“The woman in the dream.”

“She reminded me of Sylvie, I guess.”

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Lucille Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 120
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

[Sylvie] did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be. For she could regard me without strong emotion—a familiar shape, a familiar face, a familiar silence. She could forget I was in the room. She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her—this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.

But if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 195
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Housekeeping LitChart as a printable PDF.
Housekeeping PDF

Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother Quotes in Housekeeping

The Housekeeping quotes below are all either spoken by Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother or refer to Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Women and Sisterhood Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

Now and then Molly searched Sylvie’s room for unreturned library books. Occasionally Helen made a batch of cookies. It was Sylvie who brought in bouquets of flowers. This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father. That event had troubled the very medium of their lives. Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean. The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself, and if the calm that followed it was not greater than the calm that came before it, it had seemed so. And the dear ordinary had healed as seamlessly as an image on water.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother, Sylvia Foster, Edmund Foster, Molly Foster
Related Symbols: The Lake
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

We had planned to try Sylvie, but perhaps because Sylvie had her coat on and appeared so very transient, Lucille did not wait till we knew her better, as we had agreed to do.

“Oh, she was nice,” Sylvie said. “She was pretty.”

“But what was she like?”

“She was good in school.”

Lucille sighed.

“It’s hard to describe someone you know so well.”

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher (speaker), Lucille Stone (speaker), Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 51
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Altogether [the snowwoman’s] figure suggested a woman standing in a cold wind. It seemed that we had conjured a presence. We took off our coats and hats and worked about her in silence. […] We hoped the lady would stand long enough to freeze, but in fact while we were stamping the gray snow all smooth around her, her head pitched over and smashed on the ground. This accident cost her a forearm and a breast. We made a new snowball for a head, but it crushed her eaten neck, and under the weight of it a shoulder dropped away. We went inside for lunch, and when we came out again, she was a dog-yellowed stump in which neither of us would admit any interest.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Lucille Stone , Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Lucille’s mother was orderly, vigorous, and sensible, a widow (more than I ever knew or she could prove) who was killed in an accident. My mother presided over a life so strictly simple and circumscribed that it could not have made any significant demands on her attention. She tended us with a gentle indifference that made me feel she would have liked to have been even more alone—she was the abandoner, and not the one abandoned.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Lucille Stone , Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 109
Explanation and Analysis:

“I was a baby, lying on my back, yelling, and then someone came and started wrapping me up in blankets. She put them all over my face, so I couldn’t breathe. She was singing and holding me, and it was sort of nice, but I could tell she was trying to smother me.” Lucille shuddered.

“Do you know who it was?”

“Who?”

“The woman in the dream.”

“She reminded me of Sylvie, I guess.”

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Lucille Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 120
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

[Sylvie] did not wish to remember me. She much preferred my simple, ordinary presence, silent and ungainly though I might be. For she could regard me without strong emotion—a familiar shape, a familiar face, a familiar silence. She could forget I was in the room. She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her—this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.

But if she lost me, I would become extraordinary by my vanishing.

Related Characters: Ruth Stone (speaker), Sylvie Fisher, Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Page Number: 195
Explanation and Analysis: