Nature Theme Analysis

In Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, the natural world is a character in and of itself. From the beautiful but dangerous lake at the center of Fingerbone to the rare and transformative experiences Ruth and Lucille have during their various explorations of the Idaho wilds, nature plays a pivotal role in the text and serves as a kind of litmus test in Ruth and Lucille’s attempts to discover what kind of women they want to be. Though Robinson frames nature as an intimidating and occasionally dangerous force, she ultimately argues that nature has the power not just to destroy but to remake, refract, and in a way christen those who encounter it with an open heart and mind.

By positioning the threatening, lush natural world of Fingerbone in direct opposition to the town’s genteel interiors—the houses full of furniture adorned with doilies, the soda shops teeming with girls poring over dress patterns in magazines, the schoolhouse full of children in neat rows—Robinson establishes the strange duality of her fictional town. As the novel progresses, Ruth and Lucille’s encounters with nature both nourish and frighten them, and Robinson explores both girls’ entry into womanhood through their very different relationships with the natural world. Ruth and Lucille are, at the start of the novel, both haunted by and drawn to nature. They arrive in Fingerbone knowing already that the vast lake at its center once claimed their grandfather Edmund’s life, only to have their mother Helen allow the lake to claim hers, too. Nevertheless, the girls soon begin skipping school frequently to ice-skate along the lake’s surface, fish down at the lake’s shore, and explore the woods around it. The girls are unintimidated by nature and coexist with it almost without a second thought. After a night spent out in the woods, though, the girls’ relationships to nature begins to change. While Ruth finds herself increasingly drawn to the dense forests of Fingerbone, the orchard behind her own house, and the magnetic, dangerous lake, Lucille begins to eschew the natural world and focus more and more intensely on beauty, grooming, and socializing. She becomes obsessed with making a dress for herself, starts hanging around with other, more “normal” girls from school, and even crushes some old pressed flowers Ruth finds in a dictionary to demonstrate how little nature has come to mean to her.

Towards the novel’s end, when Lucille moves out of the house and goes to stay with one of her teachers, Miss Royce, Sylvie fervently begs Ruth to accompany her on a journey to a “special” valley on one of the lake’s many island outcrops. Ruth is initially reluctant, but after realizing that Lucille is not coming back, she agrees to skip school so that Sylvie can take her to the lake as soon as possible. During their trek out to the valley—a frost-covered clearing in the middle of which sits a fallen-down house, reclaimed by nature itself—Ruth finds herself tormented by visions of her dead mother, questions about the ever-growing distance between her and her sister, and fear that Sylvie, too, will soon abandon her. Ruth’s intense journey into nature breaks her down and then builds her back up—when she and Sylvie at last leave the woods together, Ruth has reckoned with several huge questions about the nature of life, love, and memory, and seems reborn as Sylvie’s daughter rather than her mother’s. Indeed, in the novel’s startling final pages, Sylvie and Ruth work together to set fire to their family’s ancestral home in preparation for setting out together as a pair of transients. Their symbolic burning-down of the house reveals their commitment to eschewing the genteel interior spaces of the place that has become their shared hometown, and venturing out into the unknown—venturing out into nature—as a way of finding a place that will not try to contain them, but will rather allow them to continually expand and remake themselves.

At the novel’s end, Ruth tries to imagine her sister, Lucille, living in the old house in Fingerbone, but ultimately cannot. Instead, she pictures her sister living in Boston, a big city removed from nature—removed from the self-examining forces of refraction and rebirth. Ruth has chosen the stranger and more difficult path in life, the path Sylvie laid out for her—a path which continually demands she commune with the natural world and give herself over to its powers. Lucille, however, has chosen the simplicity of a normal life: a life full of doilies, dinners in fine restaurants, and perhaps a devotion to the art of housekeeping, the art of preserving the very spaces which entrap her.