SOURCE: Champagne, Rosaria. “Women's History and Housekeeping: Memory, Representation and Reinscription.” Women's Studies 20, nos. 3-4 (1992): 321-29.

In the following essay, Champagne contends that Housekeeping is a feminist postmodern text in which transience and relativity subvert traditional notions of fixity, linearity, and truth.

This essay examines one important and idealized theme in women's literature in the context of postmodern literature: a woman's relationship with the domestic sphere. In Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1982), the townspeople of Fingerbone banish Ruth and Sylvie from their family home because they fail to read and follow the social prescriptions for female domesticity; that is, they refuse to read the social text which polices and maintains the boundaries that separate private and public conduct and discourse for women. Sylvie's housekeeping is abysmal, and in her displacement and reinscription of housekeeping, feminist readers can identify the historical burdens that constitute the “crisis” of female representation.¹

Fingerbone, the...