“Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson: Ruth, first-person narrator, reports her mother had committed suicide and her grandfather had behaved strangely

In Chapter 1, Ruth reports that in her childhood, mother had driven her and her younger sister Lucille to their grandmother’s house, at an hour the mother knew grandmother would be out, and left them there. The mother then drove away and committed suicide: she handed her purse to a stranger and drove the car off a cliff.

As to the girls’ father, Ruth says, parenthetically: “(I have no memory of this man at all. I have seen photographs of him…In one he is looking at my mother…)” (1, p. 14). Was she too young to remember him or does she have posttraumatic amnesia? Ruth does not offer an opinion.

Why did Ruth’s mother commit suicide? Was it related to Ruth’s father? Did it have anything to do with Ruth’s grandfather (who died in a train wreck when Ruth’s mother was fifteen)?

The behavior of Ruth’s grandfather had been strange: “How many times had she [the grandmother] waked in the morning to find him gone? And sometimes for whole days he would walk around singing to himself in a thin voice, and speak to her and his children as a very civil man would speak to strangers” (1, p. 10).

What would make a man, at times, speak to his wife and children as though they were strangers? A switch to an alternate personality who did not see himself as a member of that family.

Why doesn’t Ruth express her own opinion about her mother’s suicide and these other things? Does her character or culture exclude psychological, philosophical, and/or religious explanations? But this is only Chapter 1, and those things may come later.

1. Marilynne Robinson. Housekeeping. New York, Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980.