“Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson (post 3): Characters as alternate personalities; Housekeeping as metaphor for managing multiple personality

None of the main characters—Ruth, Lucille, Sylvie—is a whole person.

Ruth, the first-person narrator, has a reportorial function, but has no friends, tastes, interests, goals, etc. She has a function, as most alternate personalities do, but is not a full-fledged person in her own right. The closest she comes to explicitly stating this is when she says, “Sylvie and I (I think that night we were almost a single person)…” (1, p. 209).

Sylvie is a transient, a prototypical lifestyle for alternate personalities, who, by definition, come and go: are here today, gone tomorrow. Moreover, she can facilitate the transience of other personalities like Ruth (at the end of the novel they are in transit together). Sylvie is also described as being able to communicate with an unnamed personality inside: “She could speak to…someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation…” (1, p. 195).

Lucille, as noted in a previous post, has named alternate personalities: Rosette Browne and Rosette Browne’s mother, her “familiars.” Since Lucille turns out to be the personality who is leading the most ordinary, overt, public life, she would be termed the “host personality.” At the end of the novel, Lucille is described as having Ruth and Sylvie in the back roads of her mind (1, pp. 218-219).

Housekeeping Metaphor

People who know they have multiple personality often visualize it as a house or apartment building, with a different personality in each room or apartment. Thus, housekeeping is a good metaphor for managing multiple personality.

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