Small-town mid-century domesticity is a familiar scene: white picket fences, mom’s apple pie and the stereotypical beaming housewife are all classic images of Americana. However, much twentieth-century American literature has sought to probe beyond this cosy façade and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) is such a text. Like Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road (1961), Robinson’s unusual and intimate novel critiques the conformity of mid-century domestic life and portrays the home as a site of female rebellion.
Robinson is one of the most prominent public intellectuals living and working in the US today. She is a bestselling novelist, has written numerous essays and articles, and is a regular commentator on contemporary religion and politics. Beloved by former president Barack Obama, her Gilead sequence — Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014) and later Jack (2020) — investigates the role of Christianity in the ethical, spiritual and political life of the US. But Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, was written more than 20 years before she won the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead and became an intellectual icon. Composed from a series of stand-alone, densely metaphorical passages written while completing her PhD, Housekeeping is a tale of female outsiders that draws on earlier canonical American literary works.
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