Reflecting on this book, I feel like Robinson is making two major points. Feel free to dispute whether these are the two main themes of the novel, but I really see her driving home in the last chapters that
a) In the broad view of things, nothing is permanent. We are all inherent transients pretending to be housekeepers. We are only playing at stability and permanence, and those who drift are being more honest to our true nature.
b) Family members who have died are more formative presences in our minds and lives than those family members who live comfortably and normally around us, or than they would have been had they not died.
These are both interesting ideas (especially the way that Robinson presents them) on their own, but I felt a certain dissonance when they're considered side-by-side that adds another level. That is, in the novel's own estimation, a transient lifestyle is a lonely one. The very concept of family---having a family, raising a family---seems to require the housekeeping mentality to an extent. The two ideas aren't in direct contrast to each other, but it seems that one encourages the family unit sticking together and the other discourages it. When Sylvie tells the women on the couch how much she thinks of her father since his death, she is presenting it as a tragic thing. "Families should stay together. Otherwise things get out of control" (186). A surprising comment from a woman who didn't contact her family for many years.
How can the novel teach both things simultaneously? Shouldn't familial relationships fade away in comparison to the scope of geologic history, the way that homes and even mountains do? They are no more permanent. The ending of the novel only increases the tension between the two ideas, when Ruth becomes a drifter with Sylvie. I suppose we could view drifter partners as a synthesis of reverence for family and acknowledgement of impending oblivion, but I don't see any reconciliation---rather almost a refusal to pick a side. I'd be very interested to hear other people's thoughts on this.
I think one idea that seems to come out at the end of the novel is the idea that as a transient, you are part of a community that is apart from the mainstream "housekeeping" community. I think that looking at the novel from this perspective, it is easier to reconcile the two ideas that you suggested. I think Sylvie, and by the end Ruth, see each other and the transient community as a whole as their family. I think this is why Sylvie seems so taken by the random stories that she hears from strangers as she travels. She sees these people as her family, and a family so large that it encompasses all of humanity (even if a large part of humanity doesn't recognize it) is significant even on the scope of geological time.
ReplyDeleteI think that I disagree with your point about family members who have died being a more formative presence. The book shows that the death of both Ruth's mother and grandfather in the lake has changed her feelings towards it. This is especially evident when Sylvie walks out onto the bridge and Ruth and Lucille watch her from shore. But I think that the characters who have a bigger impact are the characters that are still living. Ruth and Lucille have a hard time remembering their mother and have very different images even of what she looked like. But Sylvie is a huge influence on both their lives in very different ways. While there is a significant meaning that the lake holds for Ruth and Lucille because of the family members that have died there, I think that they are much more affected by the living family members and connections around them.
ReplyDeleteYou're correct to point out how these things seem to contradict each other and I would have to agree to some extent. However I feel that much of the novel is devoted to "convincing" (not explicitly) Ruth and particularly Lucille once she denounces it, to become drifter along with Sylvie. Additionally, Sylvie and Ruth become drifters together and they are family, so it seems as though they can exist simultaneously in some respect.
ReplyDeleteIt's certainly true that we closely associate "domesticity" with family life--as if a person living alone isn't doing "domestic" things all the time! But, culturally, for obvious reasons we associate the formation and maintenance of a household with family. And you're right that Sylvie seems to walk away from that with no compunction at all (aside from an apparent willingness to go through a show of a wedding in order to make her mother happy, even if it means little to her and she has no current information on her "husband's" whereabouts).
ReplyDeleteBut it's possible to read Sylvie's development of familial feelings for Ruth as something that takes place over the course of the narrative--her strange (and mostly failed, in the end) experiment of "housekeeping" actually *does* foster in her a sense of familial obligation to Ruth (which totally surprises Ruth herself, at first). We could view Ruth and Sylvie's life together--as "ghosts" and transients, apparently without a permanent address but, as far as we can tell, a life spent mostly together, a revamp of the "we" Ruth used to use to describe her and Lucille--as a kind of alternative family structure, one that manages in the absence of a stable domestic life.