SOURCE: Galehouse, Maggie. “Their Own Private Idaho: Transience in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.” Contemporary Literature 41, no. 1 (spring 2000): 117-37.

In the following essay, Galehouse examines the portrayal of homes and vagrancy in Housekeeping, drawing attention to how Robinson's narrative and language evoke the social, physical, and temporal conditions of female marginality and transience.

Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth; And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.

John Milton, “Lycidas”

Social circles move too fast for me; my hobohemia is the place to be.

Rodgers and Hart, “The Lady Is a Tramp”

First published in 1981, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is a dreamlike, quirky novel, sustaining terse social commentary while describing intense, interior lives. Robinson's narrator, Ruth Stone, loses her mother, becomes estranged from her only sibling, and, finally, drifts into vagrancy under the tutelage of her Aunt Sylvie. Because Housekeeping challenges traditional notions of motherhood and domesticity, it is...