SOURCE: Ravits, Martha. “Extending the American Range: Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.” American Literature 61, no. 4 (December 1989): 644-66.

In the following essay, Ravits demonstrates how Robinson draws on the American literary tradition in Housekeeping and further extends the tradition by writing from a female perspective.

In trying to reinvent the American myth to fit female consciousness, the woman writer faces a double task: her work must respond to both the mainstream of native patriarchal literature and to the swelling current of writing—British and American—by and about women.¹ This dual artistic legacy creates double richness and a double bind for the contemporary woman writer that few have negotiated with the confidence of Marilynne Robinson in her 1980 novel Housekeeping.

Just two decades before, Leslie Fiedler had warned that our classic literature is “a literature of horror for boys.”² In forging a bildungsroman about a female protagonist, Robinson brings a new perspective...