Abstract
In Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, each woman possesses a unique form of mobility, which informs her understanding of home. The “home” is characterized as an anchor, a stationary monument that operates as a place of confinement, a point of return, or a destructive space. This chapter explores three generations of women in Housekeeping and their position and displacement in the home. An analysis of womanhood evaluates the influence of matriarchal mobility in the domestic sphere and how it yields generational displacement by producing women who are either resistant to or adamant about prescribed gendered identity. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates how the home acts as a place grounded in heteronormativity, which creates a palpable atmosphere of generational displacement affecting each woman, and explores how resistance manifests out of gendered oppression in the home-place.
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Notes
- 1.
Elizabeth Klaver, “Hobo Time and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 43, no. 1(2010): 28.
- 2.
Fatima Zahra Bessedik, “Home-Space in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17, no. 4(2015): 560.
- 3.
Christian Norberg Schulz qtd. in Bessedik, 561.
- 4.
Bessedik, 561
- 5.
Bessedik, 571.
- 6.
Bessedik, 571.
- 7.
Paula E. Geyh’s, “Burning Down the House? Domestic Space and Feminine Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” Contemporary Literature 34, no. 1(1993).
- 8.
Mieke Bal qtd. in Paula E. Geyh’s, 107.
- 9.
Geyh, 108.
- 10.
Geyh, 109.
- 11.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 9.
- 12.
Ahmed, 9.
- 13.
Cameron Duff, “On the Role of Affect and Practice in the Production of Place,” Environment and Planning: Society and Space (2010), 888.
- 14.
Marilynne Robinson’s, Housekeeping (New York: Picador, 1980), 3. Emphasis added. Future citations of Robinson’s work will be from this edition and will be noted parenthetically by page numbers.
- 15.
Duff, 881.
- 16.
Geyh, 108.
- 17.
Edward S. Casey, “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, no. 4(2001): 683.
- 18.
Casey, 688.
- 19.
Jane Rendell, “Gender, Space,” in Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, eds. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden (New York: Routledge, 2000), 102.
- 20.
Duff, 882.
- 21.
Clare Cooper-Marcus and Carolyn Francis., People Places: Design Guidelines for Urban Open Space (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1998), xi.
- 22.
Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), ix.
- 23.
Spinoza qtd. in Massumi, ix.
- 24.
Massumi, 57.
- 25.
Klaver, 28.
- 26.
Duff, 882.
- 27.
David W. Hill, “‘Total Gating’: Sociality and the Fortification of Networked Spaces,” Mobilities, 7, no. 1(2012): 121.
- 28.
Hill, 119.
- 29.
Duff, 882.
- 30.
Duff, 882.
- 31.
Peter Somerville, “The Social Construction of Home,” Journal of Architectural Planning and Research 14, no. 3(1996): 228.
- 32.
Amos Rapoport, “Identity and Environment: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,” in Housing and Identity: Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. JS Duncan (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 23.
- 33.
Ahmed, 7.
- 34.
Ahmed, 7.
- 35.
Casey, 684.
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Stickel Higgins, M. (2021). Matriarchal Mobility: Generational Displacement and Gendered Place in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. In: Beck, C. (eds) Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83477-7_6
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