The narrator and main character of Housekeeping, Ruth has a snide personality that allows her to make fun of tragedy and quickly dismiss misfortune. Through her indifference and acceptance of the nature of life, she elevates the characters around her despite not experiencing a dramatic personal change herself.
Ruth begins the novel by discussing the death of her grandfather and mother in a nonchalant way. At the end of the novel she describes the supposed death of herself and Sylvie in a similarly casual way. Ruth begins to think of Sylvie as her mother and becomes devoted to her as she was once devoted to Lucille.
Lucille was forced into her coming of age by rejecting the messy, immaterial life style that Sylvie embraces. Because Ruth fails to support Lucille's anger with Sylvie, she leaves the home and stays with a more socially acceptable family. Lucille is pushed indirectly by Ruth to make this choice because of her indifference to Sylvie's anti-social antics that alienated Lucille from the life she desperately wanted to have.
(Although Lucille defied Ruth and Sylvie, the two "main" characters that we should technically align with, many readers find themselves aligning with Lucille, as she represented cleanliness, sociability, and safety, sentiments we think of as necessary for an enjoyable life.)
Not much time later, the threat of losing Ruth becomes a real fear for Sylvie, who has proven to the community that she was unfit to care for the girl. Ruth describes her relationship with Sylvie and the care she receives as the care a mother would give her child. When first introduced to Sylvie, she is a despondent, childish character. Because she lived a life of transience, she needed to be able to accept and be indifferent to loss. As she builds her relationship with Ruth, she realizes that she cannot lose her, and even tries to fit in with social expectations to keep her. Sylvie's development from "child" to mother is without a doubt facilitated by Ruth and her connection and emulation of Sylvie.
Ruth's coming of age is much more physical and cyclic than the emotional development Sylvie experiences. Ruth's mother and grandfather both have their final resting places at the bottom of the lake. By being assumed dead through suicide (nearly identical to her own mother), Ruth fulfills the generational cycle that had been started by her grandfather. This coming of age is not traditional in the way that Lucille and Sylvie came of age, but it is just as significant. Unlike other novels we have read in class, each main character experiences significant development or fulfillment in their own way.
I think your idea of Sylvie's character development also being in a way a coming of age is very interesting-- it kind of relates to what we talked about earlier in the year about the fact that you never stop coming of age, but instead just come of different ages.
ReplyDeleteI think that the way the early scenes are narrated, in an indifferent way, shows how much Ruth has come of age and become more like Sylvie. Instead of clinging to the emotion of these events, Ruth just sees them as having happened and doesn't think much beyond that. In this way she shows how much like Sylvie she has become by the time she is writing this story.
ReplyDeleteYou argue an interesting side. I agree that we see development in all of the characters involved, something that sets this novel apart. It's interesting to consider if the development in others was Ruths doing...
ReplyDeleteI can see how your argument is valid and makes sense. Although I slightly disagree with this book being a coming of age novel, this post made me rethink some of my stances. super interesting take on the novel!
ReplyDeleteYour argument for each character coming of age in a different way echoes the discussion we had at the very beginning of the course centered around the question, "What exactly does it mean to come of age?" We gave a variety of different answers, but in Housekeeping, we were finally able to see all of these ideas integrated with one another. The other books we have read have centered around one character's experience, but out of Ruth's nonchalant attitude, more coming of age stories are revealed from a lack of any extreme biases.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea that we can see Sylvie reflecting a kind of coming-of-age story arc in her development of a familial bond with Ruth. I don't read the narration of their "flight" from Fingerbone at the end of the novel as quite so casual as her narration of the train derailment at the start. We get a lot of detail about what a harrowing and risky experience the crossing is, and Ruth writes about her terror walking high above the lake in the pitch dark, buffeted by strong winds. There's drama to this last scene, a sense of urgency and escape, that is quite different from Ruth's detached accounts of her grandfather and mother's deaths in the lake.
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