Housekeeping and the Phantom Ordinary

This chapter shifts focus away from the luminous images of Housekeeping to the lived experiences of traumatic grief those images often veil. The lyrical beauty of Housekeeping offers stylistic reinforcement of a first-person narrative that seeks consolation in immaterial forms. Critical focus on the transfigured ordinary and its aesthetic compensations tends to substantiate rather than interrogate the project of Ruth, focusing on the vibrancy and vitality of the images that she conjures rather than her terrifying expulsion from the everyday. Haunted by memories of maternal presence and incapable of resurrecting her mother, Robinson’s protagonist attempts to write herself out of the everyday world and into the spectral landscape in which her mother continues to exist; rendering her own embodied existence in ghostly terms, Ruth situates herself in a phantom ordinary. Housekeeping, I argue, subtly interrogates Ruth’s substitution of aesthetic images for ordinary presence in a way that anticipates the dramatic collapse of aesthetic consolation in Robinson’s later fiction.