The Uninhabitable Space of Home

By locating the reader uncomfortably within its circumscribed fictional world, Home highlights the confining cultural and narrative structures through which the everyday dynamics of family are often experienced and represented. In its refusal to provide mechanisms of imaginative transcendence that would transport the reader out of the Boughtons’ oppressive dwelling or make it more hospitable, the novel renders domestic and narrative space equally uncomfortable. Using narrative theory, cultural studies explorations of family and memory, and feminist theories of gender and space, this chapter explores how Home unsettles the culturally sanctioned idea of home as an escape from the contesting ideologies of the larger world even as it reveals the force of our investment in a domestic ideal that legislates, sanctions, and naturalizes scripted performances of the ordinary.

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.

Race and Imaginary Intimacy in Jack

Through its focus on an interracial relationship in St. Louis after the Second World War, Jack interrogates the imaginative privilege of a white character whose seeming transcendence of the ordinary occurs at the expense of the black woman he romances. Jack’s aesthetic sensibility immobilizes and isolates him in an imaginative landscape; his desire to have Della, a black woman, accompany him there, however, implicates him in the literal destruction of her everyday world. This chapter uses phenomenological race theory and everyday life studies to highlight the way that the historical, material, and political pressures of the period, including the threat of eminent domain that looms over the abstracted landscape of the novel, disrupt Jack’s literary and symbolic rendering of this love story. By inviting the reader to pursue Jack’s imaginative interests, the novel constructs an uncomfortable romance troubled by the encroachments of the wider world it would exclude.

Anxiety and the Everyday in Lila

Although Lila seems to promise access to the interiority of a character whose life has unfolded under the stresses of poverty, abuse, and homelessness, the novel captures the rhythms of its protagonist’s existence through acts of narrative repetition and deflection that defend against intimacy. Lila’s inability to feel at home reflects a self-consciousness rooted in the trauma of childhood abandonment, violence, and forced sex work. The structure of the novel reflects Lila’s experiences of anxiety and shame by constantly revisiting her detachment from the lived world of the novel. The novel adopts a radical stance, replacing the narrative construction of Lila’s interiority with the disrupted rhythm of an everyday world that remains flat and inaccessible. This chapter explores why and how Lila refuses to lend the reader the intimate access to character or the heightened acts of perception that many critics see as characteristic of Robinson’s fiction.

The Uncomfortable Ordinary

Despite extensive dialogue among Robinson scholars about the role of the ordinary in her fiction, critical attention limits itself almost exclusively to the transformation of the everyday. This chapter focuses instead on the way that, for Robinson’s protagonists, loss settles uneasily into the everyday; the aesthetic defamiliarization of a taken-for-granted world often translates into the intimate experience of estrangement. The power of representation that critics associate with Robinson’s rendering of ordinary things emerges from an intensity of perception that marks her characters’ expulsion from the taken for granted. Scarred by grief, illness, aging, and trauma, Robinson’s characters inhabit a world of transcendent beauty suffused with the terrifying threat of loss. This chapter introduces the concept of the “uncomfortable ordinary” within the frameworks of everyday life theory, Robinson criticism, contemporary novel studies, and recent dialogues on the lyrical novel to argue for the complexity, relevance, and contemporaneity of Robinson’s fiction.

Living Dying in Gilead

The cultural force of Gilead stems from its powerful unveiling of how dying complicates the sensory and psychological dynamics of human perception, expelling Robinson’s aging and ailing narrator from the ordinary world his prose so beautifully illuminates. In his journal to his son, Ames uses language to compensate for his anticipated absence; however, the reader’s experience of this first-person narrative may achieve an aesthetic transcendence that belies the aching apprehension of loss that functions as its scaffolding. Gilead localizes Ames’s psychic struggle with his own imminent death in acts of perceptual processing that it both depicts and thematizes. Combining physiological, sociological, and psychological approaches to aging with phenomenology and cognitive theories of perception, this chapter explores how the novel pushes existential concerns into the realm of the everyday to explore the way that the lived experience of dying traps Robinson’s protagonist uncomfortably in the collapsing space between perception and representation.