Degree Name

Department

David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies

College

David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies

Defense Date

2024-02-28

Publication Date

2024-03-14

First Faculty Advisor

Makayla Steiner

First Faculty Reader

Matthew Wickman

Honors Coordinator

Aaron Eastley

Keywords

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, Gilead, Reconciliation

Abstract

The concepts of restoration and reconciliation are central to Marilynne Robinson’s first two novels, Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Housekeeping structures itself around the narrator Ruth Stone’s thirst for familial wholeness, and Gilead tracks the aging Congregationalist minister John Ames’s growing realization that there are rifts in both his town and his personal life that demand healing. The books are also united in their ambivalence towards the possibility of achieving total wholeness, as in each novel the movement towards restoration is undercut in important ways. However, the books ultimately diverge in the scope of the restitution that they allow. Whereas Housekeeping emphatically refuses to countenance the fulfillment of Ruth’s craving for the return of her many scattered family members, Gilead culminates in a moment of forgiveness and ends on a note of quiet hope. This difference, far from being insignificant, is reflective of a larger transition in Robinson’s work as a novelist from a precocious verbal aesthetician to a politically conscious public intellectual.