Something that I found interesting in Housekeeping is how
the deeply personal stories of the characters are set against the background of
geological time, where the whole of human existence is inconsequential and
transpires in the blink of an eye. One example of this is the town of
Fingerbone itself, a place “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant
weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history
had occurred elsewhere”. Fingerbone is a place of huge significance to Ruth’s
family—it’s the site of the Great Derailment, the town where Sylvia raised her
children, the place Helen returned to and left her children before she took her
life, and where Ruth grows up under the care of Sylvia, Lily and Nona, and
Sylvie. But despite the connections the main characters have to the town, the
reader is constantly reminded that Fingerbone is just a temporary dot on the
map that “flooded yearly, and had burned once…a diaspora threatened [it] always”.
Even the name of the town reflects that it is a tiny and unessential component
of something larger that will also eventually decay and disappear.
The realization that the things we often see as the most solid in
our lives—civilization, history, our society—are impermanent and in the larger
scheme of things irrelevant is a difficult one to accept, or even wrap one’s
head around. Something that immediately came to mind while reading the early
chapters of the novel that helped me better visualize Fingerbone against the
backdrop of geological time was a Romantic landscape painting, such as the one
below (painted by Simeon Marcus Larson).
The river, trees, rocks, and sky
dominate the landscape to such an extent that the village on the left-hand side
is nearly invisible. Presumably there are people who live in these houses, each
with their own important story, but when placed in the middle of the landscape portrayed
in the painting, the entire village fades into the background until it is
barely visible, much less significant.
