Extending the American Range

N trying to reinvent the American myth to fit female consciousness, the woman writer faces double task: her work must respond to both the mainstream of native patriarchal literature and to the swelling current of writing-British and American-by and about women.1 This dual artistic legacy creates double richness and double bind for the contemporary woman writer that few have negotiated with the confidence of Marilynne Robinson in her I980 novel Housekeeping. Just two decades before, Leslie Fiedler had warned that our classic literature is a literature of horror for boys.2 In forging bildungsroman about female protagonist, Robinson brings new perspective to bear on the dominant American myth about the developing individual freed from social constraints. Her female adventurer emphasizes the motivations and imperatives of the classic quest and offers fresh testimony about the implications of its outcome-a survival strategy often taken for granted. Repudiation of the domestic sphere by her female quester enlarges the central tradition to include women but leaves them still at the crossroads in materialistic, patriarchal society. Robinson consciously sets her novel against the great texts of the American tradition. She opens Housekeeping, her first book, with brief sentence that echoes the famous beginning of Moby-Dick-that prime American text about castaway and survivor with significant Biblical name: My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her

Biology · Housekeeping · Range (aeronautics) · American and British Literature Analysis · American Literature and Humor Studies · American Sports and Literature · Engineering · Philosophy

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• Traumatic Endings

  LAURA CALLANAN•Women s Studies•2016

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