Branches

Ruth's young life is defined by the people who leave her. She opens the novel by identifying herself, and then by describing her succession of caretakers. That list begins with her grandmother, she who "eschewed awakening," and fails to mention the loss that starts the process in the first place, that of Ruth's mother. From there we get the story of Ruth's grandfather: how his desire to live up in the mountains took him from a "grave" sunk in the ground to a town named after a bone, and how the success of his career ended in a "spectacular derailment" as he flew into the lake which defines his home. His body is never found, and we're aware of it staring out the lake for the rest of the novel.

Ruth's grandfather is an archetypal "dreamer," who lives his life following his romantic ambitions, shirking "success" as a painter or husband to express an individual vision. His death is felt by his wife as the last in a long line of disappointments -- he "walks off" into the lake, leaving his daughters to be raised by a single parent. Ruth's fascination with this story, however, expresses more than disappointment. She gives it a sense of romantic beauty, with the old man's slip into drowning seeming peaceful in its isolation. There's no sound to hear and no crash to see; it's black one moment and black the next. The idea that at one moment he's above water and at another he's below is just an abstraction, with no relation to how the fall is actually experienced. Trying to imagine how Edmund feels in his last moments is impossible, because Ruth makes it seem like there is nothing to feel. We never get his reaction to dying, only his thoughts on life. His wife's complaints about being left behind come off as trivial in comparison.

That peaceful view of death is dangerous, because it brings Ruth herself narrowly close to the water's edge. The way Edmund's violent derailment is presented makes it seem preferable to dealing with the responsibilities of this world. We see Ruth's own desire to shut off and ignore everything around her when she sleeps by the lake. The blackness she describes there calms her because it denies that anything is really changing when the animals move around outside, just like it doesn't matter to Sylvie if the plates she puts away in the darkness are sitting on top of dozens of others; as far as she can tell everything she puts away is the only thing that's put away. There's no such thing as "mess" if your things can't visually collect. What Ruth views so romantically in her grandfather and Sylvie, however, is harder to accept in Helen, whose suicide more directly affects Ruth. Helen's death feels to Ruth much like Edmund's death feels to Sylvia: like a shirking of responsibility and a leaving her behind. We can see this with her description of the "maternal" washing machine with which Helen leaves her, and when she says that she worries Sylvie will run away "because she looked like our mother." It's impossible to know what Helen was thinking when she drove into the lake, but it seems plausible to imagine that her views on darkness were similar to Ruth's.

An idea that is stated explicitly later in the novel, but which is present throughout, is that Ruth belongs to one of two branches of her family. On one side are Sylvia, Lily, Nona, and Lucille, and on the other are the "dreamers," Edmund, Sylvie, Helen, and Ruth. The split between these two branches and their lifestyles and philosophies is the major conflict of Housekeeping, because the two sides are presented as incompatible; the two sides can live with each other for a while, but sooner or later someone has to move. Usually it's the person in the vein of Edmund, but not necessarily; Lucille is the transient in Sylvie's household. The impression we get is that maybe Ruth and her kind are not necessarily transient, it's just that they disagree with the "common persuasion," and so therefore are forced to move to escape it. When allowed to make a life for themselves, as odd and idiosyncratic as Sylvie's household may seem, they seem to be able to find comfort. At the very least, we get the sense that they can be comfortable in who they're with. Ruth certainly doesn't show many signs of getting tired of Sylvie by the end of the novel. In Ruth's side of the family, once you've found your people, you don't want to leave them -- if anything, you just want to leave everyone else.