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Women's Studies
An inter-disciplinary journal
ISSN: 0049-7878 (Print) 1547-7045 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gwst20
Traumatic Endings: Politics, Feminism, and
Narrative Resolution in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit
and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping
Laura Callanan
To cite this article: Laura Callanan (2016) Traumatic Endings: Politics, Feminism, and Narrative
Resolution in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Women's
Studies, 45:3, 251-262, DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2016.1149030
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2016.1149030
Published online: 20 Apr 2016.
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TRAUMATIC ENDINGS: POLITICS, FEMINISM, AND NARRATIVE
RESOLUTION IN LINDA HOGAN’SMEAN SPIRIT AND MARILYNNE
ROBINSON’SHOUSEKEEPING
LAURA CALLANAN
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
The League of Six Nations talk about being careful for the next seven generations;but, in my
opinion, we need to think further than even seven generations. We needto think far into the
future.
—Linda Hogan, C-Span Book TV, July 3, 2011
At the risk of offending right-thinking people everywhere, might we not check our premises?
Might we not even go so far as to wonder whether all the Great Ideas are good ideas?
—Marilynne Robinson, New York Times Book Review, October 13, 1985
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.
George Eliot, Middlemarch, 832
Marilynne Robinson’sHousekeeping (1980) and Linda Hogan’sMean Spirit (1990) both
end with the homes of the central protagonists in flames. Both endings, it could be
argued, suggest radical eco-feminist life paradigms and negotiate with the symbolic
enactment of alternative positionality. This political component results from the dual
nature of the novels’endings—they are both definitively closed, represented by explo-
sions, and radically open-ended. The closed narrative endings function as narrative
performance for characters within the text and for the reader, bringing into relief the
novels’conscious manipulation of structural expectations for how the stories will end.
What happens after the final domestic destruction allows for the possibility of a feminist
re-envisioning of gender possibilities. The lack of any clear vision of that new paradigm,
however, leaves the question of what radical transformation will produce unanswered.
Critical discussions of narrative endings often yoke structural issues with questions of
readerly expectation. Aristotle famously argues in the Poetics that tragedy has a conclusion
“which itself naturally follows something else, either of necessity or for the most part, but
has nothing else after it”(96). Frank Kermode observes in the classic The Sense of an
Ending,“[i]n a novel the beginning implies the end…” (148). Kermode implies that this
expectation includes any end—an end—the reality of a finish line. Marianna Torgovnick
expands these ideas in Closure in the Novel by addressing the way particular storylines set up
expectations for certain endings. The dialectic between these expectations and the
resulting ending often suggests the degree of aesthetic sophistication we attribute to
the work—predictability is often comforting, yet lacks aesthetic complexity. Outrageous
Address correspondence to Laura Callanan. E-mail: callanla@law.unm.edu
Women's Studies, 45:251–262, 2016
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 online
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2016.1149030
251
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endings—such as typical soap opera fare—often become predictable in their unpredict-
ability. But the ending of the apocalyptic movie Melancholia (2011), for example, com-
plicates this easy correlation—the final destruction of the world, although predictable, is
certainly complex aesthetically, emotionally, and narratively.
Kermode’s discussion of apocalyptic endings refers frequently to the tragic endings
precipitated in the Nazi gas chambers. By alluding to the traumatic aftermath that existed
in post–World War II Western societies after the defeat of the Nazis, a critical context lost
on many from within the sea of global slaughter that has taken place since that time,
Kermode helps us understand the importance of endings to an environment that can
produce such horror. For the gas chambers, in their attempt to end the Jewish race,
function symbolically as the ultimate finality—the Final Solution. The shock of this reality
found its way into many works of cultural, philosophical, and literary criticism in the
decades following the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—another set
of Final Solutions. This connection begs the question of traumatic rupture and its role in
closure—when is an ending traumatic? And is there such a thing as a politically strategic
traumatic ending? Are radical political visions essentially traumatic—epistemologically,
ideologically, or narratively?
RachelBlauDuPlessistakesthisdiscussioninafeministdirectionwithheranalysisof
modernist transgressions of the conventional female plot that ended in either marriage
or death. DuPlessis argues that “[w]riting beyond the ending means the transgressive
invention of narrative strategies, strategies that express critical dissent from the dominant
narrative”(5).Thechoiceofending,then,brings with it a political position in its
relationship to the normative stories at work in the culture. Change the ending of the
story and change the set of ideological expectations created by the narrative. This
narrative shift achieves its goal because of what Susan L. Feagin would call the “psycho-
logical connections”that narratives encourage readers to make. Because readers have
agency, and because the live in a specific culture, they come equipped to a greater or
lesser extent with a battery of narrative expectations. Triggering those expectations, in
this case for an ending, and then suddenly shifting them creates a state of ideological
reflection on those very expectations, whether of a narrative, ideological, or political
nature.
All of these issues are pertinent to a discussion of the endings of both
Housekeeping and Mean Spirit, most particularly in the connections between questions
of social justice and narrative structure. Housekeeping contains a complex discussion
of the normative pressures of small town life on a grieving family. Mean Spirit
engages the historical violation of the Osage people by a white culture bent on
taking their wealth and resources by murder, marriage, or manipulation. The end-
ings of the novels—Sylvie and Ruthie’s escape from Fingerbone, and the
Greyclouds’flight back to the traditional Osage community, respectively—suggest
a refusal of the normative and destructive powers imposed on these families.
However, there are some significant differences between the two texts: Robinson’s
novel does not provide a clean break—the fire Sylvie sets to throw town authorities
off their trail “wasn’t a good enough fire”(210), she says as they run away from the
house toward the train. This lack of closure, with closure being defined by Noel
Carroll as resulting when “all of the questions that have been saliently posed by the
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narrative get answered”(4), leaves open the overarching question fueling
Housekeeping: how will Sylvie and Ruthie avoid being separated? As the two women
move across the bridge that functions as a point of intersection for several plotlines
in the novel, it becomes clear that the two women want to control the ending of the
story the community will tell about them by creating a resolution that others will
believe. Sylvie wants them to be seen as dying in the fire, but the limited success of
the fire means that is not possible. Later, Sylvie carries a newspaper clipping that
says “LAKE CLAIMS TWO”(213), as they and the reader realize that the women
succeeded, but not as they thought they would. The town thinks that they have
drowned in the icy waters, joining Ruthie’s mother and the passengers on board the
train that fell in the lake years before. Instead of being read as dying in the house
fire, their fate becomes aligned with the overarching metanarrative of the novel—
death in the lake, the same story that the girls rebuke Sylvie for tempting when she
ventures out on the train tracks earlier in the story.
This narrative alignment allows the two women the space to live an alternative,
nomadic existence. They wander, which is (if such a thing can be said to exist) the
opposite of the domestic plotline so firmly associated with female characters and trig-
gered by the title, Housekeeping. Robinson herself comments on the relationship between
her text and feminist possibility: “So I created a female hero, of sorts, also an outsider and
a stranger. And while Sylvie obviously has her own history, to the degree that she has not
taken the impress of society she expresses thefactthathumannatureisrepletewith
nameless possibilities, and, by implication, that the world is accessible to new ways of
understanding”(“My Western Roots”171). By inadvertently feeding the narrative expec-
tations of the town by staging the traditional ending, the characters achieve space for a
newkindofstory.However,lifeafterthestaged ending is far from ideal. Robinson
presents a picture of the two women moving from town to town, making few if any
connections and lacking any kind of domestic comfort. They are free, but at what price?
The explosion that ends Linda Hogan’s1990novelMean Spirit provides more
certain closure than the complex ending of Robinson’s novel. Hogan’sendingresults
in a clear severing of the white and Native populations. The story takes place in 1922 in
Oklahoma and deals with the ramifications of massive amounts of oil being found
underneath land belonging to Native Indian tribes. Termed by some as the “Osage
Reign of Terror,”white authorities and citizens used criminal, governmental, and affec-
tive schemes to steal oil, land, and money from tribal members. The central family in this
wide-ranging novel—the Greyclouds—struggles to come to terms with the murder of
Grace Blanket, the richest woman in town. Grace died under mysterious circumstances
and in front of Grace’s daughter Nola and her friend Rena Greycloud, granddaughter of
thefamilymatriarchBelleGreycloud.Thestory presents an intricate and interlacing web
of ways in which the Osage are individually deprived of their land and resources. Near the
end of the novel, the Greyclouds first spot oil on their land which, instead of bringing joy
at the prospect of a financial windfall, produces panic as they know it will lead to their
ruin. Through several acts of civil disobedience, Belle has brought the forces of the white
community down on her, resulting in the bombing of their house and the family fleeing
into the darkness.
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Returning to Carroll’s definition of closure as resolving the questions of the
text, in Hogan’s novel the explosion, clearly definitive and concluding, does not
actually answer the questions of the novel. Hogan’s seemingly clear ending in fact
refuses the question of the text, as, I would argue, do all of Hogan’s novels. Hogan’s
novels thus far work with the same problems: How do Native and Anglo commu-
nities live with one another? How do Native and Anglo communities move beyond
the violent history the two share to forge something new? The answer provided by
the exploding house seems clear: they cannot, and what is best for Native commu-
nities is that the Native population moves back into the traditional world and
separates from Anglo society.
But why use houses to make these points? Questions of houses cross a range of
critical discussions—from an ecological perspective, the idea of the house can be
understood as in binary opposition with the natural world, or, from a spiritual,
Christian perspective, home can be the place that everyone will return to after death.
These two paradigms create very different ideas about the environment. As George B.
Handley argues, “[i]f heaven is the desired other sphere, then the earth is a mere
waystation, its destiny irrelevant to ours, and we are ontological pilgrims on our way out.
This is perhaps why some ecocritics have criticized the telluric despair at the heart of
Christian belief and its seeming incompatibility with environmental ethics”(516; see
also White 3–14). For Hogan, spirituality creates a sense of oneness with the natural
world, so that what happens to it or anything within it happens to us because we are the
same and the Earth is our home. Houses in Hogan’s novels tend to have permeable
boundaries with the natural world. As Melani Bleck suggests, “Hogan uses this theme
[of nature transgressing house borders] to further her argument that clearly demar-
cated boundaries between the man-made walls and the outside do not exist in nature,
and therefore do not exist in Native American experience”(32). For Robinson, we are
caught in an existential dilemma in which we are simultaneously part of and not part of
the natural world—her Christian understanding suggests another world in which we
are truly at home. So in our earthly manifestation we are both exile and native at once,
and our anxieties are often a reflection of this dissonant and paradoxical state. And
although our earthly existence will come to an end, we will live forever in this true
home, or its alternative. However, Sylvie creates the same permeable boundary between
the inside and outside of the house as characters in Hogan’s novels, and the movement
of the water during the flooding in Housekeeping problematizes any easy demarcation
between the two. Thus Robinson has a more complex relationship between her
environmental politics and her narrative choices than an easy nod to Christian para-
digms could suggest. With both of these novels, a seemingly definitive first ending is
simply a precursor to an open-ended second one, as reflected in the idea of the
resurrection (in Robinson’s case) or simply the continuity of time (in Hogan’s).
Endings need not be definitive, only transformative.
The items each house contains are as important to the respective critiques of Anglo-
bourgeois domesticity as is the relationship between the inside and the outside of the
structure. Grace Blanket, the woman murdered at the beginning of Mean Spirit,has
embraced the trappings of Anglo-bourgeois housekeeping, the very concept from which
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Sylvie and Ruthie are cast out. After Grace is killed we are given a description of the inside
of her house:
It was an icy palace of crystal, and European to the ceiling, even though Grace herself had never
cut her long black braids, and had preferred moccasins to the spool-heeled shoes she wore that
last Sunday on her way to church. Grace, with her placid cork face, had lived surrounded by
rooms of cut glass, and despite the lightness of that glass, the entire house felt heavy and ghostly
to Lettie, and despite the outside heat, the house was cold as a cave, and silent. (48)
Although the performance of Grace’s identity suggests an engagement with Osage
and European elements that seems to address Hogan’s central question of cultural
negotiation, the tomblike inside of the house contains items suggesting the cold,
dangerous alienation implied, the novel suggests, in Western rationalism.
1
The
space is not a liminal area of cultural negotiation. It is a tomb.
In Housekeeping, the items inside the house play a critical role in suggesting Sylvie’s
renegotiation of the conventions of middle-class domesticity from her perspective as a
transient. Sylvie’s attempt to present a sense of order to the community conveys an
awkward misunderstanding (or refusal) of its expectations, particularly when ladies
from the community begin to visit ostensibly to help, but obviously to keep the household
under surveillance:
The parlor was full of the newspapers and magazines Sylvie brought home. They were stacked
pretty neatly, considering that some of them had been rolled, perhaps to swap flies.
Nevertheless, they took up the end of the room where the fireplace had been. Then there
were the cans stacked along the wall opposite the couch. Like the newspapers, they were stacked
to the ceiling. Nevertheless, they took up considerable floor space. Of course we could have
made other arrangements, if we had planned to entertain, but we did not. The visitors glanced at
the cans and papers as if they thought Sylvie must consider such things appropriate to a parlor.
That was ridiculous. We had simply ceased to consider that room a parlor, since, until we had
attracted the attention of these ladies, no one ever came to call. (180)
Here, again, we have a house filled with items that are assumed by the occupants to
represent a particular kind of homemaking, but which are awkward and out of
place. Both novels use these images, I would argue, not only to suggest something
eccentric in the respective characters, but also to suggest something corrupt at the
heart of Anglo-bourgeois homemaking and its emphasis on accumulating things.
Gunilla Florby argues that Sylvie’s housekeeping blurs the line between nature and
domesticity, ultimately leading to Ruthie’s renunciation of domesticity and move
into transient life. Ruthie’s narrative voice here, and its rendering as absurd the idea
that they did not know piles of recyclables were inappropriate for a parlor, presents
an interesting mediating perspective between Sylvie and the reader. Ruthie suggests
a choice at the heart of the domestic eccentricity—not an inadequacy or pathology.
Sylvie herself says little in the novel.
Later, as the two women flee the house, Ruthie looks back and reflects, “Now
truly we were cast out to wander, and there was an end to housekeeping”(209).
1
Interestingly, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 novel North and South, the main character describes the drawing
room of an acquaintance as lacking because “[h]ere were no mirrors, not even a scrap of glass to reflect the light,
and answer the same purpose as water in a landscape”(79).
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They could not leave the house for neighbors to go through, “could not leave that
house, which was stashed like a brain, a reliquary, like a brain, its relics to be pawed
and sorted and parceled out among the needy and the parsimonious of Fingerbone.
Imagine the blank light of Judgment falling on you suddenly. It would be like that”
(209). Religious imagery blends with expressions of familial loyalty as represented
through items left to burn, “household things of purely sentimental value”(209).
The inside of the house is like the inside of the family, which is like the inside of a
brain—structures ever more private and inappropriate for examination by the
community’s prying eyes. This act is not, “wild and pranking”(209) as Ruthie
suggests it could look. It is an act of protection and survival.
One could argue that Mean Spirit is not a domestic novel at all, but is
instead a historical one; however, I would argue that the central problem of
stealing land from Osage tribal members represents a direct assault on tribal
understandings of home and family that includeandexceedthestructureof
the house to encompass the natural environment. The Greycloud house is
bombed as retribution for acts of civil disobedience and to break the spirit of
the Greycloud family so that they will give up their land to the whites of the
town. After the son-in-law, Floyd, discovers the men setting the bomb and gets
everyone up and out of the house, there is a pause in the narrative as the
family sits in the wagon “as if suspended. Those few moments became centu-
ries”(374). The house then explodes and “rose up in flames, wood flying
outward, the place collapsing, the broken glass catching the firelight for an
instant as the fire ascended in a blast of heat”(375). The family drives away,
breaking ties with the terrorist white community. They look back at the house
in the final paragraph: “No one spoke. But they were alive. They carried
generations along with them. …The night was on fire with their pasts and
they were alive”(375). Life, in its most basic manifestation, suggests unlimited
narrative possibility. The ending imposed on them is no ending at all—it is, like
the Christian resurrection, a transformation that returns the family to the
tribe’straditionalhome.
But perhaps we should take a moment and ask if it is fair to create a dialogue
between these two authors at all. Many of the repressive practices taken out on
Native peoples have at their root attempts to assimilate the populations into middle-
class Anglo ideals—boarding schools, forced urban relocations, forced sterilizations
can all be read as ways to eradicate or submerge Native people into the Anglo
community. So how can textual kinship be suggested between the texts, even if
motivated by an ideal of liberatory feminist principles, without potentially subsum-
ing difference into a potentially devouring Western mindset? The first move in this
process is to problematize the process of empathetic identification and embrace an
understanding of radical alterity and ideological otherness. In a fascinating article,
“Ethical Reading and Resistant Texts,”about Anglo and Native reading practices,
Patricia Linton argues that
[t]he assumption that empathic identification is desirable or even possible may co-exist with a
certain arrogance, an unwillingness to acknowledge a world in which the reader’s experience is
marginalized or entirely irrelevant. At best, an earnest desire to connect may be dangerously
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naïve, because it evades the recognition that if difference is never absolute, it may nonetheless
be overwhelmingly important. (33)
One could argue that this assumption of the possibility of empathetic identification
can lead exactly to the attitudes evident in Hogan’s novel itself. As Alix Casteel
argues of the Native people in Mean Spirit,“the Indians lack all subjectivity; they are
objects to be cleared or hunted”(50). To understand ideological and symbolic
resonances between the two texts is not to suggest absolute sameness. It is instead to
address the contested liminal places in these two communities under examination
in the texts.
The structural commonality of ending the narrative with destroyed domestic
structures, which then lead readers to reflect on the limitations of Western domestic
imperatives, licenses an examination of their common project. In addition, it
provides a compelling perspective on both authors’later works. The destruction
of the domestic in these two initial novels is followed by attempts in both author’s
future novels—and I am only dealing with their novels here, though each author
writes in multiple genres—to resolve the unfinalized endings of their respective first
texts and heal the narrative trauma, as it were, precipitated in the exploding house.
For Hogan, I would argue, in each of her four novels we find ourselves presented
with the same problem of how Native communities, and in particular women in
those communities, are supposed to carve out a life for themselves on the boundary
between white and Native culture. Each of these novels begins at a place where
Native and Western communities are in conflict. In each of the novels, I would also
argue, the only place of peace and serenity becomes traditional Native culture. As
Ellen L. Arnold argues, engaging with William Bevis’s essay “American Indian
Novels: Homing In,”“novels by Native Americans are characterized by incentric
‘homing-in’plots that take their protagonists home to community and tradition for
recovery of identity and healing of spirit”(284). This is what we can see in each of
Hogan’s novels: central characters that work to bridge or survive the clash of
cultures end up finding solace in traditional communities. Her novels each envision
some kind of positive culturally liminal space, but which ultimately find their way
“home”as that term is represented in Native narratives—a blend of traditional
culture, wise elders, and locations geographically separate from white communities.
Hogan herself aligns her own understanding with this narrative pattern. In the
essay “First People”she says the following:
[w]hat finally turned me back toward the older traditions of my own and other Native peoples
was the inhumanity of the Western world, the places—both inside and out—where that culture’s
knowledge and language don’t go, and the despair, even desperation, it has spawned. We live, I
see now, by different stories, the Western mind and the indigenous. (10)
Hogan’s narrative trajectory mirrors this political position. An ethical political
position in response to the inhumanity of the Western world necessitates a turning
away. This is the essence of a radical political position—radicalism requires a
substantive restructuring of the ideological and societal structures of the current
system. Hogan’s novels are radical in the sense that their narratives continually
reinforce the position that structural integration with white Western culture is not
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possible and, I would suggest, is unethical. To create links with an ethically and
environmentally bankrupt structure is a life-destroying choice.
2
In Robinson’s later novels, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Gilead and its sequel,
Home, it seems as if we are trying to find our way back into that house destroyed in
the first novel. In addition, the character of Sylvie is the lens through which we can
create a path through the series of novels. In Gilead she becomes Lila, the young
wife of the elderly narrator/preacher John Ames who mysteriously wanders into his
church one day. Seemingly without a past or history, Lila appears and takes up a
place as wife and mother, but retains the mysterious sense of being an outsider like
Sylvie in the earlier novel. Ames presents his impressions of his wife to his son, to
whom the entire narrative is directed:
She came in during the first prayer and sat in the last pew and looked up at me, and from that
moment hers was the only face I saw. I heard a man say once that Christians worship sorrow.
That is by no means true. But we do believe there is a sacred mystery in it, it’s fair to say that.
There is something in her face I have always felt I must be sufficient to, as if there is a truth in it
that tests the meaning of what I say. (157)
And also, like Sylvie, she does not quite fit in to the community: “Ihaveoftenworried
a little about the way the people in church act toward her. She is distant, but she
cannot help that. So they are distant”(157). Lila is like a visiting angel to Ames—an
itinerant Angel of the House—and our understanding of her arrives through other
characters’impressions of her. As with Sylvie, we are never in her head. And because
of her silence we are left with a spectral sense of her coming into Reverend Ames’s
life and bearing his son, only to follow another path at the end of the narrative. She
has no articulated individual self in the narrative beyond mysterious allusions.
Home,aparallelnoveltoGilead, follows the story of Ames’sfriendBoughton’sfamily
and follows the narrative trajectory of the prodigal son story. Home is told through the
narrative voice and perspective of the daughter, Glory, who has returned home after a
failed engagement. Glory is approximately Lila’s age—somewhere in her thirties—and
althoughwearemuchclosertoherbecausehervoiceistheonewehear,weneverlearn
all the details of her failed engagement. We do, however, learn that she will inherit the
family home, which feels to her like a kind of curse on the rest of a life that she sees
stretching out terrifyingly before her in the small town of Gilead. Once again, a woman
seems trapped in the history of home space and expectation—areluctantAngelas
opposed to Lila’s willing submission to the role.
In Gaston Bachelard’sThe Poetics of Space, the author asserts that “A house
constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability”(19).
The final “or”of this statement is particularly interesting, suggesting that the reality
2
In the Introduction to The English Novel: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton talks about the fallacy of “middle way”
rhetoric. He explains that in liberal ideology often people will resolve disagreement by arguing that the “truth is
somewhere in the middle.”Eagleton argues that this rhetorical move is ultimately a conservative capitulation to the
status quo. His example is the problem of spousal abuse. One end of the spectrum says it is unacceptable, the other
says it is utterly understandable, and, in liberal bourgeois thinking, the truth would be somewhere in the middle.
This result is not the case—spousal violence is never acceptable. Sometimes the extreme end of the spectrum is the
right answer. Recent remarks by Barack Obama chastising journalists for “middle way”rhetoric, more commonly
termed “he said/she said”in journalistic parlance, suggest the current applicability of the concern.
258 Laura Callanan
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of the stability is not as important as the idea that it exists. “And”would seem to
work better with his subsequent discussion, but instead we have “or,”which leaves us
with an indeterminate statement about whether this image of the house is actually a
symbol of stability or simply an illusion of stability. But if the construction of the
Angel in the House can be seen as all or in part resulting from the constituting body
of images provided by the house, then blowing up the house can be read as blowing
up of the boundaries of the construction, allowing the woman to exist outside of it
and its social ramifications in order to make possible a differently constructed self.
In both novels, however, this rendering of possibility is only a qualified success. The
ends of both novels are not happy or even positive—but they do allow for possible
survival in the face of eradicating structures and ideologies. As Martha Ravitz argues
of Housekeeping,“Robinson’s metaphor of ‘being put out of house’expresses not
only the renunciation of conventionality but also the assumption of metaphysical
liberty”(664).
So how do we bring these ideas together—the Angel and the House? What happens
when, like Lila, the itinerant Angel has no House? Virginia Woolf in her 1931 speech
“Professions for Women”discusses the aftermath of her famous call to kill the Angel in
the House. She says, “Theseweretwooftheadventuresofmyprofessionallife.Thefirst—
killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the
truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any
woman has solved it yet.”Here, perhaps, we have the first instance of the conundrum of
the women’s narrative that I see so clearly articulated in Hogan’s and Robinson’s
novelistic trajectories. What is the truth of a woman’s“own experiences as a body”(
243–45)?Istheemphasisonthebodyinfeministcriticism a problem? Instead of looking
in, should we perhaps be looking out? Certainly this is a fraught statement in the context
of the Angel in the House, which symbolizes the destructive ideal of selflessness and self-
abdication. Is there a stance, perhaps as articulated in the Environmental Justice
Movement, in which one lives in dynamic relationship with the living world? When, as
Hogan suggests in an epigraph to this article, our sense of time moves beyond the
assumption of an ending to focus instead on howwecreateaproductiveandsustainable
future? When individuality is continually in dialogue with a renewed understanding of
community/culture/environment? When one is more than simply oneself?
In “Femme Foetal,”Siân Mile argues that Robinson sidesteps the traps implied
in the feminist strategy of reclaiming the body as a site of subjectivity. Instead, Mile
argues, Robinson argues for a merging of subjectivities outside of individual bound-
aries, creating connections between lives and objects instead of individuality,
thereby rejecting ideas of sexuality, corporeality, maternity, and individual bodily
integrity. I would argue that rather than rejecting these things, Robinson simply
does not privilege them over other spiritual, natural, and intellectual experiences.
Nor does Robinson fully reject gender—just that we are not used to seeing it as non-
determinate of an individual’s sense of identity. And it is in that narrative conflation
that Robinson’s work overlaps most profoundly with Hogan’s. It is true that Hogan
deals with the body in Solar Storms as a text of trauma and abuse, and in People of the
Whale as a site of racial and cultural blending, but overt sexuality as a narrative
priority is absent in both authors’works.
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So do these two first novels get it right by realizing that, unlike Woolf, it is not
the Angel we need to kill—just her house? Does this take us back to Betty Friedan’s
examination of the suburban housewife trapped in her castle, whose resentment
and rage is so beautifully rendered in the character of Betty Draper in Mad Men?Is
our cultural addiction to that show a sign of a deeply felt need to reexamine these
issues at the root of second-wave feminism? And if we kill the Angel without destroy-
ing the body of images and constructions in which she is situated, do we, in a sense,
blame the victim rather than the literal and ideological structures in which she is
produced, functions, and thrives? To destroy the house—the domestic—that icon of
bourgeois American identity—is to leave the middle-class woman adrift. After all, as
Judith Fryer argues, “The structures that contain-or fail to contain-women are the
houses in which they live”(64).
If the house is destroyed, then, what happens to housekeeping or familial
relationships? Robinson defines housekeeping as activity: “At a certain level house-
keeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which, together, make the world salubrious,
savory, and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a
household as precisely sacramental. It is the sad tendency of domesticity—as of piety
—to contract, and of grace to decay into rigor, and peace into tedium”(“My
Western Roots”171). Sylvie’s behavior, and later Lila’s and Glory’s, then, should
be evaluated on the basis of action rather than location—relationship rather than
role. Marcia Aldrich argues in “The Poetics of Transience”that “Sylvie’s house-
keeping privileges natural flux and as such reverses the oppositional hierarchy at
work in the dominant ideology of housekeeping”(138). Sylvie rejects the common
signifiers of appropriate housekeeping—particular foods, schedules, priorities—in
favor of relationships and communication with the two girls.
Is the house a collection of images that entrap and construct a particular way of
life, as Bachelard and early second-wave feminists such as Friedan argue? Are the
strange collections of items within houses in the two original novels, as well as the
ways in which the line between inside and outside of these houses is transgressed
and policed, related to the question Woolf leaves open about the truth of her
experience “as a body”? Can we read the trajectories created by these novels—
novels by women living in very different corners of American culture—as in fact
telling us something about the experience of women in contemporary American
life? Has the opportunity presented by the ideological explosions of the 1960s and
1970s ended up with us sitting right back where we started, relatively speaking,
negotiating our identities in relationships to the structures containing and con-
structing traditional middle-class standards of happiness? Is third-wave feminism a
ruse, as many argue, substituting overt sexuality for real political engagement? Does
it, as Judith Butler has argued, drop the political out of her work by dropping the
term “compulsory”out of the idea gender as performance? Are we, like Glory,
inheriting the house with mixed feelings, basking in the safety of its familiarity at
the same time that we are suffocating in its limitations?
I argue that blowing up the house in both of these novels is a politically revolutionary
narrative act. Even in Mean Spirit where it is an act of terrorism perpetrated by a corrupt
and homicidal white community, rejecting the house and going “home”to the traditional
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Hill people represents abandoning the attempt to live in harmony with the white
community and moving into the solace and healing of the traditional Native community.
The ending stands as an indictment of the white culture that perpetuates a murderous
paradigm for human community. Since those early novels, the works of Robinson and
Hogan have struggled with what comes next, as has American feminism after its second
wave, ideologically, blew up the house.
Endings are always at the same time about beginnings—they shape the struc-
ture of a narrative and tell us its limits and boundaries:
It makes no difference whether the action is raveling or unraveling its way from past to future:
the ending with respect to the beginning is always an image of the future. The reason that
endings are often boldly assertive, therefore, is that they are merely assertive—for we are never
privileged to experience what will happen next until it happens. Every narrative ending stated as
decisive is actually prophetic. (Welsh 11)
As Alexander Welsh argues, endings are about desire rather than historical/natural fate
or arbitrary randomness. Robinson and Hogan blow up the house and allow the women
to flee into different lives and identities. However, each novelist’s later novels do not bring
into realization the narrative possibilities of this problematic traumatic rupture. Is this a
failure of imagination? Shall we read this as Susan Lanser might suggest in “Toward a
Feminist Narratology,”thatis,thatthereis“aplotbehindthewomen’s‘plotless’narra-
tive”which it is the reader/critic’s job to discern (688)? Must we read behind and
through the ostensible words and picture to find the political substance of the message?
I am not sure that we ever realize the creative potential released by the endings of these
two novels or by the ideological ruptures of the 1960s and 1970s. The perpetual return to
the same story in itself is a mark of a traumatic relationship—goingbacktothesame
problem and working it through again and again. The political aspect of these endings
resides in their lack of closure, even as they stage narrative closure in the destruction of
Western domesticity. In Brechtian fashion, Hogan and Robinson both suggest questions
for which their narratives provide no answers as yet. The ending to the story that begins to
resolve the trauma of the history of Native genocide or the traumatic and normalized
trauma of gender socialization remains to be written.
3
In Hogan, the essential problem of
her novels is how Anglo and Native communities can forge some kind of relationship
either on the cultural or individual level, and the answer implied is that they cannot and
they should not. However, at least thus far, she keeps returning to the question, suggest-
ing a stubborn refusal to reject the possibility that some kind of reconciliation can be
forged.
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3
I am indebted to Greg Forter’s work here for the idea of normalized social trauma.
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