No Country for Men

Housekeeping opens with a vague abstraction of the narrator’s grandfather, Edmund Foster, who on a whim, ended up in Fingerbone. As a consequence of what can only be considered a rash chimerical decision, fate placed the following two generations of Fosters in the small town as well. For a novel with such a scarcity of male characters, it’s rather ironic that a man is single-handedly responsible for all of them being in this position. Had Edmund Foster not arrived in Fingerbone, Sylvia would not have married him, nor would she have stayed after his death to raise their three daughters, and Helen would not have chosen this town to drop off her own daughters, and Sylvie would not have had to return to raise them.

The first thing that came to my mind was that in the aftermath of the unfortunate train accident that killed Edmund, there are two other widows who decide to leave the town. Suddenly it occurred to me that these women may not only have left Fingerbone to escape reminders of the tragedy that took place, but also because their husbands were the only things that had been keeping them there in the first place. Sylvia decides to remain, but deals with the loss of her husband by avoiding the subject for the rest of her life, giving us an even more nebulous impression of his character. Even more enigmatic are the portrayals of Helen and Sylvie’s husbands, only one of whom we are granted with a physical description. Due to the lack of male figures and abundance of female figures in their lives, one would think that Ruth and Lucille would spend their childhood and adolescence searching for a surrogate father, yet it’s just the opposite. Time and time again we see them defining and redefining the image of their late mother and evaluating the existing maternal presences in their lives, searching for one that will fit each of their respective sensibilities. In Sylvia’s household, the lack of a father caused her daughters to start paying more attention to her in a way they had not before. With Ruth and Lucille’s circumstances, the arrival of Sylvie made them optimistic about finally having a home and a mother. Unfortunately (for Lucille), the very aspect that is associated with women of this time and consequently most of the peripheral female characters in the novel -- the home -- is absent in Sylvie’s current way of living. To her, becoming Ruth and Lucille’s guardian is accidental protocol, and in terms of housekeeping, she mentions that she only hoards tin cans because she “considered accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping”. Housekeeping itself is about appearances, upkeep, and public perception, all of which are foreign to Sylvie the transient who has led a life in the shadows. Similarly, this lifestyle does not fit the mindset of Ruth who consciously and subconsciously avoids drawing attention to herself.

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered the possibility of a feminist presentation, but to dismiss the exclusively female selection of characters altogether would be incredibly naive. Whether or not it was intended to make a statement, clearly such discretion was a conscious choice made by the author. Now that I have finished the book, I think it’s more accurate to say that at the very least this singularity paved the way for a more focused and pure analysis of female relationships.