Delinquent Housekeeping: Transforming the Regulations of Keeping House

Sarah Orne Jewett's Deephaven and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping portray the quiet lives of rural women involved in the daily matters of keeping house. The trope of the ship punctuates these scenes of domesticity, and through this image Jewett and Robinson question, subvert, and revise conventional ideas about how women relate to space. For them, the ship functions in much the way Foucault describes in his essay "Different Spaces": It "is a piece of floating space, a placeless place" (184–85). Foucault's ship is unique because it traverses the boundaries between fluidity and stability, interior and exterior, place and placelessness. Jewett's and Robinson's use of the ship can be read in a similar way, as a creation of habitability—how subjects make space their own. Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, uses reading and writing as a model for habitability, claiming that readers mutate the author's text in order to make it "habitable" (xxi). I take this idea a step further to argue that writers use their texts to mutate space and, in so doing, make space habitable. Habitability emerges in texts when space fulfills the subject's psychological, emotional, and social needs. It goes beyond traditional ideas of home that rely heavily on feelings of personal comfort, security, and stability and incorporates the inherent flux and conflict in the way that subjects relate to space.

Tracing the figure of the ship allows Deephaven and Housekeeping to be read as a dialogue about the potential for habitability within domestic space. Each of these novels underscores how the ship functions as a site of (re)imagining the role of domesticity in women's lives. Jewett links flexible spatial practices with fluid gender roles and lays the groundwork to redefine domesticity. Robinson uses a similar idea to sabotage the very definitions and regulations of the domestic, creating an ungrounded domesticity, a domesticity that is not situated in one particular location or site.¹ These novels converge around the representation of spatial metamorphoses. Above all, they suggest that habitability is not tied to a particular kind of space or location but rather to a relationship between the subject and space. Because each approaches domesticity from a distinct historical and cultural context, together they challenge the very foundations of domesticity and its relation to habitability.²

Jewett's first novel is situated firmly in the genre of literary regionalism, but instead of celebrating a personal, affective connection to a particular locale, Jewett just as often critiques this sense of place. Deephaven details Kate Lancaster and Helen Denis's summer visit to the Maine village of Deephaven, where they keep the house of Kate's grandaunt, Mrs. Brandon. The primary spatial crisis is the tension between a rooted sense of place and an ungrounded sense of place. Jewett argues that a more flexible approach to occupying space produces a more sustainable habitability.

The tale of Miss Sally Chauncey, "the last survivor of one of the most aristocratic old colonial families" of the village of East Parish (126), serves as a textual warning of the dangers of a limited and stable domesticity. Miss Chauncey is notable because of her intense attachment to her house. After a series of family tragedies, she "los[es] her reason" and is institutionalized at a nearby hospital. When she regains her sanity, she returns home, where she discovers that another family member has sold all of her family's belongings to pay bills. At the sight of her empty house, Miss Chauncey descends, again, into a mild form of insanity, but this time she refuses to leave. The girl who looks after her explains, "She has been alone many years, and no one can persuade her to leave the old house, where she seems to be contented, and does not realize her troubles; though she lives mostly in the past, and has little idea of the present, except in her house affairs" (127). Miss Chauncey insists on living in the house even if it falls down around her. In fact, her connection to her home space is so strong that...