Ontologies of Interdependence, the Sacred, and Health Care: Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Home

Abstract

Marilynne Robinson's two most recent novels offer a compelling ethical framework for contemporary readers. After reviewing the shift in how her seminal novel Housekeeping has been received, this article demonstrates how Robinson's more recent fiction focuses on responsibility, generosity, and interdependence, all founded in a system of belief her protagonists have accepted. Robinson's work invites readers to reconsider humanistic concerns in ways that speak back to neoliberal hegemony and postmodern relativism.

Keywords::

• Marilynne Robinson
• contemporary fiction
• neoliberal ontology

Notes

Notes

¹ In a much earlier and less polemical treatment of Robinson's cultural position, Thomas Schaub called her “nostalgic,” but he uses the term more neutrally than Deresiewicz or Douglas. Douglas argues that Gilead presents a too-sanitized version of Christianity, one scrubbed of its complicity with the ills it denounces; I agree with Douglas that Robinson's Christianity is idealized, but her hopes for it are part of what give her novels their imaginative (rather than truth-telling) force. Deresiewicz questions Robinson's nonfiction for its focus on primarily white, Protestant figures who contributed to American progress, but I wonder why Deresiewicz believes Robinson must account for all participants in historical change, rather than the tradition she believes has been unfairly maligned.

² Joseph Stiglitz provides a concise definition of the Washington Consensus in Globalization and Its Discontents: the term refers to “the consensus between the IMF [International Monetary Fund], the World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury about the ‘right’ policies for developing countries,” a unified belief rooted in “the free market mantra of the 1980s” (16). Because of the major influence of the U.S. and these two economic engines on economic policy worldwide, the Consensus affected nations weak and strong, making deregulation and other pro-growth policies the global norm.

³ On this point, see also Cyrus R. K. Patell, Negative Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology, which traces how Emersonian individualism was adapted to New Right libertarianism.

⁴ In insisting on this asymmetricality, I, of course, echo Emmanuel Levinas. Rebecca Painter has also indicated that Robinson's ethics have Levinasian overtones. While she has insisted that Robinson advocates a “respect” for the Other, however, I believe “respect” implies a more level playing field between self and other than I think Levinas allows. As her references are as brief as mine, I do not want to make much of the discrepancy.

⁵ Christopher Leise discusses Ames's grandfather as an example of the New England tradition of Calvinism, one more militant than its Midwestern cousins. He makes a compelling argument for Robinson's relationship to the religious history from which she borrows.

⁶ See John Cassidy, How Markets Fail, or Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. The latter won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating neoclassical economics has had a profoundly misguided faith in a human's ability to make rational self-interested decisions.

⁷ Stefan Mattessich locates a similar interrogating impulse in Housekeeping, though he sees it as more deconstructive than I do here. As the argument will show, the uncertainty is constructive for Ames and, to a lesser extent, Glory.

⁸ I want to thank my colleague and dear friend Adam Haley for first introducing me to this distinction.

⁹ He reuses the phrase “that is a remarkable thing to consider” or close variations of it five times in Gilead (45, 49, 136, 154, 193), an expression that seems his default response to intellectual gridlock. Its multiple appearances attest to how important Robinson believes this characteristic to be.

¹⁰ Many of the essays in Robinson's Death of Adam (1998) and When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012) reiterate this claim.

¹¹ Throughout Absence of Mind (2011), Robinson targets Darwinism as one of the many deterministic discourses that reduce the human to biological or psychological impulses. I lack the space to trace all her points here: for the current argument, however, it is essential to realize that Robinson mistrusts any science claiming to explain the human, because for her, its resistance to reduction is its defining feature.

¹² The popularity of Freakonomics-style analyses of human behavior, which explain why certain practices occur (or do not occur) because of hidden incentives, speaks to how embedded this belief is in American society. Again, Robinson sees these as a byproduct of the contemporary willingness to reduce the human to a limited number of determining influences. See Absence of Mind for an extended version of this argument.

¹³ My former colleague Jeffrey Pence pointed out that this vote might seem benign to us now, but Eisenhower's actions during the Little Rock Nine incident are perhaps a motivating factor in Ames's decision (and a clue about his sense of how civil rights should be handled, though he does not speak up about them).

¹⁴ McCann and Szalay's response to McClure argues that pointing exclusively to epistemological limits is no longer an act with any political potency in and of itself. They see the failure of postsecularism in its refusal to allow any form of organization that it views as dogmatic, whereas Robinson shows no fear of dogma.

¹⁵ See the interview with Schaub for extended conversation on this point.

¹⁶ Schaub's 1995 essay critiques Robinson's claims for the existence of any apolitical space. To claim to be outside politics is, of course, a political claim. The argument this article makes, ultimately, considers whether such a gesture might still be progressive in spite of its investment in tradition.

¹⁷ In making this point, I follow Mahmood Saba, who forcefully argues that Western feminists must not view assertions of “agency” as only those actions that fit a Western counterhegemonic pattern. For Saba, agency, if it exists at all, must be understood contextually.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey Gonzalez

Jeffrey Gonzalez received his PhD from Penn State in August 2011, and since then, he spent a year teaching English at Oberlin College before becoming an Assistant Professor of English at The Borough of Manhattan Community College. His work focuses on the ways American literature after 1989 interacts with changes in the political, economic, and social spheres, especially with regard to possibilities for progressive change.