The Likeness of Modernism in Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction

ABSTRACT

This paper examines Marilynne Robinson’s view of metaphor and her deployment of metaphor in the novels Lila and Housekeeping for a model of how modernism functions in new writing. Robinson sees the metaphor as fundamental for literary imagination, precisely because it aims at understanding even as it demonstrates the limits of language and comprehension. Her fiction, specifically in her dramatisation of metaphor as a “likeness” and in the metaphor of the permeable, unstable house, participates in metamodernist oscillation, although largely devoid of the attendant despair of modernism and the irony of postmodernism. The metaphors of the house and the gendered body—especially for drifters like Lila and the main characters of Housekeeping—act as modernist markers of form, a form that negotiates fragments and wholes, interior and exterior, itinerancy and home.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Robinson, Absence of Mind, 20.

2 Ibid., 22.

3 Schaub and Robinson, 232.

4 Ibid., 250.

5 Ibid., 243–4.

6 Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 10.

7 Ibid., 14.

8 Schaub and Robinson, 251.

9 Fay and Robinson, n.p.

10 Schaub and Robinson, 239.

11 Ibid., 244.

12 Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 273.

13 Robinson, Gilead, 238.

14 Schaub and Robinson, 240–1.

15 James, 15.

16 Ibid., 15.

17 James, 13; Kelly; Eshelman.

18 Vermeulen and Van den Akker, 6.

19 For an excellent discussion of the ethical relevance of literary uncertainty, see Serpell, Seven Modes of Uncertainty.

20 Robinson, Lila, 68.

21 Ibid., 110.

22 Ibid., 176.

23 Ibid., 68.

24 Ibid., 68.

25 Ryan, 61.

26 Robinson, Lila, 68.

27 Ibid., 82.

28 Ibid., 68.

29 Robinson, Housekeeping, 53.

30 Ibid., 131.

31 Robinson, Lila, 68.

32 Ibid., 107.

33 Vermeulen and Van den Akker, 11.

34 Robinson, Housekeeping, 99.

35 Ibid., 155.

36 Ibid., 158–9.

37 Robinson, Lila, 68.

38 Ibid., 68.

39 Robinson, Housekeeping, 159.