Understanding Marilynne Robinson

By Alexander John Engebretson

A comprehensive study of the award-winning Midwestern author of fiction and nonfiction

Alex Engebretson offers the first comprehensive study of Marilynne Robinson's fiction and essays to date, providing an overview of the author's life, themes, and literary and religious influences. Understanding Marilynne Robinson examines this author of three highly acclaimed novels and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Orange Prize for fiction, and the National Humanities Medal. Through close readings of the novels and essay collections, Engebretson uncovers the unifying elements of Robinson's work: a dialogue with liberal Protestantism, an emphasis on regional settings, the marked influence of nineteenth-century American literature, and the theme of home.

The study begins with Housekeeping, Robinson's haunting debut novel, which undertakes a feminist revision of the Western genre. Twenty-four years later Robinson began a literary project that would bring her national recognition, three novels set in a small, rural Iowa town. The first was Gilead, which took up the major American themes of race, the legacy of the Civil War, and the tensions between secular and religious lives. Two more Gilead novels followed, Home and Lila, both of which display Robinson's gift for capturing the mysterious dynamics of sin and grace.

In Understanding Marilynne Robinson, Engebretson also reviews her substantial body of non-fiction, which demonstrates a dazzling intellectual range, from the contemporary science-religion debates, to Shakespeare, to the fate of liberal democracy. Throughout this study Engebretson makes the argument for Marilynne Robinson as an essential, deeply unfashionable, visionary presence within today's literary scene.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781611178036

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Marilynne Robinson

Nowadays, wrote the critic James Wood, when so many writers are acclaimed as great stylists, it’s hard to make anyone notice when you praise a writer’s prose. Yet there is "something remarkable about the writing in Gilead (Acts of Devotion). There is the grandfather who could make me feel as though he had poked me with the stick, just by looking at me (29). And the cat, trying to escape the embrace of a boy, whose eyes are described as patiently furious (90). Wood concludes these stylistic notes with a claim that Robinson’s words have a spiritual force that’s very rare in contemporary fiction (Acts of Devotion").

Perhaps James Wood—and perhaps he alone—would enjoy a volume entirely devoted to the analysis of Marilynne Robinson’s style. Such a volume might be justified from the perspective Wood suggests, namely that her words are the source of her value, the spiritual force many readers have found in her writing. The link between style and value may be true. Indeed, it is my belief that the relative popularity of Robinson’s fiction has much to do with the music of her prose, what today’s fiction writers are apt to call voice. It is arguable that she has done more than any American writer since Hemingway to realize the expressive potential of ordinary words. Yet a volume on style alone is undesirable for obvious reasons; it would be tedious and would exclude much of what is original and interesting in Robinson. In the pages ahead, there will be occasions to notice stylistic features, in particular the evolution of her style from Housekeeping to the later Gilead novels, but these will be brief vistas on our tour through Robinson’s complete works.

The theme for now is Robinson’s originality, her difference from other authors of the contemporary moment. Such a topic requires us to leave style behind and shift into the realm of ideas. It is in cultural history, biography, politics, aesthetics, and religion that we can begin to uncover the sources of Robinson’s most distinctive qualities.

The words unfashionable and contrarian are often applied to Robinson, and it is easy to see why. No matter one’s political, religious, or aesthetic persuasion, one is likely to find something disagreeable about her opinions and attitudes: she is a woman critical of feminist scholarship; a political progressive and cultural traditionalist; a liberal Protestant who admires John Calvin; an environmentalist who was sued by Greenpeace; a celebrated novelist who has published more essays than fiction; a domestic novelist and novelist of ideas; a critic of modernism and a champion of the American nineteenth century. She once described her archaic self as nothing other than a latter-day pagan whose intuitions were not altogether at odds with, as it happened, Presbyterianism, and so were simply polished to that shape (Adam 229). The critic Cathleen Schine put it simply: Marilynne Robinson … really is not like any other writer. She really isn’t (A Triumph).

A Life, from Idaho to Iowa

She was born Marilynne Summers, in the far-west town of Sandpoint, Idaho. Her father, John J. Summers, worked in the lumber industry along the Idaho-Washington border, moving the family often to follow the work, through towns like Coolin, Sagle, and Talache. Since her father was away for long stretches of time, Marilynne spent much of her childhood in the company of her mother, Ellen, and her precocious older brother, David.

By her own admission, she was an introverted and bookish child, attempting her first reading of Moby Dick at age nine. Despite the provincialism of her upbringing, she acquired a good education at the public high school in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, which she would later characterize as the acquisition of odds and ends—Dido pining on her flaming couch, Lewis and Clark mapping the wilderness (When I Was 87), as well as encounters with Emily Dickinson, Horace, Virgil, Cicero, and, most crucially, the Bible. She wrote poetry as a young girl, mainly of the melancholy variety. When I was a girl too young to give the matter any thought at all, I used to be overcome by the need to write poetry whenever there was a good storm, that is, heavy rain and wind enough to make the house smell like the woods (The World 121). Although her family was Presbyterian, religion was more an inherited intuition than an actual fact (Fay). Her upbringing and education in the West would mark her as an outsider once she left for the East, where she would discover that the hardest work in the world—it may in fact be impossible—is to persuade easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling (When I Was 86).

After graduating from high school in 1962, she followed her brother to Rhode Island, where she attended the women’s college Pembroke, now part of Brown University. She studied English, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century American literature, and absorbed the authors who would profoundly influence her: Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. She had an epiphany in the library one day, which she would later call her escape:

When I was a sophomore in college, taking a course in American philosophy, I went to the library and read an assigned text, Jonathan Edwards’s Doctrine of Original Sin Defended. There is a long footnote in this daunting treatise that discusses the light of the moon, and how the apparent continuity of the moon’s light is a consequence of its reflecting light that is in fact continuously renewed. This was Edwards’s analogy for the continuous renewal of the world by the will of God, which creates, to our eyes, seeming lawfulness and identity, but which is in fact a continuous free act of God.… Edwards’s footnote was my first, best introduction to epistemology and ontology, and my escape—and what a rescue it was—from the contending, tedious determinisms that seem to be all that was on offer to me then. (Credo 27)

The liberation she experienced through Edwards set her on a journey toward something quite different: an artistic vision she would call a democratic esthetic and an intellectual vision she would refer to as a religious belief in intellectual openness (Credo 27).

In addition to pursuing literary studies, she took her first writing workshop with John Hawkes, who, despite his own experimental preferences, gave her favorable feedback and encouraged her to continue writing. After graduating with her B.A. in 1966, she returned to the Pacific Northwest and enrolled in a Ph.D. program in English at the University of Washington. She married, had two sons, and in 1977 completed her dissertation, "A New Look at Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II: Sources, Structure and Meaning."

After earning her Ph.D., she taught for a year at the Université de Haute Bretagne in Rennes. Within a year she had a draft of the manuscript that would become her first novel, Housekeeping. Robinson suspected it was not publishable because of its elevated rhetorical style, extended metaphors, general plotlessness, and gloomy atmosphere. But to her great surprise the first agent who reviewed it decided to represent her, and the first publisher that read the manuscript, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, decided to publish it. The book won immediate praise upon its publication in 1980, becoming a bestseller and eventually the basis for a film, released in 1987 and directed by Bill Forsyth. In the coming years, she would publish many essays as well as the short story Connie Bronson in The Paris Review (1986), but it would be twenty-four years until she published another novel.

In the meantime she went to work as a professor, accepting appointments at Washington University (1983), the University of Kent, in England (1983–1984), the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts (1985), Amherst College (1985–1986), the University of Massachusetts (1987), and the University of Alabama (1988). While at Kent, Robinson became interested in the environmental impact of the British nuclear reprocessing plant located at Sellafield. She wrote an essay for Harper’s magazine that claimed that millions of tons of nuclear materials had been dumped daily into the Irish Sea for more than thirty years. Her outrage at the contamination and at Britain turned into Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution, published in 1989. Although the book was a finalist for the National Book Award’s nonfiction prize and gained a minor reputation within the environmental movement, it remains highly controversial.

Robinson’s professional wandering stopped in 1990 when she accepted a position at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, which continues to be her adopted home. Having divorced a year earlier, Robinson found Iowa City a stable place in which to raise her two children, attend services at the Congregational United Church of Christ, and continue with a project she called her re-education:

It was largely as a consequence of the experience of writing Mother Country that I began what amounted to an effort to re-educate myself. After all those years of school, I felt there was little I knew that I could trust, and I did not want my books to be one more tributary to the sea of nonsense that really is what most conventional wisdom amounts to. (Fay 210)

The product of this re-education was The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Published in 1998, this collection of contrarian-minded essays offered reevaluations of major figures in intellectual history, including Charles Darwin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and John Calvin, as well as incisive inquiries into subjects such as the environment, political correctness, nineteenth-century American abolitionists, and the Puritans. The book was also significant for its overt religious commitment. Robinson pronounces herself a liberal Protestant, and this perspective informs many of the essays in the book, which explicitly treat religious themes or build arguments on the basis of the ethical substance of the Bible. Despite the unpopularity of her views and the unconcealed moral seriousness of the book, it was mostly well received by the popular press.¹

Since The Death of Adam, Robinson’s reputation has steadily increased. She has become a popular lecturer both in the United States and abroad and a much more visible force in the national literary scene. In 2004 she published her second novel, Gilead, an epistolary work about an aging pastor, which won praise from both the public and prize committees. Many reviewers commented on the twenty-four-year gap between Housekeeping and Gilead, mistaking Robinson’s focus on nonfiction for a literary silence. James Wood offered a different account, claiming that Robinson possessed a sensibility that was sanguine about intermittence (Acts of Devotion). The success of Gilead would begin the most productive period of Robinson’s career, which saw five publications in seven years: Home (2008), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), Lila (2015), and The Givenness of Things (2015). Like Henry James and, more recently, Philip Roth, Marilynne Robinson has experienced a late-career surge in creative energy. As she enters her early seventies, this productivity shows no signs of slowing.²

Toward a Democratic Esthetic

Robinson is difficult to place among her contemporary American peers. She does not fit comfortably into any of the main postwar literary traditions, whether the postmodernist aesthetic of John Barth, the minimalist school of Raymond Carver, or the world of many ethnic and racial minority writers such as Toni Morrison or Philip Roth. She is sometimes compared to Cormac McCarthy, perhaps because they share some stylistic tics—antiquated language and King James cadences—and a strong visionary quality. But their similarities end there, as McCarthy’s work expresses a profoundly violent, naturalistic worldview that is opposed to Robinson’s religious sensibility. Flannery O’Connor did possess unfashionable religious views, though her approach to fiction—her irony, flat characterization, and flair for the grotesque—contrasts with Robinson’s approach to religious fiction. In an interview, Robinson distanced herself from O’Connor: For some reason it is not conventional for serious fiction to treat religious thought respectfully—the influence of Flannery O’Connor has been particularly destructive, I think, though she is considered a religious writer, and she considered herself one (A World of Beautiful Souls).

Though Robinson may not have an immediate affinity with many contemporary authors, she did begin her career within the context of the early 1980s, when the ascendant literary trend was Raymond Carver’s minimalism. Minimalism took Hemingway’s spare language and made it sparer, stripping away any hint of lyricism, metaphor, and ornamentation in order to render the bare, blighted reality of Carver’s lower-middle-class characters. As Carver’s style moved through major magazines like The New Yorker and filtrated through the university’s M.F.A. programs, it became dominant and spawned a legion of imitators—not including Robinson:

Especially in writing that was recent at the time I wrote Housekeeping, there was an almost puritanical assumption abroad, it seemed, that anything but a kind of plain speech or almost reduced speech, reduced language, was somehow dishonest or mannered or artificial in the negative sense. And of course I don’t believe that at all. I think that anything you can do with language that works justifies itself, and anything is fair, anything is open, including long metaphorical passages that at first don’t appear to be going anywhere. (Schaub, Interview 245)

The highly rhetorical, metaphorical style of Housekeeping was a response to the puritanical assumption of Carver’s minimalism and his followers. It is similar to her objection toward fiction made of stringing together brand names, media phrases and minor expletives, the idea being, apparently, that these amount to a demonstration of how reduced people actually are, though they are in fact no more than the statement of a notably ungenerous faith (Language Is Smarter Than We Are 3). Robinson offers a more optimistic assessment of ordinary American lives than does Carver’s bleak, enervated perspective. Later in her career, after minimalism had faded from literary fashion, Robinson would change her position on plain language, finding a strong, subtle music in it, which is intimately related to its capacity for meaning (The World 128).

If one had to choose, Robinson’s closest contemporary may be John Updike, the only other major postwar American writer of Protestant sensibilities About his own aesthetic tendency to give detailed attention to the ordinary, Updike wrote, My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me—to give the mundane its beautiful due (The Early Stories [New York: Knopf, 2003], xv). In Robinson’s review of Updike’s short story collection Trust Me, she lavished praise on this aspect of his work: The plainest objects and events bloom in these stories as if they had at last found their proper climate (At Play). Robinson’s praise of Updike’s aestheticism, his idea that gorgeousness inheres in anything (At Play), has its roots in the Calvinist value of aesthetic perception. Although they differ in what they describe—Updike foregrounds bodies and sex, while these remain in the background for Robinson—together their work testifies to a Protestant mode of attending to everyday life.

With his taste for Proust and Nabokov, John Updike was typical of his generation’s admiration for modernism and its descendants. Most postwar authors felt the need to reckon with the innovations of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ezra Pound, either rebelling against them or carrying forward their mission to make it new. As evidenced by interviews and essays, Marilynne Robinson’s attitude toward modernism is unusually hostile, with the main thrust of her critique directed against modernism’s politics and moral implications. In an early essay, Writers and the Nostalgic Fallacy, T. S. Eliot and Pound are singled out for their antiliberal, antidemocratic attitudes:

Take courtly and ecclesiastical culture as culture indeed, and modern, mass and democratic influences as anti-culture, create explicit or implicit contrasts—and you have a modernist poem. The Waste Land epitomizes this method, exposing the vulgarity of the lower-class lovers in the boat on the Thames by invoking Shakespeare’s Enobarbus’s North’s Plutarch’s Cleopatra on her barge. (34)

For Robinson, The Waste Land is problematic on political grounds, as it privileges the hierarchical past over the democratic present. In a later interview, Robinson addressed the politics of modernism directly:

The idea of democracy was something that inspired enthusiasm. But it seems to me that the elitist model of culture just overwhelmed American society in the Twentieth Century. People like Pound and Eliot and so on were the enthusiasts of elitism for years and years and years before anything happened to criticize that view, which was a political view. And they taught the idea that democracy and cultural freedom could not accommodate each other. Eliot wrote about that explicitly, Pound talked about that explicitly, it happened over and over again among modernists, the idea that true culture was being crushed and destroyed by Whitman’s masses. I think it’s ungenerous, fashionable, small-minded thinking that has overwhelmed all the resistance. (237–38)

Robinson’s critique is rooted in a narrow, political interpretation of Eliot’s version of modernism. Her project stands with Whitman’s masses—a phrase that suggests democracy and American nationalism—against her perception of an encroaching elitist culture propagated by two American expatriates. Whether this is fair to Eliot and Pound is less of a concern than how Robinson imagined them as other in order to define her own mode of fiction.³

Robinson’s opposition to modernism is long held and intense. In particular, she is opposed to the emotional and moral qualities usually associated with Eliot’s early verse: anxiety and disappointment. Indeed, a fair characterization of her own work is an anti–Waste Land aesthetic: nationalist and domestic as opposed to internationalist and exilic, an attitude of openness toward history as opposed to a sense of crisis and decline, and stylistic simplicity and accessibility rather than difficulty and exclusivity. But to define Robinson’s originality by what she opposes—that she is an antimodernist—is not fully satisfying, since it does not account for the elements of modernism she affirms—the ideal of craft and formal unity, for example—and it excludes a positive sense of what she stands for. What Robinson calls her democratic esthetic arises from a conversation with three main cultural currents: regionalism, liberal Protestantism, and nineteenth-century American literature.

When an interviewer commented that Housekeeping was in some ways … almost a modernist project, Robinson replied, I think, though, it’s modernist in the sense that Dickinson is so often a modernist (in Schaub, Interview 239). She has often spoken of her admiration for nineteenth-century American writing, those authors traditionally grouped under the American Renaissance. In The Hum Inside the Skull she wrote, If to admire and to be influenced are more or less the same thing, I must be influenced most deeply by the 19th-century Americans—Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson and Poe…. I happen to have read these old aunts and uncles at an impressionable age, and so I will always answer to them in my mind (1). Robinson appropriates two main ideas from these authors, ideas commonly associated with Romanticism. The first is the centrality of consciousness and the second is an exalted, optimistic view of self. For Emerson, Melville, Dickinson, and later writers such as Wallace Stevens and William James, creeds fall away and consciousness has the character of revelation (When I Was xiv). These authors identify sacred mystery with individual experience (When I Was xiv). Robinson agrees. In returning to these old aunts and uncles, Robinson sidesteps modernism to recover and reimagine the strong, deep, optimistic self from the nineteenth century.

It is also crucial to Robinson’s identity as a writer that these authors are American. Rightly or wrongly, she is committed to the idea of a nationally defined literary culture, which she self-consciously appropriates and commemorates. The national tradition that Robinson engages is narrowly defined, centered on the writers of New England, beginning with the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards and on to Dickinson, Melville, and Wallace Stevens. As idiosyncratic as Robinson’s project might seem, she actually seeks acceptance into the most traditional and respected literary tradition America has produced.

This is accomplished through a democratic esthetic, a conception of fiction that is stylistically accessible and that expresses the dignity of ordinary individuals. It is the conceit of all of her fiction, wrote Amy Hungerford, that ordinary people have rich and complicated interior lives, that they embody a silent discourse of thought that, if we knew its voice, would astonish us (Postmodern Belief 114). The focus on ordinary people, rather than the rich, powerful,