Home Space, Feminine Subjectivity, and Unhousing in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.
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Date
2020-06
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Abstract
The study of space was for a long time considered irrelevant to literary analysis. Nevertheless,
in the Contemporary period, the relationship between Home Space, Women, and Domesticity
has been the source of much critical debate in literary criticism. This thesis, therefore, aims to
examine the ways in which occupied spaces define concepts of domesticity, housekeeping,
feminine subjectivity, and unhousing in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980).
Additionally, it explores on the one side ‘housekeeping concepts’ such as home, houses, and
domesticity, and on the other side ‘unhousing’s concepts’ like transience, homelessness, and
border crossing. It also examines how female characters construct their identities and
subjectivity through the different spaces they occupy. Such an examination leads the way to a
deeper understanding of the two models of female subjectivity Robinson offers in her novel:
One is the settled, domestic female who makes sense of her oneness through the inside occupied
social space of a house, and the other is the vagrant and transient female constructing an identity
by crossing the borders towards an open and natural space. To achieve this, the research is
carried out by relying on important concepts of Space Theories and Feminism.
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Keywords
Keywords: Home, space, Women, Domesticity, Transience, feminine subjectivity, housekeeping, unhousing.