This essay aims to provide a reading of Marilynne Robinson's novel
Housekeeping. Housekeeping is a novel written about women and for
women, in which Robinson tries to re-construct the repressed gynohistory.
Drawing from French feminist theory (Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva) we reread
Housekeeping in the light of the current debate on mothering and assimilate
the story of Sylvie —Housekeeping's main character— to Freud's Dora
case history.
There is another woman, outside of history and the dominant
discourse, a woman who cracks the established structures, displaces them
while making them crack, a woman "written in white ink" as Cixous says,
who refuses marginality; a different woman, another woman. This essay
approaches her definition.
