Does Sylvie Care?
Throughout Housekeeping, Sylvie seems pretty nonchalant about everything. She
spends her days wandering through Fingerbone doing whatever she wants. Ruth and
Lucille are horrified when they see her walking out along the rain tracks over
the water but Sylvie does not even seem to understand why they are so upset. When
she catches Ruth and Lucille skipping school, she could not care less. She even
offers to write them a note to get them out of school. There is one day where Ruth
and Lucille are exploring in the forest and they decide to spend the night
because it is getting too dark to walk all the way back to their house. They
haven’t told Sylvie they are staying overnight because it wasn’t planned and as
they walk back to their house the next morning, Lucille remarks that Sylvie is
going to be so mad. Yet, when they get back to the house, it’s as though Sylvie
barely noticed that they were gone. Even when Lucille moves out of the house to
live with her home economics teacher, Sylvie seems unfazed.
Yet when the village tries to take
Ruth away from Sylvie, Sylvie goes into a crazy frenzy. When some of the women
in the village first suggest it, Sylvie says, “Families should stay together.
Otherwise things get out of control.” She begins to clean the house to try to
show that she is a suitable caretaker for Ruth. She burns her collections of
magazine and cans in a huge bonfire out on the lawn. She forces Ruth to go to
school and look presentable, something she never did the whole time she was
taking care of Ruth and Lucille. Eventually, when she realizes nothing is
working she tries to burn down their house. She hopes the town people will
think she and Ruth have died and they can escape in secret. The house doesn’t
burn so she and Ruth walk over the train tracks in the wind and dark. She is
literally going crazy to keep her and Ruth from getting separated.
There are other instances in the
book where Sylvie shows that family is important to her. For example, when Lily
and Nona write her a letter asking her to come to Fingerbone to take care of
Ruth and Lucille she drops everything and moves her whole life to Fingerbone so
she can be with Ruth and Lucille. She is able to give everything up for her
family. Yet it seems that even though family is important to Sylvie, she is
only able to show that she cares when there is some sort of emergency, and
sometimes that is too late.
I do think Sylvie cares, I think she cares a lot she just might not be the best at showing it. I think the fact that Sylvie kinda gave up her life as a wonder to raise Ruth and Lucille shows how much she loves them. Everyone has different ways of showing love and I think Sylvie's were different them most other people.
ReplyDeleteRuth is as surprised as you are by Sylvie's sudden "frenzy" to keep the "family" together--she still seems to think that Sylvie is about to wander off at any minute, and she is surprised and deeply moved by the evidence that Sylvie doesn't want to lose her. When the plan to clean up and fly straight falls through, she shifts to a more radical plan to burn the house and flee--but it's clear that Ruth is always part of this plan, that they will run away, cross the bridge, *together*, and that it seems to matter very much that Ruth be a part of it. So "family" is surprisingly important to Sylvie, even if that somehow doesn't equate to "housekeeping" or non-transient settlement. There's irony in the way she flees the *family house* in order to keep her family together.
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