Language in motion in Marilynne Robinson’s "Housekeeping" and the Book of "Ruth"

Authors

  • James Krasner University of New Hampshire

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.3647

Keywords:

Marilynne Robinson, Ruth, homelessness, Bible, mobility, squatter’s rights, gender

Abstract

The terminology used to describe people living in socially or legally ambiguous housing conditions is contradictory and contested in often unpredictable ways. Homeless people, as well as the laws and government discourses designed to limit their behavior, frequently choose language that is at odds with what their bodies are actually doing in the spaces they occupy. In this essay I will discuss the oxymoronic verbal formulations for how transients, especially transient women, move through and live in social space by looking at two texts that focus on homeless women and their social power, Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, and the biblical Book of Ruth (on which it is partially based). By placing these works in the context of the legal discourses of homelessness and squatting, and gender analyses of mobility, I hope to identify a mode of gendered embodiment based in the language of motion.

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Author Biography

James Krasner, University of New Hampshire

James Krasner is a Professor of English Literature at the University of New Hampshire.  His specialties are British Victorian Literature and Medical Humanities.  He is the author of The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and the Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative (Oxford UP 1992) and Home Bodies: Tactile Experience in Domestic Space (Ohio UP 2010).

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Published

23-12-2020

How to Cite

Krasner, J. (2020). Language in motion in Marilynne Robinson’s "Housekeeping" and the Book of "Ruth". Journal of English Studies, 18, 109–124. https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.3647

Issue

Vol. 18 (2020)

Section

Articles

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