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The Metaphysics of Ecology in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson is an intriguing case for ecocriticism. She is most well known for her novels, Housekeeping, Gilead (the 2005 winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and most recently Home. But she is also the author of the 1999 book Mother Country, an essay that provides a trenchant and relentless critique of England's wholesale dumping of nuclear waste into the sea at the Sellafield Nuclear Processing Plant, a fact of incomparable environmental and social devastation. Although Robinson has written a small number of highly regarded works, this book remains surprisingly little known in the United States and in England.1 This is perhaps because the book challenges a whole host of facile assumptions about what it means to be moral politically, environmentally, and socially. Robinson describes a long British history of cultivating an official morality toward the poor that has depended on their continued existence and suffering. Her diagnosis is that this is not merely a case of a divided nation, but rather of a kind of strange co-dependence between a social ill and its supposed political cures, what she calls "moral aphasia" (Mother Country 193). What she questions is why "our education produces an acculturated blindness which precludes our taking in available, unambiguous information if it is contrary to our assumptions" (27). In addition to uncovering the considerable environmental sins of England, she remains focused on the greater moral responsibility to "break down some of the structures of thinking that make reality invisible to us" (32).