The intersection of interior landscapes and external environments thrums with memory and emotion, permeating the lives of the characters in both Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping and Natasha Trethewey’s poetry collection Native Guard. These texts render memory as malleable, as something in motion. Through rich imagery and lyric writing, these authors investigate the ways in which the tangible — the natural world, the body, and the remnants of objects — can hold memory and haunt characters in the present. They explore the process of unearthing the past and restoring the forgotten. Intergenerational trauma weaves through both Housekeeping and Native Guard, demonstrating the nonlinear nature of time and history. The characters’ navigation of motherloss ultimately reveals the ways in which mobility and environment can affect the process of healing. As the characters grapple with memories of their mothers, they attempt to shape their own identities and form understandings of the impact of their familial history. 

From the very beginning of her collection, Trethewey traverses in-between spaces, examining the liminality that imbues mobility. In “Theories of Time and Space,” she writes, “You can get there from here, though / there’s no going home. / Everywhere you go will be somewhere / you’ve never been” (Trethewey 1). These lines express the way in which humans are molded by their experiences, shaped by the places they occupy. The act of mobility and the inevitability of time both contribute to the impossibility of remaining the same person throughout one’s life. Trethewey’s diction at the end of the first stanza suggests that the concept of home is rooted in impermanence. By saying “home” rather than “house,” Trethewey connotes the warmth and sense of belonging that people lose when they enter the world and roam the unknown. A house is demarcated by its stationary existence, but a home is subject to more fluidity; home can constitute any place or person who offers a welcoming presence. Throughout the subsequent stanzas, Trethewey describes the Mississippi environment in careful detail. She adds color and texture to the poem through the “dead end at the coast” and the “pier at Gulfport where riggings of shrimp boats” appear as “loose stitches in a sky threatening rain.” Meanwhile, the 26 miles of sand dumped on the mangrove swamp result in the burial of the “terrain of the past.” These images evoke isolation and grief — the physical landscape mirrors the dead ends and the desperation the subject of the poem experiences. 

Trethewey expands upon the burial and subsequent erasure of the past throughout Native Guard, delving into how altered historical documentation can manipulate memory. In “What Is Evidence,” Trethewey treats her mother’s body as a textbook. She notes the “fleeting bruises” her mother covers with makeup, the quiver in her mother’s voice (11). She draws attention to the teeth her mother wears in place of her own. These descriptions not only reveal the abuse Trethewey’s mother suffers at the hands of Trethewey’s stepfather but also suggest that Trethewey inherits her mother’s pain and grief. The intimacy of the language Trethewey uses — the way she notices the tiniest of details about her mother’s body — speaks to how the suffering of parents inflicts suffering upon their children. In a way, Trethewey’s mother becomes part of Trethewey’s external environment. She is likened to a landscape, the devastation of her “splintered clavicle” and “pierced temporal” reminiscent of the decimation a habitat can undergo during a natural disaster. In the last couple of lines, her mother’s bones are described as settling each day “the way all things do,” the way dust and sand and dirt settle. Yet Trethewey’s memories of her mother and her battered, bruised body do not settle. The intensity of grief Trethewey experiences juxtaposed with the fading of her mother through death creates a jarring contrast. 

This premature loss influences Trethewey’s perspective on the world, shrouding her surroundings in memory and leaving her unable to experience life without the underlying presence of the ghost of her mother. The legacy of her mother manifests within Trethewey’s physical landscape, leaving her emotionally immobilized. In “After Your Death,” Trethewey recalls emptying her mother’s closet, discarding the bowl of fruit bruised from her mother’s touch (13). When she twists a fig loose from a fruit tree, she finds it to be half-eaten, half rotting, a “swarm of insects hollowing it.” She describes the hollowed-out fig as another space “emptied by loss,” as another entity to which she arrives too late to save. This act of filling correlates with her determination to etch in the missing pieces of her memories. She yearns to create a memorial for her mother and for others whose narratives have been overlooked by history. However, Trethewey is forced to recognize the limitations in place for her. She will never acquire a fully-fledged, vibrant storyline due to the unreliable, fluid nature of memory. This idea carries weight in the poem “What the Body Can Say,” as well. 

       But what was my mother saying 

that day not long before her death — her face tilted up

at me, her mouth falling open, wordless, just as

we open our mouths in church to take in the wafer, meaning communion? (Trethewey 9)

These stanzas show Trethewey’s desire to read and understand her mother in a way that transcends language. She can remember the exact image of her mother the day before her death. She depicts her mother through body language and visual detail —  the way an artist might capture a moment in time when painting. The comparison to silently opening her mouth in church strengthens Trethewey’s need for wordless language between herself and her mother. Just as God cannot verbally communicate with churchgoers, Trethewey is unable to comprehend her mother’s thoughts even though she desperately wants to find meaning and discover some sort of higher truth. In addition, the highly detailed image of Trethewey’s mother relates to the subjective experience of memory. Even as Trethewey grows and physically moves away from the environment in which she had known her mother, her memories of her mother still root her firmly in a certain landscape. She relives this specific moment in time over and over again. By recording this moment in a poem, she takes a step toward pinning down and solidifying the otherwise evasive nature of memory. 

In Housekeeping, Ruth must reckon with the repercussions of motherloss from an early age. Similar to Trethewey, she yearns for an accurate recollection of her mother, for a precise documentation of her mother’s appearance and presence while alive. The way in which Ruth experiences the world is clouded by the thought of her mother, despite the two of them never being particularly close. The spaces Ruth occupies are spaces her mother once occupied; the people and places she grows up amongst are the people and places her mother once lived and breathed amongst. However, there are gaps in Ruth’s understanding of her mother that cannot be fully filled. There are several things lost in time, irretrievable and irreplaceable. Trethewey’s struggle with memory in “What the Body Can Say” echoes in Housekeeping. This is particularly striking when Ruth divulges the information that she and her sister Lucile have alternate recollections of their mother. 

Lucille’s mother was orderly, vigorous, and sensible, a widow (more than I ever knew or she could prove) who was killed in an accident. My mother presided over a life so strictly simple and circumscribed that it could not have made any significant demands on her attention. She tended us with a gentle indifference that made me feel she would have liked to have been even more alone…. (Robinson 109)

The differentiation Ruth asserts between her mother and “Lucille’s mother” demonstrates the polarity between each sister’s respective memory. Their recollections are vastly contradictory —  Lucille hones in on a comforting version of their mother while Ruth fixates on the emotional chasm her mother imposed upon her. Where Lucille remembers vivaciousness, Ruth remembers detachment. Where Lucille recalls responsibility and practicality, Ruth sees emotional and physical distance. This alludes to how the purposeful manipulation of memory can serve as a mechanism for coping. The sisters’ imagined versions of their mother both most likely fail to accurately capture the reality of who she was. Perhaps to cope with the sting of never having a doting mother, Ruth regulates how she conjures up her mother in her mind. Ruth discusses her mother’s lack of effort with a coldness that comes as surprising given her gentle approach to other aspects of life. The mitigation of the great emptiness she feels as a result of her mother’s abandonment trumps her desire for motherly love and attention. Ruth’s coldness could be interpreted as a mode of protection against the intensity of betrayal and neglect. 

Like Trethewey, Robinson demonstrates interest in the significance of spatial and temporal location, exploring how geographic history intersects with personal memory and legacy. Early in the novel, Robinson renders Fingerbone in rich detail, noting its inhabitants’ keen awareness of the lake and the “lightless, airless waters below” (Trethewey 9). The old lake is described as “smothered and nameless and altogether black.” In contrast, Fingerbone is “permeated by sunlight,” sustaining “green life and innumerable fish” (9). The town of Fingerbone itself resembles the old lake more than it does the vibrant, sun-soaked lake. “Fingerbone was never an impressive town,” Ruth internally remarks as she thinks about how the town is humbled by the “outsized landscape and extravagant weather” and “chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere” (62). The intimidating immensity of Ruth’s environment swells in intensity as it carries the memory of her mother. Similar to how residues of Trethewey’s mother saturate Trethewey’s surroundings, the legacy of Ruth’s mother rings throughout Fingerbone. The questions Ruth has about her mother — the uncertainty she feels when attempting to move on from the complex trauma she inherits from her family — impact her ability to forge her own identity and carve out a space for herself that is untainted by loss and confusion. 

The dissipation of boundaries Ruth observes in her external environment mirrors the nonlinearity of grief and memory. The parameters in place that dictate how she is supposed to perceive her surroundings slip away as she experiences the natural world in Fingerbone. When describing Ruth and Lucille sitting by the lake at night, Robinson employs rhetoric reminiscent of romantic transcendental works. Ruth observes the equilibrium of the world, the way the sky and the water exist as “one luminous gray” (114). After Lucille falls asleep in the hut, Ruth crawls out into the darkness. “There was no moon,” she remarks; “In fact, there appeared to be no sky” (115). She goes on to note the “singular, isolated lake sounds, placeless and disembodied,” as well as the cries of coyotes and owls and hawks and loons. This passage evokes a dreamlike, surreal feel. There is a sense of peace that Ruth experiences while discovering the oneness of the world. By eliminating the distinction between herself and her environment — by surrendering wholly to the darkness and the lake — Ruth achieves clarity of mind. The blurred lines with which Ruth views the world in this passage tie into the blurred lines that exist within the realm of healing from loss and making sense of memory and experience. The recognition and acceptance of the messy, hard-to-describe quality of memory can aid both Ruth and the narrative voice in Trethewey’s poetry in reconciling their identities after trauma and finding significance within the patchwork of memory and emotion they actively work through. This can allow these women to inwardly reflect on their emotional truths and articulate them for others who cannot do it for themselves. 

These texts both reveal the attachment of memory to place, showing the interconnectedness of environment, mobility, personal history, and legacy. By exploring the disappearance of boundaries and the nonlinearity of time and memory, these texts ultimately depict the duality of permanence and transience. They suggest that perhaps nothing is truly permanent — and that perhaps transience is more natural than permanence.