Lila By Marilynne Robinson Analysis

In Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, Robinson tells the story of a preacher’s wife in Gilead, Iowa. Lila was born into the world an orphan. In a benevolent act of kidnapping, Doll, a migrant worker, saves Lila from her home of neglect. Together they lead a rootless, nomadic life as “a cow and her calf.” At the mercy of the elements, taking work where they could find it, Lila and Doll belonged nowhere and to nobody except for each other. Life had been neither kind nor fair to either of them, but they found peace in one another, and shared a bond so deep that it did not matter when they did not know the words for their emotions. The world was as beautiful, tangible, and true, as it was harsh, rugged, and dangerous. Good people were forced into bad situations,
It was a practical thing – a tool for working, for hunting and cleaning fish, for protection. In giving the knife to Lila, Doll says, “‘It’s only for scaring folks with. If you go cutting somebody it’s going to be trouble no matter what the story is’” (97). Furthermore, Lila and Doll were not alone in owning a knife. Doane, the leader of the band of migrant workers with whom they travelled, also carried one. In thinking about Doane, Lila recalls, “They knew he had a knife. Everybody else had one, too, but the way they thought of his knife made them think he probably had a gun…They never saw a gun, and he used his knife to whittle and to cut his meat just like they did” (91). In this severe landscape of poverty, Doane held a position of such power and authority in the minds of his followers that his knife, despite only having been used for ordinary tasks, served as a reminder of what he was capable of. Likewise, the power of Doll’s knife lay in the potential that it harbored. One of the few possessions that they owned, it was a not just a symbol of Doll’s and Lila’s bravery – bravery to save an abandoned child, to lead a nomadic life of homelessness – but also of their desperation: “Snakes, knives, strangers, darkening sky – you felt some things with your whole body. What they might mean. It could be they were on their way to do harm elsewhere and you just saw them pass by, but how could you know?” (134). Life as a drifter was physical,
On the eve of her son’s birth, she feels the pull of the knife and all that it represents, and it frightens and excites her. She wants her son to inherit her knife, Doll’s knife, for this is their legacy. Lila recognizes that the guilt and the shame of her past are not things that can abandon. She neither wishes to reject nor pity her past. Instead, Lila fully accepts her former life for what it was: a time of courageousness and a time of resourcefulness. Robinson writes, “That knife was the difference between her and anybody else in the world” (239). One can read the story of Lila’s life through the actions of that knife. Although part of this story is the shame and the guilt that she has experienced, the other part is the love and devotion of Doll, the freedom and bravery of wandering, and the purity and truth of nature. When Lila thinks about the future she will have with her son after Ames passes away, she imagines herself telling her baby boy “We’ll just wander a while. We’ll be nowhere, and it will be all right. I have friends there” (251). He too will experience the “great, sweet nowhere,” the “soul” of the world (242). As Lila was born into the world an orphan, so he was orphaned from her body at birth. And so, both belonging to nobody, together they will wander, brave and proud, carrying Doll’s