Housekeeping: How Does The House Reinforce Sylvie's Transience?

How Does the House Reinforce Sylvie’s Transience? From the beginning of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, the house was a symbol of family and wellness (wholeness) and was an important entity that interconnected all of the main characters of Housekeeping. Sylvie, on the other hand, was a ragtag thirty-five-year-old woman that had recently come back to this house to care for her nieces Ruth and Lucille. Before Sylvie’s return, Ruth and Lucille had lived relatively normal lives, being very average at school, playing outside on the frozen lake, just getting by in the small town that is Fingerbone. It wasn’t until the passing of their grandmother that they had found themselves with Sylvie. Upon first contact with Sylvie, she had a strong transient nature about her as if it was dug deep down
Her raincoat was so shapeless and oversized that she must have found it on a bench” (p. 45). This transient nature is not only known from her history of riding boxcars through the country or any other stories of her past, but it is also shown in her interactions with Ruth and Lucille. As the story progresses, the state of the house in which they live in changes dramatically, for better or for worse. The first major event that occurred after Sylvie took Ruth and Lucille under her wing was the flood. The flood came in, soaking furniture, destroying appliances, and engulfing all of the first floor of their house as if to show Sylvie’s transient nature follows her and affects everything around her. Ruth calmly surveyed, as she stood on the first floor of their house in frigid waters, that “the house flowed around us” (p. 64). Even after the flood came and went, the house continued to resemble more and more like the outdoors, the wilderness, which is antonymous to the house’s former state of being a more civilized place. Furthermore, the “treasures” that Sylvie kept and cherished were rather odd, stashing tins and papers and even