Housekeeping: The Fingerbone Lake as a Powerful Symbol

The lake is a symbol of nature's power in Housekeeping. Nature has power over everything, no matter how hard people try to keep it out. The best example of this is when the lake floods in the spring. It fills houses, furniture, everything. Ruth's house is on the top of the hill and it still is significantly filled with water on the first floor when the lake floods. The town is totally dominated by the flood until the water dissipates, and then the town returns to normal. Even though the Fingerbone's residents value housekeeping and safety in the home, when the flood comes, all of that is lost.

The lake is a symbol of transience as well. It changes with the seasons, freezing in the winter and flooding in the spring. Additionally, when Ruth and Sylvie spend a night out on the lake, they observe the day turning into night and back into day again. the lake drifts them away from the shore and they have to paddle back again. These images of transience are subtle, but they show the lake's power to change itself and change everything around it.

The lake also is also the place where Ruth's grandfather and mother died. In the first chapter, we learn about Ruth's grandfather's death when the train he was on fell off the bridge into the lake, described as "like a weasel sliding off a rock" (6). Ruth's mother also fell into the lake, but she seemed to have driven off the cliff intentionally. This knowledge taints everything having to do with the lake afterwards with a feeling of danger. Even when Ruth and Lucille are ice skating on the frozen lake, the deaths caused by the lake loom over everything.

The long bridge over the lake is also a powerful symbol in the novel. It too holds the image of Ruth's grandfather's death, and it is the only way in or out of Fingerbone. When Ruth and Lucille are first skipping school, they wander down to the lake and witness Sylvie walking on top of the bridge. She says she had always wanted to know what it was like up there, but the girls are uneasy with seeing her walking so high above the water on a thin train bridge.  Everyone coming and going takes the bridge by train. Therefore, when Ruth and Sylvie walk across the bridge at the end of the book, they are doing so to intentionally leave Fingerbone behind.

The Bell Jar: the Bell Jar

In the Bell Jar, Esther is plagued by depression. She describes it as being under a bell jar, where she is looking at the world through distorting glass and it is stifling her, limiting her air to only that which fits under the bell jar. The bell jar analogy seems to fit how she feels in multiple ways, from the distortion when she looks outside to the limited air inside to the observation of her from people outside the bell jar. We often see a distorted version of reality when Esther looks outside the bell jar from within. One example of this is the description of her own voice as "the hollow voice" or just "a voice." It takes a second to realize she is talking about what she is saying, not someone else in her head or next to her. The level of disconnect between reality, her own actions, and her awareness seems to suggest the distortion of her perception of reality even before she acknowledges it herself.

When she is stuck under the bell jar, Esther also feels like the constraint of it is suffocating her, and restricting her abilities to do other things. In chapter 15, she says that under the bell jar, she is "stewing in [her] own sour air." She cannot even breathe the air of the world outside the bell jar, much less live in it. This suffocation also causes her to lose the ability to do some things she had taken for granted, such as reading, writing, sleeping, and eating. It is not possible that she literally didn't sleep or eat for three weeks straight, but the idea that she feels as if she did not is significant of the fact that the bell jar is suffocating her.

The last way in which the bell jar metaphor is perfect in describing how she feels is when she is being observed and questioned by doctors. they walk into her room and look down upon her as if she is just being evaluated for research and not actually helped in her recovery process, and Doctors Gordon and Nolan seem to use her as a test subject for their ideas and practices. Esther often wonders if what they are asking is a trap to see if she gets caught be answering in a certain way. Esther is bothered by the dullness and grayness of the medicinal procedure, so when the doctors observe her it unnerves her and adds to her worries. The bell jar around her is lifted off the ground after she recovers, with help from the electroshock therapy. However, it will never truly go away, but will continue to hang above the ground, threatening to clatter back down to earth and surround her again in a distorting, suffocating jar for observation.