Journal of Applied English Vol. 17, No. 2, June 2023:97-118 *Corresponding Author: Chingshun Sheu Department of Applied English, Ming Chuan University Email: cjsheu@mail.mcu.edu.tw 97 “Such Wild and Orphan Things”: Reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping against Absence of Mind 1 Chingshun J. Sheu Department of Applied English, Ming Chuan University Abstract In the 2010 Absence of Mind, her Terry Lectures at Yale, Marilynne Robinson argues that Freudian psychoanalysis is decontextualized from history, culture, and nature. But her own 1980 novel Housekeeping militates for an understanding of psychoanalysis as not a simple cure for trauma, but a means to let traumatic loss open one up to the possibilities of the external environment. In this reading of the novel, protagonist Ruth learns to address her traumatic loss not as something to be resolved, nor as something to be coped with, but as something to be rejoiced in, for it opens her up to the possibility of transcending ordinary existence and comprehending the redemptive powers of memory. Through the act of narration, she transforms her trauma into a work of beauty, thus revealing the value even of events of the utmost sorrow and sublimating her existence into the realm of collective memory. Keywords: Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, Absence of Mind, psychoanalysis, spiritual growth In Absence of Mind, her Terry Lectures at Yale, Marilynne Robinson (2010, pp. 103–04) argues forcefully against the narrow conception of reality and human experience as delineated in the “parascience” of positivism, among whose 1 I would like to thank Prof. Mary Goodwin for introducing me to the novel and providing the impetus for this paper, and to thank as well the anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments improved it greatly.