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The theological underpinnings of Housekeeping were not immediately apparent, though it seems obvious now that Ruth is remembering, and Robinson was expressing her fascination with, Emerson and Dickinson and Thoreau—and not only these writers but the shared religious heritage they drew from. This second idea, however, only became clear with a series of essays Robinson began publishing in the '80s and '90s, many of them collected in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998). There, Robinson mounts an impassioned attack on the modern tendency to explain ourselves solely in economic, social, and political terms—essentially "desacraliz[ing] humankind" by insisting on accounts of our actions that reduce us to the drives of competition and self-seeking. Such a world "has no place in it for the cult of the soul, that old Jacob lamed and blessed in a long night of struggle." Against such reductive accounts, in which "Moral behavior has little real meaning, and inwardness, in the traditional sense, is not necessary or possible," Robinson returns to versions of humankind that celebrate the individual's self-revising encounters with a world grander and more terrifying than we are able to acknowledge. She reads Calvin, for example, her most developed example, as a celebrant of that inward world—God, in Calvin, presenting himself to human contemplation "in the image of the world," a presentation continually overwhelming, but rendering unique and privileged, each individual response it calls forth. Such accounts, she argues, have vanished from the way we talk about ourselves as a culture without ever having been discredited.
Both Housekeeping and Gilead could be said to stand against such cultural amnesia by presenting versions of soul-making so remarkably beautiful and individual that one is forced to wonder why we ever let such habits of mind atrophy. Housekeeping does this by reducing its stage to a young girl with a few books and memories and extraordinary eyes; from that, an entire crystalline world grows. Gilead attempts something broader. John Ames has a full life which he looks back on and reads and re-reads, seeing it as a sort of parable whose full meaning he can never confidently grasp. His first wife and child died decades ago, those wilderness years that followed finally being brought to an end with the surprising marriage of his last years. He has made his life in the small Iowa town of Gilead, within striking distance of Kansas. By 1956, when he is writing, the town's importance during the years of the abolitionist movement, which his family was deeply involved in, has become almost totally obscured—an ember buried under layers of ash and forgetfulness. He has a grandfather, whose abolitionist legacy overwhelms him, a father he is disappointed in, a wife whose radiant sadness seems addressed to him from another world, and a son he adores.
As with Ruth in Housekeeping, Ames often reads his life through metaphor, as in this striking memory of watching as a young child while his father helped pull down the remains of a church struck by lightning, ashes and rain everywhere:
You never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. I remember my father down on his heels in the rain, water dripping from his hat, feeding me biscuit from his scorched hand, with that old blackened wreck of a church behind him and steam rising where the rain fell on embers, the rain falling in gusts and the women singing "The Old Rugged Cross" while they saw to things, moving so gently, as if they were dancing to the hymn, almost. In those days no grown woman ever let herself be seen with her hair undone, but that day even the grand old women had their hair falling down their backs like schoolgirls. It was so joyful and sad.
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