Question of Identity Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping

Abstract

The Australian novelist, Kate Grenville, has represented the Australian history in her novel, The Secret River. She has marked the violence of the country’s past. Grenville has chronicled the life of the aborigines and the culture of the early settlers in New South Wales. The regional culture of the aboriginal inhabitants is compared with the unpleasant culture of the orphans in America. Like Grenville, Marilynne Robinson, the American novelist, has portrayed America as a nation of orphans in her novel, Housekeeping. The relinquished girls in the novel are raised by a succession of relatives, who become the central characters of the plot. The moral degradation is the heightening of the orphans in the great American nation. The characters of both the novels strive for the creation of identities. The characters of Housekeeping and The Secret River climax the price of loss of life and survival. This paper focuses on the dangerous and deep undertow of transience related to identity struggles.