“The House of Your Church Is Burning”: Race and Responsibility in Marilynne Robinson'sGilead

Abstract

This article examines Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead in dialogue with her speculative reflection upon Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology to read the novel as a radically ambivalent text which exposes an aporia at the core of the Reverend Ames's Christian ethics. This ambivalence appears in the way that Ames's version of his own family history works assiduously to expiate the perceived violence done to ethics by his grandfather's support for abolitionist violence while remaining haunted by the thought that in the unforgiving context of Bleeding Kansas simply to insist upon an absolute distinction between violence on the one hand and ethics and law on the other may be irreconcilable with the workings of good faith and the ends of justice. Reinterpreting Ames's narrative in the light of Jacques Derrida's reflection on the paradoxical structure of ethical responsibility, the article argues that the violence done to Ames's ethical reflection by the memory of the grandfather, John Brown, and the excluded black body reveals the agonistic location of the ethics of abolitionist history between two kinds of violence on the uncertain border between justice and law which defines the ground of every genuinely ethical decision.

Christian White Supremacy in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead Novels

“…Thus while it is certainly true that Ames treats history as a kind of memory which enables him to repress the ethical demand central to his grandfather's radical abolitionism, his encounters with Jack Boughton are expressly designed by Robinson to enact a type of "rememory" of the past which compels him to confront the continuing trauma of African American disenfranchisement from Bleeding Kansas to the emerging civil rights movement of his own time. 13 This is fine as far as it goes, except it misses the import of my critique. Spinks is certainly right that Ames is forced to confront race and disenfranchisement in a way that is painful for him.…”