The Homemaker

Stephen Knapp

Stephen is the youngest Knapp, notorious for tantrums, cruelty, and a hard, cool stare that terrifies the neighborhood women. His mother is at her wit's end, but his father, Lester, discovers that steady attention and shared projects like a sandpile railway can reach the boy no one else could manage. Stephen's transformation from household terror to absorbed builder mirrors the family's larger reordering, making him the emotional barometer of the Knapp experiment.

Lester Knapp

Lester Knapp was always the impractical one at Willing's store, kind to delivery boys and useless at discipline, until a crippling illness leaves him at home while his wife goes out to work. He attacks the housework with a librarian's curiosity, darning stockings, studying cookbooks, and dismantling the assumption that domestic labor is beneath anyone. His quiet insistence that homemaking is real work, and his growing bond with his difficult son Stephen, make him the novel's moral center.

Helen Knapp

At thirteen, Helen is old enough to sense the secret griefs in her father's face, and bold enough to ask why he never wrote poetry himself. That moment of sympathy pierces Lester's long-buried shame and gives him a new sweetness he must learn to renounce gracefully. Her intuition and warmth mark her as the child most capable of seeing her father as a person, not just a provider.

Mattie Farnham

Mattie Farnham comes to the Knapp house armed with sympathy and formulas about the nobility of homemaking, only to find Lester darning stockings and discoursing on cream sauce with unsettling authority. Her shock when he points out that pity implies contempt exposes the very prejudice she thought she opposed. She is the reader's proxy, a decent woman whose unexamined beliefs are gently and irreversibly challenged.

Jerome Willing

Jerome Willing prides himself on discipline and results, and Lester Knapp has always rubbed him the wrong way, shielding erring delivery boys, interfering with the natural order of things. When he hears that the crippled Knapp is managing at home and his wife is thriving at the store, Willing's annoyance curdles into reluctant curiosity. He represents the world of commerce and conventional judgment that the Knapp household quietly defies.

Henry Knapp

Henry is one of the delicate Knapp children whose constant ailments worry the neighborhood and drain the household. He appears in quiet domestic moments, sleepy with his puppy, asking whether it is bedtime while his sister Helen embraces their father. His fragility underscores the family's physical and emotional vulnerabilities, and his ordinariness makes the household feel real rather than symbolic.