77 pages • 2 hours read
Jeannette WallsThe Glass Castle
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 42-54Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Welch”
Chapter 42 Summary
Jeannette and Brian find a two-karat diamond ring in a pile of rotting lumber. Rather than sell it for grocery money, Mom insists on keeping it to replace the wedding ring Dad pawned years earlier, adding that self-esteem is more important than food.
In response to Mom’s increasingly wild mood swings, Jeannette tells her she needs to leave Dad so she can qualify for welfare. Mom believes that welfare benefits will cause “irreparable psychological damage” to the kids (188). Besides, she adds, she cannot leave Dad, both because she is a Catholic and because she is “an excitement addict” (188).
Chapter 43 Summary
Amid a summer heat wave, Jeannette tries to go to the public pool but is turned away by Ernie Goad and his goons. Later, Dinitia tells Jeannette to come with her to the pool in the morning when the black children swim, in accordance with an unwritten custom of de facto segregation in Welch. Struck by the confidence of the other girls, Jeannette changes clothes in the locker room despite the deep shame she feels over her burn scars. At the end of the free swim period, Jeannette recalls, “I’d never felt cleaner” (192).
Chapter 44 Summary
Later that day, a man from child services knocks on the Wallses’ door. Neither Mom nor Dad are home, so Jeannette manages to get rid of him before he can see the squalid interior of their home. When Mom returns, Jeannette insists she apply for a teaching job to prevent the state from tearing apart the family. While Mom would rather remain jobless so she has more time to paint and write, Jeannette refuses to take no for an answer. By the end of the week, Mom lands a teaching job 12 miles North of Welch.
Virtually every morning, the kids must drag Mom out of bed and down the hill, where a fellow teacher picks her up for work. At first, the family is able to pay their bills and to buy a few essentials like an electric heater and a refrigerator on layaway, but as the months go on, the money from each paycheck seems to disappear more quickly. Before long, Jeannette is back to rummaging through the trash for food. Mom, meanwhile, manages to buy crystal vases and giant Hershey bars for herself.
Chapter 45 Summary
In the fall, Jeannette enters the seventh grade at Welch High School, a large school filled with other poor kids from all over the area. Although she finds it easier to fit in there, Jeannette laments the fact that none of the boys notice her. She attributes this to her nearly six-foot frame and her massive overbite. In an effort to correct her overbite, Jeannette fashions homemade braces for herself out of rubber bands, a coat hanger, and a sanitary napkin. When Dad stumbles home one night drunk, he examines the makeshift orthodontics and says, “Those braces are a goddamn feat of engineering genius” (202)
Chapter 46 Summary
Eager to join a club that doesn’t require her to pay for an instrument or a uniform, Jeannette joins the school newspaper. She finds a mentor and an ally in faculty advisor Miss Jeannette Bivens, who also taught and supported Dad in high school. When other teachers complain about Jeannette’s smell, Bivens vows to fight for her as long as she keeps clean. She resumes her weekend baths at Stanley’s apartment despite the threat of another sexual assault. Having realized that writing is not the sole domain of isolated shut-ins like Mom, Jeannette resolves to become a journalist.
Chapter 47 Summary
The following summer, Mom goes to Charleston for two months to take classes to renew her teaching license. With Lori away at a government-funded summer camp for gifted artists, Jeannette is left in charge of the family finances. Mom leaves her $200, or $3.50 a day, on which to survive. At the start of the eight weeks, Jeannette is confident in her ability to prevent Dad from leeching off her, concluding that she is a much stronger woman than Mom. Within two weeks, Dad convinces Jeannette to lend him $30.
The following weekend, Dad tells Jeannette that to pay her back, he needs her to accompany him on a business trip. They stop at a roadside bar, and it becomes clear that Dad’s intent is to use Jeannette to help him hustle a man named Robbie at pool. While Robbie flirts with Jeannette, Dad wins $80 off him. Robbie invites Jeannette upstairs, and she worries that he wants something sexual in exchange for losing $80. She expects Dad to intervene, but instead he encourages Jeannette to go with Robbie. Upstairs, Robbie tries to rape Jeannette. He stops only when Jeannette shows him her burn scars and suggests that her entire body is covered with them.
In the car on the ride home, Dad gives Jeannette half of the pool winnings. Instead of being outraged by Robbie’s rape attempt, Dad commends Jeannette for successfully resisting the attack. He adds, “It was like that time I threw you into the sulfur spring to teach you to swim” (213).
Chapter 48 Summary
When Jeannette refuses to go out hustling with Dad again, he demands that she stake him $40. A few days later, he steals a $200 oil lease check. Jeannette recalls, “For the first time, I had a clear idea of what Mom was up against” (214). With a month to go before Mom returns and Jeannette running out of money, she gets a $40-a-week job at a jewelry shop.
Chapter 49 Summary
In late August, Mom and Lori return home. To Jeannette, both seem like different people—Lori for the better, and Mom for the worse. Vowing to recommit herself to her art, Mom refuses to get out of bed on the first day of school. Jeannette tells her, “If you want to be treated like a mother, you should act like one” (219). As punishment for back-talking Mom, Dad whips Jeannette with his belt for the first time in years and for the first time ever with anger. From that point forward, Jeannette makes two resolutions: She will never be whipped again, and she will leave Welch before graduating high school.
Chapter 50 Summary
Jeannette and Lori plot their escape. When Lori graduates high school, she will move to New York. After securing a job and a place to stay, Jeannette will follow. The three eldest Walls kids all contribute to an escape fund, which they keep in a piggy bank named Oz—Jeannette by working at the jewelry store and babysitting, Lori by making posters for kids at school, and Brian by mowing lawns.
Chapter 51 Summary
In her efforts to escape New York, Lori faces obstacles at every turn. Her chances of receiving a National Merit Scholarship are dashed when she must hitchhike to Bloomfield to take the test, and a trucker tries to sexually assault her, causing her to botch the exam. She also hopes to win a scholarship on the basis of a sculpture she made of Shakespeare, but Dad—a conspiracy theorist who believes someone else wrote the Bard’s plays—destroys it in a drunken fit. Worst of all, Dad steals the escape funds from the piggy bank.
As graduation day looms, one of Jeannette’s babysitting clients offers to pay her $200 to accompany the family to Iowa to watch her child for the summer. Jeannette insists that she bring Lori instead and that she buy her a bus ticket to New York as compensation.
Chapter 52 Summary
In tenth grade, Jeannette is made news editor of the school newspaper. Though the two are more estranged than ever, Jeannette and Dad bond briefly when she is assigned to interview Chuck Yeager, a famed test pilot and West Virginia native who is also Dad’s hero.
Chapter 53 Summary
Lori sends Jeannette frequent letters detailing her life in New York City. She lives in a women’s hostel in Greenwich Village and works at a German restaurant. Rather than wait until graduation, Jeannette decides to leave for New York after her junior year. After she tells her parents, Dad leaves the house without a word, while Mom appears on the verge of tears. She tells Jeannette, “I’m not upset because I’ll miss you. I’m because you get to go to New York and I’m stuck here. It’s not fair” (237).
A few weeks before her planned departure, Dad asks Jeannette to look over his old blueprints for the Glass Castle. As he discusses reworking the layout to account for Lori’s absence, Jeannette tells him, “Dad, you’ll never build the Glass Castle” (238).
Chapter 54 Summary
When Jeannette leaves in the morning to catch her 7:10 a.m. bus, Mom is still asleep. Dad, however, is there on the front steps and insists on walking her to the bus. As Jeannette looks out the bus window at her Dad, she thinks about him leaving Welch at the age of 17, certain he would never return.
Chapters 42-54 Analysis
Across these chapters, Jeannette’s dominant psychological arc is largely resolved, in that she finally lets go of her innocent childhood delusions about Dad, as represented by the symbol of the Glass Castle. There are two important moments that sever these ties. The first coincides with yet another act of sexual violence committed against Jeannette. The disillusionment comes in waves. For example, when Robbie first begins to flirt with her at the pool hall, she expects Dad to violently intervene. As the night progresses, it becomes clear to Jeannette that she is little more than sexual bait in one of Dad’s hustling schemes. Surely Dad won’t let Robbie take her upstairs, Jeannette believes—but this, too, transpires without Dad’s intervention, leaving Jeannette to rely on her own wits to avoid being raped. This is yet another example of how Mom and Dad’s neglect of their children amounts to abuse, in that it forces them into situations in which abuse is likely to occur. Dad may not sexually abuse his children—something worth acknowledging, given his own likely history as a sexual abuse victim—and yet here and elsewhere, his actions indirectly cause such abuse to transpire.
On the ride home, Dad and Jeannette share a telling exchange. Despite the fact that Dad allowed Robbie to flirt with her, to dance with her, and finally to take her upstairs to his room—although she is only around 13—she still holds out hope that Dad will be angry when he discovers Robbie tried to rape her. Instead, he dismisses the attack, adding, “It was like that time I threw you into the sulfur spring to teach you to swim […] You might have been convinced you were going to drown, but I knew you’d do just fine” (213). By connecting these two traumatic experiences in Jeannette’s mind, Dad reveals that his cruelty to her is nothing new, and that the supposedly halcyon days of their relationship—good times aside—were toxic from the start.
This isn’t even the betrayal that finally lays Jeannette’s illusions about Dad to rest. That comes when Jeannette, after suffering indignity upon indignity at the hands of Mom and Dad alike, finally stands up for herself and receives a physical beating for it. The beating genuinely shocks her; Dad has whipped his kids in the past, but only when they were children and never with malice. This beating is different, angrier, and in demolishing Jeannette’s delusional admiration for Dad, it steels her spirits and empowers her to escape the horrific conditions Mom and Dad created for her and her siblings. Jeannette recalls, “I had been counting on Mom and Dad to get us out, but I now knew I had to do it on my own” (221).
The final confirmation of Jeannette’s newfound maturity with respect to her father comes shortly before her departure to New York. As a last-ditch effort to ingratiate himself anew with his daughter, Dad brings out his old blueprints for the Glass Castle. After initially telling him bluntly that he will never build the Glass Castle, Jeannette says, “Dad, as soon as I finish classes, I’m getting on the next bus out of here. If the buses stop running, I’ll hitchhike. I’ll walk if I have to. Go ahead and build the Glass Castle, but don’t do it for me” (238). What neither party says in this moment is that the Glass Castle was never anything more than the increasingly frayed emotional tether between Jeannette and Dad. Once Jeannette cuts that tether and moves on with her life, the Glass Castle is exposed as the illusion it’s always been.
Jeannette’s relationship with Mom evolves in a less linear manner in these chapters. Mom has long been selfish, and she’s long suffered from emotional distress. The incident surrounding the diamond ring, however, suggests that she is seriously psychologically unwell, a possibility that bears out further in the later chapters set in New York. When Jeannette quite reasonably argues that the ring could buy a lot of food, Mom responds, “That’s true, but it could also improve my self-esteem. And at times like these, self-esteem is even more vital than food” (186). Moreover, the fact that Mom considers the ring a replacement for the wedding ring Dad sold years ago reflects the extent to which Mom’s increasingly incomprehensible behavior is a consequence of her resentment toward Dad.
Conversely, when Jeannette is charged with handling the family’s finances in Mom’s absence, she comes to empathize with Mom. When Dad steals one of Mom’s oil lease checks, Jeannette thinks to herself, “For the first time, I had a clear idea of what Mom was up against. Being a strong woman was harder than I had thought” (214). This is a conclusion reached long ago by Lori, who in these chapters becomes a far more central character. At one point when discussing Mom, Lori references “[p]illars shaped like women. The ones holding up those Greek temples with their heads. I was looking at a picture of some the other day, thinking, Those women have the second toughest job in the world” (208).
Jeannette’s newfound empathy for Mom represents personal growth, but it does little to strengthen their relationship. Despite her recognition of Mom’s suffering, Jeannette cannot forgive her for quitting her latest teaching job, thus dooming the family once again to indigence. She says, “If you want to be treated like a mother, you should act like one” (219). The events of these chapters with respect to Mom and Dad thus allow Jeannette to achieve maturity along two vectors: empathy and empowerment. This empathy reveals itself once more in Jeannette’s final thoughts as her bus drives away from Welch. She recalls, “I wondered if [Dad] was remembering how he, too, had left Welch full of vinegar at age seventeen and just as convinced as I was now that he’d never return” (242). By putting herself in her father’s teenage shoes, she tacitly acknowledges how the trauma of his abusive, impoverished upbringing followed him wherever he went, something Jeannette fears might happen to her.
Finally, these chapters further explore the racial dynamics of Welch. Jeannette provides a striking depiction of how de facto segregation works when discussing the customs around the local public pool. She writes:
By ‘us’ I knew [Dinitia] meant the other black people. The pool was not segregated, anyone could swim at any time—technically, at least—but the fact was that all the black people swam in the morning, when the pool was free, and all the white people swam in the afternoon, when admission was fifty cents. No one had planned this arrangement, and no rules enforced it. That was just the way it was (190).
This passage reveals the extent to which segregation persists as a matter of fact in many parts of the South, long after Supreme Court rulings and civil rights legislation banned the practice in a legal sense. In the process of breaking this taboo and joining Dinitia at the pool, Jeannette experiences what is perhaps the happiest moment of her entire time in Welch, recalling “I’d never felt cleaner” (192). However, she is pressured never to relive this moment by the pervasive bigotry of Welch. Of Dinitia, Jeannette writes, “I guess we both knew that, given the way people in Welch thought about mixing, it would be too weird for us to try to be close friends” (199).
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