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.
Themes
Letting Go of Childhood Illusions
The dominant psychological arc of The Glass Castle is Jeannette’s slow yet certain rejection of her illusions concerning Dad. For much of her early childhood, Jeannette believes “Dad was perfect” (23). His intelligence, his sense of humor, and perhaps most of all his ambitions to build the Glass Castle place Dad upon a pedestal in Jeannette’s mind. Her love of her father may also stem from the fact that, superficially at least, he is far more nurturing than Mom.
These illusions, however, begin to fall away along two vectors: Jeannette’s growing personal maturity and the worsening conditions of her life with Dad. Perhaps the earliest incident that threatens Jeannette’s admiration for Dad comes when she falls out of the Green Caboose on the way to Las Vegas and an intoxicated Dad drives for miles before retrieving her. Significantly injured both physically and emotionally, Jeannette initially resists Dad’s attempts to comfort her, but all is forgiven when Dad tells her, “Damn, honey. You busted your snot locker pretty good” (31), causing her to convulse in fits of laughter. Just as Dad’s charm allows him to ingratiate himself with prospective employers on numerous occasions, his sense of humor tends to paper over intentional and unintentional acts of abuse and neglect. Consider, too, the year the family cannot afford even discounted secondhand Christmas presents for the kids. Rather than lament these circumstances, Jeannette feels lucky to receive the planet Venus from Dad for Christmas as opposed to cheap store-bought toys. Here and elsewhere early in the book, Dad finds ways to perpetuate Jeannette’s illusions about his qualities as a father by framing their transience and poverty as a grandiose adventure.
These illusions are further threatened by the Hot Pot incident, in which Dad repeatedly heaves Jeannette into stinking, sulfuric water to teach her to swim. In the moment, his behavior angers Jeannette to no end, yet when Dad tells her he did it for her own good, she accepts his reasoning without question. Jeannette recalls, “Once I got my breath back, I figured he must be right. There was no other way to explain it” (66). Of course, there are plenty of other ways to explain it—cruelty, recklessness, all-purpose bad parenting—but Jeannette is not yet ready to accept that her long-held attitudes about Dad are based on a delusion.
During this same period of her childhood, Jeannette’s attitudes about Dad are contrasted with those of her brother, Brian. Brian far more readily rejects any delusional notions he may have had about Dad after the incident with Ginger, when Dad not only uses Brian’s birthday excursion as an excuse to have an affair with a sex worker, but also gives Brian’s birthday present to her. Given this betrayal, Brian is able to look on Dad with clear eyes far earlier than Jeannette is.
Once the family relocates to Welch, Jeannette’s illusions become increasingly difficult to maintain. A series of betrayals transpire, the first of which is largely symbolic. With Dad increasingly absent, Jeannette entertains her illusions concerning him by digging a foundation for the Glass Castle. As the garbage piles up inside the Little Hobart house, Dad orders Jeannette to use the foundation as a hole for their garbage. Even an adolescent like Jeannette can surely sense the symbolism of the Glass Castle being turned into a literal garbage can—yet even then, Jeannette clings to her admiration for her father, not necessarily for any logical reasons but because to acknowledge her illusions would mean calling into question all the times she assumed he was acting out of love.
Clinging to these illusions becomes impossible, however, after the incident at the roadside bar. Dad willingly puts his daughter in harm’s way, causing her to nearly be raped, and all for $80. As if this betrayal isn’t enough, Dad connects it to the earlier Hot Pot incident, telling her, “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). To Jeannette, it is without question that their present relationship is deeply toxic. This admission reveals that their relationship, despite sporadic moments of joy, has always been toxic.
The Struggle to Understand a Parent’s Poor Choices
Some of the most intractable questions posed by The Glass Castle involve why Mom and Dad, despite being skilled, able-bodied individuals, repeatedly make choices that lead to a life of indigence for themselves and their children. To think of Mom and Dad’s vagrant lifestyle and later homelessness as a choice is an uncomfortable conclusion to reach—particularly for liberal-minded individuals like Jeannette—but particularly following the revelation that Mom owns land worth $1 million, it is difficult to view her poverty as anything other than a conscious decision.
That said, there are other circumstances to consider, the most obvious of which is Dad’s alcoholism. If one follows the lead of mainstream mental health doctrine and considers alcoholism to be a disease, this circumstance certainly complicates the narrative that Dad’s dysfunction is entirely his fault. Jeannette also strongly suggests that Dad is a survivor of sexual abuse, and self-medication through drugs and alcohol is often a long-term symptom of childhood trauma. At the same time, there are clearly broader philosophical factors at play, as both parents are intensely anti-conformist and distrustful of authority. However, philosophy alone cannot account for Mom and Dad’s lifestyle. Rather, their circumstances seem to be the result of a perfect storm that includes trauma, substance abuse, quirks of personality and philosophy, and perhaps mental illness, though Jeannette is careful not to attempt to diagnose either parent in this respect.
Indeed, it may at times feel frustrating to the reader that the author fails to provide much in the way of answers as to why Mom and Dad behave the way they do. In a work of fiction, this lack of answers could be problematic. This book, however, is a memoir about real people, whose motivations are often far too difficult to process, even by the people closest to them and even by themselves.
The Destructiveness of Codependent Relationships
Dad’s alcoholism and Mom’s attempts to cope with it present an instructive case study in codependent relationships. Broadly speaking, codependency involves a person who enables a partner’s self-destructive behavior because of his or her own psychological traits and the dynamics of the relationship between the two. As a devoted artist who is willing to live in squalor if it means she can work on her art all day, Mom often fails to put pressure on Dad to get a job rather than drink at the bar all day. In fact, it is usually when Mom herself has to get a job—and is thus deprived of the opportunity to concentrate on art—that her anger toward Dad bubbles over.
One of the clearest manifestations of her toxic codependent relationship with Dad comes when Mom tells the kids not to clean up after his most recent drunken rampage. She says, “Your father needs to see the mess he’s making of our lives” (112). Because Dad knows that Mom has an extraordinarily high tolerance for squalor, he has no real reason to clean up the mess himself, nor to stop engaging in the behavior that causes these destructive episodes in the first place. Under normal circumstances, cleaning up after Dad would be the behavior of an enabler, but these are not normal circumstances. Furthermore, even at her lowest points, Mom observes the wreckage of her life through the lens of adventure and excitement—a coping mechanism that enables Dad to continue hurling the family into ever deeper states of chaos.
An even clearer example of enabling comes when Dad quits drinking and moves upstate to work at a resort. Mom refuses to join him, but Dad realizes that if he returns to the city, he will start drinking again, in part because the city is full of familiar triggers and in part because life there is so full of hardship. Eventually, however, Mom, lonely for his presence, wears him down and convinces him to return, whereupon he immediately starts drinking again. Mom may be a victim of a toxic, verbally abusive relationship with Dad, but her tolerance for chaos and her addiction to excitement feed into and exacerbate Dad’s self-destructive tendencies.
How Poverty Increases the Likelihood of Abuse
The events of this book call into question the extent to which Mom and Dad could be characterized as “abusive” parents. Dad does dole out physical punishment, not uncommon in the 1960s, and Walls adopts a rather sanguine attitude toward this punishment, writing, “Dad whipped us with his belt, but never out of anger, and only if we back-talked or disobeyed a direct order, which was rare” (59). At least for Jeannette, however, the more traumatic abuse she suffers is more indirect, arriving through neglect. When two able-bodied and intellectually capable parents like Mom and Dad fail to provide food for their children, this, too, may be seen as a form of abuse. Moreover, Mom pithily addresses the relationship between abuse and neglect after she falls through the front steps and suffers extensive bruising. She tells the neighbors, “My husband doesn’t beat me. He just won’t fix the steps” (185).
There is another class of abuse the Walls children endure, however, not at the direct hands of Mom or Dad but indirectly, arising out of the conditions in which they live. For example, if Mom and Dad could afford a house with running water, Jeannette would not need to bathe at her grandfather’s house, where she becomes the victim of sexual abuse by Uncle Stanley. The family’s circumstances also force Lori to hitchhike to her National Merit Scholarship test and suffer the pawing and verbal predations of a trucker. Most explicitly, Dad knowingly places Jeannette in a situation in which she is likely to be raped by Robbie. In fact, the only reason she isn’t raped is that she manages to outwit her would-be assailant.
Jeannette observes how poverty causes violence and abuse outside her own family as well. Commenting on the cascades of violence in Welch, Walls says that poor, overworked miners “came home and took it out on their wives, who took it out on their kids, who took it out on other kids” (164).
Related Titles
By Jeannette Walls
