Character Analysis Of Venus In The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

The description given about Venus tells us many things about her personality, that she is shyer than the rest of her siblings, doesn’t shine as bright compared to the bravery of her brother and the intelligence of her sister. After all, she is only a planet. The wording her dad uses describing this gift The novel The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a memoir of her increasingly difficult and troubling life. Throughout these adventures her and her three siblings travel to many places from California to Phoenix, to the quite backward town of Welch, and to New York City itself. In which, her relationship with her parents and family is at times, straining and at the times, one of the strongest relationships she has. This relationship she has

This can be proved by several things, the earliest being when her Mom lets her cook hot dogs on the stove at three years old because her Mom claims Jeannette is “mature for [her] age” (11), this wasn’t the best judgement on her part. Another example is when her Dad tells the story of how Lori got bitten by a scorpion, he took her to “a Navajo witch doctor” (13) who healed her by “cutting open the wound” (13) because he “didn’t trust hospitals” (13). Both of these examples have caused injury to their children, and were caused because the parents were doing their free spirit mind of thinking. A good example of the parents thinking overcoming most logic parents would have, is how the kids “might enroll in school” (20). This is something you would think a set of parents would do in towns when they’re moving around so often. In addition, Lori once had to be paddled because “she had to punish someone” (75), this event pointed to Mom’s logic surrounding punishment, and proves that she would rather paddle her own child than paddle another

We ate irregularly, and when we did, we’d gorge ourselves” (22). To when they had such little food that Jeannette and Lori were found eating margarine (68). While in Welsh, Jeannette meets Ginnie Sue Pastor, the town whore and Jeannette’s only opinion on it is “One thing about whoring: It put a chicken on the table” (163). These all show that Jeannette’s family and the cactus attitude surrounding food put a strain on her. This gets extreme to the point that later in the novel, Jeannette hides in the bathroom during lunch and waits for the people to “throw away their lunch bags in the garbage pails” and then go to “retrieve them”