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The Glass Castle Theme Of Freedom

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In the memoir The Glass Castle, the protagonist, Jeannette Walls, tries to achieve freedom, but doesn’t fully obtain it. Jeannette Walls seeks both freedom from financial struggles, and freedom from her family, but only attains one type of freedom. As she grows up, Jeannette and her family are in and out of poverty. Jeannette realizes that living in poverty is not the way she wants to live, so she tries to free herself from it. At some points in her life, someone comes across a large sum of money, and for the short while that it lasts, her family lives more lavishly than they usually do. At the really financially hard times for her family, Jeannette and her siblings often don’t have food for school. Walls writes, “At lunchtime, when other …show more content…

From the young age of three, Jeannette is forced to be independent and take care of herself when she needs something, her parents do not pay much attention to her or care for her. The story opens up with Jeannette recalling, “I was on fire… I was three years old… I was wearing the dress to cook hotdogs… then the flames leaped up, reaching my face” (Walls, 9). At the age of three, Jeannette is already learning how to be independent. As she grows up, she lives with her negligent parents and her three siblings. In every town she lives in, someone in her family gets into trouble and they all have to skip town. Because of all their moving around, Jeannette does not have a stable childhood. Also, when they move to new houses, they always lack something important like electricity, running water, and basic furniture. Not only is she always left in these dilapidated homes, but sometimes, she is left in them alone to take care of her siblings and provide for them. Her mom occasionally gets a job but prefers to sit home and paint, leaving it to her children to get money for dinner. Her father is always out at night getting drunk, sometimes not coming home for days. When he comes home, he is always so drunk that he either just passes out or gets really mad and dangerous first, and then passes out. Her parents’ neglect for her and her family’s well-being really angers Jeannette, so she decides that she has to leave them. She tells her sister Lori about her plan to escape to New York, saying,

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In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls is forced to take care of herself from a very young age. Her parents are mentally unstable, and her dad regularly turns to alcohol. She is forced to move when any problems arise, which is often--from Battle Mountain to Phoenix to the small town of Welch, Virginia. Despite all of this, Jeannette has a memorable childhood, riding around on bikes, petting cheetahs, and declaring ownership of stars. Throughout her whole life, she is consistently the only one that believes in her reckless father.

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The Glass Castle: Controversial Topics. The Glass Castle is a 2005 book by Jeannette Walls. The memoir explains the author’s life, growing up with her family most especially with her parents who could be described as nomads and deadbeats. Notwithstanding the difficult upbringing, her siblings and she had, Jeannette perseveres and becomes a successful Journalist living in New York City.

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(115-116). This sedate tone is a clear craft move by the author. She specifically makes Jeannie seem resigned and about to give up. Denials of small, everyday, opportunities like this can have a damaging impact on one’s mental health and can create an inferiority complex. For example, Jeanne starts blaming herself and her race for everything that happens to her.

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“If you don 't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim” (41). Although Rex Walls was not always an admirable father and role model, he did make an essential point while teaching his daughter, Jeannette, how to swim. In life, not everything comes without resistance. As Jeannette Walls describes throughout her life story, sometimes people are forced to face hardships that make them question their whole life. However, as seen in her book, it is important to learn to take those hardships and use them to shape one’s future for the better.

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Then, she spent her life as a “mother” to take care of kids and she has become a determined lady to make sure that they have all of the needs. After she observed the way their family acting, it builds her personality to know what she needs to be successful. Jeannette grew up with the identity of always running away with her family. As she grew up she realized she did not want that. She wanted to try and live on her own.

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They think they can bend the rules and do what they think is necessary. Jeannette is exposed to these understandings, making her the person she grew up to be. Jeanette demonstrates how she struggles with her family throughout numerous portions of the novel: “The Desert,” “Welch,” New York.” These struggles developed and defined who she came to be.

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Later, when Jeannette becomes a preteen, she clashes with her parents’ viewpoints more, but manages to learn valuable lessons from their unreasonable cruelty. When her father has nowhere to go, he decides to take them into a town called Welsh, where his parents live. Erma, Jeannette’s grandmother is racist, hateful to her grandchildren, and is constantly beating them. Rose Mary, Jeannette’s mother, tries to explain that everyone has good qualities but Jeannette refuses to accept this idea and fires back: “ Oh yeah?

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After graduating middle school her friend lost touch with her and eventually left her life for good: “By the time she got to Welch High Dinitia changed.” Jeannette was also sexually harassed by one of her friends in Phoenix while playing hide-and-seek: “Billy smushed his face against mine… ‘Guess what?’Billy shouted. ‘I raped you’” Lastly, while going to school in Phoenix Jeannette was bullied for being smart and skinny: “The other students didn’t like me much because I was so tall and pale and skinny and always raised my hand too fast… A few days after I started school, four Mexican girls followed me home and jumped me in an alleyway…”

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It's Rex and Rose Mary not being able to provide food for their children and or them blatantly using the money they have on non essential items like alcohol and paint supplies. We see this in the first couple pages of the book when Jeannette, age 3, gets sent to the hospital after her dress caught on fire when she was cooking her own hot dogs on the stove. While being in the hospital she says “That was the thing about hospitals, you never had to worry about running out of food.” (12) for Jeannette to think about this at such a young age and early in the book shows its prominence in her life as we read. Jeanette's relationship with food throughout the book is very eye opening to the American dream.

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To illustrate, Walls begins painting her memoir by describing what was likely her first experience of neglect. After moving from place to place for years, when Walls family finally settles down in Welch, West Virginia she is forced to reconsider her circumstances. As Walls ages she realizes that she is not living a healthy, stable life style, but instead the lifestyle of a child subjective to physical and mental neglect. (“Jeannette Walls

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While Jeannette was a junior in high school she became aware of the fact she had to get out of Welch and away from her parents. “ All through the long walk, the pain had kept me thinking, and by the time i reached the tree trunk, i had made two decisions. The first was that id had my first and last whipping. No one was ever going to do that to me again. The second was that, like Lori, I was going to get out of welch.

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As a child, Jeannette Walls moves around constantly with her family. The Walls family would move to different desert towns and settle as long as Mr. Walls can hold a job. When sober, Mr. Walls represents a charismatic father who loves his children and teaches them important life skills. He encourages imagination inside of the Walls kids and often captures their dream and creativity. Together, the family had planned to build a glass castle that contains all of the family’s hope and inspiration.

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Jeannette narrowly escapes rape, but because her father exploits her in a way that makes it seem like she would consent to underage sex, she is abused. The sexual abuse Jeannette suffers results in her having more trust in her own intuition as she

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