Boundaries In The Glass Castle

Boundaries

 The boundary between turbulence and order, a zone said to have no rules, like the Walls family. They didn’t live life like everyone else, there were no set rules they made or followed, and for the most part, the Walls family didn’t even follow the law. The Walls children’s life was built upon not having their parents tell them what to do and what not to do. Throughout the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette endured many situations where she and her family are either pushing the boundary or are more on one side of it. Put simply, the Walls family epitomizes the line that separates chaos and control.  

 These forces are shown in the family’s everyday life. Metaphorically, the Walls family is the turbulence, representing the chaos;

while the order is the natural world, with laws telling people what they should do, what is right. Every time they did the “skedaddle”, it created chaos in a world where they could have settled down, had order in their lives. Or whenever Jeannette’s father, Rex Walls, ruined the everyday order by corrupting it with his drunken turbulence. Turbulence is what this family’s life was always filled with. They almost never had order in their lives, but order is seen when the Walls’ family is living in Welch, West Virginia. Jeannette’s mother, Rose Mary Walls, dispassionately applied for a job. With her mother having a job and providing a steady income for the household, you would have thought that their life was going to get better. However, they still didn’t have any stability. “So even though she had a steady job, we were living pretty much like we had before” (Walls 198), with “before” being a life filled with chaos, and constantly not having enough money for necessities such as food.

 The boundary of turbulence and order is a constant in the Walls family’s life.

They either showed the boundary existed or tried pushing it.  The house on 93 Little Hobart Street exemplified the said boundary.  It “was a dinky thing perched high up off the road on a hillside so steep that only the back of the house rested on the ground” (Walls 150). In color, the house was gray, and Jeannette decided she wanted to paint the house to try and spruce it up a bit. By doing that, she thought “people might be more accepting of us if we made an effort to improve the way 93 Little Hobart Street looked” (157). All through the memoir, the children try to grasp a sense of acceptance and fitting in.  Jeannette’s attempt to improve the appearance of the house failed, making it two-toned.  It stood out even more than it had before, and “instead of a freshly painted yellow house, or even a dingy gray one, we now had a weird-looking half-finished patch job” (Walls 158). The dwelling being two colors symbolized the boundary with the fresh paint displaying order and the dingy gray representing turbulence.  Order was trying to paint over the turbulence, control the chaos, yet neither color was more dominant than the other and both were obviously

present.  

Another scenario that showed the boundary between turbulence and order took place in the Walls family’s old car, when, “The speedometer needle crept past one hundred, the last number on the dial, and pushed it into the empty space beyond” (Walls 119). In this part of the memoir, when Jeannette’s father challenged their old car to go as fast as it could, it crossed the said boundary for a second or two. Since nothing is written past 100, once the speedometer needle passed the number and went into “the empty space beyond”, anything could have happened. The family didn’t know if the car would speed up, slow down, or explode. At this point, for Rex Walls and his family, turbulence is in its element. However, order also came into play. The car did not speed up, slow down, or explode. Instead, a “white steam that smelled like iron started pouring out from the sides of the hood” (Walls 119) and with “a terrible coughing, clunking noise, the car began to slow” (Walls 119). As the family came close to “a place where no rules apply” (61), a metaphorical impossibility, the car broke down which returned a sense of order.  

Ultimately, the author is saying that you can’t have order without turbulence, you don’t have anything to take control of if there is no chaos. Order cannot exist without turbulence. If there is no turbulence, there is nothing that has to be brought to order. Even though Jeannette and her siblings do escape to a life filled with order, they couldn’t do that without knowing what a life of living in the zone between turbulence and order was like first. Jeannette Walls is saying that inevitably, we do reach a point where we have to deal with turbulence and order in our lives but we must find the balance between the two to truly be at peace. Phil Knight once said, “There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.”