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Understanding family resilience Joan Patterson
Froma walsh family resilience essay
Understanding family resilience Joan Patterson
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The Walls' Family At the first part of Chapter 3, Walls describes her family and her miserable and struggle lives when they moved to Welch; they were starved all the time, beard biting cold, and faced all kinds of sudden danger in there so that they had to make a lot of efforts in order to survival. In The Glass Castle, each of the Walls family members has the distinct personality and has different viewpoints on the same situation, and that make Jeannette Walls has a unique family. In my opinion, the one in Walls family member I like the most is Jeannette because she is responsible for her family and has a kind heart. On the other hand, the one in Walls family member I don't like is Jeannette's mother Rosemary because she is irresponsible …show more content…
for their kids and selfishness. Jeannette was a responsible girl, who truly wished her family out of poverty and get to normal and happiness; she made efforts to help and encourage her family and even persuaded her parents to make changes when they got into trouble and did something that had negative effects on the Walls family.
For example, She wanted to improve the way 93 Little Hobart Street looked and fit into surroundings by trying to paint the house with bright yellow paint when they lived in Welch. "I was so excited by the prospect of living in a perky yellow home that I could barely sleep that night"(Walls 157). She aspired to have a nice house, and she really paid the action. Even though the other of the Walls family members didn't want to help her, she still seriously and carefully painted their house. She undertook the heavy workload, tried to make a ladder to reach the higher place, and even after the paint was ruined in the next year, she was holding on her responsibility and a last shred of hope and kept stirring the paint. She knew that as a Walls family member, she had a responsible to make their lives …show more content…
better. Another reason that I like Jeannette best is because she had a kind heart. For instance, Dinette Hewitt, who was a violent girl, bullied Jeanette every day. She abused her with the most terrible words. Despite this, she never stood in front of her indignantly and abused Dinette. "But I also kept thinking about Dinette, trying to make sense of her. I hope for a while to befriend her…She had to have some good in her, but I couldn't figure out how to get her to shine it my way"(Walls 141). Because of her kindness and a power heart, bullying could not destroy her but made her stand up. Another example of having a kind heart is she drove the dog away when it was catching a boy, and she carried the boy piggyback and kindly took him home (Walls 141-142 ). There was no rewards, no thanks; she could leave the dog and the boy alone, and she could not offer to take him home, but she still did good things and decidedly helped the boy. As we can see, Jeannette's kind heart made her become tolerant and was able to help others, this outstanding personality just like her invisible wings that helps her become to a wonderful person. Although Jeannette had good personalities, in contrast, her mother Rosemary was irresponsible for her kids and a selfishness person. This is the bad side of her character, so she is the one in Walls family who I dislike. Good parents are responsible for their children; they have an obligation to look after them and give them healthy growing environment within their capability. However, Rosemary didn't do that. One example shows that she is irresponsible for her kids is after Jeannette had found their food full of maggots, Rosemary was indifference and didn't pay attention to it but believed her kids could eat the inside part of the ham (Walls 172). This behavior had no sense of responsibility because I believe a normal parent would never let kids eat moldy foods, let alone eating the food with maggots. Fortunately, unlike Jeanette's mother, I have a responsible mother. I remember when I was a kid, my mother would take away and even throw away my snacks when they were near the expiration date because she was concerned about my healthy at any time and worried about I would get sick if I had eaten stale foods. Moreover, Rosemary ignored the serious event that Jeannette's uncle molested her. When Jeannette hastily told her that her uncle groped her, she didn't treat it seriously and didn’t care her daughter's personal safety (Walls 184). I cannot understand Rosemary's attitude. As parents, keeping their kids accountable is an essential thing that they should do, and they must do. I don't like and agree Rosemary’s behavior, and if I were a parent, I definitely would not let my kid get into a panic like this. Besides irresponsible for kids, Rosemary was a selfishness person is another reason that I don't like her.
When the Walls family suffered hunger and cold, Rosemary was hiding a huge family-size chocolate and ate it furtively. She also had an absurd excuse that she couldn't control herself, and she could not live without sugar (Walls 174). In my opinion, she was an independent adult so that she had capability to control herself and show selfless to her kids. However, she only thought about her own needs; the money that she could be used to buy breads and milk for her family was spent on buying chocolate, and to say the least, she even didn't want to share her chocolate to kids. She hid herself under the blanket on the sofa bed in order to do not letting her kids discovered her (Walls 174 ). Her selfishness made her kids' lives miserable. In addition, She stopped Brian and Jeannette to sell the ring which they found on the edge of their property (Walls 186). Despite this precious ring with shiny diamond could exchange a lot of money that is enough to them to buy more foods, Rosemary still wanted to keep it. “‘That [the ring could get a lot of food] is true…but it could also improve my self-esteem. And at times like these, self-esteem is even more vital than food’”(Rosemary 186). The words she said is too selfish. We all know that foods are the first and the most important survival conditions; diamond, luxury, and self-esteem is extra things we need to get after we
already have had normal and stable lives. Nevertheless, Rosemary had a weird concept. She never considered about what her kid's lives would be if they didn't have enough food. She only held the ring as a sacred treasure to increase her self-esteem. In her view, she found contentment, but for me, this is not to defend self-esteem; this is selfishness and self-destruction. She took away not only a ring but also her kids' hope in their lives. In summary, I like The Glass Castle because it's a great book that shows the distinct personalities of the characters. Jeannette meticulously explains the extensive experience in her life and how she ideas continually changed as she grew up. I think she had a bittersweet life. I can see she lay down in the desert and looked stars, and she also slept in a small carton box; she read book with her parents after dinner, and she had to find foods in the trash on the following day. Because she had a lot of unique life experience, the Glass Castle she wrote is interesting and attractive.
The Castle is a movie primarily about a family sticking together and their fight for the right to live in their own home. The Castle’s portrayal of family is both positive and negative.
Throughout the Glass Castle there is a constant shift in Jeanettes tone through her use of diction. Her memoir is centered around her memories with her family, but mainly her father Rex Walls. Although it is obvious through the eyes of the reader that Rex is an unfit parent and takes no responsibility for his children, in her childhood years Jeanette continually portrays Rex as an intelligent and loving father, describing her younger memories with admiration in her tone. The capitalization of “Dad” reflects Jeannette’s overall admiration for her father and his exemplary valor. “Dad always fought harder, flew faster, and gambled smarter than everyone else in his stories”(Walls 24). Jeanette also uses simple diction to describe her father, by starting sentences with, “Dad said,” over and over. By choosing to use basic language instead of stronger verbs, she captures her experience in a pure and honest tone.
Throughout the book The Glass Castle, Jeannette and her family are essentially homeless, which leaves them with dealing with the daily struggles that come along with it. Although there are only a few instances where the Walls did not have a home, the conditions they lived through were horrendous. Jeannette and her siblings cope with their situations in many ways. At the beginning, the children never complained. Their parents Rex and Rose Mary had significantly different coping mechanisms. While Rose Mary was painting or sleeping, Rex was heading to the local bars. Their ways of dealing with their living situations and overall economic and political status did not help the siblings lead a fulfilling childhood. Coping mechanisms
...d to share their deepest and most private moments with their audience members, and this in turn will create a genuine, quality story. When asked if Jeannette Walls has fulfilled the duty given to her by William Faulkner, one should not even come close to hesitating with their response. In The Glass Castle, Walls shares some of the most personal and emotion-evoking moments of her life, and they clearly include the essential characteristics of writing as defined by Faulkner. With the expert use of Walls rhetorical strategy, she makes the reader see, hear, feel, and sense the emotion as if it is occurring firsthand. So, to conclude, Jeannette Walls has most definitely fulfilled Faulkner’s expectations of a writer by crafting a memoir stuffed with superb rhetorical strategies that thoroughly translates the events in Walls’ life to the readers in a very detailed manner.
Jeannette Walls the author and narrator of the memoir The Glass Castle was a hard working and responsible young girl. Making a budget Jeannette calculated that they would, “Squeak by if,” she, “Made extra money babysitting,” (Walls 209). As a 13 year old not only did Jeannette take care of her brother and sister but she created a whole budget for the summer. Even though she did not have to work and could have rationed some money she ask baby sat to feed her brother and
The Walls family consists of three daughters and a son. Out of all of the kids, Rex the father favors Jeannette who is the middle child only because he felt that they both understand each other. “ I swear, honey, there are times I think you’re the only one around who still has faith in me” (P;79). This shows how their trust in each other is compared to the rest of the family and it also shows their bond, their sense
When the topic of childhood memory pops up in a conversation the listeners would think the story teller is telling the truth right? Well, what if I said that the people telling the stories might not even know if they aren’t? When these stories are told most don’t realize the little bit of memory actually involved. So how much or it is true and how much it came from another inaccurate place? Where could something like that come from? Were Jennette Walls’ memories real? Does this affect you or is it not a big dilemma? Should these be considered There are several different debates within itself but the main one to focus on is are your memories even your memories?
It is commonly believed that the only way to overcome difficult situations is by taking initiative in making a positive change, although this is not always the case. The theme of the memoir the Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is that the changes made in children’s lives when living under desperate circumstances do not always yield positive results. In the book, Jeannette desperately tries to improve her life and her family’s life as a child, but she is unable to do so despite her best efforts. This theme is portrayed through three significant literary devices in the book: irony, symbolism and allusion.
As I read the Glass Castle, the way Rose Mary behaves, thinks and feels vary greatly and differently throughout the memoir. The immediate question that pops up in my mind is to ask whether Rose Mary carries some sort of mental illness. Fortunately, given the hints and traits that are relevant to why Rose Mary lives like that in the memoir, we, the readers, are able to make some diagnosis and assumptions on the kind of mental illness she may carry. To illustrate, one distinctive example is when Rose Mary blames Jeannette for having the idea to accept welfare. “Once you go on welfare, it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case.” (188). In my opinion, Rose Mary is being nonsense and contractive in her criticism, because of Rose Mary’s resistances to work and to accept welfare, it often causes a severe food shortage within the family that all four little children have to find food from trash cans or move on with hunger, which could lead to a state of insufficient diet. More importantly, having welfare as a way to solve food shortage, it can certainly improve those young Walls children’s poor nutrition and maintain their healthy diet, but Rose Mary turns it down because she thinks it is a shame to accept welfare despite their children are suffering from starvation. Another example will be when Rose Mary abandons all of her school work for no reason. “One morning toward the end of the school year, Mom had a complete meltdown. She was supposed to write up evaluations of her students’ progress, but she’d spent every free minute painting, and now the deadline was on her and the evaluations were unwritten” (207). This is one of the moments when Rose Mary shifts all of her attentio...
For so long she has been around what she saw as the destination for her life, which was success and happiness, in the lifelong family friends the Lowells. She assumed they were just given this life without ever thinking they had to work as hard as she did to get there, consequently envy and resentment ensued. The resentment started with the whole family and then got more intense and personal when it came to the daughter of the Lowells, Parker, someone Andrea could identify with on a personal level. This story illustrated for us the unseen factors and repercussions that too much ambition to be accepted by anyone can have one's long lasting development into their own person. This journey to prove who you are to others can lead to intense emotions and motives that aren’t normal yours and can cause you to lose sight of the very person you’re trying to prove that you
Education plays a big role in our daily lives. Education is commonly defined as a process of learning and obtaining knowledge. The story takes place beginning in the late 1950s to the early 2000s. Jeannette Walls is the main character of the story and the narrator. She tells the events of her life living with careless and yet loving parents. This family of six lived in many cities and towns and went through tough states to stay alive. Her mother and father never kept a good steady job, but they had great intelligence. Jeannette and her siblings barely went to school to get the proper education they needed. In the book The Glass Castle, author Jeanette Walls discovers the idea that a conservative education may possibly not always be the best education due to the fact that the Walls children were taught more from the experiences their parents gave them than any regular school or textbook could give them. In this novel readers are able to get an indication of how the parents Rex and Rosemary Walls, choose to educate and give life lessons to their children to see the better side of their daily struggles.
...victims, the Walls siblings may not have chosen to overcome their painful history to become such strong and successful individuals. The abdication of what one could consider appropriate parental responsibility by moving to Welch isolated the children in a very hard environment. In their time there, the remarkable survival skills and character that the children developed served as a source of strength in their escape from their environment. Their determination in forging a better future for themselves is realized by utilizing the skills they formed while trapped in Welch. The courage to embrace change; putting aside such a deplorable childhood speaks volumes about the remarkable ability of these siblings to overcome hardship and achieve their own powerful and unique lives.
The Glass Castle written by Jeannette Walls is a true story memoir, which introducing family which consists of four children, a neglectful mother and an alcoholic father. This family is constantly confined by poverty and foolish decision making on the part of the parents (reword this it sounds awkward). Despite these obstacles, Jeannette Walls is able to progress forward and to be successful, thus proving that she indeed is the “fittest of all”. She proves that she is the fittest of all because of her ability to survive life and death situations, her ability to adapt without her parent’s, and her ability to remain determined in trying to achieve her goals.
Jeannette Walls had a horrific childhood that truly brought out the survivor in her. Jeannette had troubles with her family, friends and siblings but she was not hindered by the difficult situations and the choices that she had to make. In order to survive she to had be resourceful and use what she had to her advantage and also learn to adapt to any situation. Through it all she had the drive and purpose of a true survivor. Her survival tools of Ingenuity, Adaptability and Purpose helped her to grow into the person she is today.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a harrowing and heartbreaking yet an inspiring memoir of a young girl named Jeannette who was deprived of her childhood by her dysfunctional and unorthodox parents, Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Forced to grow up, Walls stumbled upon coping with of her impractical “free-spirited” mother and her intellectual but alcoholic father, which became her asylum from the real world, spinning her uncontrollably. Walls uses pathos, imagery, and narrative coherence to illustrate that sometimes one needs to go through the hardships of life in order to find the determination to become a better individual.