Every member of a family fulfills a specific role that allows the group to function as a cohesive unit. In most families, these roles involve traditional genders, where the father plays the role of the “provider”, bringing in money to the family, and the mother is the “nurturer”, keeping the children healthy and content while maintaining an orderly household. When these roles are left unfilled, a family can fall apart almost instantly. In Jeannette Walls’ chilling memoir The Glass Castle, Jeannette’s recollection of her childhood involves a large amount of familial dysfunction due to the lack of fulfillment of these roles. Jeannette and her siblings Maureen, Brian, and Lori grow up with their parents Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Rex and Rose Mary …show more content…
An example of this is the lack of food that the children have throughout the novel. Due to the poor socioeconomic status of the family, Jeannette and her siblings never have food to take for their school lunches. This would have been understandable if the family had no means to make money, however, this is not the case. Jeannette says that she and Brian found a “genuine two-carat” diamond ring. Jeannette tells her mother that “…that ring could get us a lot of food“ (Walls 118). In response, Rose Mary says “That's true…but it could also improve my self-esteem. And at times like these, my self-esteem is even more vital than food” (Walls 118). Clearly, Rose Mary exhibits a selfish attitude and prioritizes her self-esteem over the needs of her family. If she had sold the diamond ring, a family which could not even afford to eat would be able to thrive. Evidently, by placing her own needs above those of the family, Rose Mary shows how she is willing to prioritize herself at the peril of her family. Contrastingly, Rex tends to put the children’s needs above his own. When the children need new beds, Jeannette says that he “built each of us a wooden box with sliding doors for personal stuff” along with the bunk beds (Walls 96). Moreover, he lets the children have the bedroom in Welch and resorts to sleeping on a …show more content…
A person in these roles typically “nurtures” and cares for their children in addition to keeping a neat and tidy household. However, Rose Mary displays a complete lack of desire to conform to this gender role. As a result, her family’s quality of life suffers. She exemplifies this lack of desire when Jeannette discusses the cooking situation in the Walls household. She says “Mom didn't like cooking much. ‘Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour’, she’d ask us, ‘when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?’ ” (Walls 34). Rose Mary would prefer to cook once a week and serve the same meal daily, risking food poisoning (34). Therefore, Rose Mary displays an utter disregard for the lives of her children by refusing to cook them food daily. It is widely accepted that one of the mother’s main roles in a household is to cook food for her children. By not living up to her role as a mother, Rose Mary not only negatively affects their lifestyle by forcing them to eat the same food everyday, but also severely risks their health by forcing them to eat spoiled food. As such, Rose Mary’s declining to fulfill the traditional role of a mother is a large problem in the Walls household. Although many may question why Rex could not cook for his
Every day the safety and well-being of many children are threatened by neglect. Each child deserves the comfort of having parents whom provide for their children. Throughout the memoir, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls explains the childhood from being born into the hands of parent who neglect their children. Many may argue that children need to grow with their parents; however, the removal of children is necessary if the parents disregard the kid’s needs and cannot provide a stable life for their children.
Taylor and Lou Ann demonstrate a symbiotic relationship between the roles and characteristics in a family. Edna Poppy and Virgie Mae replaces the missing physical and emotional traits in a stable household. The examples tie into the fact that not all families in this book match “the norms” and expectations, but are equally valued, blood or
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.
The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls about her family. In this story she tells about her adventurous and dangerous childhood that shaped her to be the person she is today. Which is a strong, optimistic, responsible woman who knows how to roll with the burns and the punches literally. Brian, who is younger than Jeannette was her partner in crime in all her childhood memories. Maureen was the youngest she was not too close with the family and if I had one way to describe her it would be lost. Lori was oldest sibling and the total opposite. She was more reserved and very into her art. Which she took after their mother, RoseMary. RoseMary was a selfish woman, she would constantly put herself first. She was also, very weak and
From being able to save up money to buy a car and move out to West Virginia and then leaving the responsibility of finances and income to her children, Rose Mary Wall’s helped put Jeanette and her siblings through a hard and tough childhood. Although, a debate could be made that with all the awful impacts that the mother had on her children, all she really did was actually positively influence them to be able to conquer any hardship that they may face in their life. In the end, Rose Mary Wall’s character of being independent, unreasonable, and stubborn did both positively and negatively impact her children’s lives through the hardships they all faced
The Struggle Of Building Adversity means difficulties or misfortune. When someone's dealing with things or a situation turns out to go against them, they face adversity. Adversity is something someone comes across in life, it's like being part of a person. Decisions and actions are influenced by a lot of things. Conflicts influence all kinds of actions and decisions, depending on the person.
Jeannette Walls has lived a life that many of us probably never will, the life of a migrant. The majority of her developmental years were spent moving to new places, sometimes just picking up and skipping town overnight. Frugality was simply a way of life for the Walls. Their homes were not always in perfect condition but they continued with their lives. With a brazen alcoholic and chain-smoker of a father and a mother who is narcissistic and wishes her children were not born so that she could have been a successful artist, Jeannette did a better job of raising herself semi-autonomously than her parents did if they had tried. One thing that did not change through all that time was the love she had for her mother, father, brother and sisters. The message that I received from reading this memoir is that family has a strong bond that will stay strong in the face of adversity.
The Glass Castle is a memoir of the writer Jeannette Walls life. Her family consists of her father Rex Walls, her mother Rose Mary Walls, her older sister Lori Walls, her younger brother Brian Walls and her younger sister Maureen Walls. Jeannette Walls grew up with a lot of hardships with her dad being an alcoholic and they never seemed to have any money. Throughout Jeanette’s childhood, there are three things that symbolize something to Jeannette, they are fire, New York City and the Glass Castle, which shows that symbolism gives meanings to writing.
When the family arrives in Welch, they notice that their newly purchased house is dull-looking and depressing, matching their moods when they first start living there. Jeannette notices that their glum house is contributing to their glum moods so she suggests painting the house yellow, a colour that is symbolic of happiness, to try and boost morale. Nobody in her family is willing to help so she paints by herself and notices an improvement in the look of their house. Unfortunately, she leaves the paint outside in the wintertime causing it to freeze, meaning that she is unable to finish painting the house. One day while playing outside, Jeannette and her brother stumble upon a diamond wedding ring lying on the ground. The wedding ring symbolizes hope to the children because they realize that it can be sold for a substantial amount of money. They bring the ring to their mother and tell her that, “it could get [them] a lot of food” (185), to which she replies, “but it could also improve my self-esteem. And at times like these, self-esteem is even more vital than food” (185). Rose Mary decides to keep the ring because she values her own selfish needs over the welfare of her children. Both the yellow paint and the ring represent positive changes for the family but neither of them ends up actually changing their
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...
...life living with yet loving parents and siblings just to stay alive. Rosemary and Rex Walls had great intelligence, but did not use it very wisely. 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. Showing that it does not matter what life throws at us we can take it. Rosemary and Rex Walls may not have been the number one parents in the world however they were capable in turning their children into well-educated adults.
As if to forsake her femininity and forego a life of confinement and housework, the girl reveres her father's work and condemns her mother's duties. The sum of the girl's respect seems to lie with her father, as is evident in her reference to his work outdoors as "ritualistically important" (468). On the other hand, while the girl recognizes that her mother is busy, she still considers her mother's "work in the house [to be] [·] endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing" (468). The division between her parents' tasks is especially apparent in the girl's reaction to her mother's presence at the barn. She feels threatened by her...
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.
Emma heard the pronouncement each night from her bedroom, which was right off the kitchen. She didn’t understand how preparing one meal a day kept intact her mother’s sense of motherhood. When she tried to discuss it with her dad, he just told her to be patient with her mother; that she was going through something tough.
On “Their manner of living in society: the oldest man of every family is its governor; wives serve their husbands” (More 39). The family could be described as a “little commonwealth”. The ruler or father tie together the family or kingdom. A ruler does for his subjects as a father does for his children- provides safety, shelter, economic stability, and disciplines. The subjects- mother and children- were expected to show loyalty, love, and respect. An abnormal family structure would be one in which a powerful woman had influence over her hen-pecked and feeble husband. These attitudes reflected the aversion to a dominant woman, which would be a shortcoming to Suzanne and The Countess. Their trick on the Count would be frowned upon in Utopia because it suggests that the women are trying to defy gender roles and the patriarchal society that gave men all the