Jeannette Walls’s
The Glass Castle
Dr. Matthew Fike
Department of English
HMXP 102-003
Outline
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Epigraph
Structure
Writing in Class
Concepts
Images
What lies beneath
Themes
Parents’ contradictions
The Glass Castle
The Moral
Paper topics
Epigraph as printed in TGC
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true
From: Dylan Thomas’s “Poem on His Birthday”
“Poem on His Birthday”
• http://plagiarist.com/poetry/1136/
Preliminary Points
• The poem was written in 1952, a year before
his death. It continues a life-long fascination
with death but conveys the feeling that his
end was drawing near. He sees not only
fecundity in the natural world but also the
death of other creatures and recognizes that
their death, like his own, is inevitable.
Nevertheless, he seems to praise the Creator.
The Poem (12 stanzas)
• Stanza 1: The poet “celebrates and spurns” his 35th birthday,
watching the birds and thinking of various images of nature’s
mutability.
• Stanza 2: These reminders are personally relevant because he
realizes that he “Toils towards the ambush of his wounds; / Herons,
steeple stemmed, bless.”
– He journeys toward the time when there is no escaping the ills of old
age.
– The herons, whose beaks are narrow like steeples, “walk in their
shroud” in the next stanza (that is, they are walking reminders of the
poet’s mortality).
– In stanza 2, they “bless” (they bestow some kind of good; OR, more
likely, they strike their prey; cf. French, blesser, to hurt). In the latter
sense, the word “bless” is part of a strand of references to predation.
More on the Poem
• Religious language permeates the poem. For example, God is “Him / Who
is the light of old.” This God is specifically Christian. “In a cavernous, swung
/ Wave’s silence, wept white angelus knells.” The Angelus (an juh luh s) is a
devotion in memory of the Annunciation (when the angel Gabriel tells
Mary that she is pregnant with Jesus). A bell announces (knells) when it
should be recited. (Knells are also typically associated with funerals.)
• The point: So there is a contrast between the mutable world that the poet
sees with his “five / Senses” in a later stanza and the consolation that the
Christian Heaven offers. In other words, he sees in nature not only signs of
his own mortality but also reminders of a life after death.
• Blessings: Toward the end of the poem, he realizes that he has various
blessings. Foremost among them is that the shortness of time heightens
perception of nature’s beauty. This blessing and his faith in God are with
him as he “sail[s] out to die” in the last line. The poem is thus a Christian
counterpart to Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” which is written from
a nonreligious point of view, and ends with the line, “Downward to
darkness on extended wings” (a far superior final line, by the way).
The Key Stanza
And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true,
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for His joy.
The Key Stanza
Thomas’s stanza
And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true,
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for His joy.
Paraphrase by F.F.
With free will he wanders confusedly
Into the mysterious but renowned light
Of great, myth-rich, precious God.
Darkness is one path forward and light is a destination[;]
Heaven that never existed [here on Earth]
Nor ever will exist [here] is nevertheless true
And, in that thorny emptiness [the natural world],
Plentiful as blackberries in the woods
The living dead mature to give God joy.
Summary of the Stanza
• Wayfaring: We journey through life on a dark
and thorny path, but well-lit heaven is our
final destination.
• Blackberries: The image of humans as
blackberries is highly positive. We
grow/mature into something ripe and
desirable, thus pleasing God.
The Point
• Note that the poem is about how every year on your
birthday you are one year closer to death. We live in a
realm of toil and struggle, but heaven is our ultimate
destination.
• This is an appropriate poem to use as a epigraph for a
book that celebrates Jeannette’s dead father, for it
implies the hope that he is in Heaven and that she will
one day be there too.
• So TGC is a book about finding blessings (benefits) in a
world full of blessings (hurts, wounds). All the trials
that Jeannette endured will not be for naught—that is
the epigraph’s implication. Struggle is purposeful.
The Book’s Structure
• Frame: “A Woman on the Street” and “Thanksgiving”
– Book starts with shame re. her mother and family.
– Book ends with reaffirmation of mother and family.
• Structure: Walls states in an interview that a story has
three parts. This echoes Aristotle who wrote in the
Poetics that a tragedy has three parts—beginning,
middle, and end. The Glass Castle is similar: beginning
(desert), middle (Welch), end (NYC). But since TGC is
comic, not tragic, there is a nice correspondence to
William Blake’s stages:
The Three Main Sections
• Desert—innocence (ignorance of life’s ills; you
are subject to them but unaware that you should
be miserable; example: Jeannette gets burned
but does not register any pain).
• Welch—experience (awareness of life’s ills; you
are subject to them, are miserable, and know
that life should not be as it is).
• NYC—organized innocence (awareness of life’s
ills; you know that the world is flawed, but you
don’t let it get to you).
Illustration: Happiness
• Innocence: “I was happy in Battle Mountain” (81). But
this is because she does not know any better.
• Experience: “That summer morning I’d spent
swimming with Dinitia at the public pool was the
happiest time I’d had in Welch” (199). Here she is quite
aware that life is hard because Dinitia et al. have
assaulted her multiple times.
• Organized innocence: “I’d never been happier in my
life” (248), she says regarding her first job at The
Phoenix (as though she has risen from the ashes of her
life in Welch). She is fully aware of her parents’
problems but does not let them get to her.
Application of Blake’s Stages
• From a Youtube interview with Walls at Point
Loma Nazarine University in California:
– Oscar Wilde: “Children begin by loving their
parents [the desert]; as they grow older they
judge them [Welch]; sometimes they forgive them
[NYC?].”
• This nicely illustrates the stages that Blake is
talking about, and it captures the three-part
structure of the book.
And Yet
• “Perhaps forgive” is what she said when the Point
Loma journalism professor asked her about
forgiveness.
• She does not see herself as a victim, thinks that
her parents gave her incredible gifts, and has
compassion for her mother, whom she considers
“a damaged woman.”
• So the third stage is probably not forgiveness as
such but more likely a wholeness that she
achieves, which allows her to live and let live
without recriminations.
Another Structural Point
• Here is another way of charting the family’s trajectory. They
are supposed to report to the courthouse in Phoenix (89). If
they had not skedaddled, their lives might have changed for
the better. Later (the climax) the family assembles in court
after Maureen stabs Rose Mary (275). At last there is a kind
of reckoning (an open acknowledgement [276] that there
really is a problem in the family).
• Jeannette says: “You never truly escape your past” and
“carry these things around.” The important thing, she
stresses, is confronting the past in order to come to terms
with what and who we really are. In other words, there has
to be an inner reckoning. We must acknowledge (bring light
to) the shadows that lurk within. What is repressed will
fester. See next slide.
Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas
• “If you bring forth what is within you, what
you bring forth will save you. If you do not
bring forth what is within you, what you do
not bring forth will destroy you.”
• TGC is an exercise in bringing forth. Writing it
is part of her inner work.
Comedy vs. Tragedy
Rose Mary to Jeannette: “‘Life is a drama full of tragedy and comedy . . . You should
learn to enjoy the comic episodes a little more’” (129).
• Desert: Comedy in the sense that all the misbehavior seems funny (note
that a comic-strip writer from the Village Voice interviewed Rex).
• Welch: The potential for tragedy clearly emerges. The outer situation may
sully the family members’ inner spirit; psychological chaos may win the
game. Will the children escape the gravity field of parental dysfunction? If
TGC were a tragedy, the story would end in Welch.
• NYC: A higher sense of comedy is achieved so that harmony, integration,
and forgiveness are possible. In comedy, persons overcome problems,
though sometimes just barely. Ultimately, comedy is not about laughter; it
is about comic resolution, which hinges on an honest acknowledgement of
problems: owning them, not letting them own you.
Writing in Class: 15 minutes
• On the following slide are the book’s key
concepts.
• Step 1: Spend 5 minutes copying them in your
notebook.
• Step 2: Then underline the ones that you think
are most important.
• Step 3: Then circle the three underlined concepts
that interest you the most.
• Step 4: Finally, spend 5 minutes writing about
TGC in terms of one of those three concepts.
Concepts
• Adaptability, addiction, adventure, being special,
benighted sheep, brainwashing, brokenness,
compassion, conformity, conservatism,
employment, extroversion, fear, focus, freedom,
frontier, happiness, hardship, hunger, gambling,
imagination, inflation, killjoy, liberalism, luck,
perversion, pioneer, positive thinking, prejudice,
pride, prostitution, racism, resistance to
authority, rules, self-esteem, security, selfreliance, secrets, self-sufficiency, the shadow,
shoplifting, skedaddle, struggle, theft, truth,
values, violence, wealth, welfare.
Discussion
• What did you discover about TGC in terms of
your concept?
End of Day One
Day Two:
Causes of Brokenness
• Harm from something bad: Jeannette suggests that Rex is the way he is
because Erma (his mother) may have sexually abused him (see 148). Re.
Erma’s death: “Erma had seemed to have some sort of an evil hold over
Dad, and I thought he’d be relieved to be free of it” (180).
• Harm from providing something good: “Welfare, she said, would cause
irreparable psychological damage to us kids. . . . ‘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. You’re scarred for life’” (188). Ironically, the
assumption is that neglecting her children’s well-being would NOT scar
them for life. (Her scar is mentioned on 191: she is literally scarred for life
by the fire when she was three.)
• Questions:
– How does Rex react when Erma dies? What happens when he no longer has
his mother to blame for his problems?
– Is Rose Mary right? Does receiving public aid scar you for life? What are the
alternatives? Might it actually engender a helpful humility? Is her statement a
fallacy of overgeneralization?
Pride and Self-Delusion
• References to pride: 12, 46, 55, 73, 118, 121,
129, 134, 138, 159, 171, 225-27, 237, 239,
252, 258, 267, 269.
• The underscored pages specifically use “pride”
or “proud.”
• Questions:
– What TYPES of pride did you notice in TGC?
– What is the role of pride in the family’s
dysfunction?
Suggestion about Pride
• Jeannette to her professor: “‘But if some of them [the
homeless] were willing to work hard and make
compromises, they might not have ideal lives, but they
could make ends meet’” (257).
• Pride is one reason they might not be willing to work.
• There is also the vain hope that one can make it big, strike
it rich, etc. (Ironically, the gold Cadillac is the closest thing
to gold that Rex ever gets.) See 171: “He [Rex] was focused
on striking it rich.”
• POINT: Jeannette is giving you a formula for success in
college and in your professional life: work toward your
goals, don’t expect to get everything you want instantly, be
willing to make compromises.
Hatred of Cops and Resistance to
Authority
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48: Car chase, gestapo.
50: A cop would be “‘hauling your asses off to jail.’”
88-89: Cop comes to their house in Battle Mountain after the shooting incident.
106: Police shoot a mountain lion in Phoenix.
109: Security guards at the Phoenix zoo.
118: Rangers at the Grand Canyon.
205: Parents suspicious of all cops.
255: Cops wake them up in NYC.
262: Cop breaks up a fight between Rex and Rose Mary in Phoenix.
267 Resistance to housing agency (“battling authority”).
275: Father picks fights with security guards at court.
Question: Is pride the origin of Rex’s hatred of all
authority? Where does that hatred come from?
Does it come perhaps from his relationship with his
mother?
Images
• Geode: 60, 90 125, 152, 183, 239.
• Knives: Dinitia fatally stabs her mother’s boyfriend (200), Rex uses
knife to cut piggy bank (228), Rex gives knife to Jeannette (240), and
Maureen stabs mother (275).
• Venus: 40, 247, 281.
• Fool’s gold/iron pyrite: 59.
• Snake biting its tail: 207.
• Gold Cadillac: 224.
• Caryatid: 208.
• Drowning woman: 195.
Question: Why are these significant images in
TGC?
A Key Image: Fire
• 9ff.: Jeannette is injured by fire (in this episode, she gains consciousness;
see also the Prometheus myth).
• 15: Fascination with fire.
• 33-34: Jeannette lights toilet paper; motel burns; she wonders if the motel
fire had been out to get her for flushing the burning TP (participation
mystique, attributing a human psychological characteristic to something
inanimate; this is very typical of innocence, her early point of view).
• 115: Father lights Christmas tree on fire.
• 147: Erma fears kids will burn the house down.
• 178: Kerosene as fire-starter in Welch.
• 183: Uncle Stanley burns down his parents’ house.
• 253: Father sets room on fire.
Question: What is the significance of all the references to fire?
Images of Things That Lie
Within/Beneath
• Geode: 60, 90 125, 152, 183, 239. (See “inner
spirit” on 104, “inner beauty” on 245 vs. outward
appearance.)
• Termites: 101. Phoenix house is internally
unsound. On 101 father patches holes with metal
from beer cans: this is cosmetic—like putting a
Bandaid on a tumor. Parallel to father’s
deterioration physically and psychologically.
• Cash jar: 17. It is buried somewhere.
What Lies Within?
• Monster: Father when drunk turns into “an angry-eyed
stranger” (23). Where does this come from? It is in all of us.
But it is buried in a part of the mind that we hide. The
shadow.
• Violence: On 71 Rex tries to kill Rose Mary. They battle in
Battle Mountain. They have another fight on 122ff. Jeannette
shoots at Billy Deel on 88.
• Maureen inner life: imaginary friends on 81, 111; bogeymen
on 103.
Questions: Does alcohol impose violence on a drunk, or
does it merely unlock it? What kind of darkness lies
within? Do you have experience with imaginary friends?
Why don’t you see them now? (See CU.)
Major Theme: Turbulence and Order
• 61: “the boundary between turbulence and order.” There is the image of
the “invisible shimmery heat” above a flame or over the desert. “It’s a
place where no rules apply.”
• 261: “the transition between order and turbulence . . . turbulence was not
in fact random but followed a sequential spectrum of varying frequencies.
If every action in the universe that we thought was random actually
conformed to a rational pattern, Dad said, that implied the existence of a
divine creator, and he was beginning to rethink his atheistic creed.” (Here
science and faith begin to work together. The statement implies that there
was purpose in her chaotic upbringing.)
• 288: “A wind picked up, rattling the windows, and the candle flames
suddenly shifted, dancing along the border between turbulence and
order.” (This seems to be the sweet spot where personal growth is
possible, between ease and hardship.)
Question: How do you read TGC in light of this theme?
Tensions: Conflicting Value Systems
• Realism vs. inflation (thinking you are great).
• City vs. wilderness:
– 34: “These cities will kill you, he said.”
– 106: “He felt it was good for your soul to have
buzzards and coyotes and snakes around.” (106)
• Rules vs. freedom.
• Instruction in self-sufficiency vs. child abuse.
• “‘respect[ing] your parents’” (119) vs. enabling
their addictions.
Another Major Theme:
A Generational Swing to the Opposite
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27: Rex and Rose Mary have to get away from their mothers ; Rose Mary becomes very unlike her
mother.
59: “Mom believed that children shouldn’t be burdened with a lot of rules and restrictions.”
73: “She thought rules and discipline held people back and felt that the best way to let children fulfill
their potential was by providing freedom” (73). This is Rose Mary’s educational philosophy.
73-74: Grandma Smith had forced Jeannette’s mother to get a teaching degree; she’d really wanted to
be an artist.
91: Grandma Smith’s rules for Rose Mary vs. the latter’s never setting rules for her children.
100: Jeannette suggests roach spray.
262ff., 274: Brian becomes a cop 262ff., 274.
268: In her first marriage, she “wound up with a man [Eric] who was exactly the opposite [of her
father].”
286: Brian renovates houses 286. He does to places in NYC what Rex never did in Welch.
Jeannette lives on Park Avenue and writes about the rich and famous.
Question: Why does a generational swing happen? How does
Jeannette get out of this cycle? (Think about her husbands.)
[violation of free will & Oedipal hatred]
Parents’ Contradictions
• “God helps those who help themselves” (113), which
Jeannette’s parents do not do.
• Father’s stories: On 25 there is heavy inflation about
himself, and a tall tale appears on 37. Yet the kids are
not allowed to believe in Santa on 39.
• Father writes to the dictionary people but gets the
definition of “Immaculate Conception” wrong on 114.
(It means that Mary was conceived without sin; the
virgin birth refers to Jesus’s conception without sexual
intercourse.)
Question: Can you think of others? (These are the kinds
of things that trouble people in the experience stage.)
The Glass Castle
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The Glass Castle is mentioned on
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25: First mention of. Financing it requires finding gold
83: Mentioned.
152, 155, 157: Hole for foundation of TGC filling up with garbage.
238: Blueprints for.
279: Never got built.
Similar images:
– Lori sees NYC “as a sort of Emerald City” (223).
– The diamond ring they find on 186, the rings Jeannette sells.
– Geode would sparkle like a diamond on 238.
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When Jeannette gets her own home, it is a sturdy farmhouse made of solid wood
and stone. It is not glass or emerald or diamond; but it is what she needs, and it
suggests that she is on solid ground in her psychological life and in her marriage.
• Jeannette in an interview: TGC is “one of my father’s drunken promises or hope for
the future”; “it is whatever you choose to make of it” (a symbol).
Question: What do you think the Glass Castle represents?
A Possible Interpretation
• The glass castle never gets built, but it conveys
psychological truths about the Walls family. It
represents, for example, Rex’s tendency to
focus on unobtainable dreams (the castle, the
inventions, striking gold) and to ignore the
immediate need to fix the house in Welch,
WV. It is where the Wallses would live if Rex
were to strike it rich (171). But in the absence
of that kind of good fortune, it symbolizes his
inflation.
Writing in Class:
The Moral Lesson
• Write down what you believe the book’s moral
to be? (A moral is a short statement of the
main point that one is supposed to take away
from the experience of reading the book.)
A Possible Answer
• Page 256: “‘I think that maybe sometimes
people get the lives they want.’”
Paper Topic
• Values: In her interview at Point Loma Nazarine University
(available on Youtube.com), Jeannette (mis?)quotes Oscar Wilde
as stating, “A necessity is a luxury once sampled.” Another
version of the statement is “A luxury once tasted becomes a
necessity.” (The Internet assigns the statement and others like it
to various people, so who knows who originally said it?) Her
point is that we think that we cannot survive without things we
have grown accustomed to. Did reading The Glass Castle help
you see any of your values in a different light? Is anything that
you always considered a necessity really a luxury? Here is a great
opportunity to make a connection to Brian Swimme’s piece on
consumerism. (For “values” see TGC, pages 269.)
Paper Topic
• Science vs. religion: Jeannette makes statements
about science and religion on pages 104-05 and
261. Can you embrace religious faith AND
reason/science? Of course, science and religion
start from very different assumptions, which are
mutually exclusive, or are they? Using
connections to Jeannette’s book and a narrowly
focused experience of your own, explain where
you stand on a spectrum ranging from science’s
materialism to religion’s emphasis on things not
seen. Where does the author stand vis-à-vis
science and religion?
Paper Topic
• City life vs. wilderness: Rex Walls, for all his problems,
loved nature. “‘These cities will kill you,’ he said” (34).
Later, Jeannette writes a paragraph that begins, “Dad
missed the wilderness,” in which she develops her father’s
biophelia (106; see also the top paragraph on 185). Later, of
course, working in “untamed country” in upstate New York
seems to do him some good versus the temptations of NYC
(262). On the other hand, one might argue that a couple of
days in the desert would be more likely to kill you than life
in the city. Using an example from your own experience,
engage with Rex’s view and its opposite in order to inquire
into your own environmental ethic. Will cities really kill
you? If so, in what sense?
Paper Topic
• Harm vs. benefit: To a large extent, The Glass Castle is a book about
growing up while “living in a state of neglect” (193). Yet Jeannette
suggests that a hardship that one considers a curse may become a
blessing in later life. As her mother says, “‘What doesn’t kill you
makes you stronger’” (179). Believe it or not, Jeannette even states
in her Point Loma Nazarine interview that her parents gave her
“incredible gifts.” In the same interview, she mentions a specific
example, how her father pimped her out in a bar. She calls it “the
worst experience of my life . . . but also the best experience of my
life.” What is the worst experience in your life? Is there something
in your own life that seemed like a curse at the time but is in
retrospect a blessing? How might a Wallsian approach shed a
positive light on a dark moment in your life?
Paper Topic
• Victim vs. perpetrator: When Jeanette is sexually
assaulted by Uncle Stanley, her mother tells her
“that sexual assault was a crime of perception”
and that her uncle was “‘so lonely’” (184). Think
about a time when someone harmed you in some
way. Then think compassionately about why s/he
might have done that. For example, maybe you
were bullied, as Jeannette was by Dinitia Hewitt.
Does Jeannette’s awareness to the ills in Dinitia’s
life have a corresponding realization about your
own antagonist?
Paper Topic
• Pride: This concept, which Christians consider
a “deadly sin,” is a major theme in TGC. See
the earlier slide that lists all the page numbers
where pride rears its head. In that context,
consider how your own pride may (or may
not) have been a problem for you in a specific
situation. For example, have you ever resisted
authority just for the heck of it? Note that a
preceding slide deals with cops and other
authority figures.
END