Summary: Part II (Explanation of Glass Castle to San Francisco), continued
Jeannette Walls Sued By Mom
The Glass Castle A Memoir Jeannette Walls SCRIBNER New York London Toronto Sydney Acknowledgments I'd like to thank my brother, Brian, for standing by me when we were growing up and while I wrote this. I'm also grateful to my mother for believing in. Lori Walls is the oldest child of the family. She is two years older than Jeannette but is more reticent. Start your 48-hour free trial to unlock this The Glass Castle study guide. Lori Walls Quotes. ’Later that night, Dad stopped the car out in the middle of the desert, and we slept under the stars. We had no pillows, but Dad said that was part of his plan. He was teaching us to have good posture. The Indians didn’t use pillows, either, he explained, and look how straight they stood.
Dad promises that the family’s nomadic, adventurous life is temporary and that one day they will strike it rich by using the Prospector, a gold-hunting contraption he plans to invent. On occasion, Dad spends what little money they have on liquor, drinks too much, and comes home in a violent rage. Despite his periodic bad behavior, the kids admire him and love to listen to him tell stories about his past heroics. His sworn objective is to build his family the Glass Castle, a large home made of glass, complete with solar panels and a water-purification system.
Dad grew up in Welch, an old coal mining town in West Virginia, and left when he turned seventeen to join the air force and become a pilot. He met Mom when he saw her dive off a canyon to a lake forty feet below and jumped in after her. They got married six months later. Jeannette finds this romantic, but Mom says that Dad wouldn’t take no for an answer, and she was just trying to get away from her mother. She also frequently notes that Dad pawned her wedding ring. Dad promises to buy her a new one when he finds gold.
After they got married, Dad left the air force because he wanted to make more money. Mom quickly had four children, each one year apart: Lori, Mary Charlene, Jeannette, and Brian. Mary Charlene died of crib death when she was an infant, and Mom says Jeannette was born to replace her. Mom speaks cavalierly about Mary Charlene’s death, but Dad never recovered. After her death, he started drinking frequently and lost every job he got.
When Jeannette is four years old, Dad decides they should move to Las Vegas so he can make some money for the Prospector in the casinos. On the way to Vegas, Mom and Dad stop at a bar in Nevada and leave the kids in the car. When they return and continue on the road, Dad drives over some railroad tracks and Jeannette goes flying out of the backseat. She sits on the roadside bleeding, sore, and afraid for an indeterminate amount of time before Dad realizes she’s gone and returns to retrieve her. He refers to her bloody nose as a “snot locker,” and the whole family laughs.
In Vegas, the family lives in a hotel for about a month. Dad makes a lot of money, and says he has a system for winning at the blackjack tables. Every day, Dad buys the kids presents and takes them out to eat. Eventually, one of the dealers figures out Dad’s scheme, and they have to do the skedaddle.
Dad says that the mafia will be after them, so they go all the way to San Francisco next. They stay in another hotel, where the kids play all day while Mom and Dad are out. In the hotel, Jeannette plays with matches and sets small fires in the toilet. One night, she wakes up and discovers the curtain over her head has caught fire. Dad saves everyone and helps put out the fire. Jeannette worries that fire may be targeting her personally, noticing that her life is especially chaotic.
Lori, Jeannette, and Brian save all the money they earn from odd jobs around Welch. One day, Jeannette comes home to find her piggy bank slashed and all the money gone. Dad vehemently denies stealing it and then disappears for three days. In the end, Jeannette secures Lori a summer babysitting job with a bus ticket to New York City as part of the payment.
Lori thrives in New York City, and Jeannette decides she will leave that summer and finish her senior year there. Dad tries to convince her to stay by showing her the blueprints to the Glass Castle, but she is determined to leave. Mournfully, Dad walks Jeannette to the bus station.
Analysis: Part III (High School), continued
Picture Of Lori Walls Glass Castle
Dinitia’s plight underscores how racism and segregation enforce artificial divides between people who otherwise have a lot in common. Dinitia doesn’t identify the father when she tells Jeannette she is pregnant, but she later goes to prison for stabbing her mother’s boyfriend to death. Jeannette does not explicitly draw any conclusions, but the narration implies that Dinitia was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. From this incident, we can see that Dinitia and Jeannette’s families have quite a few similarities, including unsafe home environments, parents who put themselves before their children, and sexual violence. These parallels reveal that extreme poverty, regardless of its root causes, can have the same tragic consequences regardless of race. Furthermore, the town’s strained race relations prevent the girls from becoming very close. Had they been able to confide in each other, they could have at the very least provided some solace in mutual understanding. In this way, racism isolates Dinitia and Jeannette, depriving them of an ally.
Dad’s use of Jeannette to distract Robbie marks another shift in their relationship because Dad no longer treats her as his child. Dad actively encourages Jeannette to flirt with Robbie, a marked contrast to his childhood lesson of pervert hunting. When Jeannette confronts Dad after her escape, he cites their trip to the Hot Pot, indicating that he intentionally subjected Jeannette to the threat of sexual violence with Robbie, convinced that she could protect herself. Dad’s explanation perverts the lesson that Jeannette internalized at the Hot Pot when she was a little girl. At the Hot Pot, Dad promises that he only put her in danger so that she would learn to swim, or grow and become independent. With Robbie, Dad threw her in the proverbial pool so that they could win eighty dollars. A clue to this change in attitude lies in the way Dad says that they’re a team. This word choice shows that Dad now views Jeannette as his teammate, his equal, not his daughter whom he has a duty to protect.
Mom and Dad punish Jeannette for calling out their parenting skills because she directly challenges their authority, shattering the family narrative. When Dad whips Jeannette with a belt, it’s the first time either parent has disciplined their kids, which shows us how deeply Jeannette’s words have cut him. Throughout Jeannette’s childhood and up until Welch, the Walls family has always described themselves as creative and brilliant, and implied the children were lucky to have such wonderful parents. While their hardships in Welch have by now thoroughly shattered this illusion, Jeannette is the first to explicitly say so by accusing Mom and Dad of not acting like parents. She has not just called out Mom and Dad but completely broken through their self-images. Dad’s response, to impose physical punishment, reveals that he believes acting like a parent involves holding the power over one’s children, controlling them instead of guiding and protecting them.