Jeannette Walls
The Glass Castle is the compelling memoir of Jeannette Walls. Written in 2005, The Glass Castle follows the various exploits of a family’s drunken father and free-spirit mother. As of last month, Lionsgate began filming a Hollywood adaption of the book. The movie is anticipated for release in 2017 featuring Brie Larson (who also starred in the critically acclaimed “Room” in 2015), Naomi Watts, and Woody Harrelson. The book exposes the cultural challenges of the post-modern family and the vulnerabilities of a family outside of the Christian Church. The morality of “independence” is challenged as the memoir painfully connects “free spirit” parenting to neglected, abused, and resentful children.
The Glass Castle: A Memoir: Jeannette Walls
Background
In The Glass Castle, Jeannette records her childhood memories and moves all the way through her adult years while she describes the many different cities their family escapes from. Walls explores the decisions her parents made raising her, her father’s alcoholism, and her mother’s un-involved parenting style. She explores how parents can influence the direction of their children’s lives and how her own sensibilities were formed. The book is also a commentary on the restlessness of the counterculture movement of the second half of the twentieth century, where families moved away from traditional social values and challenged the materialism of their age.
Jeannette Walls begins the memoir with the scalding of her own three-year old body while cooking her own “easy” hot dog meal. This event introduces the family’s emphasis on the ideal of self-reliance, but also reveals the sheltered and paranoid way the Walls chose to raise their children. Jeannette’s accident leaves her under the care of hospital nurses who treat Jeannette with dignity and pamper her with what other children might view as bare essentials. Always critical of kindness, Jeanette’s family decides to rescue her from the ward in their famous “skedaddle” methodology. This type of conflict management will reappear throughout the memoir and speaks to how parenting and responsibility is to work in the Walls household. When bills stack up, their dad Rex decides to skedaddle. When dad loses a job or is bored with his work then it is time to skedaddle. Each time purging their lives of any worldly attachments for the sake of freedom. They never seem to escape their woes as their father’s issues reappear wherever he decides to temporarily plant his family.
Drinking to Forget
Rex’s woes, according to the account given by Jeannette, begin with discovering the dead body of his infant child. Being of no particular religious background and critical of his wife Rose Mary’s affinity for the Church and the miracles of Jesus, Rex looks to alcohol as a solution. They live this dichotomy out in their lives as Rose Mary drags the family to church to “do this in remembrance of me,” while Rex emptied bottle after bottle hoping to forget. His drinking left him incapable of keeping his jobs and providing for his household. The alcohol fueled his shame and caused him to turn again to alcohol. Later in the memoir, Jeannette hints to a root cause of such a systemic disorder and suggests that perhaps his own parents’ shortcomings had prepared him to be a failure as a parent.
The Walls Children
Rex had first skedaddled away from his poverty stricken hometown of Welch, West Virginia as a young man and had hoped to never return. Yet after years of burning through money, time, skin, and nearly all of his hope; the family returned to Rex’s hometown. After discovering that a family member was molested by a grandparent, Jeannette begins to think the same may have been done to her father. Rex’s first escape was perhaps coping with the sexual betrayal of his own mother. Understanding this abuse in the context of their quasi-Oedipal relationship helps to understand why Rex is so insistent on promoting self-reliance and why he also fails so frequently.
His growth and development as a person is stunted by this childhood trauma and his ability to cope with its responsibilities is still like that of a child. It is no wonder then to see Jeannette and her siblings sympathetic with their father in their childhood, but then increasingly critical as they develop into adults. Rex’s secrets and bootstrap mindset tie him to his childhood, while his children build a common community among each other and “outgrow” their childish father.
Challenging the Traditional Family
Wall’s work is an exceptional commentary on how family dynamics developed and changed during this counter-culture period and uses the familial relationships to explore changes in gender roles and the workplace. Her exploration of poverty and the influence parental choice has on the quality of life is unique to this memoir. Without preaching a particular or singular ideal of the family, Walls is able to demonstrate many of the strengths and weaknesses of cultural change. Does a quality education demand expensive tuition and the latest textbook? Not in Rex and Rose Mary’s family. Challenging the status quo’s definition of a family is for this generation nearly as important as having the correct understanding of what family is to be. Rex’s conspiracies and harebrained ideologies do not pan out, but they represent a generation that dreamed for something more out of life than what their parents had coldly re-lived from the previous generation.
The Glass Castle is named after one such dream. Rex Wall’s dream to defy conventional architecture for the beauty and independence of a massive glass mansion. A mansion that equally represents technological and social innovation. Like a looking glass, the “glass castle” is a reflection of what Rex wanted for the world. His daughter Jeannette, in many ways, incarnates the “glass castle” with her life as she carries her father’s legacy. Learning through his failures, Jeannette moves the cycle of failure the other direction and becomes the gold her father spent his whole life trying to fashion into his own “glass castle.”
New Challenges
The Glass Castle is unafraid to show a less than perfect family and their raw experiment in parenting. Jeannette Walls captures the angst of her parents’ generation while exploring how modern understandings of alcoholism, sexual abuse, and poverty will shape the next generation. The Glass Castle does well in that it translates what may have been a personal diary into a relatable series of stories exploring this generation’s toughest cultural challenges.
As the movie hits the silver screen in 2017, it will be a new opportunity for Christians to recognize the brokenness of the American family and position the Church as a source for healing, restoration, and edification for the fathers, mothers, and children. As GK Chesterton once said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” (What’s Wrong with the World, 1910)
