Essay Sample on Jeannette Walls's Success Story of Resilience and Forgiveness

Introduction

Like any other popular memoir, autobiography or biography, Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle is a modern fairy tale, a success story of a person who fights the odds one day to become happy, fulfilled, prosperous, and famous. "My favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships," writes Walls (Walls 168), and this is precisely the kind of book she has written. Readers love heroes and heroines, and if at the dawn of literature they had to be semi-gods and goddesses, or at least possess extreme strength, today Odysseus's 'Noman' has turned into 'Everyman'. As Spiderman and Ironman convincingly show, you no longer need to be special and have divine origin to become a hero. What you need is a strength of character and a firm faith in yourself. And while physical strength is still valued in the action movies, the real heroes of our time are people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Hawking, who make you believe that anything can be achieved as long as you have enough talent, perseverance, and motivation. Jeannette Walls is one of the modern heroines, a self-made Cinderella, who never met her fairy godmother, but had to work all the magic on her own - with her unyielding optimism and perseverance. In her memoir The Glass Castle, Wells shares with all young people two essential ingredients of her veritable recipe for success: resilience and forgiveness; close, uncompromising, and yet unimposing exploration of these themes becomes the book's key to success.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

The first thing that any reader would be struck by when getting acquainted with the Glass Castle and its protagonist, is the young girl's incredible resilience. At the very beginning of the book, in the second chapter, the narrator recounts one of the most horrific instances of child neglect in the whole story. Little Jeanette, 3 years old, in a fluffy ballerina skirt, is cooking hot dogs while her mother is painting in the next room. The little girl's skirt unexpectedly catches fire and the child sustains severe burns. When she is rushed to the hospital, all the nurses pity the little martyr. One of them squeezes the girl's hand and tells her she is going to be okay. The most incredible part of the scene is Jeannette's answer: "I know," I said, "but if I'm not, that's okay, too" (Walls 10). This answer is the quintessence of Jeannette's attitude to all the misfortunes that befall her and her siblings. She is prepared to face the hardships with confidence, optimism, and stoicism worthy of Greek philosophers and early Roman Christians. Covered in blood on the railroad wayside unwittingly abandoned by her parents, diving into a garbage bin or patting the cheetah in the zoo cage, the narrator never fails to see life as an adventure and a journey which will ultimately take her to happiness. And though the situation is getting more and more serious with time, Jeannette never gives up. Even when the "escape money" is stolen by their Dad, Jeannette does not lose heart and eventually sends her sister Lori to New York, which becomes the beginning of the big exodus. Charlotte Hays in her pungent book When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? calls Jeannette Walls "the best example of a White Trash escapee," and very precisely summarizes her success story: "Jeannette, who is the most sophisticated person I've ever known, actually grew up poor, on occasion even scavenging for food in the high school garbage bin. But she took a bus to New York, found a job, and put herself through Barnard College" (Hays 31). What this short synopsis says is that no matter how horrible the circumstances were, Jeannette Walls pulled herself together and did what was needed to escape the life "that was never boring" (Walls 288). This cheerful and uncompromising resilience is the main secret to success that the author is offering her readers.

Yet, obviously, the amazing life-story of Walls would not have become such a long-standing New York Times best-seller without another success ingredient - the calm, observing and nonjudgmental attitude of the narrator, which allows the reader to enjoy and appreciate the protagonist's zest for life and invincible humor. In her review of the book for the Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Jocelyn Bartkevicius writes "despite their familial drawbacks, including a handful of horrific scenes of neglect set against a backdrop of a deep and ongoing peripatetic poverty, Walls refrains from devolving into bathos and blame, or, even worse, a Pollyanna riff of saccharine sentimentality" (Bartkevicius 150). In line with How I Learned to Drive (1997) by Paula Vogel, which received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1998, Wells's memoir does not give any ready-made answers or present prejudiced accusations, on the contrary, it tries to show that life is much more complex than it might seem and there is no black and white about it. Walls shows that her parents were not only the main source of her misfortunes as a child but also those people who helped her find her own voice. The narrator not only forgives her parents, but she also finds the strength to speak about the most uncomfortable moments of her past with admirable honesty and lack of prejudice. Lynn Miller and Lisa Lenard-Cook have included The Glass Castle into their manual Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir as a successful example of such appealing honesty: "As with any character, the narrator makes mistakes and has flaws," the authors write, "It's how he or she negotiates these pitfalls that invest us in his or her story. Such an unflinching look at self and situation is what made Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (1996) and Jeanette Wells's The Glass Castle (2005) breakout memoirs" (Miller and Lenard-Cook 8). Jeannette does not judge her parents, she forgives them and allows them to speak for themselves, but she also does not idealize her past, and this is what makes The Glass Castle such a compelling story.

The Glass Castle is not just a memoir, it is a book with a mission. Being an ode to the resilience of a child growing up in extremely challenging circumstances, but also a gesture of forgiveness towards the parents who have brought about these circumstances, the book ruins the negative stereotypical image of the poor in the USA. Andrea Irvin, a teacher in a high-poverty rural area, uses the book in her class to raise her students' aspirations and empower them: while other teachers delve into the literary terminology, she focuses on "Wall's inner strength and her determination to persevere in the face of obstacles:" "By having my students analyze Wall's character", Irvin says, "I hope to plant the seed in their minds that anything is possible; no matter how or where you grew up, you can achieve and succeed" (Irvin 57). This belief is what motivated Jeannette to keep working towards the good life and this is also what is needed to change the social 'game' today. In his insightful book A People's History of Poverty in America, Stephen Pimpare writes, "there is something peculiarly counterproductive about the disapprobation that has been heaped upon poor, homeless, and welfare-reliant Americans, and the manner in which they have been infantilized" (Pimpare 4), quoting A Head Start Parent, Mrs. Robert Manwarren, who said back in 1973: "You are forced to think that you are not as good or as smart as other people ... How can we expect people who don't believe that they are worth anything, to get anywhere" (qtd. in Pimpare 5). The Glass Castle is the book that fights such stereotypes. It convinces the young Americans that being poor is not what you are, it is only what has happened to you, a temporary state if you are willing to change it. It speaks to all the young people growing up in dysfunctional families teaching them two main things: to never give up and to let go of the negative baggage of the past they are carrying.

Works Cited

Hays, Charlotte. When Did White Trash Become the New Normal?: a Southern Lady Asks the Impertinent Question. Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2013.

Irvin, Andrea. "Minds and Hearts: Using Jeannette Walls's Memoir, 'The Glass Castle', to Teach Emotional Intelligence." The English Journal, vol. 102, no. 1, 2012, pp. 57-60. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23269384.

Miller, Lynn, and Lisa Lenard-Cook. Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir. University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.

Pimpare, Stephen. A People's History of Poverty in America. The New Press, 2011.

Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle: a Memoir. Simon and Schuster, 2006.