Identity: Molded by the Very Fingers of our Past

Elias Salgado

                                                Identity: Molded by the Very Fingers of Our Past

                Identity defines the person as a whole. Personality, values, facial structure, posture—all are ingredients in the recipe of identity. How identity is created, however, depends on the person. Identity can be molded by the people one surrounds his or herself with, the environment one lives in, or even past events of victory and failure. Jeannette Walls, writer of the famed book The Glass Castle, shows that the potter that molded and shaped her identity was the significant events held in her past.

In the book, The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls relives her story from memoirs reaching all the way back from childhood to present. She reminisces about the adventures she went on as she grew up vividly with each event described down to the last detail. Alongside her visual descriptions, Walls also talks about her father, Rex Walls—a sober genius, yet violent drunk of a father, and her mother—a selfish, weak-minded artist. Her siblings (from youngest to oldest): Maureen, Brian, and Lori, were right by her side while she encountered countless “adventures.” These “adventures” were created by their father, who was searching for gold as well as avoiding the “henchmen, bloodsuckers [or] the Gestapo,” (Walls 19). Every disappointment, every bad argument, every tough decision that came from these spontaneous “adventures” was dealt with because the children held on to the promise by their father to build the Glass Castle—a large house created made entirely of glass with each room planned specifically for each child. This dream the children held onto so dearly faded slowly as they began to grow up and realize that the dream was a mere fantasy.

Later as she grew up, Walls came into contact with all sorts of people like Billy Deel, Dinitia Hewitt, and Earnie Goad. These people all bullied and teased her as she grew up. Through these people, as well as others such as Uncle Stanley or Erma Walls, she experienced life lessons such as prejudice, love, sex and even violence. Once Walls became seventeen, however, she came to the realization of how bad her lifestyle was and planned an escape to New York to pursue a better life. After some bumpy roads and setbacks, she and her sister Lori escaped to New York and eventually brought Brian and Maureen out with them. Their mother and father end up following them to stay near their children, however, they still continued their poor lifestyle. After Rex dies from a heart attack, the family’s effort to stay together dwindles and they begin to go their separate ways, only to be reunited for Thanksgiving a few years later.

Through her vivid descriptions of past events, Jeannette Walls shows that her identity was not necessarily affected by the people around her or the space she was surrounded by, but by those very same events that occurred in her childhood.  ”None of us kids got any allowances…Brian and I also collected scrap metal that we sold to the junk dealer for a penny a pound…There were so many rows and rows of delicious candies that we’d spend an hour trying to decide how to spend the ten cents we’d each made” (Walls 62). Because Walls and her little brother Brian never had any allowances, they were able to find ways to get what they want. Jeannette became a hard worker because of experiences like these because it taught her that she could get what she wanted if she worked for it—even if it was a penny at a time. Another event that shaped her identity was when she and her family arrived at the run-down town of Welch, West Virginia. Jeanette explains how the seasons showed no mercy to her family in Welch. “It got so cold in the house that icicles hung from the kitchen ceiling, the water in the sink turned into a solid block of ice, and the dirty dishes were stuck there as if they’d been cemented in place” (Walls 176). Harsh weather like this seems almost impossible to live through, but to Jeannette Walls, harsh weather was just something that needed to be dealt with.

I remember writing in my previous essay, “The Environment: The Beginning Platform,” –regarding identity—that “It is true that identity is determined by one’s choice of clothing or personality, but the seed that began the growth of one’s identity comes from where the person grew up or lived—both previously and currently.” This came to me with regards to The Glass Castle because it directly related to Jeannette Walls’ experience with housing. Walls mentions “Our apartment was bigger than the entire house on Little Hobart Street, and way fancier. My favorite room was the bathroom. It had a black-and-white tile floor, a toilet that flushed with a powerful whoosh, a tub so deep you could submerge yourself completely in it, and hot water that never ran out” (247). To anyone other than the Walls family, a bathroom like the one she described would be typical. To Walls, her new bathroom was a massive upgrade. Her lack of extravagant descriptive writing only showed how plain the bathroom was from a different perspective.  Because of her experience with holes in the ground used for toilets, she was able to appreciate the simple things in life such as a flushing toilet or hot running water. Other people who did not experience the harsh obstacles Walls faced cannot see the same glorious significance of a flushing toilet Jeannette and her siblings saw. Walls also mentions that the very same apartment she described “[M]ust have been pretty fancy when it opened, but now graffiti covered the outside walls and the cracked mirrors were held together with duct tape. Still, it had what Mom called good bones” (247). To another person who lived a better lifestyle than the Walls, an apartment in South Bronx, covered with graffiti, and clearly unsafe would not be the most coveted housing arrangement. Nevertheless, to Lori and Jeannette, the rundown apartment was just like a luxury hotel. Walls’ identity was molded by her past experiences with poverty and housing, but another factor that contributed to her being was her parent’s interactions with these events.

Rex and Mary Walls greatly contributed to Jeannette Walls’ identity because they turned what seemed like a horrible experience into a fun and exciting adventure. “We were always doing the skedaddle, usually in the middle of the night…Mom, however, told us that the FBI wasn’t really after Dad; he just liked to say they were because it was more fun Having the FBI on your trail than the bill collectors” (Walls 19). Leaving from one home to another in the dead of night in order to escape from bill collectors is never easy for children to understand.  Rex and Mary knew this, so to help the kids cooperate and not feel so sad about leaving their home so much, they turned a difficult situation into an exciting adventure. With the thrill of discovering new places, the Walls kids were able to detach themselves from any places they settled down. Constantly leaving homes at night was not the only thing that Rex and Mary changed into something exciting.

Changing their own poverty into something exciting was Mary and Rex’s greatest feat contributing to Jeannette Walls’ identity. Walls explains that “[a]t first Mom tried to make living at 93 Little Hobart Street seem like an adventure. The woman who lived there before us left behind an old sewing machine that you operated with a foot treadle. Mom said it would come in handy because we could make our own clothes even when the electricity was turned off” (153). Not having clothes, not having money for clothes, not having electricity are things that seem depressing and unfulfilling, but Mary Walls was able to turn something bad into something fun. Making their own clothes meant they could be creative with whatever style they wanted to go with. 

Jeanette’s ability to make the best out of situations while living in New York grew from her mother’s ability to make the bad seem not so bad. When Jeannette moved to New York, her job was not the most important job in the world, but she made it work. “One of my internships was at The Phoenix, a weekly newspaper run out of a dingy storefront on Atlantic Avenue in downtown Brooklyn near the old Ex-Lax factory…We never had copy paper and instead we wrote on discarded press releases we dug out of the trash” (Walls 248). Even if her internship was a rundown unknown newspaper, she was able to build the skills she needed to become an effective writer. Her personality and mentality came from her mother and father’s ability to turn a dirty rock into a golden egg.

As I had written in my essay, “Identity is the mental manifestation of who one is as a whole—their own personal meaning to why they do the things they do… Before looking at one’s appearance to determine his or her identity, however, it is necessary to look deeper—the person’s background or culture, or even where that person grew up” (“The Environment: The Beginning Platform”). Jeannette Walls’ identity came from her past and her parents’ affiliation with it. Each past event became a brick that cemented itself with others to build the tough, hardworking identity Jeanette claimed for herself.

                                                                Works Cited

Salgado, Elias. “The Environment: The Beginning Platform.” Progression I. 20 October 2011.

Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle: a Memoir. New York: Scribner, 2006. Print.