In comparison to Walls' memoir of the "Glass Castle", Stephen Chbosky's novel "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" was about how the past subconsciously makes you who you are.
The novel, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower", is about a freshmen in high school named Charlie who is going through his awkward stages of adolescence. Throughout the story, he is seen as the weird kid in school. He is also seen as a wallflower which means he's shy and introspective but very intelligent. Charlie then encounters struggles and experiences that most high school kids face such as drugs, first relationships, and alcohol. Although most teenagers enjoy the roller coaster ride of high school, Charlie has a different perspective and seems nervous about everything. He had also been very upset from his past, because his favorite Aunt, whom he always mentions in the book, had died and his best friend had committed suicide. When he falls in love with his best friend and she tries to make a sexual move on him, he starts to cry without having a clue why. He ends up in a hospital and the nurses find out what Charlie's problem is. When he was younger, he had been raped by his Aunt whom he loved so much which is the result to him being antisocial and having post traumatic disorder. Charlies feelings and thoughts have been revolved about someone who sexually molested him and that created his identity to become different than others.
In comparison to Charlie and Walls story, their past represented the way they shaped out to be. Jeanette Walls became a tough woman due to her past family relationship issues and Charlie became a teenager who had to overcome post traumatic disorder.
Parents' History
When History Becomes Identity
“In Every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future”. Author Alex Haley’s quote conveys how a person’s family history takes an enormous role in their life and what they shape up to be later in the future. The history of what occurs in a family creates a natural identity to most individuals because of traumatizing experiences, painful memories, or maybe just a small reminiscence. In Jeanette Walls’ memoir, “The Glass Castle”, Walls develops her strong willed identity due to her family’s past of struggles and differences from other families. In comparison to “The Glass Castle,” Judith Ortiz Coefer’s, “Silent Dancing”, collects the memories of how Coefer’s cultural experiences shaped her to become a woman who is proud and powerful of her ethnic background. Jeanette Walls has demonstrated that her present has been captured by the recollection of the false hope and destructiveness her dysfunctional parents went through. Both Walls and Coefer have shaped up characteristics because of their family’s circumstances.
In “The Glass Castle”, Walls lives her childhood fulfilled with disappointment and broken promises as she moves around her whole life because of bills her parents never paid. The failure of her family turns her into a determined woman, who strives to live the opposite of how she was living all through her youth. Although Walls’ tone is interchangeably neutral throughout the memoir, she still has the mentality in which she wants to move away to New York to live a different lifestyle. The influences of her family develop life lessons for Walls and that becomes a part of her identity. Even though Walls lived in shabby homes with ragged clothes, Walls was taught not to be ashamed of her family and the things she could not afford. ‘”We can’t keep dumping garbage out there”, I said., “What are people going o think? “Life’s too short to worry about what other people think,” Mom said. “Anyway, they should accept us for who we are”’ (Walls, 157). Toward the end of the novel, Walls realized that she needed to stop avoiding the questions being asked about her mother and just learn to hold on to her past. Even as she becomes a successful writer, she does not forget the things her parents had taught her, which reminds her of the person she has always been.
Being raised improperly by her family, Walls was hardly taken care of by her parents. Her mother disliked having the responsibility to take care of children, and her father drank heavily. All the features of her parents turned Walls into a responsible tough cookie. Taking care of her younger siblings and herself meant that Walls had to become an adult at an early age. For example, when she was three years old, she was caught on fire while cooking for herself and her mother was calm about the whole situation. Walls’ parents basically expected her to “suck it up” to learn how to handle situations gone wrong. As Walls grew up in New York, she had to learn how to deal with bullies because her own parents and entire childhood made her deal with bullies. “I got jumped a number of times. People were always telling me that if I was robbed, I should hand over my money rather than risk being killed. But I was darned if I was going to give some stranger my hard-earned c ash, and I didn’t want to become known in the neighborhood as an easy target, so I always fought back. Sometimes I won, Sometimes I lost” (Walls, 248). Even as an adult, Walls learned to be street smart and was even able to take care of herself in a foreign state like New York.
Not only did Walls’ childhood and family experiences shape up her character, but Judith Coefer’s family history from her own memoir “Silent Dancing”, also shaped up Coefer’s individuality. As a Puerto Rican moving to New Jersey, she developed an influence of story telling due to her family’s historical culture. “It became my father’s obsession to get out of the barrio, and thus we were never permitted to form bonds with the place or with the people who lived there. Yet El Building was a comfort to my mother, who never got over yearning for la isla. She felt surrounded by her language: The walls were thin, and voices speaking and arguing in Spanish could be heard all day. Salsas blasted out of radios turned on early in the morning and left on for company” (Coefer, 70). Coefer develops the comfort her mother felt while living in a cultural environment and grows on that. She even states that, “Negotiating life between two cultures, American and Puerto Rican”, informs sensibilities as a writer.” Also like how Walls from “The Glass Castle”, is accustomed to living in an environment where she is different from others.
Both Walls and Coefer grew up to live in different conditions with their families and that ended up shaping their lives as they grew up. Jeanette Walls story shows how much of a strong woman her past made her become, as well as how much of a proud Puerto Rican woman Coefer is, considering the challenges of facing a new culture in her past. Identities are depicted by what people went through, whether they choose to follow the paths of the past or whether they want to be different from their history, someone’s identity is shaped up by their experiences. Although Walls wanted to live a separate and adaptable life unlike her parents, “The Glass Castle” conveys that the occurrences of her family made her the famous writer she is now. Even as a child, she also maintained loyalty to her family and having loyalty depicts her personality, because the past shaped her to become someone who was devoted to her family. Also, Judith Coefer’s memoir represents the memories of her past and how she titles herself to be a bicultural woman despite being different from everyone else. A person’s family experiences will always have some kind of effect of them, whether they want to forget those past moments. The past will never be forgotten and every experience in life shapes the person someone will become. Walls and Coefer’s memoirs share their piece of identity and the women they shaped up to be after their family lifestyles and their past childhood. Just like Author Haley’s quote, family will always develop a deep personality change in a person, and that creates their identity.
Works Cited
Coefer, Judith. Convergences: Silent Dancing. Boston, New York: 2009. Print.
Haley, Alex. "Think Exist." . N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Dec 2011. <http://thinkexist.com/quotation/in_every_conceivable_manner-the_family_is_link_to/338986.html>.
url: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/in_every_conceivable_manner-the_family_is_link_to/338986.html
Walls, Jeanette. The Glass Castle. New York: Scribner, 2005.
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