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Simon Griggs

Ms. Dott

English III Honors

29 November 2017

Transcendentalism Questions

1. Rex and Mary Walls are clearly Transcendentalists by how they raise their children. One

aspect of Transcendentalism is self-reliance and the Wallses demonstrate this in the very

first pages of the memoir; when Jeannette is in the hospital she (at the age of three) tells

the nurses that “she [Mary] lets me cook for myself a lot” (Walls 11). Jeannette is very

self-reliant and individualistic because she is three – an age where most people are just

learning how to keep their pants dry, much less feed themselves – and she is fixing food

by boiling water. Her intuition is shown through the issue of how to get water into the pot

in order to boil it. “The pan’s too heavy for me to lift when it was full of water, so I'd put

a chair next to the sink, climb up and fill a glass, then stand on a chair by the stove and

pour the water into the pan,” says Jeannette as she describes her method for cooking

(Walls 11). In order to solve the problem of the pot being too heavy one must use

intuition to find this atypical solution. The logical thought process would be to ask for

help but her self-sufficiency and intuition (Transcendentalist ideas) led her to her

solution. The Wallses are clearly not believers in Romanticism because Romantics

distrust progress, “Dad was on the verge of perfecting his cyanide gold process” (Walls

81). Their father was attempting to create a new way to leach gold from ore, which is

progress. The Transcendentalists believe in progress through intuition (not deliberate

intellectualism) while the Romantics do not believe in progress at all, so the Walls family
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is clearly Transcendentalists. The attitude the Walls family has about life is a very

transcendentalist view on the world.

2. Self-reliance is the dependence on yourself for all necessities of life. The devotion the

Walls family has to the Transcendentalist parenting philosophy can be shown in how they

treat their animals. “Just because they live here doesn’t mean I’m going to wait on them

hand and foot. Mom told us that we were actually doing the animals a favor by not

allowing them to become dependent on us,” is the mother’s philosophy behind dealing

with animals. Later on in that paragraph, Jeannette says “Mom liked to encourage self-

sufficiency in all living creatures” (Walls 64). She believed that the best way to handle

the animals was to have them as pets but not let the animals become dependent on the

family for food. The treatment of animals is a metaphor for how Mary treats her children;

she was mentally absent at times and not very much of a parent. The children of the

Walls family are so self-reliant they have created their own “escape fund… Lori could

take it to New York and use it to get established, so that by the time I [Jeannette] arrived,

everything would be set” (Walls 223). The parents follow their belief in the

Transcendentalist ideals such to the point of the children believing that their best avenue

for continued survival was to be self-reliant together – apart from their parents – and they

worked together to create a legitimate means to do this. Mary Rose Walls was also very

adamant that the family would remain self-reliant and not take handouts from other

people. Jeannette Walls knew that her mother was “opposed to welfare… She said [it]

would cause irreparable psychological damage to us kids” (Walls 188). Key aspects of

Transcendentalism are that people use their own intuition to determine the ultimate

reality of God so they can remain self-sufficient. The Walls family is intent on
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maintaining their self-reliance regardless of the cost even if it means living in extreme

poverty. Self-reliance is clearly a bad thing in this case because there were solutions

which could have ended their struggle, yet they made the conscious choice to avoid those

solutions because of their Transcendentalist ideals. Thus, Transcendentalism and self-

reliance can clearly be detrimental to people.

3. Nonconformity is a belief that one must be different than the stereotypical or standard

view of society. The Walls family is clearly a believer in nonconformity because of how

they choose to live their life throughout Jeannette Walls’ childhood. When the teaching

methods of Rex Walls are examined his nonconformity is made evident. As he was

teaching Jeannette to swim he “pried my fingers from around his neck and pushed me

away my arms flailed around and I sink in the hot smelly water” (Walls 65). The typical

way to teach someone to swim is to teach them the individual aspects of it and then put it

all together in a controlled environment, i.e. swimming pool. However, Rex Walls

effectively throws his daughter into a hot spring and says “figure it out” to her; these two

methods are clearly different and the second not conforming to the first. When Jeanette

was in middle school she “was the first seventh grader to work for the [Maroon] Wave,”

again not conforming to the norms of the society around her (Walls 203). Jeanette was

the first, and only that we know of, seventh grader to work for the school newspaper; she

wanted to be a part of something and is not restrained by the fact that nobody else her age

has joined the newspaper. The Walls family also did not conform to the societal norm.

When the family was effectively operating as a single parent household (Dad went

AWOL again) Mom exclaimed “’Why do I always have to be the one who earns the

money?’ Mom asked. ‘You have a job. You can earn money. Lori can earn money, too.
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I've got more important things to do’” (Walls 218). The mother is suggesting her that two

high school aged kids should support the entire family while the mother does absolutely

nothing. It is not uncommon in lower income areas for high school students to have to

support a portion of the family, but the parents typically work (often multiple jobs) or at

least contribute something. The fact that the mother suggests that the children need to

support themselves is an extraordinarily selfish and atypical view. “Build therefore your

own world” is a famous phrase from Ralph Waldo Emmerson’s’ essay ‘Nature’

(Emmerson). The Walls family lives into this quote because they build their own little

world wherever they went, and they often stood apart from society. Our society today

does not encourage nonconformity because the Walls family was looked down upon and

anybody in high school that is different is immediately considered weird or possibly even

ostracized. These different people often find other different people and create their own

little subcommunities but those subcommunities are often look down upon by the general

“popular” portions of the student populous. The Wallses clearly believe in non-

conformity and our current society values conformity.

The Glass Castle Specific Questions

2. Brian Walls had a successful quest for opportunity in the memoir The Glass Castle. The

character began in the same situation as all of the Walls children; he was being flung

around the western half of the country until they settled in Welch, WV. In Welch he lived

in a run-down shack and barely had enough food to eat. He ends as a successful police

officer in NYC with a kid and he even had a few women interested in him. Brian goes

from having nothing to having a fairly typical life of an average American. We had

previously defined the American Dream as just this – to be better than one’s parents.
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Brian Walls is a clear example of this because he goes from an unstable (even explosive)

home life to a very stable and consistent home life as he grows up.

3. As humans we are quite pathetic at remembering exact details of a situation. We often

remember the important – or at least important to us – aspects of a situation. It would be

impossible for anyone to write a memoir without embellishment or omitting certain

details. This misinformation is not necessarily intentional or malicious in any sense, but

they are most definitely present due the selective nature of our memory. This is

evidenced by the “good old days.” Humans have a tendency to remember the extremes of

emotion, so for people who have not had traumatic lives (as most people have not), the

past is remembered fondly because the majority of those extremes are emotional highs.

The past is then thus viewed through a proverbial set of rose tinted glasses. The truth in

the past is technically only what can be supported by facts, generally through first-hand

accounts written during or after an event. As soon as personal memories are brought into

the discussion, the factual nature of the argument can and should be brought into

question. Therefore, perfectly true stories are only based on facts and do not include

personal anecdotes. So, it is not possible to say that The Glass Castle is a perfectly true

story free of any bias.

4. Legally speaking, free choice is when people make a decision but do not have anyone

designated as a power of attorney or the like to make a different decision for them

because they have demonstrated themselves to be medically incompetent to make a sound

decision. A choice made by people with a mental illness is still technically their decision,

but if they have someone set up to make the decision for them, then the decision made by

the mentally ill person is not binding. The line at which people become so mentally ill
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that their decisions need to be checked and overruled by another is quite a fuzzy line.

However, Mary and Rex Walls are clearly past this line because they have made a

conscious, and to them well-informed, decision to live in absolute poverty while they had

a quite available route out. If the ramifications of this decision only affected the decision

makers then an argument could be made to allow Mary and Rex the freedom to choose

homelessness. But because there are four humans dependent on Rex and Mary,

homelessness is not a decision they should be allowed to make. Society does have a

moral responsibility to help the homeless if children/dependents are being harmed and set

behind their peers due to their family’s chosen homelessness. The Walls family children

had to have extreme forward vision to be able to work as hard as they did to overcome

their homeless roots. It can not be expected that all children will have that same

industriousness and outlook on their future.

Insightful Question

When is it the responsibility of the children to break from the black and white rules given

by their parents once the children become an adults?