The Glass Castle

The Ideal Woman Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, gives a vivid description of what life is like growing up in a poor family where parental negligence and limited supervision is common. Walls grows up with a high tolerance for hard times and bravery that is unmatched. Her self-sufficiency and education helped Walls escape her difficult childhood and poor family life growing up. Walls’ memoir clearly refutes the statement made in The Great Gatsby by Daisy Buchanan that "the best thing a girl can be in this world, [is] a beautiful, little fool” (Fitzgerald 17). In Walls’ eyes, the best thing a girl can be is strong, motivated, and, most importantly, educated. Throughout The Glass Castle, Walls uses anecdotes, figurative language, and a repetition of words that proves her stance is one that plainly contradicts Daisy’s statement about what furthers the life of women. First, Jeannette Walls uses an anecdote in The Glass Castle that displays how education is what allowed her to further herself in society. In the beginning of the novel, Walls tells stories about how her parents, especially her dad, had taught her how to read before grade school and made everything more difficult so that she would be smarter than the rest of the children. She mentioned one time when her dad made her use binary numbers to do her math homework and how her teacher did not approve. When Walls enters high school, she uses an anecdote to prove how it was her education that allowed her to go from proofreader of the school paper to editor-in-chief quicker than anyone else had before. Because Walls had been pushed by her parents to be smarter than the other kids, she was able to join the school paper in the seventh grade. To show just how important that was in furthering herself, Walls writes, “Miss Bivens told me that as far as she could remember, I was the only seventh-grader who’d ever worked for the Wave,” (Walls 203). Walls continues the story by laying out the years before the