Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Educated, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, History, and Subjectivity
Learning and Education
Devoutness and Delusion
Family, Abuse, and Entrapment
Summary
Analysis
Tara’s mother, Faye, was a mailman’s daughter and grew up in town in a “yellow house with a white picket fence.” Her mother, a seamstress (whom Tara and her siblings all call Grandma-over-in-town) sewed her beautiful clothes for church and school, and Faye and her family’s life “had an air of intense order, normalcy, and unassailable respectability.”
In looking back on the facts of her mother’s childhood in this section, Tara attempts to chart just how Faye became so isolated from the way she grew up.
Themes
Grandma-over-in-town herself had come from a family seen as the “wrong kind” by many others in her pious Mormon community, and spent her life trying to give Faye an easier entry into the social world of their small town and “shield her” from “social contempt.” Tara believes that due to this strict, prim upbringing, Faye rebelled, and married Gene—a man with an “appetite for unconventionality.” Faye rejected her mother’s attempts at instilling respectability and normalcy in her, and instead swung in the other direction, rebelling against the upbringing she saw as materialistic and claustrophobic. Tara remembers her mother telling her a story about Grandma-over-in-town spending hours deliberating about whether to put the young Faye in white or cream shoes for church one morning.
Grandma-over-in-town tried to give her daughter a dignified and structured upbringing—but Tara, looking back on the facts, can see that it was perhaps this stringent adherence to rules, regulations, and keeping up appearances which drove her mother into the arms of a delusional iconoclast who rejected even the most basic societal norms, structures, and institutions.
Themes
Tara knows very little, on the other hand, about her father’s childhood. She knows that despite the views he developed about women’s duties to homemaking and family, Grandma-down-the-hill actually worked in town while he was growing up, and that Gene spent a good deal of time in town, too—Gene and Faye met at a local bowling alley. Tara believes that Faye, sick of “contorting herself” for other people all her life, was attracted to the “sense of sovereignty” over his own life Gene had, a sovereignty that came with living life on a mountain.
Tara can look at her mother’s life and see the path she took—and the reasons she took it—very easily. With her father, however, things are more mysterious. There is no rhyme or reason to his paranoia and delusion, and Tara continues searching for answers as to how her father became the man who raised her.
Themes
Growing up, Tara and her sibling understood that “the dissolution of Mother’s family was the inauguration” of their own. Dad rarely even set foot in Grandma-over-in-town and Grandpa-over-in-town’s house, and Faye’s parents hardly ever visited the mountain.
In marrying Gene and choosing his way of life, Faye forever removed and isolated herself—and her children—from her own family.
Themes
Get the entire Educated LitChart as a printable PDF.
Looking at pictures of her parents on their wedding day, the young Tara often wondered about how the “untroubled young man” in the picture became the Dad she knew. She is unsure of how he went from being “eccentric and unconventional” out of a desire to shock others to being controlling, paranoid, and obsessed with hoarding food and supplies for the End of Days. The older Tara reflects on how, during a college lecture years later, she heard a professor describe the symptoms of bipolar disorder and immediately thought of her father.
Tara has long been unable to deduce how her father became the paranoid, delusional man she always knew him to be—but the answers eventually come in the form of a possible medical diagnosis, which explains many of the gaps in Tara’s own understanding not just of her father’s childhood, but her own.
Themes
The older Tara reflects, too, on the recent death of Grandma-over-in-town. She attended the memorial despite tensions with her family, and as she looked down into her grandmother’s open casket, she lamented that “the only person who might have understood” her difficult childhood was kept at arm’s length while “paranoia and fundamentalism” slowly destroyed Tara’s life—and Faye’s.
In severing herself from her family, Faye effectively cut her children off from anyone who could have helped them understand that their lives were abnormal and even dangerous. Tara grieves this fact as she grieves her grandmother.
Themes
