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
The winter after Tyler leaves, Audrey turns fifteen. She gets a job and a driver’s license, and starts spending more and more time away from home and the “restraints” Dad has been trying to put on her. Tara can feel her family “shrinking.” Dad, determined to keep making money and hold what’s left of the family together, makes Luke, Tara, and Richard work every day in the junkyard. Dad teaches the ten-year-old Tara the difference between aluminum and steel, and puts her to work sorting debris. He doesn’t allow her to wear gloves or a hard hat even as she handles rusted, jagged pieces of metal, claiming they’ll just slow her down.
The Westover children are growing up—and finding ways to rebel against their claustrophobic, stifling upbringing. Tara, however, is too young to make her way out into the world, and is subjected to her father’s orders. Gene has no care for Tara’s well-being or safety—she’s just another pair of hands he can use as free labor and control however he wants.
Themes
The junkyard which was once Tara’s childhood playground becomes a “mysterious, hostile” place, as she’s forced to dodge the flying debris her father throws around carelessly. Tara thinks of all the injuries she’s seen her brothers incur over the years, but when she expresses her nervousness about getting hurt to Dad, he replies only that “God and his angels,” who are “working right alongside” them, won’t let Tara get hurt.
Gene’s belief that no harm will befall him or his “crew” while they’re at work allows him to behave with impunity. Operating under the assumption that God will protect his family from serious harm, he throws caution to the window and shirks all common-sense protocol for working in a place as dangerous as a junkyard.
Themes
Mother, meanwhile, is steadily recovering from her head injury, but her memory is erratic and she’s plagued by terrible headaches. She often loses track of ingredients while mixing tinctures, and worries that she’ll never midwife again. When, at Christmas, a friend gives her a bottle of expensive essential oil that helps her headaches, Mother decides to start making her own. Mother relies on the help of “muscle testing” in making her oils—a process by which she holds ingredients around different parts of her body and gauges her body’s muscular response to determine whether she needs to add it or not.
Mother’s delusions are worsening, too. Tara never clearly states whether she believes Mother’s sudden reliance on strange, religion-adjacent rituals stems from her traumatic brain injury or from the faith she needs to maintain her bizarre, constricting lifestyle in the wake of it.
Themes
Muscle testing soon becomes an exercise Mother does only with her fingers, by crossing the middle and index fingers and then “flex[ing] slightly to try to uncross them” while asking herself a question. If the fingers stay together, the answer is yes; if they part, the answer is no. Mother begins using muscle testing to determine answers in other kinds of healing, and she starts doing “energy work” on clients in the basement, adjusting their chakras and massaging pressure points. Mother sometimes enlists Tara and Richard’s help in these rituals, but Tara doesn’t feel the energy her mother purports to feel during the healing sessions.
Mother’s rituals and beliefs are equal in devoutness to Dad’s, and similar in their delusional quality and detachment from reality. Mother’s beliefs are rooted in spiritualism rather than Christian doctrine and scripture, but it doesn’t matter what God or idea she’s serving—she’s learned the mechanisms of intense piety and delusion from her husband.
Themes
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Mother sees muscle testing as a “divine supplication” and relies upon it almost compulsively to complete even the most basic household tasks. Dad is enraptured by Mother’s new skill, believing that she, unlike doctors, can tell what’s wrong with someone just by touching them.
Dad is proud of Mother for her new skill—and for the fact that she’s absorbed and emulated the example he’s set forth all these years.
Themes
As Tara works in the scrap yard all winter, she finds herself “haunted” by thoughts of what Tyler is doing off at school. She wants to go to school herself, but is too afraid to ask her father for permission. She tries to make time to study in private, but her work in the junkyard and with mother often renders her too tired to focus on math, science, or history. Richard, meanwhile, studies obsessively in his free time, reading volume after volume of the family’s encyclopedia.
Tara longs for an education, but at this point in her life, her fear of disturbing the status quo and rocking the boat at home outweighs her motivation to outright pursue her dreams.
Themes
Tara begins studying religion, reading the Book of Mormon, the New Testament, the Old Testament, and the writings of early Mormon prophets. Though Tara struggles with the material, her work teaches her a “crucial” skill—“the patience to read things [she] could not yet understand.”
Tara approaches the religious materials which are so central to her family’s life with a critical eye—she is not particularly pious or devoted to the texts, but instead longs to understand them on a mechanical level.
Themes
By the spring, Tara has become a slightly more competent scrapper, though she still fears accidents—and working with Dad. One morning, though, after filling a bin with over two thousand pounds of iron, Tara is forced to ask Dad for help in operating the heavy machinery needed to empty the bin. Dad, hoping to expedite the process, urges Tara to climb into the bin so that she can settle the iron once it’s been dumped. Though Tara doesn’t understand the plan, she agrees to it—and as Dad raises the forklift and starts pitching the bin forward, Tara becomes trapped as a piece of metal digs into her leg. Dad rebukes Tara for getting stuck, and urges her to go back up to the house and let Mother treat her bloody gash.
This passage represents all of the confusing and dangerous rules of Tara’s childhood more broadly. When her father instructs her to do something—even though it seems risky, and Tara is unclear about what’s expected of her—she decides that bending to his will is easier than questioning or arguing with him. As a result, she gets injured—but her father refuses to see his role in his own daughter’s suffering, and he also fails to acknowledge that the family is not, in fact, immune from accidents in the scrap yard because God and his angels are watching over them.
Themes
Mother muscle-tests Tara’s wound and declares that she will not get tetanus. She examines Tara’s bruises and determines that Tara has damaged her kidney—but decides to treat it with a “fresh batch of juniper and mullein flower.” As Tara’s wounds heal over the next several weeks, she arrives at a decision: she wants to go to school. She approaches Dad and asks for permission, but in response, he only asks her if she remembers the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau, implying that Tara is “not the daughter he had raised.”
Tara is frustrated with both her parents—her father’s carelessness and her mother’s ineffectual attempts to care for her and her siblings in the face of increasingly worrisome injuries. When Tara attempts to extricate herself from her difficult home life, though, she’s met only with cruelty disguised as piety.
Themes
