Educated

by

Tara Westover

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Family, Abuse, and Entrapment Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Memory, History, and Subjectivity Theme Icon
Learning and Education Theme Icon
Devoutness and Delusion Theme Icon
Family, Abuse, and Entrapment Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Educated, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family, Abuse, and Entrapment Theme Icon

The stifling, claustrophobic home in which Tara Westover comes of age is marked by physical, emotional, and psychological abuse—an insidious triad that serves to entrap the members of the Westover clan, keep them vulnerable, and cause them to question whether what’s happening to them is really abuse after all, or just the normal way families treat one another. As Westover looks back on the ways in which she, her mother, and her siblings all fell prey to their father’s abuse—and how some of her beloved family members became abusers themselves—she argues that abuse within families often becomes normalized, and that this normalization, and the confusion it engenders, perpetuates cycles of entrapment, confinement, and isolation for victims.

Although Tara has no trouble looking back on her childhood and recounting certain memories (or at least the way they crystallized in her mind, if not the way they actually happened in real life), it is far more difficult for her to reckon with how delusion, danger, and indeed abuse became so normalized within her family over the years. Tara’s father Gene’s intense religious devoutness centers around delusional beliefs that the “Days of Abomination,” or the events that would mark the end of the world and human civilization, were fast approaching. This led to patterns of verbal, physical, emotional, and financial abuse meant to cement those mistruths as a common reality shared by all the members of the Westover clan. Insults, rants, racial epithets, conspiracy theories, and profound isolation from mainstream society and objective truth were all just a way of life within the Westover household—and Gene’s paranoid, violent temperament was the root of the patterns of abuse that would grow and flourish throughout the family in the years to come.

With so much hate, fear, and paranoia as the baseline of relations within the Westover home, it is no wonder that the members of Tara’s family grew meek, compliant, and subservient in response. Tara’s mother, Faye, learned not to question the rules Gene dictated—because of his outright hatred of doctors, hospitals, and the medical profession, she refused to seek help even when she suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. As a result, she endured years of debilitating migraines, memory loss, and confusion—and yet never stopped to question whether her husband’s control over her and her children’s very lives was right. In fact, as Faye hewed even more closely to Gene’s dictums, she became more like him, and soon her own refusal to participate in society or seek medical help for her children in their moments of greatest need became forms of abuse in their own right.

Meekness and fear were not the only ways in which abuse became normalized and accepted. As Gene’s hold on some members of his family was tested, others—namely Shawn—became abusers themselves, seeking to wield the kind of unquestioned power they saw their father exert every day. Shawn’s role in Tara’s life is originally that of jocular, teasing older brother. As she grows older, though, it becomes clear that the insults he lobs at her and the wrestling matches he engages on her are more than brotherly jests. Shawn tells Tara that she’s stupid and makes sure to tell any friends she makes outside of the family that she’s stupid, too; he twists her arms back when she disagrees with him, and eventually begins slamming her to the ground, forcing her head into the filthy toilet, and hitting and punching her. Shawn’s abuses go unquestioned, and the claustrophobic environment within the Westover home means that Tara can never escape her brother. The normalization of misinformation, subservience, and cruelty within the Westover clan—normalization that started with Gene and Faye—eventually trickles down to the Westover children, and allows Shawn to abuse Tara physically, emotionally, and verbally for years. Even well into adulthood, Tara finds herself trying to convince herself that Shawn’s threats are real and malicious. Even when Shawn kills his wife Emily’s dog and threatens to take Tara’s life with the bloody knife he used to do the job, Faye and Gene, so inured to this culture of violence within their home, refuse to see what they have wrought—and the person they have allowed Shawn to become.

The abuse perpetrated within the Westover clan is so subtle and pervasive that over the years, it becomes impossible not just for Tara but for the majority of her family—save two of her brothers—to see the truth of what was happening to them all along. As Tara grows older, she comes to see how these mechanisms of abuse became normal and accepted within her family. With time, she understands that her parents have indeed been complicit in her suffering, as well as that of her sister Audrey, and her brothers Richard and Tyler, who chose to speak out and separate from the rest of the family. In Educated, Tara is determined to shine a light on the dark, shameful history of cruelty, indignity, and violence that is her family’s past—implicit encouragement for readers to bravely face their pasts and carve out a better future.

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Family, Abuse, and Entrapment Quotes in Educated

Below you will find the important quotes in Educated related to the theme of Family, Abuse, and Entrapment.
Prologue Quotes

I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountains, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Indian Princess
Page Number: xii
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Dad had always believed passionately in Mother’s herbs, but that night felt different, like something inside him was shifting, a new creed taking hold. Herbalism, he said, was a spiritual doctrine that separated the wheat from the tares, the faithful from the faithless. Then he used a word I’d never heard before: Illuminati. It sounded exotic, powerful, whatever it was. Grandma, he said, was an unknowing agent of the Illuminati.

God couldn’t abide faithlessness, Dad said. That’s why the most hateful sinners were those who wouldn’t make up their minds, who used herbs and medication both, who came to Mother on Wednesday and saw their doctor on Friday—or, as Dad put it, “Who worship at the altar of God one day and offer a sacrifice to Satan the next.” These people were like the ancient Israelites because they’d been given a true religion but hankered after false idols.

“Doctors and pills,” Dad said, nearly shouting. “That’s their god, and they whore after it.”

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad (speaker), Faye Westover / Mother, Grandma-down-the-hill
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:

Me, I never blamed anyone for the accident, least of all Tyler. It was just one of those things. A decade later my understanding would shift, part of my heavy swing into adulthood, and after that the accident would always make me think of the Apache women, and of all the decisions that go into making a life—the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event. Grains of sand, incalculable, pressing into sediment, then rock.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Tyler Westover
Page Number: 40
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Dad picked me up soon after on his way home from a job. He pulled up in his truck and honked for me to come out, which I did, my head bent low. Grandma followed. I rushed into the passenger seat, displacing a toolbox and welding gloves, while Grandma told Dad about my not washing. Dad listened, sucking on his cheeks while his right hand fiddled with the gearshift. A laugh was bubbling up inside him. Having returned to my father, I was taken by the power of his person. A familiar lens slid over my eyes and Grandma lost whatever strange power she’d had over me an hour before.

“Don’t you teach your children to wash after they use the toilet?” Grandma said.

Dad shifted the truck into gear. As it rolled forward he waved and said, “I teach them not to piss on their hands.”

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad (speaker), Grandma-over-in-town (speaker)
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

“Shouldn’t we drive slower?” Mother asks.

Dad grins. “I’m not driving faster than our angels can fly.” The van is still accelerating. To fifty, then to sixty.

Richard sits tensely, his hand clutching the armrest, his knuckles bleaching each time the tires slip. Mother lies on her side, her face next to mine, taking small sips of air each time the van fishtails, then holding her breath as Dad corrects and it snakes back into the lane. She is so rigid, I think she might shatter. My body tenses with hers; together we brace a hundred times for impact.

It is a relief when the van finally leaves the road.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad (speaker), Faye Westover / Mother (speaker), Richard Westover
Page Number: 93-94
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

I stood and quietly locked the bathroom door, then I stared into the mirror at the girl clutching her wrist. Her eyes were glassy and drops slid down her cheeks. I hated her for her weakness, for having a heart to break. That he could hurt her, that anyone could hurt her like that, was inexcusable.

I’m only crying from the pain, I told myself. From the pain in my wrist. Not from anything else.

This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Shawn Westover
Page Number: 110-111
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

Shawn fingered the thick steel, which I was sure he could tell was not cheap at all. I stood silently, paralyzed by dread but also by pity. In that moment I hated him, and I wanted to scream it in his face. I imagined the way he would crumple, crushed under the weight of my words and his own self-loathing. Even then I understood the truth of it: that Shawn hated himself far more than I ever could.

“You’re using the wrong screws,” he said. “You need long ones for the wall and grabbers for the door. Otherwise, it’ll bust right off.”

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Shawn Westover (speaker)
Page Number: 121
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

Reflecting on it now, I’m not sure the injury changed him that much, but I convinced myself that it had, and that any cruelty on his part was entirely new. I can read my journals from this period and trace the evolution—of a young girl rewriting her history. In the reality she constructed for herself nothing had been wrong before her brother fell off that pallet. I wish I had my best friend back, she wrote. Before his injury, I never got hurt at all.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Shawn Westover
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

A few days later Dad came home with the most frightening machine I’ve ever seen. He called it the Shear. At first glance it appeared to be a three-ton pair of scissors, and this turned out to be exactly what it was. The blades were made of dense iron, twelve inches thick and five feet across. They cut not by sharpness but by force and mass. […]

Dad had dreamed up many dangerous schemes over the years, but this was the first that really shocked me. Perhaps it was the obvious lethality of it, the certainty that a wrong move would cost a limb. Or maybe that it was utterly unnecessary. It was indulgent. Like a toy, if a toy could take your head off.

Shawn called it a death machine and said Dad had lost what little sense he’d ever had. “Are you trying to kill someone?” he said. “Because I got a gun in my truck that will make a lot less mess.” Dad couldn’t suppress his grin. I’d never seen him so enraptured.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Shawn Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad
Related Symbols: The Shear
Page Number: 138
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

I’d always known that my father believed in a different God. As a child, I’d been aware that although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. They believed in modesty; we practiced it. They believed in God’s power to heal; we left our injuries in God’s hands. They believed in preparing for the Second Coming; we were actually prepared. For as long as I could remember, I’d known that the members of my own family were the only true Mormons I had ever known, and yet for some reason, here at this university, in this chapel, for the first time I felt the immensity of the gap. I understood now: I could stand with my family, or with the gentiles, on the one side or the other, but there was no foothold in between.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

But I couldn’t do the job, because to do it would be to slide backward. I had moved home, to my old room, to my old life. If I went back to working for Dad, to waking up every morning and pulling on steel toed boots and trudging out to the junkyard, it would be as if the last four months had never happened, as if I had never left.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Faye Westover / Mother (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad
Page Number: 168
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

I came back to Buck’s Peak when I was sure the strep was gone. I sat by Dad’s bed, dripping teaspoons of water into his mouth with a medical dropper and feeding him pureed vegetables as if he were a toddler. He rarely spoke. The pain made it difficult for him to focus; he could hardly get through a sentence before his mind surrendered to it. Mother offered to buy him pharmaceuticals, the strongest analgesics she could get her hands on, but he declined them. This was the Lord’s pain, he said, and he would feel every part of it.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad, Faye Westover / Mother
Page Number: 222
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 30 Quotes

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. Marley had written that line a year before his death, while an operable melanoma was, at that moment, metastasizing to his lungs, liver, stomach and brain. I imagined a greedy surgeon with sharp teeth and long, skeletal fingers urging Marley to have the amputation. I shrank from this frightening image of the doctor and his corrupt medicine, and only then did I understand, as I had not before, that although I had renounced my father’s world, I had never quite found the courage to live in this one.

I flipped through my notebook to the lecture on negative and positive liberty. In a blank corner I scratched the line, None but ourselves can free our minds. Then I picked up my phone and dialed. “I need to get my vaccinations,” I told the nurse.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad
Page Number: 258
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 34 Quotes

The knife was small, only five or six inches long and very thin. The blade glowed crimson. I rubbed my thumb and index finger together, then brought them to my nose and inhaled. Metallic. It was definitely blood. Not mine—he’d merely handed me the knife—but whose?

“If you’re smart, Siddle Lister,” Shawn said, “you’ll use this on yourself. Because it will be better than what I’ll do to you if you don’t.”

[…] I half-wondered if I should return to the bathroom and climb through the mirror, then send out the other girl, the one who was sixteen. She could handle this, I thought. She would not be afraid, like I was. She would not be hurt, like I was. She was a thing of stone, with no fleshy tenderness. I did not yet understand that it was this fact of being tender—of having lived some years of a life that allowed tenderness—that would, finally, save me.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Shawn Westover (speaker)
Page Number: 286-287
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 35 Quotes

My parents said he was justified in cutting me off. Dad said I was hysterical, that I’d thrown thoughtless accusations when it was obvious my memory couldn’t be trusted. Mother said my rage was a real threat and that Shawn had a right to protect his family. […]

Reality became fluid. The ground gave way beneath my feet, dragging me downward, spinning fast, like sand rushing through a hole in the bottom of the universe. The next time we spoke, Mother told me that the knife had never been meant as a threat. “Shawn was trying to make you more comfortable,” she said. “He knew you’d be scared if he were holding a knife, so he gave it to you.” A week later she said there had never been any knife at all.

“Talking to you,” she said, “your reality is so warped. It’s like talking to someone who wasn’t even there.”

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Faye Westover / Mother (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad, Shawn Westover
Page Number: 291-292
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 36 Quotes

While they plotted how to reconvert me, I plotted how to let them. I was ready to yield, even if it meant an exorcism. A miracle would be useful: if I could stage a convincing rebirth, I could dissociate from everything I’d said and done in the last year. I could take it all back—blame Lucifer and be given a clean slate. I imagined how esteemed I would be, as a newly cleansed vessel. How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad, Faye Westover / Mother
Page Number: 300
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 40 Quotes

Until that moment [the girl in the mirror] had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to have changed—how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance—I was still her. At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house.

That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.

You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.

I call it an education.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker)
Page Number: 328-329
Explanation and Analysis: