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Motif
Explanation and Analysis—Houses:
Jeannette describes each place she lives in painstaking detail, such that houses become a motif throughout The Glass Castle. Each time the Walls family moves, a description of their house grounds the reader in that new location. One can imagine how carefully taking stock of her physical surroundings helped ground Jeannette, too, within the chaos of her family’s nomadic lifestyle.
Several houses stand out, like, for example, the adobe home the Walls family inherits from Grandma Smith in Phoenix in Part3 of the memoir:
When we pulled up in front of the house on North Third Street, I could not believe we were actually going to live there. It was a mansion, practically, so big that Grandma Smith had had two families living in it, both paying her rent. We had the entire place to ourselves. Mom said that it had been built almost a hundred years ago as a fort. The outside walls, covered with white stucco, were three feet thick. “These sure would stop any Indians’ arrows,” I said to Brian.
Jeannette goes on to describe the house’s many rooms and the fine objects that fill them, as well as the garden with its palm and orange trees. These details communicate Jeannette’s childlike wonder. For someone who has so often gone without safe living conditions and material goods, the house seems like a kind of paradise. Jeannette’s comment about the thickness of the walls is also significant; it shows the Walls children’s awareness of the world’s dangers, and also foreshadows how even in this place, they will want for protection.
Contrast this house with the one on Little Hobart Street that the family lives in during their time in Welch in Part 3 of the memoir:
The house was a dinky thing perched high up off the road on a hillside so steep that only the back of the house rested on the ground. The front, including a drooping porch, jutted precariously into the air, supported by tall, spindly cinder-block pillars. It had been painted white a long time ago, but the paint, where it hadn’t peeled off altogether, had turned a dismal gray.
“It’s good we raised you young ’uns to be tough,” Dad said. “Because this is not a house for the faint of heart.”
The dismal disrepair of this house, which Jeannette goes on to reveal has no running water or electricity, shows just how fall the Walls family has fallen in fortune. The house is practically built on a cliff, an apt representation of the family’s increasingly precarious situation.
In general, descriptions like these reflect not just where the family is physically, but also emotionally and psychologically. The Glass Castle’s motif of houses helps the reader track Jeannette’s literal travels and her internal journey, from naivety to disillusionment to acceptance, from merely surviving to building a life of her own.
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