The paradox of Confidence in "The Glass Castle"

In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls lacks greatly in self-confidence as an adult. Although she has the wealth and success to live in the high society of New York City, she has no self-worth. Strangely, she was filled with self-confidence as a 3-year-old despite the poor living conditions. The difference in her self-worth was caused by Jeannette becoming able to view the world from society's point of view. As she became older she lived socio-economically far from her parents, whose values were totally different from Jeanette's ideas. The difference drove Jeanette even more unconfident.

As a successful adult, Jeanette was disappointed in her life. The memoir begins with her adulthood, where she is obviously not confident about her living in the high class. Jeannette was a prospering television entertainment reporter. She was wealthy enough to afford her housing on Park Avenue while collecting costly materials such as “turn-of-the-century-bronze-and-silver vases” and “old books with worn leather spines”. Yet, she felt the emptiness of being an ideal figure, where she wrote “I’d tried to make a home for myself here, tried to turn the apartment into the sort of place where the person I wanted to be would live”. Her tone, as if she was talking about someone else was evidence of her lack of faith in herself. It was clear that she was unsatisfied with her life, no matter how luxurious Jeannette's life seemed.

Jeanette is very confident as a child for she had no idea that her life was different from other people. Because her mother and father paid little attention to Jeannette, she had to take care of herself more than a normal 3-year-old would. This is apparent in the conversation with the doctors and nurses. She said, “They asked what I was doing cooking hot dogs by myself at the age of three. It was easy, I said. You just put the hot dogs in the water and boil them”. Her tone is very natural and proud, which tells that young Jeannette felt over-complimented, rather than being criticized. It was clearly not normal for a small child to cook the hotdogs herself when her mom was painting and singing next door, yet made her feel like a strong and controlled girl, building more confidence each time.

The tremendous gap in confidence was the result of Jeanette looking at the world from society's shoes. When she was young, she was simple enough to love her parents. Especially when Rex Walls, her father talked about the poisonous scorpion bite. Jeanette says “I’d heard it a dozen times, but I still liked the way Dad told it”. She is tired of hearing the same stories overlappingly, yet she shows she liked her father. On the other hand, as she built her career in society, she had to look at the world through other people’s lenses. She cared about how people viewed her, as much as she cared about her parents. She offered economic help because she did not want her parents to live in an uncomfortable environment, which is an act of love, yet her deepest complaint was “What am I supposed to tell people about my parents?”. The bigger her and her parents’ life departed, socio-economically, the more she became unconfident, for her parents were confident about living as homeless. 

Jeannette was a confident little girl who lost her self-worth as she grew into adulthood. It was at the age of 40 when she finally published the memoir “The Glass Castle”, which contributed to overcoming her lack of confidence, by letting the truth out. It is incredibly paradoxical that it was her mother’s word “Just tell the truth” which encouraged her to be free from the agony between herself and her parents’ values when they were the cause. Through the course of writing, her confidence has become even stronger, that she could now admit her parents to live their own life, with her walking straight on her path too.