I Raped You By Jeannette Analysis

Billy had thrown the ring at me. I kept walking. ‘Guess what?’ Billy shouted. ‘I raped you!’” (pg. 87). Jeannette is confused when she hears what Billy says. She is sexually assaulted at the age of eight, and it only seems to get worse as she moves from place to place. With each attack resulting due to the continued neglect that Rex and Rose Mary show towards their kids by not providing stability. The neglect that Jeannette experiences, but does not yet understand, eventually results in the involvement of Social Services with the Walls family; “He’d launch an investigation and end up sending me and Brian and Lori and Maureen off to live with different families, even though we all got good grades and knew Morse code. I couldn’t let that happen. No way was I going to lose Brian and Lori and Maureen.” (pg. 194). It is here that Jeannette shows how much she truly cares about her family. The neglect of her parents has required her to become the responsible figure head of the Walls household and she learns to protect and care for her siblings. Jeannette develops the characteristics of a mother figure despite the careless absence of her own mother.

Rage Against the Machine’s single "Testify", the first song from their 1999 album 'The Battle of Los Angeles", is a commentary on the American public’s blindness or numbness to global issues such as war, politics, capitalism, wealth, and power through the filtering of information by the mass news media. As it relates to Sociology, “Testify” deals mainly with Marxist Conflict Theory, and also incorporates many of the topics we have learned about in class throughout the semester.

Jeannette’s self-reliant behavior is frequently shown through her refusal of help from others. On one trip to retrieve her father from a bar, Jeannette’s father is so drunk that he can no longer walk. Another man offers to drive them home, and

Furthermore, Walls uses vivid imagery of abusive actions to show that determination and a hopeful spirit can help anyone overcome obstacles to achieve his or her desires. However, before Walls had the determination to leave, she encountered another series of unfortunate event when an eight-year-old boy named Billy Deel and his father moved into the area. The author writes, “Billy smushed his face against mine, then grabbed my hair and made my head bend sideways and stuck his tongue in my mouth. It was slimy and disgusting, but when I tried to pull away, he pushed in toward me. The more I pulled, the more he pushed, until he was on top of me and I felt his fingers tugging at my shorts. His other hand was unbuttoning his own pants…” (Walls 54). Evidently, in this excerpt, it can be implied that Jeannette has been raped. Walls tried to stop him as she thinks back to what her dad told to her to do if a guy jumped on her, but because she couldn’t “knee him in the groin”, Walls used common sense and bit Billy on the ear as hard as

To stop him, I put my hand down there, and when I touched it, I knew what it was, even though I had never touched one before.” () Here, the conception of guilt and responsibility becomes blurry as it could be the blame on Jeannette as she is incapable of defending herself against the sexual assailant.

The Glass Castle simply glosses over these topics, although because Jeannette decided to include them, she had a purpose and knew that these experiences were important enough to make the cut of her memoir. The author intended her audience to know that these events are common and usually not brought to light. Jeannette uses this as an allusion in her story- she lightly touches the topic of sexual abuse and rape culture, and tiptoes around it, similar to how modern society simply glosses over the subjects as well. She does this in order to show how such an important subject is simply brushed off, thought of as

In her younger years, Jeannette was an smart and imaginative child. At first, she enjoyed moving around, and had a lot of faith in her father, which created a good relationship between them. “All we had to was find gold, once we’d struck it rich, he’d [Rex] start work on our Glass Castle” (Walls, 25). The tremendous faith that she has in Rex creates a strong bond because she is the only family member who trusts his ideas. Unfortunately, he is a raging alcoholic who can’t hold a job, so most of his promises are broken. As Jeannette gets older, he lets her down more and more. One time he brought her to a bar where she was then sexually violated. When the two had a talk after, he said “I knew you could handle yourself” (Walls, 213,) instead of defending her. It was upsetting to watch their relationship grow apart and to see how poorly he provided for his family, yet they still loved him.

“He [Jeannette’s father, Rex] will not keep me out of harm’s way, he will put me in harm’s way and I have to find a way to remove myself from the situation.” (Diversity Connection). I feel like this quote, from Jeannette, came t directly from the situation where Rex took her out to the bar to help him earn money for alcohol, but yet she still doesn’t see herself as a victim. Even though Jeannette Walls was the victim of sexual abuse at a very young age, she tries to recreate the freedom from her childhood into her adult life, But in her younger years where she has no occupational activities, no nurturing, no money and no friends to turn to, it proves to be very hard to maintain.

While Jeannette was in New York she met new people and was bettering herself. Although, she did not live in a good neighborhood she did not let that effect her negatively and she said “I got jumped a number of times. People were always telling me that if I was robbed, I should hand over my money rather than risk being killed. But I was darned if I was going to give some stranger my hard-earned cash, and I didn't want to become known in the neighborhood as an easy target, so I always fought back” (Walls 248). #Jeannette stood up for herself in these situations and she did whatever it took to get through them. Most people would not fight back and just give the person what they wanted but she never did. She became familiar with this and used it to her advantage to defend

The subject of rape is a prevalent theme in Candide. All of the female characters suffer through it on

Rape is beyond dispute one of the most explicit events that can occur to a person in order to harm them on a physiological, emotional and even physical level. The violation here is subverted into a domination of the “poor rapist”. However the heroine encounters a violation on a physical level, which becomes obvious, when she states:” I was inexperienced at dog-fashion fucking and had probably torn the skin of my cunt a little.” (70) There is physical pain as a result of the violation, but the way the heroine reacts and wipes the pain away by marginalizing (“a little”) the injury makes it less harmful and consuming. At first it seems, that the rape has no quality for her as the source for shame. But on the same page she also describes the way Toni and her interacted right after the rape had taken place: “Tomi glanced at me quizzically once or twice, but I managed to avoid her eyes”. This sentence is easily overlooked because she had taken everything that happened beforehand so lightly, but here there is a moment of judging a moment of trying to avoid shame. He avoids her eyes, because she

Jacobs’ narrative is open and honest in its depiction of sexual harassment, describing the nature of the abuse and the tortured emotional state it leaves its victims in. Though the narrative tells of a girl’s life over one hundred and fifty years ago, it remains timely in its reminder that many suffering women do not have the ability to safely end the harassment they face every day, and yet, they continue to endure the consequential

A trait that stands out in the book is the symptom of bodily memories. In Melinda’s case, during a frog dissection in her science class, she remembers the opening up and even says, “She doesn’t say a word. She is already dead. A scream starts in my gut – I can feel the cut, smell the dirt, feel the leaves in my hair.” (81). One of the other symptoms that Melinda has is self-harm. The first time that this is shown in the book, Melinda says this, “I open up a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this? A whimper, a peep?” (87). Melinda also has a hard time talking to her parents about the rape to which she says, “How can I talk to them about that night? How can I start?” (72). Some victims recover from such a traumatic experience, while others don’t and live a lifetime of depression and must undergo intense therapy. In Melinda’s case, she finds redemption by talking to her parents and the guidance counselor, and putting her faith into her teachers, friends, and her art project at school. Because rape can affect anybody anywhere, everyone should be aware of the circumstances, and how to deal with it.

Another common form of abuse exhibited against women is sexual abuse. Despite sexual abuse having the overarching inclusion of a sexual activity, Women Against Abuse candidly states, “Sexual abuse is not about sex. It is about power, and includes any sexual behavior performed without a partner’s consent” (“Types of Abuse”). Sexual assault is about exerting power over one’s partner, and in similar way,

When Nancy counters this with “you certainly manage to make a woman feel like an object rather than a person,” Billy’s response is “thank the pills for that.” This moment is presented as one of the first “lessons” that Billy teaches Nancy, that the pills are bad and somehow making her less of a woman. However, what it really suggests is that a woman isn’t worth listening to if her sexuality isn’t involved. Once Nancy reaches Billy’s hideout, other women are more than happy to assist him in raping her. It is later revealed that all of these other women were also once raped by Billy but have now “they understand” and “they’re grateful.” The fact that these victims would not only be happy to assist their rapist and kidnapper but also are described as almost worshipping him seems to suggest more of a Stockholm syndrome situation instead of one where Billy has “saved” them. Billy obviously holds the power within his “gang” and these women are willing to do whatever it takes to help him rape other women. The idea that all these women needed to become grateful was to be forcefully “deflowered” by Billy perpetuates the patriarchal idea that women need to be introduced (often forcefully) to their own sexuality. Instead of just letting the women stop taking their pills and then waiting for them to make their own