Abigail Frederick ’24
Literary Analysis: Tara Westover’s Educated
My College Writing courses this semester met in discussion groups to examine the central themes within Tara Westover’s 2018 memoir Educated, and to craft analytical questions to pursue in Unit 2 essays. The paper prompts for this unit emerged from these discussion groups, and delved into the questions the text raises: Are there limits in our capacity for redemption? How is the maternal archetype reimagined in Westover’s text? How does Westover newly engage universal symbols within nature? And, what is the impact of the normalization of violence within the family unit? Abigail Frederick’s essay focuses on the latter, and analyzes why education was ultimately fundamental to Westover’s reclamation of her body.
—Professor Wright
Renegotiating Power In Mind and Body
In Tara Westover’s 2018 memoir Educated, we learn that Westover grew up on an isolated mountain known as Bucks Peak in Idaho, as the youngest of seven children with her extremist Mormon family. Her family believes that the government can’t be trusted, and so she is not allowed to go to school to get an education, or see a doctor when she is ill. As a child, Tara was forced to work in her fathers junkyard, where various sharp objects were thrown around recklessly, and where she and her brothers were repeatedly injured. Even when they were hurt, her father believed his children were still safest at home. Another layer of trauma was inflicted by people she thought cared about her, like her brother Shawn who, on more than one occasion, was physically abusive towards her. As Westover gets older, she questions some of her family’s beliefs, and particularly the recurrent danger to her body that she experienced at home. She pursues a college education, where she gathers newfound knowledge that the world is not as black and white as her father had portrayed. Her growing knowledge gives her a voice that she never had, which strains her relationship with her family. In her childhood, the normalization of violence or physical harm symbolizes a dysfunctional family, creating fear crippling enough for experiences to be swept under the rug or silenced. As Tara’s journey evolves through her education, we grasp that the body represents a mechanism of control based on her loved ones desire for authority. Once Tara starts forming her own beliefs and cultivating an intellectual identity, she in turn gains some control over her voice, as well as her physical body.
We see the act of exerting control over another’s body stem from having the lack of control over one’s own body in the past. This is the case for Westover as well as her parents, Fay and Gene. During Fay and Gene’s childhood, their parents were very controlling, which we learn as they take care of their family on Buck’s Peak. Gene spoke very little about his childhood, and we know from his wife that his father had a temper and was very abusive. Fay is the only reason that Tara knew anything really about what her fathers childhood was like, “He never talked about it, so all I have to go on are hints from my mother, who told me that, in his younger years, Grandpa-down-the-hill had been violent, with a hair-trigger temper” (26). Some of the silence or silencing that we see in Tara and her family, we can assume, arises from the trauma that her parents went through as children. As a child, Fay was not given a choice to voice her opinions; Fay’s mother wanted to make a better life for herself because when growing up her family was viewed as unpolished. She forced Fay to conform to appearing to have a perfect life to please her parents and the Mormon community. Fay explained what Tara’s life could have been like if she grew up with her grandmother, “We’d have been up at the crack of dawn preening your hair. Then the rest of the morning would be spent agonizing over which shoes, the white or the cream, would give the right impression” (25). Tara’s parents didn’t have the proper skills to look inward to understand their feelings, address their emotions, and prevent their children from reliving their own traumas, just in different forms—and what they were taught is what they repeated when they started their own families. As a result, throughout the memoir, Tara’s body is taken advantage of by Shawn and Gene. Whether she gets hurt in the junkyard by her father, “I almost had it when Dad found a catalytic converter. I leap aside, cutting my hand on the serrated edge of a punctured tank… He’d forgotten I was there” (56). Shawn snaps her neck, “My hands are in the hot, soapy water when I hear a step behind me and feel thick, callused hands wrap around my skull” (96). Shawn submerges her head in the toilet bowl as punishment when she pours a glass of water on him. Shawn and Gene constantly make Westover feel vulnerable and expendable. From a very young age, Tara is not protected by her family, she is instead endangered, constantly. Tara’s family traveled to Arizona to visit their grandparents when Fay felt like Gene needed to be refreshed because he had stopped talking and working. On that trip, Gene and his mother argued, as he believed that she shouldn’t be going to doctors to treat her cancer, because they were trying to kill her. Tara first encounters near-death when Gene decides he wants to cut the family trip short to head home for a twelve-hour drive because he doesn’t want to lose any work days. Fay is critically injured and unable to move from the car, and yet, “There was never any more talk of a hospital. The moment for such a decision had passed, and to return to it would be to return to all the fury and fear of the accident itself. Dad said doctors couldn’t do anything for her anyhow. She was in God’s hands” (39).
The tendency for Tara’s father to be in control, where no one would dare challenge his authority, constantly puts the Westovers lives in danger. Even after the accident, his ego prevents the family from seeking medical attention. He prioritizes wanting to get back home to collect scraps in the junkyard before his family’s safety. What made him believe that his actions didn’t tear his family apart? His ego that his own beliefs should not be questioned exemplifies his need to be in control.
As a child, Tara’s lack of control over her body made her feel like she didn’t have a voice to question people’s actions or express her feelings, starting with people that should’ve made her feel safe making decisions for her. Her body is treated like an object. When the family experiences a second car crash, again, due to Gene’s decision to cut a family trip to Arizona short at three in the morning, Gene asks Shawn to come back home to help in the junkyard until he gets better. After the car accident, Tara couldn’t move her neck for about a month. Shawn braces her neck while she is washing dishes, assuming control over her body, Westover writes, “Before I can react, he jerks my head with a swift, savage motion. CRACK! It’s so loud, I’m sure my head has come off and he’s holding it. My body folds, I collapse” (97). Shawn is not a licensed doctor or chiropractor, nor does he allow Tara the opportunity to make this choice about her body on her own accord. At this point in the memoir, Tara begins to realize that some of the things she is going through are not normal. The name of this chapter, “Shield Of Feathers” proves ironic, a shield that can provide no safety. As she grows older we see a pattern, in which once you have no say over your body, you cannot evolve to feel comfortable speaking up about it. When she wants to confide in her friend Nick about her life at Buck Peak, she feels embarrassed and pushes him away, “I could have told him all that, could have surrendered the weight, let the relationship carry it and grow stronger. Instead I kept the burden for myself, and my friendship with Nick, already anemic, underfed and underused, dwindled in obsolescence (226).” She hasn’t experienced someone being that open, helping her heal from her baggage. So she longs, with her body and mind, to be recognized, but is unable to scream or ask for help without feeling ashamed. It is difficult to go from being silenced to being completely comfortable with being vulnerable with someone about your experience because after being conditioned one way you have built a wall up surrounding yourself. You can’t give something that you don’t have. Tara’s brother Tyler advised her, “There’s a world out there, Tara,” he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of the world in your ear” (120). It was only in making this break that she reset the balance of power, and found her voice.
After college, Tara learned about so many things that she was not exposed to as a child, and subsequently created her own perspective. Tara’s time at college began her exposure to a world that is not just black and white, like her parents made it seem. Her journey in higher education allowed her to realize that in order to honor herself physically and mentally, she had to let her family go. As Tara was attending Brigham Young University, her parents visited her when on their way to Arizona. During their time at dinner and at her apartment her father made negative close minded comments like asking about a poster in Tara’s room, “Is that Martin Luther King?” Dad said. “Don’t you know he had ties to communism” (248)? After they left Tara journaled, “ It’s astonishing that I used to believe all this without the slightest suspicion, I wrote. The whole world was wrong; only Dad was right” (249). After being exposed to a new environment and a breadth of knowledge that didn’t just have a right or wrong mindset, she was able to look back and reflect upon so much of her life being a facade. The fact that she was able to write about her experience conveys how she was able to overcome some of her trauma. She provides readers with another lens into her life. Her ability to reflect on her past experiences as well as her eventual writing of a memoir portrays her finding her own voice. It takes strength to reflect on past trauma, let alone tell one’s story through a new perspective. When Tara lived with her family she was silenced; as she began to educate herself in school and in the world, she was able to recognize that in order to honor her wants and needs she had to set boundaries with her family. Acknowledging one’s trauma is one thing, but sharing one’s truth with judgemental eyes and minds is brave. Tara Westover reclaimed the power over her voice, mind, and body that she once didn’t have.