College and Identity in Tara Westover’s Educated (Essay Sample)

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College and Identity in Tara Westover’s Educated
Before exploring this theme, it is prudent to give a summary of the memoir. To begin with, Tara Westover crafts an incredible picture of her family together with herself in Educated. In the entire writing, she explicates her father’s fundamentalist belief coupled with a crippling paranoia regarding the public school system. All through, the young Tara remains at the mercy of her parents’ power struggles. While she acknowledges the intense religiosity of her father, she has to embrace them as her own to become an outward convict worldly corruption. As she comes of age, Tara reminisces the past atrocities at the hands of her brother Shawn. Consequently, she becomes mentally and physically destabilized by an array of incidents prevailing in her father’s scrapyard.
Despite pursuing education eventually, followed by admission to the prestigious Brigham Young University, Westover notices her obviousness of the world. Once in control of her surroundings, including the scrapyard and the farm, she is confronted by a diverse world where she is entirely naive. Unaware of the Holocaust and her pathetic personal hygiene, she is engrossed in personal tensions with her predominantly secular roommates. Delving deeper into the world of academic reality, she secures scholarly escapades at Harvard and Cambridge. Westover is conscious that any degree she acquires makes it intricate to return to Idaho, where she led a humble life. As her father ages and weakens, she is aware of the power wielded by her brother Shawn. Also, she is cognizant of the memories held by the women in her family that she has not forfeited the history of abuse and the fear that she may speak about it altogether. Accepting the scars of her past life in the guise of lifelong education, Westover weaves a tale of questioning the subjectivity of memory, the truth of transformation, and what education implies for an individual.
Educated spans education and identity as one strives to find meaning and purpose. Even though this journey can sometimes be shrouded in