Educated HL Essay

How Tara Westover symbolises selective memory and dissociation as a response to violence in her memoir, Educated.

In this essay, I will be analysing the memoir by Tara Westover called Educated. Educated focuses heavily on religion, family, and most importantly, education. In this essay, I will predominantly be discussing how Tara Westover responds to violence over time though selective memory and memory repression. Selective amnesia- more commonly understood as selective memory, is understood as the tendency to remember only what one wants to remember. When trying to recall a long term memory, your brain triggers a reprocessing phase of this memory, which can cause some details to be forgotten if it was traumatic or highly sensitive. Westover symbolises selective memory often in her memoir, especially when discussing violent events- this is not uncommon in this book, as Tara grew up working in a scrap yard, she often dealt with injuries personally, but also watched as her brothers and sisters suffered highly traumatic injuries at a young age. Her family is strongly sceptical to any government help, so they often do not receive proper medical attention to their wounds. Later on in the book, it becomes apparent her older brother Shawn, is both psychologically and physically abusive to Tara. I will also be discussing instances of dissociation as a response to violence in Educated.

As mentioned before, Tara’s reflection on traumatic, often violent memories are selective. She can remember certain smells, noises, colors but cannot remember details of the actual event. The most compelling example of the selective memory represented in Educated, is when Shawn, her older brother gets into a motorcycle accident. Tara finds him on the road, bleeding out, and decides to take him to the hospital against the strong opposition of government help which had been instilled in her since birth. On page 147, she says: “When I think of that night now, I don’t think of a dark highway, or my brother lying in a pool of his own blood. I think of the waiting room, with its ice-blue sofa and pale walls. I smell its sterilized air. I hear the ticking of a plastic clock”. She distinctly remembers the color of a sofa she sat on decades ago instead of the horrifying idea of her brother bleeding out on a street, with his skull visible to her eye, which is understandable as her family up until the age of 17 had been the most important thing in her life, even after years, the memory of something traumatic happening to something you cared so deeply for, is sickening. It seems the memories of her older brother Shawn, both her enemy and her best friend, seem to be the most troubling in her memories. First, when he falls off a pallet whilst working and has a near fatal brain bleed, and second, when he has the motorcycle accident. Although later on in her life, after both these incidents, Shawn becomes abusive and bipolar, before these brain injuries he was a sweet, caring older brother to Tara. They worked on the scrapyard together, went on a long road trip together, and he always seemed to be a troubling, yet sweet brother. It becomes understandable that when Tara writes her memoir, she cannot fully remember the two main events which led to her brother's personality change, and inevitably to his abuse towards her. For Tara, these main two events have such terrible consequences to her relationship with her brother, and inevitably, her family, that she has repressed the majority of these memories deep down. When Shawn falls off the pallet in the chapter ‘My feet no longer touch earth’ (page 130), she says: “I remember strangely little of the hospital, or of how my brother looked. I vaguely recall that his head was wrapped in gauze, and that when I asked why, Mother said the doctors had performed a surgery…- actually, I can’t remember what she said.” Again, this shows over time Tara forgets a large amount of this traumatic experience, because it's so upsetting.

Dissociation, according to WebMD, is ‘a break in how your mind handles information. You may feel disconnected from your thoughts, feelings, memories, and surroundings.’ 2 , so when reflecting on an event years later, because you dissociated during that particular moment, you cannot remember the details of an event. Although this is less common, it is still seen often throughout Educated, especially as an immediate response to violence or trauma. Sometimes, when something extremely unexpected happens, especially traumatic, it can be too much for the brain to process, so it shuts down. This can be seen in chapter 16, ‘Disloyal man, disobedient Heaven’, when Tara rushes Shawn off to the hospital when he is in a motorcycle accident. When she places her unconcious, bleeding brother in her car, she recalls: “My thoughts wandered wildly, feverishly, through a fog of resentment. The state was dreamlike, as if the hysteria had freed me from a fiction, that five minutes before, I had needed to believe.” - this shows the dissociation Tara has from the hysterical minutes she had just had. And as discussed before, there is a pattern in the book: When Tara reflects on the events of her brother, the memories seem to be clouded- this could be through repression, or through dissociation. She could have dissociated in the moment and now experience dissociative amnesia, where she cannot remember a part of an event because she dissociated in the moment. In those moments, her brother was her best friend, her protector, and the idea of him being hurt, or even worse, dying, could have been enough for Tara to dissociate as a coping mechanism to the sadness she felt she did not deserve to feel.

In this essay, I discussed how Tara Westover, the protagonist/ writer of Educated, shows her response to traumatic and violent events through dissociation and selective memory. We focused mainly on the two events concerning her older brother, Shawn, and how the result of these events caused for the personality change in Shawn that led to the abuse towards Tara. More specifically, we analysed how Tara reflected on these events years later, and how selective memory could have been a result of dissociation.