Identity in Educated

In the memoir Educated, the protagonist, Tara Westover, struggles with forming her identity. Her identity is constructed for her by the people that she loves. She never really found her voice, or used her voice. She says, “My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs” (205). Later on in the memoir, Tara talks about her struggle to find her voice again. She writes: “This knowledge, like so much of my self-knowledge, had come to me in the voice of people I knew, people I loved. All through the years that voice had been with me, whispering, wondering, worrying. That I was not right. That my dreams were perversions. That voice had many timbres, many tones. Sometimes it was my father’s voice; more often it was my own” (265). Thus, Tara’s family plays a major role in shaping her identity. Tara does not realize that her identity can encompass many different things, such as the junkyard at Bucks Peak, along with her newfound formal academic education. Tara’s family wants her identity to still be the girl in the junkyard scrapping. Therefore, Tara allows her identity to still be a girl scrapping in the junkyard. She fails to recognize that her identity can be expanded while still keeping that girl as a portion of her identity.