Family and Abuse Theme Analysis

The differences between Eleanor and Park’s respective families aren’t just socioeconomic—while Park comes from a stable home, Eleanor’s family life is in shambles, and she, her mother Sabrina, and her siblings are subjected daily to fear, manipulation, and abuse at the hands of her stepfather Richie. As Eleanor and her family descend deeper into a spiral of abuse, she seeks refuge increasingly often at Park’s house, which becomes a safe haven for her—but is often blind to the smaller but still painful abuses Park himself suffers at the hands of his controlling, straight-laced father. Through both Eleanor and Park’s experiences with family life that range from the uncomfortable to the downright dangerous, Rowell suggests that for many individuals—even those who seem safe and privileged—family and some measure of mistreatment often go hand-in-hand.

Rainbow Rowell doesn’t shy away from depicting the more difficult and painful aspects of family life. From Eleanor’s poverty-stricken, fear-ridden home environment to Park’s idyllic but rigid family structure, Rowell shows how conflict and abuse, in varying shades and differing levels of intensity, are often at the core of families of all shapes, sizes, and configurations. Eleanor’s household is a hotbed of poverty, abuse, and misery. Her cruel, drunken, lecherous stepfather Richie hits Eleanor’s mother Sabrina, refuses to put a door on the bathroom so that he can monitor his stepchildren’s activities in there, fires “warning shots” at neighbors when they make too much noise too late, and, it’s eventually revealed, writes lewd, explicit messages on Eleanor’s paper textbook covers. The abuse Eleanor suffers is daily, and it is personal—at the start of the novel, she’s just moved home after having been kicked out of the house for a year for standing up to Richie. Even before her mother married Richie, Eleanor has never known a happy family situation: her father, who is a character in the novel but is never even referred to by a name, is a distant figure who is described as “selfish” despite his charisma. Already remarried with another child, Eleanor’s father doesn’t try to take her under his wing—when she was kicked out of the house, she went to live with family friends, never having received an invitation to come stay with him.

Eleanor’s family life is downright miserable, and occasionally even dangerous. Towards the end of the novel, when Eleanor recognizes Richie’s handwriting and realizes he’s been leaving the crude notes on her textbooks all along, she also has an epiphany in which she at last allows herself to realize all the predatory behavior Richie has been exhibiting toward her: clocking her whereabouts, commenting on her appearance, and indeed keeping a door off of the bathroom. Eleanor fears that if she stays any longer, it’s only a matter of time before Richie assaults her physically—and decides to run away to beg for help from distant relatives rather than risk being further victimized.

The abuse Park suffers is mild compared to the nightmare that is Eleanor’s home life—but the pressure his controlling, militaristic father Jamie exerts on him, especially when Park begins exploring other aspects of his identity and playing with gender roles by wearing makeup to school, nonetheless leave Park feeling vulnerable and insecure. Rowell includes the subplot about Park’s tense relationship with his father to show that even though Eleanor sees the Sheridan home as a safe haven compared to her own house, no family is perfect—and many households, regardless of how they seem on the outside, harbor borderline-abusive situations, even if the abuse is emotional rather than physical, or otherwise invisible.

Park and his father eventually reconcile, even if they don’t see eye-to-eye by the end of the novel. When Park helps Eleanor flee Nebraska to seek refuge with relatives in Minnesota, his father catches him sneaking out of the house. Though Park is afraid of incurring his father’s wrath, which is mostly verbal but occasionally physical, his father hands him the keys to his truck and allows Park to drive Eleanor to safety, in spite of the fact that the two of them have been arguing about Park’s permission (or lack thereof) to drive the entirety of the novel. Park, who was enraged that his father had been so strictly asserting he learn how to drive manual transmission, is pleasantly surprised by his own ability to maneuver the truck from gear to gear and drive Eleanor to safety. For Park and his father, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel—but for Eleanor, there is no chance of improving her abusive home life, and she knows she must escape or drown. Rowell is unafraid to show her young readers that familial conflict and abuse sometimes has no solution—individuals like Park and his father might be able to find forgiveness and common ground, but when there’s a monster like Richie in the house, she suggests, to fight to keep “family” together is futile and even dangerous.

Though there’s no doubt that Eleanor suffers abuse much more intensely and markedly than Park—and is much more vulnerable to and endangered by those abuses—Rainbow Rowell doesn’t shy away from exploring the various forms and shades that familial conflict and abuse can take on. By demonstrating the disparaging words and physical threats that both Eleanor and Park are forced to endure at home, Rowell shows how disruptive, destabilizing, and demeaning familial abuse is in any form—and yet suggests that it is, all too often, a part of family life.