Poverty and Class Theme Analysis

Eleanor and Park live in the same Omaha neighborhood, but in terms of socioeconomic class, they are a world apart. Eleanor, her mother, and her siblings live in extreme poverty, made worse by her stepfather Richie’s physical, emotional, and financial abuse. Park and his family enjoy a solidly middle-class lifestyle which, when seen through Eleanor’s yearning eyes, seems sparkling and luxurious. As Eleanor and Park navigate their burgeoning romantic relationship, they also each see, for the first time, how the other half lives. Through the two of them, Rowell highlights the inequalities simmering just beneath the surface of suburban life, ultimately suggesting that the insidious, unjust force of extreme poverty has the power to tear lives—and relationships—apart.

Eleanor and Park, like Romeo and Juliet, are star-crossed lovers kept from spending as much time as they’d like together by a variety of factors. Aside from Eleanor’s controlling, abusive stepfather Richie, one of the major obstacles in Eleanor and Park’s relationship is the extreme, abject poverty in which Eleanor and her family live. Ashamed of her home, wary of accepting the kindness and generosity of others, and armed with an arsenal of defense mechanisms, Eleanor nevertheless slowly pushes these things aside so that she can try to be with Park—but Rowell shows how poverty, like abuse, creeps into all facets of life in insidious and destructive ways.

Rowell is unsparing in her descriptions of the poverty in which Eleanor and her family live. The entire family uses one bathroom that doesn’t have a door on it, and Eleanor and her four siblings all sleep tangled in a mass on the floor in one bedroom of their shabby house. There is rarely any good food to eat, and most of the family’s meals subsist of beans. Eleanor doesn’t even have a toothbrush, and though she considers asking her guidance counselor for one, the shame she feels is ultimately too great to reveal the truth about her home life. Though poverty has no doubt been a disruptive force in Eleanor’s life for a long while, Eleanor is able to take it all in stride most of the time—but when she meets Park and begins to see how he and his family live, everything changes. The first time Eleanor visits Park’s home, she’s nervous and uncomfortable—she feels out of place and overwhelmed, and is afraid that Park is embarrassed of her for a whole host of reasons, one of them being how poor she is (and the way her wardrobe reflects her family’s lack of means.) After this brief hiccup, Park insists that Eleanor is welcome at his house any time, no matter what—and she begins steadily spending more time there, enjoying the hours she’s able to steal away from the nightmare that is her home. She begins staying later and later at the Sheridans’, enjoying dinner with them most nights before begrudgingly returning home to her real life.

When the older two of Eleanor’s younger siblings, Ben and Maisie, discover the truth of where she’s been spending her evenings (at Park’s and not, as she’s told her family, at her “friend” Tina’s), they practically beg Eleanor to take them with her—“It’s not fair,” Maisie says, “that you get to leave all the time.” Eleanor senses how “desperate” her siblings are for an escape, but feels herself “go cold and mean” as she refuses to share her time at Park’s with them. Eleanor sees her evenings at the Sheridans’ as a refuge—she doesn’t want her brother and sister, reminders of her circumstances, to disrupt the small slice of happiness and security she’s been able to carve out for herself. Shortly after Ben and Maisie’s discovery of Eleanor’s relationship with Park and the afternoons she spends at his family’s house, Eleanor worries that she is “running out of time with [Park.]” She has been able to escape the truth of what her life is really like for a while, but the disruptive forces of poverty and class, and the insular, perverted way Richie runs her family’s household, are about to rear up again. Eleanor has tried to make a life for herself that is separate from the circumstances she’s been conscripted to, but she knows, deep down, that she can’t outrun them forever.

It must be said that the poverty Eleanor and her family live in is a facet of Richie’s abuse—by keeping tabs on Sabrina’s money, he is able to keep Eleanor and her siblings in poverty and thus under his control. With no funds or freedom of their own—and with the shame, self-loathing, and instability poverty often creates at work—Richie can keep total control over his family and continue belittling and abusing them. Eleanor’s particular experience of poverty, then, is even more insidious and destructive because of its roots in Richie’s desire to manipulate and degrade his wife and her children. Poverty not only reminds Eleanor that she’s separated from Park and his family by a thin but inflexible socioeconomic barrier; it also reminds her, at every turn, that she is Richie’s captive.

Poverty is the tell-tale heart beating in the background of Eleanor and Park—Eleanor is ruled by her family’s lack of funds, and her family’s impoverishment is the impetus behind an overwhelming percentage of the feelings she has and the decisions she makes. In the end, Eleanor cannot deal with the way poverty—and the abuse that is tangled up in it—rules her life any longer, and she makes a radical escape. In Eleanor and Park, Rowell casts poverty as the great disruptor—it turns familial relationships into adversarial ones, it engenders shame and self-loathing, and it creates an invisible and impenetrable boundary around those it entraps.