Traits
Charles Wallace did not learn to talk until he was almost four, but then talked in full sentences, skipping over the "baby preliminaries" as Meg said. Because of his brilliance and his shyness, he is bullied by fellow children and misunderstood by adults outside his family. He recognizes that this is a problem he must solve himself; that like any new lifeform, he must learn to adapt successfully to his environment in order to survive.
Charles has blue eyes, and is repeatedly said to be small for his age. At fifteen, he looks "no more than twelve." This is offset somewhat by a mature and serious demeanor.
He prefers to be called Charles Wallace rather than Charlie or Chuck, as noted in Wind and Planet, but Meg frequently calls him simply Charles. In A Swiftly Tilting Planet, he allows Mrs. O'Keefe to call him Chuck, correctly guessing that she is identifying him with someone from her personal past (her brother, as it turns out).
According to an April 2004 article in The New Yorker, Charles Wallace is thought to be partly based on Madeleine L'Engle's son, the late Bion Franklin. L'Engle herself has acknowledged that Bion was the model for another of her characters, Rob Austin, but has not stated a similar provenance for Charles Wallace.
Read more about this topic: Charles Wallace Murry
Famous quotes containing the word traits:
“For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“... the first reason for psychology’s failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology’s failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.”
—Naomi Weisstein (b. 1939)
“Practically everyone now bemoans Western man’s sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organizing society for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity—advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)