Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone portrays a community going through intense, inherited, and systematic poverty. Both as a source of coping and a source of income, a large portion of the population is reliant on drugs or other mind-altering devices to ease their everyday suffering. Though Woodrell tries to build sympathy for the community and its strong heroine, he does not shy away from the toxicity of the community’s members. That is to say, the readers are not supposed to withhold judgment on characters like Ree’s father, Jessup, who is an infamous crack dealer and addict, or Blond Milton, another drug trader who lies to Ree about the circumstances revolving Jessup’s death. In fact, Woodrell leans into these outward behaviors and appearances to portray not how the poor individuals are singularly responsible for their predicament, but how their living conditions and culture beat them into what they are. Most of these troubled individuals prove to have good intentions at heart, somewhere along the line – and this is no more clear than it is with Ree’s uncle, Teardrop.
At the onset, Teardrop seems set-up to be just another
antagonist or barrier in Ree’s search for her father. Disfigured and physically
intimidating, Teardrop attempts to use his fearsome appearance to scare Ree
away from her mission – his added past as a former inmate and meth cook add to our
perception of this. Later, however, it’s revealed that Teardrop was legitimately
trying to protect Ree from the dangerous community in which they live. After
Ree is beaten by Thump Milton and his crew, Teardrop shows up to protect her,
going so far as to make a deal with them: “If she does wrong, you can put it on
me,” (137).
Though flawed (because Woodrell does not hide his
disapproval for hard drugs), Teardrop is humanized through his commitment
towards family. We later learn the same can be said of even Jessup, who was
killed because of his betrayal of the other meth cooks to the police, his
distancing the life from his family a way of protecting them. At the conclusion
of the novel, we find ourselves unable to point to a singular antagonist
(although Thump Milton and his crew represent the worst these people can
become), but rather blame the conflict on the extended crises of poverty,
inadequate/insufficient law enforcement, and all the other things which has
allowed for this criminal, desperate way of life to persist in its toxic form.
ReplyDeleteSilence and Secrets of the Ozarks
Daniel Woodrell’s Winters Bone tells the story of the Dolly family down in the Ozarks. The protagonist, 16-year-old Ree Dolly, takes it upon herself to find her missing father, Jessup. Jessup Dolly is being hunted down by “the law” to show up for his court date as he has been charged with cooking “crank”. If he does not show up, then Ree and the rest of the family lose their home. Ree, the main caregiver to her family, prioritizes finding Jessup to keep her home. On her quest to find Jessup, Ree speaks with several members of the Dolly extended family. However, her extended family heavily refuses to help her, and they lie to her about Jessup’s whereabouts.
One of the very first relatives Ree visits is Uncle Teardrop. Once Ree explains that she must find her father to save her home, his response is “Don’t go runnin’ after Jessup” (23). Ree presses the issue further by saying, “Come on, you know where he’s at, don’t you” (24)? When she tries to ask one more time, Uncle Teardrop cuts her off by stating “Ain’t seen him” (24). Uncle Teardrop gives her a stern look that indicates to not ask him about Jessup’s whereabouts again. Uncle Teardrop initially tells her not to go but ends up lying to Ree to get her to stop asking him questions. Even though Ree stops asking questions, she can tell that he is hiding the truth by his short and abrupt answers and by the look he gives her.
Another relative Ree goes to see is Thump Milton, who notably scares her. When she knocks on the door, she is greeted by his wife, Merab. As soon as Merab learns that Ree is there to look for Jessup, she immediately tries to send her away. Additionally, Thump Milton refuses to talk with Ree as well because “Talkin’ just causes witnesses, and he don’t want for any of those” (61). The word “witness” is an interesting word choice in this comment because a witness is normally someone who helps explain the truth after a crime. Given the context of witness in this setting, is evident that Thump Milton does not want any “witnesses” because he wants the truth to remain a secret.
Both Uncle Teardrop and Merab show no initial interest in helping Ree find Jessup. However, at the end of the novel, they both lead Ree to Jessup’s corpse, proving that they both originally prioritized keeping a secret over helping family. Once Ree truly knows that Jessup is dead, she hugs Uncle Teardrop and cries onto him. Merab even specifically knows the location of the body as she gives Ree certain directions such as, “He’s right there, child. Underfoot, almost” (185). As Merab retrieves the body with a chainsaw, pieces of Jessup’s bones even fly out and hit Ree in the face.
At the end of the novel, it is revealed that Jessup was killed for being a snitch and disrupting the crank cooking system. His mangled body is the physical evidence that secrets must stay hidden in the Ozarks, and how revealing secrets get you killed. People shun Ree away because they are intimidated by her thirst for the truth as some secrets are never supposed to be known in the Ozarks. The crooked Dolly clan puts preserving their secrets above their own blood to keep their criminal way of life under wraps.
I think that this was very well put. Although many moments in this novel seem to dehumanize characters like Jessup and Teardrop, it is important to remember that there is a reason why the people, as well as the community, ended up this way. Another huge problem and a big reason that these situations develop is the distrust of the police department and the law as a whole within the community. Even people like Ree, who has not done anything against the law, hates the police officer that shows up to her house at the beginning. This distrust develops through years of neglect and a failure for the government to effectively help the population. Just as you mentioned, the community needs to result to drugs to both make some sort of income and to ease the stress of life. Things such as domestic violence, murder, and rape are all too common in communities like this, and there is little to no law enforcement to stop it. It becomes a cycle, as children see their parents live the way they do, they can become reliant on drugs and crime. We can see Ree tries to pull herself, as well as her brothers, away from this lifestyle throughout the novel.
ReplyDelete