At the end of Winter’s Bone, readers find “A Conversation with Daniel Woodrell,” where Woodrell is asked questions about his novel, his life, his inspirations, and more. The interviewer observes the novel’s main character Ree as a strong and serious woman and asks on page 3, “Where did Ree come from?” Woodrell answers this question by recalling his own reading of girls in poverty who often found themselves as the primary caretakers of their households because their guardians were otherwise unable, whether because of a job or an addiction, to do so themselves (page 4).
This leaves readers with Ree, the matriarch of her family: taking care of her younger siblings — both boys — because her mother is mentally unfit to do so, and her father is entangled in her community’s drug dealings. By most accounts, this portrayal of Ree as a caretaker would be a stereotypical depiction of women in literature. However, as one reads Winter’s Bone, they will find that while her circumstances do necessitate her to take on this role for her family’s survival, she is very much not a stereotypical girl.
Ree is an incredibly fierce and strong-willed girl, and in her role as a mother, she does her best to impart these traits onto her brothers. She is gentle and nurturing, but she is not at all soft. One prime example of this is when she teaches the boys how to hunt squirrels and properly prepare them; she describes to Sonny and Harold in gruesome detail the steps, saying “Don’t be scared — the thing’s dead. Nothin’ to be scared of (106).”
She takes care of them, but she does not baby them; rather, she cares for them in a way that teaches them how to care for themselves. Her lack of a real parental role model enforces a defensive independence in Ree that she uses to protect herself, and she wants to pass this along to Sonny and Harold because her experiences tell her that she can’t rely on anyone to take care of her, therefore they shouldn’t either.
Another example of her independence as a survival technique is seen not when she is caring for her brothers, but when she is caring for herself. When Little Arthur rapes her in chapter 10, she never seeks help. She doesn’t even appear to be particularly affected by the event — instead, she views it as an opportunity to maintain power, to get whatever help she can in finding her dad and helping her family.
Ree is by far one of the strongest characters we have come across throughout this course. Because of Ree's great responsibilities, it can be easy to forget that she is sixteen years old. As you mentioned, Ree is definitely the matriarch of her family, but it is clear that, internally, she might not be as tough as she lets on to be. There are several moments throughout the novel that reveal Ree's age and how she is internally dealing with her situations. Woodrell writes, "She was strangely still and staring, still and staring on the bridge until she understood that her eyes searched for a body beneath that ice, and she crouched to her knees and cried, cried until tears ran down her chest" (70). When Ree reckons with the fact that her father's death is a very likely possibility, she becomes devastated and, in a way, shameful. This moment not only foreshadows the novel's conclusion, but also allows readers to sympathize with Ree and the reality of her situation. As tough as she is, she is still a sympathetic child who is not as ruthless as the other, older characters who have created lives around crank in the Ozarks.
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