Violence and Decay Theme Analysis

From the meat carcasses swinging low on the branches of the Dolly family’s timber woods at the start of the novel to Ree’s sickening encounter with her father Jessup’s corpse at its end, decay defines the atmosphere of Winter’s Bone. Woodrell painstakingly shows his readers time and time again how the environment’s physical destitution reflects the emotional voids his characters experience due to a lack of stability, lack of trust in one another, and lack of hope for a better future, both economically and emotionally.

The physical decay Woodrell describes directly reflects the intense moral decay that blights Ree’s world, and physical injuries characters suffer are similarly used to illustrate those characters’ injured internal states as well. Ree’s Uncle Teardrop, a complicated moral figure throughout the novel, is disfigured from a meth lab explosion, and is covered in prison tattoos. His compromised physical form reflects the consequences of his dangerous and morally shaded past. When Ree is beaten by the Thump women, her injuries are described in mortifying detail; two of her teeth are knocked out, one of her eyes is swollen shut, and she soils herself out of fear. Readers are confronted with an image of Ree that directly reflects her internal state; she is exhausted, beaten down, and completely at the mercy of the shadowy figures that comprise her rural community.

Ree helping to sever Jessup’s hands from his bloated, pond-sunk corpse is easily the most horrifying image in the novel. Merab Thump and her sisters, in the wake of their beating Ree, recognize that their reputations have been tarnished by “upset talk” traveling through the Ozarks. In exchange for her continued silence, the Thump women offer to take Ree to her “Daddy’s bones.” They bring Ree to a frozen lake, cut through the ice, and tell her to reach down for his body; when she does, they sever his hands (“flecks of meat and wet bone hit Ree in the face” as they do) so that Ree can bring his hands to the police as evidence of Jessup’s death, and can keep her home and land.

Ree’s having to be complicit in the mutilation of her own father’s corpse for her own benefit, and that of her family, is both physically and emotionally grotesque. It represents a point of no return—though in finding her father’s body Ree is able to uncover a secret and obtain both closure and freedom for herself, her mother, and her brothers, she has had to succumb to the influence of the cyclical violence and horror that permeates her homeland in order to do so.