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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Winter’s Bone, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Silence and Secrets
Family, Destiny, and Inheritance
Violence and Decay
Isolation and Independence
Women and Matriarchy
Summary
Analysis
Ree’s mother, Connie, sits in a chair next to the stove, quiet and unmoving. Ree notes that her mother had “once been pretty.” Now, though, she is heavily medicated, and “lost to the present.” Ree tells her brothers to finish their breakfast, as the school bus will be arriving soon. Her brothers complain that their socks smell, but Ree begs them to put their socks on and hurry along so that they are not late for school. The two boys are eighteen months apart, and have different fathers; the older boy, Sonny, is a “scrapper,” while Harold is gentle, vulnerable, and often “in need of fixing.”
Connie’s apparent inability to remain tethered to the world around her, combined with Jessup’s frequent absence, has forced Ree into a matriarchal role. Here she is shown caring for her brothers as a mother would. Her mother’s mental decay mirrors the financial and moral decay running rampant throughout the Ozarks and, in a way, acts as a metaphor for the shattering effect of bearing witness to such violence over an extended period of time.
Themes
Ree hopes that her brothers will not be “dulled to life” and “empty of kindness” by the time they are twelve, as “so many Dolly kids” are. There are two hundred Dollys, plus extended Dolly relations, living within thirty miles of Rathlin Valley. Some are “square” and some are “rough,” but all Dollys are subject to a set of “remorseless blood-soaked commandments that governed lives led outside square law.” Ree once again hurries her brothers off to school, reminding them to wear their hats, as snow is coming.
