Winter's Bone

Harold, Sonny, and Connie often have the television on in their house. While there’s nothing unique about watching television, Woodrell takes care to indicate the types of shows the family is watching. Ree notes that the family only receives the Public Broadcasting Service due to poor service in the valley. Later, she states that her brothers are watching a show about a small dog that dresses up in costumes and acts out the scenes of different books—a description of the show Wishbone. On one level, it is significant that Harold and Sonny are fascinated by a show that brings literature to life—a form of liberation from reality and escapism. On another level, the name of the show itself is important, in that the term wishbone also alludes to the tradition of cracking a dried wishbone in hopes of having a wish fulfilled. The wishbone becomes a symbol of luck, of fortune and opportunity. The Dolly family is haunted by both the past and the seemingly inevitable future where wishes and fortune are rare.

The Dollys’ fascination with television as a form of escapism also becomes apparent with Woodrell’s allusion to an historical Masterpiece show, characterized by distinct social classes that dictate social behavior and manners. Such a lifestyle is worlds away from their own life in the Ozarks, and it allows the family to participate in fantasies of a different reality—one that is clearly ordered, civilized, and cultured. Although their own lives are also dictated by codes and internal culture, their tangled history provides a very different reality. 

Ree Dolly listens to albums such as The Sounds of Tranquil Shores throughout the novel as another form of emotional escapism. The albums have a transformative quality for Ree, who uses them to imagine herself in a different reality. Significantly, Ree’s method of escapism differs from that of her mother and siblings. While her mother loses herself in medication and her brothers watch television, Ree chooses music that assists her in imagining a new natural world.

Ree’s deep and complex relationship with her surroundings is evident throughout the novel. She spends time by herself outside to find tranquility or self-awareness. However, she has a complicated relationship with the Ozarks, a landscape she often finds confining and repressive. As such, she finds comfort in imagining herself in a different natural world. 

Ree first hears the sounds of Beelzebub “scratchin’ a fiddle” after she discovers that her family might lose the house as a result of her father’s disappearance. Ree knows that the house’s foreclosure would result in her family being “dogs in the fields with Beelzebub scratchin’ out tunes and the boys’d have a hard shove toward unrelenting meanness and the roasting shed and she’d be stuck alongside them ‘til steel doors clanged shut and the flames rose” (15).

Beelzebub’s fiddle makes another appearance after Thump Milton’s women beat Ree. As Ree lies in bed the next day, recovering from her injuries, she can hear the fiddle throughout the house—a chorus of unseen fiddlers playing a tune only she can hear. At first the tune expresses her emotional despair over her failure to recover her father’s body or any information about him. However, when Ree recognizes a connection between her mother’s incessant humming and the fiddles she hears throughout the house. Ree suspects that her mother must also hear the fiddles that, to her, represent hopelessness, despair, and loss; she also comprehends that she does not want to become as engrossed by the fiddles as her mother is. With this thought, Ree begins to silence the fiddles in her mind—she begins to embrace the possibility of possibility and change.