Reflection on the Course

Gender Roles: The Real, Meaning Behind Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone

    

http://www.mancouch.com/734752184/gender-roles-in-todays-relationships/

     


 
     Winter's Bone is a story based around a sixteen year  old girl's quest to find her

methamphetamine cooking father, who put up the family's house for bail.  If Ree is unable

to get her father to his court date, the family will lose their house and land.  To add  more to Ree's

responsibilities, she must carefor her crazy mother who sits in a chair all day in her own space of

suspended reality and her two preadolescence brothers who she teaches how to shoot squirrels.  In

Ree's quest to locate her father she comes up against her clan, the Dolly clan.  The Dolly men for

generations have been cookers of crank.  They live by their form of hillbilly law.  One is true to

the clan and never asks questions or goes against the clan without ramifications.  Woodrell uses

Ree and Jessup to expose his disdain for traditional gender roles and authority.  Ree and Jessup

must defy the hillbilly law they live by just as Woodrell defied authority in his life.

Works Cited

Williams, John."Daniel Woodrell: The Ozark daredevil."The Independent 16 June 2006.Web.

     1 July.2012. http://www.independent.com.uk/arts-entertainment/books/feature/daniel-woodrell-     the-ozark-daredevile-html.

Woodrell,Daniel. Winter's Bone.New York:Bay Back Books. Little, Brown and Company. 

     2006.Print.

     

Response to a Critical Article

www.goodreads.com/book/show/6215979-methland

 

     Methland is a story written by Nick Reding.  The story came about by what he had seen happening to the small towns across America.  He himself had lived in Oelwein, Iowa.  A small town just across the Fayette County line.  Oelwein is a typical small town on the surface.  The businesses in town have been owned for years by the same families.  There will never be a Starbucks in Oelwein.  In Oelwein is business as usual.  Everyone goes about their normal lives but on the darker underbelly it is a different story.  Down the back alleys by the burned out homes is a man in a coat shaking in spite of the 90 degree weather (Reding par. 10).  A drug has taken hold of the people and the economy from farming and local businesses, this drug is methamphetamine.  For more than six years Reding has watched methamphetamine take over Oelwein, but it wasn’t until 2005 when news of the methamphetamine epidemic began flooding the national media (Reding par, 11).

     Like Methland, Winter’s Bones shows the effects of a drug on a small town.  Both these towns are slowly being consumed by methamphetamine.  This drug is easy and less expressive to make.  This is why meth is dubbed the working man’s drug.  Both these stories illustrate how devastating meth can be once it takes hold.  Methland supports the story line in Winter’s Bone by giving it weight, supporting the story line.  Reding actually did research on the meth epidemic.  Reding lived, touched, smelled and documented the methamphetamine epidemic that is spreading through small town across America.

                                                                  Works Cited

Reding, Nick. Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town.    New York: 
          Bloomsbury Publishing. 2010. Print.

Woodrell, Daniel.  Winter's Bone. New York: Bay Back Books.  Little, Brown and Company.
          2006. Print.