The Meth Family

David Hubbard
Mrs. Cline
English 102
19 March 2012
                                                                  The Meth Family
                A family provides more than shelter, protection and nourishment; it gives us meaning, support and unconditional love. Families are more than the sum of the individuals. They are a powerful unit that builds communities and countries. Today the foundation of family is being ripped away by a common, cheap and dangerously addictive drug. “Methamphetamine misuse affects not just individuals, but entire families” and communities (Sheridan par. 3). Woodrell paints a realistic picture in his novel, Winter’s Bones, of the destruction of the family through meth usages. Reding paints an equally gruesome picture of a father whose life fall apart, due to his meth addiction. As the dominoes fall, we begin to see the impact that Jessup’s and Jarvis’ addiction had on their entire family, member by member, and ultimately the community.

In our patriarchal society, the man is responsible for heading the household. He is often the breadwinner if not the sole income provider. He makes the important decisions that affect a families’ welfare and ultimately he is the protector. In Winter’s Bone, Jessup Dolly is societies anti-father. He left the family with no explanation and no means to provide for themselves while under the threat of losing their home. Jessup is a small, rural town meth cook, who served time behind bars previously for cooking crank. Ree discovers that Jessup was murdered due to his betrayal of the meth community in an attempt to come home.

Roland Jarvis a father, observed by Reding, was your typical, hard-working American dad. He had a family, great job, married and respected. He began using meth to increase productivity at work, working longer days and more shifts to make more money. Eventually the drug takes its toll on the man, and as the story unravels the devastating effects of meth take their toll. Jarvis loses all control with the drug when his employment status decreases. His wages suffer, his hours increase and the work load doubles. He fails, as does Jessup Dolly, to realize meth is destroying the foundation of his humanity. He soon comes to terms that he is working for meth. He finds out meth can be made at home, there for he quits his job and becomes a cook. Much like the characters depicted in Woodrell’s Winters Bone. Both expose that financial hardships increase the likelihood for people to turn to meth. As Jarvis continues down the rabbit hole, eventually he hits the bottom, blows himself up and his house from the flammable chemicals used in his meth lab. Woodrell also mentions the horrors of Meth lab's exploding, that the toxic chemicals can melt your skin clean off, even years after the fire. Both are stressing the dangers of meth cooking and the lack of this perception by those who do it.

Roland Jarvis is described gruesomely in detail as to the damage his body underwent when the Meth lab in his basement exploded. "His skin was dripping off his body in sheets" (Reding 42). Jarvis was so high on meth; he was running in and out of his house trying to salvage possessions, not knowing he was literally cooking himself alive.  "His nose was all but gone now, too, and he ran back and forth among the gathered neighbors, unable to scream, for his esophagus and his voice box had cooked inside his throat" (Reding 42). Jarvis divorced his wife, receives limited visitation to his kids, lost his house, and nearly his life. This horror is similar to Ree having to remove her father’s hands to prove his death. Evil and horrible things come from meth.

The mother is the nurturer and teacher. She also takes on the roles of housekeep and child rearing. Connie Dolly is an absent mother, who is removed from reality. Ree’s mother just sits in a chair adding to the burdens already placed on her. It is unclear why Connie is in this state, but Ree believes that meth and the trouble it brought was, “exactly the sort of shit she went crazy to get away from” (Woodrell 85). Another argument is that Connie may have damaged her brain from frequent use of crank. “Methamphetamine kills by causing heart failure, brain damage and stroke. It causes more damage to the brain than alcohol, heroin or cocaine” (Boulard par. 61).  Ree loves her mother, but is angry that she is unable to help the family, the way a mother should. Jarvis’ wife also hurts the family more than she helped, “born at the peak of his parents’ intravenous use, [their child] was wearing a colostomy bag by the age of ten” (Reding 43). Parents who use meth are no parents at all.

With her father gone and her mother a burden, Ree Dolly is left to raise her siblings. Her younger brothers, Sonny and Harold, are a constant stress and problem. Sonny the oldest brother, was a fighter, “his fists made hard young knots, and he’d become a scrapper at school” (Woodrell 7). Sheridan concluded in her study that aggression is common in young children whose parents use meth. “In homes were methamphetamine is misused, multiple stressors such as exposure to adult violence, criminality and child maltreatment may place children at risk for the development of physical aggression” (Sheridan par.6). Violence is common in the Dolly clan and is frequently witnessed by and targeted at the children.

Ree internalizes her anger, unlike her brother’s outward anger, by forming an inappropriate relationship, in her mind, with her friend Gail and ostracizing males. Sheridan found that, “girls' expression of aggression often takes the form of social/relational aggression; that is, harming others through manipulating their relationships, for example, through malicious gossip or exclusion” (Sheridan par.68). Ree resents men, due to the abusive treatment she has received from them in the past including a sexual incident with a family friend. Ree was raped by Little Arthur after he drugged her. Sexual abuse is often common in meth homes, since parents are often neglectful of parental responsibilities during “crashes.” Methamphetamine misuse is associated not only with poor judgment and impulse control, but with heightened sexual arousal” (Sheridan par.71).  

Ree is a teenager who dreams of removing herself from her family and the community by joining the Army. She stresses, that her younger brothers will grow up without carrying on the families’ legacy of cooking, which if not for her prevention, would surely happen. “So many Dolly kids were…ruined before they had chin hair, groomed to live outside square law and abide by the remorseless blood-soaked commandments” (Woodrell 8). Ree sees the evils of meth and refuses it several times in the novel. She is strong, fearless and heroic and one of the few characters in the book who do not use.

Extended family can be equally important as the nuclear family. Aunts, Uncles, Grandparents, cousins and all other blood related relatives are an additional support group. In Ree’s story, she turns to her relatives when in need and they turn her away. They lie to her, threaten her and physically harm her. A majority of Ree’s extended family uses and/or cooks crank and a side effect is, “heightened levels of both anxiety and aggression to paranoia, hallucinations and even psychosis (Redfield par. 5).  Her extended family is scared and paranoid that she’ll uncover an inconvenient truth about their meth cooking and drug dealing.

Families are intertwined with the community in which they live. If one suffers, so does the other. In Ree’s small town the effects of meth are evident from the burned meth labs to the crooked cops to the murders. This creates internal pressure and a feeling of fear as well as many other social burdens. “For the states, the manufacture and use of methamphetamine presents a plateful of social, child welfare, environmental, criminal justice and economic challenges, all begging to be addressed at the same time” (Boulard par.10). Reding, upon investigating meth in small rural towns, interviewed a doctor who described meth as “sociocultural cancer” (Reding 11). It destroys a culture, by infecting individuals and spreading. Incurring a high cost, both financially and emotionally, on all.

 Methamphetamine destroys families, creates violence, induces crime, and kills. They reveal their positions differently, but the message is the same. Woodrell's Ree is an example of a broken life, due to the destructive forces meth harnesses towards the user and the people around the user. Ree is caught in a storm of pain, anger, forced responsibility and early age maturity. She has many roles: a daughter, a mother, a sister, father, a care taker, and a power of attorney. Though, in reality she is still just a child. Jarvis is the American dream crushed by a downward spiral, in which he takes his family. Her journey and Jarvis’ tale are pleads for help to the common family, plagued with meth abuse, and the lives in which meth destroys.