Four Notes for a Workshop on Borders

Spelling ‘Home’. Gender and cultural borders in Winter’s Bone. 

Pasquale Cicchetti
University of St Andrews

1.0 In this paper, I will try and lay the grounds for a
discussion about the possibility of reading cinema – namely,
contemporary American cinema – in terms of cultural spaces.
To achieve this objective, I will not rely on a structured
argument. Instead, I will suggest to the reader a number of
interconnected points, a framework of theoretical and
historical elements that I will eventually tie up into the
investigation of a recent American film directed in 2008 by
Debra Granik, titled Winter's Bone.
1.1 My point of departure is that every text produced within
a specific culture can be considered, theoretically, as as a
map of the culture itself. By 'map', I refer here to a sort of
spatial abstraction mostly intended to draw, establish and
maintain the borders of the cultural self. A typical example
would be that of two concentric circles. The inner one
represents the space of the cultural self, the domain within
which the given culture is able to project its system of
organised meanings and associations. The outer one, then, is
the space of the cultural Other, a realm of chaotic,
unorganised and therefore unintelligible meanings.
1.2 I derive this point from Juri Lotman's idea of the “model
of the world”. According to the semiotician, each text comes
with a built-in framework, a scheme or an inner structure
which shapes its ability to produce meaning within the
culture.
1.3 Some texts – grammars, manuals, codes – possess the
ability to address the model of the world directly. They serve
as reference points, since they provide a fixed, normative
description of the model itself at a certain moment of time. As
they serve to sanction what is acceptable and right, setting
apart what is unsuitable and wrong within the cultural space,
they effectively establish a boundary.
1.4 Other texts, like narratives, address the the model in a
more indirect manner. Lotman distinguishes between
narratives based on fixed heroes and those based on mobile
heroes.
1.5 The first are stories which provide a sort of fictional
embodiment to model. Fixed heroes express the features and
the qualities of the culture they belong to, in a way that
reflects the self-image of the culture itself. In other words,
they provide a coherent illustration of reality as seen from the
centre of the map.
1.6 The second type of narratives are those revolving around
the crossing the border. As they challenge the established
boundary, mobile heroes initiate a process of cultural
adjustment intended to 'make sense' of something lying
outside the established boundaries. As that 'something'
becomes part of the cultural self, the old border is effectively
replaced with a new one.
1.7 It is fundamental to notice that, in Lotman, the presence
of mobile heroes does not automatically involve any kind of
ideological or political opposition within the subject culture.
For the 'mobile narratives' to produce meaning within the
cultural space, in fact, it is essential not to overturn the
'model of the world' completely. In Lotman's understanding,
any text expressing radical alterity to the system would be
rejected as meaningless. As a matter of fact, it would not be
considered a text at all, since the attribute of textuality can
exist only within the cultural space.
1.8 Instead of conceiving mobile narratives as oppositional
devices, then, they should be understood as a mechanism of
adaptation. These texts express a crucial function within the
model, as they reflect the ability of the map to develop
dynamically and adjust to external stimulations. This ability,
in turn, leads to a further point in the theory. In Lotman's view,
cultures are living organisms, constantly engaged in a
process of mutual adaptation. Such a process – which he
defines as 'translation' - takes place through the production of
texts which 'cross the boundaries', so to speak, to import new
'raw material' from the outside.
1.9 The translation itself is not a harmless process. The
development of new meanings and the continual re-
negotiation of the border is restrained by the opposite,
normative functions of the model. Periodically, the system
generates new codes, as those listed at 1.3, to normalize and
harness the change. As the borders of the map change, one
could say, the centre struggles to keep things under control.
The resulting contrast generates a strain, a tension which
spreads across the culture, giving rise to what Lotman
depicts as waves of cultural emotions.
1.10 In this framework, each culture appears to be
condemned to some sort of symbolic solipsism. Which is to
 say, each model can only describe the world within the reach
of its own perspective. The border, in Lotman's view, is always
a frontier, dividing the cultural self from the raw space of
otherness. The full degree of textuality and meaning can be
only achieved on the internal side: everything that lies beyond
the border, although potentially translatable, remains, up to
then, unintelligible. And so it needs to be: according to
Lotman, a certain degree of cultural blindness, so to speak, is
necessary to each culture in order to maintain its own identity
and cohesion. To be able to describe the mutual
interconnection between two or more cultural spheres, he
argues, one has to detach himself, switching to a broader,
third-party perspective.
2
2.0 Now, Lotman's organicism, in his abstract description of
culture as a living system, does not imply a detachment from
history. In order to apply his framework to the study of real
human societies, the 'model of the world' has to be
understood historically. To paraphrase what Baud and Van
Schendel argue about geopolitical borders 1, the historical
conditions in which the 'map' is drawn always retain an
influence on the way we imagine the border itself.
2.1 In the American case, the historical meaning of the
Frontier was outlined by Frederick Jackson Turner in his
pivotal essay dated 1894. The document came out during a
decade of deep cultural adjustments. After the trauma of the
Civil War and the controversial years of the Reconstruction,
the nation was struggling to find a new symbolic cohesion.
With widening economic divides and worsening class
conflicts, the former Jeffersonian imagery of the 'First New
Nation' had to be given up in favour of a more pragmatic,
Darwinian understanding of reality. In this context, the closing
of the Frontier in 1890 and the Spanish War in 1898 led to a
new stage in the history of American culture.
2.2 Turner's essay was read aloud at the Columbian Fair of
Chicago in 1893. The event was itself a sign of the importance
achieved by the Pacific coast as a cultural and political
centre at that point. In Turner's reading, the West became the
point of departure for a new reading of the entire history of
the nation. The historian drew a line of continuity across the
centuries, an arch connecting the first Puritan settlers to the

1 Baud Michiel, Schendel Willem van, “Towards a Comparative History of Borderlands”.

Journal of World History, 1997, VII.2:211-242.
unruly frontiersmen of the XIX century. A mythology was
outlined. The pushing forward of the Western border, in his
words, came to signify a progressive march of emancipation,
the coming-of-age of a new nation. The frontier became the
sacred-secular symbol of a community moving together, away
from Europe and its oppressive legacy and towards a new age
of freedom and democracy.
2.3 Previously, American imagination had conceived the
frontiersman in a less patriotic way. The literary tradition of
the hunter myths, which developed from the late XVIII
century, was more concerned with the representation of the
westerner as a dweller of the wilderness. The underlying
opposition was that of Nature versus Civilization: in those
stories, the hunter of the West featured as an individual
caught in the middle, halfway between the domestic values of
family and the savage habits of the surrounding environment.
A pattern of guilt was involved: the guilt of betraying
civilization, breaking the bonds of society and family to
indulge the selfish brutality of the wilderness. Eventually,
however, the violence of the frontier was legitimised as part of
the effort to tame the land, so to speak. The crossing of the
border, however dangerous, was a righteous act of translation:
the raw reality of the wilderness was harnessed, mediated
and reshaped into a new balance between Man and Nature.
2.4 After the publication of Turner's paper, this pattern was
effectively reworked into a powerful national mythology. It
was no longer a matter of individuals facing the wilderness, it
was now a nation performing a sacred-secular mission of
progress and self-emancipation. From its Puritan background,
in fact, American imagination had inherited a specific
religious undertone. The idea that America was a promised
land, given to the Puritan nation by God himself, resulted in a
kind of prophetic attitude towards the future of the nation.
The same spirit was now adapted by Turner and other
representatives of his generation into the new secular
ideology of the Frontier. If America was a promised land, the
Frontier was the imagined landmark on which the prophecy
relied.
2.5 With the closing of the official frontier at the end of XIX
century, then, what was a physical border became a
foundational element for a new national rhetoric. To put it in
Sacvan Bercovitch's words, a 'strategy of consensus' was
devised at that time. Turner's generation produced a narrative
of America that would have served, at one time, to justify
external conflict, obliterate internal antagonism and provide
social cohesion through the sacred-secular symbol of an
imagined Frontier.
3
3.0 At the same time, in 1895, a new optical device was
being invented in Europe. Since the beginning, cinema
became a powerful ally for the new doctrine. The narrative of
the nation was engraved in the medium since the first reels
about the Spanish-American War. The tradition of the Western
genre, in particular, has served across the decades as a
breeding ground to grow and disseminate the archetypes of
the Frontier across the national consciousness.
3.1 In the last ten years or so, however, a running trend of
independent American films seems to be questioning the
continuity of the sacred-secular prophecy. Pictures like A
Station Agent, Rachel Getting Married, Grace is Gone, Away
we Go and others are often ingrained with a sense of loss,
misdirection and uncertainty. Recurring elements also include
the absence of a parental figure and the impossibility to
renew inter-generational bonds. Some of these films, in
addiction, openly thematise the need to either find a new
home or to strenuously protect the old one. Overall, the
ongoing trend seems to be expressing of a rupture, a strain in
the symbolic fabric of the nation.
3.2 Now, it is an easy guess to recognize the political and
economic turnarounds which invested the United States and
the world since 2001 as the historical sources of the rupture:
from the military campaigns in the Middle-East to the global
financial crisis, which, interestingly enough, started with the
crash of the housing sector in 2008. However, I believe it
would be wrong to read these films as a form of explicit social
criticism. Rather than that, it seems to me that they give us
evidence about how American culture is reacting to what it is
perceived as an external threat to its own symbolic integrity.
In doing so, these pictures express a reworking of the “model
of the world” implied by the Frontier narrative, and thus, a
shift within the cultural meaning of the border.
3.3 In this context, my pick of Winter's Bone as a case study
was not casual. The film, adapted from the 2006 novel by
Daniel Woodrell, contains all the key elements of the trend.
Set in a remote village, lost among the frozen-cold forests of
the Ozark Mountains, the film tells a tale of coming-of-age.
The main character, Ree, is a young woman who does her best
to look after her family, formed by her younger brother and
sister. As the story begins, Ree's father, who was out on bail
and awaiting trial, has disappeared without a trace. Her
mother, on the other hand, lives at home, but she seems to
have descended into a blank state of indifference and silence.
The initial situation, hard as it sounds, gets even worse when
the local Sheriff shows up at the door. It turns out that Ree's
father had put the house up for the bail, so, unless he
reappears before the trial starts, the family will have to leave
the only place they have.
3.4 Since the beginning, then, Ree's quest to retrace her
father is also a quest to protect her home from an external
threat. Such a narrative premise already presents itself as a
double deviation from the established national pattern. First,
the absence of Ree's father and the consequent risk of losing
the house exposes a weakness, an underlying pattern of guilt
within the structure of the patriarchal family inherited by the
Western tradition. As it was in the hunter myths, the male
individual sidesteps again his duties towards the domestic
bonds of the family, to indulge selfishly in the wilderness.
3.5 The fact that 'indulging the wilderness', here, means
avoiding the law, is also problematic. Winter's Bone stages a
disturbing breach in the link between domestic values and the
idea of a law-based Civilization. Which also means: a failure in
the border's ability to tell the difference between two
previously distinct cultural spaces. In this regard, it is
noteworthy that Sheriff Baskin is not a discredited expression
of the social control apparatus: in fact, he is depicted as a
kind, caring person who is just doing his job. The opposition
between the internal domestic space and the external domain
of the law, therefore, appears to be almost encoded in the
environment.
3.6 As a matter of fact, the Ozark Mountains at whole
emerge as a borderland society, challenging the rule of the
state. Ree's father was involved in illegal drug-making, but he
was not the only one: the entire village runs the trade under
the direction of a mysterious chief. The local people act as a
tribe, a self-ruled community bound together by oaths of
loyalty, blood ties and an unwritten code of behaviour.
3.7 In this context, Ree's need to find her father forces her to
subvert the established gender code of the village. When she
tries to take her case up to the mysterious chief, she is first
rejected, then physically punished for her insistence.
Significantly, no man takes part in the beating. Ree is
eventually rescued by her paternal uncle, who accepts to be
held responsible for her in front of the community, thus
allowing the girl to actually become part of it.
3.8 The punishment inflicted to Ree goes beyond the scope
of her diegetic actions. What is sanctioned by her female
captors, eventually, is her violation of the gender code. In
other words, she gets beat up because she has taken a male
role on herself, although unwillingly. In doing this, she exposes
a weakness in the model of the world, the cultural pattern
through which the community represents itself.
3.9 As it turns out, Ree's father was killed by the same
people of the village because he intended to collaborate with
the law. The crossing of the border between the two distinct
cultural spaces – the borderland society and the domain of
the law – is therefore the original point of rupture of the
narrative. However, the reaction suggested by the film does
not develop towards what Lotman would describe as a
positive translation, that is, a process of effective adaptation.
Instead, by accepting Ree's new role, the community
reluctantly recognizes the failure of its own cultural code. The
killing of Ree's father, which was meant to preserve the
integrity of the communal space, has left her family exposed
to the encroaching of the law, thus opening a new breach in
the continuity of the border. By accepting her new position as
head-of-family, the village manages to mend this second
failure as well, as they help her to locate her father's body
and, eventually, provide the money to redeem the house.
3.10 The double breach, however, underscores an underlying
rupture in the generational continuity of the model. The
rejection of the mobile hero and the closure of the border may
well manage to preserve the integrity of the domestic space,
but it also impedes any further evolution in the model. The
reversal of the gender code does not seem to imply, here, a
positive process of female empowerment or emancipation.
Rather than that, it outlines a static turn of the model itself:
the 'new' family which eventually emerges from the narrative
is stuck in a residual space. Ree and her sibling sit in the
porch by themselves, cut off from the generational and
cultural legacy of their parents.
3.11 With this regard, the final claim of Ree's uncle, who
admits to know who killed her father, seems to suggest a
precise hint. As the man leaves without disclosing the name,
it is clear that he is not pursuing any plan of revenge. The new
balance requires the event to be forgotten, put apart. The
memory of the father, like his old guitar box, is something to
 be played with, evoked at most with a gentle, detached
feeling of nostalgia. In order to survive, the new model has to
detach itself from what can be seen as the historical
responsibility of the breach. In more general terms, the
narrative of Winter's Bone seems to suggest a standstill of the
model, where the ability to evolve and adapt, that is, the
ability to produce an historical grasp of reality is given away
in exchange for a sense of belonging, however residual and
uncertain. Having successfully proven the death of their
father, Ree and her relatives are now even more determined to
reaffirm that they are not going anywhere. In fact, their
behaviour confirms the resolve to stick to the space they
belong to, against whatever may lay outside the border.
4 Such a meta-historical turn evokes a previous stage of the
national narrative. Before Turner's binding of the Puritan and
the Western tradition, crossing the border meant, most of all,
to protect the values of civilization against an hostile
environment. And in fact, as Ree and her siblings strive to get
by between the threat to their home and the pressing urges of
the environment, they do seem to be as far as it gets from the
national prophecy of the Frontier. It might then be suggested
that – through the image of a remote borderland halfway
between wilderness and civilization – Winter's bone is
expressing a sort of regression within the model, the return to
a previous stage of the border.
4.0 In order to conceptualize the relationship between the
actual cinematic text and the underlying cultural pattern, I
refer to Mikhail Bakhtin's description of the chronotope. In his
view, the chronotope is a mark, a material sign which
translates a certain understanding of reality into a certain
representation of the world. It is – to quote Vivian Sobchack –
a “spatiotemporal currency between two different orders of
existence and discourse, between the lived world and the
[fictional] world”2.
4.1 The story of Winter's Bone, at this point, might be
rephrased as the emerging contrast between two different
chronotopes. On the one hand, the horse symbolizes the
national prophecy, the mobile hero's ability to cross the
border to renew the self-image of the community. On the other
hand, the house represents the desire of the cultural self to
resist historical failure and to affirm its claim of identity

2 Sobchack, Vivian. “Lounge Time. Postwar crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir”. In
Nick Browne (ed), Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory . Berkeley,
LA, London: University of California Press, 1998, 140.
against whatever threat may come from the outside.
4.2 In the opening sequences of the picture, Ree is shown
handing over the family's horse to the care of her neighbour.
She can't afford to feed him anymore. Then, as we see her
walking her little sister to school, she asks her to spell the
word 'HOUSE'. The two scenes, in my opinion, summarise the
cultural work of the film: the historic failure of the myth paves
the way to a sort of domestic fall-back, a recapitulation of
values to hold back whatever is left of the border.