Winter in the Blood | A. Lavonne Ruoff

In the following essay excerpt, Ruoff analyzes through a cultural context the narrator's "relationships with and characterizations of" the females of Winter in the Blood.

A. Lavonne Ruoff

In the following essay excerpt, Ruoff analyzes through a cultural context the narrator's "relationships with and characterizations of" the females of Winter in the Blood.

But the distance I felt came not from country or people; it came from within me. I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon. And that was why I had no particular feelings toward my mother and grandmother. Or the girl who had come to live with me

In the words quoted above, the nameless narrator of Winter in the Blood summarizes the sense of alienation which plagues him and which must be exorcised before he can become whole within himself and can close the distance he feels between him-self and the external world. To do so, he undertakes a spiritual and physical journey into experience and memory to find the truth about his own feelings and about his family and girlfriend. Through most of the novel, the only people he really loves are his brother Mose and his father First Raise. After Mose was killed by an automobile on the highway while the two boys were herding cattle back to the ranch, the narrator became a "servant to a memory of death." Though the loss of the brother was immediate, the loss of his father was gradual. Following the accident, First Raise was home less and less often until he finally froze to death on a drunken binge. In the ten years since his father's death, the narrator has been able to do nothing of consequence. The closeness he feels to them contrasts with the distance he feels from the females in the novel—human and animal. The purpose of this paper will be to examine the causes and resolution of the narrator's sense of alienation through an analysis of the cultural context—traditional as well as contemporary—of his relationships with and characterizations of these females.

The chain of circumstances which ultimately leads to the narrator's feeling of separateness begins with his grandmother, who is at once the unwitting cause of the family's isolation from the Blackfeet tribe and the means by which the narrator can partially learn about them and his family. Despite the many stories about her early life which the grandmother told her young grandson, she revealed only part of the truth about her life with Standing Bear's band of Blackfeet. In order for the narrator to determine the truth about her life and about the identity of his own grandfather, he must obtain the other parts of the story from blind, old Yellow Calf after his grandmother's death.

A beautiful girl thirty years younger than her husband, she slept with Chief Standing Bear only to keep him warm and to sing softly in his ear. The "bad medicine," which isolated not only the grandmother but also her descendants, began with the migration of her husband's band of Blackfeet from their traditional hunting grounds. After moving into Gros Ventre territory, they endured one of the hardest winters in memory. The details of the starvation winter of 1883–84 come from Yellow Calf, who lost all of his family to starvation or pneumonia.

After Standing Bear's death in a raid on the Gros Ventres, the young widow of not yet twenty was made an outcast by the band. The grandmother attributed their action to the women's envy for her dark beauty and to the men's fear of the women's anger if they helped her as well as to their own reticence because of her position as Standing Bear's widow. However, Yellow Calf attributes the mistreatment to a combination of physical, psychological, and religious causes: "She had not been with us more than a month or two, maybe three. You must understand the thinking. In that time the soldiers came, the people had to leave their home up near the mountains, then the starvation and death of their leaders. She had brought them bad medicine." Her beauty, which had been a source of pride, now mocked them and their situation. Thus, in the case of the grandmother, the source of alienation was external, resulting from circumstances beyond her control. Her isolation from the band became permanent when they were driven like cows by the soldiers to the new Blackfeet Reservation, established in 1888 at the same time as that for the Gros Ventres and Assiniboins at Fort Belknap. Because the band did not mention her to the soldiers and because she had moved a distance from the band in the spring, the soldiers thought she was Gros Ventre.

In addition to attempting to determine the facts about the band's treatment of his grandmother, the narrator also tries to find out who hunted for her. Frustrated by yellow Calf's refusal to answer his questions, the narrator suddenly realizes—at the moment his horse Bird farts—that Yellow Calf was that hunter. Solving his puzzle also solves those of the identity of his grandfather and of his own tribal heritage. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator explains that his grandmother "remained a widow for twenty-five years before she met a half-white drifter named Doagie, who had probably built this house where now the old lady snored and I lay awake thinking that I couldn't remember this fact." However, he does remember the rumors that Doagie was not his real grandfather.

Between the time she was abandoned by the Blackfeet band and the time she took in Doagie, the grandmother continued to live in isolation, separated by three miles from Yellow Calf, her secret visitor. Despite his realization of his grandfather's identity, the narrator cannot explain the distance between Yellow Calf and his grandmother: why the two waited twenty-five years after Standing Bear's death to procreate a child or why they continued to live separately afterward. Certainly the respect both had for Standing Bear is a very important part of the explanation. Their separation prior to the conception of Teresa may also be partially explained as an allusion to one of the myths about the origin of the Blackfeet. Although men and women lived separately at one time, Old Man (Na'pi), a creator-trickster figure in Blackfeet mythology, brought them together so that they could continue and so that the men would abandon their lazy dissolute ways and learn from the women's example of orderly self-government and mastery of agriculture and domestic arts. The theme of the separation of males and females is repeated in the relationships between Teresa and First Raise and between the narrator and Agnes.

A third part of the explanation may be found in the traditional Blackfeet taboo against intermarriage within the band. Because the male members of the band were considered relatives, there was an old law against such intermarriage. By the time the bands were settled on the reservation, intermarriage was no longer considered a crime but was still bad form. Consequently, when the grandmother (then about forty-five) and Yellow Calf conceived a child almost at the last opportunity before the onset of her menopause, they were violating a taboo in order to recreate a new race of Blackfeet in an alien land. Having done this, however, they chose to remain apart and the grandmother chose to obscure the fatherhood of the child through living with Doagie. Nevertheless, this violation of custom was one more portion of the bad medicine passed on to the daughter Teresa.

The unwitting cause of the family's isolation from other Blackfeet, the grandmother still serves as its link to the tribe's culture and history. The power of the oral tradition she transmits is retained in the memory of the narrator. Advancing age has not diminished the strength of her contempt for those who made her an outcast or her hatred for such old enemies as the Crees. Too weak and feeble now even to chew regular food or to go the toilet by herself, she is still fierce enough to wear a paring knife in her legging and plot ways to slit the throat of Agnes, her grandson's Cree girlfriend. Almost a hundred years old when the novel opens, the grandmother now communicates with her family with an occasional "ai" or squeak of her rocker.

In her silent old age, she must endure the vulgar teasing of Lame Bull, in violation of the old Blackfeet taboo that a man should not speak to his mother-in-law or even look at her, which was equally binding on her. Also violated is the taboo that although a mother-in-law might be supported by her son-in-law, she must live not in the same tepee with him but rather in a smaller one set up some distance away. She must also endure the disinterest of her grandson, who usually regards her as a subject for bad jokes or detached curiosity. His treatment of her is a deviation from the traditional respect children were expected to show elders.

Though she clung to the old ways in life, she is denied them in death by Teresa, who insists that she be properly prepared for burial by the undertaker in near-by Harlem. Ironically, she is sealed up in her shiny coffin so that no one gets to see his handiwork. Her funeral is neither Catholic nor traditional Blackfeet. Only her grandson observes a bit of the old burial customs by throwing onto her grave her one surviving possession from the old life—the tobacco pouch with its arrowhead. Having reached the end of his odyssey to find the truth about himself and his background, the narrator casts away the bundle containing the bad medicine which has plagued the family.

Teresa combines her mother's solemn dignity and fierce determination to survive with her own alienation from Blackfeet traditions. Because she rejected these in favor of acculturation, she is alienated both from the beliefs of her mother and from the dreams and desires of her first husband and sons. The most valuable material possessions passed on to Teresa by her mother are the land acquired through mistaken identity and a house built by a man she wrongly believed to be her father. Although the ranch supports the family, it has destroyed what has been traditional Blackfeet role structure by making the male financially independent on the female and by forcing the male to give up hunting for ranching to provide for his family. For solace and understanding, she turns to Catholicism and to friendship with the Harlem priest, who makes Indians come to "his church, his saints and holy water, his feuding eyes."

The differences between Teresa and the men in her family are revealed in her son's description of her as having always had "a clear bitter look, not without humor, that made others of us seem excessive, too eager to talk too much, drink too much, breathe too fast." She approves hard work on the ranch and disapproves foolishness and fighting. Whatever natural intolerance she possessed has been sharpened by her experiences with First Raise and her son. As a result, she has developed the ability to interpret things as she wishes to see them and to ignore what she does not, as her memories of First Raise demonstrate. At the same time that she tells her son that his father was not around enough, she insists that he accomplished what he set out to do. When her son points out her inconsistency, she merely says that he has mixed his father up with himself. Her only explanation of why First Raise stayed away so much is that he was a "foolish man" who "could never settle down"—a wanderer just like her son and "just like all these damned Indians."

Because Teresa is primarily concerned with doing what has to be done in order to provide for her family and to keep the ranch going, she marries Lame Bull shortly after her son arrives home from his latest spree in town. Clearly, she has no illusions about Lame Bull, whose advances she has previously resisted. When he jokes that her son has said she is ready to marry him, she replies in her clear, bitter voice that "my son tells lies that would make a weasel think twice. He was cut from the same mold as you." Although after their marriage she complains about Lame Bull's sloppy habits and his teasing of her mother, she is obviously sexually attracted to him. Lame Bull responds to her complaints only by grinning a silent challenge, and "the summer nights came alive in the bedroom off the kitchen. Teresa must have liked his music."

Her relationship with her son is complicated both by her own personality and by his inner turmoil. Like his father, whom he describes as "always in transit" before his death, the narrator can neither live with Teresa nor leave her permanently. The conflict between mother and son is clear from Teresa's first words after he arrives home. Immediately accosting him with the news that his "wife" Agnes took off with his gun and electric razor shortly after he left for town, she simultaneously urges him to get his property back and defends herself for not stopping the girl: "What did you expect me to do? I have your grandmother to look after, I have no strength, and she is young—Cree!" Her tactic of squeezing into one breath as much advice, criticism, and self-defense as possible only antagonizes and further alienates her son. Because she feels that her son's only real problems are that he is a wanderer like all Indians and that he is too sensitive, she cannot understand why he did not stay on at the Tacoma hospital, where he was offered a job after having an operation on his leg. His explanation that he was hired only as a token Indian male to help the hospital qualify for grant money does not penetrate her consciousness. His bitterness at her lack of understanding is summed up in his comment that "I never expected much from Teresa and never got it. But neither did anybody else. Maybe that's why First Raise stayed away so much."

The narrator's discussion with Teresa about his pet duck, Amos, which precedes their discussion of First Raise and of the narrator himself, dramatically reveals the nature and possible consequences of their conflict. It is Teresa who reminds her son about Amos, and her habitually negative recollections become a springboard for her running commentary about her first husband, sons, and Indians in general. She recalls that First Raise won Amos pitching pennies at the fair when "he was so drunk that he couldn't even see the plates" and that the other ducklings drowned because her sons did not keep the tub full of water for them—"You boys were like that." When the narrator tries to explains that Amos, who had remained perched on the edge of the tub while his siblings plunged to the bottom, survived because he was smarter than the other ducklings, she dismisses his theory with the remark that "He was lucky. One duck can't be smarter than other. They're like Indians." As far as she was concerned, the other ducks were crazy.

Like the narrator, Amos inexplicably survived a disastrous accident which killed his siblings. While the narrator is just as unable to solve this puzzle as he is that of his own survival when Mose died, he does, in the course of this conversation with Teresa, learn that she killed Amos—a truth so horrifying that he desperately tries to avoid comprehending it. When he realizes that the answer to the question of who killed Amos, one he did not want to ask, is going to be either his mother or first Raise, the implications so traumatize him that he tries to suggest, instead, that one or the other of them killed the hated turkey which used to attack him, not Amos, who must have been killed by the bobcat. Matter-of-factly leading her son to a truth he does not want to face, Teresa quietly confesses that she did indeed kill Amos. In her own eyes, she has done what her husband and sons could not do—sacrifice sentiment for practicality by killing the pet duck for Christmas dinner. Her act symbolizes the reversal of traditional male and female roles: because the hunter now can only dream of bringing elk meat home from Glacier Park, the mother is forced to provide food by whatever means available. Although the narrator is reacting to what he feels is the deliberate murder of Amos by his mother and to becoming an accomplice when he unknowingly eats his pet, he does not yet really perceive that the power of life and death Teresa held over Amos is held over him as well. This realization is revealed symbolically as he recalls his dream after the sexual encounter with the barmaid from Malta.

The conflict between mother and son is intensified by the intrusion of the opposite sex. Although Teresa treats Agnes with cold politeness because she thinks the girl is her son's wife, she does not hesitate to point out that the girl is not happy and belongs in town, which the narrator realizes means Agnes belongs in bars. Consequently, she disapproves of her son's wanting to bring Agnes back. Teresa's marriage to Lame Bull and her friendship with the Harlem priest increase the narrator's hostility toward his mother. He cannot bear to see his father replaced by Lame Bull, whom he detests as a crafty, vulgar down and whom he thinks married his mother for her ranch. Realizing that marriage to Lame Bull means that her son must leave, Teresa tells her son to start looking around because there is not enough for him on the ranch. The narrator also cannot bear his mother's drinking partnership with the priest. When the latter sent Teresa a letter, the narrator wants to read it, "to see what a priest would have to say to a woman who was his friend. I had heard of priests having drinking partners, fishing partners, but never a woman partner." Instead, because he cannot even bring himself to see her name inside the envelope, he tears the letter up between his legs.

The Oedipal jealousy he feels is part of his inability to separate himself from her and to see himself and his mother as they really are rather than as his distorted perception makes them seem. Welch provides evidence that the narrator's view is not held by everybody. When the bartender in Malta comments that Teresa is "a good one—one of the liveliest little gals I know of," the narrator wryly comments that "She is bigger than you are, bigger than both of us put together." The best example of the tender side of her nature is her care and love for her mother. The narrator is so distanced from himself and her that he has no perception of how hard the physical and psychological drain of running the ranch, raising her family, and caring for an aged mother have been on Teresa. Now fifty-six years old, she is worn down by the endless demands on her by a mother almost a hundred years old and son of thirty-two whose chief occupation seems to be getting drunk, laid, and beaten up. Her acts of genuine caring and her grief at the death of her mother contrast with the behavior of both the narrator and Lame Bull. Rather than join her new husband and her son in drinking "Vin Rose" after the grandmother's grave is dug, she walks into her bedroom to be alone. During the bizarre funeral, she falls to her knees in grief. The narrator's slowly increasing perception of the hard lives of both his grandmother and mother is reflected in his growing awareness of the fact that Teresa has come to resemble her mother. How much she differs from his one-night stands is revealed in his comment, made while digging the grandmother's grave, that "from this distance she looked big and handsome, clean-featured, unlike the woman I had seen the night before."

Deprived of the affection he needs from Teresa, the narrator seeks it in a misplaced attachment to Agnes and in casual sexual encounters. Because Agnes is a Cree from Havre, scorned by the reservation people, a permanent union with her would continue the bad medicine passed down from the narrator's grandmother. The narrator vividly recalls the stories she has told him about the Crees, who were good only for the whites who had slaughtered Indians, had served as scouts for the soldiers, and "had learned to live like them, drink with them, and the girls had opened their thighs to the Long Knives. The children of these unions were doubly cursed in the eyes of the old woman."

The contempt of the Blackfeet for the Crees was based not only on their long-standing warfare and on the Crees' close interaction with the whites but also on their strikingly opposed attitudes toward female sexual morality. Among the Crees, chastity was desirable but not essential, and illegitimacy was not a cause of great concern. An adulterous wife might be given to the lover in exchange for a gift, and wife exchange operated similarly. Among the Blackfeet, chastity was of supreme importance. Because illegitimate pregnancy was regarded as a severe family disgrace, young girls were closely watched by their mothers and married off as soon as possible after puberty. Women's prayers uniformly began with the declaration of their purity; and the most important ceremonial, the Sun Dance, began with the vow of a virtuous woman for the recovery of the sick. On the other hand, the Blackfeet male's efforts at seduction were actively encouraged by his family. Perhaps because of this double standard, the Blackfeet traded with the Crees for love medicine, which the former called Ito-wa-mami-wa-natsi (Cree medicine.)

Agnes' conduct, as well as her tribal background, reinforces the conclusion that the narrator has made a disastrous choice. Agnes is interested only in exchanging sex for a good time and whatever she can get or steal. As the narrator puts it, she is "a fish for dinner, nothing more." When she grew bored reading movie magazines and imagining she looked like Raquel Welch, she took the narrator's gun and electric razor and headed for Malta, where she quickly found a new man. Despite his recognition that she is "Cree and not worth a damn," the narrator is haunted by the image of her body by moonlight, a memory stronger than the experience itself. Because he cannot get her out of his blood, he hesitatingly decides to go after her. Like the medicine man Fish, whose interpretation of the signs after Standing Bear's death was partially responsible for making the grandmother an outcast from her band, Agnes possesses a power which cannot be withstood: her "fish medicine" is strong enough to separate the narrator from his grandmother and mother. He longs to recapture what he has convinced himself that he and Agnes had together before she left. But when the narrator finally finds her in Havre, he ducks so that she cannot see him: "I wanted to be with her, but I didn't move. I didn't know how to go to her. There were people counting on me to make her suffer, and I too felt that she should suffer a little. Afterwards, I could buy her a drink."

This same ambivalence is demonstrated in his physical descriptions of her. He is attracted by her combination of open sexuality and childlike innocence. When he meets her in a bar, she is wearing a dress cut almost to the waist in back and pulled up over her thighs. Nevertheless, her eyes "held the promise of warm things, of a spirit that went beyond her miserable life of drinking and screwing men like me." Because of his growing desire to reform himself and to believe that she really is capable of warmth and affection, he tries to persuade her to settle down by learning a trade like shorthand. Although she curtly rejects his advice in disbelief, his attempt to reform her is an essential step toward achieving his own regeneration because he had expressed concern for the welfare of someone with whom he wants a close relationship; "I was calm, but I didn't feel good. Maybe it was a kind of love." Unfortunately, Agnes' reaction to his plaintive confession that he is not happy leaves no doubt that he will get even less sympathy from her than he has from Teresa: "That's a good one. Who is?"

Neither her rejection of his suggestion for a new life nor the beating administered by her brother breaks the bond which ties him to her. Although he lies to his inquisitive neighbor Mrs. Frederick Horn when he tells her that Agnes came back with him, he obviously intends to try to fulfill this wish. By the end of the novel, he has healed enough internally to think about going to a doctor about his injured knee but not enough to risk losing Agnes by taking the time necessary to recover from surgery. His need to end the spiritual and emotional pain of his longing for her is stronger than his need to end the physical pain in his knee: "Next time I'd do it right. Buy her a couple of cremes de menthe, maybe offer to marry her on the spot." Given the evidence about Agnes' attitudes and behavior, his wish for stability and closeness through marriage is not likely to be fulfilled. He may catch his "fish" again, but he probably will not be able to hang onto her. However, his wanting a close relationship with a woman, even if he has to commit himself to marriage, demonstrates how far he has progressed from the distance he felt within himself and from the women in his life which he expressed at the beginning of the novel.

Source: A. Lavonne Ruoff, "Alienation and the Female Principle in Winter in the Blood," in Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction, edited by Richard F. Fleck, Three Continents Press, 1993, pp. 195-208.