54 pages • 1 hour read
Jennifer McMahonThe Winter People
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Bone Ring
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes reference to child death.
The engraved bone ring is a recurring motif throughout The Winter People that connects the past timeline with the present-day timeline. The bone ring is originally owned by Auntie. She tells Sara that the symbols on it mean “that life is circle” (10). The novel initially suggests that the bone ring is cursed. Sara becomes convinced that Auntie’s spirit haunts the family after her husband Martin unearths the ring. She directs him to rebury it so that “[they]’ll get [their] Gertie back” (43). This imbues a mystical quality to the ring, an implication that is strengthened when Gary finds the ring in a box he purchases at an antiques store in the Adirondacks. Afterwards, as recounted by his wife Katherine, Gary becomes increasingly withdrawn and then dies in a car accident. It seems as if the ring has had some kind of magical effect on Gary.
However, the reality of the ring is much more banal. Auntie’s spirit was not summoned by the excavation of the ring; she is still alive and she uses the ring to frame Martin for Gertie’s murder. There is no indication the ring had anything to do with Gary’s accident, as he was instead withdrawing because he was obsessed with the possibility of resurrecting his dead son Austin using the instructions he found in the box. In this way, the ring is emblematic of the theme of The Intersection of Folklore and Reality. The notion of a magic ring is a traditional trope of folklore, but despite the other supernatural elements in the story, the ring is ultimately just a ring, albeit a symbolic one.
Fox
In The Winter People, the fox is a symbol of the ambiguous relationship between the supernatural and nature. In traditional folklore, the fox is a trickster spirit who occasionally intervenes to help humans. In the text, foxes have both realistic and supernatural qualities. The fox first appears when Martin tracks one that killed his chickens. When Martin approaches the fox to kill it, the fox looks at him and “it wasn’t the animal’s eyes that gazed dispassionately at him, but Sara’s” (31). The fox then leads him to the cave at the base of the Devil’s Hand, the one where Sara and Gertie end up living. After Martin kills the fox, he feels “unsettled” rather than satisfied. The fox, although partially an “ordinary fox,” also foreshadows the tragedy to come in his life.
Later, Auntie steals the fox pelt and replaces it with Gertie’s hair, terrifying Martin. Auntie is wearing the fox pelt when she is killed. Katherine then sees a similar, if not the same, pelt in the junk-shop window in West Hall. She feels as if its glass eyes are staring at her and “seemed, at once, to know all of her secrets” (157). This foreshadows the live fox that Katherine comes across in the woods. It drops a dead rabbit in the snow that Katherine intends to use for the sleeper ritual to bring her husband Gary back to life. As it leaves, the fox looks at her in a way she interprets as meaning “See what I left you” (299). Taken together, the fox is symbolic of the way that nature communicates with humans and, indeed, even helps them.
Scents and Memory
In The Winter People, smells are connected to memories, forming a key motif in the novel. This is most clearly seen in the distinctive smell of the sleepers, suggesting they are themselves a form of living memory. When Sara first comes across a sleeper, she notes that there is “an acrid, greasy, burnt odor, similar to what you smell when you blow out a tallow candle” (8). Tallow candles are made from an amalgamation of rendered animal fats, and they have a distinct unpleasant odor. When Gertie returns as a sleeper, Sara notes that she, too, “gives off the smell of burning fat, a tallow candle just extinguished” (288). This lingering smell is a clue that indicates Gertie is still frequenting the hall closet. Ruthie notes there was an “odd, acrid burning odor” inside (119). She has the nagging feeling she has “smelled it before” (119). The smell is familiar to Ruthie because, as a very young child, she was inside the cave where Gertie lives.
Other smells are connected to memories and longing for those who have died. For example, upon waking in the morning Katherine attempts to catch a scent of her late husband, Gary. She then thinks nostalgically about her late son Austin, who “smelled like warm milk and honey” (78). She takes to smoking cigarettes because the smell of them reminds her of Gary. Likewise, Ruthie attempts to “catch a scent” (111) of her father in her mother’s bedroom closet. Sara imagines she can smell Gertie after her death (134). In all of these cases, the characters attempt to reconnect with their dead loved ones through their scent.
