The Frozen River

“Like a wounded animal, cornered and desperate, she spends her travail alternately curled in upon herself or lashing out. It ought to kill a woman, this process of having her body turned inside out. By rights, no one should survive such a thing. And yet, miraculously, they do, time and again.”

Lawhon establishes a parallel between the women of Hallowell and the town’s wildlife, most notably between Martha and her silver fox. The language of birth as a process of “turning inside out” contributes to a motif that occurs repeatedly in Martha’s descriptions of labor and delivery throughout the book.

“The contrast of ham hocks dangling from the ceiling and the body sprawled on the table sends a shiver along my spine. It is enough to make one of the men behind me gag.”

Lawhon links Burgess’s body physically and metaphorically to the meat stored in the tavern’s back room. The gruesome nature of this imagery foreshadows the vigilante justice that brought about his gruesome death, dehumanizing him in the way his rape of Rebecca reflects his dehumanization of her—an act the novel positions as physically revolting, signaled by the gagging onlooker).

“‘Them’s rare as virgins in a brothel.’ ‘And just as expensive. But I saw one, anyways. A pretty little vixen. Upriver. Yesterday. Near that mill run by the Welshman.’”

The trappers objectify the silver fox in the same sentence that they objectify women, reinforcing its symbolic significance as an emblem of femininity. Their leering, predatory words have definite sexual connotations, evoking the sexually violent culture that surrounds women in Hallowell.