I Ain’t Never Goin’ to be Crazy!

Many mental illnesses are hereditary. With Ree’s mother suffering from a mental illness, Ree does not want to end up like her mother. However, some of Ree’s thought suggest a path she fears.

Ree’s mother is very aloof from her family and the world. Ree describes her as “a cat, a breathing thing that sat near heat and occasionally made sound…Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go” (6). Her mother just keeps to herself, rarely coherently to people, and does not help at all with running the household. In society, everyone knows how Ree’s mother’s behavior changed, and they call her crazy.

As stated before, mental illnesses are for the most part hereditary. This prompts people to think that “her momma’s crazy, so there’s a good shot of [Ree] bein’ crazy, too” (131).  Throughout the novel, it seems like Ree has a mental illness because some thoughts indicate symptoms that are present when having a mental illness. For example, when Ree learns she has thirty days in the house, “the creek shifted heights in her eyes and swayed overhead floppy as snapped string, the houses beyond warped skinny as ribs and knotted together in bows, the sky spun upright like a blue plate set on edge to dry” (126). She experiences a sense of unreality with her surroundings, which is a symptom of having a mental illness. Some other situations where her mood rapidly changes or she gets an increase in sensitivity indicates having a mental illness.

Ree, however, actively tries to make sure she does not end up like her mother and is also is not perceived to be similar to her mother. Nonetheless, when recovering from getting beaten up, she sits in her mother’s chair and is “snapped to a vision of herself idled by morning pills, beside the potbelly, humming along with unseen fiddlers, and instantly [begins] to shake in [her mother’s] rocker, shake and feel weak in her every part” (152). Even though Ree tries to deny being similar to her mother on many occasions, this scene depicts how she ends up in a similar situation she’s seen her mother in almost daily. This terrifies her because she causally ended up how she sees her mother daily. While she may not be heading towards the high level of the state her mother is in, Ree’s tendencies showing signs of a mental illness could possibly develop further if she does not recognize her situation and take actions to prevent from becoming her mother.