Family love in Winter Rose

Patricia McKillip's 2002 novel Winter Rose is a book about family: what makes a family and what makes someone a family member.

Within this theme is an examination of love, especially as it relates to trust. Forming trusting and loving relationships with family is what grounds the characters in a shared reality where they are able to live. The trust and compassion for each other shown by the Melior family and their lovers are ultimately not only their salvation, but also that of others.

Nial Lynn and Rois Melior are both presented as changelings: fey children born to a human parent and the wood, barred by their partial humanities from fully understanding the non-human powers and perceptions they were born with, but constantly drawn to them. (Or they may just be unusual, with uncommon interests and social difficulties. Rois, as the viewpoint character, is unsure.)

The fundamental difference between them lies in their family relationships.

Rois's human father, Mathu, accepts her wholeheartedly, so fully that even she (and therefore the reader) can never be sure whether he suspected her mother of infidelity or not. Either way, she knows at the start that she is his daughter, and this is the conclusion she reaches each time she examines the question, regardless of her developing understanding of her memory of her mother’s actions.

She sees herself as having difficulty connecting with the human world, but despite her feelings of disconnection, we see her both seeking to connect and succeeding, as she builda her collegial relationship with the apothecary, goes to the village dance, and brings food to her family dinners with her father and sister. When she goes into the wood, she brings with her a rich experience of love and care at many levels. She also has much to return to, because she has so many people to come back for. Rois starts the novel feeling like an outsider, and both the reader and the character spend the novel discovering the ways in which she is rooted in her community. She’s strange, but not a stranger.

Successful love does not attempt to control that which is loved, but to understand it. It is this trusting and unfettering approach that enables Rois to save Corbet, and it is the emotional anchor provided by her family life that enables her to take this approach. She loves Corbet, but he is not her only human connection.

Nial, on the other hand, was never accepted by his father's wife, so had no real mother, while his father seems to have been somewhat absent. Like Rois at the start of the book, he yearns for the supernatural world and is unable to join it, even as he shows abilities no one else seems to have.

However, the wood’s power cannot replace human relationships. Nial’s lack of a loving family leaves him without the skills to create the trusting relationships that could counterbalance the pull of the inhuman. Even when he marries and builds his own family, he appears to be unable to create connections; his son Tearle is shown looking on at other families, amazed by their warmth. Nial as a father is as cold as the winter wood.

Nial appears to have focused almost entirely on his non-human abilities and interests, and he is unable to create a satisfactory life for himself in the human world. But he is unable to enter the world of the wood as anything but a victim, becoming just another part of its hazards, because he has nothing to bring to it.

The book portrays a lapse in fidelity as a potentially fatal error. Rois’s mother, Laurel, and Corbet all either die or come close to it, after being untrue to their partners. (Although it is unclear whether Rois’s mother would have described her love of the wood as a betrayal of her marriage vows, given the semi-mystical nature of her liaisons.)

Rois's fidelity — to Corbet, to her sister Laurel, and ultimately to herself — is what enables her to save all three of them. Without trying to claim any right to alter their choices, Rois stays true to both her sister and the man they have both fallen in love with. She supports them both — trying sincerely to fill their needs — while never denying her own feelings or desires.

While infidelity is punished, it is made clear that the person betrayed is better off not trying to hasten the process.

Mathu’s trust in his wife may or may not have been repaid with entirely trustworthy behaviour, but it has given him a much-loved daughter and a happy family life. If Rois’s mother did fall in love with the wood, she paid for it with her life (and possibly beyond) and needed no further punishment.

Laurel certainly pays for her lack of fidelity to her fiancé Perrin by losing her health for a long period, while Perrin's trust in and compassion for Laurel appear to gain him (eventually) a loving fiancée and a relationship that is sturdier than before.

Like Laurel, Corbet’s lack of fidelity when he forms relationships with Laurel in the social world and Rois in the wood leaves him vulnerable.

However, a lack of fidelity is not the only way to ruin a relationship. Nial causes himself great damage in his attempts to tie his family closely to him. His son, Tearle, wants freedom, and he refuses it. Nial eventually loses his son and is isolated in the wood’s magic.

Rois avoids this by accepting Corbet and Laurel’s rights to make their own decisions about their relationships, without trying to force them to make the choices she wants.

So what is the wood?

In the story, the wood is the fairy world, adjacent to, and overlapping, the real world, fundamentally inhuman, beautiful and perilous. (And it’s the local forest.)

It can be read as a metaphor for placing control or pleasure over trust or love. Rois’s mother falls for beauty and grace, but in prioritising this beauty over her marriage, she loses her own sense of value for her life. Nial is desperate for connections he can rely on, and in failing to trust or care for the people he is trying to keep, he finds only despair.

Laurel and Corbet are uncertain about their wants, and both walk risky paths, coming dangerously close to losing their connections to the real world, with Laurel wasting and Corbet held in the wood’s parallel space. Yet ultimately, both are restored safely, partly through Rois’s almost savage integrity, and partly because neither has actually been untrue to themselves or their commitments.

And the wood appears in all of these. Rois’s mother finds beauty in the wood. Nial finds power, and a prison. Laurel finds romance, and alienation. And Corbet finds a place that will keep him and someone who wants him to stay. The wood is the terrifying answer to all their questions.

The trust held for Laurel and Corbet by the characters who have integrity in their connections with others is their salvation, and it is loving relationships with people who are not under the spell of the wood that create pathways for those held in it to return. Laurel and Corbet are drawn back by Rois, and Rois is able to leave the wood because of her relationships. She can enter the wood because of her strangeness, but she can come home because she has not focused only on that.

Also, Rois loves the wood, so she understands it, so she is able to put it in its place within her world. In this part of the metaphor, the wood represents Rois’s strangeness, and it is this love of herself that enables her to overcome the risk of losing herself to her own strangeness.

It is never clear, in Winter Rose, how much of the action that we see is actually taking place. Rois’s imagination is a wild place, and Rois herself is unsure. But fundamentally, regardless of the reality of what she is imagining, it is clear that Rois’s love for her sister, for her father, for Corbet, and also for herself is what saves her from Nial’s fate. And it is clear that what has created Rois’s love is the love and care she has received, from her father, her sister, and her community.