Newspaper Symbol Analysis

In “55 Miles to the Gas Pump,” newspapers represent Rancher Croom and Mrs. Croom abandoning the ethics of civilized life. The story’s two mentions of newspapers seem to be the only hint of a connection between the Crooms and society at large—after all, the newspaper is a tool of social cohesion and information sharing, an institution that bonds a community. That the Crooms have access to the newspaper suggests a possible connection to others, but the contexts in which Proulx mentions the newspaper make clear that this connection does nothing to temper their immorality. When Mrs. Croom first sees the corpses of her husband’s victims, “she recognizes them from their photographs in the paper: MISSING WOMAN,” and then goes on to contrast those photographs with a vivid description of the state of their decaying corpses. Here, the aside about the photographs chillingly suggests that society and civilization are no match for the immorality of isolated life: after all, none of the “missing women” were ever found and Rancher Croom was never punished. Furthermore, there’s a possibility that Mrs. Croom’s engagement with the newspaper was itself perverse: she suspected that her husband was killing these women, and it seems she stared at their pictures for a long time (how else could she recognize their decayed corpses?). Whether this looking was sexually-tinged or not, to look so long at their faces in the newspaper and not act on her suspicions that her husband had murdered these women shows that Mrs. Croom has totally abandoned the morality of civilized society. Proulx’s next mention of newspaper underscores this reading: Mrs. Croom looks at one of the corpses, who has been “wrapped in newspaper nipple to knee” as well as “used hard.” The combination of the word “nipple” (rather than a more neutral word like “chest”) and the oblique reference to necrophilia gives this description a distinctly sexual tone. The newspaper, then, becomes like lingerie on the corpse, turning a symbol of civilization (the newspaper) into a tool for a violent, uncivilized kind of desire. These two mentions of newspaper both demonstrate that the morality of civilized society is absent in the rural lives of the Crooms.