Good, Evil, and Morality Theme Analysis

“55 Miles to the Gas Pump” is a loose retelling of the folktale “Bluebeard,” which begins when the heroine’s new husband forbids her to enter a certain room in his house. While he’s away, she enters the forbidden room and discovers the mutilated corpses of his previous six wives, after which she or one of her relatives (depending on the tale) usually kills him. Though “55 Miles to the Gas Pump” preserves the format of a folktale (brief, action-focused, ending with a pithy “moral”), it deliberately subverts the black-and-white morality that readers expect from folktales. Instead of judging and punishing the murderous, necrophiliac, and suicidal Crooms (and thereby upholding conventional morality), Proulx suggests that good and evil are inextricable, and that the simplistic morality of folktales is a lie.

By conventional moral standards, Rancher Croom is the story’s villain; after all, he is the analogue to Bluebeard. However, Proulx defies the folktale convention that Croom’s death will be a punishment for his sins. First of all, his suicide occurs at the beginning of the story, before the “big reveal” of the corpses in the attic. Since readers haven’t yet learned about the corpses, they will initially interpret his death as irrational and inexplicable, rather than a product of remorse for his behavior or some kind of karmic punishment. Because he is already dead once the reader discovers his crimes, his death cannot follow the discovery in order to neatly conclude the story by demonstrating that villains always get their just desserts. Indeed, rather than Rancher Croom meeting the gory, violent fate of many folktale villains, his suicide ends with him “[rising] again like a cork in a bucket of milk.” This comic, oddly triumphant description means that his death, far from being a punishment for his behavior, strikes the reader as more similar to a resurrection—a Christlike fate associated with heroes, not villains. Combining this with the fact that the violence and brutality of Croom’s death is deliberately downplayed (the details are cartoonish: “windmill arms, jeans riding over boot tops”), the reader feels that Rancher Croom’s death is unserious and triumphant, rather than tragic or deserved. In this context, it’s difficult for the reader to derive any moral significance from the suicide at all.

Just as Proulx doesn’t depict Rancher Croom as a classic folktale villain, she refuses to make Mrs. Croom the heroine. In traditional renderings of “Bluebeard,” the wife is kind, heroic, and eventually rewarded for her virtue, but Mrs. Croom is not morally pure and does not earn a reward. The most obvious instance of her immorality is the implication that she has been aware all along that her husband is a serial killer. When she finds the corpses in the attic, she is neither shocked nor frightened; the situation is, rather, “just as she thought.” By allowing her husband to kill women without interfering, she has become his accomplice. As opposed to the innocent young wife of Bluebeard, Mrs. Croom is a woman driven to look inside the forbidden room less by idle curiosity than by what she already suspects—and perhaps what she actively wants to see.

In addition to rejecting conventional heroines and villains, Proulx subverts the moralism of folktales through her language. One way in which she does this is by lingering within evocative, sensuous descriptions of horrific acts without passing judgment. For example, this is her description of the bodies in the attic: “some desiccated as jerky, some moldy … covered with tarry handprints, the marks of boot heels … some bright blue with remnants of paint … one wrapped in newspaper nipple to knee.” Neither Mrs. Croom nor the narrator of the story expresses any repulsion or moral objection; instead, they seem to take a creative, almost indulgent pleasure in observing carefully, which is apparent in the use of language that invokes all five senses and imagery that is surprising and even delightful (such as the “bright blue” paint). This enjoyment of the gruesome contrasts with the stringently moral world of the traditional folktale, in which description is often meant to reinforce moral codes (good people are beautiful and bad people are ugly, for instance). Furthermore, Proulx subverts the language of folktales by ending with a sentence that summarizes the story’s “moral”—but which is an explicit rejection of the traditional logic of good and evil. The story’s message, as summed up in the final line, is not that readers should be virtuous or that evil should be punished; it’s that you “make your own fun” (or begin to find pleasure in violence) when you live in isolation. In other words, the “moral” of this story suggests that morality doesn’t exist at all.