I/ Introduction

In their very shortness, short stories have remained close to the original source of narrative in myth, folktale, fable and fairy tale. They therefore are more apt to focus on basic desires, dreams, anxieties, and fears than novels. (May 1994, xxvi)

4As with much postmodernist art, not only does Proulx’s short fiction exhibit awareness of all forms of discourse as constructs, it simultaneously and playfully foregrounds its own ingestion and transformation of old tales. As Cristina Bacchilega argues about revisionist fairy tales, “these postmodern transformations do not exploit the fairy tale’s magic simply to make the spell work, but rather to unmake some of its workings” (23). Focusing closely on Proulx’s rewriting of fairy tales, folktales and myths, I seek to elucidate why Proulx’s use of magical realism often works in conjunction with feminist revision of old tales. I will first look at the metafictional aspects of Proulx’s stories that call attention to a folk and literary legacy. Relying on Jack Zipes’s theory of the fairy-tale genre, I will then turn to Proulx’s feminist rewriting of fairy tales in an endeavor to unpack the ideological, revisionist quality of her tales. Finally, I will tease out the implications of Proulx’s alternative scenarios for women.

II/ Proulx’s cross-genre story-telling: turning folktales and fairy tales into short stories

7Resting on interlaced, embedded narratives, “The Half-Skinned Steer” pays a tribute to old folk stories which have engendered many literary fairy tales and short stories, with their emphasis on orality and skaz. The frame narrative is told by a heterodiegetic narrator, although filtered through Mero’s point of view and memories. At that moment, Mero is an old man, driving from Massachusetts back to the family ranch in Wyoming to bury his brother. The embedded parts contain analepses going back to the time when Mero left Wyoming as a young man. These parts of the story are also delivered by the same extradiegetic narrator, using Mero as focalizing agent; yet they incorporate the voice of the intradiegetic narrator, Mero’s stepmother, just as Mero remembers hearing it. Thus, the reader gets a word-for-word version of the gruesome story of the half-skinned steer told long ago by Mero’s stepmother. Readers are nevertheless warned that she “was a total liar” (Proulx 2003, 32). The omniscient narrator debunks the eponymous story of the half-skinned steer as mere yarn, discrediting the teller’s “low and convincing liar’s voice.” She is remembered as having an enticing voice “that drew you in, that low, twangy voice, wouldn’t matter if she was saying the alphabet, what you heard was the rustle of hay. She could make you smell the smoke from an unlit fire” (Proulx 2003, 35). Proulx’s frame narrative thus foregrounds the synesthetic magic at work in storytelling, with its power to ignite our imagination as well as our senses, our awareness of the fictionality of stories notwithstanding.

10The same dry irony points to the intertextual play with many fairy tale topoi. For instance, in “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World,” the narrator recounts the story of Ottaline, growing up on an isolated ranch, who starts conversing with a grotesque, broken-down, and talking John Deere tractor. That the story alludes to “The Frog Prince” is evident in one of the dialogues between the protagonist and the enamored, monstrous creature, when Ottaline comically asks: “‘Are you like an enchanted thing? A damn story where some girl lets a warty old toad sleep in her shoe and in the mornin the toad’s a good-lookin dude makin omelettes?’” (Proulx 2003, 138). At first, Ottaline’s skepticism with regard to the possibility of magic transformation comically undercuts fairy-tale values (“a damn story”). Her irreverent language debunks the notion that she truly expects the non-human creature to transform into Prince Charming, a delusive topos inherited from many a fairy tale and which Proulx consistently attacks. It underscores the preposterous idea of turning overnight from a “warty old toad” into “a good lookin dude making omelettes,” while implying that as opposed to “some girl,” Ottaline would not be so foolish as to fall for a repulsive mate in the hope for his magic transmogrification.

11Other, less direct references to the fairy-tale genre are strewn throughout the collection via significant details working as intertextual signposts. In “Dump Junk,” Christina discovers her late mother’s magic teakettle, which bears affinities with Aladdin’s magic lamp. She remembers the miraculous apparitions of beautiful dresses in her indigent childhood, one “with a white piqué Peter Pan collar” and another with “two turtleneck knit shirts, one aquamarine and one snow white” (my emphasis Proulx 2005, 304). Years after the facts, Christina realizes that, like the fairy godmother in “Cinderella,” her mother had possessed the power to wish anything true. As it ingests fairy-tale fragments and revisits these topoi, however, the story ending is unconventional from the standpoint of classical fairy-tales. Indeed, as Christina coldly wishes her brother dead in revenge for all the abuse he has inflicted on her throughout her childhood, the narrative ends with an unexpected, mischievous twist: “And in Lusk, Wyoming, a retired lineman, Rich Hickey, the unknown, adulterous fruit of [her father’s] loins from a cattle-buying trip in 1928, tripped on his trailing bathrobe belt and flew headfirst down the stairs./ The teakettle played no favorites” (Proulx 2005, 318). Proulx’s revisionist tale strikes the turn of events with cruel irony, bringing about the death of some innocent, unacknowledged relative, while pointing to Christina’s father’s unfaithfulness as one of the unforeseeable causes for this meaningless death. This story suggests the possibility that Christina might have used the magic of the tea kettle to bring herself good fortune, beauty and health as in many fairy tales revolving around magical objects. Yet, Proulx here stages a malevolent use of magic by the heroine that has theretofore won the reader’s empathy. This represents a provocative breach from conventional fairy-tale morality. Such feminist overtones I will get back to later, as they question the standards of feminine gentleness promoted by many of the fairy tales Proulx deconstructs.

III/ De-sanitizing the fairy tale via feminist revisions

13Proulx’s story “Tits Up in a Ditch” offers a contemporary rewriting of “Cinderella” (Proulx 2008, 2008). Dakotah grows up as an orphan, raised by abusive and negligent grandparents. Infatuated with her own Western version of Prince Charming, Dakotah precipitately drops out of high school to marry Billy-the-Kid-looking Sash. Proulx foregrounds her female character’s delusory conflation of cowboy masculinity with the older European stereotype of Prince Charming found in fairy tales such as “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” or “Cinderella,” with its ensuing tragic outcome. Dakotah dreams of romantically eloping from her Cinderella-like situation at home: “Sash immediately gained a lustrous aura of outlawry and gun expertise. Now in her daydreams they rode away together, Sash twisting back in the saddle to shoot at their pursuers” (Proulx 2008, 195). Yet, the salvation and rise in society that would logically follow from marriage in many a fairy tale only takes Dakotah as far as a waitressing job, which she gets fired from the minute she announces her pregnancy.

14At first, Dakotah is said to be “eager to please” (194). Sash’s interest in her speaks volumes in terms of the feminist critique underlying Proulx’s taut writing: “[Attracted] to her shy silence, […] he gauged her a biddable handmaiden who would look to his comforts. He said let’s get married and she agreed” (195-95). Sash himself seems misguided by the gender stereotypes passed on to him via shared cultural patrimony, as he mistakes Dakotah’s “shy demeanor” for meekness. Furthermore, Proulx takes issue in this story with the rash marriage proposals and agreements cast in many a fairy tale as an ideal of romance. As opposed to the virtuous and kind heroine found also in “The Beauty and the Beast,” once they share the same roof, Dakotah cannot overlook her husband’s flaws, mostly when it comes to his condescending assumptions about her role as wife. Consequently, she resists his attempt to confine her to a domestic role. Looking at the “Beauty and the Beast” tales, Zipes shows how the story has served to dictate proper rules of behaviors and manners: “The mark of beauty for a female is to be found in her submission, obedience, humility, industry, and patience; the mark of manliness is to be found in a man’s self-control, politeness, reason and perseverance” (56). At this point, Proulx’s story could offer a feminist, ironic revision of fairy-tales such as “Beauty and the Beast,” “Cinderella,” or “Snow White,” with Proulx’s stubborn, unyielding heroine demeaning the models of feminine virtue and self-sacrifice promoted by these stories: “‘I been bossed around since I was a kid. I didn’t agree to be your maid” (Proulx 2008, 200). Dakotah’s defiance and “obstinate refusals” to tend to her husband’s domestic comfort sharply contrast with Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s portrayal of Beauty as ever-willing to serve father and Beast, with Perrault’s Cinderella’s patient endurance of her destitution as the family servant, or again with Snow White’s sweet acceptance of her role as joyful care-taker of the seven dwarves and their home (Proulx 2008, 200).

[It] became clear that the female character could assume her ‘civil’ form only if she were willing to sacrifice herself for a beastlike male. By denying herself, she could obtain what all women supposedly wanted and want—namely, marriage in the form of male domination. The male character could assume his “civil” form only when socially deviant forces were tamed and when the female was not a threat but actually charmed or tranquilized by his rationality. (56)

16Proulx typically sabotages the contrived happy ending of many classical fairy tales, whereby women are rewarded for their subservience by a blissful marriage. The mere notion of a Wyoming Prince Charming is thus undercut as both ludicrous and dangerous from a woman’s standpoint, and marriage is more often than not presented as a curse. Moreover, as Proulx’s fiction limns the discrepancy between the Prince Charming stereotype and her Wyoming wannabe-cowboys, her stories insist on the inadequate persistence of gender expectations confining both men and women in roles that cannot fit the reality of their social contexts.

17Not only do Proulx’s stories sarcastically exhibit the conservative values enshrined in many classical fairy tales in their most patriarchal versions; they moreover “de-sanitize” them. They undo the “taming of the ‘wild’ fantasies” or “sanitization” of the oral and literary fairy tales which Zipes attributes to eighteenth and nineteenth century European writers (xi). The most telling example takes place with Proulx’s stylized rewriting of Perrault’s “Bluebeard” in “55 Miles to the Gas Pump,” the shortest of all her stories. The first paragraph focuses on Rancher Croom, an idiosyncratic, hot-blooded, wild and drunken cowboy, pictured as he throws himself down a rock canyon, “parting the air with his last roar” (Proulx 2003, 251). Yet, his suicide attempt is thwarted by a baffling moment of magical realism: “but before he hits he rises again to the top of the cliff like a cork in a bucket of milk” (251). A typographical blank follows Croom’s impossible suspension, metatexually forcing the reader to suspend both disbelief and thirst for closure of this amazing episode. The second paragraph then focuses on Mrs Croom infringing on her absent husband’s prohibition to access the attic of their house, where she makes a reviling discovery:

just as she thought: the corpses of Mr. Croom’s paramours–she recognizes them from their photographs in the paper: MISSING WOMAN–some desiccated as jerky and much the same color, some moldy from lying beneath roof leaks, and all of them used hard, covered with tarry handprints, the marks of boot heels, some bright blue with the remnants of paint used on the shutters years ago, one wrapped in newspaper nipple to knee. (Proulx 2003, 251-52)

18The mention of the blue paint on the bodies in such a short short story must read as a significant detail–it functions as a clue to the intertextuality at play with “Bluebeard,” whose wife similarly ventures into the forbidden, locked room only to discover the remains of her husband’s previous victims.

19There are many ways to read this rewriting of “Bluebeard.” First, Proulx’s text acquires a metafictional dimension as the narrator concludes with a disturbing lightness of tone, “When you live a long way out, you make your own fun” (Proulx 2003, 252).The deadpan voice may here overlap with the implied writer’s, laying bare the playful and highly stylized story at hand, actually written from a secluded ranch in deep Wyoming where Proulx lives. The form of her story indeed displays a careful structure: it comes as a diptych of two symmetrical paragraphs of exactly twelve lines each, followed by a one-line coda. Moreover, the paragraphs conspicuously mirror one another as each is composed of a single, unusually long and complex sentence. Yet, the gruesome description of the corpses (“some desiccated as jerky and much the same color, some moldy from lying beneath roof leaks”) and the abuse implied in the details (“and all of them used hard, covered with tarry handprints, the marks of boot heels”) considerably temper the enjoyment derived from deciphering Proulx’s neo-regionalist toying with Perrault’s tale.

20Second, Croom’s name could be read as a portmanteau conflation of the words “crime” and “loom” or “doom.” Whereas in Perrault’s version, Bluebeard is in extremis killed by the heroine’s brothers, in Proulx’s version, Croom’s aborted suicide and magical suspension in the air hold the menacing possibility of his return and potential revenge upon his disobedient wife. Paradoxically, the narrative voice exhibits a caustic approach to such dark themes that the reader knows indeed to resurface in actual fait divers. The consonances in [r], [n], [t], and [p] phonemes in “one wrapped in newspaper nipple to knee” are for instance rather distracting; one might expect such palatable poetic devices in a nursery rhyme rather than in such an abject description. Besides, Proulx’s story stages the complicity of Croom’s wife (“just as she thought”), and even suggests a certain appetite for horror (“Mrs Croom […] whets to her desire” 251). Instead of portraying the heroine as an innocent victim, Proulx thus questions the role played by women in their relationships with violent men.

21Croom’s portrait aligns him with cowboy masculinity (“in handmade boots and filthy hat,” “stray hairs like curling fiddle string ends, that warm-handed, quick-foot dancer” 251) and signals the destructive impulse entailed by conforming to that norm. Menacing details suggest a wild, deviant temper (his stray hairs, his warm hands, his being walleyed), and physical violence–details that may recall Bluebeard’s enticing yet threatening masculine power symbolized by his eerie blue beard. Ultimately, Croom’s attempted suicide points beyond the violence inflicted on others, to the rage and self-destructive impact brought about by the violent cowboy stereotype. As Katie O’ Arosteguy has argued, Proulx “indicts the cultural project of nostalgia for a form of masculinity” (120). Driven to alcoholism and then suicide, Croom’s sketched out character encapsulates the wounded men Proulx’s cowboys become “as a result of their own violence toward themselves and others” (Arosteguy 120). Croom’s name may thus contain a warning that a culture upholding nefarious fantasies of violent masculinity may be responsible for dooming some of its men to crime.

22Finally, following Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s psychoanalytical reading of Bluebeard as the archetypal predator, Croom’s murders correspond to “the killing of the creative feminine […]. The predator [seeks] to sever a woman’s connection to her own insights, inspirations, follow through and more” (57). Delving into Perrault’s representation of women, Zipes establishes his tendency to deprive women of agency: “[Perrault’s] ideal ‘femme civilisée’ […] must be passive until the right man comes along to recognize her virtues and marry her. She lives only through the male and for marriage. The male acts, the female waits. […] If she is allowed anything, it is to demonstrate how submissive she can be” (40). Perrault’s “Bluebeard” makes it a sin for women to be curious and imaginative. Like the cellar, the cave, or the dungeon in other tales, Croom’s attic represents a place, to use Estés’s words, “to or through which a woman [accesses] the murdered one(s), breaks taboos to find the truth, and through wit and/or travail triumphs by brandishing, transforming or exterminating the assassin of the psyche” (59). Throughout Proulx’s ghastly stories, the confrontation with how much male abuse and dominion her women must endure may help readers, “break the old patterns of ignorance, by being able to behold a horror and not look away” (Estés 58). These stories then suggest that only by assessing how badly her psyche has been captured by patriarchal mores and stories can a woman assert herself and unbridle her own, creative and wild imagination. Staging the partial complicity of Croom’s wife, Proulx’s disturbing revision entails women’s responsibility in showing awareness and, eventually, in accepting or refusing the roles and pre-existing social norms they are offered.

IV/Alternative scenarios and liberating flights of fancy

23In her enterprise to upset the patriarchal frames of many of the fairy tales she rewrites, Proulx pictures a few women who become self-assertive agents of their lives. A couple of her stories challenge the Prince Charming stereotype by substituting it with a female partner. As Carolina Fernández Rodríguez demonstrates in her study of the male rescuer archetype of many classical fairy tales, there is a tendency in feminist revisionist literature to not only “demythologize the traditional hero” but also to “offer different alternatives to it” (52). Rodríguez underscores that a female rescuer is often cast in these subversive rewritings as an alternative to the traditional male rescuer, either via female cooperation, self-liberation, or homosexual relationships.

24In Proulx’s overall somber stories, rare are the characters that achieve self-empowerment. But, going back to Proulx’s gloomy subversion of Cinderella, during the brief period of independence away from Wyoming that Dakotah experiences in the army, she does form a close relationship with a co-officer, also a woman: “They had become closest friends, closer than she had ever been to Sash. Dakotah, for the first time in her life, had someone to talk to, someone who understood everything, from rural ways to failing tests. Marnie said maybe they were in love. They talked about setting up house together with Baby Verl after they got out” (Proulx 2008, 212). If the precise nature of their relationship is indeterminate, the narrative sequence hints at budding homosexuality. Indeed, in the previous paragraph, Dakotah receives a letter from a former school teacher. Dakotah, together with the reader, is thus apprised of “two lesbian women with a herd of goats” who have “bought the Tin Can house and [plan] to make cheese and sell it locally.” Highlighting the taboo on female homosexuality Dakotah has internalized, the narrator reports that “Dakotah was shocked to see the word ‘lesbian’ on the page of a letter like any ordinary word” (212). Proulx thereby offers a furtive glimpse of an alternative scenario for Dakotah’s future, all the better to shatter it: her fate as a victim of her heterosexual marriage is sealed when Marnie is pulverized by a tragic twist. The glimmer of hope Marnie might have represented vanishes in an unexpected bombing, turning her into “a heap of bloody rags and a patch of skin”, an image that evokes the melting of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz (213). Dakotah’s disempowerment is symbolized by the loss of one of her arms. Soon she discovers that the husband who has left her coincidentally happens to be staying in the same hospital, and that, still being officially his wife–they intended to sign the divorce papers but neglected to–she is now by law condemned to nurse him. Even though Sash, Dakotah, and Marnie are here physically destroyed by war rather than by homophobic agents as in the much discussed “Brokeback Mountain,” still Proulx’s cruel plotting provides another indictment of the many violent ways heteronormative society denies men and women the possibility of alternative scenarios of gender and relationships.

25In “Dump-Junk,” Christina and Rose do manage to transgress the patriarchal norms pervading many of the above-mentioned fairy tales, as “neither of them like men” (Proulx 2005, 306). It is inferred that their sexual preferences have partly been shaped by the abuse both of them have suffered from their brothers in their childhoods. Both young women emancipate by taking jobs. They meet at a boarding house where they are renting rooms with their own salaries. Despite the traditional cliché her name might carry, Rose embodies independence: she runs “her own business, the Ladyfinger Bakery” (305). Her self-assertiveness together with her sexual orientation are encapsulated in the naughty name chosen for her bakery, which, while evoking the sweet delight of cakes and sugary treats one can find in a standard bakery, implicitly suggests a different way of tending to feminine cravings. The two characters offer positive models of self-liberation and homosexual love, as they assertively choose their own future, leaving the cowboy state of Wyoming for more liberal San Francisco: “‘We don’t [have to go back]. There’s jobs all over the place here. […] And we’ll have a chance to get out of the old Wyo rut. I don’t want to be a baker. I don’t want to marry some awful mean rancher and have to bring a covered dish to the Cow Belles meetings. I want to go to college. I want my own money and my own life–and you” (307-308).

26The most provocative, feminist subversion of the patriarchal fairy-tale dictates concerning young women’s behavior may be carried out via the protagonist in “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World”. Significantly, the broken down, talking, wannabe prince tractor shows misogynistic prejudice, forbidding her from repairing it: “‘It’s men that fixes tractors, not no woman’” (Proulx 2003, 140). But the scene in which feisty Ottaline does fix the tractor contains innuendos betraying the implicit subtext of sexual empowerment: “She had brought a can of penetrating oil with her and began to squirt it on studs, bolts and screws, to rap on the rusted colts with a heavy wrench./ ‘You make a wrong move I might hurt you.’/ ‘You know what? I was you I’d lay back and enjoy it.’ Something [her former lover] Hal Bloom had said” (my emphasis 141). This dialogue grants Ottaline the upper hand and reverses power roles. It represents the last conversation between her and the tractor which is then abandoned in favor of human company. By granting herself the right to transgress habitual gender roles and by tinkering with the mechanisms of the tractor, the heroine has thus succeeded in disempowering the stories of magic and fixing their debilitating gender stereotypes.

27Ottaline is a case in point: not only does she appropriate manly tools and activities in a scene evoking sexual intercourse from a male point of view; she also develops from a subaltern character maintained in an inferior and shameful position by her father and grandfather into an agent of her own life. She successfully defies gender restrictions, endorsing her own personal attributes and desires. She marries a man who values her as “knowledgeable” and “damn-good looking” whereas up to then, Ottaline had been described as “the family embarrassment,” perceived as grotesque because of her obesity. She ends up taking power over the ranch, running it with her husband. Ottaline thus stands apart from many of Proulx’s other female characters, first because she shows skepticism toward fairy tale values, and second, because she offers a rare example of feminine empowerment both within Wyoming and within marriage. By naming Ottaline’s father Aladdin, Proulx again points to the fairy tale legacy passed on from one generation to another; yet Ottaline shows wise misgivings with respect to the feminine compliance encouraged by the stories heard in her childhood.

28Proulx’s narratives thus often make use of magic to go against the pernicious inheritance contained in patriarchal myths and tales. As a matter of fact, the teakettle inherited by Christina is said to be “monstrously heavy” (Proulx 2005, 303), loaded as it is with ancient, potentially noxious magic power. Moreover, Christina’s use of magic with the intention to kill her abusive brother clearly deviates from the standards of kindness and forgiveness exhibited most notoriously by Perrault’s Cinderella. In retributing the lurid behavior she suffered from as a child and using magic as a means to inflict a violent death upon her torturer rather than to access marriage, Christina’s character defies rampant clichés of feminine passivity, of acceptance of harassment or reliance on heterosexual marriage. It is rather telling in that sense that Christina should be appalled by her mother’s lack of imagination with the teakettle: “But Christina’s heart was sore at the downright awful dishes her unworldly mother had ordered. All of the menus were drawn from her hoard of recipes, the conglomerations with perky names clipped so carefully from ladies’ magazines and from the backs of cans and packages. Nothing had ever seemed sadder” (317). Magic is used by both Cinderella’s godmother and Christina’s mother to produce pretty dresses or recipes advertised in ladies’ journals, thus reinforcing patriarchal mores via these metonymies for standard femininity and domesticity. Christina’s departure from those and her deviant use of magic then offer a rather provocative vision of how magic might be used in the hands of transgressive, imaginative women unwilling to bend to potentially destructive norms.

29As for the magic of the teakettle, if read in analogy with the act of writing, it may potentially refer to the transformative power which story-telling retains, igniting our fancy and transmuting mere fragments and words into visible images and felt experiences. In other words, Proulx’s appropriation of the fairy tale magic demonstrates that, as Bacchilega argues, “postmodern fairy tales reactivate the wonder tale’s ‘magic’ or mythopoeic qualities by providing new readings of it, thereby generating unexploited or forgotten possibilities from its repetition” (22).

30Comforting, happy endings are scarce in Proulx’s short stories. Yet there is a certain morality to be gained from reading these feisty pieces. As I have shown elsewhere, if many of Proulx’s stories dwell on flawed or immoral characters, her plots nevertheless often instill a sense of poetic justice. Not surprisingly, Proulx’s ecofeminist critique of patriarchal dominion and abuse of nature is also achieved in large part via the retributive magic wand provided by magical realism. Casting the Devil as a character and recycling myths of hell, a few of her stories resort to magical realism to send animal poachers directly to hell, or give life to frightful pterodactyl birds in modern-day Wyoming. Yet, these stories contain metafictional elements that call attention to the presence of the implied writer as a demiurge manipulating mythical and literary material, both exposing and simultaneously reactivating their potential power. Proulx’s ecofeminist stance is moreover perceptible in her reversal of the chastisement of female characters’ disobedient behavior occurring in many fairy tales. Proulx remarkably spares her rare, truly independent and alert female characters, while her more conventionally feminine heroines seem systematically cursed. Furthermore, she often retributes male abuse of nature or women with dire fates. Exploiting the liberating effects of magical realism in her short fiction, Proulx’s mythopoeic flights of fancy merge different realms in quite innovative ways: a mute, half-skinned steer leaps from an old folk tale into the realistic narrative of Mero’s life; a tiny sagebrush turns into a monstrous, man-eating creature; and a cast-away tea-kettle becomes a death-bringing object. Each of these recycled fragments bring about a sense of poetic justice, while giving new life to all sorts of marvels and tales.

V/ Conclusion

34Eventually, Proulx’s stories sustain Charles E. May’s notion that the short story genre relies on “the power of metaphor and story itself to answer that cry of the heart of its characters, ‘Who am I?’” May argues that “[as] opposed to the novel, the short story says one does not find the answer to that question in a similitude of the real world, but rather in being caught up within the role that the story demands and being therefore metaphorically transformed” (1989, 73). Looking at Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories in comparison with her novels, it does indeed appear that the two forms present different approaches to mimesis, magic, and realism. Whereas her novels are dominated by grim realism, Proulx’s omnivorous Wyoming short stories stand out as they kindle a kind of verbal magic that reignites one’s imagination, calls attention to the potency of language itself, and thus empowers liberating flights of fancy across rigid categorizations of both genre and gender.