ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the concept of home, a social and symbolic space deeply encoded with social, economic, and cultural gender constructions, informs the way Annie Proulx's Wyoming stories represent the American West both historically and currently as a place in flux, constantly moved. As a twist on the old adage about the bad luck of having two women under one roof, Georgina soon learns that blood thicker than water and finds herself outmaneuvered by Linny, and becomes a stranger in her own home. Proulx's literary works range from the New England and Newfoundland settings of Heart Songs and Other Stories and The Shipping News to the accidental and irrational journeys across the continent in Postcards and Accordion Crimes to the Texas panhandle in That Old Ace in the Hole. Proulx's trilogy of Wyoming stories, Close Range, Bad Dirt, and Fine Just the Way It Is, an unruly, nonlinear, idiosyncratic corpus of short stories with rural Wyoming as the setting.
