The Spectacle Of The West In Annie Proulx’s Close Range:Wyoming Stories

Annie Proulx is considered to be one of the most famous female writers in contemporary America.Heart Songs and Other Stories,as Proulx’s first short stories collection,did not come to public until Proulx was 53 years old,and since then she won important awards such as the Faulkner Award for Fiction,the U.S.National Book Award for Fiction,and the Pulitzer Prize for her great works.Regarded as one of the new female voices in the West,Proulx’s works have a strong sense of regionalism.Her Close Range: Wyoming Stories revels the harsh reality of Wyoming community struggling to adapt the legacy of the West to postmodern economic realities.Their lives are manipulated by the commodity economy and glitzy advertising,living in a contradiction between myth and modern economic spectacle.Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories offers windows onto Wyoming,depicting a western society of the spectacle where the substantial is concealed by the western apparent.In this work,western mode of production,commodities and myth serve as spectacles,inscribed with the imprint of modern capital.Miscellaneous visual appearances control the desire of the subject,conceal the western reality,and eventually lead to the loss of the subjectivity of the Wyoming people.From the perspective of Guy Debord’s theory of Spectacle Society and its related comments,this thesis attempts to set about from the commodified western signs and discuss the construction and dominance of the western spectacle to the identity of Wyomingites,reveal the hidden enslavement of the cotemporary western spectacle to the subjectivity of Wyomingites and reveal a western society manipulated by the spetacle.The first two parts of this thesis are intended to show the western appearances: the western consumption spectacle and the western mythology spectacle separately.Here,the western society is materialized by the western commodities and the visualized western production methods which create false desires.In Wyoming,Dude ranches and dazzling memorabilia replicas found everywhere are eager to sell a commodified West to the outside world.What’s more,the combination of nostalgia and capital creates what Baudrillard calls a “hyperreality”.Besides the western consumption spectacle,the myth of the garden rooted in the American identity and those myth symbols construct a fabulous imagination of the mythic West for Wyomingites.An unrealistic cowboy dream erodes Wyoming’s youth in Proulx’s writing,instigating and supporting their self-destruction.The last part of this thesis depicts the social reality under the cover of the previous two parts of spectacles which is fully reflected in the short stories collection of Anne Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories.As Guy Debord argues in The Society of the Spectacle,the invisible control is the deepest enslavement.Western traditions are falling apart in the modern context,and such an invisible control has also caused a kind of alienation which makes them suffer from the conflict between an idealized vision of the West and the harsh reality of Wyoming.Living under the enslavement of the western spectacle,Wyomingites have no other choice but submit to it in the one-dimensional way,and the only way out of it is to build new situations in daily life.In this work,Annie Proulx presents to her readers the false wants constructed by the western spectacle and calls for a liberation of human beings’ actual needs so as to build their own situations.