25 pages • 50 minutes read
55 Miles to the Gas Pump
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Symbols & Motifs
Gas Pump
The titular gas pump represents the remoteness of the Croom residence and highlights The Dangerous Effects of Isolation. If the gas pump is so far away, it suggests other essentials are as well, including neighbors, shops, school—and the police. Croom lives free from prying eyes and is at liberty to indulge his darkest impulses. By contrast, isolation for Mrs. Croom and especially for her husband’s victims means they have no recourse to justice, no chance of being saved. If they cry for help, there is no one to hear them. If a wife defies her husband, he can respond however he wishes, which perhaps explains why Mrs. Croom never voiced her suspicions about her husband’s activities.
The story’s ironic final sentence emphasizes again the remoteness symbolized by the gas pump and the grievous effects of isolation upon the human psyche. In such a manner, the title and final sentence bookend the story.
Newspaper
Newspaper, mentioned twice in the story, symbolizes civic life and society. Although the Crooms live far from town, they nevertheless read the paper. The presence of the newspaper suggests that the Crooms are perhaps not as remote from society as it may otherwise seem, rendering their flouting of social norms all the more egregious. That Croom has actually covered at least one of his victims in this very newspaper heightens the irony.
The other reference to newspaper explains how Mrs. Croom recognizes the bodies of Croom’s murder victims: She saw their portraits printed in the newspaper. It seems odd that she recognizes the women given their bodies’ advanced state of decay; the implication is that she must have studied their photos at length. The detail therefore underscores the depth and duration of her suspicions, as she would presumably have had no other reason to commit the women’s faces to memory.
Attic
The attic in the story symbolizes the deep, hidden recesses of Croom’s disturbed psyche. While the attic serves a practical purpose in providing a space in which to hide the bodies, it also represents his psychological compartmentalization of his crimes. With the bodies out of sight and out of mind, he can carry on with his ranching, drinking, and dancing without having to face up to what he has done. Yet the story implies that no one can outrun their own mind. Whether Croom finally brought the horror of his crimes out of the shadows and into his consciousness, or whether they remained hidden, they likely prompted in one way or another his decision to die.
The literary trope of remote rooms harboring secrets is well established. An upper floor of Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) imprisons Rochester’s first, “mad” wife, and literature from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King teems with attics, cellars, and crawl spaces sheltering all manner of horrors. The 1957 publication of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, theorizing how rooms in a home represent different psychic spaces, has greatly enriched literary studies and interpretations of the attic in particular as a site of psychological complexity.
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