"We're just like everybody else, only more so:" On Queering Myth and Returning to the Present

This thesis places Andrea Lawlor’s novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl in conversation with Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony to explore how the fairytales of Paul offer new, queered refashionings of familiar fairytales that exemplify refusal’s relationship to the present. The fairytales of Paul reject the norms central to happiness myths like the American Dream, and the rest of the novel works to relay what that post-crisis moment of refusal might look like through Paul’s story. The Laguna myths of Ceremony show something similar but are not afraid to reach back and offer ways to untangle and heal from the past so that one can meaningfully interact with it in the present moment. Using Matthew Spellberg’s understanding of the function of myth, Maria Tatar’s approach to fairytales, and Heather Love and Mari Ruti’s conceptions of queer refusal as frameworks, this thesis examines the ways in which the repetition of mythic stories primes readers for each novel’s culminating moments of refusal and rejection. Through a decidedly queer refusal, Paul is able to embrace his identity as a metamorph and fully embody the trans theory Hil Malatino proposes. As a result, this image of Paul is one that exemplifies what a specifically queer return to the present might look like.