Brokeback Mountain

Content Warning: This section discusses anti-gay bias, including hate crimes.

Forbidden love, the primary theme of “Brokeback Mountain,” is common in literature. Rather than class, race, marital status, or family feuds, it is the hyper-heteronormative world of late 20th-century rural Wyoming that thwarts the central relationship: Masculine Sexuality and the Forbidden Love of Queer Romance are front and center. While the primary obstacle is anti-gay bias, such bigotry takes place within a context of toxic masculinity that poses its own problems. With families that are either nonexistent (as in Ennis’s case) or absent and uncaring (as in Jack’s), the two men yearn for love and companionship. However, neither recognizes this desire until they meet one another because society so discourages male emotional expression of any kind. The sexual/romantic aspect of the relationship places it even further outside the bounds of what society deems acceptable. Consequently, Ennis and Jack can physically express their love only when they are literally outside of culture—i.e., in nature. Brokeback Mountain and their infrequent backcountry trips allow them to experience the love and companionship they have found with each other.

Partly for this reason, setting figures prominently in the story. However, Proulx’s writing also regularly focuses on place, and her detailed descriptions and imagery invest the Wyoming setting with additional weight. Here, for example, is Proulx’s description of Ennis and Jack waking up that first morning on Brokeback:

Dawn came glassy-orange, stained from below by a gelatinous band of pale green. The sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same color as the smoke from Ennis’s breakfast fire. The cold air sweetened, banded pebbles and crumbs of soil cast sudden pencil-long shadows, and the rearing lodgepole pines below them massed in slabs of somber malachite (258).

Throughout the story Proulx continues to provide vivid portraits of the awe-inspiring yet unforgiving landscape in which the men’s love affair plays out. Such descriptions mirror the dualities of the relationship itself while also reflecting Proulx’s debt to literary naturalism—a genre concerned with the way in which environment shapes (or even determines) human action.

Naturalism tends toward pessimism, and a sense of Powerlessness and Loss of Hope pervades “Brokeback Mountain” even before the men’s relationship begins. Both men grew up in poverty, and circumstances largely beyond their control—ranging from a broken-down car to socioeconomic shifts in American society—conspire to keep them from bettering their circumstances. This sense of futility expands to include the love affair, which seems destined to end badly (violence is repeatedly foreshadowed). The urgency the men feel when they are together is intensified by the knowledge that such moments are fleeting. Sometimes Proulx demonstrates this through the characters’ frustrated physical action, as when the men leave Brokeback early in the story: “He looked away from Jack’s jaw, bruised blue from the hard punch Ennis had thrown him on the last day” (263). Elsewhere, the narrator explicitly conveys their frustration: “One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough” (276).

While both men feel the frustration of a love too seldom acted upon, Jack’s dissatisfaction is greater than Ennis’s. This reflects a deeper character difference: While Jack regularly fights the heteronormative culture’s limits and tenets, Ennis acquiesces to them more readily. This is evident in their behavior when they aren’t with each other; Jack has other male sexual partners while Ennis does not. In their last encounter, Jack articulates their differences and says what has been on his mind for years: “You know, friend, this is a goddam bitch of a unsatisfactory situation. You used a come away easy. It’s like seein the pope now” (277). The price Jack pays for accepting his orientation and acting upon it is steep, and his life ends violently because of it. It is not until Jack has paid the ultimate price that Ennis seems to accept himself.

The conflict between Ennis and Jack, while evident, is secondary to the conflict between the men and the heteronormative culture in which they live. The consequences of this conflict are sometimes subtle and sometimes tragic and violent. When Alma confronts Ennis in her kitchen, she never directly says what she saw between the men or what it meant, but she does convey her feelings about it: “Don’t lie, don’t try to fool me, Ennis. I know what it means. Jack Twist? Jack Nasty. You and him—” (273). Similarly, when Jack returns to Brokeback Mountain to look for work, Joe Aguirre refuses to rehire him and says, “You boys found a way to make the time pass up there, didn’t you” (269). These comments convey the weight of judgment the men face. Even at its height, the men’s fulfillment is overshadowed by the gaze of a disapproving society; Joe Aguirre and Alma are secret intruders on and observers of the love affair, leveling disapproval and disgust at the men’s love. This prejudice culminates in the two violent deaths the story recounts—those of the man from Ennis’s youth and Jack’s at the end of the story. While the story never explicitly states that these deaths are hate crimes, the implication is clear. Ennis’s conversation with Jack at their first reunion reflects the impression the childhood experience left on him and foreshadows Jack’s murder: “We do that in the wrong place we’ll be dead. There’s no reins on this one. It scares the piss out a me” (269).