32 pages • 1 hour read
Annie ProulxBrokeback Mountain
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Masculine Sexuality and the Forbidden Love of Queer Romance
The primary and most obvious theme in “Brokeback Mountain” is one of forbidden love, a common subject in literature. This story combines the familiar trope with the struggles and expectations of masculine sexuality and the cultural obstacles inherent in queer romance. The characters contend with both society’s heteronormality and toxic masculinity and with the internal struggle to conform to such cultural norms.
Ennis and Jack live in late 20th-century rural Wyoming, a culture that accepts and even celebrates toxic masculinity and anti-gay sentiment. Growing up with families that are uncaring, absent, or abusive leaves both men with an unfulfilled need for love but a simultaneous difficulty recognizing or expressing it. Even 20 years into the relationship, Jack can’t quite articulate what he wants from it: “What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time […] when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger” (276). Despite this masculine repression of emotion, they find companionship with each other on Brokeback Mountain, and they talk deep into the night, telling each other about their lives, offering opinions on ranches and rodeos, families and dreams. Both find a home in each other’s words: “[T]hey were respectful of each other’s opinions, each glad to have a companion where none had been expected” (260). This kind of emotional bond and open communication is foreign to each of them; Ennis reflects that “he’d never had such a good time” (260).
The connection soon becomes physical, but because of the relationship’s forbidden nature, the couple can only realize their love when they are away from heteronormative culture. For 20 years, they find connection and intimacy in the backcountry of Wyoming, from Brokeback Mountain to the Wind River Range. These distant and hard-to-reach locales, mirroring their hard-to-reach intimate connection, are far from the eyes of society. Even so, they can’t escape the haunting gaze of their own heteronormative conditioning. During the summer they spend together, they are both quick to distance themselves from queer identity, and they both eventually marry and pursue (or claim to pursue) various affairs with women, which they discuss with one another. That Ennis is more unwilling to acknowledge the relationship’s significance probably stems from the childhood trauma of seeing the victim of an anti-gay hate crime. However, while Jack seems more accepting of his orientation, his anecdote about realizing he was circumcised reflects lingering anxieties around masculinity broadly. He remarks that there was “[n]o way to get it right with [his father] after that” (282), implying that the physical difference between him and his father speaks to some fundamentally different experience of manhood.
Furthermore, while the men seek isolation and privacy, from the beginning societal eyes intrude upon their intimate connections. In that first summer, the foreman, Joe Aguirre, watches them on the mountain with his long binoculars, and Alma later witnesses a passionate kiss. They respond to the men’s love with disapproval and even disgust. Escaping these internal and external barriers proves virtually impossible for Ennis and Jack, and the small victories of stolen moments become the only satisfaction they find.
The Inescapable Effects and Momentum of Poverty
Ennis and Jack both grow up in poverty. That poverty, and the inability of the characters to escape it, is a theme that runs throughout the story. In the first few paragraphs, the narrator describes Ennis’s youth: His parents die in a car crash and leave $24 to him and his siblings, and he has to drop out of school after the family truck breaks down, leaving him with no transportation. Jack’s background is not as dire; although he didn’t finish high school, his parents are still living. Nevertheless, his parents also live in a world of never-ending want, and they did not pass on any knowledge they might have had to their son. Jack reveals to Ennis that “his father had been a pretty well-known bullrider years back but kept his secrets to himself, never gave Jack a word of advice, never came once to see Jack ride” (260). Despite his father’s lack of support, Jack makes yearly visits to help out on his parents’ “meager” ranch.
When Jack and Ennis take the job at Brokeback Mountain, both hope to use their earnings to set themselves up in life. These youthful dreams do not manifest; their poverty follows them throughout their lives, their dreams becoming more elusive as they age. Jack’s work as a rodeo cowboy dries up because, as Jack explains, the system favors men who train as college athletes, which requires money. He lives entirely on his wife’s income, which Lureen’s father provides to his daughter, and his father-in-law would be happy to be rid of him. Meanwhile, Ennis goes from one short-term ranching job to another. In the prologue, he’s in the process of leaving his latest position:
He has to be packed and away from the place that morning. Again the ranch is on the market and they’ve shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, ‘Give em to the real estate shark, I’m out a here,’ dropping the keys in Ennis’s hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job (255).
Alma eventually leaves Ennis in part because he continues to seek ranch work rather than a more stable job.
However, if personal choice plays a role in the characters’ poverty, it’s minimal. More than any particular event or action, it is momentum that keeps them impoverished. It’s hard to climb out of poverty, and even harder when a person has known nothing else and has no support on that climb. The story’s depiction of poverty overlaps with its naturalism, as it suggests a person’s childhood socioeconomic circumstances play a defining role in their life’s course.
Powerlessness and Loss of Hope
Ennis del Mar’s and Jack Twist’s sense of powerlessness pervades this short story. Whether in the characters’ inability to climb out of poverty or their inability to find happiness, the story depicts the men as unable to effect change and forced to accept their powerlessness as an inescapable fact of their lives. This reflects Proulx’s use of naturalism; her characters are shaped and limited by the harsh conditions in which they live.
Despite their youthful hopes of attaining a better life, the characters’ outlook is bleak even early in the story. When Proulx describes the wind on the mountain as a “coursing, endless wind” (258), she foreshadows this powerlessness and portrays it as entwined with the men’s environment. Their insignificance in the face of that environment soon becomes clear: “Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain” (259). Proulx’s description of Ennis as a fleeting “spark” against a “huge black mass” suggests the forces he is up against and mirrors the impermanence of the men’s hope of happiness together. When the men leave the mountain, Proulx once again uses description to foreshadow the life they have ahead of them: “As they descended the slope Ennis felt he was in a slow-motion, but headlong, irreversible fall” (263). This sense of “falling” applies to the inevitability of their romance, but it also suggests a fall from the innocence and happiness the men found on the mountain.
When the men next meet, the happiness they find with each other is tempered by their powerlessness to create a life together. Ennis, the realist of the two, dismisses the future Jack pictures for the two of them: “Two guys livin together? No. All I can see is we get together once in a while way the hell out in the back a nowhere—” (270). He then adds, “[I]f you can’t fix it you got a stand it” (271), highlighting his resignation to the life they have been handed. A similar sense of futility informs his life choices. When Alma leaves him, he returns to a transient life, working short stints at ranches with “no hard feelings, just a vague sense of getting shortchanged” (272). Jack, though less willing to accept it, feels similarly unable to change the direction of his life. This frustration is not limited to his relationship with Ennis: When Jack sees that his son, at 15, is struggling to “get anything right” (276), he doesn’t know how to help him. He depends on his wife’s money, and Lureen refuses to see or address the problem.
The happiness the men felt that one summer on Brokeback Mountain is a fleeting oasis of happiness and choice that they never again experience. They visit scores of places in the backcountry, from Wyoming’s “high meadows” to its “mountain drainages” (273), but they “never [return] to Brokeback” (273). This mirrors the ups and downs of their lives, which never recapture the happiness they found on the mountain. Their inability to influence or alter the events unfolding around them extends even beyond Jack’s life; his father thwarts his final wish to have his ashes scattered on Brokeback Mountain. Powerless to change Jack’s father’s mind, Ennis responds to the sight of the family’s cemetery plot with resignation and denial: “[H]e didn’t want to know Jack was going in there, to be buried on the grieving plain” (284). Proulx gives Ennis the final word in the story, and his thoughts sum up the futility the men have always recognized: “There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it” (285).
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By Annie Proulx
