Brokeback Mountain (Criticism)

Criticism

Wendy Perkins

Perkins is a professor of American and English literature and film. In this essay, she examines the theme of desire and denial in the story.

In an assessment of Annie Proulx's collection Close Range, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly notes "the mean, brutal pain-filled world" of her characters, "who need courage to sustain — much less find — a little dignity in the misery, futility and dread of daily existence on land plagued by drought and flood, sleet and scorching sun." "Brokeback Mountain," the most celebrated story in this collection, presents characters who suffer the bitter winds of Wyoming while they herd sheep in mountain pastures. Yet, in this tale, the land is not as harsh as the people on it, especially the violently intolerant ones who refuse to allow two men to openly love each other. This is the brutal world that Ennis Del Mar must find the courage to endure by juggling two competing impulses: desire and denial.

Ennis has never had a sexual relationship with a man before he goes up Brokeback Mountain to herd sheep with Jack Twist. On the day Ennis meets Jack, he is not yet twenty and plans to marry Alma Beers. These plans get complicated, however, when he crawls into Jack's bedroll one cold night on the mountain.

Ennis's desire for Jack stems from the combination of easy compatibility and sexual chemistry between the two. When they first arrive on the mountain, they spend many hours together and Ennis thinks "he'd never had such a good time." They talk about their past troubles and their future dreams, "respectful of each other's opinions, each glad to have a companion where none had been expected."

Their friendship eventually evolves into a sexual relationship that inspires feelings in Ennis that he occasionally tries to deny while the two are on the mountain. One night, he insists to Jack, "I'm not no queer" to which Jack responds, "me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody's business but ours." However, when they eventually come down from the mountain, they cannot keep others from making it their business as well. The blatant homophobia that Ennis experiences causes him to deny his feelings for Jack and to try to adapt himself to the heterosexual culture.

On the mountain, they spend a "euphoric" summer — their relationship deepening into love for each other as they experience moments of sexual pleasure as well as a closeness that provides the satisfaction of a "shared and sexless hunger." They believe that they are alone on the mountain, but through his binoculars Joe Aguirre, the ranch foreman, has watched them acting out sexually. Aguirre, whose disgust over what he sees prompts him to refuse to rehire Jack the next summer, foreshadows the difficulties Ennis and Jack face when they try to express their love for each other after they come off of the mountain.

Ennis senses this approaching trouble when the sheep he and Jack are herding mix together with another herd. When he tries but fails to get them sorted out, he feels that "in a disquieting way everything seemed mixed." The landscape adds an air of danger when they prepare to leave the mountain before a blizzard approaches. As the clouds move in, the mountain appears to boil "with demonic energy" and the wind blows through the rock with a "bestial drone." As Ennis descends, he feels that he is traveling in a "slow motion, but headlong, irreversible fall."

This sense of impending danger causes Ennis to deny his feelings for Jack as much as he can. When the two part after they come down from the mountain, they say an awkward goodbye, knowing that there was "nothing to do but drive away in opposite directions." Yet the thought of not being with Jack sickens Ennis so intensely that he has to pull over to the side of the road and wretch, feeling "about as bad as he ever had and it [would take] a long time for the feeling to wear off."

Ennis tries to follow the rules of convention by marrying Alma and raising a family. Yet his propensity for anal sex, which Alma hates, suggests that although he is trying to suppress his homosexual desires, he does not succeed. When Jack arrives for a visit, four years after their time together on Brokeback Mountain, Ennis's passion for him becomes a "hot jolt" as the two lock together in a heated embrace and kiss on the lips, which Alma observes. He tries to excuse his display of feelings for Jack by explaining to her that the two had not seen each other for four years, but Alma "had seen what she had seen."

At this point, Ennis cannot check his desire for Jack, and so the two spend the night together in a motel bed after Ennis tells Alma they will be out "drinkin and talking" all night. They do talk that evening, about what they were going to do about their "situation." Ennis admits to Jack, "I shouldn't a let you out a my sights" when they came down Brokeback Mountain, but then tells him, "I doubt there's nothing now we can do."

Ennis is determined to fight his desire for Jack because he cannot face the prejudice against such a union. The dominant heterosexual society has taught him to believe that homosexuality is not "decent," and he knows that if the two are caught together in the wrong place, they could be killed. Ennis's conflicting emotions are so powerful that he admits, "it scares the piss out of [him]." This confusion of passion, shame, and violence had emerged on the mountain when after an intense sexual coupling, Ennis punched Jack so hard that he knocked him out.

When Jack talks about the two of them leaving their families and starting a ranch together, Ennis insists on following convention, telling Jack, "I'm stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can't get out of it." He suggests that he would be ashamed to be openly homosexual when he notes, "I don't want a be like them guys you see around sometimes." He also recognizes the danger when he adds, "And I don't want a be dead."

Ennis illustrates the violent response that prejudice can inspire when he tells Jack about a homosexual man in his town who was beaten to death with a tire iron and then dragged through the streets for all to see. Ennis's father made sure that nine-year-old Ennis also saw the corpse as a warning that if he ever had a sexual relationship with a man, his father would come after him with a tire iron as well. With the acknowledgement that there would be many men out there waiting with tire irons, Ennis concludes that he and Jack can only see each other occasionally, and then "way the hell out in the back a nowhere."

The prejudice against homosexuality that he has witnessed causes Ennis to develop unconsciously an internalized homophobia, characterized by the same negative responses heterosexuals harbor toward gays and lesbians. Ennis struggles to align himself with the very culture that denies his right to exist because he cannot accept himself as the target of that culture's prejudice. His inability to identify himself as a homosexual and his need to be accepted by his straight community prompts him to reject Jack's suggestion that they find a more tolerant place to live where they might be able to enjoy a fulfilling relationship with each other.

Ennis's desire for Jack, however, refuses to be suppressed, which interferes with his determination to lead a conventional life. Even though he and Jack go off together infrequently, his marriage to Alma falls apart. Unable to check her resentment over his "fishing trips" with Jack, which she realizes do not involve fishing, and his emotional distance from her and their children, she divorces him. Ennis's conflicting emotions about his homosexuality again erupt in violence when one evening, Alma voices her disgust over his relationship with Jack. In response, he wrenches her wrist and threatens her as he storms out to a bar where he picks a "short dirty fight."

Even though Ennis is no longer married, his internalized homophobia prevents him from seeing Jack more than once or twice a year. His love for Jack, however, has not abated, which becomes evident during the tender moments they spend together. Yet "one thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough."

Ennis's fears about someone coming after him with a tire iron are realized not with him, but with Jack. After Mr. Frost tells him that Jack had planned to start a ranch first with Ennis, then with another man, Ennis understands that Jack's death was no accident. His intense sorrow over the loss of Jack becomes evident when he buries his face in Jack's shirt, hoping in vain to pick up his lover's scent.

In the years after Jack's death, Ennis finds a way to endure the pain through his dreams of their time together on Brokeback Mountain, from which "he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release." In an effort to preserve his sense of dignity and to avoid a violent response to an open display of their love, Ennis could never allow himself to recognize the depth of his feelings for Jack, insisting "nothing could be done about it." In Ennis's final resolve that "if you can't fix it you've got to stand it," Proulx handles ironically Ennis's response to his difficult life without Jack. In one sense, Ennis has demonstrated the courage necessary to endure the sufferings of the human heart, but he also has revealed his inability to accept his homosexuality or act in any way to enlighten others about their prejudice. Through her portrayal of Ennis's struggle with desire and denial, Proulx reveals the subtle complexities inherent in the recognition and acceptance of self.

Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on "Brokeback Mountain," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

What Do I Read Next?

• All the Pretty Horses (1992), by Cormac McCarthy, focuses on the coming of age of its two protagonists in the Southwest and Mexico.
• Larry McMurtry's novel Lonesome Dove (1985) weaves together stories of cattle herding that portray the difficult lives men and women experienced in the American West at the end of the nineteenth century.
• Proulx's "The Half-Skinned Steer" (1998) appears in the same collection as "Brokeback Mountain" and focuses on the hard landscapes of the West and the troubled people who live there.
• American West (1994), by Dee Brown, explores the last half of the nineteenth century and the development of the enduring myths of the West.