Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx Reviewed
A Gay Cowboy Love Story That Subverted Genres and Defied Stereotypes
Brokeback Mountain will go down in history as the gay cowboy love story that fought its way into the mainstream when it was recreated as a major motion picture in 2005 as directed by Ang Lee and staring Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger, but the epithet of a gay cowboy love story robs Brokeback Mountain of its truly masterful range, a breadth that demonstrates more about human emotion in sixty-four pages than many five-hundred page novels can achieve.
Background to Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx
Originally published in The New Yorker in October, 1997, Annie Proulx's short story Brokeback Mountain earned The New Yorker a National Magazine Award for Fiction and would later go on to be a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize awards. Brokeback Mountain would, during this interim, be slightly expanded and released as part of Proulx's collection of short stories called Close Range: Wyoming Stories, but was also published separately in book form in 1997 and subsequently after the release of the film in 2005.
The Plot of Brokeback Mountain
Set in the unforgiving but savagely lovely Wyoming country, 1963, two teenage ranch-hands by the names of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist are brought together, both broke and needing work, for a sheep herding and tending job up on the unforgiving but lovely Brokeback mountain.
Whilst on Brokeback, away from the world and in the simplicity that isolation brings, the two men fall into a powerful kind of attraction that goes deeper than the "one-shot thing" Ennis later refers to their brief rutting as. Together, Annie Proulx's two lonely cowboys almost seem to make home for themselves, as if, stripped of society's gaze, the two cowboys' nature unfurls like a flower to the warming sun.
Brought down from Brokeback mountain, though, life breaks them apart and both men marry, both have kids and life goes on, but years later they once again collide, and all that was unsaid before stays unsaid now, yet it simmers, boils and makes them bleed as throughout some twenty years Ennis and Jack meet for brief moments of joy in one another's arms, always stealing those seconds in a time that makes being gay a deadly crime. And eventually, one of them does pay the price.
Ennis del Mar and the Prison of Brokeback Mountain
This is not a gay cowboy love story. Whilst love is a theme, and it is a grand, powerful love, at its heart Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the damage repressed sexuality can cause, not just to the two lovers, but to their families too. Ennis goes through life keeping people, including his soon ex-wife Alma and his two daughters, all at a distance, and even Jack, who gets closer than most, is held at arms length.
Ennis is fundamentally homophobic. He isn't bigoted, but he has no way of understanding what it means to be gay, no frame of reference on how to live a life like that knowing only the American West's hand-me-down definition of a man as a tight-lipped red-blooded cowboy, and as such he confines his sexuality to Brokeback, to the mountain where his love first emerged, and there it stays, isolated, lonely, and hardly ever spoken of.
Ultimately, Annie Proulx tells everything a reader should want to know about Ennis when she relates a harrowing and defining childhood memory as a shard of Ennis' remembrance, one that cuts like a knife: Ennis' father drags a young Ennis out to see a local cowboy who was a known homosexual lying dead in a ditch, beaten and naked, killed by the townsfolk who clearly didn't like what they saw. Reason enough, then, to confine your love to a mountain like Brokeback if ever there was one.
This is the fear that boxes Ennis in throughout his life, until one tragic event sparks a change, and by the end of Brokeback Mountain, there is hope that Annie Proulx's cowboy protagonist Ennis, whilst not free by any means, has opened the door to his inner world just a crack. So the reader is led to understanding, Brokeback Mountain is a story about what love can unlock, and what abiding sadness and terrible loneliness can feel like.
Brokeback Mountain almost reads like poetry. It is a work of dense paragraphs, but short, stabbing sentences; a story stripped to the bones and savage in how it reveals itself in bare detail. It does not sugar coat, and it does not hold back. This is where its visceral power lies.
When Ennis mourns, so does the reader, and this is where Annie Proulx's true strength as a writer exists, because she is, at all times, utterly convincing, authentic and deliberate, making Brokeback Mountain a true landmark on the literary landscape, and a compulsive read, not just for those interested in lesbian and gay issues or fiction, but for a wider audience as well. A triumphant and haunting story that is highly recommended.
(Most Recent Edition: November 1, 2005; Paperback: 64 pages; Publisher: Scribner; ISBN-10: 0743271327; ISBN-13: 978-0743271325)
Brokeback Mountain Original Cover
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