32 pages • 1 hour read
Brokeback Mountain
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Background
Authorial Context: Annie Proulx
Content Warning: This section mentions anti-gay prejudice and hate crimes.
Annie Proulx was born in Connecticut in 1935 and lived in the northeast United States and Canada for much of her early and academic life. She published her first collection of short stories in 1988 (Heart Songs and Other Stories) and her first novel in 1992 (Postcards). Proulx focuses her writing around place—the environments in her stories shape and affect her characters. She has been called a regional writer, but she eschews the traditional definition as one who identifies with one region and stays with it. Proulx’s writing instead ranges from Newfoundland to rural Wyoming. Her lifelong love of and experience in the outdoors figure prominently in her writing, as do people who live near and interact regularly with natural forces.
Proulx’s characters are often victims of unwanted social change: “She often takes as her subject the dissolution of North American rural life: farmers, laborers, and ranchers whose livelihood is destroyed both by changes in society and their own purblind stubbornness” (Proulx, Annie. Interview with Christopher Cox. “Annie Proulx, The Art of Fiction No. 199.” The Paris Review, vol. 188, spring 2009). Ennis and Jack find themselves affected by these factors; Ennis can’t find long-term work as ranches dwindle in size or are sold off, and Jack’s experience as a rodeo cowboy is affected by a shift to “guys with money […] trained athaletes” (268).
Although her characters’ struggles often carry themes of displacement and social change, Proulx makes it clear that her writing is about the story: “Storytelling trumps social issues. […] I don’t write to inspire social change, but I do like situations of massive economic or cultural change as a background. We think of change as benign, but it chews some people up and spits them out” (Proulx, “The Art of Fiction No. 199”). Although “Brokeback Mountain” does implicitly critique various aspects of American society, most obviously its heteronormativity but also The Inescapable Effects and Momentum of Poverty, it is first and foremost a love story.
Socio-Cultural Context: Late 20th-Century LGBTQ+ Movement
Beginning with the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the struggles of LGBTQ+ individuals have become more visible. After Ronald Regan refused to say the word “AIDS” as thousands of people were dying, an open movement to resist discrimination based on orientation began to emerge in the United States. Mainstream bookstores began to devote shelf-space to queer literature, and plays and films emerged portraying queer relationships and the struggles many LGBTQ+ individuals faced. The play Rent, which debuted in 1994, hit Broadway with full force to critical acclaim, and 1990s movies such as The Birdcage, Philadelphia, and Boys Don’t Cry received widespread attention.
These movies both celebrated queer life and showed the danger LGBTQ+ individuals face in their everyday lives. When Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” was published in The New Yorker in 1997, it wasn’t necessarily groundbreaking, but it was on the front edge of the movement to legitimize such stories. Due to its greater visibility, the 2005 film adaptation was arguably more impactful, bringing a classic star-crossed lovers story to the screen from an LGTBQ+ perspective and challenging stereotypes about gay men. In both book and film, Ennis’s fear of anti-gay violence and Jack’s unfulfilled desire to live life openly together reflect real concerns of contemporaneous LGTBQ+ communities. Proulx heightens this tension via the story’s setting—rural Wyoming of the 1960s through 1980s, steeped in toxic masculinity and heteronormative culture. In 1998, almost exactly one year after Proulx’s story was published, Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten, tortured, and left to die in just this setting.
Notwithstanding its sociocultural context, Proulx says the story is primarily a love story. However, when discussing the film, she adds that [t]he only people who would have problems with it are people who are very insecure about themselves and their own sexuality and who would be putting up a defense, and that’s usually young men who haven’t figured things out yet. Jack and Ennis would probably have trouble with this movie (Proulx, Annie. “Annie Proulx Tells the Story Behind ‘Brokeback Mountain.’” The Advocate, 17 Dec. 2005).
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