Annie Proulx’s Imaginative Leap: Constructing Gay Masculinity in “Brokeback Mountain”

Like other female novelists, Annie Proulx-until somewhat recently best known for her 1993 novel The Shipping News, winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, which focuses on complex romantic and familial relationships amid the backdrop of a desolate Newfoundland fishing village-regularly constructs male characters and masculinities in her various literary creations. In recognition of her noteworthy accomplishments in this regard, various critics have noted that Proulx "entertains the mythic legends of drunken cowboys, rodeo heroes, betrayed lovers, and aging ranchers" (Bakopoulos 43); creates "tough-asnails characters who do the best they can to make ends meet and to make relationships work" (O'Neal 4D); "vividly portrays the complex interplay between people and their environment" (O'Neal 4D); "deftly uses the influence of the elements taking its toll on the characters' psyches" (D'Souza 32); understands the "deadly accidents that can strike like lightning in the midst of exhausting daily routine that grant her stories their distinctive impact" ("Close" 91); and composes works filled with "images of unrequited longing, wide-open spaces, [and] hardscrabble lives" (Jacobs 369). In addition, critics have observed that Proulx has "made a specialty of what might be called fancy writing about plain folks" (Rubin 20), possesses the impressive abilities "to reveal both the humor and the sheer awfulness of what it's like being caught between a rock and a hard place" (Rubin 20) and "to merge the matter-of-fact and the macabre" ("Close" 91), and continually "demonstrates her creative mastery of the English language" (Glover and Hoffert 115) to create "luscious prose" (Jacobs 369) with "descriptive flair [that] few contemporary writers can match" ("Range" 8), effectively "twirl[ing] words like a black-hat badman twirling Colts, fires them offfor the sheer hell of it, blam, blam, no thought of missing, empty beer cans jump in the dust, misses one, laughs, reloads, blams some more" (Skow 88).When it comes to Proulx's constructions of male characters and masculinities, arguably the most intriguing example of this process occurred with her construction of gay masculinity in the short story "Brokeback Mountain." Originally published in the October 13, 1997 issue of The New Yorker and reprinted two years later in Proulx's collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories, "Brokeback Mountain" tells the tale of two Wyoming ranch hands, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who fall in love while working together as sheepherder and camp tender in 1963 and later pursue their intense magnetic attraction and ongoing relationship over two decades. As Proulx has revealed, this story began taking shape one evening when she noticed an older, lean and muscular ranch hand in a Wyoming bar who was intently watching a group of young cowboys playing pool (qtd. in "Getting" 130). She noticed something in his expression that suggested a kind of bitter longing, which led her to wonder whether he might be gay, and what it must be like for any man to grow up gay in homophobic rural Wyoming (qtd. in "Getting" 130)."'Brokeback' was constructed on the small but tight idea of a couple of home-grown country kids, opinions and self-knowledge shaped by the world around them, finding themselves in emotional waters of increasing depth," Proulx has stated ("Getting" 130). With regard to the process of constructing the short story's two male central characters, she has expressed, "Put yourself in my place: an elderly, white, straight female trying to write about two nineteen-year-old gay kids in 1963. What kind of imaginative leap do you think was necessary? Profound, extreme, large" (qtd. in Minzesheimer 4D). The goal of the present essay, therefore, is to determine just how effectively Proulx used her imagination in constructing the gay masculinity of this story's two protagonists.Without a doubt, Proulx has done a nice job of creating interesting central characters in "Brokeback Mountain. …