Stereotypes In Brokeback Mountain

The Midwest in the 1960’s was a completely different world than it is today. It was a time of cowboys who worked from a young, adolescent age at hands-on jobs all the way through adulthood until they became too old to do so. These men were seen as real manly fellows, and had “manly” interests. Family life in this time was the basic American visualization, with a working husband who would come home after a long day of working to his wife and children. Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist are men in this time period that challenge the stereotype of what a cowboy was expected to be. They are soul-mates who meet as teenage boys, and they spend their lives hiding the love they have for one another. In “Brokeback Mountain”, the novel accentuates the uncharacteristic

He wished that there was more closeness and wished he had spent more time with Jack. When he goes to his house, he takes in all of the things he wished he could have seen with Jack. Their relationship was “stiff with long suspension”, just like the shirts he found in the closet that Jack had kept from Brokeback Mountain (540). The long suspension of the shirts suggests the long distance between them and how there was not as much communication as they had hoped. They were rarely together, and it was hard for them to be close when they were together because Ennis was too prideful to allow himself to be in a relationship with a man. Their love was nothing more than two old hidden shirts in the back of a closet that no one could

He knows he loved him, and knows Jack felt the same. Ennis felt a lot of remorse because they shared so much love for one another. When he finds his shirt “stolen by Jack and hidden… inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one”, it is a model of how he felt with Jack. They concealed their love from the world, and made it so no person could ever recognize it. It also symbolized how Jack took care of Ennis, in the way that his shirt was inside of Jack’s. It was as if his shirt cradled Ennis’, which was how they treated each other, very lovingly and affectionately. The shirts were one-in-the-same, just like Ennis and Jack were. They were each in-love with the other, and always longed be together because they so