Meanwhile, Jack has extramarital affairs with both men and women and is relegated to a vague managerial role when Lureen inherits her father’s business, leaving him with less power than his wife. Ennis loses interest in Alma, both emotionally and sexually, and she divorces him, taking the girls with her. However, when Ennis and Jack reignite their affair, both men’s façades of traditional masculinity begin to fall apart. Likewise, Jack marries Lureen and moves to Texas, where he has a son. Ennis asserts dominance over Alma, dictating where they live, how much money they earn, and how they have sex.
Ennis and Alma marry and have two girls, whom Ennis adores. At first, both men appear to have picture-perfect families. Traditional notions of masculinity prize heterosexual virility and dominance, and for a time, it seems that both Jack and Ennis are able to fit into this narrow ideal. Like Ennis’s father “punishing” Earl for his homosexuality, Jack’s father’s punishment of Jack for soiling himself shows that masculine norms are often reinforced through violence and humiliation, no matter how minor or accidental the “transgression.” Likewise, Ennis recalls a story Jack told him about how his father once beat and urinated on him for not making it to the toilet in time, even though he was only three or four years old. This experience was clearly meant to impress upon Ennis that being gay was not acceptable. When he was a young boy, for instance, Ennis’s father took him to see the mutilated corpse of a gay man ( Earl), and Ennis even surmises that his father may have been one of the men who killed Earl. Jack and Ennis have both internalized homophobic concepts of masculinity that they learned from their fathers. Ultimately, this reveals the inherent flaws of narrowly defining how an entire gender must act and advocates for a more expansive definition of masculinity-one that includes non-heterosexual forms of sexual expression.
Proulx explores the intersection of masculinity and homosexuality by illustrating the ways in which society sees any deviation from the very narrow traditional notions of masculinity as unnatural and deserving of punishment. Jack and Ennis’s homosexuality defies the masculine norms under which they have been raised, leaving them unable to reconcile their understanding of the lives they are supposed to lead as men with the relationships they want to pursue.
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