Traditional notions of masculinity often demand that men appear invulnerable and repress their emotions, which they equate with weakness. In Legends of the Fall, Harrison uses his male protagonists and the challenges they face to illustrate how the demand to avoid vulnerability results in an inability to grapple with emotions, damaging themselves and the people around them.

Cochran, the protagonist of “Revenge,” served 20 years in the military as a pilot before retiring. Military culture and its occupational demands required him to be emotionally removed from the violence of war and the damage that he perpetrated as a participant. Yet he is not unscathed by his experience. The narrator says, “Now the war only reappeared in nightmares […] he could not bear the sight of a plane” (22). When he falls in love with Miryea, the narrator says, “not since he was eighteen had there been a relationship with a woman in which he wasn’t in complete control” (26). He experiences the vulnerability of his love as a nightmare at first but gradually opens himself up. As a result, he is even more devastated when he loses her.

The other man in “Revenge,”

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