Fiction Analysis Of “Boys And Girls” By Alice Munro
In the short story “Boys and Girls”, author Alice Munro writes about memories and different aspects of her father’s fur trading business in Canada around the World War II era, and her experiences growing up. The author describes how the protagonist and her brother, Laird, grow and learn to accept the harsh reality of predetermined gender expectations for roles based on society’s perception, judgement, and constraints when they experience life changing events. Each adult family member, with their own assigned responsibilities based on gender, play an important role in determining the future of the male and female children and their developing expectations. Munro illustrates the difficult transition period from lacking gender biased identities in an innocent childhood to accepting their defined gender roles and expected labor functions in adulthood, and the conflicting perceptions associated with that transition.
The protagonist works to help her father and he even introduces her to a salesman by saying “Like to have you meet my new hired man”. She carries the fox’s water, rakes cut grass, and follows her father around helping with the “ritualistically important” outside work. The protagonist is rebellious towards her mother’s requests to come inside the house and help her. She states that she “hated the hot dark kitchen in the summer” and “the work in the house was endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing”. She defies the stereotypical expectations in accepting and conforming to the homemaker role women are expected to fulfill and looks for every excuse possible to escape from the house. Ironically, both the indoor and outdoor jobs are both physically demanding tasks, but the protagonist only recognizes her father’s work as a real job.
Munro starts off describing the fox pens as “a world my father made for them. It was surrounded by a high guard fence, like a medieval town, with a gate that was padlocked at night”. The protagonist associates this to her own evasive quest to stay out of the house she sees as prison. Her father is her hero, the fearless, courageous leader of the fox den whose work is honorable. She dreams at night of herself being a hero who valiantly rescues others. However her dreams at night start to change from hero to victim, as her heart slowly starts to mellow and mature.
The turning point in this short story is towards the end and rapidly becomes obvious by a series of events. The protagonist deliberately leaves the gate open allowing Flora to experience freedom, something she dreams of for herself. She knows realistically Flora’s flight of freedom will come to an end abruptly, just as her own freedom in the outside world ends when the protagonist chose to ignore her father’s demand to shut the gate. They will both be captured and accept defeat. Laird, who watched the protagonist’s intentional action, is accepted in the Flora’s hunting party and transitions from boy to man. He further guarantees his new found recognition from to his father when he betrays his sister and proudly announces “It was her fault Flora got away” and “she could of shut the gate and didn’t. She just open’ it up and Flora run out”. When Laird’s mother asked him to go wash his blood streaked hands at the dinner table, he deliberately disregards her but obeys his father’s orders to wash up, solidifying his stance with his mother’s lack of authority. The father relinquishes his custodianship over the protagonist by stating “She’s only a girl”. The two children accept their respective newly assigned gender roles and expectations in the family and society.
Munro’s short story about the difficult transition period from the innocence of childhood ending and accepting the reality of adulthood beginning has several complex layers in her writing style. She takes the reader through conflicting themes of child versus adult, independence versus confinement, and hero to victim. In the end the protagonist and her brother are captured in to accepting their respective gender assigned roles.
