Gender Roles Within A Society In Three Short Stories
Society has a way of impacting a young person’s life in more ways than not. It can either suck people in to the mainstream of things and leave them there to die or it can show people what their life is going to be like and help them make decisions to leave. The main character’s from the stories “Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro, “The Boat” by Alistair Macleod and “Aunt Moon’s Young Man” by Linda Hogan each face what society is like and many challenges coming from it. The main characters from each of these stories each have their own gender roles in society which affects each one in different ways in becoming an adult.
The main character from “Boys and Girls” has many different problems in becoming a women. Right from the beginning all she wanted to do was help her dad on the farm. She loved to do “mans work”. In that time women were unequal to man. It was different for a lady to want to help out so much on the farm. The narrator hated what her mother did, she did not want to stay in the house to do dishes, laundry or cook. All she wanted was to be acknowledged by her dad, which he rarely did. “My father did not talk to me unless it was about the job we were doing. . . One time a feed salesman came down into the pens to talk to him and my father said, “Like to have you meet my new hired man. ” I turned away and raked furiously, red in the face with pleasure. “could have fooled me. ” Said the salesman. “I thought it was only girl”’. Society did not accept girls to be helpers on the farm and it was one of her first experiences in becoming a women. The narrator next realization of not wanting to do a “mans” job is being apart of the deaths of their horses. She is disgusted by the way her family has handled the killing of her horses. When her father tries to get Flora she opens the pen door to set the horse free. Later that night when Laird is showing the blood of the horse on his hands proudly, she feels sick to her stomach. She no longer wanted to do a “mans” job and accepted it when her brother blamed her for letting flora get away, with her dad not punishing her but only saying “She’s only a girl”’.
“The Boat” is a great story of showing perseverance and not reforming to society. The narrator from this story dreaming of what his old life was like back home in Nova Scotia. He was the only boy born in his huge family. This was a town where fishing was a very popular way for supporting the family. Where books and schooling was not a first choice to most families, the father in this family loved to read and so did his sisters. The mother however, hated books and loved the old way of life, just as most of the society did. “In the next world God will see to those who waste their lives reading useless books when they should be about there work”’. The mother wanted all her children to reform to society where the women would stay at home and do the chores, while the men go out and fish to sustain the family. The boy just like his father did not want to fish. They both wished they could have gotten an education and find jobs elsewhere. All the men in this society do not go to school to get a good job but stay and fish for a har earned living. The mother in family resents the girls leaving home with an education and their new boys friends. “Sometimes she would say softly to her sisters, “I don’t know what’s the matter with my girls. It seems none of them are interested in any of the right things”. The real perseverance is when the narrators father dies and it finally takes the courage for him to leave the family and pursue his dreams of becoming a professor. Not very men were able to get out of the way this society sucked the souls of many in this small fishing community, he was just one of the lucky people who were able to do it. The small place of Pickens Oklahoma was a hurting town just after the depression. This was a town were people were born there, raised there and died there. Sis did not want to live there and decided to finish school in the city. She resented what Pickens was all about, she hated the gossip that the town carried and the way life was lived there.
Aunt Moon was so different from the rest of the town and that’s what she loved most. “Aunt Moon with her second sight and heavy breasts managed to break all the rules. She threw back her head and laughed out loud, showing off the worn edges of her teeth”. Aunt Moon did not care what other people thought of her, she was not going to be like the rest of people in Pickens. Sis needed to gain her own identity which she was never going to get at home. Wiping the cold kiss off her face was important because she had no identity, it was like she was another women living in Pickens. “And I had a small, beautiful women in my eye”. This was the last sentence in the story and it is the most important. This shows how Sis now has her own identity when she is leaving her home. She had beaten what she desperately did not want to become and was not knowing where live would take her or if she would ever be back. Aunt Moon was the inspiration and guidance Sis needed to leave and experience the world for its greatness outside of Pickens.
The characters in these stories all have their coming of age experience when they realise what society is doing. All of stories show how unfair society is towards males and females. Society looks to reform people and have their own way of life. These characters show lots of grit and determination to either realize what their role is or to help them live the way they want to.
