The Importance Of Gender Roles In “Boys And Girls” By Alice Munro

The importance of gender roles in “Boys and girls” by Alice Munro

Boys and girls is a coming-of-age short story written by the Canadian writer Alice Munro. It was included in the short-story collection Dance of the Happy Shades, which was published in 1968. This story takes place in 1940, when Canadian society (as American’s and also Europe’s) was infested with gender roles and stereotypes.The theme in the story is the transition from the childhood tomboy into the mature woman.

Alice Munro tells us a story about a young girl who was not ready to accept her gender identity in a society where women were viewed as second-class citizens. The young girl’s father was a fox farmer and though he didn’t talk to her unless it was about the job they were doing, she loved helping him workingoutside with the foxes and that filled her with pride. The girl wanted her father attention and she thought that her father’s work was “ritualistically important” and that’s why she preferred helping him, instead of helping her mother in the kitchen; a work, which seemed to be “endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing”. However, even though the narrator could do more work than her youngerbrother, she was still under appreciated, and she noticed that, when she heard her mother saying to her father: “Wait till Laird gets a little bigger, then you’ll have a real help”. A male’s birth used to be considered superior to a woman’s, and that’s why the family had innate expectations of Laird to follow in his father’s footsteps.

Her parents were more concerned with their son and that he coulddo no wrong (this reflects society’s notion at the time, how men were always right), so she wants to be more than “just a girl”, and she starts to disobey her grandma’s commands like “Girls don’t slam doors like that” or “Girls keep their knees together when they sit down” because she thinks that it will keep her free. Girls were expected to be dainty and quaint, while men were expected to be therough and tumble one, and that’s why she wanted to become powerful and independent just like in the stories she used to tell to herself at nights, in which she “rescued people from a bombed building […] shot two rabid wolves who were menacing the schoolyard […] and rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee, acknowledging the townspeople’s gratitude for some yet-to-be-worked-outpiece of heroism…”

She identifies with Flora, one of the family’s horses whose meat was used by her father in order to feed the foxes. Flora was a violent horse, which, after winter, would be shot, just as Mack, the other family’s horse. The day they were going to shoot Flora, the young girl and Laird were asked to close the gate of the fence when they saw their father and his hired man introuble with the horse, because Flora was about to escape. The young girl could have closed the gate but she didn’t do it and Laird went with his father and his assistant to capture the mare in order to kill her.

When they came back home Laird lifted his arm to show off a streak of blood and said: “We shot old Flora and cut her up in fifty pieces”. When he said that, his mother told him not to golike this to her table, but he didn’t go to wash the blood off until his father said so. That was when Laird realized that he was superior to his sister and girls in general just because he was a boy and male gender was superior to female gender.

While having dinner and after realizing that, Laird blames his sister of having left open the gate instead of closing it, and that was how Flora wasable to got away. His father asked the young girl if that was true and the young girl nodded and began to cry. After that, Laird said matter-of-factly: “She’s crying”, and his father didn’t say a word, except: “Never mind, she’s only a girl”. Then, the young girl wasn’t able to react, and she didn’t get annoyed because off her father’s remark, because, he may be right and she may be “just a...