If you would ask me why I chose this particular story for my fiction analysis, I would gladly answer, “Because I am a feminist.” Yes, I am that nut case who thinks that women can do the traditional male jobs just fine or, in some cases, even better. I am the one who is against gender discriminations such as unequal compensation of men and women for the same position with the same amount of training and experience, promotion difficulties, and even a matter of courage. I think that because of their natural maternal instinct women generally survive in a “grinder” of modern life much better than men do. Moreover, women are that magic force, which keeps men going. We could be struck by a sad number if only we tried to count how many men lost their life battle and sunk straight to the bottom without a female encouragement. The story “Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro portrays a feminist notion of search for one’s own identity as evident in (from) characterization, symbolism, and theme. In her interviews Munro admitted that she addressed herself in the childhood and adolescence when she wrote autobiographical stories such as “Boys and Girls,” “Walker Brothers Cowboy, “ “Images,” and “Red Dress” (Rasporich 36). Step by step, I will now unravel the process of the central character’s painful self-discovery.
In the story “Boys and Girls,” the central character, a girl, described her life on a fox farm and her process of search for gender identity. From the vivid descriptions, the readers learned how the girl used to watch her father pelting the foxes. The narrator also proudly shared how she helped her father in the barn feeding the foxes, brining the water, and cleaning the watering dishes. The girl witnessed how on several occasions her mother persistently negotiated with her father about getting the girl to work in the house more. One day she secretly watched how her father shot one of the two horses for fox food. At the end of the story she let the second horse, Flora, escape, but the horse was still captured and butchered. Although the girl’s younger brother announced proudly during the family dinner that it was his sister’s fault that Flora got away, her father dismissed her with resignation and even good humor by saying that she was “only a girl.”
Munro presents her characters through direct description and also shows them in action. In “Boys and Girls” the central character is a young girl who narrates the story about her life on a farm and about her search for gender identity. Through various episodes in the story we learn that the girl is courageous, physically strong, adventurous, and highly imaginative. Some of those qualities are typical masculine strengths and would be normally used to describe a male character. Feminism of Munro’s central character is shown through her possession with those masculine qualities and with her exercising them in her everyday life. For example, every night when Laird, the girl’s younger brother fell asleep, she arranged herself tightly under the bed covers and told herself stories. According to the girl’s memories, she “rescued people from a bombed building, shot two rabid wolves, and rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee” (Barnet 254). The fact that those bedtime stories presented the opportunity for heroism, boldness and self-sacrifice, speaks of the girl’s courage, which is usually considered to be a male quality. The girl was also learning to shoot in reality, and although she could not hit anything yet, she practiced definitely a masculine (male) hobby, which may have made her look manly in the eyes of the strangers.
From descriptions of the girl helping her farther to take care of the foxes we conclude that despite of her young age she possessed with enough physical strength to carry out jobs, which involve hard physical labor. One of the girl’s jobs in summer was to bring water to the fox pens. Twice a day, after nine in the morning and then again after supper, she filled the drum at the water pump and trundled it down through the barnyard to the pens, parked it, filled her watering can, and went along the pens. She recalls sarcastically that Laird, her younger brother, “came too, with his little cream and green gardening can, filled too full and knocking against his legs and slopping water on his canvas shoes” (Barnet 255). As opposed to Laird, his older sister used her father’s “real watering can,” though she could only carry it three-quarters full. With great pride, the girl demonstrated to her father that she was capable of doing a man’s work and handling the real tools from the adult world.
Ironically, the girl perceived Laird only as a little boy, not seeing or not wanting to recognize a perspective of him eventually growing up and becoming a man. When one day the children’s mother said to her husband, “Wait till Laird gets a little bigger, then you’ll have a real help,” the girl’s entire nature furiously protested. She felt that no one “could imagine Laird remembering the padlock and cleaning the watering dishes with a leaf on the end of a stick, or even wheeling the tank without it tumbling over” (Barnet 256). In her opinion Laird was of “no help to anybody” because he usually swung himself sick on the swing, went around in circles, or tried to catch caterpillars. It was not until the girl turned eleven years old when she experienced her brother’s physical strength. Once Laird and she were fighting, and “for the first time ever” she had to use all her strength against him. Even so, Laird still caught and pinned her arm for a moment, really hurting her. The farm worker Henry saw the fight and said, “Oh, that is where Laird is gonna show you, one of these days!” (Barnet 257). This was the first time when the girl realized that her brother, slowly but surely, began turning into a man. However, the feminist part of her character refused to surrender, saying that she “was getting bigger too.”
From the two outstanding episodes we learn that the central character in “Boys and Girls” was not only courageous and athletic, but also adventurous. On the day the children’s father was going to shot one of the two horses, Mack, he sent them out of the stable to play around the house. The girl never saw her father shoot a horse, but she knew where it was done. Dying from curiosity, she led Laird around to the front door of the barn, opened it carefully, and went in. The hay was low, and the children had to pile it up in one corner. Then the girl boosted her brother up and hoisted herself. They found the knotholes in the barn walls and quietly watched Mack being shot. When Mack’s legs stopped kicking in the air and his muscles sank, the girl said in a congratulatory way, “Now you’ve seen how they shoot a horse” (Barnet 259). The procedure of shooting a horse was not something the girl wanted to see, but as she admitted, “it was better to see and know as if a thing really happened” (Barnet 258). This confession characterizes the girl as a person of action and also communicates her need for being a center of attention. She did not want other people tell her how they saw a horse being shot; instead, she wanted to watch the process herself so that she could tell about it.
Right after Mack was shot, the girl remembered how, when Laird was little, she had brought him into the barn and told him to climb the ladder to the top beam. When he did, she ran screaming to her father. Her mother leaned against the ladder crying while her father climbed up and brought Laird down. Both parents arrived at a conclusion that the girl simply was not watching her brother, and, of course, the boy was too little to know enough to tell. We find out from the narrative that the girl had done it not out of cruelty, but “out of a need for excitement and a desire for something to happen” so she could tell about it (Barnet 259). The life on the farm was safe and steady, and the girl carried out the same old chores day after day, year after year. It was the routine that the girl could not put up with, and it was a need for exciting adventure that inspired the girl to commit these two acts. Nothing can add more to an image of a feminist character than these two episodes where the girl basically acted as a leader. Both times she told her younger brother exactly what she wanted him to do, and both times he obediently followed her orders. Here is another way to look at it: How often do we run into a traditional, non-feminist girl who wants to see a horse shot and who puts her brother’s life in danger for fun?
The same need for excitement along with unsatisfactory, boring reality boosted the young girl’s immense imagination. The narrator lived in two worlds, imaginary and real, traveling back and forth in her mind between home and an exotic other place. As I mentioned in several other paragraphs throughout my essay, the girl recalls how in her early bedtime stories she “rescued people from a bombed building, shot two rabid wolves, and rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee.” When the central character turned eleven years old, her fantasies underwent a substantial change. Now men rescued her and the stories were concerned with what the girl looked like. Even description of the fox pens was touched by the girl’s vivid imagination that turned the entire animal area with a high guard fence into “a medieval town.” The girl referred to her imaginary world as “recognizably mine” and was regretful of the real world, which did not present opportunities for courage, boldness, and self-sacrifice. As Carscallen noted, in Munro’s writing “again and again we have the sense of a place or time or order of things standing apart from our own” (Carscallen 1). MacKendrick agrees with Carscallen by saying that “Munro’s central characters often find themselves in circumstances where it seems that anything may happen,” and that only these central characters “see the ordinary as extraordinary”(MacKendrick 115). We find extensive usage of the imaginary world in the many other stories by Alice Munro such as “At the Other Place,” “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” “Red Dress,” “Day of the Butterfly,” and “Miles City, Montana” to name a few.
Unfortunately, the need for excitement had its own consequences—a sense of guilt that emerged in a form of meditation. Munro showed this particular episode of meditation by a flashback technique when the girl suddenly recalled that the case with her brother occurred in spring, that the hay was low, and that Laird was wearing a little bulky brown and white checked coat. Every time she saw that coat hanging in the closet, she felt a weigh in her stomach and the sadness of unvoiced, secret guilt (Barnet 259). Louis MacKendrick labeled this case of meditation as “one minor example of a treachery of the heart” (MacKendrick 65). The fact that the girl dwelled on her shameful action from the past leads me to believe that she was not only adventurous, but also sensitive.
From another brief episode of meditation, we learn that the girl struggled to understand the reasons why her mother wanted her to help more in the house knowing that her daughter absolutely hated the housework. At first, the girl thought that her mother did it “simply out of perversity and to try her power,” but after she matured a bit, she regretfully admitted: “It did not occur to me that she [mother] could be lonely or jealous” (Barnet 256). I think that this sudden wisdom and sympathy appeared in the girl’s character not only due to her mature age, but also because, I would even highlight, mainly because she was a true female. I know from experience that females usually can explain the inner motives of human behavior better than males can.
A meditative nature of the central characters is evident on a larger scale in the other stories by Munro. As Carscallen claims, “it is typical of Munro’s characters to dwell on causes” because they feel, as the narrator of “Home” does, that “seemingly malicious or silly behavior should be explained, and explained sympathetically” (Carscallen 26). We also can see a remarkable degree of meditation in “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” In that story Et watched the others through the long evening on the porch, recalled things that in turn recalled Blaikie’s reappearance, the old love affair, and Char’s attempted suicide. It was Et who connected the suicide with the rat poison and fatally matched the group sitting together in apparent concord. In the same way a conversation in “The Ferguson Girls Must Never Marry” was twice interrupted by lengthy episodes from the past that are clearly memories touched off in Bonnies’s mind (Carscallen 19).
In “Boys and Girls,” the notion of freedom is symbolically represented by the horses from the girl’s own stories and from reality. As a child, the girl used to tell herself stories where, among other things, she “rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee,” which she considered to be an act of heroism (Barnet 254). The winter when the girl turned eleven years old, her father kept two horses, Mack and Flora, in the stable because the foxes were fed horsemeat. In spring Mack was shot first. On the day Flora’s turn to be shot came, she broke away form the farm helper Henry. The girl and her brother climbed up the fence and watched Flora running free in the barnyard. Despite the fact that Flora was just an old sorrel mare, “it was exciting to see her running, whinnying, going up on her hind legs, prancing and threatening like a horse in a Western movie” (Barnet 260). Generally, a horse that runs free like “an unbroken ranch horse,” symbolizes a freedom of spirit and freedom of existence (being). The horse that was locked in a dark stable for several long winter months, could not resist the power of space and fresh air, and understandably went wild, when she was taken out on a bright spring day. Perhaps, a sense of the coming end made Flora take advantage of a sudden freedom and enjoy the last moments of her life. No wonder that the independence-spirited girl who was confined in the same old farm for eleven years, got excited about watching broken free Flora.
Munro used symbolism in her other stories as well. For example, a narrator in the story “Day of the Butterfly” described her first experience with death of her six-grade classmate. In that story “the immense, complicated bows of fine satin ribbon,” which were made by the mothers for Myra’s last birthday party in the hospital symbolized “the artificial, decorative function of women” (Rasporich 37).
The theme of “Boys and Girls” addresses the problem of acquiring self-awareness as a girl. For the girl such awareness comes only with a sense of shame and humiliation—her dreams of heroism are of kind not usually attributed to girls and her one act of greatness (letting Flora escape) is misinterpreted, leaving her marked as “only” a girl. Munro had successfully played upon the word “girl” not only in a verbal exchange between the father and the salesman, but also by suggesting its connotations throughout the story. Let me illustrate my claim. The girl differentiated the father’s world from that of the mother. By so doing, she appears to be arriving at some sense of self-definition, particularly by insinuating herself into the father’s world. For example, nothing gives her a greater sense of pride than to be introduced by her father as “my new hired man,” a phrase that protects her from the salesman’s observation, “I thought it was only a girl” (Barnet 255). Despite a belittling connotation, her first encounter with what other people meant by the word “girl” was rather pleasurable, and she never referred regretfully to that instance throughout the story. Because the girl considered working for her father “ritualistically important,” we can see how her dwellings about the choice between the house and the barn symbolize a female and male difference. Moreover, these dwellings portray a typical female dilemma between a sense of independence and submissiveness. When the outdoor work was pleasant, desirable, and “ritualistically important,” the housework, by contrast, was “endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing.” Because of the girl’s attachment to the father, her mother feels as if there is “no girl in the family at all” (Barnet 256). Ironically, when one day, the girl’s mother comes outside to talk to her husband, the girl feels that the mother has no business at the barn. This was the second time when the girl heard adults bringing up the theme of being a “girl.” From the conversation she overheard, the girl concluded that her mother was simply plotting, and she did not expect her father to pay any attention to what the mother said.
The winter when the girl was eleven years old, she began to hear a great deal more on the same theme her mother discussed with her father in front of the barn. The word “girl” no longer seemed innocent and unburdened like a word “child.” For the first time she realized that a girl was not, as she supposed, simply what she was; it was that she had to become. As the narrator says, “It was a definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment. Also it was a joke on me” (Barnet 257). She felt that people around expected a certain behavior from her, the kind of behavior that is appropriate, typical, and socially acceptable for a girl.
During a few weeks when the children’s grandmother stayed with the family, the girl got a third chance to feel directly a social pressure associated with the word “girl.” The girl heard quite a few alarming things such as “Girls don’t slam doors like that,” and “Girls keep their knees together when they sit down.” The worst the narrator heard was the response “That’s none of the girl’s business” when she asked some subject-related questions (Barnet 257). The girl continued to slam the doors and sit as awkwardly as possible, thinking that by such measures she kept herself free. Given that much information, we can clearly see a conflict between regarding herself as the essential, and the social pressure to accept herself as a passive object.
Professor Blodget brought up an interesting nuance of the theme by pointing out that a word “girl” was qualified twice in the story at its first and final usage by the word “only.” Based on this, he suggested that in “Boys and Girls” a state of becoming a girl “was accompanied by a sense of irrevocable separation and loss” (Blodget 35). By the forth encounter with the hidden meanings of the word “girl,” the girl’s destiny was sealed in her father’s final words “She is only a girl,” which absolved and dismissed her for good. I am surprised by the ease, with which men can label us, women, as “only girls” based just on one act of kindness. To the girl in the story, this label meant a loss of not only her status as the father’s helper, but also a loss of her individual identity and the freedom of choice. Blodget contributed greatly to my own understanding of the story by a remarkable historic insight, where he explains:
To
be only a girl is rejection of a radical kind, for in the world of the rural
Ontario farm in the late thirties and early forties aspirations that went beyond
those of sexual stereotypes were not simply wrong, they were taboo. They are not corrected by anger, but by a more powerful
method, by “good humor.” The
implication is that to be a girl is a destiny that carries with it a certain
stupidity that cannot be corrected (Blodgett 33).
Let us now analyze the indications in the text that foreshadow the internal changes occurring in the girl. After watching her father pelting the foxes on a regular basis, and especially after watching Mack being shot, the girl claimed that she was used to seeing the death of the animals, and that she accepted it as a necessity by which the farmers lived. However, the girl was surprised by a new sentimental feeling that filled up her heart. On the day she found out that Flora was going to be shot, the girl felt a little ashamed. She recalled how “there was a new wariness, a sense of holding-off, in my attitude to my father and his work” (Barnet 260). By this slight bit of foreshadowing Munro gives us a clue that the seemingly masculine girl began slowly turning into a sensitive young lady.
And surely, later on in the story the narrator leaves not doubt in the reader’s mind about the core changes that had occurred in her internal world. The girl described how she decorated her part of the children’s bedroom trying to make it fancy, and how she separated her section from the one of her brother. More importantly, the plot of her bedtime stories had also significantly transformed. Although the story might start off in the old way, “with a spectacular danger, a fire or wild animals,” and for a while the girl might rescue people; then things would change around, and instead, somebody would rescue her. The significance of a twist here is that “somebody” was usually “a boy from our class at school, or even Mr. Campbell, our teacher” (Barnet 261). I would not be surprised if the girl would indicate somehow that she was romantically attracted to her teacher. At this point the imaginary story was concerned with what the girl looked like—what dress did she wear and how long her hair was. By the time the girl worked out these details in her mind, the initial excitement of the story was lost. All these confessions only prove the original claim that the narrator was a “girl,” which, among other things, means surrendering to a male savior.
Being a girl also means having a soft heart and emotional personality. We can find a proof of this statement in the two episodes where the girl allowed Flora escape and where she cried while her father questioned her about that positive gesture. According to the girl’s own recollection, she could not understand why she disobeyed her father when instead of shutting the gate, she opened it as wide as she could. She claimed with confidence that she did not plan this in advance, or she did not decide to do this on the spot; she just did it. The irony of this situation comes to the surface when the girl tells us that she completely understands the interconnection of the chain of events she interfered. She knew that her father had paid for the horse, that the family needed the meat to feed the foxes, that the family needed the foxes to make their living, that her father would catch the horse anyway, and that all she did was created more work for him. Let us contemplate about the force that pushed the girl to free the horse. Obviously, the girl did not wish for the horse to die. But why? I think that the horse that was about to lose her life, reminded the girl of herself who was about to lose her freedom of self-concept and a freedom choice. The fact that Flora broke free and ran away makes me think that she sensed the coming end. The horse ran away because she did not want to die. Flora’s unwillingness to die symbolizes the girl’s unwillingness to work in the house for her mother. To the girl, not only her freedom, but also her entire future would die with the death of the horse. Perhaps, that is why the girl feels so closely connected to the horse, and that is why the girl, lead by her own subconscious, reflexively helps Flora escape.
At the very end of the story we see how emotional the narrator really is. During the family dinner Laird announced that his sister could have shut the gate but she did not do so. When the father asked his daughter if that statement was true, she nodded quietly, swallowed food with great difficulty, and began crying. A typical female reaction to the father’s question, tears that flooded her eyes, illustrates the emotional aspect of being a girl. The society created certain rules of acceptable social behavior for boys and girls, for men and women. From the early childhood, the boys are taught not to display their sensitivity; in other words, they are taught not to cry on public. By contrast, it is perfectly fine for the girls to cry in any place, at any time, for whatever reason. According to Rasporich, the girl’s final tears suggest compliance (Rasporich 38). The girl only commented that she was ashamed of her tears, of the mere fact of crying. Perhaps, her sensitive feminine nature confronted her feminist desire to stay strong as a man, and when the first finally won over, the girl bursted into tears. I suggest that a fear of punishment for letting Flora escape could be another possible reason for crying. I could not ignore the fact that Munro made her central character cry only once during the entire narrative, and she purposely saved this episode until (for) the end the story. I am convinced that by using this technique Munro made a powerful point—she revealed a conflict between the two parts of the girl’s self: masculine and feminine.
In “Boys and Girls” Munro recorded the humiliated and anguished psychology of a child who was being conditioned by society to become a definition—a girl, which she perceived as a joke on herself. The characterization, symbolism, and theme were the three tools Munro used to explore the process of self-discovery of a young farm girl. The child found herself no longer free to help her fox-farmer father outdoors, but instead was forced to do the hated housework. The climax of the story occurred when the girl freed a horse that was about to be shot and by so doing demonstrated that she was “only a girl” as her father commented. The story pictures a contradiction between the girl’s status as a real human being and her vocation as a female. Although there is no real resolution to the situation in “Boys and Girls” and it seems that the girl is conforming to social rules by adjusting her fantasies, she is partly victorious when she opens the gate in an attempt to rescue the fated horse. In the girl’s opinion, the horse symbolized freedom, and the death of the animal meant the end of her own freedom and a loss of her identity. The story suggests a deep contemplation about how badly could the social rules and expectations alter the one’s self-concept. My thoughts boil down to a question, “Why the traditional patriarchal world was so opposed of the concept of feminism in the early forties, and why the smoke of this conflict still echoes today?”
Works Cited
Barnet, Sylvan, et al. An Introduction to Literature. 12th ed. New York: Longman, 2001.
Blodgett, E.D. Alice Munro. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.
Carscallen, James. The Other Country: Patterns in the Writing of Alice Munro. Ontario:
ECW Press, 1993.
MacKendrick, Louis K. Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Acts. Ontario: ECW
Press, 1983.
Rasporich, Beverly J. Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro.
The University of Alberta Press, 1990.