the short story by Alice Munro. A thematic introduction written by the inimitable Abigail Cohrs for high-schoolers.
In a year of changing seasons, “Boys and Girls” depicts the unnamed
narrator’s experience growing up on a farm. Her gender is not
immediately clear from the beginning, which echoes the relative freedom
she experiences when she is primarily considered a child rather than a
girl. However, when others begin treating her as a girl rather than a
child, conflict develops between her own desires and traditional
expectations for her behavior. Childhood is liberating, allowing the
narrator more agency, but girlhood is treacherous. As a child, she
enjoys helping her father with outdoor tasks like raking and watering,
but dreads helping her mother in the kitchen, “eyes smarting and
streaming” as she cuts onions. Knowing that even more menial work lies
in store for her in the future, she no longer sees the word
girl as “innocent and unburdened, like the word
child,” but understands it to carry the colossal weight of an
unfair expectation.
Although she resents the idea of becoming a girl, she slowly but surely
shifts towards it. In childhood, she imagines herself as a valiant
knight endowed with the traditionally masculine virtues of gallantry and
courage. However, in girlhood, she increasingly imagines herself not as
the rescuer but as the rescued. Stories had been her escape and
liberation, but they begin to resemble the feminine tales her mother
tells her about boys and dresses. This return to convention within her
imagination shows how the narrator unconsciously adjusts to societal and
familial expectations for girls. The narrator begins to internalize the
idea that she is “only a girl,” which negatively impacts her
self-esteem. Through a poignant portrayal of the narrator’s
transformation from childhood to girlhood, Munro argues that gender
expectations have a damaging effect on children, even in the most subtle
and unconscious ways.
The narrator’s family divides responsibilities on the farm in a traditional manner: the mother works inside, the father works outside. The narrator loves the outside, but feels afraid of the house, particularly the unfinished upstairs bedroom and the claustrophobic kitchen. The inside represents tedium, while the outside represents freedom. The narrator’s fascination with the outside, the masculine, counters her fear and dread of the inside, the feminine. Munro goes on to employ the duality even further. Inside and outside also work to show the narrator’s relationship to knowledge. The narrator is often on the outside of the inner workings of the farm, but gradually moves closer to being on the inside. In other words, she gets to be in the know. This movement from metaphorical outside to inside allows the narrator to experience all aspects of farm life, including the morbid and grotesque. Exchanging innocence for experience, she gains knowledge through observation and secrecy; for instance, by spying on her father as he skins foxes and kills horses. Approaching the inside, the narrator feels less afraid of it, but also possesses a new understanding of how death and violence play a part in their lives. Being on the inside allows her to gain knowledge and awareness, but also facilitates a loss of curiosity and innocence. Spying on the inside becomes an emphatically less exciting adventure for her when she actually becomes integrated into it, and when she becomes aware that she cannot go back outside. She cannot take back her discoveries. In Munro’s portrayal of the narrator’s evolution from outside to inside, she shows how seeking out knowledge is desirable, but often results in disillusionment.
In “Boys and Girls,” death is routine. The narrator divulges how her
father raises foxes for their pelts, raises horses for their labor,
slaughters them, and feeds the foxes with their meat. A grim way to make
a living. This thread of the story exists in parallel to how the parents
raise the children. In the same way that the foxes are raised for their
fur and the horses are raised for their meat, the boy is raised to be a
boy, and the girl is raised to be a girl.
The horses Flora and Mack parallel the unnamed female narrator and her
brother Laird. All of them are to some extent aware of their
predicaments, but the girls are understandably more outraged than the
boys. Mack and Laird are relaxed and obedient. Mack is shot by the
father without a fight, and Laird reacts to the sight only with a groan
of surprise. But Flora gallops and kicks, and attempts to run off. This
can be read as both a reproach and an indignant attempt to escape the
farm and her fate. The narrator can sympathize: she understands that
killing animals and conforming to gender roles is how the family makes a
living, but rightfully resists this. Although the narrator aids in her
escape, Flora still dies brutally at the hands of the father and
brother, who, according to Laird, cut her into fifty pieces. Laird’s
adventurous initiation into boyhood is juxtaposed against the narrator’s
humiliating initiation into girlhood.
Nevertheless, both siblings are metaphorically killed by their parents
in the same way the horses are killed literally. Just as the foxes feed
on horse meat, the profit of the farm feeds on labor divided according
to traditional gender roles. The mother seems alone in mourning this, in
her “dead-quiet, regretful” way of talking about the narrator, and her
dislike of the entire pelting operation. Using horse slaughter as a
symbol for the siblings’ initiation into their roles on the farm, Munro
shows that conforming to gender roles is a metaphorical death, a loss of
identity.
In “Boys and Girls,” Munro makes the argument that humor can be a tool of sexism and oppression; the male characters often make jokes at the expense of female characters. For farmhand Henry Blair, humor is a weapon as well as a means of petty personal entertainment. He tends to laugh at death and gender, which the narrator has some awareness of–– for example, Henry laughs cruelly at the idea of her soon becoming weaker than her younger brother Laird when he nearly beats her in a fight, and the narrator is both physically and emotionally wounded.
The narrator enjoys observing the happenings of the farm, and sometimes interfering with truth to create exciting material for the stories she loves to tell and imagine. Her brother Laird keeps her secrets until the final scene, in which he tells their parents that the narrator intentionally freed Flora the horse. Facing the truth directly by saying it out loud, the narrator suffers a great shock; through this event, Munro effectively shows how secrecy, fantasy, and fiction can give us power over our life circumstances, and how jarring it can be when that power is forcibly taken away.
Knowing her fate is to do women’s work, the narrator struggles to find power and freedom. However, she understands that her radical acts have only a temporary effect: after the narrator lets Flora escape, the men go after the horse in an exaggeratedly masculine manner, in a truck loaded with guns and knives, and the narrator then has to grapple with the futility of her actions. Munro creates sympathy for the narrator, advocating for gender equality by contrasting short-lived illusions of power and freedom with a long-term reality of captivity.