Boys and Girls

Boys and Girls

-Alice Munroe

The story is set in the 1940s, on a fox farm outside a rural area. The farm is a place that reflects the ingenuity of the narrator's father. The pens for the foxes are arranged in neat rows, inside a high guard fence like a "medieval town". The pens each contain a kennel, a wooden ramp, and dishes attached to the wire fence. The fox farm is the father's domain, a place of hard work and creativity, in which the narrator feels at home. The house itself is the mother's domain, but it is a place that the narrator shuns, as she shuns many elements of the feminine world. This piece of literature identifies a coming-of-age story about a young girl who is enjoying her tomboy years and is defiant about becoming a woman.  The theme in "Boys and Girls" is this transition from the childhood tomboy into the mature woman.  The girl is unsure about whether she wants to be a woman or not, because she enjoys her father's work of raising and pelting silver foxes then selling the furs to the Hudson’s Bay Company and wants to be a part of it.

Since the beginning of time gender roles have existed, and when it was nearing the time for the narrator to accept who she was and to give into society will. The narrator’s mother plays a large influence on her of the ideal woman in that era. Consistent small ways of try to get the narrator to spend more and more time in the house by making stylish dresses for the narrator to go to school. In the dark hot kitchen, where the summer sun would peek through the green blinds with laid out flypapers, and an old oilcloth table, a wavy mirror and bumpy linoleum flooring there her mother gave her jobs of peeling peaches that have been soaked in hot water, or cutting up onions to become more feminine. It wasn’t till the following winter that the narrator felt that her mothers influence has been getting too her. “A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become. It was a definition,... [continues]

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