Gender Roles In Boys And Girls By Alice Munro

“Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro tells a story about a young girl’s search for identity and opposition to womanhood in a society with well-defined gender roles. The story takes place in the 1940s on her family’s fox farm in Canada. Becoming a “girl” was a time filled with struggles for the young protagonist because she knew that women were considered inferior to men. Originally, she tried to prevent being the “typical girl” by resisting her parents’ attempts to educate her behaviors that women of this time were expected to posses. This defiance, however, proved to be hopeless. The fact that the main character is nameless symbolizes the narrator’s lack of identity. However, the girl’s little brother has a name and this symbolizes that simply because he is a boy, he is more powerful and of greater importance. These names were given intentionally by Munro to signify how at birth the male child was inherently deemed superior to his sister. The protagonist wants to work with her father on their fox farm and likes the attention that he gives her when they work together: “My father did not talk to me unless it was about the job we were doing … Nevertheless I worked willingly under his eyes, and with a feeling of pride” (140). Subsequently, she began to despise working in the kitchen with her mother, and loss respect for her mother’s subservient
In these stories she would envision herself as a hero. She was bold and daring and everyone respected her. These stories symbolized the woman that she wanted to become; powerful and free, which was the complete opposite of the stereotypical “girl”, whom her family wanted her to become. At the end of the story, after she realized that she must succumb to society’s expectations, her stories began to change. Instead of heroic expeditions, the stories now focused on the boys from school and her physical