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Boys And Girls By Alice Munro Analysis

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Boys And Girls By Alice Munro Analysis
In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” the story is about a young girl’s resistance to womanhood in a society based all upon gender roles and stereotypes. Initially, the girl believes that she can be of great value to her father in his work, then the destruction of her dreams occurs when she realizes society's view and expectations of her being a female.Therefore, she loves working on the fox farm with her father as she also, loves the attention she gets from her father while working. "Wait till Laird gets a little bigger than you`ll have a real help"(pg.194) indicates that the mother did not consider the girl help at all but to her, she is merely a replacement for Laird until he is old enough to do the farm work himself. However, her mother wishes …show more content…
The girl thinks she cannot trust her mother, she thinks her mother is plotting against her "to get me to stay in the house more, although she knew I hated it"(pg.195). She thinks her mother`s work is not as important as her father's. More importantly, inside work she finds "endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing"(pg.194) and outside work "ritualistically important"(pg.194). In the stories she tells herself every night, she fills them with heroic moments of her being the heroine in these stories, shows how she intends to become someone who makes a difference in the world. While she wishes to become the heroic woman of her dreams, it is the opposite of the stereotypical girl her family insists her to become. As she struggles to find her identity, she is expresses her identification with a horse called Flora. Furthermore, Flora is a beautiful, powerful and rebellious horse who is for fox meat, but escapes from the farm and when the girl is able to stop her she lets Flora go. Subsequently, the girl did not close the gate, but left it open so she could freely escape "I did not make any decision to do this, it was just what I

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