Alice Munro: "boys and Girls"

Alice Munro: "Boys and Girls"

In this story the main character tells about her childhood life growing up in a household where her father was a fox farmer and her mother was a homemaker which involved many laborious duties as a member of the family who lived shadowing her parents responsibilities. Throughout the story, her feminine ways are denied and even ignored since her interpretation of being a girl allowed for less possibilities of being able to experience the same things as the males in her life (which were her father, her brother Laird, and her father's assistant Henry). She eventually realizes in the end that she is truly a girl turning into a young lady and that her ignorance of this fact has later on turned into a curiosity about herself and the world around her through new and feminine eyes.

The story starts off describing the repugnance of belonging to a family that dealt with a home based pelting operation. The smells and the colors described in the story are repulsive yet, the girl's senses as we see have been numbed to this day-to-day scenario. It may be even considered as her being prideful of this fact and being "non-girlish" enough to be able to accept this way of life as an everyday way of living (not common to most people). Her and her brother Laird found adventure in each daily event including the pelting, the killings of animals, and also the raising of the animals beforehand. She took took initiative in playing a masculine role for her younger brother showing him gruesome events that she looked at as being somewhat of being a "rites of passage" for him being a young boy growing into an older boy (which can also be observed as her inclination to wanting to be more boyish in her ways of thinking and feeling.) Her father was very mechanical in his dealing with the pelting and killing of animals which showed in the story as we see events unfolding of these children being somewhat emotionally tied to the animals beauty then eventually being shot and killed for the purposes of being utilized for reasons other than being domesticated. Her mother was tied down to the humdrum of homemaking responsibilities which the girl in the story detested due to it being "girlish" and somewhat even unexciting as it was being compared to being a boy. Being a boy was tied to adventure while being a girl was affiliated with it's girlish "responsibilities", being deemed as even unacceptable, and limited in the avenues that can be chosen as being of this so called gender. Through her mother, she had been the main feminine role in her life that allowed for her to look at femininity through this perspective. She later on in time realizes through eventually being in touch with her feminine nature that she could not longer fathom the idea of the killing of these animals. She realizes she