Boys And Girls Alice Munro Analysis

821 Words4 Pages
Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” is a germane story which is lucidly centered on sexual identity as the narrator struggles with the increasingly conflictual tension between her percipience of self and what is determined for her as a female in her family and social background. Alice Munro 's fabrication of an unnamed female character signifies that the narrator is without identity or power compared to her younger brother who is named Laird which means "lord"; implying that he, in consideration of his gender alone, is infused with identity and is to become a superior child. At this time where females are generally considered as minorities, the narrator refuses to accept this stereotypical identity and is determined to engender an identity of her own of being more than “just a girl”. In her avidity to accomplish this, she persistently seeks attention from her father, avoids her predestined womanly duties and tries not to do some things generally characterized to females. The narrator’s father in the story is a fox farmer. He raises foxes, skins them and sells their pelts for profit. Growing up, the narrator derives pleasure in helping her father outdoors on the farm which is rather considered as a male thing to do in intention of pleasing her father and most importantly to do more than what a girl is generally conditioned to do. She explains in the story that “besides carrying water she helped her father when he cut the long grass, and the lamb 's quarter and flowering money-musk