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Gender Roles In The Girl With The Bangs By Zadie Smith

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Gender roles have been a hot button topic within the past few years. In the short story “The Girl With the Bangs” by Zadie Smith, the narrator gives her insight on boys and girls and how they typically act in relationships. Throughout her affair with Charlotte, she realizes that although society perpetuates the idea that it’s usually boys chasing after girls, that isn’t always the case. The narrator’s observations and change of opinion about gender roles in relationships serves to diminish a gendered view on modern romance. The narrator states her views on the difference between males and females very early on in the story. She believes that boys have very little depth past the surface while girls are much more complex. She thinks that girls seem to have qualities that hook men, causing the men to chase after the women, which happened to be the bangs in Charlotte’s case. As she tries to get Charlotte’s attention, she sits near her at lunch and gets acquainted with her friends, which she calls “old boy tricks” (273) because she believes these …show more content…

The narrator compares herself falling for Charlotte to the popular trope of the man standing below the woman’s window, waiting for her to say yes to him. For this reason, the narrator feels as though she is acting the way a boy does when trying to get a girl because she was playing the role typically assumed by the man. Even as Charlotte’s boyfriend Maurice returns and talks to the narrator about wanting to marry Charlotte, the narrator still calls it a “man-to-man” (274) talk, implying that she is a man even though she’s not. The narrator feels like she is playing the role of a man because in popular media and throughout history, the position of the man was to court the woman. She hadn’t yet realised that though men usually assume that role, women could as

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Indeed, we see how as the narrator devotes an increasing amount of time with Charlotte, he becomes detached from his surroundings: he ignores his friends’ promptings and eventually progresses to a point where he is unaware of both time and location, that only today in introspection can he “recall that [they] were in [his] room” the day Maurice returns (197). Towards the end, the narrator describes how his clothes and Charlottes’ becomes “indistinguishable”, being “thrown over every chair” in the study room (191). Isolated and devoting so much time in this “cocoon” of the relationship, the narrator seems to lose part of his rational and orderly self and becomes more similar to the disorganized and anti-social Charlotte. The descriptions of Charlotte’s room and the imagery of the “cocoon” highlight this sense

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