Gender Roles In The Girl With The Bangs By Zadie Smith

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

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