As children, we are naive and innocent and see no harm in living freely and according to our own rules. However, as we enter the years of early adolescence, we become more conscious of the choices we make and how they reflect certain societal standards. The idea of slowly conforming to society’s expectations and how it can affect a person’s character is discussed throughout the novel “Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro. Munro illustrates that external pressures can lead to society’s ideals taking priority over fulfilling personal desires. In the beginning, the narrator of this story is introduced as a tomboy who enjoys working outdoors with her father on their family fox farm. Her actions depict that she is a hard worker who is capable of keeping …show more content…
As young children, they had traditions of singing songs and playing games together but as they grew older, a battle for power developed. The innocent wrestling that occurred while they were young transformed into the older sister getting hurt. The games of tricking Laird into doing something foolish turned into screams of tattles to Mother and Father. Laird is constantly being praised for doing much simpler things than her and with time, her confidence starts to deteriorate as a result. People began to show more respect towards Laird than his older sister, even though he was lazy and foolish unlike her. All she wanted to do was live her life on her own terms but due to her circumstances, she found herself constantly having to compete with her brother to get even the slightest taste of her desired …show more content…
Despite her wishes to take on a bigger role around the farm, her mother is constantly reminding her that she should be helping out around the house as opposed to outside. In the narrator's eyes, work in the house was “endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing” whereas work done outside with her father was “ritualistically important”. When the narrator says “I continued to slam the doors and sit as awkwardly as possible, thinking that by such measures I kept myself free”, her rebellion towards these concepts is evident. However, with time she finds herself trying to make her bedroom fancier and becoming more concerned with her appearance. By doing so, it becomes apparent that her family’s persistent nagging is beginning to impact her and she has begun to succumb to the gender roles being forced upon
Lily’s idea of home is having loving parent/mother figures who can help guide her in life. Because of this desire, she leaves T. Ray and begins to search for her true identity. This quest for acceptance leads her to meet the Calendar Sisters. This “home” that she finds brightly displays the ideas of identity and feminine society. Though Lily could not find these attributes with T. Ray at the peach house, she eventually learns the truth behind her identity at the pink house, where she discovers the locus of identity that resides within herself and among the feminine community there. Just like in any coming-of-age story, Lily uncovers the true meaning of womanhood and her true self, allowing her to blossom among the feminine influence that surrounds her at the pink house. Lily finds acceptance among the Daughters of Mary, highlighting the larger meaning of acceptance and identity in the novel.
Janie's Grandmother is the first bud on her tree. She raised Janie since she was a little girl. Her grandmother is in some respects a gardener pruning and shaping the future for her granddaughter. She tries to instill a strong belief in marriage. To her marriage is the only way that Janie will survive in life. What Nanny does not realize is that Janie has the potential to make her own path in the walk of life. This blinds nanny, because she is a victim of the horrible effects of slavery. She really tries to convey to Janie that she has her own voice but she forces her into a position where that voice is silenced and there for condemning all hopes of her Granddaughter become the woman that she is capable of being.
Throughout the story, it has been Sister who has tried to persuade the reader to take her side in the debacle with her family. The truth is that it was Sister who caused the entire dispute that is going on with her obsession to compete with her sister that goes back to her childhood where she feels that Stella-Rondo is spoiled and continues to be spoiled up to the end following Sister’s desperate need for attention.
Since Sister was affected the most by certain actions of the family, Welty narrated this short story through Sister’s point of view to show how the function of the family declined through these actions. Sister was greatly affected when her sister broke the bonds of sisterhood by stealing her boyfriend and marrying him. Secondly, Sister was affected by the favoritism shown by her family towards her younger sister. Since her sister was favored more than her, this caused her to be jealous of her sister. For example, Sister shows a lot of jealousy by the tone she uses when describing what Stella-Rondo did with the bracelet that their grandfather gave her. Sister’s description was, “She’d always had anything in the world she wanted and then she’d throw it away. Papa-Daddy gave her this gorgeous Add-a-Pearl necklace when sh...
The lives of men and women are portrayed definitively in this novel. The setting of the story is in southern Georgia in the 1960’s, a time when women were expected to fit a certain role in society. When she was younger she would rather be playing ...
The theme that has been attached to this story is directly relevant to it as depicted by the anonymous letters which the main character is busy writing secretly based on gossip and distributing them to the different houses. Considering that people have an impression of her being a good woman who is quiet and peaceful, it becomes completely unbecoming that she instead engages in very abnormal behavior. What makes it even more terrible is the fact that she uses gossip as the premise for her to propagate her hate messages not only in a single household but across the many different households in the estate where she stays.
Gender roles have been the one of the longest conflicts since the creation of man. Females have been struggling to gain way in the country since the foundation of the United States. For most of our country’s life up until the 1940’s women predominantly were supposed to stay at the house and do all the house work. For a fictional unnamed female child in the short story “Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro, the life of the average woman is not the life she wants to live. She wants to work the hard labor with her father who sells fox pelts but, she is constantly getting “harassed” by her mother to do lady like work. The women’s struggle for rights can be divided up into centuries starting with the 19th and continuing to present day. At the end of the story the girl finally accepts her role as a female because she messes up and her father says, “She’s only a girl.” Men on the other hand, have had always had any opportunity they wanted but, generally their role is the
The Story begins with a description of the house. The house in itself is a symbol of isolation women faced in the nineteenth-century. The protagonist describes the house as isolated and miles away from the village, but also described as “the most beautiful place” (Gilman 217). During the nineteenth-century, women were in a sense isolated from society, just like the house. The role of the women was to stay home and tend to the
In order to get the title she wants, Muir deceives the family by passing as an innocent young girl when in reality she is a grown woman using them for her benefit, thus her role as the protagonist can be questioned by some. She is a smart and manipulating woman capable of making the men in the family fall down to her will. Her intentions are for the two young brothers in the family, Gerald, who...
Marie’s grandparent’s had an old farm house, which was one of many homes in which she lived, that she remembers most. The house was huge, she learned to walk, climb stairs, and find hiding places in it. The house had a wide wrap around porch with several wide sets of stairs both in front and in back. She remembers sitting on the steps and playing with one of the cats, with which there was a lot of cats living on the farm...
In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls,” there is a time line in a young girl’s life when she leaves childhood and its freedoms behind to become a woman. The story depicts hardships in which the protagonist and her younger brother, Laird, experience in order to find their own rite of passage. The main character, who is nameless, faces difficulties and implications on her way to womanhood because of gender stereotyping. Initially, she tries to prevent her initiation into womanhood by resisting her parent’s efforts to make her more “lady-like”. The story ends with the girl socially positioned and accepted as a girl, which she accepts with some unease.
In her story, Boys and Girls, Alice Munro depicts the hardships and successes of the rite of passage into adulthood through her portrayal of a young narrator and her brother. Through the narrator, the subject of the profound unfairness of sex-role stereotyping, and the effect this has on the rites of passage into adulthood is presented. The protagonist in Munro's story, unidentified by a name, goes through an extreme and radical initiation into adulthood, similar to that of her younger brother. Munro proposes that gender stereotyping, relationships, and a loss of innocence play an extreme, and often-controversial role in the growing and passing into adulthood for many young children. Initiation, or the rite of passage into adulthood, is, according to the theme of Munro’s story, both a mandatory and necessary experience.
In conclusion, co-dependency and rivalry is very common in the world today. Though it is not a big issue out in the open, it is an emotional attachment that only one can define. In this short story the two main aspects of having siblings is the theme which revolves around codependency and rivalry. Having siblings is a part of everyday life and problems do occur which sometimes makes a person, or changes a person in ways. In this situation, Pete and Donald are completely different people but they are in fact very dependent upon one another.
Citizens of today’s society have to comprehend that by conforming to the pressures of others and imitating everyone else, they will get nowhere in life. First of all, a teenage boy attends his first big high school party at a friend’s house one weekend and he is pressured into drinking beer and smoking marijuana so he will seem cool in front of the popular jocks and cheerleaders. Since many teens are so terrified of ridicule and downright embarrassment in front of fellow students, they decide to give in to their peers even though their actions may go against their beliefs. Emerson believed that by being an individual “you shall have the suffrage of the world.” Furthermore, an innocent sixteen year old girl’s parents go out of town for the weekend and she invites her cute, popular, senior star quarterback boyfriend over, but he pressures her into having sex when she i...
In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” she tells a story about a young girl’s resistance to womanhood in a society infested with gender roles and stereotypes. The story takes place in the 1940s on a fox farm outside of Jubilee, Ontario, Canada. During this time, women were viewed as second class citizens, but the narrator was not going to accept this position without a fight.