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Examples of gender roles in boys and girls by alice munro
Feminism in the works of alice munro
Examples of gender roles in boys and girls by alice munro
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Alice Ann Munro was born on July 10th, 1931 in Wingham, located in the Canadian province of Ontario. Her father, Robert Eric Laidlaw, was a fox and a mink farmer, and later turned to turkey farming. Her mother was a school teacher (The Noble Prize in Literature). Munro attended a government funded school and was viewed as a brilliant and aspiring student, to the point that she was evaluated as a gifted student at an early stage. She started composing fiction while in secondary school and even composed a novel by the time, which she has said was subordinate to Emily Bronte 's well known Wuthering Heights (The Noble Prize in Literature). She won a grant to attend the University of Western Ontario and spent two years there majoring in the English …show more content…
Furthermore, her brother who is always described as being somewhat lazy and unable to handle hard work, no longer wants to sing songs with her before bed, or even really talk to her. Instead, her brother views their previous nightly interactions as childish. Her brother has also changed, and has come to take on the role that she had played in the family as the child who was responsible for working on the farm (Rasporich 38). The change in behaviors and interactions between the narrator and her brother is another sign of gender roles. At the beginning of the story, the narrator took on a more masculine role working on the farm, while her brother took on more of what might be described as a feminine role playing on the farm and helping his mother in the farmhouse. By the end of the story, however, their roles had reversed as the narrator took on the feminine role that her mother considered being more appropriate for a young lady, while the narrator’s brother becomes the more masculine of the two in terms of his actions …show more content…
She begins to cry fearing that her father will not trust her anymore. However, when the father does not become angry, but blames her action on the fact that “She’s only a girl” (Munro 147), the young girl seems to accept his explanation. She said, “I didn’t protest that, even in my heart. “May be it was true” (Munro 147). At that point, it is possible to understand that the girl who once viewed her mother as being silly and dumb for talking about boys and dances was becoming that girl. She was accepting a gender role in society for herself that was based on going to dances and being with boys as opposed to feeding wolves and working on the farm (Rasporich 114). The transformation that takes place in the way in which the girl thinks about gender roles is not described directly as an issue of what is appropriate for men and women. Instead, the description is much more subtle, and almost a natural change that occurs in every person (Rasporich 130). It is this subtleness in the language causes the readers to not only feel sorry for the young girl, but to also think about their own views of gender
Munro uses a fox farm for the setting of Boys and Girls to bring out many of the social issues between genders. While her father worked outside doing all the labor work, her mother stayed inside cooking and cleaning, “it was an odd thing to see my mother down at the barn” (Munro 12). The girl was very resentful towards her mother, mostly because she did not agree with the stereotypical life that her mother led. Causing the girl to spend more time helping her father around the farm. The girl would help feed the foxes, “cut the long grass, and the lamb’s quarter and flowering money-musk” (Munro 10). Although when she turned eleven, things started to change causing the girl to not only observe gender differences between her mother and father but to experience it between her and her brother Laird when working around the farm. While Laird became more predominant with helping on the farm, the girl became less valuable to her father and was forced to help her mother around the house.
The adults in the story expect the children to grow into the gender role that their sex has assigned to them. This is seen in several places throughout the story, such as when the narrator hears her mother talking to her father, “I heard my mother saying, ‘Wait till Laird gets a little bigger, then you’ll have a real help’…. ‘And then I can use her more in the house’” (Munro 495), when her grandmother comes to visit and tells her all the things girls aren’t supposed to do, and when she is roughhousing with her little brother and the farm hand, Henry Bailey, tells her, “that there Laird’s gonna show you, one of these days” (Munro 497). While the narrator disagrees with the adults, and tries not to conform to their expectations, at the end of the story both she and her brother end up acting exactly as a child of their age and gender would be expected to act: the preteen girl crying with no apparent logical reason, and the young boy excited to have been included with the men, and talking about the thrilling tale of slaying a horse.
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
Gender is such a controversial subject. There are some people who see it as what you are born as whereas other people see it as a choice to be whatever you want. There are people who judge whatever gender you are, no matter the choices you make. Paul Theroux wrote about how restrictive masculinity is in his article “Being a Man.” There are so many more restrictions on being feminine. Theroux’s idea of masculinity being restrictive is being challenged on the account that being feminine is seen as bad, and weak.
Alice Munro was born and raised in Sowesto, a small Canadian town, which directly influenced her success in writing. In small towns such as Sowesto, a woman’s place in society was to stay home and cook, clean, and raise children. If a woman did have a job, it typically was simple such as school teaching, writing for a newspaper, or piano playing. Another challenge facing Munro--and others who wished to pursue writing--was the lack of authenticity of Canadian writing. Wishing to be successful writer on a worldly platform was something to be laughed at not only because publishers in Canada were few and far between but in general, works from Great Britain and USA were what people throughout the world recognized and loved. However, many other factors of being raised in Canada played a role in Munro’s success. Religion in a small Canadian town typically had a Protestant culture that believed forgiveness was hard to receive and punishments were harsh and often and that shame and humiliation were close by. Her ancestry also largely influenced her outlook on the world.
The young girl in the story is struggling with finding her own gender identity. She would much rather work alongside her father, who was “tirelessly inventive” (Munro 328), than stay and work with her mother in the kitchen, depicted through, “As soon as I was done I ran out of the house, trying to get out of earshot before my mother thought of what to do next” (329). The girl is torn between what her duties are suppose to be as a woman, and what she would rather be doing, which is work with her father. She sees her father’s work as important and worthwhile, while she sees her mother’s work as tedious and not meaningful. Although she knows her duties as a woman and what her mother expects of her, she would like to break the mould and become more like her father. It is evident that she likes to please her father in the work she does for him when her father says to the feed salesman, “Like to have you meet my new hired man.” I turned away and raked furiously, red in the face with pleasure (328-329). Even though the young girl is fixed on what she wants, she has influences from both genders i...
“Boys and Girls” describes a major turning point in a girl’s life, turning down a path towards womanhood. Her childhood fears of the dark and fears of being less than a perfect worker to her father and her control of her brother slowly dissolve. Her decision to free the terrified horse highlights her pivotal journey into adulthood. And her ability to cry with sensitivity over her decision of freedom, demonstrates the acute sensitivity of a woman.
...alized that “a girl was not, as [she] had supposed, simply what [she] was; it was what [she] had to become” she was starting to admit defeat, and then finally when she begins to cry, it is here that the narrator understands that there is no escape from the pre-determined duties that go along with the passage of a child into being a girl, and a girl into a woman, and that “even in her heart. Maybe it (her understanding that conforming is unstoppable) was true”
Unrealistically, the narrator believes that she would be of use to her father more and more as she got older. However, as she grows older, the difference between boys and girls becomes more clear and conflicting to her.
But when a person of the [female] sex, which according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarize herself with these thorny researches, succeeds nevertheless in surmounting the...
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.
A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen, and Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, were both published in the nineteenth century, when the campaign for women’s rights was starting to make an appearance. In 1755, Corsica allowed women’s suffrage, until 1769, when it was taken over by France. This started the ball rolling towards universal suffrage for women. This play and story serve as the last remnants of a time in the western world when women had very few, if any, rights.
...the young girl prior to meeting the wolf, how the young girl strays from the ideals of femininity once she meets the wolf, and last, what is inherently not feminine as represented by the wolf and his masculine characteristics. The wolf does not naturalize masculine characteristics within the reader because he still acts somewhat like a wolf, he is used as a tool to further naturalize the ideals of femininity, by standing in stark contrast to them.
Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning and also the basis of education. Curiosity had killed the cat indeed, however the cat died nobly. Lives of Girls and Women is a novel written by Nobel Prize Literature winner, Alice Munro. This novel is about a young girl, Del Jordan, who lives on Flats Road, Ontario. The novel is divided into eight chapters; and each chapter refers to a new, unique event in Del's life. As an overall analysis of the book reveals that Del Jordan's intriguing curiosity has helped her throughout her life, and enabled her to gain further knowledge The character is often seen in scenarios where her attention is captivated, and through the process of learning she acquires information in order to her answers her questions about particular subjects. There are many examples in the book that discuss Del’s life, and how she managed to gain information, as well as learn different methods of learning along the way.
One important thing to understand is that these acts of gender are not done in isolation or done on an individualistic level – this cannot be targeted merely by changing actions on that level. Acts are a shared experience and a collective action – and since gender is understood as an act, gender is never one’s alone. While every single individual acts out gender in their own one, but it is still done in reference to certain sanctions and prescriptions that it is never fully one’s own. Acts are in themselves public, as the choice to ‘perform’ such acts means to render implicit social conditions explicit. The “play” of gender requires both the ‘script’ of gender, and the personal interpretation of acting out such a