Gender Roles In Wuthering Heights By Alice Ann Munro

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

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

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