Opinions on "Boys and Girls"

The short story "Boys and Girls" by Alice Munro is filled with excellent uses of symbolism and characterization that lends support to the theme of gender roles.

  The foxes that the father keeps on his farm to ultimately slaughter, and skin to sell the pelts, represent the girl. The foxes are trapped in their cages, unable to roam free, they are kept behind high guard fences in a world that was "made for them." Similarly the girl is suck on the farm, as if it were the same kind of enclosure that the foxes are trapped in, and she believes that if she were to leave, she would not be able to survive, metaphorically speaking, just as the foxes are only able to leave their pens, when they are killed. This is also supported when she releases Flora the horse from the confines of the farm, knowing that she was about to be killed. Only to have her die outside the farm within mere hours of her escape.

 The characterization techniques used by the writer also help to support the theme of gender roles. For example, the girl's name is never spoken throughout the entire story, whereas her male counterpart, Laird, has a name that means lord, this creates an even larger rift between the view of boys and girls in this time period. They do the same work as well but when speaking about the girl, people refer to her as "only a girl," and by the end of the story this phrase hurts her even more than before, signifying that she has completed her "transformation" into a girl. Laird does the same work as her, sometimes less, but is praised for his efforts.

Through the use of these devices, the theme of gender roles is prevalent in this story. I liked this story myself, but it was frustrating to have such a good, well rounded character forced into a stereotype of being "just a girl", an opinion that I believe to be very barbaric, chauvinistic, and quite frankly, just really really stupid.