45 pages • 1 hour read
Boys And Girls
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Themes
The Loss of Innocence
One of Munro’s major themes in “Boys and Girls” is the loss of innocence. This loss of innocence happens differently from Laird and the narrator, based on their gender. The central event, Mack’s shooting, effects them both and leads them both to confusion. But the way that the boy and girl move forward from that event shows how the loss of innocence works differently for boys and girls.
Laird’s loss of innocence brings him closer to the “blood and animal fat” that the whole family smelled and participated in at the beginning of the story (Paragraph 2). He shows off “a streak of blood” on his arm after he helps his father and Henry Bailey shoot Flora (Paragraph 46). Almost abruptly, Laird ceases to be afraid of anything, as he once was when trapped on the highest rung in the barn. He no longer needs or wants to sing to dispel the fear of the dark, as he and the narrator did when they were young.
The narrator, on the other hand, seems more reluctant to lose her innocence. She still tries to sing before she sleeps, and she still tells herself stories, though those stories change shape. Seeing one horse killed means that she never wants to see another. She doesn’t “think of watching” Flora’s death, because seeing Mack’s had left her thinking about the occasion often. Her loss of innocence brings forth “a new wariness, a sense of holding-off,” in relation to her father’s work (Paragraph 36).
Gender Roles and Expectations
Male and female gender is a concern that arises within the first few pages of the story. Before she overhears her parents discussing her work value, she notes that it is rare to see her mother outdoors, and even more rare to see her near the barn. Gender divisions revolve around work. Women can peaches and vegetables, a laborious but “endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing” job (Paragraph 13). Men get to be outdoors, dealing with adventure, invention, and danger. Animals are unpredictable, but ultimately men have control over their lives and deaths.
Munro includes several stereotypes of femininity to show that her narrator slowly enters the female world. She begins to stand “in front of the mirror” to comb her hair and wonder “if [she] would be pretty” as an adult (Paragraph 36). Trying to “make part of [her] room fancy” is a new concern, and with that effort comes the desire “to put up some kind of barricade between [her] bed and Laird’s” (Paragraph 45). While the narrator speaks directly about her relationship to gender, she also speaks indirectly, by employing these figures of traditional femininity and applying the anecdote of Flora’s death to make sense of her newfound womanhood.
Both parents have a clear sense of the division between manhood and womanhood, and they live out that division on a daily basis. But the contrast between Laird’s confident and accusatory speech, at the end of the story, and the narrator’s inability to speak leave a final note of male domination in the story. Once both children take on more adult personae, Laird’s voice becomes dominant, even though he is younger than his sister. The narrator, as a genderless child, felt more drawn to her father’s mysterious and silent masculinity. Ironically, her final femininity is then mysterious and silent.
Seasons of Change
The story moves through the seasons as markers of natural change. Underlying the story’s progress is the cold winter, the arrival of spring and its “great feeling of opening-out” (Paragraph 23). As the children no longer need to fear the dark and cold in their room, the practices they use to cope with that season, like singing and storytelling, fade or change.
Where winter means the death of foxes, which seems seasonal and natural to the narrator, with spring comes the death of horses, which seem more human to her. Witnessing their death, which is the food that will allow the family to keep on living, suddenly seems to be an ultimate sacrifice—even though the practice of shooting horses is part of the natural progression of the seasons for her family.
Although the narrator points out key events that seem to bring major change, Munro places them in the sense of cyclical seasons to suggest that the events are natural and common. Thus, the narrator’s sense of resistance to the progress of time stands out as absurd and impossible, just like her effort to release Flora from the family’s farm to allow her to escape imminent death.
Adult and Child Perspective
In “Boys and Girls,” adults operate downstairs spaces, while children watch from above. The narrator listens to her parents’ conversation from the loft where she and Laird sleep. The two watch Mack’s death from the hayloft in the barn. While none of their process of growing older, and more gendered, seems to be a secret, they only witness it secretly and from this separate, higher space.
When the narrator returns to her room to think through her inexplicable effort to free Flora, she recognizes mostly the ways in which she, and the room, have changed. That childhood perspective, from which she watched the world below, is no longer accessible: it’s not the same, and she cannot recapture it.
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By Alice Munro
