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“Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro, Gender Roles, and Literature
Author’s Note: This is part of my series for my Literature class. All of my academic assignments can be found in a public list on my profile called, “Academic Writing on Medium”. If you’d like to read this story, the audiobook is linked in the works cited below.
For this assignment, I read the short story, “Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro. In the story, the narrator discusses her farming chores with her father, which she enjoys and feels ecstatic about. The female unnamed narrator is treated equally by her father and often mistaken for a boy by people around her.
This misgendering lasts until she becomes a teenager. At this point, her mother starts expecting her to start helping in the kitchen with chores like cooking and cleaning. Her mother expected this of her because of her gender. In the story, the narrator is a feisty, imaginative, little tomboy She imagines herself doing heroic deeds and protecting her town when she grows older. The narrator regards her father’s outdoor farmwork as important and real, and her mother’s indoor labor as boring. As she grew, the adults around her emphasized her gender and began to openly attempt to impose the social expectations of girlhood on her, such as crossing her legs, wearing dresses, and behaving more along the lines of traditional gender norms for young women. The main…
