Gender Roles of Boys and Girls free essay sample

† â€Å"Boys and Girls† is a coming of age story about a girl who is enjoying her life as a tomboy. The young girl, who does not want to assume traditional female gender roles and is very resistant about becoming a woman. The story â€Å"Boys and Girls† by Alice Munro explores issues of feminism, and gender roles through key elements such as characterization, symbolism, and theme. The author presents her characters through direct description and also shows them in action. In â€Å"Boys and Girls† the central character is a young girl who narrates the story about her life on a farm and about her search for gender identity. Through various episodes in the story we learn that the girl is courageous, strong, adventurous, and very imaginative. Some of those qualities are typically viewed as masculine strengths and would be normally used to describe a male character. The young girl shows this in her everyday life while helping her father take care of the foxes. We will write a custom essay sample on Gender Roles of Boys and Girls or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Another example, every night when Laird, the girl’s younger brother, fell asleep she arranged herself tightly under the bed covers and told herself stories. According to the girl’s memories, she â€Å"rescued people from a bombed building, shot two rabid wolves, and rode a fine horse spiritedly down the main street of Jubilee† (Munro 571). Those bedtime stories presented the opportunity for heroism, boldness and self-sacrifice, speaks of the girl’s courage, all which are usually considered to be a male qualities. The girl was also learning to shoot, and although she could not hit anything yet, she practiced definitely a masculine hobby, which may have made her look manly in the eyes of the strangers. In â€Å"Boys and Girls,† freedom is symbolically represented by the family’s farm horses, and the girl’s own stories. The winter when the girl turned eleven years old, her father kept two horses, Mack and Flora, in the stable because the foxes were fed horsemeat. In spring Mack was shot first. On the day Flora’s turn to be shot came, she broke away from the farm helper Henry. The girl and her brother climbed up the fence and watched Flora running free in the barnyard. Despite the fact that Flora was just an old mare, â€Å"it was exciting to see her running, whinnying, going up on her hind legs, prancing and threatening like a horse in a Western movie† (Munro 577). Generally, a horse that runs free like â€Å"an unbroken ranch horse,† symbolizes a freedom of spirit and freedom of existence. The horse that was locked in a dark stable for several long winter months, could not resist the power of space and fresh air, and understandably went wild, when she was taken out on a bright spring day. Perhaps, a sense of the coming end made Flora take advantage of a sudden freedom and enjoys the last moments of her life. No wonder that the independence-spirited girl, who was confined in the same old farm for eleven years, got excited about watching broken free Flora. The theme of â€Å"Boys and Girls† addresses the challenges of acquiring self-awareness as a girl and the transition from the childhood tomboy into the woman her mother wants her to be. The girl feels uneasy about becoming a woman, because she enjoys helping her father and respects his work. The girl does not want to take part in the female gender chores in the house; she wants to work outside with her father. The story is centered on gender roles of women and the girl must face and accept that her role is not outside with the pelting operation but more so in the kitchen father’s service with her mother. â€Å"It seemed to me that work in the house was endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing, work done out of doors; and in my father’s service was ritualistically important. In â€Å"Boys and Girls† the author recorded the humiliated and anguished psychology of a child who was being conditioned by society to become the definition of a girl, which she perceived as a joke on herself. The characterization, symbolism, and theme were the three tools the author used to explore the process of self-discovery of a young farm girl. The child found herself, no longer free to help her fox-farmer father outdoors, but instead was forced to do the hated housework. The story pictures a contradiction between the girl’s status as a real human being and her vocation as a female. Although there is no real resolution to the situation in â€Å"Boys and Girls† and it seems that the girl is conforming to social rules by adjusting her fantasies, she is partly victorious when she opens the gate in an attempt to rescue the fated horse. In the girl’s opinion, the horse symbolized freedom, and the death of the animal meant the end of her own freedom and a loss of her identity.