Boys and Girls by Alice Munro - Essay Example

In “Boys and Girls”, the author highlights the story of a young girl, who had greater concern for her favorite horses, in the first person narrative. The girl, though very young, helped her father in his farming work mainly by caring for the horses. The internal conflicts of the girls start when he father decides to kill the old horse to feed his foxes. In an attempt to save the horse from death, she lets it free and waits fearfully for her father’s response on finding that she was the culprit behind the escape of the horse.

The story develops from there with her little brother’s enthusiasm to get the horse chased back home with the help of a hired hunter. Most parts of the book represent the author’s concern over the societies that undermine the roles of women in active social life. As Martin comments, “it is not a funny story, but in fact, a poignant comedy” (45). In a situation of the story, when her brother tells everyone during a dinner that the girl was the reason behind the missing of the horse, her father replies by saying “Never mind, she’s only a girl”. . The siblings were given a room to share in the home with a number of safety instructions from their father.

As Hooper reflects, “Boys and Girls returns readers to an already familiar Munro place where mother’s sphere of things is boring and repressive…” (12). The author expresses the ways in which boys enjoyed more social freedom than girls in a family. Girls had to fear almost all factors ranging from darkness to strangers in her time. When the decision making was a question before their life, it was always a conflicting situation between the prospects of parental approval and social acceptance.

As Munro writes, even when she had to see the way her father shot the horse with the help of his farm hand, she only told her brother “Now, you have seen how they shoot a horse.” This expression shows the acquired numbness of the author from the experiences of her childhood in which she used to witness her father engaging in the trade of animal husbandry that involved killing of animals for money. In another context when her father says to her mother with a blood stained appearance that he had shot old Flora, the mare, her mother replied saying “Well, I don’t want to hear about it, and don’t come to my table like that.

” This expression sounds the general disagreement among women with the ‘killing business’. While focusing more on the protagonist, the author can be seen to have given little significance to her name – to a great extent, it may be because of the influences of her own childhood experiences of low self esteem forced by the over preference prevailed in common families of her society. In the story, the girl is critically disregarded by her family members after the birth of her brother. She was treated