"Boys and Girls"

In Munro’s story the main character, a young tomboyish girl, believes that her mother wishes to convert or initiate her into the duties of being a mother and domestic laborer. The character sincerely does not want this, and considers her mother to be her enemy, and to be plotting against her. The character identifies more with her father, with masculine traits: she enjoys helping him in his work, (raising and skinning foxes) dreams of performing acts of great heroism, and endeavored to learn horse riding and shooting. The plot of the story focuses on a pair of horses that the character’s family owns and means to slaughter for meat for foxes; one of the horses is named Mack and the other was a rambunctious Flora, a mare, with whom the main character identifies with on an implicit level. The focus of the story is when the character helps Flora the mare escape before it is shot and butchered. Flora is eventually caught and butchered anyway. When it is discovered that the character allowed the horse to escape she is ashamed of herself and her father is disgusted with her, and he condemns her as being “Only a girl.”

Munro states that there was no motivation on the character’s part – she says: “that was the only thing I could do.” Taking this into account, it is clear that the author does not with to discuss the internal dynamics and motivations of the character, or to provide information that the reader may thoroughly deconstruct her perception of the world. What I believe Munro tries to do in the way she describes the world is to present a greater dynamic than one’s characters mind, but the dynamic of human growth and human relations.

The character grows in the story, at first being very masculine, dreaming of being a stereotypical and capable hero, and in the end the character dreams of being the stereotypical damsel in distress, and thinks about how her hair will look, and what clothes she will wear. Again, Munro does not examine the character’s motivations, or why she thinks these things. The reader only knows that the change has occurred. The character and reader have both been involved in the action of the story, and at the end the character has changed. The reader must assume that it was the events of the story that caused this change somehow. It would seem then that the question that the author is trying to present is, what is significant about these actions? What is significant about the life of the character’s father and mother, and the actions they undertake?

Much of the story is about the character’s relation to her family. The author describes certain traits about the character’s parents: how her mother will go on and on in conversation, but how her father is very brief; the character is more or less disdainful of her mother, but surges with pride when her father describes her as his hired hand. The character begins with a great respect for her father and disdain for her mother. In the key point of the story the character betrays her father by releasing a horse, so that her father will have to painstakingly find it before it is butchered. The motives for the action are not discussed; the reader must accept prima facie that the character had some inarticulate but internal impulse. For following this internal impulse, her father shuns her, and labels her as a girl. The author here does not present a question so much as offer a situation to be explored and understood.