Personal Integrityrity In Boys And Girls By Alice Munro

The father in the story was a fox farmer. He raised foxes and would skin them and sold their pelts for to provide for the family. While growing up, she sought for attention from her father and began to enjoy working with her father with the foxes. Even though her father did not talk to her unless it was about the job they were doing she still enjoy the time spent with her

In Alice Munro’s short story “Boys and Girls,” our narrator is a young farm girl on the verge of puberty who is learning what it means to be a “girl.” The story shows the differing gender roles of boys and girls – specifically that women are the weaker, more emotional sex – by showing how the adults of the story expect the children to grow into their respective roles as a girl and a boy, and how the children grow up and ultimately begin to fulfill these roles, making the transition from being “children” to being “young adults.”

When we are adolescents we see the world through our parents' eyes.  We struggle to define ourselves within their world, or to even break away from their world.  Often, the birth of our "self" is defined in a moment of truth or a moment of heightened self-awareness that is the culmination of a group of events or the result of a life crisis or struggle.  In literature we refer to this birth of "self" as an epiphany.  Alice Munro writes in "Boys and Girls" about her own battle to define herself.  She is torn between the "inside" world of her mother and the "outside" world of her father.  In the beginning her father's world prevails, but by the finale, her mother's world invades her

The story, “Runaway”, written by Alice Munro, suggests how human beings try to escape from their problems when they cannot manage them. The story tells how a girl in a bad marriage who unable to deal with it runs from the situation but later came back, refuses a chance of escape from her abusive husband. Even the goat Flora who cannot be fully tamed as an animal runs away and Carla is described as a girl who wants the attention from her husband that she does not get and runs away from him. Carla’s nature is like the goat Flora because they both escape from their situations. Munro shows parallels between Flora and Carla, which argues that Flora’s behavior mirrors Carla’s relationship with Clark.

In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls,” there is a time line in a young girl’s life when she leaves childhood and its freedoms behind to become a woman. The story depicts hardships in which the protagonist and her younger brother, Laird, experience in order to find their own rite of passage. The main character, who is nameless, faces difficulties and implications on her way to womanhood because of gender stereotyping. Initially, she tries to prevent her initiation into womanhood by resisting her parent’s efforts to make her more “lady-like”. The story ends with the girl socially positioned and accepted as a girl, which she accepts with some unease.

One of the most impertinent characteristics of a happy life, is the loyalty to one’s morals and ideals. In order to thrive, one has to know what they stand for and not allow anyone to change their path in life. While growing and changing, their path may shift on its own accord, but it should never be moved by anyone other than the person who will follow it, as others who try to change it, will not walk it, and will not suffer any detriments to their life. Sandra Cisneros and Kathryn Stockett, authors of The House on Mango Street and The Help respectively, stress that loyalty to one’s character, despite outside forces, is important to one’s growth.

Characters in literature often display intense courage when they face difficult or dangerous situations. Elizabeth Proctor showed much courage in the play The Crucible even after everything she has been thought.

Alice Munro developed the theme “Be yourself, and do not let others change that” in her short story, “Boys and Girls” with the use of characters and the setting. At the beginning, the narrator sees herself as a daddy’s girl who enjoys helping out on the farm, but as the story continues she is shaped into a character more like her mother. Together, Munro’s characters and the setting of the story influence the theme in a variety of ways.

The narrative voice is intriguing when choosing a literacy technique when applied to Alice Munro 's “Boys and Girls” and Jamaica Kincaid 's “Girl” because it highlights the significance of women 's role during the 1960 's. The story of Boys and Girls is in third person narration describing an eleven- year old girl. This story was published in 1968, a time when the second wave of feminism movement occurred. This story gives information about adult gender roles. The setting of the story is in Canada during the winter. The narrator is living in a fox- breeding farm which correlates to the North American culture in the 1960 's. In the 1960 's, women were stereotyped as happy wives and mothers. In contrast, the society believed that unmarried

     Throughout the story the Protagonist demonstrates a very unbalanced relationship with her family members. She feels intimidated by the world around her and turns her lack of knowledge into knowledge by controlling and influencing her younger brother Laird. She does so by telling him stories and exposing him to experiences she claims to be familiar with. In her later years her relationship with her brother becomes strong as they both realize they can benefit from each other’s experiences and differences. As a child the Protagonist viewed her father as God-like because he had control and organization over the lives and deaths of the foxes. In essence he became her hero as she admired his control over the animals. In her future relationship with her father she came to see that he was simply a business man and she made a great attempt to form a deeper relationship with her father. As she began to understand he was simply human and was no longer fearful of him. Her relationship with

Feminist theory has been around for many years restricting women on how they behave, dress and even what jobs they are ‘allow’ to do. In the short story, “Boys and Girls”, Alice Munro portrays a young girl who is socially and psychologically undermined by her family and the sociality to show her readers how feminist theory took a toll on girls back in 1964 and still happening till this day.

The feeling of pride swelling up within her is because of that fact that her father acts as her primary role model for. In the society she lives in, girls often associate themselves with their mothers and take after them but such is not the case for the protagonist. She spends the vast majority of her time outside helping out her father with whatever work she is capable of doing. Her mother expresses her disgust for the work that her husband does as the protagonist states that her mother “[dislikes] the whole pelting operation”(100). This dislike can be attributed to the stereotype that women in this society are typically thought to have, as they do not associate themselves with such grueling and filthy work. While the mother finds the work to be off-putting the girl expresses polar opinions as she finds the smell of decaying fox carccases to be “reassuringly seasonal” (100). Her association with the smell paralleling the season of autumn emphasizes her innocence and naivete as she cannot differentiate between what society deems conventional and what is customary to her. Due to most of her time being spent outside and around men, her idiosyncratic behaviour is further reinforced. This initiates a positive feedback for the protagonist as the more she involves herself with her father and his work, the more that she yearns to be like her father. She envisions herself to be like him in the future, which would mean that she

her father tries to change who she is and force her into a gender role

Alice Munro's short story, "Boys and Girls," explores the different roles of men and women in society through a young girl's discovery of what it means to be a girl. A close examination of the elements of a short story as they are used in "Boys and Girls" helps us to understand the meaning of the story.

ven though the article is a difficult read and hard to comprehend at some points, the article is a valuable resource because the article is supported by a mountain of evidence, organized and Lynn Blin understand Alice Munro’s writing style. Lynn Blin understands the way Alice Munro’s writing style works with the underlying dark or “naughty” concepts of “Friend of My Youth”. The article does not only analyze the story itself but the writing techniques and the deeper meanings, or as the writer, Lynn Blin says the different narratives. Throughout the article itself, she goes into detail about the different narrators and how each narrator sees how the world works and the situations that the characters face. Blin mainly focuses on the words