“Boys and Girls”
By Alice Munro
Alice Munro
• Small-town settings. “Southern Ontario Gothic” style of
writing. Born July 1931.
Before we begin, write your
own thesis statement for the
piece
Theme
• Thematic Threads: Conformity, coming of age, defiance.
• Thematic Statement:
1) The conflict between attaining personal desire and
conforming to your present environment can lead a person
to take serious actions that will affect the rest of their lives.
2) People can suffer through great obstacles when fighting
conformity, and even if at first they do not succeed, they
must not give up on what they truly believe in.
Structure
• Begins and ends with a fixation on her father.
• The entire short story is a flashback, in chronological order.
• Irony: She becomes what she despises. Her whole angle and
identity was based around acting powerfully defiant, but in
the end, she enjoyed the “feminine thoughts” and succumb to
them.
• Foreshadowing: 1) Pg 197- similarities between Flora’s traits
and the protagonist’s. We know what happens to them both.
2) She begins to decorate her room with “fancy” (202) things.
Plot
EX: Idealistic setting of daughter idolizing her father, bossing
about her brother.
• RA: She responds with zest to the continuous male ridicule
and endless ploys to get her back in the house- the domestic.
• CLI: Challenging her father’s rule of who can cross gender
boarders by opening the borders for Flora, aka, herself. Laird
joins the men and assimilates to his gender role. We see the
father as a killing machine, no longer as her hero. She begins
to “think female”. A change in the protagonist has occurred.
• RES: Gender role has been decided- she is now the victim in
her fantasies and her life. Laird no longer needs her to sing.
Conflict
• Person vs. Person: Protagonist vs. Mother
• Person vs. Environment: Protagonist fighting to remain
outside in the wilderness, as opposed to inside a domestic
setting.
• Person vs. Society: At this time in history, all the natural
actions of the protagonist were against society’s gender
norms.
Setting
• Inner spaces of the home linked to memory, spirituality,
fantasy and femininity. The mother will share memories with
her daughter in this space (193). The daughter fantasizes in
her room, an inner space.
• Outer spaces of the home linked to the wild, being untamed,
and to masculinity. This is where all interactions with her
father occur. “It was an odd thing to see my mother down at
the barn” (193).
• Cellar: Page 189. White-washed = covering dirt. Brightly lit=
better than the darkness of being in the house.
• Bedroom: Scary to fancy as she comes of age
• Read top of 190.
Characterization
• Protagonist: No name. “These stories were about
myself…they took place in a world that was recognizably mine,
yet one that represented opportunities for courage, boldness
and self-sacrifice, as mine never did”.
• Father: No name. “My father did not talk to me unldess it was
about the job we were doing” (193).
• Brother Laird: Name Laird= Lord.
• Mother: No name. “She disliked the whole pelting operation”
(189).
• Henry Bailey: the real hired hand. “[Henry] sand in a high,
trmbly, mocking-sorrowful voice…” (197). Mocks the life and
passions of animals.
Point of View
• 1st person
“ I worked willingly under [my father’s] eyes, and with a feeling
of pride” (193).
Symbolism
• Foxes’ pens and horses’= being raised in a controlled
environment. “The foxes inhabited a world my father made
for them” (191).
• The kitchen= a pen, a prison. “It seemed like work in the
house was endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing; work
down out of doors…was ritualistically important” (194).
• The protagonist is linked to Flora the horse, both are spirited
animals who are used as specific means of production (food).
• Calendar= domesticating the wilderness to be of use to
humans.
• Apron= how a female uses it for dishes vs. a male for blood
• Crying-= a female trait. The newly “male” Laird points this out
as her new “female flaw”.
Language and Style
• “Raising” foxes has a connotation of “raising” children. The
link is that children are for parents’ use, and each child has a
role to play within the whole farm eco-system.
• Tone: The bitter tone at the conclusion sets readers to believe
that although the protagonist was defeated in that moment,
as a person of the future telling of the past, she continues to
fight patriarchal society.
• Mood: Sad, bitter, defeated.
• Find a simile and personification in the passage on 190 that
was read before. There is a metaphor above that passage as
well.
Definitions
• Reminder- if there is a word in a short story that you do not
understand, look it up!
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•
•
•
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Portage (189):
Trundled (192):
Malevolent (193):
Exquisitely (193):
Tarpaulin (203):
Tomorrow’s Lesson
• Show PowerPoint- difference between personal response and
analytical response.
• Personal response structure:
Para #1- intro with thesis statement, para #2 about literature,
para #3 about you, para #4 how the two relate and conclusion.
Rubric
• Demonstrate a setting- inner or outer, with at least 3 quote as
proof. Drawing or magazines or a computer program are
accepted.
Questions back of book