FREE ESSAY ON BOYS AND GIRLS

BOYS AND GIRLS

A Comprehensive Summary of
Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls"
Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls" is a story about a girl that struggles against society's
ideas of how a girl should be, only to find her trapped in the ways of the world. 
The story starts out on a farm in the 1940's. The narrator is a woman who is telling the
first person point of view of when she was a girl. The girl's father was a fox farmer. He
was a hard working, quiet man and the girl really respected him. Every winter the father
killed the foxes that he raised and sold their pelts. The girl loved this time and found
it seasonal, although her mother despised it.
In the beginning the girl is about nine years old. She had a younger brother named Laird
with whom she shared a bedroom. At night when they would go to bed they would get scared
and try to distract themselves by singing. After Laird would go to sleep the girl stayed
up and told herself stories. In these stories she was a great hero. She was courageous
and bold and she accomplished great feats to rescue others. Everyone adored her for being
heroic. The stories always involved her riding and shooting though she couldn't ride a
horse or shoot a gun. 
The girl took great pride in the fact that she helped her father with the chores on the
farm. Her main chore was to water the foxes. Laird would help with a small watering can
though he would usually spill most of his water. The girl would also help her father when
he would cut the long grass around the fox pens. He would cut it and she would rake it
up. He would then throw the grass on top of the pens to keep the sun off of the foxes.
The entire fox pen was well thought out and well made. The foxes were fed horsemeat,
which could be bought very cheap. When a farmer had a dying horse her father would pay
for the horse and slaughter it. Her father was very ingenious with his fox farm and the
girl was obviously impressed. She was proud to work with her father. One time while her
father was talking to a salesman he said, "Like you to meet my new hired man." That
comment made her so happy, only to have the salesman reply that he thought it was only a
girl.
While the girl loved the work outside she hated to do the 'woman's work' inside. She
disliked her mother for making her do it, and believed that her mother only made her do
it because she didn't like it. She didn't like anything about this work. She hated the
hot dark kitchen, and thought that work was endless, depressing and unimportant as
compared to the work she did for her father. She would do a chore for her mother and then
run off before she could tell her anything else to do. She had a very low opinion about
anything to do with mother. The only thing the mother had to talk about were things that
were unimportant to the girl, like dresses and old boyfriends. She thought that her
mother was undependable, easily fooled, conniving and ignorant about the way things
really were. This opinion was very much different than that she had of her father.
The girl began feeling like she was being attacked. Like everyone was out to make her a
'girl'. When her grandmother came to town she was bombarded with comments like, "Girls
don't slam doors like that." and "Girls keep their knees together when they sit down."
The worst was when she would ask a question and the grandmother would reply "That's none
of a girl's business." The girl rebelled against comments like these and continued to
slam doors and sit awkwardly. 
By this time things were changing. Farmers were buying tractors and it became harder to
find horses. The family would sometimes get healthy horses that no longer had any use.
They would keep these horses all winter long. One winter when she was eleven years old
they had two horses, Mack and Flora. Mack was an old workhorse slow and easy to handle.
Flora was a sorrel mare who was violent and reckless. 
The following spring Mack was to be slaughtered. Henry, who was a hired man on the farm,
led Mack out of the stable. While this was going on the girl took Laird up into the barn
so that they could watch them shoot the horse. When the horse was shot it didn't die
instantly but instead he fell over and kicked his legs for a few seconds, which caused
Henry to laugh. After he died the men examined the horse in a very practiced and
businesslike way. The girl felt very uneasy about the death. She then became scared that
she would get into trouble for showing Laird the killing so she took him to a movie to
help him forget it.
Changes on the farm weren't the only changes going on. Laird was becoming stronger than
she was. She began fixing up her side of the room with lace. She had a dressing table,
and she was planning to put a barricade in between her bed and Laird's. At night she
wasn't scared anymore and she stopped singing. Her stories that she told herself were
changing. She was now the one being rescued by boys and men. She began to worry more
about what she was wearing and what her hair looked like.
Two weeks after Mack was slaughtered it was time for Flora to be killed. This time she
didn't think about watching. She even felt somewhat ashamed, and her attitude to her
father and his work began to change. So while the killing was underway her and her
brother were picking up sticks to make a teepee out of. Suddenly there was a lot of
commotion and Flora was running free. Her father told her to shut the gate. She ran to
the gate and just had just enough time to close it. Instead of closing the gate she
opened it wide and let the horse run free. Laird got there just in time to see her do it.
When her father and Henry showed up they thought that she didn't get there in time. They
simply got the gun and the knives they used and jumped in the truck. On the way out they
stopped and picked up Laird who was begging to go.
Even though the girl thought that she would be in trouble for letting the horse out she
did not regret it, even though she wasn't sure why she had done it. After everyone
arrived back home they had dinner. Laird was excited and showed off the blood that he had
on his arm from the horse. During dinner Laird told everyone how she had let the horse
out of the gate. She began crying and her father said, "Never mind, she's only a girl."
Finally she didn't protest it and thought that maybe it was true.