45 pages • 1 hour read
Boys And Girls
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Animal Pelts
Animals, throughout the short story, are the vehicles by which Munro communicates family and gender dynamics. They are the means by which the family survives, and the natural life cycles that they enable are a system that the family must keep going. For example, procuring and killing horses for meat is necessary to keep foxes alive so that their pelts can be sold for the family. This life cycle neutralizes the animal pelt, or its flesh, as another element of the seasons. The smell of death is, to the narrator, “reassuringly seasonal” (Paragraph 2).
At the same time, the storytelling narrator starts, perhaps unconsciously, to give the animal bodies a greater meaning. Although she does not circle back to the fox pelts, she zeroes in on one part of this life cycle and disrupts it, thus questioning the overarching process by which her family lives. In working to free Flora—whose entrapment shows her own as well as her family’s entrapment in the perhaps-problematic life cycle in which they live—the narrator points out a flaw in this life cycle.
The animal’s dead body becomes a motif through which the story operates. It also comes to separate men from women. Thus, the animal pelts that at first seem harmless are the narrator’s lifeblood in a different way. They help her to work out her anxieties about adulthood and gender, but they lose their
The House and the Barn
The house and the barn are symbolic spaces across the text. The diegetic space of the short story is limited to this home area, which the narrator describes carefully. She is intimately familiar with both spaces and has formed her childhood life around the way that they make her feel. Practices like singing before bedtime are part of the “rules” that will protect against the dark and mysterious house (Paragraph 5). But in the daytime, the house is her mother’s space, and it feels limiting to the narrator.
The barn is her father’s domain, and it is strange to see her mother anywhere near it. This is the space where they keep the horses and the hay. The narrator watches from both the loft within the house and the loft within the barn, which are spaces where she can watch the lives of adults in secret.
The space between the house and the barn is the best place for a child: both the narrator and Laird are “afraid of inside” (Paragraph 5). The narrator loves to help her father tend to the foxes in the “world” that her father creates for them (Paragraph 8). Animals and children seem to live suspended between the male and female, constructed worlds. Being pulled into one space or another feels unnatural for the narrator.
Storytelling
The practice of storytelling is a motif across the story. It is the primary way that the narrator differentiates between her father and her mother. He works silently. The narrator’s mother, by contrast, “would tell [the narrator] all sorts of things” about her childhood (Paragraph 11). The man’s stories are private, whereas her mother’s stories are frequent and take a significant role in occupying her time.
The narrator tells herself stories. It is through these stories, primarily, that readers can track the shift between her childhood worldview and her more adult worldview. Her childhood stories, which involve her own heroism, shift to show her need for heroism to save her. This theme of entrapment, the narrator herself notices, seems to exemplify her mother’s lifestyle. It also seems inevitable.
Therefore, storytelling becomes a means of survival and a means of escape. It is also her way of understanding the world. In the story’s final scene, the narrator is ultimately silenced, unable to speak directly of her transformation into a woman. Indeed, she never explicitly tells the listener what happens to her across the text. Storytelling, for women, seems to be a way of explaining what happens without saying it directly: this feminine practice is both an expression of power, then, and an expression of limitation.
Unlock all 45 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Alice Munro
