Boys and Girls by Alice Munro

The story, Boys and Girls by Alice Munro, describes feelings of young woman coming of age. The nameless girl lives in the fox farm with her family in a secluded world created by her father. The world of demanding manual labor that is “surrounded by a high guard fence”. Everything in this farm had a purpose and everyone was expected to act according to their roles.

The young woman coming of age has a conflict with her mother; the misunderstanding of her mother’s views on the young girl’s behavior and expectations. The young girl recognizes the authority and power of her father, and gladly complies with any duties assigned by him, but she does not recognize her mother in the same way. The father’s request for help around the fox farm invokes in the girl, a sense of pride, responsibility and importance, regardless of the task she had to complete. However, the mother’s requests for help around the house have been avoided like a plague. The girl feels very rebellious towards her mother; she does not understand or want to accept the role of girl. “A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become.”

She is feeling trapped in the expectations of becoming a girl, after all, everything in her father’s farm had to have a purpose; the foxes are raised and then killed “when their fur was prime”, the mother took care of the house, her brother Laird would be “a real help” to her father when he “gets a little bigger”, the horses were a fed for foxes.  Everyone complied with their roles.

In her attempt to escape her own future of becoming a girl, she does something that she has never done before, disobeying her father, and letting the runaway horse run free. She could have stopped her and she knows that sooner or later Flora would be caught and will fulfill her purpose of becoming feed for the foxes, but at that moment she enjoys seeing that animal running freely away from this farm. Perhaps that was a moment, like in her night time stories, that she told herself, about herself “that presented opportunities for courage, boldness and self-sacrifice”.