Nature vs. Nurture in Munro's "Boys and Girls"

Kudos to the 24 who ventured to the library in muggy weather last evening for our discussion of the short story "Boys and Girls," by Alice Munro.

The conversation spun around two poles.  As a coming of age story, the narrator comes to terms with her "girlness."  That "girlness" becomes defined by her relationship with her younger brother, Laird, as they grow up.

The setting of the story, a fox farm in Ontario, provides an interesting backdrop -- not wholly wild, not wholly civilized -- to the evolution of the personalities of the two kids.  The father runs the enterprise, the fox fur business, and the mother concerns herself with the home and the hearth.

The messy little secret of the operation is that the foxes subsist on the meat of horses killed after they have outlived their usefulness to the farmer.  After seeing one of the horses, Mack, killed by her father, the girl impulsively abets the escape of a mare, Flora, from the farm.  The father, Laird, and the hired hand Henry Bailey capture Flora and kill her.

The narrator is, as Munro writes, "absolved and dismissed" from her action because she starts crying when Laird identifies her as the one who let Flora out of the gate.

There were some in attendance last night who thought the narrator's actions were determined by the inexorable laws of sexual development.  Others considered them to be imposed from without, by a social construct of what it means to be female.

Author of the Month: Alice Munro (1931- )

"Boys and Girls," this month's featured selection, relates an episode in the life of a young girl growing up on a fox farm in rural Ontario. She is repelled by the killing of old horses to provide meat for the foxes. In a moment of revelation, she comes truly to understand the differences between boys and girls.

Munro is a prolific Canadian short story writer who is published often in the New Yorker magazine. "Boys and Girls" offers a child's-eye view of gender roles on the farm. Our narrator watches her mother canning fruits and vegetables in the kitchen and says, "It seemed to me that work in the house was endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing; work done out of doors, and in my father's service, was ritualistically important."