Comparing Themes In Girls And Alice Munro's Boys And Girls

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The story “Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro and the story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell have similar themes. They both are coming of age type stories that show the growth of a character because of a situation they were put in or things that happened to them. In “Boys and Girls” the narrator enjoyed helping her father with his work much more than helping her mother with the house, she thought that work that her mother did was boring and she dreaded it. Throughout the story they refer to the word “girl” in a negative way, “The word girl had formerly seemed to me innocent and unburdened, like the word child; now it appeared that it was no such thing. A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what …show more content…

When the narrator saw this she did not like it and it greatly affected her. She feels very sad about seeing the horse killed and it helps her mature into a young woman. She realized that there is nothing wrong with being a girl and she begins acting more like a lady and helping out in the house with her mother more and less with her father. In “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” the girls are taken from the wolves and they have a lot of trouble adapting to their new lives. They have trouble trying to learn to be human. As the story goes on and some girls begin to catch on and get used to acting human we are able to see the struggle it is for them to adjust. Being taken from their families helps the girls to learn to be human girls. By the end of the story, most of the girls have figured out how to act human. They even realize that they can switch from acting like wolves to acting like humans easily enough to be able to visit their family, but still live as humans away from their family. In both stories the characters mature and learn about who they …show more content…

A story can have several different themes, but the theme that I noticed both of these stories having is coming of age. A story with the theme coming of age will show a journey of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood, both of these stories show this. In both stories, the characters reject adulthood at first. In “Boys and Girls” the narrator does not like helping her mother with work inside the house and she refuses to act like a lady. The narrator says, “It seemed to me that work inside the house was endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing.” (Munro 156) In “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” the girls had trouble adjusting to human behavior at first. At the beginning of the story, the narrator tells us, “I clamped down on her ankle, straining to close my jaws around the woolly XXL sock. Sister Josephine tasted like sweat and freckles. She smelled easy to kill.” (Russell 246) By the end of each story, however, the characters have matured and grown to learn who they should be. In “Boys and Girls” the narrator learns that she doesn’t have to be ashamed to be a girl and she begins to act more like a girl. “I still stayed awake after Laird was asleep and told myself stories, but even in these stories something different was happening, mysterious alterations took place. A story might start off in the old way, with a spectacular danger, a fire or wild animals, and for a while I might rescue people; then

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