Theme Of Gender Roles In Boys And Girls

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Father is outside, in the sun, sacrificing his body and energy in order to attain a comfortable living for his family. Mother is watching Father through the kitchen window as she chops carrots for tonight’s stew. Suddenly, she meets the eyes of her daughter, walking gently through the grass, being careful not to tear her dress. Playfully chasing after the girl is a young boy with scruffy hair who will one day, join his father under the beating sun. This scene highlights the gender roles that humans have duplicated generation after generation. The short story “Boys & Girls” by Alice Munro tells the story of a fox- farming family who exemplify societies set gender roles. THESIS: On the farm, the foxes represent how women are confined, looked down upon and objectified by men. The foxes who inhabit the farm are raised by men, controlled by men, owned by men, skinned by men, and sold for a price- by men. The narrator demonstrates this idea by explaining that “alive, the foxes inhabited a world my father made for them” (Munro 38).Women, compared to the foxes, have lived their lives for men throughout history. For instance, girls have been trained to find the right husband in order to gain self- worth and are often forced to obey a father, brother or husband. To further prove this, the narrator describes “a …show more content…

Our narrator is a classic example of how women and girls are thought of as useless for things of importance when there is a male around to dominate. The dominant examples to this statement that the author gives us are the management and roles of the silver foxes, the escape of Flora and what it symbolizes for the character dynamics and women as an entity, and the change in the narrator’s state of mind. The goal of this piece is to explain what gender roles are and how it forces women into a labelled box created by men and the

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