Spatial Separtion In Alice Munro's Boys And Girls

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Alice Munro 's 'Boys and Girls ' is a short story that follows the narrator as she very slowly begins to understand what it means to be a 'girl '. Goldman proposed that, through the careful use of spatial separtion, imagery such as the unfinished bedroom, the foxes, the calendars as well as their placement and the horses, along with the narrators slow seperation from the male world, Munro 's story is one that attempts to illuminate the cultually built distinction between male and female. Before we are told the gender of the narrator, she is introduced by speaking of her fathers fox skinning business admiringly, and she even suggests that the smell of the dead fox is “reassuringly seasonal”, which is to say, it is a comforting smell. She paints a poetic view of the foxes innards as her father kills and skins them, and speaks highly of his disguesting hired man who had “taken a swipe” at her with a bag of dead skinned foxes and whom “shot out a great clot of phelgm” into the fire. These are things which typically offend, rather than evoke feelings of admiration. So at this point it 's clear the narrator is allied with this manner and behaviour. It is also worth mentioning that we are not aware of her gender, and therefore approving of these behaviours makes her appear to be a boy. Munro goes on to describe the bedroom in …show more content…
She trys to act as though it doesn 't effect her, and that she 's seen it before, but her shakey legs tell otherwise. Goldman adds that the narrator recognizes this as an abuse of power, as she remembers a time when she abused her own power with Laird. When it was time for Flora to die, the narrator didn 't want to see it. She felt detached from her father now. She was acting more feminine now, decorting her room with lace and frills, dreaming of boys rescuing her, and seperating her side of the room from Lairds. The seperation between boy and girl are clear

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