means the set of beliefs that underpin the aspirations of

Obviously, one short story cannot pack in the entire (and in fact very diverse) feminist platform. Nevertheless, what this story does do is dramatize certain basic feminist ideas, and it does so quite effectively. Since the notion that a woman might move beyond the home necessitates the notion that women are not genetically programmed, as it were, to be only effective in the home, one thing that feminists argue is that desiring a traditional role is often the result of training or socialization, and not necessarily the result of nature (‘‘nature versus nurture,’’ as the debate is often called). That is, if girls are not discouraged, then they might very well chose a profession which, before the women’s movement, was thought solely appropriate for a man. This basic premise is presented cogently by Munro; the narrator thinks: ‘‘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 I had to become.’’ By saying that a girl is something she must ‘‘become,’’ Munro puts forward the idea that this development is in no way natural, but rather will be the result of training or socialization. Soon after this realization, the narrator notices how it is she is urged ‘‘to become’’ a girl, or how the socialization proceeds:

My grandmother came to stay with us for a few weeks and I heard other things. ‘‘Girls don’t slam doors like that.’’ ‘‘Girls keep their knees together when they sit down.’’ And, worse still, when I asked some questions, ‘‘That’s none of girls’ business.’’ I continued to slam doors and sit as awkwardly as possible, thinking that by such measures I kept myself free.

What is understood from passages such as the ones above is that there is not much difference in behavior between the sexes if they are left to their own devices. However, figures in positions of authority, such as the grandmother, take it upon themselves to train the sexes in appropriate sex-specific behaviors. Judging from the above, the training of girls concentrates on making them into beings who demonstrate physical self-containment and modesty (no slamming doors; sitting demurely). And beside behavior restrictions, there is the training of girls in their proper interests, ‘‘girls’ business.’’

Clearly, this training would not be resisted so strongly by the narrator if this differentiation of the sexes did not involve a simultaneous devaluation of ‘‘girls’ business,’’ which is a second major feminist issue. That is, it is not simply that girls are trained to be specific types of persons, but also that the person they are to become is considered, socially, less important than a man. Munro develops this idea in scenes such as the following:

One time a feed salesman came down into the pens to talk to him [the father] and my father said, ‘‘Like to have you meet my new hired man.’’ I turned away and raked furiously, red in the face with pleasure. ‘‘Could of fooled me,’’ said the salesman. ‘‘I thought it was only a girl.’’

Or, at the end of the story, when it has become known that the narrator let the horse out of the field purposefully: ‘‘‘Never mind,’ my father said. He spoke with resignation, even good humor, the words which absolved and dismissed me for good. ‘She’s only a girl,’ he said.’’ What this pointed repetition of the phrase ‘‘only a girl’’ points to is precisely this societal notion that girls and women are considered less significant than men. The narrator is so deeply pleased by being referred to teasingly as a ‘‘new hired man’’ because she is quite aware that being a man is better than being ‘‘only’’ a girl or woman. She resists her future role as mother’s helper in the story because her pride rebels against being considered second to anybody.

Feminists combat this unfortunate hierarchy in two ways. One, they insist that traditional woman’s work is valuable, and must be recognized for how it keeps society going. In ‘‘Boys and Girls,’’ this idea comes across in the way that Munro depicts her mother as constantly busy and very hardworking. She may be doing housework, but if she did not, the family would fall apart. The reason why this hierarchy came about, feminists suggest, is because men’s work is more public, and women’s more private, and since it takes place in the home it is less visible and thus has gone unacknowledged and undervalued. Also, another way that feminists work toward the changing of women’s secondary social status is to insist that, if given the chance or choice, women could do as well as men in the more public professions. By letting women move beyond the home, it will be seen how they can compete with men and thus be seen as their social equals. Further, feminists argue that some women have talents specifically matched to public professions, and that it would be a shame to waste these talents by forcing them to remain in the home. Indeed, as an aspiring writer in an era before women’s advancement was as consolidated as it is today, Munro herself voiced just such an observation in an interview. On the farm, Munro observed, ‘‘there is a sexual polarity.’’ And, she adds ‘‘you are a bit out of luck if you don’t have the talents for the sexual role that you’ve been born into.’’ Of herself she says, ‘‘I’m not good at hooking rugs and making quilts and things like that, so I would have had a very rough time in this life.’’

Luckily for Munro, she was born when there had been enough advancement of women in the realm of the arts that it was possible for her to develop her true talent, which was to be a writer and artist. However, since these advancements took so long to achieve, and were majorly advanced in the very decades that she came of age as an artist, it is not surprising that some of her stories, like ‘‘Boys and Girls,’’ records this social issue of women’s rights. Literature or fiction is not conceived of in a vacuum, rather it arises from the experiences of real men and women living in history. For this reason, it is misguided to assume that art always transcends time and place. Rather, much of the most respected fiction in the history of literature is so respected precisely because it was able to grasp and communicate the social and historical reality of its time and place.

Source: Carol Dell’Amico, ‘‘Literature and Social History,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999. Dell’Amico is a doctoral candidate in the program of Literatures in English at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She specializes in the twentieth-century novel.

Although Alice Munro knew from the time she was 12 years old that she wanted to be a writer, her first collection of short stories was not published until 1968, when Munro was well into her adulthood. Since then, however, she has remained one of Canada’s top authors, and her work has crossed the world’s boundaries; her writing has been translated into 14 languages and her works are widely anthologized. Her writing often features the world she knows best, the Depression-era southwestern Ontario of her early years. In Dance of the Happy Shades, from which the story ‘‘Boys and Girls’’ is taken, Munro presents the hardscrabble childhood of her youth. Critics and readers responded to this collection positively, noting her evocation of place as well as her understanding and depiction of the gender roles that characterized the time period. For this collection she won the prestigious Governor’s General Award, an honor that would be bestowed upon her several times.

‘‘Boys and Girls’’ may be termed a rite-ofpassage story, for it tells of a significant event that helps one girl to recognize and accept the womanhood that is her future. The 11-year-old narrator lives on her family’s fox farm. For years she has helped out her father, but that winter she realizes that her mother is expecting her to become more of a ‘‘girl’’—working in the house, for instance, instead of in the fox pens. The narrator resists such efforts at transformation. However, when her father intends to kill a mare in order to feed the foxes, with no forethought the girl frees the panicked horse. The girl is not surprised to later learn that her father has recaptured and killed the mare. What does surprise her, however, is that he is not angry with her transgression; after all, as he says, ‘‘‘She’s only a girl.’’’ And perhaps also surprising to the girl is her own reaction to his statement: ‘‘I didn’t protest that, even in my heart. Maybe it was true.’’

One of the most striking features of the story is Munro’s presentation of how the ideas suggested by ‘‘boy’’ and ‘‘girl’’ come into opposition; this opposition is reflected in all facets of the narrator’s world. Still, the story slowly builds to this conclusion, for as it begins, the narrator and her younger brother, Laird, have both firmly allied themselves with their father; they spend their time watching their father work, skinning the foxes. Their mother, however—the homemaker—dislikes this bloody business.

Clearly, the narrator has given thought to the differing roles of men and women and has chosen to identify herself with the male sphere. She sees the inside of the house as her mother’s territory, a territory she does not care to inhabit. Outside the house is the real world, the world of foxes and commerce and vibrancy. Even her bedroom, part of the inside house, is not a sanctuary but instead an ‘‘unfinished’’ space she shares with her brother. Marlene Goldman has written that this space remains ‘‘undifferentiated,’’ implying the same state in the children—that they have not yet accepted their respective labels of ‘‘girl’’ or ‘‘boy.’’ The children are so alike they even share the same fear: ‘‘inside, the room where we slept,’’ instead of outside, with its chilling winter. At the beginning of the story, it is the outside world in which the girl participates. She has a summer job of giving the foxes water with the ‘‘real watering can, her father’s,’’ while Laird only carries a ‘‘little cream and green gardening can, filled too full and knocking against his legs and slopping water on his canvas shoes.’’ The girl’s subtle boast emphasizes her belief that she has access to the male tools and thus the male identity. The girl compares working sideby- side with her father to working in the house with her mother. Her father remains silent, while her mother often would tell her stories. The girl, however, gets a ‘‘feeling of pride’’ working with her father that she lacks with her mother. Clearly, housework and ‘‘women’s work’’ do not have the same value as the male, outside work. She feels her role on the farm is assured—her father even refers to her when speaking to a feed salesman as ‘‘‘my new hired man,’’’ which makes her ‘‘red in the face with pleasure.’’

The girl has no expectations that her daily life will change. By this point she has fully embraced the male identity, even down to the stories she tells herself at night in which she plays a rescuing hero and then rides down the main street on a horse to receive the townspeople’s gratitude, even though the only person to ever do so is the man who plays King Billy during the town’s yearly parade, itself a state of make-believe. One day, however, she sees her mother by the barn. This itself is the first sign that something is amiss, for ‘‘[I]t was an odd thing to see my mother down at the barn. She did not often come out of the house unless it was to do something— hang out the wash or dig potatoes in the garden.’’ The girl overhears part of her mother’s words—‘‘And then I can use her more in the house, . . . It’s not like I had a girl in the family at all.’’

Despite this conversation, the narrator does not expect anything to change. As she puts it, ‘‘Who could imagine Laird doing my work . . . It showed how little my mother knew about the way things really were.’’ Her statement shows that not only does she believe her help to be indispensable to her father, but that, because of her male work, she believes herself to be superior to her mother—more knowledgeable and more useful. Her acknowledgment that ‘‘I did not expect my father to pay any attention’’ to her mother’s words further shows that she has placed herself on an equal level with her father; as the only family representatives of the male identity, they share the secrets of the farm; her mother, trapped in the house and in her female body, remains ignorant.

Despite her protestations, at this point the girl enters into a new stage, one in which she is no longer able to securely latch on to her chosen identity. For throughout the winter she hears ‘‘a great deal more on the theme’’ and admits, ‘‘I no longer felt safe . . . The word girl had formerly sounded to me innocent and unburdened, like the word child; now it appeared it was no such thing. A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I was to become.’’ That winter other challenges to the girl’s right to occupy the male sphere are launched. As Goldman points out, with her grandmother’s visit, the narrator learns lessons about how girls are expected to come under societal control: girls don’t slam doors, girls keep their knees together when they sit down, and the worst of all, in response to a question, ‘‘‘That’s none of girls’ business.’’’

To what extent these lessons influence the narrator is unknown to the reader at this point. Only later does the reader learn that the girl has taken to ‘‘standing in front of the mirror combing my hair and wondering if I would be pretty when I grew up.’’ The stories she tells herself at night have changed, too; although they start out the same, they switch so that she no longer does the rescuing but suddenly a male figure is rescuing her. Her belongings have similarly taken on the trappings of femininity: old lace curtains as a bedspread, a dressing table with a skirt. She also has grown dissatisfied with the bedroom she shares with Laird. What she had previously presented as a common space, where the two siblings cheerfully engaged in storytelling and singing, she now plans to divide with a barricade. When this transformation happens is unknown to the reader, but clearly it has been building up before her fateful encounter with Flora. In fact, it is likely that the narrator deliberately withheld this information from the reader, mirroring the way she has kept herself from understanding the true meaning of her actions. The narrator’s ability to hide pertinent details has already been demonstrated in her exclusion of how her father feeds the foxes—‘‘I have forgotten to say what the foxes were fed. My father’s bloody apron reminded me.’’ That the story opens with the dead, bloody bodies of the fox shows that the narrator has left out this detail in an attempt to present her favored father in the best light possible.

The spring began as any other spring. Yet, as her father prepares to kill Flora, a mare he has purchased with the intention of feeding her to the foxes, the girl undergoes a drastic transformation, particularly so in comparison to her reaction at the killing of another horse a short time before. When that horse was killed, the girl’s legs were a ‘‘little shaky,’’ but she felt ‘‘all right’’ after going to the movies that afternoon.

The girl has already identified herself to some extent with Flora, a high-strung horse, for Flora, like the girl and even the foxes, experiences con- finement. Clearly, the structure and description of the farm itself reinforce such ideas of entrapment. The foxes, which the girl recognizes as beautiful but hostile, live in a ‘‘world my father had made for them.’’ She describes the fox pens, which Goldman points out are ‘‘spaces in which bodies are confined and controlled,’’ as bordering the streets of a town; inside the pens the foxes restlessly ‘‘prowled up and down,’’ much as Flora, when let out of the barn, ‘‘trotted up and down and reared at the fences, clattering her hooves against the rails.’’ Goldman further comments on the house and the farm: the dark, hot kitchen that ‘‘imprisons’’ the mother and threatens the narrator; the fields that surround the farm and the gates that restrict traffic are an ‘‘enlarged version of the pen’’; even the town itself is an ‘‘inescapable enclosure.’’

When Flora is brought out of the barn to be killed, the girl states, ‘‘It was exciting to see her running, whinnying, going up on her hind legs, prancing and threatening like a horse in a Western movie, an unbroken ranch horse, though she was just an old driver, an old sorrel mare.’’ The horse brings to life the narrator’s fantasies, though now generally rejected, of the female striking against imposed societal expectations and becoming a creature strong in its own right. Flora breaks away into a meadow where a gate has been left open. The girl’s father shouts to her to shut the gate. It is at this moment that the girl breaks irrevocably from her self-imposed male-identified position. Her desire to free the female horse is stronger than her desire to please her father. She knows however, that the horse will be recaptured, and that freedom is only an illusion. For the first time in her life, she disobeys her father. ‘‘Instead of shutting the gate,’’ she recounts, ‘‘I opened it as wide as I could. I did not make any decision to do this, it was just what I did.’’ While the girl returns to the house—‘‘inside’’—her younger brother becomes a man; he remains ‘‘outside’’ and goes along with the men to track down and catch Flora. This is the point at which the narrator admits to the changes that she has been undergoing; she opens her heart up to the truth. She has become a ‘‘girl.’’

Marlene Goldman calls ‘‘Boys and Girls’’ a ‘‘narrative which highlights the almost invisible societal forces which shape children.’’ By the end of the story, the sister and brother have firmly stepped into the roles that society has extended to them. ‘‘Boys and Girls’’ also introduces two themes that reappear in Munro’s writing: the burden of femininity and the women’s need to break free.

Source: Rena Korb, ‘‘A Rite of Passage,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999. Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers.

She also looks at the very different worlds—outside and inside, the male sphere and the female sphere— described by Munro in the story. ‘‘My father was a fox farmer.’’ So begins Alice Munro’s short story ‘‘Boys and Girls,’’ a narrative which highlights the almost invisible societal forces which shape children, in this case, the narrator and her brother Laird, into gendered adults. There is no doubt that males and females are biologically distinct at birth. Yet the behaviours and roles ascribed to each sex on the basis of this biological distinction are not natural. In this study, then, when I speak of gender, I refer not to sex, but to this set of prescribed behaviours.

Children, as the text clearly illustrates, do not evolve naturally into gendered adults. Instead, the construction of gendered subjects constitutes a form of production. Yet unlike other systems of production, the mechanisms which assist in the creation of gendered adults remain invisible; they seem natural, and for this reason they are taken for granted.

One such ‘‘invisible’’ mechanism, central to the production of gendered adults, involves the division and control of space. In ‘‘Boys and Girls,’’ spatial divisions and the control of space within the home and on the farm are emphasized by a narrator still young enough to remark upon details which the adults ignore. As a result of the narrator’s relatively innocent and inquisitive perspective, the reader can appreciate how the division of space facilitates two seemingly disparate systems of production: farming and the construction of gendered adults.

As a farmer, the father cultivates wild animals for the purpose of consumption. As the narrator explains, he ‘‘raised silver foxes in pens.’’ The word ‘‘raised’’ refers to silver foxes, but the term offers more than this strictly referential meaning. It can also be understood within the familial context: people often speak of raising children. The plurality of the word opens the text to diverse readings— readings which introduce the possibility of a correspondence between the two systems of production.

In particular, the father raises the foxes in ‘‘pens’’—spaces in which bodies are confined and controlled. As the narrator explains, he took great pains to build a miniature city for his captives: ‘‘alive, the foxes inhabited a world my father made for them.’’ Moreover, the pens resembled a medieval town ‘‘padlocked at night.’’ This image of the enclosure and the concomitant distinction between inside and outside (indoor and outdoor) recur throughout the text.

Early on, the house takes on the properties of the pen. The dark, hot, stifling kitchen imprisons the narrator’s mother and threatens to imprison the narrator. Similarly, the fields surrounding the farm and the gates, which restrict traffic, become an enlarged version of the pen. Finally, the town itself and the outlying farms are conceived of in terms of an inescapable enclosure. As a result of these replications of the enclosure, the father’s occupation and his role in establishing and supervising the boundaries between inside and outside take on greater significance and begin to reflect a far more pervasive cultural project.

The Marxist critic Ivan Illich sheds light on the nature of this project when he suggests that the capacity to enclose, essentially a male privilege, was the key factor responsible for the emergence of industrial society and wage work as we know it today. Illich states that the economic division of labor into a productive and a non-productive kind was pioneered and first enforced through ‘‘the domestic enclosure of women.’’ As he explains, men became the ‘‘wardens of their domestic women.’’ Thus, the narrator’s father, in his capacity as guardian and gate-keeper penning in the bodies, performs a task which supports industrial society and wage work, and ultimately, capitalist production.

In addition to enclosing the foxes, the father in ‘‘Boys and Girls’’ also controls a specific space within the home. When not working out of doors, he carries out his activities in the cellar, a room which is white-washed and lit by a hundred-watt bulb. By definition, white-wash is ‘‘a solution of quicklime or of whiting and size for brushing over walls and ceilings to give a clean appearance.’’ Figuratively speaking, ‘‘white washing’’ suggests clearing ‘‘a person or his memory of imputation or [clearing] someone’s reputation.’’ In this case, the presence of white-wash in the male domain suggests that an attempt is made to ‘‘give something a clean appearance’’— something which may be fundamentally unclean.

Furthermore, the intense light which illuminates the space also reflects the father’s desire to control or, more specifically, to manipulate one’s impression of his territory. In his book Power/ Knowledge, Foucault studies the use of light in various structures in terms of the desire to maintain an arbitrary, yet powerful force. He concludes that ‘‘a form of power whose main instance is that of opinion will refuse to tolerate areas of darkness.’’ Thus the white-wash and the bright lights in the cellar effectively undermine the seeming neutrality of the father and his activities.

Initially, although sensitive to the details of the procedure, the narrator takes it for granted that the father’s work—the raising of foxes—is an ideologically neutral activity, one without agency. It simply ‘‘happens’’ in the fall and early winter that he ‘‘killed and skinned and sold their pelts to the Hudson’s Bay Co.’’ But the commercial basis of the slaying undercuts any claims to neutrality. The father’s occupation is enmeshed in a cultural discourse which imposes specific views upon the world.

The narrator, however, remains unaware of the implications of her father’s activities for some time. She feels safe in the male sphere and enjoys the ‘‘warm, safe, brightly lit downstairs world.’’ She feels threatened, not by the male domain or the icy winter world outside, but by the ‘‘inside,’’ the ‘‘unfinished,’’ upper portion of the house, the bedroom which she shares with her brother Laird. Unlike the clearly delineated male territory below, the bedroom remains undifferentiated. Neither male nor female, the space is fraught with danger. Poorly lit, the room specifically threatens their link with the male domain. In the darkness, the children must fix their eyes ‘‘on the faint light coming up the stairwell’’ in order to retain their connection with the male sphere.

The unfinished state of the room can be taken as an image of the undifferentiated consciousness of the children. Laird has not yet adopted a gender role associated with the father. Nor has the narrator been forced to sever her connection to the father and take up an identity aligned with the mother. This hypothesis concerning her male orientation gains support from the nature of her nocturnal fantasies.

In the stories she tells herself late at night, she casts herself into the role of heroic subject. As male savior, she rescues people from a bombed building, shoots rabid wolves and rides ‘‘a fine horse spiritedly down the main streets.’’ Yet nobody except a male, ‘‘King Billy,’’ ever rode a horse down the street. Before her subjectivity has been constituted, her body fought over and conquered, these dreams of male heroism seem attainable.

By the end of the story, however, her gender role has been established. This psychic division is replicated on the level of a spatial division, signalling the children’s acquisition of gendered subjectivity. The bedroom is divided into two halves—one for the boy, the other, for the girl. Even the stories the narrator tells herself have altered. The plots start off in the old way, but then ‘‘things would change around, and instead, somebody would be rescuing me.’’ No longer the valiant hero, she becomes the victim in need of rescue.

Further proof of the narrator’s initial alignment with the father lies in her assurance that she is his ‘‘hired man.’’ During the day, rather than help her mother in the house—a job she abhors—she assists her father in looking after his captives. While watering the foxes, secure in her position, she looks scornfully upon her little brother’s efforts to assist. Too small to handle adult tools, Laird toddles along with his pitiful gardening can—an overtly phallic object. In boasting that she ‘‘had the real watering can, my father’s,’’ the narrator further emphasizes her belief that she has access, not to the father’s actual member, but to the privileged symbolic system aligned with the phallus.

By aligning herself with her father, the narrator thus accrues a measure of the status associated with the set of signifiers which attend the phallus, including ‘‘law,’’ ‘‘money,’’ ‘‘power,’’ ‘‘knowledge,’’ ‘‘plentitude,’’ ‘‘authoritative-vision,’’ etc.

As a result of this access to a particular set of signifiers, her relationship with her father differs dramatically from the connection she has with her mother. The contrast can be best understood within the inside/outside paradigm. Father and daughter engage in the context of outer space—space that is ‘‘structured, interpreted and rendered meaningful by social discourse produced by the system of intellectual and cultural traditions.’’ The narrator literally joins her father on the outside (the out of doors) where they do work that is ‘‘ritualistically important.’’

The relationship the narrator has with her mother, on the other hand, contrasts sharply with the silent, disciplined relationship she has with her father. Once again, to use the inside/outside paradigm, the association between mother and daughter, which occurs within the house, reflects the qualities of ‘‘inner’’ space. Louise Forsyth explains that ‘‘inner’’ space is also the realm of ‘‘the imaginary, of spirituality, of memory.’’ The narrator enters this space when she tells herself stories, and the mother, in sharing her memories with her daughter, also enters this space.

The mother does not belong to the powerful ruling elite, the patriarchy. Thus, she cannot control her daughter by utilizing the strategy available to the male. Whereas work done out of doors is ‘‘ritualistically important’’ or real, work performed indoors is ‘‘endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing.’’ For this reason, the mother treats her daughter as a fellow prisoner and their association is characterized by speech and openness.

At bottom, the separation between inner and outer space is arbitrary. No undisputed boundary separates inside from outside or nature from culture, unless, as Derrida argues, ‘‘it is granted that the division between exterior and interior passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of the exterior.’’ That is to say, the supposed border which divides the space must either pass through the ‘‘inside’’ or the ‘‘outside.’’

While the separation between inside and outside may be arbitrary, these divisions are upheld by the virtually intractable force of opinion and tradition. Moreover, as we shall see, the placement of specific objects within either space affords a tremendous amount of cultural information concerning power relations. For instance, in exchange for the pelts, the family receives calendars. As the narrator explains, the Hudson’s Bay company or the Montreal Fur Traders supplied them with ‘‘heroic calendars to hang on both sides of the kitchen door.’’ At first, in the context of the discourse of production, calendars seem out of place. Why does the narrator not refer to the receipt of a more logical item such as money? Yet upon closer examination, calendars prove to be an apt symbol, one which, like the word ‘‘raised,’’ underscores a connection between the father’s economic occupation as a farmer and his role as a producer of gendered subjects.

For one thing, the placement of the calendars on both sides of the kitchen door links the father’s work, the production of animals, to the domestic sphere (the kitchen being the area within the home most closely connected to females). Secondly, mimicking the device of mise en abîme (the story which tells a story about telling a story, ad infinitum), the calendars not only ‘‘speak’’ as a result of their placement on the kitchen door, but they also tell a story by way of their depiction of the colonization in the norther wilderness.

The calendars depict nature being conquered by male adventurers in all their plumed flag-planting majesty: territory is claimed and controlled. This depiction, in turn, recalls culture’s age-old project of mastery over nature. Furthermore, the opposition between culture and nature illustrated by the calendar is closely aligned to a more general, cultural opposition between male and female.

Derrida argues that throughout history nature has been opposed to a chain of cultural institutions. Moreover, as Derrida and other critics have pointed out, these institutions have been traditionally aligned with the male, while the realm of the natural has been long associated with the female. Thus, by placing the calendars on both sides of the kitchen door, the aperture of the female domain, and by supplementing this with an illustration of the colonization of the wilderness, the calendars underscore the correspondence between the colonization of nature and the colonization of gendered subjects— specifically female subjects.

Finally, the natives within the calendar illustration, who bend their backs to the portage, have, like the foxes, been co-opted into the cultural project. Both foxes and natives exemplify bodies named by the discourse of production. The farmer transforms the foxes into ‘‘pelts’’ just as the early explorers transform the indigenous people into ‘‘savages’’ by imposing limited interpretations of their beings upon them. Both farmer and explorer reduce bodies, fragment them into raw material and conscript them into the service of production.

Thus the seemingly insignificant detail of the placement of the calendar with its depiction of the colonization of the wilderness provides a diachronic perspective of the farmer’s activities—a perspective which enables one to see that the enclosure of the foxes’ bodies and the bodies of the other family members (who also ‘‘inhabit a world . . . [their] father made for them’’), replicates our forefather’s enclosure of the feminine wilderness. Moreover, the calendar solidifies the connection, first established through the use of the word ‘‘raising,’’ between the two types of production: farming and the raising of gendered adults.

Slowly but surely, as a result of these spatial arrangements, the narrator’s position on the outside— her tenuous alignment with the male—is threatened. The first threat is delivered by the father’s hired hand, Henry Bailey. After the foxes are skinned, Bailey takes a sackful of their bloody bodies and swipes at the narrator, saying ‘‘Christmas present.’’ This gesture subtly suggests a connection between the narrators current fate and that of the foxes. Throughout the story, Bailey relishes the prospect of the narrator’s acquisition of her gender role with its concomitant enforcement of subjugation to the male. When he comes across the narrator and her brother fighting, Bailey laughs again, saying, ‘‘Oh, that there Laird’s gonna show you, one of these days!’’

Yet another threat arrives in the form of a feed salesman. The father introduces his daughter to the salesman as a hired man. The salesman responds according to the dictates of culture: no female is allowed on the outside. He reacts to the threat of her presence by treating the father’s remark as a joke: ‘‘could of fooled me,’’ he says, ‘‘I thought it was only a girl.’’

Other challenges to the narrator’s connection to the father and her right to occupy the male ‘‘outside’’ space are launched from within the household itself. Female family members begin to coerce the narrator. Efforts to restrict her behavior occur at every level of existence. For example, her grandmother tells her, ‘‘girls don’t slam doors like that’’ (control of her movement through space); ‘‘girls keep their knees together when they sit down’’ (control of the body); and when she asks a question, she is told ‘‘that’s none of girls’ business’’ (control of consciousness itself).

In a similar bid for control, the narrator’s mother confronts the father in front of the barn one fall evening, demanding that he relinquish his right to the girl’s labour. The mother explains that, according to his law, the child should remain with her inside the house. In confronting the father at the barn, the mother transgresses the culturally established boundary between inside and outside. The narrator remarks on the scandal, noting how unusual it was to see her mother down at the barn. From her privileged, male-vantage point, the narrator looks on her mother in the same way she looks on the foxes. The narrator does not comprehend that the hostility she sees in the foxes’ ‘‘malevolent faces’’ is a response to their enforced captivity. Similarly, her mother’s behaviour is interpreted, not as an expression of frustration and disappointment, or loneliness, but as a manifestation of innate wickedness and petty tyranny.

Ultimately, the narrator gives way to the variety of pressures directed at her. Once again, the two systems of production are shown to be linked: at the same time as the horses are butchered, the children’s gender roles are fixed. The slaying of the horses recalls the initial butchering of the foxes. In effect, both horses and foxes are part of the chain of production, with the horses’ bodies filling a crucial gap in the system. To ensure the continuation of the process, the foxes must be fed, and they are fattened on the bodies of the horses.

As I have suggested above, drawing attention to the use of such words as ‘‘raised,’’ to the father’s role as the warden of the foxes, and to the placement of the calendars on both sides of the kitchen door, the cycle of production on the farm parallels the production of gendered subjects within the family. The familial discourse—a discourse which is ‘‘absolutely central to the perpetuation of the present, phallocentric order’’—must also be fed; it too requires bodies.

Understandably, the narrator neglects to mention the butchering of the horses. She represses the information until the end of the story, claiming that she merely ‘‘forgot to say what the foxes were fed.’’ More likely, her desire to omit the information is connected to her wish to leave the image of her father untarnished. She has a vested interest in preserving the white-wash that protects the powerful figure to whom she is allied. Perhaps she believed that a denial of the operation would ensure her protection. With the butchering of the horses, Henry Bailey reappears, as does the initial menace inherent in Bailey’s ‘‘joke,’’ swiping at the protagonist with the sack of dead foxes.

When they learn that the butchering will take place, the narrator and her brother make their way to the stable, where they find Bailey ‘‘looking at his collection of calendars.’’ The reappearance of the calendars recalls the initial discussion concerning the placement of the calendars on the kitchen door and the significance of their portrayal of the colonization of the wilderness.

Unlike the calendars in the family kitchen, however, Bailey’s calendars are ‘‘tacked up behind the stalls’’ in a part of the stable the mother ‘‘had probably never seen.’’ Bailey’s calendars are hidden from the mother for good reason: they are almost certainly pornographic. At this point the link between the calendar and the colonization of female bodies becomes explicit: the father’s ‘‘stable’’—a pen for livestock—becomes a pen for Bailey’s pinup girls, women who have received a specific projection of male desire.

In keeping with this brutal character, Bailey treats the butchering of the first horse, Mack, as a bit of fun. When the narrator asks if he is going to shoot the horse, Bailey breaks into a song about ‘‘darkies’’: ‘‘Oh there’s no more work, for poor uncle Ned, he’s gone where the good darkies go.’’ In effect, foxes, savages, horses, and now ‘‘darkies’’ fall under the category of those bodies supposedly aligned with nature. When there is no more work for a fox, a horse, or a Black, in the terms outlined by the discourse of production, they are condemned to death. The ‘‘pen’’ of the patriarchal, capitalist institution has the power to inscribe and erase each and every one of them.

Despite Bailey’s enjoyment of power, it is the father who ultimately shoots the horse. Bailey laughs as the horse kicks its legs in the air ‘‘as if Mack had done a trick for him.’’ The image of the horse’s death has tremendous impact upon the narrator. In the midst of other thoughts, the memory intrudes upon her consciousness; she sees ‘‘the easily practiced way her father raised gun, and hears Henry laughing when Mack kicked his legs in the air.’’ Bailey’s laughter is particularly unnerving because it fully exposes his delight in power based on sheer inequality.

The narrator recognizes this as an abuse of power, not due to any innate feminine instincts, but as a result of her own experience. She, too, lorded power over an innocent victim; when Laird was younger, she told him to climb to the top beam in the barn. ‘‘Young and obedient,’’ as trusting as the horse led to slaughter, Laird did as he was told. When her parents rushed to the scene, her mother wept, asking her why she had not watched him. Perhaps as a result of her mother’s distress, the narrator’s behaviour later fills her with regret. She felt a weight in her stomach, the ‘‘sadness of unexorcised guilt.’’

In addition to finding the display of power distasteful, after the shooting the narrator can no longer continue to separate her father from his hired man. After the shooting, her father’s ‘‘easy’’ practiced movements and the hired man’s laughter coalesce. The white-wash dissolves. The father loses his innocence. On some level, the narrator realizes that it was never her mother who would ‘‘act out of perversity . . . to try her power’’ but her father, the person she had trusted all along. However, it is only when the men try to shoot the second horse, Flora, that she radically breaks from her male-identified position.

In many respects, Flora resembles the spirited horse of the narrator’s nocturnal fantasies. When the men try to pen her in, to use her for their own, limited ends, the mare makes a run between Bailey and the father. For the first time, an inmate dares attempt to escape. Immediately the father calls to his daughter, telling her to shut the gate and lock the horse in. Yet, instead of carrying out his instructions, she opens the gate ‘‘as wide as she could.’’ Without deliberating, she frustrates her father’s project of separating inside from outside and she challenges his unquestioned right to legislate who moves across these borders.

Laird, watching his sister’s scandalous behaviour, cannot comprehend why she disobeys her father. When the men swing by in their truck, he begs them to take him along. As they lift him into the truck, the little boy becomes a man: he joins the hunting party. Upon his return, he brandishes the streak of blood on his arm, behaving as if he just beheaded a lion instead of shooting a geriatric horse. No matter, the mark of blood and the domination of the Other continues to function as a crucial element in the rites of manhood. The boy cements his alliance with the father on the basis of their mutual triumph over nature.

The narrator, however, distanced from the father’s activities, looks upon the spectacle and sees it for the sad charade it is. She knows that there is no longer any viable distinction to be made between nature and culture—in this case, wilderness and civilization—and that, when these distinctions are made, they are imposed by more powerful forces upon the weaker. After helping the mare to escape, she sums up the hopelessness of the situation: Flora would not really get away. They would catch up with her in the truck. Or if they did not catch her this morning somebody would see her and telephone us this afternoon or tomorrow. There was no wild country here for her to run to, only farms [emphasis mine].

At night, the heroes return to assemble around the table. Laird denounces his sister, telling everyone that she let the horse escape. Rather than deny the accusation, the narrator bursts into tears and fully expects to be sent from the table for her unseemly, ‘‘feminine’’ behaviour. But her behaviour is taken for granted. Yet why should she be asked to leave the room? The kitchen is to be domain, after all.

Relishing his newly acquired power, Laird points out that she is crying, but the father tells him ‘‘never mind.’’ For the first time, the family treats her as a female. Her father shows her the same kind of consideration he showed her mother the night the latter confronted him at the barn. He listened to the mother’s complaints, ‘‘politely as he would to a salesman or a stranger, but with an air of waiting to get on with his real work’’ (emphasis mine).

As the narrator herself predicts, her refusal to participate in the father’s project of spatial control ultimately severs her connection to him. After she defies him she realizes ‘‘he was not going to trust me anymore, he would know that I was not entirely on his side.’’ The use of the word ‘‘side’’ further emphasizes the spatial transformation whereby the narrator permanently aligns herself with Flora. (The horse is aptly named, suggesting a relationship to nature and, by extension, the female.) Like her mother and the other natural bodies (foxes, savages, horses, and darkies), she becomes ‘‘unreal.’’ The father has only to seal her fate by naming her and he does so ‘‘with resignation and even good humor.’’

Assuming his right as the giver of names, a male privilege which extends as far back as the first male—Adam—the father pronounces the words which ‘‘absolved and dismissed’’ the protagonist for good: ‘‘she’s only a girl.’’ The act of naming constitutes yet another form of enclosing. However, in order for these words to have any power over her, she must accept the name—which she does, saying, ‘‘I didn’t protest that, even in my heart. Maybe it was true.’’ If being a girl means refusing to sanction violence and the abuse of power, then she must indeed be a girl. In the end, brother and sister take up their ‘‘rightful’’ positions, acquiescing to the pressures which divide them physically and psychically. The cultural discourse has been inculcated. A revolution in the cycle of production is complete.

One final note. Although this is the ostensible conclusion, the read must keep in mind that the story is not told by the child. The mature narrator speaks from the margins (space that is not rigidly monitored), the only position where the cultural project of production remains scrutable. Thus, like the hostile foxes, who even after death continue to exude a strong primitive odour ‘‘of fox itself,’’ the narrator’s identity has not been completely fixed by an ideology which accords her a role and set of behaviour on the basis of her sex. The consistent tension between the bitter, mournful adult voice and the child’s idealistic perception suggests that she continues to resist and criticize the patriarchal system which names her.

Source: Marlene Goldman, ‘‘Penning in the Bodies: The Construction of Gendered Subjects in Alice Munro’s ‘Boys and Girls’,’’ in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1990, pp. 62-75.