Boys And Girls

From its beginning, “Boys and Girls” sets up binaries: adult and child, boy and girl. The narrator, at 11 years old, starts to cross those binaries. As she feels more pressure to stay inside the house with her mother, instead of inside the barn with her father, “the word girl,” which “had formerly seemed to [her] innocent and unburdened like the word child,” seemed to become “a definition” (Paragraph 21). Her stories shift away from empowered belief that she “might rescue people” to the need to have another person “rescuing” her (Paragraph 45). She and her younger brother, Laird, cease to watch the adult world in fear from their positions in the upstairs of the house and the barn. As they participate in more adultlike ways, they also take their positions in the girl (home) and boy (farm) spaces.

The narrator discovers gender, and its limitations, through the lives of the animals around her. The family’s work revolves around the foxes, and the narrator moves fluidly across gendered spaces to help her father take care of the foxes. She seems to enjoy the fox pelting at the beginning of the story, calling the smell “of blood and fat” and “the strong primitive odor of the fox itself […] reassuringly seasonal, like the smell of oranges and pine needles” (Paragraph 2). After she and Laird watch her father kill Mack, the horse, she begins to take on a gendered and adult role. She wants to look after Laird and protect his innocence, but she also seems to identify with Flora. This empathy is not part of the male world, and her desire to stay distant from the animal’s murder aligns her with her mother’s feminine world.

The narrator initially complains that her mother is “plotting to get [her] to stay in the house more,” even though she hates to be indoors, yet the narrator ultimately enters the house of her own accord (Paragraph 17). The division of gendered spaces across the story means that empathizing with an animal is liberating. When the narrator identifies with Flora, she seems to see that she and the horse are both trapped. Although their “death” and “freedom” is imminent, she still longs to find a way to wait until she can arrive at this impending doom. The narrator does not protest her father’s final resignation that “[s]he’s only a girl” because “[m]aybe it was true” (Paragraph 48). The world decides for her that she will be an adult and that she will live as a girl: there is no way to fight this reality.