Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls"

In "Boys and Girls," Canadian writer Alice Munro portrays the narrator experiencing coming of age disillusionment. Her story's characters and setting form a tightly woven web such that the story's sequence of events seems inevitable. To replace the characters or to place them in some other setting would rob the story of its seeming wholeness. By seeming wholeness I mean the way the story reveals the nature of its characters and their relationships with each other. Munro's weaving them together gives her fiction plausibility. Fiction doesn't succeed if it's unable to overwhelm readers' objections that because it's simply a made up story it doesn't matter. In "Boys and Girls," Alice Munro overpowers such disbelief through populating its imaginary world with characters that are who they are because of what their setting demands of them.

Readers enter this story's narrator's childhood world through her identifying herself as the daughter of a fur farmer, and she launches her account of childhood at the climax of his working year. She doesn't offer any detail how "in the fall and early winter, when their fur was prime, he killed" the foxes. Nor does she leave any clues as to whether she doesn't detail the killing of the foxes because it mightn't be polite or whether her parents themselves kept her from seeing it. At any rate, she opens her story with matter-of-fact details about what became of the foxes' remains. "My father removed the pelt inside-out from the body of the fox, which looked surprisingly small, mean and rat-like, deprived of its arrogant weight of fur." This takes place in her house's basement, and "My brother Laird and I sat on the top step and watched." For an imaginative, inquisitive girl that the narrator seems, this seasonal intrusion beneath the glare of a 100-watt basement light bulb appears to be one of the most fascinating spectacles real life brings her. That she's not caught up pitying the foxes distinguishes her as neither sentimental nor squeamish.

The skinning operation in the basement also divides her parents. Her mother "disliked the whole pelting operation-that was what the killing, skinning, and preparation of the furs was called-and wished it did not have to take place in the house." The odor seems to have been particularly offensive to her mother, and the odor stimulates more matter-of-fact description of her father's activities in pelting: "After the pelt had been stretched inside-out on a long board my father scraped away delicately, removing the little clotted webs of blood vessels, the bubbles of fat ... " But the narrator doesn't share her mother's disgust of what transpires in the basement before Christmas, finding the odors "reassuringly seasonal, like the smell of oranges and pine needles."

This difference in taste between mother and daughter establishes what some adherents of psychoanalysis call an Electra complex. These theorists believe girls go through bouts jealous of their mothers in seeking their fathers' attention. The Electra complex gets its name from a character Electra who in Greek legend plotted with her brother Orestes to murder their mother, Clytemnestra. Electra blamed Clytemnestra for murdering her father, Agamemnon. No such violence against humans marks Munro's "Boys and Girls," but the story does have a certain resonance with the psychoanalytic theory named for Electra.

All the same, the narrator is highly aware of animal deaths. Curiously she makes no acknowledgment of ultimately what makes profitable her father's rearing and killing the foxes beyond the companies that buy their pelts from her father, "the Hudson's Bay Company or the Montreal Fur Traders." She seems more aware of mere symbols on promotional freebies from these companies than the actual cash exchange for the pelts: "These companies supplied us with heroic calendars to hang, one on each side of the kitchen door." The calendars offer an escape from the mostly dull world of her father's fox farm with their pictures' "cold blue sky and black pine forests and treacherous northern rivers" and "plumed adventurers" staking colonial flags while "magnificent savages bent their backs to the portage." She omits mention that the Hudson's Bay Company and Montreal Fur Traders themselves might profit from the pelts they bought from her family because people of means in far away cities used them as adornment mostly in women's clothing, leaving it a mystery. Was she unaware nor even curious about where the pelts ended up? Or, seeming more plausible, did she think it self-evident, needing no mention?

I'm not claiming Munro intentionally connected "Boys and Girls" to Greek myths; yet some of the imagery here at the story's opening suggests other mythical allusions. Henry Bailey, a hired hand who helps the narrator's father with the pelting, suggests the Greek god Hephaestus, more familiar in his Latin analog, Vulcan. Henry Bailey's difficulty breathing and periodic need to expel phlegm associates him with underground fire, the stove in the basement, where he spits with a hiss. Rounding out the list of suggested classical deities associated with earth would be Hades, god of treasures brought from the earth, wealth, and overseer of the underworld. The narrator's father's winter underground activities with dead foxes generate the farm's cash flow, uniting death and treasure in his realm.

The Greeks didn't shrink from taboo family pairings in their myth. For instance, Hades abducted his sister Demeter's daughter Persephone to be his lover. And this formed a mythological explanation for the seasons. While Persephone reigned with Hades, winter prevailed. When she was back with her mother Demeter, spring and summer could progress. So, drawing a still closer family circle, could it be that the narrator in "Boys and Girls" herself serves as a figure for Persephone? More evidence to bolster that speculation emerges as the story progresses.

From a very real spectacle under the glaring lamp and with the heat of the stove that hissed with Henry Bailey's frequent expectorations, the setting of Munro's "Boys and Girls" shifts to where the narrator's imagination is freed, and the travels of that liberated imagination reveal the way she is at the beginning of her story. She and Laird ascend from the basement to "the upstairs" where their bedroom is. Traces of the ongoing pelting operation in the basement fade out: " ... we could still smell fox and still hear Henry's laugh, but these things, reminders of the warm, safe, brightly lit downstairs world, seemed lost and diminished, floating on the stale cold air upstairs." Given that hot air tends to rise, I find it unusual that the narrator remembers upstairs as being chillier than in the basement with its stretched pelts drying. I wonder if in recalling this situation, she confuses the light and action in the basement with actual heat. Laird's and her bedroom, being dark and quiet and lacking the stove Henry Bailey's spitting makes hiss, seems visually chilly by comparison.

It's a place that engages her active imagination in ways the bright, warm basement didn't. She uses her imagination to paint frightful stories to scare herself and, more vividly, Laird. She paints the winter night outside in haunting enough terms: "snowdrifts curled around our house like sleeping whales and the wind harassed us all night, coming up from the buried fields, the frozen swamp with its old bugbear chorus of threats and misery." However, this string of images follows her assertion that these features of winter nights spooked Laird and her not at all. Her narrative gaze shifts to the unfinished loft where she and Laird sleep. It's haunted by "things that nobody had any use for any more—a soldiery roll of linoleum, standing on end, a wicker baby carriage, a fern basket, china jugs and basins with cracks in them, a picture of the Battle of Balaclava." Her predisposition in her upstairs imaginings reveals itself in her adjectives. Soldiery animates a mere displaced roll of flooring, giving it a heroic air. The picture of battle strikes her as "very sad to look at." She begins and ends with martial imagery. Between, her list consists of ordinary household items, and she's prone to see their defects if she notes anything particular about them, the cracks in the jugs and basins. This pile of waylaid odds and ends becomes a source of dreadful thrills which she imposes on her little brother. "I had told Laird, as soon as he was old enough to understand such things, that bats and skeletons lived over there; whenever a man escaped from the county jail, twenty miles away, I imagined that he had somehow let himself in the window and was hiding behind the linoleum."

The imagined dangers lurking in the pile of junk lead to an elaborate set of rituals which she tells Laird will keep them safe. Depending on whether the light's on or off, they're safe so long as they're on "the square of worn carpet which defined our bedroom-space." In the latter case, however, they're supposed to face grave danger anywhere but on their beds. Through imagining fearful situations, she dominates Laird. That her little brother's name is also a Scottish variation of lord foreshadows the changes "Boys and Girls" portrays. The safety of their beds finally ties their ascent to bed with the haunting imagery of the winter night where mounded snow suggests dreaming whales. The oceanic suggestion carries over: "lay on our beds, our narrow life rafts."

Laird succumbs to sleep directly from singing. This leaves the narrator alone in "the most perfectly private and perhaps the best time of the whole day." Now she gives free rein to highly wrought fancy. I speculate that the picture in the upstairs junk pile depicts the charge of the light brigade, arguably the best known action of the Crimean War's Battle of Balaclava, in which case this neglected picture likely portrays dead and injured horses along with still-charging ones, linking the picture to the stories the narrator indulges in between Laird's drifting off and when she, too slumbers. These stories she imagines cast her invariably as a mounted hero. "There was always riding and shooting in these stories." Her fantasies are very different from her daylight experiences. "I had only been on a horse twice—bareback because we did not own a saddle—and the second time I had slid right around and dropped under the horse's feet." As to shooting, "I really was learning to shoot, but I could not hit anything yet, not even tin cans on fence posts." And there her blissful moments imagining growing into someone who would show "courage, boldness and self-sacrifice" end as if she'd dropped to sleep.

The calendar swings wide when "Boys and Girls" resumes after the narrator's fantasies on the edge of a winter sleep. The next episodes recall the fur farm in months sweeping from summer into fall. In contrast to the opening scene with fox carcasses and their skins stretched inside-out, the narrator now describes working among their pens while they're alive. Her father and his hired hand Henry Bailey seem to shift between which one most resembles Greek god Hephaestus who ruled over volcanoes and workshops. Now the narrator's father appears like this god because of his inventiveness. "Alive, the foxes inhabited a world my father made for them." The narrator compares the pen compound to "a medieval town" because of the way it's secured with a high fence and locked gate.

Looking closer at the pens, she sees her father's handiwork: "feeding and watering dishes attached to the wire in such a way that they could be emptied and cleaned from the outside." Another hint of her father's association with Hephaestus is his favorite book, Robinson Crusoe, a tale of survival in an alien country through invention and improvising.

One of his projects was a water barrow, "a tin drum on a wheelbarrow." Because she's bigger and more dextrous than Laird, the narrator gets the job of wheeling this contraption among the fox pens, filling their water dishes. Laird's there, too, but his watering can's a useless toy, and even with that he carries it "too full and knocking against his legs and slopping water on his canvas shoes." Indeed, his presence gives the narrator a sense of security. Her father needs her help because Laird is so incompetent.

Her admiration of the living foxes comes with a share of mutual distrust. She recalls them "always watching me, their eyes burning, clear gold, in their pointed, malevolent faces." But despite the malice she perceives "They were beautiful for their delicate legs and heavy, aristocratic tails and the bright fur sprinkled on dark down their backs—which gave them their name—but especially for their faces, drawn exquisitely sharp in pure hostility" and once again she notes the yellow gleam to their eyes. This description follows a slightly confused account of the foxes' names. "The foxes all had names," the narrator begins. This may be true between Christmas and when they give birth; however, first year kits got no name unless "they survived the first year's pelting and were added to the breeding stock." The reminder of pelting restores the narrator's father to a Hades-like role: ruling both over a realm of death and of wealth.

Further evidence linking the narrator with Persephone emerges in tasks she helped her father with. As summer progressed, vegetation sprang between the fox pens: "long grass, and ... lamb's quarter and flowering monkey-musk." Her father mows this growth with a scythe—again Hadean imagery. Modern iconography paints death as a grim reaper with a scythe. She gathers the fallen stems, and her father strews the cut herbage above the pens to shade the foxes, keeping the sun from altering their coats' color. This reaping action seems to hasten autumn. Walking on the cut stalks, she notices twilight coming red and earlier.

Her work among the pens with her father leads to some comparison of her father and mother. Her father doesn't talk unless it's required for their work together. For the first time in "Boys and Girls," the narrator now mentions that she also spends some time helping her mother in the house. She notices that her mother talks about plenty including stories from her own childhood and maturation. She finds her mother "kinder than [her] father and more easily fooled, but you could not depend on her." Her mother's intentions appear beyond any scrutiny.

The work the narrator helps her mother with tend to have to do with harvests of fruit and other plants. "These days our back porch was piled with baskets of peaches and grapes and pears ... all waiting to be made into jelly and jam and preserves, pickles and chili sauce." This association of her mother with agriculture and harvests of plants further cements an association of the narrator with Persephone.

In Greek mythology, the goddess Persephone's shuttling between Hades' realm of the dead and the world of the living to be united with her mother brings on seasonal shifts from winter through spring and summer respectively. The setting in "Boys and Girls" so appropriately mirrors such seasonal shifts. The farm the narrator lives on makes its money from winter's making the foxes' coats extra plush thus increasing people's desires to wrap in them. But without the summer and its demands for the narrator to help her mother with preserving fresh produce, her family's winter diet would falter.

Still, even though it's summer, the narrator prefers to spend her time helping her father down among the soon-to-die foxes. Her mother transgresses this area where the narrator enjoys her father's favor. "It was an odd thing to see my mother down at the barn. ... She looked out of place." Like Demeter seeking her kidnapped daughter Persephone, the narrator's mother has come to beg her father to let the narrator spend more time helping her mother in the house.

Photo courtesy of Pot Noodle