Boys And Girls

“But we had rules to keep us safe. When the light was on, we were safe as long as we did not step off the square of worn carpet which defined our bedroom-space; when the light was off no place was safe but the beds themselves.” 

Along with her brother, Laird, the narrator as a child lives through the mystery and fear of her house by creating behaviors to manage their emotions. Laird easily casts aside these rules as he adopts a certain amount of maturity, but the narrator is reluctant to stop practices like singing at night. Even if she does not need the safety, the routine of seeking it feels comforting and familiar, a way to put off maturing.

“My father did not talk to me unless it was about the job we were doing. In this he was quite different from my mother, who, if she was feeling cheerful, would tell me all sorts of things—the name of a dog she had had when she was a little girl, the names of boys she had gone out with later on when she was grown up, and what certain dresses of hers had looked like—she could not imagine now what had become of them. Whatever thoughts and stories my father had were private, and I was shy of him and would never ask him questions.”

The narrator is interested in contrasts between her mother and her father. His silence is a different kind of silence from the imposed silence the narrator faces at the end of the story. Although each character seems to have his or her private world, the narrator initially recoils at her mother’s perceived openness; she seems to see privacy and mystery as powerful.

“It 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. She looked out of place, with her bare lumpy legs, not touched by the sun, her apron still on and damp across the stomach from the supper dishes.” 

The narrator notices the way that her parents delineate and ascribe gender to certain spaces. The “odd” vision of her mother outside of the home space seems to cement her mother’s domain within the house.

“My mother, I felt, was not to be trusted. She was kinder than my father and more easily fooled, but you could not depend on her, and the real reasons for the things she said and did were not to be known.”

The narrator’s mother is mysterious, but in a different way from her father. She only seems to be withholding information, less in a powerful way than in a manipulative way. The narrator is skeptical of her mother’s silence, whereas she seems to admire her father’s.

“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. It was a definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment. Also it was a joke on me.”

This moment, in which the narrator distinguishes between childhood and girlhood, signals a shift toward wariness of her gender. To lose her childhood is to lose the innocent idea that a girl and a boy could be the same or could be treated as the same. She has a “disappointed” and negative view of this difference.

“Snow drifts dwindled quickly, revealing the hard grey and brown earth, the familiar rise and fall of the ground, plain and bare after the fantastic landscape of winter. There was a great feeling of opening-out, of release.”

The narrator repeatedly reminds readers of the passage of seasons, which she initially welcomes and describes using beautiful imagery. The idea of “release” in springtime becomes ironic when she, and Flora, are trapped.

“Mack did not collapse at once but swayed, lurched sideways, and fell, first on his side; then he rolled over on his back and, amazingly, kicked his legs for a few seconds in the air. At this Henry laughed, as if Mack had done a trick for him.” 

Henry’s presence in the family seems to heighten the masculine sense of detachment and physical domination. His connection to the calendars in the barn, and his mysterious potential derision to the family, only give him more power over the narrator and the world around him. He becomes, then, the emblem of masculinity in his dominance over nature and the family.

“This time I didn’t think of watching it. That was something to see just one time. I had not thought about it very often since, but sometimes when I was busy, working at school, or standing in front of the mirror combing my hair and wondering if I would be pretty when I grew up, the whole scene would flash into my mind: I would see the easy, practiced way my father raised the gun, and hear Henry laughing when Mack kicked his legs in the air.”

The memory of Mack’s death becomes significant for the narrator, where it is, for others, another part of the life cycle that the family lives in. This attachment to specific memory seems to be a feminine attribute (her mother continually repeats old stories), but it is also part of her process of making sense of the world around her in new ways. It is the most significant moment describing her loss of innocence.

“I felt a little ashamed, and there was a new wariness, a sense of holding-off, in my attitude to my father and his work.”

The narrator, here, is ashamed of her attachment to the memory of Mack’s death. She recognizes that it creates a distance between herself and her father, where she initially connected deeply to him.

“Instead of shutting the gate, I opened it as wide as I could. I did not make any decision to do this; it was just what I did.”

These lines show that the narrator’s identification with, and release of, Flora is largely unconscious. She does not make sense of the situation for the reader.

“And when my father found out about it he was not going to trust me any more; he would know that I was not entirely on his side. I was on Flora’s side, and that made me no use to anybody, not even to her.” 

By recognizing “sides,” the narrator notes that releasing Flora was a full abandoning of her connection to her father. She also notes that this “useless” identification with a horse pulls her outside of the life cycle of her family, who uses every day and every action to be of use. This sense of useless or pointless action to create freedom enhances her sense of shame.

“Lately I had been trying to make my part of the room fancy, spreading the bed with old lace curtains, and fixing myself a dressing table with some leftovers of cretonne for a skirt. I planned to put up some kind of barricade between my bed and Laird’s, to keep my section separate from his.” 

The narrator’s slow shift to thinking about aesthetic spaces, set off from her brother’s boyish spaces, shows a new connection to traditionally feminine realms. It also suggests a need for privacy and secrecy that she attaches with adulthood; becoming older means becoming more private.

“A story might start off in the old way, with a spectacular danger, a fire or wild animals, and for a while I might rescue people; then things would change around, and instead, somebody would be rescuing me.”

This shift in the stories the narrator tells reflects her overarching shift into helplessness, defined by the gender norms of her society.