“. . . only a girl”? Labor, Gender, and Murderous Constituencies in Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls”

Abstract

Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” is situated on the boundaries of a phallocracy breeding gendered captives, both both animal and human. The unnamed narrator in this Bildungsroman remembers her 11-year-old self, growing up on a farm and helping her father raise silver foxes for their pelts before she is shifted unwillingly from childhood to girlhood, and from the event-filled fields into (it is implied) her mother’s kitchen. Loaded into this transition are gender definitions impelled with “reproach and disappointment” (575); Munro’s tone remains largely elegiac. Presenting gender as performative, Judith Butler understands these constituencies as a “corporeal field of cultural play” (Butler 282); what seems clearest in Munro’s text is that each body is linguistically engendered, male language (authoritative and rendering silence) substantively defining and foreclosing psychic, affective, and spatially functional zones for female others. This paper reads Munro’s presentation of emergent gender constituencies as a constellation of power/knowledge discourses in which language situates subjects within differentiated symbolic orders; the grammar and syntax of male iterations of “girlhood” is read here as gesturing toward a protagonist’s imminent entrapment and enclosure.