Boys and Girls

Munro uses the world of animals to stand in as a metaphor for the world of humans. Specifically Flora, the horse that the narrator tries to save, becomes a metaphor that the narrator uses to display her own trapped situation. Importantly, the narrator not only uses that metaphor to explain herself to her audience, but also to understand her own situation.

Spaces function metaphorically, too. The upstairs and downstairs of childhood and adulthood creates a map to describe human positions. The home and barn are also metaphors for femininity and masculinity. Again, Munro does not explicitly create these binaries, but she instead positions key characters in space to create oppositions and charge space with meaning.

Munro alludes to stories and myths of masculine power to create an imaginary story-world for the narrator’s father. Whereas her mother tells stories of “the Normal School Graduation Dance,” her father’s stories are more glorious, but they are also mysterious, mythical, and not personal.

The narrator only knows that her father’s “favorite book in the world was Robinson Crusoe” (Paragraph 8). She mentions the tale almost offhandedly, just as she mentions the “heroic calendars” given by fur companies that show “cold blue sky and black pine forests and treacherous northern rivers […] magnificent savages” who carry out the portage (Paragraph 1).