Boys and Girls
A)
In Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls" there is a number of binaries one of which is the clear difference of boys and girls or the father to the mother. The narrator gives off the impression that the father is superior to the mother from her point of view. The way she describes the fathers outdoor work to the mothers makes it very obvious that she finds his “ritualistically more important”. The "foxes lives in the world my father created for them". Their pen had a high fence around it them that looked like "medieval town", and everything was tidy, ingenious, and tirelessly inventive. Where as she finds the mothers work "endless, dreary, particularly depressing". She admires her father and even though when she helps him with the daily jobs of tending to the yard and foxes he only talks to her, "unless about the job they were doing". She is too shy to ask him any questions about his life but she still feels a sense of pride working under him. While on the other hand her mother is kind to her when she helps her out in the kitchen and shares old stories about her life growing up. Still she still dreads having to help her mother out in the kitchen and runs away every chance she gets. The narrator was feels that a “girl [is a] word which [she] had to become a definition always touched with emphasis with reproach/disappointment”.. and she feels she can do the work that any boy can do. She works really hard to impress her father who in the beginning is happy to have her help him with the work despite the mothers objection. He even father brags to a salesman saying, "have you met my new hired man". The salesman sees that it is just a girl implying that she can’t work as hard or efficient as a boy. The father acts like she is as good as any boy worker allowing her to rake up cut grass and bushes, and help bring water to the foxes in the summer. In the end the fathers perspective changes when he finds out she lets the horse run free saying that she is "only a girl" implying that she is inferior to boys and can’t handle the work that man do. The narrator is never given a name like it isn’t important because she is a girl and while her brother’s name Laird means lord. The author made it clear that the family feels that boys are more important because he can carry on with the fathers work and the family legacy.
Another binary is the how the bedroom is dark while the down stairs is light. The narrator feels that their bedroom upstairs is cold, dark, unfinished, and contains old unwanted furniture. They imagine skeletons living in the furniture or that criminals that escape from the local prison and would hide in there. The bedroom is clearly not a place that she would choose to be, unlike children now a day’s who spend most of their time in their rooms. She feels unsafe when the lights are turned off and that the only safe place is there bed. There bedroom is nothing compared to the downstairs which is "warm, safe, brightly lit". She comforts herself every night by singing or imagining stories every to be able to fall asleep.
Inside and outside is another binary because the daughter sees the outside to be freedom and her father’s work to be very important. While the inside kitchen is “dark, dreary and peculiarly depressing” she thinks her mother is evil and can’t be trusted because she tries to plot against her to stay inside the house with her father which she clearly knows that she doesn’t like.
B)
The character Eustacia Vye is a beautiful young woman who dreams of becoming a magnificent woman in foreign lands leaving the small town she doesn’t fit into. After a local town man Clym Yeabright returns from selling diamonds in Paris she is determined to met and marry him because he is her ticket out of the town. However after they marry he takes a low wage laboring job in the town crushing her dreams to once leave. Another man offers to help Eustacia leave the town but while they are visiting Clym’s mother comes to visit. She is refused entrance and is forced to walk back home dying on the way. Clym finds out what Eustica did and kicks her out of the house blaming her for his mother’s death and also for adultery. Eustica feels that if this man helps her she will have to become his lover which upsets her because her husband has been nothing but good to her. In the end she ends up throwing herself into a lake and drowning on the night she planned to leave.
Moby Dick is told by the only survivor Ishmael of a whaling vessel set out to kill a white whale that bite off the captains Ahab leg in a previous voyage. Ahab wants to pursue the legendary Moby Dick because he sees it as a embodiment of evil. The journey takes them around Africa to the Indian ocean on a mad whale hunt. Along the way the encounter many other ships who have come across the whale all experiencing fatal casualties. The captain Ahab refuses to notice the bad omens in an effort for revenge and ends up killing the entire crew in a 3 day battle with the whale.
Ham Peggotty is a orphan boy following in the footsteps of a strong, sturdy, and a good nature sailor. He is found to have extremely different social class. He dies in a sailing storm when he tries to save the lives of people stranded on a boat. It was seen as very self sacrificing because the man he was trying to save was thought as a very evil man .
In Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls" there is a number of binaries one of which is the clear difference of boys and girls or the father to the mother. The narrator gives off the impression that the father is superior to the mother from her point of view. The way she describes the fathers outdoor work to the mothers makes it very obvious that she finds his “ritualistically more important”. The "foxes lives in the world my father created for them". Their pen had a high fence around it them that looked like "medieval town", and everything was tidy, ingenious, and tirelessly inventive. Where as she finds the mothers work "endless, dreary, particularly depressing". She admires her father and even though when she helps him with the daily jobs of tending to the yard and foxes he only talks to her, "unless about the job they were doing". She is too shy to ask him any questions about his life but she still feels a sense of pride working under him. While on the other hand her mother is kind to her when she helps her out in the kitchen and shares old stories about her life growing up. Still she still dreads having to help her mother out in the kitchen and runs away every chance she gets. The narrator was feels that a “girl [is a] word which [she] had to become a definition always touched with emphasis with reproach/disappointment”.. and she feels she can do the work that any boy can do. She works really hard to impress her father who in the beginning is happy to have her help him with the work despite the mothers objection. He even father brags to a salesman saying, "have you met my new hired man". The salesman sees that it is just a girl implying that she can’t work as hard or efficient as a boy. The father acts like she is as good as any boy worker allowing her to rake up cut grass and bushes, and help bring water to the foxes in the summer. In the end the fathers perspective changes when he finds out she lets the horse run free saying that she is "only a girl" implying that she is inferior to boys and can’t handle the work that man do. The narrator is never given a name like it isn’t important because she is a girl and while her brother’s name Laird means lord. The author made it clear that the family feels that boys are more important because he can carry on with the fathers work and the family legacy.
Another binary is the how the bedroom is dark while the down stairs is light. The narrator feels that their bedroom upstairs is cold, dark, unfinished, and contains old unwanted furniture. They imagine skeletons living in the furniture or that criminals that escape from the local prison and would hide in there. The bedroom is clearly not a place that she would choose to be, unlike children now a day’s who spend most of their time in their rooms. She feels unsafe when the lights are turned off and that the only safe place is there bed. There bedroom is nothing compared to the downstairs which is "warm, safe, brightly lit". She comforts herself every night by singing or imagining stories every to be able to fall asleep.
Inside and outside is another binary because the daughter sees the outside to be freedom and her father’s work to be very important. While the inside kitchen is “dark, dreary and peculiarly depressing” she thinks her mother is evil and can’t be trusted because she tries to plot against her to stay inside the house with her father which she clearly knows that she doesn’t like.
B)
The character Eustacia Vye is a beautiful young woman who dreams of becoming a magnificent woman in foreign lands leaving the small town she doesn’t fit into. After a local town man Clym Yeabright returns from selling diamonds in Paris she is determined to met and marry him because he is her ticket out of the town. However after they marry he takes a low wage laboring job in the town crushing her dreams to once leave. Another man offers to help Eustacia leave the town but while they are visiting Clym’s mother comes to visit. She is refused entrance and is forced to walk back home dying on the way. Clym finds out what Eustica did and kicks her out of the house blaming her for his mother’s death and also for adultery. Eustica feels that if this man helps her she will have to become his lover which upsets her because her husband has been nothing but good to her. In the end she ends up throwing herself into a lake and drowning on the night she planned to leave.
Moby Dick is told by the only survivor Ishmael of a whaling vessel set out to kill a white whale that bite off the captains Ahab leg in a previous voyage. Ahab wants to pursue the legendary Moby Dick because he sees it as a embodiment of evil. The journey takes them around Africa to the Indian ocean on a mad whale hunt. Along the way the encounter many other ships who have come across the whale all experiencing fatal casualties. The captain Ahab refuses to notice the bad omens in an effort for revenge and ends up killing the entire crew in a 3 day battle with the whale.
Ham Peggotty is a orphan boy following in the footsteps of a strong, sturdy, and a good nature sailor. He is found to have extremely different social class. He dies in a sailing storm when he tries to save the lives of people stranded on a boat. It was seen as very self sacrificing because the man he was trying to save was thought as a very evil man .