"Boys and Girls"

For this blog, I chose to write about the story "Boys and Girls".   I did like "The Yellow Wallpaper", but I did not understand a lot about what made sense to her and why she, therefore, did what she did.  In Boys and Girls, however, the girl did not want to be cooped up in the house and thought of as a simple girl.  She did not like the fact that her mother made her come inside and work when she would rather be working with her father outside. She simply wanted to be different and there is nothing wrong with that.  However, in that day and time, they did expect the women to stay inside and do all the housework while the men were outside doing the more manly jobs.  I chose to answer some of the questions on the norton website and one in the book for this blog.

In the book, the second question is "Find the two occurrences of the phrase 'only a girl.' Why and how does the meaning of the phrase change in each case?"  In the first scenario, the girl is working with her father when a salesman approaches.  The father introduces his daughter to the salesman as his "new hired man" in a sarcastic manner, insinuating that she works just as good as a boy.  "Could have fooled me," the salesman replies. "I thought it was only a girl." What he means by this is that, at first sight, she is a girl.  But, in fact, she works in the barn with her father, like a hired man of that day would.

One question on the norton website asks how I reacted to animals being killed in the story.  One thing I did not like was how Henry, the father's hired man, laughed when the horse, Mack, kicked his legs in the air after he had been shot. The other stuff did not bother me so much.  I did feel sorry for poor Mack; it was rather sad.  It was also sad about the horses and the foxes, nevertheless, this is how the father made a living, and he supported the family.

I am going to read the story again and see if I can tell if this girl gave up trying to be a tomboy, or if she simply exited that particular phase in her life and other things began to appeal to her.