The Comparative Analysis of the Father Figure in Boys and Gi
The Comparative Analysis of the Father Figure in Boys and Girls and Walker Brothers Cowboy
Many of Alice Munro’s stories are written in the first-person, often from the perspective of women whose voices and experiences suggest the author’s own history. Taking her two short stories---i.e. Boys and Girls and Walker Brothers Cowboy---for example, much of the setting and the characters within has the autobiographical disposition. And of all the characters Munro depicts in both of the two stories, I find the father character to be one of the most interesting and revealing, both in the thematic and symbolic terms. If one is, holding the above-said autobiographic claim to be 100 percent true, confident enough to combine these two stories together, in order to get a more thorough overall picture of what the father should be, he would, with fair reason, get such an impression that the father is, during different times, both an unfeeling parent and a melancholy lover. How could that be? Perhaps partly because we might not have given duly proper proportion of attention to the stories’ fictionality as well as to their autobiographicality. And partly because the narrator (narrators) uses different angles of view with different purposes and different sympathies. According to the background comparison, the setting time of Boys and Girls should be ahead of Walker Brothers Cowboy for the father in Boys and Girls is still in the fox-raising business. So I would like to deal with this story first. The father in the story is a typical masculine trinity of father, husband and, basically, man. Though comparatively a minor figure, the father exercises his omnipresent influence over the girl’s development. From the beginning of the story, the girl shows a psychological intimacy with her father who could represent the male role of authority and contemptation to her mother and, later, other female characters who would willingly be restrained and submitted. At first, the girl is much superior to her little brother, both physically and intellectually, which gives her reason to question, or even challenge, the seemingly unfair double standards in the treatments of the boy and the girl by other family members. But when the two children both develops, the competition for controlling each other begins to intensify and appears more and more unfavorable to the girl. That they peek the killing of Mack the old horse which was originally designed as a manifestation of the girl’s superiority turns out to undermine that superiority considering subsequent respective reactions of the boy and the girl. And after that, the girl develops “a new wariness, a sense of holding-off,” in her attitude to her father and his work. The climax of the story occurs when the men try to kill Flora the mare and the girl betrays her father’s will to shut the gate and helps Flora to escape. But Flora has nowhere to go after the escape and nor does she have any option but be killed at last. When the father is told by the boy that it was the girl who let Flora escape, the father shows an outward disgust for this kind of unfaithful behavior. The girl cries, and then is absolved and dismissed for ever by her father’s four words: “ She’s only a girl.” Flora cannot escape her fate, neither can she. She cannot be like her father who is always in the superior position in the family. The father in Walker Brothers Cowboy is the protagonist of the story as the title suggests, though ironically he is not so much of a cowboy. He is a salesman and was also a fox raiser before the Great Depression in the 1930s, with a lady-like wife and two little children (in accordance with the situation of the family in Boys and Girls). In order to keep from trouble, he would, as no proud cowboy would disgracefully do so, try to please the tramps. He teaches the girl about geography, and then the girl notices his physical limitations (“His fingers make hardly any impression at all”, “Even my father…… has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in.”; Walker Brothers Cowboy), thus gradually descending the father from an omnipotent role model down to the more or less equal footing with the girl who assumes a gap-less relationship with her father while maintaining a certain distance of disapproval from her mother (this perhaps could also be explained by Freudian Complex theory), so she would voluntarily go out with her father whereas complaining about going out with her mother in the lady-shopping manner. When they are out together during her father’s work, the girl would not notice what her father says or does to try to cheer the clients into buying something since she is simply forbidden to follow, or even leave the car. But when they are back home the father says all the funny things to the family as he would say during work, his wife “would laugh finally, unwillingly”, because she does not think of this behavior gentleman-like and insists on living with dignity, the illusion of which separates her from the other poor rural people. Whether those funny things her father says are true or not, the girl does not quite know, but she does for once see an incident in which her father becomes the target of a malicious foul water splash. And from the calm manner in which he receives such a treat people could infer that it is not the first time he has been so humiliated, or even this humiliation has become so routinely that this kind of degradation has become part of his job and he has got quite used to experiencing it. He never tells the true nature about his work to his family, especially his wife. Immediately after the splash, the father drives the children out of his working territory to a house of which the “promisingly” gurgling of the bottles in the father’s suitcases gives us quite a positive expectation. This is the house of the father’s ex-lover, Nora. It could be surmised out easily from many hints that there were and perhaps are still some delicate feelings between the father and the Catholic woman, the reason for their parting could have been religious. Perhaps Nora is still waiting for an opportunity to express her love towards the girl’s father and be given love in return, regardless of the other party’s marital status. However, when a dance is offered, the father kindly but firmly refuses it, implying an end to all the romantic dreams he had in youth. Marriage begins where all love ends. This Nora knows too well. And they both know they will never be together, or even meet again. So “Nora does not repeat these directions. She stands close to the car in her soft, brilliant dress. She touches the fender, making an unintelligible mark in the dust there.” This time nobody teaches the girl anything, or tells her to do or not to do anything. But she learns a lot. She knows what is to be kept a secret, and she also begins to know more and more, however vaguely, about her father and about what adulthood means. Between the girl and her father there again appears a distance at the end of the story. But this time, the distance is not like the distance in the beginning part of the story which is caused by looking up to a role model and omnipotent father figure. This time, the unimaginable distance and weatheredness turns the familiar figure of the father into a sophisticated and blurred human simulacrum. If we make a comparison of the two stories, it is clear that the girl-narrator’s visual angle toward the father is different. In Boys and Girls, the girl uses the angle of elevation to view her almost idol-like father from the beginning to the end with few slight angle changes. But in Walker Brothers Cowboy, the girl’s visual angle toward her father is elevated---straight---elevated. Elevated visual angle creates a sense of difference between the viewer and the viewee while straight visual angle depicts an equal position between the two. Boys and Girls is a story mainly on the gradual self-recognition of one’s sex role through one’s psychological initiation. The girl sets for herself a role model which she can never reach because there have always been the gender differences between her and her father which are social as well as physiological. So she has to maintain an elevated visual angle up to her father to create the necessary and obvious difference and distance between them. Only by this ,can she succeed in revealing the theme that both the physiological and social forces mold a rebellious girl into a submissive woman in a men-dominated world. The sympathy of the narrator leads the reader to sympathize with the girl since there is forever an impassable distance between the father and the girl-narrator that the father cannot hope to share this sympathy. In an ideal world, this sympathy may be 100-percently pure. But in reality, one may find it hard to be totally sympathetic with the girl. The reason for this lies in the social context. The male dominance in society has influenced everything from one’s self-value to one’s thinking pattern. The tragedy of the girl begins when she tries to confront this social convention, and ends when she reconciles with it, thus fulfilling our androcentric expectations and comfortableness. This is why we may not feel totally sympathetic with the girl, and here perhaps lies the real tragedy of the story. In Walker Brothers Cowboy the theme of the story is “the pathos and degradation of men and women who face the deadening quality of life in a cycle of promise and decay.” To achieve this, the girl-narrator has to go deeper into her father’s mind and world to know better of him by reducing the personal distance between herself and her father. So the narrator has to low down her visual angle toward her father to maintain an equal position to get access to the totality of her father’s character. Although she tries hard to use this privilege to empathize with her father, she fails upon the knowledge that the previously assumed “gap-less” relationship with her father is a false cloak which covers all the secrets and pains of her father’s unfathomable heart. Because of this unbearably unpenetrable lightness of being, she resumes the angle of elevation to view her father signifying that both of them surrender and fail to communicate through a kind of transcendent understanding. So now, we could safely conclude that the two fathers in the two stories are the two sides of one coin, which is the original form of the supposed father. The two different depictions of this one original father figure are thematically significant. Yet Alice Munro feels sorry for both of them, one about his simple-minded treatment of an admiring daughter, and the other about his sophisticated abandonment of a lost self.
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