In literature, this sentence means more than “a truism” itself; it refers to several common themes, motifs, and narrative devices, which will be called “cliché” in this passage. A plot and characters must be carefully thought through to prevent the work from fitting into a commonplace storyline or becoming highly predictable due to the plots being too close to real-life scenarios. Through her writing, Alice Munro examines the ideas and views which are perceived as stereotypes; an example is a story about a young girl growing up on a Canadian village farm; she presents a tale where the character tries to distinguish between her natural desires and societal norms. Even if cliché details like girls being closer to their fathers and socially accepted clichés are present throughout the program, Alice Munro still portrays the spirit of identity and agency through the characters, reinforces certain clichés, and subverts others like gender roles and sexual prejudices.
The main element that led to the creativity in which Munro writes around the clichés associated with gender norms is the choice of characters and their contribution to the tale. Mandell (41) states that characterization through the division of roles and responsibilities may constitute stereotyping, which will foster conversation about the dynamics associated with gender and its effect on forming an identity. This is the situation where the main character is an omniscient narrator, a young lady experiencing an initiation process. A popular platitude with biblical connotations is, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Munro creates a creative obscurity with this character. Although in the initial parts of the short story, this protagonist is uninterested in traditional clichéd gender roles and personality traits like being inclined to domestic work over farm work, at the end of the story, Munro includes the quote, “Maybe it was true,” which is about her being only just a girl (Munro 127).
Moreover, the other characters in the story also affect the resolution and the characters’ fates; for instance, the father represents the father figure embodying the archetypal norms of masculinity by focusing more on farm work and hunting. However, the mother fulfils the cliché about women’s traditional roles because she seems locked to the domestic sphere and provides comfort in times of need, acting like what is expected of traditionally feminine behaviour. In addition, the brother is the most crucial figure in this tale. In the coming-of-age era, the younger brother is also represented together with farming work like cliché interests and in conflict with the choice of his watering can – cliché tasks. Therefore, these character’s interactions and inherent dynamics are necessary as they influence the creativity of Alice Munro in her divergence of the clichés of gender norms and societal expectations of the children of those times, most especially self-discovery.
Moreover, the plot structure allows some essential perspectives critical to the storyline, contrasting agency to identity. Though the plot revolves around the cliché, Alice Munro displays how her mother and grandmother try to maintain the gender roles in resistance to her freedom. Along with societal constructs, Munro uses the narrator’s mother; she operates in the domestic sphere, like in cooking and cleaning and seldom visits the barn where the narrator’s father keeps the animals (Munro 116). The narrator still feels reluctant to comply even though her mother gives her some home tasks that the woman in society usually does, such as peeling peaches (Munro 116). Besides, the narrator’s mother and grandmother join in to reiterate dominant gender patterns, such as holding one’s legs together when sitting down (Munro 119). This loops the cliché being presented, which readers can resonate with Munro’s use of this in the story. Along with this, the mother and the grandmothers seemingly identify the gender roles and societal expectations, depicting an excellent comparison between the dominant themes of that time and the narrator’s different identity development.
Therefore, Munro elucidates creativity by acknowledging the clichés regarding gender roles in the story and prepares a foundation to present further themes and motifs associated with societal expectations and identity formation.
Though Munro mentions some corny elements, such as the link between women and domestic work, the author undertakes a serious plot development and characterization that runs against social conventions and expected behaviour. The tale depicts the childhood experience of the heroine, which entails how she is bound to housework and women’s conduct. On the other hand, her brother receives more hands-on orientation to the duties that men have in their society, like working in the ban. On the other hand, the author’s journey to explore her identity may be stepping beside the conventional norms; still, the narrator mentions that she enjoys spending time with her father—a seemingly more masculine activity that clichés would conclude to be more suitable to boys than girls. Conversely, on the farm, the mother protests the disposition of roles, especially in the event of the father, saying to him that he should be careful to include the narrator in intensive activities at that epoch of his growth and, after that, he would soon be old enough to participate in the more significant tasks arguing, “Wait till Laird is a little bigger then you will have a real help” (Mun As for Laird, he, the guy, to a great extent is the contrary of the stereotype associated with boys. Whether it is how the narrator describes the watering can as “little, cream, and green coloured” (Munro 114), he had trouble carrying it around; that process will go back to that period. Also, Laird chose to use the name Maud, which was associated with those feelings the family once had towards an employee who used to work for them when he was much younger. (Munro 115). These elements offer a very different perspective to that on which many societies used to place boys and flouting of the projected masculine traits. This intentional quest to subvert entrenched cultural realities and generalized ideas is an artistic masterpiece. Thus, the author employs Laird and the narrator as vehicles for unstated but obvious resistance and rejection of societal commonplaces that express satiric undertones in the tale of a remote farm in rural Canada.
In addition to the gender differences between the boys and the girls, the familiar elements in the power and responsibility area determine these differences. To exemplify this, there are some cases where mothers perform other roles than the fathers or vice-versa. Another case is when the dad explains about putting down the horses. Another factor that compounds the situation is that Hamlet relies only on Henry’s support and does not consider the mother’s options. Also, their position is visible when you address the domestic environment, the mother’s authority, and the responsibilities like gardening, cooking, and cleaning. To give an example, towards the end of the story, when the family sits to eat, and the father comments that they came from the farm to hunt the dog named, Flora, just then the mother throws a warning to the father he is not to sit with the blood at ‘her’ table. This situational and internally flexible attribute of each individual’s powers indicates the prevailing societal norms that secretly sanction it all. Through the principle of power conflict between the parents in this story, to the eyes of the readers, the parents stand out as people who accommodate social norms and are governed by power and position.
In addition, there is the issue of Munro’s usage of the clichés she often mentions within the story- the relationship between the narrator and her father. According to McGlynn (22), the phrase – father-daughter – is a common cliché element in literature, reflecting the sublime ideas of protection, authority, and guidance. Like the narrator, Munro parodies the cliché of finding comfort, as she also portrays pater familias as a figure of the triumphant patriarchy in the narration. The relation can be ascribed to the preferences of the daughter who, for example, in the “pelting” activities, sports the smell of blood and animal fat as “reassuringly seasonal”, reminding of the smell of “oranges and pine needles”. This quote illustrates how to coil cliches in literature by comparing masculine tropes, such as the ‘hard’ scent of blood and animal fat, with the softer feminine tropes, like the ‘soft’ scent of oranges. However, further than the physical activity with the father, the narrator has an equally intense relationship with her father. The other issue is the ethical superiority that the father enjoys and how it influences the narrator’s self-image as she shapes her identity. In the end, the father does call the girl ‘just a girl’ because she also thinks she has embarrassed her father by letting the horse run away from the farm (Munro 127). It can be said that the narrator did not realize she was still considered weak because of her gender by her father, despite her hard work on the farm and collaborating with her father on some tasks. Thus, Munro’s portrayal of the cliché in the father-daughter relationship foreshadows some of the more profound and more complex thematic concepts, which portray the reason behind the relationship and how people’s expectations can be embedded in them but still exist.
Rather than being a blatant cliché, the narrator’s relationship with Laird displays a more subtle cliché that embodies the narrator’s identity as she grows. In the initial phase of the story, particular choices of the narrator and her brother determine the status of their relationship. We see little evidence of any divide between genders that have been created or maintained by their parents. The narrator and Laird usually want to sing before bedtime, and they choose specific chores and watering cans based on their natural tastes and preferences. Nevertheless, in the latter part of the plot, the characters have changes to some extent, as if they have come to perceive the messages from the community in the way that they are different because of their genders. For example, after some funny joking around, where the narrator tells Laird to go and climb the top beam in the barn, they ask him, “Why weren’t you looking after him?” indirectly, they mean they think that it is your responsibility, to observe your little brother (Munro 122).
Moreover, forcing the children to watch the killing is a turning point in the plot since, despite Mack being dragged to get killed, the father offers to take Laird in place of the narrator, whom he left to track and kill Flora. As Laird is describing the extraordinary actions taken to kill the bird in the climactic last scene, one could quickly note the disaster of the loss of innocence of the two boys. These changes in behaviour are manifested tacitly, like the sobbing of the narrator when the male character mocks the song they all as a group were performing and her subsequent internalization of feeling unwanted and confined in the corner of her room. Thus, it is duly noted that the plot of cliché conveyed by Alice Munro and the study of Laird and the narrator as the main characters present the creation of art in depicting the identity formation between the two genders.
Nicely, several of the characters appeared to act contrary to base stereotypes of their particular actions; nevertheless, at the same time, the overarching societal elements considerably affected the characters’ decisions and behaviours. By contrast, this dissimilarity emphasizes how even those whose behaviours were not in conformity with the antiquated perspective of gender disappearadiation of people adopted the elements reflected in their actions, such as in this situation where women are typically associated with displaying emotional states, such as crying, in a specific way. Finally, the father comes to confront the narrator about the situation, and Laird reveals that it was Flora’s anxiety that caused her to run away before the peace of being euthanized could fall upon her. Before the dinner at the table, the narrator had already been beating herself up for what she had done:
“All I had done was do more work for my father, who worked hard enough already. And when my father found out about it, he would not trust me anymore; he would know that I was not entirely on his side” (Munro 125).
This repentant side might be why she started the narrator to tell what happened. Nevertheless, the father, who in the novel, until the ending part, had been often perceived as the creature who led Ann-Marie to deviate and meet society’s clichés, defends Ann-Marie from any consequences for the misbehaviour she showed in the family by comparing to that “she is just a girl” (Munro 127). This underpins that when shown the unique traits of noncompliance with clichés, the subject was aware of the narrator’s sex, social norms regarding the genders, and the clichéd attitude toward being a “girl.”
Works Cited
Mandell, Laura. “Gender and cultural analytics: finding or making stereotypes?” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 (2019): 3–47.
McGlynn, Aine. Fathers, daughters and masculinity in crisis in contemporary fiction. University of Toronto (Canada), 2010.
Munro, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades: Boys and Girls. Vintage, 1998, pp. 111–27.
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