"She's crying." "Never mind," my father said. He spoke with resignation, even good humour the words which absolved and dismissed me for good. "She's only a girl," he said.
The last trait of socially-assigned roles for girls, and in the words of a man. Women always cry.
I still stayed away after Laird was asleep and told myself stories, but even in these stories something different was happening, mysterious alterations took place. A story might start off in the old way, with a spectacular danger, a fire or wild animals, and for a while I might rescue people; then things would change around, and instead, somebody would be rescuing me. It might be a boy from our class at school, or even Mr. Campbell, our teacher, who tickled girls under the arms. And at this point the story concerned itself at great length with what I looked like – how long my hair was, and what kind of dress I had on; by the time I had these details worked out the real excitement of the story was lost.
This is also a very interesting passage to make clear how growing-up has changed everything and, at the same time, how the narrator has begun to identify herself with more girly roles and feelings.
Lately I had been trying to make my part of the room fancy, spreading the bed with old lace curtains, and fixing myself a dressing table with some leftovers of cretonne for a skirt.
As age comes, she tries to belong to that world of women. She also begins to realize that she no longer belongs to the aggressive world of his father and men. Changes are also noticeable towards Laird as both quit singing at night.
Yet I felt a little ashamed, and there was a new wariness, a sense of holding-off, in my attitude to my father and his work.
The narrator has an odd feeling towards her father after she finds out the way he kills those animals.
Snow drifts dwindled quickly, revealing the hard grey and brown earth, the familiar rise and fall of the ground, plain and bare after the fantastic landscape of winter. There was a great feeling of opening-out, of release.
As spring comes along, changes become more notorious, not only in the field around the house, but also in the narrator’s own personality: it is spring as an awakening.
This winter also I began to hear a great deal more on the theme my mother had sounded when she had been talking in front of the barn. I no longer felt safe. It seemed that in the minds of the people around me there was a steady undercurrent of thought, not to be deflected, on this one subject. The word girl had formerly seemed to me innocent and unburdened like the word child; now it appeared that it was no such thing. A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become. It was a definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment. Also it was a joke on me.
Here come the definitions of the roles and the expected behavior attached to it with the sense of unsafeness. Words like “reproach” and “disappointment” are very strong. Then came the do’s and don’ts for girls which strengthen that feeling.
My mother, I felt, was not to be trusted. She was kinder than my father and more easily fooled, but you could not depend on her, and the real reasons for the things she said and did were not to be known. She loved me, and she sat up late at night making a dress of the difficult style I wanted, for me to wear when school started, but she was also my enemy. She was always plotting. She was plotting now to get me to stay in the house more, although she knew I hated it (because she knew I hated it) and keep me from working for my father. It seemed to me she would do this simply out of perversity, and to try her power. It did not occur to me that she could be lonely, or jealous. No grown-up could be; they were too fortunate. I sat and kicked my heels monotonously against a feed bag, raising dust, and did not come out till she was gone.
The first appearance of the Oedipus complex as a desire for involvement with the parent of the opposite sex and a concomitant sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex?
I felt my mother had no business down here and I wanted him to feel the same way. What did she mean about Laird? He was no help to anybody. Where was he now? Swinging himself sick on the swing, going around in circles, or trying to catch caterpillars. He never once stayed with me till I was finished.
Again, the battle with the womanly world (my mother had no business down here) and the depiction of men or boys as useless pieces of junk.
"And then I can use her more in the house," I heard my mother say. She had a dead-quiet regretful way of talking about me that always made me uneasy. "I just get my back turned and she runs off. It's not like I had a girl in the family at all."
Roles socially attached to boys and girls.
I wheeled the tank up to the barn, where it was kept, and I heard my mother saying, "Wait till Laird gets a little bigger, then you'll have a real help."
Roles socially attached to boys and girls.
I hated the hot dark kitchen in summer, the green blinds and the flypapers, the same old oilcloth table and wavy mirror and bumpy linoleum. My mother was too tired and preoccupied to talk to me, she had no heart to tell about the Normal School Graduation Dance; sweat trickled over her face and she was always counting under breath, pointing at jars, dumping cups of sugar. It seemed to me that work in the house was endless, dreary, and peculiarly depressing; work done out of doors, and in my father's service, was ritualistically important.
The narrator does not consider herself as a common girl. She does not like what is supposed to like her. Besides, she perceives, again, the world of women as a strange, oppressing and boring atmosphere, whereas manly work is important.
"I thought it was only a girl."
The salesman says that as if the girls were incapable of doing such things. This is the very first time in which we find verbalized the roles imposed to girls as opposed to those imposed to boys.
Page 4 Boys and Girls father had were private, and I was shy of him and would never ask him questions. Nevertheless I worked willingly under his eyes, and with a feeling of pride. One time a feed salesman came down into the pens to talk to him and my father said, "Like to have you meet my new hired hand." I turned away and raked furiously, red in the face with pleasure.
The world of men involved a sense of pride, in the first place, as opposed to that of women, which was kind of a dull one for the narrator.
My father did not talk to me unless it was about the job we were doing. In this he was quite different from my mother, who, if she was feeling cheerful, would tell me all sorts of things – the name of a dog she had had when she was a little girl, the names of boys she had gone out with later on when she was grown up, and what certain dresses of hers had looked like – she could not imagine now what had become of them.
This is the first description in which we can see how males and females are presented in their most inherent characteristics. We begin to notice what the story is going to be about.
Henry Bailey suffered from bronchial troubles. He would cough and cough until his narrow face turned scarlet, and his light blue, derisive eyes filled up with tears; then he took the lid off the stove, and, standing well back, shot out a great clot of phlegm – hss – straight into the heart of the flames. We admired his for this performance and for his ability to make his stomach growl at will, and for his laughter, which was full of high whistlings and gurglings and involved the whole faulty machinery of his chest. It was sometimes hard to tell what he was laughing at, and always possible that it might be us.
In this passage we can see how men are depicted as disgusting and uneducated beings.