When children are young, sometimes their perception of how the world works isn’t quite accurate. Some children want to become firefighters and policemen, only to change their minds and select a more practical or perhaps more attainable career later in life. In the short story, Boys and Girls, the author develops the idea that, an individual’s perceived identity may be changed or altered by the effect of external and internal factors acting upon him or her.

In this short story, the author shows a change in a girl’s perceived identity due to external stimulus. In the beginning of this story, we see a girl who enjoys working with her father in the farmyard, but dislikes working with her mother in the kitchen. “…work in the house was endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing; work done out of doors, and in my father’s service, was ritualistically important.” She perceives her service to be of the utmost importance to her father and she is proud of it. “…my father said, ‘Like to have you meet my new hired man.’ I turned away and raked furiously,

Because the girl has been exposed to external stimuli, internal changes in her perceived identity take place. The girl feels herself changing; who she is as a person and as a female is changing. “I still… told myself stories, but even in these stories something different was happening… somebody would be rescuing me… and the story concerned itself at great lengths with what I looked like…” The girl becomes more girlish yet. “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…” The girl we knew at the starting of this short story would have never done this. The girl’s father is a fox farmer, and the foxes’ situation brings out relevant trait in the girl’s character. They are a crude symbol of the girl’s life to come. The foxes are caged and in a pen; this mimics society’s conventional role of women. In addition, the foxes remain nameless unless they are used for breeding. This mirrors society’s protocol of a woman receiving the name of her husband when she gets married. Finally, both foxes and girls find themselves serving the needs of man. In the story the girls shows us that she is embracing more and more of the traditional adjective that define a woman. She sees Mack the horse get shot and she says she doesn’t want to see anything like that again. “Two weeks later I knew they were going to shoot Flora… This time I didn’t think of watching

Some topics in this essay:
Boys Girls, , perceived identity, short story, girl woman, girl story, perceived identity girl, individual’s perceived identity, role women, individual’s perceived, identity girl, external stimuli, girl feels, resist change,