![]() He is clearly taking the piss while appearing to follow his sister’s instructions regarding gifts for his nephews. Only the uncle feels like an interesting individuation. ![]() “Toys Of Peace” is the story of a community, and the characters of “Toys Of Peace”are archetypes. Girls’ toys encourage nurturing and care: tea sets, dolls, miniature versions of household appliances, toys which teach the basic skills of sewing, and anything that prettifies. Boys play with things they can assemble, which require technical knowledge, which move, and which fight. We all simply know which toys are for boys and which are for girls. The paratext of this short story comes not from book blurbs and marketing copy but from an entire corpus of toy advertising and illustration, which in turn influences how boys and girls play. Munro expressing a ‘boys will be violent boys’ view, or has he left a little more room for reader interpretation? STORY STRUCTURE OF TOYS OF PEACE PARATEXT Unfortunately, it gets so complex that this idea is beyond the average opinionated Joe who finds ‘nature versus nurture’ pleasantly simplistic, and will stick to it, thank you very much, because “I’ve had sons and also daughters, and they were definitely different, and my personal experience equals science.” Scientists now understand that nature and nurture work in tandem, influencing each other. ![]() If only more people understood that the ‘nature versus nurture debate’ is long-gone, replaced by far more nuanced science. Instead of ‘nature’ the phrase ‘primitive instinct’ is used here.įast forward to 2020, this is such a boring and frustrating binary discussion and I refuse to get into it. It is of historical interest to read a short story written more than 100 years ago which shows how long this discussion has been going on. This was the prevailing view of the 20th century and continues into the present. Take away their guns and children will only utilise sticks to the same end. (I liked those guns as much as my brothers did.) Our parents said on more than one occasion, probably to other adults with me eavesdropping nearby, that it is clearly fruitless to take toy guns away from children. My parents gifted us guns, which came with firecracker dust cartridges and made a satisfying popping sound, replete with smoke. I remember slivers of the debate about boys and toy guns as I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s. Lego has always been considered more of a boy’s toy I shared the Lego that was gifted to my brothers. In the 1970s and 80s, Lego was not gendered and they sold less of it. Witness the increasing gendering of Lego, as evidenced by the addition of Lego Friends (marketed at girls). Toys have been gendered since the industrial revolution, at least, and the more marketers can persuade adult gift-buyers that boys and girls need different toys, the more toys they will sell families with both boys and girls won’t feel they can reuse the same toys for all of their kids. It contains no girls, so ostensibly says nothing about girls, but there is a good reason why Munro chose two nephews rather than a nephew and a niece as the child subjects of this story, and it’s the same reason he created a mother to instruct the boys’ uncle on what to give them rather than an uncle who decides to embark upon this n=2 experiment himself. “Toys Of Peace”, set in 1914, is a story about boys and their toys. Readers will most definitely arrive at this story with their own ideas about children, toys, gender and violence. This volume was published after Saki’s death. This is the opening short story in a collection called The Toys Of Peace And Other Papers by H.H. Saki) and is out of copyright so can easily be found online. ![]() “The Toys of Peace” (1919) is a short story by H.H.
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