“Kids will be kids,” and “inseparable friends will do what inseparable friends do.” Those are the two generic truths that adults adopt and swap amongst themselves when they fail to understand the younger generations. Children can be predictable, but they can also be eccentric, wild. Alice Munro’s "Child's Play" exemplifies the imaginative minds of young children and the dangers that can ultimately be associated with trains of group-thought.
*Spoilers*
Marlene and Charlene, friends dubbed “twins,” not only because of their rhyming names but also because of their apparent lack of separation, mutually develop and nurture a deep mistrust and cruelty toward another young girl named Verna. Throughout the first half of the short story, Marlene confesses her feelings of inferiority within her friendship; she often remarks on Charlene’s natural aura: a “seductive” confidence that empowers her beauty and mind. The fear of hierarchy within the friendship coerces Marlene to exaggerate her distaste for a fellow girl, Verna. Claiming she was the sole point of another girl’s affection, Marlene convinces herself of her own worth by dominating another’s reputation, as well as “proving” her superiority over another to impress Charlene. Willfully ignorant about mental disabilities, Marlene monsterizes Verna into a stalker, a freak. However Verna is rather a young girl with mental disabilities who lives within a time period where the term “Special” is socially acceptable; it's the same time period that society is not exceptionally eager to embrace difference. Ultimately, Marlene and Charlene broach a whole new territory of group-thought, of “Mean Girl.” Attaching themselves as a single unit, the girls follow a path of mutual assured destruction: the culmination of that path being the drowning of Verna.
The children murder Verna. Verna drowned in cold water and in cold blood. However, before writing Munro’s short story off as a child-killing, demonizing story, we must reflect: Do we not all murder some parts of people?
There is the phrase, “died a little inside.” Isn’t that what we do to one another? When we do not accept, when we shrug off, we kill each other a little on the inside. Disrespecting another human being, casting aside his or her feelings and shutting off your own compassion, no it isn’t illegal, but does that make it emotionally-lawful?
"Child's Play" features a crux about the reaction we have toward seemingly-irreconcilable differences, and how our elitism and our condescension plays a climactic role in the treatment of others. These “others” we may find ultimately to be not too unlike our own selves. Fundamentally we aren't so different.
The lesson we must remember from Munro's work is that we shouldn't be too within our own minds, our own vanity, and our own definitions of what is “normal.” In the past, our society has been stunted by our own blindness - or even our dismissal - of patience, altruism. But now having our history beneath our belt, we need to remember that harmful actions are the result from hurtful phrases and words that may have been shaken off as simple childhood development. Because child's play isn't always kind.
Munro, Alice. "Too Much Happiness: Stories." New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Print.
