Gender Roles and Racial Passing in Boy Snow Bird

Boy Snow Bird and Race

The novel \\\\\\\"Boy, Snow, Bird\\\\\\\" combines historical realism and interpretation with the use of fairy tales in a thought-provoking way. While seemingly different, these two forms coexist in the novel, with Oyeyemi using fairy tale elements to explore and comment on real-world social issues of the 1950s American context in which the novel is set (Oyeyemi, 2014).

The presence of social problems, such as racism and sexism, creates both possibilities and problems for the novel and the reader. On the one hand, the novel\\\\\\\'s use of fairy tale elements can serve as a powerful tool for critiquing and subverting social norms and expectations. On the other hand, the presence of these social problems can also make the novel difficult to read, particularly for readers who have experienced similar forms of oppression in their own lives. I found the clash to be somewhat jarring—but maybe that was the point.

Oyeyemi, I think, wants to jar the reader by creating complicated albeit nuanced characters who are both products of their time and actively working to resist social structures that oppress them. Boy, Snow, and Bird all struggle with issues of race, gender, and identity in different ways. For Boy, the issue of racial passing is significant but I wonder whether it would be an issue if society itself harbored a little less on race overall (Stanford Alumni, 2015). But then there is also the issue of the gender swap—Boy is a girl, after all—but the swap is confusing and disorienting. It is like in reading the novel I am in a blender and getting all cut up and mixed up. Kind of like life in the 1950s, actually, when women were breaking traditional gender roles (Gender Roles in the 1950s).