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CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN TWO SHORT STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO...
My analysis of the short story “Five Points” will be short because I will
focus on only two points of discussion: 1. Literary deployment of passive
elements of culture; 2. Cultural approximation in literature. This analysis will
serve as a prelude to my analysis of “The Albanian Virgin”.
Literary deployment of passive elements of culture
By passive elements of culture, I mean all the instances when a cultural feature
is mentioned in a literary text unexplained and undescribed. A feature of a
culture is used as a passive leitmotif, which is important for the development
of the narration and the characters.
“Five Points” provides an illustrative example of such cultural re-inter¬
pretation. When Neil remembers Maria’s family taking over the candy shop,
he is not certain about the family’s origin. Neil says: “After she died, some
new people, Europeans, not Poles or Czechs but from some smaller country
— Croatia; is that a country? — took over the candy store and changed it.””
This example shows Munro’s masterful use of dialogues in constructing
literary characters. The sentence hints at at least two important aspects of
Neil’s character. Firstly, he seems to be quite a superficial or at least a careless
person who does not care much about details. It is a bit surprising that Neil
actually knows that both Poland and the Czech Republic are bigger countries
than Croatia. Secondly, and more importantly, this example shows that Neil
feels he is in the position of power. When Neil asks “is Croatia a country?” that
only emphasizes his power to distance himself from all of the facts that do
not directly influence his life (and this is the attitude he partially has towards
Brenda). Neil’s feeling of power and, perhaps, supremacy, is only reconfirmed
when he states: “... she would call for her husband in Croatian, or whatever
— let’s say it was Croatian — in such a startled way you’d think you'd broken
into her house..." In this way, besides explaining Neil’s mentality, Munro
also sets a semantic binary opposition between the two working classes in
Canada: the Canadian working class (illusion of power) and the immigrant
working class in Canada (mostly shut out from or unaware of power). Besides
that, Neil’s statement shows that the man in the Croatian family was regarded
by his wife as the one who solves problems, and that provides yet another layer
of cultural commentry.
Neil mentions Croatians two more times in the story. “Croatians”, without
any explanation or description, is how he refers to Maria and her family. He is
using this term purely mechanically, deploringly denying members of Maria’s
family any personal or cultural identity; Neil is simply saying “Croatians kept
1 Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth, London, Vintage, 1996, 25.
20 Ibid., 26.
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