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CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN TWO SHORT STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO... Montenegro”. This mainly coincides with Munro’s description of Charlotte’s voyage in the story, which also started in Trieste down the Dalmatian coast. Charlotte then stopped in the port of Bar, but “she would never take the road over the mountains to Cetinge**, Montenegro’s capital city” (because she was attacked on the way and taken to Northern Albania). Besides the possible influence of Durham’s writing, the descriptions of Montenegro also bear some features of tourist guidebooks. The narrator of the story is a bookstore owner, just like Alice Munro was (there seem to be a few autobiographic or semi-autobiographic elements in the story), and she had various travel books at her disposal. The narrator even mentions several of these books: A Trek Through the Black Peaks, High Albania, and Secret Lands of Southern Europe. I could not find A Trek Through the Black Peaks and Secret Lands of Southern Europe online (these might be pseudo titles, maybe connected to the books on Mediterranean cruises that the narrator mentions at one point), but High Albania is one of the central pieces by Edith Durham in which she writes precisely about the northern part of Albania which is featured in “The Albanian Virgin”. I believe it is quite possible that Alice Munro gave away her principal sources of the knowledge on Albania and its culture, and these are the works by Edith Durham and travel books. The influence of Durham’s writing can be seen in Munro’s idyllic descriptions of Albanian cultural practices, while the influence of travel books is even more obvious in Munro’s use of multiple names for places, in her simplified explanations of some features of the land and its people, and in the somewhat forced introduction of various bits of factual data, which are used to make the story credible. However, this often has the opposite effect. For example, in her description of Lottar’s life after becoming a sworn virgin, Munro lists all the features of sworn virgins’ lives that can be found in popular descriptions (mainly travel books): Lottar belongs to the village, she has to move into a separate house, she cannot spend time with women any more, she spends time with the men, she can smoke and carry a gun (Munro even specifies which type of gun). In one whole passage, the Franciscan priest gives his own definition of the sworn virgin, and he lists all of these features more in the manner of a tourist guide than someone deeply immersed in the described culture.* 33 Edith Durham was a great Serbophile that turned Albanophile. In her later works she praised the Albanians and did not hide her despise for the Serbs. Her legacy is still highly regarded in Albania and Kosovo. Durham herself was a subject of great controversy and it would be extremely interesting to analyze her work from the point of view of cultural appropriation. (Partially based on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Durham#Collections [accessed April 2020].) This is an erroneous spelling of the Italian name for Cetinje used in the story; the right form would be Cettigne. Although the idea of the sworn virgin was introduced earlier in the story when Lottar sees a sworn virgin, does not recognize him as her, and is subsequently laughed at by the village women.
