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CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN TWO SHORT STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO...
became an important part of the cultural image of the Balkans constructed
by outsiders. Charlotte talks about two types of supernatural creatures,
Striga®’ and ora. Both striga and ora do feature in Albanian folk tradition and
both are, not surprisingly, featured in Edith Durham’s book. It seems that in
this instance, Munro is dangerously playing with the popular images of the
region, which can easily be seen as clichés, especially amassed in this manner
in a literary work.
There is yet another questionable usage of a cultural feature in the story.
When the Franciscan talks about his return from Italy to Albania, he says
that a hairless face in the northern part of Albania is a disgrace, and that
coming there without a moustache would be met with the disapproval and
scorn of the locals. This might be a bit of an exaggeration. While most of
the men really did grow moustaches in the past as a sign of maturity, there
were those who did not, especially among the younger men. On the other
hand, moustaches were regarded as a sign of masculinity not only in northern
Albania but in most of Europe at the time.
Probably the most questionable passage in the story from the point of
cultural appropriation is surely Munro’s idyllic description of Albanian men
and women running through the woods in the summer, and she writes, “it
seemed that this was a custom of theirs.” I could not find any confirmation of
this being an Albanian custom but this is the lesser problem. From the point
of view of literature, the problem is more in the neo-Byronic writing style
that, in my opinion greatly affects the credibility and the critical appreciation
of the story. This is only further emphasized with the following description of
Albanians sitting on the banks of a stream, smoking and talking. The entire
passage could easily have been an ekphrastic description of a romanticist
painting, glorifying the idyllic purity of a certain cultural group.
The description of clothes features prominently in Alice Munro’s writing, and
“The Albanian Virgin” is no exception. One long passage of the text is dedicated
to the detailed description of both male and female Albanian folk costumes.
Munro does not stop at simply describing the clothes but she also describes their
production. When the villagers dress Lottar up for the marriage, Munro pro¬
vides yet another description of national costume, this time a traditional female
wedding dress. In the second half of the story, which is more concentrated on
the Canadian setting, Munro uses descriptions of clothes to express Charlotte’s
and Gjurdhi’s alienation from the dominant Canadian culture.
” The term is derived from the Italian word strega, which simply means witch. The word was
adopted in the Croatian language as well as striga, with the same meaning. Pronounced in
the same way as Striga, the Albanian version is shtriga (spelt erroneously in Munro’s story).
The Albanian shtriga is also a vampire, a blood-sucking woman that can take a form of a
moth. This directly corresponds to the south Serbian myth of leptirica (meaning moth), a
blood-sucking woman that can turn into a moth as well. The myth was the theme of the first
Yugoslav horror movie Leptirica (1973).
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