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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 provides 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). + 87 +
