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CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IN TWO SHORT STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO... Virgin” are indeed numerous and they are almost all established through the literary use of elements of culture. I will provide only a short overview of the ones more important from the point of view of cultural reinterpretations. First of all, there is the opposition between Lottar and the Franciscan and Charlotte and Gjurdhi. How do we know that they are the same people? Munro provides at least nine proofs of that: 1. Gjurdhi wears a large wooden crucifix over his coat, the same one mentioned in relation to the Franciscan, 2. Gjurdhi is wearing a cap with a tassel and his clothes are reminiscent of an elderly clergyman, 3. He eats Albanian food and drinks sherbet and “desperately strong coffee”. 4. Gjurdhi’s eating style and numerous elements of mentality point towards a person from the Balkans, 5. From the story it is evident that the Franciscan is in love with Lottar, and it is clearly stated in the last sentence of the story that the Franciscan waited for Lottar in Trieste, 6. There is a joke about a wizard in the story, which is, in my opinion, one of the less successful passages in the story, which ended with the protagonists’ escape to America on a steamer, 7. The name Lottar reminds us of the name Charlotte, 8. Charlotte was an heiress, and that could explain how she and Gjurdhi gained money in the end, and, finally, 9. If Charlotte and Gjurdhi immigrated to Canada in the late 1920’, they would be exactly the age ascribed to them in the story by 1964 (the year marked by the narrator as the time when she opened her bookstore). The only question is if the whole story was true or if it all, together with the cultural re-interpretation and assimilation (of ideas), took place only in the head of the aging, sick, and bored Charlotte.“ Munro’s mastery of geography enabled her to construct binary oppositions between cultures typical of certain regions. First, it is the opposition between Albania and Canada, that is, Lottar’s/the Franciscan and Charlotte’s/ Gjurdhi’s lives. Charlotte and Gjurdhi seemed to be outsiders in both places, as previously stated, and their existence mostly revolved around survival; in Albania that meant survival according to traditional laws, while in Canada it meant survival in a state of poverty. The second opposition is between Albania and Italy, clearly stated by the Franciscan’s cultural input. Finally, Munro provides the opposition between Albania and Malési e Madhe (the Gheg land), the Gheg land being the rougher, wilder and more original part of the land, where a given word still means something. Another interesting point connected to the opposition between Albania and Canada is that Munro often uses the information and style typical of tourist guidebooks in her descriptions of the traditional Albanian life, which “There is an instance in the story that might point to that direction when Charlotte claims that she and Gjurdhi would have been something if they lived in a different country, revealing a streak of escapism in Charlotte’s mind. Then again, this could be another proof that they actually came together from a different country, namely Albania. + 93 +
