Andrea Szabó F.
Crossing the Border: Cross-dressing and Transgression in Alice Munro’s “The Albanian Virgin”



“The matchless Munro makes art out of everyday lives” states the publisher’s blurb on the back cover of the Vintage UK edition of Runaway (2005). Vintage Munro is “lucid, restrained and piercingly honest [fiction] about women characters,” which the Giller Prize jury (Canada’s premier literary prize for fiction) called “locally Canadian, remarkably ordinary, and at the same time startlingly universal” (Bethune:29). Munro's subject is “the narrow lives of characters in small-town southwestern Ontario” (Govier:86); and acclaim for Munro “represents a victory for the realist, place-rooted tradition” (Govier:86). Perusing reviews, publisher’s blurbs and popular magazine articles about the work of one of the one hundred most influential people of the world, “the modern equivalent of Anton Chekhov” (Donahue, USA Today), one is startled to see how little popular culture seems to have absorbed of the academic debate that has been going on since the 1970s trying to locate Munro on the literary scene. At the beginning of her career she was referred to as a regional writer, later apostrophized as a Canadian postmodern, and, concurrently, as a follower of the Southern Gothic tradition, she still cannot shake off the realist label that has stuck to her name since the publication of her first volume in 1968, even though there is no reviewer who would not acknowledge Munro’s effort and success at pushing the short story form to and beyond its limits in her portrayal of what she called “the complexity of things—the things within things,” which is endless (Munro qtd. in Franzen n. p.).

Thus, Munro is viewed as a realist and a regionalist. Not even her rather surprising volume of Open Secrets (1994) with its stories of an obviously invented distant past, a New Zealand amazon, a spaceship, a gory decapitation, and a kidnapping in the Balkans could correct this view; likewise, the dark vision of her groundbreaking The Love of a Good Woman (1998) with its heavy intertextuality effected little change in the perception of Munro’s art, let alone her The View from Castle Rock (2006). In the following paper an attempt will be made to challenge the popular perception of Munro as a realist by focusing on one short story in Open Secrets, in which the heroine is not the typical Canadian small-town girl coping with adolescent or adult life, but one who leaves her native country—a rare thing to do in Munro's fiction—, and discuss it from a perspective informed by gender theory: we will see what, in fact, it means for a Munro heroine to leave her native country, Canada, and how masquerade, a perceived necessity and opportunity at the same time, relates to the construction of gender. In the discussion it will be argued, first, that the story uses foreign territory side by side with a rather unusual abundance of references to clothing as a device of making those conflicts and contradictions strange that are inherent in the culture which the heroine leaves. Thus, stories that take place in far-away fairylands reflect the cultural practices of those found in contemporary North-America. This way, notwithstanding the geographical and temporal distance of the setting of the story, “The Albanian Virgin” does share some of the realist preoccupations. Second, by representing a woman who either eagerly embraces the opportunity for theatrical self-display and/or who is made an unwitting object of display and exchange, the story forces readers to see masquerade as the condition of femininity. So, the story collapses the distinction between masquerade, disguise, and the seemingly disparate characters, and selves and points to the only freedom that is available to gendered beings in a world of binary logic: complicity. Put succinctly, it is better to manipulate the terms of representation than be manipulated by them. This way, the challenge remains only that: a challenge; since it does not matter how far away in place or time a Munro story takes place, her fiction addresses the very concrete experience of what it means to be born into our world full with gendered expectations.

As noted above, Munro is customarily referred to as a regional writer of Canada. She rarely leaves her country, in fact she is perceived to rarely leave her home, although she is among the most celebrated contemporary authors regularly showered with prizes for her fiction in the British Commonwealth and the United States. In 2005 she has been listed among the one hundred most influential people in the world by Time Magazine. Yet, she shuns the limelight and withdraws to her home as if she were a charming housewife writing only some short stories that others happen to be interested in (it has to be noted though that recently she has referred to her withdrawal as a necessary condition for her art to thrive).

It is true that Munro leaves Canada rarely, and it is equally true for her characters. In fact, in her volumes from the 1960s to the 1990s there are altogether only three short stories where the characters cross the border. In two of them, however, they not only cross the border but travel to worlds that are magical, peculiar, where North-American rules do not apply. “The Albanian Virgin” in Open Secrets is such a story. Moreover, border crossing here is not restricted to the geographical sense only, but the characters overstep socially articulated boundaries (tribe, gender, propriety) as well; and one of them (the Virgin) goes so far as to venture into the territory of the taboo (with a metaphorical incest).

Since the story might not be familiar, a short summary seems useful. “The Albanian Virgin” was published in Open Secrets (1994), in a volume that somewhat surprised critics. In the story a young North-American heiress on her world tour at the beginning of the twentieth century is taken captive by a tribe in Albania by accident and as the tribe decides not to kill her (killing a woman is beneath them), they are stuck with her. Here she has to learn to live by acquiring the ropes of a seemingly different social reality. By the time she can manage to cope with her surroundings, the Albanians decide to sell her as a wife to a Muslim; since she does not belong to the tribe, they are free to do so. A Franciscan priest comes to spread God's word, he however, thwarts their plan—because the groom is not a Christian—by making her into a Virgin, a woman made man, who can enjoy the freedoms of male existence at the cost of removal from the world of women—and by renouncing sexuality.

The story for avid Munro readers is an anomaly on several accounts. For one, the ethnographic background is heavily emphasized, and Munro soon after the publication further underlined that the story was inspired by a travel book on Albania. Indeed, one can easily find ethnographic studies on what has been called as “the third gender”, “the third sex”, or “gender-switching” in the Balkans, about the phenomenon of “sworn virgins.” They are, as Alison Shaw and Shirley Ardener explain, women in the Balkans, specifically, in Albania, Montenegro, and Serbia, who can “elect to become honorary males and, by declining marriage altogether, inherit and act as heads of households—as ’sworn virgins’ (vajzë e betuar or virgjinescha: Durham 1909, Grémaux 1994)” (78). Secondly, beside the—for Munro—rather unusual setting outside Canada, the story abounds in references about disguises, to the importance of dressing, to cross-dressing, and masquerade. And masquerade is specifically understood as the wearing of clothes, which are culturally loaded signifiers.

It is mainly eighteenth-century cultural and literary scholarship that sets the study of masquerade into its focus. Since Henry Fielding warned from the freedoms and excesses that masquerade allowed to all—to women, specifically— and since the ground-breaking work of Mikhail Bakhtin, the wearing of disguise has been interpreted as having a liberating power since it allows for the hiding of those markers upon which mankind can be comfortably categorized into groups based on gender, class, age, etc. In fact, disguise hides exactly those markers that portion out customary social prerogatives. Thus, by assuming a disguise, one can “unlawfully” gain prerogatives otherwise denied.

Reading “The Albanian Virgin” against this background, we can come to a comforting understanding. An alien woman in a totally disempowered situation in a strictly patriarchal society escapes being objectified as a commodity by transforming into a metaphorical male, a Virgin, dressed in male attire, sharing in the fun of males, without the obligation to serve them, free of the numerous household chores, free to do what (s)he wants, except going to the consulate and find her way back to North-America. But at one point she stops desiring to go back, because life in Maltsia e madhe is not bad after all.

Recent scholarship on the works of eighteenth-century women writers, however, proved, that masquerade, far from having a liberating potential, often offers sophisticated forms of oppression instead of freedom. In fact, there exist two dominant visions about the masquerade: one emphasizes its power to temporarily suspend rules and, thereby, it functions as a form of resistance to the standing order by showing that things could be otherwise; whereas the other views masquerade and the wearing of disguise as a submission to male voyeurism that does not break out from the dominant patriarchal economy of desire. This view posits that masquerade, on the one hand, allows for role-reversals by cross-dressing; on the other hand, however, it leaves the foundations of the terms of representation untouched; moreover, it may encourage the fetishization of the body and the fragmentation of the self. In fact, the main purpose of the masquerade is to provide a spectacle for the male gaze.

In fact, this is what happens in “The Albanian Virgin.” The story begins when the young heiress rejects her status as a female and sets out to satisfy two transgressive desires of hers: (1) she wants to escape the middle-aged gentleman “summoned from England to meet her … [a] transatlantic heiress” (84) and (2) she wants to “see the bell tower where the heads of the Turks used to hang” (84). Both desires are connected to sight—she does not want to be a spectacle beheld, instead, she wants to situate herself into the position of the spectator. Ironically, she does see a head hanging in a sack, the head of her guide, but from a differentiated, independent and desiring woman, after a series of transformations that starts with an ailing body suspended and existing outside time. By the end of the story she transforms (reforms?) into a Virgin, alien, neither female nor male, uncouth, deaf, mute, impotent, grotesquely dressed in a man’s attire, only able to say “’Xoti! Xoti! Xoti!,’ which means ‘leader’ or ‘master’ in the language of the Ghegs” (128). She is lack incarnate, an object of exchange handed over from one male to another.

But let us not run so much ahead. In the heiress’s story there are two scenes where a masquerade is donned. The first is when the female protagonist feels already somewhat at home in the community of the Ghegs. One day she finds herself pulled onto the veranda, shaved, made up, dressed

into a white blouse with gold embroidery, a red bodice
with fringed epaulets, a sash of striped silk a yard wide
and a dozen yards long, a black-and-red wool skirt, with
chain after chain of false gold being thrown over her hair
and around her neck. For beauty, they said. And they said
when they had finished, ‘See! She is beautiful!’ Those who
said seemed triumphant, challenging others who must have
doubted that the transformation could be made. (91-2)

She is fetishized, fragmented and silent when the Franciscan priest arrives and tells her that she was almost sold as a wife to a Muslim.

“She felt as if she could hardly move or open her mouth,
under the weight of her greased hair and her finery. Under
this weight she struggled as you do to rouse yourself to a
danger, out of sleep” (92-3).

The priest explains that there is only one way out of her predicament of becoming a commodity in an unchristian home: she has to become a Virgin, the traditional third-sex in Albania. In this second scene of masquerade when she makes an abrupt exit from commodity status, “They brought out men’s trousers, worn and with no braid, and a shirt and head scarf. Lottar put them on. One woman with an ugly pair of shears chopped off most of what remained of Lottar’s hair” (93). She undergoes the mirror image of the previous transformation.

All the while, she ceases to have wishes and feelings. She becomes an object of gaze, the repository of others’ desires. Cross-dressing in itself is not transgression, rather, in the patriarchal society of the short story cross-dressing itself guarantees the upholding of the status quo, since if a woman rejects her position as an object of barter, as a commodity to put men into relationship with each other for the sake of passing on an inheritance from father to son, she can opt out by becoming a fake man, by parodying male behavior. Her lack will be all the more visible, as she will always only appear like a man, she will never become one. /1/

Yet, this virgin does pose a threat to this social order, although not on account of her status. The priest fears that the Ghegs will still sell her to a Muslim in times of need, because her position of namelessness (Lottar is what they make of her real name) would absolve them from under the vow to respect a Virgin. She is a nonentity in the community since she does not belong to any of the families, she has no proper name, no father. /2/ So he steals her out of the community and takes her to the nearest city to the bishop to save her Christian soul. There she realizes how much she loves the priest and utters her only directly quoted words (“Xoti!” – master); and he too realizes how much he loves her. This is the scene where she acknowledges her existence as lack incarnate.

In spite of the rather melodramatic scene of recognition, here, we need to stop and take a detour. “The Albanian Virgin” is a truly Munrovian story in its notorious indirection and its employment of several interlocking narratives. The ethnographically inspired story of the virgin is just one of the narratives in the short story; in fact, the reader is already half-way through the story by the time they realize that it is a story planned for a movie by a somewhat crazy old lady, whom the narrator, the speaking I, of the short story visits in a hospital. Yet, the reader cannot escape the feeling that this story tells the life of Charlotte (Lottar), the old lady and her husband. Her husband, Gjurdhi looked as

just one of a number of shabby, utterly uncommunicative
old men who belong to the city … He was wearing a coat …
and a brown velvet cap … The sort of cap a doddery old
scholar or a clergyman might wear in an English movie.
There was, then, a similarity between them—they were
both wearing things that might have been discards from
a costume box. (117)

And he wears a wooden crucifix (97), a fact that points to his identity as the Franciscan priest in Albania (82).
Having established their identity, Charlotte is Lottar and Gjurdhi is the priest, their story definitely cannot have finished by recognizing mutual love after their departure at the bishop’s. What we know of them is the following: in Canada both wear costume-like clothing, both look outlandish, they are not disturbed by discomfort, such as the lack of electricity or furniture, and that Charlotte is the boss. He is soft-spoken, he does the cooking, the serving of meals, and all he cares about is Charlotte. He is a henpecked husband, a man feminized, a male Albanian virgin, the third-gender in reverse.

In Albania, however, he was the priest, the mouthpiece of law (only he could force the Ghegs into obedience with threats of burial into unholy ground), a Father, the representative of the biblical Father. But how does this austere mentor miraculously transform into a feminized lover?

What happens to his character has happened to eighteenth-century male characters in women’s fiction. Janet Todd and Katherine M. Rogers describe the process that led from desiring and predatory males to characters who display virtues that are valued in and by women, such as passivity, consideration, mindfulness of obligations, the valuing of privacy and domestic happiness. In short, female authors displaced the locus of fear from men in general onto the law-giving father. Fathers and surrogate fathers were to be feared the most, while lovers became feminized displaying feelings hitherto allowed only for women. Men thus came to be categorized as lovers or fathers, the two terms of a binary logic.

The interpretation of Gjurdhi’s character too is defined by this binarism. In Albania he is the law, in Canada he is the lover, and his inability to be both mentor/Franciscan Father and a man desiring a woman is a sign of the inescapability of the mutually exclusive terms. The problem is that he is humbled into love: his rectitude is lost, he has broken his vow of celibacy, he has proved to be disloyal, his learning can be of no use any longer; instead, he is a peddler of books, words, and happy when he comes into some money.

It is here that Lottar-Charlotte, the virgin, works her transgression. By seducing the priest, she defies the law and oversteps all patriarchal boundaries. As a priest, the Franciscan is forbidden as an object of desire, as a surrogate father, he is doubly forbidden, as the law-giver he becomes the locus of all that is taboo for a woman. Yet, strangely enough, the priest is not forbidden throughout the story for the virgin. He becomes a taboo, when Charlotte speaks, when she enters language, when from unwitting a nonentity-object she becomes a speaker, when she becomes a desiring speaker and by accepting the terms of the binary logic, still in male attire, she calls for a master and is ready to take on the position of the seducer, the bad woman, the femme fatale. She reenacts a symbolically oedipal plot and manages to seduce the father, which then leads to the valorization of herself and the feminization of the father as a textbook example of what Luce Irigaray writes: “The girl’s only way to redeem her personal value, and value in general, would be to seduce the father and persuade him to express, if not admit, some interest in her” (87).

Lottar’s masquerade as a male, Albanian virgin, and her cross-dressing is then transgressive. Its transgression, its subversive power, however, lies not in the fact that a female entity can dress up as a man and behave like a man, but in the fact that this lack is made all the more visible by the masquerade that can seduce the stern and inflexible law-giver; that she, at the lowest rank of society, as the poorest and most outcast of women, this improbable femme fatale can dissolve his power and reduce him to the size of “just one of a number of […] old men who belong to the city somewhat as pigeons do” (Munro 117). Moreover, this fact also points to the possibility that being a man is nothing but masquerading as a man, that what holds for women is true for men: genuine manliness and the masquerade are the same thing, in the spirit of Joan Riviere's insight. /3/ And when the law-giver breaks the law by passion, the status quo cannot be guaranteed any longer.

The speaking subject’s narrative substantiates this reading. It is typical of Munro to write parallel, interlocking narratives in one short story that then reflect upon each other. The speaker’s narrative is a story of the break-up of a quiet and eventless marriage by a love triangle. The narrator starts an affair with their boarder, a manly, potent, physically attractive young man. When the dermatologist husband learns about the affair, he leaves and, in his yearning after domestic bliss, he marries his assistant. The narrator, however, escapes from her lover to British Columbia, the other end of the continent, where she opens a bookstore and meets Charlotte. All the while she keeps writing letters to both her ex-husband and her ex-lover, till one day she sees a man:

He was a short man dressed in a trenchcoat and
a fedora. I had the impression of someone disguised.
Jokingly disguised. He moved toward me and bumped
my shoulder, and I cried out as if I had received the
shock of my life, and indeed it was true that I had
For this was really Nelson [the lover], come to claim me. (127)

Yet, the narrative is not about reunion, but more about separation. Just before the lover appears, the narrator has imagined what their life together would be like and sums it up as a series of separations and reunions, rituals, routines: “We become distant, close—distant, close—over and over again” (127). Which is then repeated in a section that is typographically set apart from the main body of the text, whose dreamy diction stands out from the whole:

We have been very happy.
I have often felt completely alone.
There is always in this life something to discover.
The days and the years have gone by in some sort of blur.
On the whole, I am satisfied. (128)

This is the story of capitulation. All capitulate. The priest capitulates to seduction, the speaking I capitulates to routine, just like the person did whom she is writing her thesis not very quickly on, Mary Shelley, who “learned her sad lessons and buckled down to raising her son to be a baronet” (111), and lovers capitulate to desire. /4/ In Munro’s fiction the terms for love often allude to violent appropriation: the speaking I asks “Wouldn’t we rather have a destiny to submit to, then something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?” (127), and physical love is compared to “some hot and skinny, slithery, yellowish, indecent old beast, some mangy but urgent old tiger … conduct[ing] a familiar rampage” (123-4). But surrender to passion is necessary to be able to step outside from the culturally sanctioned role. Yet, this surrender is temporary; it is only for a duration.

Only women like Charlotte can escape surrender, who “would not operate from sympathies, principles … [who] would be playful about what other people took seriously” (121). Earlier she would have been called a witch, a sorcerer, today she is seen as a crazy old lady making up stories because she challenges the social structures that make life comfortable by compartmentalizing social realities. All the while she manages to uphold an ironic distance between her roles and herself; she has learnt that femininity is a masquerade worn and that it is “a curious norm, which indicates through its very contradictions the difficulty of any concept of femininity in a patriarchal society” (Doane, “Masquerade Reconsidered 42-3). In her variety of disguises, in her many roles and multiple transformations, all sanctioned by culture and society, she becomes excess: as an economically and verbally empowered young woman she desires to see; as a bride, an object of exchange between man, she discloses the relations of power, of dominance; as a virgin, she calls attention to her lack on account of her abnormality; in these two roles her identity becomes fragmented and her body fetishized; as an unlikely femme fatale she suspends the law and destabilizes patriarchal order while finding her value; as a wife she acts like a male; as a friend she fails; in short, she destabilizes dichotomies, she poses a threat to order because she has learnt to inhabit her masquerades as masquerades. She does not wear any of them for real.
For her costumes allow for the creation and recreation of her selves that are assumed, temporary and exchangeable. As Joan Riviere writes:

Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask,
both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the
reprisals expected if she was found to possess it—much as
a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to
prove that he has not the stolen goods. The reader may
now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the
line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade.’
My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such
difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the
same thing. (39)

Mary Ann Doane comments on Riviere’s vision of femininity that for her masquerade is far from being joyful or affirmative, rather it is ridden with anxiety. It places women into a position that is uncomfortable and inconsistent (47).

Masquerade in itself is then neither the key to nor the condition of escape from the patriarchal economy of desire, just like the third gender presents no challenge to society in the Balkans “where male/female differences are heightened” (Shaw and Ardener 74); in fact, it is exactly these traditionally patriarchal societies that invented the woman-masked-as-man “to support and enhance a rigorous binarism: male and female [...] as powerfully contrasted and determining categories” (82). Similarly, in Munro’s stories, assuming a costume, cross-dressing, transvestism do not guarantee freedom by themselves, just as leaving home is not always liberating.

Yet this story, “The Albanian Virgin,” works to destabilize the order as one is forced to look beyond, to search further and not remain contended with first impressions. It makes femininity and masculinity, the two terms of a binary logic warring with each other for power, yet neither being able to permanently force to surrender the other, seem as masquerades that can be assumed and discarded knowingly or not, comfortably or not, but the important thing is that one should be aware of a necessary distance between the masquerade and the self, which can and should be gulfed only for short periods of time, for the duration of surrender.


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/1/ Shaw and Ardener in their study put it in the following way: “Nor do they [sworn virgins] appear to dilute the dichotomy. Indeed, they seem to support and enhance a rigorous binarism: male and female still appear as powerfully contrasted and determining categories in Northern Albania.” (82)
/2/ In Shaw and Ardener's words: “’Sworn virgins’ generally attain their status in one of three circumstances. The only way an adoloescent girl can avoid her arranged marriage is by swearing perpetual virginity (formerly before a group of twelve elders in the church or mosque. A father without a son to whom to leave his propoerty (who in turn would become … ’master of the house’ or household head) may proclaim a daughter to be a man. Thirdly, if a family loses one or more of its young male members, a girl may be selected to take his place. ’Virgins’ now dress as men, with short hair, trousers, wristwatch and gun. They assume male gestures and body language.” (78)
/3/ Stephen Heath on Joan Riviere. “Disguising herself as a castrated woman, the woman represents man’s desire and finds her identity as, precisely, woman—genuine womanliness and the masquerade are the same thing, as Riviere insists.” (52) (qtd. in Craft-Fairchild 43)
/4/ It is to be noted that Gjurdie is probably pronounced as 'Georgie', which then would lead to the assocation of Gjurdie with George Byron, the hero of Albania, who poses in one of his best known paintings in Albanian dress. This association is not in conflict with other Munrovian references to English Romanticism. Also, the narrator of the parallel story is Claire, the namesake of Byron's lover, the mother of his daughter, Mary Shelley's sister.