As a child, Alice Munro read Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Little Mermaid — a “dreadfully sad” story, as the Canadian author remembered in a video shown at the 2013 Nobel Prize Award Ceremony. The tragic ending of The Little Mermaid, in which the titular character cannot marry the prince she loves, set Munro’s power of imagination free: she rewrote the fairy-tale with a happy ending. This was the beginning of her literary activity, as the 2013 Nobel Laureate said in the same interview.
This power of imagination permitted Munro to incorporate the phenomenon of the Albanian sworn virgin into a tale called The Albanian Virgin and published in her 1994 short story collection Open Secrets.
A foreign traveller, a girl named Lottar, explores the northern Albanian region “Maltsia e madhe”. Her only confidant in the village, a Franciscan monk, tries to protect her from a forced marriage by making her abandon her female identity and becoming a male member of society: an Albanian sworn virgin. One day, the Franciscan decides to escape the patriarchal society with Lottar by leaving for a Bishop’s residence in Shkodër. Over the course of these events, their relationship remains obscure — maybe due to her male social identity.
