The Genealogy of the Hero: A Source-study of “The Albanian Virgin” by Alice Munro

This essay investigates some of the wealth and the workings of Alice Munro’s explicit and secret intertexts to propose the hypothesis that the origin of her Albanian female hero can be traced all the way back to the character of Hero, a female priestess dedicated to Aphrodite who broke her vow of chastity because she fell in love with Leandros, a young Greek who swan across the Dardanelles to join her every night in her tower on a rock by the sea. Alongside the investigation of Munro’s adaptation of the Greek source and of some of its successive re-writing, it also proposes an exploration of collateral allusions to illuminate the twists and turns she takes to problematize the notion of loyalty in this ever-proliferating and densely interconnected narrative.