Review: Sworn Virgin - Elvira Dones

Translated by Clarissa Botsford

Sworn virgins are women who live as men, adopting their dress, habits and privileges, whilst also maintaining a strict vow of chastity. This seems like a remarkable, transgressive phenomenon, but its roots are a pragmatic reaction to the strict codes of behaviour in the mountainous region of northern Albania. The photographer Jill Peters, who has documented the lives of the few remaining ‘burneshas’, explains that ‘the freedom to vote, drive, conduct business, drink, smoke, swear, own a gun or wear pants was traditionally the exclusive province of men…  a family suddenly without a patriarch or male heir would find themselves in jeopardy of losing everything’. Where a suitable marriage couldn’t be found, a woman could become head of the household, but only if she cut her hair, dressed in male clothes, and permanently abstained from sexual contact.

The sworn virgin of Elvira Dores’ novel is Hana Dona, an intelligent and driven young woman from the Albanian Alps, who has moved to Tirana to study. Although life in the capital city is still repressive, with all of the security state paranoia and nepotism you’d expect of a dysfunctional late stage communist society, it still offers Hana the opportunity to expand her horizons, discovering the poetry of Nazim Hikmet and interacting with boys away from the strict codes of behaviour (the kanun) that governs the mountains. Her education is bought to an abrupt end when she discovers that her adoptive father has terminal cancer. Returning home, she finds him desperately trying to arrange a marriage for her, to ensure the future of their kulla (home). Rather than giving up her independence, she takes the drastic step of becoming a burnesha, taking the name Mark, only to find that the she has swapped one set of prescriptive behaviours for another.

Sworn Virgin moves backwards and forwards in time. The earlier sections deal with the events which lead up to Hana’s decision to become a sworn virgin; these are interspersed with chapters set after the fall of Enver Hoxka’s regime, when she rejects her new identity and emigrates to America, to live as Hana again. Here, she has to adapt to her new urban environment whilst also trying to shake off the mannerisms she has adopted when she was living as Mark. Hana sees these are two distinct personalities inhabiting her body, trained to notice different things. Early on, meeting an American man at the airport, Dones makes this duality clear: ‘Mark concentrates on his carry-on… Hana reads the name on his card’.

The idea of a character having to learn to be female after life as a man has echoes of Orlando. ‘Mark’ did not enjoy the material privileges of the young Orlando, but socially enjoyed far more freedom than Hana would have had. This power initially attracts Hana, as it offers her a way out of becoming a wife, which she sees as no better than slavery. Later, though, she comes to believe that her solitary life is deeply unfulfilling: ‘Mark Doda’s life has been no more than the sum total of the masculine gestures [she] had forced herself to imitate’.

Moving to Washington DC, initially to live with relatives, is an enormous culture shock, after a life lived largely in a village of 280 inhabitants. After growing up in a society dominated by an authoritarian government and a rigid moral code, the relative freedom of American life is overwhelming, although it must be preferable to living in a country described by Dores as having ‘faded into the howls and excrement of stray dogs’. Over time, Hana adapts to female clothing, learns English and gets her own flat and car, but finds sex more of a mystery. Power relations in Albania are clearly defined, to the point where even Hana’s affectionate uncle says ‘pity you were born a girl. If you were a boy, the kulla would have someone to look after everything now’. Used to such divisions, Hana finds it hard to trust men who treat her as more or less of an equal. Dores implies that this internalised sense of inferiority, hammered home by generations of tradition, is harder to shrug off than any set of learned behaviours.

Where Sworn Virgin falls down a little is in its failure to really probe beneath the surface of Hana's decision to adopt a male persona. It may be that the decision was entirely pragmatic, but the narrative doesn't give many clues to her subconscious feelings. As far as we can tell, her time as a man seems to have simply delayed her passage into womanhood, acting as an obstacle to be overcome rather than fundamentally transforming her conception of gender. Therefore, the novel is stronger as a cultural record than as a psychological portrait.

While Hana is eventually able to leave her adopted identity behind, there are some burneshas left, even if Albania’s social traditions are less rigidly enforced nowadays. For Hana, life as a man robbed her of a crucial sense of self, forcing her to concentrate on maintaining a persona rather than developing her inner life. In America, she realises that ‘what’s missing is her vision, the point of view from which she is supposed to read the world… she’s only just realising now that for a long time she has had to consider things from both points of view’. Sworn Virgins is a punchy and poetic novel, which takes the reader into what is likely to be a totally unfamiliar world and makes it vivid and engaging. While it doesn't quite live up to the classic novels of shifting gender identities, such as Middlesex and Orlando, it is still worth investigating.