Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 84: Karen Blixen and the frame tale?

Q.  I'm looking for sources of information about Karen Blixen's use of the "tale within a tale."

A.    Susan Hardy Aiken, in Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative, quotes an interview with Karen Blixen by the Danish newspaper Politiken on 1 May 1934, in which she talked about "Gothic" as related to her writing. Blixen refers to "Gothic" as "the age of that man--what was his name?--who built Strawberry Hill."  [She meant Horace Walpole, who wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764), and is credited with inventing the Gothic genre.]

Aiken says Blixen's texts resemble Gothic architecture like Strawberry Hill because the stories are like a labyrinth. Aiken quotes from Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic: "unpredictably various, full of hidden ascents and descents, sudden turnings, unexpected subspaces, alcoves, and inner rooms, above all, full of long, tortuous, imperfectly understood, half-visible approaches to the center of suspense."

I don't know of an essay devoted to Karen Blixen's use of the "frame tale," but a mention of the general technique appears at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_tale--which might give you some ideas for further research.

As you probably know, the frame tale allows the writer to separate herself from what she writes, so that the reader does not conclude that the narrative is the writer's own viewpoint or opinion. The technique was popular among Romantic writers of the 1800s, who were fascinated by the relationship of inner consciousness to reality and believed that truth could only be relative to a given situation.

In the same interview with Politiken mentioned above, Karen Blixen told her interviewer that her writing technique was designed so that readers would not ask:
"Did you really mean it? . . . Have you experienced this yourself?"

You could explore the words "frame tale" and "Romanticism" in your library.

Copyright © 2004 by Linda Donelson. All rights reserved