Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

• Introduction

• The Deluge at Norderney
• The Roads Round Pisa
• The Supper at Elsinore
• The Poet
• The Dreamers
• The Monkey
• The Old Chevalier

In the early 1930's, during a difficult readjustment to living in Denmark, Karen Blixen prepared several stories, which she had been working on in Africa, to be sent to publishers. She offered the tales under the name Isak Dinesen, a name meant to sound like they were written by a man. She was afraid that, as a woman, her work would not be taken seriously. But even in this endeavor, she could not resist whimsy, for the name "Isak" in Hebrew means "the one who laughs."

She did not meet early success; she offered the tales to the prestigious editor, Constant Huntington, at England's Putnam, who was not interested. Yet, within a remarkably short time--less than two years--she was able to exploit her brother Thomas's acquaintance with the American writer, Dorothy Canfield, to get a volume of stories published by Robert Haas and Harrison Smith (later Random House). Chosen for the Book-of-the-Month-Club, this first effort by an unknown author, Seven Gothic Tales (1934) established her reputation and laid the financial foundation for her future writing. Soon Putnam in England published the tales, and they appeared in Denmark (1935) under her own translation.

Karen Blixen wanted to make her point by startling the reader, somewhat as children do who make up ghost stories. She called the seven tales gothic because they hearken to the literature of the gloomy and the grotesque. They also have magical and supernatural elements. While she had read and been impressed by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), she designed her own tales not to frighten, but to make a profound statement. The tales arise from Karen Blixen's sense of whimsy; even in her most tragic story, she wanted the reader to discover a joke. By setting the tales a hundred years earlier, she hoped that the avoidance of realism would render the stories mythical. To reinforce this vision, she wrote each tale as a collection of intricately woven inset stories resembling, in structure, the Thousand and One Nights.

Isak Dinesen relates the story almost as if she were describing a series of still-life paintings. She conveys her meaning through description rather than action. She crafts the story so that it resembles the conversation at a dinner party: it is comic and lyric with a free exchange of ideas. The wittiness of the various anecdotes depends on puns and other turns of phrase.

Each of the characters has a tale that bespeaks misplaced identity; it is the power of the story that helps them discover who they really are. The young woman Calypso is the first of many Dinesen characters who realizes her true nature by gazing into a mirror. By studying an erotic painting reflected beside herself, she comes to understand the power and pleasure of being a woman. The older, Miss Malin, has sinned by living primarily within her own imagination. Excessive moral idealism has prevented her from partaking in the true joys of life. The Cardinal tells the inset tale, "The Wine of the Tetrarch," which explains how the robber Barabbas met his fate, going free so that Christ might be crucified.

In the dramatic denouement, the Cardinal removes a bandage from his face to reveal that he is really the actor Kasparson in disguise. He has played many and varying roles, and this is his answer to the problems of identity: "I have lived long enough, by now," he says, "to have learned, when the devil grins at me, to grin back."(SGT 77).

Because of its tragicomic aspects, "The Deluge at Norderney" is considered one of Isak Dinesen's finest tales. The characters are doomed by the rising waters, but they do not lose their sense of humor.

Karen Blixen wears the mask of sociability and reveals little about her inner life in the tale. Even so, the inset story about Jonathan Mersk, a youth frustrated in his social ambitions, sheds an intriguing light on her adolescence in Copenhagen. The twin tales of Calypso and Miss Malin seem to be a commentary on the Victorian morality of her Aunt Bess, an idealist who never married.

"The Roads Round Pisa" is the story of a mistake. Its inset tales give clues to a chain of events that the reader at first finds incomprehensible. Only when all the pieces of the puzzle have been revealed, do the characters in the story realize the extent of their misunderstanding.

The tale is woven throughout with erotic images. Prince Potenziani, impotent and fearing that his young wife will demand an annulment, secretly employs his friend, Count Nino, to take his place in the marital bed. Ironically, on the same night, the wife sneaks away and substitutes a friend in her place. Ignorant about the switch, the Prince blames the Count for not carrying out his promise to impregnate his wife. A duel ensues, interrupted only when Prince Potenziani realizes how badly he has misunderstood events. He declares, "Always we fail because we are too small...Too small I have been, too small for the ways of God"(SGT 207). He dies, his gun firing skyward--in a gesture of spiritual fulfillment.

The story demonstrates Isak Dinesen's overarching philosophy: any interpretation of events depends on one's perspective. Isak Dinesen views life as story, and individuals as players in the ultimate story, the mythological progression of history. The script is written by Fate, and the mold of individual experience is merely a casting for something more symbolic--for myth. "Humanity, the men and women of this earth," according to Monti, a poet in "The Roads Round Pisa," "are only the plaster of God, and we, the artists, are his tools, and when the statue is finished in marble or bronze, he breaks us all up."(SGT 188)

This tale also illustrates Isak Dinesen's penchant for telling a story by suggestion and impression, rather than by explication. She admired the poet Sophus Claussen (1865-1931), who stressed the subtle approach to revealing meaning. The reader must cooperate fully with the author in understanding the tale.

"The Supper at Elsinore" presents a commentary on the aesthetic versus the active life. Two sisters hold a conversation with the ghost of their dead brother, Morton, who had disappeared from home years earlier. In the intervening time he has had many adventures as a pirate and gun-runner on the high seas. The tale contrasts the attitudes of the sister, Fanny, who resents not having lived such a full life, and the other sister, Eliza, who rejoices vicariously in Morton's adventures. The story seems to criticize Fanny's failure to live according to her instincts. But the tale also suggests that the story can replace what we cannot experience directly.

In "The Poet" Isak Dinesen satirizes those who believe they have power over destiny. The "poet" in the story is a councilor in a bourgeois Danish town, whose efforts at matchmaking lead the lovers to murder him. The killing, which comes about inadvertently, dooms the lovers. At the denouement, the woman cries, "You poet!," in sarcasm at the Councilor's interference in her life. Only the Councilor, as he dies, realizes that fate has wrought a story greater than he could have invented. Isak Dinesen takes a swipe at Goethe (1749-1832)--the Councilor's ideal poet in this tale--whose philosophy of romanticism differed from her own. Goethe's heroes bring about their own tragic fate, while Isak Dinesen's victims are innocents, like the lovers in this story, helpless to the will of destiny.

In "The Dreamers" Isak Dinesen uses the concept of identity to offer a way to cope with tragedy. A famous opera singer, Pellegrina Leoni, loses her voice in a terrible fire. Afterwards she pursues a life of constantly changing roles. The author delivers this tale as a tragicomedy. The heroine dies at the end after some joyous adventures under assumed names. Karen Blixen later said that the diva's loss of voice represents her own failure with her farm, and in this story she evaluates how to go on living. With a clear identity as an opera singer, Pellegrina experiences earthly paradise. But tragedy makes her assume a series of masks. By living in her imagination, she escapes responsibility for life's troubles. At the end of the tale when she has to face her real identity, she dies.

Throughout her journeys Pellegrina is accompanied by a mysterious, wealthy Jew, Marcus Cocoza, an ambiguous figure that some have interpreted as the dual representation of Satan and the Archangel--representing Isak Dinesen's belief in the holistic nature of being. The real life example of the faithful servant, or constant companion, was Farah, her manservant in Africa, fondly described in Shadows on the Grass. "Farah and I had all the dissimilarities required to make up a Unity"(SOTG 410), she says. But the original idea perhaps arose from her lifelong habit of meditating upon an imaginary overseer, or guardian angel, of her fate. Early in life this role of mystical friend was her dead father; later it was the idealized memory of Denys Finch Hatton. She liked to think that their dead spirits watched over her and beckoned her toward greatness.

One tale, more than the others, lends the name gothic to Seven Gothic Tales. "The Monkey" is the story of a Prioress who exchanges her soul with a demon. While she is possessed with the spirit of the monkey, she plots for her nephew, a homosexual, to rape a young woman, Athena Hopballehus.

Athena is one of Isak Dinesen's most notoriously intrepid women. Tall, powerful and undaunted, she strikes out at Boris, the aggressor, biting him, drawing blood, and repelling his advances. This scene evokes the ancient Greek Dionysian ritual, in which women tear apart and cannibalize their prey. The story speaks of "those romantic and sacred shores of ancient Greece which they had till now held in high esteem"(SGT 149). But Athena is eventually forced to give in to the Prioress's machinations and marry Boris. She is the first of several strong young virgins in Isak Dinesen's stories who are ruined by petty authority.

The tale, often said to be the most mysterious of Isak Dinesen's career, seems to be a statement about the dehumanizing power of sexual obsession.

In "The Old Chevalier" Isak Dinesen tells another story about a failed love affair. A man becomes involved with a prostitute who has never offered herself for money before; the girl is an innocent, trading favors for shelter. He falls in love, but she remains oblivious to his passion. She leaves after their encounter, without emotional involvement, as if she has completed a task. The story offers an opinion about independent women: "most women, when they feel free to experiment with life, will go straight to the witches' Sabbath. I myself respect them for it, and do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick"(SGT 87). Isak Dinesen may be implying that the only really interesting women are those who dare to think for themselves and to defy society.

Seven Gothic Tales was poorly received in Denmark where the fantastical stories clashed with the preferred realism of the times. The sexual symbolism was said to be perverse, and the stories, set a century earlier, were pronounced decadent. The critic Frederik Schyberg deprecatingly called the tales "a literary conjuring trick." But Isak Dinesen's American audience loved them and eagerly awaited the next work by the mysterious Danish author.