“Take a Taste”

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2
“Take a Taste”:
Selling Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales in 1934

Moa Matthis

Department of Language Studies

Umeå 2014

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Department of Language Studies
Umeå University
SE-901 87 Umeå
http://www.sprak.umu.se
http://umu.diva-portal.org

Studier i språk och litteratur från Umeå universitet 22

This work is protected by the Swedish Copyright Legislation (Act 1960:729)
Cover Illustration: Mika Matthis
Cover Layout: Ida Holmgren
Printed in Sweden by Print & Media, Umeå 2014
ISBN: 978-91-7601-013-6

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Table of Contents

Introduction
This Little Book Went to Market
Book-of-the-Month-Club 20
Consumer Culture 28
The Flood of Books and the Image of the Author 39
Selling Stories 50
Consuming Isak Dinesen 56
Saving Isak Dinesen for Modernism 62

A Race Apart?
A Peculiar Mania 73
A Race Apart and Verisimilitude 79
Ridiculous but Real 88
Profitable Appearances 90

Navigating Through the Literary Fog

Gothic Tales? 118
The Allegorical Compass 127

Perfectly Real Human Beings

Salvaged by the Past? 142
Salvaged by Romance? 148
Unachievable Closure 160
Nomadic Identities and Desires 163

Conclusion 171
Sammanfattning 179
Works cited 185
Index 197

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Acknowledgements

Having spent most of my life selling my words on a commercial market, it has not
been easy to adapt to the academic world where the reader has to be imagined
differently. At the same time, I firmly believe that the academic reader is no
different from the reader in the commercial sphere in that both of them read in
order to share the thoughts of our own time.
At our first meeting, my main supervisor Professor Heidi Hansson patiently
listened to my diffuse explanations of what I wanted to do with Seven Gothic
Tales. Then, she very neatly handed my garbled account back to me in the form of
one brief sentence: “So, you want to show that Karen Blixen is a middlebrow
author?” That sentence has been resting on my mantelpiece while I have been
writing, and every time I lost my way I took it down, unwrapped and pondered it.
It speaks of the ease with which Heidi identifies the essence of an argument, and
her comments and readings have been invaluable. I know that I have tried her
patience many times, and I am deeply grateful that she has nevertheless continued
to support me.
I have known my secondary supervisor Professor Stefan Helgesson as a lucid
and learned writer of beautiful prose on a wide range of topics for almost three
decades. Now, I also know him as a perceptive reader whose generous advice has
encouraged me. Professor Anna Williams’ insightful reading of a late draft of this
manuscript heartened me and made me feel that it was worthwhile to plod on
towards the end.
I would also like to thank the literary seminar at the Department of Language
and Literature in Umeå: Nicklas Hållén, Katarina Gregersdotter, Hilda
Härgestam-Strandberg, Malin Isaksson, Van Leavenworth, Maria Lindgren-
Leavenworth, Tove Solander, Anette Svensson and Anna-Lena Pihl.
Outside of the academic world, my colleagues in Fotokopieringsfondens
Stipendienämnd för Facklitteratur have provided spirited conversation as well as
unlimited sources of knowledge about everything having to do with culture. Over
the last four years, Anders Björnsson, Lilian Edvall, Ingmarie Froman and I have
read through thousands of pages of sometimes heartrending applications from
authors all over Sweden, and while it was hard work the company turned every

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 meeting into a seminar on the sociology of culture that I will sorely miss. My co-
readers in the Bokcirkeln have listened to my self-pitying complaints without
paying much attention, and then reminded me of the joy and excitement of inter-
disciplinary readings of every kind of writing, ranging from Anne Carson to Anne
Applebaum. Together with Ingrid Elam, Göran Hemberg, Kenneth Hermele, Olle
Jeppsson and Mikael Palme, I share the thoughts of our time. I also want to thank
Mikael for kindly cautioning me against “applying” Bourdieu without the
empirical data to back it up, and Göran for keeping the art of oral story-telling
alive. Anna Rosenhall, Paula and Nadine Rosenhall-Gomis have shared their
home and their lives with me when I have been in Umeå.
Finally, my husband Kenneth Karlsson is and remains the mainstay of my life,
emotionally and intellectually. Mika and Palmer remind me every day that there is
one identity that is reassuringly absolute: that of a parent. For that, I am grateful.

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Introduction

In 1968, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt published a collection of essays

entitled Men in Dark Times. In her preface, Arendt described her essays as
explorations of the uncertain, flickering lights that illuminated the darkness of the
first half of the twentieth century with its “political catastrophes, its moral
disasters” (vii). One of the illuminating lives and works that Arendt explored in
this book was Isak Dinesen’s, the Danish author known as Karen Blixen outside
the English-speaking world. To Arendt, Dinesen belonged in the company of
light-bearers because she had been able to turn the disasters of her life into stories,
re-creating herself in the role of a story-teller when she had lost her farm in Kenya
and her lover Denys Finch-Hatton. As such, she reminded the world that we have
to accept life’s tragedies, “be loyal to life” was how Arendt put it, without giving
in to despair or self-pity (97). Life is not a fiction that can be bent to the whims of
our wills and desires, but by looking back and using our imagination we can
create fiction out of life as long as we do not mistake the one for the other. To tell
the story of one’s life retrospectively is to create order out of chaos and to make
peace with life transformed into destiny: “The story reveals the meaning of what
otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings,” wrote
Arendt (104).
There is no doubt that Arendt considered Isak Dinesen a major author, but her
essay is a strikingly ambiguous kind of celebration. 1 In her biography about
Arendt, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl framed her own decision to write a biography by
referencing Arendt’s reservations about the genre and her desire to separate
private from public and work from action, in line with her political thoughts
(xvii). Young-Bruehl claims that while Arendt did write biographically, as she did
in Men in Dark Times, she did not write intimately and avoided gossipy realism,
heading her own warning in the essay on Isak Dinesen that “our eagerness to see
recorded, displayed and discussed in public what were once strictly private affairs
is probably less legitimate than our curiosity is ready to admit” (93).

1
In an essay on story-telling and theory, Lynn R. Wilkinson has discussed Hanna Arendt’s use of Dinesen’s
works to illustrate her own theses on politics, history and philosophy, focusing on the centrality of story-telling
to political thought and action.
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 And yet, the first sentence in Arendt’s essay on Dinesen reads

The Baroness Karen Blixen née Karen Christentze Dinesen – called Tanne
by her family and Tania first by her lover and then by her friends – was the
Danish woman author of rare distinction who wrote in English out of loyalty
to her dead lover’s language. (95)

These first lines strike a strangely intimate, gossipy chord, approaching and
naming the subject as a family-member, friend and lover and Arendt’s
introduction of Baroness Blixen, Karen, Tanne, and Tania is markedly different
from the introductions of the other historical figures of this volume. In her essays
on Walter Benjamin, Hermann Broch, Karl Jaspers and the others, work precedes
biography and we never learn what these men were called by family, friends or
lovers. Since Arendt was a close friend of all of them there is something very odd
about the way she chooses to resist base curiosity in their cases, while giving in to
it in Dinesen’s case.2
One way of explaining Arendt’s intimate approach to the topic of “Isak
Dinesen,” would be to think of it as a consequence of the fact that this essay was
originally published as a review in The New Yorker of Parmenia Miguel’s
biography Titania. The Biography of Isak Dinesen, in 1968. On the other hand,
Arendt is highly critical of what she calls Miguel’s “wrong-headed delicatesse,”
especially in the matter which is “by far the most relevant new fact the book
contains,” revealing that Dinesen’s ex-husband had “left her a legacy of illness,”
but refusing to name the venereal disease and withholding the medical history
which “would indeed have been of considerable interest” (99). Simply put, Arendt
wanted to know more about the intimate details of Dinesen’s private life than
Miguel’s biography was prepared to offer. Since it was, as Arendt pointed out,
commissioned and supervised by the author, the responsibility for holding back
ultimately fell on Dinesen who, according to Arendt, made a fool of herself by
being led astray by her vanity and need for adoration. By not telling the world
about her syphilis, Dinesen refused to add yet another piece to the public

2
The only people in this volume that Arendt did not know personally were Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Rosa
Luxemburg, Pope John XXIII, and Isak Dinesen.
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 representation of her life as a story about loss and ultimate redemption through the
act of story-telling. Parenthetically, Arendt comforted herself with the suggestion
that it was perhaps not the wise story-teller Isak Dinesen who made the decision
to withhold tragic truth, but rather Baroness Karen Blixen (99).
Arendt’s wish to know more about Dinesen than she was ready to share jars
strangely both with Arendt’s comment on people’s inappropriate curiosity, as well
as with her observation at very beginning of the essay of the author’s own desire
to avoid the harsh, unflattering light of the public domain (95). In fact, it seems to
jar with the entirety of Arendt’s thoughts on politics, society and the relationship
between the private and the public spheres. In her introduction to Men in Dark
Times, Arendt was careful to point out that by “moral disasters” she did not only
refer to the monstrosities of wars and systematic extermination. Men in Dark
Times was a response to what she calls the “light of the public that obscures
everything,” borrowing this description of the public realm from Martin
Heidegger (ix). The obscuring light of the public sphere is the omnipresence and
overwhelming power of “mere talk” and “double-talk”: “speech which does not
disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and
otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to
meaningless triviality” (viii).
Arendt saw the babbling, obfuscating public realm as a consequence of a
historical process whereby the ancient distinction between the private and public
realms had become obliterated. The private sphere, determined by necessity and
need, progressively engulfed and transformed the public sphere, the polis of
ancient Greece as a space set apart for public action and speech. The rise of what
Arendt called “the social” left no room for truly political thinking or acting, or for
any kind of thinking. In The Human Condition from 1958 Arendt described what
she called mass society as a world where we perceive the political community in
the image of a family taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide bureaucratic
administration of house-keeping. In this world political science or philosophy had
been eclipsed by national or social economy that maps and represents the nation
imagined statistically as a collective household. It is in this world that the public
realm has become a sphere of babbling and triviality, manipulating and swaying
public opinion.

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 The question that comes to mind when reading Arendt, is why her wish to drag
intimate details from Dinesen’s life into the harsh public light should not be
understood as yet another manifestation of the ills of modern mass society?
Would not the disclosure of Dinesen’s syphilis and medical history have been an
example precisely of what Arendt decries in her introduction: something that
“unhidden and unprotected by the privacy of the self, appears in public” (ix)? A
real-life tragedy reduced to triviality and entertainment in the light of the public
that obscures everything that is true and authentic. It would be easy to answer
those questions by simply saying that Arendt displayed a certain degree of
hypocrisy and elitism, or at least inconsistency, in her treatment of Dinesen. More
interesting, however, are the operations by which Arendt’s essay is able to contain
and reconcile its own ambivalence. First, by implicitly positing the existence of
two kinds of public spheres, one of which is of course Arendt’s own writing and
the context of Men in Dark Times. This is the ideal public sphere, akin to the
classical polis of ancient Greece where men appeared to tell stories about
themselves, others and the world at large in order to reflect on and understand this
world. In this sphere, the uncensored biography of Isak Dinesen, Baroness Blixen,
Tanne and Tania would not have appeared as triviality and mere talk, but rather as
the foundation for Dinesen’s fiction: a kind of storytelling that “reveals meaning
without committing the error of defining it” (105). Since this is the sphere that
Arendt’s writing performs, it does not really need to be commented upon or
defined. It simply is by virtue of its own praxis. At the same time, it becomes
visible when Arendt explicitly outlines its opposite where

one reads page after page about [Dinesen’s] “successes” in later life and
how she enjoyed them, magnifying them out of all proportion – that so
much intensity, such bold passionateness should be wasted on Book-of-the-
Month-Club selections and honorary memberships in prestigious societies,
that the early clear-headed insight that sorrow is better than nothing, that
“between grief and nothing I will take grief” (Faulkner), should finally be
rewarded by the small change of prizes, awards, and honors might be sad in
retrospect; the spectacle itself must have been very close to comedy. (104)

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 This is the public sphere perverted by twentieth century mass society;
commercial, shallow, and vulgarly obsessed with the kind of public recognition
and honor that can be converted into monetary terms. It is from this sphere that
Arendt distances herself and from which she wants to rescue Dinesen in order to
salvage the intensity and bold passion of her life and writings from the
obfuscating light thrown by the wrong kind of public sphere. The problem here is
not only the existence of such a public sphere, but more importantly Dinesen’s
own willing alignment with it. This is where Arendt’s essay performs its second
important dissociation by splitting the subject of the essay in two. One is the
successful author who valued the commercial benefits of the Book-of-the-Month-
Club, and who happily basked in the dark light of the public sphere and received
its superficial tributes. The other is the wise story-teller who valued life’s sorrows
because they could be turned into story-telling. This is a dissociative rescue-
operation that runs throughout Arendt’s essay, explicitly surfacing in the
suggestion that it was vain Baroness Blixen who circumscribed the truth about her
own life in order to safe-guard her public success. More importantly, it is present
in Arendt’s description of Dinesen as someone who never wanted to be a
professional author at all “who has his [sic] identity confirmed, inescapably, in
public” (96). When she started writing, she did so simply because she had to make
a living, and there is, according to Arendt “a sharp line dividing her life from her
afterlife as an author” (98). Dinesen became an author because life failed her, or,
perhaps, because she failed at living. But while the professional author Dinesen
may have succumbed to the lures of public rewards, performing in the “spectacle”
of commercial publishing, the intuitive, natural story-teller Dinesen
simultaneously triumphed through her ability to recreate life’s tragedies
aesthetically in her writing. There is then, on the one hand, the empty husk of the
public persona Baroness Blixen, mistaken for the real thing by a public sphere
unable to discern between the authentic and the superficial. And, on the other, the
magnificent writing that organically grew out of Isak Dinesen’s inability to live. It
is the latter that Arendt cherishes and attempts to extricate from the tragi-comic
spectacle of the former’s success.
Arendt’s essay is an early and beautifully written example of an idea that
would characterize much feminist writing on Dinesen in the 1980s and 1990s: that

5
 her writings could productively be read and interpreted as a form of recuperative
“self-production,” as Susan R. Horton has written in her study of Dinesen’s Out of
Africa (108). And, that her writings represent a remarkable illustration of the
generic female artist’s experience of “bleeding into print” as Susan Gubar wrote
in her by now classical essay on Dinesen’s short story “The Blank Page” (296).
Even when the studies have not been intentionally biographical the historical
figure of Dinesen has always loomed largely in the interpretations of her works,
often throwing, as in Arendt’s case, a somewhat problematic shadow having to do
with the sheer marketability of her, her works and her life. The success that
Arendt lamented has remained a problem, even though it is more often addressed
as she addressed it; as a comedy, open to the professional critic’s ridicule.
Almost twenty years after the publication of Men in Dark Times, Danish
literary scholar Hans Hertel published three short pieces in the Danish daily
Information, entitled “Karen Blixen Superstar.” The first sentence reads

Just to make sure: my admiration for Karen Blixen is almost infinite. It

grows every time I read her works, and I wish everybody would come to see
her as I do. But, five weeks prior to a certain centennial celebration Blixen-
fetishism is about to surpass every kind of parody. (228)
(Bare for en ordens skyld: min beundring for Karen Blixen er næsten
grænseløs, den vokser for hver gang jag genlæser hende, og jeg drømmer
om at hun vil gå op for alle. Men fem uger før en vis 100-årsdag er Blixen-
fetishismen ved at overgå enhver parodi.)

Published in 1985, Hertel’s article dealt with the centennial of Blixen’s

birthday, celebrated with festivities attended by Danish royalties, conferences and
loads of books, radio- and TV-broadcasts, and articles published in glossy
magazines around the world. It was not only the centennial Hertel was
referencing. It was perhaps even more importantly Sidney Pollack’s Hollywood-
movie Out of Africa, premiering in 1985, which according to Hertel had given
Danes living in Kenya the bright idea to get together and raise money to turn the
remains of Blixen’s African farm into a museum. Two “bonneted ladies,” as
Hertel called the Kenya-based Danes, were collecting furniture for this venture,
and since they could not get hold of the real thing they would probably have to

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 settle for the props left behind by Universal Pictures, the elegant but fake façade
of the movie-industry (228). In the stores khaki-clothes were marketed à la Denys
and silk-blouses à la Karen, since everybody was suddenly on a first-name-basis
with the aristocracy, observes Hertel. The well-known silver-ware manufacturer
Georg Jensen instructed its customers in the art of laying a table in Blixen-style,
and advertisements for coffee suggested that its flavor was as smooth as a Kenyan
night.
Hertel’s pieces are mean and funny, but since he is a literary scholar interested
in the mechanisms of the book market he was not only out to score simple points
at the expense of gullible people and shallow commercialism. His final point is
analytic: the role of books in the commercial sector is to stimulate a chain reaction
where what he calls the aura of literature sells movies, clothes, silver-ware and
customized trips, and vice versa. In fact, what he is describing is an entire
commercial cycle where the movie, coffee and clothes also sell books. People
who watch Pollack’s movie where Meryl Streep portrayed Blixen, or stroll past
the displays at Georg Jensen will perhaps also buy books about and by Blixen to
place next to the coffee-cup from Royal Copenhagen as a marker of social status.
They may even read them. So, while Hertel could not abstain from suggesting that
it would be Baroness Streep’s books that would sell hundreds of thousands of
copies worldwide, he ended his article by advocating a non-puritanical stand vis-
à-vis the global Blixen-industry. Under cover of the commercial hubbub an
outstanding book would find its way, being “smuggled” is the word used by
Hertel, into homes where it would hardly have come by other routes (231).
Hertel’s approach to Blixen/Dinesen’s ongoing commercial success is analytic,
but like Arendt he frames it in terms of parody or comedy, suggesting that there is
something slightly ridiculous about the marketability of her works and her public
persona. And, like in Arendt’s case, the ridicule encompasses the historical figure
of Blixen/Dinesen. Hertel brings up the circumstances of Blixen/Dinesen’s 70th
birthday in 1955 and he quotes the Danish critic Aage Henriksen who in 1984
wrote that the lack of public recognition had made Blixen/Dinesen so sulky that
she decided to become ill since only

if we had been able to bring about the illumination of the whole of

Copenhagen, the opening of the Tivoli and the words KAREN BLIXEN
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 SUPERSTAR inscribed by fireworks against the nightly skies, would her
soul have been at peace. (qtd. in Hertel 229)
(hvis vi havde været i stand til at bringe det i stand at Køpenhavn blev
illumineret, Tivoli åbnet og ordene KAREN BLIXEN SUPERSTAR med
fyrværkeri indtegnet på nattehimlen, kunde hendes sjæl være faldet til ro.)

Hertel comments that this “wishful dream” almost came true at the centennial.
Thus, he not only takes Henriksen’s account of Blixen/Dinesen’s supposedly
narcissistic view of her own importance at face value, but also in fact transforms
the words of the former into the dream of the latter. While less conspicuous and
vehement than in Arendt, there is a dissociative process going on in Hertel’s texts
as well whereby the works are separated from the historical figure of the author.
There are the outstanding works on the one hand, and the conceited author on the
other whose happy-go-lucky participation in the commercial hullabaloo makes her
slightly laughable. I do not believe that either Arendt or Hertel consciously set out
to ridicule Blixen/Dinesen. Rather, they portray her as someone who was seduced
by her own success, blinded by the public light and the fireworks of fawning
admiration. Fame-craving, susceptible and almost infantile Blixen/Dinesen can
thus be saved along with her work from the public, commercial sphere that never
really understood her anyhow.
Yet, it was precisely in the sphere of commercial, popular publishing that
Blixen/Dinesen’s career as an author once begun. In this study I will argue that it
became possible because her first work Seven Gothic Tales was published in close
cooperation with one of the most commercially aware and inventive agents on the
North American book market in 1934, namely the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Without its backing of the unknown, middle-aged, European lady Karen Blixen,
there probably would have been no Isak Dinesen for Arendt to include in Men in
Dark Times, and possibly no Karen Blixen Superstar either. The fact that the
North American book market and the Book-of-the-Month-Club were crucial to
Blixen/Dinesen’s success has been duly noted in scattered writings about her over
the years. In a public lecture given in 1989, Canadian novelist and Dinesen-
scholar Sara Stambaugh pointed out that the US provided her with a prime
lucrative market and that American advertising was essential in the process of
reaching this market (8). As recently as in November 2013 in an article in The
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 Guardian, novelist Margaret Atwood remarked that it was “New York that had
made her famous back in 1934.” In a Danish context, Grethe Rostbøll’s 2005-
study of Blixen/Dinesen’s publishing history in the US and in England is, besides
an excellent source that I have drawn on in my study, an acknowledgement of the
importance of the North American market not only to the existence of
Anglophone Isak Dinesen, but also to the world-wide renown of the Danish
author Karen Blixen. As for Blixen/Dinesen herself, she recognized the truth of
Stambaugh’s claim that Isak Dinesen was and is American already in 1937,
writing to her American publisher Robert K. Haas

America took me on when I could not even make the publishers in Europe
have a look at my book, and the American reading public received me with
such generosity and open-mindedness as I shall never forget. (Karen Blixen
i Danmark Bind 1 246)

While there may be a tacit recognition within Blixen/Dinesen-research that the

North American book-club readers were instrumental in the making of the author,
very little scholarly interest has been paid to the question why they received her
with such generosity in 1934. This is the more surprising since many academic
studies of Blixen/Dinesen’s works begin with the suggestion that her writings are
difficult to place in relation to the time of publication and literary history in
general. In fact, the view of Blixen/Dinesen’s stories as problematically
anachronistic has almost become an academic tradition in its own right. In an
important study published in 1964 Robert Langbaum set out to prove their
relevance to modern life by reading them as a part of a modernist literary canon
(1). In 2005, Ellen Rees’ description of the author as someone who stood “entirely
alone in her literary preoccupations” suggests that fifty years of research, and
feminist research in particular, has not quite overcome Langbaum’s concern that
Blixen/Dinesen’s works need to be contextualized in order to prove their value
(On the Margins 13). This concern may at least partially explain why
Blixen/Dinesen’s writings have been defined both as modernist, post-modernist
and late modernist, and also why they have generated such a variety of
approaches, ranging from feminist, gothic and queer to theological and

9
 existentialist. Norwegian Blixen-scholar Tone Selboe suggests as much when she
writes that

Despite the fact that many Blixen-readings have a focus on the exotic or
anachronistic aspects of Blixen’s works in common, there is hardly any
other author who has been placed under as many different labels as Karen
Blixen. (12)
(Til tross for at mange Blixen-kommentarer har det til felles at de fokuserer
på det eksotiske og usamtidige i forfatterskapet, så er det knapt noen annen
forfatter som har blitt plassert under så mange ulike merkelapper som Karen
Blixen.)

While recognizing the importance of academic studies of Blixen/Dinesen as

modernist, late modernist, post-modernist, gothic or queer, this study will not
attempt to define Blixen/Dinesen in relation to the labels of literary history or
theory. Instead, I want to explore the marketability of Seven Gothic Tales and try
to understand why this collection of short stories written by an unknown,
European woman became a commercial and popular success in the US in 1934. I
will look at the marketing strategies of the Book-of-the-Month-Club, but also at
the ways in which Blixen/Dinesen herself contributed to her success. I will argue
that far from being a susceptible victim of the commercial process of marketing
and selling literature, Blixen/Dinesen was a fast learner who very consciously set
about to make a living out of her writing. Since I do not conceive of the Book-of-
the-Month-Club- readers in 1934 merely as gullible victims of clever marketing, I
also want to consider Seven Gothic Tales as a work that made sense to its readers
at that particular time and place, and still today. Unlike Arendt and Hertel, I do
not feel the need to rescue Blixen/Dinesen either from herself, or from the readers
and admirers who made her career possible in 1934 and who continue to sustain it
outside the scholarly world. On the contrary, I find it fascinating that books by
and about Blixen/Dinesen continue to find readers almost a century after her first
book was published and fifty years after her death.
I am interested in why Blixen/Dinesen and her works were marketable during
her life-time and continue to be so, and I will claim that marketability is one way
of understanding the specific quality of Blixen/Dinesen works. This study is

10
 founded on the conviction that the material conditions of a particular time and
place are inscribed in the literature written at that time and place, and that the
work of art always grapples with the reality and experience of the historical
moment of its coming into being, not simply reflecting it but responding to and
often resisting the course of the world. The time-frame of this study roughly
encompasses the first three decades of the twentieth century, an era of exceptional
technological, economic and productive growth with concomitant social changes,
leading up to the Great Depression during which Seven Gothic Tales was
published. The effects of globalized transformation of production and
consumption were felt in the two places that went into the making of Seven Gothic
Tales: colonial Kenya where Blixen lived between 1914 and 1931 and where the
book was begun, and the US where it was first published. I will argue that the
success of Seven Gothic Tales in the US depended on the way in which
Blixen/Dinesen’s experience of colonial Kenya was an experience of commercial
modernity that reverberated with the experience of the American readers. Central
to this argument is, paradoxically, the ideal of feudalism as an explicit and
decisive element in the creation of colonial Kenya. In Blixen/Dinesen’s second
book, Out of Africa (1937), she efficiently used this ideal in her representation of
Edenic bliss in a perfectly ordered, hierarchal world, mapping the confirmation of
and desire for social stasis inherent in the feudal romance onto the African
colonial geography and onto her own biography. What makes colonial Kenya so
important in my study, however, is the manner in which the ideal of feudalism as
a reflection of a divinely ordained social order became marketable as a
commodity at a time of general affluence when social status and identity had in
fact become negotiable on a consumer market. The economic structures had
created a culture of consumption which fostered the need to create and display
your identity and social status on an increasingly competitive labor-market
through consumption of the kind of goods, experiences and knowledge that
signaled the desired qualities. The consuming self is an individual freed from the
restraints of tradition and communal values, making her free choice of whom to
be on an increasingly diverse market, endlessly inventing and reinventing her
identity. But this self is also a commodity on an increasingly complex and
impersonal market where appearance is destiny, an experience which makes

11
 emotional sense of Marshall Berman’s observation that “to be fully modern is to
be anti-modern,” torn between a desire to be free and to be safe (14). What
interests me, then, is the way in which this particular interpretation of modernity
was realized in colonial Kenya and the US in the 1920s and 30s, and how this
experience was given form in a couple of successful and popular literary works of
the time, one of them being Seven Gothic Tales.
Since Kenya, the US and the twentieth century are entirely absent from Seven
Gothic Tales, its tales set in European locations in the 1800s, the form and
structure of the tales will be crucial in my reading. While Out of Africa explicitly
set out to market the feudal ideal in the form of achieved reality at a particular
time and place – and at the time of its publication only a decade away – Seven
Gothic Tales interrogates the viability of this ideal. While the marketability of Out
of Africa rests on its conscious and elegant salvaging of the anti-modern urge at
the heart of modernity, the marketability of Seven Gothic Tales rests on its
uncompromising representation of modernity as the experience of unfulfillable
desire. The logic of consumerist economy dictates that there can be no end and no
closure since each year, month, week and day brings a new type of car, book,
experience, and identity to be bought and emulated onto the market. At the same
time, this logic relies on keeping the ideal and the idea of fulfillment and
completion alive as achievable reality through the imagery of omnipresent mass
advertisement.
I also need to say a few words about my own experience of the marketability of
Blixen/Dinesen since I have made a partial living out of her and her works within
the academic world but mostly outside of it. Over the years, decades by now, I
have read, written about, and published texts on both Isak Dinesen and Karen
Blixen, for a number of reasons. In the 1980s Gubar’s essay on “’The Blank Page’
and Female Creativity” inspired me to read Blixen/Dinesen as partaking in
collective “efforts to sanctify the female through symbols of female divinity,
myths of female origin, metaphors of female creativity, and rituals of female
power” (308). A few years later, inspired by Roland Barthes’
structuralist/semiotic study S/Z, I subjected “The Monkey” to a painstakingly
laborious close reading, a text which eventually and strangely found its way into
an anthology into which it did not fit at all – as one reviewer pointed out – since

12
 the anthology was intended to encourage a shift in literary studies and critique
away from theory and towards contemporary political contexts. Next, I settled for
a thematic treatment of a couple of Blixen/Dinesen-short stories in relation to
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which was not a very original idea either. Then, post-
colonial studies suddenly awakened my interest in Out of Africa and Shadows on
the Grass (1961) and the ways in which a white, female author negotiates and
represents identity in a colonial setting. Isak Dinesen, or rather Karen Blixen since
I was writing in Swedish, became my favorite point of reference and starting point
in a number of texts dealing with other female authors within the same colonial
tradition. And, since it is impossible to write about negotiations of identity
without submerging oneself into the life where this identity is lived, Blixen’s
biography became my next focus of interest, which I of course share with so many
Blixen- and Dinesen-readers. I have written commercially about herself and her
works but also about her silver-ware and sofas in magazines, daily papers, and
books, and I have talked about her in public libraries. And while my use of
Blixen/Dinesen initially consisted mostly of derivative practices in text-analysis, I
have learned something important about Blixen/Dinesen, her life and works,
through the years: Blixen/Dinesen sells not only khaki-outfits, postcards and
silverware but also thoughts and ideas.
Fifty years after her death and the publication of her last book women mostly
and a few stray men, will trudge to the local library to listen to a talk on Blixen.
They are the faithful readers of her books and books about her and despite the fact
that they have already read everything by and about her there are still new things
to be learned and discussed. Was she a racist? But, then, what about the fact that
she taught some of the children at the Ngong farm in Kenya in secret since the
British did not allow native schools outside the missionary stations? Was she a
feminist? But, then, what about her 1953 Båltale where she claimed that to be a
man is to do, to go out and possess the world and shape it. To be woman is to be,
to stay at the hearth and remain loyal to the man and to her own womanhood.
How does this view of the sexes as unchanging, diametrically opposed essences
fit into the story of her life? She who went out in the world to possess and shape
it, and then became a professional author who lived off and supported others by
her pen. How does it fit into her tales where appearances can never be trusted?

13
 Where a man may transform into a woman through the simple act of putting on a
bonnet, where a woman transforms into a monkey and where women never stay at
their hearths but roam the world plotting, planning and acting to change it in
accordance with their desires. Was she an old-school conservative who believed
in the unchanging essence of blue blood, the absolute rights of the feudal lord and
a divinely ordained social order? Well, she did insist on being called baroness by
everybody but the close family, even by her faithful, under-paid or not at all paid
living-in secretary-cum-maid. But what about the ways in which she cleverly
navigated the modern world of mass media and regularly appeared on the radio or
on television and arranged to meet Marilyn Monroe on her visit to the US? She
turned this meeting into a public photo-opportunity that eternalized the moment
when the voluptuous, ultra-feminine, platinum-blonde and the emaciated, black-
clad, turbaned, sex-less figure face one another, raising their glasses. And what
about all the noble bastards in her tales? The valet successfully disguised as a
blue-blooded Cardinal and the shape-shifting or slightly mad Ladies that inhabit
her literature. What about her self-declared materialism and love of money? Her
mystical beliefs in eternal, transcendent values? The incongruities of
Blixen/Dinesen’s life and works, within her writings, between what she said and
what she did, between what she said and what she wrote, between what she
insisted on being in one moment, and how she appeared in the next, continue to
fascinate. Although, at the libraries, we do not speak of it as incongruities because
that would suggest that we would like her and her literature to be stable entities,
always identical to a single, true source of meaning and selfhood, transparent and
easy to place in the order of thoughts, traditions and -isms. We speak of it as
playfulness, and we recognize the significance of Blixen/Dinesen to our own lives
in the way in which both her life and her works map and articulate our own
experiences of living at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They confirm
our experience of being torn between the freedom of being a self-inventing
subject on a market in constant flux on the one hand, and the safety of being
confirmed by a world where identities and values are stable and unchanging. But
we also recognize Blixen/Dinesen’s ability to turn this experience into a
commodity on the market, turning herself and her books into consumable artefacts
by exploiting our need to feel safe and our desire to reinvent our selves at one and

14
 the same time. We admire her for her shrewdness because, as one library-visitor
pointed out, it makes her a role-model for all women within the framework of the
consumer society in which we have to make our living, thus recognizing
playfulness as grace under duress.
My own experience of Blixen/Dinesen’s continuous marketability on a
commercial market was an important incentive in the writing of this study. But so
was my experience of her continuous marketability within an educational system
that while importantly construing itself as non-commercial, in fact behaves very
much like a market where theoretical fashions come and go, and money and
salaried positions are allocated accordingly. The perception of Blixen/Dinesen
within both worlds bears witness to the relevance of her works and her life to our
attempts to understand the world in which we live.
My guide throughout this study will be the introduction to Seven Gothic Tales,
written by Dorothy Canfield Fisher in 1934. Today, Blixen/Dinesen’s fame
certainly outshines Canfield Fisher’s, but at the time the latter’s sponsoring of the
authorship was crucial and it is probably correct to say that without her, neither
Isak Dinesen nor the author Karen Blixen had ever come into existence. In August
1931 46-year old Blixen had left Kenya and moved in with her ageing mother in
the house at Rungstedlund where she had grown up. She was deeply depressed
and utterly destitute, quarrelling with her mother about money for cigarettes and
the right to go out by herself in her mother’s old car every now and then. Still, she
continued her work with the stories that she had begun in Kenya, and less than a
year after her arrival in Denmark she asked her brother Thomas Dinesen to write a
letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Canfield Fisher was an old friend of Blixen’s
aunt Bess Westenholz, and Thomas Dinesen had met the American novelist
briefly a few years earlier when picking her up at the airport outside Copenhagen
and driving her to his aunt. 3 The letter is signed by Thomas Dinesen but the
editors of Blixen/Dinesen’s Danish correspondence are probably correct when
they refer to it as Blixen’s “first personal approach to the person who would be
the first to champion her fantastic stories and secure her breakthrough as an author

3
According to the editors of Karen Blixen i Danmark, Canfield Fisher would later recall that Bess
Westenholz had become quite upset when she learned of her niece’s tactics and her exploitation of an old
friendship (Bind 1 83).
15
 on the American book market” (første personlige henvendelse til det menneske,
der først af alle gik i brechen for hendes fantastiske historier og skaffede hende et
litterært gennembrud på det amerikanske bogmarked) (Karen Blixen i Danmark.
Bind 1 83). In fact, Blixen, using her brother as a mouthpiece, asked Canfield
Fisher to read the stories with the American magazine market in mind. In the
letter, Thomas Dinesen pointed out that his sister, “Baroness Blixen,” was trying
to find an English publisher who was willing to publish the stories in a book, but
“she wants to try first whether it would be possible to have one or two of them
taken by a magazine in America or England,” as the letter puts it, helpfully listing
a handful of “well known” magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s or
Harper’s (83). Blixen’s first contact with the American publishing industry is
interesting because it foreshadows traits that would characterize her later career.
While she freely admitted that America had taken her on before anyone else was
willing to do so, there would always also be something roundabout and haughty in
Blixen/Dinesen’s approach to her American benefactors and publishers. The go-
between role assigned to her brother in 1932 would later be taken over by her
English publishers when Blixen/Dinesen decided that her manuscripts would have
to pass through their hands for editing before they got to the Americans. And
while keeping her American editors at an arm’s length distance she would
continue to write with an eye on the American magazine market with its promise
of swift rewards.
If Canfield Fisher was at all put off by Baroness Blixen’s peculiar combination
of old-fashioned reticence and business acumen, she did not show it. She wrote
back to Thomas Dinesen in August 1932, and her letter combines praise of the
stories with a down-to-earth estimation of their value. She had shown them to a
visiting friend who also happened to be a publisher who

has taken them back to New York with him to show them to his partner. He
agrees with me that there is little possibility that any magazine could use
them serially, (they are too long, and with too little of what is called
“narrative interest” for that, we both think) but the book publication by an
American publishing house is apt to be rather more profitable to an author
than the British publication. (Karen Blixen i Danmark. Bind 1 90)

16
 The friend and publisher was Robert K. Haas at Harrison Smith and Robert Haas,
and he wrote directly to Blixen herself, dropping all pretences of corresponding
with a protective brother.4 He did find the stories “remarkable,” but reluctantly
declined publication “on account of the difficulty of selling any collection of short
stories in substantial quantity” (95). In a second letter a month later Haas again
expressed his regrets at not being able to publish short stories by an unknown
author, adding that he was sure that Baroness Blixen had heard about the present
“business conditions” (98). When Canfield Fisher finally wrote directly to Blixen
in April 1933 she also blamed business when she accused the American
publishers of not getting “up their courage in the face of the depression” (106).
Only a few months after Canfield Fisher’s letter Haas changed his mind about
publishing short stories by an unknown author and he sent Blixen a contract
which stipulated that she would not receive the customary advance. While there is
nothing in writing to prove it, it is likely that Canfield Fisher in her capacity of
Book-of-the-Month-Club-associate had everything to do with his change of mind
and that she had promised not only to promote the book in the Club, but also to
write an introduction.
Her introduction is a shrewd piece of salesmanship written by someone who
knew the potential customers, their desires and fears. It emphatically places the
stories of this collection in the “stand in the literary market where they are for
sale,” brandishing their alluring newness while encouragingly pointing out that
they are not the work of genius (vi). It is in this context that Blixen/Dinesen’s
career begun, and this is also where my study starts, drawing on Janice Radway’s
and Joan Shelley Rubin’s studies of the history and set-up of the Book-of-the-
Month-Club in the context of an evolving American consumer culture and the
advertising industry of the early twentieth century. Against this background, I will
consider the significance of what Blixen/Dinesen’s publisher Haas identified as
difficulties in the promotion of Seven Gothic Tales: her insistence on anonymity
and the short story format. On an ever-growing book market the author’s public
persona became a crucial part of marketing, and I will consider Blixen/Dinesen’s
initial resistance in relation to the careers of authors Ellen Glasgow and Vicki

4
Robert Haas served as President of the Book-of-the-Month-Club between 1926 and 1931 before going into
publishing.
17
 Baum who were also promoted by the Book-of-the-Month-Club. My discussion
of the short story format takes Haas’ observation that the American public did not
like books made up of collections of short stories as its starting-point, considering
it in relation to the neighboring magazine market and Blixen/Dinesen’s publishing
strategies. The final two sections of part I argue that the spectre of sordid
commercialism has haunted the critical and academic perception of
Blixen/Dinesen’s works and that in order to fit the mold of what Fredric Jameson
has termed the ideology of modernism, the author and her works have had to be
detached from the commercial, mass culture context, a process beginning in the
1960s and on-going today.
In the second part of this study, I will use Canfield Fisher’s description of the
characters in Seven Gothic Tales as a “race apart” to consider the significance of
the feudal and aristocratic theme to Blixen/Dinesen’s stories and their reception
(vi). Using Tzvetan Todorov’s discussion of verisimilitude and the fantastic in a
close reading of the first few pages of “The Roads Round Pisa” that opens Seven
Gothic Tales I will try to show that it is possible to read this story, explicitly set in
1823, as a story about a familiar, hierarchical world in 1934. At the same time, the
representation of the aristocratic characters demands a shift in the mode of reading
that de-familiarizes the familiar, suggesting that social reality and hierarchy are
grounded in an imaginary register that is produced and re-produced in the form of
a world view, or an ideology. The notion that there is such a thing as blue-
bloodedness may be ridiculous and fantastic but it nevertheless shapes social
reality. In the final section of part II, I will argue that Blixen/Dinesen’s Kenyan
years hold the key to an interpretation of the aristocratic theme that permeates
Seven Gothic Tales. Not, as it has been suggested, because they enabled her to
live out and recreate a European, feudal past in her writings, but because colonial
Kenya reinvented the feudal ideal as a marketable commodity in a global
consumer society. Read against the colonial background, Seven Gothic Tales
testifies to the viability of the aristocratic idea and the feudal, hierarchical ethos as
image, appearance, and as fiction.
In part III, I will reflect on the form of Seven Gothic Tales, the significance of
its title but also its two most conspicuous features, namely the wealth of
intertextual references and the inset tales. Using a formulation from Canfield

18
 Fisher, I will consider the ways in which what she describes as the “many-colored
literary fog” in Seven Gothic Tales makes it into a malleable, multi-purpose work
of art that could capture a diverse audience (ix). Finally, I want to try to make
sense of Canfield Fisher’s claim that Seven Gothic Tales, despite being a book
about a “race apart” viewed through the haze of a “many-colored literary fog”
could also be said to be a book about “perfectly real human beings” (x). How did
Seven Gothic Tales fit into the time and place of its first publication, that is to say,
the US in the grips of a deep and catastrophic Depression?
Throughout this study I will refer to the author as Blixen/Dinesen. It is an ugly
and clumsy construction, but since I am using biographical material by and about
Karen Blixen while writing about the literary works written in English under the
name Isak Dinesen, this seems to be the only reasonable way of referring to her.
The translations from Danish, Norwegian and Swedish into English are my own
throughout.

19
This Little Book Went to Market
Book-of-the-Month-Club

When Blixen/Dinesen published her first work in 1934, her authorship was
launched in close collaboration with the Book-of-the-Month-Club. In 1934, the
Club had been around for more than a decade and had amply demonstrated, as
Charles Lee observed when he wrote a laudatory study in 1958, that
“advertisement could encourage popular culture. Culture could produce profits”
(29). To Lee it was obvious that Blixen/Dinesen belonged on the list of “new
writers the Club has sponsored (with their publishers of course!),” together with
names such as Pearl Buck, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, Margaret
Mitchell, Vicki Baum, Sigrid Undset, and Mika Waltari, Americans as well as
Europeans, works in English as well as translations (118). Lee also quoted Haas
who quite frankly stated that “Seven Gothic Tales might have done 3000 instead
of the 20 000 copies it did in the trade” had it not been for the Book-of-the-
Month-Club-selection (207). This success paved the way for a British edition, and
speedy translations into Danish and Swedish.5
When Lee wrote his study of the Book-of-The-Month-Club’s history in 1958,
the Club had been in existence for more than a quarter of a century and the story
Lee told was one of almost uninterrupted success. By mid-century, the Book-of-
the-Month-Club had become an important and even somewhat respected
institution on the American book market, and it was no longer selling only books.
In the early 1950s, the Club had sought and gained the confidence of institutions
such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Opera, establishing
joint ventures where reproductions of famous works of art and opera recordings
were sold with the recommendations of the two prestigious Mets’ and through the
commercial channels created and controlled by the Club.
It had not always been thus. That is, the Club had always been a commercially
successful enterprise since its inception in April, 1926 when it sent out its first

5
In a reply to a letter from her Norwegian friend Gustav Mohr, congratulating her on her American success,
Blixen/Dinesen wrote in June 1934 that the Club’s selection meant that her book would reach “50 000 readers.”
Since this figure does not correspond to the actual number of Club-members, it is likely that she is referring to
the print run commissioned by the Club (Karen Blixen i Danmark Bind I 140).
20
 selection of books to 4 750 members, with the exception of a dip in circulation at
the beginning of the 1930s. By the end of 1926, the membership-number had
increased to 46 539 customers, and 362 585 a decade later (Lee).
The Club had, however, been deeply criticized and contested from the very
beginning, and not only by the book-sellers who accused the mail-order club of
unfair competition in the market place. Much more virulent and lingering was the
critique coming from universities, intellectuals, publishers and authors. They
accused the Club of lowering literary standards and, indeed, threatening the very
concept of literature itself.
In her study of American corporate publishing in the early twentieth century,
Kim Becnel points out that the book-making endeavor had always been
considered a gentleman’s art. The Club was considered as “a child of advertising”
and was seen as openly and unabashedly challenging this tradition and the cultural
values it sanctioned and protected (20). In the same vein, Janice Radway, in her
massive and personal study of the Club, writes that the book industry was
“notable for its continuing ideological, if not economic, dependence on a different
model of production organized around the creative activity of a singular,
autonomous author understood to be the initiator of the publication process” (A
Feeling for Books 128).
The Club’s founder Harry Scherman certainly did not fit the mold of a
gentleman publisher. He started out as a copy-writer in the mail-order department
of an advertising agency, and used his combined experience of advertising and
mail-order business when he started the Little Leather Library together with
Maxwell Sackheim in 1916. The Little Leather Library were reprints of canonical
literary works, often abridged and nicely bound in leather, sold through
subscription and sent out by mail to the customers. The Leather Library did fairly
well, but Scherman soon understood that the classical works were too small a
literary base to found a commercially sound enterprise on; their number was, after
all, limited. He needed new books, new merchandise, but he also needed to
impress on his potential buyers that the untried merchandise held (almost) the
same cultural value as that which had been tried and found valuable by the ages.
Where value had once been accumulated and established slowly Scherman needed
it to be established immediately; pre-reading as it were. The Club bought the

21
 distribution rights from the publishing houses based on manuscripts not-yet-in-
print, and, as early as 1930, manufactured its own editions. As Joan Shelley Rubin
points out

The originality of Sherman’s contribution was, of course, not the

transformation of books or even culture into objects for purchase. Rather, by
selling an opportunity to acquire books not yet published, instead of the
books themselves, Scherman created a new kind of cultural commodity.
(103)

But in order to sell what we might call “book/cultural options,” Scherman

needed to authorize the value of the books he wanted to sell. In order to do so he
introduced the Selecting Committee, a crucial marketing device that successfully
set the Club apart from competing book-clubs.6 The Book-of-the-Month-Club was
not the only mail-order-based book-club on the American or European markets at
the time. Only in the US, there were nine thriving subscription-clubs in 1928,
testifying to the educational zeal of the members, but also to the scarcity of book-
stores; 32 per cent of the US public were without direct access to any book-store
in 1930 (Lee 26). Neither is it correct to claim, as Lee did in 1958, that the Club’s
special contribution to the merchandising of new books consisted of adapting the
mechanisms of a magazine-operation by turning book readers into subscribers.
The Book-of-the-Month-Club was one of the first clubs to do so in the US, but in
Europe and especially in Germany, the system of membership, subscription and
“limited choice” was already in practice by 1926. 7 Rather, it was in the field of
establishing cultural value that Scherman and his Club broke new ground when he
instituted the “Judges.” Originally, there were five of them, and their salaried job
was to read all manuscripts being sent in by publishing houses (not by authors
directly). They discussed those at a monthly day-long meeting in New York, and
selected the handful of books that would be included as Books-of-the-Month. This
task soon became impossible, due to the sheer number of manuscripts pouring in.

6
“so that [the subscriber] would know he wasn’t buying a pig in a poke” as Scherman himself put it (qtd. in
Rubin 104).
7
The ”negative option”- construction was and is crucial to any commercial membership-based enterprise.
The customer is offered an item – the book or a pair of socks – of-the-month and in order not to receive this
item, he or she must say “no.”
22
 Thus, the judges’ final selection was preceded by a first selection made by
anonymous “readers” employed by the Book-of-the-Month-Club. Never exactly a
secret, this first “in-house” selection was not something the Club chose to make
public. In 1927, the judges were presented in a brochure with full-page
photographs and their lists of credentials, “a format that made the judges into
larger-than-life exemplars of mastery” as Rubin writes (101). Pictures of the
judges routinely appeared in ads between 1926 and 1933, thereafter more seldom.
The Selection Committee drew immediate critical fire, both from agents within
the commercial book market, such as book-sellers, -publishers and -reviewers,
and from the academic world. The former complained that the Club was
instituting a sort of literary dictatorship and a standardization of literature that
would eventually destroy the readers’ ability to pass independent judgments. The
latter, however, seemed to be less concerned with the readers’ sensibilities.
Rather, it was the presupposed autonomy of the aesthetic field at large that was at
stake when books were being advertised and sold like any other commodity, and
when new books that no one but editors and the Club-judges had read, were
passed off as the “important new books.” 8
The book-sellers and the publishers calmed down eventually when the Club
was able to prove statistically that their selections tended to boost book-store
selling of the chosen titles. On the commercial book market then, the Club was
able to present itself as a complement and even an ally rather than the enemy. The
academic world however, remained distrustful and openly critical of the Club.
The blatantly commercial nature of its operations was not really the issue since
Sherman hardly invented the art of selling books through advertising. Also, the
Club could not be accused of peddling pulp literature produced in fiction
factories, since it always worked together with respectable publishing houses and
identifiable authors. Instead, the first real problem was that the Club, through its
Selecting Committee, openly set itself up as a competing expert in the field of
literature. Secondly, the board of judges approached literature in a way that did
not sit well with the academically trained literary elite. Henry Seidel Canby was

8
1927-Book-of-the-Month-Club-brochure (qtd. in Rubin 100)
23
 the chairman of the judges, and in an interview he summed up his own approach
to the task and the role of great versus good books:

Because no permanent contribution to world literature has been published in

the month of May, is a critic therefore stopped from recommending
somebody’s good and readable novel? … To conceive of a critic as an
arbiter who lowers himself by approving of the plain fare of good books, not
great, which most of us largely feed upon if we are to share the thought of
our own time, is literary snobbery and devoid of common sense. (qtd. in Lee
118)9

Canby however, was not only a Club-judge, but also an English Professor at
Yale University. In another interview he made clear that he really did not
distinguish between his activities at the university on the one hand, and in the
Committee on the other. Wherever he was, and whatever books he was reading,
with whatever audience in mind, he defined his own ruling purpose thus:
“Whether in college or on the Book-of-the-Month-Club or on The Review, [it] has
been the passing on of sound values to others” (qtd. in Lee 124).10
“Sound values” and “common sense” are keywords in Canby’s definition of
what makes for good enough but perhaps not great literature. Radway describes
him as someone whose literary preferences lay with an older generation of
writers, such as Edith Wharton or Willa Cather. Rubin describes him as someone
whose view of the world and the role of literature were governed by “genteel
idealism” (123). In this respect, Canby had a great deal in common with the
second most important judge, Dorothy Canfield Fisher. While the Committee

9
That Canby did make a clear distinction between “good” and “great” literature and the role of the Club
becomes obvious when we consider his statement on Pearl Buck’s 1938-Nobel-prize. He said: “The Swedish
Academy’s standards are high but evidently they are flexible, otherwise it would be difficult to account for the
recent award.” As a judge, he was responsible for selecting no less than fifteen works by Pearl Buck as Club-
books. He was also responsible for not selecting William Faulkner’s works, whose comment on Pearl Buck’s
Nobel-prize nevertheless echoes that of Canby; “I don’t want it. I’d rather be in the company of Sherwood
Anderson and Theodore Dreiser than S. Lewis and China-hand Buck” (both Canby and Faulkner qtd. in Becnel
89). Sinclair Lewis was also a steady presence on the Club’s selection lists. Faulkner, on the other hand, did not
make the selection until after he received his Nobel-prize in 1949. Which, incidentally, he did accept.
10
Canby was the founder and first editor of the literary magazine The Saturday Review of Literature
24
 knew no formal hierarchies but operated according to the principle one person-
one vote, Canby and Canfield Fisher were the most widely known among the
judges, and it was to those two that journalists and later researchers turned when
interested in the opinions and history of the Club’s Committee. She, too, was an
academic with a PhD in English/French literature from Columbia University but
after marriage she settled for a life as a farmer’s wife and freelance writing, also
of fictional pieces, and eventually novels. During WW I she volunteered as an
ambulance driver in Paris and wrote a collection of essays on her experience in
war-time Europe. She also wrote on child-rearing, inspired by Maria Montessori
whose works she translated and introduced in the US. Radway defines her as a “a
female literary sage who could effectively mediate for her readers between the
demands of contemporary life and an older, more stable, moral and ethical
universe” (179). In a moving introduction to a collection of stories that was
published in 1956, Canfield Fisher put forth what could perhaps be labelled her
cultural credo, her view of what art could and should be. She writes “that art with
its magical intuition brings, and should bring, to the observer an enrichment of
human life … of humanity’s ceaseless Pilgrim’s Progress through the years” ( A
Harvest of Stories 31). This is a somewhat more sage-like echo of Canby’s call
for “sound values” and “common sense,” Through the agency of good, readable
books, both Canby and Canfield Fisher in their role as judges wanted to offer the
readers a “sentimental education” as Radway puts it (263). That is, both judges
embraced a notion of traditional bourgeois “Bildung,” understood both in a moral
and a cultural sense, and cherished the possibility of transmitting it to the masses
through reading. Good reading made for good people, and Rubin points out that

Canby’s and Fisher’s dominance as exponents of integrity, morality, and

literary standards perpetuated the genteel tradition in a perhaps surprising
place: at the heart of an institution inextricably tied to advertising and
consumption. (143)

This also meant that formal literary experiments, later labelled modernist by
literary history, were not included in the selections during the 1920s, 30s and 40s.
T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein or Ezra Pound are
conspicuously absent. Virginia Woolf, however, is represented by her cheerful

25
 “dog-biography”-novel Flush in 1933, and in 1941 the Club ambitiously offered
Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. It is probably safe to say that the
first judges reasoned in a way similar to that of Radway’s informants in the 1980s
who declared that some books were simply “much too academic for us” (9). It
was, however, not only a matter of form. Out of a 95-title list of “Radical Novels
of the Depression Era,” compiled in 2004 by Janet Galligani Casey, only one
made the Club’s selections.11 The Club chose not to select a number of authors
that have come to be regarded as outstanding writers of and on the era; John Dos
Passos, Tillie Olsen or Dalton Trumbo. Thus, it is probably also safe to say, as
Radway does, that “the judges were much more comfortable with books that
attempted to combat despair with sympathy and affiliation,” as opposed to
political organizing and wrath (279).
So, the judges chose good, enriching books that were neither formally
experimental, nor too radical in terms of subject or political views. Good, but not
necessarily great, books, “a plain fare” for readers whose main activity was not
reading to interpret or analyze, but reading for pleasure. At the same time, the
Club-advertisements as well as the judges’ definitions of “good literature” suggest
that pleasure was not the Club’s pre-eminent selling point, but rather usefulness:
the promise that ‘Bildung’ and enrichment would follow from pleasure as an
almost accidental by-product. An early Club-ad read:

Think over the last few years. How often outstanding books appeared,
widely discussed and widely recommended, books you were really anxious
to read and fully intended to read when you ‘got around to it’, but which
nevertheless you missed! Why is it you disappoint yourself so frequently in
this way? (qtd. in Rubin 99)

11
Richard Wright’s Native Son was selected in 1940, the year it came out. Black Boy, by the same author,
was also selected in 1945. According to Radway, the judges asked Wright to make alterations in both
manuscripts, and he complied, knowing fully well how important a selection could be for sales figures. Native
Son sold 215 000 copies within three weeks. Radway wryly comments that there were “limits to the kinds of
identifications the judges thought their subscribers could tolerate or enjoy” (286). The other author on the
“radical list” who made the Club’s list was John Steinbeck, not, however, with The Grapes of Wrath which was
turned down by the judges. According to Lee, Canby still regretted this decision when asked about it more than a
decade later (171). Whether his feelings were due to Steinbeck’s 1940-Pulitzer Prize or a case of genuine regret
over having willingly passed over a good book, we of course cannot know.
26
 The language suggests that “Bildung” in this context should not be understood
primarily in its traditional, bourgeois sense, but rather “Bildung” as something to
be consumed and displayed in a social setting, such as a suburban cocktail-party
where books were one topic. Still, in the appeal to rigorous self-fashioning
through cultural consumption and in accordance with a preconceived notion of the
ideal citizen, the moral imperative at the heart of the Bildung-concept still echoes
in the Club-ad.
The Club members and readers were indeed intent on educating themselves
culturally and otherwise. In an article in 1921 in North American Review, before
he became a judge, Canby wrote about the new audience created by education:

Homes have changed, especially “refined” homes, and a new home means a
new public. The refined home nowadays has been to college. (There are a
million college graduates now in the United States.) Forty years ago only
scattered members had gone beyond the school … Refined homes may not
be better or happier than they used to be, but if they are intellectual at all,
they are more vigorously intellectual. This means at the simplest that home
readers of the kind I have been describing want stimulating food, not what
our grand fathers used to call “slops.” (437)

The readers from refined homes were a new and ever-growing audience, and
their desires shaped the literary field and the image of the author/s, also in the
sense of what authors they did not want to, or, according to Club-standards should
or could not, read. Radway writes that

the Book-of-the-Month-Club always wanted to have it both ways. It wanted

to appeal to the general reader’s desire for pleasure, entertainment, and
titillation and, at the same time, to cloak itself in the highbrow garb of
cultural significance. (319)

In the light of the Club’s selections during the 1930s, Radway is unnecessarily
harsh when she describes the dual agenda as “cloaking itself in highbrow garb” to
cover up its purely commercial interest in satisfying consumer desires. There are a
great number of titles during those years that reflect the educational zeal of
Canby’s and Canfield Fisher’s Bildung-idealism, for example: The Heart of
27
 Emerson’s Journals (1927), The Intelligent Woman’s guide to Socialism and
Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw (1928), All quiet on the Western Front by
Erich Maria Remarque (1929), War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Living
Philosophies by Albert Einstein (1931), Nine Plays by Eugene O’Neill (1932)
and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937).
There was an American dominance but a number of translated works of fiction
and non-fiction were selected every year. Since data on the early membership of
the Club has not survived, or never even existed, we cannot know for whom these
rather challenging reading lists were intended. Lee was probably right when he
observed that at least in the 1950s, the Club “eliminated” illiterate enrollees
(146). 12 In a 1996-lecture to the Swedish Publisher’s Association, Radway
claimed that “doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers – these were the people the club
counted on,” or, in other words, the professional-managerial class with enough
money and spare time, and with cultural ambitions (Books and Reading in the Age
of Mass Production 31). The only existing statistical survey of Club membership
that I have come across, suggests that women have dominated the membership
rolls, at least between the years 1947-1958 (Lee 147), suggesting that it might
have been the home-making wives of the doctors, dentists and lawyers that the
Club counted on, at least until the 1960s and 1970s.

Consumer Culture

In Canfield Fisher’s introduction to Seven Gothic Tales in 1934, “new” is a key-

word in the opening passage where the experience of reading this particular book
is likened to eating a new fruit, with a strange new flavor, giving a new sensation
(v). Almost immediately the notion of newness is coupled with that of tradition,
when Canfield Fisher references a number of authors, such as Byron, “Romantic
School,” Cervantes, R. L. Stevenson and Hoffman, thus establishing a kinship
between the brand new stories at hand and the kind of literary and cultural value
that can only be accumulated over time. The references to tradition are,
seemingly, only present to be discarded, because finally, writes Canfield Fisher,

12
Without going into detail about how this elimination was carried out, or on what grounds.
28
 “you can’t find a comparison” (viii). What the reader will get, after all, is
newness, but by now associated with that which has been tried and found valuable
by the ages. They are buying an “important new book” and “stimulating food,”
but not “a pig in a poke” or “slops,” to speak in the language of Book-of-the-
Month-Club-advertisement, Scherman, and Canby. Or, as the well-known literary
critic Hershell Brickell put it in his review of Seven Gothic Tales in The North
American Review in June 1934: “seven novelettes whose flavor is finally their
own, although it is possible to recognize some of the elements in the blend” (569).
Brickell also admitted that while he liked the book, he found it “very odd” and
difficult to describe, and he suggested that this was the reason why the publishers
had added an introduction written by Canfield Fisher, which was “not only a
charming essay in itself, but which will serve admirably as a sample; that is, it
catches the essential quality of the stories and lets you know whether the book is
for you or not” (569)
The food metaphors that pervade the writings of Scherman, Canby, Canfield
Fisher and other central figures in the Book-of-the-Month-Club and on the
American book market in general cannot be a mere coincidence. The readers are
addressed as consumers of literature facing a market. Their tastes need to be
cultivated through the intake of books carefully chosen by the Selecting
Committee or a reviewer, in accordance with the understanding that you are what
you consume. There is an over-determined, if not conscious, slippage between the
levels of literal and metaphorical speech in the ways in which literature is being
sold as a consumable item to be devoured.
Seven Gothic Tales, then, in Canfield Fisher’s rendering, is a “dead-ripe
pineapple. Yet only if it had always been watered with fine old wine. Grown out
of doors in Siberia too, for all it has that southern tang. Nothing hothouse about it”
(v). Clearly, there is nothing of the “plain fare of good books ... which most of us
largely feed upon if we are to share the thoughts of our own time,” as Canby put it
in explaining the selections he made in his role as Book-of-the-Month-Club-judge
(qtd. in Lee 118). At the same time, Canfield Fisher is careful to point out that
Seven Gothic Tales “for all their bizarre power, can scarcely expect to have the
thumping signboard of genius hung up above the stand in the literary market
where they are for sale” (vi). In this single sentence, she cleverly captured the

29
 innovative spirit of the Book-of-the-Month-Club that made it into such a
successful actor on the American book market. First, by addressing the potential
reader in her or his role as a customer ambling between the stalls of the literary
market, Canfield Fisher was using the image of the market as socially levelling,
egalitarian force. Books were no different than other consumer items, and culture
in general was accessible to everybody who could afford to buy it. Secondly, she
assured the reader that this particular work was not only accessible in market-
terms, but also intellectually within reach of the potential reader. Defined as a
good-enough book but not a work of genius, Seven Gothic Tales was presented as
a typical Book-of-the-Month-Club product.
Still, there was a complication that had to be overcome in the marketing of
Seven Gothic Tales that Canfield Fisher explicitly addressed when she wrote that
she could not tell the reader the first fact “which everybody wants to know about a
book – who is the author” (v). While Blixen/Dinesen was prepared to have the
Americans change the order of the tales, and accepted their title-suggestion, she
was adamant about using a pseudonym.13 She also initially insisted on complete
anonymity, and only allowed her publisher to reveal her identity once the book
had been published and proved a success. In a letter written on the eve of
publication in January 1934 when bound copies of the proof had already gone out
to critics and book clubs, Haas made a final attempt to make her change her mind.
It is worth quoting at some length as an example of a publisher’s weary and wary
attempt to explain the workings of the commercial, American book market to an
inexperienced and recalcitrant author:

Living in a small country you can hardly conceive of the immense flood of
books that deluges the American critics in the Spring and Fall. To be
assured of success a book has in some way to become established even
before it is published. It must be by a popular writer who can command a

13
In a 3-line telegram in February 1934, Haas informed Blixen/Dinesen that Seven Gothic Tales had been
selected by the Book-of-the-Month-Club. He also wrote: “would you consent exchanging position of deluge and
Pisa/ cable,” that is, opening the collection with “The Deluge at Norderney” rather than “The Roads Round Pisa”
(Karen Blixen i Danmark. Bind 1 126). There is nothing in writing to show whether this last-minute proposal had
been discussed earlier, or whether Dinesen cabled back her approval. When the book was published in April, the
order had been changed. While it cannot be proved, it seems likely that the Book-of-the-Month-Club-
representatives informally shared their views with Haas on this matter, and he acted accordingly.
30
 large audience, or by some device the publisher must have established the
merit of his book in the mind of the book world weeks before it appears.
With Seven Gothic Tales we have the advantage of Dorothy Canfield’s
charming introduction. Against it we have the fact that the American public
does not like books made up of collections of short stories, and it does want
to know about the author of a book. The anonymity you have chosen is a
very real difficulty. (Karen Blixen i Danmark. Bind 1 124)

There is a note of desperation in this letter as Haas enumerates the obstacles,

counting Canfield Fisher’s introduction as the only tangible asset in the marketing
of Seven Gothic Tales. He was probably right in his assessment of
Blixen/Dinesen’s inability to understand the American situation, and not only in
relation to the marketing of books but in relation to a general consumer culture
evolving on the other side of the Atlantic at this time. To understand the
“newness” of Seven Gothic Tales and the way in which its “newness” must have
reverberated with the particular “newness” of the USA in the 1930s we need to
understand something about the role played by the concept of “newness” at this
precise time and place. This era marked the beginning of a “new” way of
imagining and being in the world, including the author’s “being” as a part of the
marketing mechanisms.
In fact, Canfield Fisher’s use of the image of eating a ”dead-ripe pineapple” to
define the ”new” sensation of reading Isak Dinesen, suggests the particular quality
of this “newness.” It presents the act of reading as literal consumption and
suggests that the concomitant notion of taste is a crucial aspect in the selection of
a book on an ever-growing market of books. It is also significant that it references
the imported fruits that, once exclusive, had become available to a wider range of
consumers in the early 1900s and was advertised on a mass market. In 1907, Dole
had produced one of the first nationwide consumer advertisement campaigns in
the US. Canned pineapples made the transfer from an elite-consumer segment to
the mass market that had already been made by other colonial products such as
tea, coffee, tobacco and cocoa.14 Canfield Fisher’s choice of the consumption of a

14
Blixen/Dinesen herself never wrote about pineapples, and in general there is not much eating going on in
her stories, with the significant exception of Babette’s Feast, first published in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1950.
31
 pineapple to represent the experience of reading Seven Gothic Tales in 1934
becomes an evocative way of selling the work at hand in a cultural context where
“social practices and cultural values, ideas, aspirations and identities are defined
and oriented in relation to consumption rather than to other social dimensions,” as
Don Slater writes in his study of consumer culture (24). Identity and self were
continuously re-created through the increased accessibility to things which were
themselves always presented as new and improved.
Slater points out that consumption is always a cultural process in the sense that
what and how we consume has cultural significance in any society at any given
time. 15 The terms consumerism and consumer culture, on the other hand, are
understood as referencing a culture of consumption, where consumption is the
dominant mode of cultural reproduction in a social context, and intimately bound
up “with central values, practices and institutions” (8). In a consumer culture, the
relationship between lived culture and social and material resources is
predominantly mediated through markets. The individual is perceived and
perceives her- or himself as a consumer on these markets, making free and
rational choices about what and how to consume. Further, in a consumer culture,
everything can be turned into a sellable commodity on the market. In her fiction,
Blixen/Dinesen often productively used the tension between our lingering sense
that certain things, experiences and beliefs somehow belong in a non-commercial,
non-consumable sphere of existence on the one hand, and our sometimes painful
realization that there can be no such sphere any longer on the other. In Seven
Gothic Tales, this tension is present in the long, inset tale called “The Wine of the
Tetrarch” where Barabbas and Peter meet the day after the crucifixion and
Barabbas makes the latter an offer:

If, today, however, one uses the combination “Dinesen/pineapple” in a net-search, one gets a number of hits
referencing a Danish movie based on the tale (1987). To read the tale and watch the movie in one sitting offers
an illustration of the way in which consumer culture has evolved during the forty years that separate tale from
movie. In the tale, eating and drinking is tastefully exclusive, restrained, and – set in rural Norway in the 1870s –
in fact entirely realistic: Amontillado, Veuve Cliquot 1860, turtle-soup, Blinis Demidoff, Cailles en Sarcophage,
grapes, peaches, figs. The movie, on the other hand, revels in imagery of tropical fruits such as papaya,
pomegranates and pineapples, which, of course, undermines the realistic tendency of the original.
15
A fact which Babette’s Feast makes ample and highly amusing use of it in its representation of the way in
which the profoundly religious and ascetic Norwegians approach and interpret the feast prepared by the French
cook.
32
 ‘I have been informed that your Rabbi, on the night before he died, gave a
party to his followers, and that at the time a special wine was served, which
was very rare and had some highly precious body in it. Have you, now, any
more of this wine, and will you consent to sell it to me? I will give you your
price.’ (177)

Peter’s response is one of utter perplexity and distress, and we understand his
perplexity while at the same time recognizing the modern consumer making a free
and qualified choice on the wine-market in the figure of Barabbas. However we
decide to describe and interpret the effect of this clash between two inherently
opposed systems of value, I would argue that the effect is only achievable in a
cultural context where Barabbas’ understanding of value is as applicable as
Peter’s. To a reader in a consumer culture the suggestion that the precious body of
the wine of the Last Supper can be sold and bought no longer primarily comes
across a sacrilegious proposition. It becomes instead a hilarious and perhaps
slightly troubling comment on the degree to which all values had become
translatable into monetary terms.
In recommending the looked-for newness of a tale such as this in 1934,
Canfield Fisher must have had a well-grounded sense of the contemporary
readers’ sensibilities. Slater and other theorists on consumer culture and
modernity dismiss the notion that consumer culture suddenly erupts at a particular
point in time as the result of one single historical process. Still, the North
American 1920s was, as Slater points out, the first decade to proclaim a
generalized ideology of affluence, promoting a powerful link between everyday
consumption and modernization. Modernity was present in the seemingly
endlessly expanding markets of consumer goods, real estate and credit cards, and
the spread of affluence and leisure to new social segments able to take up their
positions as modern consumers (13). Consumer culture fostered a consumption
ethics which placed value in the very act of consumption itself, propelling
development and freeing the individual from the restraints imposed by an earlier
culture defined by want and the restrictions imposed by social authorities of
tradition, religion and political and economic elites. To be a consumer is to
choose, and consumer sovereignty is, as Slater points out, an extremely
“compelling image of freedom, providing one of the few tangible and mundane
33
 experiences of freedom which feels personally significant to modern subjects”
(27). Viewed from this perspective, both the question and figure of Barabbas
appear as significantly modern. Neither recognizing the authority of divine
cosmology, nor the authority of the Roman state, Barabbas exercises the
consumer sovereignty granted to him by his apparent affluence. He is disguised as
a poor shepherd in a goatskin cloak but sports “a fine crimson silk scarf … a gold
chain … and heavy gold rings” (174).
The Barabbas of this tale is somewhat of a heroic and likable figure in his
materialistic, sensual and fearless approach to life in comparison with the
conceited, meek and angst-ridden figure of Peter who lowers his eyes as he
professes that “at the end of the road a cross might await me,” quickly adding
“although you may think I am boasting” (179). Still, the critique of consumer
ethics as a part of a materialistic, individualistic modernity that lacked collective
values and truths was very much present in the literature of the 1920s, as it had
been at least since the end of the nineteenth century. When, in the opening of his
1922 novel Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis described his protagonist as a man who “made
nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but … was nimble in the
calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay” he was giving
a one-line definition of the on-going development of a consumer culture in the
post- WW I-era (6). Lewis’ novel may be heavy-handed in its satire of the
Standardized American Citizen and the label of fiction extended to include it only
by a sort of courtesy as influential critic H.L Mencken wrote in his praising
review. Nevertheless, its immediate commercial and critical success suggests that
Lewis’ readers recognized the social and economic dynamics of Zenith, Babbitt’s
beloved home-town.
Industrialized America produced consumer goods on an ever increasing scale.
Industrial production doubled during the 1920s and the wheels of industry and
commerce “demanded a new ethic, an ethic that encouraged people to buy, a
consumption ethic,” as historian Warren Susman wrote in his essays on popular
culture and social change in the 1920s and 30s (187). Babbitt the seller is also
Babbitt the buyer contemplating his new water-cooler; “up-to-date, scientific, and
right-thinking. It had cost a great deal of money (in itself a virtue)” (31). The
nineteenth century industrial revolution had called for a production-oriented ethics

34
 that stressed the virtues of self-restraint and discipline in the individual worker
complying with the demands of an assembly line. Mature capitalism needed to re-
educate the public in accordance with a consumer ethics that celebrated the virtue
of achievement through spending and consumption; “how much it might
pleasurably consume rather than how little it might get by on,” as Roland
Marchand writes in his study of American advertising between 1920 and 1940
(120). While production ethics with its stress on discipline may seem the opposite
of consumption ethics stressing pleasure, mass consumption must also be seen as
a function of production. The industrial system that had “socialized the masses
into a labor force had to go further in order to fulfill itself and to socialize the
masses (that is, to control them), into a force of consumption” as Jean Baudrillard
writes in his analysis of consumer society (50). Baudrillard’s understanding of
consumption as social activity or even social labor is important. It is not primarily
a matter of fulfilling individual needs and desires, but of generating a system of
shared values and meanings. Consuming is not simply buying, it is a collective
and active social practice, producing and reproducing normative patterns of
action, thoughts and emotions.
In the process of generating the shared values of a consumer society,
advertisement was crucial. Writing in 1960, Raymond Williams described
advertising as a “major form of modern social communication” that passed from
being simply a matter of selling goods and services into a discourse teaching
social and personal values during the first decades of the twentieth century (184).
The increase of total advertising volume in the US rose from $ 682 million in
1914 to $2 987 million in 1929, and national magazine advertising increased by
600 percent during the same period (Marchand 7). These figures obviously reflect
the producers’ need to boost the sale of their particular product in a commercial
arena of mass production aimed an ever-growing mass of consumers. But, as
Marchand points out, it also signals a shift in the role of advertising in a society
teaching consumption as virtue by shaping a “community of discourse” and
shared “frames of reference and perception” (xx).
In his analyses of copy text and style, Marchand shows how advertisement
adopted the voice of authoritative, yet personal, counseling, shifting from “factory
viewpoint” to “the mental processes of the consumer” as a representative of the

35
 industry put it (11). Earlier ads had focused on presenting the product in a copy
text laden with arguments and facts accompanied by a large picture of the product.
In the 1920s, copy text and imagery tended to deal more with the potential buyer
as an individual in need of help. People instead of products dominated
illustrations, and the copy texts read as brief short stories, dealing with problems
and offering solutions, under headings such as: “‘And he wondered why she said
no?’, ‘Little Dry Sobs Through The Bedroom Door,’” inviting the reader to play
a vicarious, scripted role in the story (Marchand 12). As Celia Lury has shown in
her study of the development of branding as a marketing strategy, it involved a
conscious transformation of the connection between producer and consumer away
from a view of it simply in terms of stimulus-response, towards a conception of it
as a personalized, emotional relationship (139).
As the headlines above suggest, the ads invited their readers to partake in
fictive, miniature sociodramas, laced with fear and suggestions of inadequacy and
lack. She says no because he has a bad breath, the child sobs because she has been
upbraided by her teacher at school for falling asleep during class. The ads invited
the reader to identify with a personal failure in a social setting, a failure that could
only be remedied by consumption of a certain product. While one type of
advertisement invited the reader to identify with failure, another type invited him
or her to identify with success. The success-oriented ad relied on references to the
habits and tastes of the famous and wealthy, or allusions to classical culture and
imagery. The design of a Chrysler car was compared, detail by detail, to the
carvings and figures of the Parthenon friezes. The buyer of such a car did not just
simply own a car, but also demonstrated his knowledge and appreciation of the
eternal qualities of high art. The choice of a particular car, towel, cigarette,
bathtub or book bore witness to the owner’s ability to make distinctions based on
taste. He or she was not quite simply a consumer at the mercy of the chaos of
products on the mass market or an accumulator of things. His or her choices
demonstrated a carefully delineated, refined personality that stood out in the
crowd, just like the Chrysler as an inheritor of classic aesthetics was distinct from
all other cars surrounding it.
In the world of advertisements there is no clear line between appealing to fear
or a desire for success. While it may have been easier to sell Listerine by evoking

36
 a fear of bad breath, rather than trying to create associations to classical culture or
wealth, the fear-inducing advertisement always ended with a promise of success
in the future. At the same time, the success-promising ads bred fear that the
person who did not choose or who could not afford to choose this particular brand
lacked the refinement inherent in the object. In both cases, the aim of the copy
texts and the illustrations is to encourage an emotive response that blurs the line
between individual and product, according to a consumerist logic where you are
what you consume.
Since material goods and objects have always functioned as markers of social
differentiation and hierarchies, it is easy to think of consumer society as only an
extension of established systems of social signification, reflecting a democratizing
leveling of society. Consumer society invited everybody who could afford it to
enjoy the pleasures that had hitherto been reserved for the social elite. While you
may not have read the classics and could not afford to visit the Parthenon, you
could partake of its aura of culture by reading Isak Dinesen or driving a Chrysler.
While you may never become a millionaire, a movie-star or a titled heiress, you
could smoke the same cigarettes as they did, and use the same toothpaste.
Advertisement appealed to the desire to be somebody else, infusing consumption
with a magical, transformative power. At the same time however, in its appeal to a
desire for change, advertisement relied on the stability of the social, cultural and
economic orders in order to represent a product as desirable. The advertising
system did not structure social relations; it did not create the millionaire or the
titled heiress. But, as Baudrillard observes, it demarcated “them in a hierarchical
repertoire” where the titled heiress signified a quality to be desired and emulated
through consumption (19). In consumer society, transformation and change can
only ever take place at the individual level. The industry hammered home the
message that “failure was personal, not social, and success can be achieved by
some adjustment, not in the social order but in the individual personality,” as
Susman writes (165).
Modernity is routinely associated with a sense of fragmentation linked to the
eradication of older systems of value founded on kinship and local tradition in an
increasingly urban and mobile society developing in the wake of a war that had
weakened the authority of inherited morality and religious belief. While not

37
 necessarily disputing this view, it needs to be considered in the light of the degree
to which ubiquitous mass media in a consumer society created the sense of
insecurity and inadequacy required to address the individual as a consumer in
need of improvement in a competitive society. In advertisement, every kind of
relationship was represented as a trial where the individual could fail or succeed
in the role of parent, lover, husband, wife, employee, neighbor, student, friend,
and bus-passenger or just simply by disappointing him- or herself. Your breath,
intestinal vigor, bathroom fixtures, speech pattern, posture, reading habits, shoe
polish, cooking bore witness to who you were, and whether this “you” was a
success, or a failure. The advertisements of the 1920s and 30s frequently
suggested that “people” talked about you behind your back, commenting on your
dandruff, complexion or lack of knowledge. The copy texts were accompanied by
accusingly pointing fingers or heads close together, whispering. In the context of
these advertisements where life was presented as a struggle to fit in and be
accepted by family and friends as well as by nameless, faceless “people,” it makes
perfect sense to speak of consumerism as a socializing, moral activity. Success
was not only measured by the accumulation of wealth, power and influence, but
also by how well one was liked by others and the degree to which the individual
was able to adapt him- or herself to their expectations.
In 1930, a representative of the advertisement industry contentedly observed
that the standardized age seemed to have created an inferiority complex that had
turned out to be “a valuable thing in advertising” (qtd. in Marchand 13). This was
nowhere more apparent than in the wealth of self-help books and courses that
flooded the market. Babbitt and his son are seen perusing ads promising that the
consumer is guaranteed to become “More Popular and Make More Money” by
improving their memory, developing soul-power, learning to play the ukulele, or
creating a strong personality in order to get on “the High Road to Prosperity and
Domination” (66). Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby was set in the
affluent and cultured social milieu which middlemen such as Babbitt were
encouraged to emulate. Nick the narrator describes personality as “an unbroken
series of successful gestures,” and compares the sensitivity of the self-invented
parvenu Gatsby to “one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten
thousand miles away” (6). This was, as Susman points out, the great age of the

38
 how-to-do-it books. Personality was presented as something to be assembled and
bought piece by piece, screw by screw, in order to convince the indifferent, but
potentially hostile, name- and faceless “people” that ruled your fate that you met
the standards. In order to get ahead, the modern machine-like individual had to
mold a personality based on a scientifically calibrated sensitivity to certain
pertinent data. Personality itself was a product, the result of the individual’s
diligent study and interpretation of social demands fabricated in and disseminated
through the mass media. The notion that personality had to be consciously and
conscientiously constructed validates Baudrillard’s suggestion that consumption
should be thought of as social labor, rather than in terms of satisfaction or
pleasure. As a product, personality was just as salable and consumable as cars and
cereals, and just like other mass market products, personality was acquiescent to
shifting market desires.

The Flood of Books and the Image of the Author

This background makes sense of Haas’ anxious attempt to persuade Dinesen to

promote herself along with her book. In the flood of products, books and authors
alike had to be marketed as singular and unique, worthy of the consumer’s
attention. Many critics today seem to take for granted that the development where
the author’s public persona became a crucial part of marketing a book or an entire
oeuvre was audience-driven. It was the readers who had a desire to know the
renowned, who wanted the writers to be distinctive or even glamorous, or as
Becnel writes: “America had begun to look to its authors for wisdom and
leadership” (104).
While not specifically addressing the question whether capitalist consumer
society is a matter of fulfilling needs, or creating desires in order to sell the
promise of fulfilment, the view that author-centered marketing was audience-
driven does seem to lend too little weight to the marketing devices of inventive
businessmen such as Scherman, as well as to the dynamics of the market itself.
The new author-centered strategy for selling books was a response to a market
that was overflowing with authors, books and magazines as well as other types of
media. Becnel writes that this was

39
 a period marked by a deluge of inexpensive books and a host of new
authors, the concept of original genius was now invoked to separate these
writers who were really original, and who were therefore true artists, and
those who were merely craftsmen, playing by the rules and creating nothing
new. (60)

Publishing houses and book clubs such as the Book-of-the-Month-Club needed

to create cultural commodities that stood out in the flood, and they also needed to
represent themselves as reliable and discriminating gate-keepers in relation to the
deluge of books and authors.
One way of doing so was to invest money in the creation of an image of the
singular, autonomous author, celebrating, in photos and biographical information,
“the empirical uniqueness of the creator or of his creative achievement” in Walter
Benjamin’s words (244). The beauty of this creation was of course that it
referenced a perception of the author as a unique genius that belonged in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the period that immediately preceded the
birth of consumerist mass market in the late nineteenth century. Ideologically
untainted by commercialism, this image helped to sell some books as though they
were a different kind of commodity than the ones offered by the mass of faceless,
un-identifiable writers writing pulp fiction. Thus, the author as a public persona
became part and parcel of book marketing in the early twentieth century. In his
study of Hemingway with the suggestive title Hemingway and His Conspirators.
Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture, Leonard
Leff writes that

the mass media of the late 1920s transformed the relationship between
Americans and their public figures. Capitalizing on professional sports,
network, radio, and Hollywood motion pictures, the press and its syndicated
gossip columns produced a desire to know the renowned. (xvii)

While turning book-publishing and selling into a highly profitable business for
itself as well as for many of its authors, the Book-of-the-Month-Club retained the
ethos of non-commercialism through the Selecting Committee as well as in its
projection of itself as a kind of educational institution. This balancing of

40
 commercial reality and aesthetic and moral ideals is also reflected in the writing
and correspondence of many successful Book-of-the-Month-Club authors. Two
authors who were closely connected with the Book-of-the-Month-Club were Ellen
Glasgow (born 1873) and Vicki Baum (born 1888). Their careers and strategies
illustrate the ways in which authors dealt with the demands of a book market that
retained the idea of author as unique creator at an ideological level, while in
practice turning the author and her book into marketable products. When Glasgow
published her first work in 1897, she did so anonymously in accordance with the
notion that commercial writing compromised the ideals of true womanhood. Her
third novel, The Voice of the People (1900), made her name as an author, it sold
12 000 copies in six months, and she had used her own name. Throughout the
1910s she would continue to publish a new novel every second or third year. She
emerged, as Susan Goodman writes, as a major public figure in the 1920s when
Barren Ground (1925) sold at over 1000 copies a week and The Romantic
Comedians (1926) sold over a 100 000 copies within a few months of its
publication, and was picked out by the Book-of-the-Month-Club in its very first
selection (163). In 1938, she was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, the sixth woman ever to be chosen, and in 1942, she received the Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction.
Goodman points out that Glasgow seems to have had a natural aptitude for
business, but also an equivocal relationship to popular culture (231). When the
Cosmopolitan wanted to serialize her novel The Sheltered in 1932, offering a
stunning $ 32 000, she instructed her agent to turn the offer down, arguing that “I
have stood against the commercialization of my work – for my work is the only
thing in the world that makes life endurable. If I lose that integrity, I am lost
indeed” (qtd. in Goodman 199). By then, Glasgow could afford to insist on her
artistic integrity, but at the same time she was willing to sell They Stooped to
Folly to Hollywood for $ 25 000. While Cosmopolitan may have offered a larger
sum, Hollywood promised exposure to a world-wide audience that the magazines
could not reach and Glasgow seemed to have been well aware of the commercial
potentials of having her books turned into movies.
As demonstrated by the quote above, Glasgow had no qualms about her own
status as an artist, being, as Dorothy Scura puts it: “a serious and committed artist

41
 who received positive reviews of most of her books; nevertheless, she frequently
wrote books that sold well” (xii). Scura’s antithetical construction where
Glasgow’s artistic commitment is put in opposition to her commercial success,
reflects the fact that writers have good reasons to express ambivalence about their
own ability to sell what they write. Thus, while Glasgow seem to have felt secure
enough in her role as an artist after a few decades of writing professionally, she
still needed to affirm this identity by distancing herself from the commercial
sector in 1932. No longer a genteel amateur, but definitely not the kind of
commercial scribbler who would sell her soul to anyone, no matter what they
offered. Glasgow apparently felt safe enough – at least towards the end of her
successful career – to go beyond the ideal of genteel amateurism considered
appropriate for female writers, and claim the kind of artistic integrity that had,
until quite recently, been reserved for male writers. In her self-biography she
unabashedly writes that

as a whole, these five novels [Barren Ground, The Romantic Comedians,

They Stooped to Folly, The Sheltered Life, Vein of Iron] represent, I feel, not
only the best that was in me, but some of the best works that has been done
in American fiction. (270)

Glasgow seems to have been highly aware of the importance of exposing herself
in media as well as publicity material in order to sell her books: “From the very
beginning of her career, Glasgow seems to have realized that the public wanted its
writers to be as glamorous or at least as distinctive as their characters” (Goodman
61).
While Glasgow may be an example of an author who comfortably interacted
with the media in an exchange profitable to both, not all authors were prepared to
sell themselves along with their books. When Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth
was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month-Club 1931 and became the best-selling
book that year, as well as the following year, the Club editors wrote that “We
should like all biographical material you can jot down,” and Buck replied: “I do
not want to make selling the book more of a task than need be, but at the same
time I really cannot endure personal publicity” (qtd. in Becnel 84). Nevertheless,
when Pearl Buck moved back to the US in 1934, she, according to Becnel, “found

42
 herself deeply entrenched in the ‘literary racket’ that Walsh [her editor and future
husband] had mentioned” (55).
If Glasgow is an example of a skilful balancing of the ideal of unique, artistic
creation and marketable cultural commodity, Baum’s bitter autobiography tells of
the difficulties of maintaining this balance. While Haas may have been right to
stress the sheer mass of books as peculiar to America, the tendency to sell authors
along with their books was present in Europe too at this time. Vicki Baum started
her successful career as author/journalist in Germany, working for the publishing
house of Ullstein, cutting-edge modern in its commercialism and possibly a
source of inspiration for Scherman when he launched the Book-of-the-Month-
Club. Her first five novels were serialized in the Berliner Illustrierte, owned and
run by Ullstein where Baum also worked, during the 1920s and early 1930s. They
were accompanied by feature stories about the author, identifying her with the
female characters of her novels as representatives of the New Woman; self-
supporting and independent. When Grand Hotel was published in book-form in
Germany in 1929 (Menschen in Hotel), however, Baum herself became the focus
of scrutiny: “she was now a brand name, and the commodity she was identified
with was popular literary products ... each review addressed the issue of
commercialism,” as Lynda King writes in her study of Baum’s career (112).
Clearly, the public persona created by the publishing industry in order to sell
books could backfire if the crude commercial apparatus behind it became too
obvious and blatant. The bitterness of Baum’s autobiography with its underlining
of her craftsmanship as opposed to real artistry, can probably be traced back to her
experience with the German press accusing her of writing kitsch or
“Schriftstellerei” following the success of Grand Hotel (qtd. in King 114). Still,
Baum’s association with commercialism did not seem to have troubled the people
who bought and read her books. Grand Hotel was probably, as she herself pointed
out, her biggest success on both sides of the Atlantic.
Baum left Germany for the US in 1932 after her books had been banned by the
Nazi regime. She continued her career in close cooperation with the Book-of the-
Month-Club, possibly crowning it when her novel Grand Hotel was turned into a
major Hollywood movie, starring Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. Like Glasgow,
Baum displays an equivocal relationship to the sphere of commercial, popular

43
 culture where she made a successful living. In her autobiography she writes about
how “I was and remained ‘the woman who wrote Grand Hotel’, and I felt like the
cat with a rattling can tied to its tail” (“Jag var och förblev ‘hon som skrev
Människor på hotell’ och kände mig som katten som man har bundit en bleckdosa
vid svansen på” 214). At the same time, Baum is very clear about her reasons for
writing: “When I’ve written potboilers I did so quite deliberately; to hone my
tools, prove my skills, and, naturally, because I needed money” (qtd. in King
137). Throughout her autobiography, Baum distinguishes between “good books”
and “great literature” on the one hand, and the kind of books she herself wrote.
King writes that

Baum certainly believed that most of her books were technically well-
written and exhibited the craftsmanship (handwerkliches Können) that came
from working hard at the details of writing. Since she could not or would
not write what was considered good literature, craftsmanship was the word
she used from at least 1931 on to describe the type of writing she chose to
produce. (140)

Her autobiography stresses the notion of writing as a “job” that she learned in
order to keep her family from starving, and the “publications of my books … have
left me very indifferent” (“publiceringen av mina böcker … har lämnat mig
mycket oberörd” 208). At the same time, however, there are traces of the
nineteenth century ideal of genteel amateurism embraced by an earlier generation
of female authors. While describing herself as someone who writes for money,
she makes it abundantly clear that this was not a matter of choice: “I had two
children and a husband who should never feel forced to sell his soul” (“Jag hade
två barn och en man som aldrig borde känna något tvång att sälja sin själ” 199).
She describes the process of selling her soul in bitter detail, but she
simultaneously, seemingly paradoxically, insists that she feels an “insurmountable
distaste for talking about money” (“Jag har motvilja mot att tala om pengar” 186).
When writing about the success of her craftsmanship, she suggests that “I had
apparently learnt the aristotelic principle of the three unities from Ibsen” whom
she read, and “worshipped” as a child (“Jag hade tydligen av Ibsen lärt den
aristoteliska principen om de tre enheterna” 122).

44
 Unlike Glasgow, Baum as a bread-winner having to support a family in
Germany and as a refugee in America seems to have felt that she could not afford
any pretense to artistic integrity.16 Instead, she stresses her own professionalism
and her ability to churn out potboilers, finishing her first novel three days before
she gave birth to her second son. Throughout her autobiography, Baum expresses
a sort of bitter pride in her own ability to make money out of writing, signaling
her awareness of the ideal of artistry as being completely untainted by commercial
considerations, while simultaneously showing how poorly this ideal fitted her
reality. At the same time, however, the very opposition that Baum constructs
between her own writing on the one hand, and “great literature” on the other,
safeguards the sphere of art from encroaching commercialism. In Baum’s view,
great literature can be written, but only by those who can afford it.
In 1934, 49-year old Blixen who lived with and was financially dependent on
her mother was in a position more akin to Baum’s than to Glasgow’s, but the way
she dealt with the commercial aspect of writing professionally and the public
limelight was quite different. In her comprehensive study of Blixen/Dinesen’s
American and English publishing history, Grethe Rostbøll explains her insistence
on anonymity and her use of the Dinesen-pseudonym in 1934 as an expression of
her identification with her father who published his works under pseudonym (21).
This explanation has remained as current as the argument that Blixen/Dinesen
wrote in English in order to liberate her imagination, and there is plenty of
evidence in letters and interviews to support this view. Throughout her career,
Blixen/Dinesen would identify herself publicly with the kind of genteel
amateurism that had been the ideal of an earlier age. In a letter to her English
publisher in 1949, she wrote:

I shall always remain in a way an amateur as a writer. Had I been able to

keep my farm, I should never have written any books at all … My father,
also as an amateur, wrote a most charming Danish “Sportman’s Diary,”
always said that professional writing was beneath a man, - I cannot get away

16
Goodman writes that “despite an income that would have easily kept a middle-class family comfortable,
Glasgow could not live on her royalties” (199). We may assume that Baum and Glasgow with their different
backgrounds also had very different expectations on life.
45
 from the feeling that it does somehow apply to a woman as well. (Karen
Blixen i Danmark. Bind 1 529)

While this letter seems to prove Rostbøll right, I would argue that it in fact
illustrates Blixen/Dinesen’s conscientious construction of a particular public
persona once she had become a recognized author, and that her insistence on
anonymity pre-publication was simply a matter of fearing public failure and
humiliation. Only a month after receiving Haas’ telegram confirming the selection
of Seven Gothic Tales by the Book-of-the-Month-club with an enclosed 5000-
dollar check in February 1934, Blixen/Dinesen wrote him a letter which sheds a
different light both on the question of anonymity and professional writing. She
sent him photographs but also “a few short, quite truthful recounts of my life on
the African farm.” She wanted his “assistance” to have these stories published “in
a good magazine” under her real name and since they could not be “classed as a
book,” she could see no reason why they should “interfere with our contract”
(Karen Blixen i Danmark. Bind 1 127). In his gracious reply, Haas cautioned
against publishing the stories at once since it may result in confusion, but wrote
that he was delighted to read about her extraordinary background. At the same
time, he must have been quite annoyed and a bit puzzled. Only two months
earlier, in January, he had written a long, ingratiating letter where he had
explained the difficulties of marketing an anonymous author, begging her to
consider sending photographs and information. Or, at least, to let him go public
with the author’s real identity, ending his letter on a pleading note: “P.S. In the
meantime, should you be willing to allow us to announce your name as that of the
author, will you not just cable us the one word ‘yes.’ Thank you.” (126). Baroness
Blixen did not even deign to answer Haas’ entreaty at that time, and when she did
get in touch again she was not only treating him as her agent rather than as a
publisher, but also suddenly not only willing but even eager to go public.
Over the years, Haas would get used both to Blixen/Dinesen’s commercial
initiatives, and her rudeness vis-à-vis her American publisher. The Americans
may have made her career as an author, but once she was “made” she treated her
American benefactors rather haughtily. Blixen/Dinesen had approached the
English publisher Constant Huntington at Putnam & Co. in June 1933, but was
turned down by him. After her American success, Putnam & Co. quickly bought
46
 the publishing rights to Seven Gothic Tales, which was published in England in
September 1934. Blixen/Dinesen triumphed when Huntington wrote her a
fawning letter in April of the same year where he reminded her that they had met
at Lady Islington’s in London, replying that she remembered their meeting very
well since it was their conversation there “which finally decided me to cable Mr.
Haas, accepting his offer for my book” (Karen Blixen i Danmark. Bind 1 130).
Having thumbed her nose at Huntington, she nevertheless added that she was glad
to be published in England since that country was “in every way, nearer to my life
and heart” (130). This feeling may explain why Blixen/Dinesen favored her
English publishers in the work on what would eventually become Out of Africa,
starting from the truthful recounts that she had sent to Haas in 1934. She
communicated with the Americans through her English publishers, and Haas had
to put up with reading her manuscripts second-hand when they had already been
through the hands of English editors. He was, of course, upset and irritated by her
preferential treatment of Huntington, but also concerned about the way in which
this affected her chances on the American market, writing to her in the fall of
1937: “It seemed clear to me, upon comparing our revisions with Huntington’s
proofs, that ours were really infinitely better suited to the American market.”
Blixen/Dinesen curtly replied, through Huntington: “We ask you to answer Mr.
Haas that the Baroness wants your and her edition to be published in America
without alterations of any kind” (qtd. in Rostbøll 44). Out of Africa was published
in England in November 1937 under the name Karen Blixen and four months later
in the US, still under the name Isak Dinesen, where it, too, was chosen as Book-
of-the-Month by the Club. 17 Blixen/Dinesen wrote to Haas that while she was
pleased with the American edition, she would have preferred it to appear under
her own name as in England, adding that she supposed the American decision was
based “on editorial motives, and may be a better thing in America” (qtd. in
Rostbøll 46). Blixen/Dinesen apparently trusted the Americans publisher’s
commercial know-how, while simultaneously manifesting her distrust for their
literary abilities.18 Once established as Isak Dinesen in America, she recognized

17
Danish and Swedish editions were published at the same time as the English edition.
18
It would be insincere to pretend that Blixen/Dinesen’s view of American cultural competence is eccentric.
In the fall of 2008, the then secretary of the Swedish Academy that awards the Nobel Prize for literature, Horace
47
 the importance of sticking with the pseudonym as an identifiable brand name, but
there is nothing to suggest that it had any significance to her beyond purely
commercial considerations.
From the very beginning of her career, she comes across as an entrepreneurial
kind of author in her correspondence with her publishers, especially with her
American publisher. She was extremely concerned with the pecuniary side of
things and always interested in the possibility of making money by selling
material of “lighter quality” to magazines. In 1947, she wrote to Haas about her
plans to place stories or serials with American magazines that may or may not be
collected into a book-volume later on. What she wanted most of all would be to
obtain an agreement with some magazine or publishing firm that would agree to
publish a number of stories each year, since “such an arrangement would relieve
me of much anxiety as to means of subsistence, and of fair working conditions”
(Karen Blixen i Danmark. Bind 1 471). She insisted that she could pursue this
lucrative side-line, while continuing with her “real” writing. As Rostbøll points
out, the conflict between writing popular fiction in one context and serious
literature in another, would become the main theme in Blixen/Dinesen’s
professional correspondence after the war, her publishers both in England and
America repeatedly warning her not to be led astray by the lures of easy money
(12). She was also very apt at placing the same material in a number of media,
illustrated by the use she made of the story “Farah” which was broadcast by
Swedish radio in May 1948, then published in the Danish daily paper
Nationaltidende in August of the same year, then broadcast by Danish radio in
March two years later, and published as a separate story by a Danish publishing
house the same year, and eventually included in the book Shadows on the Grass
in 1962.
At the same time she would very skillfully craft a public persona far removed
from the money-making side of writing, starting with her self-portrayal in Out of
Africa as a lady-of-the-manor in a colonial setting, telling stories to servants and

Engdahl, raised a stir when he commented on the fact that there have been relatively few American literary
Nobel Prize winners. Engdahl said that this was quite natural since Europe is still the center of the literary world,
and that American literature is too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture. According to him, the US is
insular and does not participate in the big dialogue of literature, and their ignorance of foreign literature is
restraining.
48
 titled guests alike. In her book Notater om Karen Blixen (1974), her secretary
Clara Selborn has described the toll writing took on Blixen/Dinesen who was
often seriously ill and a slow writer even at the best of times. Selborn’s portrait of
the professional, conscientious author who struggled with every sentence is far
from the image of herself Blixen/Dinesen projected in public where she would
appear in the role of oral story-teller, emaciated and dramatically dressed in black.
While many authors clearly felt intimidated by the demands of the publishing
industry and even, as in the case of Baum, somehow damaged by them, others
seemed to have been able to put it to good financial use, while simultaneously
retaining their sense of self-determination. I would suggest that Blixen/Dinesen
belongs in the latter category and that she, unlike her publishers, never worried
about the impact her commercial writings would have on her career as an author
of serious literature. Becnel discusses William Faulkner’s ability to combine his
hack writing for magazines with writings that clearly aimed at a different, more
sophisticated audience, and “the desire to maintain an aristocratic lifestyle” while
simultaneously presenting himself as an illiterate farmer (105). Becnel
persuasively argues that in Faulkner’s staging of his public persona, the
combination of illiteracy and an aristocratic image associated with a romanticized
southern past, suggested that his ability to write highbrow literature was due to
innate genius rather than education. A man of genius did not need to be afraid to
write sellable pieces every now and then, since it did not threaten his innate
artistic integrity. In fact, he could even turn lowbrow into highbrow, as Becnel
shows when she writes

according to Faulkner himself, Sanctuary, published in 1931, was written as

a ‘potboiler’ aimed at a lowbrow audience. According to Faulkner, he had
made a thorough and methodical study of everything on the list of best-
sellers, and then had made his own novel ‘stronger and rawer’. (107)

Whether this was true or not, it does show that in a period when, according to
Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt, “never before in Western literary history have
marketing forces exerted so strong a force over artists in all media,” it was still
possible for a market savvy author to manipulate these forces rather than to be
manipulated by them.” (5)

49
 Selling Stories

When Robert Haas wrote to Blixen in the fall of 1932, he reluctantly declined
publication “on account of the difficulty of selling any collection of short stories
in substantial quantity.” To impress on Baroness Blixen the fact that it was the
format rather than the quality of her writing that was a problem, Haas wrote: “if
the obstacle of too short a length were eliminated, I can imagine no other reason
which would prevent our being delighted to bring out your novel” (Karen Blixen i
Danmark. Bind 1 95). He was concerned enough to return to the issue again when
the book had already been accepted for publication, writing that “the American
public does not like books made up of collections of short stories” (124).
This sensibility was in fact paradoxically linked to the very popularity of short
stories on a market adjacent to but significantly distinguished from the book
market proper, namely in the magazines. In his study of the culture and commerce
of the American short story, Andrew Levy points out that from the “time of Poe,
the short story has been designed as a culturally disposable artefact – a thing to be
read once and enjoyed” (2). This deprecating view of the short story makes
perfect sense of Edgar Allan Poe’s well-known 1842 review of Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales which is in essence a defense of the superiority of
the short story in relation to the novel. According to Poe, the latter could neither
achieve the “immense force derivable from totality,” nor the “single effect” of a
prose tale that could be read “at one sitting” (522). In his vindication of the short
story Poe was attempting to establish its inherent literary value. In fact, Poe wrote
his review at a time when he was trying to raise money to found a magazine that
would publish shorts stories, his own amongst others.
A century later, in 1957 in one of the stories in Last Tales, Blixen/Dinesen had
one of her characters comment on the superiority of the short story in relation to
the novel in words that eerily echo those of Poe.19

19
While there is no evidence that Isak Dinesen had ever read Poe’s review of Hawthorne, Robert Langbaum
writes that she did express her poor opinion of Poe’s tales in their conversation, proving that she had at least read
his fictional works (89).
50
 “Madame”, he said, “I have been telling you a story. Stories have been told
a long as speech has existed, and sans stories the human race would have
perished, as it would have perished sans water. You will see the characters
of the true story clearly, as if luminous and on a higher plane, and at the
same time they may look not quite human, and you may well be a little
afraid of them. That is all in the order of things. But I see, Madam”, he went
on, “I see, today, a new art of narration, a novel literature and category of
belles-lettres, dawning upon the world. It is, indeed, already with us, and it
has gained great favor amongst the readers of our time. And this new art and
literature – for the sake of the individual characters in the story, and in order
to keep close to them and not be afraid – will be ready to sacrifice the story
itself …
“Mistake me not”, said the Cardinal, “the literature of which we are
speaking – the literature of individuals, if we may call it so – is a noble art, a
great, earnest and ambitious human product. But it is a human product. The
divine art is the story. In the beginning was the story.” (Last Tales 23)

When Blixen/Dinesen wrote “The Cardinal’s First Tale” in 1957, her

publishers had been trying to get her to write a novel for more than two decades. 20
She did write Gengældelsens Veje (1944) in Denmark during the war (The Angelic
Avengers, 1946 in England, 1947 in the US), but published it under the
pseudonym Pierre Andrézel and always referred to it as her “illegitimate child.”
She was annoyed when it was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month-Club, since she
did not consider it to be fit to stand with her other works. Critics have tended to
agree with her, and Langbaum wrote that the book has no literary value (198).
Blixen/Dinesen excelled in the short story and even though her publishers

20
She also wrote ”The Cardinal’s Third Tale” but a reader looking for the second tale will be searching in
vain. One way of interpreting this absence, is to see it as a part of Blixen/Dinesen’s construction of herself as an
oral story-teller, a Scheherazade who referred to her age as “three thousand years” in letters and public
appearances (Karen Blixen i Danmark. Bind 2 47) When you have been telling stories for 3000 years, it is only
natural that one or two of them have gotten lost in the process, especially if they were never written down. In the
world of short story theory and writing, Blixen/Dinesen is not alone in projecting the image of writer as teller,
and of stressing a proximity to, and/or identifying with, an oral tradition. At the same time, short story writers in
general seem more prepared to, and capable of, reflecting on the technique and craft of writing short stories than
most authors of fiction, which is perhaps why the roles of critic and practitioner often coincide within this field.
51
 recognized this fact and had the selling figures to prove it, they kept on dreaming
about the novel they hoped she would write one day.
Not surprisingly, the passage from Last Tales appears at the beginning of more
than one text written by short story critics and/or writers on the nature of the short
story. Since it is a rather forthright celebration of the short story, the passage is
usually included without further comments. It speaks for itself, and quite
unabashedly so. At the same time, it is clear that the celebratory tone is part and
parcel of a defensive attitude. Short stories are usable and sellable as witnessed
by the textbooks and anthologies used in classrooms in elementary school and
higher education all over the world, but this seems to be precisely the problem.
Short story theorist Susan Lohafer writes: “it may be that the greatest obstacle to
the development of short story criticism has been the simple ubiquity, the
serviceability, of the short story textbook” (5). Artistically as well as theoretically,
the short story is a stage to be left behind as the author/scholar matures into a
writer/interpreter of novels. While this may sound overly dramatic and self-
pitying, it is nevertheless an underdog perspective that much writing on short
stories conveys, and that necessarily finds its way into short story theory. The
stated, professional aim to explain what a short story is and how it works, often
seems to be intertwined with a more or less pronounced personal desire to lift the
short story to the level of novel, or beyond.
Another brilliant short story-writer is Alice Munro, and in her latest collection
of short stories, Too Much Happiness, one of her characters picks up a book in a
bookstore and reflects:

How Are We to Live is the book’s title. A collection of short stories, not a
novel. This is in itself a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book’s
authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to
the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside. (50)

Just like Blixen/Dinesen’s “The Cardinal’s First Tale,” Munro’s “Fiction” written
50 years later reads like a meta-reflection on the problematic status of the short
story, but where the former was celebrating the divinity of the form, Munro’s
stance is ironic. The sinister shadow thrown by the novel in almost all discussions
of the short story reflects a reality where the short story somehow is of lesser

52
 value. Short story is apprenticeship, novel is art. Short story is creative writing
courses, novel is genius. Short story is discipline and technique, novel is
inspiration. Short story is textbook anthology, novel stands by itself. Short story is
popular, educational and commercial culture, novel is just culture.
The American magazines, writes Levy, “had until the 1920s owned a virtual
monopoly on the American mass marketplace, and until the postwar era had
continued to exert an enormous economic and cultural power” (86). The growth
of popular magazines clearly reflects this development. In 1885 there were 3 300
periodicals in the US, and over the next 20 years, 7 500 more were founded.
While many of these magazines were short-lived and had a small circulation, by
1905 more than 160 of them were selling more than 100 000 copies and at the
beginning of the 1930’s there were 4500 periodicals, a figure that has increased to
6000 at the end of the decade, despite the Depression.
These magazines had a seemingly endless need for literary material in the form
of the short story, and when the 1891 international copy agreement made it less
profitable for American publishers to use foreign, that is to say British, material,
American writers flocked to the genre and the magazines. In 1921, Canby
commented that not only was the magazine a distinctly American creation, it also
contributed to the development of the American short story by creating a need for
short fiction (434).
Levy points out that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the short story
“because of its popularity and its presence within commercial magazines had
become an uneasy intersection of the fields of literature and commerce” (50).
Even the short story handbooks teaching the art of writing, Levy writes,
“contained apologia for the democratizing promises they offered” (89). The
financial rewards of publishing shorter pieces and serializing novels in popular
magazines meant that even authors considering themselves well above the
standards and tastes of readers of the same magazines, published there. Becnel
writes about William Faulkner who “quickly produced stories to sell to magazines
when he needed money, and he did design these stories to appeal to a wider base
of readers so that the magazines would buy them” (29). In 1921, Glasgow wrote
to her agent: “Please get me the largest price you possibly can – even if it has to
go to the Cosmopolitan!” (qtd. in Cook 23). Blixen/Dinesen’s called her contacts

53
 with American magazines a “side-line” that she quite openly defined as purely
financially motivated writing: “Whether I shall write in Danish or English is to
me, in this case, really a question of which would pay me best” she wrote to the
editors of The Saturday Evening Post (qtd. in Rostbøll 57). In March 1949, she
wrote to Haas that the short stories she was currently working on were written
only for pecuniary reasons, even though she also wondered whether he would
consider publishing them in book-form (Rostbøll 97). In the fall of the same year
her English publisher wrote her, saying that while Haas had apparently offered to
publish Anecdotes of Destiny as a book, he himself was not quite willing to do so:

I have thought that you have written them hurriedly, without very much
thought or study, with the idea that they would be good enough for
anonymous magazine publication. This I don’t consider a very good plan.
Magazine stories are generally written under pseudonyms by the editorial
staff or by famous writers under their own names. If the latter, they are
expected to be up to the famous writer’s standard which, though highly
readable, these stories definitely are not. (Karen Blixen i Danmark. Bind 1
536)

While sympathetic to Blixen/Dinesen’s need to make money, her publishers

constantly attempted to persuade her to stay away from the lucrative side-line of
writing stories for magazines, and encouraged her to focus on writing a novel
instead. In September 1950, the man who had succeeded Huntington as
Blixen/Dinesen’s contact at Putnam & Co. wrote: “And I do hope you won’t get
quite side-tracked from your new novel by the swift rewards of writing about food
for the ravening American magazine-readers!” (qtd. in Rostbøll 107). Like many
other authors she did get side-tracked and when the collection Anecdotes of
Destiny was finally published in 1958, only one of its stories was new. The same
was true about the collection preceding it, Last Tales in 1957, where most of the
stories had already been published in American, Danish or Swedish magazines
over the years, one of them as early as 1938. In fact, looking at Blixen/Dinesen’s
entire production, only the stories in Seven Gothic Tales were original book-
publications throughout.

54
 Money was clearly important, but the appeal of the ever growing magazine-
market was often more complex. It could be argued that the authors were indeed
more savvy about marketing their products than the publishers, as well as less
concerned with the boundaries between high- and lowbrow so nervously patrolled
by publishing houses. Canfield Fisher serialized several of her novels, and in 1933
Woman’s Home Companion paid $30 000 for the rights to Bonfire. With a
circulation of 3 million copies a year Woman’s Home Companion was the most-
read women’s magazine of the 1920s and 30s. Aimed at white, middle-class
homemakers, the magazine still had a progressive agenda, culturally and
politically, encouraging its readers to educate themselves in order to take part
more fully in society. Editor Gertrude Lane (1911-41) wrote about the woman she
had in mind when creating her magazine that “her horizon is ever extending, her
interest broadening, the pages of Woman’s Home Companion must reflect the
sanest and most constructive thought on the vital issues of the day” (qtd. in Harker
35). When publishing in Woman’s Home Companion, Canfield Fisher did not
only make a lot of money; she also reached out to potential new readers and
Book-of-the-Month-Club-members, and she publicly aligned herself with a
political and cultural agenda akin to her own.
While Blixen/Dinesen certainly did not have Canfield-Fisher’s knowledge of
or interest in the American magazine-market, I agree with Rostbøll when she
writes that her publishing in American magazines earned her – besides money – a
“good-will” amongst readers who might very well decide to buy a collection of
her stories, once they had tasted a sample of them in a magazine (105). Her most
frequent place of magazine-publishing in the US was Ladies’ Home Journal,
which in 1934 meant that her stories could be read by 2.5 million readers.
Founded in 1883, almost by accident, Ladies’ Home Journal “opened the 1930s
by doing what it had done for many decades – providing images of women
serving as the moral steward of the home,” as David Wekly writes in his study of
American print culture during the Great Depression (114). Unlike Woman’s
Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal advocated a rather traditional view of
women as primarily mothers and housewives, but it also set out to furnish these
women with high-quality writings by authors such as Pearl Buck, Willa Cather,
Edith Wharton, H.G Wells, Agatha Christie, and Isak Dinesen.

55
 Consuming Isak Dinesen

The Club’s selection was crucial to Blixen/Dinesen’s career as an author, as was

her strategy to sell her stories one by one before bringing them together as a book.
At the same time, the specter of sordid commercialism has haunted the critical
perception of her works. Instead of recognizing the commercial incentive of the
author herself, the topic of commercialism in connection with Blixen/Dinesen,
when touched upon, has routinely been traced to the hugely successful 1985
movie Out of Africa, based on her 1937 book by the same name. In an article
written a decade after the release of the movie, Susan Hardy Aiken set out to
address the “disquieting questions” that were raised by the fact that the
Hollywood-movie once “again” made “Isak Dinesen” a “pop icon” (“Consuming
Isak Dinesen” 4). Icon “Isak Dinesen” could sell anything from fashion to posh
restaurants to reprints of Dinesen’s own books “emblazoned with the insignia
‘Official Movie Tie-In Edition, bear[ing] the ‘bankable’ images (Hollywood’s
term) of Robert Redford and Meryl Streep” (4). Writing under the dramatic title
“Consuming Isak Dinesen. Devouring Dinesen: Art(ist) as Commodity,” Aiken
argued that the process of marketing “Isak Dinesen” (her quotation marks) as a
brand-name, raised disquieting questions because they “recall, on a massive scale
... Dinesen’s own performative self-displays – her deployment of herself,
especially in the later years, as a consumable artefact” (4). Aiken is not primarily
concerned with the logic of capitalism, but Blixen/Dinesen’s own
commodification of herself, her willing involvement in the culture industry which
would make her

profoundly complicitous not only with consumerist culture inseparable from

what Gayle Rubin, following Emma Goldman, has called the ‘traffic in
women’, but also with the widespread reactionary nostalgia recently evident
in much contemporary popular culture of the West ... for an imperialist,
aristocratic world. (4)

It is precisely this reading that Aiken first conjures up and then sets out to rescue
Blixen/Dinesen from, by using Teresa de Lauretis’ discussion of women’s use of
56
 masks and masquerade to represent a subjectivity that expresses a political
consciousness of women’s subjugation, and Aiken argues that

far from being simply a perpetuator of reactionary ideologies, Dinesen

anticipated insights of contemporary critics ... by deconstructing or radically
ironizing her own self-representations in both autobiographical texts and
public performances ... she simultaneously exploited, explicated, and
exploded certain conception of “femininity” as well as the commercial
construction and manipulation of both “woman” as textualized body and her
writing as textual corpus. (7)

Aiken’s central argument that Blixen/Dinesen anticipated late twentieth century

feminist theories and her initial remark that the marketing of “Isak Dinesen” in the
1980s recalls Blixen/Dinesen’s own self-promotion are interesting reversals of
diachronic time. What Aiken suggests is that Blixen/Dinesen was modern even to
the degree of being before her time both in her writings and in her self-promotion,
but whereas the former is something to be cherished, the latter is only deplorable.
That is to say, Aiken’s project is essentially to rescue what she defines as a
modernist, or even post-modern, aesthetics from modern commercialism.
In its attempt to decontaminate the aesthetic sphere, Aiken’s thesis is an
example of the academic and intellectual discourse and thought on modernity that
Andreas Huyssen has labelled “The Great Divide,” writing that “ever since the
mid-nineteenth century, the culture of modernity has been characterized by a
volatile relationship between high art and mass culture” (vii). This process reaches
back, as Huyssen argues, well into the nineteenth century. In 1939, Benjamin
writes in one of his essays on Baudelaire that

The crowd – no subject was more entitled to the attention of nineteenth-

century writers. It was getting ready to take shape as a public in broad strata
who had acquired facility in reading. It became a customer, it wished to find
itself portrayed in the contemporary novel, as the patrons did in the
paintings of the Middle Ages. (166)

Benjamin discusses the image of the crowd not only in Baudelaire’s poetry, but
also in the writings of others, suggesting that “fear, revulsions, and horror were
57
 the emotions which the big-city crowd aroused in those who first observed it”
(174). In his work, “Baudelaire battled the crowd – with the impotent rage of
someone fighting the rain or the wind” (194). The “crowd” in Benjamin’s essay is
a seemingly paradoxical but highly suggestive combination of natural forces with
the comparison between the crowd with purchasing power and the wealthy patron
of the Middle Ages, in itself a paradoxical juxtaposition. The faceless crowd as a
force of nature ruling capitalist consumer society like a medieval prince by the
strength of its purse.
In his acerbic study of the intellectuals and the masses, John Carey brings the
study of the specter of the terrifying crowd to bear on twentieth century British
literature, when he writes: “Dreaming of the extermination or sterilization of the
mass, or denying that the masses were real people, was, then, an imaginative
refuge for the early twentieth century intellectuals” (15). Carey illustrates his
claim with examples from the writings of T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, W. B.
Yeats, Virginia Woolf and many others. Carey is less generous than Benjamin in
his view of the early twentieth century intellectuals and artist battling the crowd,
since he understands this battle essentially as a class-struggle where, ultimately,
democratic society is at stake. He also does not hesitate to apply the term
modernism to this battle when he writes that “the principle around which
modernist literature and culture fashioned themselves was the exclusion of the
masses, the defeat of their power, the removal of their literacy, the denial of their
humanity” (21). While Carey does not reference Huyssen’s work on modernism
and mass culture in the twentieth century, his characterization of modernism as an
excluding reaction echoes Huyssen who writes: “Modernism constituted itself
through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its
other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture” (VII).
While both Carey’s and Huyssen’s studies are persuasive, they do not take into
account the fact that many of the authors later labelled modernists did, or tried to,
place at least some of their work in mass culture media. During the last decade
and a half critics have challenged Huyssen’s claim that the authors later labelled
modernists created and maintained a chasm between themselves and the larger

58
 public.21 These authors in fact had quite a clear perception of marketing strategies
that they also put into practice; they were, as Aaron Jaffe points out, “more canny
about fashioning their careers … than is often appreciated” (3). Or, as Michael
Murphy suggests in an article on contributors to Vanity Fair, “being modern – and
by extension being modernist – was not about market phobia at all, but precisely
about market savvy” (64). Becnel writes about Djuna Barnes, that “like other
modernists she was loathe to have her romantic vision of authorship sullied by the
business of publishing” (33). She nevertheless tried to find a commercial
publisher for her novel Nightwood, and by 1922 Gertrude Stein had contributed
more often to Vanity Fair than to the exclusive Little Review.
Pecuniary reasons were of course decisive in many cases and should never be
underestimated, but in for example Stein’s case money could not have been the
only issue. Already in 1915, Ezra Pound wrote to T.S. Eliot’s father that there
were only two ways for a writer to become important at the time: “either to write a
great deal, and have his writings appear everywhere, or to write very little” (qtd.
in Jaffe 8). Pound’s attempt to placate Eliot’s father is not without interest,
coming as it does from someone who was instrumental in molding the writings
and careers of several authors that have later been labelled modernists. What is
interesting about Pound’s advice is the fact that it does not at all address the
quality of writing itself, only the quantity and the arena of publication. It is a
thumbnail sketch of the workings of the literary market in the early twentieth
century where you can either write and publish a lot, like Baum or Glasgow, or
opt for exclusiveness. Still, even the exclusive author had and wanted to publish
and be read and talked about, in the right places and by the right kind of people.
The less exclusive author had to make sure that he or she did not write too much,
and certainly not everywhere, since that was the market position of the faceless
moniker. When in the 1930s, Glasgow said no to Cosmopolitan with a 1.7 million
copy-circulation per year, she did so because at that stage in her career she did not
need the kind of broad exposure guaranteed by magazine publication. As a
successful author with Hollywood-options she could afford to say no to the wrong
kind of magazine. Gertrude Stein, on the other hand, had just as good and

21
By preventing “them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand” according to
Carey (16).
59
 carefully calculated reasons to want to appear in Vanity Fair, together with
Virginia Woolf, Man Ray, Picasso, T.S Eliot, W.B. Yeats and many other authors
and artists later labeled modernists. Compared to Cosmopolitan or Ladies’ Home
Journal, Vanity Fair (1914-1936) was small, its circulation peaked in 1936, also
the year of its demise, at 90 000 copies as compared to 1.7 and 3 million ditto. But
it was this exclusiveness that made Vanity Fair into a magazine where authors and
artists who decried the advent of mass culture/education/readership could and
would publish.22 At the same time, Vanity Fair is known to have featured more
pages of advertisements than any other contemporary American magazine which
is why it foundered when the Depression hit the New York market. And while the
authors and artists contributed the cutting-edge modern avant-garde-feeling, it was
precisely the wealth of ads that connoted luxury; catering to a small audience with
enough money to make it worthwhile the ads despite the limited circulation.
Pound’s “littleness” then, should perhaps not only, or even primarily, be
understood in relation to the author’s production, but rather in the consumption of
his or her work. The “conscious strategy of exclusion” that Huyssen characterizes
as a modernist trait was not primarily, as Carey would have it, a matter of how the
writing was done. Carey’s “difficult”-argument in fact reeks of the kind of elitism
he is criticizing. Rather, it had to do with where and for whom it was published in
a time of mass-literacy. Nor was it a matter of excluding commercialism or
market dynamics, but rather of adjusting to or even embracing them. Enterprises
such as Book-of-the-Month-Club, Vanity Fair or Woman’s Home Companion, as
well as the authors that published there, needed to create commodities that stood
out in the flood of cultural products. Yet, they also needed to create the right kind
of consumers for these products and the image of the ideal reader/buyer was
constantly projected in editorials and advertisements. While the Book-of-the-
Month-Club and Vanity Fair figured, and still figure, as each other’s cultural
opposites, the language of these ads tells a different story:

22
“There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards,” wrote
T.S Eliot in Christianity and Culture in 1939. His own quarterly magazine Criterion, never exceeded 800
subscribers.
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 Think over the last few years. How often outstanding books appeared,
widely discussed and widely recommended, books you were really anxious
to read and fully intended to read when you ‘got around to it’, but which
nevertheless you missed! Why is it you disappoint yourself so frequently in
this way? (early Book-of-the-Month-Club advertisement, qtd. in Rubin 99)

And, in Vanity Fair, next to a reproduction of a cubist painting by Picasso:

Somebody paid $ 3,500 for this…WHY? Why did Picasso, master

draughtsman, choose to paint a portrait like this? – Why
Braque...Matisse...Derain…Cezanne?-What do they mean? What do you say
when your pretty dinner partner asks you? – Could you even tell if this were
wrong side up?- You’ve got to know. Not just gulp soup! – One way to find
out...READ VANITY FAIR! (advertisement for annual subscription, qtd. in
Meyer 61)

The fear of the mass that Benjamin traced back to Baudelaire and that Carey
exemplifies in his readings of early twentieth century authors is reflected in these
ads too. Only this time it is the faceless, fearsome mass itself that is being
addressed and promised redemption through consumption. The individual could
stand out in the flood of people by signaling his or her belonging in a delimited
segment of society, culturally, and by implication also economically, elevated
above the masses. Culture as a tool for social differentiation was nothing new, nor
the sales trick of appealing to the fear of being indistinguishable from the masses.
What was new was the scale and the presence of a mass media market.
While the ads above are mirror-images in the sense that they reflect identical
marketing mechanisms and one copy-writer could have written them both, there
are crucial dissimilarities. In the Club-ad the social usefulness of keeping up with
the latest literature is implied, but it is the educational, self-improving aspect of
actually reading good literature that is foregrounded. To read outstanding books is
a moral obligation for the aspiring middle class consumer. The Vanity Fair-ad, on
the other hand, dwells solely on the social usefulness of knowing what a Picasso
is when you are sitting at a dinner table. The work of art has no intrinsic,
autonomous value, morally or aesthetically, but only as something to be known

61
 about in order to signal a belonging in a certain social sphere. In fact, you do not
even have to look at a Picasso-painting, it is enough to read about his art and
memorize the other artists’ names that go with it. In Murphy’s analysis of the
early twentieth century “Slicks,” Vanity Fair is singled out as the most striking
example of branding as the sole purpose of the magazine: “it no longer mattered
what was in a magazine, only what brand it was” (79).

Saving Isak Dinesen for Modernism

It may seem paradoxical that the authors and artists that would later be celebrated
as modernists published and appeared in a forum that commercialized culture to
an extent that the Club never even got close to. It does however make sense of
Lawrence Rainey’s provocative formulation that modernism’s success depended
largely on the promotion of the author’s reputation among non-readers.
Retrospectively, the promotion among consuming non-readers would seem to
have been more successful than the Club’s morally based appeal to the reader bent
on self-education. Not only are the works of T.S Eliot, Gertrude Stein and other
Vanity Fair-contributors still in circulation on the commercial literary market,
they have also become the better kind of literature. Jamie Harker describes this
process when she writes that in the mid-1940s, “modernism and New Criticism
fused into an academic field, and intellectual calling and a moral good” (153). The
books singled out by the Book-of-the-Month-Club, on the other hand, have
largely been categorized as a lesser sort of literature marked by time-bound
commercialism. Paradoxically, they have lost their value on the literary market,
are difficult to find in libraries, and are not included in school or university
standard curricula. Modernism has become, as Harker points out, “the dominant
paradigm of the twentieth century” (15).
In her assessment of the choices made by the Book-of-the-Month-Club’s
Selecting Committee during the 1920s and 30s, Rubin writes that:

Thanks largely to Canby’s and Fisher’s conviction that it was their job to
place before the public books that met their own rigorous aesthetic
standards, the club’s selections ... are better, from a literary standpoint, than

62
 today’s; thanks to their animus toward modernism ... they are likewise not
as good as they might have been. (144)

Both parts of this statement are interesting, but since I am focusing on the Book-
of-the-Month-Club and the book market of the 1930s, I will only discuss the latter
part. Clearly, Rubin’s statement reflects a generally held opinion within the
academic world at the end of the twentieth century about what good literature is;
an opinion that encompasses that which is written today as well as that which was
written almost a century ago. At first, Rubin’s statement seems to necessitate a
discussion of what the terms “better” and “not as good” signify. Is William
Faulkner’s Sanctuary a better book than Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum or The Good
Earth by Pearl Buck: all published in English in 1931, the latter two Club-
selections that year, and would the selection have been better if Faulkner’s novel
had been included? 23 On second glance, however, it is clear that Rubin uses
“modernism” as the yard stick against which to measure the quality of the Club’s
selections. Modernism is used as synonym for quality; an evaluating concept that
takes a great deal for granted. Taking my cue from Rubin’s untroubled use of the
term “modernism,” I will consider it as a term of critical placement and judgment
that defines and orders a work of art contextually and hierarchically in relation to
other works of art. That is, unlike concepts such as for example Dada, vorticism
or imagism, modernism is a concept used by the critics rather than the artists.
What Rita Felski argues about postmodernism holds true in the case of modernism
as well, that it is “not a discrete reality, but a series of perspectives ... the totality
of discourses on [modernism]” (14). In my reading of Blixen/Dinesen-critics the
term modernism is understood as critical perspective that places and judges

23
In “Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism,” Fredric Jameson points out that there is
no single correct answer to the question of literary merit, when he writes that “in their heart of hearts …
everyone knows that John O'Hara’s novels still give a truer picture of the facts of life in the United States than
anything of Hemingway or Faulkner, with all their tourist or magnolia exoticism. Yet, the latter are palpably the
greater writers” (18). While Jameson situates and contextualizes the question of “better” and “not as good” in a
discussion of modernism that takes the concept of realism as its starting point, it seems that he would still agree
with Rubin’s assessment of the Book-of-the-Month-Club selections during the first half of the twentieth century.
Incidentally, John O’Hara was never a Club selection, despite his critical and commercial success in the
1930s and onwards. When his first novel Appointment in Samarra was published in 1934, Canby published a
highly disapproving review headed “Mr. O’Hara and the Vulgar School” on the front page of The Saturday
Review of Literature. To Canby, O’Hara’s writing was too sexually explicit and the author himself a
“sensationalist” whose characters were not “accurate studies of contemporary Americans” (qtd. in Matthew J.
Bruccoli, 107).
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 literary works in relation to the totality of discourses on modernism, and as a tool
for inclusion of certain literary works, and critics, within a canon produced and
reproduced by intellectual and academic traditions and institutions, or, in Fredric
Jameson’s word, as the “ideology of modernism” (“Beyond the Cave” 3).
Since I understand modernism as a term of placement and judgment rather than
as an analytical tool, I am interested in the process by which Blixen/Dinesen was
made a modernist author, placed and judged contextually and hierarchically,
starting in the early 1960s and on-going today. She has also been labelled a “post-
modernist” and a “late modernist.” Inspired by Felski, I am less concerned with
the question of whether the ism-labels are “true (as compared to what?), than
whether they are useful ... What do these terms allow us to see more clearly?
What do they obscure?” (10). I want to understand what is achieved by labelling
Blixen/Dinesen’s works one thing or the other? What do the labels clarify and
what do they obscure?
In 1964, Langbaum published Isak Dinesen’s Art: The Gayety of Vision at
University of Chicago press. Langbaum’s book was not the first Dinesen-study to
come out of the academic world. In the 1950s, Aage Henriksen published a couple
of essays in Danish on Blixen’s works and in 1961 American scholar Eric
Johannesson published The World of Isak Dinesen. Both Henriksen who wrote his
thesis on Søren Kierkegaard, and Johannesson, professor of Scandinavian
literature, placed Blixen/Dinesen within a limited Scandinavian/Nordic cultural
and literary context. Both of them also understood her works as literary
anachronisms, albeit in a positive vein. Johanneson compared Blixen/Dinesen
with Selma Lagerlöf, and he wrote: “Seven Gothic Tales like Gösta Berlings saga
some forty years earlier, marked the return to myth and story-telling,” away from
naturalism and “psychological and sociological analysis” (7). Henriksen’s studies
written in 1952 and 1956 relied on a Jungian interpretative apparatus that also
stressed the mythical, a-historical or even a-temporal dimension of
Blixen/Dinesen’s works.
In relation to these earlier works, Langbaum’s study marks an important shift
in Blixen/Dinesen-reception, and I agree with Norwegian scholar Tone Selboe’s
appraisal that his work, still, represents the most important study of her entire
oeuvre (13). He starts off by pointing out that his work is inspired by the suspicion

64
 among many Blixen/Dinesen-readers, including Langbaum himself, that they are
in fact not reading good literature at all, but “brilliant mystifications and nothing
more” (1). Langbaum set out to prove this suspicion wrong, and he did so by
placing Blixen/Dinesen’s works squarely within a European/American modernist
literary tradition, stressing their thematic and structural affinities with works by
for example T S Eliot and Thomas Mann, and locating their shared philosophical
sources in the critics of Western civilization and the belief in Reason, such as
Nietzsche and Freud.
Since then, quite a few academic critics have followed in Langbaum’s
footsteps in their attempts to analyze and define Blixen/Dinesen’s modernism, and
to defend her rightful place within a modernist canon, even suggesting that her
works anticipate “conceptions of language and subjectivity more recently
articulated by continental writers like Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray” (Aiken, Isak
Dinesen and the Engendering of Narrative 8). That is, a sort of post-modernism
before the fact. In 2006 Ellen Rees even took issue with what she perceived as a
tendency to read Blixen/Dinesen “through the lens of postmodernism” and to
make her works “represent an anachronistic example of postmodernism” (“Holy
Witch and Wanton Saint” 333). Instead, she wants to fit Blixen/Dinesen into the
less widely discussed literary movement known as late modernism and in her
book-length comparative study of Blixen/Dinesen, Virginia Woolf and Djuna
Barnes she attempts to re-contextualize these writers within the frame of
European modernism, labelling Blixen/Dinesen’s works “a peculiarly atavistic
expression of modernist literary and aesthetic ideals” (On the Margins 36).
Between Langbaum’s contextualization of Blixen/Dinesen within modernism
in 1964, and Rees’ re-contextualization of her works within modernism with a
twist in 2005, lies feminism. In Langbaum’s study, the reference list includes two
female authors. Sigrid Undset because according to Langbaum Blixen/Dinesen’s
short story “Pearls” was written in response to an Undset-novel, and Canfield
Fisher because of her role in the publishing of Seven Gothic Tales. When Rees
decides to re-contextualize Blixen/Dinesen whom she describes as “a writer so
often considered to stand entirely alone in her literary preoccupations,” in the
company of Woolf and Barnes, 30 years of feminist studies has broadened and

65
 fundamentally changed the literary landscape created by academics and critics
(On the Margins 13) .
Still, Rees’ definition of Blixen/Dinesen as an “atavistic” modernist and
someone who “stands alone” in the literary tradition strangely echoes the
interpretations of Langbaum, Johannesson and Henriksen half a century earlier. It
seems that viewed from the academic perspective, Blixen/Dinesen’s works
become somewhat of a problem, whether it concerns one critic’s uncomfortable
sense that they are not really “good literature” at all, or another critic’s feeling that
they do not really fit into the linear, temporal structure of canonized literary
history unless labelled “peculiarly atavistic” modernism. The critics represent
Blixen/Dinesen’s work that they have singled out for their studies, as though it did
not quite measure up on its own but is in need of critical, academic support.24
Langbaum sets out to rescue her work from his own suspicion that it may not be
literature at all by reading them into the Western canon. Rees inserts her into the
company of two certified modernists, doing away with her pre-supposed
loneliness in literary history.
I find this approach to Blixen/Dinesen’s work problematic. Langbaum and
Rees, while taking off from widely differing theoretical starting-points,
nevertheless seem to share the sense that some literature, including
Blixen/Dinesen’s, needs to be canonically framed and contextualized in order to
realize its potential: to become “literature” in Langbaum’s words. Or, in Rees’
case, to be properly understood as late modernism despite its peculiar atavism.
Langbaum’s approach is openly condescending despite his professed admiration
for Blixen/Dinesen’s works. Rees, on the other hand, is far from condescending.
Like other feminist interpretations of Blixen/Dinesen, Rees places her in the
company of Barnes and Woolf as a creator of “a new experimental realm where
these women authors took the liberty of inventing their own rules” (On the
Margins 44). Writing as she does in the wake of a feminist embracement of
Blixen/Dinesen’s works in the 1980s which eventually led to an inclusion of her
within a broader academic context, Rees does not need to rescue the works from
any suspicion that they are not literature at all. At the same time, her “desire to

24
Langbaum writes: “I want to find the reasons why we like her – for one admires before one knows why –
and to suggest that Isak Dinesen is an important writer, that her work is literature” (1, my emphasis).
66
 illuminate a meaningful literary context” that is decidedly and self-proclaimed
modernism, leads to strained interpretations (13). I do find Rees’ comparative
readings of Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Blixen/Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales
(1934) suggestive in two respects: the “gender bending and masquerade” and the
concept of “magical realism” that Rees borrows from Tyrus Miller’s work on late
modernism (40). Then again, while both gender bending, masquerading and
magical realism are conspicuous components of all Blixen/Dinesen-works, they
are not so in Woolf’s case. Rees’ comparative reading would work much less well
in the case of for example Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. Also, I am not at
all convinced by Rees’ main argument that the works above together with Barnes’
Nightwood (1936)

concern themselves fundamentally with the question of what Europe

signifies, posed by women writing from the culturally ambiguous positions
of England, America and Denmark, all of which have highly ambivalent
attitudes toward the idea of Europe. (37)

Surely, the question of what Europe is, is too broad a question to use as an
argument to single out and link only three authors, especially in the inter-war
period? And, could it not be claimed that cultural ambiguity and ambivalence
toward the idea of Europe is similarly a much too generalized concept on which to
base an interpretation that is, essentially, selective?
While sympathetic to Rees’ feminist intentions, I cannot help but feel that it is
Rees’ desire to establish a context of “women authors” in which to place the
otherwise lonely Blixen/Dinesen that underlies her interpretations. In fact, Rees
openly says so, when she writes that she sees “Blixen – consciously or
unconsciously – allying herself with other women writers of the period, such as
Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes” (36). Since we do not know whether
Blixen/Dinesen even read Woolf and Barnes, much less if she consciously or
unconsciously decided to ally herself with them, Rees’ vision has more to do with
her own critical intentions, than with Blixen/Dinesen’s literature. 25 Similarly,
Rees’ need to establish the image of Blixen/Dinesen as someone looking for

25
Blixen/Dinesen mentions neither of them in her extensive correspondence.
67
 female allies springs from her own representation of the author as a loner and
ultimately from her definition of Blixen/Dinesen as a problem within literary
history. Rees writes: “Blixen’s status in relation to literary modernism has not
really been resolved, and – claimed both by the Scandinavian and the Anglo-
American canons – she is most often categorized as an anomalous writer without
counterpart” (36). It is this dilemma that Rees constructs and then sets out to
resolve by adding Blixen/Dinesen to the constellation Barnes-Woolf, since the
two latter, as Rees points out, have been brought together in comparative readings
before.
Of course, all these studies were written retrospectively, as it were.
Blixen/Dinesen had been dead for two years when Langbaum published his book,
T.S. Eliot had received his Nobel-Prize in 1948, Virginia Woolf had died in 1941
and Djuna Barnes had been silent for almost 30 years. In the 1960s, literary
modernism had become a non-disputed part of university curricula and today, in
the twenty-first century, modernism is the new “classics.” To declare Blixen/
Dinesen a modernist is equivalent to claiming a place for her writings on the
literary Parnassus; to canonize her. Langbaum’s study initiated the canonization
more than 50 years ago, and when the then-secretary Horace Engdahl of the
Swedish Academy confided to Rostbøll in 2004 that it was an “unforgivable sin of
omission” not to reward Blixen/Dinesen with the Nobel Prize in the mid-1950s, it
may be argued that her election had been completed and sealed (171). Today, it is
uncontroversial to argue that Blixen/Dinesen is a modernist writer.
I have dealt at some length with Rees’ texts, partly because I view her as an
important Blixen/Dinesen-scholar whose contribution to the field I value. But also
because I find her approach representative of a tendency amongst academic
scholars to fit Blixen/Dinesen into the modernist slot because of the status of
modernism within the academic curricula and the intellectual tradition. That is to
say, if she can be proved to be a modernist her perceived status would be made
un-anomalous. In this context, I am inclined to agree with Valentine Cunningham
who writes that “Literary Theory in fact diminishes the literary, diminishes texts,
by reducing them to formulae, to the formulaic, to the status only of the model”
(122). And I definitely agree with Harker who writes that modernism

68
 has been stretched to its limit … in including women modernists, Harlem
Renaissance writers, and proletarian writers. Many other models of
authorship can be seen in looking at literature of the interwar period, but
these writers have not enjoyed cultural cachet, manifestos, and fifty years of
critical work. (15)

I would argue that what this tendency clarifies is not primarily the possible
modernism of Blixen/Dinesen’s works, but the status of modernism within
academic research; the modernist ideology. The question, following Felski, is
what it might obscure? Here, I would like to turn again to Aiken, another
important Blixen/Dinesen-scholar who also reads her with a clearly pronounced
feminist perspective. In her influential interpretation of Out of Africa, Aiken
claims that Blixen/Dinesen’s text uncovers

’the interplay of heterogeneous elements’ in what an Occidental

phallocentric ontology would read indifferently as monolithic, static, and
same. [Dinesen] evokes alternative ways of seeing and being that ultimately
subvert the politics and poetics of the very systems which, paradoxically,
has made Out of Africa possible. (Isak Dinesen and the Engendering of
Narrative 126)

Aiken’s argument exemplifies the sub-category within the post-colonial field that
raises the claim that white women in the colonies and their discourses in the form
of literature undermine the hegemony of the Imperial family where colonialism is
imagined and represented as a family romance. Consequently, their works should
be read as a veiled critique from a sort of proto-feminist standpoint of the
colonial, patriarchal system of which they were part. Aiken writes: “The
‘blessing’ of paradise regained that Out of Africa finally promises then, is not the
dream of empire, but the bliss of writing and reading” ( 245).
In much feminist writing on Blixen/Dinesen, whether with a postcolonial or
modernist slant, the idea of her work as liberating self-production/self-

69
 construction is central, and both Rees and Aiken exemplify it.26 While I find it
understandable and to some extent politically necessary, I also find it problematic
to make Blixen/Dinesen herself or her texts champions of a feminist and/or an
anti-colonial cause. Partly because it means turning a blind eye to
Blixen/Dinesen’s public and very clear and conservative stand on questions of
gender equality and sexual identity, as well as the racism inherent in her writings
on Africa. More importantly however, the critics’ desire to locate a feminist, anti-
capitalist and anti-colonial theme or message in Blixen/Dinesen’s works is
ultimately grounded in the author herself, consciously or unconsciously allying
herself, self-producing, reading and writing, and becoming an example of the
“woman writer as the meaning of the texts studied,” as Toril Moi writes in her
discussion of Anglo-American feminist criticism. Moi continues:

From one viewpoint this is a laudable project, since feminists obviously

wish to make women speak; but from another viewpoint it carries some
dubious political and aesthetic implications. For one thing it is not an
unproblematic project to try to speak for the other woman, since this is
precisely what the ventriloquism of patriarchy has always done. (67)

Like Rees, Aiken identifies Blixen/Dinesen herself as the meaning of the literary
works. Against “Isak Dinesen” the pop icon, the aristocratic elitist complicit with
consumerist culture and reactionary ideologies she pits a Blixen/Dinesen who
actively deconstructs and, to use Aiken’s own terms, subverts the politics and
poetics of the very systems, capitalism and colonialism, which made her writing
possible (“Consuming Isak Dinesen” 4).
While I do find Aiken’s and Rees’ readings of Blixen/Dinesen’s works
interesting in many respects, I also find their determination to construct her as a
feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist heroine, and her writings as reflections
of her heroic stance, problematic for several reasons. There is nothing inherently
wrong with Rees’ and Aiken’s attempts to read Blixen/Dinesen’s texts from a
feminist perspective, exploring the feminist, political impact her gender bending

26
Terms from Horton’s study Difficult Women, Artful Lives. Olive Schreiner and Isak Dinesen, In and Out of
Africa.
70
 stories may have on a late twentieth and early twenty-first century reader. Quite
the opposite! For some reason however, Rees and Aiken are not content with text-
based interpretations but want to ground their arguments in the author herself,
thus insisting on the identity of author and text. This approach where the author is
made to conform to the critic’s feminist interpretations of the texts weakens rather
than strengthens the feminist argument. It suggests that the feminist critic is
limited to dealing with texts written by self-proclaimed feminist authors, thus
excluding a great number of contemporary authors both male and female, as well
as almost all older authors. It also calls for an image of the historical figure of the
author as a unified, self-conscious subject, pitting her strength against a similarly
monolithic, unified patriarchal and/or imperialistic totality in order to create a
“new experimental realm.” It is ironic too, that feminism criticism produces the
same author-centered understanding of the literary work as the promotion
campaigns of the Book-of-the-Month-Club and the publishing house, while at the
same time castigating the commercialism of this process.
In Blixen/Dinesen’s case, Rees’ and Aiken’s author-based arguments also
create more problems than they solve. While her texts may well be read on their
own terms as playfully undermining or underpinning various ideological
structures, the historical figure of Blixen/Dinesen does not as easily lend itself to a
liberating feminist, anti-colonial or anti-commercial agenda. Why, then, include
this historical figure in a literary analysis? Partly, I believe it has to do with a
desire to create heroic narratives for feminism. This is a desire which I fully
understand. More importantly however, I would argue that the need to portray
Blixen/Dinesen herself as actively choosing selected female allies and subverting
capitalist/patriarchal structures is the academic critic’s response to the demands of
a modernist ideology described by Huyssen as a “discourse which insists on the
categorical distinction between high art and mass culture,” understood as the
amalgam of works, artists and audiences (viii).
In order for Blixen/Dinesen’s texts to fit the mold of modernist ideology, the
author has to be detached from the commercial, mass culture context that in fact
gave birth to and has continued to sustain the authorship. In her case this becomes
especially necessary since she, as Aiken points out, deployed herself as a
consumable artefact in the author-centered marketing of her books. I would also

71
 argue that the demands of a modernist ideology make sense of the defensive tone
sounded by Langbaum in the introduction to his 1964 study. Blixen/Dinesen’s
first visit to the USA in 1959 – a visit that she had postponed for almost 30 years
due to the war and her own illness – was still fresh in memory. Aiken writes about
how, during her visit, Blixen/Dinesen had become “the center of media attention,
the subject of public adoration, and the fetishized iconographic object of
celebrated photographers Cecil Beaton and Richard Avedon” (“Consuming Isak
Dinesen” 4). Langbaum’s need to prove to himself and his readers that she writes
literature and not just “brilliant mystifications” becomes understandable when
related to modernist distinctions between art and mass culture. And against the
background painted by Aiken, a commercial scene where Blixen/Dinesen
willingly transformed herself into a fetish of capitalist consumer culture, and
“capitalized, in every sense, on her role as Baronessen and literary lioness,” as
Aiken writes (4).
If modernism is understood as a term of placement and judgement that defines
and orders a work of art contextually and hierarchically in relation to other works
of art, today’s use of the term faithfully mirrors and reproduces the excluding
processes that operated already when Baudelaire battled the crowd, and when
Vanity Fair promised that knowing Picasso meant an escape from it. It is not then
so much a matter of the quality of writing which can never be settled anyway. Nor
does it really have to do with the commercializing of culture from which
intellectuals and the academic world want to distance themselves in order to
defend their own autonomy and that of the artwork. Ultimately, it seems to be an
attempt to avoid grappling with the emerging mass consumer society that not only
produced the literary lioness cum Baroness, but also the tales of her fiction.
If, as Rees has written, Blixen/Dinesen is an author who has been “considered
to stand entirely alone in her literary preoccupations,” perhaps this is because the
searchlight has been that of modernist ideology (On the Margins 13)? What
happens, then, if Seven Gothic Tales is placed instead within the framework of
mature capitalism evolving into a consumer culture that displaced inherited
notions of cultural value in practice, while retaining them at the imaginary level?

72
A Race Apart?
A Peculiar Mania

In Canfield Fisher’s Introduction to Seven Gothic Tales, she writes that “the
people in this book are a race apart.” She also describes it as a book which has
“many aristocrats in it, cardinals, ambassadors, Chanoinesses [sic], exquisite and
perverted young noblemen – and old ones too” (vi vii). Yet, she is careful not to
establish any causal link between these two observations. In Canfield Fisher’s
account the people in this book are not a race apart because they are aristocrats.
There is something slightly disingenuous about this representation, since the
stories themselves are quite clear on this point. The notion that the aristocracy is
in fact a race apart is explicitly and implicitly addressed in Seven Gothic Tales and
it is difficult to imagine that an experienced reader such as Canfield Fisher could
miss the way in which this tenet is fundamental to its structure and themes. At the
same time, it is easy to understand why she wished to downplay this structuring
principle. First, because it might have given the potential reader/buyer the
impression that this was a historical romance in the vein of Walter Scott, which it
certainly is not. Secondly, because there would have been something unsettling
and even offensive to suggest to a reader in 1934 that these were stories that
advocated the kind of autocratic blood-mysticism that the twentieth century had
cast off in favor of democracy and notions of equal values and rights. By and
large, academic Blixen/Dinesen-research has reproduced Canfield Fisher’s
decision to by-pass the thought-provoking, or just provoking, aspects of Seven
Gothic Tales’ aristocratic features, and indeed of her whole oeuvre. The
predominance of aristocrats is noted but not analyzed, as though it was something
that does not deserve critical attention, being a slightly embarrassing flaw in
otherwise fascinating works. The “anachronism” of Blixen/Dinesen’s work is
never linked to the themes of blue-bloodedness that runs through the stories, even
though the idea that the aristocracy is a race apart certainly seems to belong in the
past.
In the public critical reception of Blixen/Dinesen – both her works and herself
– the aristocratic theme has surfaced every now and then ever since 1934,
especially in the Scandinavian countries. Often in a slightly ridiculing tone and

73
 sometimes with a vengeance. In 1957, the Swedish edition of Blixen/Dinesen’s
Last Tales (Sista berättelser) was reviewed by author Arthur Lundkvist in the
Swedish daily Morgon-Tidningen. By then, Lundkvist was a central figure in a
Swedish and Nordic cultural context, having translated and introduced a number
of authors since the early 1930s, including James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, William
Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Pablo Neruda, Nadine Gordimer and many others. In
1968, he was elected member of the Swedish Academy and he continued to be
influential until the time of his death.
Lundkvist had translated Out of Africa from Danish into Swedish in 1937, and
when he wrote an introduction to an edition published in 1984, he declared his
great admiration for her book on Africa. It was, however, quite different with Last
Tales. I will quote his review at some length since it is, as he points out,
representative of a critical tendency in Blixen/Dinesen-reception in Scandinavia.

The Danes have been calling for a Nobel Prize for Karen Blixen. At the
same time, the harshest criticism of her oeuvre has come from Denmark.
When one has seen through her stylistic illusions, one has discovered
magazine-style plots, coldheartedly manipulative marionette-spectacles and
artfully perverted eroticism. Her stories are reduced to costume pieces,
cleverly disguised pastiches, with a bombastic and contradictory profundity
which does not survive a closer look. It is … entertainment, appealing to a
wide audience looking for cheap sensations, and an elite that wishes for the
same thing as long as it is decked out, disguised, and fitted out with an
aesthetic distance.
To this criticism, one may add yet another objection which strikes me as
important. It concerns Karen Blixen’s obsession with the upper classes, her
peculiar mania for noble ancestry and blue blood. She persistently and
admiringly deals with royalty, nobility and church-dignitaries, and also with
artists in the shape of divas … She never for a moment lets us forget that
she is a baroness, and that her world is so infinitely more refined and
superior than ours, obeying laws and eternal contexts that remain
indecipherable to the rest of us …
Eventually, all this upper-classiness begins to look like a parody. One even
starts to doubt its sincerity. Such a self-conscious aristocracy does not seem
74
 natural. Is it not in fact hiding the feelings of a parvenu, a self-doubt? Is
Karen Blixen’s taste not fundamentally vulgar, but hidden under a highbrow
style, and with claims to links to classic literature? (qtd. In Den främmande
förförerskan 288)27

When reading Lundkvist’s diatribe, a well-read reader with a good memory would
recall the reviews written by Danish critics when Syv fantastiske fortællinger
(Seven Gothic Tales) was published in Denmark two decades earlier. In particular,
they would remember the scathing review by the influential Danish critic Fredrik
Schyberg in Berlingske Tidende who wrote that the main ingredients in these tales
were snobbery, artifice and perversion. Schyberg was especially upset by the
perverse eroticism in the tales “where there are no normal people,” but their
aristocratic mien also annoyed him and he concluded his text: “this is gossiping
aristocratic ladies at high tea” (“Det er adelig Dame-Te, hvor der sladres”
Blixeniana 228). Schyberg may have been more aggressive than most among the
Danish reviewers in 1935, but his denunciation of the aristocratic air of the stories
was echoed in almost all reviews, beginning with the reviews of the American
edition in 1934 when Tom Kristensen wrote in Politiken: “It is a profoundly
reactionary mind we get to know through this book” (“Det er saaledes et dybt
reaktionært Sind, vi lærer at kende gennem denne Bog” 159). And Hans Brix
wrote in Dagens Nyheder that this book represented: “La pourriture noble” –
noble decay” (“La pourriture noble. Edelfaule” 174). The latter critic also
reviewed the Danish edition in 1935, describing it as the “Hollywood of
literature” and several other reviewers frankly suggested that this book would

27
(Danskarna har ropat högljutt på ett nobelpris åt Karen Blixen. Men samtidigt har från Danmark riktats den
hårdaste kritiken mot hennes författarskap. När man sett igenom dess stilistiska bländverk har man funnit
följetongsintriger, kyligt beräknat marionettspel och raffinerat förvänd erotik. Hennes berättelser reduceras till
kostymstycken, skickligt förklädda pastischer, med ett högtravande och motsägelsefullt djupsinne som inte håller
vid närmare granskning. Det är artistiskt upplyft underhållning, vädjande till en stor publik som önskar raffel och
till en elit som önskar detsamma bara det är tillräckligt garnerat, maskerat, belagt med estetisk distans.
Till en sådan kritik kan fogas ytterligare en invändning som förefaller mig väsentlig. Det gäller Karen
Blixens överklasskomplex, hennes besynnerliga upptagenhet av börd och blått blod. Hon handskas ständigt och
under oförställd beundran med kungligheter, adel och kyrkliga dignitärer, också gärna med konstnärer på
divastadiet … Hon låter oss aldrig ett ögonblick glömma att hon är baronessa, att hennes värld är så oändligt
mycket finare och upphöjdare än vår, underkastad för oss andra ofattbara lagar och eviga sammanhang … All
denna överklassighet kan slutligen inte undgå att verka parodisk. Man börjar rentav betvivla dess äkthet. En så
självmedveten adlighet verkar inte naturlig. Döljer den inte en uppkomlingskänsla, ett tvivel på sig själv? Har
inte Karen Blixen i grunden en vulgär smak som måste döljas under högdragen stilisering, under anspråk på att
stå nära klassikerna?)
75
 never have been published in Denmark if it had not been for the American
success. Schyberg wrote that only Americans could find the representation of
aristocratic decadence glamorous, to a European it came across as mere
sensationalism.
When Lundkvist wrote in 1957 the Danes’ feelings for their by-then famous
author had softened. The Danish society of Authors had nominated
Blixen/Dinesen for the Nobel Prize already in 1950, and as Lundkvist points out
they had continued to call for it. She had received a number of Danish prizes and
had been sought out by a younger generation of authors, calling for her support
and contributions to magazines. In short, by 1957, Blixen/Dinesen was an
established figure on the Danish public scene, popular and respected, albeit a bit
reluctantly so.
Yet, there is no getting around the fact that the aristocratic characters abound in
Blixen/Dinesen’s works, especially in Seven Gothic Tales, and her preoccupation
with the aristocracy is not limited to her fictional works. In her letters from Africa
she often returned to the notion that the aristocracy is an elect group of people to
which she herself belonged. She described herself as “God’s chosen snob” who
could not stand the thought of living amongst the middle-class in a letter to her
sister in 1928, and infamously claimed that her syphilis was a price worth paying
for becoming a baroness, in a letter to her brother in 1926 (Breven från Afrika 393
281). Her faithful secretary-cum-maid Clara Selborn who lived and worked
together with Blixen/Dinesen for twenty years had to call her baroness during
their first ten years together. Only then was she allowed to use the name “Tania,”
reserved for close friends, and the year before Blixen/Dinesen’s death: “Tanne,”
her name in the family (Notater om Karen Blixen).
Lundkvist’s suggestion that Blixen/Dinesen’s aristocratic mania in fact hid the
feeling of a parvenu was mean, but not off mark which he of course knew. She
was a parvenu and a baroness only by marriage, and when she wrote to her
brother she put the word “baroness” in quotation marks to signal this awareness.
And while she insisted on being addressed as baroness by the world at large, she
probably had no illusions about the fact that the born aristocrats did not
necessarily include her in their circle of elects.

76
 When young Karen Dinesen set out to meet her fiancé baron Bror von Blixen-
Finecke in December 1913, she traveled by boat from Naples to Mombasa.
Aboard the boat were Prince Wilhelm of Sweden and his chamberlain, Count
Lewenhaupt. On the first of January, the latter wrote in his diary that he and the
prince were considering offering young miss Dinesen a place at their table, since
she was clearly embarrassed by sitting alone in the dining room: “we will
probably do so, since at least one knows what and who she is” (“Antagligen göra
vi så, ty man vet åtminstone hvad och hvem hon är” qtd. in Aschan 58). This
comment indicates what kind of world young Karen Dinesen was about to enter
through her marriage to the Swedish baron. It was a world defined by strictly
patrolled, absolute boundaries between those who by birth belonged in the
aristocracy and the royalty, and those who did not. The prince and his consort
knew what and who Karen Dinesen was in the sense that she was about to be
married to a man who belonged in their own ranks. Yet, since she was not yet
married she still belonged in the category of people with whom princes and dukes
do not necessary mingle and mix; the unknowns. But then, she was not an
unknown to the prince and the count and while the latter’s diary is written to
suggest that they suddenly discovered her presence aboard, they knew very well
that she would be there. They were friends of Baron Blixen, and one of the
reasons for their presence on this boat was the fact that they had agreed to be
witnesses at his wedding in Mombasa where he was waiting for the three of them
arrive. In the diary, Karen Dinesen appears as a liminal creature who could only
“probably” be invited to his and the prince’s table, since she had not yet made the
complete crossing into the sphere of the select few. In Lewenhaupt’s conceited
and cruel description of the lonely and uncomfortable miss Dinesen, there is also
the suggestion that even when she has made this crossing through marriage she
will still remain an outsider, a nobody with whom one can choose to mix, or not.
Was Karen Dinesen, uncomfortably sitting by herself in the dining room and
slowly traveling across the waters towards her destination and marriage, at all
aware of the duke’s and the prince’s deliberations? Definitely. She was born into a
wealthy, bourgeois family of merchants, land-owners and militaries, and on her
father’s side she was distantly related to the aristocratic Krag-Juel-Vind-Frijs
family. She was intermittently invited to their estate, which is where she probably

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 met Bror and his twin brother Hans whose mother was born a Krag-Juel-Vind-
Frijs. In her interactions with her distant relatives she had learned about the ways
in which the aristocracy could choose to accentuate the importance of what and
who you are through excluding gestures. In her biography on Blixen/Dinesen,
Judith Thurman describes the way in which young Karen Dinesen was placed next
to other untitled relatives or older married men at dinners, reserving the titled,
unmarried young men for the aristocratic young women (98).
To anyone interested in the biography of Blixen/Dinesen, the complexity of the
aristocratic theme is something that has to be explored at the level of individual
psychology, but also in relation to the ways in which the author Blixen/Dinesen
consciously staged herself as a baroness in the marketing of her works. When
writing about her fiction the aristocratic theme is also something that has to be
dealt with, again, especially in relation to Seven Gothic Tales, or as Langbaum put
it: a question that has to be answered (74). Quite simply: what is the function of
the aristocrats in her tales? To Langbaum, the answer to this question was fairly
simple. Referencing Schyberg’s vituperative review, Langbaum suggested that as
an American he could afford to take “a kind of tourist’s interest in Isak Dinesen’s
aristocratic point of view” (74). In doing so it became obvious to him that
Blixen/Dinesen treated her aristocrats ironically, reviving them and creating a
deliberately anachronistic literary universe in order to “use their obsolete virtues
as a stance from which to understand and criticize modern values” (76). In
Langbaum’s reading, the aristocrats represent the voice of cultural memory and a
sense of historical continuity that had been lost in the modern world. The view of
Blixen/Dinesen’s aristocrats as representations of an existential position severed
from any socioeconomic or historical context has become the typical way of
reading them, exemplified by Frantz Leander Hansen who writes “Thus, in Karen
Blixen’s works the bourgeois and the aristocratic are fundamentally
manifestations of approaches to life which are to be found irrespective of time,
place – and social class” (2).
Langbaum was probably right in his assessment of the way in which the
proximity to real aristocrats affects the critics’ judgment. Schyberg and Lundkvist,
and especially the latter who was an autodidact from a humble background, were
writing in the midst of an era of political and social upheaval that drastically

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 changed society, making Blixen/Dinesen’s writings appear as a voice from an
autocratic past. At the same time, Lundkvist and Langbaum reach similar
conclusions: Blixen/Dinesen’s use and treatment of the aristocratic characters and
their anachronistic system of values is ironic and it creates parody. There is
something laughable and even ridiculous about the counts, countesses and princes
that people Seven Gothic Tales. Not only that there are so many of them, but also
that they act like a race apart, so “unlike us and the people we know in books and
in real life,” as Canfield-Fisher wrote (vi).28 Clearly, Blixen/Dinesen’s aristocrats
do not fall into the realistic category, if by realism we mean the representation of
characters as complex personalities whose actions and thoughts can be understood
with reference to an individualized psychological make-up and history with which
the narrative has provided us. If, on the other hand, we think of realism as a
representation of social reality and Blixen/Dinesen’s characters as the means by
which this social reality is exposed and explored, Seven Gothic Tales becomes
very much a book about real life and real people, and the aristocratic characters
the main vehicle for this representation.

A Race Apart and Verisimilitude

On a “fine May evening of 1823” the young Danish nobleman Count Augustus
von Schimmelmann, sits by a table made out of a millstone, in the garden of a
small hotel near Pisa (“The Roads Round Pisa” 7). He is trying to write a letter to
an old, close friend, but unable to finish it he goes for a stroll. The air is warm,
filled with swallows and the scent of grass and trees. He walks between tall
poplars in the golden rays of the setting sun, brooding on his own unhappy
marriage and the nature of truth and identity. Suddenly, his thoughts are
interrupted by a terrible noise as a large coach comes towards him in a cloud of
dust, the horses wildly galloping and hurling the carriage from one side of the
road to the other. The coachman and lackey are thrown from their seats, and the
carriage itself is thrown to one side of the road. Inside, there is a bald, old man
and a young, broad woman. When the latter puts a bonnet with ostrich feathers on

28
Even though Lewenhaupt's diary should caution us to be quite as confident as Canfield-Fisher was.
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 the head of the old man, he is transformed into a fine old lady of imposing
appearance. The old lady is carried out of the wreckage and into the hotel, where
she is placed in an enormous bed with red curtains. She is pale and her right arm
has been broken. Outside, the horses are caught and brought back. The broad
young woman, whom von Schimmelmann has identified as the maid, turns to him
and asks whether he is a doctor, but before he has had time to answer, the old lady
speaks: “’No’, said the old lady from the bed, in a very faint voice, hoarse with
pain. ‘No, he is neither a doctor nor a priest, of which I want none. He is a
nobleman, and that is the only person I need’” (11).
I have re-told the opening pages of “The Roads Round Pisa” at some length in
order to argue that the old lady’s recognition of von Schimmelmann as a
nobleman is a decisive moment. As fleeting as it may be, this moment necessitates
a very definite shift in one’s mode of reading. Since the reader has been
introduced to the young man as Count Augustus von Schimmelmann in the very
first line of the story, it is easy to miss the shift: the old lady simply states what
the reader already knows. The maid’s question, however, draws attention to the
fact that there seems to be nothing within the narrative to identify him as such. To
her, he is simply a young man who may be the required doctor. In terms of
physical appearances all we know about him is that he would have been good-
looking if he had not been a little too fat. The no-nonsense account of his bodily
characteristics is similar to the description of the maid as “broad,” and in marked
contrast to the portrayal of the old lady who is said to have a “refined” face and an
“imposing appearance.”
Yet, she somehow knows what he is, before she finds out who he is. In trying
to make sense of the old lady’s recognition, I want to turn to Tzvetan Todorov’s
discussion of the fantastic in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary
Genre. The full title of Todorov’s classical work suggests that its primary aim is
to exemplify a structuralist analysis of the concept of genre. The fantastic just
happens to be the “principle operative in a number of texts” chosen for this aim
(4). Identifying this principle allows Todorov to read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis,
James’ The Turn of the Screw and Gogol’s short story “The Nose” (to name but a
few examples) as belonging within the genre of the fantastic, despite our sense

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 that they may belong not only within three quite different literary traditions, but
also within different genres.
Since I am not attempting a genre-definition of Blixen/Dinesen’s tales at this
point, I will leave Todorov’s deductive genre-theory aside, focusing instead on its
by-products which in fact take up most of the space in his study. While Todorov
does not use the term verisimilitude in his study of the fantastic, his definition
explicitly relates the concept to the real and the imaginary (25). At the heart of his
argument is the question how readers deal with instances of the supernatural in
literary texts, or rather, the ways in which literary texts determine the reader’s
response to these instances through linguistic devices. The text may choose to
present the supernatural such as a ghost, devil or vampire, as a given fact which
places it, according to Todorov, in the realm of the marvelous. Or, it may explain
the supernatural as nothing but an illusion, a dream or a hallucination, in which
case we are dealing with an instance of the uncanny, in Todorov’s terminology.
The fantastic is the state in-between, a state of hesitation and uncertainty where
the reader is unable to choose between a supernatural and a naturalistic
explanation of events.
The problems inherent in the kind of rigid structuralism that Todorov applies in
this particular genre-study, surfaces in his struggle to keep up the distinctions
between the marvelous, the uncanny and the fantastic, and especially between the
latter two. He admits as much when he observes that the fantastic leads a life full
of dangers, and may evaporate at any moment, characterizing it as an “evanescent
genre” (42). What becomes clear in Todorov’s attempts to trace boundaries
around the fantastic as genre, is that in can only be defined in terms of the reader’s
relation to a statement. That is to say, in terms of a modal relation, rather than as
an absolute category, independent of cultural and temporal contexts. As Jonathan
Culler has observed, Todorov explicitly bases his genre-definitions on operations
of reading arguing, for example, that it is the reader’s praxis which makes it
possible to read animals speaking in a fable allegorically, rather than as instances
of the supernatural, or the language of poetry as precisely poetical, rather than
fantastic, uncanny or marvelous (32). At the same time and in this particular work,
Todorov himself is rather vague about the ways in which this praxis is bound by
time and space. The real and the imaginary, the natural and the supernatural are

81
 traced against the background of “our world, the one we know,” a “familiar
world,” leaving aside the questions of what this particular world is, and how and
why it draws its boundaries between the one and the other (25). Obviously,
Todorov counts on his readers to be able to identify, and identify with, this un-
interrogated, “familiar” world and the praxis of its readers. As Culler points out,
Todorov’s definitions of genre-conventions, whether fantastic or otherwise, are
essentially possibilities of meaning that are realized in an act of interpretation and
assimilation “within the modes of order which culture makes available” (137).
While much could be said about this world in terms of geography, time,
gender, class, and education, that is to say its modes of order, at this point it is
precisely Todorov’s refusal to do so in his genre-analysis in The Fantastic that I
find useful for my purposes. I quite simply want to consider how to deal with the
old lady’s recognition of the nobleman against the background of an unexamined
world, where the categories of real and imaginary are conceived as stable and
absolute.
In the very first, long, sentence, the reader learns that Count von
Schimmelmann is sitting by a millstone-table writing a letter on a fine May
evening in 1823. The rest of the first passage qualifies the temporality of this
statement in a series of sensuous representations of “evening”: the image of the
sun-rays falling almost horizontally between the tall poplars, and the swallows
cruising through the air to make the most of the last half-hour of daylight. von
Schimmelmann goes for a stroll, witnesses the coach-accident, and discovers the
broad young woman and the person he first believes to be a man inside the
wreckage. The bonnet is fastened onto the bald head, and the old man is
transformed into a fine old lady who smiles faintly at Augustus. Having
introduced this rather extraordinary metamorphosis, the narrative abruptly turns
its attention away from von Schimmelmann and the old lady. Instead, it spends a
few sentences surveying the scene and the other characters who have figured in
the narrative, however marginally. The coachman, all dusty, comes running
towards the wreckage, while the lackey is seen lying in the road in a dead faint.
The people of the small inn have come out, shouting and gesturing, and one of
them manages to capture one of the runaway horses, while two peasants can be
seen at a distance, trying to capture the other horse. Only when everybody has

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 been accounted for, does the narrative turn back to the old lady and the count,
leading to the moment of recognition. Neither coachman nor lackey, horses,
peasants, inn-people ever figure again in the story. These passages, with their
wealth of seemingly unimportant details, could rightly be called “narrative
luxury,” borrowing a term from Barthes’ essay on the reality effect in literature.
The innumerable swallows in the sky, the dusty coachman and the horses combine
to create a sense of reality in the opening of this story, the world we know in the
words of Todorov.
Within this reality which we might call natural reality where swallows fly in
the evening and where runaway horses are caught, there is however a second kind
of reality embedded, one which could be called social reality. In her introduction
to Seven Gothic Tales, Canfield Fisher wrote that they are “solidly set in an
admirably factual background somewhere on the same globe we inhabit” (iv). In a
few words, she was signaling to potential readers that while the stories may seem
“new” and the people in them “a race apart”, a Book-of-the-Month-Club-reader
would still recognize their world as familiar and be able to assimilate their
meaning within the modes of order made available by North American culture in
1934. Using a term introduced by structuralist writing, we might say that she was
asserting the degree to which these stories adhered to conventional patterns of
literary verisimilitude.
In his brief four-page-introduction to Communications 11 in 1968, Todorov
distinguished between four different senses of this concept, all of them related to
our perception of reality, or Canfield Fisher’s factual background. The first is
what he calls the most “naïve” sense where verisimilitude is constructed by the
way a literary text conforms to what might be termed predictable reality. It is not,
however, the predictability of the natural laws that make swallows fly at dusk.
Rather, it is the predictability of human praxis, that is to say sequences which
conform to the reader’s experience of human behavior. In “The Roads Round
Pisa,” this kind of verisimilitude is exemplified by the moment when von
Schimmelmann’s thoughts are interrupted by the terrible noise of the approaching
carriage; by the coachman getting up and running towards the site of the crash or
by the people of the inn emitting loud exclamations of sympathy at the sight of the
accident. The definition of this sense of verisimilitude as naïve indicates that it is,

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 as Culler points out, essentially a manifestation of “that which is taken as the ‘real
world’” (140). While seemingly innocuous and neutral, representations of
predictable reality are in fact saturated with social and cultural values that
determine our reading of the entire text. “The Roads Round Pisa” would have
conformed to predictable reality if von Schimmelmann had continued his stroll
unperturbed by the crash, or if the people of the inn had laughed and cheered at
the accident. It would, however, have been a representation referencing a different
set of cultural and social values. What the first pages of “The Roads Round Pisa”
set out to represent is a solidly hierarchical society. The world view that underpins
such an order is expressed in the representation of the serving classes as
unswervingly loyal to their masters and mistresses: the coachman that gets up and
comes “running” to the crashed coach and the maid who obeys, despite the fact
that both of them have just had a terrible accident. They may look like marginal
characters in the text, appearing and disappearing within the scope of a few lines.
Yet, their presence and actions are absolutely essential in establishing the
verisimilitude of this particular story, and indeed, the entire collection.
The social reality of these first few pages is clearly hierarchical and there are
two recognizable, interrelated social layers: one consisting of people who serve,
such as the lackey, the coachman, and the maid, and another consisting of people
who are served, such as Count von Schimmelmann, and the as yet nameless old
woman. Another way of thinking of these social identities would be to say that the
former are defined by their functions as lackey or maid within the system of
production, their labor, or quite simply by what they do. In the narrative the
coachman runs, the maid finds the bonnet to place on the old lady’s head, and the
people of the inn and the peasants catch the horses, and carry the old lady to bed.
The count, on the other hand, does nothing and his inactivity becomes especially
pronounced in contrast to the activity and commotion created by the coach-
accident. Thus, even before the narrative has reached the old lady’s statement
which explicitly addresses the nature of a nobleman, it has established his identity
as something having to do with being, rather than doing.
The second kind of verisimilitude is related to what Todorov calls “public
opinion.” It is not always easy, or necessary, to distinguish from naïve
verisimilitude, but it is more explicitly sociopolitical. Todorov stresses that this

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 kind of verisimilitude conforms to discourses that, while impersonal and
anonymous, can still be identified as a social construction by the reader. In “The
Roads Round Pisa,” the maid is described as broad and the old lady has a refined
face and an imposing appearance. The reader recognizes these characteristics as
stereotypes that indicate social status and class, but would be hard put to pinpoint
the exact source of his or her recognition. Yet, the fact that the maid is broad
rather than graceful contributes to the construction of verisimilitude since it
conforms to a general opinion on what maids look like.
“Public opinion” may seem like an opaque concept, referencing a sort of
collective unconscious without links to material reality. Perhaps the best way to
define it functionally is to think of it as an everyday actualization and
manifestation of ideology or world view, understood as an imaginary
representation of the real world. The broad maid in Dinesen’s text is an
ideological construct and an example of verisimilitude precisely because it does
not refer to real maids, but to an imaginary, generic “maid.” Since the physical
appearance of real maids is arbitrary, it is the “broadness” of Dinesen’s particular
maid which signals the ideology at work in the construction of literary
verisimilitude. The reader may think of her physical appearance as an indication
of the fact that a maid performs manual labor, but it is more likely that he or she
will assimilate the maid’s broadness in relation to the description of the other
passenger having a “refined face.” In fact, the syntactical construction where the
reader learns about the young woman’s broadness before she is presented as a
maid, suggests that a maid is not broad because she is a maid, but that she is a
maid because she is broad. Physical attributes are not derived from a certain social
position and function, but the other way around.
Most likely, however, the reader will not pause to think at all about the
broadness of the maid, since it conforms to a public opinion on which the text
relies to create a sense of verisimilitude. At the same time, the “broadness”
performs its work in the construction of a fictional world which the reader
recognizes as coherent, intelligible and familiar. What seems important about the
concept of verisimilitude in relation to a “public opinion” is that it, like ideology,
does not refer to a representation of the real world, but rather to a representation

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 of an imaginary relationship to this reality. Verisimilitude is what we believe the
world to be like, a representation of a world view.
This understanding of verisimilitude makes it possible to read the first few
pages of “The Roads Round Pisa,” set in 1823, as a story about a familiar world in
1934, and still today. The “reality” to which these pages refer is the world view
expressed in the representation of a hierarchical social order where adjectives
such as “broad” and “refined” function as indications of social status. These
attributes travel across the temporal and spatial boundaries that the story explicitly
establishes because an average Book-of-the-Month-Club-reader in 1934 would
recognize them as functional social demarcations in the public opinion of her or
his own time.
Within the parameters of our known, familiar world the existence of noblemen
is simply a social fact and a reality. The existence of a social segment identified as
the aristocracy is historically grounded, and a noble family can trace its lineage
back in time to the exact date at which a forefather received his title, and the
political and economic reasons for it. The von Schimmelmanns, for example,
originated in the bourgeois Schimmelmann-family, which made a fortune in the
seven-year war between 1756-1763, and was rewarded for its financial services to
the crown by the Danish king.
“The Roads Round Pisa” relies on the reader’s ability to assimilate the events
of the story and the characters within the modes of an order which naturalizes
social facts, such as the existence of noblemen along with lackeys and maids. To
go along with the reality of noblemen is not, however, the same as accepting that
they may be recognized as such without recourse to names or titles. Nevertheless,
this is precisely what the narrative demands of its reader when the old lady
identifies Count von Schimmelmann. While in historical times, the nobility could
indeed be recognized at a glance since the manner of dress and accessories, such
as carrying a sword for example, were regularized trough sumptuary laws, this is
clearly not the case in this story. Not only because such laws had become defunct
by the year 1823, but also because of the maid’s question which brings attention
to the fact that von Schimmelmann’s appearance reveals nothing specific about
his social identity. Except, that is, to the old lady. Her words thus require a shift
in the mode of reading as they give rise to the question of how she knows. To

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 make sense of the old lady’s knowledge, the reader has to reckon with the
presence of the supernatural. Since the reader knows that she is right, this is not a
case of the supernatural that can be explained by recourse to hallucinations or
dreams, that is to say the uncanny in Todorov’s terminology. Instead, the reader is
initially conditioned to interpret this event as marvelous, or magic, and the
supernatural is simply assimilated and accepted by the reader according to the
modes of order laid down by the text.
To identify the event of recognition as marvelous, however, does not really
finalize and settle the question of how to read this text, since that which is
recognized, Count von Schimmelmann, does not really belong in the category of
the supernatural. Or, does he? If, using an example from Todorov, the old lady
would have said: “He is a vampire, and that is the only person I need,” the text
would be a clear-cut example of the marvelous or explicit supernatural. Here,
however, we are dealing with a social category that while entirely familiar and
very much part of the world we know, is also and at the same time the only social
category besides royalty that is legitimized and reproduced differently from every
other social category. Count von Schimmelmann is a count by virtue of birth, and
although his social position may change and vary in terms of wealth and
influence, his identity as a member of the aristocracy is unalterable. The
aristocracy as an identifiable social group is maintained without links to a position
within the order of production and social reality. The son of a lackey may become
a lackey himself, but he is not born as such. The son of a count is born a count,
and even if he became a lackey he would still be a count. Identity and destiny is
defined in terms of blood, outside historical and social dynamics that change
human conditions of being. In this sense, the aristocracy is a construction founded
on a notion of an absolute and unalterable essence of being that is passed down
through generations within an exclusive group.
While a count is not supernatural in the sense that a vampire is within the
modes of order of our culture, he is also not quite natural in the same way as a
maid or a lackey is within the same order. A maid is defined by what she does,
while a count can only be defined by what he is, an essence of being that extends
beyond the boundaries of the individual self, and that is, just as in the case of the
vampire, a matter of blood. I want to suggest that the old lady’s marvelous

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 recognition of von Schimmelmann extends its magic by drawing the reader’s
attention to the potentially supernatural quality of the aristocracy. If a count can
be recognized at a glance, is that not because there is something inherently
magical and unearthly about both his being and his existence in the first place?
The juxtaposition of the maid’s question and the old lady’s statement creates a
textual structure where the reader’s sense of the marvelous is transposed from the
moment of recognition to the very existence of counts, that is to say, to social
reality. The reader simply cannot choose between a supernatural and a naturalistic
explanation of events within the parameters of this story and the familiar world on
which it relies. On the one hand, the old lady’s recognition is impossible
according to the unexamined modes of order regulating this world, a fact
confirmed by the maid’s misrecognition. On the other hand and in the same
world, so realistically and meticulously constructed by the narrative, the
aristocracy does exist as a social entity distinct from all other social groups since
it is based solely on blood: a race apart. And, in such a world, would not the old
lady’s accurate recognition be entirely possible? Perhaps the best way to describe
the kind of supernatural that is revealed by the old lady’s recognition is to think of
it as the magic produced by social reality and by the unexamined, familiar world
itself. For this very reason, it is a magic kept on hold by a narrative structure that
determines the reader’s response in a way reminiscent of the fantastic mode
understood in Todorov’s sense as a state of hesitation and uncertainty. The
moment of recognition necessitates a shift in the reader’s modal relationship to the
register of real and imaginary, but not only at the textual level. It is a moment
which de-familiarizes the familiar world by bringing to the surface the possibility
that it is our concept of the real and the accepted modes of order of our culture
that makes the supernatural not only visible, but inescapable.

Ridiculous but Real

The first few pages of “The Roads Round Pisa” sensitize the reader to the
imaginary and magical dimension of our perception of social reality. The
aristocratic theme brings this paradox to the surface, but it is also set forth in the
representation of the broad maid and the old man with a refined face. At the same

88
 time, the notion of stable gender-identity is unhinged as the old man transforms
into an old lady by the simple act of donning a wig and bonnet. Seven Gothic
Tales will return again and again to the idea that we are deceived by our
preconceived and socially constructed notions of what and who a person is. It is
present in the representation of a valet who successfully disguises himself as a
noble cardinal in “The Deluge at Norderney” or in the story about the opera-
singer who decides to become “many persons” and re-invents herself in the roles
of prostitute and revolutionary in “The Dreamers.” It is also present in the way in
which the characters of these stories imagine and create their own histories, for
example the spinster miss Malin Nat-og-Dag who in her old age “believed herself
to have been the grand courtesan of her time, if not the great Whore of the
Revelation” in “The Deluge at Norderney” (138). People in this book
continuously invent and reinvent themselves, act roles and exchange identities,
such as when Agnese takes the place of her friend Rosina in “The Roads Round
Pisa” and much has been written about the theme of role-playing, masks,
masquerades and unstable identity, both with respect to Blixen/Dinesen’s works
and her own life.29
I am, however, more interested in the way in which Seven Gothic Tales in fact
sustains the notion of the aristocracy as a race apart, defined by blood-lines. Seven
Gothic Tales is a universe where boundaries are continuously transgressed:
humans may turn into animals as in “The Monkey” and a dead man returns to the
world of the living in “Supper at Elsinore”, while themes of incest and
homosexuality are brought to the fore. Yet, the magical recognition of Count von
Schimmelmann in “The Roads Round Pisa” sets the tone for stories where the
blood-will-tell convention of the traditional fairy-tale or courtly romance is

29
A selection of titles from Blixen-bibliography is suggestive:
Bag Blixens masker. Min far, mig selv og månefruen. Samtale med Aage Henriksen. Henriksen, Morten,
2010. (Behind Blixen’s Masks. My Father, Myself and the Lady of the Moon)
Karen Blixen - masker och magi. Combüchen, Sigrid, 2000 (Karen Blixen – Masks and Magic)
Karen Blixen, 'Isak Dinesen' og rummet mellem dem. Aikin, Susan Hardy, 1993 (Karen Blixen, ‘Isak
Dinesen’ and the Space in Between)
Who Am I? The Story of Isak Dinesen's Identity, Thorkild Bjørnvig, 1993
The Mask of Form in 'Out of Africa', Judith Lee, 1993
Isak Dinesen and Karen Blixen. The Mask and the Reality, Donald Hannah, 1971

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 challenged, but upheld. The noble bastards Kaspersen and Jonathan Maersk of
“The Deluge at Norderney” may not be recognized as aristocrats by the strict
edicts that regulate this particular social group. The story however, makes it clear
that their behavior and personalities reveal the innate qualities of a race apart.
Young Jonathan Maersk who is revealed to be the illegitimate son of Baron
Gersdorff is unable to escape his destiny to be “a glass of fashion and a mould of
form” just as his father, despite the fact that he fights it. It is true that Dinesen
treats her aristocrats ironically in the sense that she ridicules the way in which
society treats them as a race apart, the whole of Copenhagen’s social elite
recognizing in Jonathan the glass of fashion when they find out about his
parentage. Or in the representation of Baron Guildenstern in “The Dreamers” who
holds himself to be a “giant,” while he is in reality a man whose sense of self-
esteem is completely dependent on the admiration of others (357).30
What Seven Gothic Tales suggests is that while the existence of a race apart
may be ridiculous it is nevertheless real, since social reality and hierarchy is
grounded in an imaginary register that is produced and re-produced in the form of
a world view. The world is what we perceive it to be, and our beliefs structure the
world fantastically. Blixen/Dinesen’s use of authentic aristocratic names such as
von Schimmelmann, von Schreckenstein or Nat-og-Dag underlines that these
beliefs are not a matter of personal choice, but rather of “general opinion.” We
may choose to believe that there is no such thing as blood-determined lineage, but
it nevertheless exists.

Profitable Appearances

Blixen/Dinesen-interpretations have generally treated the memoir Out of Africa as

a book that reconstructs an imaginary European, feudal past. Sometimes, this view
is paired with an understanding of Seven Gothic Tales as a book that was made
possible by Blixen/Dinesen’s experience of colonial Africa. Langbaum succinctly
writes that “Seven Gothic Tales is a great book about Europe, because Isak

30
It has been suggested that baron Guildenstern was intended as a caricature of Blixen/Dinesen’s ex-husband
Bror Blixen.
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 Dinesen’s experience of Africa stands behind it; and Europe stands, in the same
way, behind every word of Out of Africa” (119).
The idea that an idealistic image of a harmonious feudal European past stands
behind Out of Africa, and that the aristocratic milieu and feudal ethos of Seven
Gothic Tales was made possible by colonial reality, is, at first glance, persuasive.
It is a neat explanation of the anachronistic aspect of Blixen/Dinesen’s first
collection of tales, since it points to a source of inspiration in the social reality of
colonial Kenya where Blixen/Dinesen lived for almost eighteen years, and where
she started writing her stories. The problem with this view, however, is that it
does not explore and take into account what the social reality of the colony in fact
looked like. While most critics agree that the harmonious feudalism of Out of
Africa has very little to do with Blixen/Dinesen’s actual life at the farm at Ngong,
the exploration of the material political and economic conditions of colonial
Kenya are left outside the interpretation of Seven Gothic Tales.31 I want to argue
that Blixen/Dinesen’s experience of “Africa” does stand behind Seven Gothic
Tales but not only as an experience of the feudal mimicry made possible by
colonial power-structures, an anachronistic taste of a European past, but also the
inspirational experience of feudal mimicry and imagery brought up-to-date and
turned into an marketable economic asset. In order to understand the
contemporaneousness and marketability of feudal mimicry in the colonial setting,
I will look closer at the kind of “Africa” that Blixen/Dinesen experienced between
1914 and 1931. In this reading, Out of Africa, published in 1937 but begun
already in the early 1930s, does not figure as a nostalgic re-creation of a European
past, but rather as an apt analysis of what made colonial Kenya so sellable on a
Western market. And, as a map for reading the aristocratic/race-apart-theme of
Seven Gothic Tales as a reflection on the ways in which social fantasies and
public opinion sustain a magic perception of the world and shapes social reality.
In the spring of 1931, Blixen wrote her brother Thomas Dinesen a long letter. It
is a letter of grief and bitterness. The coffee-farm which had been her home for
seventeen years had been sold at a compulsory auction. The 6000 acres of farm-
land which she had claimed as hers was going to be divided into lots and turned

31
The recent publication of Blixen/Dinesen’s complete African correspondence gives an even more clear
view of the ways in which her literary representation of the farm differs from her actual life there.
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 into a suburbia of bungalows for the growing middle-class of Nairobi; the “shop-
people” who ran out into the hills on Sundays on their motor-cycles and shot at
anything they saw, as she resentfully referred to them in Out of Africa (15). 1200
farm-hands and squatters would once again be driven off the land that had been
expropriated by the British colonial government in the early 1900s and set aside
for European settlers, such as the young Karen Dinesen and Baron von Blixen-
Finecke. The land which for ages had been a site of agrarian production, initially
in the form of Kikuyu small-scale agriculture and Masai livestock production,
later in the form of large-scale, export-dependent, European-owned farming of
primary products, became a real estate market.
To Blixen this was a personal tragedy that she blamed on her tight-fisted
bourgeois relatives back in Denmark, uncles and aunts who had invested in the
grand colonial project initiated by the young Blixen-couple in 1913. Over the
years they had lost not only their faith in Karen’s and Bror’s capacities as farmers,
but also a great deal of money. Karen Blixen’s hard-working, prudent bourgeois
relatives understood the failure of Karen Coffee in moral terms and blamed in on
the Blixens’ sumptuous consumption, her uncle Aage Westenholz writing already
in 1921 to Thomas Dinesen that

While we back home are forced to sell the shirts off our backs for the sake
of Karen Coffee, Tanne blithely keeps her splendid house, all her expensive
furniture, her costly boys, her horse and, above all, her dangerous husband.
(qtd. in Westenholz 33)
(Mens vi herhjemme gradvis klædes af for Karen Coffees skyld, har Tanne
stadig behold sit fine hus, alle sine kostbare møbler, sine dyre boys, sin
ridehest og, fremfor alt, sin farlige mand.)

While it is true that Blixen/Dinesen was an ardent and self-professed consumer

of goods that would demonstrate the social standing of a baroness, Parisian
clothing, thoroughbreds, exclusive crystal, china and furniture, and a staff of
white-clad servants, her failure as farm-manager was neither personal nor moral,
at least not in any simple sense. Colonial Kenya was a late addition to the British
empire and it was imagined and shaped by its European settlers as well as by the
colonial administration in a very particular and definite way. In 1906, this was

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 formulated by Colonel John Ainsworthy, top administrator and Chief Native
Commissioner, when he wrote: “White people can live here and will live here, not
as colonists performing manual labor, as in Canada or New Zealand, but as
planters, etc., overseeing natives doing the work of development” (qtd. in Wolff
54.). This view of what kind of colony Kenya should and would be was seconded
by the kind of people who set out to be its colonists. Most famously perhaps by
Lord Delamere, The Rt. Hon. Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere, a man
appropriately and admiringly described by another colonist, Elspeth Huxley, in
1935, as someone in whom the “feudal system was in [the] bones and blood” (6).
The colonial empire at large in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
permitted, as Benedict Anderson has pointed out, “sizeable numbers of bourgeois
and petty bourgeois to play aristocrat off centre court: i.e. anywhere in the empire
except at home,” naming this mimicry a “feudal-aristocratic drag” (150). This
kind of drag-show was probably nowhere as manifest as at the mythologized
Muthaiga Country Club in Nairobi between the wars where the “Happy Valley”-
set mingled and partied. They were a group of people from Europe’s upper
echelons, infamous enough to have generated a number of books, and a film, over
the years, and searchable on Wikipedia today. Karen Blixen was never really a
part of this clique, partly from choice and partly because she voiced dissenting
opinions on the ways in which the English viewed and behaved towards the
colonized Africans, both at the level of colonial administrative politics and in the
case of individuals. Three months after her arrival in Kenya in April 1914, Blixen
wrote a letter to her brother very different in tone from the one she would write
seventeen years later as she was leaving the country. She criticizes “the English”
for their lack of interest in learning anything at all about the “natives,” and
applauds the latter’s ability to learn “our habits”: “an old Somali may in six
months learn enough about the arrangement of a dinner, so that he is able to vary
a menu made up of six-seven courses; I always expect to be served soup after
dessert” (“på ett halvår kan en gammal Somali lära sig en middags komposition så
hjälpligt att han kan variera en meny på sex-sju rätter; jag väntar mig alltid att vi
ska få soppa efter desserten” Breven från Afrika 36). Blixen’s attitude towards the
“natives” was, as Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o would point out in a speech
in 1980 to the Danish Library Association, “the love of a man for a horse or for a

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 pet” (665). The difference between her opinions and those of “the English” was
one of degree, rather than kind. In the very next sentence of this enthusiastic letter
written in 1914, Blixen calls forth an image of feudal harmony by way of a
reference to an Icelandic saga, exemplifying colonial ideology where the
relationship between periphery and metropolis was understood in temporal, rather
than spatial, terms;

I often think that our lives out here must be like Erling Skjalgason’s or
Hårek at Tjotta with all our thralls … You, who are interested in social
issues, would find useful material. In fact, there are no societal difficulties
here, neither conflicts between poor and rich, nor between men and women.
(Karen Blixen i Afrika 36)
(Jag tycker ofta att våra liv här ute måste likna Erling Skjalgassons eller
Hårek på Tjotta med alla våra trälar … För Dig som är intresserad av
samhällsfrågor, skulle här finnas stoff för intressanta studier. Här existerar
faktiskt inga sociala frågor, varken konflikt mellan fattiga och rika eller
mellan män och kvinnor.)

But of course there were. British East Africa, later Kenya, was a conflict-ridden
colony from the start. The conflict between a native, African majority-population
and the white minority, was always present long before the 1950s and the Mau
Mau uprisings. There was a continuous conflict between settlers and
administration (London/metropolis), not least concerning the status of the
“natives” and the running of the colony. At a financial level, the colony was
dependent on the metropolis, a situation that parallels Blixen’s relationship to her
relatives back in Denmark, and it bred the same kind of bitterness and resentment.
Intertwined with the periphery-metropolis-conflict was a class-conflict that not
only divided the settlers whose political representatives came from aristocratic
backgrounds from the British tax-payers, but also divided the white colony from
within along class-lines. As early as in the 1920s, twenty percent of the fertile
lands known as the White Highlands – expropriated from the African population
and reserved for white settlers – was in the hands of only five owners. Thus,
colonial Kenya quickly saw the same economic development as the colonial West

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 Indies had seen in the seventeenth and eighteenth century where small, white
landowners were pushed out by bigger ones with larger financial reserves.
In his book on the economics of colonialism in Kenya between the years 1870-
1930, Richard Wolff concludes that “the quantity and quality of official assistance
to European agriculture in Kenya were among the highest in any colonial
experience” (88). While many of British Kenya’s laws were routine colonial
measures the administration, pressured by Lord Delamere and his followers both
at home and in Kenya, went further than usual in their attempts to placate this
group who were still never really satisfied. As Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale
write in their study of social conflict in colonial Kenya, significantly called
Unhappy Valley, the settlers where

characterized by a striking combination of political and social organization

and ‘clout’, and economic weakness and inexperience, and they responded
with frustrated rage when the state showed reluctance to use its power to
further their private material interests. (195)

This response seems to have been largely successful. In 1921, the Nairobi court
ruled that even land that had been set aside for “natives” was in fact Crown land,
and thus also open for the kind of land speculation that was rife in the colony due
to extremely low prices and favourable lease-arrangements running to 999 years.
In 1903, Lord Delamere received a one hundred thousand acre grant that was to
become the object of Parliamentary inquiry due to its sheer size (Kennedy 40).
Huge tracts of land were bought, sold and leased, but only thirty percent of the
land owned by Europeans was in agricultural use by 1930. Wolff’s strictly
economic analysis of colonial Kenya’s finances suggests that European
agriculture in the 1920s was inefficient, artificially protected and, in strict
accounting terms, an unprofitable use of resources at all levels. The investments
made by individual settlers, or, as in the case of Karen Company, a European-
based company run by relatives, as well as direct and indirect governmental
subsidies to European farming, was quite simply lost. Wolff concludes: “The
European settlers, as a class, more resembled a landed aristocracy than a capitalist
entrepreneur group” (146).

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 The problem was that their notions of a paternalistic feudal life-style were
economically unviable on a capitalist, globalized market. The trickle of raw
products coming out of colonial Kenya could not compete on the world market,
and tax-based subsidies could not remedy this fact. Ironically, the economic
mechanisms and technological developments that brought Karen Coffee Company
to bankruptcy were exactly the same forces that wiped out small-scale farming in
Europe and the US during the same time-period. The Great Depression clinched
the inevitable outcome of the Karen Coffee Company-adventure, its 6000 acres of
coffee too small a venture, its thousands of human hands and ox-carts too
inefficient and – despite everything – too costly.
Karen Blixen never really understood the mechanisms that wiped out her way
of life or the massive scale of change that mature, globalized capitalism and
technological development entailed.32 She blamed the disaster on the miserliness
of her bourgeois relatives and they in their turn blamed it on her extravagant life-
style. The truth is that Karen Blixen could have sold off all her horses and gone to
live in a hut, and it would not have made any difference to the outcome of the
Karen Company. While it is true that many of colonial Kenya’s aristocratic
settlers exhibited, as Dane Kennedy puts it, a “cultural distaste for the ledger-book
mentality,” the financial conundrum of European agriculture in the colony has to
be explained at a macroeconomic level (41). Global, capitalist economics and
technological development had no place for pre-industrial farming.
What global capitalism did have a place for was a different kind of efficient
exploitation of natural resources. Colonial Kenya failed as a plantation-based
economy, but from its very inception it was a prime example of what Ali Behdad
has called the most advanced stage of colonialism, namely the tourist industry,
creating new markets and businesses that were monopolized by European
colonizers (49). The tourist industry is inextricably linked to the development of a
consumer culture where the whole world is a consumable experience, and
consumption the privileged site of the production of self and identity. To be a
tourist is to make a number of public claims about who you are, most apparently

32
I agree with Dane Kennedy who writes that “much of Out of Africa’s special power derives from Isak
Dinesen’s failure to fully comprehend the subversive forces that undermined her lived pastoral and drove her
from her farm in Africa” (37). His essay is significantly called “Isak Dinesen’s Recovery of a European Past”.
96
 about your economic power which buys you leisure and the ability to spend your
leisure-time away from home. But being a tourist is also about making the choice
to travel, and where and how to do it, and thus also a statement about identity that
goes beyond the mere matter of wealth.
Lord Delamere had initially come to Kenya for big-game hunting, and this was
true of many of the settlers. The Blixens themselves had been swerved from their
initial plan to buy a rubber-plantation in Malacca by Bror Blixen’s uncle Count
Mogens Krag-Juel-Wind-Frijs, who came back from a safari-trip to Kenya with
stories of lion-hunting and rivers of champagne at the Muthaiga Club. Following
the Blixens’ divorce in 1921, Bror Blixen left the farm and set himself up as an
organizer of and guide on big-game hunting-safaris. His clients over the years
included nobility and royalties such as the Prince of Wales as well as a number of
American and European business magnates, and, perhaps most famously, Ernest
Hemingway who wrote Green Hills of Africa (1935) about his experience. Unlike
his former wife and other settlers who struggled on with their unprofitable farms,
Bror Blixen was able to make a decent living and did not leave Kenya until in
1938. The Hon. Denys Finch-Hatton, close friend and possible lover of Karen
Blixen, also made a living as a guide on hunting tours, using his airplane to scout
for game from the air.
The customized trips for wealthy westerners included guaranteed opportunities
to collect the heads of the “Big Five”, visits to Masai villages and to especially
arranged Ngomas or native dances, as well as to Muthaiga Club in Nairobi and its
famous race-course. Beryl Markham, English-born and Kenya-raised aviatrix,
game scout, and race-horse-trainer, wrote in her autobiographical book West With
the Night (1942) that was praised by Hemingway whom she, of course, knew, that
when her father, Captain Charles Clutterbuck, left England and bought land at
Njoro in 1906 he did so “because East Africa was new and you could feel the
future of it under your feet” (67). The fate of plantation-style farming in colonial
Kenya as well as the story of her own life proves her both wrong and right.
Wrong, in that Clutterbuck’s farm at Njoro was, just like Blixen’s farm at Ngong,
a failure and went bankrupt following WW I. Right, in that the entrepreneurial
segment of market capitalism that she herself contributed to and lived off, marked

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 the beginning of what is today one of the most financially important sectors of
world economy.
To reformulate Wolff’s description of the European settlers we might say that
some of them did indeed prove to be excellent, forward-looking capitalist
entrepreneurs. And, that their success depended on the conception of colonial
Kenya as a haven for a landed aristocracy put under pressure in Europe both by
capitalism’s radical re-structuring of agricultural production, and by politically
radical movements, “flotsam from Europe’s old landed elites, dispersed by the
stormy social and economic changes occurring at home” as Kennedy writes (39).
Simply put: Markham needed Baroness Blixen, not necessarily the failed farmer
but definitely the titled consumer of thoroughbreds, Parisian dresses and white-
clad servants whose marriage in Nairobi in 1914 had been witnessed by a Swedish
prince. To make sense of this seemingly paradoxical statement, it is useful to turn
to American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen, an early theorist on
consumption patterns and social status and a contemporary of colonial settlers
such as Lord Delamere and the Blixens. His theory on social status as measured
by the distance or exemption from productive labor and conspicuous consumption
echo in Colonel Ainsworthy’s vision of British East Africa and in Karen Blixen’s
letters filled with entertaining anecdotes about teaching servants how to make a
perfect Cumberland-sauce for the Prince of Wales’ visit to the farm. Leisure is not
idleness, but non-productive activity in the consumption and display of goods and
knowledge completely severed from productive labor. This may include

knowledge of the dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct

spelling; of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and
other household art; of the latest proprieties of dress, furniture and equipage;
of games, sports and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and race-horses.
(Veblen 47).

To have time and money to waste on acquiring and cultivating this kind of
knowledge signified a social and economic supremacy that allowed the leisure
classes to exist as non-productive consumers of the useless.
The budding industry of big-game hunting-safaris in colonial Kenya built on
the consumption ideals of the leisure classes, reaching far back in history. In fact,

98
 Veblen argues that the trophy is the first consumer goods and a severed elephant-
head on the wall a sign both of the hunter’s skill and his or her freedom from the
functional need to hunt in order to eat. Thus, it was no coincidence that the first
big-game-hunters coming out to British East Africa where men such as Lord
Delamere or Count Krag-Juel-Vind-Frijs; men and a handful of women from a
social layer that was defined and defined itself precisely through its exemption
from productive labor. It was, and is, also a group where the social position and
status is a matter of blood, and part of a cosmological order where power is
ordained by God through the royal agency. No other part of the leisure classes
was more distinctly defined by their distance from productive labor than the
European nobility. In fact, their non-productivity was the ideological basis of their
existence and as Kennedy writes: “Hunting sport retained deep residues of social
significance for the aristocratic class; it offered a lingering symbolic expression of
their lost warrior role” (39).
The conspicuous presence of European nobility in the colony and the feudal-
aristocratic drag-show combined to create a stage for emulation of the life-style of
the most prestigious part of the leisure classes by those who had the wealth, but
not the blood, to prove their belonging there. As Veblen pointed out at the turn of
the nineteenth century, “the lines of demarcation between social classes have
grown vague and transient” as market capitalism continuously added new groups
of people to the rank of the leisure classes (70). Wealthy industrialists could
afford to buy the status symbols and manners traditionally associated with the
aristocracy such as big-game hunting safaris, and thus, as Slater puts it, “aping a
life-style founded on non-productivity” (156). Social status manifested in the
consumption of the useless became consumer goods on a market regulated, not by
birth or blood but by economic power. Just as Kennedy points out, many of the
settlers who re-oriented themselves from farming to the safari-industry in the role
of “white hunters”, did not have much money to go with their titles. Both Denys
Finch-Hatton and Bror Blixen were younger sons and fated by the strict
aristocratic rules of primogeniture. And while princes and nobilities were among
their clients, many were American and European industrialists who paid well for
the opportunity not only to consume conspicuously, but also to associate with the
titled elite they desired to emulate. Ironically, then, the titled “white hunters”

99
 could remain part of the leisure classes by selling their non-productive knowledge
of hunting skills and the proper hunting-manners (not shooting at anything they
saw), as well as themselves in the role of embodiments of the exclusive segment
of the leisure class whose status could never, at least in theory, be bought, but
only inherited.
Colonial Kenya in the first half of the twentieth century is a prime example of
the advent of a consumer culture awash with signs and images, where the
structure of status and meaning had become unstable and negotiable and where
“appearance becomes a privileged site of strategic action in a unprecedented
way,” as Slater writes (31). To appear in the company of men and women
embodying the signs of social status in their hyphenated names, imitating their
table manners, dress-style, and language was a strategic action and an investment
in a time where social status and identity had become an open-ended, ever-on-
going project where calculated consumption was imperative.
The social order envisioned by the colonial elite of British Kenya, and
deferentially sponsored by the colonial administration, must be understood as the
creation of a cultural product for sale on a global market. The colonists’ self-
proclaimed pre-modern, feudal ideals that expressed a conscious, systematic
alienation from the entire sphere of business and industry was paradoxically what
made “their” product – “Africa” – desirable on the market.
When the Kenyan author Ngugi spoke at the Danish Library Association in
1980 it was precisely the creation of this “Africa” that was the topic of his talk.
He mapped the contours of three versions of “Africa,” present in Western Europe
as economic realities and imaginations. One is represented by the “businessman’s
Africa,” the hunter after profit coming to Africa in search of raw materials and
cheap human labor. The second is “the European hunter after pleasure,” the
tourist. To Ngugi however, the most dangerous “Africa” is the “Africa” in
European Fiction, “beloved by both the hunter for profit and the hunter for
pleasure,” and therefore “Out of Africa is one of the most dangerous books ever
written about Africa” (665). He is far from alone in his perception of Out of Africa
as somehow exceptional in the flood of books representing Africa to European
and Western readers. In a comparative reading of a number of biographies and
memoirs written by colonial settlers in Kenya, Thomas Knipp claims that Out of

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 Africa “is the paradigmatic white African memoir” (53). Since Knipp just like
Ngugi is eager to stress the degree to which Blixen/Dinesen’s writings on Africa
must be considered as a part of the production of the racist ideology,
“paradigmatic” is as double-edged a praise as the latter’s observation that the
author had a gift for words and dreams. If the danger and “paradigmatic” quality
of Out of Africa can be measured in number of re-prints and its continuous
presence on a global literary market, Knipp’s and Ngugi’s appraisals certainly
seem accurate. Unlike the books enumerated by Knipp, written about the same
time-period and the same social circles (they figure in each other’s books), Out of
Africa is read well beyond the scope of those limited few who are interested in the
specific time and place of colonial Kenya during the first three decades of the
twentieth century. Only five years after Ngugi’s speech in Denmark
Blixen/Dinesen’s book was turned into a blockbuster movie by Hollywood-
director Sydney Pollack, featuring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford cast as Karen
Blixen and Denys Finch-Hatton. This film signaled a renewed commercial interest
in Blixen/Dinesen’s literary works and the turning of her Danish home
Rungstedlund into a Karen Blixen-museum was, ironically enough, made
financially possible by a film that scarcely acknowledged her life in Denmark at
all. In Nairobi, the film led to the opening of a Karen Blixen-museum where the
film-props left behind act the role of Karen Blixen’s original furniture.
While the Hollywood movie inaugurated a renewed interest in
Blixen/Dinesen’s writings on Africa and in “Africa” as an object of European
consumption, Out of Africa did hold a distinct place in the colonial canon even
before then. What I find interesting in Ngugi’s talk is the fact that he neither
places her writings within the limited setting of the first decades of the twentieth
century, nor in the long tradition of colonialist discourse to which it certainly
belongs. Instead, he presents Out of Africa as a book belonging in the immediate
present of the late twentieth century. I do not want to appear cynical or naïve. I do
recognize that he was taking a political stance in reminding his audience that the
inherently racist power structure that shaped colonial Kenya had remained
essentially unaltered after independence. At the same time, his perspective is
refreshingly different from much that has been written about Out of Africa as an
“elegiac” written for “the angst-ridden haute bourgeoisie,” a “cultural nostalgia,”

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 as Kennedy writes (3). Or, as “a paradise lost” in Langbaum’s more benevolent
and less acid analysis (119)
I would suggest that these readings are very much in agreement with how Out
of Africa consciously presents itself to the reader, closing its very first chapter by
pointing out that “the colony is changing and has already changed since I lived
there” and modestly suggesting that what has been set down in this book – as
“accurately as possible” – “may have a sort of historical interest” (28). Out of
Africa clearly does belong in the colonial sub-genre described by Behdad in terms
of belatedness, nostalgia and tragedy, where, as Langbaum writes, Africa is
imagined in terms of a European past and thus becomes a refuge from the
European present (141). This type of nostalgic colonialist literature very
consciously sets itself up as an escape from Western modernity understood as
urban, industrial, conflict-ridden, bereft of moral values, consumerist and shallow,
by positing a pre-modern, Edenic world elsewhere. In doing so, it draws on
various traditions and strains of colonial discourse, combining eighteenth century
ideas of the noble savage with the spatialization of time in nineteenth century
evolutionist anthropology. The inversion of time and space is explicitly addressed
in a passage entitled “Of Natives and History” in Out of Africa where the Natives
are said to inhabit the stone age, “walking on the shadowy paths of our own
ancestors” they embrace the spiritual experience of the Transubstantiation in
much the same was as “our ancestors” did, preferring it to the material rewards of
modernity, such as bicycles or motorbikes (252).
It easy to concur with the idea that colonialist nostalgia was and remains
sellable due to a general Western malaise with the ways in which industrial,
capitalist modernity swept away and continues to change traditional ways of life.
It is important to remember, however, that the nineteenth century scientific
discourse on spatialized time on which the nostalgic genre relies was far from
melancholy. It was, as Johannes Fabian has pointed out, a politics of time closely
allied with colonial forces of oppression that exonerated violence and exploitation
in the name of civilization and development (17).
In the same way, Ngugi’s speech shifts the perspective away from nostalgia
and elegy towards an understanding of Out of Africa and the genre to which it
belongs as a simultaneous celebration of Western modernity understood as the

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 freedom to consume the world. Mature capitalism evolving into a consumer-
based, global economy created a market for the consumption of meaning-creating
leisure that could be profitably exploited. From this perspective nostalgia appears
as a marketing device, and Out of Africa as a promotional piece selling the
possibility of experiencing a past, feudal harmony in the present of colonial
Kenya.
To call Out of Africa a piece of promotional writing may seem unnecessarily
harsh, but I want to stress the fact that the immediate success of this book well
outside of the “angst-ridden haute bourgeoisie”-readership, not least because of
the Book-of-the-Month-Club, is inseparable from the development of consumer-
oriented capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s. While most of the readers of Out of
Africa in the 1930s could certainly not afford to travel to Kenya to go big-game
hunting in the company of aristocrats, train white-clad servants in the art of haute
cuisine, breed thoroughbreds, or send off to Paris for a new dress, they did have
what their ancestors only a generation back did not have: leisure and money
enough to be able to make the effort to emulate the truly leisured, encouraged to
do so by mass-advertising.
Out of Africa may be appropriately described as a pastoral (Langbaum) or a
romance (Kennedy), but it is above all a beautifully written book about leisure. At
the center of this book there is a coffee-farm where no-one is ever seen to work.
There are squatters, workers, servants, boys and totos aplenty, but we do not
follow them into the fields, to the laundry-room, or even into their own small
allotments. The lady of the house is never seen bent over ledgers, in business
transactions or in correspondence with company representatives. We are never
allowed to see the material, economic mechanisms behind the running of the farm,
and in this respect Out of Africa is very different from the contemporary memoirs
mentioned by Knipp. By leaving sordid reality behind it effectively transforms
base matter into dreams that could be shared by anyone in a consumer culture
which encouraged the individual to believe that dreams of adventure, power, joy
and transformation could be realized through consumption, regardless of his or
her position within the chain of production.
In this sense, Out of Africa’s commercial success testifies to the explosive
growth of the middle-class following WW I. While this development was

103
 discernible in Europe it was especially marked and rapid in North America, its
industries untouched by war. The middle-class consumer whose parents or
grandparents had perhaps toiled under conditions not unlike those of Blixen’s
workers on the Kenyan farm, were now invited to identify with the colonial
version of a landed gentry, not only by virtue of a racial affiliation, but also in
their role as potential consumers of leisure and the use-less, including literature.
Knipp’s suggestion that we understand Out of Africa as a romance with
Dinesen in the staple-role of “sorceress-queen, equal parts Merlin and Guenevere,
who slays lions rather than dragons and uses medicine rather than magic to save
lives and communities” is interesting in this context (4). It identifies the
hierarchical structure of Out of Africa where the white, powerful self at the heart
of the narrative is what Abdul JanMohamed has called “the centripetal force” that
guarantees order and stability (77). Out of Africa read as a romance should also be
understood in relation to Erich Auerbach’s discussion of medieval romance as an
expression of a feudal ethos adopted by the ruling class to conceal its real
function, describing “its own life in extrahistorical terms, as an absolute aesthetic
configuration without practical purpose” (138). While Auerbach suggests that we
read the courtly romance as a form of literary escapism created at a moment of
social crises for the feudal aristocracy, he also points out that “the knightly ideal
survived all the catastrophes which befell feudalism in the course of the
centuries,” since this ideal was adopted by the emerging bourgeois (137). That is
to say, Out of Africa can be read as a romance in the sense that it left the
historically conditioned systems of production and ownership outside the story
and offered a white, literate reader who could afford to buy the book and had the
leisure time to read it, a vicarious experience of belonging to a ruling class. The
feudal ethos expressed in the romance form is transferable across time and space,
and can thus be recycled in relation to shifting power structures as long as there
are ruling classes at all. In the case of Out of Africa it was recycled in a colonial
setting at a time of an expanding consumer market in the West and this
combination of historical forces helps to explain its success as well as its lasting
influence and presence in the Western canon. It also explains why the Danish
edition, Den afrikanske farm, was well received and reviewed in the Danish press
in marked contrast to the critical reception of Syv fantastiske fortællinger three

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 years earlier. In Social-Demokraten, Svend Erichsen wrote: “She no longer writes
about the waning nobility of times past, or about peculiar people – copied from
the paintings or tapestries of castles – but about today’s Negroes and
Mohammedans from inner Africa. And she writes masterly” (Hun skriver ikke
mere om Fortidens falmede Adel, om sære Figurer – snittet ud af gamle Slotssales
Malerier eller Gobeliner – men om Nutidens Negre og Muhamedanere fra det
Indre af Afrika. Og hun skriver som en Mester”). In Nationaltidende, Haakon
Stangerup praised Den afrikanske farm’s “passionate tenderness,” and Kjeld
Edfelt in Berlingske Tidende recognized the voice of a “wise and experienced
woman” in its lines (“”intens Varme”, “klog og erfaren Kvinde”). There were a
few dissenting voices, such as Emil Frederiksen in Kristeligt Dagblad who found
Blixen’s observations of the natives as “banal as those that may be found in any
kind of women’s literary salon. Her stories about the Negroes clearly reveal that
she delights in their perception of her as a higher kind of being” (“saa banala som
i en hvilken som helst litterær Dame-salon. Hun fortæller om Negrene med en
gennemtrængende Tone af at nyde den Opfattelse, de har af hende som et højere
Væsen”). In general though, the feudal ethos was palatable in Denmark when
brought to life in a particular socio-economic context, in this case the colony with
its racialized social structures.
This observation should caution us to think about the appeal of the feudal ethos
to social groups outside the nobility proper or of the expansion of the leisure
classes in terms of democratization or social levelling. Both the feudal idea and
the reality of leisure, presupposes the existence of a hierarchical, social order
where production is carried out off-stage and by someone else. And while Out of
Africa depended on the emerging, consuming Western middle-class for its
commercial success, it also relied on the continued existence of socio-economic
differences and hierarchies within Western societies. In the world of capitalist
consumption- and mass media-dependent marketing there must always be
someone and something that is superior to what I am and have. There must be
someone whose tastes in clothes, furniture, food, hobbies, reading, coiffure and
music the consumer can be enticed to try to emulate through consumption.
I want to suggest that reading Out of Africa towards the end of the twentieth
century in a culture immersed in copy texts selling an “Africa” of adventure and

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 freedom that is only a flight away, its copy text-potential surfaces. The copy text,
touristic quality was always there in Blixen/Dinesen’s book by virtue of its use of
the romance format, mood and archetypes where the sorceress-queen and the
knight-errant Denys Finch-Hatton perform the magic of Western technology in a
stable and hierarchically ordered and pastoral universe of masters and servants. In
the manner of copy text, or romance, Out of Africa never touches upon the
material conditions that go into the creation of this pastoral, nor the historically
grounded power structures that bring it into being. The Ngong farm is, like
today’s holiday resort or the enchanted palace of romance, represented as purely
aesthetic configurations without practical purposes and entirely exempt from the
system of production.
Today, apart from the Karen Blixen museum of Nairobi, located in the suburb
called Karen, there is a Karen Blixen camp in the wildlife reserve Masai Mara and
Karen Blixen Coffee cottages and restaurants, close to the Karen Golf and
Country Club. The historical person Karen Blixen may have lost her farm, but her
name lives on as a sign for leisurely and privileged consumption on the global
market of tourism. As I have tried to show the process whereby her name came to
signify consumption of a certain kind of experience and the commodities to go
with it, cannot be understood in isolation, taking into account only her person or
indeed only the particular time and milieu of colonial Kenya. It was and is part of
global context, understood as the development of a mature capitalist economy that
restructured the systems of production and consumption.
When Blixen sat down to write a letter to her brother in Denmark in 1931, she
had no idea that her mere name would turn out to be a profitable commodity more
than half a decade later. She was desperately and despondently casting around for
ways of making a living, but, as she points out, it was “frankly speaking, very
difficult to imagine what I could possibly do in the world” (“Uppriktigt sagt, så är
det ju mycket svårt att se vad jag över huvud taget kan göra i världen” Breven från
Afrika 426). Since the farm had always been a financial failure letters such as this
one where Blixen miserably and aggressively pondered her economy and what to
do if the farm had to be given up, were routine in the correspondence between her
and Thomas Dinesen These letters are sprinkled with pecuniary complaints
mixed with covert suicide threats, for example, a letter written in 1926: “I would

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 agree to lose a leg in return for £ 5000 a year ... since I believe that I can be
myself without a leg, but it seems to me incredibly difficult to be myself without
money” (“Jag skulle gå med på att mista ett ben för att få £ 5000 om året … därför
att jag tror att jag kunde vara mig själv utan ett ben, men det förefaller mig så
utomordentligt svårt att vara mig själv utan pengar” 286). When trying to
envision a future beyond the management of the farm, she had listed suggestions
ranging from the absurd to the questionable, such as becoming a slave-trader, a
hotel manager in Nairobi or a chef in Paris.
In the letter of 1931, written just a few months before leaving Africa,
something had changed in her stubbornly immature approach to financial matters.
She had, in fact, started to do something: “doing what we siblings do when we do
not know what else to do – I have started to write a book. I wrote in English, since
I thought it would pay better” (“gjort vad vi syskon gör när vi inte vet vad vi
annars ska göra – jag har börjat skriva en bok. Jag skrev på engelska därför att jag
tänkte att det skulle löna sig bättre” 426). My translation is clumsy, but even in
the original, “do” appears three times in the first sentence quoted. Not only had
she written, but she had also sent her manuscript to a publisher to ask his
opinions, especially about her language. His positive response encouraged Blixen
to consider a career, perhaps as a journalist. In the context of her letters, Blixen’s
first serious attempt at authorship is represented as a peculiar mixture of the ideal
of genteel amateurism where writing is represented as a pastime rather than hard
work, and canny pragmatism with a view on the literary market. Still, against the
background of the way in which the ideals of the leisure classes were successfully
brought to the expanding tourist-market, this paradoxical representation of writing
professionally as a leisurely pursuit of the use-less in order to making a living
makes perfect sense as yet another way of profitably exploiting leisure, the
writer’s as well as the reader’s.
Readers just like tourists were an ever-growing group of consumers at this
time, and while Blixen seems to have had no clear conception of the most
important market for books written in English at this time, that is to say the North-
American market, her decision to write in English is explicitly framed in
monetary terms. In her study of the international literary space, Pascale Casanova
points out that “the ‘choice’ of writing in a great literary language, is never a free

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 and deliberate decision…What needs to be described, then, is a general structure
whose effects are felt by writers on the periphery without their always knowing it”
(178). While questioning the possibility of defining a single forceful structure that
would fit all trans-linguistic authors, I believe that Casanova’s observation that the
decision to write in a language that is “great,” has to be thought of in structural
terms rather than those of the immediate life-circumstances of the individual
author. Thus, I find the attempts to interpret Blixen/Dinesen’s choice to write in
English as yet another reflection of her self-proclaimed identity as an outsider vis-
à-vis the Danish cultural context too limited. It is true that Blixen/Dinesen herself
often referred to her own sense of not “fitting into” this milieu. In 1947 she was
asked to write a few lines that would be engraved on a memorial to the Danish
resistance-movement during the war. She declined to do so, and in her reply she
wrote:

I do not believe that the Danish people see me as their true representative, in
reality neither as Danish nor of the people …. I have often felt – despite all
benevolent recognition – this distrust, e.g. in an overview of contemporary
Danish literature, where our critics hardly ever are able to fit me in, without
expressing concern or dislike. (Karen Blixen i Danmark. Bind 1 467)
(Jeg tror ikke at det danske Folk føler mig som sin fuldgyldige
Repræsentant – i Virkeligheden ikke som hverken dansk eller folkelig …
Jeg har ofte, - al velvillig Anerkendelse tiltrods – følt denne Mistro, f.Ex. i
en Oversigt over vor Tids danske Literatur, hvori vore Kritikere sjælden
uden nogen Uro eller Modvilje finder en Plads for mig.)

Blixen’s feeling should certainly be taken seriously and it was a well-founded

feeling. In 1978 the Danish critic Henriksen wrote:

Finally, I would argue that what she [Karen Blixen] says about Byron; that
his superior creation was his own life, holds true in her case also. That her
life is superior to her books, and that this life is a greater, more striking
unity, and also a much more gripping tale, than her books. (31)
(I sidste instans mener jeg – ligesom hun mener om Byron, at det bedste han
fik produceret, det var hans liv – at hendes liv er overordnet hendes bøger,

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 udgør en større, mere forbavsende helhed, også en langt mere rystet enhed
end hendes bøger.)

Henriksen’s statement that Blixen/Dinesen’s life is superior to her books is

slightly unsettling, coming as it does from someone who spent several decades
and six books on her literary production. Henriksen might be considered the
majordomo of Danish writing on Blixen and when he discussed her work he
spoke with the authority of someone who knew her fairly well. His relationship to
Blixen was personal and complex. In 2003, Henriksen received the Rungstedlund
Prize and was interviewed in the large Danish daily Politiken in April 2003 under
the heading “The Kiss of the Baroness.” Henriksen is quoted saying that Blixen
entered his life “like a cruise missile” (in 1951) and the article describes the
“domineering Karen Blixen” as Henriksen’s “soulmate” and “fate”. The article
was written by Politiken-critic Ebbe Mørk, whose coffee-table-book Karen
Blixens gæstebud- billeder fra Rungstedlund had been published the same year by
Politiken’s own publishing house. The Politiken-interview interestingly reflects
and encapsulates Blixen’s position in the cultural economics and politics of
contemporary Denmark. She is grudgingly revered in the shape of literary super-
star Isak Dinesen, and dramatically staged and ironically undermined in the role
of Baroness Blixen at Rungstedlund, and, ultimately, endlessly sellable.33
Against this background it is easy to see why Blixen/Dinesen would feel
ambivalent about her identity as a Danish author, and why English would remain
her literary language together with Danish. It is just as easy to concur with
feminist interpretations represented by for example Judith Lee and Inge Lise
Rasmussen of her use of the English language and a pseudonym as an expression
of her desire to define herself as an artist. Still, I believe that Blixen/Dinesen’s
construction of herself as an outsider, however well-founded, has to be seen as an
afterthought in relation to her reasons stated as she began to seriously consider
professional writing in 1931. In his comprehensive discussion of the world

33
The story of Henriksen’s and Blixen’s relationship is told – from his perspective - in a book recently
written by Aage Henriksen’s son, Morten Henriksen: Bag Blixens maske, min far, mig selv og månefruen, samtal
med Aage Henriksen, 2010 (Behind Blixen’s Mask, My Father, Myself, and the Lady of the Moon, Conversations
with Aage Henriksen. Morten Henriksen has also created a documentary film out of these conversations between
father and son (2011).
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 literature concept, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen roughly delineates two potential
approaches. One stresses the Goethian understanding of world literature as “the
idealistic vision of the symphony of the masterpieces from different nations.” The
other is “the more cynical vision of global distribution of books as commodities,”
where Marx and Engel rather than Goethe, are the founding proponents and
ideologues (26). There is an interesting and potentially explosive dualism inherent
in Thomsen’s twofold definition of world literature. Can a book be a
“masterpiece” and “commercial” at one and the same time? I believe that
Blixen/Dinesen brings this tension to the surface even without her own clearly
stated ambition to write in English in order to make money, explaining perhaps
why she is so briefly and dismissively treated by Thomsen as quite simply an
author with a “cosmopolitan attitude” (46). On the other hand, she is completely
absent from the studies of other world literature-theorists such as David Damrosch
and Casanova, exemplifying the striking absence of female authors in general
from their discussions. Thomsen’s, Damrosch’s and Casanova’s bibliographies
read as highly traditional Western canonical lists including Franz Kafka, James
Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, with the addition of a handful, male authors originating
from non-western countries, typically Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, Orhan
Pamuk and a couple of others. In Damrosch’s list of authors who “broke with the
norms of realism and began to set their stories in mysterious, emblematic locales”
he includes Kafka, Borges and Beckett, Kipling and Pamuk. He writes that “all
three chose to move beyond a provincialism they found stultifying,” and I cannot
help but feel that Blixen/Dinesen’s absence from this list marks a conspicuous and
meaningful void (108).
Blixen/Dinesen who was certainly no Marxist obviously thought of her own
writing as a commodity for sale on a market and the choice to write in English
was simply a matter of calculating potential profit. What is interesting about her
uncompromising market-analysis set in colonial Kenya is that it complicates the
view that there is such a place as “the periphery.” Further, it exemplifies the fact
that the colony plays a crucial, formative role in the development of a consumer
culture. Slater stresses the importance of colonial trade since the West was a
“master consumer of imperially expropriated goods before it was a consumer of
goods it produced itself” (18). This observation is important because it

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 accentuates the fact that colonial expansion and exploitation, from its very
inception, makes it impossible to think or speak in terms of national or even
regional economies or systems of production, consumption and acculturation.
While often useful in analyzing the unequal distribution of economic and political
power, the terms metropolis and periphery easily invite a binary manner of
thought. The image of center and margin suggests a one-directed flow of ideas,
inventions and influences where the metropolis brings already existing cultural
patterns, infra-structural technology, commercial know-how, and organization of
production and consumption to bear on the periphery. Slater suggests that we
understand colonial expansion in terms of a global commercial revolution that
generated a vast range of new notions and activities which we call modern.
Colonialism not only created the necessary economic conditions and the necessary
financial instruments such as transnational banking systems, but it also offered a
model for “large-volume production, to be sold over wide geographically
dispersed markets to a ‘general public’ of consumers rather than locally to known
customers,” as Slater writes (21). Thus, the export-oriented, mono-crop,
plantation-economy that Kenya’s colonialist settlers imagined in terms of a
revival of a feudal, European past, was in fact the achievement of
commercialized, colonial-based systems of agricultural production that were not
realized in Europe until well into the twentieth century. When speaking of the
systems of production of raw materials, what is routinely called the periphery was
modern in the sense of being large-scale and export-oriented way before the
metropolis, using cheap or enslaved human labor to accomplish what technology
could not yet realize.
Colonialism created new patterns of production and marketing that radically
affected the concepts and conditions of production and consumption within
Europe itself. The wealth of new commodities flowing into Europe, coffee, tea,
sugar, fruits, potatoes, cloths and dyes, created new kinds of consumption
patterns. It radically added to the group of potential consumers, but also widely
extended the range of products available to those consumers. Fashion, in the sense
of the conspicuous and changing display of status through consumption, was no
longer restricted to the aristocracy. The breakdown of an older social order
combined with the incessant influx of new commodities, generated the notions of

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 discerning choice and taste closely associated with a consumer culture where
social distinction is manifested in the ability to choose. There was a general
orientation towards commercial exchange and trade where social interaction was
no longer thought of only in terms of established hierarchies and traditional bonds
of loyalty, but as a potential and impersonal market. In this process where the
experience of the world was entirely transformed the colonies were important in a
way which also complicates the notion of a center influencing a periphery. The
colony was not only a generator of new wealth but also an arena where social
interaction was predominantly defined in terms of commercial, impersonal
market-transactions, and where there was no old order of inherited values to
reckon with. When the Blixens arrived to the farm at Ngong in 1914 there were
no bonds of loyalty, oral traditions or intricate family relations that bound the
Europeans to their 1200 native laborers, or vice versa. They were strangers to
each other’s languages, religious beliefs, histories and cultures, even though the
Africans of course were much less so. Viewed from the perspective of the
interchange between settlers and Africans, the farm at Ngong was fully post-
traditional in the sense that the needs and/or desires of the present took
precedence over any truths embodied in shared history, tradition and continuity.
The laborers were brought there by their need to make a living and the settlers by
their desire to flaunt a particular kind of living. Need and desire translatable into
monetary terms brought them together. And, since colonial politics
institutionalized enforced relocation together with the expropriation of land, not
even the native laborers did necessarily have any ties to the land itself. In fact, the
relationship between employer and employee at farms such as Ngong were more
reminiscent of the impersonal pecuniary transactions of large-scale industrial
operations, than of the complex social web generated by centuries of social
interaction between landed gentry and their workers.
Thinking of colonialism as a truly global commercial revolution that changed
the world in terms of economy, culture and social interaction, destabilizes the
notion of the metropolis as the site of transformative power molding the periphery
in its image. When Blixen decided to write in English in 1931 her English was not
the language of the imperial metropolis London, but the language of a colonial
experience that cannot be defined as peripheral in relation to global processes. It

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 was the language of experience of a cultural, political and economic reality that
was, in many ways, more modern than contemporary Europe.
The concept of feudalism in relation to colonial Kenya, then, must be
understood as referencing a purely economic structure of exploitation, completely
severed from any traditional understanding of feudal relationships in terms of
social interactions or mutual loyalties. The European estates in colonial Kenya
may have had, and were intended to have, the appearance of time-honored family
seats where masters and servants had interacted through many generations, but
this was no more than an appearance. And, as merchandise, appearance was easily
transformed into a marketable commodity on a global market. In this forward-
looking social milieu where social interactions were market-mediated, aristocrats
such as Bror Blixen and Denys Finch-Hatton could transform the abstract value of
their titles into concrete, monetary value in a commercial barter with wealthy
industrialists. And in her writings on Africa Blixen/Dinesen could sell the fantasy
of feudal harmony.
When, in Shadows on the Grass (1961), Blixen/Dinesen returns again to her
colonial experience, she writes about the relationship between herself and Farah
Aden, “my servant by the grace of God,” comparing it to the “particular Unity,
made up of essentially different parts … that of Master and Servant. We have met
the two in rhyme, blank verse and prose” (6). She illustrates her claim by listing a
number of other Master-Servant unities from literary history; such as the Old
Testament prophet Elisha and his servant Gehazi; Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza; King Lear and the Fool; Calidorus and Pseudolos from Plautus’ play, and a
handful of others. The ideal of master and servant acting in pre-scripted roles in a
fixed, social order to achieve a perfect, hierarchically shaped union was a theme
to which Blixen returned many times in her fictional writings too; most explicitly
perhaps in “Sorrow-acre” and “The Invincible Slave-Owners” in Winter’s Tales
(1961). In the context of Shadows on the Grass, however, it is interesting to note
the way in which the supposedly biographically based relationship between her
and Farah Aden is introduced and characterized through fictional agency. It is a
wonderfully grand claim where Blixen/Dinesen places her own writing in the
company of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and the Bible, but it is also a tacit
acknowledgement of the degree to which the representation of hers and Farah’s

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 relationship is fictional. His and her characters are as made up as those of Lear
and the Fool, Quixote and Sancho. Farah Aden’s loyalty to Karen Blixen may in
reality have been as unswerving as that of Sancho Panza to Don Quixote, but we
really do not know anything about that since Farah Aden did not write down his
version of the story. What we do know is that their relationship was a financial
one; Farah Aden was hired by Bror Blixen to function as his wife’s servant.
Unlike the entirely fictional story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza there is an
identifiable and precise beginning to their interaction, just as there is an
identifiable end which is not the death of the Master, but her leaving the country.
Farah went on making a living, working intermittently in Bror Blixen’s safari-
venture and as a driver of other Europeans.
When, is Shadows on the Grass, Blixen/Dinesen points out the she and Farah
were separated by race, gender, religion, environment and experiences, she draws
our attention to the fact that their relationship is set apart from the fictional unities
she calls upon to solidify her claim that difference is needed to create the mystical
unity. Unlike Blixen and Farah, the literary characters she enumerates did share
religion, environment, experiences, language, gender and history. And,
simultaneously to the fact that racism as the cornerstone of colonial exploitation
generated a fixed status order that was as absolute as the divinely ordained social
hierarchy of Cervantes’ or Shakespeare’s time. In fact, it was even more absolute
since both Cervantes and Shakespeare wrote at a time when colonial, trans-
Atlantic trade was already generating a more dynamic social structure in Europe.
In early seventeenth century Europe, the social dynamics made Don Quixote
possible as a supreme example of a realistic parody of traditional romance where
the Master has taken on the properties of comedy traditionally associated with the
Servant, as Northrop Frye points out in his study on romance, (39). It is racism
that generates the essential difference that Blixen/Dinesen’s dualistic imagery
requires. At the same time, it is institutionalized racism that brings them together
in their roles as Master and Servant, and in the absence of shared values the bond
between them has the form of a business transaction. While racist ideology and
practice has always been ripe with validating theories on intellectual disparities, it
has always also relied on appearances, literally speaking, in making these
distinctions. This explains the racist obsession with perceptible variations in hair-,

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 skin- eye-colors and facial contours. In a racist society meaning is, literally, only
skin-deep. In Blixen/Dinesen’s writings on Africa, racism cloaked in feudal garb
is installed as the only remaining fixed social order on which a hierarchically
ordered universe can rely. This is a post-traditional world where aristocrats are for
hire by the bourgeois, and where there may be three women claiming the title
Baroness von Blixen-Finecke walking around Nairobi at one and the same time.34
It is, ironically, an ordered universe which depends on the significance ascribed to
appearance in the colonial commodification of human bodies on a mass-scale,
created at a time when commodified appearance – the images we construct on the
surfaces of our bodies – begun to power the wheels of production on a hitherto
unknown scale.
In Seven Gothic Tales appearances are deceptive. The old man turns out to be a
woman, the prioress a monkey, and the cardinal is really a valet. At the same time,
the stories make it abundantly clear that anyone looking for stable essential truth
behind the mask of deception is searching in vain. The prioress and the monkey
are two inseparable aspects of the same being and the valet impersonating the
blue-blooded cardinal is not only an actor, but also the illegitimate son of royalty.
He may be acting the part of cardinal, but he simultaneously belongs in the race
apart to which he lays claim through his acting. What Seven Gothic Tales seems
to suggest is that deception is the truth, and that it is useless to think of
appearances in terms of a surface hiding depth. In “The Poet,” the futility of
making meaningful distinctions between surface and depth, appearance and
content, is explicitly addressed in the representation of Count von Schimmelmann
who returns in this final tale to sum up his experience of life as a masquerade.
Having come into a fortune which the world thought was a wonderful thing to
happen to him, he has “accepted the happiness of life in a different way, not as he
really believed it to be, but, as in a reflection within a mirror, such as others saw
it” (330). The “others,” the “world,” “general opinion” furnish the count with an
identity that he inhabits as though it was a role, recognizing the distance between
a self that he is unable to imagine on the one hand, and the self that the world
imagines him to be on the other:

34
Bror Blixen remarried once, and while he never married his third lover, Eva Dickson, she did call herself
baroness in public.
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 He looked stronger than he was, like a man who enjoys his food and wine
and sleeps well at night. He did not enjoy his food or wine much, and
thought that he slept very badly, but to be envied by his neighbors for these
goods of life became to him quite an acceptable substitute for the real
goods. (330)

The young count who was magically recognized as such at the beginning of the
collection has become someone whose appearance is a fraud, but a fraud which
the count himself has come to accept as the only available version of truth.
Throughout Seven Gothic Tales, there is an ongoing investigation of the feudal
ethos and ideals that served to construct colonial Kenya as a sellable consumer
item. In “The Roads Round Pisa” the aristocratic characters are larger-than-life,
passionate believers in eternal love and unswerving loyalty, who send each other
off on romantic quests, challenge each other in duels and quote Dante. This fairy-
tale or courtly romance-ideal is firmly established in the first tale only to be
progressively dismantled. In “The Old Chevalier”, Baron von Brackel reminisces
about his youth in the decadent and adulterous circles of Parisian aristocracy
where true love has been transformed into barren and murderous passion (57).
“The Deluge at Norderney” introduces the idea that nobility has become mere
performance as the two bastard aristocrats Maersk and Kaspersen act the roles of
aristocrats in front of audiences to whom social value is measured in terms of
fashion and form. In “The Dreamers,” both Guildenstern and Hohenemser are
represented as pathetic, the former because of his conceited self-appreciation, and
the latter because he has no sense of self at all and “all people who came near him
had, somehow, the same feeling about him, that, while they had nothing against
him, here was a fellow with whom they could do nothing at all” (254). At the
same time he does “not get on badly in society, which, I suppose, demands a
minimum of existence from its members,” a characterization which prepares the
ground for the re-introduction of Count von Schimmelmann in last tale as
someone whose identity and being is a mere reflection of what “the others”
perceive it to be.
Against the colonial background, it seems insufficient to say that
Blixen/Dinesen traced the decline or “decadence” of the aristocracy in the course
of the nineteenth century in order to call attention to the demise of an old order,
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 and to defend the obsolete values of this order against modernity, as Langbaum
suggests (76). What Seven Gothic Tales demonstrates is rather the viability of the
aristocratic idea and the feudal, hierarchical ethos as image, appearance, and as
fiction. Hohenemser of the noble family of Coburg and Guildenstern may be
ridiculous aristocrats, and von Scimmelmann a tragic one, but they are
nevertheless functional and desirable in the social setting, playing the roles of
aristocrats that still carry the imaginary quality of being magically recognizable as
a “race apart.” Seven Gothic Tales makes American readers of us all, taking, as
Langbaum wrote, a tourist’s interest in the aristocratic characters. To be a tourist
in this context, however, is not equivalent to being a disinterested visitor to an
exotic theme-park exhibiting an image of the past tinged with nostalgia. It is
rather the experience of always constructing identity and character through
emulative consumption.

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Navigating Through the Literary Fog
Gothic Tales?

Towards the end of her introduction, Canfield Fisher apprehensively asks her
readers whether she has given them the “idea that the book is filled with a many-
colored literary fog” (ix). I do not read this as a purely rhetorical question, even
though Canfield Fisher hastens to assure the reader that if that is the impression
her description of the tales has given, she has been exceptionally inept at
describing them. In her role as Book-of-the-Month-Club-associate, Canfield
Fisher was probably as concerned as Blixen/Dinesen’s publisher Haas about the
ways in which these incomparably “new” tales would be received by the Club’s
members. Were they perhaps too difficult and strange for the average member,
despite the fact that they were not works of genius? In 1934, Swedish critic Klara
Johansson read the English edition of Seven Gothic Tales and wrote to a friend:

I have finally gotten hold of Seven Gothic Tales. If I were a reviewer, I

would read it at least seven times before I would dare to write about it. The
fact that this book has become a popular success must be due to some
curious mistake. (qtd. in Den främmande förförerskan 265)
(Seven Gothic Tales har jag nu äntligen fått i mina händer. Vore jag
recensent skulle jag läsa den sju gånger minst innan jag vågade mig på den.
Att den boken har gjort publiklycka måste bero på något sällsamt misstag.)

To a professional reader such as Johansson, the popular success of Seven Gothic

Tales was inexplicable because to read it required an almost scholarly familiarity
with literary tradition if one were to decipher the wealth of allusions that it
contains. The sheer literariness of Blixen/Dinesen’s writings, especially in her
first published work, is daunting, and Johansson wrote: “I do not think that I have
yet discovered half of all the allusions and traps hidden in this book” (“Ännu tror
jag mig inte om att ha upptäckt hälften av de allusioner och fällor den gömmer”
265). To a well-read critic such as Johansson or to professional academic readers
Seven Gothic Tales really does present itself as a potential trap, or maze to get lost
in. Many critics have pointed to the almost overwhelming wealth of intertextual
references in Dinesen’s works. Unlike these critics, I am not so interested in
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 puzzle-solving per se, but rather in the way in which Seven Gothic Tales presents
itself as a meaningful work of art to potential readers, ranging from the
professional critic intent on puzzle-solving to the average reader addressed by
Canfield Fisher in 1934, and still today. Why did Seven Gothic Tales become, and
remain, a popular success, despite that fact that someone like Johansson felt that it
was much too difficult? What tools does the work itself offer its reader in the
navigation through a many-colored literary fog?
As Culler has pointed out, the structuralism concept of intertexuality is closely
related to the concept of verisimilitude, and Todorov’s third and fourth senses of
verisimilitude have to do with the way in which a literary text conforms to and
deviates from genre-conventions in a number of ways (139). Leaving the
intertextual puzzle aside for the time being, I want to start by considering the way
in which Seven Gothic Tales uses paratextual and extratextual components to
place itself and become recognizable to a reader.
Aristotle’s discussion of comedy and tragedy laid the ground for the
development and refinement of a strict and normative genre-system founded on
the notion of unity between form, subject matter, characters and style during the
Renaissance. And while the rigor of the French Classicists may have been the last
battle-cry of genre-exactitude, the system was still operative well into the
nineteenth century when the realistic novel was still considered to be a low-status
kind of writing. Today, we still talk about genres such as poetry, biography, short
story or novel, but the system is less hierarchical and the boundaries between
genres are fluid. In practice, the concept of genre has essentially become an
indication of subject matter or literary mode when we speak of fantasy, crime and
science-fiction as separate genres on an increasingly diverse and heterogeneous
book market. But while the concept of genre may no longer reflect and sustain a
strictly regulated social order and world view, the use of genre-definitions still
function to establish a contract between work and reader, so “as to make certain
relevant expectations operative,” as Culler writes (147). The contractual aspect of
genre is perhaps best understood in terms of genealogy where the individual work
combines form, style, characters and subject matter in a way which complies with
and deviates from the reader’s expectations and knowledge of the genre at hand.

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 In fact, today’s fluid genre-boundaries may have made the notion of genre as
contract as important as in the time of the Renaissance, albeit in a different
manner, witnessed by, for example, the hybrid genre of fictional biographies.
Successful books such as Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), Joyce Carol
Oates’ Blonde (2000), Calm Toibin’s The Master or David Lodge’s Author,
Author (both in 2004), use the poetic license of the novel to construct fiction
based on the lives of actual, famous people: Virginia Woolf, Marilyn Monroe and
Henry James. Since these books are defined as “novels,” sometimes explicitly as a
part of the title, and written by well-known and established “novelists,” the reader
does not expect them to provide sources or to necessarily be biographically
accurate. At the same time, a work such as Blonde makes generous use of
biographical material in its cover illustrations, and back and front cover blurbs.
As this example indicates, the weakening of a normative genre-system has
made the concept of genre more dependent on paratextual, but also extraliterary
elements. Looking at a work such as Don Quixote, published at the beginning of
the seventeenth century, it is obvious that this work derived its meaning and
coherence by explicitly relating to the chivalric romance, parodying a well-known
and highly formulaic genre by using its staple characters, attributes and events.
When, in 1922, James Joyce published Ulysses, the relationship between the
heroic epic genre that Joyce’s novel alludes to is less direct and apparent in the
text itself. Without the title, it is doubtful whether the average reader of Joyce’s
novel would have caught its intertextual reference at all. At the same time, extra-
literary elements such as the fact that the book was written by James Joyce and
published by Shakespeare and Company, served the same contractual purpose as
Cervantes’ explicit references to the chivalric romance. The names of author and
publisher functioned as relay-points by which Ulysses assumed a relation with the
universe of literature, and a very definite corner of this universe.
That is to say, a definition of genre has to be both textually and contextually
based, and it has to take into account that a literary work may be defined as
belonging to several genres at once, depending on the reader’s context but also on
paratexts and extratextual conditions. Today, Don Quixote is read as a significant
parody of the chivalric romance since it prefigures the development of literary
forms liberated from formulaic genre-convention, but also as a novel. Then again,

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 if it was read without knowledge of literary history it would still function as a
parody, but then perhaps in reference to the traditional fairy tale or Walt Disney’s
recycling of the chivalric code in movies.
In fact, the publication and reception history of Seven Gothic Tales offers an
excellent example of the ways in which paratextual and extraliterary contexts
determine the reading and reception of a literary work as belonging to a particular
genre. It is a book which forces us to think about the work of art as an object for
sale on a market, even without Canfield Fisher’s introductory text which explicitly
places it there. One of the most obvious ways in which a book targets an audience
on the market is through its title. Blixen/Dinesen’s first work exhibits an
interesting plasticity in this respect that reflects the identification of consumers on
an increasingly globalized mass market as a diverse group, and maximizing profit
by constructing the modern work as a kind of multi-purpose object designed to be
used by each subgroup after its own fashion and needs (“Beyond the Cave” 17).
Seven Gothic Tales was published in the US in April, 1934, and in England in
the fall of the same year. In September, 1934, her collection was published in
Swedish under the title Sju romantiska berättelser, and, finally in 1935, in Danish
under the title Syv fantastiske fortællinger. Susan Brantly rightly points out that
the choice of titles in English, Danish and Swedish, has to be thought of as
reflections of a “canny assessment of her potential audiences and the literary
traditions with which they might be familiar” (14). That is to say, the titles were
tailored to suit different cultural contexts. While it could be argued that the
appellations gothic, fantastic and romantic all aptly reflect the content of
Blixen/Dinesen’s tales, this was not the most important aspect of their function on
the mass market. I want to take Brantly’s observation one step further and suggest
that while the assessment of the audience’s willingness to buy this particular
object did take into account national differences, it did not count on the readers’
familiarity with specific literary traditions, but rather on the way in which these
appellations signified literary tradition per se: literary brands.35 You did not have
to know classical architecture and aesthetics in order to want to drive a car that
supposedly signified the cultural value inherent in the idea of ancient Greece. You

35
In the Scandinavian languages and in German, ”Gothic” translates as ”skrekkromatik” and
”Schauerroman” in a literary context.
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 did not have to have read Walpole or Byron, in order to want to buy a book the
title of which promised that you were reading or just displaying on your
bookshelves something that was part of established, recognized and valued
culture. In buying Blixen/Dinesen’s tales, the consumer could claim an affiliation
with Literature, not only in the act of buying the book, but through the branding
established by its title(s).
The marketing of her first collection of stories also reflect the breakdown of the
homogenous, bourgeoisie Western reading public that had been taken for granted
by the publishing industry only a couple of decades earlier when reading for
pleasure was an activity limited to a small segment of society. A class of people
who, like Blixen/Dinesen herself, knew and read several European languages, and
whose approach to literature was not primarily defined in national terms but as a
manifestation of social belonging and standing. Her original idea for a title was
Tales of Nozdref’s Cook, an accurate expression of her own belonging in the
educated bourgeoisie. It was a title that presupposed an intimate knowledge of
Gogol’s 1842 novel Dead Souls in order to be interpreted, a novel where Nozdref
(or Nozdrev) is a minor character and his cook only indirectly present for half-a-
page in the description of the food she has cooked. A few decades earlier, this title
would have functioned as a desirable demarcation of an exclusive audience. In
1934 and in the Book-of-the-Month-Club-context on a mass market it would have
signaled unattainable sophistication and accumulated learning of the kind that
could not be packaged and marketed for immediate consumption by a middle-
class audience.
At the same time, to the reader familiar with the traditions alluded to the titles
do suggest a mode of reading, a set of expectations that the reader brings to his or
her reading of the book. In the world of professional readers trained in identifying
intertextual allusions, genres and structures, the explicit reference to the gothic not
only invites a certain mode of reading. It becomes an imperative call for a reading
grounded in knowledge of this particular tradition. This would explain why Seven
Gothic Tales has been read and interpreted in relation to a gothic tradition by,
primarily, English-speaking critics and academics. In an interesting relatively
recent Swedish article, arguing that Blixen/Dinesen should be read within a gothic
tradition, Claudia Lindén suggests that the reason why

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 the gothic has played a subordinate role in Danish Blixen-research, may also
be understood as a consequence of the Danish Syv fantastiske fortællinger.
Even if the fantastic is close to the Gothic, the self-evident association to a
genre has disappeared. (107)
(Att det gotiska spelat en underordnad roll i den danskbaserade
Blixenforskningen har kanske också sin förklaring i översättningen till
danskans Syv fantastiske Fortællinger. Även om det fantastiska ligger nära
det gotiska, så har den självklara genreassociationen försvunnit.)

Just like the English and Danish titles, the Swedish title references an identifiable
literary tradition, namely romanticism, and in a Swedish context, Dinesen’s – or
Blixen’s – tales have often been read in relation to a Romantic tradition, most
recently by Leif Dahlberg in a dissertation entitled Tre romantiska berättelser
(Three Romantic Tales 1999); a study of three twentieth century Swedish authors
where Blixen/Dinesen’s writings are constant and crucial intertexts, signaled
already in the title alluding to Sju romantiska berättelser.
To a reader of Seven Gothic Tales, the gothic is something that has to be dealt
with at some point, whether or not the professional reader aims to show and
exemplify that Blixen/Dinesen’s tales are indeed part of a gothic tradition. The
degree to which she is considered to belong there seems to reflect the critic’s
intentions as well as the status of gothic fiction at the time and place of writing. In
1964, Langbaum, in passing and without explicitly mentioning the gothic, stresses
that her tales are neither hair-raising, nor filled with the “blatantly supernatural”
(88). They are, he writes, “fantastic in the way wit is – in the jubilant freedom
with which possibilities are stretched and ideas combined” (89). Langbaum was at
pains to distance Blixen/Dinesen’s writings from the gothic, in favor of what he
labels her “Romantic wit” (74). A decade later, critic Ellen Moers placed
Blixen/Dinesen squarely within a tradition that she identified as “Female Gothic”
(5). In her by now classical feminist work Literary Women, she constructed a
female gothic genealogy, starting with Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley, including
Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Djuna Barnes, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath
and reaching into the present through the works of the poet Robin Morgan and her
collection Monsters (1972).

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 Moers’ identification of the “Female Gothic” as a tradition reaching back into
the late eighteenth century and continuing interrupted into the twentieth century
has, as Lindén points out in her article on one of the tales in the 1934 collection,
continued to inspire in particular feminist critics. Important Blixen/Dinesen-critics
such as Juhl and Jorgensen, Stambaugh, James, Aiken, Jackson, and Lindén
herself read Blixen/Dinesen as part of this tradition, comparing her with Radcliffe
at one end of the temporal spectrum, and Barnes and Woolf at the other. There is
no doubt that the readings of Blixen/Dinesen as a gothic author have been and
continue to be critically productive, in at least two respects, also identified by
Lindén. They place her writings within a recognized literary tradition and context,
and instead of being labeled atavistic and anachronistic she becomes, as David
Punter writes, “one of the most important Gothic writers of last two centuries”
(411). Further, as part of an ongoing tradition with claims to academic
recognition, Blixen/Dinesen’s writings can always be brought up to date
theoretically, making them today, as Dag Heede writes “a goldmine for
postsexual, postfeminist and queer theory” (13). Readings of her works within the
field of queer-theory continue along what Lindén calls the “gothic trail” in reading
the fantastic and supernatural as explorations and disruptions of stable notions of
sexuality and gender (103).
I do not want to diminish the value of Blixen/Dinesen-studies with a gothic
and/or queer theoretical slant. I find them both inspiring and insightful, and I am
well aware of the importance of half-a-century of feminist engagement with
Blixen/Dinesen’s writings. I am also grateful for the impact it has had on the
standing of female authors and women within and outside the academic world. At
the same time, I want to suggest that the reading of her works as part of a Female
Gothic tradition which is in itself an academic tradition by now, also reflects the
degree to which the necessity of branding a product and to continuously reinvent
it within the parameters of the brand in order to make it visible and consumable
on the mass marketplace permeates society. This includes sectors that would not
necessarily identify themselves with the consumerist logic.
The branding of Blixen/Dinesen’s tales as gothic encourages diachronic
analyses of her works, identifying thematic similarities in trans-historical readings
where the late eighteenth century is as relevant to the interpretation as the

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 concerns of the early twenty-first century. 36 Or, when the approach is structural
rather than thematic Seven Gothic Tales may become, as in Jaqueline Howard’s
bakhtinian approach to gothic fiction, yet again, an “anachronistic” example of
gothic writing (105). While this makes her writings forever potentially
contemporary in the hands of the critic, it also makes them strangely a-temporal.
While acknowledging the importance of studying Blixen/Dinesen as a “rewriter”
of patriarchal tradition, and being inspired by, for example Rees’ study of her
“intertextual use of ... gothic precursors,” I believe that the intense
contemporaneousness of her writings demands a more flexible understanding of
the way in which Seven Gothic Tales conforms to more than one genre (“Holy
Witch and Wanton Saint” 333). That is to say, a reading that is prepared to leave
the gothic trail pointed out by the English title, or at least stray from the path
every now and then.
I choose to read the first word of Blixen/Dinesen’s title as an indication of the
role played by marketing considerations and extratextual components in genre-
construction on a modern, dynamic and transcultural book market. The second
word in the title, while more consistent across languages, must also be considered
extratextually. “Tale,” “fortællinger” and “berättelser” all refer to oral tradition: to
telling (fortalle and berätta), and Blixen/Dinesen would stick with this oral
reference throughout her career, writing Last Tales and Winter’s Tales. 37
Blixen/Dinesen also used the image of herself as a story-teller in the marketing of
her stories, appearing on the stage in public, on radio and television, telling
stories. It is significant, however, that the stories she chose to tell on stage or
television were either shortened versions of stories from her non-fiction writings
on Africa, such as “Barua a Soldani” from Shadows on the Grass (1962), or inset
tales from her fiction, such as “The Wine of the Tetrarch” from “The Deluge at
Norderney.” When her stories were broadcast by Danish radio, she of course read
them. By all accounts, Blixen/Dinesen was an excellent story-teller on stage as

36
Or, indeed, ”fantastic” or ”romantic”
37
As I have already indicated, the “Angelic Avengers” was a “failed” novel which Blixen/Dinesen did not
want to count among her real works. “Anecdotes of Destiny” (1958) was the last fictional work she published,
and in a letter to Haas in 1956 she compares it to Last Tales, which she insists on having published first, saying
that while she does not think of Anecdotes as a work of lower quality than Last Tales, it is “played on a different
kind of instrument, and does carry less weight.” (Karen Blixen i Danmark. Bind 2 328)
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 witnessed by, for example, Arendt who went to listen to and see Blixen/Dinesen
in New York and who wrote to a friend

She came, very very old, terribly fragile, beautifully dressed; she was led to
a kind of Renaissance chair, given some wine, and then, without a shred of
paper, she began to tell stories [from the Out of Africa book], almost word
for word as they exist in print. The audience, all very young people, was
overwhelmed … She was like an apparition from god knows where or
when. And even more convincing than in print. Also: a great lady. (qtd. in
Young-Bruehl 18).

The narratives of Seven Gothic Tales also foreground the act of story-telling at
various levels. The characters are brought together within an enclosed space and a
delimited time-frame, such as a sinking hayloft in “The Deluge at Norderney” or
on board a dhow in “The Dreamers,” where they tell each other stories. These
narratives are essentially stories about people telling stories and responding to
each other’s stories by telling yet another story. The characters also explicitly
refer to the art of story-telling and the figure of the story-teller. The cardinal in
“The Deluge at Norderney” encourages miss Malin Natt-og-Dag to transfer her
talents as a hostess of a salon to the sinking loft in order to make everybody keen
to be at his or her best even in the face of death. When everybody has told his or
her story, dawn breaks and the water slowly floods the floor-boards. Miss Malin
Nat-og-Dag

stopped and looked toward the wall. Between the boards a strip of fresh
deep blue was showing, against which the little lamp seemed to make raid
stain. The dawn was breaking.
The old woman slowly drew her fingers out of the man’s hand, and placed
one upon her lips. ‘À ce moment de sa narration’, she said, ‘Scheherazade
vit paraître le matin, et, discrete, se tut.’ (188)

In “The Dreamers” the professional story-teller Mira Jama who appears again in
Blixen/Dinesen’s future works, reflects on his own profession and what a story is
before he settles down in the role of listener as Lincoln Forsner tells his story,
which turns out to be in fact four tales, one inserted within the other.
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 Thus, the title and narratives of Seven Gothic Tales like Blixen/Dinesen herself
reference an ancient oral tradition that had been lost in a time and place of general
literacy, magazines and radio broadcasts. At the same time, modern technology in
the form of radio and television is decisive in the creation of the image of
Blixen/Dinesen as a story-teller. In the twentieth century, the author may again
appear in the role of story-teller, but only as apparition and mediated presence: a
body-less voice or a face on the screen. Human interaction represented as the
exchange of stories which is both a theme and a structure in Seven Gothic Tales,
has become monetary-based exchange in a one-way communication with a paying
audience. Perhaps the figure of Mira Jama, the professional story-teller who has
fallen silent and decided to tell no more stories can be read as a sign of
Blixen/Dinesen’s awareness of the irony inherent in reviving the figure of story-
teller in the twentieth century. While making good use of the deliberate
anachronism of story-telling, she hints at the sheer impossibility of story-telling in
a time and place when print-culture and mass media ruled supreme.

The Allegorical Compass

Story-telling and the reference to an oral tradition is not only present at the para-
textual, extratextual and thematic level of Seven Gothic Tales. It is also very much
present in the structure of these stories where inset tales and the wealth of explicit
intertexts are the most conspicuous narrative features. In his discussion of the
medieval romance genre and its relation to an oral tradition and culture, Eugène
Vinaver points to the ways in which the romance tradition conceived of
composition as a precarious balance between conjointure and contes, between
coherence and digression, “leaving part of its material free from the restraints of
design,” and measuring the degree of artistry in the ability to build up sequences
out of already existing stories (52).
While the box-within-a-box structure and the intertextual references that
characterize Seven Gothic Tales are traceable back to an oral culture, Langbaum
was the first to point out that despite Blixen/Dinesen’s own claim that she was a
story-teller, “the complexity of pattern, the need to read backwards and forwards,
would make the stories impossible to take in by ear” (25). Not only impossible to

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 take in by ear, but also impossible to interpret without a profound knowledge of
Western cultural tradition, history and languages, and access to a well-stocked
library. Theoretically, the lists of topics and themes that is opened up by
Blixen/Dinesen’s extensive use of intertexts is endless, and it might very well lead
the reader into something that feels very much like a wild-goose chase, but still
within the parameters of intertextual interpretation.
Blixen/Dinesen research and criticism has dealt with the intertextual wealth in
the only way possible by starting out with a very definite view of what to find,
and interpret allusions in accordance with this view. Langbaum’s book is a
learned and sensitive study of the ways in which Blixen/Dinesen belongs within
the main stream of literature which to him consisted of Yeats, Mann, Joyce and
Eliot. Thus, he interprets the intertexts as examples of how Blixen/Dinesen
salvages the romantic idea of a self emerging from archetypal identities, and
grounded in internal instincts that originate from the “earliest tremors of earthly
life” (284). Later critics have followed in his footsteps, reading the tales as
“multilayered texts embedded with new clues to be discovered upon each
rereading” as Brantly writes (1). Or as “intricate intertextual puzzles” as Rees puts
it (“Holy Witch and Wanton Saint” 333). While using the same interpretative
tools, that is to say solving the puzzle by identifying the clues, later critical
writing has shifted Langbaum’s main-streaming project towards an understanding
of Blixen/Dinesen as essentially a re-writer of the ideological underpinnings of
main stream literature (Rees, Glienke, Brantly, Stambaugh, Aiken and others).
Often, but not always, with an explicitly feminist understanding of the
relationship between text and intertext. In Rees’ interesting and persuasive article
on Blixen/Dinesen’s intertextual use of R.L. Stevenson’s short story “Olalla” and
the French author Amadée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1874-story “À un diner d’athées”
in “The Dreamers,” she suggests that “Dinesen actively inverts the characteristics
of the two female characters by reversing their roles and calling into question the
assumptions about female identity that the source stories present” (334). Other
influential non-feminist scholars define her works in a similar vein, as, for
example, Bernhard Glienke who writes that Blixen/Dinesen’s “creativity often

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 works though so-called ‘counter-stories’”(“arbejder hendes kreativitet gerne med
såkaldte ‘modhistorier’” 422).38
However, even when the interpreter has a very definite idea of what he/she will
find in Blixen/Dinesen’s intertextual references, there is always the possibility of
being led by one’s ardent desire to make sense and create meaning into a maze of
interpretations. In “The Dreamers,” Lincoln Forsner’s tale of his meeting with
Olalla frames the inserted tales of two other men, who have met and fallen in love
with the same woman, but they know her as Lola and Rosalba respectively. One
of these characters is called Baron Guildenstern and the other Friedrich
Hohenemser, but the latter was, according to Forsner who is telling the story, “in
looks and manners, so like a dog I had once owned and which was named Pilot,
that I used to call him that” (254).39 The name Pilot will lead the well-read critic
to “Rochester’s dog in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1874), making him a very
minor Gothic character indeed” as Brantly writes (60). Or, raise the question
whether this is indeed a significant intertextual reference or merely a rather
common dog’s name? In “The Monkey” the observant reader of a collection of
short stories described as gothic by the title, will note the fact that the peculiar
monkey has been given to the prioress by her cousin, Admiral von Schreckenstein
(75). Perhaps he or she will also remember that Count von Schimmelmann in
“The Road Round Pisa” reminiscences about “adventures” – possibly of the
adulterous kind – that he has had at Ingolstadt (8). He or she will perhaps struggle
to find a connection between a possible Frankenstein-intertext and the bust of
Immanuel Kant on the pedestal on to which the monkey gracefully leaps on the
final page of the story. Several critics place the monkey on top of Immanuel Kant
in their interpretations, suggesting the importance they attach to the Kantian

38
Glienke has very meticulously established a 60-page “inventory of references” (Referenzinventar) in his
book on Dinesen, and he has even counted the number of times a particular author and his (always) works are
referred to in Blixen/Dinesen’s works. Shakespeare heads the list with 139 instances, outdistancing Homer (39),
Goethe (33) and H.C. Andersen (24). Glienke does not include the Bible in his list, but points out that references
to biblical passages and the appearance of biblical figures in these stories are more frequent than even
Shakespeare (Fatale Präzendens. Karens Blixens Mythologie. Skandinavistische Studien, Band 18. Neumünster:
1986).
39
While both names - Guildenstern and Hohenemser – are actual non-literary names, the former is also the
name of the servile and treacherous baron of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Thus, the reader intent on looking for
meaningful clues in the intertextual web will try to understand the function of Blixen/Dinesen’s Guildenstern in
relation to his role and character in Hamlet, a play directly alluded to in the very first tale of Seven Gothic Tales,
as well as in the title of “The Supper at Elsinore.”
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 intertext. In reading “The Deluge at Norderney,” the fact that the poet Count
August Platen-Hallermund is discussed by the characters suggests that his poetry
may be an interesting intertext, but since it is mainly Platen-Hallermund’s
homosexuality that is targeted in the text, Heinrich Heine also figures as a
possibly meaningful intertext. Heine wrote about the homosexual “von Platen-
affair” in Die Bäder von Lucca (1829), and he also wrote about his stay at the
fashionable seaside resort of Norderney in 1825. Johansson commented on
Blixen/Dinesen’s reference to von Platen: “She invents ‘historical’ characters, and
she provides the real historical characters with astonishing biographies. It is
difficult to imagine anything as wonderfully impudent as her treatment of poor
August von Platen” (“Hon uppfinner ‘historiska’ personer, och de verkligt
historiska ger hon en fantastisk biografi. Man kan inte tänka sig något mer
överdådigt fräckt än hennes behandling av stackars Augustus von Platen” qtd. in
Den främmande förförerskan 266). “The Supper at Elsinore” will again bring
Shakespeare’s Hamlet to mind, and the character nicknamed Timon of Assens in
“The Deluge at Norderney” will invite an intertextual comparison between
Dinesen’s story and Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.
A well-read reader intent on pursuing the intertexts always runs the risk of
being overly creative. Brantly writes that “no doubt, Dinesen also noticed the
similarity of the name ‘Olalla’ to the ‘Oh-la-la!’ of the Parisian cancan girls (59).
Since there are no Parisian cancan girls in “The Dreamers,” this suggestion relies
entirely on a supposition about the associations of an author who has been dead
for half-a-century. In “The Supper at Elsinore,” the sisters de Connick are visited
by their long-lost brother Morten’s ghost, and Fanny reproaches him for having
taken off and deserted the woman, Adrienne, whom he was supposed to have
married. She looks at him to see what he would say to this but instead of saying
anything Morten starts to quote “one of Uncle Ferdinand’s ditties. This had been
made on a special occasion, when the old aunts of the King of France had been
leaving the country” (224). The siblings take turns in quoting, in original French,
the verses of this song that was written in 1792 and that playfully suggest that
Marat’s shirts had all been stolen from the King’s aunts: “Avait-il des chemises?

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 Moi je crois qu’il n’en avait pas. Où les avait-il prises?”(225).40 The quoting of a
childhood ditty seems to renew the bond between the siblings, and “with these
words the brother and the sisters lightened their hearts and washed their hands for
ever of fair, unhappy Adrienne Rosenstand” (225). Langbaum, however, is not
satisfied with this rather straightforward interpretation of the significance of the
French intertext, but suggests instead that “the point seems to be that just as Marat
had only the shirts he had stolen from the aristocrats, so Adrienne never had any
existence to destroy” (92). That this “seems to be” the point signals Langbaum’s
awareness of how weak his interpretation is. Nevertheless, he cannot abstain from
suggesting it since the puzzle-character of Dinesen’s writings challenges the
professionally trained reader to interpret and pursue all intertexts as possible
clues, as signs of culture and tradition. In his reading of “The Monkey,”
Langbaum also struggles to fit two passages from Aeschylus’s Eumenides into the
puzzle. Boris has been sent by the prioress/monkey to attempt to seduce Athena,
and while walking to her room, Boris quotes Orestes’ prayer to Pallas Athena for
help in his forthcoming trial where he will be charged with matricide. Langbaum
suggests that “in violating his own ideal of chastity, Boris is perhaps in a
psychological sense killing his mother” (84). When Boris leaves Athena’s room
after the failed seduction, he again quotes from the Eumenides, this time Orestes’
prayer to the goddess after having been exonerated of his crime. Langbaum writes
that Athena “would seem, for some psychological reason that is obscure, to have
helped Boris overcome the sense of guilt about sex that is associated in his mind
with matricide” (87). In Langbaum’s text the words “perhaps,” “would seem” and
“obscure” again signal doubts about his own interpretations of the intertext, and,
again, he cannot abstain from pursuing them. Boris arrives at Closter Seven after a
homosexual scandal to ask his aunt the prioress to help him to arrange a marriage:
“’I should like’ – here he swallowed to keep his rebellious heart in place, knowing
how little indeed it would like it – ‘to marry’” (79).41 While Boris’ decision to
marry certainly violates his homosexual desire that the story discusses at some

40
In a footnote, Langbaum traces the source text, and it seems that he might have been put on the right track
by Karen Blixen herself.
41
Langbaum suggests that Blixen/Dinesen’s cultural intertext in this case is the Eulenberg Affair that took
place at the Prussian Court in the early twentieth century.
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 length, there are no traces in his character or actions of the ideal of chastity or the
guilt-ridden sexuality that Langbaum invokes. The theme of matricide is
introduced by the quote from Orestes, but there is nothing in the story that
connects Boris’ supposedly lethal feelings for his mother with sexual desire,
indeed Boris’ mother is hardly mentioned at all.
In order to solve the Orestes-puzzle, the critic Annelies van Hees introduces
the idea that Boris’ homosexuality is the result of an oedipal complex, and Brantly
follows this lead when she writes that Boris “has become so bonded to his mother
that sexual relations with another woman would constitute a betrayal” (37). Read
in the light of an oedipal complex, the lines from Orestes suddenly become
meaningful as “sex with another woman is tantamount to the murder of [Boris’]
mother and betrayal” (Brantly 38). Again, the absence of Boris’ mother in the
narrative makes this a difficult interpretation to sustain outside of the intertextual
reference in isolation.
If, as Vinaver suggests, the romance with its roots in oral traditions measures
and demonstrates artistry in the artist’s ability to build up sequences out of already
existing stories, it might be argued that Blixen/Dinesen’s stories displace the
demonstration of artistry onto the reader, who has to work hard and be creative in
order to identify the clues and solve the puzzle. Johansson felt that she could
smell an army of rats in Blixen/Dinesen’s extensive use of allusions, suggesting
that she was in fact making fun of the reader ardent on solving the textual
puzzles.42 Whether Johansson was right or not, the intertextual puzzles and the
box-within-a-box structure are two textual features that function as allusions to an
oral tradition, while simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically accentuating the
literariness of Seven Gothic Tales. The reader cannot for a moment forget that she
or he inhabits a work of art, as Langbaum points out (25). This observation brings
me back to Johansson’s question in 1934: how did the masses that made Seven
Gothic Tales into a bestseller, in fact read this book? Obviously, there is no clear-
cut answer to that question, but I believe that Canfield Fisher’s foreword offers a
clue in its extensive use of references to classical literature in the attempt to define
the nature of this intensely “new” book. Again, Seven Gothic Tales offered and

42
One of Johansson’s examples is the way in which quotes straight from Søren Kierkegaard are spoken by
characters belonging in a time when the Danish philosopher had not yet started writing.
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 continues to offer itself as multi-purpose object designed to be used by each
subgroup after its own fashion and needs. For the academically trained reader, the
intertexts read as exciting challenges and puzzles that call for neat solutions. To
the Book-of-the-Month-Club-reader, Seven Gothic Tales presents itself as a work
of art that puts the reader in touch with canonical culture.
Seven Gothic Tales strikes a very clever balance between being, as Johansson
wrote, “difficult” and highbrow on the one hand, and accessible and middlebrow
on the other. To say however, that the average Book-of-the-Month-Club-Reader
read Blixen/Dinesen’s tales simply because he or she wanted to flaunt cultural
know-how is to underestimate both the average reader and the tales themselves. I
want to illustrate this by looking at one passage in “The Roads Round Pisa”.
Count von Schimmelmann has been sent by the old lady into an adventure ripe
with traditional romance-themes. Rosina loves her cousin Mario, but is forced to
marry the old, powerful Prince Potenziani. A month after the wedding, Rosina
petitions the pope for an annulment, on the grounds that the marriage has not been
consummated. The prince then sends his young friend Prince Nino into Rosina’s
bedchamber to rape her in order to prove the consummation of the marriage. On
that particular night, however, Rosina has persuaded her friend Agnese to take her
place in the marital bed, in order to slip away and meet her lover Mario. Thus, it is
Agnese who is raped by Nino. Prince Potenziani believes that his friend Nino has
betrayed him, and challenges him in a duel. At this point, Agnese steps forward to
reveal the truth. Prince Potenziani forgives his friend, and dies without a single
shot being fired. Following the duel-scene and its revelation of Nino’s rape of
Agnese, the two young people stand facing each other as the cock crows, “a
descendant of the cock in the house of the high priest Caiaphas” (44). Nino then
quotes the lines from Divina Commedia where Dante meets Beatrice at the top of
the mountain of Purgatory. He goes on to quote Dante’s repentance for his
unfaithfulness to Beatrice, and Agnese responds by quoting Beatrice’s
forgiveness. All in Italian.43 In a persuasive interpretation of this brief passage,
Langbaum suggests that the crowing cock alludes to Peter’s denial of Christ, thus
expressing the “intensity of Agnese's unspoken accusation against Giovanni”. By

43
Blixen/Dinesen did not translate quotes in Latin, German, Italian or French, while quotes from the
Scandinavian languages were translated into English.
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 referring to Dante, the two young people who “were brought together physically
when they acted out the old comic tale of the substitute bride … step[ping] into a
more exalted artwork” and are brought together spiritually (17).
Langbaum’s learned uncovering of the intertextual references certainly adds
depth to the scene and the exchange between the characters. Still, to a reader
without any knowledge of Italian or unable to recognize the quote as being from
Dante, this scene would also be significant because of the way in which it is
structured. Agnese and Nino are described as “marionettes” on a stage, speaking
in quotes, which is of course what actors do, and Blixen/Dinesen’s theatrical
imagery has been noted by many critics. Langbaum observes that marionettes are,
besides the Book of Job, the reference that recurs most often in her works and I
will quote some of these instances (48):

“They all stood perfectly immobile, like a party of little wooden dolls placed
on that terrace of the inn.” (“The Roads Round Pisa” 41)
“Over our softly hissing glasses we were brought back to seeing ourselves
and this night of ours as a great artist might have seen us and it, worthy of
the genius of a god. I had a guitar lying on my sofa, for I was to serenade, in
a tableau vivant, a romantic beauty.” (“The Old Chevalier” 68)
“In the warm and cosy room he supped by himself. Like, he thought, Don
Giovanni in the last act of the opera.” (“The Monkey” 96)
“Out of gratitude to his godmother, he had resolved to do his best. He had
laid his mask with great care in front of his mirror, and had exchanged his
uniform for that black colour which he considered more appropriate to his
part.” (“The Monkey” 102)
“As if they had been four marionettes, pulled by the same wire, the four
people turned their faces to one another.” (“The Deluge at Norderney” 131)

The recurrent theatrical imagery of these short stories conditions our reading of
certain incidents in the stories as “scenes.” The narrative pauses momentarily as
the characters turn to one another in foregrounded and ritualized dialogue,
reminiscent of a duet in an opera. Whether or not the reader is able to fully
interpret the reference or the language, she or he will read the Dante-passage as
fraught with meaning, even if the precise meaning is obscure or ambiguous. To

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 use a phrase from Walter Benjamin, we might speak about the “allegorical
outlook” that Blixen/Dinesen’s tales inspire in its readers, as witnessed by the
professional readers’ attempts to fit each and every intertext into all-embracing
interpretations (The Origin of German Tragic Drama 220). Allegory understood
as a sustained metaphor always aims to illustrate an idea or a moral, and Seven
Gothic Tales uses the cultural and literary intertexts to construct a narrative that
encourages allegorical readings, giving the reader a sense of complexity and the
presence of concealed meanings.
The inset tales function in a similarly allegorical fashion, being, as Langbaum
pointed out, “the symbolic language through which the main story is told” (24).
The narrative of Seven Gothic Tales combine inset tales, or contes, to create a
main story “through the expansion or unrolling of a number of interlocked
themes,” as Vinaver writes in his study of classical romance (75). These contes
seldom relate themselves directly to the events of the mains story. Rather, they
function allegorically in relation to the main story, obliquely offering a frame of
interpretation. In “The Monkey,” the prioress tells the story of an African elephant
being sent to the King of Ava who had it chained and put in a cage. Within the
frame of the main story, the elephant-tale reads as a comment on the ‘caging’ of
sexuality that the dual character of prioress/monkey sets about to amend (107).
Towards the end of the main story, when the reader and the other characters learn
that the prioress speaking at the dinner table is really the monkey, the inserted tale
can also be interpreted, retrospectively, as a comment on the (African) monkey’s
situation as the prioress’ pet in Closter Seven as well as on the atmosphere of
Closter Seven as a retreat for unmarried ladies of noble birth.
While the relationship between inset tale and main narrative seems rather
straightforward in the case of the caged elephants, the allegorical meaning of an
inset tale is just as often dependent on the reader’s knowledge and point of view.
In “The Roads Round Pisa,” Prince Potenziani tells a story of the poet Monti who,
having just finished his Don Giovanni, is asked by his friend Monsignor Talbot
why he is so gloomy. 44 Monti rhetorically asks if it should not “weigh upon the

44
Monsignor Talbot might very well be the secretary to Pius IX, immortalized in Lytton Strachey’s
mischievous biographies of a number of admired public figures in Eminent Victorians (1918). The Prince carries
the same name and title as the governor of Rome, Prince Potenziani Spada (1880-1971), whose official visits
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 mind of a man to have created a human being who was to burn through eternity in
hell” (26). Talbot responds smilingly that this could only happen to real people
and asks whether the poet really believes himself to be a creator in the same sense
as God. Monti then erupts into a soliloquy, calling on Homer’s Ulysses,
Cervantes’ knight, Orlando and the Misanthrope to suggest that the artist is God’s
tool and that while the Monsignor himself will go out as a candle when he dies,
the literary creations will walk the mansions of eternity. When the Monsignor
questions this heretical view, Monti cries “oh, go and find out for yourself then!”
and shoots him (27). “Monti, the poet” is perhaps the Italian writer and translator
Vincenzo Monti (1754-1828), quite influential in his time, but certainly not very
well known in 1934.
In her reading of this passage, Brantly points out that Donald Hannah has
traced Monti’s words to a similar passage in Luigi Pirandello’s play Six
Characters in Search of An Author (1921), and Brantly finishes her discussion of
Blixen/Dinesen’s playful use of intertextual connections by asking, in
brackets:”(Could Monti have been the author Pirandello’s six characters were
looking for?)” (47). In fact, all of these intertextual references could be brought to
bear on the meanings of Blixen/Dinesen’s story. The story about Monti
establishes a connection between her story and other texts, and the function of this
inset tale within “The Roads Round Pisa” can be understood as alluding to a
number of themes such as love, artistic creativity, seduction, spiritual redemption,
quest, sacrifice, betrayal, the ways in which inherited values will always be
undermined and re-evaluated as time passes, literary tradition and so on.
Theoretically, the lists of topics and themes that is opened up by
Blixen/Dinesen’s use of inset tales is endless, depending on how far and wide a
reader is prepared to search. Unlike Brantly, I have not found any literary
treatment of Don Giovanni by Monti, but a work called “La Lettera di Fransesco
Piranesi al signor generale don Giovanni Acton” from 1794. It was written by
Monti at the instruction of the artist Piranesi to defend the latter’s dealings with
the Swedish envoy in Naples, Baron Gustav Mauritz Armfelt who conspired
against the Swedish regency. The Don Giovanni of this work was Sir John Acton

both to London and New York in the mid-1920s made it into newspapers and newsreels. The real Prince
Potenziani was forced by Mussolini to resign in 1928.
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 (1736-1811), the prime minister of Naples at the time of Armfelt’s stay there.
While we may consider this entirely random and apocryphal, the early nineteenth
century probably did not in the wake of the French revolution and the
assassination of the Swedish king Gustav III in 1792. And what about
Blixen/Dinesen who, despite being removed by a hundred years from these
dealings between barons, counts and kings, had a very definite view of the
meaning of nobility and the unswerving loyalty to an ideal that they supposedly
represented? And who was also, it should be remembered, incredibly well versed
in the ins and outs of European aristocratic and royal lineages and doings. Is her
reference, then, to the minor poet Monti’s work Don Giovanni, a canonical
subject in Western culture, and the poet’s violent reaction, really a tongue-in-
cheek comment on the affectations of any author claiming to create immortal
literary characters more real than reality, when he is in fact nothing but a hired
pen in the service of material, political interests? This too, would fit into a reading
of the entire Seven Gothic Tales which finally brings us to the councilor of the last
tale, where the appellation ‘Poet’ has become a lethal insult and culpability.
I find Brantly’s and Hannah’s tracing of Monti back to Pirandello both
persuasive and much easier to endorse since it is interliterary. At the same time, it
is impossible, once one has started thinking about it, to completely dispel the
thought that the figure of Monti and his work Don Giovanni is possible to read as
something which devalues any highfaluting celebrations of art as a vehicle of
spiritual truth. Finally, both allegorical interpretations of this inset tale can be
defended against the background of “The Roads Round Pisa” in isolation, as well
as in relation to Blixen/Dinesen’s entire collection.
In order to make sense of the inset tales, the reader is often forced to read
backwards and forwards. In “The Poet” Anders Kube envisions the council at
Caiaphas’ house in Jerusalem where Mary Magdalena persuades the Jewish elders
“that Christ was in reality the only-begotten son of God … and that what they
were about to do would be the only true crime in all the history of mankind”
(322). Eventually the council decides that “they must carry through their prospect.
If the world had really this one hope of salvation, they would have to fall in with
the plan of God, however dreadful the deed” (322-23). This beautiful inserted tale
seems quite meaningless at the point in the story at which it is told, and only

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 realizes its full allegorical potential at the end when Kube shoots his protector the
councilor in order to save his beloved from having to marry the councilor, and
also to save himself from the councilor’s desire to make a poet of the young man
by denying him love. Still, even then this allegorical relationship remains obscure,
and open to a number of different interpretations. Like the Jewish council Kube
has to commit the “true crime” of killing the councilor in order to realize his own
calling, un-enslaved by someone else’s desires and ambitions. Or, is it the
councilor who, like the Jewish Council, sacrifices himself in order that Kube may
realize his life’s calling, an interpretation suggested by Anders’ vision where “the
Councilor’s own face was somewhere in the council of the high priests” (323)?
Or, are we to read Kube in the figure of “red-haired Judas” who kills the councilor
for the simple reason that he is evil and wants the bride-to-be for himself (323)?
Or, does the inserted tale have no bearing at all on the events of the main story?
This question often comes to mind when reading Blixen/Dinesen.
The inset tales in Seven Gothic Tales seem to function in a way highly
reminiscent of the function of contes in traditional, courtly romances, where they
create what Frye has called a vertical perspective, where the romancer who
scrambles “over a series of disconnected episodes, seems to be trying to get to us
to the top of it” (50). Only, in Blixen/Dinesen’s stories, the role of romancer is no
longer acted by the character of the knight-errant hero of the traditional romance,
but rather by the reader. The inset tales have to be correctly interpreted and
understood in order for the events at the level of main story to proceed in a
meaningful way. At the same time, the allegorical content of the inset tales create
a digressive horizontal extension, where the fiction is kept going by adding tale to
tale.
While Langbaum only mentions romance in passing in his study of
Blixen/Dinesen’s works, his reading of her as “an important writer because she
has understood the tradition behind her and has taken the next step required by
that tradition” is clearly influenced by Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, published
only a few years earlier, and in his succinct summation of what the “next step”
entails, Langbaum writes:

Like the other, more massive writers of her generation – Rilke, Kafka,
Mann, Joyce, Eliot, Yeats too, though he is older – she takes off from a
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 sense of individuality developed in the course of the nineteenth century to
the point of morbidity, and leads that individuality where it wants to go. She
leads it back to a universal principle and a connection with the external
world. The universal principle is the unconscious life of man and nature,
which, welling up in the human consciousness as myth, is the source of
civilization, individual consciousness, and our concept of God’s unlimited
consciousness … to effect a transition from the individual to the archetypal
character: from the novel, with its separation of psychological and external
data, to the myth which speaks with one voice of both. (53)

I have quoted Langbaum at some length to suggest the flavor and tone of his
reading of Blixen/Dinesen’s art in a vein reminiscent of Frye’s. Art in general,
and certain literature in particular, takes on the teleological role hitherto reserved
for religious writings, with the author in the role of prophet leading her readers
towards closure and a sense of unity, from individual to collective consciousness.
The romantic movement initiated the celebration of the author in the role of
visionary, but I would suggest that Langbaum’s author- centered view where the
artist and the artwork fuse into a self-explanatory wholeness is also closely
connected to the marketing-of-the-author-strategy launched by the publishing
industry and the mass media market in the early twentieth century. Thus,
Blixen/Dinesen figures largely in Langbaum’s study as a consequence of
successful marketing strategies that created the “public figure”, author, actor,
politician, millionaire, industrialist, and artist, as a role model to be admired and
listened to, and paradoxically reflects the “morbid” development of individuality
as a sellable item in consumer society.
Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Langbaum’s author-centered,
teleological interpretation of Blixen/Dinesen’s works has been taken over by
feminist/queer readers. They represent her as a purposeful re-writer of
patriarchal/heteronormative traditions, implying that an all-encompassing,
teleological perspective on her works is both possible and desirable. Langbaum
argued that the thematic preoccupations with masks, masquerades, riddles,
unstable identities and marionettes in her works were resolved at the level of a
unifying myth. Today’s critics read these figures as symbolic enactments of
liberation and freedom from stable identities and sexualities. In both cases, the
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 work is approached as a harbinger of happy tidings, where the correct
interpretation will reveal the presence of new, and improved, order and social
vision.
Thinking about the way in which inset tale and main narrative relate
allegorically to one another, it becomes obvious that Seven Gothic Tales is a type
of literature that like fable, fairy-tale, myth or sacred scripture invites a message-
oriented, intensely interpretative reading. At the level of structure, allegorical
digressions, the interlacing of inset tales with main story, and the wealth of
intertextual references create a processional or sequential narrative where each
sequence seems to be charged with meanings that have to be revealed and
understood in order for the reading to continue towards the end and closure.
I want to suggest that it was precisely this allegorical element in
Blixen/Dinesen’s writings that made Lundkvist fume at her bombastic and
contradictory profundity in 1954 and that the Danish critics found pompous and
artificial in 1934. Langbaum too framed his attempt to prove that Blixen/Dinesen
wrote literature against the background of a perception of her writing as brilliant
mystifications and pastiche (1). To learned readers such as Langbaum and
Lundkvist there was clearly something potentially tasteless and irreverent about
Blixen/Dinesen’s use of intertexts where literary and cultural material is
referenced to produce a sense of profound, but ambiguous or unresolved
significance. Or to put it differently, where a sense of depth and significance is
produced through proxy.
I also want to suggest that the referential, allegorical structure of Seven Gothic
Tales was one reason why it became a popular success. It referenced Culture with
a capital ‘c’ in combination with a message-oriented structure that was familiar to
the average Book-of-the-Month-Club-reader in 1934 who was also a consumer
trained in the art of interpreting omnipresent commercial messages referencing
desirable cultural values. Extending Canfield Fisher’s market-metaphor, it might
be said that Seven Gothic Tales is not only a book on the market but also a book
which mimics the market overflowing with decipherable and value-laden signs
beckoning to the reader/consumer. Reading Seven Gothic Tales in this vein is not
unlike the experience of talking a walk in the maze of a commercial downtown
center, or leafing through the pages of Vanity Fair where each and every page

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 confronts the reader with signs referencing culture, refinement and socially useful
knowledge with the magical potential of transforming the self and the world if
correctly interpreted. The simple copy text story about the man who was turned
down because he had a bad breath contains, like allegory, a hidden, spiritual
meaning that has to do with identity and being. While the average Book-of-the-
Month-Club-reader in 1934 may have been unable to trace and identify all the
intertexts that Seven Gothic Tales explicitly and implicitly used, she or he was
highly sensitized to the presence and importance of hidden meanings and
messages. When Canfield Fisher filled her introduction with references to Byron,
Stevenson and Cervantes she was not only giving the potential reader an
orientation in literary tradition, she was also erecting the thumping signboard of
Culture to entice prospective consumers. In consumer society, Culture is a sign
that sells, just like Health, Love or Fame. Seven Gothic Tales represents the
experience of living in this world of consumption in a form which we recognize;
flooding us with a torrent of signs, meanings and values out of which we construct
the semblance of coherence. But since the sign-flood is potentially endless it
continuously shifts the ground for our attempts to create meaning and
significance, reminding us that there can be no final closure and no completeness.
Read against the background of modern consumer culture, the compositional
aspect of the romance-tradition where tradition is foregrounded to demonstrate
artistry in the interlacing of old and new, takes on a new significance.

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Perfectly Real Human Beings
Salvaged by the Past?

So far I have discussed Seven Gothic Tales as a malleable, multi-purpose work of

art and I have tried to show how its ostensibly anachronistic traits function in
relation to diverse audiences, interpreting these features in accordance with
distinct fashion and needs. Now, I want to consider how Seven Gothic Tales in its
entirety may be read as a typical Book-of-the-Month-club book in the sense that it
invited its readers “to share the thoughts of our own time,” as Canby put it in
explaining the selections (qtd. in Lee 118). In the final lines of her introduction,
Canfield Fisher defended the book against her own suggestion that it may seem a
many-colored literary fog, by writing that it was in fact a book where the light
may be strange, “but it is clear light, and in it we see a series of vigorously
presented, outrageously unexpected, sometimes horrifying, but perfectly real
human beings” (x). In the final instance the race-apart is revealed to be like the
collective “us” and the “we” that Canfield Fisher’s text consciously sets out to
create: the Book-of-the-Month-Club readers in 1934.
Seven Gothic Tales was published in the midst of the Depression that hit the
US in 1929, a disaster that is perhaps best represented in a scattering of figures.
Between 1929 and 1934, the GDP fell around 30 percent. More than 1 million
families lost their farms. The income figures of the average American family
dropped by 40 percent. 5000 banks went out of business. 2 million Americans
were homeless and migrated around the country looking for jobs. As Susman
points out, people in general, the “enormous American middle class,” who had
lost their jobs, homes, and savings did not react with anger and rebellion against
an economic and political system that had promised eternal progress for all but
had delivered ruin to many. Instead, the reaction was one of fear and shame,
which, writes Susman, makes it easier to understand “why the period proved in
the end so fundamentally conservative as it concentrated on finding and glorifying
an American Way of Life” (192). One of the sources Susman uses in his
discussion is Studs Terkel’s classical book of interviews Hard Times: An Oral
History of the Great Depression (1970), and Terkel himself wrote in a
commentary

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 The suddenly-idle hands blamed themselves, rather than society. True, there
were hunger marches and protestations to City Hall and Washington, but the
millions experienced a private kind of shame when the pink slip came. No
matter that others suffered the same fate, the inner voice whispered “I’m a
failure” …. Outside forces, except to the more articulate and political rebels,
were in some vague way responsible, but not really. It was a personal guilt.
(5)

While experts still debate and disagree on how to explain the economic and
political mechanisms of the Great Depression, a public addressed and socialized
as consumers responsible for producing themselves through consumption,
interpreted the cataclysmic events at the level of personal failure.
The degree to which consumerism ideology had saturated society becomes
apparent when reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) that has
become, as Casey points out in her essay on the American Depression literature,
“the arbiter of Depression imagery” (96). This is a novel that explicitly,
energetically, and politically, attempted to relocate failure from the personal to the
political level, from the individual to the macroeconomic level. The “failure [that]
hangs over the State like a great sorrow” is not the failure of the Joad-family and
millions of poor tenant-farmers along with them (385). They have been forced
from their barren lands, ploughs and mules in order to go west where “men of
understanding and knowledge” use technology and chemistry to augment and
diversify the yields of the land, developing new colors, flavors and fruits for the
consumer market (383). Steinbeck’s novel decries the moral failure of
technological development harnessed to profit-driven consumption-based
economy. It produces an endlessly growing variety of consumer goods on a large
scale but there is “a failure [here] that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the
straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of
pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange” (385).
But while this is a novel that persistently calls for anger and solidarity as a
reaction to a moral failure identified as social and systematic, it is also a novel that
is peculiarly nostalgic in its effort to imagine resistance and social change. When
Tom Joad walks out of the novel towards the end, the dialogue between him and
Ma Joad resonates with the imagery of rebellion and revolution. Yet, what Tom
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 envisions as the goal of collective struggle, is markedly individualistic and
backward-looking; for “our folks [to] eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses
they build,” to “farm our own lan’” (463). Casey argues that the popular success
of The Grapes of Wrath was due precisely to its ability to fuse an intimation of
collective, progressive action with the fundamentally individualistic, conservative
and nationalistic values of the yeoman farmer (96). In his novel, Steinbeck pitted
the simple, agrarian folk who had not changed with industry and to whom land
and food were one, against the “machine man, driving a dead tractor” (126). The
machine man is in the service of faceless producing industry, and the consuming
“Californians [who] wanted many things, accumulation, social success,
amusement, luxury” (257). Steinbeck created a powerful manichean drama in The
Grapes of Wrath by calling on the reader to make a morally infused choice
between the nebulous, undefined and seemingly insatiable wants of the
Californians and the literally earthbound, modest wants of the Okies (257). Yet,
while celebrating the heroism of the simple, victimized folk, the novel
acknowledges the impossibility of imagining the future as anything but a return to
a past that has been blasted out of existence by irreversible social change. The
choice is ultimately nonexistent and the novel reverts to a strikingly mythical,
archaic imagery in the final pages where the young woman, Rose of Sharon, who
has given birth to a still-born child breastfeeds a starving stranger in a deserted
barn, filled with the broken and rusty tools of a doomed agrarian society. The
iconic rendering of the lactating, nurturing woman with a mysterious smile on her
lip, cradling the stranger’s head in her hands, liberates the novel from the strains
of realism and the tragedy of not being able to envision a viable, collective future
beyond a morally failed but triumphant system.
Using a formulation from Casey, it could be argued that Steinbeck’s successful
novel struggles with the problem of how to “narrate stasis? The question cuts to
the core of fictional expression during the Great Depression” (iv). Actively and
passionately resisting and questioning the linear notion of progress, the novel opts
for a covert but nonetheless distinct regress into a mythologized, American past.
While Steinbeck’s novel may have become the quintessential account of the
Depression era, its nostalgia for a simpler, agrarian past and its celebration of the
resilient and honest farmer was typical of much cultural and intellectual

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 production at the time. As Susman points out, the 1930s was marked by a
complex effort to describe and define the singularity of American culture,
“distinguished from the material achievements (and the failures) of an American
industrial civilization” where “civilization itself – in its urban-industrial form –
seemed increasingly the enemy” (156). In this effort historical retrospect played a
crucial role. In his study of popular literature during the first half of the twentieth
century, Gordon Hutner writes that “the sheer enthusiasm for history animating so
many plots may never, in America, have been more fully sustained or widely
shared” than during this period (163).
It is tempting to think of the popularity of historical romances and popular
studies in earlier American history and culture at this time, simply in terms of an
escape from contemporary problems. Together with an ever-growing number of
murder mysteries they topped the annual best-seller lists during these years when
American progress seemed to have reached an impasse, the mechanisms of which
no-one seemed to be able to fully explain. Looking, like the Joad family, for an
answer to the question that runs throughout Steinbeck’s novel – “what’s it comin’
to?” or the answer to the question that animates the crime genre – whodunnit? –
the public looked to increasingly available forms of popular culture. Susman
suggests that the 1930s should be called the age of Mickey Mouse and Walt
Disney, creating a world that initially appears brutal, “absurd and even terrifying
… where the inanimate become living things, men become artificial, and nature
human, accepted scientific laws seem somehow no longer to apply … a world out
of order” (197). Yet, this is also a world where order is eventually and magically
restored, wishes fulfilled and traditional values reinforced.
To talk about popular culture in terms of escapism, however, suggests the
possibility to imagine that there is a somewhere else to go. As Steinbeck’s novel
makes clear, that “somewhere else” in the age of consumerism can only be
imagined in temporal terms. Thus, it is perhaps more productive to think of
popular culture in the 1930s as an arena creating, in the words of Anderson, a
“narrative of identity” encompassing the nation as an imagined community
grounded in a particular history (205). Like in a crime story, the riddle of the
present could only be solved by constructing a narrative of the past.

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 In this context, Seven Gothic Tales seems to offer itself as a book very much
about the past, its stories set in nineteenth century Europe where revolutions may
have come and passed but where the social order remains stable. The “proud and
kindly spirit of past feudal times seems to dwell” not only in Closter Seven of
“The Monkey,” but also in the fashionable sea-side resort of Norderney where
ladies, marriageable daughters, young dandies and old gentleman gather to gossip,
court and become one with romantic nature (75). It is a world of leisure and
wealth where young aristocratic men travel Europe in search of romantic
adventures and old ladies preside at social gatherings, creating an aura of wit and
refinement even if the “salon” happens to be located on a sinking hayloft or in the
presence of a ghost. In a sense, Seven Gothic Tales does present its reader with a
fairy-tale or romance universe where young noblemen are sent out rescue young
maidens as in “The Roads Round Pisa,” and where one can imagine, as Boris does
in “The Monkey,” a herd of unicorn grazing upon the sunny slopes (84). While
Blixen/Dinesen’s image of the past may seem to represent the absolute political
opposite of Steinbeck’s celebration of the agrarian working-class, it can, like
Steinbeck’s work, be read as distinct regress into a mythologized past in the face
of troubled and conflict-ridden present.
To say that the past of Seven Gothic Tales is an image of a serene past would,
however, be to close one’s eyes to the violence that runs through the collection,
both on a thematic and a structural level. Seven Gothic Tales is brutal and bloody.
There is, as Langbaum has pointed out, heartlessness in Blixen/Dinesen’s stories,
or, as Canfield Fisher wrote in her introduction, a “tense, fierce, hard, controlled,
over-civilized, savage something-or-other” atmosphere in these tales (vi). People
are shot, hanged, drowned, or just die because their hearts give up. Death and
violence sometimes takes place off-stage, but just as often on-stage. And in the
one story where there is no death, “The Monkey,” there is still violence and blood
as a man and a woman meet in the dark on what is supposed to be a night of
seduction, or rape, but which turns into a fight where they scratch and bite,
drawing blood. In these stories women are raped, left on the day of their wedding,
hunted down like wild animals, driven off, bought and sold. People kill each
other, plot and deceive, and they take pleasure in the sorrows of others.

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 Yet, Blixen/Dinesen’s stories have never been read as horror-stories, pulp-
fiction or tragedies. They neither make us shiver nor cry. They are neither
sentimental nor crusading. They do not make us pity the woman raped, nor curse
the rapist; they do not condemn or punish the murderer, the betrayer or the
ruthless plotter. In fact, the stories place their characters and thus their reader in a
sphere beyond emotions and morality, where we are not called upon to pass
judgment or to feel anything about the atrocities committed. Canfield Fisher
captured something important when she described these tales as over-civilized and
savage. First, because savagery in Blixen/Dinesen’s vocabulary is not a bad thing.
It is an ideal characterizing the native, the nobility and the proletariat: those who,
unlike the bourgeoisie, have nothing to lose and who place their freedom higher
than possessions or safety. Secondly and more interestingly however, is the way
in which the constant presence of death and violence at the thematic level of
Seven Gothic Tales heightens our awareness of the violence inherent in culture
and in the past. It selects intertexts from various genres, traditions and eras that
remind us of how steeped our cultural tradition and its most esteemed works are in
representations of condoned and even holy violence, suffering and death: the
Bible, Frankenstein, Divina Commedia, Faust, Hamlet, and The Eumenides.
Seven Gothic Tales suggests that savagery is perhaps the most important way in
which we understand ourselves in Western civilization, that we are merciless
savages that will not let anything or anybody come between ourselves and our
desires.
Thirdly, while we can speak of the ways in which the new feeds on the old,
deconstructing while simultaneously transmitting inherited material, in terms of
influence and inspiration and of this process as tradition, Seven Gothic Tales
reminds us that there is violence in this process too. The narrative rips whole
passages, a line or just a single name from its original context and forces it to
signify in accordance with the new context. Like the scientists of Steinbeck’s
novel who used old products to engineer new colors, flavors and fruits for the
consumer market, Seven Gothic Tales approaches the past, tradition and history as
a storeroom to be used in creating the taste of the new in the same way as
Nozdref’s cook used yesterday’s left-overs. While The Grapes of Wrath may be
read as the quintessential account of the Depression era because of its nostalgic

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 representation of an imaginary, mythical past, Seven Gothic Tales explores and
exploits the past in an uncompromising, unsentimental fashion.

Salvaged by Romance?

It is not, however, fair to represent Blixen/Dinesen as a happy-go-lucky iconoclast

in relation to the questions raised by the sense that Western civilization had come
to a dead end as all values were being swept away by mechanization and the
seemingly blind forces of unrestrained capitalism. In fact, Seven Gothic Tales
represents a chillingly dystopian and claustrophobic vision of a world where there
is no longer any answer to the question “what’s it comin’ to?” But where
Steinbeck’s novel explicitly posed this question within the frame of a realist
novel, Seven Gothic Tales poses and explores this question at the level of form.
The romance form of Seven Gothic Tales, with a focus on the quest for identity,
meaning and closure is an organizing principle that is both posited and
challenged. The proposition to treat these stories within the interpretative
framework of romance invites an objection that is eerily similar to my own
reservations about reading Blixen/Dinesen diachronically within the tradition of a
female gothic. As Heidi Hansson points out, the term “romance” can be used to
describe both a literary form and a literary quality, and in both senses, it can be
made to encompass a wide variety of works; stretching from Le Morte D’Arthur,
through Ivanhoe to Fifty Shades of Grey (11). As a genre-concept, romance is
elusively elastic both in time and social space and the suggestion that Seven
Gothic Tales could be read as part of a tradition beginning in at least the early
Middle Ages seems to suggest the kind of a-temporal reading that I want to
distance myself from.
In his essay on romance as genre, Jameson in fact suggests that it is precisely
the possibility of positing romance’s diachronic existence as a kind of relatively
autonomous formal development, or a type of narrative that makes a temporalized
reading possible (“Magical Narratives” 156). Such a reading would look for what
Jameson calls difference and discontinuity in the realization of the romance form
in a particular work, at a particular time. Thus, the generic affiliations that
characterize the work would serve as a sort of background against which the

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 systematic deviations from the generic code would become apparent and
significant, read as “protopolitical response[s] to a historical dilemma” (157). In
Jameson’s reading discontinuity at the level of form is not equivalent to the
concept of “rewriting” that has been central in feminist readings of
Blixen/Dinesen as a part of a female gothic tradition. “Rewriting” places agency
in the author, grappling, critiquing and ultimately controlling both her own text
and tradition, using it to formulate an alternative vision in the form of a message
interpreted and presented by the critic. To think of difference and discontinuity in
Jameson’s terms, on the other hand, places agency in history and social change to
which the literary work cannot choose but to respond at the level of form.
This approach contextualizes the reading as well as the work historically and
socially. What Frye calls the “blood will tell”-convention of romance will, for
example, when realized in Seven Gothic Tales in 1934 take on a different meaning
than in a medieval, chivalric romance. But also, and more importantly, it
distinguishes between the accepted academic understanding of what Frye has
described as romance’s pervasive social snobbery as an example of ironic pastiche
on the one hand, and the possible significance of this romance-convention in the
setting of a 1934-consumer society where everything about a person would “tell,”
in the sense of revealing social standing in a socially mobile society (161).
To think of Seven Gothic Tales as a romance that creates meaning by
conforming to and deviating from a romance-type of narrative does not
necessarily preclude reading it as gothic, witnessed by the fact that we may speak
of “gothic romance.” Rather, it suggests a perspective that emphasizes romance as
genre that combines a particular structure with a cluster of properties proper to
romance. Thus, while the presence of the marvelous or supernatural in and by
itself could be used to motivate a reading of Seven Gothic Tales as gothic (or,
“fantastiske”), it is not sufficient to a reading of the work as a romance, however
important the fantastic element may be in the romance tradition. Instead, such a
reading needs to move back and forth between a concept of romance structure and
conventions belonging to the genre, recognizing that while love may be a crucial
property of romance, being “almost by definition a love story” in the words of
Frye, the structure of the particular love story told will determine whether it is
indeed a romance or something else (83). This becomes especially important in

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 the case of Seven Gothic Tales since the short story-format shares some crucial
features with romance. How do we decide whether the simplified characters are
the “virtually inevitable” result of brevity as Levy argues in the case of the short
story (75)? Or, a consequence of a combination of typical romance features such
as a strongly enforced code of conduct with the importance of destiny outside of
which “character has no existence,” as Vinaver argues (92)? Or, the short story-
tendency to leave significant things to the reader’s inference because of brevity,
versus the traditionally allegorical, digressive mode of romance that continuously
calls for the reader’s interpretation? And, perhaps most importantly for my
argument, the way in which short story “endings conditions the whole of the text,”
as Lohafer argues, which brings the short story in close contact with romance
understood as structured by the quest and its possible outcome (111). The point
here is not to argue that the stories in Seven Gothic Tales are not short stories
which they clearly are, but to suggest that they are short stories that should be read
in relation to the romance genre, and that this generic affiliation is more decisive
to an interpretation than their relative brevity.
Patricia Parker’s understanding of romance as a form which simultaneously
quests for and postpones a particular end, objective or object will be crucial to my
reading. In his comprehensive study of romance, Frye writes that most romances
end happily and Gillian Beer also lists the happy ending among the “cluster of
properties” belonging to romance (10). While this may seem as such a general
observation that it borders on the useless, it becomes important if romance is, as
Frye suggests, “nearest of all literary forms to the wish fulfillment dream” (186).
Or, in Beer’s, words: “always concerned with the fulfillment of desires” (12). In
Frye’s understanding of romance as a secular scripture that attempts to restore
order to a fallen, lower world of human experience, the concept of a happy ending
takes on extensive, existentialist meanings. In a consumer, mass media society
saturated with representations of dreams and promises of fulfillment through
consumption, yet conditioned by a perpetual postponement of fulfillment,
romance understood as a representation of desire fulfilled takes on an interesting
significance.
In the original version of Seven Gothic Tales “The Roads round Pisa” came
first. The American editors, however, decided to open the collection with “The

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 Deluge at Norderney” which they thought was the most powerful of her stories.
Blixen/Dinesen did not argue the matter, probably because she felt that she was in
no position to do so. In all other editions except the German one from 1937, she
made sure that her original conception was realized. When Seven Gothic Tales is
read in the order in which it was originally conceived it reveals itself as a
systematic reflection on literary form, taking off from the classical romance of the
first tale and gradually exposing its form to the impact and demands of historical
change. Read as a sustained interrogation of the possibilities and restrictions of
narrative forms at a particular historical moment, Seven Gothic Tales exemplifies
what Parker has called “the cloven fiction of an increasingly remote or evasive
‘faery land’ and an increasingly pressing reality” (11). Parker’s comment is
specifically geared to the development of romance but in her description of a
“cloven fiction” that reluctantly registers the historical moment as a determinant
in relation to literary imagination we may recognize the dilemma of Steinbeck’s
essentially realistic and highly political Depression-novel. The Grapes of Wrath
attempts but fails to fulfill its own desire for a particular closure. Unlike The
Grapes of Wrath, Seven Gothic Tales is not an explicit attempt to represent and
critique the particular historical moment of writing and publishing. It is also not a
novel, but a collection of short stories. Nevertheless, I want to argue that Seven
Gothic Tales invites an interpretation that revolves around the question of the
degree to which pressing reality not only determines the limits of literary
imagination, but structures imagination itself at a specific historical moment.
Further, I want to argue that Seven Gothic Tales pursues this discussion in terms
of literary form, where the romance quest becomes the touchstone against which
the relationship between reality and imagination is tested.
In Blixen/Dinesen’s original conception the two tales that frame the collection
are significantly linked in two ways. Count von Schimmelmann reappears in the
last tale in a minor but important role, and both tales revolve around the theme of
young love impeded by an older, wealthier man. In “The Roads Round Pisa,”
Rosina loves her cousin Mario, but is forced to marry the old, powerful Prince
Potenziani. After a series of staple fairy-tale or romance-adventures and
complications the young loving couple is brought together, grandmother and
granddaughter are reunited and a child is born. This straightforward account of the

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 story does not really do justice to its remarkable and intricate form which is
anything but straightforward. “The Roads Round Pisa” very consciously presents
itself as a piece of traditional romance craftsmanship where inset tales, or contes,
are combined to create a main story through the unrolling of a number of
interlocked themes: truth, love and loyalty. Love can only triumph if loyalty is
observed and the truth is told. Prince Nino’s loyalty to Prince Potenziani and
Agnese's loyalty to Rosina combine to create the moment of revelation and truth
that kills the old man standing in the way of the young lovers. The contes have to
be correctly interpreted for the events at the level of main story to proceed in a
meaningful way.
While “The Roads Round Pisa” conspicuously sets itself up as beautifully
crafted romance both thematically and structurally, it also initiates a breach in the
mold of romance by introducing a romancer, or hero, whose character is
fundamentally foreign to the demands of the romance genre. Count von
Schimmelmann is introduced to the reader in the form of a long-winded first-
person inner monologue where he reflects on the nature of truth and love in
general and the truth about himself in particular, seeking it in the reflections of
mirrors. The image of the mirror indicates, as Frye points out, ”the threshold of
the romance world” revolving around the quest for identity and meaning (109).
In a reading of “The Roads Round Pisa” as a romance quest, the old lady
magically recognizes the count as a potential hero and he soon finds himself in the
midst of the traditional, blue-blooded romance-adventure that make up the bulk of
“The Roads Round Pisa.” Unlike the other, traditional romance characters of this
tale, however, the I-centered, self-reflective von Schimmelmann cannot dedicate
himself to a quest where individual identity is eclipsed and even canceled by
collective fate in the form of a story. Even though he responds to the old lady’s,
Countess di Gampocorta, request in the proper formulaic manner - “’I am at your
service, Madame’” - his role in the story remains that of a mere bystander or
witness (17). His failure as a romance character is confirmed in a final passage
where the countess once again offers him the possibility of becoming part of a
collective story. In his pocket, von Schimmelmann carries a smelling bottle
painted with an image of a landscape and a pink, crenelated castle, left by a
maiden aunt who had traveled to Italy as a girl and “every dream of romance and

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 adventure was in her mind attached” to this castle (9). The countess offers him a
precious gift in the form of a similarly shaped smelling-bottle, a dear memory of a
childhood friendship with a girl from a foreign country, one of only three people
that the countess had ever loved. Painted on the bottle is a landscape and a house
that von Schimmelmann immediately recognizes as his own place back in
Denmark, and he as well as the reader understand why a “vaguely familiar note
within” had struck him as he watched the landscape outside the countess’ villa:

He could feel his own little bottle in his waistcoat pocket, and came near to
taking it out and showing it to the old lady. He felt that this would have
made a tale which she would forever have cherished and repeated. (50)

True to character, however, he withholds his bottle, and thus also the tale “held
back by a feeling that there was, in this decision of fate, something which was
meant for him only – a value, a depth, a resort even, in life which belonged to him
alone, and which he could not share with anybody else” (50). Being a character
unfit for romance he cannot comprehend the meaning of fate in a romance quest
where “character has no existence outside destiny, and destiny means the
convergence of simultaneously developed themes, now separated, now coming
together” as Vinaver writes on classical romance (92). He is a character that
instead of allowing a tale of loyalty and love to emanate from fate, makes his
own deliberate, individual decisions that go against the grain of romance design
“charged with echoes of the past and premonitions of the future” (Vinaver 92).
“The Roads Round Pisa” is a romance that ends happily for the simplified,
unreflective characters which are functions of the romance format and acts in
accordance with its code. Identity and meaning are confirmed by the completion
of the quest and the countess, having become a great-grandmother, confides in
von Schimmelmann that “Life is a mosaic of the Lord’s, which he keeps filling in
bit by bit. If I had seen this little bit of bright colour as the centerpiece, I would
have understood the pattern” (49). He, on the other hand, unable to perceive and
fit into this pattern, is lost in his lonely, self-preoccupied search for identity and
the final line of the story suggests that he has learned nothing from the story he
has witnessed, as he takes “a small mirror from his pocket. Holding it in the flat of
his hand, he looked thoughtfully into it” (51).

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 While the mirror-imagery in the opening of “The Roads Round Pisa”
represents the threshold moment of romance as a quest for identity the presence of
the mirror in the count’s hand at the end of the story suggests that complete
closure cannot be achieved if the romance form is not understood on its own,
stringent terms. What Frye has called the spiral form of quest romance, where the
“end is the beginning transformed and renewed by the heroic quest” remains
uncompleted as the count returns to his own reflection in the mirror (174).
The degree to which “The Roads Round Pisa” is a meta-literary discussion of
genre conventions and form is indicated by von Schimmelmann figuring not only
as an inept character in this tale but also in the role of inept reader and interpreter,
unable to understand the conditions of the kind of story he must submit himself to.
At one point early in the tale he watches a marionette comedy, “the immortal
Revenge of Truth” where the plot revolves around a curse cast on a house to the
effect that any lies told within it, will become true. 45 In a concluding soliloquy the
witch-marionette sums up the “truth,” or “moral” of the play which is that “we
are, all of us, acting in a marionette comedy. What is more important than
anything else in a marionette comedy, is keeping the ideas of the author clear’”
(36). The “cursed house” of the play is the form of the particular kind of romance
literature that “The Roads Round Pisa” explicitly exemplifies and discusses.
Inside of romance with its “problematic” association to reality, as Hansson writes,
conventional definitions of truth and lies are no longer valid (12). While a
predominantly realistic novel achieves truth through complex, “life-like”
characters whose interactions set the plot in motion, romance achieves its
particular kind of truth through observance of a traditional quest-form where
character is a function of the demands of plot. Watching the play, the count seems
to be on the verge of giving in to the lure of romance as he thinks “if my life were
only a marionette comedy in which I had my part and knew it well, then it might
be very easy and sweet … If I have now at last, he thought, come into a
marionette play, I will not go out of it again” (36).
The tragic irony is of course that the very fact that he thinks these “thoughts”
reveals the degree to which he is unable to become a romance marionette.

45
Langbaum points out that this was an “private joke”, since ”The Revenge of Truth” was a comedy written
by Blixen/Dinesen herself as a child, and published in 1926 in a Danish literary magazine (11, note 2)
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 Surrounded by characters prepared to rape and kill in the name of loyalty and
honor, the count appears as the only perfectly real character in this first tale. There
is absolutely nothing horrifying, unexpected or outrageous about him. He is, if
anything, rather boring in his self-preoccupied and narcissistic reflections that will
eventually peter out in his pragmatic acceptance of his own identity in the final
tale “The Poet”: “not as he really believed it to be, but, as in a reflection within a
mirror, such as others saw it” (331).
In “The Poet” von Schimmelmann reappears in the role of a friend of one of
the main characters, the councilor. Without this apparent intertextual linkage
between the two tales it would perhaps be easy to overlook the ways in which
“The Poet” continues the exploration initiated in “The Roads Round Pisa”: what
happens when our conception of the world as a coherent narrative where everyone
plays their pre-scripted role breaks down in the face of the forces of the real?
Where “The Roads Round Pisa” was an example of classical romance-structure,
“The Poet” is essentially a strictly diachronically progressing, linear narrative
with very few inset tales. If “The Roads Round Pisa” exemplified and tested the
romance-form by introducing a modern, individualistic character into its midst,
“The Poet” presents itself as a question of what romance becomes once its
sequential, digressive form has dissolved into a linear narrative where romance
only remains as a possible mode. What happens to the quest when meaning-
creating deferral in the form of allegorical contes that call for continuous
interpretation is replaced by an undeviating narrative that proceeds
uninterruptedly towards completion and closure? With its essentially linear
structure and realist mode, the final tale of Seven Gothic Tales is significantly
different from the tales that lead up to it. The main narrative progresses stately
through a serene, pastoral, Danish landscape without castles or catastrophic
floods. It is uninterrupted by long inset tales and in no need of allegory or
intertextual references in order to make sense. There are no shape-shifters, ghosts,
homicidal actors, masquerades, rapes or lethal chases across Swiss mountain
passes. “The Poet” is, as Langbaum points out, the most naturalistic and least
witty of the Seven Gothic Tales, one that one admires “rather more than one likes
it,” as he writes (118).

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 The narrative of “The Poet” repeats the central plot of “The Roads Round Pisa”
where young love is impeded by the desires of an old, powerful man, but in a
form that is fundamentally different. The story is set in a provincial Danish town
of “average burghers” called Hirschholm, and the setting in Denmark in and by
itself becomes significant as a move from southern to northern Europa (312).46 In
“The Roads Round Pisa” the Count’s reflection on the sweetness of being a
marionette is followed by his understanding of this “ideal” as possible only to the
people of the South, “as immune to the terrors, the crimes and miracles of the life
in which they took part as were the little actors upon the old player’s stage … as if
life were, in any of her whims, a comedy which they had already rehearsed” (36).
“The Poet” can be read as a comment on the geographic convention typical of
certain kinds of romance where southern Europe is represented as exotic,
mysterious and potentially threatening to the rationality of the “people of the
North [to whom] the strong agitations of the soul come each time as a strange
thing” (36).
The main character of “The Poet” is not a nobleman but a state servant, a
chamber-councilor named Mathiesen provided with a thorough biographical
background, complete with his ideas on politics, history, literature and art. The
councilor does not have to search for his identity in mirrors, since he has found it
in an identification with the actual historical figure of the great Geheimrat Goethe.
Mathiesen has tried to write poetry in an attempt to emulate the great Geheimrat,
but recognized his own limitations, and settled for the role of Maecenas to a
young district clerk by the name of Anton Kube; “a nearly perfect specimen of a
type of Danish peasant” who also happened to be born with a gift for poetry (315).
The third character is a young Italian widow, Fransine. She has ended up in
Hirschholm as a result of a marriage to an old Dane which we are made to
understand was dictated by poverty rather than love. The councilor who is afraid
that his protégé will be distracted from writing poetry by drinking, decides to

46
In Dinesen’s original conception of Seven Gothic Tales, the tales move north from a beginning in Italy,
into Paris, Prussia, an island outside the continental Baltic coast, and finally to Denmark in ”Supper at Elsinore”
and ”The Poet”. Inserted between the last two Denmark-based tales is ”The Dreamers” which takes off on a boat
sailing to Zanzibar, but, since the bulk of this story is made up of inserted tales, later moves through several
continental European countries.

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 arrange a marriage between Anders and Fransine but on seeing the young woman
dance, changes his mind and decides to marry her himself. Meanwhile, Anders
and Fransine have fallen in love but reveal nothing to the old man. The councilor
proposes to Fransine who accepts, but on the night before the wedding he comes
upon the young couple as he takes a walk in the woods. Hidden, he watches them
quarrel and when Fransine runs off, Anders who has brought a gun for shooting
ducks, discovers the councilor and shoots him. The councilor drags himself to
Fransine’s house and asks for help, but she kills him with a big stone, crying out
“You poet!” (363).
In the terminology of romance we might say that Anders and Fransine are
made for each other and that they, unlike the councilor, are potential romance
characters. Anders is a peasant-cum-poet character and in the single passage
where his poetic gift is demonstrated, he appears in the role of archaic conteor or
oral story-teller, reciting a “ballad” to his protector and the visiting Count von
Schimmelmann. Fransine is not only Italian, but also described as

a doll; not like the dolls of the present day, which are imitations of faces and
forms of human babies, but like the dolls of old days which strove, parallel
with humanity, toward an abstract ideal of female beauty. (319)

Anders and Fransine are misplaced pastoral romance characters caught in the
wrong kind of story: he as a peasant-cum-poet that has to make a living as a clerk,
and she as a character who has had to trade her ideal feminine beauty for
economic security. As a reader of poetry the councilor recognizes the pattern of
romance destiny as he watches the two young people’s first meeting: “It was, he
thought, like the opening bars of a piece of music, or the first chapter of a
romance called Anders and Fransine” (321). But, since the councilor is not a
romance character the immediacy of his “impression” is transformed into
pragmatic reflection in the next passage where he conceives his idea of arranging
a marriage, not as an acknowledgement of the primacy of love and destiny, but as
a practical arrangement that would provide his protégée with a home, a stable
income, and keep him from drinking. Where “The Roads Round Pisa” used
structure in the form of allegorical contes to explicate and orchestrate the
movement of the quest, “The Poet” relies on naïve verisimilitude to create the

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 logic of its fictional universe. This crucial difference and its effect are highlighted
in a comparative reading of “The Poet” and “The Roads Round Pisa” with a focus
on the function of money in each story. Prince Potenziani and Councilor
Mathiesen are older, wealthy men, both described as Maecenas, and they function
as impediments to young love in both stories. In the romance narrative the wealth
of the former is nothing but a minor detail in the first inset tale where the countess
provides von Schimmelmann with the background story to her request. In “The
Poet,” however, wealth has become the way in which the councilor defines
himself and the force that structures the narrative. His scheme converts the central
romance-theme of destined love into explicitly monetary terms, suggesting a
financially dictated code of conduct as absolute as that of romance. When the
councilor changes his mind a few pages later and decides to marry Fransine
himself, his inner monologue does not contain the word “love.” Instead, his
reflections revolve around his own standing as a “rich man.” It is as such that he is
able to value and deserve the “rarest things in life,” such as a doll-like wife, and it
is as such that he holds the power of a Maecenas over the poet Anders, a
“supremacy” that might be lost if the two young people were united (327). The
councilor understands himself as a creditable potential husband because he is
credit-able and the narrative of “The Poet” confirms the credibility of his
reasoning and actions. Unlike the two young lovers of “The Roads Round Pisa,”
the destined lovers of “The Poet” do not even consider the possibility of an
adventurous escape, and the romance quest is nipped in the bud. Like the
councilor they act in accordance with naïve verisimilitude that understands
identity and destiny as determined by pressing reality in the shape of money.
Perhaps the ways in which a comparative reading of “The Roads Round Pisa”
and “The Poet” can be brought to bear on the question of how social reality
impinges on imagination itself, is most apparent in the function of death in these
two tales. Prince Potenziani and Councilor Mathiesen are both characters that
understand desire in terms of consumption. As wealthy men they are entitled to
claim ownership of young, beautiful women. They are both villains in narratives
that revolve around the fulfillment of desire in destined love and therefore they
both have to die, but they die very differently. Where the prince dies magically,

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 sacrificially “ascending to heaven, and they his disciples, left behind, gazing up
toward him” (43) the councilor dies brutally and realistically

The blood spouted to all sides. The body, which had a second before
possessed balance, a purpose, a conception of the world around it, fell
together, and lay on the ground like a bundle of old clothes, at the pleasure
of the law of gravitation, as it had fallen. (364)

Where in the first tale the villain’s death is the turning point which clears the way
for the happy-ever-after ending and the birth of a child, the councilor’s death in
the final tale ends the story and we do not learn what happens to Anders and
Fransine. In romance death is generative, but in the absence of a romance
perception of the world and its manifestation in narrative structure, death is
merely death and “engulfing darkness” (364).
Should we, then, as Langbaum suggested, read Blixen/Dinesen’s tales as a
celebration in the romanticist vein of art’s ability to transcend the limits of social
reality? Her writing effecting a “transition from the individual to the archetypal
character: from the novel, with its separation of psychological and external data,
to the myth which speaks with one voice of both,” set forth in a cleverly
constructed collection of tales moving from the perfect, blue-blooded, happy-
ending romance of the first tale to the sordid realism of the last tale? This is
certainly a possible reading, and one which fits well with Blixen/Dinesen’s
professed view of herself as “God’s chosen snob” who, at least in theory, defied
middle-class values, and in an often quoted passage from a letter to her sister
Ellen Dahl in 1928 wrote that if she could not live with the aristocrats or the
intellectuals, she would chose the proletariat or the natives of colonial Kenya over
the middle-class, defined and delimited by its fear of loss (Breven från Afrika
393). Councilor Mathiesen can certainly be read as an expression of
Blixen/Dinesen’s despise for what she perceived as bourgeois urges: a character
who like Lewis’ Babbitt or Steinbeck’s Californians is driven by a desire to
possess and a simultaneous fear of losing his possessions, and a character who for
these very reasons ultimately loses his life.
But, what to do with the fact that Seven Gothic Tales turns the transition
Langbaum described on its head: taking off from archetypal character and myth,

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 and ending in individualized and sordid realism as though it was impossible to
maintain myth beyond the scope of a single tale? Reading Seven Gothic Tales as
a sustained interrogation of the conditions of a cloven fiction suspended between
desire fulfilled in the form of romance myth and desire perpetually displaced, the
series of tales appear as a progressive dismantling of the romance formula at
several levels, or, as Parker writes, “a centrifugal process” away from the first
tale’s concentration of meaning where the mosaics eventually fall into place (69).

Unachievable Closure

In his 1957 diatribe on Blixen/Dinesen’s artificial trickeries, Lundkvist made an

important observation. Perhaps because he was less concerned with celebrating
Blixen/Dinesen’s essential wisdom than critics such as Arendt or Langbaum. He
wrote that “Karen Blixen’s stories are conspicuously often left unfinished”
(“Karen Blixens berättelser är påfallande ofta oavslutade” qtd. in Den Främmande
Förförerskan 289). To Lundkvist, the inconclusive character of Blixen/Dinesen’s
tales was a consequence of her allegorical outlook where profound truths were
hinted at but never fully revealed, and in the final count by the fact that the only
truths Blixen/Dinesen had to offer the world were those of an outdated feudal
social order. The image of an ordered world where god and the lord of the manor
ruled supreme was no longer viable and while Blixen/Dinesen struggled to re-
establish this image, she came up against the forces of history and indirectly
admitted defeat by “having to finish in the form of the unfinished in order not to
expose her artifice” (“nödgas sluta oavslutat för att inte avslöja sin konst” 290).
Again, Lundkvist does have a point in his observation, but his obsession with
Blixen/Dinesen’s obsession with the aristocracy blinds him to the fact that what
he reads as a failure on the part of the author may in fact be read as a reflection of
the way in which art responds to a historical dilemma: how to narrate stasis at a
point in time when the grand narrative of progress and fulfillment is no longer
valid? The Grapes of Wrath responded by bringing its story to a closure of sorts
by reverting to an archaic imagery mustered from a mythical source located
beyond the confines of history and change. Seven Gothic Tales on the other hand,
performs the disintegration of narrative, closure and fulfillment at the level of

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 form as the romance structure erodes, splitting the inset tale from the framing
main narrative and bringing the former into focus while the latter recedes and
loses all significance.
Looking at the three longer tales of the collection it becomes obvious that
Seven Gothic Tales performs a progressive dismantling of the classical romance-
contes-conjointure structure of “The Roads Round Pisa.” In “The Monkey” there
is still a main narrative where action progresses but its outcome has become
unimportant. In ”The Deluge at Norderney” the main narrative brings the reader
to a sinking hayloft where people tell stories and respond to each other’s stories
by telling yet another story while waiting to drown. In ”The Dreamers” the main
narrative is nothing but an insignificant framing device and we are left with one
story-teller creating an intricate box-within-a-box structure which remains
completely unrelated to the frame narrative. There is then, throughout these tales,
a movement towards complete stasis at the level of main narrative in “The
Dreamers” as the contes liberates themselves from the horizontal structure where
meaning is produced through advancement towards meaningful closure and end.
One of the most obvious examples from literary history of the inserted tale as
simultaneously a quest for and a postponement or delay of a particular end is
Scheherazade’s story-telling in One Thousand and One Nights. The final passage
of “The Deluge at Norderney” reads: “The dawn was breaking. The old woman
slowly drew her fingers out of the man’s hand, and placed one upon her lips. ‘À ce
moment de sa narration’, she said, ‘Scheherazade vit paraître le matin, et,
discrete, se tu.t’ (188). Like Scheherazade or the story-tellers of the Decameron
the characters on the sinking hayloft tell stories in the shadow of death. The
stories told in “The Deluge at Norderney,” however, cannot postpone or delay the
inevitable: “The water had risen to the level of the hayloft. Indeed, as they moved,
they felt the heavy boards gently rocking, floating upon the waters” (188). Where
Scheherazade not only survives by her stories but also earns the Sultan’s heart, the
inserted tales of “The Deluge of Norderney” make no difference at all to the main
story that frames them. The story-tellers simply fall silent, and drown. In “The
Monkey,” the reason for the prioress to transform into a monkey is to bring about
the marriage of the two unwilling young characters Boris and Athena. At the end,
the prioress transforms, but we learn nothing about their future or the marriage-

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 plans that initially set the events in motion. In “The Dreamers,” the professional
story-teller Mira Jama confesses that he has given up telling tales because “I have
become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing that one
thing is much worse than the other” (239). I am suggesting that Mira Jama’s
words could be read as a meta-reflection on the endings of all the stories in Seven
Gothic Tales with the exception of “The Roads Round Pisa”; they do not really
matter. In “The Old Chevalier” the narrative focus is divided between the old
baron’s love affair with a married woman who eventually tries to poison him and
his encounter with a young prostitute in Paris. Once the story of the married
woman has been told she completely disappears from the story. In the final page
the listener asks about the young girl in Paris: “’And did you never see her again?’
I asked him. ‘No, he said, and then, after a little while, ‘but I had a fantasy about
her, a fantaisie macabre, if you like.” (74). The baron goes on to recount how
many years later, a friend of his shows him a skull, and how looking at this skull
had reminded him of the young woman: “’Did you ask your friend anything about
it?’, I said. ‘No’, said the old man, ‘what would have been the use? He would not
have known’” (74). Again, the reader is left with three disconnected stories – the
love affair, the young prostitute, the skull – that end with a statement that seems to
echo Mira Jama’s: what is the point of asking for full knowledge when it does not
really matter what happens one way or the other? In “The Dreamers,” the
character Forsner tells four inserted tales, one within the other, and the main story
where the boat sails towards Zanzibar never interferes in these tales. The final
lines, “Lincoln sat for a little while, smoking a cigarette or two. Then he also lay
down, turned himself over a couple of times, and went to sleep,” put the reader
back on the boat, which is just the same as when we left it (309). We do not learn
what happens to Said Ben Ahmed, the passenger introduced in the beginning with
the words: “It was the hope of revenge within Said’s heart which, more powerful
than the monsoon, was in reality forcing the boat on” (237). Said or his thirst for
revenge is never again mentioned in the story.
The heartlessness of Seven Gothic Tales is structural as well as thematic. The
intricately constructed narrative of the past falls apart and the answer to the
question of what the world is coming to is quite simply silence and emptiness.

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 Nomadic Identities and Desires

While the Depression era culture may have looked to the past for redemption and
identity, technological developments in the mass media fundamentally changed
the nature of cultural communications. The narrative of identity took shape as a
collective effort, aiming at welding a sense of social coherence and to create and
enforce uniform national values. Simultaneously, and like the copy text of
advertisement, the individual was brought into focus as the President´s voice
reached out to each American through the radio in the living room, and as Life –
re-invented in 1936 as a photo magazine – offered everybody glimpses into the
lives of the powerful, wealthy and famous. While The Grapes of Wrath,
significantly written in 1939 and thus writing the Depression era in retrospect,
intermittently calls forth the image of a people welded together, walking together,
the narrative never realizes successful unity in action beyond the unit of an
extended family. From the debris of an imagined, agrarian past, Steinbeck instead
salvages the resilient, sturdy individual represented in the figure of the matriarch
Ma Joad struggling to keep her family together. Speaking up against her
husband’s despondent declaration that “our life’s over an’ done,” she calls forth
the philosophy of Woman where life is not the sum of material objects, but a
stream and a river that alters its flow when running into obstacles and “goes right
on. Woman looks at it like that. We ain’t gonna die out. People is goin’ on –
changing a little, maybe, but goin’ right on” (467). Ma Joad’s vindication of a
future in the face of despair and doom reverberates with the final words of another
literary heroine of the 1930s, in a novel that, just like Steinbeck’s, was a
commercial and popular success, a Pulitzer-prize-winner, and quickly turned into
a blockbuster movie. Set in a time of social rupture and violent upheaval,
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind celebrates the individual’s ability to
adapt in order to survive.
In the same year as Gone With the Wind was published, Dale Carnegie’s How
to Win Friends and Influence People sold 5000 copies a day and it remained on
the top-seller-lists throughout the decade, and still in print today, remains one of
the best-selling self-help books ever. Carnegie used material culled from
newspaper columns, biographies, court material, radio shows, his own life,
psychology, and interviews with scores of successful people ranging from
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 President Roosevelt to Clark Gable. He drew on anecdotes to illustrate his
overarching proposition that it is possible not only to change your own behavior
in order to achieve success, but also the behavior of others in ways that are to your
advantage. The elusive “Manself” that Steinbeck’s celebrated in one chapter and
that the novel as a whole mourns in the exalted style of a sermon, is an absolute,
unchangeable essence of man. The self that Carnegie constructed in his anecdotal,
casual style was malleable and exploitable material. Relationships, including
marriage, were a matter of human engineering. Your personality was the tool with
which to manipulate the social machine in order to win, succeed, be popular,
better, influential and wealthy since financial success was the ultimate goal of all
social interactions. If you followed the detailed behavioral rules laid down by
Carnegie’s book, based on scientific research, your personality-change would
work its “magic.” If you failed to do so, the chapter-headings warned you of the
dire consequences: “He Who Can Do This Has the Whole World with Him. He
Who Cannot, Walks a Lonely Way”, “If You Don’t Do This, You Are Headed for
Trouble.”
Despite the overwhelmingly cheerful tone of Carnegie’s book and other self-
help books at the time, society was essentially represented as fiercely competitive.
The only thing that stood between the individual and failure was his or her ability
to construct personality as “an unbroken series of successful gestures” that would
magically ward off danger. In his discussion of how the Depression affected
advertisement, Marchand emphasizes that while Depression-ads looked different,
visually more cluttered, favoring a wealth of stark black-and-white pictures and
cartoon-style illustrations, their content was the same personal-failure-oriented
message that had developed during the preceding era. In fact, Depression-ads
tended to be even more blatant in their stress on the degree to which the individual
was responsible for failure. The notion that society was essentially competitive
was explicitly brought into focus with captions such as “Gee, Pop – They’re All
Passing You” to sell fuel, or “The Lonely Uphill Struggle You Would Like to
Save Your Boy” to sell life insurance (Marchand). What Marchand calls the-first-
impression-parable where the consumer was invited to identify with a script
where the protagonist failed because of bad breath, unpolished shoes, or lack of
knowledge became even more important in an era when unemployment figures

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 rose from three percent in 1929 to a staggering 25 percent in 1933. What the
advertisement suggested was that the consumer could literally not afford to
disregard the importance of appearances, and that every minute detail in the
make-up of a personality needed to be carefully tended to: “every American was
to become a performing self,” wrote Susman (280).
Thinking of society as a stage and the individual as a script-reading actor
creating a personality for this stage are expressive metaphors in analyses of the
way in which a developing consumer mass society produces and re-produces
collective social practice. At the same time, these metaphors invoke the image of
an elsewhere, a world beyond society-as-stage which would allow for the real
identity behind the enforced personality-masks to be developed. Even Marchand’s
suggestion that we think of advertisement as parables implies the existence of an
independent reality to which the copy text can refer in the way of simile. What
popular novels such as The Grapes of Wrath written in the aftermath of the
Depression, or Babbitt, written in the preceding era, suggest, however, is that
there is no such elsewhere from which to reflect on and resist the logic of
consumerist society. Babbitt is a laughable caricature of the Standardized
American Citizen, but he is also profoundly tragic. Throughout Lewis’ novel,
Babbitt is seen yearning for something beyond the circle of Good Fellows whose
relationships are first and foremost defined and saturated by commercial
considerations. His “incredibly mechanical” and futile way of life makes him sick,
and he intermittently and pathetically tries to envision and create an identity
untouched by the ethos of “hustling”: as a friend, father and lover (109). He
escapes to idealized nature and at night he dreams of the fairy child in a setting
straight out of a romance novel. What Lewis’ novel makes explicitly clear is that
even Babbitt’s vague dreams of being somebody else in a world beyond
commerce and consumption are figments of thoroughly commercialized and
consumerist imagination. Babbitt’s tragedy is that while his unformed longing
may be his own, his dreams are not. They are culled from the Standard Citizen’s
consumption of radio shows, movies, popular literature, and, not least,
advertisements.
Unlike Steinbeck, Lewis did not intend to offer his main character or his
readers any escape from this modern world where the individual’s boundaries,

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 sources of meaning, social relations and needs become blurred and uncertain. A
world where choosing religion and toothpaste are interchangeable acts of
consumer-choice in the construction of a marketable identity as commodity.
In Seven Gothic Tales there is a continuous movement from action to telling as
the main story recedes and it is accompanied by a move towards identity as the
main theme of the narrative, explored in the form of inset tales. In “The Deluge at
Norderney” the main story brings a number of people to the sinking hayloft one of
them being Cardinal Hamilcar von Sehestedt who has played a heroic role in the
rescue mission. When all the inset tales have been told the main narrative is
resumed as the cardinal stands up and starts undoing the bandages around his
head:

‘I had better get rid of these’, he said, ‘now that the morning is almost here’.
‘But will it not hurt you?’ Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag asked anxiously. ‘No’ …
‘It is not even my blood. You, Miss Nat-og-Dag, who have such an eye for
the true noble blood, you ought to recognize the blue blood of Cardinal
Hamilcar.’ (181)

The character of the cardinal is revealed to the other characters and reader alike as
the cardinal’s valet. Having killed his employer in the chaos during the flood, the
man Kaspersen – an actor by profession – has donned the cardinal’s clothes and
this is enough to deceive both peasants and aristocracy. Unlike the countess in
“The Roads Round Pisa,” Miss Nat-og-Dag at first seems to fail to recognize that
Kaspersen is an impostor, but in the very next moment Kaspersen reveals that he
is the bastard son of the Duke of Orléans “who insisted on being addressed as
Citoyen, voted for the death of the King of France, and changed his name to that
of Égalité” (183). The revelation of Kaspersen’s true identity towards the end of
the story suddenly makes sense of his inset tale about how Barabbas and Peter
meet the day after the crucifixion and Barabbas complains that all his wine has
gone bad. It is only when Kaspersen reveals himself that the significance of
Barabbas’ inability to understand the unique body of the wine functions as a
commentary on the magic of aristocratic blood but also as a way to understand the
meaning of the preceding tales as revolving around the matter of identity.

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 While “The Roads Round Pisa” introduced the theme of vicariousness, masks
and role-playing as necessities in order to further the action of the plot and to
bring about a particular end where desire was fulfilled, role-playing takes on a life
of its own as the reader moves further into Seven Gothic Tales’ maze of inset tales
and intertexts. In “The Deluge at Norderney,” Kaspersen describes his life as a
series of identities: as a ballet dancer taken up by “the great elderly noblemen of
Berlin” he knew “what it was to be a lovely woman,” a barber in Seville, a printer
of revolutionary papers in Paris, a dog-seller in London, a slave-trader in Algiers,
lover of a dowager princess in Pisa, an explorer in Egypt, a hostler in
Copenhagen, and finally the cardinal’s valet (184). The answer to Miss Nat-og-
Dag’s question why he killed his master is simply: “I am an actor. Shall not an
actor have a role?” (184). Kaspersen impersonates the cardinal in the same way as
Agnese impersonated her friend Rosina, but where in the latter story, role-playing
is a means to an end, the former story represents role-playing as an end in itself:
Kaspersen does not kill the cardinal in order to save people from the flood, but
because he is an actor in search of a role.
In “The Dreamers,” the main narrative has shrunk to a meaningless frame, and
the inset tales have no necessary relationship whatsoever to the framing. Instead,
they explore the theme of role-playing and identity understood as a potentially
endless series of impersonations as Pellegrina Leoni/Olalla/Rosalba/Lola roams
through Europe in the roles of prostitute, revolutionary and saint, pursued by three
lovers who unwittingly chase her to death. She is, as her name indicates, a pilgrim
on an interminable quest structured by a permanent reinvention of self. They are
the remains of the figure of the knight-errant, driven by a desire to possess that
reverses the notion of sacrifice in the name of love.
The first and last tales of Seven Gothic Tales are the only two tales of the
collection that could properly be labeled “romantic” in the sense that they uphold
the classical romance ideal of love, and are structured by the possibility of its
fulfillment in the form of quest. In the other tales, the romantic concept of “love”
is brutally mocked and challenged, represented as the “barren passion” of
adulterous affairs in the highest social circles or prostitution in “The Old
Chevalier,” forbidden homosexual desire that has to be remedied by a forced
marriage of convention in “The Monkey,” betrayed and incestuous love in “The

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 Supper at Elsinore,” narcissistic desire in “The Dreamers,” or imagined
debauchery in “The Deluge at Norderney.”
In these tales, the concept of romantic love is ground to pieces by desires that
are represented not only as barren, but lethal. The married mistress of “The Old
Chevalier” tries to poison her lover and a forced kiss in the midst of a fight in
“The Monkey” has the effect of a “rapier.” Morten in “The Supper at Elsinore”
runs away from his young bride and returns many years later as a ghost to his
spinster sisters who have put their lives on hold, waiting for him. In “The
Dreamers,” the lovers pursue the woman in a chase that finally kills her, and in
“The Deluge at Norderney” the two young people are united in an improvised
wedding, and meet their death on a sinking hayloft.
At the same time all of these tales could be described as quests for identity, but
an identity that no longer uses or understands love as both vehicle and fulfillment
in the quest. The desires that run through Seven Gothic Tales cannot be
represented or fulfilled in the form of romantic love, but roam aimlessly like
Morten across the sea, like Pellegrina across the map of Europe, or like Kaspersen
through a series of identities, and only death puts an end to this interminable
quest.
In fact, the impossibility of representing romantic love is present already in the
first tale where, paradoxically, the ideal of love progresses and structures action.
The two young lovers Rosina and Mario are never present in the story, except as
characters in inset tales told by others. When Rosina does appear in the last
passage of the tale, the narrative seems unable to imagine her presence. All the
other characters have been described in sensuous, intimate detail with “eyelids
that were like crêpe” (49), “extraordinarily small and elegant feet” (40) “soft
locks” (44), or with colors like “the patina of old paintings” (25). The narrative
conspicuously passes over Rosina at the only moment when she is directly
present, quickly passing from “the young mother, on a sofa” to the nurse on whom
it, again, sensuously pours forth: “a large, magnificent young woman in pink and
red, like an oleander flower” (49). The notion of star-crossed lovers and love is an
ideal that remains as form, structure and interpretative tool in the “The Roads
Round Pisa,” but only indirectly representable in the form of inset tales. The
second young couple of the tale, Agnese and Nino, quote Dante to each other but

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 the ideal of transcendent love that overcomes death has no bearing on their further
actions: “she walked away, and though she passed so near to him that he might
have held her back by stretching out his hand, he did not move or try to touch her”
(45). The intertextual reference may illuminate the moment as Langbaum
suggested, by reaching outside of the story in order to find the words of love that
the story itself seems unable to produce, but it is unable to bring about love or
change anything at the level of main narrative. While “The Roads Round Pisa”
uses the romance love-quest as a centripetal, structural force, it also initiates the
centrifugal process where romantic love is displaced by multifaceted desire unable
to name its object in a search that know no bounds. Agnese, like Athena of “The
Monkey,” wants to study astronomy and “turn to the infinity of space,” no longer
imaginable as Dante’s celestial spheres of Heaven made navigable by romantic
love (22).
But where romantic love is no longer a viable or even representable ideal, there
may be freedom of a kind, for women. In 1923, Blixen wrote to her mother from
the Ngong farm in Kenya:

I will give all young women two pieces of advice: to cut their hair and learn
how to drive an automobile. These two things change life completely. The
long hair has really been a kind of slavery for thousands of years; you
suddenly feel free in a way that words cannot express, with a short mane
that you can fix in a minute and through which the wind blows. And then,
out here, where you do not wear the corset, you can really move like a
man’s equal. (Breven från Afrika 156)
(Två råd ska jag ge alla yngre kvinnor: att klippa av håret och att lära sig
köra automobil. Dessa två saker förändrar hela tillvaron. Det långa håret har
verkligen varit ett slaveri i årtusenden; man känner sig plötsligt så fri, som
ord inte kan uttrycka, med en kort man som man kan ordna på en minut och
som vinden kan blåsa igenom. Och när man sedan inte har korsett här ute, så
kan man verkligen röra sig som en mans jämlike.)

In Seven Gothic Tales some of the women walk away like Agnese or young
Calypso who escapes Count Seraphina’s misogynistic castle. Athena Hopballehus
refuses marriage and turns to the infinity of space. Fransine kills her husband-to-

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 be, and Pellegrina Leoni and miss Malin Nat-og-Dag set out on interminable
flights from the shackles of identity, imagining and reinventing themselves. It
would be wrong to claim that Blixen/Dinesen’s representations of the women
characters are triumphant. They are no Scarlett O’Hara who leaves the reader with
the promise of another day to come. Pellgrina dies in the manner of the opera-diva
she once was and miss Malin Nat-og-Dag and Calypso fade away into silence. But
they are also not like Ma Joad or the Rose of Sharon, representations of
archetypical, nurturing womanhood defined by loyalty to family-bonds. For the
women who survive the slaughter-house called Seven Gothic Tales, Agnese,
Athena, Fransine, the lack of closure reads, if not as a promise, then at least as a
possibility.

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Conclusion

In this study I have used Canfield Fisher’s introduction as a guide through my

reading of Seven Gothic Tales as a potentially desirable object for sale on the
market in 1934. But also in my reading of this collection of stories as a literary
investigation of the conditions of being and identity-construction at a time when
mature capitalism evolved into a consumer-based, global economy during the first
half of the twentieth century. In this reading, the Great Depression figures as a
moment that reveals the degree to which consumerist ideology and logic had
become the only way to imagine being and identity, a condition that Seven Gothic
Tales both reflects and resists. In doing so, I have shown that Seven Gothic Tales,
far from being anachronistic, can be read as a work of art that shared the thoughts
and concerns of its time. A historicized interpretation that addresses the material
circumstances of Blixen/Dinesen’s writing does not need to prove the value of her
works through recourse to the sorting tools of canonization. It does not need to
perform a dissociative operation whereby the historical figure of the author on the
one hand and her works on the other, are pried apart in order to salvage the works
from the commercial sphere. Nor does it need to construct an image of the author
as champion of virtuous values, whose works reflect these very virtues.
In her introduction to Seven Gothic Tales, Canfield Fisher explicitly addressed
the reader as a consumer when she used the image of the market as a place where
he or she could stroll amid the stands, a compelling image of abundance and the
freedom to choose. At the same time Canfield Fisher’s introduction by itself and
as a part of the Book-of-the-Month-Club’s communication with its members, also
addressed the reader as someone who needed to improve him- or herself and
construct an identity in order to get on in society. In Canfield Fisher’s rendering,
Seven Gothic Tales combined elements from canonical tradition - Byron,
Stevenson, Cervantes - to create a “new sensation” that could not really be
described but had to be experienced: “’Take a taste yourself. You’ll eat it to the
core, if you do’” (v). Like the scientists of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the
anonymous author had engineered a new kind of fruit out of already existing
material, and to eat it was to incorporate the kind of newness that would magically

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 transform identity. To read Seven Gothic Tales was to consume in order to
become consumable.
In the first part of this study, I described and discussed the Book-of-the-Month-
Club as a commercial enterprise that did not only offer its members books, but
also the opportunity to conscientiously construct a marketable identity through
consumption. The Book-of-the-Month-Club’s marketing strategies have to be
considered in relation to an evolving consumer culture, a steadily growing market
and the role played by advertising in the process of creating pliable consumers
concerned with developing agreeable and interesting personalities. I argued that
the creation of an author’s public persona that could be used in the promotion of
his or her books has to be considered as yet another aspect of consumer culture,
mass market and advertising strategies, rather than as a response to the readers’
innate desire to known the renowned. Likewise, the authors did not necessarily
seek out the public limelight willingly, but responded to the demands of the
publishing industry. In this context, Blixen’s insistence on using a pseudonym in
1934 could have been considered as an expression of an author’s desire to avoid
the harsh, unflattering light of the public domain. Still, the fact that her
correspondence reveals that she was not only willing but even eager to go public
following the success of Seven Gothic Tales suggests that her initial reticence had
more to do with her fear of failure combined with her ignorance of the workings
of the American market. Since her use of the pseudonym “Isak Dinesen” has often
been read as yet another significant expression of her claim to multiple identities,
or of her identification with her father, or of the female artist’s claim to self-
production, it is interesting to consider her willingness to discard it once she had
made it as an author, as well as her somewhat grudging acceptance of it based on
American editorial motives. The fact that Blixen/Dinesen is a writer of short
stories must also be considered in relation to literature understood as an object for
sale on a market. Like many other authors of the time, she proved herself to be
less worried than her publishers about maintaining the boundary between book-
and magazine-publishing. While recognizing the urgent financial motives behind
Blixen/Dinesen’s short story-writing and -publishing, I also argued that her
publishing strategies should be considered in terms of purposeful self-marketing
in relation to the mass market offered by American magazines. In the final section

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 of this first part, I interpreted the critical and academic reception and treatment of
Blixen/Dinesen as marked by a desire to salvage her works and her public persona
from the commercial market by creating a space for her within canonical literary
history. I also suggested that this desire has generated the image of
Blixen/Dinesen’s works as “anachronistic,” as well as a need to present both
author and works as champions of feminism and anti-colonialism.
In the second part of this study, I discussed the way in which Seven Gothic
Tales uses the aristocratic characters to install fantastic or magical elements in the
midst of an otherwise realistic narrative. In doing so, Seven Gothic Tales draws
the reader’s attention to the fact that our perceptions of social reality and
hierarchy are grounded in an imaginary register that could also be labelled
ideology. The world is what we perceive it to be and our beliefs structure the
world fantastically, but the fantasies are, like the nobility, engendered by an
existing social hierarchy. The existence of counts and countesses may be as
ridiculous as the idea that buying a particular product could change one’s life and
being, but understood as a fantasy supported by the ideological and economic
apparatus of consumer culture it is a functional fantasy in the sense that it shapes
self-perception and action. Blixen/Dinesen’s criticism has by and large, if at all,
read the aristocratic theme of Seven Gothic Tales and her later works in the vein
explicitly suggested by the author herself in her extensive correspondence. That is
to say as manifestations of timeless, universally valid approaches to life where the
aristocratic mien is contrasted with bourgeois values, and the former celebrated.
This study, on the other hand, suggests that the aristocratic theme in Seven Gothic
Tales should be read in relation to the socioeconomic context of colonial Kenya
where the stories were begun and where the aristocratic idea and the feudal,
hierarchical ethos proved their market value as image, appearance and fiction in
the context of a budding tourist industry. I argued that while Out of Africa should
be read as a part of the fictionalization of “Africa” as a commodity for sale on a
global market, Seven Gothic Tales in fact reflects on the social fantasies that made
this marketable fictionalization possible.
The third part of this study started off from Canfield Fisher’s description of
Seven Gothic Tales as a many-colored literary fog, and discussed the work as an
example of a malleable, multi-purpose work of art that functions in relation to

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 diverse audiences. I considered Blixen/Dinesen’s title(s) as indications of the role
played by marketing considerations and extratextual components in genre-
construction on a modern and transcultural book market, explaining why her
works continue to function both on the popular and the academic markets. The
intertextual elements and the inset-tale structure of her stories invite a message-
oriented kind of reading that tends to interpret her stories allegorically, looking for
hidden meanings in the interlacing of old and new material. I suggested that the
compositional aspect of the romance-tradition within which Seven Gothic Tales
consciously places itself, takes on a new significance in a consumer culture
overflowing with value-laden signs beckoning to the reader/consumer.
Reading Seven Gothic Tales as a romance and romance as a literary form
cloven between a desire for fulfillment and closure on the one hand, and the
pressing demands of reality on the other, becomes especially relevant in the light
of the fact that it was published in the midst of the Great Depression. The fourth
part of this study considers Seven Gothic Tales in relation to the question of how
to narrate stasis in an era when the wheels of American progress grinded to a
brutal halt and the future loomed as a threat rather than a promise. In this
atmosphere of fear and doubt people looked to an imagined, mythical past for
comfort and solutions to the question of what it was all coming to. Set in the
nineteenth century of a seemingly serene and stable old-world civilization, Seven
Gothic Tales may at first appear as an example of the kind of literature where an
imaginary past figures as an escape route from the chaos of the present. Still, read
in relation to Steinbeck’s representation of the Depression era couched in
nostalgia in The Grapes of Wrath, it becomes clear the Seven Gothic Tales in fact
explores and exploits the past in an uncompromising, unsentimental fashion both
at the level of form and of narrative. The romance structure aiming at closure and
fulfillment breaks down as the inset tales engulf the frame narrative and action
comes to a standstill as questions of identity move to the fore. In the brutal and
lethal world of Seven Gothic Tales closure and fulfillment are revealed as
unachievable ideals at a time when identity has become an interminable project
driven by desires that cannot be fulfilled according to the logic of a consumerist
economy. Read in the context of the time and milieu in which it was published,
Seven Gothic Tales becomes very much a work that shares the thoughts of its

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 time, and of our own time, inviting us to reflect on the price we may have to pay
for the freedom of inventing our selves anew each day.
In his essay on advertising as a system of magical inducements and
satisfactions, Williams wrote: “We are the market, which the system of industrial
production has organized” (187). The notion that we are the market may seem like
a banal statement of the obvious fact that products are produced, sold and bought
by people. In a consumer culture, however, the proposition that we are the market
has to be understood literally, and in that sense the notion that market equals
being is far from banal. Basing her definition of what consumer culture entails at
the level of being on empirical studies consisting of in-depth interviews and
focus-group discussions, Lury suggests that

People’s involvement with consumer culture is such that it infiltrates

everyday life not only at the level of economic decision-making, social
activities and domestic life, but also at the level of meaningful
psychological experience. It affects the construction of identities, the
formation of relationships and the framing of events. (193)

In a consumer culture where the individual is encouraged to construct his or her

identity through the act of consumption but also to perceive of this identity as a
commodity for sale, the market cannot be construed as an exterior space that we
can choose to visit and leave at will, but as an integral part of our being. We are
the market not only in our capacity of potential buyers, but also in our capacity of
potentially marketable identities. Today, almost a hundred years after Seven
Gothic Tales was first published, few would quarrel with the description of the
consumer as today’s master category of identity. During the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries the availability and range of products have increased steadily
together with the sites for purchase and consumption, ranging from the Internet to
shopping malls. Former publicly or state-run services such as education, transport
and housing have been placed on the market, and people who once thought of
themselves as citizens, tax-payers and students have been re-trained to think of
themselves as consumers, while political discourse identifies freedom with
individual choice. We are encouraged to borrow money in order to consume and
shopping has become a leisure pursuit, driven by pervasive advertising. At the

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 same time, shopping and consumption are not merely about satisfying individual
desire, but just as importantly about satisfying someone else’s desires. Personality
has to be constructed as “an unbroken series of successful gestures” in order to
create a marketable identity (Fitzgerald 6). One may, as Arendt or Hertel did,
deplore this process and its consequences but it is difficult to even imagine a
space or a human activity untouched by it.
Karen Blixen died on the 7th of September 1962. She was 77 years old and the
cause of death was undernourishment. In one of her vary last letters, written six
months before her death, she wrote:

I cannot walk two steps without support, nor stand up and keep my
equilibrium – some time ago I fell in my bathroom and broke a rib, - and I
cannot eat, so cannot get my weight above 70 pounds … The doctors tell me
that I have all the symptoms of a concentration camp prisoner, one of them
being that my legs swell so that they look like thick poles and the feet like
cannon balls. This last thing is terribly unbecoming and for some reason
very vulgar. Altogether I look like the most horrible old witch, a real
Memento Mori! (Karen Blixen i Danmark. Bind 2 463)

Yet, she lived throughout the summer, receiving visitors and admirers. She had to
be carried around the house and since even the slightest touch caused bruising on
her emaciated body, she was always wearing thick sweaters and was wrapped in
blankets. Every now and then discussions still erupt in public, revolving around
the unsolvable question whether it was syphilis or anorexia that eventually caused
Blixen’s death. Her relentless pains and her failing heart were symptoms of
syphilis in the third and final stage. But anorectics also eventually die, like she
did, from a heart-failure resulting from long-term starvation. She wrote that she
could not eat, but her servants and close friends have suggested that it was rather a
matter of her not wanting to eat during the last years of her life. In 1956, a gastric
ulcer had led to surgery where parts of her stomach had been removed. Looking at
photographs from this time, one can see how the ageing, slim but still healthy-
looking woman transformed almost overnight into the shrunken, old witch that
she described in her letter. Instead of following the dietary recommendations of

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 her physicians, she kept a diet she had composed herself consisting of oysters,
strawberries and champagne. Or, she did not eat at all.
We know all these intimate details about Blixen’s body and its ailments
because so many of Blixen/Dinesen’s friends, relatives and admirers have written
books about her. Parmenia Migel’s Titania that was published in 1967 and is still
in print today and that was reviewed by Arendt the following year, was only one
book in a flood of books about Blixen/Dinesen that have deluged the book market
after her death and over the last half-century. One of them being a commercial
book I wrote in Swedish in 2006. Perhaps Arendt would have liked my writing on
Blixen/Dinesen better than she liked Migel’s. I spent quite a lot of letters and
space on discussing syphilis and anorexia, and its cultural significance as well as
its significance to Blixen/Dinesen herself, whose father also suffered from
syphilis and committed suicide when she was ten years old. In connection with
this biographical tidbit I also created a rather elegant link between
Blixen/Dinesen’s own life and her fiction, suggesting that we read a passage from
a story in Last Tales, written at about the same time as the author begun her self-
erasing diet, as a redemptive reflection on her own tragedy. In “A Country Tale” a
middle-aged mother complains to her daughter that she has gotten old, and even
worse than that: that she has gotten fat:

“If I had grown thin!” Sibylla moaned on her daughter’s breast. “If I had
become a skeleton, a skull, a memento mori to the trivial crowd, who refuse
to think of time and eternity! Then I should still be an inspiring figure to
them! And upon my entrance into a ballroom I should still strike sparks
from them all: epigrams, poetry, heroic deeds – and oh, passion as well. I
should at least inspire them with horror, Rikke, and I should expect to
inspire horror.” (214)

It is of course so easy, and therefore so tempting, to create an association between

these lines and the image of emaciated Blixen/Dinesen herself on stage or on the
screen, telling her stories in a voice made deep and husky by years of chain-
smoking: the apparition from god knows where or when that Arendt went to listen
to in New York in 1959. There is nothing wrong with this kind of associative
reading where the text is interpreted as an organic reflection of the author’s life

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 and vice versa. There is also absolutely nothing wrong with using
Blixen/Dinesen’s life, public persona and works to sell one’s own writing. I have
done it, and I would say that I am in rather good company. Hertel’s four-page
essay on “Karen Blixen Superstar” is included in a 371-page-volume of texts that
he wrote in various Danish magazines and daily papers and on various topics
between the years 1954 and 1996. This single essay, however, has also lent its
title to the entire volume called Karen Blixen Superstar. A Glimpse of Literary
Life in the Age of Media (Karen Blixen Superstar. Glimt af det litterære liv i
mediealderen). On the front cover is a reprint of Hertel’s article taken from the
daily, including a photo of a turban-clad Blixen with a lop-sided smile on her
wrinkled face. On the fly-leaf there is a drawing of her in profile and again it is
the aged, emaciated author clad in black. To a reader interested in Blixen/Dinesen
and especially the ways in which she interacted with modern mass media in
various ways, the title and front cover of this book would make it almost
impossible to by-pass. Upon opening the book, however, the consumer may very
well experience a sense of disappointment and even of being the victim of
dubious marketing tactics. I know I did.
Having once again had the opportunity to return to Karen Blixen and Isak
Dinesen in this study written in a public sphere that still holds out against the
commercial sphere that created Blixen/Dinesen, I have learned that her stories in
Seven Gothic Tales have the power to inspire horror in their readers all by
themselves. It is not the kind of horror that can be contained or redeemed by the
author’s own life or public persona. It is the horror of being at the mercy of the
bound-, face- and body-less process we call modern, capitalist consumer-society.

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Sammanfattning

Det här är en studie av den danska författaren Karen Blixens framgångsrika debut
med novellsamlingen Seven Gothic Tales på den nordamerikanska bokmarknaden
1934, lanserad av bokklubben Book-of-the-Month-Club. Utgångspunkten är
bokens säljbarhet där och då, och begreppet säljbarhet är det perspektiv som styr
mina tolkningar både av boken som ett objekt på en marknad, och av novellernas
innehåll och form. Med avstamp i förordet till Seven Gothic Tales som skrevs av
författaren Dorothy Canfield Fisher som också var medlem i Book-of-the-Month-
Clubs urvalsjury diskuteras dels hur boken marknadsfördes i ett samtida
ekonomiskt och kulturellt sammanhang, dels hur novellerna är möjliga att läsa i
relation till just detta sammanhang där konsumtion, säljbarhet och
marknadsföringsbarhet blivit ett sätt för människor att förstå och förhålla sig till
subjektskonstruktion och sin egen identitet. I Canfield Fishers presentation av
Seven Gothic Tales framställs boken som ett åtråvärt konsumtionsobjekt på
marknaden därför att den kan förvandla det läsande subjektet till ett likaledes
åtråvärt objekt på en marknad, i besittning av kunskaper och bildning som bidrar
till en säljbar identitet. Novellerna framställer och förhåller sig till just denna
historiska förskjutning av identitetsskapande till och på en kommersiell marknad
där identiteten representeras som ett ständigt pågående projekt som per definition
aldrig kan fullbordas, utan ständigt måste uppdateras och förbättras.
Grundläggande för avhandlingens argumentation är uppfattningen att de
materiella villkor som råder vid en given historisk tidpunkt och på en given plats
tar sig uttryck i den litteratur som skrivs, oavsett om det är författarens medvetna
intention eller ej. Uttryck förstås här alltså inte som en fråga om en realistisk
återspegling av rådande villkor, utan som den litterära textens gestaltning och
bearbetning av verklighetens samhälleliga konflikter i berättelsens form.
Studiens tidsram omfattar nittonhundratalets tre första decennier och
framväxten av en global, kapitalistisk marknadsekonomi baserad på ständig
produktions- och konsumtionsökning. I avhandlingen första del presenteras Book-
of-the-Month-Club inom ramen för den framväxande nordamerikanska
konsumtionskulturen där reklam och marknadsföring var avgörande i formandet
av bilden av människan som i första hand en konsument. I bokklubbens

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 marknadsföring liksom inom reklamen i allmänhet framställdes och tilltalades hen
som en otillräcklig människa i behov av stöd och råd. Reklamsektorns explosiva
tillväxt och innovationer under nittonhundratalets första hälft måste ses mot
bakgrund av produktionssektorns snabba tillväxt och behovet att framhäva den
egna produkten i konkurrens med andra produkter inom samma sektor.
Det förhållandet gällde också bokmarknaden och i det sammanhanget blev
utvecklandet av en säljbar offentlig författaridentitet som kunde marknadsföras
tillsammans med bokprodukten av avgörande betydelse och något författarna
tvingades förhålla sig till. Avhandlingen diskuterar Blixens initiala insisterande på
anonymitet och en författarpseudonym i relation till Ellen Glasgow och Vicki
Baum, två författare som också marknadsfördes och såldes av Book-of-the-
Month-Club. När det gäller Blixen har både populärvetenskapliga och akademiska
verk tolkat hennes val att använda pseudonym – och själva valet av pseudonymen
Isak Dinesen – som ett betydelsebärande uttryck för hennes identifikation med
fadern eller som en återspegling av hennes önskan att inte låta sig begränsas av en
enda identitet, utan i egenskap av författare framträda maskerad. Hennes
korrespondens med den amerikanske förläggaren Robert K. Haas i kölvattnet efter
framgången med Seven Gothic Tales visar tvärtom att Blixen ville publicera sin
nästa bok under sitt egentliga namn också på den amerikanska marknaden, och att
hon något motvilligt böjde sig för Haas förläggarerfarenhet och insikten att ”Isak
Dinesen” blivit ett värdefullt varumärke.
I korrespondensen mellan Haas och Blixen framstår också novellformen som
ett problem i marknadsförandet av Seven Gothic Tales eftersom den amerikanska
publiken, enligt Haas, inte tyckte om noveller. Avhandlingen diskuterar Haas
uttalande i ljuset av novellens status i förhållande till romanen med tonvikt på
novellens säljbarhet på den expanderande tidskriftsmarknaden gentemot vilken
bokförlagen ville markera avstånd. Trots att Blixens förläggare under hela hennes
liv fortsatte att hoppas på att hon en dag skulle skriva en roman, förblev hon en
novellförfattare. Det finns naturligtvis många infallsvinklar på Blixens val av
litterär form, men i föreliggande studie hävdar jag att det bör tolkas som ett val
betingat både av ekonomiska skäl och i termer av marknadsföring. Novellformen
gav Blixen möjlighet att publicera och få betalt för samma text i ett flertal olika

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 medier och sammanhang, och det innebar dessutom en möjlighet att marknadsföra
författarskapet i en mängd olika fora.
Det sista avsnittet i avhandlingens första del behandlar den akademiska
receptionen av Karen Blixen och Isak Dinesen med början i Robert Langbaums
inflytelserika bok om författarskapet från 1964. Här hävdas att den har präglats av
en önskan om att skilja författarskapet från den kommersiella sfär som skapade
både författare och verk, och att begreppet modernism - förstått som ett redskap
med vars hjälp verk placeras och bedöms i ett hierarkiskt system – har använts för
att placera Blixen/Dinesen på rätt plats, det vill säga utanför den kommersiella
sfären. Jag hävdar också att framställandet av Blixen/Dinesen som en medvetet
feministisk och/eller antikolonial röst likaledes bottnar i en önskan om att
omskapa författaren i enlighet med den modernistiska ideologins särskiljande
mellan högt och lågt. Som en konsekvens av dessa ideologiskt färgade tolkningar
av Blixen/Dinesen beskrivs hennes texter ofta som anakronistiska och författaren
som en avvikare eftersom varken hennes verk eller Blixen/Dinesen själv enkelt
låter sig fogas in i det fack som tolkaren skapat åt dem.
I avhandlingens andra del diskuterar jag de aristokratiska karaktärernas
betydelse i Seven Gothic Tales. Den rikliga förekomsten av aristokratiska
karaktärer och miljöer i Blixens författarskap har tidvis uppmärksammats och, i
synnerhet i ett skandinaviskt sammanhang, blivit föremål för en biografiskt
orienterad kritik med början i de danska recensionerna av Syv fantastiske
fortællinger. Även när receptionen inte har varit kritisk, har den i huvudsak utgått
från och övertagit författarens egna tolkningar i brev och andra dokument av
begreppet aristokrati som en beteckning för en livshållning snarare än en
identifierbar samhällsklass. I denna avhandling hävdas istället att aristokraterna i
Seven Gothic Tales bör förstås med utgångspunkt från det kulturella och
ekonomiska sammanhang i vilket novellerna påbörjades, nämligen den brittiska
kolonin Kenya där Blixen bodde mellan åren 1914 och 1931. Kolonin Kenyas
ekonomiska och politiska system som dominerades av representanter från främst
brittisk men också kontinental adel, återspeglade en uttalad önskan att etablera en
feodal samhällsordning där rasismen utgjorde fundamentet för en oföränderligt
hierarkisk ordning. Kolonins feodalt uppbyggda agrarbaserade ekonomi var dock,
i likhet med nordamerikanska och europeiska småjordburk, inte konkurrenskraftig

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 i ett globalt sammanhang där tekniken alltmer ersatte mänsklig arbetskraft.
Däremot var det feodala idealet och föreställningar om aristokratins blodsbundna
utvaldhet och kulturella förfining möjliga att framgångsrikt omsätta som vara på
en framväxande turismmarknad. Det aristokratiska varat är unikt i det att det till
skillnad från andra sociala kategorier är undandraget alla materiella och
ekonomiska villkor, och det gör detta vara till en åtråvärd och säljbar vara på en
konsumtionsmarknad där identitet saluförs inom ramen för en hierarkiskt
uppbyggd världsbild. Seven Gothic Tales gör läsaren uppmärksam på den magiska
och fantastiska dimension varpå föreställningen om aristokratins utvaldhet vilar,
men betonar samtidigt denna föreställnings grund i en reell samhällshierarki
genom användandet av familjenamn hämtade från verkligheten. Ett annat namn
för denna magi, fantasi eller världsbild är ideologi, och i Seven Gothic Tales är det
just framställningen av de aristokratiska karaktärerna som tydliggör ideologins
funktion som tolkningsram i förhållande till den sociala verkligheten. Den
ideologiskt färgade föreställningen om varats betydelse synliggörs i Seven Gothic
Tales, och avhandlingen hävdar att det är en förklaring till bokens säljbarhet på en
nordamerikansk marknad styrd av och uppbyggd på föreställningar om
identitetskonstruktion genom konsumtion.
I avhandlingens tredje del diskuteras Seven Gothic Tales som ett modernt
konstverk i den bemärkelsen att den var säljbar på en bred, transkulturell litterär
marknad med många olika typer av läsargrupper. Novellerna betecknades som
”Gothic”, ”fantastiske” eller ”romantiska” beroende på kultursfär, och i samtliga
fall refererades en erkänd och igenkännbar litterär tradition inom varje språk- och
kulturområde. Referensen till en muntlig tradition genom beteckningen ”tales”,
”fortællinger” och ”berättelser” refererar en muntlig tradition och avhandlingen
diskuterar det muntliga berättandets och berättarens betydelse både tematiskt och
strukturellt i en tid när masskommunikation via radio, och så småningom också
TV, gjorde det möjligt för författaren att framträda i rollen som just muntlig
berättare. Vidare diskuteras hur Seven Gothic Tales apostroferar den höviska
riddarromanens tradition både tematiskt och strukturellt, dels genom den
aristokratiska miljön, dels genom sitt flitiga användande av intertextuella
referenser och sammanflätandet av huvudnarrativ och inskjutna berättelser som är
möjliga att läsa allegoriskt i förhållande till huvudnarrativet. Jag hävdar att det

182
 skapar en litterär text som inbjuder till en genomgående allegorisk, intensivt
tolkande läsning där varje intertextuell referens är potentiellt betydelsebärande,
och mängden betydelser potentiellt oändligt många. För en akademiskt skolad
läsare framstår Seven Gothic Tales som en komplex gåta som kan och måste läsas
och lösas genom en tolkning grundad i kännedom om litterära traditioner och verk
där urvalet betingas av läsarens intentioner. I Canfield Fishers förord
marknadsförs också boken i förhållande till den genomsnittliga Book-of-the-
Month-Club läsaren som en åtråvärd vara därför att den sätter hen i förbindelse
med en kulturell, kanonisk tradition. Avhandlingen hävdar att även om den
genomsnittliga bokklubbsläsaren 1934 inte kunde identifiera eller ens förstå Seven
Gothic Tales alla intertextuella referenser, var hen en läsare skolad i konsten att
betrakta och förhålla sig till omvärlden som ett teckensystem där viljan och
förmågan att tolka tecken framställdes som livsavgörande i reklamen.
I avhandlingens sista del diskuteras möjligheten att betrakta Seven Gothic Tales
som en typisk Book-of-the-Month-Club-bok mot bakgrund av den djupa
lågkonjunktur som rådde. Konsumtionskulturen byggde på och projicerade bilden
av den enskilda människan som en i grunden bristfällig varelse, och den sociala
och ekonomiska katastrofen tolkades följaktligen på individnivå. Avhandlingen
tolkar John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath mot den bakgrunden och verket
framträder då som ett uttryck för konsumtionsideologins grepp om förmågan att
föreställa sig människan och hennes möjligheter och vara. I Steinbecks roman är
framtiden bara möjlig att föreställa sig i termer av en mytisk och romantiserad
förflutenhet, och trots romanens uttalat radikala politiska ansats befinner den sig i
en samtida kulturell huvudfåra där mytisk historieskrivning och absoluta,
oföränderliga identiteter fungerar som en besvärjelse mot en oviss och
skrämmande framtid. Medan Seven Gothic Tales vid en första anblick tycks
ansluta sig till samma mytifierande och romantiserande bruk av historien, hävdar
avhandlingen tvärtom att boken förhåller sig både osentimentalt och våldsamt till
historien, förstådd både som föreställning och tradition. Den höviska
riddarromanens form där slutet är liktydigt med den goda ordningens återställande
etableras i samlingens första novell, men dekonstrueras stegvis allteftersom den
klassiska sammanflätningen av huvudnarrativ och inskjutna berättelser faller
sönder. Handlingen avstannar, det identitetsfokuserade berättandet träder i

183
 förgrunden och novellerna betonar sin oavslutbarhet eftersom det inte längre är
möjligt att föreställa sig en ordning där den mänskliga identiteten är avgränsad
och på förhand given. Seven Gothic Tales framställer istället det mänskliga varat
som en oändlig serie identiteter, ett existentiellt tillstånd som avhandlingen
betecknar som nomadiskt och grundat i ett begär som aldrig kan tillfredsställas.
Seven Gothic Tales brukar den litterära traditionen för att skapa ett verk som
brutalt iscensätter det moderna konsumtionssamhällets omformande av det
mänskliga varat och identiteten till ett säljbart objekt på en marknad, underkastad
ett ansiktslöst, amorft begär som kräver ständig förändring, förnyelse och
förbättring.

184
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Index

advertising 9, 18, 21, 35-38, 172, 175 Casanova, Pascal 107-108, 110

Aiken, Susan Hardy 56-57, 69-72, 124 Casey, Janet Galligani 26, 143, 144

allegory 135, 137-141, 150, 155, 158, 160, 174 closure 160-163

Anderson, Benedict 93 colonial nostalgia 56, 101-102, 117

Arendt, Hanna 1-8, 10, 126, 160, 176-177 consumer culture 11, 28-39, 140-141

aristocracy 18-19, 49, 56, 73, 75-79, 86-99, 104, Culler, Jonathan 81, 82, 84,119
111, 116-117, 146, 160, 166-167, 173
Cunningham, Valerie 68
Aschan, Ulf 77
Damrosch, David 110
Atwood, Margaret 9
Den afrikanske farm 104-105
Auerbach, Erich 104
Dettmar, Kevin and Stephen Watt 49
Babbitt 34, 38, 159, 165-166
extratextual 119-122
Baudrillard, Jean 35, 37
Fabian, Johannes 102
Baum, Vicki 18, 43-45, 59, 63
fantastic 18, 80-82, 87-88
Becnel, Kim 21, 39, 42, 49, 53, 59
Felski, Rita 63-64, 69
Beer, Gillian 150
feminism 5-6, 67, 69-71
Behdad, Ali 96, 102
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield 15-17, n16, 18, 19, 24-25,
Benjamin, Walter 40, 57-58, 61, 135 27, 28-31, 33, 55, 65, 73, 79, 83, 118, 119, 121,
132, 142, 146, 147, 171, 179, 183
Berman, Bruce and John Lonsdale 95
food metaphors 29, 31-32
Berman, Marshall 12
Frye, Northrop 114, 138, 149, 150, 152, 154
Book-of-the-Month-Club 4-5, 8-10, 17-18, 20-30,
40-43, 46, 60-63, 51, 55, 71, 83, 86, 103, 118, 122, Glasgow, Ellen 18, 41-42, 53, 59, 180
133, 140-142, 171, 172, 179, 180, 183
Glienke, Bernhard 128, n129
Brantly, Susan 121, 128-130, 132, 136-137
Goodman, Susan 41, 42, n45
Brickell Herschell 29
Gothic 122-125
Bruccoli, Matthew n63
Grapes of Wrath, the 143-145, 151, 160, 163, 165,
Canby, Henry Seidel 23-25, 27, 29, 53, 62, n63, 171, 174, 183
142, 150
Great Depression 11, 19, 96, 142-145, 171, 174
Carey, John 58, n59, 60-61
Great Gatsby, the 38, 176
Carnegie, Dale 163-164
197
Gubar, Susan 6, 12 Levy. Andrew 50, 53, 150

Haas, Robert K. 9, 17-18, 20, 30-31, 39, 46-48, 50, Lindén, Claudia 122-124
54, 180
Lohafer 52, 150
Hansson, Heidi 148, 154
Lundkvist, Arthur 74-76, 79, 140, 160
Harker, Jamie 62, 68
Lury, Celia 36, 175
Heede, Dag 124
Marchand, Roland 35-36, 164-165
Hees, Annelie van 132
Markham, Beryl 97-98
Henriken, Aage 8, 64, 108-109
modernism 25, 58-72
Hertel, Hans 6-8, 10, 176, 178
Moers, Ellen 123-124
Horton, Susan 6, n70
Moi, Toril 70
Howard, Susan 125
Munro, Alice 52
Hutner, Gordon 145
Murphy, Michael 59, 62
Huxley, Elspeth 93
Out of Africa 6, 11, 12, 13, 47-48, 69, 74, 90-91,
Huyssen, Andreas 57-58, 60, 71 n96, 100-106, 126, 173,

inset tale 135-140 paratextual 119-122

intertextuality 127-145 Poe, Edgar Allen 50

Jaffe, Aaron 59 public persona 39-49

Jameson, Fredric 18, n63, 64, 148-149 Radway, Janice 17, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28

JanMohammed, Abdul 104 Rees, Ellen 9, 65-68, 70-71, 72, 125, 128

Johannesson, Eric 64 romance 102-106, 127, 132, 141, 148-160

Johansson, Klara 118, 119, 130, 132, n132, 133, Rostbøll, Grethe 9, 45, 46, 48, 55, 68

Kennedy, Dane 95, 96, n96, 98, 99, 101, 103 Rubin, Joan Shelley 17, 21, 23, 24, 25, 62-63, n63

Kenya 1, 6-7, 11-12, 13, 15, 18-19, 90-117, 159, Scherman, Harry 21-22, 29, 39, 43
169, 173, 181
Schyberg, Frederik 78, 79
King, Lynda 43, 44
Scura, Dorothy 41
Knipp, Thomas 100-101, 103, 104
Selboe, Tone 10, 64
Langbaum, Robert 9, 51, 64-66, 68, 72, 78-79, 90,
101, 102, 103, 117, 123, 127-128, 131-132, 134, Selecting Committee 22-23, 29, 40, 62
135, 138-140, 146, 155, 159-160, 169, 181
Shadows on the Grass 13, 48, 113-114, 125
Leff, Leonard 40
short story 50-55, 150, 172
leisure 98-99, 103
Slater, Don 32-33, 99,100, 110-111

198
Stambaugh, Sarah 8-9, 124, 128

stasis 11, 144-148, 160-161, 174

story-telling n1, 3, 5, 64, 125-127, 161

Susman, Warren 34, 37,38, 142, 145, 165

Syv fantastiske fortællinger 75-76, 104, 121, 123,

181

Terkel, Studs 142

Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 93, 100-102

Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl 110

Thurman, Judith 78

Todorov, Tzvetan 18, 80-88, 119

Vanity Fair 59-62, 72, 141

Veblen, Thorstein 98-99

verisimilitude 18, 81-86, 119, 157-158

Vinaver, Eugène 127, 132, 135, 150, 153

Wekly, David 55

Westenholz, Anders 92

Wilkinson, Lynn n1

Williams, Raymond 35, 175

Wolff, Richard 95

World Literature 107-110

Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth 1

199
200