Dinesen, Isak | Mark Mussari (essay date spring 2001)
Mark Mussari (essay date spring 2001)
SOURCE: Mussari, Mark. “L'Heure bleue: Isak Dinesen and the Ascendant Imagination.” Scandinavian Studies 73, no. 1 (spring 2001): 43-62.
[In the following essay, Mussari considers Dinesen's use of the color blue in the imagery of the stories comprising Winter's Tales.]
Ein blauer Augenblick ist nur mehr Seele. [A blue moment is purely and simply soul]
—“Sebastian im Traum: Kindheit” Georg Trakl
In several of the stories in Winter's Tales, Isak Dinesen makes painterly use of the imaginative breadth of blue.1 The color functions on two levels: a number of her characters are ultimately enveloped in the blue other-world she constructs early in the collection; and at the same time, her colorific language, calling to mind Kandinsky's assertion that the eye is “absorbed” into a circle of blue, draws the reader into her imagined...
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