Because the work of Isak Dinesen reflects her patrician inclinations, her skeptical view of "emancipated" women, and her high regard for the symbolic—rather than the sociological or psychological—value of art, her stories often appear fairly remote from contemporary concerns; in a world animated largely by individual striving for equality and self-realization, Dinesen seems to speak, conservatively, for values that many of us have learned to distrust. And yet, Dinesen's work is deeply rooted in her abiding preoccupation with a problem that is alive in our own time. Experienced as a disjunction between identity and role, or between self-image and social stereotype, this problem has been formulated by Simone de Beauvoir as a conflict between selfhood and "otherness." In her analysis of the social, psychological, and political implications of "otherness" for women, de Beauvoir has shown that the role of "other" deprives one of autonomy, of a sense of self based upon norms that are appropriately female, and ultimately of a valid personal and generic identity. Quite simply, to be cast as the "other" is, for de Beauvoir, to lose one's sense of oneself as a subject and to accept a peripheral, passive role as object in a busy world dominated largely by men. But for Dinesen, "otherness," despite its dubious implications for individual autonomy, is a vital fragment of human identity that must be acknowledged and accepted before selfhood can be achieved.

Dinesen's preoccupation with the idea of "otherness" appears in virtually all her published work; as a major theme, a source of metaphor, and a seed of dramatic situation, therefore, this idea bears looking at from a strictly literary point of view. But from another perspective, one might explore this idea in her work simply for its own sake, to consider possibilities that may be obscured by the tendency to conceive the roles of subject and object, self and "other," as mutually exclusive. If one has learned, in other words, to reject the role of "other" as threatening to the integrity of the self, Dinesen may reveal self and "other" as two states of being that can co-exist in fruitful tension. Like all the great antinomies which bracket human existence, self and "other" may be seen, in the words of one of her characters, as "two locked caskets, each of which contains the key to the other." And to achieve a sense of the relationship between them may be, as it is for the characters in Dinesen's work, to widen the range of one's own experience and to understand that experience more fully.

For Dinesen's characters, the need to conceive oneself as the "other" and also the quest to experience and understand life more fully are determined partly by the nature of her fictional "world." Whether she writes of twentieth-century Africa or nineteenth-century Europe, Dinesen's "world" is essentially realistic in one important respect: it never wholly yields to the individual will or conforms to the needs of men and women who live within it. Like our own world, it may allow individuals the brief illusion that they shape events according to their own desires, or the momentary pleasure of finding themselves in tune with a larger, cosmic harmony, but it is always, simply, itself: resistant, or at best indifferent, to the human desire for mastery. When locusts descend on a beloved coffee plantation, or a ledge of ice breaks under the weight of two young lovers, Dinesen's "world" seems to express its resistance to the individual will, and it is partly this resistance that illuminates the limits of individual autonomy and reveals the self as "other." In short, for Dinesen, the "other" in oneself seems called into being in response to experiential encounter with a will that is not one's own.

Experience alone, however, is not sufficient to the task of human understanding, for Dinesen's stories also demand that characters learn to appreciate the logic which governs the resistance of the world and limits the autonomy of the self. Thus, unlike our own world which is often opaque, bewildering, absurd, Dinesen's fictional "world" is always transparently symbolic: entirely coherent, wholly expressive, thoroughly meaningful. If, as one critic has observed, her characters "change colour vividly … grow rigid with rage or terror … shake with laughter … tremble with anger, fear or grief … [and] blush—in all hues of red," they do so partly because they are fulfilling their function as symbols; the self of each is entirely devoted to the task of symbolic revelation, of showing that meaning inheres in every gesture, word, wish, and response of every individual. Many of the tales also manifest a structural concern with the showing forth of meaning; the fine network of separate stories interpolated within single works can invariably be seen, in retrospect, as a deliberate design in which all the stories play small but mutually relevant parts. Images too, particularly images of masks, mosaics, and marionettes which abound in the tales, reflect Dinesen's apparently fundamental belief that the world and all within it are symbolic in their design, as one character puts it, "Life is a mosaic of the Lord's that he keeps filling in bit by bit," a vast and intricate design whose meaning becomes clear only when the pattern is complete and one's own role in the pattern is recognizable.

This conception of the world as mosaic has, of course, both religious and philosophical implications. Its human implications, however, are worth noting, for they account for the distinct emphasis on the importance of seeing oneself as both subject and object that seems so pervasive in Dinesen's work. Theoretically, if life is a mosaic, then the identity of individual tiles is never submerged; the color, shape, size, and texture of separate pieces will always remain distinct within the whole, for a mosaic is not an ill-defined blur of color, but, to use Dinesen's phrase, "a homogeneous up-heaping of heterogeneous atoms"—a harmonious construct, if you will, whose ingredients retain their separate identities. But the identity of every tile, however, remarkable in itself, is also part of a larger identity, for each tile participates with its near and distant neighbors in a larger image. And it is the need to perceive the self in both of these roles, as a subjective, autonomous individual and as an objective part of the whole, that seems to motivate many of Dinesens' characters.

For most characters in the stories, awareness of oneself as both self and "other" depends partly upon one's sensitivity to the symbolic meaning of experience, and partly upon one's openness and vulnerability to forces outside the self. And because these two human faculties are rarely balanced in individual characters, the stories allow one to recognize the differing virtues of both symbols and experience in the quest for selfhood and "otherness."

One character who appears in two of the Seven Gothic Tales (1934) provides an excellent example of this imbalance, for although he is deeply responsive to symbols and devoted to the task of discovering the "other" in himself, he is persistently unable to expose himself to life's uncertainties. In Count Augustus, then, one can see that symbols may help to illuminate the "otherness" of the world, but only the hazards of experience can create the "other" in the self. (pp. 615-17)

If Augustus reveals that symbols can help to illuminate meaning in the world of others, but that self-image must be exposed to experiential risk before one can discover the "other" in oneself, then Charlie Despard, a writer who figures in two of the Winter's Tales (1942) probably illustrates the attempt to achieve balance between the symbolic and the experiential quest for "otherness." In both stories, "The Young Man with the Carnation" and "A Consolatory Tale," we see Charlie becoming aware of and making peace with a self he has to discover, with the truth of both his own autonomous desires and his role as "other" in the larger world. In the first of these stories, Charlie initially rejects, but later embraces, the symbols of experience that constitute his material as a writer. As he beholds the happiness of other men in the radiant face of the young man with the carnation, he reflects on his own unhappy state: "It was no wonder that God had ceased to love him, for he had, from his own free will, exchanged the things of the Lord—the moon, sea, friendship, fights—for the words that describe them."… Unlike Augustus, who willingly accepts the terms of this painful bargain, Charlie wishes to abandon the satisfaction of interpreting symbols for the more immediate satisfactions of the experiential world.

Ultimately, however, he renews his dedication to symbolic truth by turning toward the "things of the Lord" that speak to him, ironically, as though they were symbols. Ships in the harbor reveal symbolic meanings to him; pregnant with possibilities, dominators of the vast, formless sea because of their lightness and "superficiality," they seem to speak to him of the virtues and power of the hollow, superficial "word."… And in the young, waterfront whore who gives him "only a shilling's worth" of love, an opportunity to "press her palm, rough and clammy as fish skin, to his lips and tongue," Charlie discovers the meaning of his loveless marriage. As the voice of God explains at the end, Charlie's writing serves the purpose of the Lord, and in exchange for that role Charlie will have to be content with "a shilling's worth" of love "and no more."… In the eyes of God, and eventually in his own eyes as well, Charlie accepts the restrictions which his role in the mosaic imposes; instead of the pleasure sought eternally by the unenlightened "self," he will be given the reward of understanding his identity as both self and "other": a half-successful seeker after love, and a reluctant but effective wielder of symbols in the service of God.

Again, in "A Consolatory Tale," Dinesen shows us the poet's necessary acceptance of his identity as both subject and object in Charlie's description of the writer's dependence upon his audience. Like Augustus, for whom reality is the truth revealed by reflections, Charlie acknowledges that both the painter and the writer await the "consent, or the cooperation" of the public to "be brought into existence at all."… Although he imagines himself in the role of the Lord who addresses his public, Job, from out of the whirlwind, Charlie knows that the Lord may actually be "more dependent upon Job than Job upon the Lord."… Both the creator and his public are subjects, capable of capricious and willful activity, but the relationship between them makes both objects as well; each party to the relationship is self as well as "other," initiator as well as responder.

And the symbolic import of this relationship, as Charlie learns, lies in the ability of each to serve as reflector of the other. Job validates the subjective self of the Lord, like an audience the self of the artist, by bowing in acknowledgment of the Lord's creative power. Conversely, in his resistance to the Lord's will, as in an audience's rejection of a poet's work, Job reveals to the Lord his "otherness." Meaning, here, emerges from the mutual reflectiveness of both parties to the relationship, like the mutual reflectiveness, in the words of the beggar in the interpolated tale, of Sultan and slave, life and death, mean and woman, you and I. Each of these "locked caskets" reveals and discovers its own identity partly by way of symbolic reflection.

On the whole, then, the value of symbols as reflectors of the human self and its objective situation is undeniable in Dinesen's work. The stories that Charlie creates, like mirrors and dreams and also like the natural world which becomes richly eloquent as it becomes symbolic in her stories, are as vital in their own way to human awareness as experiential and material reality. (pp. 620-22)

Characters who seek to discover the truth of self and world in symbols also reveal that the great obstacle to discovery of the self as "other" is too firm a grasp upon one's own autonomy. For Dinesen, the fruitful tension between identity and role cannot exist unless one recognizes the limits of one's own power. Augustus, for example, is forever denied even a "shilling's worth" of real happiness because he will not risk haphazard and uncontrollable reflections which might distort his preconceived image of himself. But Charlie Despard and others take that risk; by yielding themselves to unflattering yet truthful self-reflections, each discovers a role as "other" that enlarges his sense of self. (p. 622)

On the whole, the price of failure in the quest for "otherness" is as high as the price of success, for some characters who fail to realize the "other" in themselves live out their lives in the cage of a partial selfhood. The de Coninck sisters in "Supper at Elsinore," for example, never break free of the cold, sterile lives that reflect only those fragments of themselves that they willingly display to the world's mirror. But Miss Malin, in "Deluge at Noderney," who hates cages … and whose self-image has developed in fantasy if not in fact, does manage to achieve both dignity and self-satisfaction; as the fanatical virgin of her youth becomes, in old age, the lascivious temptress, Miss Malin achieves the fruitful tension between self and "other" that eludes the grasp of the faded sisters de Coninck.

Whether characters depend chiefly on symbols or experience as agents of fuller awareness, moreover, the cage of self is the chief obstacle to be overcome. Often, characters reach the end of their lives before they discover their roles in a design in which they have been ignorant participants. (pp. 622-23)

But most of Dinesen's characters neither wander rootlessly nor remain in cages, for her stories deal chiefly with the ways in which characters press beyond the cage of the self into a freer and more "generous" world. Indeed, the central drama of many of the stories is precisely the moment of liberation when a character realizes that his own imagination has conceived an unexpectedly impoverished image of himself.

There are various sorts of experience that may provoke such a realization; perhaps the most impressive is the experience of love. For Dinesen, male/female love seems to serve as a metaphor for the tension between self and other, or for the relationship between two locked caskets that are forever opposed and forever meaningful to one another. For many readers, however, the tendency to limit some characters, particularly female characters, to their metaphoric or symbolic roles in Dinesen's love stories seems to obscure her emphasis on reciprocality as the essence of such relationships and also to illustrate the importance of balancing the truth of symbol against the facts of individual experience. For example, it has been suggested that Dinesen conceived the woman's role in male/female relationships to be fundamentally different from the man's, that, like the speaker in "The Old Chevalier," Dinesen believed women ought to be taught to think of themselves exclusively as symbols of womanhood rather than as individuals, in order that they become fully adapted to their feminine roles [see excerpt above]. But Dinesen seems to have written her own ironic response to the old chevalier, who wishes to deny individual selfhood to women and to grant them existence only as symbolic "others." Indeed, the pursuit of desirable symbols seems to bear fairly predictable fruit for the old chevalier; he may long nostalgically for the mysteriously bustled and draped figures of the symbol-women of his youth, but after his escape from death at the hands of his mistress, and a single night of wordless love with a young and beautiful prostitute, he will be a stranger to the love of women. Because he values the symbolic above the individual woman, his long search for love will end in contemplation of a skull.

But men and women who risk love as individuals may win not only the fruits of love but also the symbolic illumination of themselves as "others." To be sure, the stories suggest that women—like mirrors, paintings, dreams, birds, mountains, and oceans—undoubtedly play a symbolic role as reflectors and illuminators in Dinesen's work, but that role is always reversible; if there are many stories in which "woman" does indeed illuminate one facet of the male that might otherwise be obscured, there are also many many stories in which men serve exactly the same function for women. (pp. 623-24)

[The] tendency to identify characters entirely with conventional symbolic designations may oversimplify the wonderfully complex and reciprocal interaction of male and female characters. In the view of one reader [see Langbaum excerpt above] for example, the contrast between "the male principle of boundless desire [Peter's longing for both Rosa and the sea], and the female principle which is … to make boundaries and establish nests" explains why "Woman," for Dinesen, "fears the sea and found it to her interest to bring about the fall, and so … establish the restrictions of civilization." Historically, it may be accurate to consider women a civilizing force in human society. But fear of the uncontrollable and unbounded is hardly peculiar to women in Dinesen's work; Count Augustus, for example, also suffers from such a fear. And the feeling of "boundless desire" appears in Dinesen's female as in her male characters; in "Alkmene" Dinesen shows us a young woman in whom such desire has been severly repressed, and in "The Caryatids" we meet a woman in whom such desire is just awakening…. Dinesen's "world," as in our own, though men and women may have to satisfy "boundless desire" in different ways, their motivations may be very much the same. Thus, to divide male and female principles along conventional lines seems to reduce Dinesen's sense of potentiality in all creatures and to diminish her apparent confidence in women as well as men to realize themselves more fully than either cultural stereotypes or Jungian archetypes usually allow. (pp. 626-27)