SOURCE: "Karen Blixen's 'Carnival,'" in Scandinavica, Vol. 22, No. 2, November, 1983, pp. 159-70.

[In the following essay on the short story "Carnival," the critics examine Dinesen's literary style, characters, and use of fantasy, while exploring the themes of aristocratic life and the role of the artist. They also discuss the influence of Aldous Huxley, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, and E. T. A. Hoffman on Dinesen's work.]

'Carnival', which is among the most recently published of Karen Blixen's tales, dates from the 1920s—presumably around 1926, just after she had completed the shorter marionette comedy entitled Sandhedens Hævn. Originally, 'Carnival' too, was planned as a marionette comedy. The comedy was rewritten as a tale and was intended to be included in a collection to be entitled 'Nine Tales by Nozdref's Cook', which contained the material for Seven Gothic Tales (1933). In 1961, the year before Karen Blixen's death, she contemplated revising the manuscript of 'Carnival'. 'Carnival' warrants close study because its thematic and structural patterns prefigure those of her subsequent tales.

With the publication of Karen Blixen's letters from Africa in 1978, much of the conjecture about her development during the years between 1914 and 1931—and consequently about her posthumous tales from that period—has been eliminated or is at least now based on a more reliable body of material. The background of her artistic achievement can now be understood in terms of her private life. In reading the letters, we realize how greatly her correspondence resembles ideas that are expressed in her essays and fiction, in particular, with regard to the individual's attitude toward social codes. Although Karen Blixen's letters comment relatively infrequently on her literary efforts, they nevertheless reveal the interplay of truth and fiction and relate the origins of her fantastic tales. Letters to her mother, Ingeborg Dinesen, her Aunt Mary Bess Westenholz, and her brother Thomas Dinesen contain references to persons, books, and events that have been helpful in restructuring the myriad of her personal and literary activities that were essential to the creation of 'Carnival'.

The most difficult period for Karen Blixen coincides with the years that lead to the composition of 'Carnival'. It is instructive to consider events in her personal life between 1919, the year in which it becomes certain that her marriage with her cousin Bror Blixen Finecke cannot continue, and 1926, when she returns to Kenya from Denmark and experiences a number of personal crises. In 1920, Karen Blixen returns to Africa after her second visit to Denmark. She is accompanied by her brother Thomas, who is to assess the financial state of the coffee farm of which she later is appointed manager. In 1921, she separates from her husband. She is disappointed in her first expectation of pregnancy by her English companion Denys Finch Hatton in 1926. The following year Karen Blixen begins to write a lengthy essay on the institution of marriage entitled 'Moderne AE gteskab og andre Betragtninger' (first published in 1977). The finished manuscript is sent to Thomas Dinesen in 1924. Karen and Bror Blixen are divorced in 1925, after which she returns to Denmark in order to establish literary relations there. Her unsuccessful attempts lead her back to Kenya in 1926 when Sandhedens Haevn is published. During this year, Karen Blixen again takes up the tales and comedies begun in her youth, along with 'Carnival', one of the first gothic tales. In a letter to Thomas dated 16 May 1926, she writes, 'Jeg er ved at skrive paa to smaa nye Marionette Komedier for at trøste mig, men det er en daarlig Trøst….'

Documents from the years between 1919 and 1926, that attest Karen Blixen's preoccupation with ethics are her comments in the letters from Africa on marriage, sexuality, and morals and her essay on marriage. The common theme in the letters, the essay, and the tale 'Carnival' is society's axiomatic assumption that love—for which marriage is a symbol—represents a source of value. Karen Blixen believed that relationships between men and women had been construed traditionally as necessarily linked to sexual morality, so that morality associated with sexual behaviour also threatened to become one of the foundations of modern society. In reshaping her ideas about individuality and democracy, Karen Blixen protested traditions of the age that made eroticism the foundation of everyday life, 'som har regnet med at bygge virkelig praktiske og reale Forhold i Livet,—Hjem, Slægt, økonomiske Forhold,—op paa denne farlige og usikre Magt: Erotiken' [Breve for Afrika, 1914–34, edited by Frans Lasson, 1978]. In this connection Karen Blixen recommended to her brother Thomas, Bertrand Russell's book Principles of Social Reconstruction (first printed 1916), in which he discusses the weight that reactionary opinions carry in the consideration of moral problems. Russell's aim is to suggest a philosophy of politics that is based on creative impulse and not on materialistic values of human experience. In a chapter on marriage, Russell outlines the ills of this—to use his term—political institution. Karen Blixen's own essay on marriage is, incidentally, very much in tune with the ideas in Russell's book.

Karen Blixen confesses the unsuitability of marriage for herself and in this context, advances the theory that modern love is 'Homosexualite,—opfattet paa samme Maade som naar man bruger Udtrykket i homogen,—som mere tager Form som en lidenskabelig Sympathi, et Fællesskab i Kærlighed til Ideer eller Idealer, end som en personlig Opgaaen i, og Hengivelse til hinanden;…' 'Aldous Huxley', writes Karen Blixen, 'har et Udtryk; 'The love of the parallels,' som han rigtignok anvender i en temmelig tragisk Betydning, men som jeg vel kan have Lov til at opfatte som jeg vil.' (Blixen rephrases, incidentally, Huxley's title—'The Loves of the Parallels'—to her own advantage. Her interpretation of Huxley's phrase is that 'one does not "[løbe] 'ud i', gaar ikke 'op i' hinanden; men kommer maaske ikke hinanden saa nær som de Mennesker, der har Evener til en saadan Opgaaen i hinanden, og man er sletikke hinandens Maal i Livet, man mens man er sig selv og stræber mod sit eget fjerne Maal, finder man Lykken i Overbevisningen om i al Evighed at løbe parallelt".' She proposes that the relationship between men and women be one of 'parallel moving' beings.)

On 13 July 1927, Karen Blixen continues the discussion of man's search for values with her Aunt Bess by arguing that 'bourgeois happiness' is not what people search for in life; neither is it 'bourgeois happiness' which satisfies them. She feels that in determining one's raison d'être, misconceptions about marriage and the development of the self arise. Accordingly, she fails to understand why one cannot live for oneself in marriage. She finds the practice of free relations a more nourishing alternative. The configurations of free relationships in 'Carnival' is, consequently, not a symbol for immorality, but rather for friendships that are void of the conflicts of marriage and that are maintained by the mutual tastes, work, and interest of spiritually self-sufficient individuals. That Karen Blixen should choose adventures of the heart as a central issue in the tale is consistent with her belief that society of her day substituted amorous inclinations for hazardous passions. In retrospect, she relates the idea of comfort to the style of life characteristic of 1925, thus borrowing from her contemporary Aldous Huxley ideas about the materialistic philosophy of 'le moderne comfort'.

In her letters from Africa, Karen Blixen cites Huxley as an author whom she liked very much. Her literary attraction to Huxley grew into a personal friendship that continued even after she had returned to Denmark permanently. (Karen Blixen's companion Denys Finch Hatton was, moreover, a personal friend of Aldous Huxley's brother Julian.) Huxley's popularity during the twenties, which presumably reached Karen Blixen through her circle of English friends in Kenya, was symptomatic of the times. Besides themes of decadence and materialistic philosophy, Huxley's works from the twenties—Chrome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925)—demonstrate a search for values. In these novels, Huxley draws references from various disciplines—science, philosophy, psychology, religions, art, and music.

We know that Karen Blixen did not always attempt to be original with regard to themes, symbols, and archetypes in her stories. Not only does she quote from individual authors—classical and contemporary—but she also consciously creates a mosaic of her sources. With 'Carnival' Karen Blixen set out to write a certain kind of tale. Huxley's own discussion of his narrative technique throws some light on the spirit in which 'Carnival' was created.

All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel contrapuntal plots … You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by repudiating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love … in different ways … In this way, you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations in any number of different moods. Another way: The novelist can assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events of the story of their various aspects—emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical, etc.

            [Huxley, Point Counter Point, 1928]

An essayist and novelist, Huxley engages a fluidity of form that allows him to comment on a wide range of subjects. Any given subject may serve as a starting point for discussing something else. His reader's task is to reconstruct order.

Comparisons and narrative devices used by Blixen and Huxley can be made with regard to the sudden shift of ideas and the repetition of themes and their variations. Karen Blixen writes, for example, in the tale 'Carnival' about a diplomat's reassignment from Copenhagen to Egypt; this remark is followed by an excerpt from a fairy tale, an exchange in blank verse between lovers, and an artist's discussion of colours. All of this within a single paragraph. Throughout the tale, seemingly unmotivated anecdotes of events that occurred in remote lands interrupt the story. The recurrence of themes is observed in parallel love affairs, searchings for a source of value by all of the characters, dual personalities, and desires to experience seduction.

In this study, Aldous Huxley, A Study of the Major Novels (London, 1968), Peter Bowering points out that Huxley's first major novel (Crome Yellow, 1921) is a house party novel, that is (as we shall witness in 'Carnival'), a tale which employs as its point of departure the meeting of a circle of social and artistic dilettantes at a secluded house party. In Huxley's tales, the characters, each of whose personalities characterizes a particular set of values, are exposed one by one. The polemical element of his narrative allows for a dialectical discussion that concerns the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the postwar era. Like Huxley's, Karen Blixen's tales are intellectual dialogues couched in satirical moralities on love and art.

Up until the 1930s, the period of Karen Blixen's development that is of interest to us, public and private and morality was a chief consideration in Huxley's fiction and nonfiction. Karen Blixen and Huxley question love as a source of value. The relation between men and women, the social versus the personal self, the fruits of self-denial, the harsh gaiety of the twenties, and the overindulgence of aristocratic society were central issues in their tales.

A certain perception of the aristocratic world is inherent in Karen Blixen's metaphor 'carnival'. Although Baroness Blixen was not born into the aristocracy, she married into it and managed to enjoy the style of life it maintained. Blixen's characters were, too, 'rich, disillusioned, and hungry'. They were at once themselves and impersonators in a world that was not their own. The 'carnival' is a fitting introduction to the tale, as the metaphor defines the scene ('the great Opera Carnival at Copenhagen of 1925') to which the players were to return after an evening in the manner of the past—masquerading as caricatures—superimposing a sense of substance on their own empty lives.

We are reminded of Thackeray's use of the carnival as a symbol of the warped state of society in his novel Vanity Fair (1847–48). Like the message in Blixen's tale, Thackeray's social novel of the previous century holds up hypocrisy, greed, pretence, and moral insensibility to ridicule. Both works strive to suggest that a lack of self-knowledge contributes to the superficiality of aristocratic society and that man can progress from moral insensibility to self-knowledge. Unlike 'Carnival', however, Vanity Fair is a social satire in which characters' weaknesses are unmasked. The strength of 'Carnival' lies not in its derision of superficiality, but rather, in the simple statement that 'life itself is a true carnival'. Life of the aristocracy too, is a marionette comedy in which a player has no soul, no conscience, and no values. Karen Blixen regards the aristocracy as separate from ordinary society in that aristocratic and artistic values are much the same.

'Carnival' is set on the outskirts of Copenhagen in the mid-1920s. The story involves members of a supper party who decide to draw lots that will allow one of them to live on their pooled income for one year, while the others forfeit their wealth. The party takes an unexpected turn when an intruder who poses as a Negro page holds up the assembled group and demands money. The dinner guests persuade the intruder to take part in the lottery, that is ended when one of the original guests draws the winning card and elects to take on Zamor, the page, as an artificial shadow.

Personalities in 'Carnival' are disentangled only through the reader's careful separation and matching of figurative and literary pseudonyms with given names. One is best served by arranging a list of characters subsumed under the headings: Christian name, masks, and relation (to the other characters). Masks and given names are referred to interchangeably in the tale. Females play male roles but also their own roles as women. The pronoun 'she', for example, may sometimes refer to the female masked figure, when, in fact, the actual male person is being referred to. Moreover, complex relations between marriage partners and friends may lead to confusion.

The nine characters in 'Carnival' include four women and five men. Mimi ('Watteau Pierrot') and Polly ('Arlecchino') are sisters. Mimi is married to Julius ('The Venetian lady'), who has twice been in love with Fritze ('Camelia'). Tido, the male futuristic Harlequin is in love with Annelise ('Søren Kierkegaard'). Her divorced husband is, incidentally, married to his divorced wife. The foreigner among the dinner guests is Charlie ('The Magenta Domino'). Rosendaal, the painter, is the eldest among them. Finally, Zamor (whose actual given name is not imparted), Madame Rubenstein's salesman and adopted son, pretends to be a Negro page.

Much of the narration in the first half of the tale deals with the manner in which the disguise of the other self is manifested. Costumes have been carefully chosen, and persons who don them play the roles that are dictated by their masks. Camelia is dressed in pink satin that accentuates her indeterminate character—'at whatever place you cut her slim body … you would have got a perfectly circular transverse incision.' Søren Kierkegaard—'that brilliant, deep, and desperate Danish philosopher of the eighteen forties was admired for her rare grace.' The sisters 'Pierrot' and 'Arlecchino' are likened, not to 'a congenial up-heap of heterogeneous atoms, but to a heterogeneous up-heap of congenial atoms.' We witness with them 'a scoffing expression which one finds in the faces of Japanese dolls.' 'The Venetian lady' wears heavy luminous silver cloth and brocade. The futuristic Harlequin is dressed in clothes of soft metallic materials in pale shades of jade, mauve, and grey. The Magenta Domino, whose face is not fully concealed—is played by an Englishman; as a foreigner, he perceives the events with some degree of disinterest. Rosendaal is dressed in yellow to challenge the belief that 'yellow is a colour which has no depth.' Zamor's colour is 'unmistakably a fake.' The black of his skin is described as an 'unmixed, sooty darkness.'

'Carnival' convincingly recalls the traditions of commedia dell' arte, the theatre of improvisation originated in sixteenth-century Italy in which players—referred to as 'masks'—work from a plot outline and fulfill inherited or invented roles. Stock players generally wear disguises or comic make-up; they include among others, old men, lovers, and comic valets. Although Karen Blixen employs familiar stock types as well as historical figures, her general design in 'Carnival' remains loyal to improvised theatre.

Two elements account for the fundamental structure of 'Carnival': first, Karen Blixen's use of fantasy and second, her questioning of the compatibility of traditional ethics and modern society. The interplay of these elements (which underscores a convergence of the artistic, psychological, and social parts of Karen Blixen's philosophical convictions) is emphasised here. 'Carnival' is a symbolic expression for how Karen Blixen dealt with the various forces that moulded her view of life. Metaphorically speaking, the tale is as well a sketch of her later paintings.

Some stories of Karen Blixen—or 'Isak Dinesen' to use her English pseudonym—dramatise a theme of ambiguous identity that is at first reminiscent of tales by E. T. A. Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe. The distinguishing motif in Karen Blixen's tales is, however, the theatrical quality of life that manifests itself in the mask. Her tales involving the mask range from the years before she was to achieve fame until recently when her posthumous tales were published. Karen Blixen's early fiction—some tales considered by her to be incomplete—contains basic ideas for her later, major stories. The marionette comedy Sandhedens Hævn—The Revenge of Truth—which was published in 1926 in the Danish cultural monthly Tilskueren illustrates her attempt to dispel the theatre's traditional verisimilitude. In the play, characters reveal consciousness of their roles and their audience. Comic awareness is emphasised by impromptu stage directions, improvisations, and the characters' ability to alter their established roles. As a result, the play can be perceived not merely as a world of marionettes, but also as a world in the tradition of commedia dell'arte, where players enjoy relative freedom of action—a freedom which conforms to Karen Blixen's idea that art and life are reconciled in the mask.

That Karen Blixen should employ the mask as one of her chief symbols is not arbitrary. The manner in which she herself chose private and public roles shows her own need to have had at her disposal various facets of personality. In the short story 'The Roads around Pisa' (in Seven Gothic Tales), Karen Blixen—'Isak Dinesen'—epitomises consciousness that can tolerate ambiguous identity. The essence of this consciousness is the ability deliberately to choose among several roles or modes of behaviour. Such a choice is governed by the integrating force of a unique and permanent self. The capacity to assume a new role at will without losing the sense of continuity of the self (that is, without displaying signs of pathological processes that threaten the psyche) defines the attitude of the actor. In 'The Roads around Pisa', the protagonist becomes an actor in a play within a play and the work's narrative structure is understood in terms of the theatre. In 'The Cardinal's First Tale' (Last Tales) the reader is confronted by a character whose personality is a blend of a metaphorical God and of man, as it were, of priest and poet. The ambiguity of identity appears again in 'The Dreamers' ('Drømmerne'), where the opera singer Pellegrina Leoni poses in a succession of diverse disguises, but also vows never again to limit herself to being only one person.

As Donald Hannah points out in an essay entitled 'The Latter Phase: "Isak Dinesen",' Karen Blixen considered the name 'Isak Dinesen' not a deception, but a mask [see Hannah, 'Isak Dinesen' and Karen Blixen, 1962]. The public face was a mask that permitted and nourished her artistic concept of the self and was to superimpose the identity society had chosen for her. Karen Blixen's dissatisfaction with society's expectations—which defined the boundaries of her conventional identity—stemmed from an awareness that the exploration of the inner self constitutes artistic freedom. The idea of making explicit a hidden facet of one's self by creating a new role and a new outward appearance is illustrated vividly in Kasparson's words from 'The Deluge at Norderney' (Seven Gothic Tales): 'the witty woman chooses a carnival costume which ingeniously reveals something in her spirit or heart which the conventions of everyday life conceal'. By using a mask deliberately, it is possible to become detached from one's assigned role on the 'stage of life'.

The donning of masks—as portrayed in Karen Blixen's tales—distinguishes itself from classic depictions of the double—or double identity—to be found in the works of Hoffmann, Poe, or Maupassant. Instead of allowing her characters to be intimidated by their alternate roles (as Hoffmann does in his tales), she allows the characters playfully to engage in conversation about the ability to create and choose roles. Instead of portraying incidents of pathological processes in which individuals are incapable of distinguishing their doubles from their permanent selves, Blixen injects an intentional contradiction of the consciousness of the artistically created identity (signified by the mask) and the function of the created identity. Blixen's players as well as her readers are aware that the personae may simultaneously reveal multiple facets of their identities. The nature of disguise—costumes with half masks, no masks, or, as in the case of 'Pierrot', a floured face that reveals her conventional identity but that cannot be unmasked—enhances the idea of conscious conflict and the conflict of consciousness. In Karen Blixen's tale, the purpose of the mask is not motivated by a desire to escape fear. There are no doppelgänger among Blixen's multiple identities. In Karen Blixen, the reader perceives an alternate spiritual identity and not a physical double. 'Masks' in Karen Blixen's tales do not function as ethical contrasts, but rather as caricatures in their own right. The ambiguity of identity may be contained in a single person. The masks in 'Carnival' are not used to obscure the identity of the wearers entirely; on the contrary, certain comic effects in the tale are attained by contrasting the wearer's still visible, banal appearance with the highmindedness revealed by the choice of the mask. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, for example, must coexist with the shallow figure of Annelise, whose brilliance is defined only by her outward appearance.

Among the most striking 'masks' in 'Carnival' are the Chinese painter, Arlecchino and Pierrot. The painter assumes the personality of stock types known as 'the old men'; this type wears a mask of dignity, but Rosendaal, as Blixen states, would shed his skin 'with the ease of an old snake which believes it has got something better underneath.' 'Arlecchino' appears in 'Carnival' as the 'genuine classic figure of the old Italian pantomime.' Blixen's 'Pierrot' is expressly labelled 'Watteau Pierrot', recognisable by admirers of works by Antoine Watteau. Karen Blixen, who herself studied art, achieves a refinement of the mask by attending to artistic principles that suggest three-dimensionality through the use of shadows and defined luminous sources.

The combination of light and colour, atmospheric effect, and linear drawing are essential to 'Carnival'. The costume of the Venetian lady is compared to a great waterfall of moonlight. 'Moonshine' is the password of Blixen's sister masks and rivals, 'Arlecchino' and 'Pierrot', and is a symbol for the 'enhanced lustre, the gentle reflection of a coveted admiration with which the happy rival would shine in the unhappy rival's eye.' As the dinner party begins Karen Blixen remarks on a 'meeting and mating of light and colour.' Arlecchino complains of the vulgarity of being three-dimensional and considers making a shadow theatre. Zamor is saved from an 'embarkment to Cythere', clearly an allusion to a painting that is characteristic of Watteau's style: L'embarquement pour Cythere is a delicate courtly fantasy represented in warm and shimmering tones.

Donning a mask is not only a matter of masquerading. All of the dinner guests are aware of their costumes; this makes it possible for them to develop conversation about the superficiality of their society—the ethos of Karen Blixen's tale. They talk of the fundamental falsity of the traditional idea of covering up the body and leaving the face bare. Pierrot remarks: 'but to be your own caricature—that is a true carnival', and thus concedes the theatrical qualities of our own age. Mimi considers taking a job as a mannequin—'[to be] twelve different mannequins to twelve different houses, and to create twelve different styles.' A preoccupation with masks—in defence of deception—is further revealed in Arlecchino's command to her sister: 'change your face now, for here comes your husband.' The mechanical act is to effect a change of disposition as well as a change of person. And in Julius' apology to Polly, 'I beg your pardon, it was your costume misleading me', the character's subconscious response becomes clear.

Karen Blixen also dramatises ambiguous identity in the character's adaptation to social forces. As in 'The Roads around Pisa' in which the protagonist finds his identity mirrored in the minds of others, so too in 'Carnival' do the personae find their traits reflected in objects that serve to complement—in concrete and abstract terms—the inadequacies of the ego. The reader is struck by the structural similarity of Karen Blixen's technique in portraying alternate identities with principal ideas in Freud's explanations in psychoanalysis; yet, there is not sufficient evidence among her biographical writings to confirm that Karen Blixen intended to write or have her works interpreted in light of Freud's teachings. When 'Carnival' was written, Karen Blixen had been living in Africa, and except through a circle of European friends, had little opportunity to learn about contemporary movements in psychology in Western Europe. She complains frequently in her letters about her lack of current sources and books. That she is aware of Sigmund Freud's contribution is, however, clarified in at least one interview with the Danish journalist Bent Mohn. Mohn remarked: 'You spoke of the unconscious. What do you think of Freud?' Karen Blixen replied by saying, 'I really don't know enough about Freud to express myself about him … I believe that Freud did his time a great service by acknowledging complexes or facing up to them and thereby freeing people of much worry and anxiety. But I also believe that those who came after him frequently carried his ideas too far, or that they misunderstood him.'

The distinction that Karen Blixen makes between Freud and 'Freudian' is also fundamental to the present discussion. Karen Blixen's allusions to ideas historically associated with Freud illustrate merely that she was affected by the assumptions of her time. She was a contemporary of Freud and Carl Jung, as well as of authors of imaginative literature whose works reflected a consciousness of new perspectives inspired by psychoanalysis.

The source of Karen Blixen's allusion to Freud's teachings in a scene involving Tido and Camelia:

Your mask would give you at least that release from self … Your centre of gravity is moved from the ego to the object; through true humility of self denial you arrive at an all comprehending unity with life.

is confirmed in Freud's explanation of the mechanism that involves a shift of energy from the ego to the object. In Freud's terms, the 'ego is regarded as a great reservoir of energy' that maintains a fluctuating balance between ego and object. Otto Rank, among the most prominent of lay theorists of psychoanalysis, provided a psychoanalytic interpretation where the ego is indistinct from its object; the imagined outward projection of the ego is, in other words, its 'double'. Infatuation of the ego with itself perpetuates an exact copy of itself in the outer world. The double relays guilt and death impulses toward the person. On a psychological level, resulting murderous and suicidal impulses are equivalent because object and ego are perceived as identical.

Karen Blixen's expansion of the self through the creation of a personality which reveals a hidden facet of the original self surpasses the idea of mere infatuation with the self. The confrontation of the social self and the artistic concept of the self provides a springboard for the question 'Who am I?' 'Masks' in 'Carnival' are in each case visibly different personalities—even though the personalities represented by the masks contain psychic energy that has been displaced from the original self. The altered outward appearance of the 'masks' underlines Karen Blixen's attempt to utilise knowledge about the self by exploring its many possibilities.

The process of 'moving one's centre of gravity from the ego to the object' takes on thematic and structural importance in 'Carnival'. The moral insufficiency that predominates in 'Carnival''s social institutions causes individuals to forfeit self-realisation. Early in the story Mimi and Polly discuss the advantages and disadvantages of marriage and, in general, relations between the sexes. By being married, Mimi denies her own desires for the sake of deception—deception that is assumed to bring about happiness. 'All my existence becomes nothing but being in love … nothing at all has got any meaning except for his sake and for the sake of what he thinks of me.' Mimi refers to her existence in terms that recall visual perspective; her life runs parallel with Julius'. Mimi shifts her interests to those of her husband. 'My thoughts turn around a single person.' Mimi compares her dilemma to that of nuns who live for God; she suggests that God dislikes their inability to find their own lives interesting. Mimi longs for a relation with Julius in which their lives intersect, that is, 'to be Julius' shadow.' She remarks to Polly, 'God, how sorry one ought to feel for all parallel lines which want to intersect as badly as I do.'

The conversation between 'Pierrot' and 'Arlecchino' foreshadows symbols and ideas explored philosophically in the events leading to the lottery's execution. 'Carnival''s two-fold purpose—to contemplate human existence in a society that lacks values and to consider a means of acquiring moral sensibility—is expressed with references to colour, two-dimensional images such as the shadow and the silhouette, as well as mirror images. Superficiality and artificiality are the characteristics of aristocratic life symbolised. A striking aspect of Blixen's descriptions is her assignment of sensual qualities to colours. Pastels are 'flat and greasy'; 'they have no depth'. Black, by contrast, possessed substance—'a little piece of night itself, containing all its mystery, depth, and bliss …;' black is hard, dry, and light. The pastels and black are frequently juxtaposed. Pierrot insists on not wanting to be black and remarks that had she known what to do with her legs, she would have come to the carnival as a rainbow. Blixen tells us that Camelia is dressed in pink satin and has blackened eyelashes. When speaking of her visit in Paris, Camelia refers to her moments there as glowing bits of black, against the flat pink faces of the new houses. And finally, Rosendaal explains to Zamor the treat of being the one central little shadow in a world of artificial rosy lights. Blixen's aim in each case is to impress upon the players and the reader the necessity of getting a little black into life. The street 'Vognmagergade' was the 'black spot upon the clean face of Copenhagen.' The time had almost come when it would be necessary to have government grants in order to protect society from pastel coloured 'fatty degeneration'.

The contrast of black and white in 'Carnival' is discussed in conjunction with the shadow as a symbol for the conscience. The insinuation—in keeping with the painter's insistence on the superior nature of black—is, of course, contrary to traditional ideas. The paradox is, for example, witnessed in Arlecchino's remark 'Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretched heroes the beggars' shadows.' The shadow can be interpreted as the soul or alter ego; it may symbolise as well a split personality. Losing one's shadow, as recalled by Karen Blixen in the case of Peter Schlemihl, connotes a loss of one's soul. By contrast, the prospect of being able to acquire a shadow—'they must be marketable goods', says Arlecchino—results in her decision to take Zamor, who only pretends to be black, as her artificial shadow—her artificial conscience. Similarly, black and the shadow are employed in more subtle contrasts: the black mole at the small of Camelia's back is likened to 'the little shadow of a wick within the alabaster lamp'. The verole is described as a strong black, like a shadow throwing itself forward and backward.

Airiness and transience of life are intimated in Blixen's use of mirror images. The two sisters, dancing, stop before one of the long mirrors. The law of gravitation has been done away with for the night. In 'Carnival' mirror images are enticing. They are able to bring out the inner significance of the person but do not grin back or frighten.

Karen Blixen's use of reflections as symbols is strengthened by manipulations of visual perspective. While the actors maintain a passive role—they do not react to each other's frequently nonchalant metaphors containing sudden changes of visual perspective—the reader realises that the subtle references to depth, direction, and intensity contain clues to the ethos of the tale. The watchful reader proceeds in active anticipation of such references. A frequent means of keeping the matter of perspective in the reader's mind is the juxtaposition of the concrete and the abstract or of the subjective and the objective. During the course of Polly's conversation with Mimi we are, for example, directed abruptly from subjective contemplation to a perceptible, trivial act.

When I think, said Arlecchino very slowly, of all the people who envy you your modern silhouette. Yes, said Pierrot sadly. The silhouette of your mind, Arlecchino went on with great force, might be a Masaccio. Yes, said Pierrot. She dived into her large pocket for her cigarette case.

Later a moment of insight is compared to a sensation of distance. The idea of Zamor's taking part in the lottery

suddenly gave new importance to their gamble … In Pierrot herself it produced the sensation when you get in an aeroplane, when you have for some time kept your eyes inside the machine, and then turn to look down—an apprehension of distance, a perspective.

In each of these examples there is a sharp contrast of subjective and objective realms of experience. Although the lottery really does take place, it initially involves a gamble of aristocratic possessions and not those of the lower class. The inclusion of Zamor redefines the effect of the lottery's outcome. The swift transition from the elevated to the mundane also speaks to the artificiality and shallowness of conversation and attitude in 'Carnival'. Karen Blixen addresses the aristocratic society's superficiality as well in the physical features of the persona: Rosendaal—although 'a brilliant person'—has 'a little full-moon face, with no features, hair or expression to speak of, indeed most of all like the posterior of a baby.' And Julius had the capacity of drowning his observer's eye in his own being, and of remaining forever unseen.

The concept of the self is also a primary theme in Karen Blixen's later gothic tale 'The Deluge at Norderney'. The story contains many metaphors derived from 'Carnival', which Robert Langbaum suggests was the preliminary version of the gothic tale. One recalls among other themes and images, the tenuous line separating truth and deception, the practice of disguising the truth and of playing roles, the donning of the mask, the virtue of black, the contrast between the virtues of the bourgeoisie and the vices of the aristocracy, and characters who are by profession actors. Kasparson, the protagonist in 'The Deluge', exemplifies yet another manifestation of ambiguous identity, achieved not through the alteration of the self or the transference of the self to an object or person, but rather, the replacement of the self; the individual takes on the identity of another but is at the same time conscious that he is playing a role. When Blixen remarks, 'I suppose you have understood that the two figures, the Cardinal and Kasparson, are really one and the same person' [Aage Henriksen, Det quddmelige barn og andre Essays on Karen Blixen, 1965], she implies not that Kasparson sees himself in the Cardinal, but rather, that Kasparson has played this particular role well. The earlier mentioned distinction that Karen Blixen makes between Freud and 'Freudian' is demonstrated by her use of multiple possibilities of the self—not for a pathological interpretation where characters are overwhelmed by distortions of the mind, but rather, as an exercise in self-knowledge for which the character's conscious recognition of his social and artistic roles is requisite. Karen Blixen is concerned less with the psychological mechanisms that lead to ambiguous identity than with the possibilities for behaviour granted by the mechanisms. Her portrayals, moreover, underscore the trend of her generation of writers to acknowledge subconscious processes as an explanation for some of our behaviour. Kasparson's impersonation of the Cardinal is psychologically distinct from that of the person who sees the double as a reflection of the ego—a threat to the integrity of the self—and who tries to kill the double in spite of his knowledge that he is simultaneously killing himself. Kasparson's murdering the Cardinal brings, in fact, the opposite result; indeed, his disguise and future existence depend on the Cardinal's death. Art and life are reconciled in the mask of the Cardinal. Reminiscent of sentiments expressed in 'Carnival', Kasparson warns: 'Not by the face shall the man be known, but by the mask.'