Isak Dinesen's remarks to Robert Langbaum have served as a touchstone for almost all later interpretations of “Sorrow-Acre” or “Sorg-Agre”. Langbaum, who notes that his conversations with the Danish writer and storyteller took place in 1959 and 1961, reports:

Isak Dinesen told me that she read while in Africa a modern rendition of this tale by the Danish writer, Paul la Cour. She felt la Cour had made a mistake in establishing the boy's innocence, that the point ought to have remained ambiguous. The occasion for attempting her own version occurred many years later, after she had returned to Denmark. In the course of arguing with a socialist friend, she asked him whether there really was such a thing as an arbejderkultur, a proletarian culture distinct from the middle-class culture that seemed to give the workers all their values. He asked her in return whether there was such a thing as an herregaardskultur, a distinctively manorial culture. She wrote “Sorrow-Acre” to show what such a manorial culture was like and how different its values were from ours—to suggest, one gathers from the story—, that you cannot speak of the past as evil since our ideas of good and evil have changed.

(32)

Unquestioned in most discussions of “Sorrow-Acre,” from Langbaum to Donald Hannah and the recent feminist analyses of Judith Thurman and Susan Hardy Aiken, is the assumption that the tale is a nostalgic evocation of an aristocratic culture whose cruelty, grandeur, and beauty serve to point up the pallid uniformity and dullness of twentieth-century mass culture. In this view, “Sorrow-Acre” is an integral part of the more or less unchanging oeuvre of the writer Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen, whose works are a late expression of an elitist European modernism anxious to distinguish itself from all forms of non-elite culture.¹

Yet the circumstances of the story's composition and publication are very probably more important than Dinesen was willing to let on. Langbaum reports that she told him she read la Cour's story, first published in 1931, while she was in Africa, and only wrote hers “many years later, after she had returned to Denmark.” Although Thurman notes that Dinesen had begun work on Winter's Tales “almost as soon as Out of Africa was finished” (293), she situates the remark about the differences between working-class and manorial cultures in the context of a conversation between the writer and a classical scholar and socialist, Hartvig Frisch, that took place in 1941 (299). But even if the exact dates of the tale's composition are unknown, the remarks quoted by Langbaum, as well as the findings of Thurman, suggest that she did not complete it until after the beginning of the German occupation of Denmark in 1940. What we do know is that English and Danish versions of “Sorrow-Acre” were published in the collections Winter's Tales and Vinter Eventyr in 1942. Surely a curious time to publish a story glorifying the cruelty of the Danish manorial system—if, indeed, that is what the tale is about. Curious, as well, the silence of most critics on the subject.²

What to make of the remarks quoted by Langbaum? Did Dinesen misunderstand or consciously misrepresent her own work? Or is “Sorrow-Acre” really only about a time and a context far removed from the date of its publication? None of Dinesen's critics base their interpretations on her expression of authorial intent alone, yet most overlook the many elements in this tale that undermine her later representation of the tale. Ranging from such apparently superficial details as scattered references to the foreignness of the cruelest character of the tale to thematic parallels to other works produced in the early 1940s to the tension between Dinesen's tale and its oral and textual sources, these elements suggest a very different reading of “Sorrow-Acre,” one that brings into focus its relation to the historical context of its publication.

1. LA COUR'S “DANSKE SAGAER”: ON RECREATING THE STYLE OF THE SAGAS

No work by Dinesen is more clearly or complexly related to oral tradition than “Sorrow-Acre.” It is true, as Langbaum reports her saying, that Dinesen's version draws on la Cour's published versions of both the transcribed folktale and his own reworking of it. But it also responds to that same author's comments on the nature of the oral tale and what it can do. Dinesen's “Sorrow-Acre” represents a criticism of la Cour's work and an attempt to go him one better, to reproduce within an impersonal style worthy of the most self-conscious of modernist writers to a far greater extent than her predecessor not only the heroic perspective associated with the greatest of the Icelandic sagas but also their laconic style, which demands that the reader fill in for him- or herself crucial aspects of the narrative which are either omitted or only intimated.

Paul la Cour's “Sorg-Agre” was published at the end of an article that also includes a discussion of the relationship of the Danish folktale to the Icelandic sagas and a reprint of a tale, also called “Sorg-Agre,” as it had been transcribed and reprinted by Danish folklorists. According to la Cour, Danish folktales from part of a common Nordic narrative heritage. In Iceland, the traditions of oral narrative developed into the grand narrative forms of the Icelandic saga; under different circumstances, the same might have happened in Denmark. Instead, what is left of the rich tradition of medieval oral narrative in Denmark are compilations, “vanskelige at orientere sig i, fordi det digterisk værdifulde har været trykket af et altfor stort Stof, som ganske savnede denne Egenskab” (231) [“difficult to orient oneself in, because aesthetically worthwhile material is obscured by the overabundance of material of little aesthetic value”]. The Danish tales, as well, are characterized by a terseness that makes it difficult for a modern reader to appreciate them. They call for a reworking on the part of modern writers, la Cour argues: “Nu er de som nævnt saa skematiske og fortættede, at der maa pustes Luft i dem for at gøre dem til selvstændige Kunstværker, der, selv isolerede, uden Vanskelighed aabner sig for den moderne Læser” (232) [“They are, as we have said, so schematic and terse, that one must inflate them in order to make them into independent works of art, each on its own capable of reaching a modern reader without difficulty”].

La Cour's comments draw heavily on the pioneering work on oral narrative of Axel Olrik, who considered the Icelandic sagas as a principally oral form, a point of view that is by no means uncontroversial in saga scholarship. But la Cour is less interested in the principles of saga composition than in the ethos they convey. Following Olrik, he argues that the sagas—and also the best of the Danish folktales—represent a narrative form that combines a “voldsom digterisk Økonomi, en streng Skematisering, en ubønhørlig Logik, der finder sit Maal i det mægtige, plastiske Billede, som er Sagnets Hjerte og egentlige Mening” (232) [“a powerful poetic economy, a strict schematization, a merciless logic, whose goal is the powerful plastic image that is the heart and real meaning of the saga”]. That powerful plasticity, in turn, is subordinated to a focus on action: “De plastiske Optrin er Sagnets Midtpunkter, fordi Sagnets Indhold ligger i dets Handling, i den kommer baade Person, Karakter og Livsbetragtning til Udfoldelse” (233) [“The plastic depiction is the central point of the saga, because the content of the saga is its action, through which persons, characters, and worldviews are set forth”]. The most difficult task for the writer who wants to adapt and rework the terse material of the Danish folktale is to maintain the focus on action. La Cour writes that he is working on such a collection and that “det er ikke Hensigten at Skabe Novelledigtning over Sagn, men at lade Sagnene selv udfolde sig gennem et moderne Sind” (233) [“it is not his intention to make novellas out of folktales, but rather to let the folktales themselves appear through a modern temperament”].

What la Cour means by “Novelledigtning” is unclear. The tradition of the novella stands in a complicated relationship to oral narrative, for novellas often contain narrative frames that emphasize the role of the storyteller as he or she performs a story for an audience that is often also depicted. Perhaps he sees the self-conscious aspect of this narrative-within-a-narrative as a device that detracts from what he and Olrik saw as the emphasis on action characteristic of oral narrative. Perhaps the novella, especially as it developed in Germany, represents a focus on problems of perception and psychology that set it irrevocably apart from epic narratives.³

La Cour's distinction seems even less clear when one considers his adaptation of the original transcription of the folktale. This transcription concerns a series of events believed to have taken place near Ballum:

Under en Stormflod drev en Del Gods i Land ved Ballum. En ung Mand fra Byen kendte nogle af sin Families Ejendele derimellem og gav sig til at bjærge dem. Som han stod dær, kom een af Strandrøverne fra Skærbæk til og vilde tage Godset. Det blev til Slagsmaal mellem dem, og den unge Karl havde det Uheld at dræbe Voldsmanden. Nu var disse Strandrøvere dengang mægtige Folk, og paa Tingshuset fik de ham dømt til Døden. Det blev hans Moder grov sølle over. Hun gik til Greven paa Skakkenborg og klagede sin nød og bad ham saa mindelig om, at hendes Søn maatte faa Naade. Det lovede Greven hende da ogsaa, paa det Vilkaar, at hun skulde slaa en Fenne Byg fra Sol stod up til Sol gik ned. Den var saa stor, at fire Mænd kunde have Arbejde nok med den en hel Dag. Om hun kunde gøre det, skulde hendes Søn blive fri. Moderen gav sig i Lav dermed, og hun blev ogsaa færdig. Da hun havde skaaret den sidste Handfuld af med Seglen, saa sagde hun:

Nu vil Solen under gaa,

Nu vil jeg Guds Naade faa.

Men i det samme hun rettede sig op fra sin bøjede Stilling, brækkede hendes Ryg, og hun faldt død om. Moderen fik sin Grav paa Ballum Kirkegaard. Ovenpaa Graven ligger en Ligsten, hvor hun er aftegnet med et Neg og en Segl i Armen. Fennen, hvor hun skar Kornet, viser man endnu. Den kaldes den Dag i Dag Sorg-Agre.

(233-34)

During a flood with high tidal waves, a good deal of flotsam drifted ashore near Ballum. Amongst it, a young man from the town recognised some pieces belonging to his family, and started salvaging them. Whilst he was doing this, one of the robbers from Skærbæk came and wanted some of it. They started fighting, and the young lad unfortunately killed his opponent. At that time, however, these beach-robbers were so powerful that they had him condemned to death at the courthouse. His mother, deeply distressed by this, went to the Count at his castle of Skakkenborg, told him of her grief, and implored him to show mercy towards her son. The Count promised to do so on the condition that she must mow a field of barley between sunrise and sunset. This field was so large that four men would have much labour to cut it in one day. If she could do it, her son would be set free. The mother accepted the task, and did finish it. When she had cut the last handful with her sickle, she said,

Now the sun will set

Now God's mercy I will get.

But at the very moment when she raised herself from her bent position, her back broke and she fell dead. The mother was buried in the churchyard at Ballum. On her grave, a stone has been laid, on which she is drawn with a sheaf and sickle in her arm. The field where she cut the corn is still sown. To this day it is known as Sorrow-Acre.

(Hannah 81-82)

True enough, the original folktale supports la Cour's argument concerning the oral style of these narratives, especially their terseness and focus on action. Despite its brevity, however, this tale brings together at least two disparate themes, possibly originating in quite different events or stories. One concerns the double catastrophe of a flood and man's injustice to man: the pirates who, after a natural disaster, take away the only things an old woman and her son have left. The other has to do with the injustice inherent in the absolute power of a feudal overlord, who, for reasons left entirely unstated here, chooses to inflict a fatal task on an old woman.

La Cour's reworking of the tale gives it a unified focus: the love of a mother that leads her to sacrifice everything for her only son. Paradoxically, however, his version contradicts nearly everything he had said in his introduction concerning oral style. Where the original is “hermetically terse,” asking readers or listeners to fill in the gaps and judge the action for themselves, la Cour's version offers a plethora of detail, giving the woman a name, Kristin, a past, and even a point of view. The second paragraph of his tale, which explains how the woman had become a widow and describes her circumstances, is a good example of his approach:

Hun boede i Ballum By paa et lille Sted. To Køer paa Stald havde hun men ingen Mand i Stuen. Ham havde Havet taget for Øjnene af hende, hun havde set sig blive Enke og var gaaet taareløs hjem til Sønnen Jakob. Fra han var ganske lille tog han fat sammen med hende, gik med Løben og saaede og høstede de smalle Markstrimler med Segl i Haand, naar Solen havde hvidnet Kornet. Han gik ogsaa paa Havet og tog Fisk, satte Ruser eller medede. I hans Tid fik de et Baadskur, han tømrede sammen. Der slæbte han Prammen ind og havde sine Nøster og Grejer staaende. Sa langt man kendte op ad Stranden fandtes der ikke bedre Baadskur.

(235)

She lived on a little place at Ballum. She had two cows in her stall, but no man in the house. The sea had taken him before her very eyes, she had seen herself become a widow and had gone tearless home to her son Jacob. From the time he was quite small he set to work with her, ran along and sowed and harvested the small strips of land with sickle in hand, when the sun had turned the grain white. He also went to sea and caught fish, set traps or dropped a line. In his time they also had a boatshed that he built. There he sheltered his boat and kept his nets and things ready. As far as one knew up and down the coast there was no better boatshed.

By focusing on the smallness of their world and its trivial details, the passage also diminishes the characters and their actions. Where the folktale focuses on the appearance of events, their “plasticity,” la Cour gives us an extended interior monologue on the part of the mother, thereby sentimentalizing her plight. And where the actions of the anonymous woman and her son in the folktale have an enigmatic grandeur, in la Cour's version they are rendered as specific and pitiful. But above all, his emphasis on psychology shifts focus away from the actions of his characters.

Dinesen's “Sorrow-Acre” rises to the challenge posed by la Cour's discussion of oral narrative, but takes issue with his own rendition in nearly every way. Her portrayal of the mother, whom she renames Anne-Marie, could not be more concrete. We see this character exclusively from the outside, burnished by the sun, to the extent that she seems more like a work of art, a statue, than a living human being. Her situation is again rendered ambiguous. Has she been married? Did she have an illegitimate child whom she murdered? Whose son is Goske Piil? And certainly the old lord who condemns her to her ordeal represents the woman's actions as both important and heroic.

But Dinesen also introduces some significant changes. Instead of what Langbaum characterizes as “the vaguely medieval setting” (32) of the original folktale, she sets her version on a Danish estate at the end of the eighteenth century. And as Donald Hannah notes, she introduces the character of Adam. (83) But if, like la Cour's, her version also names the woman who undertakes the ordeal, it makes her silent. The verse spoken at the moment of death both in the folktale and in la Cour's version is absent here. Anne-Marie's dialogue with the old lord is presented only through the words of the old lord himself. And, perhaps more significantly, her tale represents a mixture of styles that la Cour would have found unacceptable. The actions of the peasant woman are represented with a terseness, plasticity, and emphasis on action worthy of an oral narrative, but they are also embedded in a frame narrative reminiscent of the structures of the writerly European novella tradition, in which the convention of enclosing one narrative within another, of framing it once or more, can become the occasion for questioning the reality, or pointing to the fictionality, of an event. For it is the old lord who first points her out to his nephew and tells her story. And both men ask repeatedly what it is that we should see in the death task of the old woman.

Dinesen's “Sorrow-Acre” clearly represents a violation of what Olrik and la Cour had presented as the principles of saga narrative in several respects. Her descriptions, especially the opening description of the setting of the manor house and estate are linked only in a very general sense to the action of the main characters, and are far more ornate than those of any saga or folktale: the emphasis on the sheer aesthetic appeal of the manor house and its surroundings is utterly foreign to the older narratives. But the pointed contrast between the representation of the actions of the old peasant woman and previous renditions of it, on the one hand, and the elaborate framing devices and aesthetic emphasis of the rest of Dinesen's narrative, on the other, suggest that she may have been striving for an effect parallel rather than identical to that of her oral models.

One of the fundamental principles of saga style is its allusiveness. La Cour referred to this as its “almost hermetic terseness”; recent critics often refer to the “gaps” in saga narratives which readers—or listeners—are required to fill in in order to understand the work as a whole.⁴ Sagas, in other words, require their audiences to see, to comprehend, and often to judge what is not explicitly stated. This, I believe, is exactly what Dinesen's “Sorrow-Acre,” with its many reversals of its oral and aesthetic models and its juxtaposition of an action modeled on an oral source and a series of epistemological and aesthetic frames, asks its audiences to do.

2. DINESEN'S “SORROW-ACRE”: FRAMING HEROISM

In Isak Dinesen's version of “Sorrow-Acre,” the first reference to the peasant woman who sacrifices her life for that of her son does not occur until over a third of the way through the narrative. Instead, the tale opens with a leisurely description of a Danish manorial estate at dawn as seen through the eyes of a young man, Adam, who has recently returned from an extended stay abroad, where he has imbibed democratic political ideals. He encounters his uncle, whose recent marriage to a very young woman may produce a son that will displace Adam as heir to the estate. Not until considerable time has elapsed does the young man notice that his uncle is watching something in the distance. The object of Adam's uncle's attention turns out to be the peasant Anne-Marie, whose story the old lord proceeds to tell. Eventually the pair move toward the field she is reaping, and we see her from a closer perspective, but still through the eyes of the two observers in the tale. In Dinesen's version, the past and present actions of Anne-Marie are mediated through a series of frames associated with the words and visual perspectives of the two men who regard and discuss her. It is, moreover, only one of two plots associated with the desires and beliefs of the two men whose conversation occurs as if in the foreground of the tale, itself also enclosed, “framed,” by evocations of the Danish landscape as undulating, timeless, and only slightly marked by the transient presence of human beings.

The series of frames in Dinesen's “Sorrow-Acre” has much in common with the novella tradition against which la Cour implicitly defined his own activity in “Danske Sagaer.” Her tale is, if anything, more complex than many novellas, which simply enclose a recounted action, a hitherto unrelated occurrence, to paraphrase Goethe's famous definition, in an account that represents the circumstances of the storyteller and his or her audience. For Dinesen's narrator does not simply introduce a storyteller, but first evokes the landscape and then the storyteller's curious and appalled audience, before presenting the old lord, who not only tells the old peasant woman's story but then also shows her to the audience-within-the-tale and, in so doing, also to the audience outside the tale, its readers. What is left of Anne-Marie's story, as it is mediated through the intricate structure of Dinesen's tale? Unlike la Cour's version, Dinesen's gives us no direct insight into the thoughts and emotions of the suffering woman, but it presents her presence and her activity as a kind of perceptual problem in a manner that is essentially foreign to saga narrative.

The action in her “Sorrow-Acre” takes place on three planes, as if in a painting. In the foreground throughout most of the narrative, Adam and his uncle argue about the guilt of Goske Piil and the ordeal the old lord has imposed on his mother: if she can reap a particular field in its entirety between sunup and sundown, he will release her son, whom he has condemned, although there is no evidence of guilt. In the distance, barely visible at first, is the peasant woman herself, engaged in a task that will prove fatal. And finally, in the shade of the manor house itself, invisible from the standpoint of the old lord, the young wife considers her reflection in a mirror and later performs a duet with Adam himself. The end of the tale suggests resolutions to all of these scenes: Anne-Marie finishes reaping the field and dies at the moment the sun goes down; Adam resolves to stay on the estate, instead of emigrating to America, as he had originally planned; and it is strongly suggested that he will be the father of a child that will bear the old lord's name.

Although there are three plot lines, the tale has two settings, evoked in terms of light and shadow that suggest both difference and complementarity; the outdoor scene, in which Anne-Marie reaps, while uncle and nephew watch and discuss her, is described as flooded by sunlight; the passages that have to do with the young wife, Sophie Magdalena, and Adam are all set in the shadows. Dinesen's finely crafted chiaroscuro effect poses an interpretative problem similar to that of a painting in which a significant detail is hidden either in a shadowy area or a proliferation of apparently superfluous detail. What is it one has difficulty seeing here, a difficulty which the tale may also be attempting to bring into focus?

The question comes to the fore early in the tale. Adam, who has just encountered his uncle at daybreak, notices that the old lord's attention lies elsewhere:

“I have listened to you,” said Adam, “with great interest. But while we have talked you yourself have seemed to me preoccupied; your eyes have rested on the field outside the garden, as if something of great moment, a matter of life and death, was going on there.”

(40)

What is going on in the distant field, of course, is the ordeal of the peasant woman, who never has the chance to tell her own story, but instead becomes the occasion for a long conversation between the two men. Beginning with the old lord's account of the barn burning and his decision to allow the old woman to sacrifice her life for that of her son, their exchange soon turns to more abstract issues. How—in what context—should one view the situation? Adam at first sees the plight of the old woman from the perspective of the Enlightenment: the old lord's actions are an affront to reason and the rights of man. But Adam's position is undermined from the start. A volume by the late-eighteenth-century Danish poet, Ewald, under his arm, he is forced to admit that there are other, less clear-cut, factors governing his actions: his longing for home, to begin with, and later his desire for the young wife of his uncle. The old lord, on the other hand, deploys a veritable arsenal of arguments to defend his position, evoking cultural models from the gods of the Greeks and Norsemen, some of whom had to be cruel because they were omnipotent, to a position close to Nietzsche and fin-de-siècle aestheticism. It is the old lord himself and his word, the uncle tells Adam, who has just asked him to release Anne-Marie from her task, that give meaning to the peasant woman's actions:

Yes, my nephew, it is possible, did I grant you your prayer and pronounce such an amnesty, that I should find it void against her faithfulness, and that we would still see her at her work, unable to give it up, as a shuttle in the rye field, until she had it all mowed. But she would then be a shocking, a horrible sight, a figure of unseemly fun, like a small planet running wild in the sky, when the law of gravitation had been done away with.

(59)

And yet, despite or perhaps because of the old lord's words, some readers or listeners may well imagine Anne-Marie's plight in just these terms, a possibility encouraged by the uncle's repeated suggestions that what Adam, they, or anyone else sees in the distant field is just a matter of perspective. One can even choose, he asserts, between tragedy and comedy: the first represents the point of view of the powerless, the second that of the gods and a ruling class that views itself in god-like terms.

Despite the proliferation of perspectives, however, the two men are unable to bring Anne-Marie into focus as a human being or hear her speak. Even when they approach the field, they see her in insect-like terms: “Like an insect that bustles along in the high grass, or like a small vessel in a heavy sea, she butted her way on, her quiet face once more bent upon her task.” (57) Even her death at the end of the tale is evoked in non-human terms: “Then, softly, lingeringly, like a sheaf of corn that falls to the ground, she sank forward onto the boy's shoulder, and he closed his arms around her.” (69)

By this time, Adam has withdrawn from the scene to the interior of the manor house, where he accompanies his uncle's wife in a duet that includes the significant lyrics: “Mourir pour ce qu'on aime, c'est un trop doux effort.” (63) His departure is preceded and made possible by a perception that explains away the situation in the field and allows him to substitute one woman for another:

He saw the ways of life, he thought, as a twined and tangled design, complicated and mazy; it was not given him or any mortal to command or control it. Life and death, happiness and woe, the past and the present, were interlaced within the pattern. Yet to the initiated it might be read as easily as our ciphers—which to the savage must seem confused and incomprehensible—will be read by the schoolboy. And out of the contrasting elements concord rose. All that lived must suffer; the old man, whom he had judged hardly, had suffered, as he had watched his son die, and had dreaded the obliteration of his being. He himself would come to know ache, tears and remorse, and, even through these, the fullness of life. So might now, to the woman in the rye field, her ordeal be a triumphant procession. For to die for the one you loved was an effort too sweet for words.

(63)

What Adam thus brings into focus is a distant, faded, and evocative pattern; what he turns away from is the plight of a solitary individual sacrificed to the whim of a tyrant, the irreversible linear movements she traces on the field that is to become her place of death. Adam's aesthetic and aestheticizing vision—he sees the situation in terms of sweetness and harmony—allows him to overlook the ethical dilemma presented by the plight of a woman who never quite comes into focus in this tale. He could have intervened. He could have left for America. Instead, by the time he leaves the scene of the ordeal, Adam has resolved to remain on the estate as the illegitimate father of a son who will carry on the family name of the tyrant.

The conversation between the two men thus inscribes a third plot, in which Adam is seduced by the old lord, as well as his young bride. This seduction may well figure, as if in a mise-en-abysme, the potential effect of this intricate tale on the reader. It is all too easy to be taken in by the dazzling array of arguments the old lord deploys and thus to accept unquestioningly Adam's decision to remain and collaborate in the old lord's plans.

This is certainly the perspective of Langbaum and other critics who focus on the relationship of Dinesen's work to the aesthetic traditions of elite European culture. Only recently have feminist critics begun to question the ethical nature of the choices made in her version of the tale, but their perspective tends to be equally ahistorical. One major interpretation of “Sorrow-Acre,” Susan Hardy Aiken's “Tracing the Woman's Line,” raises the ethical questions surrounding Anne-Marie's ordeal by focusing on the old lord as the representative of patriarchal power. Aiken's emphasis lies with Sophie Magdalena, whose sexuality and desires will undermine from within the power of the old lord and his belief in his good name. Her interpretation draws on recent feminist theories of female identity, such as those of Nancy Chodorow or Dorothy Dinnerstein, who suggest that women have a greater sense of identification and solidarity with other human beings, especially other women, because, unlike men, they are not forced to define themselves against their mothers in early childhood. The theory brings into focus the significance of the scene in which Sophie Magdalena contemplates her body in the mirror and thinks above all of two things: the naked bodies of peasant women she had seen bathing in the river the day before; and her sense that “Someone ought to have been with her who was not.” (46) Interestingly, Aiken points out that that missing person is not necessarily Adam, but might also be a female companion or companions. What she does not note, however, is that Sophie Magdalena's longing and possible feminine solidarity does not extend to Anne-Marie, whom she certainly has never seen as an attractive young body bathing in a river.

Like Langbaum's, Aiken's analysis turns on a central paradox: how it is that women are able to write or communicate at all in a world in which almost all forms of representation are dominated by patriarchal tradition. Sophie Magdalena thinks in images; the evocation of the curvaceous Danish landscape at the beginning of “Sorrow-Acre” may also point beyond the texts inscribed both by the tale and the lines traced by the inhabitants of the landscape. Thus the most intimate aspects of feminine experience contain a kind of utopian potential that, if understood, may undercut the cruelty of patriarchy.

One of Aiken's subsidiary points is particularly suggestive, however, and points beyond the transhistorical focus of her argument in general. The uncle's ferocity, she suggests, may well be an attempt to compensate for his inability to father a son.

Both Aiken and Langbaum focus on only one plot line in “Sorrow-Acre,” and neither critic accounts for the interconnections among all three or, especially, the significance of the long argument between uncle and son. And although Langbaum suggests that the tale may represent “the last dance of a dying order” (36), neither critic gives much weight to the historical setting of the work or the date of its publication. Before turning to these issues, I would like to construct a third, ahistorical, interpretation that links the plots surrounding Anne-Marie and Sophie Magdalena in provocative terms.

It is surprising that no one has published an interpretation of this tale, in which Anne-Marie is compared to Christ on several occasions, along the lines of René Girard's theory of scapegoat rituals and plots that, he believes, function in order to allow a community to vent and overcome feelings of intense hostility. It is, after all, Anne-Marie's death that will allow Adam to remain on the estate and the life of the family as a whole to continue, despite the old lord's loss of his only son and inability to father another. It is even possible that he kills Anne-Marie in place of his wife, who he knows will soon be unfaithful to him. Yet in proposing the scapegoat model as universal, Girard also suggests its inevitability. Is this the case in Dinesen's tale? Do the references to the crucifixion combine to suggest that her death is a holy and even desirable one? The fact that here, as so often in Dinesen's work, apparent allusions often alter and reverse the original casts suspicion on this interpretation. The ending of the tale, in which Goske Piil cradles his mother in his arms, after all, is a reverse pietà. What kind of cruelty is at stake here? And what is the significance of the gender of the victim?

There are numerous hints in “Sorrow-Acre” that the old lord may be a representative of a ruling class and of traditions that are foreign, although they have taken root on Danish soil. If the tale opens with a reference to the Danish landscape—“The low, undulating Danish landscape was silent and serene, mysteriously wide-awake in the hour before dawn.” (29)—it describes the history of the land over the past thousand years in terms of a kind of cultural sedimentation that ends with the establishment of the power of a manorial class who inscribe “elegant, geometrical ciphers” on the countryside. (30) The text comments on these structures in terms of an occupation: “They spoke of power, the lime trees paraded round a stronghold.” (30) It points to the foreignness of the rulers' style and its ambiguous relationship to the Danish countryside:

Foreign artisans had been called in to panel and stucco it, and its own inhabitants travelled and brought back ideas, fashions, and things of beauty. Paintings, tapestries, silver and glass from distant countries had been made to feel at home here, and now formed part of Danish country life.

(31)

And Adam's first glimpse of his uncle also emphasizes the old lord's distance from the Danish landscape:

As once more he came to the pavilion at the end of the avenue his eyes were caught by a bouquet of delicate colours which could not possibly belong to the Danish summer morning. It was in fact his uncle himself, powdered and silk-stockinged, but still in a brocade dressing-gown, and obviously sunk in deep thought.

(37)

Who is the old lord? Adam's initial view of him as a group of exotic colors that seem strikingly foreign to their surroundings poses this question, and suggests that we view the old lord both as a late representative of Danish feudal tradition and as one of a long line of foreigners to take temporary possession of the landscape.

The description of the landscape as a timeless undulating presence upon which human beings have left a series of marks also invites us to consider the various cultural moments evoked here in terms of repetition and reinscription. The narrator names two at the beginning of the tale: Christianity and neoclassicism have both left traces on the countryside. The perspective of Adam and the old lord is considerably more complicated: as already noted, for them, the landscape and its inhabitants call up associations in Greek and Scandinavian mythology, as well as more recent political and philosophical theories. But one moment, I believe the most important, is unnamed, and that is Denmark around 1940, with the threat and actual presence of National Socialism in the countryside.

Reading “Sorrow-Acre” with the context of its publication in mind brings into focus the dialectical potential of this strange and resonant evocation of a cruel moment in Danish cultural history. The old lord's actions serve as a reminder of a certain Danish tradition that is uncomfortably close to the practices of the foreign invaders.

Consider the parallels between “Sorrow-Acre” and two other fictional works composed at about this time. 1942 also saw the filming of the Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer's Day of Wrath or Vredens dag. Like “Sorrow-Acre,” this work focuses on a cruel moment in Danish history, the burning of a witch in the seventeenth century, an action which, the film also suggests, reflects Danish patriarchs' deep-rooted fear of sexuality. That contemporary Scandinavian audiences found the parallels between the representation of Danish scapegoating traditions and the practices of the Nazi invaders compelling is illustrated by the fact that Dreyer's friends urged him to flee the country, which he did immediately after the release of the film in November 1943.⁵

The similarities between “Sorrow-Acre” and Thomas Mann's treatment of German tradition in his novel Doctor Faustus, which he began in 1943, illuminate another aspect of Dinesen's tale.⁶ The works of both writers are concerned with the sedimentation and survival of layers of a tradition that make possible—and also attractive—the spread of totalitarian doctrines. Thomas Mann's novel, of course, which allegorizes the history of German culture since the Reformation in the development of the main character, Adrian Leverkühn, goes into the process in considerably greater detail. But the parallels between the two fictions do suggest that we read the evocation of an at first bewildering array of Danish and European cultural models in Dinesen's tale of forty pages from a similar perspective: as an investigation of how and why such practices become possible, at home, as well as abroad.

One short tale, quoted in Chapter Thirteen of Doctor Faustus, presents a particularly striking parallel to “Sorrow-Acre.” This story, originally told to Mann's narrator by the academic theologian Schleppfuss, concerns the psychology of witchburning in Germany. Schleppfuss's narrative has it that a young man, who was in love with a woman named Bärbel, found himself impotent with other women. His fear and shame led step by step to the arrest and condemnation of Bärbel and an old woman who, under repeated torture, admitted to being a witch. The complex and allusive evocation of Anne-Marie's past in “Sorrow-Acre” raises similar issues. For, as the old lord tells her story, she is rumored to have borne an illegitimate child whom she murdered; it is also possible that her son, Goske Piil, is illegitimate. The father of both children is unnamed, but some connection to the old lord is suggested in his remark that “the boy … was my son's playmate, the only other child that I ever knew him to like or to get on with.” (43) Anne-Marie thus plays the role of the Biblical Hagar, the concubine of Abraham, who was cast out after the birth of the legitimate son, Isaac. Here, as well, however, the allusion is reversed: Anne-Marie's ordeal is brought on by the death, not the birth, of a legitimate son. But the double plot, in which the old lord all but offers Adam his wife, also suggests that his actions are governed by a fear and resentment of female sexuality—and sexuality in general.

“Sorrow-Acre” may well find its place as a kind of narrative told within the tradition of elite modernist literature and aesthetics that attempts to come to terms with the heritage and psychology of totalitarian ideologies. In such works, the juxtaposition of images, of moments from the past, can serve to point up the human significance or loss in a particular situation in the present. Juxtaposition and discontinuity have the potential to undercut the danger inherent in the construction of totalizing systems that may go hand in hand with the justification of the most inhuman kinds of behavior. In “Sorrow-Acre,” it is, after all, Adam's ability to see life and death as a magnificent aesthetic synthesis that allows him to walk away from Anne-Marie's ordeal.⁷

Against the seductively aesthetic patterns of modernist writing, Dinesen sets the story of Anne-Marie, a woman, a peasant, and a victim of tyranny. She is a curious figure: I have already mentioned the implied reversal of the Hagar and pietà motifs in her representation. Another reversal that is particularly pertinent for an understanding of the tale as a whole concerns the name Dinesen gave her: Anne-Marie. The name, which may well have been given to a Danish peasant woman in the eighteenth century, also calls up associations with the French Marianne, which was not only common among the French peasantry at the same time, but which, as the studies of Maurice Agulhon and Lynn Hunt have shown, also named one emblem of the French Revolution, an embodiment of the revolutionary peasantry who also represented freedom, La Liberté. The reversal of the name of the revolutionary emblem may provide a link between the distanced reworking of the old folktale's half-inarticulate protest against the arbitrariness of absolute power and an equally outrageous present, suggesting that we read the actions of the obedient and accepting Anne-Marie as their opposite, as call for rebellion against the unjust actions of a tyrannical overlord.

I would suggest, then, that Dinesen embedded the reworking of the folktale, “Sorrow-Acre,” in a self-consciously aesthetic and aestheticizing art tale in such a way that readers familiar with previous versions might recognize it as an allusion to—and criticism of—the actions of the most recent tyrannical overlords in Denmark: the Germans. But her juxtaposition of oral and written models also has a significance beyond that of the contemporaneous Danish resistance to the occupation: it points to the difficulty of thinking about power, resistance, and individual action in an aesthetic culture in which there are no accepted absolutes and in which the proliferation of aesthetic models obscures the significance of the individual and the potential of actions undertaken either by individuals or by groups. The one explicit reference to power in Dinesen's “Sorrow-Acre” represents it as descending textually from above: “The child of the land would read much within these elegant geometrrical ciphers on the hazy blue. They [the forms of the manorial French garden] spoke of power, the lime trees paraded around a stronghold.” (30) The voice that might speak out against the geometrical inscriptions, that of Anne-Marie or the class she, in at least one context, represents, has been silenced here.

The aestheticizing frames of Dinesen's narrative, then, frames that reach into the delineation of the peasant woman's sacrifice, also point to a “gap,” a dimension of the narrative that is named only ironically in Adam's uncertain democratic arguments against his uncle's actions. In Kierkegaardian terms, the aesthetic interpretations within the narrative evoke their counterpart, an ethical response to the work as a whole. Aiken quite rightly linked the embedded structure of Dinesen's narrative to the invisible and unspoken forms of feminine sexuality and the female body. (175-78) But I would argue that what is unspoken here also transcends gender. Dinesen's ornate and self-conscious text turns back on itself to criticize the very language of modernism—which is also in many cases that of postmodernism—for its failure to bring into focus the significance of individual human beings, their potential to act, or a concept of justice that is not out of step with a sense of beauty.

Notes

1. For an overview of interpretations of Dinesen, see Pelensky, but see also the essays by Arendt and Moi. Almost all book-length studies of Dinesen's work comment on “Sorrow-Acre.” Moi's intertextual focus has been particularly suggestive for my own interpretation of the relationship of “Sorrow-Acre” to oral and textual precedents.

2. The sole critic to have addressed this issue head on is Thomas Whissen. In his 1976 article, “Without Fear: Isak Dinesen's Winter's Tales,” Whissen argues: “These tales are not’resistance’ literature. They would be better described as’reconciliation literature …” (58) Concerning “Sorrow-Acre,” he notes that “the point is simply this, that you beat your oppressors at their own game. Humanitarian impulses such as those that motivated the evacuation of the Jews take on a special edge and call forth unexpected heroism if only because to obey such impulses is to get the better of those who deny them.” (59)

   My thanks for this reference to Marianne Stecher-Hansen, who gave a paper on this subject at the 1995 meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study.

3. The literature on the German Novelle is enormous, but for good discussions in English, see especially Edwin Keppel Bennett, A History of the German Novelle; John M. Ellis, Narration in the German Novelle; Martin Swales, The German Novelle; and Roger Paulin, The Brief Compass: The Nineteenth-Century German Novelle.

4. For a sample of recent saga criticism, see Lindow et al.

5. Begun in 1942, Day of Wrath had its Danish premiere November 13, 1943, some six weeks after the Gestapo's unsuccessful attempt to round up all the Jews in Denmark on the night of October 1-2. They had also attempted, again not always successfully, to arrest a number of Danish intellectuals, including Dreyer's friend, Ebbe de Neergaard.

   On the filming of Day of Wrath and Dreyer's subsequent flight to Sweden, see Drouzy, 283-301. For this critic, Dreyer's modifications in the script that inspired his film signaled a critical intention, shifting the focus of the plot from the psychological conflict between a young wife and her mother-in-law to “une dénonciation de l'appareil ecclésiastique coercitif et répressif” “a denunciation of the coercive and repressive ecclesiastical apparatus.” (287)

6. On the genesis of Doktor Faustus, see Mendelsohn. See also Mann's Entstehung.

7. Isak Dinesen's storytelling has much in common with the ideas of Walter Benjamin on the cultural significance both of storytelling and of mechanical reproduction. Both techniques preserve, albeit in degraded form, the sacred beliefs and practices of homogeneous communities, beliefs we can only begin to recall and use again through a kind of contemplation that understands the fallen present in a dialectical relationship to a past imagined as its opposite. Several commentators on Dinesen's work, above all Judith Thurman, have noted the parallels between the two writers' nostalgic notions of storytelling, and Benjamin's emphasis on the juxtaposition of moments, of dialectical images, as a first step in imagining a better world certainly brings into focus the problem of perspective in Dinesen's narratives, as well as the negative importance of the contexts of mass culture and totalitarianism for her work.

   In her chapter on Winter's Tales, Thurman comments:

   But the very fact that Isak Dinesen became a storyteller rather than, say, a novelist was a moral choice. She was taking side with the “heroic” past, and with the fabulists of an older age, against her own contemporaries. The old tales have a common ground with hers, which Walter Benjamin suggests with his usual felicity: “The wisest thing—so the fairy tale taught mankind in olden times, and teaches children to this day—is to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and high spirits. (This is how the fairy tale polarizes Mut, courage, dividing it dialectically into Untermut, that is, cunning, and Übermut, high spirits).”

   Dinesen's tales make the same point—in a dialectical manner. They contrast Christian morality with its guilt and humility—which make it passive—to what could be called an heroic morality that is based on honor: trial by ordeal, incurring risk, and taking its consequences.

   (297)

   To these perceptive remarks I would only add that it may be less easy to be sure with whom—or what—Blixen takes sides than Thurman suggests here.

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