1 Introduction
After some debate with her American publisher Robert Haas, Dinesen decided to title her first English-language publication Seven Gothic Tales. âAnd when I used the word âGothic,ââ she recollected in 1959, âI didnât mean the real Gothic, but the imitation of the Gothic, the Romantic age of Byron, the age of Horace Walpole, who built Strawberry Hill, the age of the Gothic revivalâ (Brundbjerg 2000, 213â214). A year later, the Danish equivalent followed as Syv fantastiske Fortællinger (Seven Fantastic Tales), a title perhaps gesturing more strongly towards cultural influences from German romanticism (Brantly 2002, 14â15). While Robert W. Langbaum insists that âIsak Dinesen is not a writer of hair-raising talesâ (1975, 89), other scholars studying Dinesen in relation the gothic and the fantastic have produced a substantial body of critical work primarily grounded in various forms of psychoanalysis, feminism, and poststructuralism (e.g. S. James 1983; Black 1985; Aiken 1990, 67â83; Stoddard 1996; Rees 2006; Kastbjerg 2013, 242â342).
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain â a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space. (2004, 84)
Less a fixed genre than a way of working across or athwart genres, the weird is conceptualized as a âmodeâ (Machin 2018, 16), an âinflection or toneâ (Luckhurst 2017, 1045), or âthe result of a worldviewâ (Joshi 1990, 1) that âveersâ (Luckhurst 2017, 1052) between periods, movements, national traditions, and cultural hierarchies. Focused more on mood, atmosphere, affect, and worldview than on plot, character, and verisimilitude, and tilting âtowards the existential, the ontological, and the epistemologicalâ (Machin 2018, 19), weird stories build dark and discomfiting storyworlds with elements that question, interrupt, violate, or destabilize widely accepted ideas about the world and the human place in it. The âweird creates not just unease, but dislocationâ (VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2011, 154), it engenders a âsensation of wrongnessâ (Fisher 2016, 15), it expresses an urgent feeling of âestrangement of our sense of realityâ (Noys and Murphy 2016, 117), and it âcall[s] into question what we think we know about ourselves and the worldâ (Weinstock 2016, 187). The plots of Lovecraftâs stories, inasmuch as they can be said to exist at all, arise from a traumatic rupturing of the social consensus of reality. They almost invariably involve a male New England scientist or academic who undertakes a journey of discovery, believing that rational inquiry will help affirm humansâ comfortable and secure position in the world and in the cosmos at large. In the course of the tale, however, the entitled scholarly protagonist uncovers bizarre evidence that upends enlightenment ideologies, utterly confounds orderly epistemological paradigms, and explodes any sense of safe or privileged human being-in-the-world. Lovecraftâs weird-finders end up bereft of their orientation and grounding in the world, unhinged, traumatized, and permanently diminished by their entanglement in powers and processes that defy comprehension and refuse the centrality and meaningfulness of human life.2
is not the era of human mastery of nature. It is not the fulfilment of dreams of progress. On the contrary! The point of the term is to make us aware of how much we do not control, and of what a mess our species has made without really thinking about it. [â¦] Unrealistic dreams of the reach of human mastery fueled the scholarly divide between humans, ready to conquer, and nonhumans, waiting for conquest, just as these dreams encouraged the programs of irresponsible investors. Messes,
people thought â if they thought at all â would be cleaned up later. Well now we are all down inside the mess, with no signs of clean up. (2015, 44).
If the term âAnthropoceneâ implicitly promises a reassuring continuation of human power and separateness amidst superstorms, wildfires, landslides, melting icecaps, rising seas, droughts, dead zones, and zoonotic pandemics, the alternative term âglobal weirdingâ (Friedman 2010; Canavan and Hageman 2016) perhaps better captures the reality of profound bewilderment and the urgent need for new acts of cognitive mapping. Similarly, if mainstream realist literature can be viewed as practicing âmodes of concealment that prevent [â¦] people from recognizing the realities of their [ecological] plightâ (Ghosh 2016, 119), weird fiction in turn maps onto our present predicament, in which âthe wild has become the normâ (Ghosh 2016, 8). With a taste for the bizarre, the extreme, the macabre, and the outré, weird writers from Arthur Machen to Ray Bradbury, Daphne du Maurier, and China Miéville never accepted the banishing of âthe unheard-of and the improbableâ (Ghosh 2016, 41) in the name of gradualism, uniformitarianism, and common sense. Central texts in the weird mode from Samuel Taylor Coleridgeâs âThe Rime of the Ancient Marinerâ (1798) to Mary Shelleyâs Frankenstein (1818), Edgar Allan Poeâs âLigeiaâ (1838), Algernon Blackwoodâs âThe Willowsâ (1909), Johannes V. Jensenâs âKondignogenâ (1907), and Franz Kafkaâs âThe Metamorphosisâ (1915) were always part of a countertradition attuned to stranger, darker, uncannier, less realistic, but perhaps (as we now comprehend) truer and timelier ways of imagining the natural world and the human place in it.
Notorious for his xenophobia and misogyny, Lovecraft only acknowledged a narrow and selective range of male Anglo-American ancestors, and he particularly championed four enabling âmodern mastersâ (2004, 138) of the weird mode: Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, and Lord Dunsany. Recent critics and editors, however, have worked to reconceptualize the weird as a broader category that can encompass a more international and gender-diverse range of texts and authors. Ann and Jeff VanderMeerâs seminal anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2011), assembles more than 100 stories by authors as widely dispersed as Lovecraft, Kafka, du Maurier, Gustav Meyrink, Jose Luise Borges, and Stefan Grabinski. Like Melissa Edmundsonâs Womenâs Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890â1940 (2019) and Womenâs Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891â1937 (2020), however, the VanderMeersâ massive tome bypasses Dinesenâs texts specifically and Scandinavian literature more generally.3 The Old English word wyrd, from
2 Uhygge All Around
And as it swallowed up all these voices in itself, the storm filled the air with such a terrible noise that it was to the hermits like being at the bottom of a witchâs cauldron. The fire went out, the whole house was filled with an icy weirdness [âuhyggeâ], and everything in it that was loose hammered, wiggled, and thundered like little trolls who found their pleasure in mixing their voices with the great mighty spirit, the storm, and acting out their mad little dances together with the eternal sea, â and in the middle of this cold house the hermits sat and waited for the storm, of which there was still hope that it would one day stop. (KV, 29â30 [authorâs translation])
The first story that Dinesen ever published, under the pseudonym âOsceola,â âEneboerneâ appeared in the Danish literary journal Tilskueren (The Spectator) in August 1907 on the recommendation of the influential critic Valdemar Vedel. It was never rewritten or translated into English, and apart from a few short notices (e.g. Black 1985, 383â384), it has largely been ignored by critics. Set in the late eighteenth century, the story meshes influences from a number of popular genres to achieve a haunting vision of âanthropoperipheralâ (Miëville in Venezia 2010) nonbelonging amidst elemental forces that seem at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to human projects.
The recently married Vandamms have journeyed from England to the island, whose name and geographic location are never revealed, to ensure
The period from the 1880s to the 1920s is widely considered the golden age of the ghost story, and spectral tales enjoyed particular popularity among female writers, who often used the form to reflect critically on gender relations and sexual politics in patriarchal society. Jennifer Uglow points out that âthe popular origins of ghost stories, their alliance to oral tradition, gave educated women one way of criticizing and undermining the structures which constrained their livesâ (1988, XI). Melissa Edmundson adds that â[l]ike the ghosts and spirits which haunt their pages, women writers of ghost stories âtroubledâ the present by raising awareness of unsafe domestic spaces, gender relations, economic conditions and the consequences of imperialismâ (2013, 5). Throughout âEneboerne,â Lucie struggles but fails to find meaning and satisfaction in her socially prescribed roles as dutiful daughter and self-sacrificing wife. Lucie grows up in a country house with her mother, who is âweak and always bedridden,â her three sisters, who âleft to themselves [â¦] were closely knit by a sincere friendship,â and her father, âa little-appreciated scientist and politician, [who] harbored a deep contempt for women and only occasionally and very theoretically concerned himself with the upbringing of his four young daughtersâ (KV, 13 [authorâs translation]). She is the product of a misogynist culture that practices a strict separation of genders, reserving education for boys and men while leaving girls and women isolated and vulnerable.
â[V]ery gifted, a passionate and suffering nature, a great idealist, but curiously narrow in his concepts of idealsâ (KV, 14 [authorâs translation]),
He began his new book, a great work, and as he worked his way into the thought of it, they drifted apart by his silence. He had such difficulty in compiling it in the city, where he was constantly disturbed, that it drove him mad, and when he came and told her that he had to go away and live alone in order to write his book in peace, it did not occur to her that she could stay behind, she traveled with him and tried to the best of her ability to make life comfortable for him and to find something to occupy herself. (KV, 15â16 [authorâs translation])
He came close to her, at once he took her in his arms, wrapped both his arms around her, he had never touched her before. Everything went black before her eyes, and a terrible coldness enveloped her completely, as he pressed her close to him, like the cold waters of the sea over a drowning man. She stood completely stiff for a moment, suddenly heard a long wailing scream in the darkness, and thought: Is it me who screams, and then felt how she sank deeply, and the darkness collapsed over her. (KV, 31â32 [authorâs translation])
Published when Dinesen was twenty-two, and inviting comparison with works of the female fantastic by contemporary writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Sitwell, Thit Jensen, Astrid Ehrencron Kidde, and Selma Lagerlöf, âEneboerneâ inaugurates Dinesenâs careerlong efforts to dispel the aura enveloping heterosexual courtship rituals and bourgeois married life.7 Women writers felt considerable attraction for ghosts and ghost stories, Vanessa D. Dickerson argues, because âthe position of the nineteenth-century femaleâ was âinfluential [â¦] yet equivocal, ambiguous, marginal, ghostlyâ (1996, 5). At one moment in the story, Lucie discovers that â[t]here was a woman among the pirates, though Lucie was not told how she had come there, who seemed paler and more shadowy than the others, and who had her long hair hanging down her back; her high voice sometimes sounded like that of a seabird through the stormâ (KV, 29 [authorâs translation]). As she lies dying, Lucie sees in her mindâs eye a âpale and slender childâ whom she recognizes as Joseph, the servant boy who âcrashed from the rock on their first day on the islandâ (KV, 35 [authorâs translation]). In patriarchal society, Dinesenâs story suggests, women already lead insubstantial, spectral lives. They lurk in the background, haunting environments where they can never truly be at home. It seems cruel but
It appears, however, that there is more than one nonhuman agent troubling the world of âEneboerne.â Dinesenâs storyâs more profoundly uhyggelig effect, I suggest, stems from its disconcerting vision of a natural environment that is weirdly alive and unfriendly, refusing to accommodate human wishes and desires. Since Shakespeareâs The Tempest (1611) and Daniel Defoeâs Robinson Crusoe (1719), the uninhabited island has been a powerful narrative motif, and âsome of the most popular literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is replete with desert islandsâ (Kinane 2016, 6). John R. Gillis asserts that the West ânot only thinks about islands, but thinks with themâ (2004, 1), while Elizabeth DeLoughrey holds that literary islomania laid the foundation for a representation of island confinement, seclusion, and timelessness, which subsequently served to justify and authorize the Western taming of the environment and subduing of foreign lands. Literary islands are there for the taking, DeLoughrey argues, and â[t]he self-made male who accidentally colonizes a desert isle has been a powerful and repeated trope of empire building and of British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesâ (2007, 13).
To the west there are high rocks that run straight down into the water, and the sea roars and breaks at their feet and far, far away. The fishermen say that they were hidden reefs, a pirate ship once sank here, thatâs why they call them the Gallows Hills. Further in and to the east, our island is lower, completely overgrown with grass and somewhere down in a depression there is a long birch grove â but when you are up on the highest places, you can see the water far around and the other islands, just like the hedges and the cut boxwood bushes in the garden at home. (KV, 10â11 [authorâs translation])
Two candles were lit and stood on the table, and at the table some men sat playing cards. One of them sat with his back to her, and the others were so absorbed in their game that they did not notice her, and she remained quite still and watched them attentively. They played very eagerly and loudly; whole piles of gold coins were passed from one to the other, and during this their faces were very spooky [âuhyggeligeâ] to look at, for they played as prisoners might play in prison on the last morning before their execution, and while the morning was already dawning, and as if this moment was a conflagration, torn out by a terrible fire. (KV, 21 [authorâs translation])
In the course of Dinesenâs narrative, Lucieâs island and the surrounding waters emerge as sites of resistance to âwestern models of passive and empty space such as terra and aqua nullius, which were used to justify territorial expansionâ (DeLoughrey 2007, 3). The story, in other words, redefines the island and the ocean neither as blank spots on the map that can be readily inhabited nor as passive resources that can be safely exploited by the human protagonists, but as weirdly active and wily antagonists, pushing back against human domination.
From the beginning of the story, Lucie feels acutely conscious of âthreatening dark and uncanny [âuhyggeligeâ] and hostile powersâ (KV, 33 [authorâs translation]) inherent in the sea, the land, and the air. Already in her introductory letter to her sisters, she construes the death of the coupleâs servant boy, Joseph, as a conscious, deliberate act by which the island seeks to repulse them. âAnd isnât that a wonderfully eerie [âuhyggeligâ] welcome from the island,â she writes: â[I]tâs as if it didnât want us hereâ (KV, 9 [authorâs translation]). Later, in prose still primarily focalizing Lucieâs experiences, the third-person narrator uses similar forms of personification to endow the island with a strange, menacing vibrancy. Lucieâs deteriorating situation on âthe distant and cold islandâ (KV, 18 [authorâs translation]) only strengthens her understanding of the elements â âthe cold and the fog, the rocks, and the seaâ (KV, 20 [authorâs translation]) â as adversarial agents that have declared her and her husband personae non gratae: â[S]he began to feel so strangely heavy about her heart, for there was such an expression in all things to her that the storm was not a storm alone; its noise was horrible to listen to, because it signified unfriendliness, dislike, and now she understood that the quiet gray weather in the first days had signified mistrustâ (KV, 23 [authorâs translation]).
The second storm followed. From the time when it first began to blow, and as it rose and still rose and let loose its furious fury over the island, Lucie knew what it meant, and that it was a threat, repeated because the first was not understood, so frothy and snorting because the person who uttered it was losing patience. Dissatisfied with the effect of the first warning and saddened by the presence of these living people, the sea sent them messenger after messenger for nine days to shake them off. (KV, 29 [authorâs translation])
Dinesenâs weird desert island story consistently locates agency with the nonhuman, while stressing the human charactersâ smallness, passiveness, vulnerability, and exposure in the face of the âgreat oceanâs mighty watersâ (KV, 22 [authorâs translation]). Rather than Lucie and Eugène occupying âtheirâ island, the islandâs dynamic processes occupy them, throwing up âflying flakes of foam [â¦] as if in a kind of furious and wild arrogance to show that there were no limits to its powerâ (KV, 22 [authorâs translation]). Nothing in âEneboerneâ remains stable, compliant, or docile, simply offering itself to human possession. Everything, including the howling winds, the turbulent waters, and the very shape of the island, is unruly and restless, resisting the emigrantsâ attempts to grasp or contain it. For Lucie, âit was as if the cold damp air outside laid its hand, as it struck her, not only on her face and body, but on her soul, and as clearly as in words told her its opinionâ (KV, 21 [authorâs translation]). The strange, prolonged storms breach all boundaries, weaken all defenses, and pierce all architectural, bodily, and psychic spaces. The fishermanâs cabin provides no protection from âthe mysterious world of the sea [that] began to rise under this storm, to show how little the obstacles that were set against it mattered, and to fill and flood, to lift and rock everything, and to penetrate everywhereâ (KV, 29 [authorâs translation]). The âvoice of the wild seaâ fills the islandersâ heads with âa noise so deafening that it ached in their headsâ (KV, 22 [my translation]), and the âsharp salty moisture that the sea brought up against the rock penetrated [Lucieâs] whole body with its coldnessâ (KV, 23 [authorâs translation]).
Weird horror fiction, Andrew Thacker argues, meditates on human finitude and allows us to consider âthe subtraction of the human from the worldâ
In her inchoate but strangely captivating literary debut, Dinesen reveals her attraction to the weird mode when she meshes Robert Louis Stevenson-inspired pirate melodrama with feminist critique, Robinsonade, and âdark ecology,â a mode of ecological thinking that âincludes negativity and irony, ugliness and horrorâ (Morton 2010, 17). Written and published well over a century ago, the storyâs most significant contribution is its powerful invocation of what Lovecraft calls âcosmic alienage or outsidenessâ amidst âan atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forcesâ (2004, 176). By prioritizing female weird knowledge, moreover, Dinesen resists the predictably gendered logic of better-known narratives by contemporary writers like Blackwood and Lovecraft, who typically reserve unheimlich insights for their exclusively male protagonists. From the perspective of the island, Lucie realizes, she and Eugène have no certain place, enjoy no special privilege, and can even be considered alien, intrusive presences. To be sure, âEneboerneâ is narrated in a manner that allows skeptical readers some freedom to psychologize Lucieâs weird visions as the products of her fragile and increasingly frenzied imagination.8 The more alarming likelihood, however, is that Lucie, and Lucie alone, can intuit the coupleâs and potentially everyoneâs uhyggelige situation with frightening clarity. In my interpretation, then, the title of Dinesenâs debut
3 Something Wrong
Reprinted in anthologies like Man into Beast: Strange Tales of Transformation (Spectorksy 1946, 156â208) and The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Baldick 1992, 344â385), âThe Monkeyâ is often justifiably placed among âthe most Gothic of [Dinesenâs] talesâ (James, 1983, 43). In the third chapter of this book, I focused on the storyâs âheroâ Boris von Schreckenstein in order to highlight the storyâs seriocomic undermining of inviolable soldier masculinity. I now return to reconsider âThe Monkeyâ as a story that engages with gothic but pushes beyond gothic conventions to activate the energies of what Lovecraft labels âthe true weird taleâ (2004, 84).
The term âgothicâ originally implied a relation to the ancient Germanic tribe known as the Goths, but its meaning eventually came to encompass all the qualities associated with northern European culture and especially the Germanic culture and architecture dominant during the medieval period after the fall of Rome. While companion stories such as âThe Roads Round Pisaâ have a Mediterranean setting, âThe Monkeyâ is set exclusively in one of âthe Lutheran countries of northern Europeâ (SGT, 109). Obsessed with patrimony and ancestry, the barbarian, gorilla-like Count of Hopballehus traces his family to the Wends, one of the âwild Nordic tribesâ (SGT, 131) who, like the Goths, flourished in Europe during the Dark Ages.
Eve K. Sedgwick opens her argument in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions by writing that â[o]nce you know that a novel is of the Gothic kind (and you can tell from the title), you can predict its contents with an unnerving certaintyâ (1986, 9). âThe Monkeyâ recreates eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic fictionâs characteristic atmosphere of unease, foreboding, anxiety, gloom, and entrapment. It reuses many of gothicâs familiar physical trappings, including a convent, a castle, a dark forest, a magic potion, and a library filled with âbrittle folios a hundred years old [â¦] dealing with strategy, princely marriage contracts, and witchesâ trialsâ (SGT, 109). It resuscitates some of gothicâs most formulaic character types, including a witchlike Prioress, an obsessive male aristocrat, a longsuffering virgin, and a melancholic lover, and it self-consciously exploits the gothic formâs association with seduction,
Just then the door opened and the Prioressâs old servant came in again, this time with a letter on a silver tray, which he presented to her. She took it with a hand that trembled a little, as if she could not very well take in any more catastrophe, read it through, read it again, and colored faintly. âIt is all right, Johann,â she said, keeping the letter in her silken lap. (SGT, 117)
When Boris visits Hopballehus, he carries another letter from the Prioress to the Count, who in turn appears still shocked by a third âletter from his lawyer, which he had just received, and was still holding in his handâ (SGT, 124). This third letter contains the news that the Count has won a lengthy lawsuit that restores to his possession what he understands as his ancestral land in Poland â a decision that suddenly makes Athena a wealthy heiress. Later, when priming her nephew for his assault on Athenaâs virtue, the Prioress conveniently
Jonathan Newell suggests that we imagine the weird not as an alternative to gothic but âas a tumour of sorts growing out of the gothic â composed of the same tissues but unfamiliar, alien and yet not-entirely-so, at once part of its progenitor and curiously foreign to itâ (2020, 3). Lovecraft, too, acknowledges the kinship between gothic and weird, but he insists that âthe true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to ruleâ (2004, 84). Mark Fisherâs The Weird and the Eerie can help us explicate this elusive âsomething more,â which in my understanding makes âThe Monkeyâ not only gothic but also weird. Fisher echoes Lovecraftâs description of the weird, claiming that âthe weird is that which does not belongâ (2016, 10). The weird is the presence of that which should not be present, or the happening of that which should not happen. The weird involves a âsense of wrongnessâ (2016, 13), a âconviction that this does not belongâ (2016, 13) that portends âthe presence of the newâ (2016, 13) and sometimes opens âan egress between this world and othersâ (2016, 19). Fisher continues to argue that
From time to time, particularly in the autumn, when nuts were ripening in the hedges along the roads and in the large forests that surrounded the convent, it happened that the Prioressâs monkey would feel the call of a freer life and would disappear for a few weeks or a month, to come back
of its own accord when the night frosts set in. The children of the villages belonging to Closter Seven would then come upon it running across the road or sitting in a tree, from where it watched them attentively. But when they gathered around it and started to bombard it with chestnuts from their pockets, it would roll its eyes and grind its teeth at them, and finish by swiftly mounting the branches to disappear in the crowns of the forest. (SGT, 110)
And suddenly it came upon him that somewhere something was not right, was quite wrong and out of order. Strange powers were out tonight. The feeling was so strong and distinct that it was as if an ice-cold hand had passed for a moment over his scalp. His hair rose a little upon his head. For a few minutes he was really and genuinely afraid, struck by an extraordinary terror. In this strange turbulence of the night, and the wild life of dead things all around him, he felt himself, his britzska, and his gray and black horses terribly and absurdly [âuhyggeligt,â SFF, 111] small, exposed and unsafe. (SGT, 133)
If the weird involves âthe conjoining of two or more things which do not belong togetherâ (Fisher 2016, 10), the monkey constitutes the outlandish irruption of that which âshould not exist, or at least [â¦] should not exist hereâ (2016, 15). A Zanzibari monkey, we feel, does not belong and is not at home in the storyâs landscape. A wild African creature is out of place and should not be running loose in the northern European forest. Following Fisher, however, we might argue that the monkeyâs gambols among the Prioressâs fir trees expose a deeper weakness or wrongness in how we habitually conceptualize concepts
âNo! No!â shrieked the old woman in a paroxysm of horror. The knocking went on. The monkey obviously had something in its hand with which it was beating against the pane. The Prioress got up from her chair. She swayed in raising herself, but once on her legs she seemed alert and ready to run. But at the next moment the glass of the window fell crashing to the floor, and the monkey jumped into the room. Still holding her frock with both hands, and bending double, as if ready to drop on all fours, madly, as if blinded by fright, she dashed along the wall. But still the monkey
followed her, and it was quicker than she. It jumped upon her, got hold of her lace cap, and tore it from her head. The face which she turned toward the young people was already transformed, shriveled and wrinkled, and of dark-brown color. There was a few momentsâ wild whirling fight. Boris made a movement to throw himself into it, to save his aunt. But already at the next moment, in the middle of the red damask parlor, under the eyes of the old powdered general and his wife, in the broad daylight and before their eyes, a change, a metamorphosis, was taking place and was consummated. The old woman with whom they had been talking was, writhing and disheveled, forced to the floor; she was scrunched and changed. Where she had been, a monkey was now crouching and whining, altogether beaten, trying to take refuge in a corner of the room. And where the monkey had been jumping about, rose, a little out of breath from the effort, her face still a deep rose, the true Prioress of Closter Seven.
The monkey crawled into the shade of the back of the room and for a little while continued its whimpering and twitching. Then, shaking off its misfortunes, it jumped in a light and graceful leap onto a pedestal, which supported the marble head of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and from there it watched, with its glittering eyes, the behavior of the three people in the room. (SGT, 161â162)
This catastrophe shockingly ruptures the otherwise predominantly realistic mode of narration in Seven Gothic Tales, confronting characters and readers with a weird âsuspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Natureâ that Lovecraft considers âour only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed spaceâ (Lovecraft 2004, 84).11 While the Prioress and the monkey have hitherto seemed separate creatures, they now appear deeply and ambiguously implicated in each otherâs existence, even to the point where it becomes uncertain when if ever readers have encountered âthe true Prioress of Closter Sevenâ (SGT, 162). The Prioress and the monkey, it seems, coinhabit or co-constitute each other, as already foreshadowed by the Countâs reference to certain Janus-faced âWendish idols [â¦] of which the goddess of love had the face and facade of a beautiful woman, while, if you turned her around, she presented at the back the image of a monkeyâ (SGT, 130â131).
4 Impenetrable Darkness
INTERVIEWER: I really have about a million things I want to ask, if you permit. For instance, The Angelic Avengers.
DINESEN: (Laughing). Oh, thatâs my illegitimate child! During the German occupation of Denmark I thought I should go mad with boredom and dullness. I wanted so to be amused, to amuse myself, and besides I was short of money, so I went to my publisher in Copenhagen and said, look here, will you give me an advance on a novel, and send me a stenographer to dictate it to? They said they would, and she appeared and I started dictating. I had no idea at all of what the story would be about when I began. (Brundbjerg 2000, 203â204)
Recalling Mary Shelleyâs characterization of Frankenstein as âmy hideous progenyâ (Shelley 2012, 169), Dinesenâs metaphor highlights her most financially successful bookâs slippery, indeterminate, and miscegenate nature, and it foreshadows criticsâ difficulty in pinning a convincing generic label on The Angelic Avengers. Irregular, ungainly, and immoderate, The Angelic Avengers has generally been placed among Dinesenâs minor works, as a book with âlittle or no value as literatureâ (Hannah 1971, 49), a ârefreshingly sillyâ text (Thurman 1982, 306), a tongue-in-cheek pre-postmodern âpasticheâ (B. F. Rostbøll 2013, 341), or a thinly veiled allegory of life in German-occupied Denmark (e.g. Wivel 1987, 131â132).12 Inspired by The Danish Language and Literature Societyâs 2013 publication of its critically annotated edition of Gengældens Veje, scholars have begun to reconsider the novelâs status among Dinesenâs works and in Danish
The original Danish dust cover of Gengældelsens Veje made references to Poe, Stevenson, and the popular Norwegian pulp writer Stein Riverton, while also claiming, spuriously, that âthis novel rests on real events that are described in French police reports in 1840â1841â (GV, 316 [authorâs translation]). The Book-of-the-Month-Club, in turn, proclaimed Dinesen âthe greatest Gothic novelist of our time,â touting The Angelic Avengers as â[a] spellbinding story of fascinating romance, chilling mystery and perilous adventure that sets two friendless young women in a house of unspeakable evilâ (qtd. Tesio-Ryan 2019, 115). Set in Britain and France, Dinesenâs âpotboilerâ (Kastbjerg 2013, 309) careens promiscuously among genres, channeling inspiration from Radcliffeâs The Italian (1796), Charlotte Brontëâs Jane Eyre (1847), and du Maurierâs Jamaica Inn (1936) as well as less familiar governess novels, sensation fictions, detective stories, ghost tales, and gothic thrillers (Brix 1949, 231â258; Glienke 1977; H. Mogensen 1983, 82â90; Agger, 1988; Schmidt-Madsen 2012, 109â126). Labelled a book of âromance, mystery, diabolism and horrorâ by The New York Times (qtd. Tesio-Ryan 2019, 116), Dinesenâs bricolage exploits the lurid topics of white slavery and sexual trafficking, which were often used in lowbrow crime and suspense fiction. In addition, constant transatlantic cross-references intertwine European locations and characters with the Caribbean, as Dinesen recycles voodoo lore popularized by William B. Seabrookâs The Magic Island (1929) and by subsequent representations of African Creole witchcraft and sorcery in travel writing, nonfiction, pulp fiction, and low-budget horror movies.13
In Shadows on the Grass, Dinesen points out that her âhighly illegitimate childâ was composed during World War II and âas was probably inevitable under the circumstances developed into a tale of darknessâ (OA, 452).14 The Angelic Avengers, I suggest, explores âdarknessâ as a racial, ethical, and epistemological category. Remarkably, the novel incorporates a transported dark-skinned woman â Zosineâs fatherâs âcoal-blackâ (AA, 36) nurse and maid, Olympia â as its most compelling and energetic character. Early on, readers learn that Zosine âas a child had been to the West Indiesâ (AA, 24), that her father âowned great properties in the West Indies [that] his father and his grandfather had owned [â¦] beforeâ (AA, 23), and that âZosineâs own mother [â¦], a Frenchwoman by birth, [â¦] had come from Santo Domingoâ (AA, 24). Although he now resides in England, the âtremendously richâ (AA, 23) Mr. Tabbernor has arranged his country estate, Tortuga (the Spanish word for turtle), as an exoticized and orientalized âearthly paradise of a unique and fantastic natureâ with â[m]any tropical trees and shrubs [â¦] brought from far away and [â¦] planted in the parkâ along with âhothouses with rare flowers and fruit, and a big glass house with small monkeys and parrotsâ (AA, 24).15 In addition,
Aye, he was an awful man! He was after human flesh, like the leopards in Africa at night. [â¦] he had acquired a taste for human flesh, and his mouth was ever watering for it.
[â¦]
He now said to us, âI have been to Africa, to the very places where your own fathers lived. I have known your own tribe, as it is before kind white people help it to get to America. I have learned your old magic, and have seen bigger snakes there than you have ever set eyes on. Now I am Papa le Roi.â (AA, 59)
âBut when, early in the morning,â Olympia cried out in a dreadful voice, âI came back to my own house, my child was not there. I then remembered that it was my own baby, which I had borne from my body, and it seemed to me only the more lovely because it was black. Then the old white priestâs words of the goat without horns rang awful in my ears. I wept and wailed in that hour of dawn, so loud that all the black men and women from the house came and stood round me.â (AA, 60â61)
In Dinesenâs novel, the ever-fascinating trope of cannibalism, which has so often been used to justify the conquering and civilizing of âsavageâ natives by the dominant Western world, is recuperated and used to characterize the colonizers themselves. Olympia, however, has parlayed her suffering at the hands of white flesh eaters into tremendous physical and mental fortitude. Indecorous,
Olympia suddenly stopped her wild war dance and stood immovable, like a majestic, dark statue. Then she took a step toward the man before her, and stared at him. âIt is Papa le Roi!â Olympia once more roared from the middle of the floor, swinging her arms, and throwing her body forward and back. âIt is the gray man from the woods who has come back!â [â¦]
âWhere do you come from?â she cried in a deep, ringing voice. âYou gray man who ate my child! You were as old as you are now, fifty years ago. Could you no longer lie still in your grave?â (AA, 259)
The master has had the young girls here that they talked of. He has also sold them. I do not know what it means, I did not know that one could sell white people. But it must be possible to do, and he has done it. The girl in the boat, of whom they spoke, came from here. It is not true that there have only been three girls here. There have been many, many, and he has sold them all. What happened to her has happened to them. (AA, 174)
Lucan and Zosine are horror-struck when they discover that history moves circuitously rather than linearly, that the same cruel acts are perpetrated recurrently and habitually, and that slavery, cannibalism, and human sacrifice persist at the heart of advanced and civilized Europe even after â[t]he humane feelings of our century [â¦] have abolished the trade with Negro slavesâ (AA, 150).
Lucanâs father had been a scientist, a highly gifted botanist, ahead of his time, and therefore but little appreciated by it, and opposed by certain of the clergy. He had many friends among French and German scholars. One of them was the French man of science. Dr. Braille, who invented the system of writing for the blind. Lucan had seen the famous man in her home, and had listened as he developed his ideas. (AA, 4)
The Angelic Avengers appears to yield the clarity and closure that would satisfy âthe orthodoxy of the man of scienceâ (AA, 273). At the end of the novel, Mr. and Mrs. Pennhallow escape their humiliating unmasking in front of Olympia and the girls by committing suicide. When Lucan begs the gun-toting
The old womanâs black face suddenly became empty and expressionless. It was as if a door had been shut. âWho of you,â she said, âknows our ways? Black people have got their own souls and their own noses. Of that we will not speak. And this time,â she added, more to herself than to Zosine, âsomebody from the old time came and helped me. They came from far away to show me the road. The Negro to whom I was married came, yes, my own baby laughed and jumped a little ahead of me where I walked. But why they came I do not know. And at last, tonight, I smelled your danger and your fear. And do you think that any human being could then have kept me back or made me turn? But all this is nothing for nice young ladies to ask about, or listen to.â (AA, 251)
At rare intervals, late at night, in the long dining-room, he took out a queer, old- fashioned flute, and played on it. There were ancient, sweet melodies on his programme, and some strange exotic tunes as well. He was no virtuoso, but his playing had a peculiar, unaccountable charm, which made the girls listen in breathless silence and sigh deeply when it ceased. (AA, 97)
They might, they thought, have been drawn by a person in a dream or a nightmare. There were human figures in them, but they were supplied with new fantastic features and limbs unknown to the girls. Zosine once said that they were like some old, dark idols which the Negroes on Santo Domingo had carved in black wood, and which Olympia had brought with her. (AA, 211)
Like Olympia, the âold motherâ (AA, 261) to whom he is strangely bound across time and space, Pennhallow seems to occupy some inaccessible domain between the human and the nonhuman, life and death, nature and the supernatural. He lives, it seems, on the threshold, in awareness, anticipation, and preparation of some numinous presence or imminent diabolical irruption, âhis
The European enlightenment celebrated vision as what René Descartes called âthe most comprehensive and nobleâ of the senses (qtd. Jay 1994, 21). The Angelic Avengers alludes to the enlightenmentâs âocularcentrismâ (Jay 1994, 20) with constant references to eyes, looks, gazes, and stares. During their stay in London, the girls feel acutely on display, subjected to the âscrutinizingâ (AA, 78) glance of their employment agent, âa long, thin and bald gentleman with a pair of strong spectaclesâ (AA, 77), and the desirous gazes of young men in the streets, which make them âput down the veils of their bonnets whenever they walked outâ (AA, 79). From their first encounter, likewise, the Pennhallows seem to stamp the girls with âthe brand of their evil eyesâ (AA, 179). Mrs. Pennhallow possesses âa long, deep and scrutinizing glanceâ (AA, 214), and she develops a âhabit of staring at Lucanâs pretty faceâ (AA, 107) as if vampirically âtrying to draw the beauty from [Lucanâs] face into her ownâ (AA, 98). Among her brother/husbandâs features, moreover, âit was his eyes which made the deepest impression on those he looked at. They were light, clear, watchful and piercingâ (AA, 82).
âI am always thinking of Rosa now,â [Zosine] said after a while. âWherever I am, I feel that she relies on me. She was friendless, in the hands of monsters, but she would not give in to them. When the other girls talked to her, she struck them. I have dreamed of her, and on waking up in the morning I have seen a red ring round my wrist. It was the mark of Rosaâs fingers, where she had held on to me.â (AA, 202â203)
Why, do you think, were you allowed to find your way to this house, and to be with me and her at this hour? On that dark road, who was your leader? In your own heart you guessed, then, and you know now, that he is ready to grant you a sweeter ecstasy and a deeper pleasure than you have ever experienced. He is waiting for you. Is he to wait in vain? (AA, 265)
According to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, the weird tale represents âthe impulse to remind readers of the strangeness of the world and the limits of our understanding of itâ (2011, XVII). Carl Freedman similarly argues that weird fiction is âfundamentally inflationary in tendency,â aiming âto suggest reality to be richer, larger, stranger, more complex, more surprising â and indeed, âweirderâ â than common sense would supposeâ (qtd. Noys and Murphy 2016, 118). Jeffrey A. Weinstock, in turn, defines weird fiction as âstories that undercut anthropocentrism by thematizing the insufficiency of science and human reason to comprehend the universeâ (2016, 82â83). Enjoying an odd, liminal status in Dinesenâs oeuvre and the critical discourses that surround it, The Angelic Avengers is the authorâs only full-scale novel, her most commercially successful publication, and her most sustained, pulpy investment in weird uhygge. To assume that Dinesen wrote the novel only for commercial reasons or âto provide myself and my countrymen with a bit of fun in a [â¦] funless timeâ (KBD, 1:425) is in my view to neglect the textâs achievement as a perplexing âtale of darknessâ (OA, 452) that eschews traditional literary monstrosities and common notions of the supernatural and demonic to let readers perceive âthe beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universeâs utmost rimâ (Lovecraft 2004, 108). An âillegitimate childâ (OA, 452), an âunclassifiableâ (Tesio-Ryan 2019, 199) text, and in every way â[a] curious bookâ (Bleiler 1983, 7), The Angelic Avengers posits a lifeworld imbued with irreducible alterity. It produces the disquieting feeling that we can never truly and fully know or understand which forces, entities, or energies actually govern what happens in the universe. Things are not as they appear on the surface, below which terrible realities lie concealed.
Now there is something of which you do not know, on our island, on Santo Domingo. We have got our own customs there, at night, in the woods. We have a big snake, magic, things altogether outside your understanding.
We met in the woods, and sung and danced, we sacrificed young goats to the big snake. And the one who knows the snake best and is aware of what it wishes, and whom we must all obey when he commands, is there called Papa le Roi. (AA, 58)
A low moan broke from her lips. At last Zosine walked up to the chair. With a shiver, as if it had been a long, dead snake, she lifted up the rope and let it run through her hands. It seemed as if she could not again let go of it. âOh, come back, Zosine,â Lucan said. Zosine followed her slowly, but she took the rope with her. It trailed after her along the kitchen floor. (AA, 241)
Snakes, of course, are traditional symbols of evil, but in The Angelic Avengers the plethora of coiling shapes â in the bookâs narrative, its characterizations, its descriptions, and even on the cover page of the first Danish edition (GV, 318) â point toward an alien, inhuman mysteriousness inherent in the very fabric of things. To borrow China Miévilleâs formulation, paragraphs such as the above manifest a characteristically weird âswillageâ of âawe and horror from âbeyondâ back into the everydayâ (2009, 511). Here as in other weird stories, there is a pervasive sense of a dreadful, intrusive, unknowable otherness underlying everything, of in- or antihuman âlurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of lifeâ (Lovecraft 2004, 114). The âbig snake,â it seems, is everywhere and nowhere, its power never visible as such yet constantly discernible
5 Conclusion
In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh critiques mainstream realist fiction, a genre that enjoys considerable cultural prestige but is predicated on a worldview whose core assumptions â that culture is separate from nature, that environmental processes are stable and predictable, that we can fully understand and control what happens in the world â seem increasingly out of step with âa time when the wild has become the normâ (2016, 12). As other critics (e.g. Heise 2018) have noted, however, Ghosh remains disappointingly reluctant to abandon âthe mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residenceâ for even shorter visits to the âhumbler dwellingsâ (Ghosh 2016, 24) or âouthousesâ (2016, 66) of genre fiction. The power of Ghoshâs polemic is limited by his decision to restrict his discussion to what he deems âserious fiction,â a category from which he excludes not only science fiction but also the fantastic, gothic, horror, comics, and all other literary forms with a speculative orientation and/or a broader popular appeal.
the awful and ambiguous worlds of weird fiction feel eerily similar to our rising ecological awareness, in which the entire world seems to have
become uncanny [â¦]: we are now, all of us, in the dark about the precise nature of the world in which we live, still waiting for the empirical data, charts, and statistical trend-lines to confirm what we all know, that things just arenât the way they used to be, something has gone wrong. (2016, 10)
The many myths and fables that surround, border, and frame Dinesenâs person, life, and authorship themselves read like weird tales, fraught with strangeness and incongruity that sometimes verge on the mystical, supernatural, or occult, and supported by highly stylized photographs by Rie Nissen, Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon, Rigmor Mydtskov, and Carl van Vechten.17 Dinesen herself coins one potent legend in an April 1926 letter to her brother Thomas, when in the throes of a deep existential crisis she claims âthat Lucifer is the angel whose wings should be hovering over meâ (LA, 246). In The Pact: My Friendship with Isak Dinesen, Thorkild Bjørnvig elaborates on this alleged âkinship with the Devilâ (1983, 62), citing personal conversations in which Dinesen claimed to have made a pact with Lucifer, exchanging her sexuality for her extraordinary storytelling powers. Another younger acquaintance and follower, the academic and esotericist Aage Henriksen, purported that Dinesen put a spell, mark, or curse on him during an encounter in February 1958. The enfeebled bedridden writer, Henriksen claimed, gripped his neck with a preternatural force that blocked his kundalini flow and gave him a chronic migraine that could only be partially alleviated with lifelong yoga exercises and transcendental meditation (1988, 166â169).18
In addition to such stories about Dinesen, there are narratives by Dinesen that are often labeled gothic or fantastic but, as I have suggested, perhaps better understood as (also) weird, in that they consistently place us in unknown territory, amidst strange company, or on unstable ground, challenging us to reconsider presuppositions concerning human identity, agency, intentionality, knowledge, and control. Wrestling with â(un)earthly belongingâ (Turnbull
The word âpulpâ refers to the low-quality paper on which these magazines were printed.
The closing reflections of the Bostonian anthropologist Francis Wayland Thurston in the short story âThe Call of Cthulhuâ (1928) are exemplary: âI have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. [â¦] Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of menâ (Lovecraft 2013, 51â52).
The Modern Libraryâs Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Wise and Fraser 1944), by contrast, reprints Dinesenâs âThe Sailor-Boyâs Taleâ alongside weird classics like Edgar Allan Poeâs âThe Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,â Guy de Maupassantâs âThe Horla,â M. R. Jamesâs âCasting the Runes,â Arthur Machenâs âThe Great God Pan,â and Lovecraftâs âThe Dunwich Horror.â Timothy Jones includes a brief discussion of Dinesenâs âThe Dreaming Childâ in his chapter on âThe Weird Taleâ for The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English (2019, 168).
Bill McKibben (2011) argues that since the dawn of industrial civilization, humans have inadvertently been making a planet so lively, alien, and inhospitable that it now deserves a new, weird name: âEaarth.â
According to Anders B. Jensen, â[t]he first decade of the twentieth century was the germination time for a sickly and twisted literary growth, which flourished briefly in the period until 1920.â Literary-historical accounts solely focused on the post-1900 rise of Danish realism and naturalism, Jensen argues, risk overlooking the existence and popularity of such texts, in which âthe twisted, the exaggerated and the supernatural cause a breakdown of our normal, everyday understandings of realityâ (2019, 187 [authorâs translation]).
For a discussion of uhygge, see Sandberg 2015, 25â35. The antonymic and much better-known term, hygge, denotes informal socialization in a cozy, unthreatening atmosphere characterized by âspatial encapsulation and interactional clustering around common, central pointsâ (Linnet 2011, 34). Dinesen criticizes Danish hyggemania in a November 1944 letter to Birthe Andrup (KBD, 1:383â384).
Lagerlöf can be viewed as the preeminent Scandinavian representative of the female or proto-feminist ghost story renaissance of the fin de siècle and early twentieth century. In her 1898 short story âSpökhandenâ (âThe Ghost Handâ), for example, the appearance of a spectral severed hand forces the young woman Ellen to question her decision to enter into a loveless bourgeois marriage yet leaves her no viable alternative to this fundamentally dishonest way of life (Lagerlöf 1943).
The meanings of better-known texts from the same period, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilmanâs short story âThe Yellow Wallpaperâ (1973 [1892]) and Henry Jamesâs novella The Turn of the Screw (2021 [1898]), pivot on a similar ambiguity concerning the female narratorâs mental state.
According to Kate F. Ellis, â[o]ne of the real achievements of the Gothic tradition is that it conjures up, in its undefined representation of heroinely terror, an omnipresent sense of impending rape without ever mentioning the wordâ (1989, 46). In âThe Roads Round Pisa,â Prince Giovanni (Nino) Gastoneâs rape of Agnese della Gherardesca, in lieu of her friend Rosina, is narrated so obliquely that the exact events of the story have often eluded readers.
In Austenâs novel, Catherine Morland discovers a mysterious gothic manuscript that daylight reveals to be âan inventory of linen, in coarse and modern charactersâ (1995, 163).
The other major occurrence of the unexplained supernatural in Seven Gothic Tales is the ghostly materialization of Fanny and Eliza De Coninckâs hanged pirate brother Morten in âThe Supper at Elsinore.â
When Dorothy Canfield Fisher used her allegorical reading of The Angelic Avengers to gain the novel inclusion in the American Book-of-the-Month Club, Dinesen privately objected that â[t]he point of view taken by Mrs. Canfield: that the book does, in some way, symbolize the Danish-German contest [â¦] is totally absurdâ (KBD, 1:461).
Dinesen often disparaged the literary value of The Angelic Avengers, but her letters reveal that she also believed that the novel possessed certain cinematic qualities. âI think myself that the book might have chances with the movies,â she writes to her British publisher Constant Huntington in September 1945, âand it would amuse me very much indeed, could this be worked. So I beg you to consider the problem, and to do all you can for it. It would be the greatest fun to me to go to England to see it being rehearsedâ (KBD, 1:425). Despite interest from several studios (Keller 1999, 235â242), a film version of The Angelic Avengers was never made, but a one-hour radio dramatization, starring Ann Blyth as Lucan and Margaret Phillips as Zosine, was produced and aired by CBS (Studio One 1948).
In the Danish version of the text, Skygger paa Græsset, Dinesen uses the term âGyserâ (âthrillerâ) (SGE, 85).
With its incongruous mélange of âartificialâ elements and âmultitude of fresh and fantastic detailsâ (AA, 29), Tortuga can be understood as a mise-en-abyme representation of The Angelic Avengers itself.
In a letter to Robert K. Haas, Dinesen acknowledges that âthe romances of the two girls, and the happy ending of the novelâ appear âa bit anticlimacticâ but adds that âsomehow I rather prefer the book to end in this way. It is not meant to be an orthodox crime novel, where the whole plot finishes with the discovery or punishment of the murderer. I see it more as a kind of âhold-all,â where romance, crime and idyll are all blendedâ (KBD, 1:435).
See Juhl 2017 for a photographic biography and Aiken 1996 for a detailed analysis of how Dinesen constructed her photographic persona.
Consider also this passage by the American writer Wallace Stegner, fictionalizing his 1954 meeting with Dinesen in his novel The Spectator Bird: âA woman in a floppy hat stood up beside a raised, slanted hotbed. She had a trowel in one hand and a stone or clod in the other. [â¦] She was brown-faced and brown-handed, as if Kenya had permanently altered her Danish skin. Though she was smiling, no teeth showed in her smile: she merely bent her lips. Her eyes were dark, alive, and noticing. She stood very still. Witch, for sure. Shape-shifter. If you held a mirror behind her it would reflect not a little brown woman but a monkey, one of those ambiguous old-woman monkeys of her tales, or perhaps a still bird with a curved billâ (1976, 191).