“Ehrengard,” Kierkegaard, and the Secret Note

Abstract

INTRODUCTION novella Ehrengard from 1963 has commonly been regarded, and rightly so, as Karen Blixen's (Isak Dinesen's) answer to Soren Kierkegaard's Forforerens Dagbog from Enten-Eller. FersteDeel (184-1) (1987; The Seducer's Diary in Either/ Or. Part I). Shortly after publication, Robert Langbaum was first scholar to point out connections between Ehrengard and Forforerens Dagbog in his book Gayety of Vision (1964). Since publication of this work, at least twenty articles or separate book chapters discussing novella in various ways have been published, for most part focusing on notion of gender, art, and seduction. (1) A visit to Royal Danish Library (December 2010), where seven different manuscript versions of novella are to be found in Karen Blixen archive, confirmed that even though Ehrengard has received renewed scholarly attention in past ten years, (2) important information crucial to our understanding of novella has so far been overlooked. In this paper I will focus on following in order to renew and enrich our understanding of this significant work by Blixen: (1) I will point out new meta-narrative connections to The Seducer's Diary significant for interpretation and understanding of narrative, (2) I will show how deleted passages in earlier drafts carry new information crucial for our understanding of J. W. Cazotte's blush in final scene, and (3) I will show how hidden homophonic puns add to understanding of novella as a comedy and connect it to Kierkegaard in new ways. EHRENGARD Already as early as middle of 1920s, Blixen expressed her interest in Kierkegaard in various letters from Africa. most elaborate passage we find in a letter from August 3,1924, to her brother Thomas Dinesen: Laes forresten ogsaa Soren selv om Du maaske vil synes han er lidt indviklet (maaske ogsaa lidt gammeldags for Dig!) Vi har i hvert Fald Enten-Eller hjemme. Jeg tror ikke, at noget Menneske kan la:se ham med Eftertanke uden at gribes af ham. Han var etsrligt Menneske og led under det; maaske vil Du i hans Opfattelse af Den Enkelte finde noget af dig selv. (Blixen 1979a, 280) And by way, read Soren too, even though you may find him a litde complicated (he may be a little old-fashioned to you, too!); I know that we have Either/Or at home, anyway. I do not think that anyone can read him closely without being gripped by him. He was an honest person and suffered for it; you may perhaps see something of yourself in his concept of The Individual. (Dinesen 1978, 225-6) Later, in 1926-27, after a yearlong trip to Denmark in 1925 where she met Georg Brandes on two occasions in October (Bunch 2011, 77), and during a turbulent time in her relationship with Denys Finch Hatton, Karen Blixen started working on her writing with much more focus and ambition. She wrote first draft of Carnival in Africa during these years. tale is about a supper party in a house north of Copenhagen in 1925 after a great masked ball has taken place. At supper party we find one of female characters, Annelise, dressed as the young Soren Kierkegaard, and plot of Kierkegaard's Forforerens Dagbog plays a significant role in tale. Here Annelise plays role of seducer, when she is trying to create a new version of seduction plot in Forforerens Dagbog with her lover Tido. (3) Carnival was eventually stored away and not published until 1975 in Clara Selborn's Danish translation and two years later in original English version (1977). Blixen, however, never gave up on her interest in and Forforerens Dagbog in particular, and in early 1950s she decided to develop a full-length tale based on this work, drawing in part of some of ideas from Carnival. tale, or novella as I will refer to it in this paper, was tided Ehrengard. …