Karen Blixen on Feminism and Womanliness: "En Baaltale med 14 Aars Forsinkelse"

Abstract

Kvindens Virke er at udvide hendes eget Vosn. Det kan brede sig meget vidt, som et stort Tros Krone, men det har stadig sin Rod i hendes eget Jeg. (Blixen, En 80) Woman's function is to expand her own being. It can spread very wide like the crown a great tree, but still have its roots in her own Self. IN THE INTRODUCTION tO En Baaltale med 14 Aars Forsinkelse (1953; at a Bonfire 14 Years Late [1979]), Karen Blixen muses that the original invitation to speak at an International Women's Congress in Copenhagen in 1939 may have been given under forkerte Forudsaetninger (72) [on mistaken assumptions] and adds slyly that these feminists maaske alligevel ubevidst kaldt paa noget som de kunde bruge (72) [may nevertheless have evoked from me something which they may make use]. In her oration 1953, given fourteen years later, Blixen relates that she had informed the chair the committee, Mrs. Estrid Hein, that jeg er ikke kvindesagskvinde (72) [translated as am not a (in Daguerreotypes 66)]. (1) As a consequence this somewhat imprecise English translation as well as the author's deliberate ambivalence, feminist and other critics since the 1970s have indeed found in Blixen's fiction much of which they may make use to borrow the author's own words. In other words, critics have often plucked Blixen's statement out the polemical context the essay and overlooked the nuance in the original Danish text, jeg er ikke kvindesagskvinde [literally, am not a woman the 'Women's Cause]. Whether Blixen's on women, on the feminist movement and on gender roles remained consistent or static throughout her life and literary work, whether these evolved or whether they became increasingly conservative as the author aged are questions that have been addressed by other critics although most often in a cursory manner. The general consensus is that Blixen's on grew increasingly conservative as she matured so that by the rime she wrote the Bonfire Oration in 1953 she had reached a position that contradicted the convictions her letters the 1920s. Judith Thurman, for example, writes in Isak Dinesen: The Life a Storyteller (1982) that Blixen's views [on Feminism] had grown considerably more conservative since her letters [from Africa] on the subject to Aunt Bess, when she had called the most revolutionary issue the nineteenth century (348). In Det Umenneskelige: Analyser af seksualitet, kon og identitet hos Karen Blixen (2001; The Inhuman: Analyses Sexuality, Gender, and Identity in Karen Blixen), Dag Heede maintains that konsforestillingeme [gender representations] gradually stivner (173) [stiffen] in Blixen's work, so that she eventually rejects the conception constructed gender roles evident in her early work. Yet in a letter 26 May 1926 to her maternal aunt Mary Bess Westenholz, the forty-one-year-old Karen Blixen articulates on and the Women's movement that were to prove remarkably consistent throughout her life and literary career: Jeg mener da, at 'Kvindesagen ... vistnok overhovedet maa betragtes som det nittende Aarhundredes mest betydningsfulde Bevogelse, og at den langt fra i dette Ojeblik har done with de Omvoltninger, den vil bringe; thi den har ikke naaet sit mal med at have gjort det muligt for Kvinder at blive Jurister, Loger, proter etc., med en ny AEgteskabslov og lige Arveret for Kvinder som for Mond; alt saadant er kun Udslag af den langt dybere liggende Bevogelse. (Breve fra Afrika 2: 42) I consider that feminism ... should probably be regarded as the most significant movement the nineteenth century, and that the upheavals it has caused are far from done with at the present moment; for it has not reached its goal by having made it possible for women to become lawyers, doctors, priests, etc., by the a marriage law and equal right inheritance for women and for men; all these things are only manifestations the far deeper rooted movement. …