Study Guide to Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645422358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, one of the last books to come out of British Colonization in Africa. As an autobiographical narrative of the mid-twentieth century, Out of Africa is a coming of age story with ideas of serenity in the wilderness, the courage and simplicity of primal peoples, and nature as a moral force. Moreover, Dinesen explores various literary techniques and blurs the lines between narrative, memoir, and prose pastoral. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Dinesen’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO ISAK DINESEN

DINESEN’S LIFE AND WORKS

Karen Christentze Dinesen, born April 17, 1885, was the second daughter of Ingeborg Westenholz and Wilhelm Dinesen, who was related to the greatest nobleman in the Kingdom of Denmark. According to the biographer Judith Thurman, Karen’s mother and father were an “antithetical” couple, that is, they were exact opposites. The Westenholz men were traders and self-made millionaires, while the women were passionate feminists, non - conformists, and Unitarian converts. The Dinesen men tended to be virile and opinionated, and the women elegant and pretty. Though Karen Dinesen did not like her mother’s family, she inherited many of their qualities and these dictated her later life. The idea that “Life seemed immoral without some calling” was a Unitarian ideal that all the Dinesen children aspired to. Karen’s brother Thomas, like his father, sought fulfillment in battle and later was a writer. All three Dinesen girls showed creative and artistic talent, and Karen showed talent in both drawing and writing. She collected plots for stories, jotting down fragments and polishing them in her notebook.

Karen, also known as Tanne, a nickname she disliked but was called by her family, was the most ambitious of the siblings. At seventeen, Karen started attending drawing classes regularly in Copenhagen and later attended the Academy of Arts in Scotland, with the idea of becoming a painter.

At twenty - two, she made her debut as an author under the pseudonym “Osceola.” “The Hermits” appeared in August 1907 in Tilskueren, Denmark’s most distinguished literary journal. After her “The de Cats Family” appeared in the January 1909 issue of Tilskueren, she lost her impulse to write till later in life. This Osceola writing period reflected her religious crisis and struggles with virtue and sin, God and the Devil, and Christianity and paganism, according to some critics. Karen called her work of this period the “mystic melancholy of adolescence.”

PSEUDONYM

According to biographer Judith Thurman, the pseudonym Osceola had a private meaning for Karen, and possibly was a private joke, since it was the name of her father’s German shepherd that accompanied father and daughter on their walks. Wilhelm Dinesen saw and admired the American Indian Osceola as a literary figure of noble “natural man” making a last stand against extinction. Osceola (1804-38) was a leader and hero of Seminoles, born to an English father and a Creek mother. He fought against the American Government’s pressure to sign a treaty that would force Indians out of Florida and into Arkansas.

FATHER’S INFLUENCE

Wilhelm was an officer first in the Danish Army and then in the French. When not at war or hunting, or in love, he was participating in Parliament as an independent with sympathies for the Liberals. Elected in 1892, the year his son Thomas was born, he wrote letters to newspapers and political pamphlets to gain support for national defense. He led Karen out of the domestic limbo and limited world of woman into the “wild.” Instilling in her his great love of nature and teaching her to become observant, he guaranteed that her writing would appeal to the senses. In helping her exercise her senses he was sharing the ways of the hunter, which she regarded as a second literacy. Wilhelm stood in her mind for the sensual, uninhibited aspects of a man’s life, in contrast to the women in Karen’s world, with their ethical perils and self - denial. Wilhelm felt a deep affinity with the Indians, with their code of honor, their elegance, bravery, and knowledge of animals and of the wild. He romanticized their wisdom and believed they were more civilized than Europeans. This acknowledgment of the otherness, of the Native and his romanticized visions of civilization and nature, left their permanent mark on Karen’s life.

FIRST PERSONAL TRAGEDY

Karen’s first great grief was her father’s suicide when she was ten. Wilhelm killed himself by hanging, a dishonorable death, since it was the method used by the army to execute its deserters. This conscious choice of death may have been his final gesture of betrayal of wife, family, and political loyalties. Having contracted syphilis he was doomed to live a wretched life; he may not have been able to endure it, being an outdoor man and soldier. According to Thurman, Karen at fifteen became “obsessed by the idea that her father lived on in her.” She romanticizes her father in “The Hermits” and he appears as a melancholy figure in “Copenhagen.”

GENESIS OF OUT OF AFRICA

The influence of Wilhelm cannot be said to be the only influence in Karen’s later writings but it had major impact. Ideas from Wilhelm’s Letters from the Hunt, his themes of survival and of the price of one’s existence appear in her works. According to her biographer, since her youth Karen tried to “realize” an idea and anticipate her life’s destiny by making an old story come true. The story she had planned to act out in her life was actually meant to be the “requiem” of her father’s story. The ideas of serenity in the wilderness, the courage and simplicity of primal peoples, and nature as a moral force are all lessons learned from her father that are incorporated in Out of Africa.

FORESHADOWING OF SECOND TRAGEDY

When her love for her second cousin, Baron Hans Blixen - Finecke, was not acknowledged or returned, she married his twin brother, Baron Bror Blixen - Finecke of Nasbyholm. It was a marriage of convenience. Her story “The Old Chevalier” evokes the experience of first love and explores the problems of unrequited love.

Bror, known for his stamina, is believed to have been a model for Hemingway’s great white hunter, Robert Wilson, in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” Though Bror had the erotic impertinence of her father, he lacked finesse, intelligence and integrity. Their marriage was a mutual exploitation with real affection on both sides. Bror had a title and connections with the highest nobility, including the Swedish royal family. But more importantly, it was the Westenholz fortune that underwrote the farm they bought in Kenya. “The Dreaming Child” in Dinesen’s Winter Tales includes her explanation of the marriage of convenience as practiced by Copenhagen women.

ON TO AFRICA

Robert Langbaum, one of Isak Dinesen’s best critics, describes how she “rediscovered in Africa the validity of all the romantic myths which locate the spirit in the elemental - in nature, in the life of primitive people, in instinct and passion, and in aristocratic, feudal and tribal society which have their roots in nature.”

When she married Baron Bror in 1913 and went to Africa, she joined the early white settlers in the newly established British colony, Kenya, in East Africa, and for the next seventeen years unsuccessfully attempted to make a coffee plantation profitable.

LIFE TRAGEDY TWO

Karen chose the men in her life who were like her father: unavailable and unreliable. Bror proved unfit to be a farm manager because of his unreliability over money. He also showed no discretion about his affairs with a friend’s wife or with African women, mostly the Masai women who had a high rate of venereal diseases.

Karen contracted syphilis, like her father, and came to believe her father’s destiny had been repeated in her own destiny. As a result of the syphilis she became sterile. When she finally confessed to her mother in a letter that she and Bror had separated, she begged her mother not to share the news with the family. In an Autumn 1921 letter she expressed the trauma of her father’s death as the greatest misfortune. She felt he had deserted her. Nevertheless, “Father understood me as I was, … loved me for myself.”

OTHER INFLUENCES

References to Georg Brandes, Hume, Nietzche, classical mythology, Shelley, Shakespeare, and the Bible are found in most of her works. Karen credits Georg Brandes, the great Scandinavian critic thought to be a corruptor of youth, with revealing literature to her. Karen’s attraction to the greatest critic of the age was enhanced by the fact that he knew her father well. Romantic traditions in her tales were influenced by Brandes’ intellectual history of Romanticism. It was Brandes who introduced her to the relatively unknown Nietzsche in his lectures “On Aristocratic Radicalism.” Brandes also helped Karen publish the marionette play The Revenge of Truth.

REPUTATION AS A STORYTELLER

Most of Dinesen’s tales are embroiled in the spirit of storytelling; a basic theme in all her tales is the storyteller’s defense of the art of the story. She spoke of herself as Scheherazade, whose life depended on keeping the thread of the tales going through The Thousand and One Nights so that the Sultan never lost interest. She holds the readers’ interest by involving them in the story.

One writer saw Dinesen “perform” one of her tales. She had the “trance-like stare of the soothsayer living wholly in another space and time.” Her study of painting and art is revealed in her writing when she paints landscapes with words, as in Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass. Her admiration of great painters is evident in her tale “The Deluge of Nordency.” Dinesen saw herself as clearly belonging to the oral tradition of literature. She believed her tales have “an almost physical or instinctual source, like the dance,” according to her biographer.

PSEUDONYMS

For her major works Karen Blixen adopted the pseudonym “Isak Dinesen.” This name indicates her rediscovering herself by redefining herself. Isak, a Hebrew masculine name meaning “one who laughs,” emphasizes the masculine side of her nature. Dinesen, her father’s name, indicates her desire to stay connected to her father. She decided to use this pseudonym, at the age of 48, with the completion of Seven Gothic Tales, in the hope of avoiding excessive negative attention. The use of a pseudonym is a way of erasing the author’s social identity.

DINESEN’S AFRICA

Dinesen left Denmark to expose herself to a life unprotected by society, to “find herself,” as Brandes would advise, to protect wild animals, wilder outcasts, deserters from Europe, the adventurers turned guides and Safari Hunter, all in memory of her father. Her Africa is a different Africa from Elspeth Huxley’s accounts of her early years in Kenya (as in The Flame Trees of Thika and The Mottled Lizard; White Man’s Country is her history of the colony). Out of Africa is told as a visionary flight of fancy in which everything seems more than it is.

Out of Africa, written five years after Dinesen left Africa for good, deals with a period already set back in the past. The distancing of time and place better enabled her to reflect about her African experience. Dinesen altered and rearranged the actual facts of her years in Africa to fit the purpose of the storyteller. She describes picturesque moments without chronology or any hint of how much time has elapsed. No details of her life prior to Kenya are included; intimate self revelations are left out so as not to distract the reader. Omissions about her life also concealed agonizing defeats in her personal life. In another book, Letters from Africa, she reveals her truly personal feelings about her experiences in Africa. In Thomas Dinesen’s My Sister, Isak we find still other facts that she had not revealed in Out of Africa.

LOSS - PERSONAL TRAGEDY THREE

When Dinesen realized that leaving Africa was inevitable, she perceived parting with Africa as “Armageddon.” The loss of the farm and the death of her lover, Denys Finch Hatton, whom she considered a true aristocrat, were the two events that determined her own destiny and future as a writer.

Isak Dinesen - the Baroness Karen Dinesen Blixen - died in 1962, aged 77, from emaciation after long suffering from syphilis.

DINESEN’S THEMES

Themes: explicit and implicit

During and after an experience with good fiction, we naturally reflect on its subject, central ideas, thesis, message, moral, its overall meaning. And pulling together all the conclusions we can derive from a story, we find it convenient to designate them with a catchall word: themes. We sometimes refer to one aspect of a theme, a subtheme, as a motif. We may consider our inferences to be valid if our formulations of the themes and motifs prove to be interrelated and overlapping.

Sometimes an author states his themes explicitly, outright, either in his own authorial voice (e.g., Dinesen’s theme of civilization and nature) or more subtly, through his characters’ own statements of their beliefs and conclusions. Thus, many of Dinesen’s themes can be found in dialogue involving the natives and Dinesen, and aristocrats and Dinesen. We know that Dinesen intends their intellectual observations to be thematic because she makes them all sympathetic characters. We know the author does not intend us to take our philosophy of life from Baron Bror because she makes him unattractive: his ideas seem to be inherent in his unpleasant personality.

At other times the author will use the subtle, artistic means of expressing themes. She allows us to derive her meaning from the conduct and fate of her characters, from the outcome of their actions. Thus, we learn about Dinesen’s view of organized religion from the Missions’ behavior and the author’s attitude toward the natives from the shooting incident. Such themes are expressed implicitly.

Dinesen seems to offer these ideas, explicit or implicit, as her main themes in Out of Africa:

Aristocracy and nobility

The characters and descriptive landscapes reflect Dinesen’s idea of aristocracy. The idea of “noblesse oblige” (i.e., “rank has its obligations”), is embodied by the fearless Africans, Dinesen’s favorite English aristocrats - Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch - Hatton - as well as by her African servants, Farah and Kamante, and the wild animals. Dinesen invests in the natives many heroic and aristocratic character traits. The aristocratic attribute she gives to ...