Sorrow-Acre

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Sorrow-Acre

Isak Dinesen 1942

Author Biography

Isak Dinesen was born Karen Christentze Dinesen at the estate of Rungstedlund, near Rungsted, fifteen miles north of Copenhagen, Denmark, on April 17, 1885. Though she is best known today for her writings about Kenya—works like Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass—she in fact spent most of her life at Rungstedlund. She was raised there, returned there after her years in Kenya, and lived there until her death; it is at Rungstedlund that she wrote Winter’s Tales, the collection in which “Sorrow-Acre” appeared.

Dinesen’s parents were from two very different walks of life. Her mother’s family, the Westenholzes, were quite wealthy, urbane, liberal, and bourgeois. Judith Thurman, in Isak Dinesen, the Life of a Storyteller, writes that the Westenholzes “were also . . . passionate feminists and nonconformists, converts to the Unitarian Church. . . . Their energies went into practical or abstract projects, and mostly to their own moral excellence.” Her father’s family, the Dinesens, were cut from a different cloth. Although they were also wealthy, her father’s family was from the country; they carried no title, but nonetheless had aristocratic, rather than bourgeois sensibilities. In Thurman’s words, “the men tended to be virile and opinionated, the women elegant and pretty.” Isak navigated through life guided by the magnetism of these two opposite poles, poles Thurman identifies as “Dinesen/Westenholz, freedom/taboo, aristocrat/bourgeois,” and finally, “either/or.”

Dinesen’s life as a writer can be conveniently broken up into three periods. During the first period, as Karen Dinesen, she filled her time with the social life her station in life afforded her—with parties, receptions, balls—but also with writing. During these early years, she succeeded in getting three of her stories published in Danish literary reviews—“The Hermits,” “The Ploughman,” and “The de Cats Family”—but she did not yet think of herself as a writer. The first period came to an abrupt end in 1914 when she moved to Kenya and married her Swedish cousin, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, who had purchased a large coffee farm near Nairobi with her family’s money. The seventeen-year period which followed, recounted in the memoirs Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass, was brought to a close when the farm eventually ran into so much debt that she was forced to sell it and leave. The marriage with Blixen had failed also, he being chronically unfaithful to his wife. In 1931 Dinesen, now forty-six, returned to Rungstedlund where she began to write in earnest, publishing the story collections and memoirs for which she is known. The remainder of her life was spent with her international reputation growing greater, while her physical well-being declined. Dinesen died at Rungstedlund in 1962 of emaciation, the result of her long, unendingly painful fight with the syphilis she had acquired from Blixen early in their marriage.

Plot Summary

At his mother’s urgent request, a young man named Adam has returned from England to his ancestral home in Denmark at the height of the short Danish summer. He meets his uncle in a beautiful garden on the estate. After an amiable discussion comparing the tasks confronted by the gods of Rome to those of the earlier Norse gods, Adam notes that his uncle seems distracted. His uncle admits that his thoughts are elsewhere and tells Adam the story of Goske Piil.

One week before Adam’s arrival, his uncle says, someone burned down his barn at Rodmosegaard. A few days later, the keeper at Rodmose and a wheelwright came to the house with Goske Piil, a widow’s son, in tow. They swore that Goske was the person who had set the barn on fire. Both men disliked Goske. The keeper suspected him of having poached on the grounds of Rodmose, while the wheelwright suspected Goske of having relations with his own young wife. The boy swore to his innocence, but he was unable to convince Adam’s uncle in conversation with the two men that he was truly innocent. Adam’s uncle had Goske locked up, meaning to send him to the judge of the district with a letter. The judge, he explained, is an idiot and would have done whatever he thought the uncle wanted him to do: send the boy to prison, put him in the army as a bad character, or even free him.

During a ride through his fields, Adam’s uncle met Anne-Marie Piil, Goske’s mother. She protested her son’s innocence, saying that her son had indeed been in Rodmose at the time of the barn-fire,

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but only to visit someone. Still uncertain of what to do with Goske, Adam’s uncle had an idea: he told Anne-Marie that if she could mow the rye field in which they stood in a single day, between sunrise and sunset, he would drop the case and free Goske. If not, “he must go, and it is not likely [she] will ever see him again.” The task to which Anne-Marie agreed was huge: “a day’s work to three men, or three days’ work to one man,” but Anne-Marie agreed gladly, “kiss[ing] his boot in gratitude.”

At sunrise, as Adam and his uncle discussed Norse and Olympian mythology, Anne-Marie begins to mow the field. A little later in the morning the narrative focus shifts to Adam’s uncle’s new wife, Sophie-Magdalena, a seventeen-year-old girl who had been raised at court. Although she is not, as the narrator observes, ideally suited for the role she is to fill as the uncle’s wife (“there was probably not in the whole country a creature more exquisitely and innocently drilled to the stately measure of a palace”), she quickly learns to adapt to country life, enjoying the sensual reality of nature in a greater intimacy than life at court allowed. In terms of action, Sophie-Magdalena’s scene is quite short. She wakes up, takes her nightdress off and observes her naked form in a mirror, kills a flea on her leg, and dresses.

In the afternoon, after a ride around the bounds of the estate with Sophie-Magdalena, Adam returns to the garden, joining his uncle who continues to watch Anna-Marie’s progress across the field. Now, for the first time, Adam begins to understand that Anne-Marie will almost certainly die, whether she succeeds or fails, and begs his uncle to change his mind. But Adam’s uncle remains resolute, insisting that his word cannot be broken, and that Anna-Marie is at peace with their agreement. They quarrel, and Adam threatens to leave forever, but shortly thereafter has a change of heart.

As sunset nears, it appears that Anne-Marie may finish the acre and succeed in freeing her son. The whole village gathers around her to watch as she makes her way, ever more slowly, down the last row. The village bailiff has even brought Anne-Marie’s son to the field to watch. After she cuts the last handful of corn, the uncle tells her that she has succeeded, that her son is free. She does not seem to hear, so he tells her son to repeat what he has said. Goske tells her. She reaches up, touches his tear-stained cheek, and falls into his arms, dead.

“In the place where the woman had died the old lord later on had a stone set up, with a sickle engraved in it. The peasants on the land then named the rye field ‘Sorrow-Acre.’ By this name it was known a long time after the story of the woman and her son had itself been forgotten.”

Characters

Adam

Adam, the first character described in the story is also the story’s protagonist, or main character. The narrator’s initial description of him is external: “he was dark, a strong and sturdy figure with fine eyes and hands; he limped a little on one leg,” but it soon becomes clear that Adam is also keenly intelligent and well-traveled. Not only is he familiar with Roman and Danish mythology, but he is well-read in philosophy: from Aristotle’s Poetics, which provides the structural background to his discussion of tragedy, to then-modern philosophical tracts, most notably Thomas Paine’s (1737-1809) “The Rights of Man” (1791). He has “traveled and lived out of Denmark, in Rome and Paris,” and is appointed to the Court of King George, the same King George from whom the American colonies won their independence in the Revolutionary War.

Anne-Marie Piil

It is Anne-Marie Piil who works herself to death in “Sorrow-Acre,” and for whom the acre is subsequently named. Although she says nothing during the course of the story (with the exception of her reported conversation with Adam’s uncle), her wordless presence in the story is meant to be an overwhelming demonstration of what Dinesen terms “an effort too sweet for words”: “to die for the one you loved.”

Goske Piil

Goske, Anne-Marie’s son, is the catalyst for the story’s action. Accused of setting a barn on fire, he was to be sent to the magistrate for trial; but Adam’s uncle, meeting the boy’s mother, Anne-Marie, by chance, agrees to free Goske if she can reap a large field in a day’s time. Like Anne-Marie, Goske says little during the story, but he is present at the end of the day, and it is in his arms that his mother dies.

Sophie-Magdalena

Like Adam’s uncle, Sophie-Magdalena’s full name is never given, and her character remains somewhat incomplete as well. Originally the intended bride of Adam’s young, sickly cousin, Sophie-Magdalena marries the bridegroom-to-be’s father soon after his son’s death. Being from a good family, Sophie-Magdalena will, it is hoped, restore Adam’s uncle to good graces with the King. Sophie’s appearance on the stage of “Sorrow-Acre” is brief; but her nubile, sensuous awakening in her bed-chamber nonetheless provides a striking contrast to the cool, dispassionate intellectualism of the conversation taking place outside between Adam and his uncle.

Uncle

The uncle is both Adam’s foil and his future. Adam’s uncle is the head of the family estate, the younger man’s father having died some time ago. The uncle had wished to leave the estate and his name to a son, but his only son died before the beginning of the story’s action, and before he was able to marry and provide Adam’s uncle with a grandson. In order to pass his name on, Adam’s uncle marries his son’s intended bride, Sophie-Magdalena, shortly before the start of the story’s action.

Themes

Custom and Tradition

From the opening paragraphs, in which the narrator reminds the reader that “a human race had lived on this land for a thousand years” to the closing sentence, in which the reader is told that the place was known as “Sorrow-Acre a long time after the story of the woman and her son had itself been forgotten,” Dinesen keeps the power of custom and tradition in the forefront of her narrative. In this fictional world, custom and tradition work hand in hand, reinforcing each other—things are done in a certain way, a customary way, because there is a tradition of doing them that way; the tradition exists because of the adherence to custom. This is, in some sense, the crux of the story, for when Adam returns from England, awakened to the ideas of freedom and equality then sweeping America, France, and England, he finds it difficult to accept the feudal state that still exists in his ancestral home. Interestingly, however, it is only when Adam is confronted with the reality of Anne-Marie’s suffering that he becomes upset; this demonstrates the degree to which he has remained a product of his culture.

Duty and Responsibility

Hand in hand with custom and tradition runs the theme of duty and responsibility. In one of the crucial passages in the story, Adam and his uncle articulate their very different visions of what it means to give one’s word, and, by extension, the meaning of words themselves. In an allusion to the opening passage of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”), the uncle says, “you have learned in school . . . that in the beginning was the word. It may have been pronounced in caprice, as a whim, the Scripture tells us nothing about it. It is still the principle of our world, its law of gravitation. My own humble word has been the principle of the land on which we stand, for an age of man. My father’s word was the same, before my day.” The uncle’s argument maintains that the word, once given, is irrevocable; it creates a responsibility for both the giver and receiver, so that neither the uncle nor Anna-Marie can be freed from the might of the word.

Adam, on the other hand, sees the word in more Joycean terms (“in the virgin womb of the imagination the Word was made flesh”), arguing that his uncle is wrong, that the word “is imagination, daring and passion,” sentiments more in keeping with the present day than with the “thousand year old” precedents the uncle is fond of quoting. Nonetheless, despite the appeal of the sentiments Adam voices to contemporary readers, one must think carefully about the implications of the uncle’s undoubtedly correct assertion that, while he and Adam—and by extension, modern readers—“do not, perhaps, quite understand one another,” he is “in good understanding” with “[his] own people.”

Religion

Though religion does not play as prominent a place in this story as one might expect it to, Christian and pagan gods are a recurrent theme. As the narrator explains early on in describing the country house, the class of people from which Adam comes is less concerned with the hereafter than with the here: “The country house did not gaze upward, like the church, nor down to the ground like the huts; it had a wider earthly horizon than they. For these people, as Adam and his uncle demonstrate, God may be useful, but the gods of old are more useful, at least as a starting point for a discussion of absolute power, its workings, and its pitfalls. While Adam believes that the Norse gods were morally greater than the Greco-Roman gods because they possessed the sublime human virtues of righteousness, trustworthiness, benevolence and chivalrousness, his uncle argues that virtue came more easily to these gods because their power was not absolute. “‘And does power,’ Adam again asked, ‘stand in the way of virtue?’” “‘Nay,’ said his uncle gravely, ‘Nay, power is in itself the supreme virtue.’”

Style

Point of View and Narration

“Sorrow-Acre” is told from a consistent third-person, or “he said/she said,” point of view, and from a strikingly even narrative distance. The narrator is partially omniscient; that is, she can tell the reader what Adam and Sophie-Magdalena are thinking when the alternative would be unwieldy. (Imagine, for example, how awkward it would

Topics for Further Study

What is the significance of the sickle engraved on the stone marker at the end of “Sorrow-Acre”? Does the sickle have a symbolic function?
Evaluate the arguments Adam’s uncle gives in favor of making the widow Piil finish the entire field. Are they persuasive? Would your opinion be different if she had lived?
Adam decides not to go to America. How would the reader’s impression of the uncle be affected if Adam had made good on his threat and left?
The reader learns that Sophie-Magdalena is unhappy, then she disappears from the story. Why? Is her story complete?
What is the purpose of the many allusions to the Bible in “Sorrow-Acre”?
How does the material Dinesen added to the uncle’s speech change your understanding of the story? (See the essay by David Kippen.)

appear if Sophie-Magdalena had to say everything she thinks aloud to herself or someone else). But generally the narrator prefers to present narrative commentary (“the low, undulating Danish landscape was silent”; “a young man walked”) and report speech. At the same time, this narrator clearly has a personality distinct from the personalities of the story’s characters, and seems to view the characters with occasional irony and complete detachment. The narrative voice, not to be confused with the personal voice of the author, is similar to the voice Dinesen utilizes in some of her longer works; compare, for example, the first-person voice and tone in the opening lines of Out of Africa to the narrative tone at the outset of “Sorrow-Acre.”

Setting

The story is set in an almost feudal Denmark in the late eighteenth century, but the England of George III—a nation on the cusp of modernity—is a powerful, albeit offstage, force. Adam, the story’s protagonist, tries to bridge the impossible gulf between these two but must eventually choose either to flee to America, or to be a Dane in Denmark.

Structure

Although “Sorrow-Acre” can be read as a story, it works better when read as an allegory. As is often the case in the heavily stylized, nuanced allegorical form, the action takes place during a single day, from sunrise to sunset. During that interval, two characters, one young, the other old, engage in a genteel battle between feudalism and modernity, which in turn can be read as a commentary on the far-from-genteel battle between the democratic Allied forces and the quasi-feudal Axis forces fighting for control of Europe during the early years of World War II, when Dinesen’s Winter’s Tales collection was written and published. (One of the advantages of allegory over many other fictional forms is that one can talk about controversial things in oblique language, which makes allegory more difficult to censor and perhaps even safer than thinly disguised narrative).

Fairy Tale

“Sorrow-Acre” exhibits many characteristics of a fairy tale or fable. The story is set in a timeless agrarian place where nobles, the gentry, and the yeoman peasantry interact along clearly drawn class lines. There is a palatial estate upon which the action takes place, specifically the undertaking of a challenge which, if met, will mean the difference between life and death. There is an inflexible tyrant in the uncle, a beautiful young woman longing for more from life than she is experiencing, a traveler from afar (Adam) to challenge the tyrant’s prerogative, and an earnest old peasant woman who accepts a challenge which seems beyond her ability to fulfill.

Historical Context

In order to fully understand the critique of Dinesen’s “Sorrow-Acre,” one must first examine three very different historical moments and places: late eighteenth-century Europe, early twentieth-century Kenya, and mid twentieth-century Denmark.

Eighteenth-Century Europe

The first, most obvious point of inquiry is the late eighteenth-century during which the story’s action takes place. The story’s physical setting is Denmark, but in light of Adam’s preoccupation with the intellectual currents sweeping England, France, and the newly independent United States, it is clearly important to consider what is happening in these places as well. Although changes during this period are many, the most significant are that the French Revolution and the American War of Independence have ushered in a new age of individual rights. The once clear divisions between the landed nobility and the landless peasantry now became increasingly complicated. One complicating factor is the emergence of a “middle” class—a consequence of the fledgling Industrial Revolution. Another is the contradiction between “the divine right of kings” and the “inalienable rights of men.” It is important, however, to keep in mind that these new, liberal ideas are not embraced by the landed aristocracy in England, France, or anywhere else; they are a threat to the very idea of traditional aristocratic rights. In Denmark, to this point, the eighteenth century has seen a gradual, but nonetheless substantial, erosion in the rights of the peasantry. But as England’s needs for grain outstrip its ability to supply its needs, it turns to Denmark (among others) to fill the gap. In turn, the rise in the prices for grain and other agricultural commodities ushers in a period of increasing economic advantage for the farmworker that lasts until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1809. So the period during which “Sorrow-Acre” is set is not one of stasis, but instead, an historic moment in which the pattern of centuries is dramatically revised.

Twentieth-Century Kenya

Less obvious, but no less essential to understanding Dinesen’s point of view, is an understanding of Kenya in the early twentieth century. It is in Kenya that Dinesen learns to be her own person and—more importantly—to begin to empathize with people who do not share her fortunate station in life. It is also here that she gathers the material which is to become Out of Africa, the collection of stories for which she is best known today. Like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, the record of Kenya’s twentieth century is greatly influenced by the colonial power which ruled it—in Kenya’s case, Britain. Early twentieth-century British policy in Kenya centered around the Uganda railway: first building it, then making it profitable. The building done, Britain encouraged settlement and farming of the Kenyan highlands in the hope that transporting the agricultural produce of this largely uninhabited, good land would be sufficiently lucrative to support

Compare & Contrast

1940s: Breaking its promise of non-aggression, Germany invades and occupies Denmark in 1940. Although active resistance is futile, a powerful passive-resistance movement soon emerges. The Nazis occupy Denmark throughout World War II. Denmark is liberated at the war’s end and joins the alliance of Western nations called NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) four years later.

1990s: Denmark is considered one of the world’s nations most open to free expression and personal autonomy.
1940s: Dinesen enjoys a generally positive critical reaction to her writings, including Winter’s Tales, becoming increasingly confident in herself as a public intellectual and in the issues surrounding women’s intellectual advancement.

1990s: After the popular and critical success of Sydney Pollack’s film version of Out of Africa (1985), Dinesen’s literature enjoys a revival among a new generation of readers; today it is widely read and the source of much critical interpretation.

the line. It is in these highlands that Dinesen settled and about them that she writes in the beginning of Out of Africa: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” In an ironic parallel to Europe’s gradual democratization from the late eighteenth century onward, white hegemony, or control, in Kenya is questioned with increasing frequency and insistence during the years of Dinesen’s tenure there. For many, this questioning culminates in 1938 with the publication of Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, a book whose effect on Kenyan politics of this period is similar to the effect of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man on the politics of the English-speaking world of the late eighteenth-century Revolutionary era.

Denmark and World War II

Knowing something about what Denmark was like during the late 1930s and early 1940s is also quite important. One cannot pass over these years without making reference to the reality of World War II and the conflict between freedom-loving nations and nations bent upon conquest of other people and their lands. If the motion of the prior 150 years has been toward greater individual freedom, Hitler’s invasion—and Denmark’s acquiescence—signaled the elimination of individual freedoms and the advent of totalitarianism. The physical contest between nations is therefore of less concern to Dinesen at this point than is the threat of totalitarianism—which seeks to control the minds of others—that she sees in Hitler’s National Socialism. Winter’s Tales, the collection containing “Sorrow-Acre,” can perhaps be best understood, therefore, in the context of the fairly successful passive-resistance movement in Denmark.

Critical Overview

Critical reaction to Winter’s Tales must be seen through two lenses: present and past. Although she is now considered a major twentieth-century writer, Dinesen was, for a time, essentially forgotten. The revival of interest in her as a writer can be attributed in large part to Sydney Pollack’s film version of Out of Africa. As a result, one cannot speak of a single critical reaction, but must instead consider two reactions: those of her contemporaries and those of the post-revival critics. Interestingly, each group seems to have seized upon very different facets of her writing as most worthy of comment. For the most part, earlier critics were more interested in her stylistic accomplishments, for example, Orville Prescott, writing in the New York Times, called her style “elaborately artificial, formal, suave, and beautiful,” while William Sansom wrote in the SaturdayReview that she “gives us tales of blood and doom and honor in the old grand manner.” Later critics seem more interested in understanding the significance of her stories’ content.

However, there are some points at which all critics seem to agree. Although they understandably see many different things in Winter’s Tales, they are unanimous in their praise for the literary accomplishment the stories demonstrate. David Richter pointed out in the Journal of Narrative Technique that “Sorrow-Acre” “invokes many of the persistent themes that haunt Dinesen’s work: the contrast between the cruel beauty of the ancien regime and the more prosaic humanitarian ethos of modern democracy that will inevitably displace it; the inextricable connections between men and the land they live on; the arcane routes by which men seek and find their destiny; the perverse and terrible costs which love extracts.”

Criticism

David Kippen

Kippen is an educator and specialist on British colonial literature and twentieth-century South African fiction. In the following essay, he discusses “Sorrow-Acre” as an allegory.

Like fable, allegory describes one thing—usually something quite specific—to talk about something else that shares similar features or characteristics. So, for example, Aesop’s fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” isn’t really “about” a tortoise or a hare; instead, it is about plodding perseverance and mercurial quickness—the tortoise and the hare are merely physical manifestations of these moral attributes. Similarly, Dinesen’s “Sorrow-Acre” is neither about a young man named Adam nor about the fate of the widow Piil. These characters are representations of—or standing in for—what turns out to be a complex use of history. Unlike fable, however, allegory rarely presents a clearly discernible moral. While “slow and steady wins the race” neatly summarizes both the story of the race run by the tortoise and underscores the (moral) value of perseverance, it is difficult to draw a single, clear moral from Dinesen’s story. This difficulty is due both to the complexity of the ideas the characters manifest and to the greater length and larger cast of allegory in general and Dinesen’s story in particular. However, while one may not be able to reduce the meanings of “Sorrow-Acre” to a single phrase, it is nonetheless clear that the story has as its focal point Adam’s question at daybreak, and the landscape’s answer at dusk.

Returning to Denmark after an extended stay abroad, Adam finds his homeland deeply familiar, but his absence gives him new vision, enabling him to stand outside this familiarity. He sees his homeland, and his hereditary place in it, as natural, but not inevitable. He sees the windmill, the church, the manor—all of these give evidence of a process by which the land and the people who live on it have worked upon and shaped one another, in much the same manner as sea and seashore exist in simultaneous opposition and partnership, each defining itself against, but also through, the other. As the omniscient narrator observes, “a human race had lived on this land for a thousand years, had been formed by its soil and weather, and had marked it with its thoughts, so that now no one could tell where. . . the one ceased and the other began.”

However, though Adam returns as “nominal” heir to his manor and estate, his stay in England coincides with the powerful emergence of a set of ideas that throw into question doctrines arguing that the rights of kings and lords over their subjects represent the will of God, and are therefore the divine intention: “[H]e had come in touch with the great new ideas of the age: of nature of the right and freedom of man, of justice and beauty. The universe, through them, had become infinitely wider to him.” Thomas Paine’s “The Rights of Man” (1791), the French Revolution (1789), and the American Revolutionary War had in common a theme most forcibly articulated in the second paragraph of the American colonies’ Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Perhaps it is the dissonance between this strident call of the future—a call for rulers to be accountable to the ruled—and the feudal, thousand-year past through which Adam finds himself walking that morning, that makes Adam speak to the

land “as to a person, as to the mother of his race.” He asks: “Is it only my body that you want . . . while you reject my imagination, energy and emotions? If the world might be brought to acknowledge that the virtue of our name does not belong to the past only, will it give you no satisfaction?”

His question, asked “half in jest,” receives no answer that morning, but it holds within it the conflict at the heart of Dinesen’s story between the uncertainty of feudal authority, and the verdant, certain fructiveness of democracy. As Susan Hardy Aiken observes, “Sorrow-Acre” “constitutes a fundamental interrogation of patrilineal primacy both cultural and textual, not only on the literal level of its narrative ‘events,’ but also on the symbolic level, where it functions as an oblique, mythopoeic parable about its own origins and its ‘illicit’ position in the lineage of male texts.”

It would be wrong, of course, to argue that this conflict between feudalism and democracy, between the powers of paternity and maternity is the only important theme in “Sorrow-Acre.” Although most of her other thematic concerns are ultimately subordinate to this one, as noted earlier, Dinesen’s story has a number of other well-developed thematic threads, as well as some important parallels to other texts. A useful discussion of these relationships could easily be the subject of several essays and is therefore beyond the scope of the present study, but the most important parallels—to the Bible and to Shakespeare’s Hamlet—should not be passed over without mention.

Dinesen is not light-handed when she wishes to have her reader note an allusion to another text. While another author might be content to name his protagonist “Adam” and, having done so, expect his reader to look for simple symmetry between the contours of his text and the Old Testament, Dinesen creates an elaborate parable-in-parallel between the Bible and her text. She invokes an “old Adam,” in the person of the Uncle, who personifies commandments brought into question (or up to date) by the arrival of the “new Adam,” in youth like Christ; she sets their meeting in a garden “which is as fresh as the Garden of Eden, newly created,” and she thereby invites her readers to link the relationship of the divine right of kings and the Rights of Man. Similarly, when she wishes to invoke Hamlet Dinesen is not content to create a young Danish protagonist who has been called back to his ancestral home—now under the reign of “his father’s brother”—by the death of a relative and the incestuous marriage

What Do I Read Next?

Judith Thurman’s lsak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (1982) is the most comprehensive biography of Dinesen’s life in print. Thurman writes in a clear, straightforward, readable style, and her work is accepted by most as the definitive biography of Dinesen.
Winter’s Tales (1942) is the collection in which “Sorrow-Acre” first appeared. The other stories in the book, according to critic Marcia Landy, “are structured around dominant Shakespearian motifs—the relationship between art and nature, loss and recovery, and the pastoral elegiac vision as a vehicle for exploring these motifs.”
Out of Africa is Dinesen’s best-known work. Loosely adapted and mixed with parts of Shadows in the Grass, it was made into a movie by Sydney Pollack in 1982. Both novel and film chronicle an Africa of dangerous, arduous beauty.
In terms of economy and insight, Guy de Maupassant is considered by many to be a short story writer without equal. Like the stories in Dinesen’s Winter’s Tales his Day and Night Stories deal with moral issues. They are short, concise, and—like Dinesen’s—offer a clearsighted vision of Everyman confronting the challenges of circumstances for which he is not entirely prepared.

of his uncle. As if this might not yet be clear, she peppers the rest of her text with unveiled references to the play: “a Rosenkrantz . . . at Rosenholm”; “He remembered the old servants who had taught him; some of them were now in their graves”; “the stage of this world.” While exploration of these parallels is not possible here, it is certainly worth noting that the unquestioned authority of paternity is the central focus of each of them: God, the Father of man; Hamlet, his father’s avenger.

Dinesen engages with authority, but particularly paternal authority, at a number of levels, some abstract, seemingly far-removed from the story’s action, others quite concrete. At Adam’s first meeting with his uncle, for example, they enter into an obscure, lengthy discussion whose primary subject is a comparison between the Norse gods and the gods of Greece and Rome. As Adam’s uncle explains, the primary distinction between these gods (at least for Dinesen’s purposes) comes down to this: the Norse gods were not omnipotent; the Greco-Roman gods were. One is tempted to understand this discussion as a framework for the rest of the story, to create an equation between Adam and the Norse gods’ impotence, on one hand, and his Uncle and the Greco-Roman gods’ omnipotence on the other. This line of thought would seem to be borne out by the quick shift in their discussion from this highly abstract terrain to the fate of the widow Piil, and it is reasonable to assume that—at least on the surface of the allegory—Dinesen’s intention is to be understood in just this manner.

Near the end of the day, Adam again joins his uncle, who has spent the morning and afternoon steadfastly watching the widow’s progress. Adam, who until this point seems to have understood that day’s events in an academic, or philosophical framework, is now close enough to the widow to see her as a suffering individual; he is finally moved to beg his uncle to break his word and release the widow from their agreement. His uncle refuses, saying “my own humble word has been the principle of the land on which we stand, for an age of man. My father’s word was the same, before my day.” Adam responds: “you are mistaken. . . . The word is creative, it is imagination, daring and passion. By it the world was made.” But Adam is unable to move his uncle, who says “you are young . . . I am old-fashioned, I have been quoting to you texts a thousand years old. We do not, perhaps, quite understand one another.” In the American edition, he then says “But with my own people I am, I believe, in good understanding.” The uncle seems to end the discussion here, saying in essence: “I’m not going to argue any more. I’m going to do what I wish.” But this is not Dinesen’s final word.

According to Olga Anastasia Pelensky (author of Isak Dinesen: The Life and Imagination of a Seducer, 1991), the following passage was added when Dinesen rewrote the story in Danish, then added to the British edition, but was never incorporated into the American edition. After “we do not, perhaps, quite understand each other,” Dinesen later added:

“But if, to your ears, my orthodoxy does now sound antiquated, remember that within a hundred years both mine and your own speech will sound antiquated to the generations then discoursing upon word and life. Have patience, let me explain myself to you.
“Believe me, I have the public welfare as much at heart as you yourself. But should we, in our concern, for le bien commun, gaze only at those human beings who happen to be about us today, and look neither before or after? When we consider the matter rightly we will find the past generations to be in majority—Well,” he interrupted himself, as Adam made a gesture of impatience, “let them rest as they deserve to. But the coming generations, you will agree, must ever be in majority. And when we speak of the welfare of the many we must needs let them have the last word. King Pharaoh, I have been told, made a hundred thousands of his subjects slave for him and suffer great hardships, in order to build him a pyramid. He might at the same cost, have distributed bread and wine amongst his people, have fed and clothed them, and have been blessed by them. Still even so things would have been with them, today, what they are now: they would all be dead and gone. And a hundred generations have, since the days of King Pharaoh, lifted their eyes to the pyramids with pride and joy, and acclaimed them their own. A great deed, my nephew,—be it even brought forth with tears, even with blood,—is a fund of resource, a treasure for the coming generations to live on, it is, within hard times and the hour of need, bread to the people.
“But the true insight into these matters,” the old lord went on, “you will never find, and can never reasonably expect to find, with the common people, to whom the chief concern in life is their daily bread, and who are living, mentally as well as physically, from hand to mouth. Nay, my nephew, it is our affair and our responsibility, we, who have inherited from the past and who know that we are to live on, in name and blood, through the coming centuries. These humble peasants, whose life is one with the life of the earth, and of whom you have spoken with so much fervency, what good are we to them but this: that they may trust you to look after le bien commun, not at the moment only, but in the future? And see you now, my good

“What does the thunder say? That it is not the world deciding for the individual, but the individual who must decide for himself whether his virtue is to be found in his ‘imagination, energy and emotions’ or in the possession of a thousand-year-old name with the power to rule.”

nephew, you and I may find it a little difficult to see eye to eye.”

Then follows the line, “but with my own people I am, I believe, in good understanding.”

Why, one wonders, did Dinesen add this passage? It complicates the uncle’s position with regard to Anne-Marie Piil, suggesting that she is not only the author of her fate, but that there exists a grander order of things in which it is more important to le bien commune (“the common good”) that there someday be a place called “Sorrow-Acre” than that justice be done today. What does the story gain by this addition?

In order to answer this question—which is another formulation of Adam’s question (“Is it only my body that you want . . . while you reject my imagination, energy and emotions?”)—one must recall both the function of allegory and the historical moment during which Dinesen composed “Sorrow-Acre.” As I observed at the beginning of this essay, allegory describes one thing to talk about something else that shares similar features or characteristics. To this point, I have discussed the correspondence between Adam and one nexus of ideas—Paine’s “Rights of Man,” the Norse gods, etc., and the correspondence between his uncle and an opposite nexus—feudalism, Greco-Roman gods, etc. But Dinesen’s allegory works on another level as well: as a critique of Hitler’s paternalistic, feudal National Socialism.

Unable to attack National Socialism directly (Denmark was invaded in 1940, two years before Winter’s Tales was published), Dinesen was forced to choose a more oblique line of approach, one that revisits the past to illuminate the present. While the uncle is not a clearly-recognizable Hitler figure, this fact is essential to Dinesen’s critique, for it shifts the reader’s focus away from the uncle’s person toward the customs and traditions that make him do what he does. For Dinesen, the interesting question is not “why Hitler,” but why do otherwise good people do bad things, or in Adam’s case, fail to stop others from doing them? Dinesen’s answer, it would seem, is that good people do, or allow, bad things because they remain susceptible to the powerful allure of custom and tradition.

Adam has a chance to escape the tradition of arbitrary punishment masquerading as justice by leaving Denmark for America, but in order to do so, he would have to sacrifice not only his ancestral home but also a conceptual framework that, at the most profound level, makes sense to him. All day long, as Anne-Marie makes her slow passage back and forth across the Rye field, the landscape silently waits for him to decide between the freedom of the unknown and the security of the morally repugnant known, and to declare his decision. Finally, he says to his uncle “If you wish it I shall not go. I shall stay here.” A wordless peal of thunder immediately reverberates through the hills: “the landscape [has] spoken.” What does the thunder say? That it is not the world deciding for the individual, but the individual who must decide for himself whether his virtue is to be found in his “imagination, energy and emotions” or in the possession of a thousand-year-old name with the power to rule.

Source: David Kippen, “What the Thunder Said,” in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.

David H. Richter

A professor of English at City College of New York—Queen’s College, Richter is the author of Fable’s End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction and Ten Short Novels. In the following essay, he discusses what he calls the “covertplot” of “Sorrow-Acre,” stating that Dinesen encrypted the secret meaning into her story in a gesture of cultural elitism.

Perhaps none of Isak Dinesen’s novellas has been more admired, and certainly none has been more widely anthologized, than “Sorrow-Acre,” originally published with her Winter’s Tales in 1942. This lyrically tragic tale, set in Denmark in the 1770s, invokes many of the persistent themes that haunt Dinesen’s work: the contrast between the cruel beauty of the ancien regime and the more prosaic humanitarian ethos of modern democracy that will inevitably displace it; the inextricable connections between men and the land they live on; the arcane routes by which men seek and find their destiny; the perverse and terrible costs which love exacts. These themes have been sensitively and eloquently elucidated in the published criticism on Dinesen, particularly the studies by Langbaum, Johannesson and Hannah; what these critics, and others, seem to me to have misunderstood about Dinesen’s “Sorrow-Acre” is not her themes but her plot. Or her plots, rather. For it is my basic thesis that “Sorrow-Acre” is informed by two interlocking plots, one overt and obvious, which no reader can conceivably miss, the other merely hinted at through foreshadowing allusions which previous commentators have misread or read but in part. The brief essay that follows will concern itself with the covert plot of “Sorrow-Acre,” its relation to the more visible plot, and why Dinesen may have adopted the apparently risky strategy she chose of structuring a story around a plot so enciphered that it might easily remain a mystery.

The open or visible plot of “Sorrow-Acre”—which to my mind is the subordinate one of the two—has its source in a Jutland folk-tale collected by Ohrt and retold by Paul la Cour in 1931; Hannah has found the latter, more literary version to have been Dinesen’s most direct inspiration. The story, as it appears in “Sorrow-Acre,” concerns a widow, Anne-Marie, whose only son Goske has been accused of setting fire to a barn belonging to the “old lord” on whose landed estate they work. Anne-Marie pleads with the old lord to save her son, and the old lord offers her a bargain: if she will mow in one day a rye-field that would be work for three men, he will let her son go; if she fails, the boy will be sent away to be judged and she will never see him again. On the day set for the ordeal, Anne-Marie begins mowing the field, quickly at first, then ever more slowly as her strength ebbs and as the heat of the day takes its toll. In the presence of a crowd of peasants gathered to commiserate with and encourage her, and in the presence of the son for whom she made the bargain, Anne-Marie finishes the field just at sunset, only to collapse, dead from exhaustion.

While this story occasionally occupies the foreground of Dinesen’s narrative, particularly at the denouement, for the most part it forms the backdrop against which a very different figure is traced. This takes the shape of a debate between the old lord and his young nephew, Adam, whom most commentators correctly take to be the focal character of the story. On the day set for the mowing, Adam has just returned to his ancestral estate from England, where he has absorbed the liberal and humanitarian values current there in intellectual circles, and which we today would associate with Jefferson or Rousseau. As he walks to the mansion at the centre of his uncle’s feudal estate, Adam experiences a recrudescence of intense love for the soil of his forefathers, which he senses wishes to claim him, body and soul; these feelings are qualified, however, by his awareness of how alien his values have become to the hierarchical structures of autocracy physically emplanted in the topography of the manor. As Adam stands listening, in the morning, to the old lord’s exposition of the bargain he has made with Anne-Marie, he says nothing to challenge his uncle’s decree, but as the day wears on the drama being played out in the rye-field weighs ever heavier upon his conscience, and he is driven to remonstrate with his uncle: “‘In the name of God . . . , force not this woman to continue.’” The old man answers Adam calmly and reasonably from within his aristocratic and feudal values: that Anne-Marie chose to accept the ordeal as freely as he chose to offer it; that his word, once given, is to him as sacred as that Word out of which the world was created; that his decree, if cruel as those of the Greek gods, at least allows the woman the beauty of a tragic destiny to which gods themselves cannot aspire; finally, to the prediction of Nemesis foreseen by Adam, the old lord responds with a shrugging “Amen,” accepting whatever fate history will bring to him and his class. The old lord is immovable, his fortress of reasons impregnable, and Adam is finally driven to declare that, rather than stay in a land where such brutality must be, he will leave Denmark and go, not to England, where the feudal structures are incompletely eradicated, but to America, in whose fields and forests his more modern ideas reign supreme.

But this is not where Dinesen leaves the matter. In a long passage of interior monologue written with an intensity that marks it as the emotional climax of the story, Adam reverses his decision and decides to stay on his uncle’s estate. The passage begins with the old lord’s bitter benediction upon Adam’s choice to go to America:” ‘Take service, there,. . . with the power which will give you an easier bargain than this: That with your own life you may buy the life of your son.’” This refers, most obviously, to the bargain the old man had concluded with Anne-Marie, but it also alludes to the uncle’s private sorrow—the death of his only son, who was to inherit the manor. Though the old man has married himself the bride intended for his dead son, and may, Adam thinks, have children by her, Adam sees as he had not before the old man’s suffering, and his ever-present dread of “the obliteration of his being” through the failure of his direct line. And as Adam contemplates his uncle with pity and forgiveness, he recognizes that beneath his liberal values was a stronger, universal vision which determines him not to leave but to stay. To make this vision comprehensible it must be quoted at some length:

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 arose. 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.
As now he thought of it, he knew that all his life he had sought the unity of things. . . . Where other young people, in their pleasures or their amours, had searched for contrast and variety, he himself had yearned only to comprehend in full the oneness of the world. If things had come differently to him, if his young cousin had not died, and the events that followed his death had not brought him to Denmark, his search for understanding and harmony might have taken him to America. . . . Now they have been disclosed to him today, in the place where he had played as a child. As the song is one with the voice that sings it, as the road is one with the goal, as lovers are made one in their embrace, so is man one with his destiny, and he shall love it as himself.

As Adam decides to stay, he feels the hour “consecrated . . . to a surrender to fate and to the will of life,” and as he speaks of his altered plans to his uncle a roll of Jovian thunder signals the fateful choice. But Adam is not afraid: he thinks, in his present amorfati, that “he had given himself over to the mightier powers of the world. Now what must come must come.”

But just what is it that “must come”? What is the fate that Adam has accepted with such gravity? This is what I have called the covert plot of “Sorrow-Acre,” for it is not so much told to us as it is enciphered by Dinesen in the loose and stray details surrounding the visible story. One common view is that expressed by Robert Langbaum: “It is the destiny of Anne-Marie and the old lord to die, and it is the destiny of Adam to inherit the lord’s estate and marry his young wife.” Another view is that of Johannesson, who speculates that Adam will cuckold his uncle; the latter, we are told, “is a comic figure because . . . he will have a son produced for him by his wife and Adam.” Now while there is evidence to support elements of both these views, neither is very congruent with the tone Dinesen uses to describe Adam’s acceptance of his fate, or Adam’s reflection, a little later on, that “Anne-Marie and he were both in the hands of destiny, and destiny would, by different ways, bring each to the designated end.” The sombre tone of Adam’s vision, and his foresight of a link with Anne-Marie’s tragic destiny, suggest a very different fate for Adam than the inheritance of a valuable estate or a sexual romp with his uncle’s beautiful young bride. Contemplating either destiny would require little in the way of amorfati. I believe, however, that when Dinesen’s hints are read as a whole, the story in which one infers Adam will play the role of protagonist would be more like that of Tristan and Isolde than like Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale.” There will indeed be a love-affair between Adam and his youthful aunt, a love-affair that will culminate in the birth of a child; but Adam’s fate will be to die, at the hands or his uncle or his minions, sacrificing himself to save the woman and their son.

The common ground of all three interpretations is the future connection between Adam and his uncle’s seventeen-year-old bride, and indeed this is the element of Dinesen’s covert plot that is most difficult to miss. Our inferences are primarily cued by the lengthy digression Dinesen makes from the visible story to portray this girl, who plays no explicit part either in Anne-Marie’s tragedy or in Adam’s fateful decision. Dinesen’s language is somewhat coy here, but the portrait clearly enough indicates her sexual frustration. We are told, somewhat ambiguously, that “she was given an old husband who treated her with punctilious respect because she was to bear him a son. Such was the compact. . . . Her husband, she found, was doing his best to fulfill his part of it, and she herself was loyal by nature and strictly brought up,” Such mild hints that the old lord may be impotent are validated by the bride’s dreadful “consciousness or an absence” in her life, her longings for “the being who should have been there” in her embrace, “and who had not come.” This absence is quite clearly sexual, for it is when examining her nude and lovely body in the looking-glass that she most intensely feels “a horror vaccui like a physical pain. That Adam will be the one to fill this vacuum, to complete her inchoate longings, is first hinted at when the bride tears herself from her unpleasant meditation by thinking instead about “her new nephew arrived from England,” with whom she plans to “ride out on the land.” The activities of Adam and his aunt on the day the narrative is set are chaste enough, of course, but their thoughts about each other, their ride together, and their collaboration in a musical duet as the curtain is drawn upon them symbolize even as they presage the love-affair we can foresee.

That his will be an illicit affair, rather than a more staid romance that will wait upon the death of Adam’s uncle, is largely implicit in the sexual urgency of the bride’s physical frustration, taken together with the absence of any suggestion that the old lord is soon to die. But there are other hints as well. The young bride’s middle name, for one thing, is Magdelena, traditionally identified with the fallen woman of the seventh chapter of the Gospel according to Luke. For another, there is the prophecy made to Adam back in England: “When at Ranelagh an old gypsy woman looked at his hand and told him that a son of his was to sit in the seat of his fathers.” If we take the prophecy seriously, and in the literal way such foreshadowing is generally to be taken in tragedies and folk-tales, it suggests that, while a son of his will possess the manor, Adam himself will not be its inheritor. Thus one must reject the Langbaum interpretation, and accept the Johannesson, as far as it goes. But Johannesson’s notion that the covert plot of “Sorrow-Acre” is a cuckold comedy is unsatisfactory for quite a number of reasons.

The first and perhaps most unanswerable reason is that already mentioned: that the tone of “Sorrow-Acre” is tragic, not merely in the section devoted to the destiny of Anne-Marie but in that devoted to Adam and his fateful decision to remain on his uncle’s manor. Here Adam foresees that “he himself would come to know ache, tears and remorse,” which is far from suggesting that his love-affair will be a bedroom farce devoid of serious consequences. Second, Johannesson’s formulation is structurally off kilter, for his view takes the old lord to be the protagonist of this comedy, whereas it is clear from the narrative point of view that it must be Adam that is the protagonist of the novella’s covert plot. Finally, there are a great many subtle hints within the text that death, rather than birth or love, is the focus of Adam’s fate.

First off, there is Adam’s name, recalling the Biblical Adam, our once innocent forefather who was betrayed by woman into death. Second, there is Adam’s sense, on his first approach to the manor house, that he has been invited there by the dead (“Dead people came towards him and smiled upon him. . .”). Next, there is the tragedy by Johannes Ewald which Adam brings with him and leaves with his uncle. It is not named in the text, but the conversation it kindles suggests that it must be the 1775 verse drama of Baldurs Dod, which centers upon a young god who dies, driven by his passion for a mortal woman. Fourth, there is the sinister aspect to the young bride’s sexual fantasies, which imply that loving her would be a most dangerous thing:

A sudden, keen itching under her knee took her out of her reveries, and awoke in her the hunting instincts of her breed. She wetted a finger on her tongue, slowly brought it down and quickly slapped it to the spot. She felt the diminutive, sharp body of the insect against the silky skin, pressed the thumb to it, and triumphantly lifted up the small prisoner between her fingertips. She stood quite still, as if meditating upon the fact that a flea was the only creature risking its life for her smoothness and sweet blood.

Fifth, there is the recurrent pair of lines from Gluck’s Alceste, repeated three times within the novella: “Mourir pour ce qu’on aime, C’est un trop doux effort.” These lines about dying for the one you love are not only translated within Adam’s interior monologue, they are alluded to as the curtain is discreetly drawn upon him and his aunt, for it is Alceste’s aria which the two are playing and singing together. They apply, obviously, to Anne-Marie, who sacrifices herself for her son, but in his interior monologue Adam apparently applies them to his own case. Finally, there is Adam’s sense, already alluded to, that his fate and that of Anne-Marie are somehow linked, that they are “both in the hands of destiny” which will bring each of them to “the designated end”; in the context this makes even more ominous Dinesen’s guarded statement, “Later on he remembered what he had thought that evening.”

Arching over all these details, and marshalling them into perspective, is the reader’s desire to make the fullest possible sense of Dinesen’s story, to take this “twined and tangled design” and find in it a “pattern,” to unify this work of literature and participate in its harmonies in the same way that Adam wants to decipher the hidden unity and harmony

“If we take the old gypsy woman’s prophecy seriously, and in the literal way such foreshadowing is generally to be taken in tragedies and folk-tales, it suggests that, while a son of his will possess the manor, Adam himself will not be its inheritor.”

of life. It is this aesthetic sense that has dictated Adam’s decision to stay, just as it is the old lord’s aesthetic sense that has made him stage-manage the tragedy of which Anne-Marie is the protagonist. And I suspect that Dinesen trusted the aesthetic sense of her readers to complete, to stage-manage in their own minds, the tragedy linked to the visible one of which Adam is the protagonist. And, if we have been following her implications correctly, a single denouement, the completion of Anne-Marie’s sacrifice and death, will serve as the katharsis for both. Anne-Marie, as a peasant-woman, is the heroine of a tragic folk-tale; Adam, as befits his higher birth and station, will be the hero, not of a folk-tale or a fabliau, but of a variant of the tragic myth of Tristan.

It is in fact a misapplication of Dinesen’s aesthetics that led Johannesson and Hannah to posit a cuckold-comedy as the covert plot of “Sorrow-Acre.” Their argument is based upon the old lord’s view that, just as the omnipotent Greek gods could not be tragic, so too the aristocrats of Denmark “who stand in lieu of the gods” should “leave to our vassals their monopoly of tragedy.” But it is only the old lord himself who, in his omnipotence and amorality, like the Greek gods, is beyond the reach of the tragic. His nephew is no Zeus; he is more like the Norse gods of Asgaard who, the old lord tells us, “had, at all times, by their sides those darker powers which they named the Jotuns, and who worked the suffering, the disasters, the ruin of our world”; and like the Norse gods, like the Baldur of Ewald’s drama, Adam in his limitations possesses the capacity for tragedy. The old lord quite explicitly identifies Adam with Baldur: the new age, which Adam represents “has made to itself a god in its own image, an emotional god. And now you are already writing a tragedy on your god.” To put it another way, the old lord, from his Olympian perspective, may indeed view himself as a comic figure, a deceived Vulcan whose Venus has strayed. But from Adam’s perspective—and given the point of view it is his angle that we share—his destiny to love the young bride, to father her son, and to die sacrificing himself for them is indeed a tragic fate, which his uncle characterizes as the highest human privilege.

I have tried to show how the demands of tone, of parallel structure, of point of view, and of details and verbal allusions all collaborate to convey the covert tragic plot of “Sorrow-Acre.” But if we can agree that Dinesen has succeeded in organizing her story in such a way, then we must also paradoxically admit that she has failed. She has failed, at least, to convey her covert story to five sensitive readers whose studies I have cited, and therefore, one suspects, to most of those who have perused her novella. To the initiated, Adam says in his interior monologue, the pattern of life, that complicated and mazy design, “might be read as easily as our ciphers—which to the savage must seem confused and incomprehensible—will be read by the schoolboy.” And yet Dinesen has so enciphered the primary plot of her story that few of her readers are likely to make it out. For those who succeed, the pleasures of tacit collusion with the author are intense and refined indeed; for those who fail—and here is Dinesen’s insurance policy—most will have not sense of what they have missed.

The fact is that Isak Dinesen was an elitist in more ways than one. The reception of Seven Gothic Tales had suffered in Denmark, critic Tom Kristensen remarked, from the common readers’ reaction to “their too aristocratic tone, verging on snobbery.” Though Kristensen felt that the Winter’s Tales had more “humanity” than the earlier book, it is clear that her defense of the ancien regime, her contempt for democratic vistas, are by no means absent from the later collection, which includes “Sorrow-Acre.” And as an elitist, Dinesen was very unlikely to have been averse to reserving some of her work’s secret pleasures for a select group of kindred souls capable of following her indirections and allusions. Like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, whose meaning is encrypted in thousands of puns in dozens of living and dead languages, like Nabokov’s “The Vane Sisters,” whose hidden denouement is encoded in the initial letters of the last paragraph’s words, and like Dinesen’s own “The Roads Round Pisa,” whose ending requires the reader to decipher an obscure symbolic passage in Dante, “Sorrow-Acre” is a story that is also part puzzle, a reflection of its author’s intellectual snobbery and a challenge, moral as well as intellectual, to the reader’s own.

Source: David H. Richter, “Covert Plot in Isak Dinesen’s ‘Sorrow-Acre’,” in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter, 1985, pp. 82-90.

Eric O. Johannesson

Johannesson has written distinguished studies of Dinesen and the novels of August Strindberg. In the following excerpt, he discusses “Sorrow-Acre” as a story that expresses Dinesen’s elitist views and aristocratic sympathies.

The most dramatic illustration of the aristocratic philosophy of life is found in “Sorrow-Acre.” This story, which is set in Denmark, seeks, in Milton’s words, to justify the ways of God to man. It seeks to answer several related questions: Why is life so dear? Why is life so pitiless? Is there not a God who can temper the laws of necessity with mercy?

The central incident concerns a crime. Anne-Marie, a peasant woman, has a son who is accused and probably guilty of having set fire to a barn, and for this crime he is to be punished. When Anne-Marie pleads for her son the lord of the estate makes a stipulation: if she can mow a field of corn in one day, her son will be set free. Normally this is a task for three men. Anne-Marie succeeds, however, and the son is set free, but she dies from exhaustion.

This incident, and particularly the role which the lord plays in it, is very shocking to his nephew, the young hero of the tale. Adam has been living in England and has been imbued with a number of the new liberal ideas: ideas about nature, justice, and the rights and freedoms of man; he even has some notions of going to the United States. To him the uncle, who has always been an embodiment of “law and order, the wisdom of life and kind guardianship,” now appears as “a symbol of the tyranny and oppression of the world.” At one point he tells the uncle to stop “this terrible thing,” and he decides to leave the estate and go to the United States. Before evening, however, he has changed his mind. The reasons for this change are to be sought, I think, in his three conversations with the uncle, and in certain events which put the figure of the uncle in a new light.

These conversations are central to the story. They concern the nature of comedy and tragedy. Adam has been reading a tragedy by the Danish poet Johannes Ewald (1743-81), entitled Balder’s Death (1775), and at his suggestion the uncle also reads it during the course of the day.

During the first conversation Adam suggests “that we have not till now understood how much our Nordic mythology in moral greatness surpasses that of Greece and Rome.” Adam feels that the gods of Greece and Rome were “mean, capricious and treacherous,” while “the fair gods of Asgaard did possess the sublime human virtues; they were righteous, trustworthy, benevolent and even, within a barbaric age, chivalrous.” The uncle disagrees with this statement: it was easier, he insists, for the Nordic gods to be virtuous because they were not as powerful as the gods of classical antiquity. The Nordic gods, he says, had at all times “by their side those darker powers which they named the Jotuns, and who worked the suffering, the disasters, the ruin of our world.” The omnipotent Greek and Roman gods had “no such facilitation. With their omnipotence they take over the woe of the universe.” Jove is superior to Odin because he “avowed his sovereignty, and accepted the world which he ruled.”

The second conversation occurs after the uncle has read Balder’s Death. This conversation concerns the nature of comedy and tragedy. Adam suggests that tragedy is, “in the scheme of life, a noble, a divine phenomenon.” The uncle agrees that tragedy is a noble phenomenon, “but of the earth only, and never divine.” “Tragedy,” he says, “is the privilege of man, his highest privilege.” As such it “should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.” The gods, on the other hand, are not subject to necessity. As a result they can have no knowledge of the tragic: “When they are brought face to face with it they will, according to my experience, have the good taste and decorum to keep still, and not interfere.”

“The true art of the gods is the comic,” the uncle insists. “In the comic the gods see their own being reflected as in a mirror, and while the tragic poet is bound by strict laws, they will allow the comic artist a freedom as unlimited as their own.” The comic artist may even mock at the gods.

On earth the aristocrats stand in lieu of the gods and have likewise emancipated themselves “from the tyranny of necessity.” For this reason they must

“Adam learns to accept tragedy—not as a misfortune—but as a human privilege, because it confers on us ordinary human beings a greatness which is denied the gods and the aristocrats, denied those who are liberated from necessity.”

also “accept the comic with grace.” And no master will “make a jest of his servants’ necessity, or force the comic upon them.” The aristocrat will not fear the comic: “Indeed,” says the uncle, “the very same fatality, which, in striking the burgher or peasant, will become tragedy, with the aristocrat is exalted to the comic. By the grace and wit of our acceptance hereof our aristocracy is known.”

The third conversation occurs after Adam has told the uncle to stop the terrible tragedy that is being enacted on the cornfield. The uncle answers that he is not at all forcing the old woman to go on. Adam’s animadversions that the woman’s death will come upon the uncle’s head leave the uncle unperturbed. He says he has given Anne-Marie his word, and in his world the word is still the principle, the law of gravitation. Adam speaks for imagination, daring, and passion as greater powers of the word than those of any restricting or controlling law, but the uncle answers that it is impossible for him to stop Anne-Marie now without making light of her exploits, which would be making her into a comic figure. Adam’s statement that he might go to the United States the uncle answers as follows: “Take service, there, with the power which will give you an easier bargain than this: That with your own life you may buy the life of your son.”

The conversations between Adam and his uncle are evidently designed to illustrate the differences between two worlds: the world of the eighteenth century and the world of the postrevolutionary and romantic nineteenth century; between the feudal and aristocratic eighteenth century and the sentimental and humanitarian nineteenth century. The uncle represents a firm and well-defined order based on law, form, style, and continuity, and within this order his word is law. He has unlimited freedom within this order, but it is a freedom of the same kind as that possessed by the composer of a fugue or a symphony: it is circumscribed by certain rules. The uncle cannot break his word, and he must accept responsibility for the world he rules. Thus he is an aristocratic figure.

Adam, the rebel, cannot accept at first the inhumanity of the uncle’s forcing Anne-Marie to sacrifice her life for her son. At last he does so, however. Two things make him change his mind. He realizes that his uncle, too, is a tragic figure who has suffered as other human beings must suffer. The uncle has suffered because he has lost his only son. Thus the whole world that he represents is in danger of perishing, because it is based on the principle of continuance. Adam also comes to realize that the uncle is a comic figure, a representative here on earth of the comic-amoral divinities. He is a comic figure because, as a gypsy had prophesied, he will have a son produced for him by his wife and Adam. This is clearly indicated in the story. At the very outset it is suggested by the author that the real power in this aristocratic world is held by the women, because they alone can attest to the legitimacy of the sons who are to inherit the estates. When we are introduced to the wife of the uncle, she is standing naked in front of the mirror, admiring herself, while thoughts of a sexual nature flit through her mind: she thinks of the bulls and the stallions; she is conscious of an absence of some kind, and when a flea bites her she thinks it silly that only a flea should have the courage to risk its life “for her smoothness and sweet blood.” In the afternoon she and Adam ride together in the field. Finally, it is said about Anne-Marie that to save her son is a sweet effort. This line also occurs in a popular tune, the words of which flit through the minds of both Adam and the wife: “C’est un trop doux effort.” The sweet effort referred to in this connection, although obviously of another nature, is to the same end as that of Anne-Marie: to save a son.

Thus Adam is able to accept the feudal-aristocratic world, and his acceptance is based on a kind of religious experience: he realizes that all which lives must suffer, and that, consequently, there are no easy bargains in life. Adam realizes the unity of all things and accepts the world as it is. He also realizes that suffering brings greatness. By letting her play her role the uncle has conferred immortality on Anne-Marie: the field is forever after known as “Sorrow-Acre.” Adam learns to accept tragedy—not as a misfortune—but as a human privilege, because it confers on us ordinary human beings a greatness which is denied the gods and the aristocrats, denied those who are liberated from necessity. . . .

Source: Eric O. Johannesson, in his The World of Isak Dinesen, University of Washington Press, 1961, pp. 99-104.

Sources

Aiken, Susan Hardy. “Dinesen’s ‘Sorrow-Acre ’: Tracing the Woman’s Line,” in Isak Dinesen: Critical Views, edited by Olga Anastasia Pelensky, Ohio University Press, 1993, pp. 174-98.

Hannah, Donald. “Isak Dinesen” and Karen Blixen: The Mask and the Reality, Putnam & Co., 1971, p. 12.

Pelensky, Olga Anastasia. Isak Dinesen: The Life and Imagination of a Seducer, Ohio University Press, 1991, pp. 178-79.

Thurman, Judith. Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, St. Martin’s Press, 1982, pp. 6, 8.