Fact or feminism

The episodic narrative entitled Out of Africa, written by Isak Dinesen, and its cinematic adaptation have provided valuable insight into the world of colonial Kenya and the adventures of protagonist Karen Blixen as she lived and worked there. Writing under the pseudonym of Isak Dinesen, Blixen relays in her book stories of adventure, politics and humor that, taken together, help to impress several philosophical ideologies upon the reader. Although the authenticity of these anecdotes has recently been brought into question, Dinesen’s overlying theme of feminine independence and her portrayal of herself as Nietzsche’s “affirming woman” were made evident through Dinesen’s real-life opinions and adventures among the wildlife and Natives of Kenya in addition to the oft-idealistic—and sometimes fabricated—tales appearing in Out of Africa.

The crux of Dinesen’s tales could be identified as her testament to the achievement of, and the importance of, feminine independence in a phallocentric environment. One of the foremost examples of Blixen’s independence is her ownership and management of the Kenyan plot of land she inhabits throughout her memoir. As Lewis asserts in his article “Culture, Cultivation, and Colonialism in Out of Africa and Beyond,” Dinesen treats the property as granted “without any history of prior possession, without reference to negotiation or purchase” (1)¹. However, regardless of how the land that became Blixen’s farm passed into her hands, throughout her memoirs she displays firm and effective management of the internal affairs, hiring and supervising the workers and squatters in her employ.

Stemming from this workplace relationship with the Natives is Blixen’s reputation in the Native communities she encounters. Dinesen boasts that she was an excellent shot with a rifle, and relays how she was repeatedly called upon by the Natives to shoot a bothersome lion or to accompany the men of the community on a shooting safari (14)². Additionally, she served as a doctor for the Natives, allowing her to form many new relationships (22)² and during this service made the acquaintance of one Kamante, a major character in the rest of her story (24)².

While the accuracy of these claims has been questioned by some, namely Simon Lewis, nearly everybody agrees that Blixen played a pivotal role in the events that unfolded in her chapters called “A Shooting Accident on the Farm” (85–93)². In her description, Blixen was able to exert an impressive amount of poise and rationality during an emergency situation, and did everything she could in an effort to save the lives of several wounded and dying Native boys following the titular shooting accident (87–88)². These violent events might have paralyzed even the strongest of individuals, but Blixen is the epitome of calm and composure throughout the tragic episode.

However, Judith Thurman’s 1982 biography of Dinesen brings into light many inconsistencies between the assertive, independent Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa and the dependency Karen Blixen exhibits in real life. For example, Blixen’s life was full of failed love interests, including her marriage to Bror and her relationship with Denys (233)³, neither of which appears at length in Out of Africa. Neither of these men stayed faithful to her (232–233)³, and Thurman calls her wedding ceremony with Bror “not meaningful” (116)³. She was anything but independent in the relationship with Denys, even saying that she needed his company to maintain her happiness (185)³. However, these two major factors in Blixen’s life go unmentioned in her memoir, and Thurman suggests throughout her book that this was due to Dinesen’s feeling that the omission of these painful experiences from her story would help her escape them altogether (103–106)³. Thurman even reveals that her exodus to Africa was a result of her inability to cope with the society she loathed in Denmark (106)³. Overall, the Thurman biography casts Dinesen’s ideal of herself as an independent woman into a strongly critical light, questioning if this woman was even the slightest bit independent (259)³, or if she merely stressed her half-fictional womanly qualities (234)³.

Another key element to Blixen’s campaign of showing her perhaps-nonexistent independence was her unorthodox views toward a fairly orthodox religion. Throughout the story, Blixen maintains a great relationship with the local Catholic missionary, regularly attending services there (26–27)². She even extends her interest in religion toward the Natives she works with by exposing them to the “Catholic” way of living, to the point where a Native boy named Kitau tells her that:

…he would become either a Christian or a Mohammedan [Muslim], only he did not yet know which. For this reason he had stayed for three months in my house to see the testurde—the ways and habits—of the Christians (50)².

Blixen even manages to convert the formerly non-religious Kamante to the faith, a religion that inexplicably brings him unprecedented bravery and a cure from all his previous phobias (58–60)². Blixen, however, was personally much farther from Catholic dogma than the Natives might have realized:

Dinesen was herself critical of the [religious] repression of the body and its natural instincts. Her depictions of the parsonage and its environment are quite unfavorable, disclosing its repressive control over human sensuality and sexuality. (54)⁴

Dinesen also harbored some interesting sentiments regarding the relationship between the sexes which are reflected in her dealings with men in Out of Africa. Apart from her turbulent romantic relationships with Bror and Denys, Dinesen discusses a friendship with “Old Knudsen,” an elderly man who begs her assistance during a trip to Nairobi (53)². She takes him in and proceeds to care for him in his old age and illness (54–55)², perhaps thinking of herself, as the woman, the dominant figure to his inferior—masculine—nature. This experience of having someone, especially a man, dependent upon her was doubtless a source of pride for Dinesen. Regardless of her intentions, by befriending Knudsen, she learns vague snippets of his background and experiences, but is able to gather from his reaction toward her that:

On these occasions [Knudsen] was afraid of me, for he thought that I would be sure to have disapproved of his escapades, and that I would profit by his weaknesses to triumph over him. Old Knudsen […] had in his heart a deep mistrust of woman, and saw her as the enemy of man […] out to stop his fun (57)².

The friendship with Knudsen grows and he begins sharing with her his secret dreams and aspirations, discussing what “even had the flavor of such things that one ought not talk to ladies about” (56)². By modern pop-culture’s standards and terminology, Dinesen probably would have identified herself as a “tomboy” or “just one of the guys,” both being gender roles quite divergent from the traditional Catholic and Western sexual identities.

These sentiments extended to how Dinesen depicted the Natives’ practices regarding marriage and gender. One of the unfortunate truths regarding colonial Kenya is that women are valued much less than men, and are treated accordingly in love, marriage, and society. For example, it is a common practice among the Native Africans to marry off a daughter in exchange for monetary reimbursement. Kanogo reports that “one way a household could preserve itself was by […] pawning some of its women, who would be sent into the custody of another ethnic group in return for the food needed to survive” (44–45)⁵. Dinesen was surrounded by these objectifying and dehumanizing attitudes throughout her time in Africa, and these experiences doubtless shifted her opinions in one direction or another.

A great example of this chauvinistic injustice in Out of Africa appears when a little Native girl named Wamboi is killed in an accident in front of Blixen’s abode. However, Blixen explains that her parents were pained not because they’d lost a child, but instead because they’d lost a fortune:

I knew that this would be a heavy loss for them, for the girl had been of marriage-age, and would have brought them in her price of sheep and goats and a heifer or two. This they had been looking forward to since her birth. (98–99)²

Within this system of sexual oppression, women can achieve nothing outside of marrying into status. As Maathai puts it, “most women who gained importance in society did so because their husbands were important […] not because they themselves were educated or successful” (157)⁶. Just as Mary Wollstonecraft dreaded in “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,”⁷ women in Africa were unable to make something of themselves without marriage. The situation in Africa was, and is, such that “highly educated wom[e]n [were] accused of not being enough of an African woman, of being a ‘white woman in black skin’” (110)⁶. And so Virginia Woolf’s fears in “A Room of One’s Own”⁸ come to fruition: woman cannot achieve due to a lack of education. Both Woolf and Wollstonecraft would agree that this lack of respect for woman leads to her objectification as a sex object.

But, according to a conversation appearing in Out of Africa, the Native Somali girls would disagree with their assessment. Dinesen reports that:

[…] the girls asked me if […] nations in Europe gave away their maidens to their husbands for nothing […] shame on such parents, [they said,] and on girls who gave themselves up to such treatment! […] where was their respect for woman, or for virginity? (173)²

The Somali women have a very high idea of themselves and their sexuality, or lack thereof. They feel, as outlined in Blixen’s relating of conversations with them, that their virginity is so important that losing it before marriage would invalidate them as human beings and shame themselves and their families for generations. If unchaste, they would not want to be married and feel that other societies allowing non-virgins to marry are shaming the females worldwide (170–173)². Dinesen depicted these sentiments as primitive and as a tragic result of the Somali environment, all part of her endless portrayal of the Natives as one step above beasts. But Dinesen’s ideas regarding womanhood are quite different than both the Christian and Somali mindsets.

In reality, Dinesen’s philosophies were worlds away from the traditions of Catholicism. The author was heavily influenced by the writings of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (41)⁴, whose ideas are loathed by the Church about as much as an all-accepting institution has the capacity to loathe. According to Anne Sabo in her article “Revamped Woman and the Untruth of Truth,” Dinesen revalued the traditional Christian god into one “[who gave] blessings to witches and sensuality, a Dionysian god” (50, 54)⁴. This viewpoint is one extremely divergent from the traditional Apollonian version of god that most Christian sects worship, making her a very bad example of a true Christian for poor Kitau. Nietzsche was doubtless a primary source for such rebellious ideas, because it was he who explored the natures of the Apollonian and Dionysian in his book The Birth of Tragedy (589)⁹. Taking her philosophy in part from Nietzsche and similar sources, Dinesen’s other works apart from Out of Africa espouse many complex ideals that oftentimes fell into the realm of either extremist feminism or even, albeit inconsistently, antifeminism (45–48)⁴. Unfortunately, Nietzsche has had a reputation among the scholarly community of having ideas regarding feminism that by today’s standards would be judged sexist, and, therefore, has been disregarded by some (1–2)¹⁰. This would seem to add merit to the belief that Dinesen might have had antifeminist leanings; but new, feminist interpretations of Nietzsche’s writings have recently arisen, as “Nietzsche scholars and feminists […] have begun to explore how his comments on women […] might benefit [women and feminists]” (1)⁴.

One of Dinesen’s main problems with the phallocentric viewpoints of modern society concerned, surprisingly enough, clothing. As Sabo reports, “In Dinesen’s tales, long skirts serve [a] suggestive function. Dinesen herself preferred skirts over pants” (45)⁴. She continues to explain that:

Dinesen promotes the creative power of the imagination, using skirts, a feminine asset, as a metaphor for the art of suggestive imagination, versus legs in their straight pants, which she uses as a metaphor for oppressive logic, a masculine proclivity (45)⁴.

So fearful was Dinesen of the “castration of gender” that pants apparently represented, she identified the skirt in her short story “The Old Chevalier” to be “a decisive symbol of a woman’s dignity in former times” (47)⁴ because women wearing pants leave nothing for the man to imagine concerning her physical properties (47, 48)⁴.

But perhaps more important in that passage is the mention that logic is a masculine quality. This idea would seem to be compatible with one of the foremost feminist goals: a feminine way of thinking and expression separate from the current phallocentric thought, logic and language. Sabo elaborates:

Rejecting the current age of masculinity, with its statistics, experimental science…which oppresses and confines our outlook on life, [Dinesen felt that] the former age of femininity…affirmed life through the art of imagination, expanding the range of perspectives on life. (49)⁴

This sentiment again creates another common ground between Dinesen’s writings and the ideals of the feminist movement. However, the most profound relationship between her works and feminism is still to come, and it again concerns Mr. Nietzsche.

The famous Nietzschean ideal of the “affirming woman” was exactly what Dinesen must have loved about his philosophy most (43)⁴. The ideal is sort of like the female version of Nietzsche’s famous “Übermensch,” and she can be defined as a woman who was opposed to the castration of gender and therefore exemplified femininity despite masculine pressures (6–7)¹⁰. As Kelly Oliver puts it, Nietzsche “dreaded this castrated woman […] he dreaded this castrating woman […] he loved this affirming woman” (7)¹⁰. She interprets Nietzsche’s writings to say that the “castrated woman” represented the “will-to-truth,” and lived dogmatically; that the “castrating woman” represented the “will-to-illusion,” and exemplified Apollonian nature; and the “affirming woman” represented the “will-to-power,” and exemplified the Dionysian nature that Dinesen was so particularly fond of (8)¹⁰. So, in reality, Dinesen’s interest in and inspiration by Nietzsche might actually have added to the feminist nature of many of her works, especially Out of Africa.

The idea of the “affirming woman” also seems to crop up frequently in Dinesen’s writing. For example, Sabo informs us that Pellegrina, the main character in Dinesen’s tales “The Dreamers,” which appears in Seven Gothic Tales, and in “Echoes,” part of her collection called Last Tales, “embodies and propounds Zarathustra’s [the titular hero of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra] teaching as a female Übermensch, an overwoman” (54)⁴. Since Kelly Oliver has already proven that the affirming woman could be a feminist ideal, it then goes without saying that if Dinesen’s works are riddled with this ideal, then they are also filled with hints and themes of feminism.

But what does any of this mean for Out of Africa? Since the authenticity of many of the stories and anecdotes appearing in the memoir has been questioned, one could call the work “semi-autobiographical.” And since Dinesen as she appears in these stories is the archetypical “affirming woman,” it would be easy for one to assume that Dinesen intended the fabricated sections of her stories to help paint a portrait of herself as an assertive, independent, and ultimately feminist “affirming woman.”

Throughout Out of Africa, Dinesen continually portrays herself as independent, although biographical information from Thurman seems to conflict with this portrayal. Perhaps these exaggerations on her character were a part of Dinesen’s mission to make herself into her feminist ideal of the “affirming woman,” adopted from Nietzsche. These facts put the legitimacy of her anecdotes in Out of Africa into question, but the underlying themes remain. The memoir still shows the feminist struggle in Native cultures, and shows the semi-fictional independence of a semi-fictional protagonist named Karen Blixen. Taken with a grain of salt, Out of Africa still retains its importance as the story of a strong and independent feminist woman overcoming the dangers of a phallocentric society.