“The Juices of the Body”: Ecomasculine Fluidification in Two Stories by Isak Dinesen

Abstract

Gender is a key factor in shaping perceptions of environmental relationships, and moving toward sustainability requires that we rethink dominant ideas about both femininity and masculinity. Danish bilingual author Karen Blixen (1885–1962) wrote cryptic and convoluted stories under the male pseudonym Isak Dinesen, and while there is an abundance of feminist scholarship on Dinesen, her critique of masculine identity and her relevance to the emergent field of ecomasculinity studies have so far gone unnoticed. In this essay, I draw on feminist scholarship and cultural histories of male embodiment, as I analyze fluid masculine corporeality in “The Monkey” (1934) and “Ehrengard” (1962). In both her early and late narratives, I argue, Dinesen pushes back against the 20th century “metallization” of male bodies with baroque narratives and characters whose trajectories begin to produce novel and fruitful understandings of masculinity and the male body in relation to other bodies and the more-than-human world. More specifically, what I label “fluidification” designates recurring moments in Dinesen’s writing when corporeal boundaries are breached and male characters find themselves re-manned and re-environed by their bodies’ all-too-human participation in “transcorporeal” flows. The male bodies that populate Dinesen’s fiction, I find, diverge strikingly from the seamlessly solid, statuesque, and self-enclosed men of steel fantasized by contemporary fascists, communists, futurists, militarists, and machine-age modernists. While the hegemonic ideal of hard, dry, anti-ecological masculinity has persisted and even flourished to the present day, I approach Dinesen’s fictions as counterhegemonic sites where alternative earth-friendlier meanings of masculinity can become visible.

Keywords

Isak Dinesen ecomasculinity corporeality literature trans-corporeality fluidity 20th-century fiction

Since the 1970s, ecofeminists have produced a great deal of valuable work helping us grasp how the downgrading of the natural world has accompanied the objectification of woman and buttressed the exploitation of female bodies along with the planet’s nonhuman creatures and resources (e.g., Merchant 1980; Plumwood 1993; Warren 1997; Mies and Shiva 2014). Yet, as Sherilyn MacGregor and Nicole Seymour point out, “the concept of ‘gender,’ as far as the environmental humanities and social sciences are concerned, remains largely synonymous with women,” and “men qua men […] are almost never objects of critical inquiry in the environmental disciplines” (2017, 10). “[M]asculine identity has been constructed as so very anti-ecological” (Gaard 2017, 167), but until recently relatively little energy went into scrutinizing biophobic constructions of manhood and searching for more capacious alternatives to the “malestream” (O’Brien 1985, 5). This, however, is beginning to change with the emergence of ecomasculinity studies, a research paradigm committed to “uncover[ing] fresh and creative resocialisations of modern Western masculinities” (Hultman and Pulé 2018, 3).

Ecomasculinity scholars critique hegemonic masculinity’s “ethics of daring” (Pulé 2007, 158) while also rejecting any essentialist claim that women are inherently closer to nature than men, and while qualifying undiscriminating references to “‘men’ (or ‘male’) to describe the source of all ecological degradation” (Slovic 2004, 72). Early contributors to this discourse envisioned an alternative ecomasculine “ethics of caring” (Pulé 2007, 160) primarily (but not exclusively) based on the experiences of white, middle-class, heterosexual North American academics, environmentalists, and wilderness enthusiasts (e.g., Allister 2004). The use of the plural form “ecomasculinities” in recent scholarships (e.g., Hultman and Pulé 2018; Brandt and Cenamor 2019), however, indicates increasing recognition of the complexities and multiplicities of “the masculine” and the inherent ambiguity of “nature” and “the environment.”

Danish bilingual author Karen Blixen (1885–1962) drew and wrote under a shifting plurality of male pseudonyms, including “Peter Lawless,” “Osceola,” “Pierre Andrezel,” and especially “Isak Dinesen.”¹ Dinesen declared that “I am not a feminist” and maintained that “feminism […] is a matter which I do not understand, and which I have never concerned myself with of my own volition” (1979, 65–66), but her writing has attracted considerable attention from feminist, women’s, gender, and queer studies scholars (e.g., Juhl and Jørgensen 1985; Horton 1995; Heede 2001; Stecher 2014). Typically set in a stylized 18th- and 19th-century world of priests, prostitutes, peasants, aristocrats, opera singers, and gypsies, Dinesen’s convoluted, self-reflexive, and densely allusive stories refrained from direct sociopolitical commentary but tapped the tropes of gothic romance, grotesque comedy, and fairy tale to complicate morality, identity, gender, sexuality, and embodiment. Thus, if Dinesen’s oblique style, themes, and personae made her appear “something of a literary anachronism” (Brantly 2002, 4), feminist critics, in particular, have responded to her texts’ (post)modern play with gendered masks and discourses, their use of sexually ambiguous cross-dressing characters, their rejection of Christian morality and bourgeois convention, their subversion of patriarchal power and language, and their affirmation of the natural world and the sensuous life (e.g., Gubar 1981; Froula 1983, Stambaugh 1988; Aiken 1990; Straumann 2011).

Amidst the proliferation of feminist scholarship addressing Dinesen’s “écriture féminine” (Aiken 1990, 256), however, considerably less has been written about her critique of masculine identity and her tell-tale refusal to accept the unmarked universality of the male subject. Nobody (to my knowledge) has pursued the interest in “masculine ecologisation” (Hultman and Pulé 2018, 8) that runs through some of her best-known narratives. The topics of this essay are body fluids, corporeal (im)penetrability, and Dinesen’s literary “fluidification” of hard and dry male bodies. Human bodies contain about 60% fluids, and the fluids that stream within and across bodily boundaries attest to the body’s incompleteness, materiality, and environmentality, connecting it to other embodied selves and the nonhuman environment. Nevertheless, a gendered distinction has often been drawn, separating female bodies characterized by leaking, porous fluidity from male bodies defined as rigid, impervious, and tightly bound containers. Writers envisioning what Walter Benjamin (1969, 241) called “the dreamt-of metallization” of the male body, particularly between the world wars, reinforced “the androcentric dualism man/woman” (Garrard 2012, 26) and helped obscure men’s “trans-corporeal” (Alaimo 2010) connectedness with the more-than-human world.

In this essay, I draw on feminist scholarship (particularly corporeal feminism and the new materialist [eco]feminism) and on cultural histories of male embodiment (particularly Klaus Theweleit’s classic Male Fantasies), as I seek to navigate the “fluid space” (Aiken 1990, 91) of Dinesen’s fiction. Both in early stories like “The Monkey” (1934) and in late tales like Ehrengard (1962), I argue, Dinesen pushes back against “the historical armoring of the male body” (Foster 1991, 75) with baroque narratives and “perverse” characters whose trajectories begin to produce novel fruitful understandings of masculinity and the male body in relation to other bodies and the more-than-human world.² Contrasting “metallization” and “armoring,” what I label “fluidification” designates recurring moments in Dinesen’s fiction when corporeal boundaries are breached and male characters find themselves re-manned and re-environed by their bodies’ all-too-human participation in relational flows. While Dinesen’s stories predominantly construct narrative worlds of white, aristocratic privilege, I find that her fictional male bodies diverge strikingly from the seamlessly solid, statuesque, and self-enclosed men of steel fantasized by contemporary fascists, communists, futurists, militarists, and machine-age modernists. Assuming that literature and other cultural forms can enable “subversive interventions into reproductions of normative masculinity” (Thomas 2002, 61), I envisage Dinesen as a writer who long preceded but can still inform our current interest in critiquing “carbon-heavy masculinities” (Alaimo 2016, 94), “construct[ing] manhood around ecological principles and practice” (Allister 2004, 7), and “restructur[ing] modern Western masculinities for the sake of all life” (Hultman and Pulé 2018, 11). Dinesen understood that masculinity is neither set in stone nor clad in iron, and her texts highlight the historicity, mutability, and potential for change inherent in men’s experience of embodiment.

Hard and Dry Bodies

In the opening of Dinesen’s “The Immortal Story” (1953), readers encounter the wealthy British tea merchant Mr. Clay, who is characterized as “a tall, dry and close old man,” “iron-hard” with a “stony figure” (1993, 135). Immobilized by gout, the solitary Mr. Clay values “solid fact” (1993, 151) and worships gold, striving for a metallic hardness that will be “proof against dissolution” (pp. 176–177). He associates body fluids, which he calls “the juices of life,” with weakness and corruption:

‘I myself,’ he said, ‘am hard, I am dry. I have always been so, and I would not have it otherwise. I have a distaste for the juices of the body. I do not like the sight of blood, I cannot drink milk, sweat is offensive to me, tears disgust me. In such things a man’s bones are dissolved. And in those relationships between people which they name fellowship, friendship or love, a man’s bones themselves are likewise dissolved.’ (pp. 176–177)

In modern somatic philosophy, as Mr. Clay’s comments suggest, body fluids present somewhat of a scandal. For Julia Kristeva, the body’s “abject” spillages, wastes, and fluids are viewed with suspicion precisely because they violate the desire and hope for a “clean and proper” body, making the boundaries and limitations of our selfhood ambiguous, and indicating the body’s physical wasting and ultimate death (1980, 2–3). For corporeal feminist Elizabeth Grosz, similarly, fluids that circulate within the body, escape from orifices, and ooze across bodily boundaries vividly “attest to the permeability of the body” and “its necessary dependence on an outside,” betraying “a certain irreducible materiality.” Body fluids “affront a subject’s aspiration toward autonomy and self-identity” (1994, 193,194) by revealing that human bodies do not simply exist but are continually made in messy exchanges with other (non-)human bodies and the material world. “[N]ecessary but embarrassing” (p. 194), viscous corporeal effluvia—”blood, vomit, saliva, phlegm, pus, sweat, tears, menstrual blood, seminal fluids” (p. 195)—blur the contours of the coherent and self-possessed human self as conceived by western philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Scholars in feminist new materialism thematize corporeal fluidity while hoping to lay the foundation for a new environmental ethic centered on interconnection, relationality, indebtedness, and becoming. While it is contrary to strong western traditions to think of the human body as inherently porous and leaky, the posthumanist feminist Stacy Alaimo coins the concept “trans-corporeality” to situate the human body as always already enmeshed and entangled in material exchanges with other bodies and with the physical and biological world. As embodied beings, Alaimo argues, we are literally part of our environment, which “is always the very substance of ourselves” (2010, 4). Alaimo draws attention to the fluids that flow within and across human bodies, animals, and nonhuman environments, as she revisits environmentalist Rachel Carson’s claim that “each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost-the same proportions as in sea water” (qtd. Alaimo 2016, 118).

As Tobias Menely and Margaret Ronda observe, humans’ “essential likeness” to each other and to nonhumans “becomes vividly evident when the shared substance of life spills from the body” (2013, 25). In Bodies of Water, Astrida Neimanis similarly foregrounds the fact that liquids flow both inside and outside human bodies, and that “the various bodily fluids that intercorporeally sustain our bodies…[are] part of the biological and meterological cycles of water that extracorporeally nourish our bodies” (2017, 66). By counterintuitively reimagining humans not as solid entities but as “bodies of water” involved in constant aqueous exchanges, Neimanis aims to estrange the Enlightenment’s conception of sovereign, discreet, autonomous individuals. Her defamiliarizing gesture reaches beyond the anthropocentric discourse of human exceptionalism, fostering the recognition that every time we drink, bleed, sweat, urinate, breastfeed, etc., our bodies remind us that “[w]e are literally implicated in other animal, vegetable, and planetary bodies that materially course through us, replenish us, and draw upon our own bodies as their wells” (p. 3).

The desiccated Mr. Clay’s disavowal of “the juices of the body” and his fear that in fluidity “a man’s bones are dissolved” (my emphasis) resonate with Luce Irigaray’s claim that “historically the properties of fluids have been abandoned to the feminine” (1985, 116). Breaching their boundaries through discharges and fluidities, women’s bodies are constructed as “leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting, as lacking […] self-containment” (Grosz 1994, 203). Yet while women’s bodies are said to exist in a volatile and risky state of porous susceptibility, male bodies have been granted the power—or charged with the duty—to cordon themselves off from the external world, fighting against contamination, violation, and death.

The valorized ideal of the tough, shell-like, insular male body harks back to the cuirasse esthétique (muscled male torso) of antique Greek athletic statues (Clark 1984, 40) and to 18th-century neoclassicists who imagined a male “body separated from its environment and from other bodies by seemingly impermeable boundaries” (Dudink 2001, 158). Monumental masculine hardbodies, however, were privileged with particular fervor in the years between the world wars, when Dinesen began her writing career, and when “images of active and energetic male bodies hardened against external seductions, consumer conveniences, and the sensuality of the flesh abound[ed]” (Forth 2008, 196). During the 1920s through the 1940s, compact masculine bodies with hard edges and gleaming surfaces proliferated in left- and right-wing political discourses as well as in various both élite and popular cultural genres, from avant-garde modernist manifestoes (Foster 1991) to hard-boiled detective novels (Ogdon 1992), bodybuilding manuals (Carden-Coyne 1999), and superhero comics (Bukatman 2003, 48–78).

The celebration of the hard, dry, anti-ecological male body reached an extreme in the novels, pamphlets, and letters of proto-fascist members of German paramilitary groups (Freikorps) between the world wars. As Klaus Theweleit shows in his classic Male Fantasies, Freikorps “soldier males” (1987, 23) fixated on working-class, politically radical, and sexually active women, whose bodies they obsessively figured in terms of organic fluidity and liquidity, as a destructive natural force or “red tide” (p. 229) threatening to overwhelm and engulf the German nation with “filthy floods” (p. 407). In stark contrast, these texts celebrated the rational German soldier male’s “erect soldierly body” (p. 409), which was vigilant, impervious, hard, and metallic, as though encased in a “shell” (p. 242) or “body armor” (p. 223). In the hyperphallic discourse that Theweleit critiques, “[n]othing is to be permitted to flow” (p. 230), for masculinity is a precarious structure that must be maintained through constant acts of disavowal. Only the dry and hard male body guarantees solid and permanent “borders against the world of all other flesh and the flowing of all the rest of the world outside” (p. 313).

Into the Maelstrom: Soldier Masculinity in Crisis

Appearing as the third story in Seven Gothic Tales (1934), “The Monkey” is set among early 19th-century soldiers and aristocrats in one of “the Lutheran countries of northern Europe” (Dinesen 1991, 109), which Aage Kabell (1968, 127) identifies as Prussia. In “The Monkey,” the young officer Boris von Schreckenstein has dishonored himself by involvement in what appears to be a homosexual scandal, and now he consults his aunt Cathinka, who owns the titular monkey and is the prioress of a former convent that has been adapted into a home for elderly ladies. Cathinka commands that Boris court and wed Athena Hopballehus, the daughter of a neighboring aristocrat. Such a union, she surmises, will both repair the damage to Boris’s reputation and produce an heir “of noble birth” (Dinesen 1991, 109) who can unite the two families. The strong but sexually inexperienced Athena rejects Boris’s suit, however, vowing that she “will never marry” (p. 135). The prioress then invites Athena to a “great supper of seduction” (p. 139) that she hopes will weaken her defenses and seal the alliance.

Dinesen’s neo-Gothic pastiche revels in ambiguous reversals, cryptic innuendos, and risqué double-entendres, and critics have long struggled to resolve the gender trouble that it foments (e.g., Aiken 1990, 133–153; Van Hees 1984; Mishler 1985; Heede 2001, 49–57, 99–105).³ What particularly interests me about this tale is how Dinesen disputes the ideology of the “sealed up, impermeable [male] body” (Grosz 1994, 199) and keeps fluidity uppermost in readers’ minds. The Baron of Hopballehus, for example, is the owner of an estate with a “famous row of jets d’eaux [fountains], which were constructed by the great Danish astronomer Ole Roemer, the same who made the grandes eaux of Versailles” (Dinesen 1991, 135). When Boris calls upon him, the Baron compares their meeting to “the wedding of Cana, and asserts that “water has certainly been changed into wine” (pp. 126–127). Among other exploits, the Baron has written The Undine (p. 127), a tragedy whose title refers to a female water spirit seeking to marry a terrestrial male in order to gain a human soul.

Later, during the “great supper of seduction,” the prioress plies Athena with rich food and wine, and. Athena, whose skin is “white as milk” (p. 134), struggles to maintain her composure under the influence of the prioress’s potent drink:

She had drunk very little wine in her life, and had never tasted champagne, and with the amounts which the hostess of the supper party poured into her, she ought rightly not to have been able to stand on her legs. But she had behind her a long row of ancestors who had in their time lain under all the heavy old oak tables of the province, and who now came to the assistance of the daughter of their race. Still the wine went to her head. (p. 140)

Throughout the story, wine is “poured out […] very freely” (p. 140), and both Athena and Boris contemplate the effects of these potent beverages on their mental state and behavior. On the night of the dinner, Athena worries that she has “‘drunk too much of the good wine. Look, my hand is not even steady when I put it on this table” (p. 140). On the morning after, Boris, “who could drink more than most people” (p. 140), still feels the effect of “the wine of the previous night” (p. 159), and he suspects that “a good deal of [Athena’s] pallor and immobility might be due to the wine and the exertion of the night” (p. 158).

When Athena retires to her room, the prioress orders Boris to force himself upon her and thereby coerce her to comply with their marriage plans. When Boris objects that “‘there is a limit to the effects of will-power in a man’” (p. 149), his aunt concocts a liquid “love philter” (p. 155) to fortify his resolve:

The old woman kept staring at him. She stretched out her dry delicate little hand and touched him. Her face twisted in a wry little grimace. After a moment she moved around to the back of the room and brought back a bottle and a small glass. Very carefully she filled the glass, handed it to him, and nodded her head two or three times. In sheer despair he emptied it.

The glass was filled with a liquor of the color of very old dark amber. It had an acrid and rank taste. Acrid and rank were also the old dark-amber eyes of the woman, watching him over the rim of the glass. As he drank, she laughed. Then she spoke. Boris, strangely enough, afterward remembered these words, which he did not understand: “Help him now, you good faru,” she said” (pp. 149–150).

This episode illustrates the ingenuity with which Dinesen decenters normative understandings of gender and sexuality. Intent that Boris marry, reproduce, and carry on the noble von Schreckenstein name, the prioress seeks to steal her soldier-nephew’s phallic prowess. Dipping into her fount of arcane knowledge, the “witch-priestess” (Stambaugh 1988, 57) sends the “young officer” (Dinesen 1991, 141) on a mission to conquer the reluctant virgin. It is highly ironic, however, that Boris’s hardness must be produced through the ingestion of pulverized rhinoceros horn, an exotic substance or liquid pharmakon that “acts as both remedy and poison” (Derrida 2004, 75).⁴ Far from coming naturally to all men, Dinesen implies, heterosexual, penetrative, and procreative desire must be taught, enforced, and disciplined. Codes of gendered behavior and sexual orientation governing what it means to be male and female lie embedded less in human beings themselves than in collective structures, social expectations, and conventional practices.⁵

In addition, the exchange illuminates how Dinesen makes manifest the “interconnections, interchanges, and transits between human bodies and nonhuman” (Alaimo 2010, 2), and especially how she situates male bodies as porous, processual, and vulnerable to infiltration and pollution. To wear down Athena’s defenses, the prioress serves “marzipan and crystallized fruit” (p. 140), “champagne” (p. 142), and a “sweet pudding” (p. 146) spiced with cloves imported (like the rhino horn) from Africa. Foods, drinks, and drugs in “The Monkey” act as “storied matter” (Oppermann 2018), material agencies possessing “the active power to exert forces and create effects” (Bennett 2007, 133). Here as elsewhere in Dinesen’s writing, the use of animal metaphors carries considerable significance (Mortensen 2018). The rhinoceros’ panzer-like skin and phallic horn make it a suitable symbol for a complete and indestructible masculine body with “armorlike properties” (Theweleit 1987, 164). Boris’s embodiment is defined not by unflinching impenetrability, however, but by its extreme susceptibility to substances that enter his body, course through it, and compromise its integrity from within: “His blood leapt up to his brain; he hardly knew where he was. With failing breath he wondered if this was an effect of the Prioress’s love potion” (p. 151). Even before he ingests the prioress’s aphrodisiac, Boris is shown enjoying “two glasses [of wine], which did him good” (p. 116), drinking “his wine in a happy mood” (p. 128), and “pouring himself out some more coffee” (p. 134). A little later, Boris explains the kinship that he feels with the ocean and its watery creatures: “There is nothing for which you feel such a great longing as for the sea. […] far from the sea you feel part of your own soul dying, disappearing, like a jellyfish thrown on dry land” (p. 145). As Alaimo (2013) argues, visualizing the “extreme fluidity and fragility of jellyfish” can open new perspectives on (post)humanity, for “[w]hile Western humanist subjects have long imagined themselves as distinct from their environments […] jellies exhibit another way of being in which the living creature is immersed within and inseparable from its watery world” (p. 140, 152). Boris’s humorous self-comparison—to a gelatinous jellyfish rather than a monumental rhinoceros—establishes permeability and viscosity as crucial (though mostly disavowed) characteristics of human and more specifically male embodiment. It implies that male bodies are not contoured and contained but radically open to the environment, changing, growing, and evolving in their engagements with the world.

Flux and Flow: Dissolving Male Inviolability

Seven Gothic Tales is awash in scenes and images of flux and flow. Not coincidentally, the first story in the American edition, “The Deluge at Norderney,” opens with a terrific bursting of dams and dikes:

In the late summer of 1835 a terrible disaster took place at the bath of Norderney. After a three days’ storm from the southwest, the wind sprang around to the north. This is a thing that happens only once in a hundred years. The tremendous mass of water driven up by the storm was turned and pressed down in the corner, upon the Westerlands. The sea broke the dikes in Westerlands. The sea broke the dikes in two places and washed through them. Cattle and sheep were drowned by the hundred. Farmhouses and barns came down like card castles before the advancing waters, and many human lives were lost even as far as Wilsum and Wredon. (1994, 5)

Bodies in “The Monkey” are not solid and impervious but porous and permeable, linked to other bodies and sites through constant liquid exchanges. Men are caught up in this state of affairs, as fluids ooze not only into but also from the male body. When Boris intrudes upon Athena in her bedchamber and disingenuously professes his passion—“Athena […] I have loved you all my life”—he is met with stubborn resistance:

For a moment the light-eyed girl stared at him, bewildered. Then she drew herself up as a snake does when it is ready to strike. That she did not attempt to cry for help showed him that she had a clearer understanding of the situation, and of the fact that she had no friend in the house, than he had given her credit for; or perhaps her young broad breast harbored sheer love of combat. The next moment she struck out. Her powerful swift and direct fist hit him in the mouth and knocked out two of his teeth. The pain and the smell and taste of the blood which filled his mouth sent him beside himself. He let her go to try for a stronger hold, and immediately they were in each other’s arms, in an embrace of life and death. (p. 152)

With this scuffle, Dinesen again burlesques the normative distribution of gender roles in heterosexual courtship rituals. Athena is introduced as “a strong young woman of eighteen, six feet high and broad in proportion, with a pair of shoulders which could lift and carry a sack of wheat” (p. 129). With her powerful physique, strong political persuasions, and complete disinterest in heterosexual marriage, she towers above Boris, the “fickle lover” (p. 153) dressed “in his white uniform and high golden collar, his pomatumed curls like a halo in the light” (p. 130). Previously “blood leapt up to his brain,” but here, at the climax of the story, Boris feels blood leaking from his body: “The blood kept coming into his mouth […] Gasping for air, his mouth full of blood, he saw the whole room swaying from one side to another” (p. 154). Unlike Freudian psychoanalytic critics, I read Boris’s manhandling not as a symbolic “castration” (Hees 1984, 20; Mishler 1985, 443) but as a counter-hegemonic fluidification that helps us reimagine masculinity in terms of corporeal incompleteness, fragility, and environmentality. With its fleshy contours and seeping liquid, Boris’s wound prizes open the anti-ecological male body, reveals its depth and vulnerability, and lays bare its inescapable participation in organic processes. The blood that streams from Boris’s “bleeding mouth” (Dinesen 1991, 155), in other words, dissolves the myth of the heroically contained and controlled male physique, where “all orifices […] are closed” (Bakhtin 1984, 320), and inscribes male corporeality as a “mode of seepage” (Grosz 1994, 203). Gendered representations have often stressed female enmeshment in fluidity to suggest that “[w]omen are somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men” (Grosz 1994, 14). “The Monkey,” however, co-implicates male bodies in the “maelstrom” (Dinesen 1991, 158) of “creaturely consanguinity” (Menely and Ronda 2013, 25).

The Aesthetic Tradition: Painting Woman-as-Water

Originally slated for publication in Anecdotes of Destiny (1958), Ehrengard was first printed as “The Secret of Rosenbad” in the American women’s magazine Ladies’ Home Journal in December 1962, and it only appeared as a separate book in 1963, 1 year after Dinesen’s death. Described as a “joke” (Dinesen 1996, 2, 118), Ehrengard contains echoes of Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons (1782) and especially Søren Kierkegaard’s The Seducer’s Diary (1843), to which it is often seen as “a kind of feminist response” (Smyth 2004, 191). Equally important, the story connects intertextually to other parts of Dinesen’s oeuvre, including “The Monkey.” Hailing from a strict Prussian family, the titular heroine Ehrengard has been “[b]rought up in the sternest military virtues” (Dinesen 1993, 228), and not coincidentally she shares a surname with Boris von Schreckenstein of Dinesen’s earlier story.

Set (as with “The Monkey”) in early 19th-century Germany, Ehrengard transports readers from the world of Gothic romance to that of that of “pastoral comedy” (Langbaum 1963, 639). The Grand Duke and Duchess of the small German principality of Fugger-Babenhausen desperately need male heirs, lest “the ducal crown […] pass to a lateral branch of the dynasty, of doubtful legitimacy and principles” (Dinesen 1993, 216). After “a waiting time of fifteen years” (p. 216), the couple finally produces a son and heir, but Prince Lothar, once he comes of age, shows little interest in marrying and perpetuating the family line. The Grand Duchess commissions her friend, the womanizing painter Wolfgang Cazotte, to resolve the quandary, and success seems secure when Lothar marries Princess Ludmilla of Leuchtenstein. The plot thickens when it becomes clear that Ludmilla expects a child “a full two months before law and decency permitted” (p. 223). Upon Cazotte’s suggestion, Ludmilla is removed to the remote rococo Rosenbad Castle, where her circumstances can be concealed until the birth of her child can safely be proclaimed to the world.

At Rosenbad, the emphasis shifts toward Cazotte’s growing obsession with the princess’s virtuous maid-of-honor, Ehrengard. A “blatantly misogynistic” (Stambaugh 1988, 94) libertine and aesthete, Cazotte in many ways resembles Kierkegaard’s ironic seducer, Johannes, but Cazotte contrives something more subtle than a simple physical seduction. By making Ehrengard blush, he plans to elicit a physical reaction which he associates with humiliation and self-surrender, and which he believes will expose Ehrengard’s sensual warmth as fully as any sexual encounter: “I shall in time be drawing my young Amazon’s blood, not down onto the ground—for I dislike the sight of human blood outside the human body, it is the wrong color and mars a picture—but upwards from the deepest, most secret and sacred wells of her being, making it cover her all over like a transparent crimson veil and making it burn her up in one single exquisite gasp of flame” (p. 233). Cazotte discovers that Ehrengard is in the habit of bathing nude in a forest lake, and he begins clandestinely painting her naked portrait. Seeing herself captured, revealed, and compromised in his painting, he speculates, will make Ehrengard blush, her blushing will seal his triumph, and she “will be more thoroughly seduced than was ever any other maiden” (p. 245):

The picture which he had here been ordered to paint—”Nymph bathing in a forest lake,” or “The bath of Diana”—would be in itself a wonder and a glory, the crowning of his career as an artist. But more wonderful and glorious still would be the moment in which he was to set it before the eyes of its model.

[…]

The figure on the canvas would remain chastely silvery before the ardent eyes of the spectators. But the maiden by his side would slowly become all aglow. Behind the shawl, silk gown, embroidered petticoats, and dainty cambric, the straight, strong, pure body from heel to forehead would blush into a deep exquisite crimson, a mystical rose persan, which no clear water of a mountain lake would ever wash away. (pp. 251–252)

Throughout this story, Dinesen evokes conventional conceptual codings that link women’s bodies with indeterminacy, impermanence, and fluid boundaries. Cazotte refers to the feminized Rosenbad community as “the Venusberg,” a name that is both a reference to Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser (1845) and the German word for the mons veneris of the female genitals. Venus’ Greek name, Aphrodite, was taken from the word aphros (“foam”), and Cazotte also characterizes the “coterie” of Rosenbad as “servants of the seaborn Goddess” (p. 232). At Rosenbad, the household organizes itself around the pregnant body of Princess Ludmilla, “heavy with the sweetness of life” (p. 235). When Ludmilla gives birth to a boy, the community expands to accommodate the young wet-nurse Lispeth, “buxom, pink and white,” and the mother of “two children beside the baby which she had left in order to give her warm bosom and heart to the little Prince” (pp. 240–241). As the result of intercourse and the precursor to childbirth, pregnancy makes the female body’s permeability visible. Iris M. Young writes that pregnancy “challenges the integration of my bodily experience by rendering fluid the boundary between what is within, myself, and what is outside, separate. […] [T]he boundaries of my body are in flux. In pregnancy I lose the sense of where my body ends and the world begins” (2005, 49–50). Breastfeeding similarly highlights how fluids collapse the distinction between inside and outside, and how “[w]omen are often understood to be in possession of insecure (leeking, seeping) bodily boundaries” (Longhurst 2001, 2). Pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, all of which figure prominently in Dinesen’s narrative, seem to epitomize the female body’s liminality and lack of fixed contours.

In plotting Ehrengard’s “ruin” (Dinesen 1993, 244), “the irresistible Don Juan of his age” (218) imagines her as a porous vessel that can be filled and emptied at his desire: “I am making her drink in by eye, ear, and nostril and by every pore of her clear skin the sweet poison of the Venusberg” (p. 237). Although Cazotte considers himself a genius and fancies his painting a masterpiece “for all eternity” (p. 251), his voyeuristic likeness of Ehrengard as “a water nymph happily back in her element” (p. 250) is steeped in familiar aesthetic conventions and cultural dichotomies. Far from original, it draws on the Greek myth of the birth of Venus, on classical stories of sirens, nymphs, and naiads, on Renaissance images of Diana and Actaeon, and on innumerable 18th- and 19th-century representations of naked female bathers:

Over and over again: the women-in-the-water; woman as water, as a stormy, cavorting, cooling ocean, a raging stream, a waterfall; as a limitless body of water that ships pass through, with tributaries, pools, surfs and deltas; woman as the enticing (or perilous) deep, as a cup of bubbling body fluids; the vagina as wave, as foam, as a dark place ringed with Pacific ridges; love as the collision of two waves, as a sea voyage, a slow ebbing, a fish-catch, a storm. (Theweleit 1987, 283)

By painting Ehrengard as enticing baigneuse, Cazotte will reveal her essential nature and “capture,” “fasten,” and “fix” (Dinesen 1993, 251) her in her proper, watery element. As so often before, Cazotte’s male gaze will objectify woman as a creature of messy materiality: a “seaborn goddess” (p. 232) inescapably part of the environment, and engulfed by the fluidity that defines her. At the same time, the painting will affirm an equally traditional understanding of the male subject as isolated from, set off against, and exalted above the female body and the natural world. While Ehrengard will be sensually immersed in the water, Cazotte will, as always, occupy the dry ground.

The Male Blush: Regendering Flow

The story culminates when jealous rival members of the Babenhausen dynasty persuade a young peasant, Matthias, to kidnap his wife, the wet-nurse Lispeth, and deliver the royal baby to them as evidence of foul play. When the fleeing pair stop at an inn to “feed the baby” (p. 264), Ehrengard and Cazotte arrive in hot pursuit, hoping to retrieve the prince, and a brawl ensues:

[Ehrengard] gripped Matthias by his long hair and three times knocked his head against the wall behind him till the room darkened and swam before his eyes. He gave out a row of low wails which, however, far from frightening his tormentor, infuriated her into striking him in the face with her fist, so that the blood spouted from his nose. In actual fear of his life, of being knocked to pieces by the strong young hands that held him, he made his cries for help ring through the house. (p. 276)

By coincidence, Ehrengard’s fiancé, Kurt von Blittersdorf, is at the inn, and alarmed by the scuffle he demands to know who the child is. Ehrengard cannot break her vow of secrecy, so she sacrifices her relationship with Kurt by claiming that the child is her own. Kurt, in turn, requests that she disclose the name of the father:

“It is he,” she said. “Herr Cazotte is the father of my child.”

At these words, Herr Cazotte’s blood was drawn upwards, as from the profoundest wells of his being, till it colored him all over like a transparent crimson veil. His brow and cheeks, all on their own, radiated a divine fire, a celestial, deep rose flame as if they were giving away a long-kept secret.

And it was a strange thing that he should blush. For normally an onlooker in a fauteuil d’orchestre would grow pale at seeing the irate hero of the stage suddenly turn upon him. The actual situation held very grave possibilities to Herr Cazotte. A duel might be the immediate consequence of it, and Herr Cazotte, as it is known, disliked the sight of human blood outside the human body. Any gallant warrior of Babenhausen, knowing Kurt von Blittersdorff’s reputation with a sword or a pistol, might have gone white, even white as death.

But Herr Cazotte, who was an artist, blushed (276).

Ehrengard is a “story of blushes” (Anderson 1992), and Cazotte’s blushing—instead of Ehrengard’s—marks the story’s ironic denouement. A century-long tradition in North European and American aesthetics has gendered and racialized the mysterious physiological phenomenon of blushing, associating light-skinned people’s facial reddening with hidden layers of sensibility and sensuality (Rosenthal 2004). In 18th- and 19th-century fiction, “[b]lushing is the realm of the female,” functioning “metonymically as the sign of the female’s sexual or biological instability” (Wiltshire 1992, 79). Dinesen, however, regenders blushing in poignant characterizations of her male protagonists. In “The Immortal Story,” for example, Mr. Clay’s antithesis,” the young Danish sailor Povl, is “full of the juices of life” (Dinesen 1993, 177) and easily “flushed with food and wine” (p. 177). Povl reddens readily, frequently, and forcefully throughout the story. After enjoying a glass of wine, “he suddenly blushed so deeply that his eyes seemed to water with the heat from his burning cheeks” (p. 173), and later again, “the blood rushed to his face; it sank back, mounted again and kept glowing darkly through the tan of his cheeks” (p. 180). Susan Brantly finds that Povl is connected with nature and “the watery element of the sea […] the same essences that the dry Mr. Clay despises” (2002, 195). Povl plunges into the story, setting solids in motion. In his company, “even Mr. Clay had strangely come to life. It was as if the young runner […] had made his own old blood run freer; he even had a faint pink in his cheeks, like that of a painted woman” (Dinesen 1993, 172).

In Ehrengard, too, blushing betrays the male body’s “reenfleshed” (Thomas 2002, 71) involvement in the flows of the natural world, which Cazotte has disowned, aestheticized, and feminized. Cazotte observes the colors of the landscape, and he dreams of replicating in Ehrengard’s face the phenomenon known as “Alpenglühen” (alpine glow), when “[a]fter the sun has set, and as the whole majestic mountain landscape is already withdrawing into itself, suddenly the row of summits, all on their own, radiate a divine fire, a celestial, deep rose flame, as if they were giving up a long kept secret” (Dinesen 1993, 234). During the catastrophe, however, it is Cazotte’s own body that is naturalized, revealing its “play of […] colors” (p. 234). Dinesen repeatedly reminds her readers that Cazotte “disliked the sight of human blood outside the human body” (p. 276), and the older man only narrowly escapes the bloodletting that befalls his younger counterparts, Boris and Matthias. Yet the flow of his blood has already divulged its “long kept secret,” and Cazotte’s immediate disappearance from Babenhausen, and his failure to complete the painting, indicate the severity of his exposure. Cazotte’s irrepressible blushing, I suggest, again challenges the ideology of masculine corporeal inviolability. Dinesen’s late sex comedy, in other words, not only “reverses” (Smyth 2004, 189) Kierkegaard’s The Seducer’s Diary; it also continues the work of “The Monkey” by deconstructing Cazotte’s painting of Ehrengard as “bathing […] Diana” (Dinesen 1993, 254). Cazotte’s flushed face in the final scene reminds us of the male body’s disavowed “debt to nature” (Kristeva 1980, 102) and lays bare the fact that men, too, have “bodies of water” (Neimanis 2017, 1). Instead of Ehrengard, it is Cazotte himself who is exposed as “seaborn” (Dinesen 1993, 232).

Conclusion

Gender is a key factor in shaping perceptions of environmental relationships, and moving toward sustainability requires that we rethink dominant ideas about both femininity and masculinity. Man, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, is not only born but also made, yet what still “remains under-addressed are the myriad ways in which masculine roles, identities, and practices shape human relationships with the more-than-human world” (Macgregor and Seymour 2017, 10). Neither re-armoring the male body nor mythopoeticizing men as indomitable warriors will help us articulate adequate responses to chemical pollution, environmental injustice, mass extinction, ocean acidification, and climate change. A more fruitful strategy would be to adopt a stance of “insurgent vulnerability” based on the acknowledgment “that we all inhabit trans-corporeal interchanges, processes, and flows” (Alaimo 2016, 108). For example, growing alarm about deteriorating semen quality and declining male fertility has often been “reinforced by militaristic language” warning that “men were losing the sex wars” and thus “shift[ing] focus from the vulnerabilities of the male body” (Daniels 2006, 53, 54, 56). Mobilized more productively, however, such concerns can also stimulate male awareness of environmental justice issues, forge links between male and female environmental health debates, and involve men more strongly in traditionally female-centered campaigns to limit the industrial use of phthalates, microplastics, and other chemical and endocrine-disrupting toxins.

Current feminist, ecofeminist, and new materialist scholars debate how notions of female corporeal leakiness can be rescued from their more essentialist and derogatory meanings and used to formulate a new environmental ethic (Stephens 2014). Grosz wonders why “[t]here are virtually no phenomenological accounts of men’s fluids” (1994, 198), while Benjamin, Theweleit, Foster, and others critique the literary, cultural, intellectual, and political valorization of impervious masculinity throughout the 20th century and even today.⁶ Numerous critics have analyzed literary texts’ key role in perpetuating hegemonic codes of “manly” identity and behavior that situate men in transcendent, alienated, adversarial, or exploitative relationships vis-á-vis women and the natural world (e.g., Kolodny 1984). Conversely, however, cultural and literary production and analysis can also help germinate a creative imagination and “pave the way for the construction of new masculinities and new relations between men and nature” (Brandt and Cenamor 2019, ix).

Crafting a gender-ambiguous authorial persona, Isak Dinesen published stories in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, but she also permitted Seven Gothic Tales and Winter’s Tales (1942) to be reproduced as Overseas Editions freely distributed among U.S. servicemen fighting in World War II (Rabinowitz 2014, 114–115). Dinesen’s fiction teems with characters who exhibit “deviant masculinity,” insofar as their “defining desires and identifications are ‘perverse’ with respect […] to a phallic standard” (Silverman 1992, 1). Like many of Dinesen’s stories, both “The Monkey” and Ehrengard raise doubts about their male protagonists’ libidinal investments and identifications. Throughout “The Monkey,” Boris labors under a cloud of suspicion concerning his involvement in sexual practices that people “had learnt to connect […] somehow with those romantic and sacred shores of ancient Greece” (Dinesen 1991, 111). And while Ehrengard’s Cazotte enjoys a reputation as “conqueror and seducer” (Dinesen 1993, 218) of women, he is most prominently shown deliberately foregoing the “physical delight” of heterosexual relations in favor of a “celestial embrace” (p. 245).

What has primarily concerned me here, however, is not whether such male characters can be read as a-, bi-, or homosexual, but rather how these narratives queer “the hard, organized, phallic body devoid of all internal viscera” (Theweleit 1987, 218). In her rarefied stories set among white European aristocrats, I have argued, Dinesen pursues the important strategy of imbricating male characters in “a metaphysics of fluids, where the being of any location depends on its surrounding and where we cannot delineate clearly what is inside and outside” (Young 2005, 81). Dinesen’s writing, then, yields not an affront to masculinity but a timely challenge to men’s “internalized invincibility” (Pease 2019, 120) and an invitation to consider what alternative meanings masculine embodiment can have in a participatory social and ecological context. In her narratives “[t]he masculine, too, flows with […] the elements” (Neimanis 2017, 82), and this male fluidification is not incidental, but rather a recurrent feature in her project of reorienting gender and embodiment.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Peter Mortensen

Notes

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