K. Blixen’s Winter’s Tales: Intertextual Interaction with H. Ibsen’s Texts

Abstract

The article considers various intertextual references to H. Ibsen in three short stories by the Danish modernist writer Karen Blixen / Isak Dinesen (1885–1962) from her collection Winter’s Tales (1942): “The Pearl,” “The Sailor-Boy’s Tale,” and “The Young Man with the Carnation.” These elements suggest an intertextual dialogue with Henrik Ibsen’s plays Love’s Comedy (1862), A Doll’s House (1879), and the narrative poem Terje Vigen (1862). These elements, functioning as markers, prompt the reader to seek analogies in an attempt to fill in semantic gaps. They appear in different forms across the stories. In one case, it is a direct quotation from a line in Love’s Comedy; in another, Ibsen himself is introduced as a character. A character who exhibits certain similarities to the protagonist of H. Ibsen’s Love’s Comedy and can illustrate the possible fate of Ibsen’s character after his departure into the mountains represents another variation of the intertextual dialogue marker. Finally, the character’s name matching that of a figure in Ibsen’s poetry or drama may also be a signal for the reader to draw on his background knowledge of the playwright’s works — just as Ibsen’s antithesis of “plains vs. mountains” takes on new meaning in Blixen’s writing. Henrik Ibsen’s artistic world appears in Blixen’s texts in a simplified form. His characters are reduced to the level of types and placed in a long literary lineage of figures who have faced similar situations. On the other hand, the reader is invited to speculate on the further development of the character’s fate.