Because the work of Isak Dinesen reflects her patrician inclinations, her skeptical view of "emancipated" women, and her high regard for the symbolic—rather than the sociological or psychological—value of art, her stories often appear fairly remote from contemporary concerns; in a world animated largely by individual striving for equality and self-realization, Dinesen seems to speak, conservatively, for values that many of us have learned to distrust. And yet, Dinesen's work is deeply rooted in her abiding preoccupation with a problem that is alive in our own time. Experienced as a disjunction between identity and role, or between self-image and social stereotype, this problem has been formulated by Simone de Beauvoir as a conflict between selfhood and "otherness." In her analysis of the social, psychological, and political implications of "otherness" for women, de Beauvoir has shown that the role of "other" deprives one of autonomy, of a sense of self based upon norms that are appropriately female, and ultimately of a valid personal and generic identity. Quite simply, to be cast as the "other" is, for de Beauvoir, to lose one's sense of oneself as a subject and to accept a peripheral, passive role as object in a busy world dominated largely by men. But for Dinesen, "otherness," despite its dubious implications for individual autonomy, is a vital fragment of human identity that must be acknowledged and accepted before selfhood can be achieved.
Dinesen's preoccupation with the idea of "otherness" appears in virtually all her published work; as a major theme, a source of metaphor, and a seed of dramatic situation, therefore, this idea bears looking at from a strictly literary point of view. But from another perspective, one might explore this idea in her work simply for its own sake, to consider possibilities that may be obscured by the tendency to conceive the roles of subject and object, self and "other," as mutually exclusive. If one has learned, in other words, to reject the role of "other" as threatening to the integrity of the self, Dinesen may reveal self and "other" as two states of being that can co-exist in fruitful tension. Like all the great antinomies which bracket human existence, self and "other" may be seen, in the words of one of her characters, as "two locked caskets, each of which contains the key to the other." And to achieve a sense of the relationship between them may be, as it is for the characters in Dinesen's work, to widen the range of one's own experience and to understand that experience more fully.
