SOURCE: Stambaugh, Sara. “Misogyny.” In The Witch and the Goddess in the Stories of Isak Dinesen: A Feminist Reading, pp. 83-107. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Stambaugh examines Dinesen's portrayals of the effects of patriarchal Christianity on men and women in her short fiction.

Dinesen's opposition to Christianity appears not only in the stories I have discussed but is also reflected elsewhere, in “The Caryatids,” for example, in the story of the priest, Father Bernhard, who opposes the gypsies but ultimately capitulates to them. Her general attitude is expressed by Boris of “The Monkey” as he avoids Pastor Rosenquist: “beware … of people who have in the course of their lives neither taken part in an orgy nor gone through the experience of childbirth, for they are dangerous people” (SGT [Seven Gothic Tales], p. 145). Her opposition to Protestant denigration of the flesh is also reflected...