Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Susan Hardy Aiken

Critical Essay by Susan Hardy Aiken

SOURCE: Aiken, Susan Hardy. “Writing (in) Exile: Isak Dinesen and the Poetics of Displacement.” In Women's Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, pp. 113-31. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Aiken underscores the “conflation of exile, sexual difference, voice, and writing” in Dinesen's “The Dreamers.”

People who dream … know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom … the freedom of the artist.

—Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

The Art of Dreaming

Day is a space of time without meaning, and … it is with the coming of dusk, with the lighting of the first star and the first candle, that things will become what they really are, and will come forth to meet me. … During my first months after my return to Denmark from Africa, I had great trouble in seeing anything at all...
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