"There are many that I can be": The Poetics of Self-Performance in Isak Dinesen's "The Dreamers"

Abstract

This paper looks at issues of identity in relation to artistic performances of the feminine self. Isak Dinesen’s story “The Dreamers” from her collection Seven Gothic Tales (1934) is remarkably in tune with contemporary theories of identity construction, notably with Judith Butler’s concept of gender performance. Pellegrina Leoni, the protagonist of Dinesen’s tale, is an acclaimed opera singer who loses her voice in a tragic accident. After having herself symbolically buried, she assumes an infinite series of masks and masquerades. My reading demonstrates how by abandoning her rigid star persona, Dinesen’s heroine comes to perform a far more mobile selfhood. Her relentless role-play stands in stark contrast to a narrative desire which seeks to impose a stable identity upon her and by which she is eventually killed in a fatal scene of interpellation. By reading “The Dreamers” as a quasi-manifesto of Isak Dinesen’s art, I argue that her poetic project feeds on a complex dialectics of self-masking and self-presentation. It is in and through her masquerade that this modernist writer develops a compelling form of feminine self-expression.