Witches’ Milk: Queer Breastfeeding and Alternative Kin-Making in Isak Dinesen’s “The Caryatids”

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I use the recent convergence of queer, feminist, and ecocritical perspectives under the heading of “queer ecology” to analyse how Danish bilingual author Isak Dinesen (real name: Karen Blixen) deploys breastfeeding in her Gothic story “The Caryatids: An Unfinished Story.” Queer ecology entails critiquing the assumption (or myth) that heterosexual identities, monogamous relationships, consanguineous kinship networks, and reproductive nuclear families are better, healthier, or more “natural” than other formations. I situate Dinesen in opposition to the tradition of Enlightenment “lactivism,” whose proponents (chief among them Jean-Jacques Rousseau) celebrated exclusive maternal breastfeeding within hetero-reproductive nuclear family structures. In my reading of “The Caryatids,” I place special emphasis on three Gothic-related female characters—the incestuous wife, the adulterous mother, and the “gypsy” witch—who breastfeed queerly, knowingly or unknowingly thwarting the demand that women nurse the monogamous and patriarchal bio-family order into existence. When removed from its sanctioned familial context, I argue, the lactating breast in Dinesen’s narrative proves a disorderly signifier of errancy and dissent, pointing towards the possibility of alternative, emergent, contingent, and potentially more sustainable configurations of gender, relationship, and community.

KEYWORDS:

• Isak Dinesen
• queer ecology
• literature
• Gothic
• breastfeeding

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Berlant and Warner (1998) define heteronormativity as “the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent … but also privileged” (p. 548).

2. Emery’s (2017) reading connects the “aristocratic” Dinesen with avant-garde Russian writers of the early Soviet period, whose writings also “work against the grain of patriarchal curses and patrilineal property” (p. 78).

3. In 1938, however, Dinesen published a Danish version of the story entitled “Karyatiderne—En ufuldendt fantastisk fortælling” [“The Caryatids: An Unfinished Fantastic Tale”] in the Swedish magazine Ord och Bild (Brantly, 2002, p. 163).

4. Childerique’s “brother” is unnamed in the English text, but in the Danish version, he carries the name Childeric (Dinesen, 1957). By giving the couple homonymous names, Dinesen reinforces the story’s Gothic confusion of identities.

5. When Dinesen wrote her story, the word “gypsy,” which many now consider unacceptable, was widely used to refer to itinerant people with Roma and other ethnic backgrounds.

6. Rousseau’s (2009) birthplace and home is alluded to, for example, when readers are told that Childerique’s step-mother “did not come from Dordogne, but from the Province of Geneva” (p. 129).

7. In “The Monkey” (1994), for example, it is the disinclination that Boris von Schreckenstein and Athena Hopballehus feel towards any heterosexual coupling, rather than the possibility of their half-siblinghood, that drives them apart.

8. Interestingly, in Rousseau’s unfinished and posthumously published sequel to Emile, Emile and Sophie; or The Solitaries (1781), Sophie is seduced by another man and gives birth to an illegitimate child (Rousseau, 2009, pp. 270–330).

9. According to Brantly (2002), “blossom” figures in Dinesen’s fiction appear law-abiding yet often prove capable of “transgressing the rules of patriarchy” (p. 11) by committing sexual indiscretions and bearing illegitimate children.

10. In his brief but insightful commentary on the story, Emery (2017) observes that “a noblewoman nurses a peasant infant; incompatible with the patriarchal control of maternal functions that sustains hereditary castes, their relationships suggests an alternative social order, perhaps more generous and free” (p. 104).

11. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Indian classical musician Uday Shankar performed in Europe with a French pianist and dancer, Simone Barbier, who took the stage name Simkie. Dinesen, it seems, derived her “gypsy” names from this pair of popular performers.

12. Dinesen’s interest in Native American culture was inspired by her father, Wilhelm Dinesen, who spent two years (1872–1874) in Wisconsin and published his memoirs as “Boganis”—a name given to him, he claimed, by friends among the Chippewa tribe.

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Peter Mortensen

Peter Mortensen is associate professor of English and steering committee member of the Center for Environmental Humanities at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the editor (with Hannes Bergthaller) of Framing the Environmental Humanities (Brill, 2018) and the author of many ecocritical essays on European and American literature and culture.