“Dressed up in the body of an old woman”: Gothic Conventions in Ingemann, Andersen, Blixen and Høeg

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Despite growing in prominence in the popular and critical mind in recent years, Gothic fiction has yet to be examined within the Danish literary canon. This paper attempts to fill that void by demonstrating an ongoing negotiation of Gothic conventions in select works by B.S. Ingemann, H.C. Andersen, Karen Blixen and Peter Høeg.  In addition to reworking traditional Gothic conventions for a Danish context, these writers also draw attention to core features of the Gothic genre that have generally escaped critical attention, such as the peculiar surface-depth perspective that is played out on all levels of narration, setting and characterization. The excessive foregrounding of surfaces contributes to the extremely unstable sense of personal identity, which is the Gothic counternarrative’s most important contribution to the representation of the human predicament in the post-romantic consciousness and which clashes dramatically with the particular Danish discourse of “Dannelse.”