ABSTRACT
'Real art always includes some witchcraft' - thus wrote Karen Blixen from Africa in 1929 to one of her correspondents. As Elizabeth Bronfen reminds us in her Over Her Dead Body, the feminine diabolic gets its name from the Greek diaballo, meaning to split, change, cause strife or deceive. Blixen's choice of a monkey as the Prioress's demon or familiar, suggests what has been regarded as a special kinship between women and primates. In urging the concept of change and multiplicity as the basis of true 'jouissance' (fun) Pellegrina is self-consciously, pitting herself against the philosophers, that is, the male, patriarchal concept of unified identity. This subversive idea is central to Blixen's oeuvre as a whole, but in particular it furnishes the dynamics of her story 'The Monkey', a text which concludes with a final, hair-raising episode of metamorphosis - a monkey turning into a Prioress.
