Nostalgia Personified: Isabelle Eberhardt and Karen Blixen

Abstract

Iconic personalities, who represent elements of a given time or event, become poles around which nostalgia can form. European colonies had their share of such figures but few women transcended the notoriety of colonialism to have a true post-independence appeal. Two literary personalities, Isabelle Eberhardt in Algeria and Karen Blixen in Kenya, managed to do so as much by the manner in which they conducted themselves in their respective colonies as by the way their admirers and champions reimagined their colonial lives for them. In the introduction to the recent volume, Constructing Charisma, Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi point out that “charisma is both a social and an individual trait” for charismatic personalities are as dependent on their followers in defining their charisma as they are in projecting the personal traits that define them as such.¹Although neither Blixen nor Eberhardt qualify as charismatic, as defined by Berenson and Giloi, their status as icons of nostalgia was dependent, in much the same way, on the manner their lives were imaged and reconstructed by their “followers.”² The endorsement of their celebrity occurred, not in the colonial space but outside of it, when the colonial moment of both these women had passed. The renown of both was posthumous: Eberhardt’s in a literal sense after her death; Blixen’s in a metaphoric sense, at the demise of her emotional, entrepreneurial and colonial life, for her departure from Kenya coincided with the death of her lover, Dennis Finch Hatton, and the collapse of her farming venture. Recapturing what their lives were thought to have been, rather than what they actually were, was the essential element in constructing the aura of nostalgia that came to surround both these women in the aftermath of their passage through the colonies. It is the slippage between the life lived and the life imagined with which this chapter is concerned.

“Les lieux où l’on a aimé et où l’on a souffert, où l’on a pensé et rêvé, surtout, les pays quittés sans espoir de jamais les revoir, nous apparaissent plus beaux par le souvenir qu’ils le furent en réalité.

Isabelle Eberhardt (1901)

… when one comes to realize the whole nature of life, which is: that nothing lasts and in that very fact lies some of its glory…

Karen Blixen (1931)