| This dissertation brings together the work of Isak Dinesen (1885-1962) and Bernard Williams (1929-2003). Bernard Williams was one of the leading philosophers of the late 20th century, and wrote on a wide variety of topics: agency and responsibility, personal identity, philosophy and literature, classical thought and our relationship to the ancient Greeks, to name a few. Many of those familiar with Dinesen know Out of Africa, the memoir she wrote about her 17 years in Kenya, but towards the end of her time in Africa, she began writing what would become her first published collection of short stories. Dinesen wrote until her death in 1962, becoming one of one of Denmark's most notable writers and a major figure in 20th century fiction. The pairing is not intuitive, but I hope to show that both offer insightful treatments of a network of concerns central to the study of religious ethics.; I begin with some introductory remarks on ethics and genre, focusing on the need to look beyond the theoretical forms on which we often rely on in ethics, especially if we are to do justice to the importance of necessity and chance in our ethical thought. Vulnerability to necessity and chance is a defining characteristic of our humanity, so we must acknowledge and address the importance of luck and the role played by forces beyond our control in our attempts to think well about living well. Williams and Dinesen both write about these forces in ways we in religious ethics would do well to attend.; In Chapter One, I give an overview of Williams' Shame and Necessity. Here, Williams calls our attention to the models of human action and experience expressed in Greek tragedy, and suggests that by reevaluating what is there, and realizing how much of it is still alive in our own ethical thought, we can recover the ideas of moral luck and necessity that have been suppressed in the dominant traditions of moral philosophy.; Dinesen shares Williams' intuition that the world is not shaped to our interests, much less to our specifically ethical interests. The bulk of the dissertation will comprise my readings of two of her paradigmatic short stories, "Sorrow Acre" and "The Cardinal's First Tale." In Chapters Two and Three, I give an extended analysis of "Sorrow Acre," in which we see characters struggling with some of the larger forces we have seen Williams address. Necessity, responsibility, and moral luck are central, as is the connection between selfhood and storytelling. Like Williams, Dinesen draws attention to the instability of some of the things we consider part of a flourishing life, and the ease with which those things we value can be lost. She also emphasizes the danger of self-deception in these matters. In Chapter Four, I examine the vision of human flourishing that Dinesen presents in "The Cardinal's First Tale." This shows us another aspect of the connection between selfhood and storytelling, but it also raises some important questions about gender, selfhood, and virtue.; I conclude with some more general thoughts about Dinesen, religious ethics, and genre, specifically Williams' concept of stark fiction, Lee Yearley's idea of persuasive presentation, and Dinesen's relation to both. In all of this, we will see that Dinesen highlights the ethical challenge of telling an honest story, one that is truthful concerning the character of the self and the world. |
