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Chapter 18
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Danish Girl, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gender Transitioning
Self-Transformation
Freedom and Constraint
Love and Acceptance
Courage
Loss and Grief
Summary
Analysis
In January of 1930, Einar travels to Germany. Alone. Greta had wanted to come, but Einar refused, unsure he could follow through with the surgeries if she were there to remind him of their happier days. Einar doesn’t want to hurt Greta, but he can’t go on unless things change. So, over Carlisle’s objections (he still thinks Einar should return to Dr. Buson), Einar sets out alone for Dresden and a series of operations about which he knows next to nothing.
Readers should be careful not to take Greta’s and Einar’s shared perception that a gender transition is like death as representative of all transgender people’s experiences. The book suggests that things feel so final to Einar in part because he doesn’t know much about the process and has no way to predict what his life will look like on the other side of it. Lili is blazing a trail for others to follow in the future without the benefit of any certainty of how it will pan out. But it the book also positions this choice as a reflection of a society with little tolerance for queer sexuality, hence the pressure to make a binary choice between male (Einar) or female (Lili). The death image also reflects the way that the historical Lili Elbe talked about her experience of transition in her memoir and in contemporary interviews.
Active
Themes
On the train, Einar’s eyes fall on a newspaper open to the obituary section. He wonders what his obituary—drafted by Greta and ruined, no doubt, by the editors at the newspapers—will say. He knows it won’t include the experiences that meant the most to him. Like his first memory of being swathed in his lacy christening gown and lifted from his crib by his grandmother, dressed in her fine summer solstice dress. He wanted to be surrounded by the eyelets of her sleeves and the lace of his dress forever.
Einar doesn’t begin to live as Lili until his mid-30s, but his gender dysphoria has been a constant in his life for as long as he can remember. This memory illustrates how long Einar has felt uncomfortable living as a male—his whole life. It gestures obliquely toward the possibility that Einar was born with an intersex condition and misgendered based on external genitalia. But it also cultivates readers’ empathy for the struggle transgender people face when asked (or forced) to conform to a gender with which they do not identify.
Active
Themes
Nor would the obituary describe the day Einar sold his first painting, when he was still a student attending the Royal Academy of Fine Arts on a scholarship for country boys. The Academy director had hung up the students’ artwork in the halls in such a way as to prominently display the works of his favorites, but a mysterious and authoritative Parisian art dealer had swept past these and straight for Einar’s tiny bog landscape even though it was hanging near the janitorial closet.
Active
Themes
And the obituary would miss the otherwise ordinary August day when Greta had walked, unannounced, into Einar’s life again. In the five years they were separated by the war, Einar had thought of her often and had come to consider her—with her vivacity, certainty, and drive—as his ideal of womanhood. She had showed up at his office, grabbed his hand, and confidently led him across town and to the street where Mr. Waud lived. Ducking behind parked cars, she led him close enough to watch the men were packing up Mr. Waud’s belongings in preparation for his return to California. Greta was excited because she would be staying behind, “free at last” with an ocean and a continent between her and her family.
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Nor would Einar’s obituary mark a day just the previous summer when Lili had woken up to the sound of Hans and Carlisle talking with Greta in the other room. After a while, Hans and Carlisle barged into her bedroom, helped her get dressed, and took her to the Tuileries Gardens where they sat and watched people pass by. The last time Lili had been to Tuileries before this, a passing schoolboy had called her a lesbian, stinging her with his cruel insult. Sitting between Hans and Carlisle, Lili had known her time with Einar was coming to an end, even if she didn’t know what that meant for him.
Active
Themes
