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Chapter 23
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
It takes Greta weeks to get the apartment in Widow House back into livable condition. Although she’d hired a caretaker to mind the building (which she’d bought with trust fund money many years ago), he did a poor job. But by the early months of 1931, she and Lili are resettled, at least physically. Lili seems restless, and Greta intuitively knows that soon, Lili will want to strike out on her own. Greta wishes Lili would stay, that they could share a life of peace and quiet, “alone but together,” like they used to.
Greta hung on to the apartment in Copenhagen, but it isn’t the same as when the Wegeners left years earlier. Likewise, her relationship has been totally transformed. She still wants to cling to what she had, first with Einar and then, in a changed form, with Lili. But it’s clear (even if she’s not yet ready to embrace the truth) that things have utterly changed. Greta’s thoughts here also suggest why her nontraditional relationship worked so well for her. She liked the connection she had to Einar and the relative freedom that she gained by living with Lili. Regardless, loving Lili means letting het go to live her own life eventually.
Active
Themes
Literary Devices
But things don’t go back to the way they were. The Danish government grants Greta’s divorce from Einar with a speed she finds appalling. Secretly, she had hoped it would be caught up in the bureaucracy for years. The government denies her request to issue a death certificate for Einar Wegener.
Greta’s shock at the speed of her divorce and her quest for a death certificate suggest the degree to which she hasn’t yet mourned the loss of her husband. Although she wants to cling to the life she once made with Einar as he was transitioning into Lili, she must let it go in order to complete her own transformation and begin to heal.
Active
Themes
One day in April, Greta runs into Hans at the Royal Academy of Arts. He tells her that she needs to let Lili, who is no longer the person Greta married, have her own life. Greta snaps that she has never stood in Lili’s way. But she feels sad and lonely. She realizes that she and Hans are standing at the foot of the staircase where she fell in love with Einar, and then it really hits her that Einar is dead. Hans moves closer to her. Outside, in the square, a boy with a long blue scarf and a girl are kissing passionately.
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