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Chapter 8
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
The next morning, Einar peppers Greta with questions about the dinner, which he doesn’t remember because he wasn’t there. It was Lili. Greta tells him Lili and Hans arranged to meet later in the day. She’s tired and edgy. Einar wishes she could—or would—just let Lili come and go as Lili pleases. But Greta has expectations, and she presses Einar to abandon his own painting so that Lili can come and pose for Greta. Einar doesn’t like feeling forced to choose between his work and hers, but he capitulates.
Einar and Lili are distinct personalities. Note the tension between Lili’s desire for autonomy (to come and go at will) and Einar’s desire to please his wife. This foreshadows conflict to come in their relationship. It’s hard to live as two people, and the experience causes Einar increasing levels of distress.
Active
Themes
Einar begins the transformation into Lili by picking one of the sample dresses. Then he undresses and carefully tucks his penis between his legs and secures it with medical tape. He slips into the undergarments Greta helped him purchase, drops the dress over his head, and applies makeup with careful artistry. These external changes set the stage, but Lili doesn’t arrive—doesn’t fill up Einar’s skin—until he asks her to, wakes her up where she slumbers inside him.
There is both a self-conscious artistry to the way Einar becomes Lili and a sense that, inevitably, she is the true expression of their existence. He has to call her forth (something that gets easier and easier as time goes on) because he spent so much of his life thus far trying to keep her hidden.
Active
Themes
Each day for nearly a week, Lili poses for Greta in the mornings and evenings and spends her afternoons on outings with Hans. They explore the town of Menton and drive to other villages and towns up and down the coast where they buy art and souvenirs in open-air markets. Lili learns that Hans was married once—to a girl he got pregnant when they were teenagers. After they settled in Paris, however, the girl drowned, and he never married again. When asked, she tells him the first made-up fact about Lili: that she is 24, which is much younger than Einar. She also tells him she would like to marry someday, and he gently but firmly tells her not to pin her hopes on him.
One day, as Lili and Hans drink beers in an outdoor café, pickpockets steal Lili’s handbag off the back of her chair. It contains little of value, just some money, a pair of novelty sunglasses, and a tube of lipstick. Still, Hans insists they make a police report. It isn’t until they’re on the very steps of the police station that Lili realizes she can’t. Legally, she doesn’t exist. She has no identification. She doesn’t even have a last name. She says the purse doesn’t matter, but Hans insists. She only escapes when, like the night at the Artists’ Ball, her nose begins to bleed profusely. Hans scoops her into his arms and carries her back to her apartment.
Active
Themes
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