Gender Trouble in The Danish Girl

Today’s audience may be unfamiliar with the story of Einar Wegener in The Danish

Girl yet, in spite of the adaptations of his story in order to shoot it, we still feel shocked while

we watch through his story. A successfully famous landscape painter married to Gerda

Wegener, Einar is a comparatively shy and introverted character. Gerda on the other hand,

cannot be called as successful as his husband whereas she is more sociable and she is more

extroverted. One day upon Gerda’s painting model’s not arriving she basically asks Einar to

be her model. To this request, the audience sees, the instant rejection of Einar, while the sharp

rejection does not arouse any remarkable importance when analysed thoroughly, this rejection

could be the hints of suppressed feminine feelings of Einar, which is the subject of this paper.

Although Einar rejects to be Gerda’s painting model at first, we see that he is a better

feminine model in a way as he timidly asks or implies how he must pose and how his hands,

feet and impression should be. Regarding the post-war world of Denmark after WWI we can

empathize with his timidity and shyness to be a counter gender model. After a couple of times

helping Einar to wear clothes, socks, shoes and make-up, Einar himself starts to visit city

theatre backstage to pick up women clothes and wigs, which we can regard as the starting

point of his gender transformation on the way of becoming Lili. Upon being asked to join a

party that famous intelligentsia and artists will also join but Einar, being an introverted

person, refuses this offer. Although he does not want to join this party as Einar himself, with

another offer coming from Gerda he accepts to refashion himself and joins the party as a

woman, her name being Lili. That is the main point of Butler in her essay ‘Performative Acts’

as she suggest that “The acts by which gender is constituted bear similarities to performative

acts within theatrical contexts.” (Butler 521), with another saying she means that

transformation of Einer and his gender is something as usual as we see in a movie character’s
evolution through that movie. In France, to show a famous painting trader her paintings Gerda

brings Lili with her and they come across with a childhood friend of Einer, who turns out to

have had a sexual relationship with Einer when they were children and Einer wore his

grandmother’s apron. If we are to analyse this “gender trouble” (Butler 505-516) situation in

Freudian context it would be correct to comment that this suppressed childhood relationship

of him came up with Lili afterwards and this process is what French philosopher Lacan called

‘Mirror stage’ in his essay ‘Mirror Stage’. Lili’s mirror stage can be said to be completed

when she undergoes a surgery and becomes a biological women as well, after which she

works as a beauty expert in a shop. So within all these aspects it can be said that in the light of

Judith Butler’s essay ‘Performative Acts’, Einar’s transformation process indicates that

gender is not a stable identity, rather it is constituted in time, through which this

transformation can be examined.

If we are to divide The Danish Girl into three divisions that will elucidate Einar’s

transformation better, it would be correct to say that the first one of this divisions ends at

Einar’s preparation to the party in which he becomes Lili and meets with Henrik as the pre-

stage to his imago. As Lacan suggests the child recognises himself for the first time in the

mirror, thus becoming aware of his unified and, more important, external body. Since this

body, however, does not correspond to the infant’s otherwise still fragile state of being, the

reflection in the mirror, or imago, is seen as the Ideal-I, while the pursuit of becoming

said I will last his whole life time. Also, Lacan states that “this form [the Ideal-I] situates the

agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction” (Lacan 503).

Accordingly it can be said that the child Lili starts to shape the Ideal-I imitating Gerda by

wearing socks, wearing make-up, walking and talking. The preparation to the party, in this

aspect, can be regarded as the preparation to acceptance of ideal identity within another real

body. In spite of rejecting to wear the dress Gerda wanted Einar to just hold, cuddling the
same dress and feeling the soft material it is made makes Einar excited since it awakens

suppressed feelings coming from his childhood where he kissed a boy wearing an apron. As

Lacan suggests, though the shoes do not fit his feet, they are used in the movie to convey the

clashing ideas of ideal identity versus the real one.

The second division to be made in The Danish Girl is the Lili’s continuity of imitation

but this time not only through Gerda but also a prostitute, as well, which we can refer as the

Ideal-I and Real-I of Einar’s meeting point. By copycatting the prostitute’s mimics and

gestures Lili lets her emotions come up but there is a problem as her ideal feminine body does

not parallel with his real masculine, male body and when Lili realizes this ideal versus real

relationship she cannot hide her real feelings anymore. Annalena Rolenz in her article writes

that “Einar, based on the filmic developments, knows without a doubt that he is a woman, but

is not able to envisage quite yet all the ramifications of such knowledge” (Lorenz 1). The

conflict between Einar’s belief in his ideal identity and Gerda’s initial disbelief about this

makes Einar in a way exclude himself from society and develop unsuccessful relationships. In

response to Gerda’s lamentation “Stop playing that stupid stupid game.” Lili answers “Please

Gerda, don’t you think this is a game.” (The Danish Girl, 70-71). What makes Einar a woman

is not his clothes, make-up or gesture rather we can say that “Gender reality is performative

which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed.” (Butler 527).

In this context we cannot put all the blame on anyone alone because neither society’s

condition was convenient enough with a transgender case nor science itself was developed

enough to prescribe or guide Einar in the best way; we should keep in mind that initial

diagnosises of the doctors were either schizophrenia pervertedness or similar identifications

about his feelings being lies or wrong. So it would be correct to infer that in spite of all these

oppositions, Einar succeeds to find and identify with his ideal-I by copying and imitating

through semi-reflective mirrors.

 The third and last division of The Danish Girl, according to this order, would begin

after the first surgery is done and last till the end of the movie. This part of the movie is the

most dramatic part as Einar does not only identify with his ideal-I but also says that he saw

his most beautiful dream (The Danish Girl, 109). We can say that with the operation Einar

undergoes his mirror stage is completed and he reaches his ideal personality. Working in a

cosmetics store as a beauty expert and acting accordingly makes Lili feel better. Since gender

is not a role requiring whether disguising or expressing certain qualities, Lili achieves what

Einar wanted but could not manage since childhood. Being physically beaten or complained

does not make a big difference for Lili to be what she wants to be since that way is the only

possible way to be happy for her. She does not need any other women to copy or imitate

instead she wants to bear a child just like any other “normal” woman. Although there are

arrogant and incapable people who will not understand Lili, there still will be people like Dr.

Warnekros, who conducted the surgery, and Henrik that will continue to be in Lili’s life. The

movie presenting us with the previous hardships of being transgender, it can be seen as a

metaphor to the situation of the transgender in today’s world. Since we can obviously infer

from the movie that without reaching our ideal-I’s it is almost unbearable to live, there is not a

strict border about genders. As Butler suggests “Genders, then, can be neither true nor false,

neither real nor apparent.” (Butler 528). So, what other people should do is to let each other

be who they want to be and de-construct what traditional way of thinking has brought up and

seems to require.

To summarize this paper we can divide the movie into three sections, each

representing one stage of what Lacan suggests as mirror stage. While from beginning of the

movie until the party scene can be regarded as first section, from that scene on until the first

surgery Lili undergoes second, and the rest we can see as the last section. Each part shows

how a little child starts to shape his ideal identity, the process of adapting that identity and the
struggles of newly shaped identity. Though Lacan does not necessarily talk about transgender

mirror stage, in this paper I tried to explain how this process is adapted to a transgender

person while identifying him with his new gender referring to Judith Butler’s article

‘Performative Acts’. Considering the historical context this paper aimed to give explanation to

The Danish Girl getting the help of Lacan and Butler primarily. It can be concluded while

gender is not a stable role of people in the society, choosing one gender one another can be

judged neither as true or false. As we saw in Einar’s situation it can be a male born with

female instincts and feminine nature or a female born with male instincts and masculine

nature.

REFERENCE

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gneder Constitution: An Essay in

Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 519. Web.

Butler, Judith. “Gender, Sexuality, Performance – Gender Trouble: Feminism and the

Subversion of Identity” Live Theory (1990): 505. Web.

 Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed

in Psychoanalytic Experience” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B.

Leitch et al. (2001):1285-90. Print.

Lorenz, Annalena. "The Danish Girl (2015) and the De/Construction of Gender

Identity." Inquiries Journal 8.06 (2016). <http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/a?id=1423>

The Danish Girl. Dir. Tom Hooper. Perf. Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander. N.p.,

n.d. Web. 27 Nov. 2015.