Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea as Intertext in Isak Dinesen’s “The Dreaming Child”

Abstract

This article argues that Henrik Ibsen’s play Fruen fra Havet is a significant intertext in Isak Dinesen’s short story “The Dreaming Child.” I maintain that Dinesen knew Ibsen’s works well, including the play in question, and the similarities between the two texts cannot be pure coincidence. The article examines the concrete intertextual connections and shows that they occur on several levels of the texts: story, theme, characters, motifs and symbols. Both works tell the story of a marital crisis; in each case the main female character is under the spell of a sailor with whom she once fell in love, and this memory disturbs her relationship with her husband. To each wife, the husband is mainly a partner in a marriage of convenience, whereas the sailor represents unbound passion and absolute freedom. Both texts involve the motif of a dead child who is an important link between the sailor and the female character. Each story culminates in the female character demanding that her husband make an extremely difficult fundamental choice; in both cases, the husband fulfills his wife’s request. Thereby each woman is freed from inner turmoil and finds mental balance.