Identity

In the first paragraph of the story, Dinesen explains that the events happened one hundred and fifty years ago in the Danish countryside. The two young people at the center of the story are Sigismund, aged twenty-four, and Lovisa, aged nineteen, newlyweds who have been married only a week. In Dinesen's aesthetic—indeed in her view of the world—such facts are important because much of human identity comes from milieu, the particular place and time in which an individual finds himself. Sigismund, the story says, is a "squire," a propertied gentleman-farmer; that is his role. Lovisa's role is the gentleman-farmer's loving wife. It is a case not so much of individual but of traditional, even geographic, identity. The two young people have not yet transcended their milieu to become fully individual; rather, they still bear the impress of the countryside where they were born and...