Einar Wegener would kill himself in the spring. He had
chosen a date – May 1, 1930 – after a year spent in torment. The
cause of his suffering was quite simple: he was sure he was a woman, born into
the wrong body. Or perhaps it was more complicated: sometimes Wegener, whose
life is soon to be portrayed on film by the Oscar-winning British actor Eddie
Redmayne in The Danish Girl,
felt he was two people in the same body, each fighting for supremacy.
One was a Danish
landscape painter, a steadfast man who, in his own words, “could withstand
storms”. He was married to a woman whose strength and talent matched, or
perhaps even surpassed, his own: Gerda Wegener, a successful Art Deco
illustrator who produced portraits of fashionable women for magazines such as
Vogue and La Vie Parisienne.
The other shared none of these qualities.
Lili Elbe was, as she set down in letters and notes for an autobiography, a
“thoughtless, flighty, very superficially-minded woman”, prone to fits of
weeping and barely able to speak in front of powerful men. But despite her
womanly defects, by February 1930 she was becoming too powerful for Wegener to
resist. “I am finished,” he wrote at the time. “Lili has known this for a long
time. That’s how matters stand. And consequently she rebels more vigorously every day.”
As it
turned out, Wegener did not commit suicide on the appointed date. In February
1930 he was told of a doctor who might be able to help him – who did, in
fact, perform a series of groundbreaking operations that allowed Einar to
become Lili. But all the same, by September 1931, Elbe was dead, the victim of
a misjudged surgery to transplant a womb into her body. (Ciclosporin, the drug
that prevents the rejection of transplanted organs, was first used successfully
in 1980, almost 50 years after Elbe's death.)
In the year before
her death, Elbe had divorced Gerda, given up painting, and was embarking
tentatively on a relationship with a French art dealer. “It is not with my
brain, not with my eyes, not with my hands that I want to be creative, but with
my heart and with my blood,” she wrote. “The fervent longing in my woman’s life
is to become the mother of a child.”
According to her own
telling, Wegener’s transition into Elbe began by chance, when one of her wife’s
life models failed to turn up. The couple’s mutual friend, an actress named
Anna Larsen, suggested that the slight Einar might step in instead. At first
she resisted, but eventually she gave in to Gerda’s pleas. “I cannot deny,
strange as it may sound, that I enjoyed myself in this disguise. I liked the
feel of soft women’s clothing,” she wrote. “I felt very much at home in them
from the first moment.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/04/14/the-tragic-true-story-behind-the-danish-girl/
Structure of the Lead :
WHO :
WHEN :
WHAT :
WHY :
WHERE :
HOW :
Keywords :
1. torment : (n.) 痛苦
2. portray : (v.) 描繪
3. supremacy : (n.) 至高無上的
4. steadfast : (a.) 堅定的
5. surpass : (v.) 勝過，優於
5. surpass : (v.) 勝過，優於
6. superficially : (adv.) 淺薄地
7. vigorously : (adv.) 精神旺盛地
8. tentatively : (adv.) 暫時地
9. disguise : (v.) 偽裝
