Dinesen, Isak | Lynda Sexson (essay date summer 2001)
Lynda Sexson (essay date summer 2001)
SOURCE: Sexson, Lynda. “Bride's Blood and God's Laugh: Reading the Evidence of Desire on ‘The Blank Page’ of the Torah.” Religion and Literature 33, no. 2 (summer 2001): 37-57.
[In the following essay, Sexson utilizes Hebraic law to interpret Dinesen's “The Blank Page.”]
Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived.
—Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Suppose, deuteronomic law speculates, a man marries a woman, but after going in to her, he dislikes her. And suppose the man lies, I married the woman; but when I lay with her, I did not find evidence of her virginity (Deut. 22:13-21).1 He lies with her and then lies about her. This is the law and the lie that Isak Dinesen unravels and re-knits into her miniature narrative, “The Blank Page.” The story, more a proposal than a plot, calls out: Look where the ‘tokens...
[The entire page is 9781 words long]
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