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 of virginity’ might have been and in...