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Knut Hamsun's novels Pan and Victoria focus on the tragedies of the attainment of love and then its subsequent loss due to the pressures of social conventions and responsibilities. In Pan, the male protagonist, Thomas Glahn, meets Edvarda, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and attempts to consummate his love for her. Due to an inability to engage in social interactions as he feels more akin to nature, Glahn cannot properly continue his relationship with Edvarda. In Victoria, Hamsun writes of Johannes Møller, the son of a miller, who falls in love with the daughter of a landowner, Victoria, who returns his love, but cannot show him her love due to her familial responsibilities. While many scholars focus on Glahn's and Johannes's respective troubled relationships with mortal women, they discuss Iselin, a nature spirit, only in respect to Glahn's relationship with nature and his ideal of a feminine woman.
In Pan, Hamsun initially introduces Iselin as an amorous nature spirit, a legend that comes alive when the protagonist enters the northern forest. In Even Arntzen's article, "Munken Vendt-på sporet av Knut Hamsuns mytiske estetikk," he considers the characters fantasy figures that arise from Glahns's mind (Arntzen 1996). Once again, in Victoria, Iselin appears as a character from one of Johannes's fictional writings. Johannes creates Munken Vendt as his poetic voice, and through the narration of Munken Vendt, a reader finds Iselin (Arntzen 1996). While I do not discuss Iselin in greater detail in Hamsun's later drama Munken Vendt, I will mention that Hamsun develops her ethereal character into a mortal woman who also loves Munken Vendt, yet does not overcome his initial rejection of her. Though I do not discuss the difference of interpretations in context of the play, I broach this difference from the perspective of Iselin to refer to Hamsun's formulation of Iselin's character. For some readers, Iselin remains mythical, and symbolic of a mythical female figure of creation, a point that supports my view of Iselin as the origin of sublimated desire. In this article, I use Jacques Lacan's ideas on sublimation to describe four different aspects of how Iselin evokes libidinal desire from the male characters. The first part entails Glahn's encounter with Iselin as a nature deity in Pan, as...