samme Resultat, som Naturphilosophien blev sig bevidst i Begyndelsen af det 19de Yarhundrede.']34

This kind of comparison was of course relatively common in eighteenth-century and romantic-period writing about indigenous Polynesian and Australasian peoples which had, similarly, a tendency to represent such cultures less as entirely distinct from than as proto or potential Europeans. It is significant, though, that Ingemann here invokes not an ancient Nordic but a classical European comparison in his advocacy of Greenlandic society. He does not, in other words, attempt to represent contemporary Greenland as the living incarnation of the Norse world reconstructed by eighteenth-century antiquarianism, which had proved such fertile imaginative ground for English and Nordic romanticisms. His argument recalls more the universalism of an eighteenth-century Enlightenment tradition, albeit one which is arguably no lessin _Houseboat_ ) on the contradiction between the Grant persona and domesticity.

A similar theme is implicit in _Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House_ (1948), in which the hero's dissatisfaction with settlement expresses itself, ironically, in the compulsiveness with which he pursues his ambition of constructing the perfect family home. That, at least, is potentially the theme. The film in fact submerges it and is left hesitating among the opinions that (1) the "dream house" represents a valid democratic aspiration; (2) it is "irresponsible," because the father's obsession with the dream house threatens to disrupt the family; and (3) Blandings is neurotic (see, for instance, his paranoid jealousy of Bill Cole [Melvyn Douglas]).

The themes from which _Mr. Blandings_ withdraws are fully dramatized in Grant's last film for Howard Hawks,