After breakfast was over, the ogre called out: “Wife, wife, bring me my golden harp.” So she brought it and put it on the table before him. Then he said: “Sing!” and the golden harp sang most beautifully. And it went on singing till the ogre fell asleep, and commenced to snore like thunder.
Then Jack lifted up the copper-lid very quietly and got down like a mouse and crept on hands and knees till he came to the table, when up he crawled, caught hold of the golden harp and dashed with it towards the door. But the harp called out quite loud: “Master! Master!” and the ogre woke up just in time to see Jack running off with his harp.
Jack ran as fast as he could, and the ogre came rushing after, and would soon have caught him only Jack had a start and dodged him a bit and knew where he was going. When he got to the beanstalk the ogre was not more than twenty yards away when suddenly he saw Jack disappear like, and when he came to the end of the road he saw Jack underneath climbing down for dear life. Well, the ogre didn’t like trusting himself to such a ladder, and he stood and waited, so Jack got another start. But just then the harp cried out: “Master! Master!” and the ogre swung himself down on to the beanstalk, which shook with his weight. Down climbs Jack, and after him climbed the ogre. By this time Jack had climbed down and climbed down and climbed down till he was very nearly home. So he called out: “Mother! Mother! bring me an axe, bring me an axe.” And his mother came rushing out with the axe in her hand, but when she came to the beanstalk she stood stock still with fright, for there she saw the ogre with his legs just through the clouds.
But Jack jumped down and got hold of the axe and gave a chop at the beanstalk which cut it half in two. The ogre felt the beanstalk shake and quiver, so he stopped to see what was the matter. Then Jack gave another chop with the axe, and the beanstalk was cut in two and began to topple over. Then the ogre fell down and broke his crown, and the beanstalk came toppling after.
Then Jack showed his mother his golden harp, and what with showing that and selling the golden eggs, Jack and his mother became very rich, and he married a great princess, and they lived happy ever after.
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† Joseph Jacobs, “Jack and the Beanstalk,” English Fairy Tales, 3rd ed. (London: David Nutt in the Strand, 1898).
INTRODUCTION: Hans Christian Andersen
“He was a perfect wizard,” August Strindberg declared in a tribute to the author whose stories had captivated him as a child.1 Strindberg has never been alone in his enthusiasm for Hans Christian Andersen. According to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, Andersen ranks among the ten most widely translated authors in the world, along with William Shakespeare and Karl Marx. His stories have become collective cultural property, operating almost like malleable folk tales rather than fixed literary texts. Children in Beijing, Calcutta, Beirut, and Montreal have wept over “The Little Match Girl,” admired the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and identified with the abject baby swan in “The Ugly Duckling.”
Walt Disney Studios has done much to sustain and extend the global reach of Andersen’s fairy tales, first with its animated film The Little Mermaid (1989), then with Frozen (2013), inspired by Andersen’s “Snow Queen.” That Andersen is not just for the young becomes quickly apparent from the many adult adaptations of the tales, from Kathryn Davis’s The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf through Sandra Gilbert’s “The Last Poems about the Snow Queen” to Joyce Carol Oates’s “You, Little Match Girl.” These contemporary writers, along with Henry James, Hermann Hesse, W. H. Auden, and Thomas Mann, grew up with Andersen’s stories and then grew into them, admiring their imaginative force and allowing it to seep into their own art.
We remember Andersen for the beauty of his images—for the shiny red shoes that captivate Karen, the golden slipper hung around the neck of the melodious nightingale, and the chunks of ice dancing for joy in the palace of the Snow Queen. In “The Little Mermaid,” the sun looks like a “purple flower with light streaming from its calyx” (see here); the eleven brothers in “The Wild Swans” write on “golden tablets with pencils of diamond”; and the soldier in “The Tinderbox” enters a hall where “hundreds of lamps” are shining. The bright wonders and vivid marvels in Andersen’s stories go far toward explaining what drew artists like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, and Kay Nielsen to illustrate the fairy tales.
Andersen’s paper cuttings, sketches, and collages remind us that he was supremely dedicated to the visual, a painter as much as a poet. He was committed to everything that glitters, dazzles, and shines, yet he was also deeply concerned with what lies beneath appearances. Surface and depth were equally important. We not only witness the suffering of the Little Mermaid and the Little Match Girl, we also get inside the skin of the two characters, empathizing with them and experiencing their feelings vicariously. Andersen uses beautiful objects to enliven his stories, enabling us to visualize other worlds, but also moves from surfaces to interiority so that we not only see what his characters see but also feel what they feel. His moving pictures harness aesthetic effects to animate narrated worlds as well as the real-life reader outside the text.
If Andersen’s magic lies in his ability to combine beautiful surfaces with emotional power surges, critics have been reluctant to dwell on it. Instead they focus on autobiographical features, showing how the tales mirror their maker. In Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller, Jackie Wullschlager begins by declaring that her subject is a “compulsive autobiographer” and proceeds to document in superbly comprehensive ways how the art charts the stations of its author’s troubled soul. In the fairy tales, we discover, the truest self-portraits are etched in generous and fulsome detail. “He is the triumphant Ugly Duckling,” she declares, “and the loyal Little Mermaid, the steadfast Tin Soldier and the king-loving Nightingale, the demonic Shadow, the depressive fir tree, the forlorn Little Matchgirl.”2 Here is another authority on the Danish writer: “Andersen never stopped telling his own story.… Sometimes he tells it in an idealized form, sometimes with self-revelatory candor. In tale after tale … he is the hero who triumphs over poverty, persecution, and plain stupidity, and who sometimes, in a reversal of the facts, marries the princess … or scorns her.”3
In some ways, these critics are staging a familiar argument, one that legitimizes the study of Andersen’s fairy tales by seeing in them a prism of adult fears and desires. After all, if the tales are just “simplistic narratives for children,” they are hardly worthy of adult attention. More Than Just Fairy Tales, the title of a recent volume of essays on Andersen’s stories, is symptomatic. Academic anxiety about analyzing fairy tales runs high, less because they belong to the regime of popular culture than because they were so long consigned to the nursery.4
Andersen’s fairy tales promote a cult of classical beauty, with all its seductive power to lure us into the world of surfaces, but they add a sinister edge, as a reminder of the perils of aesthetic enchantments. They also add a cult of grotesque suffering to their narrative circuits, one equally compelling in its evocation of the emotionally gratifying satisfactions of witnessing pain and empathizing with its victims—feeling bad in order to feel good. The double face of beauty is brilliantly represented in the invisible cloth woven by the two swindlers in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” That fabric captivates, making us do the imaginative work of seeing something beautiful even when it has no material reality and is constructed from mere words. The cloth is “magnifique” (see here), “light as spider webs” (see here), and “exquisite” (see here and here). Here we are in the realm of a self-reflexive allegory about how verbal art is both captivatingly beautiful illusion and ludicrous fraud. Stories take us in so long as we are willing collaborators and co-conspirators, but it is also easy to mock them as mirages with no grounding in reality.
Andersen’s “The Nightingale” takes us almost seamlessly from aesthetics and the pleasure principle to a poetics of pain by building a contrast between the songs of two very di
fferent birds. Both nightingales in the story are enchanting, but the real nightingale, as opposed to the jewel-encrusted mechanical one, sings with a voice “so lovely” (see here) that tears roll down the emperor’s cheeks. Beauty moves the emperor to tears, and the scene of his emotional release enables us to see a possible link between unalloyed, organic beauty and the healing power of suffering. The nightingale’s song restores the emperor’s health, but in tales like “The Red Shoes,” the protagonist’s love of beauty is shadowed by sadistic punishments that lead to suffering that is anything but transcendent. The magic of the beautiful new shoes made for Karen turns against her, taking possession of her feet, compelling her to dance endlessly in a frenzied spectacle that ends with the amputation of her feet. For Andersen, beauty has transformative energy, but its link with vanity arouses profound fears about excesses both evil and dangerous. And it can easily tip into the unsightly and grotesque.
Andersen, committed to success on the stage more than anything else, took up fairy tales as a sideline. He inserted himself into a tradition that famously staged spectacular punishments, nearly always reserved for ogres and other evildoers. The witch from “Hansel and Gretel” perishes in the oven; the evil stepmother in “Snow White” dances to her death in red-hot iron shoes; and like a latter-day David, Jack slides down the beanstalk and vanquishes a giant. Andersen’s stories rarely indulge in enacting revenge fantasies or deserved punishments. Instead we have scenes of suffering, tableaux designed to evoke compassion and stir pity rather than to enunciate triumphant programs for survival.
Take the Little Match Girl, a character whose story begins as follows: “It was bitterly cold.” Already we are plunged into a world of painful sensation. “Poor mite, she was the picture of misery as she trudged along, hungry and shivering with cold.” We swiftly move into the girl’s head, feeling the sharpness of her pain: “She knew that her father would beat her, and besides, it was almost as cold at home as it was here.” Suddenly we move from a gaze that takes in externals to a place inside the girl’s head. “Ah! Maybe a lighted match,” she thinks, “would do some good.” All that follows is focalized through the little match seller, and as readers, we see what she sees, feel what she feels. “No one could imagine what beautiful things she had seen,” Andersen writes at the end of her story. That may be true for those who find her corpse on the cold sidewalk, but certainly not for those who read about her New Year’s Eve visions.
In “The Little Mermaid,” Andersen moves us almost immediately into the consciousness of the youngest of the Sea-King’s daughters. She is the one who loves to hear about the human world, who longs to rise to the surface, and who cannot take her eyes off the young prince and his ship. And we witness her suffering when she loses her voice and feels as if her heart is breaking “for grief.” When she drinks the potion of the Sea Witch, we feel the “sharp pain” that courses through her body as well as the force of the “double-edged sword” slicing through her and the “sharp knives” on which she walks. This tale, like “The Little Match Girl,” shows how a curious transvaluation takes places as Andersen struggles with the cruelty of those who enjoy a cult of beauty and pleasure (the bon vivants celebrating New Year’s Eve at home in “The Little Match Girl” and the royals feasting and dancing in the prince’s palace in “The Little Mermaid”) while others suffer in silence. The two “pictures of misery” draw our notice more powerfully than the warmth and light of interior scenes. We gaze and empathize more than we admire and wonder.
Our own culture’s answer to Andersen’s spiritually triumphant mermaid appears in the adventurous, rebellious, curious, and “upwardly mobile”5 Ariel created by Disney Studios. As one shrewd critic of The Little Mermaid observes, the Disney film establishes a powerful hierarchical relationship dividing the blithe Caribbean-equivalent sea creatures from the humans above who engage in labor and transform nature into culture. Ariel’s longing for this realm, which manifests itself in the commodity fetishism of her enthusiastic collecting of booty from shipwrecks, is fulfilled through Ursula, a grotesque Medusa-like octopus who, like Andersen’s Sea Witch, represents the monstrosity of feminine power. Ariel may regain her voice when she is assimilated to the human world in the end, but Disney conveniently leaves us in the dark about the cost, allowing the couple’s final embrace to erase Ariel’s rebelliousness, her troubled relationship with the feminine, and the painful self-mutilation involved in her transformation. As Patrick D. Murphy points out, “the escapist character of the film” is especially evident in its avoidance of the problem that will inevitably arise when “Ariel’s former friend Flounder shows up on the dinner table one evening.”6
Maurice Sendak, renowned for creating vibrantly spirited and scrappy child characters, was disturbed by the “disquieting passivity” in Andersen’s books for children. “At his worst,” Sendak comments on Andersen, “he dreadfully sentimentalizes children; they rarely have the spunk, shrewdness, and character with which he endows inanimate objects.”7 The Little Mermaid, the Little Match Girl, and Karen of “The Red Shoes” he found particularly “irritating,” surely in part for the simple reason that the stories of all these creatures end with their deaths. “His heroines always wind up going to the bosom of God (if they’re good), or else they’re praying or being saved from Hell by someone else’s prayers,” the illustrator Trina Schart Hyman observed in recollecting her childhood reading of Andersen.8
Andersen’s fairy tales may still begin with “What if?” and move us to ask “What’s next?” but they are also unusual in inspiring us to ask “Why?” Causation is no longer random and arbitrary, but psychologically motivated and realistically portrayed. In both “The Little Match Girl” and “The Little Mermaid,” beauty co-exists with suffering in ways that create a new aesthetic, one that turns from a cult of beautiful objects to a commitment to widening the gaze to include scenes that inspire compassion as much as wonder. We may enter the tales through the gates of Beauty but we linger in the precincts of the unsightly and grotesque, in places that lead us to look in horror rather than to gaze in pleasure. As compensation we exit these narratives with a renewed sense of compassion and connection but, more important, with a more capacious sense of what beauty and its grim opposite can do.
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1. Maria Tatar, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen (New York: Norton, 2007), p. xv.
2. Jackie Wullschlager, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller (New York: Knopf, 2000), p. 3.
3. Reginald Spink, Hans Christian Andersen: The Man and His Work, 3rd ed. (Copenhagen: Høst, 1981), p. 10.
4. Julie K. Allen, More Than Just Fairy Tales: New Approaches to the Stories of Hans Christian Andersen (San Diego: Cognella, 2014).
5. Laura Sells, “ ‘Where Do the Mermaids Stand?’ Voice and Body in The Little Mermaid,” in From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), p. 179.
6. Patrick D. Murphy, “ ‘The Whole Wide World Was Scrubbed Clean’: The Androcentric Animation of Denatured Disney,” in From Mouse to Mermaid, p. 133.
7. Maurice Sendak, “Hans Christian Andersen,” in Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books & Pictures (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Michael di Capua Books, 1988), pp. 33–34.
8. Trina Schart Hyman, “ ‘Cut It Down, and You Will Find Something at the Roots,’ ” in The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions, ed. Donald Haase (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1993), p. 294.
The Little Mermaid†
Far out at sea, the water is as blue as the petals of the prettiest cornflowers and as clear as the purest glass. But it’s very deep out there, so deep that even the longest anchor line can’t touch bottom. You would have to pile up countless church steeples, one on top of the other, to get from the bottom of the sea all the way up to the surface. The sea people live down there.
Now you mustn’t
think for a moment that there is nothing but bare, white sand down there. Oh, no! The most wondrous trees and plants grow at the bottom of the sea, with stalks and leaves so supple that they stir with life at the slightest ripple in the water. The fish everywhere, large and small, dart between the branches, just the way birds fly through the trees up here. At the very deepest spot of all stands the castle of the Sea King. Its walls are coral, and the tall, arched windows are made of the clearest amber. The roof is formed of shells that open and close with the current. It’s a beautiful sight, for each shell has a dazzling pearl, any one of which would make a splendid jewel in a queen’s crown.
The Sea King had been a widower for many years, and his aged mother kept house for him. She was a wise lady, but also very proud of her noble birth. And that’s why she wore twelve oysters on her tail, while everyone else of high rank had to settle for six. In every other way she deserved great praise, for she was deeply devoted to her granddaughters, the little sea princesses. They were six beautiful children, but the youngest was the fairest of them all. Her skin was as clear and soft as a rose petal. Her eyes were as blue as the deepest sea. But like all the others, she had no feet, and her body ended in a fish tail.
All day long the sea princesses played in the great halls of the castle, where real flowers were growing right out of the walls. When the large amber windows were open, fish swam right in, just as swallows fly into our homes when we open the windows. The fish glided up to the princesses, ate out of their hands, and let themselves be caressed.
Outside the castle there was an enormous garden with trees that were deep blue and fiery red. Their fruit glittered like gold, and their blossoms looked like flames of fire, with leaves and stalks constantly aflutter. The soil itself was the finest sand, but blue like a sulphur flame. A wondrous blue glow permeated everything in sight. Standing down there, you really had no idea that you were at the bottom of the sea, and you might as well have been high up in the air with nothing but sky above you and below. When the sea was perfectly calm, you could catch sight of the sun, which looked like a purple flower with light streaming from its calyx.
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