The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen

by Hans Christian Andersen

  The beautiful visual effects in this story are not at all anticipated by the term “ugly” in the title. This tale in particular led many of Andersen’s contemporaries to think of him as an illustrator as well as an author, and indeed he had an artist’s eye for beauty. Andersen enjoyed sketching at home and on his travels, and he left behind over three hundred drawings and well over one thousand paper cuts. He was also an enthusiastic visitor of museums and kept track of the many paintings he saw in his travel diaries.

  3. chattering away in Egyptian. Legend has it that storks were once men and that they returned to their human state in Egypt during the winter. That storks bring babies is a familiar superstition, which seems to derive from the fact that the birds have long been perceived as harbingers of good fortune and happiness. It was believed that they picked up infants from marshes, ponds, and springs, where the souls of unborn children dwelled. Storks and birds in general (associated with freedom and hope) appear frequently in Andersen’s stories, and one of the tales he wrote is entitled “The Storks.”

  Andersen reports that he was frequently inspired by the sight of birds—swallows and storks in particular. In 1848, he wrote: “Many of my stories are caused by a ‘sighting’ from outside. Anyone with the eye of a poet can look at life and nature and experience a similar revelation of beauty. It could be called ‘accidental poetry’ ” (Travels, 300).

  4. an old castle. The grounds bear a striking resemblance to Bregentved, the old manor house, complete with moats and drawbridges, where Andersen began writing the story. (Andersen had already achieved a degree of fame that allowed him to take advantage of hospitality from admirers of his work.)

  5. huge burdock leaves. The burdock plant is a coarse, broad-leaved weed bearing prickly heads of burr. It grows wild on waste ground, by roadsides, and in wet areas and has large lower leaves on thick stalks sometimes reaching a foot in height. Its unattractiveness contrasts with the natural beauty of the area in which it grows. The plant introduces the theme of gawky unsightliness, but beyond that it also serves as a womb-like (“secret”) shelter, one that connects love and birth, for the burdock’s lower leaves are heart-shaped at the bottom and egg-shaped at the top.

  6. “The world is so big!” Andersen’s tales often draw a contrast between the rural and the urban or between the local delights of the village and the urban anarchy of towns and cities. (He himself had experienced both the small-town serenity of Odense and the alluring hustle and bustle of Copenhagen.) For the newborn ducklings, as for all children, the measure of the world is taken by how far the eye can see. The “wide world” is a recurrent theme in the stories, and vast expanses are seen as both intimidating and exhilarating.

  7. looking ever so big and hideous. The hideousness of the “duckling” contrasts with the “loveliness” of the other newborns, whose attractiveness has a moral as well as aesthetic dimension. Andersen does not use the Danish equivalent of “ugly” until the end of the tale.

  MARGARET TARRANT

  The ducklings take their first plunge and have no trouble coming back to the surface. Perched on a stone, the mother duck takes note of the one anomaly in the group.

  8. “She’s the most genteel of anyone here.” Note that Andersen’s farmyard has its hierarchies and social rankings, and that the psychological dynamics and social organization resemble that of the human world. Andersen himself suffered perpetually under the burden of his social origins, and some critics see in the farmyard a symbolic representation of Odense, Copenhagen, Slagelse, and Elsinore, places at which Andersen documented the resistance he felt to social acceptance.

  W. HEATH ROBINSON

  The duckling is picked on by everyone. Even the maid who feeds the poultry threatens him, and he tries desperately to escape. Far larger than the small duckling, the maid menaces the poor creature with her pot and with the dark shadow she casts.

  9. “he’s a drake, and so it doesn’t matter as much.” In fairy tales, looks count less for the heroes than the heroines, who usually succeed in living happily ever after because of their perfect beauty. By contrast, even a beast can win a fair princess, although Andersen’s ugly duckling does not take up that particular opportunity.

  10. pecked and jostled and was teased. As a boy growing up in Odense, Andersen kept to himself, but he witnessed the cruelty of schoolboy taunts when his mentally unstable grandfather was chased down the street. Attending school in Slagelse, he became—as the oldest and tallest in the class—the perpetual target of teasing.Even as an adult, Andersen found himself subject to constant insults. In his travel diaries, he recalls an incident that took place at the theater, when he intimated to an acquaintance that he might be attending a ball held by King Christian VIII. “What was your father?” the friend asked. “The blood rose to the top of my ears,” Andersen recalls. “ ‘My father was a shoemaker!’ I said. ‘I am what I am, with the help of God and my own initiative, and I would hope that was something you could respect.’ ” Andersen adds that he never received an apology “for this slight” (Travels, 229–30).

  11. The ducks nipped at him. The cumulative effect of bites, nips, and kicks drives the duckling from the “civilized” world of the barnyard to the swamp, where wild creatures live. An outcast in the animal world, the duckling is scorned by humans as well—the girl who feeds the animals represents the lack of charity in humans as well as animals toward the unsightly appearance of the duckling. “It’s because I’m so ugly,” the duckling declares as he reproaches himself by pointing to the disruptive energy of ugliness and how it is seen to elicit hatred and aggression. As so often in Andersen’s writing, a series of events leading to a climactic turn is captured at a breathless pace: the ducks nip, the chickens peck, and the maid kicks until the poor animal flees.

  12. until he reached some marshes. Andersen referred to himself as a swamp plant, a form of life that had originated in murky waters. Note also that the swamp is an in-between zone, one that combines solid land with watery depths.

  13. He wasn’t dreaming about marriage. While many fairy-tale heroes rise in social station through marriage, the duckling aspires merely to social acceptance. For those who read the story in biographical terms, it is worth noting that Andersen remained a bachelor all his life.

  14. wild geese. One critic has identified the wild geese as the young Bohemian poets with whom Andersen associated during his schooldays at Slagelse. Fritz Petit, who translated Andersen into German, and Carl Bagger, to whom the volume containing “The Ugly Duckling” is dedicated, lived loosely and encouraged Andersen—unsuccessfully—to indulge in a more reckless lifestyle. The swans that appear at the end of the story stand in stark contrast to the wild geese and have been seen as representing the great writers of Europe.

  15. The water turned red with their blood. The soothing greens and yellows of the rustic landscape are turned red with blood and become blue with smoke from the guns. The appearance of hunters in the wilderness marks a second, even more violent, incursion by humans into settings populated by animals. Both domestic creatures and wild animals are threatened by the brutality of human agents.

  16. An old woman was living in the cottage with her tomcat and hen. The duckling has an opportunity to escape the threats from the barnyard and the dangers of the wilderness and to try out the comforts of interiority and domestic life. The old woman plays a subordinate role in the household, with the purring cat and the egg-laying hen serving as master and mistress. Unable to adjust to the two domineering figures and longing for fresh air and sunshine (despite the perils of the “wide world”), the duckling returns to his natural element.

  17. “But it’s so lovely to glide on the water.” The duckling, unlike the hen that can lay eggs, provides no added value in the household. Even as a swan, he will produce nothing but pleasure, gliding on the waters and diving into them to indulge himself and to evoke the admiration of observers.

  18. “I should like to know who does.” The duckling remains misunderstood, despite
repeated efforts to find a place where he feels at home. Like many characters in Andersen’s short stories, he is determined to seek a second home, a place where he can escape persecution.

  19. a raven perched on a fence. Often considered birds of ill omen, ravens are also famous for their intelligence. The term “raven’s knowledge” means knowledge of all things. The croaking of the raven has a venerable literary tradition suggesting doom: “The raven himself is hoarse / that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / under my battlements,” Lady Macbeth declares (Macbeth I, 5). It is not by chance that common parlance refers to a “terror of ravens” or a “murder of crows.” As birds who feed on carrion, ravens have come to be associated with vengeance, death, and with the doom and gloom of Poe’s raven, who repeats the word “nevermore.”

  20. had never seen anything so beautiful. The story begins in an idyllic country setting marked by sunshine and summer beauty. Scenes of squalor and degradation follow, but the appearance of the swans provides a burst of beauty in a season of clouds, cold, hail, and snow. The birds are not only physically beautiful, they also have “wondrous” calls that heighten the astonishment produced by their appearance. The aesthetic effect of the birds conveys the experience of the sublime, a moment in which shock mingles with wonder, leading the duckling to let loose a cry and plunge into the waters. The “whiteness” of the swans contrasts with what is described as the “black-gray” hues of the duckling.

  21. He had no idea who those birds were. Andersen takes us inside the mind of the ugly duckling. Unlike conventional fairy tales, Andersen’s stories let us inhabit the minds of the central characters, feeling their pain and enjoying their pleasures. The introspective turn and perpetual selfanalysis of the characters leads to a constant monitoring of their affect. The prominence of phrases such as “he felt,” as in this passage, makes it clear how important it was to Andersen to have the reader establish an empathetic relationship to his characters.

  MABEL LUCIE ATTWELL

  The ugly duckling’s gawkiness makes him a misfit. The children react to him with astonishment and trepidation, pointing fingers and keeping their distance but also moving forward with gestures and implements that threaten the duckling’s safety. The creature is clearly not in his element.

  22. frozen fast in the ice. In the pond, the ugly duckling struggles to stay alive, and, in a classic triple sequence that is a trademark of Andersen’s style, he is “faint with exhaustion,” “quite still and helpless,” and finally, “frozen fast in the ice.” The final phrase points to the duckling’s glacial incarceration: he becomes a petrified ornament in the pond, dead to the world. For Andersen, a turn away from carnality (sometimes taking the extreme form of mortification of the flesh and physical paralysis) serves as the prerequisite for spiritual plenitude and salvation. This episode points up the cult of suffering embedded in Andersen’s stories—physical distress and spiritual anguish are a sign of virtue. It could, alternatively, be argued that the ugly duckling undergoes a test of his character and fortitude. Staunchly enduring taunts from others and defying the physical challenges of nature, he steadfastly paddles his legs to stay alive.

  MARGARET TARRANT

  The duckling flees after flying into the butter tub and overturning the flour bin. The duckling is already in a transitional stage, halfway to becoming a swan.

  23. took the duckling home to his wife. In this final, failed attempt to find refuge, the ugly duckling’s disruptive presence becomes evident. His “ugliness” and clumsiness become stimuli for aggression, with a farmer’s wife who repeats the violence of the girl who feeds the animals in the barnyard.

  24. the duckling was afraid they would hurt him. Andersen’s surprising dislike of small children, given the audience for his stories today, is well documented. In the plan for a commemorative statue in Copenhagen, he asked that the child looking over his shoulder be removed from the design. But his hatred of one of the sketches, which reminded him of “old Socrates and young Alcibiades,” may have been inspired by very different anxieties. As a child he was an avid reader, who stayed away from other children. “I never played with the other boys,” he reported in a letter to his benefactor Jonas Collin, “I was always alone.”

  25. fluttering right into the milk bowl. One commentator notes that the duckling flies “into the milk (the substance of creation), butter (a source of richness and abundance), and flour (a distillation of earth energy).” Those elements are reconstituted and baked in the bread tossed by the children at the swans (Gambos, 70).

  W. HEATH ROBINSON

  The swan glides on the surface of the water while a girl gazes at him from the marshes with admiration.

  26. It would be dreary. The narrator claims to suppress the desire to elaborate on the misery endured by the duckling, and yet the story of the ugly duckling provides painful details about all the hardships, physical and mental, suffered by the tormented animal.

  27. it was a beautiful spring day once again. The return of spring signals the renewal of hope. For Andersen, every season has a different affective power, with all of the obvious cyclical associations of winter with death and spring with rebirth and renewal. Summer and spring are, as in “The Snow Queen,” always a time of joy.

  28. he found himself in a large garden. The garden represents the point at which nature and culture meet, the place where the ugly duckling finds happiness at last. The utopian beauty of the garden, with its colors and fragrances, becomes the perfect setting to display the beauty of the swans.

  29. “Oh please just kill me,” cried the poor bird. The duckling’s suffering is so intense that it moves him toward selfannihilation. It is startling that he looks on death as salvation, so long as the beautiful swans are the executioners.

  30. He saw his own image. In this scene of transformation, the ugly duckling engages in a moment of reflection—reflection in the double sense of the term. He sees himself mirrored in the surface of the water and also analyzes his condition. In this extraordinary humanizing moment—animals cannot engage in this double process—the ugly duckling transcends both ugliness and his animal condition. Self-reflexivity may not be the cause of the transformation, but it is telling that it coincides with the transformation.

  If the ugly duckling triumphs in the end and reigns supreme as the “most beautiful of all,” he is also reduced to the rank of an ornament, gliding on the surface of the pond as he is admired by children who reward his preening with bits of bread. Many scholars have argued that “The Ugly Duckling” is the most deeply personal of Andersen’s stories, a narrative that traces his trajectory from humble origins to a literary aristocracy with a deeply servile attitude in relation to the real aristocracy. Jack Zipes comments that it only “appears as though the swan has finally come into his own. . . . As usual, there is a hidden reference of power. The swan measures himself by the values and aesthetics set by the ‘royal’ swans and by the proper well-behaved children and people in the beautiful garden. The swans and beautiful garden are placed in opposition to the ducks and hen yard. In appealing to the ‘noble’ sentiments of a refined audience and his readers, Andersen reflected a distinct class bias if not classical racist tendencies” (Zipes 2005, 70).

  Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s “The Really Ugly Duckling” provides a postmodern revision of Andersen’s tale, one in which there is no transformation, just the move from being an ugly duckling to a “really ugly duck.” As Jean Webb points out, “The convention of transformation so essential to the tradition of the fairy tale has been supplanted by the removal of the sublime experience, the achievement of the ideal. The postmodern perspective recognizes that we cannot become ideal selves, idealized forms, for there are realities which have to be accepted” (Webb, 161).

  31. a good heart is never proud! For Andersen, pride and vanity are the cardinal sins of humanity, and, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that he was guilty of both, he never ceased to excoriate both. Those with a humble heart are the true heroes o
f mankind, and they are often oppressed by the haughty, arrogant, and proud. Children from prosperous families scorned the young Andersen and mocked him with the words “Look, there’s the playwright!” In his memoirs, Andersen recalls that he went home, hid in a corner, and “cried and prayed to God.” Later in life, he suffered countless insults from his patron Jonas Collin and his family members, who always made him aware that he was their social inferior. Danish reviewers of Andersen’s work were also less kind than critical and condescending, constantly pointing to the author’s class origins and aspirations to a higher social rank. “When I was young,” Andersen pointed out, “I could cry; now I can’t! I can only be proud, hate, despise, give my soul to the evil powers to find a moment’s comfort.” As he reflected further on the vitriolic reviews of Danish critics, he warmed to his topic: “The Danes are evil, cold, satanic—a people well suited to the wet, moldy-green islands from where Tycho Brahe was exiled. . . . May I never see that place; may never a nature such as mine be born there again. I hate, I despise my home, as it hates and spits upon me!” (Diaries, 137–38)

  32. “I never dreamed of such happiness.” In a famous essay of 1869 on Andersen, the renowned Danish literary critic George Brandes denounced the servile tone of “The Ugly Duckling” and its glorification of a tamed existence: “Let [the duckling] die if necessary, that is tragic and grand. Let it lift its wings and fly soaring through the air, jubilant at its own beauty and strength” (Bredsdorff 1993, 154). The fantasy of such sublime happiness was fulfilled in part for Andersen after the astonishing success of the fairy tales in Denmark and abroad. “The Ugly Duckling” was one of the tales that transformed him from a local writer into a celebrity of international importance.