29. Lemon and orange trees were growing in the garden. The prince’s domain is clearly in southern regions. The architecture of the buildings suggests a southern European locale, and it is likely that Andersen had Italy in mind. He had been deeply impressed by the beauty of the Italian countryside and wrote with enthusiasm about Italy’s landscape and culture: “If France is the country of reason, then Italy is the country of imagination. . . . Here is all you could wish for in a landscape—the oranges hanging so yellow between the lush greenery; big, grass-green lemons greeted us with their fragrance.—Everything was like a painting. . . . When visiting the magnificent galleries, the rich churches with their monuments and magnificence, I learned to understand the beauty of form—the spirit which reveals itself in form” (Diaries, 48).
HARRY CLARKE
Eels and eel-like fish serve as extensions for the Sea Witch’s hair. The magical potion drifts down to the little mermaid, whose grace is admired by some of the fish below.
30. with her arms wrapped around the beautiful marble statue. The little mermaid clings to the statue in much the way that the flowers wind their stems and leaves around the tree, blocking its light. Drawing on the ancient marriage trope of the elm and the vine, Andersen points to the possibility that the little mermaid’s feminine devotion to the prince may block light from the sun and thereby stand in the way of her salvation rather than promoting it.
31. There was so much she would have liked to know. The little mermaid is intent on broadening her horizons. What she sees on earth stimulates her desire for challenges. She wants, above all, to explore the world—by flying across oceans and climbing mountains—to discover what is beyond the realm of “home.” Her twin longing for both the prince and the world he inhabits create two competing narrative models, one based on the male bildungsroman, or novel of education, the other on the female marriage plot. As Rhoda Zuk puts it, “The heroine’s aspiration to progress and perfection is forwarded by the virtues appropriated from feudal romance . . . including imaginative sympathy, resourcefulness, courage, and self-discipline. Yet the tale is also predicated on the marriage quest” (Zuk, 166).
HARRY CLARKE
The little mermaid dances in a skirt forming an oval that contrasts with elongated leglike patterns behind her. The touch of red is reminiscent of Karen’s footwear in “The Red Shoes.”
32. We lack an immortal soul. Andersen was deeply invested in conveying Christian messages about immortal souls and eternal life, even as he and his characters clearly delight in worldly pleasures. Roger Sale finds the hierarchies set up in the tale nearly intolerable, for the prince, who is “a dense and careless man,” is positioned as morally and spiritually superior to the mermaid.
33. “having a share in that heavenly world.” It becomes clear in this passage that the little mermaid’s deepest longing is not for the prince but for an immortal soul. “Why weren’t we given an immortal soul?” she complains. And rather than being motivated by love for the prince, she is driven by what Gregory Nybo describes as raw terror—“an abiding fear of death.” Nybo judges the mermaid harshly: “She submits to [a] horrible mutilation, which also is the symbolic and radical denial of her own identity, for reasons that now stand revealed as entirely self-serving and from a motive that is purely solipsistic and negative, that is, fear of death” (Nybo, 417).
34. her voice was more beautiful than any other. The beauty of the mermaid’s voice makes the exchange with the Sea Witch all the more tragic. One reader of the story describes the exchange as one in which the mermaid “gives up everything magical for an unrequited and lackluster reality” (Grealy, 161). Or as Joyce Carol Oates puts it, the little mermaid must strike a bargain that requires her to “relinquish her siren’s voice in return for a human shape and human love on earth—a disturbing parable of women’s place in the world of men” (Oates 2004, 166).
35. There were no flowers growing there. The realm of the Sea Witch is characterized by a grotesque aesthetic very different from what is found at the palaces of the father and the prince. Colorless and without adornment, it is the site of whirlpools and bogs that threaten to engulf and swallow up intruders. Even the branches of the trees are like snakes that twist themselves around their victims; and the sea polyps too threaten to squeeze the life out of anyone who swims by. Perhaps sensing that a part of her must die in order to achieve transformation, the little mermaid seeks out the Sea Witch, whose domain is affiliated with strangulation, destruction, and death.
36. a house, built with the bones of shipwrecked human folk. Like the demonic Baba Yaga of Russian folklore, the Sea Witch has a house constructed of human bones. Affiliated with the grotesque and the monstrous, her realm is one of decay, death, and destruction. However, since mermaids may be the ones responsible for the shipwrecks from which the Sea Witch and the polyps benefit, the Sea Witch is not a completely alien figure.
37. There sat the Sea Witch. In Disney’s Little Mermaid, the Sea Witch is given a name (Ursula) and a camp identity that enables her to steal the show. An obese octopus with black undulating tentacles, she expresses what Marina Warner terms “the shadow side of [the little mermaid’s] desiring, rampant lust. . . . She is a cartoon Queen of the Night, avid and unrestrained, what the English poet Ted Hughes might call a ‘uterus on the loose’ ” (Warner, 403). The Sea Witch and the grandmother represent antithetical maternal figures that stand in for the mermaid’s absent mother.
To gain full mobility in the human world, Andersen’s mermaid must sacrifice her voice to a woman who, in her connection with biological corruption and grotesque sensuality, is diametrically opposed to the promise of eternal salvation. The marsh in which she resides and the bones of the human folk supporting her house all point to a regime that vividly puts human mortality and bodily decay on display. Initially attracted to what the Sea Witch can provide by being willing to brave the dangers of a visit to her abode, the little mermaid ultimately renounces her black arts when she flings the knife meant for the prince into the sea and is rewarded with the possibility of earning salvation.
38. “enough to make your feet bleed.” Feet and footwear figure prominently in fairy tales and are especially central to stories written by the son of a shoemaker. Perhaps inspired by the example of Snow White’s stepmother, who dances to death in redhot iron shoes, Andersen often located suffering in the feet of his protagonists. Like Karen in “The Red Shoes,” the little mermaid must endure agonizing pain whenever she walks or dances. The renunciation of the tail for legs can be seen as a rite of passage, in which the little mermaid becomes a sexual being, as Dorothy Dinnerstein points out. But it also marks yet another moment of self-division for a heroine who is already a hybrid creature, torn between her loyalties to family, home, and the sea on the one hand, and to the prince and the possibility of earning a soul as a human on the other.
W. HEATH ROBINSON
39. “Stick out your little tongue and let me cut it off in payment. ” That the little mermaid sacrifices her voice for the promise of love has been read as the fatal bargain women make in Andersen’s culture and in our own. Yet the mermaid’s willingness to give up her voice is driven not only by her love for the prince but also by her desire to enter a richer and more enriching domain, one that will allow a greater range and play for her adventurous spirit. Cultural fantasies about the seductive quality of women’s voices are staged in The Odyssey, when Odysseus orders his men to put cotton in their ears so that they will not be bewitched by the enchanting voices of the sirens.
The mermaid’s bargain with the Sea Witch has been compared with Faust’s pact with the devil. The mermaid wins a soul but loses her capacity to create beauty, while Faust exchanges his soul for knowledge, wealth, and power. The two themes are woven together in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, a work in which the brilliant composer Adrian Leverkühn makes a pact with the devil and identifies powerfully with Andersen’s little mermaid and her anguish through the “sword-dance of art.” One critic emphasizes
that Andersen’s “Little Mermaid” can be read as an allegory of “the artist’s painful endeavor to locate his place within a society hostile or at best indifferent to creative imagination” (Fass, 291).
The novelist Rosellen Brown writes poignantly about her childhood response to the cutting out of the tongue, how that event both terrified and fascinated her: “I think back to my attraction to this story and I truly can’t reconstruct the way it made me feel. But this I can say: it was the mermaid’s voicelessness that fascinated and panicked me. Or not so much her silence as her incapacity to explain herself. . . . Children recognize that they can’t explain so much they would like to. I don’t know that I felt particularly misunderstood but the threat is always there for children that they will be inadequate, possibly even speechless, when it’s urgent that they be heard. So the idea that the mermaid, for love, would volunteer to lose her voice and thus yield up any chance to make her case—ah, this was so terrible to me I could hardly look it in the eye. And so, of course, I looked and looked” (Brown, 55).
40. it looked just like clear water. The purifying force of fire turns the potion into something resembling the beauty of the ocean water. Grotesque as she may appear, the Sea Witch possesses the power to transform the little mermaid into a creature who aspires to live a higher, more spiritual existence.
41. she cut out the little mermaid’s tongue. In losing her tongue, the little mermaid sacrifices her ability to communicate. She becomes silent, mysterious, and fascinating, but also vulnerable and disempowered, bereft of the gift she had to create music and beauty. She resembles Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who loses the power to speak and broadcast the misdeeds of her brother-in-law. For Jack Zipes, the little mermaid becomes “voiceless and tortured, deprived physically and psychologically” and ends up serving “a prince who never fully appreciates her worth” (Zipes 1983, 84–85). Note that the little mermaid is obliged to give up an upper body part (her tongue) in order to transform a lower body part (fish tail into legs). In the Disney version, Ariel loses her voice but is not mutilated by having her tongue cut out.
42. “just throw a single drop of this potion on them. ” The instructions of the Sea Witch foreshadow the brutal act later proposed by the little mermaid’s sisters. In both cases, the little mermaid abstains from violence: the first time because it is not necessary, the second time because she makes a deliberate decision to do no harm.
43. her fish tail was gone. The metamorphosis of the little mermaid moves her from the realm of sea creatures to that of humans. Her transformation, like that of the seal maidens and swan maidens of Scandinavian folklore, is reversible; but it occurs at some cost, as the ending to the story reveals.
44. as if she were treading on sharp knives and piercing needles. The little mermaid’s pain has been seen by Dorothy Dinnerstein to have a double meaning: “On the one hand, it is the human pain of growth, the pain of renouncing childhood’s immersion in magical fantasy life and parental care, the pain of independence and risky lonely exploit; and on the other hand—it feels like piercing knives—it is the special female pain of traditional sexual initiation” (Dinnerstein 1967, 107). There is both a “hopeful, euphoric surge of competence, movement, energy in a person on the brink of adult autonomy; and at the same moment a drastic sacrifice of intactness, a submissive preparation for invasion, an irrevocable loss of spontaneous, playful mobility.”
The little mermaid’s pain has also been interpreted as the agony of a woman in love: “The woman in love,” Simone de Beauvoir writes, “tries to see with . . . the eyes [of the beloved]; she reads the books he reads, prefers the pictures and the music he prefers; she is interested only in the landscapes she sees with him, in the ideas that come from him” (Beauvoir, 653). Indeed, it is true that the little mermaid explores the world of the prince even as he shows no interest at all in the domain that is her home. Beauvoir saw Andersen’s tale as an allegory of heterosexual romantic relations: “Every woman in love recognizes herself in Hans Andersen’s little mermaid who exchanged her fishtail for feminine legs through love and then found herself walking on needles and live coals. It is not true that the loved man is absolutely necessary, above chance and circumstance, and the woman is not necessary to him; he is not really in a position to justify the feminine being who is consecrated to his worship, and he does not permit himself to be possessed by her” (Beauvoir, 654).
45. the prince clapped his hands and smiled at her. Andersen lived for praise and approval. He describes his buoyant feelings when his play Love at St. Nicholas’s Tower received an ovation: “I was overpowered by joy. . . . I was bursting with happiness and rushed out of the theater, into the streets, into Collin’s house, where only his wife was at home. Nearly fainting, I threw myself into a chair, sobbing and weeping hysterically. The dear woman had no idea what was going on and she began to comfort me. . . . I interrupted her, sobbing: ‘They were applauding and shouting “Long Live!”’ ” (The Fairy Tale of My Life, 64–65)
46. on a velvet cushion. That she sleeps outside the prince’s door on a cushion implies that the little mermaid is something of a waif (she is called a “foundling,” after all), an exotic pet for the prince. Does he somehow suspect that she belongs to an animal species? In a study focused on representations of childhood deaths, Kimberley Reynolds includes “The Little Mermaid” as a “paradigm of child death” and as a story that promises “rewards for those unhappy, mistreated, or overlooked in this world” (Reynolds, 185).
47. The prince had a page’s costume made for her. Critics who bemoan the self-effacing nature of the little mermaid often neglect to note that she is also more adventurous, spirited, and curious than most fairy-tale heroines. Cross-dressing is a sign of her willingness to cross boundaries and to take risks in order to see the world.
48. “She is the only one in the world whom I could ever love.” Ironically, the prince labors under the delusion that the young woman who appeared in the temple was his savior. He remains unaware that he was miraculously rescued at sea by the little mermaid. The Sea Witch may have provided the little mermaid with legs, but she can do nothing to dispel the prince’s conviction that his true beloved dwells in the temple. The princess functions as the earthly double of the little mermaid, just as the marble statue functioned as the oceanic double of the prince.
49. And he reached out and drew his blushing bride toward him. The motif of the false bride becomes even more prominent in Disney’s Little Mermaid, when Ursula turns herself into a beautiful rival who uses Ariel’s exquisite voice to win Eric. Andersen’s blushing bride may be the little mermaid’s rival, but she is not marked in any way as evil.
50. “you must plunge it into the prince’s heart.” Knives figure importantly in Andersen’s work, but nowhere more so than in this story, where the implement that figuratively tortures the little mermaid’s feet becomes the instrument she can turn on the prince. One critic points out how the knife reveals the mermaid to be a femme fatale, whose violence might erupt at any moment: “Andersen’s mermaid clings winsomely to her dispossession, but her choice is a guide to a vital Victorian mythology whose lovable woman is a silent and self-disinherited mutilate, the fullness of whose extraordinary and dangerous being might at any moment return through violence. The taboos that encased the Victorian woman contained buried tributes to her disruptive power” (Auerbach, 8).
51. she threw herself from the ship into the sea. The little mermaid’s sacrifice of her own life points to the words of Mark 8:35: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.” The little mermaid’s death, return to the sea, and resurrection are eliminated from the Disney film, which ends with a wedding celebration. Jack Zipes suggests that Ariel’s “temporary nonconformist behavior was basically a selling point in the Disney film; her rebellion was never to be taken seriously because she was destined from the beginning to wed the perfect partner and form a charming cou
ple that would beget not only a baby, but a TV series of The Little Mermaid (1992–94), and a sequel, The Little Mermaid II: The Return to the Sea (2000)” (Zipes 2005, 114). It is hardly surprising that the spinoffs and sequels become derivative and turn into cartoon versions (as it were) of the original.
52. “the daughters of the air.” Andersen had planned to call his story “The Daughters of the Air,” and the airborne creatures striving for redemption are, like the mermaid and her siblings, all female. Belonging neither to the sea and to merfolk nor to land and humans, they represent a transitional phase that leads to immortality. The story emphasizes the importance of space (land, sea, and air) and how the elements (fire, water, earth, and air) have a special significance.
53. “you too can earn an immortal soul.” The three hundred years of good deeds coincide with the life span of merfolk. The little mermaid is not in Purgatory, for she has been liberated from her aquatic state and takes on agency, bringing cool breezes and the fragrance of flowers while flying through the air. The little mermaid herself has achieved immortality in the real world, not only through her story but also through the bronze statue of her that has become Copenhagen’s most popular tourist attraction.
Andersen, like the little mermaid, also wins his bid for immortality through his art but loses the chance to find “true” love. Near the end of his life, he congratulated a young man on his recent wedding: “You have got yourself a home, a loving wife, and you are happy! God bless you and her! At one time I too dreamed of such happiness, but it was not to be granted to me. Happiness came to me in another form, came as my muse that gave me a wealth of adventure and songs” (Wullschlager, 175).
55. “each of those tears adds another day to our time of trial.” The contrived words at the end add a disciplinary twist to the tale, suggesting to the children outside the book that an invisible presence monitors their behavior. This lesson can be far more frightening than the descriptions of the tortures to which the little mermaid is subjected. P. M. Pickard maintains that the story ends in “a mist of mysticism utterly unsuitable for children” (Pickard, 88), and P. L. Travers forgives Andersen for much in the tale but scolds him for the ending: “It is in the last three paragraphs—so sad, so romantic, the devotees say—that Andersen, with his wanton sweetness, his too-much-rubbing of Aladdin’s lamp, stands most in need of forgiveness. . . . She has given up her tail—good. She has graduated to air—better, at any rate from her point of view. Let her now discover patience. The soul will happen in its own time. But—a year taken off when a child behaves; a tear shed and a day added whenever a child is naughty? Andersen, this is blackmail. And the children know it, and say nothing. There’s magnanimity for you” (Travers, 92–93).
The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen Page 21