The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen

by Hans Christian Andersen

  “You’re trembling,” the princess said, when the shadow came into her room. “Has something happened? You mustn’t get ill on the night that we are going to be married.”

  “I have just been through the most dreadful experience you can imagine!” said the shadow. “Just think! Well, I suppose a poor shadow’s brain can’t take very much. But imagine! My shadow has gone mad. He thinks that he is a human, and—picture this—he takes me for his shadow.”

  “That’s horrifying!” said the princess. “He’s locked up, isn’t he?”

  “Oh, of course. But I doubt he will ever recover.”

  “Poor shadow,” said the princess. “He must be terribly unhappy. It would be an act of compassion to liberate him from the little bit of life left in him. If I stop to think about it, there’s no choice but to do away with him—very quietly.” “How painful that is,” the shadow said. “He was such a loyal servant.” And he managed to let out what sounded like a sigh.

  “What a noble character you have,” the princess declared.

  VILHELM PEDERSEN

  The shadow and the princess appear on the balcony to acknowledge the cheering crowds at their wedding ceremony.

  That evening the entire city was brightly lit. The cannons boomed, and the soldiers presented their arms. It was quite a wedding!32 The princess and the shadow appeared on the balcony to be admired by all, and they received another round of cheers.

  The learned man didn’t hear any of that, for by then they had taken his life.33

  KAY NIELSEN

  The shadow itself (or the shadow of the shadow), in silhouette against the prison, gazes down at the cross marking what is presumably the gravesite of the learned man.

  1. Shadow. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Shadow: A Parable” (1850), Oscar Wilde’s “The Fisherman and His Soul” (1891), J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s The Woman without a Shadow (1919) are all about what it means to lose a shadow. Often seen in symbolic terms as a manifestation of the soul (“the shadow of the body is the body of the Soul,” Wilde tells us in his story), the shadow can also function as an uncanny double that detaches itself from the body to haunt others. The shadow becomes a spectral presence that generally incarnates the darker desires and longings of the self. The Danish term for shadow, skygge, can mean both shade (in the sense of a ghost or a spirit) and shadow.

  2. the sun can really scorch you. The opening sentences, in Andersen’s signature casual, conversational tone, make light of what will become a weighty matter. The scholar has entered a domain in which your skin color can change (note that the implied reader has white skin) to brown or black. Instead of risking that particular metamorphosis, in which he could be “baked black,” the scholar takes up residence in a “moderately hot” country and avoids heat and light, retreating into his study to investigate the good, the true, and the beautiful (thereby remaining “white”). Ironically, his “black” side nonetheless emerges in the form of a shadow that achieves dominance.

  The menacing shadow has dark habits. In his first appearance as a man, he is “dressed in black, with clothes made from the finest cloth,” with a black hat. But his transformation is achieved through exposure to the “brightness” of the apartment that is described as the dwelling place of Poetry. And he begins to sport accessories that are generally associated with the sparkle and shimmer of art. The sharp distinctions between black and white established at the beginning of the story through skin color begin to break down in both moral and aesthetic terms.

  3. Along with all other sensible souls, he had to stay indoors. The use of the term “sensible,” along with the description of the learned man as a scholar dedicated to the life of the mind, suggests that the warmer countries lack the intellectual power found in northern regions. Yet the term “sensible” may also be used ironically, as it is when the narrator notes that the learned man decides not to write about himself, “which was very sensible of him.”

  4. It was really unbearable! The living conditions are unbearable in part because of the heat and in part because of the claustrophobic living conditions. Shutters and doors close the learned man off from the world, and his contact with the outside world seems limited to the nocturnal outings on the balcony, where he appears as an observer rather than as a participant, looking onto a narrow street with tall buildings. It is precisely by shutting himself off from the world and retreating from life that the learned man creates the conditions for the separation of shadow from self. On his own trips to Italy, Andersen rarely closeted himself in and spent much of his time visiting sights, meeting literary worthies, and socializing with his fellow travelers. In his diaries, he describes the effects of the sun during a stay in Naples: “The heat from the sun followed us, becoming more and more oppressive as the sirocco blew hot and dry air; I thought as a Northerner that the heat would do me good. I should have noticed that the Neapolitans stayed at home, or crept along in the shadow of the houses, as Paar and I dashed from one museum to the next or down to the pier. Then, one day, my breathing started to fail, the sun burnt into my eyes, the rays going through my head and back, and I fainted dead away” (Travels, 257).

  5. did the man and his shadow come back to life. Even at this early point in the story, the shadow has been anthropomorphized with its own identity and agency. It seems to shrink, stretch, and become animated on its own.

  6. it was very lively down in that street. The effervescent quality of everyday life forms a sharp contrast to the quiet, hermetic existence in which scholar and shadow dwell and to the silence of the building in which Poetry dwells. The scholar, while aware of the life below, finds himself attracted more powerfully to the mysterious, silent abode. Andersen, like many writers, found himself divided between the lively attractions of the real world and the beauty of an imaginative, inner world. The learned man, however, seems to reside in a limbo, not daring to engage with one or the other.

  7. Only one house stayed quiet. The beauty of the flowers is the most compelling attraction of the building across from the scholar. The “fabulous” music breaks the silence of the front rooms and deepens the aura of mysterious beauty in the architectural wonder situated in the urban landscape.

  8. a strange, shimmering light on his neighbor’s balcony. It is not clear whether the enchanting maiden is dream or reality. The stranger thinks he sees a peculiar glow and is then persuaded that the flowers are indeed gleaming like flames, but when he opens his eyes and rouses himself “from sleep,” the vision of flowers in flames and of the maiden vanishes. The vision produces uncertainty in the mind of the character and the reader. That uncertainty is symptomatic of an effect that the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov has called “the fantastic,” as opposed to “the marvelous,” which is truly supernatural, or “the uncanny,” which is strange but not contrary to natural laws. The fantastic is the hallmark of the poetic fairy tales written by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Adelbert von Chamisso, and the other German Romantics who inspired this particular story.

  9. “If only my shadow were clever enough to step inside.” “No sooner said than done” takes on a new depth of meaning here. The learned man speaks words that work magic, for his wish is quickly—and subtly—translated into reality. He has, in a sense, willed his shadow to detach itself from him, commanding it to do what he is afraid to do. At first the shadow’s moves are in concert with its owner (“the shadow moved too”), then the shadow appears to have an independent existence (“Look how much at home it is among the flowers”), and finally it actually walks in the opposite direction, entering the building across the way. Note the absence of witnesses (“If anyone had been paying attention”), a fact that emphasizes the possibility that the learned man is hallucinating.

  10. a story about a man without a shadow. The story that everyone in the “cold countries” knows about is most likely Adelbert von Chamisso’s The Marvelous Story of Peter Schlemihl. Chamisso’s story of a man who sells his shadow to the devil becam
e so well known that it was cited in works by E.T.A. Hoffmann (“Adventures on a New Year’s Eve,” written in the year Peter Schlemihl was published) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (“The Intelligence Office” of 1844). Note the anxiety of influence expressed in the scholar’s fear that others will believe that he is simply copying another author and creating a shadow of another story. That shadow of the story of Peter Schlemihl does exactly what the shadow of the learned man does: disappear only to reappear in an unexpected new form. In Andersen’s tale, the shadow detaches itself from the scholar to lead a successful, independent life.

  11. a new shadow had started growing. The growth of a new shadow points to the possibility that the learned man is simply hallucinating, but it may also function as an event that reinforces the supernatural turn to the story once the shadow detaches itself.

  12. “I can’t get over it!” The literal meaning of the learned man’s words are “I can’t come to my self!” It is at this point that the text, as Clayton Koelb points out, acts out a literal meaning that is ordinarily impossible. “That ‘I’ should meet ‘myself’ is a simple matter for language,” he observes, “but we do not expect that grammatical possibility to be thus transformed into practice” (Koelb, 207).

  13. “I’ve been following in your footsteps since childhood.” The playful rhetoric in the midst of existential crisis is characteristic of the tale’s style, and here the shadow plays on the figurative and literal dimensions of language, revealing how he has, for most of his life, taken after the scholar.

  14. “Do I owe you—or it—anything?” Note how the shadow here, in acknowledging the new shadow as “it,” also validates the division of self and shadow even as he sets up a hierarchy that privileges the learned man (“you”) over his shadow (“it”). The shadow seems to have the success in commerce that the learned man himself never achieved.

  KAY NIELSEN

  The shadow appears at the home of the learned man. He is dressed in black and carries in one hand the flat top hat and wears diamond rings, along with a watch on a chain. Confident and debonair, he cuts a dashing figure on the moonlit evening.

  15. “a man is as good as his word.” In this key dialogue between the man and his shadow, the learned man asserts that a man is his word and his shadow declares that a word is his shadow. Both man and shadow have the word in common, and, in this rhetorical sleight-of-hand, it becomes evident that, through language, man and shadow can reverse their positions, as they do in Andersen’s narrative. As soon as shadow and learned man take these oaths, the shadow begins to take over the life of the man.

  16. It was dressed in black. The shadow, appropriately, wears clothing that reflects his true identity, including a hat that can be closed so that only the crown and brim (for which the Danish word is “shadow”) remain. At the same time, he wears brilliant, costly jewelry—gold and diamonds that point to his wealth and to the fact that he has, at least in part, transcended his dark existence and affiliated himself with the bright light of art, even if in its vulgar, material manifestation.

  17. didn’t move or make a sound. The second shadow, which has grown as a replacement for the first, seems also to have human qualities. Note that the first shadow contemplates the possibility of obtaining the scholar’s second shadow, perhaps to facilitate his full transformation into a man. Unlike the learned man, the shadow has “a root” and can continue to grow new copies of itself.

  18. “Poetry!” The learned man had perceived the building across the way as an enchanted world (en Trolddom), and he discovers, retrospectively, that the maiden he saw was Poetry, a figure who appears at nighttime, but with a brightness rivaling that of the sun, “as radiant as the Northern lights.” Like the sun, the maiden creates a lethal abundance of light, enough to have “killed” the shadow, who cannot tolerate too much brightness, given his dark nature (shades of the mole in “Thumbelina”). The encounter between the dark shadow and the bright spirit of Poetry allegedly leads to knowledge (“I’ve seen everything, and I know everything”) and also gives flesh to the shadow, but, ironically, it appears to have turned him into a cynical, sinister figure who uses his shadowy abilities to intimidate others, betray the learned man, and dupe the princess.

  19. “address me in a more formal manner.” In Danish, as in French and many other languages, a distinction is made between the formal “you” (De) and the familiar “you” (Du). During their first encounter, the man uses the familiar Du, and the shadow speaks with the man using De until finally insisting on also being addressed with De. Andersen himself had been deeply humiliated when his offer to Edvard Collin (the son of his benefactor) to shift to the Du form of address was rejected. On May 28, 1831, Collin wrote to him: “There is something that I simply can’t explain in my reaction. . . . When someone I’ve known for a long time—a person I admire and like—invites me to use Du, I develop a mysteriously unpleasant reaction.”

  20. “Was it like a green forest?” The learned man assumes that either verdant nature or powerful spiritual beings will occupy the halls of Poetry. His reference to the “starry sky” could be alluding to Kant’s declaration, from the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), that he was moved to awe and wonder by “the starry sky above me and the quiet law within me.” Those words were chosen by Kant’s friends for his tombstone and became a commonplace expression.

  21. “connection with Poetry.” As an entity affiliated with darkness and shady matters, the shadow claims to be completely at home in the sphere of poetry. Dwelling there, he manages to discover his innermost being and to develop depth despite the fact that he is a two-dimensional being. Poetry here fulfills its mission of cultivating profundity, but it does not succeed in achieving moral improvement of any kind.

  22. “because I know you won’t put it in a book.” The learned man has not only liberated his shadow by declaring it to be free, he has also abdicated the power to tell his story because he fears being perceived as an imitator. This double disavowal, first of his shadow, then of his narrative voice, deepens the identity crisis he faces even as it is symptomatic of an attempt to achieve singularity. “The Shadow” is, of course, told by a third-person omniscient narrator, not by the learned man.

  23. “I ran up and down the streets.” The shadow, despite the fact that he has become a man, still resembles a shadow. That he stays at home when it rains (a time when shadows disappear) is further evidence that he has not completely evolved into a human being.

  24. “I saw what no one else could, or should, see.” The shadow asserts his kinship with poetry and describes himself as a creature who can pry, eavesdrop, and snoop, gaining access to the secret life of the soul. And yet he does not translate this knowledge into any kind of poetic insight, using his observations for nothing other than venal purposes. Dickens, to whom Andersen had paid a visit in 1857 when he traveled to London, writes about a proposed commentator for a periodical he was planning and sketches a character much like Andersen’s spectral figure: “a certain SHADOW, which may go into any place, by sunlight, moonlight, starlight, fire-light, candlelight, and be in all homes, and all nooks and corners, and be supposed to be cognizant of everything, and go everywhere, without the least difficulty. . . . a kind of semi-omniscient, omnipresent, intangible creature” (Forster, II 419–20). Like the nightingale in the tale of that title and the daughters of the air who appear at the end of “The Little Mermaid,” the shadow has the capacity to supervise and surreptitiously monitor behavior.

  25. “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” The learned man is committed to a Platonic vision in which reality is nothing but a refraction of the world of ideas in which the good, the true, and the beautiful are one. His search for the good, the true, and the beautiful reveals an inability to engage with reality, and that inability has real consequences, for the shadow emerges to claim all the materialistic, venal, sinister traits that the learned man has worked so hard to purge from his life.

  26. The shadow was now the master, and the master was the
shadow. Despite the fact that the shadow does not become fully human, he begins the process of overshadowing his host. The learned man has become nothing more than a shadow of himself. The interplay between shadow and self continues in a verbally playful manner but in a situation charged with malice. The learned man may be kind and gentle, but his shadow operates with calculation and ruthlessness, aiming for a complete reversal of positions.

  27. “to call you by yours.” The shadow claims to meet the learned man halfway, but he is, of course, gaining the upper hand by offering to use the informal form of address. The reversal in forms of address marks the point at which subjection becomes complete. The shadow has now become “the real master.”

  28. the disease of being able to see too well. The princess suffers from a malady that the shadow may well understand, since he has “seen everything.” That she immediately perceives the shadow’s lack of a shadow and understands that the failure to grown a beard is simply a cover for deeper problems suggests that she may have some redeeming virtues, but in fact she is easily taken in by the shadow and proves less insightful than she initially appears. She may see too much, but she cannot see through the shadow and his machinations.

  29. She was light on her feet, but he was even lighter. The narrator continues to engage in word play, with the shadow, despite his darkness, being “light,” if only in the sense of insubstantial and without weight.

  30. “What a man he must be to have such a wise shadow!” It is telling that the learned man retains the quality that has been his chief attribute all along, as signaled in the adjective “learned.” In the end, however, even his intellect is appropriated through the clever ruse of the shadow, who understands how to get the upper hand on every count.

  31. “I’m going to tell everyone the whole story.” The scholar decides to tell his story at last, but too late to ensure his own survival. Ironically, he fails to write about himself for fear of being perceived as an imitator, and ends up, not just as a shadow of himself, but as a shadow of his shadow, doomed to mime his every move. Storytelling has been linked with survival ever since the time of Scheherazade, who told her thousand and one tales to delay her execution by King Shariyar. For the scholar, the impulse to tell his story and thereby save his life comes too late, for the shadow has already secured the power he needs to engineer an execution.