Fairy Tales: Unappealing and Ubiquitous Andersen

When I first started A-Z List 7, I knew I would need to tackle Hans Christian Andersen eventually. I was not looking forward to the experience. 

Turns out, I am not as averse to Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales as I initially assumed. I realized, looking over his bibliography, that a number of tales I didn't associate with Andersen, such as "The Wild Swans," are his. I will address some of those tales in a later post.

Unfortunately, the Andersen tales I really dislike, I really dislike.  

As I mention in an earlier post, I'm not automatically opposed to Disney's sweetness-and-light approach to fairy tales. For that matter, I don't care if Disney wants to use its movies as vehicles for a particular philosophy. Welcome to capitalism! The company can produce all the stuff it wants. I can watch it or not as I please. 

"The Little Mermaid" is one place where I greatly appreciated Disney not going down the maudlin, depressing angst corridor (if you don't know whereof I speak, read the original tale). 

Don't get me wrong: Andersen is a skilled storyteller.  "Ugly Duckling," "Little Match Girl," "The Tin Soldier," not to forget "The Little Mermaid" are all memorable because they capture a zeitgeist exceedingly well. 

But doing something well is not the same as doing something everybody wants to read, just as disliking something personally doesn't mean there isn't another audience out there for it. 

I find many of Andersen's tales unbelievably depressing. Even the "Ugly Duckling," which ostensibly has a happy ending, rests on a desperate and unnerving desire for approval by others. And the sad deaths of so many of Andersen's characters begin often with rejection by others. 

I can appreciate that the tales reflect the author--I can even appreciate that they despondently zero in on part of the human condition. It's like every emo Goth in the universe got together to grouch, "Life is so depressing, you know, a dark pit of despair and nothingness. Yeah, yeah, like that."

I chose "The Snow Queen" for this post because it is more chilling--ha ha--than down-in-the-dumps. And has impacted our culture greatly, from Frozen to ballets to literary references. 

In "The Snow Queen," Gerda joins a notable pantheon of heroines searching for lovers, suitors, brothers, and other male missing persons. The trope has a long history.

Note: Regarding folklore, a trope is a narrative element that shows up in more than one tale. A motif is a singular element (in literary analysis, the motif is often connected to theme). Gathering helpers to search for a lover is a trope. A magical ring or object is a motif.

Kay is rescued from the Snow Queen--or, rather, from the shards of a broken mirror that turned him into a posturing jerk ("I'd like to know if you deserve to have someone running to the end of the world after you," says the robber girl to Kay). The Snow Queen is never specifically punished. Rather, like mermaids, the Snow Queen exists at a remove: untouchable, indifferent, ruthless, snow itself. Punishing her would be pointless (especially if you live in Northern Europe).    

Kay is rescued from the allure of perfection and returned to the warmth and complications and oddities of everyday life, including all the good, imperfect helpers Gerda met along her journey: "Kay and Gerda looked into each other's eyes. There they stood, grown up and yet children--children at heart--and it was summer, warm and delightful summer." 

Vladyslav Yerko's version of the tale is gorgeously illustrated. I rather wish the final picture corresponded to the text--all the main characters remain children except the queen. But the gap between image and text is easy to overlook, the book is so beautiful. 

"The Snow Queen" is not only one of Andersen's (ultimately) more positive tales, it seems to present an answer from Andersen to Andersen about the double-edged sword of pursuing the unattainable. As a writer, rather than a collector, of fairy tales, Andersen created cultural phenomenons, memorable tales whose tropes and motifs touch on the human condition. They add to it. They complicate it. They make it whole. They don't need to be perfect to be valuable.

They may not have made their creator very happy. But his feat is worthy of Gerda's search.