Personal Fantasy in Andersen's Fairy Tales DISCovering Authors, 2003

[In the excerpt below, Griffith illuminates Andersen's handling of love and sexuality in his fairy tales.]

[Andersen] wrote love-stories by the dozen—"The Little Mermaid," "Thumbelina," "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," "The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep," "The Sweethearts" and "The Bog King's Daughter" are perhaps the most famous. Through them all runs one story, the basic Andersen fantasy. The central character is small, frail, more likely to be female than male—above all, delicate, an embodiment of that innocence which is harmlessness, that purity which is incapacity for lust. He/she is usually incapable of ordinary motion, physically unsuited to pursuit and consummation: the tin soldier has only one leg, the mermaid has no legs at all, Thumbelina is carried from place to place as if she were crippled. Andersen's imagination is much taken with statues as the emblem of chaste erotic feeling: the tin soldier and his ballerina are inanimate figurines, the shepherdess and the chimney sweep are made of porcelain, the little mermaid falls in love with a marble statue before she ever sees the prince in the flesh. (It is fitting that Copenhagen has immortalized the little mermaid herself as a statue.) In another story, "Psyche," the hero creates a statue of the girl he loves, the pristine symbol of his devotion. The girl herself rejects him.

Andersen's ideal lovers are often rejected. A few of the folk-tales he retold—such as "The Tinderbox"—end with the hero married and living happily ever after; but the stories he made up himself do not. Usually something prevents marriage—rejection, misunderstanding, snobbery, fate. At the end of "The Bog King's Daughter," the heroine steps out onto a balcony on her wedding night and just disappears. Andersen doesn't care very much if love is satisfied in this world, since the conclusion his fantasy really works toward is splendid, mystical death—the launching out of the soul into the infinite, leaving troublesome flesh behind. "It is lovely to fly from love to love, from earth into heaven," says Andersen, describing the death of the hero in "The Ice Maiden." "A string snapped, a mournful tone was heard. Death's kiss of ice was victorious against corruption." Similarly, the little mermaid leaves her body behind and becomes a daughter of the air. The tin soldier and the ballerina die together in flames, he melting into a tin heart and she reduced to a bright spangle. The shepherdess and the chimney sweep "loved each other until they broke." Thumbelina dons white wings and flies away with her fairy-lover, who is "almost transparent, as if he were made of glass." The bog king's daughter becomes "one single beautiful ray of light, that shot upward to God."

Physical sensuality in these stories tends to be pictured as grasping, slimy, and disgusting. Thumbelina is coaxed, abducted, clutched at by a toad and her son, a fat black mole, and an ugly insect before she flies away to the fairy-king; the shepherdess is pursued by a satyr who had "a long beard, ... little horns sticking out of his forehead and the legs of a goat." The princess in "The Bog King's Daughter" is shudderingly embraced by an "ancient king; a mummy, black as pitch, glittering like the black slugs that creep in the forest." Frequently the physical ordeal Andersen's lovers must go through in pursuit of transcendent love is a descent into dark, close, filthy places—the tin soldier floats down a gutter into a sewer and is swallowed by a fish; the shepherdess and the chimney sweep have to creep up and down a chimney flue; the ball and the top met in a garbage bin where "all kinds of things were lying: gravel, a cabbage stalk, dirt, dust, and lots of leaves that had fallen down from the gutter."

Andersen's sharpest vision of sensual horror is in "The Little Mermaid." There the heroine, smitten with love for a human prince, sets out to find what she must do to make him love her in return. The grotesque ordeal Andersen contrives for her is a direct fantasy-enactment of the idea that, in order to be a wife, a girl must submit to rape. She must "divide her tail," and the experience is an excruciating one. She has to travel down to a terrible forest in the deepest part of the ocean, through polyps "like snakes with hundreds of heads," with "long slimy arms, and they had fingers as supple as worms" that reach out to grab her as she "held both her hands folded tightly across her breast" and hurries past.

At last she came to a great, slimy open place in the middle of the forest. Big fat eels played in the mud, showing their ugly yellow stomachs.... Here the witch ... sat letting a big ugly toad eat out of her mouth, as human beings sometimes let a canary eat sugar candy out of theirs. The ugly eels she called her little chickens, and held them close to her spongy chest.

The witch tells her that if the prince is to love her, she must lose her tail with a sensation of having her body pierced by a sword. "The little mermaid drank the potion, and it felt as if a sword were piercing her body. She fainted and lay as though she were dead."

Nowhere else in classic children's literature is there so terrified a vision of sex, seen through the eyes of innocence. The scene in "The Ice Maiden" where Rudy accepts death as his lover is calm by comparison:

He threw his arms around her and looked into her marvelous clear eyes for a second. Only for a second! And how is one to describe, to tell in words, what he saw in that fraction of a moment? What was it that overpowered him—a ghost? Or was it a bit of life that exists in death? Had he been lifted upward or had he been plunged into a deep, death-filled world of ice?

When she kisses him, "the eternal coldness penetrated his backbone and touched his forehead." Here, as elsewhere, Andersen compresses into one scene the contradictory ideas that death is erotic, and that one can escape eroticism by dying. Something of that same paradox is present in another Andersen story, "The Garden of Eden," which posits sex as original sin. A young prince falls from innocence by kissing the lips of a beautiful naked woman, and death is both the reward and punishment for his action.

A fearful clap of thunder was heard, deeper, more frightening than any ever heard before. The fairy vanished and the garden of Eden sank into the earth: deep, deep down. The prince saw it disappear into the dark night like a far distant star. He felt a deathly coldness touch his limbs; his eyes closed, and he fell down as though he were dead.

This troubled view of sex is important even in Andersen stories which are not explicitly about erotic subjects, for it explains his obsession with innocence in many forms. Innocence is the watchword in Andersen's fantasies. No virtue rates so high with him as child-like purity, by which he means freedom from adult desire, ambition, and thought. He found inspiration of a sort in folk-tales, because they often begin with heroes who are simple, humble and childlike. But he had to change the folk-tale pattern in order to bring out his personal fantasies. The traditional folk-tale shows its protagonist's growth and happiness directly; he gets money, love and power—as for instance in Andersen's own re-telling of "The Tinderbox," in which a soldier seizes a princess, kills her father, and ascends to the throne; or "Little Claus and Big Claus," in which an underdog-hero kills his rival and gets rich. The stories that Andersen made up himself turn this pattern inside out. Like folk-tale heroes, Andersen's start poor—but his stories demonstrate that the poor in spirit are blessed. Like them, Andersen's heroes hurl themselves into life—but discover that they would do better to die and be with God. In an Andersen story, it is better to be the peasant girl who can hear the nightingale than the chamberlain who cannot ("The Nightingale"); better to be little Gerda, who trusts and believes and wants to stay at home, than Kay, who "gets a piece of the Devil's glass in his eye" and questions and criticizes and explores ("The Snow Queen").

In story after story, Andersen makes fun of and punishes people who care about money and power and artifice and prestige and critical judgment; he celebrates the humble and long-suffering and credulous and sentimental. His attitude belongs partly to Christian asceticism, and partly to nineteenth- century Romantic primitivism, sentimentalism, and anti-intellectualism, and no doubt takes many of its forms and phrases from those philosophies. But for Andersen personally the value of innocence is closely tied to his nightmarish view of sex, a fact which is easily discernible in several of his most famous stories. For him, to be innocent is, first and foremost, to expunge or repress one's sexual urges. One especially graphic case in point here is his tale "The Red Shoes," a story Andersen found to be a particular favorite in the Puritan strongholds of Scotland, Holland, and the United States. Read in the loosest, most abstract terms, the story is a parable on the idea that pride goeth before a fall: a pretty girl, preoccupied with beauty and finery, shows her vanity, is punished for it, and learns her lesson. But given the concrete details of Andersen's personal fantasy, the story vibrates with sexual panic, celebrating innocence that is won through the repression of sexuality.

Andersen records that "The Red Shoes" was inspired by a memory from his youth: "In The Fairy Tale of My Life, I have told how I received for my confirmation my first pair of boots; and how they squeaked as I walked up the aisle of the church; this pleased me no end, for I felt that now the whole congregation must know that my boots are new. But at the same time my conscience bothered me terribly, for I was aware that I was thinking as much about my new boots as I was about our Lord." Out of that bothersome conscience came Andersen's story, with the new boots transformed to red shoes, and Andersen, the boy wearing them, transformed to a pretty girl named Karen.

What Andersen consciously thinks of as an emblem of pride and vanity, he unconsciously imbues with sexual significance in a number of ways. First, he gives his heroine the name of his scandalous half- sister, the one who disappeared into the red-light districts of Copenhagen and later embarrassed her brother by turning up with a common-law husband. Shoe and foot-symbolism tends to be sexual in many uses—the Old Testament and other folk-literatures often say "feet" as a euphemism for sexual organs, and foot-fetishism is a common neurotic device for expressing forbidden interest in the genitals. That "The Red Shoes" emanates from Andersen's memory of a ritual of puberty, and of his flaunting the new boots he had for that occasion, also helps to place it psychologically. Andersen emphasizes the sexual quality by making Karen's shoes red, the traditional color of unruly passion, and by making them dancing shoes, with a power to catch her up and carry her away against her conscious will: "Once she had begun, her feet would not stop. It was as if the shoes had taken command of them ... her will was not her own." Giving herself over to their excitement, she faces the debility Andersen associated with sexual excess: "You shall dance in your red shoes until you become pale and thin. Dance till the skin on your face turns yellow and clings to your bones as if you were a skeleton."

She must first acquire the red shoes against her mother's wishes; it is a man who sets them doing their fearful, orgiastic dancing, an old soldier with "a marvelously long beard that was red with touches of white in it." When he touches them, they begin dancing.

The shoes "grow fast" to Karen's feet and will not come off—they are part of her body. The only way she can purge their evil is to cut off the offending members. "Do not cut off my head," she begs the executioner, "for then I would not be able to repent. But cut off my feet!" He does as she asks, and she becomes like Andersen's other acceptable lovers: crippled. For a time thoughts of the lost sexuality still linger—she sees the red shoes dancing before her when she tries to go to church. Finally, in an agony of contrition and self-reproach, she wins God's mercy, and He sends His sunshine: "The sunshine filled Karen's heart till it so swelled with peace and happiness that it broke. Her soul flew on a sunbeam up to God; and up there no one asked her about the red shoes."

"The Red Shoes" is a harrowing, gothic little tale, to be sure, and that may help to explain its popularity. Actually, it doesn't succeed very well in advancing the dry moral idea that we should be humble and love God better than ourselves. What the solid events of the story convey is rather the idea that there is something we are tempted to do with our feet, but old ladies and ministers and angels don't want us to do it. If we refuse to listen to their warnings, a leering old man will touch our feet and set them working and we won't be able to stop. Then we'll be glad to have the grown-ups chop them off, and to be allowed to die and go to God. I suppose there is more than one way to say what that fantasy means; but any description which fails to account for the evocative image of the red- bearded man touching the girl's feet and setting them dancing uncontrollably has hardly done it justice.

Andersen himself was aware—at least partly—of the psychological links between his inhibited sexuality and his artistic creativity, his wish for fame as an artist, and his longing for death. The story "Psyche" shows clearly that he believed that his pursuit of ideal beauty and immortality through art and religion sprang from sexual longings that he could not allow himself to fulfill.

"Psyche" is the story of a young artist, poor and unknown, who strives for perfection in his art, but cannot produce anything that satisfies him. His worldly friends tell him he is too much the dreamer: "You have not tasted life. You ought to take a big healthy swallow and enjoy it." They invite him to join them in their orgies and he is excited—"his blood ran swiftly through his body, his imagination was strong." But he cannot bring himself to go with them—he feels "within himself a purity, a sense of piety" that stops him, and turns him toward working in clay and marble instead, as a superior alternative to physical lust. "What he wanted to describe [in his sculpture] was how his heart sought and sensed infinity, but how was he to do it?"

The answer is that he sees a girl, just in passing, and falls in love. At first he makes no attempt to approach her; he turns his attention to a mental image he has of her, as she becomes "alive in his mind." He sets to work on a statue of her, made from marble he has to dig out from heaps of "broken glass," "discarded vegetables," "the tops of fennel and the rotten leaves of artichokes." With these materials—a fantasy-image snatched from a passing glimpse of a beautiful girl, and white marble extracted from the filth of ordinary life—the artist constructs an image of perfect beauty.

He wants to believe that he now has what his friends have—only better. "Now I know what life is," he rejoices. "It is love! It is to be able to appreciate loveliness and to delight in beauty. And what my friends call `life' is nothing but empty vanity, bubbles from the fermentation of the dregs, instead of the pure wine, drunk at the altar to consecrate life." But despite this brave speech, he finds that his feelings for the statue are rooted in those "dregs" of erotic passion. He desires not just the idea of beauty, but the girl herself. "Soon both God and his tears were forgotten; instead he thought of his Psyche, who stood before him, looking as if she had been cut out of snow and blushing in the light of the dawn. He was going to see her: the living, breathing girl who stepped so lightly, as if she walked on air, the girl whose innocent words were music."

His attempt to make love to the girl is a disaster. "He grabbed her hand and kissed it, and he thought it was softer than a rose petal and yet it inflamed him. He was so excited, so aroused, that he hardly knew what he was saying; words gushed out of his mouth and he could no more control their flow than the crater can stop the volcano from vomiting burning lava. He told her how much he loved her." Contemptuously she spurns him. His lust aroused, the young artist yields to his friends' coaxing and spends a riotous night with some beautiful peasant girls. Andersen's metaphors convey the sexual excitement, release, and disappointment he feels: "The flower of life ... bloomed, bent its head, and withered. A strange, horrible smell of corruption blended itself with the odor of roses, it lamed his mind and blinded his sight. The fireworks of sensuality were over and darkness came." Sickened with guilt, he buries the beautiful statue, enters a monastery, and begins a lifelong struggle to suppress the "unclean, evil thoughts" that spring up inside. "He punished his body, but the evil did not come from the surface but from deep within him." He dies at last, his body and bones rot away, and the centuries pass over the unmarked grave of the statue which his love inspired him to make. At last, workmen digging a grave in a convent unearth the statue. No one knows the name of its creator. "But his gain, his profit from his struggle, and his search, the glory that proved the godliness within him, his Psyche, will never die. It will live beyond the name of its creator. His spark still shines here on earth and is admired, appreciated, and loved."

What Andersen says in this elaborate parable is that the erotic hunger which other men feed with "a big healthy swallow of life"—"not only the bread, but the baker woman"—has for him been diverted to a hunger for ideal beauty and fame and spirituality. But he can find no satisfaction in these ideals; he goes to his grave cursing "the strange flames that seemed to set his body on fire." The statue he has made is beautiful, perfect, and his own, a product of his imagination inspired by passion. But there is no primary gratification to be had from it—only highly theoretical pleasure in the hope that this embodied fantasy would constitute a "gain, his profit from his struggle and his search, the glory that proved the godliness within him."

Andersen's stories are like the artist's statue—minded from the "dregs" and "filth" of ordinary life, with energy that might otherwise have been spent in sensual revels. Their substance is the stuff of desire, the drive for love and power; but the art that shapes them is self-doubt and anxiety and troubled conscience. So they become in the end monuments to chastity and innocence, a marble statue in a nun's grave: no abiding satisfaction to their creator, but still something to be admired by others, "his spark that still shines here on earth and is admired, appreciated, and loved." Thus, finally, and by a most circuitous route, is the desire for love and eminence to be fulfilled, for Andersen.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale.

Source Citation Griffith, John. "Personal Fantasy in Andersen's Fairy Tales." DISCovering Authors. Detr oit: Gale, 2003. Student Resources in Context. Web. 4 Dec. 2015.

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