The Ugly Duckling's Legacy: Adulteration, Contemporary Fantasy, and the Dark

Abstract

In the annals of childhood reading Hans Christian Andersen lurks, a latent wound. For many of us he provides the first whisper of pain that will not heal, of quests that fail, of desires that remain unsated. And yet his linger in the imagination, partly because they defy the words of comfort with which parents. teachers, and children's books attempt to blot out the terrors of childhood: terrors of isolation, abandonment, extinction. Ursula K. Le Guin writes that she hated Andersen's as a child, but [t]hat didn't stop me from reading them, and rereading them. Or from remembering (61). Similarly, Rosellen Brown asks herself why 'The Little Mermaid' so fascinated me that I shuddered and read it and again (57), musing that perhaps [she] was a simple child to believe the worst, but she preferred the sad endings and couldn't accept the fake good Andersen occasionally offers (56). Others recall that when they were children Andersen's most virulent females provided them with role models: Maria Flook identified with Inger's macabre sense of humor in Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (127). A. S. Byatt found something secretly good, illicitly desirable, about the ice hills and glass barriers of the Snow Queen's palace (71), which came to signify for her the desirability and the pain of the artist's quest for beauty. These anecdotes by accomplished writers about their childhood reading belie the desire to mute or disguise the presence of pain in human experience by censoring or denying children access to depictions of it - adulteration, if you will. Pain, together with sexuality and other conflicts usually identified as adult pervade Andersen's writings, one reason his are often abridged and altered. Stefan Sullivan assumes in his review of Tiina Nunnally's recent Andersen translation that darkness is, by definition, adult: the review, titled Ugly Duckling Grows Up, opens with the comment that these tales should be marked with a parental advisory sticker (Sullivan). The Disney Corporation's appropriation of The Little (1989) transmutes Andersen's bittersweet ichor into G-rated diet soda, with the ostensible goal of making it child-safe. Whose fears are actually being assuaged? The truism that the or cynical aspects of Andersen's works are directed toward adults rather than to children and that children must be shielded from the representation of things that might make them afraid or sad deserves to be questioned. Dark and painful conflicts are not necessarily and definitively adult; Andersen's stories, which describe broadly human fears, wishes, and nightmares, should not be classified into sunny tales appropriate for children and dark tales for adults. For some child readers, Andersen's depictions of the pain of human existence have inspired new artistic achievement. As Alvin Schwartz has noted, children request scary stories and hand down their own folklore of fear orally from child to child (Marcus 46). Far from being inappropriate for children, Andersen's tales might actually offer children who need it relief from the hearty good cheer that pervades ordinary kiddie-lit and falsifies their experience of the world. In fact, adults writing for other adults are as likely to amend the pain of Andersen's as are children and writers for children; Disney's neutering of Ehe Little Mermaid is no more sentimental or dishonest than many fairy-tale writers' attempts to debunk or deny the pain that Andersen's invoke. For example, Melissa Lee Shaw's Ehe Sea reconfigures Ehe Little Mermaid as a tale in which the Sea Hag is a wronged mother, dispossessed by her power-hungry spouse; in this sisterhood-is-powerful version, the mermaid's desired union with her love is still a possibility at the end of the story, and the mother-Hag makes a glorious sacrifice for her beloved daughter. In contrast to those who wish the to experience conventional happiness, Gwyneth Cravens recalls as a child reading Andersen's story and being both troubled and satisfied and uplifted by the story's conclusion: What of its subtleties I could have articulated to myself back then I don't know, but some part of me readily absorbed them. …