The World in Pieces: Concepts of Anxiety in H. C. Andersen's "The Snow Queen"

Abstract

This paper draws parallels between Kierkegaard's themes of anxiety, and despair, and irony as they are laid out in The Concept of Anxiety, The Sickness Unto Death, and The Concept of Irony, respectively, and similar motifs in his compatriot Hans Christian Andersen's long moralizing fairy-tale, "The Snow Queen." Bringing a psychoanalytical framework to bear on all these works, the paper argues that "The Snow Queen" is in many ways a dramatization of some of Kierkegaard's own key concerns, a dramatization which however flinches before Kierkegaard's more rigorous stance towards what contemporary psychoanalysis calls "depression."