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| Source: The Little Mermaid |
“Her skin was as clear and delicate as a rose-leaf, and her eyes as blue as the deepest sea; but she had no feet any more than the others, and her body ended in a fish's tail.”
Everybody has watched Disney’s modern fairytale, The Little Mermaid, and thought what a beautiful and touching love story it was, a bit twisted but charming nonetheless. A pretty mermaid falls in love with a human prince, rises to the surface, and after a few obstacles, wins his love and gets married in the end. A happy ending indeed. But the original story doesn’t have this “happily ever after”.
Written by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, and published in 1837, ‘The Little Mermaid’ follows the journey of a young mermaid princess to obtain an immortal soul. Unlike Disney’s adaptation, this isn’t a fairytale that you would tell children as a bedtime story. Reading the original story will definitely leave you disillusioned.
The True Story of The Little Mermaid
The original and the animation are just as similar as they are different. The set-up is the same in both the stories. In the original story, the little mermaid is the youngest of six sisters. When a mermaid turns sixteen, she is allowed to go to the surface to see the world above. The plot-line is pretty much the same from when the mermaid goes to the surface to when she saves the prince by bringing him ashore.
In Hans’ version, the prince wakes up and sees a temple maiden and mistakes her as his savior while the mermaid watches them while hiding. According to the story, mermaids can live for 300 years. But when mermaids die, their soul ceases to exist and they turn into sea foam whereas the human’s soul is immortal. Only after having a human fall in love with them and marry them, are they able to obtain immortal souls.
To get both the prince and an immortal soul, the mermaid goes to the witch, has her tongue cut in exchange for a pair of legs. However, every time her feet touch the ground, it will feel as if she was walking on sharp knives. And if the prince didn’t marry her, she would turn into sea foam when the sun comes up.
The prince finds her on the shore and takes her to the castle. They spend a lot of time together and it seems like the prince might just marry her. But then, as instructed by his parents, he goes to another kingdom and immediately recognizes the princess there as the maiden who saved him and decides to marry her.
On their wedding day, the mermaid’s sisters come up and ask the mermaid to kill the prince with a dagger given by the witch so she could turn back to a mermaid. The mermaid does consider it but isn’t able to do it. When the sun comes up, she turns into seafoam. However, she turns into a spiritual being and is greeted by other spirits who tell her that if she does good deeds for humans for 300 years, she can have an immortal soul.
About Hans Christian Andersen
Source: Famous People
Hans Christian Andersen was born on 2nd April 1805 in Odense, near Copenhagen, Denmark. He is best remembered for the fairytales he wrote, though he also wrote travel books, novels, poems, plays, and autobiographies. The most famous of his fairytales include The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, Thumbelina, The Little Match Girl, The Princess, and The Pea, and many more.
Andersen's fairy tales, which span nine volumes and have been translated into more than 125 languages, have been culturally implanted in the West's collective consciousness, teaching not only youngsters but also mature readers about virtue and persistence in the face of misfortune. Being born in a poor family, Andersen went through many hardships and essentially turned his pain into art, mostly fairytales.
Andersen was a huge drama queen of his time. He was known to have tantrums and mood swings. Once, while staying at Charles Dickens’ house, he threw himself face down on his lawn and wept for hours because he got a bad review for one of his books.
Andersen was declared a “national treasure” by the Denmark government when he was in his late sixties and even constructed his statue to commemorate his 70th birthday and a sculpture of the Little Mermaid. He died 4 months after his 70th birthday.
Themes and Interpretations of the Fairytale
It's no wonder that Disney made many changes to make it seem more like a ‘happy’ fairytale than the total tragedy it really was. It has many other darker aspects than the little mermaid’s tragic fate. Her sisters are dangerous beasts, singing to sailors and telling them to not be afraid of falling to the depths of the sea, luring them to their deaths.
The prince isn’t a good guy either. He is described to be entertained by female slaves, treating the mermaid-like a literal pet, even saying he loves her as he would “love a little child”. A total creep in general. He even has the nerve to say that she would support him in his marriage for she loves him the most. The poor girl even danced at his wedding.
“...all present cheered her in ecstasies, for never had she danced so enchantingly before. Her tender feet felt the sharp pangs of knives; but she heeded it not, for a sharper pang had shot through her heart.”
What the mermaid really wanted was to see the outside world and a soul and merely saw the prince as her chance to obtain it. It's not just a simple love story. The tragic twist was surely unexpected but realistic at the same time. One cannot force the other to reciprocate their love. The story has numerous symbols and plot details and numerous ways to interpret them.
Andersen’s fairy tales are often dramatizations of his own dilemmas, The Little Mermaid being one of them. For years, this story has been interpreted in a lot of ways. From a feministic approach, it shows the sacrifices that women have to make for marriage, how they have to leave their own family and marry into the men.
In his book My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters Through the Centuries, Rictor Norton theorizes that Hans Christian Andersen wrote The Little Mermaid as a love letter to Edvard Collin. Andersen’s letter to Collin after he learned of Collin's engagement to a young woman, somewhere around the time the Little Mermaid was written, bases the theory. He wrote,
“I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench... my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery.”
The letter is interpreted by Norton as a proclamation of Andersen's homosexual love for Collin, and The Little Mermaid is described as an analogy for Andersen's life, him being the mermaid, Collin being the prince and the mermaid’s transformation might mean how he was rejected by Collin who preferred women and so, could only be loved if he left behind his identity as a man (like the mermaid’s sacrifice of her tail) to be with the man he loves.
Written By - Sanjana Chaudhary
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