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"The Little Mermaid" (1836)
Feb. 9th, 2013 12:48 pmI have never before read “The Little Mermaid” (1836) in an unabridged form. What really strikes me is how textured and dense the descriptions are.
The colour imagery in the two paragraphs alone is so intense. They live ‘where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal’, not on ‘bare yellow sand’ but in a palace with walls of coral and windows of ‘the clearest amber’. The roof is made of shells with ‘glittering pearls’. The garden is full of undulating sea flowers and plants ‘in which grew bright red and dark blue flowers, and blossoms like flames of fire; the fruit glittered like gold, and the leaves and stems waved to and fro continually.’ The earth was ‘blue as the flame of burning sulphur’. ‘Over everything lay a peculiar blue radiance, as if it were surrounded by the air from above, through which the blue sky shone, instead of the dark depths of the sea. In calm weather the sun could be seen, looking like a purple flower, with the light streaming from the calyx.’ The Little Mermaid’s garden plot has ‘pretty red flowers’, and a statue carved from ‘pure white stone’ and covered with a ‘rose coloured weeping willow’. The cornflower blue sea might be a bit of a cliché, but the accretion of detail on detail makes it into a set piece, a fairy tale image.
I am impressed with the way Andersen weaves his religious theme into the story through his imagery and incidental detail. The ocean is so deep that many church steeples piled on each other could not reach the water above. The first sister to breach the water hears the merry bells from the church steeples. The fifth sister seas icebergs ‘larger and loftier than the churches built by men’. The Little Mermaid sees fireworks like ‘the stars of heaven falling’. After she rescues the Prince she leaves him at a convent. All these details are noted in passing, before the central point of the story – that mermaids live a long time but have no eternal soul – is reached.
Andersen’s concern was to demonstrate the importance of an immortal soul. The mermaids do not have them, and once they die, perish like foam on the waves. The humans, on the other hand, live forever because their souls are imperishable. The Little Mermaid attempts to get a soul through the love of a good man, but, unfortunately, he chooses another Princess and the Little Mermaid falls into the water and appears to perish. But then, miraculously, she becomes a spirit of the air and once she has accumulated enough good deed she will be able to reach eternal life in heaven (rather a tacked on ending). To modern readers this seems to be an unsatisfactory ending and she is instead imagined in the Disney film as achieving happiness through the Prince.
Either interpretation leaves the Little Mermaid gaining an identity only through the Prince. In the original version she also does not have a name, is effectively cut off from her family, and suffers horrible pain as she walks. Each step is like walking on knives and she leaves bloody footprints as she dances (albeit graceful dancing). Not that she can complain, of course, since she gives up her voice for the pleasure of being near the Prince. It’s a mind-blowingly grim depiction of a teenaged girl who gives up, literally, everything for the love of a young man who never even notices her.
You could definitely read it as a critique of patriarchy, since she, like Patient Griselda, gives up more and more until she has no part of her identity left at all. This might be reading against the grain, as Andersen no doubt thought no sacrifice was too great for a soul, but frankly, even the conflation of a soul with getting married is so horrifying that it is impossible to read this short story in a celebratory way. It is just a take of endless sacrifice of herself for no good reason.
The colour imagery in the two paragraphs alone is so intense. They live ‘where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal’, not on ‘bare yellow sand’ but in a palace with walls of coral and windows of ‘the clearest amber’. The roof is made of shells with ‘glittering pearls’. The garden is full of undulating sea flowers and plants ‘in which grew bright red and dark blue flowers, and blossoms like flames of fire; the fruit glittered like gold, and the leaves and stems waved to and fro continually.’ The earth was ‘blue as the flame of burning sulphur’. ‘Over everything lay a peculiar blue radiance, as if it were surrounded by the air from above, through which the blue sky shone, instead of the dark depths of the sea. In calm weather the sun could be seen, looking like a purple flower, with the light streaming from the calyx.’ The Little Mermaid’s garden plot has ‘pretty red flowers’, and a statue carved from ‘pure white stone’ and covered with a ‘rose coloured weeping willow’. The cornflower blue sea might be a bit of a cliché, but the accretion of detail on detail makes it into a set piece, a fairy tale image.
I am impressed with the way Andersen weaves his religious theme into the story through his imagery and incidental detail. The ocean is so deep that many church steeples piled on each other could not reach the water above. The first sister to breach the water hears the merry bells from the church steeples. The fifth sister seas icebergs ‘larger and loftier than the churches built by men’. The Little Mermaid sees fireworks like ‘the stars of heaven falling’. After she rescues the Prince she leaves him at a convent. All these details are noted in passing, before the central point of the story – that mermaids live a long time but have no eternal soul – is reached.
Andersen’s concern was to demonstrate the importance of an immortal soul. The mermaids do not have them, and once they die, perish like foam on the waves. The humans, on the other hand, live forever because their souls are imperishable. The Little Mermaid attempts to get a soul through the love of a good man, but, unfortunately, he chooses another Princess and the Little Mermaid falls into the water and appears to perish. But then, miraculously, she becomes a spirit of the air and once she has accumulated enough good deed she will be able to reach eternal life in heaven (rather a tacked on ending). To modern readers this seems to be an unsatisfactory ending and she is instead imagined in the Disney film as achieving happiness through the Prince.
Either interpretation leaves the Little Mermaid gaining an identity only through the Prince. In the original version she also does not have a name, is effectively cut off from her family, and suffers horrible pain as she walks. Each step is like walking on knives and she leaves bloody footprints as she dances (albeit graceful dancing). Not that she can complain, of course, since she gives up her voice for the pleasure of being near the Prince. It’s a mind-blowingly grim depiction of a teenaged girl who gives up, literally, everything for the love of a young man who never even notices her.
You could definitely read it as a critique of patriarchy, since she, like Patient Griselda, gives up more and more until she has no part of her identity left at all. This might be reading against the grain, as Andersen no doubt thought no sacrifice was too great for a soul, but frankly, even the conflation of a soul with getting married is so horrifying that it is impossible to read this short story in a celebratory way. It is just a take of endless sacrifice of herself for no good reason.
