As in “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Snow Queen,” an aesthetics of whiteness dominates “The Psyche.” The blinding white beauty of the marble statue, “carved from snow,” like Kai’s letters, can be seen as what Toni Morrison, in a study that identifies the racial fault lines in black/white aesthetics, has called an “antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness.”28 Just as beauty is haunted by death even as it lays claim to immortality, white is troubled by blackness, by shadows and darkness that are a source of both fear and desire. It therefore comes as no surprise to find that Andersen had written, some fifteen years before he penned “The Psyche,” a story called “The Shadow.” And it is perhaps not coincidental that the Danish titles (“Psychen” and “Skyggen”) come close to rhyming with each other.29
“The Shadow” is itself haunted by the anxiety of influence. When its protagonist, a “learned man,” loses his shadow, he is less disturbed by the disappearance of the shadow than by the fact that “there was another story about a man without a shadow.” “The Shadow” is mirrored by another tale: Adelbert von Chamisso’s Romantic novella Peter Schlemihl’s Marvelous Story (1814), which was quickly translated from German into many European languages, including Danish. It had established itself as a classic by the time Andersen read it. The learned man, discouraged by the notion that others will believe that he is doing nothing but imitating a literary character, decides not to tell his story at all. In a grotesque inversion of a fairy-tale ending, he is liquidated on the wedding day of his shadow, who has come to life by imitating him.
How does the shadow disengage from his proprietor to lead an independent existence? Like so many of Andersen’s characters, he finds in beauty a power so seductive that it leads him to abandon his ordinary existence. One evening the learned man awakens to see “a strange glow” coming from his neighbor’s balcony, where flowers gleam like flames of the loveliest colors. There he sees an “enchanting” maiden and is nearly blinded. Light quickly gives way to sound, and the learned man finds himself under the “spell” of gentle and lovely music.
The house across the way is described as some kind of magic world (en Trolddom). The scholar turns his back on it and retreats to his study, where he devotes himself to the good, the true, and the beautiful. The shadow, by contrast, stretches himself and crosses over into the realm of poetry, exposing himself to the transformative power of art. There, he finds the means for attaining autonomy, creating illusions, and reversing the power relations between himself and his host. The shadow’s strategic alliance with beauty marks the triumph of double-dealing, duplicity, and fraud.
Andersen created in “The Shadow” a shadow of himself, a creature that feeds off his artistry but also lives on even after his creator has perished. If Andersen celebrated beauty and its transformative power in tales such as “The Ugly Duckling,” he also began to explore the sinister side to beauty—its links to artifice, frigidity, and paralysis—in works ranging from “The Emperor’s New Clothes” through “The Snow Queen” to “The Psyche.” “The Shadow” is his supreme concession to the troubled and troubling side to beauty, a dark exploration of how beauty may not in fact engage the good, the true, and the beautiful and may instead conceal a deadly desire to destroy as it takes over life, becoming animated and, at times, even achieving immortality.
Beauty may have a beastly side, but it never loses its power to weave spells that draw us into its alluring orbit. And Andersen summons it for us again and again, as if to remind us that, through its jolts and shimmers, it still has the power to animate us. Great writers, as Nabokov reminded us, are not only storytellers and teachers but also enchanters. The storyteller produces somatic effects, speeding up our beating hearts, leaving us breathless, making us weep real tears, or prompting us to laugh. The great teachers are beyond Aesop, instructing us less in the art of problem-solving than in the art of identifying and deepening them. The enchanters—along with the effects of the spells they work—are less easy to describe, but how they work their magic becomes utterly clear when we read the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen.
1. August Strindberg. “H. C. Andersen. Till Andersen-jubileet 2 april 1905,” in Efterslåtter: Berättelser. Dikter. Artiklar, ed. John Landquist, Samlade skrifter av August Strindberg 54, Supplementdel 1 (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1920), 443–45. I am grateful to my colleague Stephen Mitchell for the translation of Strindberg’s remarks about Andersen.
2. Adam Gopnik, “Magic Kingdoms: What Is a Fairy Tale Anyway?” The New Yorker, December 9, 2002, 139.
3. The phrase is inspired by Elaine Scarry’s concept of radiant ignition as developed and elaborated in Dreaming by the Book (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999).
4. J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 22.
5. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 2.
6. Ibid., 6.
7. C. S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (New York: Harcourt, 1994), 36.
8. Jackie Wullschlager, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller (New York: Knopf, 2000), 3.
9. Reginald Spink, Hans Christian Andersen: The Man and His Work, 3rd ed. (Copenhagen: Høst, 1981), 10.
10. Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Paddington Press, 1975), 21.
11. Wullschlager, Hans Christian Andersen, 3.
12. Hans Christian Andersen, Das Märchen meines Lebens ohne Dichtung, trans. Michael Birkenbihl (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1979), 145–46.
13. Jackie Wullschlager refers to Andersen’s double gift of adapting and inventing: “He was the first writer who was not only skilled at adapting existing stories in an original and lasting manner, he was also capable of creating new tales that entered the collective consciousness with the same mythic power as the ancient, anonymous ones. This individual achievement has never been matched. Almost two centuries after he wrote them, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and ‘The Ugly Duckling’ are still bywords for elements of the human condition, while his Snow Queen, Little Mermaid, and Steadfast Tin Soldier belong with characters of folk memory” (Introduction, in Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales [New York: Viking, 2004], xvi).
14. Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes: An All-Star Retelling of the Classic Fairy Tale (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1998).
15. Joseph L. Graves, The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2001), 1.
16. Jack Zipes, Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller (New York: Routledge, 2005), 127–28.
17. Ibid., 129.
18. Hollis Robbins, “The Emperor’s New Critique,” New Literary History 34 (2004): 663.
19. Zipes points out that the red shoes “are magical like our appetites, for they cannot be tamed on this earth, and Karen’s obsessive appetite reveals the injustices and mortifying humiliation that any child from the lower classes must suffer for desiring to improve his or her lot. Though she is punished for her fetish, the harsh punishment does not fit the crime, and one must wonder why a girl’s innocent longing for some beauty in her life is considered a sin” (Hans Christian Andersen, 88–89).
20. Barbara Bazilion, illus., The Red Shoes (Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge Publishing, 1997).
21. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Random House/Modern Library, 1992), 25.
22. Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading (Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2002), 87.
23. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine, 1992), 322.
24. Jacob Bøggild, “Ruinous Reflections: On H. C. Andersen’s Ambiguous Position between Romanticism and Modernism,” in H. C. Andersen: Old Problems and New Readings, ed. Steven P.
Sondrup (Odense: Univ. of Southern Denmark Press, 2004), 85.
25. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 3.
26. Karin Sanders, “Nemesis of Mimesis: The Problem of Representation in H. C. Andersen’s Psychen,” Scandinavian Studies 64 (1992): 1–25.
27. Jack Zipes focuses on Andersen’s “discourse of rage and revenge,” but he too recognizes that Andersen’s tales are also “theoretical speculations about the nature and beauty of art and the qualities a great artist needs to gain the recognition he deserves” (Zipes, Hans Christian Andersen, xv). Jackie Wullschlager describes these tales as “high-voltage,” for they take up “the terror of psychological disintegration” and other existential matters. See Introduction, Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales, trans. Tiina Nunnally (New York: Viking, 2005), p. xvii.
28. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), 33.
29. Bøggild, “Ruinous Reflections,” 94.
Ordering the Tales: From the Familiar to the Strange
When we read Andersen to children today, we often rely on translations that fail to give us the full story. “The Red Shoes,” newly illustrated by Barbara Bazilian in 1997, has been adapted to eliminate the scene in which Karen’s feet, with the beautiful, magical shoes still on them, are chopped off. The little match girl, in a version of her story published in 1944, finds “warmth and cheer and a lovely home where she lives happily ever after.” And “The Little Mermaid,” under the spell of Disney Studios, appears in countless new print editions, each ending with a happily-ever-after wedding that contrasts sharply with the three hundred years of good deeds assigned to the mermaid at the end of Andersen’s tale.
New translations, many timed to coincide with the bicentennial of Andersen’s birth, have been more successful in capturing the letter and the spirit of the tales. Jeffrey Frank and Diana Crone Frank’s Hans Christian Andersen: A New Translation from the Danish stresses the importance of working from the original language, in part because so many of Andersen’s translators did not know Danish and relied on German versions of the tales. The Franks’ volume is part of a new wave of translations that shows respect both for the broad contours of the stories as well as for their telling details. Tiina Nunnally’s Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales seeks, in lively renditions of thirty tales, to capture the author’s “unique voice” with all its stylistic quirks. Neil Philip’s Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen offers forty “enchanting masterpieces from one of the world’s greatest storytellers” with the aim of providing family-friendly entertainment. Since the bicentennial of his birth, Andersen has gained much in translation.
In this volume, Julie K. Allen and I have returned to the original Danish in an effort to capture Andersen’s many different voices—impassioned yet also playful, unaffected yet also complex, sweet yet also doleful, and musical yet also maudlin. We have recognized that translations can never be pitch-perfect, but we have tried to re-create Andersen’s tales in English versions that lend themselves to reading out loud (a practice that Andersen himself endorsed for the stories) and to thinking out loud (a practice that we need to revive when we become aware of the full cultural force of these stories). Unlike the Grimms’ tales, which circulated in hundreds of different versions as part of an oral storytelling culture, Andersen’s stories are literary narratives in which every word counts and should be weighed and measured with care.
Today, we think of Andersen primarily as an author of books for children, but in his own day he was a prominent dramatist, a distinguished novelist, and a chronicler of travels that took him from London and Paris to Athens and Istanbul. To be sure, even in his own day, critics believed that his greatest accomplishment came in the form of fairy tales (“told for children,” as he frequently noted in the titles to his collections). And yet many of those fairy tales took up adult themes and, with time, Andersen shifted from enchanting stories that breathe the sweet air of miniaturized fancy and whimsical beauty to carefully constructed literary tales that pulse with dark existential torment and human suffering. In between, there are stories that appear crafted for children but that enlist a pedagogy of fear that does not square with our contemporary sense of bedtime reading. The selection of stories in this volume begins in the child-centered mode of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “The Snow Queen” and moves gradually to a darker Andersen—one not familiar to Anglo-American audiences—who is no longer thinking about the child as hero.
The first dozen tales in this volume may seem too harsh for children at times, but they constitute the Andersen canon, which has migrated successfully not only to the United States but also into 153 different literary cultures, as documented by the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense. The second set of twelve tales give us a less familiar Andersen, an author who worried about art, beauty, and the creative process and who sought to produce something so luminous and large that it would serve as a bulwark against suffering and mortality. We need to know something about the less familiar Andersen in order to fully understand what is at stake in more familiar stories like “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” This volume gives us both sides of Hans Christian Andersen, a writer whose commitment to the transformative power of art and beauty was so deep that it altered the landscape of children’s literature in profound ways, creating stories that may seem to take a moral turn but that in fact teach children that words and their art have the power to change you.
Andersen himself was aware of the fairy tale’s reach, and he defined the genre in a way that makes evident its appeal for young and old: “In the whole realm of poetry no domain is so boundless as that of the fairy tale. It reaches from the blood-drenched graves of antiquity to the pious legends of a child’s picture book; it takes in the poetry of the people and the poetry of the artist.” Taking the poetry of the people as his point of departure, Andersen also fashioned the poetry of the artist, giving us stories that are deeply familiar, hauntingly strange, and everything in between.
The Emperor’s New Clothes 1
Kejserens nye klæder
Eventyr, fortalte for Børn, 1837
Andersen’s tale of the truth-speaking child has won many admirers because it pays powerful tribute to youth and innocence. “When I was a child,” historian Ruth Rosen writes, “my favorite story was ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’ A chorus of adults praises the Emperor’s new wardrobe, but a child blurts out the truth: The Emperor is in fact stark naked. From this tale, I learned that adults could be intimidated into endorsing all kinds of flummery” (Rosen, A11).
Andersen’s tale is encoded with many possible lessons, and every reader seems to take a different message from it. For the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, the story offers a “nice parable of the subversive power of collective humor,” revealing the strength that comes in numbers as well as the power of the “involuntary, disruptive, and contagious signal” sent by laughter (Pinker, 551). The child in Andersen’s story, who is irreverent, fearless, and spirited, speaks truth to power even as adults—deferential, intimidated, and insecure—succumb all too easily to deception.
The voice of the child has diverted significant attention from something in the tale that is described as “beautiful,” “lovely,” “enchanting,” “priceless,” “exquisite,” “extraordinary,” “amazing,” “magnifique,” “splendid,” “superb,” and “delicate.” Although “lovely” was one of Andersen’s favorite words and was used by him repeatedly, it still comes as something of a surprise to find that term and its variants used so often in a story with less than two thousand words. And it is even more astonishing that those adjectives all describe something invisible, a cloth and clothing that do not exist. The Emperor’s train, like his clothing, are “not there at all,” as the last words of the tale tell us.
The first story in this collection speaks volumes about Andersen’s art. Using nothing but words to lure
objects of beauty into being, Andersen creates nightingales that sing, shoes that dance on their own, marble statues that pulse with life, underwater gardens that glitter with golden fruit—and even a cloth that is “not there at all.” In the mind’s eye, the nightingale, the shoes, the marble statue, the gardens, and the cloth possess a radiant energy that makes them palpably real. Invisible and “not there at all,” they still remain enchanting, exquisite, and lovely. The words have a certain ignition power that allows us to imagine the world constructed by Andersen’s art.
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” has been translated into over a hundred languages and continues to fascinate and inspire imitation, as the recent publication The Emperor’s New Clothes: An All-Star Illustrated Retelling of the Classic Fairy Tale suggests. In that volume, Dr. Ruth Westheimer refashions the story by narrating it from the point of view of an imperial physician; Calvin Klein reports that “nothing comes between me and my Emperor!”; and Steven Spielberg makes an appearance as the “honest boy” who blows the whistle on the Emperor’s birthday suit. The tale has migrated into many different media, with a Russian film of that title directed by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky in 1919, a song by Sinéad O’Connor, a musical of 1987 with Sid Caesar as Emperor, and numerous plays, short stories, and animated films that offer enactments or send-ups of the tale.
Many years ago there lived an Emperor who cared so much about beautiful new clothes that he spent all his money on dressing stylishly. He took no interest at all in his soldiers, nor did he care to attend the theater or go out for a drive, unless of course it gave him a chance to show off his new clothes.2 He had a different outfit for every hour of the day and, just as you usually say that kings are sitting in council, it was always said of him: “The Emperor is in his dressing room right now.”