Strangely graceful creatures and spirits
March 18, 2018 9:41 PM   Subscribe

The Original Little Mermaid: Amber Sparks writes on Kay Nielsen, Disney and the sanitization of the modern fairy tale. previously.
posted by Rumple (32 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Does Little Mermaid even count as a fairy tale? I thought it was an 19th century misogynistic misery porn. I mean, the more I learn about the guy, the less I think of his stories.

Though Little Mermaid still could be better, there really is something to be said for Disney flying some properties. .
posted by happyroach at 10:42 PM on March 18, 2018 [6 favorites]


I think the original is unsatisfactory as a story; the narrative arc seems defective. Emotionally, it’s dreadful: you can read it as going straight to tragic failure, without much narrative complication, or as a moral warning: girls, accept your place; neither of those works properly to engage our sympathies. Fairy stories are meant to be about happy endings; aspirations achieved and courage rewarded. I’m old enough to have known the original as a kid before the Disney version came out, and I always hated it.

I do like the Kay Nielsen stuff, though. One or two made me think of Erté.
posted by Segundus at 11:15 PM on March 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


I love Nielson's illustrations. I found a reprint of East of the Sun and West of the Moon in the late seventies and was enthralled. In the title story, it had a description of a troll with a nose three ells long. Because there was no illustration of that character, I have spent many a sleepless night since then wondering how long an ell is.
posted by pangolin party at 12:23 AM on March 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


I love the work by Kay Neilsen - and it is so frustrating to realise that he made it as far as Disney's studios and draw up the actual concept designs - before getting sidelined.

Walt Disney travelled to Copenhagen about 10 years after Nielsen had worked on part of Fantasia, in the early 50s. He was struck by the Tivoli Gardens amusement park - and its safety, cleanliness and constant state of being in development - all of which served as a template for his own theme parks. He seems to have been influenced by a Scandinavian love of darker storytelling not at all, unfortunately.
posted by rongorongo at 12:55 AM on March 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Because there was no illustration of that character, I have spent many a sleepless night since then wondering how long an ell is.
3 ells = 1,371mm According to Wikipedia - about the length of a small elephant's trunk.
posted by rongorongo at 1:05 AM on March 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


An ell is five spans. If you remember there are 32 ells in a bolt you won’t go far wrong.
posted by Segundus at 2:47 AM on March 19, 2018 [22 favorites]


... did you guys read the same Little Mermaid that I did? It's not a tragedy! She doesn't fail! She gets an immortal soul, which is what she really wanted all along, and she does it not by marrying the stupid prince as she was told to, but by refusing to become a murderer even though she thinks that choice will cost her everything! She *doesn't* accept her place, her aspirations *are* achieved, and her courage *is* rewarded.
posted by kyrademon at 4:45 AM on March 19, 2018 [17 favorites]


Fairy stories are meant to be about happy endings; aspirations achieved and courage rewarded.

Says who?

The article implies that what we think of as "fairy stories" often began as stories peasant mothers told to daughters to prepare them for life. It stands to reason that some of those stories must have been warnings about things like "know your place" and "be careful of men with empty promises", and in some sad cases, "you don't have the same social advantages as others, so there are things you simply won't be able to pursue".

It's only in the age of Disney - and probably the Victorians before that - that we have the idea of fairy stories as being happy-ending stories. It was only in the 17th and 18th centuries that childhood was even seen as being a special status; before that, children were just inexperienced short adults who needed toughening up, and what better way to toughen them up than to tell them stories with lots of blood and guts and scares and warnings?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:45 AM on March 19, 2018 [23 favorites]


Seriously. The original tales range from the stark fantasy of being rescued from poverty by a miracle, to instant doom for failure to remember one’s place in life. Evil mothers and murderous siblings abound. The woods are dark and terrible and evil beasts lurk there. These are horror stories, not light-hearted fantasy. And they are spectacular. The original editions are well worth seeking out.
posted by caution live frogs at 4:50 AM on March 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


I also agree completely with EmpressCallipygos, but still think it's weird to be having this discussion about a story where the heroine gets her heart's desire and it turns out to have nothing to do with marrying some guy.

I'm really scratching my head over how this story is being interpreted here. Is it because getting a soul involves so much pain and self-sacrifice on her part? Is it because it seems unfair that she has to work to become ensouled in the first place? Is it because the idea of "be noble on earth even if that means suffering and get your reward in heaven after death" sits ill as a happy ending in a modern non-religious age? What's the deal here?
posted by kyrademon at 4:52 AM on March 19, 2018 [6 favorites]


Another Disney story that doesn't measure up to the original is Cinderella. In the Grimm version, the main relationship is between Cinderella and her dead mother, who speaks to her through a tree. Her stepsister(s?) cuts off part of her foot to fit into the shoe, but even though the prince is fooled initially, her feet bleed and her eyes are pecked out by birds--and in the end, someone (I think the stepmother) is made to dance in red hot iron shoes until she dies as part of the wedding celebrations. Details like that give the story quite a different flavor!
posted by pangolin party at 5:22 AM on March 19, 2018 [9 favorites]



I'm really scratching my head over how this story is being interpreted here.


it helps if you have no affinity for andersen and no interest in reading enough of him (it doesn't take much) to notice that his self-insert character, and there usually is one, is almost always a woman. he's a 'misogynist' like Jean Rhys is a misogynist. almost, but not quite, exactly like.

he is not only a great genius of the fairy tale form, but the greatest self-pity artist of our time. considering "our time" to start in what, 476 C.E.

Nielsen is not to be treated as an obscurity, either, but I have vented my spleen on that point elsewhere already.
posted by queenofbithynia at 5:47 AM on March 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


At the same time, it is worth remembering that many of the fairy tales do have a happy ending, of sorts, as with the mentioned Cinderella one where the witch/step mother is forced to put on burning hot shoes and dance herself to death, or the Sleeping Beauty where she's raped and produces offspring for the king with the old queen getting thrown into the fire. The stories are cruel in ways that match the world of the eras from which they came, but I find it hard to imagine many people are going to want to read those versions to their own children as bedtime stories today.

Old fairy tales fascinate in ways their updated versions don't because they contain so much inexplicable excess that we have a hard time digesting as part of a smooth story so we want to read something else into that excess to give it added meaning. Fairy tales in that way have provided ample stock for analysis by writers who explore those elements that don't fit cleanly into stories as we're more used to them today.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:48 AM on March 19, 2018



Old fairy tales fascinate in ways their updated versions don't


are you considering Andersen's story to be an example of an old tale or an updated version?

or maybe you are not directly addressing The Little Mermaid at all, but working from pre-established/stolen/borrowed source material doesn't make his work part of the 'inexplicable' folk tradition any more than Schubert's lieder are unprocessed folk songs. Andersen was every bit the deliberately manipulative and conscious artist Walt Disney was, though a much much better one of course.
posted by queenofbithynia at 6:02 AM on March 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


A somewhat related story:

When I was being "interviewed" for first grade (not competitive to enter the school, just a chat so a teacher could find out how I was at talking, playing, etc.), I had just read (or maybe watched?) the Andersen version of the Little Mermaid. I was chattering on and on and was telling her the story. At some point, the woman said, "Well, but in the end, she kisses the prince and they get married and they live happily ever after, right?"
I looked her right in the eye and said, "Oh no, that is the Disney version. In the real version by Hans Christian Andersen, the prince marries someone else. Her sisters sell their hair and say she is supposed to kill him, but she doesn't, and instead she turns into an angel or something. Isn't that really very interesting?"
This woman was dumbfounded.
Later, apparently she called my parents to tell them that I was a very articulate and creative child, but that I was making up unnerving stories. My parents had to say, "... No, she was not making that up. That is the real story of the Little Mermaid."
Not the first time I'd know more than a teacher.

(PS Now I am a teacher)
posted by bookgirl18 at 6:28 AM on March 19, 2018 [23 favorites]


Oh man, I've been familiar with Kay Nielsen's work for some years and always loved it, not least because I never did the minimal amount of deeper reading and so I always assumed he was a woman. (I made the same mistake with Kay Bojesen. I will never learn).
posted by Mchelly at 6:56 AM on March 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


The evolution of fairy tales from a folk tradition to a literary tradition (a transition in which Anderson was a key figure, although not the first or only one) is actually pretty interesting.

The Little Mermaid has some notable influences. The immediate precursor is the 1811 literary fairy tale novella Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. But digging a little deeper, you also find some of its origins in the French folk fairy tales of Melusine, the mermaid who must never be looked on in her bath, and in addition in a passage in Paracelsus' 1566 alchemical work "Liber de Nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris et de caeteris spiritibus", in which he states that an undine (water elemental) can acquire an immortal soul by marrying a human. The Little Mermaid was therefore a story based on the finest 16th century science!
posted by kyrademon at 6:58 AM on March 19, 2018 [9 favorites]


but still think it's weird to be having this discussion about a story where the heroine gets her heart's desire and it turns out to have nothing to do with marrying some guy.

She doesn't get "her heart's desire", though. Her heart's desire is to marry some guy, but she doesn't get to do that; she sacrifices her voice, walking on human feet hurts her terribly, and when she can't kill him in the end, she throws herself into the sea in despair and is turned into seafoam. So she sacrifices to try to win the heart of someone outside her world and it kills her.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:19 AM on March 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


> "Her heart's desire is to marry some guy, but she doesn't get to do that"

Is it? I mean, she does fall in love with him eventually, sure, but here's how her wishes are first presented (this is after she's already seen the prince and saved his life):

“Why have not we an immortal soul?” asked the little mermaid mournfully; “I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human being only for one day, and to have the hope of knowing the happiness of that glorious world above the stars.”

That doesn't sound to me like she's all about being deeply in lurve with this dude and marrying him. But *then* she learns that if she does get married to him, she'll get her soul. He's a means to an end, although she does come to sincerely care for him after a while.

But whenever he's brought up, it's always in conjunction with her soul:

“I know what you want,” said the sea witch; “it is very stupid of you, but you shall have your way, and it will bring you to sorrow, my pretty princess. You want to get rid of your fish’s tail, and to have two supports instead of it, like human beings on earth, so that the young prince may fall in love with you, and that you may have an immortal soul.”

...

She knew this was the last evening she should ever see the prince, for whom she had forsaken her kindred and her home; she had given up her beautiful voice, and suffered unheard-of pain daily for him, while he knew nothing of it. This was the last evening that she would breathe the same air with him, or gaze on the starry sky and the deep sea; an eternal night, without a thought or a dream, awaited her: she had no soul and now she could never win one.

> "when she can't kill him in the end, she throws herself into the sea in despair and is turned into seafoam."

But that's not the end. The story doesn't end when she turns into seafoam. She joins the daughters of the air and gets her chance at a soul even though she wasn't supposed to, she was supposed to just dissolve away and disappear forever:

She cast one more lingering, half-fainting glance at the prince, and then threw herself from the ship into the sea, and thought her body was dissolving into foam. The sun rose above the waves, and his warm rays fell on the cold foam of the little mermaid, who did not feel as if she were dying. She saw the bright sun, and all around her floated hundreds of transparent beautiful beings; she could see through them the white sails of the ship, and the red clouds in the sky; their speech was melodious, but too ethereal to be heard by mortal ears, as they were also unseen by mortal eyes. The little mermaid perceived that she had a body like theirs, and that she continued to rise higher and higher out of the foam. “Where am I?” asked she, and her voice sounded ethereal, as the voice of those who were with her; no earthly music could imitate it. Etc.
posted by kyrademon at 7:39 AM on March 19, 2018 [6 favorites]


The Little Mermaid has some notable influences. The immediate precursor is the 1811 literary fairy tale novella Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. But digging a little deeper, you also find some of its origins in the French folk fairy tales of Melusine, the mermaid who must never be looked on in her bath, and in addition in a passage in Paracelsus' 1566 alchemical work "Liber de Nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris et de caeteris spiritibus", in which he states that an undine (water elemental) can acquire an immortal soul by marrying a human. The Little Mermaid was therefore a story based on the finest 16th century science!

And if you like all that, you really need to read A.S. Byatt's Possession.
posted by emjaybee at 8:15 AM on March 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


It seems odd that Disney would approach Kay Nielsen at all. Their styles are nothing alike.

I almost suspect he really wanted to meet the sculptor Kai (with an i) Nielsen, then quite dead, whose rounded, stylized, fleshy figures do somewhat resemble Disney’s, or rather vice-versa, and who was no stranger to the occasional faun or centaur.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:43 AM on March 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


These tales had been the one place that women, however flawed, were allowed to take up space.
Amber Sparks, The Original Little Mermaid


I was really struck by this line, because the versions recorded by Anderson/Grimm/etc. to me are the ones that started the exclusionary process of the tales. I've always been fascinated by the fact that there were different versions of fairy tales - my proudest collection as a 7-year old were my numerous versions and retelling's of Cinderella. I've also always thought of these tales as similar to whisper networks - the older women cautioning the younger ones about the brutality of the (feudal) world without naming names.
posted by A hidden well at 10:21 AM on March 19, 2018


If the Little Mermaid should be connected a folktale because of the antecedents, then you might as well consider The Hobbit as a folktale, sinvr you can trace the precedents and influences on Tolkiens work.

Also, the folktales I've read are about concrete rewards and punishments--get to marry the prince, get to bring fire and gold back while the mother and stepsisters get burned to death. Having the reward be "You get to die and get an immortal soul" is completely different different in kind- it's a Victorian literary conceit.

And I'll stand by my description of Hans Christian Anderson--he was basically like one of those writer "friends" who ends up sleeping on your couch and eating your food while complaining about how miserable life is, until you're sick of him.
posted by happyroach at 10:27 AM on March 19, 2018


> "And I'll stand by my description of Hans Christian Anderson--he was basically like one of those writer 'friends' who ends up sleeping on your couch and eating your food while complaining about how miserable life is, until you're sick of him."

Dickens was in a pretty bad mood already when all that went down, to be fair.
posted by kyrademon at 10:43 AM on March 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


How guest Hans Christian Andersen destroyed his friendship with Dickens

For his part, Andersen found Gad’s Hill, in Higham, Dickens’s country home, too cold, a biographer has noted. And he was also upset that no one was available to shave him in the morning. Soon his mood swings also became a problem. He lay down on the lawn and wept after receiving a bad review and then cried again when he finally left Gad’s Hill on 15 July. Dickens was less glum on his guest’s departure, writing on the mirror in the guest room: “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks — which seemed to the family AGES!”
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:44 AM on March 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


> "If the Little Mermaid should be connected a folktale because of the antecedents, then you might as well consider The Hobbit as a folktale, sinvr you can trace the precedents and influences on Tolkiens work."

By the way, I don't know if this was in part directed at me, but if it was, I never said that The Little Mermaid should be considered a folk tale, and in fact pretty explicitly said it wasn't one.
posted by kyrademon at 11:03 AM on March 19, 2018


Andersen's Little Mermaid falls apart when retellings excise the Christianity. It's not misery porn for human romance; it's misery porn for God, with the mermaid's suffering intended as Christlike sacrifice that elevates spiritual love above earthly love (which I'm sure was totally unrelated to Andersen's miserable earthly love life) and that makes the mermaid worthy of a Christian soul.

The little mermaid wants the prince's love because the only way for her to get an immortal soul and go to heaven is to win the love of a human. The prince dude is always explicitly a means to that spiritual end for the mermaid. The prince doesn't love her, so she's not going to get a soul that way and will now dissolve into sea foam oblivion. Her sisters bring the mermaid a knife to save her life by killing the prince, but she still won't have an immortal soul, and she'll have murdered her beloved (a mortal sin against the soul she doesn't have). So the mermaid throws away the knife and jumps into the sea expecting to die, but instead she is taken up by spirits, the daughters of the air: "A mermaid has not an immortal soul, nor can she obtain one unless she wins the love of a human being. On the power of another hangs her eternal destiny. But the daughters of the air, although they do not possess an immortal soul, can, by their good deeds, procure one for themselves. [...] You, poor little mermaid, have tried with your whole heart to do as we are doing; you have suffered and endured and raised yourself to the spirit-world by your good deeds; and now, by striving for three hundred years in the same way, you may obtain an immortal soul." The little mermaid's noble suffering, steadfast longing for a soul, and refusal to sacrifice another's life to save her own have won her another shot at the immortality in Christian Heaven that was what she really wanted all along.

Now all of this doesn't change the hugely problematic misogynistic/masochistic streaks in "The Little Mermaid" positing that earthly misery=beauty/holiness/goodness, among other things. But taking the rampant Christianity out of "The Little Mermaid" is how you get the sneering hot takes castigating the story as a bleak downer-ending doomed romance of a doormat mermaid who kills herself in despair over unrequited love for some dude. "The Little Mermaid" doesn't belong in the tragic romance canon; it goes on the religion shelf with the idealized martyrs and saints who suffer and die in gruesome ways to prove their devotion to God.
posted by nicebookrack at 12:38 PM on March 19, 2018 [12 favorites]


Sys Rq: "It seems odd that Disney would approach Kay Nielsen at all. Their styles are nothing alike."

Thank god Disney did though, because that "Night on Bald Mountain" bit in Fantasia was worth it.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:39 PM on March 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


One of my favorite fairytale retellings is a Yuletide fic: Knives Beneath Her Feet by miss_lanyon, which explicitly links The Little Mermaid and BDSM.
posted by nicebookrack at 1:00 PM on March 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


To understand Hans Christian Anderson, you need to read a lot of him. Enough that you find yourself asking questions like "If flowers can talk, what about blades of grass? And if the kettle can talk, what about the handle to the kettle?"
posted by acrasis at 3:36 PM on March 19, 2018


What a delightful post. In the early 2000s my wife and I got onto an illustrators kick. She got interested in N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle and Jessie Wilcox Smith (and the other Red Rose Girls), while I was was caught up by Maxwell Parrish and Kay Nielsen. Somehow, Parrish seems very much a product of his time, but Nielsen is timeless.
posted by lhauser at 4:43 PM on March 19, 2018


I read The Little Mermaid for a Children's Lit class in college, and what I remember that hasn't been mentioned yet is a bit at the end where it's said that the period of the Little Mermaid's suffering was shortened whenever kids were good and lengthened when they were bad:

Copied from here:
“After three hundred years, thus shall we float into the kingdom of heaven,” said she. “And we may even get there sooner,” whispered one of her companions. “Unseen we can enter the houses of men, where there are children, and for every day on which we find a good child, who is the joy of his parents and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened. The child does not know, when we fly through the room, that we smile with joy at his good conduct, for we can count one year less of our three hundred years. But when we see a naughty or a wicked child, we shed tears of sorrow, and for every tear a day is added to our time of trial!”
"So you know what that means, my children? It means that you should all shaddup and go to sleep!"
posted by JHarris at 4:44 PM on March 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


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