Literary Critique of Hans Christian Andersen’s “THE LITTLE MERMAID”
The author, Hans Christian Andersen, described the characters in detail and painted with words a very vivid, colorful and incredible image environment of the bottom of the sea. The fairy tale of “The Little Mermaid” is a story about redemption, about how at the end the little mermaid, through her selfless act, saves herself, by saving her soul.
The story of “The Little Mermaid” is a story about of how a mermaid abandon her home and risk her life against all odds to be with a prince. The story focus on the sacrifices made by the princess in order to achieve her goal, from leaving her family to losing her voice in exchange for a pair of legs to appear human, to be with the prince. Sacrifices that come with incredible pain, physical and emotional, and that in the end are not enough to reach her objective, choosing her prince’s life over her own, but by doing this, she attains redemption.
http://www.online-literature.com/hans_christian_andersen/2084/
Most of the people would have different conclusions of the lessons of this particular tale, I however found lessons that can be applied to many people in very different levels and conclusions that can be particularly disturbing. The original story gives, which without any doubt has an incredible literary value, carries a misogynistic tone of how women are just objects to adorn a man’s life. The tale, which I thought it was sad, widened my eyes and shed more light to a disturbing reality of how people, in particular women, are treated and objectified by society.
The original story starts with what I would call curiosity and end with what it seems to be a full blown obsession. The little mermaid’s desire to be with the prince makes her exchange her voice for a pair of legs and gamble her life for a chance to be with him. In the musical Disney’s version this is represented by the song of “Poor Unfortunate Souls” sang by the witch of the sea, and at a point, she makes reference about how man prefer women who do not talk and are submissive.
https://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/t/the_little_mermaid/poor_unfortunate_souls.html
What kind of message is this sending to little girls? That they have to change everything about them, not to be loved, but to be noticed? That in order to be with a man they have to change and transform into someone else? That they should lose their “voice”? (Clearly a reference about a woman’s personal opinion). As if they didn’t have anything else to offer more than their bodies and/or appearance? And that just made realize that is not only women, everyone that doesn’t fit a particular mold will feel the need to change as if they were forced to do so, in order to be happy. Women get plastic surgery, young men use steroids, and everyone buys the new clothes or follow the new trend to be noticed. Made have an epiphany of sorts; what we consider happiness is our “prince” and the “witch of the sea” is the society that we live in. The question is what are we willing to lose to fit in? At the risk of never getting it back or even die.
The original story main lesson is redemption. How the little mermaid gained a “soul” to finally arrive to paradise, while other fairy tale about magical love and the common shared “happily ever after” that all the others new versions of fairy tales share. But I concluded that it should be a warning on how what we do to be accepted, and to know if we are changing for the right reasons or for the better. How much of you should you change to be accepted? And is it worth it? Are you willing to lose yourself in an obsession just to become something different? The more ones grow up, the more one notice that fairy tales are just cautionary tales that were given “happy endings” to be more marketable and therefor more profitable.
While the center character was hailed years ago as a heroine, nowadays it just a reminder of how retrograde society was in terms of gender politics. Nevertheless, the little mermaid is a step stone in the development of females leading characters and the definition of heroine. As author Lenika Cruz stated “If looking back at the very first reviews of The Little Mermaid reveals anything, it’s how pop culture’s loose, collective definition of “heroine,” changes over time, sometimes dramatically.” (Cruz, L. (2014, November 17). The Feminist Legacy of The Little Mermaid’s Divisive, ‘Sexy’ Ariel. Retrieved October 08, 2018, from https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/the-little-mermaid-at-25-and-the-evolving-definition-of-strong-female/382581/)
In the story the author not only build the personality and background of the main protagonist, he also showed the princess’s sisters’ personalities to demonstrate in contrast the great difference between them. Worth noting is in the story, the little mermaid’s sisters are the ones who collect human paraphernalia, while the little mermaid just possessed a statue of the prince, an image or reference that she focus on constantly, building to the defining moment of the story, when she meets the prince and later saves him from drowning in the sea. Making her in the process seem like just a one dimensional character that only care about being with the prince and nothing else.
Another aspect of the story that changed was the willingness of the sisters to help the princess search for the prince and how the princess’s love evolve from a simply infatuation to an obsession, one strong enough that she risked her life continuously to the point of wanting changing herself to be accepted and loved by the prince.
An important and crucial moment of the story is changed and subsequently completely lost in its modern counterpart; the religious/spiritual aspect of the story. This start when the little princess inquires about humans and mortality, which has the grandmother explain humans and mermaids longevity, and explains how humans have an immortal soul and mermaids do not, how mermaids dissolve into foam when they die ye humans have graves and their souls go to heaven. Any reader old enough will surely have the same questions about this; how she get this information, how does she knows of an afterlife. Making it appears that this part of the story is to appeal the religious sentiment of the readers. The allusions of that a mermaid can gain a soul from a loving human makes them look like inferior beings instead of a marvelous creature.
The little mermaid went to the sea witch to become human and the price was her voice. With a clear distinction that in the original version the witch cut her tongue while in the new version is was a magical light that came out of her mouth. A contradictory part is how in her way to see the sea witch she saw the corpse of a mermaid that has been strangled by the tentacle of the polyps yet the grandmother said that when mermaid dies they dissolve into foam. While the princess eventually becomes humans the author is very specific on how painful the process is, and how every step she takes is like walking on sharp blades. This could be a reference on how hard is to be human or maybe is a punishment for appearing to be one. The author does have religious inclinations and even insinuates how “inferior” this creatures (and perhaps women) really are. After all “The Catholic Church is one of the last great bastions of misogyny, It’s an empire of misogyny” (Catholic Church ‘an empire of misogyny’ — Mary McAleese. (2018, March 08). Retrieved October 08, 2018, from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43330026 )
In the Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” the mundane journey of the main character ends when she dies after her heart breaks when the prince marry another woman, but because she refused to kill her beloved prince, instead becoming foam of the sea, she attains redemption and become a Daughter of the air, some sort of spirit who performs good deeds to rise to the kingdom of God (again the author is very religious). This is the moral of the original story, while in other fairy tales is the common happily ever after.” The Little Mermaid” is a story that constantly puts sacrifice, God, and the theme of acceptance in close focus, along with the theme of how women should be quiet, and giving her voice is a metaphor on how women should give their freedom of speech for a man or to fit in a society. The story puts in perspective that the decisions ones makes to be accepted by pretending to be something that one isn’t, is present a secondary, yet concealed, moral story.
Fairy tales usually have a moral lesson that teaches and relates to people’s life on one level or another. “The Little Mermaid” accomplish this by introducing redemption as its final lesson, easing it in while introducing the themes of spirituality and sacrifice. But this lessons are quickly overshadowed by the misogynistic tone and retrograde ideology of female inferiority, which is thinly veil during the story’s length. Furthermore, the little mermaid never attained her objective and died because of her choices, making the story more of a warning than a tale. The tale of “The Little Mermaid” not only presents a moral story of redemption, but also sow in our minds important questions: “Is it worth changing ourselves just to fit in?” “Have I done something similar to be accepted?” and “will I risk my life for it?”. The scope of this questions can be applied to all of us; surgery, alcohol, drugs and relationships take the role of the prince, like in the story, and it can represent how goal could become an obsession, leading us to take decisions that could imply risking our lives, similar to the little mermaid, just to be loved or accepted. But above all, the story leave us with an important questions to ponder upon, is your “prince” worth to lose your life over it?