"The Little Mermaid"

The Little Mermaid - Edmund  Dulac

 A guest post by Cassandra Golds

Once upon a time, when I was a very little girl, my father bought me and my younger sister a record.

It was one of the Tale Spinners for Children series — a collection of records so fondly remembered by some adults that there is a (very handy) website devoted to them. Tale Spinners for Children was a series of fully dramatised British adaptations of classic fairytales and stories — everything from “The Sleeping Beauty” to The Count of Monte Christo. They were lavishly produced in the manner of BBC radio drama, with appropriate classical music and British actors who were rarely credited on the sleeves, although they included such luminaries as Maggie Smith and Donald Pleasance — and who had voices to die for. They made some fifty of them altogether, throughout the sixties, and incidentally the brilliant producers and adaptors were not credited either. We as a family had several of them, but one of these had the dread hand of fate on it. It was the Tale Spinners adaptation of “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen. They used Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor as incidental music, and used it so masterfully, you would swear the work was written for the story. From the moment I first heard it — a moment some time before I could read — I was in love, with both the story and the concerto.

The first time I listened to it I remember sitting on the lounge in front of the big record player in my childhood home with  an aching throat and tears streaming down my face. The Tale Spinners version — which, although dramatised, stuck closely to the Andersen original — was about unrequited love, self-sacrifice and the hope of ultimate transcendence. In other words, it was not the Disney version. And yet, at the age of five or so, none of it seemed foreign to me. Not only did I think this was the most beautiful story I had ever heard — immediately I conceived a passionate allegiance to it. From this point on, for me, “The Little Mermaid” was what a good story should be — sad, noble, uplifting, passionate, desperate, extreme and big, opera-big. And it had to make you cry. It was the first time I was ever moved to tears by a work of art, and I have never fully lost the conviction that that is art’s first duty: the gift of tears.

And the dread hand of fate? Well, from the moment I first heard that record, I was destined to be a children’s author. It changed the course of my life. Or set me on it.

“The Little Mermaid” is not a traditional fairy tale or folk tale, but an original story by an author who is a legend in himself. What’s more, we know a good deal about the biography of the author, and like many of his stories, this one has strong autobiographical overtones. We are often told that folktales were not originally told specifically to children — that they were meant for an audience of all ages.  Original fairytales, on the other hand, such as Andersen’s and Oscar Wilde’s, are probably more truly children’s literature in the modern sense. And yet ever since I was an adult myself it has struck me that “The Little Mermaid” is a very adult story. Or at least, that it is an adult story told in the form of a children’s fairytale. Because it takes as its subject, not (for example) every child’s two greatest fears, as Adele Geras says so perceptively of “Hansel and Gretel”, but unrequited love, terrible self-sacrifice, and eventual transcendence, I have spent a good deal of time wondering what it was that I saw in it at that age. Why did I identify with it so strongly?

 

The Little Mermaid - Arthur Rackham

 

There are a number of possible answers to that question. One thing I believe with all my heart is that there is nothing trivial about childhood emotion. Children may be small, but their emotions are big, as big if not bigger than the emotions of adults. You will never be more passionate than you are at five. Things will never matter to you more, and you will never be capable of more suffering. It is also perfectly possible that you have already had your heart broken. I am the eldest of two sisters; my younger sister was born when I was eighteen months old. It is a family anecdote that, when my beloved grandfather came to see my baby sister for the first time, he walked past me and went first to her in her bassinet, the new baby. I’ve been told that I ignored him  completely for the duration of the visit which followed that betrayal and indeed that our relationship never recovered. I hope you are not shocked — in fact I think this is a fairly ordinary family story; one adult or another   must have made that kind of crucial false step every time a new baby has been born into this world. But I think, in common with many children, that must have been my first experience of losing a beloved to another, and that that was one of the things I was recognising in “The Little Mermaid”. You learn all the basics of romantic love before you hit kindergarten; I’m quite certain of that.

But romantic love is not the only subject of “The Little Mermaid”. It is also, crucially, about the longing for another state of existence; and about dignity and even triumph in humiliation in suffering. In a way, the Little Mermaid’s falling in love is just the trigger for a drama about personal identity; she doesn’t just love the prince, she wants to be him, that is, human, with an immortal soul, which in Andersen’s tale is the exclusive preserve of human beings. And — according to the Sea Witch — she can only truly become a human being, with a human being’s immortal privileges, if she wins the love of the prince. The Sea Witch can give her legs — at a dreadful price. Only the prince can give her a soul.

The Little Mermaid, Jiru Trnka

 

 

Many people seem to think that this story of Andersen’s is deeply anti-feminist. I think that is a profound misreading. I’m not arguing that he was a feminist in our terms or that he was anything other than a man of his time. But it astonishes me that such people haven’t noticed that he has identified himself completely with his female hero — she’s not the Other (as women continue to be for so many male authors), she is himself.  Furthermore, she is doing something completely atypical of traditional fairy tale heroines (or at least those belonging to the canon of the best known) — she is the lover, not the beloved, the active, not the passive one. Indeed, it is she who saves the prince from drowning in a feat that would take almost impossible strength and stamina, even for a mermaid. She’s only a fifteen-year-old girl with a fishtail, after all, and yet she holds the insensible prince above the waves during the entirety of a terrible storm at sea, which has wrecked his ship, and which rages all night. Then, as the story develops, she pursues him — but, lacking the voice she has given in payment to the Sea Witch for the magic that will split her fishtail into legs (and less obviously but just as importantly, being a foundling with no family or earthly breeding) — she is unable to win his love. (And incidentally, what an unforgettable character the Sea Witch is — laughing in scorn at romantic love, and cutting, with the Little Mermaid, one of the most chilling devil’s bargains in literature. And the Little Mermaid’s grandmother — what a marvelous creation! — with all her wise counsel against reaching too high, and being discontent with what she believes to be the pretty good wicket of mermaid-hood.) It is also crucial to note, not only that the Little Mermaid makes her own independent choices, creates her own destiny, throughout the story, but also that in the overwhelmingly powerful denouement, which is to some extent a twist, the Little Mermaid beats the Sea Witch and even the strictures of the story itself, at their own game. Two possible endings have been laid out for her by others; instead — by staying utterly true to her self, her principles and her conception of genuine love — she invents her own.

The Little Mermaid - Edmund Dulac

When I was twelve, because of the Robert Redford film, which I adored, I read "The Great Gatsby" for the first time. It had the same effect on me as “The Little Mermaid”, and when I was in my twenties and more capable of analysis it dawned on me that it is exactly the same story. Gatsby is the Little Mermaid. He, a poor boy, falls in love with a rich girl, Daisy. He cannot win her in the state of existence into which he was born — that is, poverty — and so he devotes his life, spectacularly, to transforming himself into a rich boy. He gets the mansion and the money, just like the Little Mermaid gets the legs. But he cannot win Daisy from the husband she has chosen from her own kind, just as the Little Mermaid cannot win the prince from his intended. For both of them, tragedy, and a strange kind of transcendence, results.

Unrequited love makes you question your entire existence. It is as if your whole self is worthless, because that self is worthless, or not worth enough, to the beloved. If you experience unrequited love profoundly, it will have a profound effect on your personality. You will be inclined to define yourself by it, as if it is the single most important aspect of your personality. And it will force you to find a means of transcendence — a sense of worth, even of personal destiny, that makes the indifference of the beloved bearable and even creatively and spiritually lucrative.

Here is something I will never know, but will wonder about all my life. When I first heard “The Little Mermaid”, was I already, at five or six, that kind of personality who would spend much of her life loving unrequitedly? Or could it be true — though, as a children’s author, I hope with all my heart that it is not — that the story affected me so deeply that it turned me into such a person?

I’m sure you already know why I hope that’s not true. It’s because I don’t want to have that much power. I don’t want any story to have that much power.

 

Cassandra Golds, Friday 19th November, 2010

Update Friday 22 June 2012: Cassandra writes:

P.P.S. Now here, gentle reader, is a post script which I feel bound in honour to add, for life is nothing if not surprising, and we would all do well to remember this -- especially those of us who are authors! The very week that I wrote this piece in late 2010 -- the very week -- I met the man who has become the love of my life. It took until well into my forties, but I have finally experienced a love that is not unrequited. And so you see, “The Little Mermaid” notwithstanding, my life has turned out quite unexpectedly. I seem almost to have gone from being a Hans Andersen heroine to a Jane Austen one. And as Emma discovered, we are not entirely the authors of our own biographies. For that matter, as Catherine Morland discovered, we are not characters in our favourite books, either! In the infinitely complex, utterly unpredictable stories that are our lives, we never know what plot twists we will encounter -- perhaps on the very next page.

Cassandra Golds is an Australian writer of children's and YA fantasy: she and I seem to have much in common, not least that we are both big fans of the wonderful, currently-neglected-and-out-of-print Scots author Nicholas Stuart Gray, whose wildly imaginative yet down-to-earth fantasies we both grew up on and both love.

Cassandra says, “I was born in Sydney and grew up reading Hans Christian Andersen, C.S. Lewis and Nicholas Stuart Gray over and over again.” She always knew she wanted to write for young people and had her first book accepted for publication when she was nineteen. Her beautifully-written novels, Clair-de-Lune, The Museum of Mary Child, The Three Loves of Persimmon and Pureheart (2013) are deeply influenced by the worlds of fairytale and 19th century literature. 

The Snow Queen

by Katherine Roberts

Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” has haunted me all my life, so I was delighted when Kath gave me an excuse to revisit this one. It’s a fairly complex fairytale, with its story of Kai who gets a splinter of the devil’s mirror in his eye, rejects his sweetheart Gerda, and runs away with the Snow Queen. But like all the old tales, there are layers of meaning hidden under the story too. I think that’s what makes them endure over the years, so I hope you’ll be interested in my personal interpretation.

As a little girl I enjoyed the story mostly for its adventure and magic. Living in the southwest of England, Torbay in Devon, where we seldom see snow even in the coldest winters, I also liked the otherworldly beauty of the snowy mountains and the enchantment of the Snow Queen’s ice palace – see, I was a budding fantasy writer even then! I remember the book I owned as a child (now sadly lost) had a beautiful full-colour picture of the Snow Queen dressed in white fur, driving her sleigh pulled by prancing white horses with silver bells on their harness through the Northern Lights across a winter’s sky. Being pony crazy, I think it was probably these horses that drew me to the story initially. I never much liked later versions where the horses were replaced by reindeer or swans, or – as in the DVD version I have starring Bridget Fonda – an engine! Talk about destroying the magic…

But back to the story. As soon as I discovered that in this fairytale it is the boy – Kai – who gets kidnapped, and the girl – Gerda – who sets out on a quest to rescue him, I was hooked. After all those sugary little princess stories, here was a true heroine setting out on her own adventures! (I was Gerda, of course.) My memory of the actual adventures Gerda had on her quest is hazy, and I know these are often edited for simplicity, so maybe that’s why. The version of the tale I re-read for this post has Gerda encountering a witch living in a cottage in the woods who tries to keep her as her own little girl, then a princess with a long line of suitors seeking her hand who tries to marry her off, followed by a robber girl who supplies her with a reindeer, and finally two old women – a Lapp and a Finn – living alone in the snow, who feed and warm Gerda on her journey. The DVD version leaves out the Lapp and Finn women entirely, linking each of Gerda’s encounters to a different season so that she journeys through spring, summer, and autumn to find winter and the Snow Queen. I don’t think the details really matter. However, I do think that, on a deeper level, Gerda’s quest represents the stages of womanhood she will travel through in the world and perhaps that’s why this fairytale speaks to me so strongly.

This is how I see Gerda’s journey:

Spring – In the witch’s cottage, Gerda is cared for and allowed to play in the garden but is forbidden to step outside the gate into the dangerous wood. The witch banishes all the roses that might remind her of Kai and does everything she can to keep the little girl from continuing her quest. Having a clingy mother myself, I can identify only too well with this stage. Even now, my mother seems unable to accept that I might want to open that gate and have adventures of my own in the big wide world.

Summer – At the Princess’ palace, Gerda at first thinks Kai is the prince, and is disappointed when he turns out to be a stranger. In my DVD version a line of charming suitors try to win her hand, but Gerda rejects them all and escapes. This season represents the young and fertile woman chased by boys and making herself beautiful for them. It seems summer will last forever, with its dances and its roses and its declarations of love. But it is over all too soon.

Autumn – Here, I see the robber girl and her bandit mother representing the menopause, when a woman has finished with being a wife and mother and is beginning to find her own way in the world, coming into her power. It might be the autumn of her life, but autumn is a period of fruitfulness and harvest where the seeds sown in spring that blossomed in summer are ripening. Here, Gerda finds strength she didn’t know she had and escapes by riding the robber girl’s reindeer.

Winter – The Finn and Lapp women, living alone in their modest, cosy houses isolated in the snow, represent old age. They help Gerda, but warn her that if she chooses to continue her quest she must leave the reindeer and go on alone. This last part of her journey represents death, which everyone must face alone.

Finally, Gerda reaches the Snow Queen’s palace, where she finds Kai trying to form a word out of shards of ice. The word is LOVE, but Kai’s heart has been turned to ice by the Snow Queen’s kiss, and the splinter of the devil’s mirror in his eye means he cannot complete the puzzle. (In the DVD version, Kai’s task is to reassemble the actual mirror). Of course he cannot do it, until Gerda kisses him and melts his heart. He weeps with joy at seeing her, and the splinter comes out of his eye. Like all fairytales, it is a happy ending. Kai completes his impossible task, winning his freedom from the Snow Queen, and the two young people return to their rose garden, where (one imagines) they got married and had a gloriously happy life bringing up their own children with the advantage of the lessons they have both learnt… I like to think so, anyway!

The splinter in Kai’s eye is a powerful image. The devil – or hobgoblin or elf – made this mirror to reflect beautiful things as ugly and make ugly things seem normal. It’s very true that the way you look at something can change completely the way you see life, and I’ve certainly gone through phases myself when a splinter of the devil’s mirror gets lodged in my eye, and I have to make a conscious effort to squeeze it out before I can see the good around me.

Breaking a mirror is also very symbolic, bringing seven years of bad luck according to some. I broke a large mirror seven years ago… of course I’m not superstitious AT ALL, but it is rather spooky how, after almost seven years of being out in the cold as an author following the death of my agent, this year sees the publication of a brand new quest for my readers beginning with “Sword of Light”. And happily, I’ve no need to worry about breaking another mirror, since my lovely editors at Templar sent me this silver unicorn horn as a publication day present, which as everyone knows is a powerful charm against bad luck…

Katherine Roberts grew up in the wild, rocky counties of Devon and Cornwall with their brooding moors and rugged coasts.  She gained a first class degree in mathematics from Bath University, and went on to work as a mathematician, computer programmer, racehorse groom and farm labourer - before her first novel, ‘Spellfall’, won the Branford Boase Award in 1999 and enabled her to fulfil her dream of becoming a full time writer. Her many fantasy books for children and young adults include 'The Echorium Sequence' (beginning with Song Quest), 'The Seven Fabulous Wonders' series of historical fantasies (beginning with 'The Pyramid Robbery'), and 'I Am The Great Horse', the story of Alexander the Great told by his famous horse Bucephalus.  

Katherine's latest book, 'Sword of Light', the first of four Arthurian fantasies for children, has just been published by Templar. 

Visit Katherine's website!




Picture credits: images from The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by Errol le Cain

Fairytale Reflections (10) Cassandra Golds

Cassandra Golds is another writer whose acquaintance I am fortunate enough to have made because of this blog – although I was already aware of her fiction through Adele Geras, whose Fairytale reflection on Hansel and Gretel was the second in this series, and who is also a big fan.

Meeting Cassandra via email and the internet has been great fun. We seem to have much in common, not least because we are both big fans of that wonderful, currently-neglected-and-out-of-print Scots author Nicholas Stuart Gray, whose wildly imaginative yet down-to-earth fantasies we both grew up on and love. In fact, Cassandra has started a Facebook page in his honour.

Cassandra says, “I was born in Sydney and grew up reading Hans Christian Andersen, C.S. Lewis and Nicholas Stuart Gray over and over again.” She always knew she wanted to write for young people and had her first book accepted for publication when she was nineteen. Her three novels, Clair-de-Lune, The Museum of Mary Child and The Three Loves of Persimmon (just out in Australia) are all deeply influenced by the worlds of fairytale and 19th century literature.

Cassandra’s writing is beautiful, delicate and strong; and her books are not like anyone else’s at all. Clair de Lune is about a young girl who has never spoken a word since the death of her mother, a great ballerina. Then she meets Bonaventure, a dancer-mouse, who takes her to a mysterious monastery hidden away in the building where she lives... And The Three Loves of Persimmon is also about a friendship between a girl and a mouse living in a vast railway station. Does that sound sweet, cute? Maybe it does, but believe me these are not twinkly books. Cassandra’s writing takes the reader into surreal places where dark emotions and the hidden places of the human soul can be explored.

The Museum of Mary Child just blew me away. It begins with a prisoner, a young man chained in a dark cell, who is visited in his sleep by birds – a society of birds, in fact: The Caged Birds of the City. It moves on to the city madhouse, where a young woman has just been turned out into the streets. And it concerns a young girl called Heloise who lives with her cold, unloving godmother, the guardian of the strange museum next door, the Museum of Mary Child, where ‘visitors enter smiling and depart with fear in their eyes’. Heloise’s godmother even censors the Bible wherever there is any passage concerning love. So when one day Heloise finds a beautiful doll buried under a loose floorboard in her room, she knows she must keep the discovery secret. She names the doll Maria, and one day, sewing in her room, muses aloud,

“I wonder what you would say to me, Maria dear, if you could talk?”

She glanced casually at Maria’s serene little face. Then a strange thing happened. There was a shift in the air, a shimmer, and something changed. Was it Maria’s face, or was it the world itself? For the briefest moment, Maria’s features became fluid with expression, and Heloise heard a voice, as clear as a bell, and yet inside her head, answering promply:
“I would say, I love you.”
Heloise froze.
“Oh, Maria, dearest,” she whispered with all her heart. “I love you too.”


… For this – this – was love. This closeness, this affection, this protectiveness, this respect, this joy between Maria and herself was not charity but love. And this fear of losing her, and the sadness and loneliness that would come if ever she did – that too was love. Love was allowing someone to matter to you. Not for their usefulness to you, or even for your usefulness to them, but for no reason, except that they were they and you were you. Love was everything, all that mattered. And yet, in a strange kind of way, her godmother had been right. For love was a kind of folly, a losing game. The Greatest of all Wastes of Time.


But then, that depended on what you thought time was for.

The Museum of Mary Child was recently short-listed for the Young Adult section of the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards. Cassandra says it was inspired by the worst nightmare she ever had…

And her Fairytale Reflection is -

THE LITTLE MERMAID

Once upon a time, when I was a very little girl, my father bought me and my younger sister a record.

It was one of the Tale Spinners for Children series — a collection of records so fondly remembered by some adults that there is a (very handy) website devoted to them. Tale Spinners for Children was a series of fully dramatised British adaptations of classic fairytales and stories — everything from “The Sleeping Beauty” to The Count of Monte Christo. They were lavishly produced in the manner of BBC radio drama, with appropriate classical music and British actors who were rarely credited on the sleeves, although they included such luminaries as Maggie Smith and Donald Pleasance — and who had voices to die for. They made some fifty of them altogether, throughout the sixties, and incidentally the brilliant producers and adaptors were not credited either. We as a family had several of them, but one of these had the dread hand of fate on it. It was the Tale Spinners adaptation of “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen. They used Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor as incidental music, and used it so masterfully, you would swear the work was written for the story. From the moment I first heard it — a moment some time before I could read — I was in love, with both the story and the concerto.

The first time I listened to it I remember sitting on the lounge in front of the big record player in my childhood home with  an aching throat and tears streaming down my face. The Tale Spinners version — which, although dramatised, stuck closely to the Andersen original — was about unrequited love, self-sacrifice and the hope of ultimate transcendence. In other words, it was not the Disney version. And yet, at the age of five or so, none of it seemed foreign to me. Not only did I think this was the most beautiful story I had ever heard — immediately I conceived a passionate allegiance to it. From this point on, for me, “The Little Mermaid” was what a good story should be — sad, noble, uplifting, passionate, desperate, extreme and big, opera-big. And it had to make you cry. It was the first time I was ever moved to tears by a work of art, and I have never fully lost the conviction that that is art’s first duty: the gift of tears.

And the dread hand of fate? Well, from the moment I first heard that record, I was destined to be a children’s author. It changed the course of my life. Or set me on it.

“The Little Mermaid” is unusual in this series in that it is, not a traditional or folk tale, but an original story, by an author who is a legend in himself. What’s more, we know a good deal about the biography of the author, and like many of his stories, this one has strong autobiographical overtones. We are often told that folktales were not originally told specifically to children — that they were meant for an audience of all ages.  Original fairytales, on the other hand, such as Andersen’s and Oscar Wilde’s, are probably more truly children’s literature in the modern sense. And yet ever since I was an adult myself it has struck me that “The Little Mermaid” is a very adult story. Or at least, that it is an adult story told in the form of a children’s fairytale. Because it takes as its subject, not (for example) every child’s two greatest fears, as Adele Geras says so perceptively of “Hansel and Gretel”, but unrequited love, terrible self-sacrifice, and eventual transcendence, I have spent a good deal of time wondering what it was that I saw in it at that age. Why did I identify with it so strongly?

There are a number of possible answers to that question. One thing I believe with all my heart is that there is nothing trivial about childhood emotion. Children may be small, but their emotions are big, as big if not bigger than the emotions of adults. You will never be more passionate than you are at five. Things will never matter to you more, and you will never be capable of more suffering. It is also perfectly possible that you have already had your heart broken. I am the eldest of two sisters; my younger sister was born when I was eighteen months old. It is a family anecdote that, when my beloved grandfather came to see my baby sister for the first time, he walked past me and went first to her in her bassinet, the new baby. I’ve been told that I ignored him  completely for the duration of the visit which followed that betrayal and indeed that our relationship never recovered. I hope you are not shocked — in fact I think this is a fairly ordinary family story; one adult or another   must have made that kind of crucial false step every time a new baby has been born into this world. But I think, in common with many children, that must have been my first experience of losing a beloved to another, and that that was one of the things I was recognising in “The Little Mermaid”. You learn all the basics of romantic love before you hit kindergarten; I’m quite certain of that.

But romantic love is not the only subject of “The Little Mermaid”. It is also, crucially, about the longing for another state of existence; and about dignity and even triumph in humiliation in suffering. In a way, the Little Mermaid’s falling in love is just the trigger for a drama about personal identity; she doesn’t just love the prince, she wants to be him, that is, human, with an immortal soul, which in Andersen’s tale is the exclusive preserve of human beings. And — according to the Sea Witch — she can only truly become a human being, with a human being’s immortal privileges, if she wins the love of the prince. The Sea Witch can give her legs — at a dreadful price. Only the prince can give her a soul.

Many people seem to think that this story of Andersen’s is deeply anti-feminist. I think that is a profound misreading. I’m not arguing that he was a feminist in our terms or that he was anything other than a man of his time. But it astonishes me that such people haven’t noticed that he has identified himself completely with his female hero — she’s not the Other (as women continue to be for so many male authors), she is himself.  Furthermore, she is doing something completely atypical of traditional fairy tale heroines (or at least those belonging to the canon of the best known) — she is the lover, not the beloved, the active, not the passive one. Indeed, it is she who saves the prince from drowning in a feat that would take almost impossible strength and stamina, even for a mermaid. She’s only a fifteen-year-old girl with a fishtail, after all, and yet she holds the insensible prince above the waves during the entirety of a terrible storm at sea, which has wrecked his ship, and which rages all night. Then, as the story develops, she pursues him — but, lacking the voice she has given in payment to the Sea Witch for the magic that will split her fishtail into legs (and less obviously but just as importantly, being a foundling with no family or earthly breeding) — she is unable to win his love. (And incidentally, what an unforgettable character the Sea Witch is — laughing in scorn at romantic love, and cutting, with the Little Mermaid, one of the most chilling devil’s bargains in literature. And the Little Mermaid’s grandmother — what a marvelous creation! — with all her wise counsel against reaching too high, and being discontent with what she believes to be the pretty good wicket of mermaid-hood.) It is also crucial to note, not only that the Little Mermaid makes her own independent choices, creates her own destiny, throughout the story, but also that in the overwhelmingly powerful denouement, which is to some extent a twist, the Little Mermaid beats the Sea Witch and even the strictures of the story itself, at their own game. Two possible endings have been laid out for her by others; instead — by staying utterly true to her self, her principles and her conception of genuine love — she invents her own.

When I was twelve, because of the Robert Redford film, which I adored, I read The Great Gatsby for the first time. It had the same effect on me as “The Little Mermaid”, and when I was in my twenties and more capable of analysis it dawned on me that it is exactly the same story. Gatsby is the Little Mermaid. He, a poor boy, falls in love with a rich girl, Daisy. He cannot win her in the state of existence into which he was born — that is, poverty — and so he devotes his life, spectacularly, to transforming himself into a rich boy. He gets the mansion and the money, just like the Little Mermaid gets the legs. But he cannot win Daisy from the husband she has chosen from her own kind, just as the Little Mermaid cannot win the prince from his intended. For both of them, tragedy, and a strange kind of transcendence, results.

Unrequited love makes you question your entire existence. It is as if your whole self is worthless, because that self is worthless, or not worth enough, to the beloved. If you experience unrequited love profoundly, it will have a profound effect on your personality. You will be inclined to define yourself by it, as if it is the single most important aspect of your personality. And it will force you to find a means of transcendence — a sense of worth, even of personal destiny, that makes the indifference of the beloved bearable and even creatively and spiritually lucrative.

Here is something I will never know, but will wonder about all my life. When I first heard “The Little Mermaid”, was I already, at five or six, that kind of personality who would spend much of her life loving unrequitedly? Or could it be true — though, as a children’s author, I hope with all my heart that it is not — that the story affected me so deeply that it turned me into such a person?

I’m sure you already know why I hope that’s not true. It’s because I don’t want to have that much power. I don’t want any story to have that much power.

P.S. You can hear what I heard as a five-year-old at this site, if you can play an mp3 file. Scroll down until you see The Little Mermaid and download to your heart’s content!

Picture credits: The Little Mermaid swimming by Edmund Dulac

                                 The Little Mermaid saving the prince by Jiri Trnka

Fairytale Reflections (8) Sue Purkiss

Sue Purkiss describes her first few stories as ‘ghostie, witch fantasies for young children’. Her next two novels, ‘The Willow Man’ and ‘Warrior King’ are for older children. ‘The Willow Man’ is a contemporary story underpinned by the presence of the mysterious and magical figure of the ‘Willow Man’ or ‘Withy Man’, a huge outdoor sculpture by Serena de la Hey, set in a field near Bridgewater in Somerset. Young Tom is fascinated by the figure, which becomes ever more meaningful for him as he and his family struggles to cope with his little sister Sophie’s sudden stroke. ‘It only happened to one child in fifty thousand’ the doctors say – but Tom can’t help wondering if it happened because he quarrelled with her… And when on top of everything else, his friend Ash goes missing, perhaps the Willow Man can help?

He thought he had closed his eyes, but he could see the sunlight through his eyelids, and then he must have opened them a tiny crack. Or maybe he just thought he had, because he wasn’t sure what he’d seen, or, really, if he’d seen anything. Well, he couldn’t have. He might have seen Sophie hold up the flowers, but he couldn’t possibly have see the Willow Man bend gracefully down and take them. It must have been something to do with the sunlight again – when you stared into the sun with your eyes closed, it did make funny patterns on the inside of your eyelids…

Beautifully, delicately written, ‘The Willow Man’ is about hope and resurgence. And ‘Warrior King’ is a re-imagining of part of the life of Alfred the Great – king of Wessex from 871 to 899, renowned for his learning, for his defence of England against the Danes, and in a legend once famous among schoolchildren, for burning those cakes. Enchantment is present in this book too, in the shape of Cerys, the silver-eyed wise woman.

Sue’s books are grounded in the landscape of Britain, especially the beautiful county of Somerset where she now lives, which contains the original Isle of Avalon, the mysterious Glastonbury Tor, and the misty marshes where Alfred once hid from the Danes. (Her latest book, ‘Emily’s Surprising Voyage’ is a story of Brunel’s spectacular ship the SS Great Britain, now permanently to be found  in Bristol harbour.) I can’t resist quoting this passage from her website, about a visit to Athelney ‘where Alfred made such a botch of baking the cakes’:

There was a low green hill with a stumpy stone monument and apart from that, just a magical landscape, with rows of willows, water birds calling above stretches of floodwater, and in the distance, the iconic outline of Glastonbury Tor. You could see hardly any houses. It struck me that this place had hardly changed in hundreds of years.


As I leaned on the gate looking at the hill – at Alfred’s Athelney – an old man came up to me. “Ah,” he said – and I swear this is absolutely true – “you’ll be looking for Alfred.”

After that it may come as no surprise that Sue’s choice for ‘Fairytale Reflections’ is that tale of hope and transformation -

THE WILD SWANS

 

I have been a reader of fairy tales at various stages in my life. When my sister and I were small, my mother used to buy us Ladybird books – Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood – always with the same reassuringly familiar format: a page of text on the left, and a full colour, full page illustration on the right. They taught me to read: we read the same books over and over, and one of my earliest memories is of insisting to Dad that tonight, I would read to him. I’d heard the stories so often that I’d memorised them, and begun to link up the printed words with the spoken ones.

Later on, when I really could read, I had a series of little buttercup yellow books, which each featured a single fairy story. I really liked these. I think it was partly because they were miniature: I also liked little teddy bears, dolls’ house furniture, and tiny porcelain animals. I remember reading Beauty and the Beast under the sheets when I was supposed to be asleep. It had lovely pictures. There was one bit where the father brought back a red rose and a white rose from the Beast’s castle. His daughters were astonished to see roses in the middle of winter; such a thing was impossible, and therefore proof of something magical. The roses in my garden often flower late, into November and even December, and when they do, I always feel vaguely surprised – because I know from that story that they shouldn’t.

Later, when I was older, I used to get as many books as I could out of the libraries in town and at school. I read anything I could get hold of, including fairy stories: collections from different countries and Andrew Lang’s series of rainbow fairy books. Then I read a book called The Amazing Mr Whisper, by Brenda Macrow. That was the first story I’d come across where the magical world intruded into the real one: the precursor for me of the Narnia books, Alan Garner, and eventually Tolkien. I was enchanted by the idea that the two worlds could collide, and I think after that I began to drift away from pure fairytales. 

I rediscovered them when I had children of my own. My mother bought more Ladybird books: I bought collections with gorgeous illustrations. The children loved them, as I had done. I remember a friend saying she wouldn’t buy fairy stories for her children: they are full of such terrible things, she said – old ladies pushed into ovens, grannies eaten by wolves, stepmothers poisoning princesses, parents abandoning their children. Well, yes… and yet, these stories endure, as others don’t. (I managed to track down a copy of my beloved Mr Whisper a while ago; it hasn’t worn well, even for me!) Children cope with the cruelty in fairy stories, just as they love the horrors that Roald Dahl’s characters encounter; I think sometimes they are not given enough credit for being able to tell a fictional world from the real one, the one they have to live in.

The Wild Swans, by Hans Christian Andersen, has terrible things in it. But it’s also a story of haunting beauty. This is what happens.

It begins with eleven princes, who write ‘with diamond pencils on golden tablets’ and their little sister, Elisa, who has ‘a picture book that cost half the kingdom’. Their mother is apparently dead, but nevertheless they are happy until their father marries an evil queen, who turns the brothers into swans (they change back to their true forms only at night) and sends Elisa to live with peasants in the country. When she is fifteen, Elisa returns to the court, but the stepmother manages to get rid of her (not without some difficulty, but she’s a resourceful woman). Elisa flees the castle, and find herself in a dark, dark forest. Thanks to a troop of glow worms, another of angels, and a mysterious old woman, Elisa finds her way through the woods to the sea, where she meets up with her brothers. They carry her over the ocean to the country where they live, a place of forests, mountains and castles. As she sleeps, a fairy comes to Elisa in a dream and tells her she can lift the enchantment from her brothers, provided she makes each of them a shirt out of nettles. But she must not speak a word till she has done: if she does, her brothers will die.

            She begins the work, but she has only finished one shirt when  the king of the country comes across her while he is hunting. He falls in love with her, takes her back to his castle, gives her ‘regal gowns’ and has her hair ‘braided with pearls’. They marry, and she falls in love with him too, but is determined to press on with her task. The archbishop, however, believes she is a witch. He follows her one night when, having run out of nettles, she goes to a churchyard to collect more, passing by monsters which feast on the flesh of corpses to do so. The archbishop accuses her of witchcraft, the king can find no other explanation for her trips to the graveyard, and of course she cannot speak: he declares that the people must decide on her fate. They do – they say she’s a witch and must burn. Still she keeps sewing, still she won’t speak. Just in the nick of time, her brothers appear. She throws the shirts over them, and they are transformed into their real selves. (All except the youngest. His shirt is not quite finished, so he is left with a swan’s wing instead of an arm.) Elisa, exhausted, collapses, seemingly lifeless. But then something magical happens: the faggots which had been used to make the pyre suddenly begin to grow, and in no time at all a hedge of beautiful red roses has appeared. At the very top is a single white one. The king plucks it, lays it close to Elisa’s heart, and she comes back to life.

So – terrible things indeed. Some of the elements of this story are to be found in others too. There is the evil stepmother. She has the king: she doesn’t want to be burdened with his twelve children. So they experience the sudden loss of an idyllic lifestyle; they sink from the top of the heap to the very bottom. There is the journey – the quest –  through a forest. Forests, of course, were dangerous. They still are in many places (though not, perhaps, in our small island). In a real forest, you can quickly become disorientated and lose your way, and then you are at the mercy of fierce creatures: wild boar, wolves, and bears. In an enchanted one, there are other dangers too – witches, goblins, sinister trees.

Elisa is beset by dangers from the start. But once she sets about her task, she becomes even more vulnerable; she is not allowed to speak, so she cannot explain or defend herself. The king is kind and he loves her, but even he is a threat to her: he takes her away, without her permission, from where she needs to be. She has to go to the graveyard – it’s the only place she can get fresh supplies of nettles – but in doing so, she lays herself open to the Archbishop’s accusations. Then she falls victim to a mob: one day the people cheer her: the next they jeer and condemn her to a terrible death. The fickle affections of the mob are frighteningly real.

But she is not a passive victim. We know that she is only allowing all this to happen to her because she is ferociously loyal and determined. Even when she falls in love with the king, she still doesn’t allow herself to be distracted. She loves her brothers and she is determined to keep to her commitment to save them, no matter how hard it may be. She may be a victim, but she’s far from weak.

We talk of ‘fairy-tale endings’ as if fairy stories invariably end well. True, in the end Cinderella and her prince live happily ever after. So does the Sleeping Beauty; so does Snow White. But it isn’t always so. In The Wild Swans, one brother is left with a swan’s wing instead of an arm. Perhaps this is one of the things that makes this particular story so poignant; there’s an admission that everything doesn’t always turn out all right, no matter how hard you try. Fairy stories may take place in an enchanted land, but they deal with situations we must face in real life.

There is even something paradoxical about the enchantment. The stepmother wants to turn the princes into ‘voiceless birds’, but her power has its limits, and instead of becoming something ugly, they are turned into ‘beautiful wild swans’. They are no longer princes, and their true lives have been taken away, but still they have been transformed into something wonderful: to borrow from Yeats, ‘a terrible beauty is born’: and they fly across the ocean at sunset to meet their sister like ‘a white ribbon being pulled across the sky’. It’s a lovely image and a lovely moment, as Elisa sees her brothers for the first time in so many long and difficult years.

The Wild Swans is about as far as you can get from the popular Disneyfied construct of what a fairytale is. Like a wild landscape, it is bleak and harsh. But, for me at any rate, it has also a beauty that touches the heart.

Photo Credit: This decoupage of the Wild Swans is by Queen Margrethe of Denmark - find more about her work at http://wildswansfashion.blogspot.com/2010/03/wild-swans-decoupage-by-queen-margrethe.html