In Defense of Hans Christan Andersen

I will defend Hans Christian Andersen till the day I die.

For some pathetic reason, I identify with the man's lonely, misunderstood, creative existence. If all readers have a literary soulmate, then he is mine.

This morning, I read a tweet from a librarian I am newly following on Twitter. She stated that "Hans Christian Andersen is an asshole," and linked to a blog entry.

Now, this caused me alarm, because I am (for some reason) instinctively defensive of my boy Hans. When I read the entry, I was disappointed to see that the argument for calling him an asshole is steeped in an anti-feminist misreading of his tales "The Red Shoes" and "The Little Mermaid."

I do not want to argue with a librarian who wrote a two-hundred paged thesis on reinterpretations of fairy tales in Young Adult librarian. No, sir. I myself am an aspiring librarian, though I'm years away from going through the process of even applying to a LIS school, and I greatly respect librarians (on Twitter as well as the ones in my community) for all the training they have to go through. Librarians know their shit.

So I'm not arguing with a librarian (though I did tweet two rebuttals), but Twitter's micro-blogging format just isn't enough sometimes. This is just my own opinion, in response to someone else's opinion, based on my own readings and interpretations of Andersen's stories and life.

The Red Shoes may seem on the outset a cruel story about a little girl that is essentially punished with death  for digging a pair of rockin' red shoes. To understand any of Andersen's stories to the fullest is to understand his life. Most, if not all, of his stories have a biographical element. (The man was a narcissist!) Hans based the little girl's story on a memory he had from his confirmation. When he was in church, all he could think of were his squeaky new boots. There's a lot to mine in this tale, such as defying the church, and finding your passion . . . . To only view this tale as anti-feminist, due to (spoiler alert!) the little girl's death is to do Hans a great disservice. It's my personal opinion that Hans was much too childlike in his own mind to exhibit any sort of misogyny. I also think that he imposed his own feelings better into female characters than male ones due to his bisexuality. Which leads me to . . .

The Little Mermaid is my favorite tale, and the one that hooked me into the world of Hans when I was eight-years-old (and this was before Ariel made her splashing debut). I revisit this story several times a year, through many different translations, and (this is going to be cliche) I find something new every time. A new layer, waiting to be peeled away. On the surface (haha, pun), this is another story where a female character bites it due to following her passions. But that doesn't mean that Hans hated women, it means he hated HIMSELF. (In addition to being a narcissist, he was also self-loathing.) "The Little Mermaid" is a tale of sexual repression, a sob-fest about someone who couldn't have what she truly desired because the world didn't have a place for her.

This is the very thing that Hans was trying to recreate with this tale. Hans had fallen in love with a man named Edvard Colin (Hans would be on Team Edvard today), and was never completely rejected by him. This was probably because Hans never felt he could speak out his true feelings (sound familiar?) This story was written when Hans took solace on the island of Fyn to avoid Edvard's wedding (to the woman he loved) in Copenhagen. His own personal anguish was poured into the story, and into the main character herself.

Hans IS the little mermaid. If his stories are cruel to women, it is only because the poor guy was so hard on himself. I don't think it is fair to read these pieces solely as sexism (though I'm not denying it can easily be found), because I doubt Hans actually mean to tear down the opposite gender. I think he was simply finding an outlet for his personal feelings that felt safest to him. (Which is really messed up if you think about it long enough.) (Which I just did.)

So. Hans was definitely a strange fellow (I mean, dude carried a length of rope with him when he traveled because he was deathly afraid of fire - say wha?), and a completely misunderstood one. But I maintain that his cruelty to the women in his tales was only an extension of cruelty to himself. The guy never, ever caught a break.

I need to thank Magpie Librarian for inspiring me to sort out my thoughts on this fine Tuesday morning (when I should actually be writing an essay on Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" - oops!) There are no hard feelings, of course, and I am very appreciative of her blog entry because it led me to the discovery of an Andersen retelling by Dorian Cirrone, Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You.

This is exactly the reason I heart Twitter.