The Emperor may indeed have no clothes, but the fabrications of the swindlers—their acts of invention—are invested with a certain dramatic artfulness (they cut the air with scissors and sew with a needle that has no thread) and with a powerful degree of imaginative value (though one diametrically opposed to what is asserted by the thieves). Oddly, that “most wonderful cloth” that they produce becomes more and more substantial as it is described, and by the end of the tale the courtiers are engaging in pantomimes similar to those practiced by the swindlers while picking up the train and holding it in the air. Their art works magic, for it produces out of thin air something that is beautiful and seemingly palpable, even though it is not at all there.
Andersen’s weavers, as one commentator points out, are merely insisting that “the value of their labor be recognized apart from its material embodiment.”18 The invisible cloth they weave may never manifest itself in material terms, but the description of its beauty (“as light as spiderwebs” and “exquisite”) turns it into one of the many wondrous objects found in Andersen’s fairy tales. It is that cloth that captivates us, making us do the imaginative work of seeing something beautiful even when it has no material reality. Deeply resonant with meaning and of rare aesthetic beauty—even if they never become real—the cloth and other wondrous objets d’art have attained a certain degree of critical invisibility. Their value has been obscured by the lesson inscribed through the embodied finger-pointing (the sure sign of a message) at the end of the tale. It is no accident that nearly every illustration of the story shows us the child gleefully calling attention to the Emperor’s nakedness. When it comes to children’s literature, endings count, and it is there that we habitually—sometimes mindlessly—seek meaning and morals for the child reading the story. Aesthetics rarely matters, even if it is the appearance of beauty that has engaged attention in the first place. But it is to beauty that we must look to discover why we still read Andersen today.
MATCHES AND THEIR IGNITION POWER
The wondrous objects concealed in Andersen’s tales are not always easy to identify and locate, for they engage in remarkable disappearing acts, playing hide-and-seek with characters and readers alike. Take the case of the pea in the celebrated “Princess and the Pea,” and it becomes evident that even the most ordinary objects can come to be invested with a special aura. The pea that was placed under the mattresses becomes, by the end of the story, an authentic museum piece on display in the Royal Museum. That is, if it has not yet disappeared—“if no one has stolen it,” as Andersen emphasizes. The nightingale, in the story of that title, also comes and goes, singing its enchanting melodies when it pleases. The invisible cloth, the bird in the woods, and the pea have real impact on the child reading the story, for they carry an emotional charge far more powerful than the lessons that have been permanently emblazoned on the tales by well-meaning editors. William J. Bennett may insist that “The Little Match Girl” is a “simple, tragic story that stirs pity in every child’s heart,” but many child readers will be more moved by the girl’s beautiful visions than by her abject state.
There is good reason to be cautious about enshrining beauty as the supreme value of the fairy tale. Andersen’s cult of beauty is shadowed by a profound fear that the enchantments of beauty can turn demonic, evoking desires so powerful that they exceed the bounds of civilized society and turn into an indulgence that is both evil and dangerous. A deep ambivalence about beauty and pleasure becomes evident in “The Red Shoes,” a story that punishes a child’s quite natural curiosity and appetite for beauty. The young Karen is enamored of a princess’s shoes—“There’s nothing in the world like a pair of red shoes!”—and has a pair made by the local shoemaker: “They were beautiful!” But the magic of that beauty turns against Karen, taking possession of her feet, compelling her to dance endlessly, and punishing her for desires that are, on one level, innocent, natural, and benign.19 One picture-book version of “The Red Shoes” eliminates the gory scene in which Karen’s feet are chopped off and ends happily with Karen vowing to “think twice” before she makes another wish.20
Beneath this simple story we can hear the rustling of ancient myths. It is as if Andersen had miniaturized and domesticated the rivalry between Arachne and Athena, creating a homespun tale in which a girl vies with a royal superior and is punished for daring to put beauty on display. But Andersen mingles the pious with the pagan. As a devout if not wholly orthodox Lutheran, he had good reason to feel anxious about beauty and its sensual, seductive powers. The desire it arouses can never be wholly innocent, even when, as in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” it has no substance at all. Beauty can quickly turn into a force with the power to devastate, crush, and overwhelm, especially in Andersen’s later tales about troubled artists and their struggles with the creative process.
But Andersen also understood that, without beauty, our lives are impoverished, and almost every story he wrote contains scenes, objects, or characters that are uplifting, stirring, and enchanting. Many begin with descriptions of landscapes that are “lovely,” and it is no accident that dejligt (the Danish term that captures a mix of beauty, charm, and delight) turns out to be Andersen’s favorite word. Andersen was dismayed that his critics took to counting the number of times the word appeared in a story.
Andersen’s cult of beauty may be unwelcome news to parents and educators (especially those who seek to enlist the stories in building character), but it would have been cheering news to one writer who took up the genre of the fairy tale and reworked it in literary terms. Oscar Wilde, whose literary fairy tales celebrate compassion and good works (sometimes even at the expense of beauty), ventriloquizes through a character in The Picture of Dorian Gray a view that captures the aesthetics of Andersen’s fairy tales: “People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”21 Appearances always count, and Andersen’s deepest commitment in the fairy tales is to the description of surface beauty.
It is not always easy to predict the “wonder of wonders” that will catch the attention of a child. For readers of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it may be the Turkish delight that Edmund is given by the witch of Narnia. Francis Spufford, whose stirring memoir about childhood reading reveals the importance of reading with the spine (rather than the brain), does not specifically refer to Turkish delight, but he calls attention to C. S. Lewis’s ability to construct something that he calls “invented objects for my longing.” In The Child That Books Built, he reports that the author of The Chronicles of Narnia “gave forms to my longing that I would never have thought of, and yet they seemed exactly right: he had anticipated what would delight me with an almost unearthly intimacy.”22
Objects of desire appear in forms that are both obvious and subtle. For readers of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it may be the Golden Ticket itself as much as the outlandish confections at the chocolate factory that serves as the “invented object” incarnating childhood desires. In Alice in Wonderland, if you look closely, it is not the White Rabbit but the watch in the waistcoat pocket that makes Alice “burn with curiosity.” All these invented objects produce a form of desire that serves as a reliable antidote to the boredom that can beset a child—sometimes the child in the book, sometimes the child outside the book, and sometimes both—with nothing to do.
Andersen is not often associated with beauty, in large part because Christian symbols and pious thoughts so dominate the narrative landscape of his fairy tales. “The Little Match Girl,” for example, is nearly always read as a story of salvation, without reference to the visions produced by the lighting of matches. The flames lit by the girl have the power to kindle imagination, producing visions of warmth (a brass stove), whimsy (a roast goose that waddles on the floor with a fork and knife in its back), and be
auty (the Christmas tree). The comparison of the match’s glow to a “tiny lamp” is more than likely an allusion to the magic lamp in the story of Aladdin, a figure with whom Andersen identified when he read The Arabian Nights as a boy with his father. To the best of my knowledge, only Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in her compelling study of fairy tales, has understood the lighting of matches in poetic terms, and she equates the gesture with a damaging form of escapist fantasy: The little match girl loses herself in a vision “that has nothing to do with reality. It has to do with feeling nothing can be done, so one might as well sink into idle fantasy.”23
For Andersen, the light of poetry was more than idle fantasy. The little match girl can be seen as possessing a power of imagination not unlike that of Andersen’s “new Aladdin,” who promises to renew poetry with the illuminating power of his lamp:
A bard will come, who, with a child’s mind, like a new Aladdin, will enter the cavern of science—with a child’s mind, we say, or else the powerful spirits of natural strength would seize him and make him their servant—while he, with the lamp of poetry, which is, and always will be, the human heart, stands as a ruler, and brings forth wonderful fruits from the gloomy passages, and has strength to build poetry’s new palace, created in one night by attendant spirits.24
It is through beauty, poetry, and visionary power that the world will be renewed.
BEAUTY, REFLECTION, AND REPRESENTATION
Andersen revels in descriptions that evoke nature’s beauty. Here is the beginning of “The Little Mermaid”: “Far out at sea, the water is as blue as the petals of the prettiest cornflower and as clear as the purest glass.” “The Ugly Duckling” may state in its title the antithesis of beauty, but it begins by describing the vibrant colors of country splendors: “It was so beautiful out in the country—it was summertime! The grain was golden, the oats were green, and hay was piled in tall stacks down in the green meadows.” Andersen works hard to capture in words the physical beauty of earth, sea, and sky, and of the creatures that inhabit those three regions.
Beauty, as Elaine Scarry has eloquently put it, “seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication.”25 It brings “copies of itself into being,” and “when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.” This form of expressive desire is accomplished in its most immediate and unmediated manner by what is probably the most famous of all Andersen’s fairy-tale characters: the ugly duckling. Andersen’s barnyard animal experiences the shock of beauty when he sees swans, mourns their loss, and ends by metamorphosing into the very creatures that enchanted him.
The transformation does not take place without a price, and, for Andersen, the cost for creating beauty is almost inevitably some form of suffering. The ugly duckling begins as one of the most abject of Andersen’s characters, a creature that figures as the “laughingstock of the barnyard.” An outcast in the animal world, he is scorned by humans as well—kicked by the maid, shot at by hunters, and struck with tongs. “It’s because I’m so ugly,” the duckling declares, pointing to the disruptive energy of ugliness and its capacity to elicit hatred and aggression. The ugly duckling knows beauty and has seen it in the form of “majestic birds” with “magnificent wings” and “wondrous cries.” Although not driven by ambition (“How could he ever aspire to their beauty?”), he nonetheless performs as a supremely able imitator, one who comes to embody, not just replicate or duplicate, the beauty that fills him with awe and admiration.
The ugly duckling may suffer through the icy winter, but the transformation from duckling to swan requires no real effort on his part. It is, of course, part of a natural, biological process, much like the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly. In the scene of transformation, the ugly duckling engages in a moment of reflection—reflection in the double sense of the term. He sees himself in the mirrored surface of the water and at the same time reflects on his condition. In this extraordinary humanizing moment—animals cannot, of course, engage in this double process—the ugly duckling transcends both ugliness and his animal condition. Reflection may not be the cause of the transformation, but it is telling that it coincides with the moment of transformation.
The process of creating beauty is not always so smooth, and, like beauty itself, it too has a dark side. “The Snow Queen” troubles the waters of “The Ugly Duckling,” suggesting that the desire to strive for beauty, when it falls short of perfect imitation, can turn diabolical and destructive. Andersen’s story of Kai and Gerda makes it clear that creativity can turn sinister, for it is affiliated with a disturbing form of self-division and self-deception. The magic mirror introduced in the very first paragraph of “The Snow Queen” is a tool of the devil, a surface that has the capacity to shrink what is “good and beautiful” and to enlarge what is “worthless and ugly.” It may reflect reality but it also distorts it, engaging in critical disfigurement that is said to show “what people and the world were really like.”
Andersen’s troll/devil is a kind of artistic anti-Christ whose art consists of finding truth through satiric distortion. In the course of his arrogant, Babel-like project to take the glass up to the heavens, he creates shards that lodge in the eyes and hearts of all those down on earth, including Kai, who is seduced by the icy beauty of the Snow Queen. Kai is, in the end, redeemed by the warm, passionate tears of his beloved Gerda, but not before he almost loses himself in the frigid palace of the Snow Queen, working an ice puzzle of the mind, trying to shape frozen chunks into the word “Eternity.”
In “The Ugly Duckling,” we have a triumphant moment of self-reflexivity, for the transformed duckling, unlike Narcissus, does not fall in love with his image. He recognizes that what is being mirrored back to him is his own reflection. Consider Kai, however, who labors in solitude, mirror lodged in his heart, to achieve immortality. He is caught in a conflict that one critic has called the “nemesis of mimesis,” the revenge of art on those who try to represent and create.26 Striving for mathematical perfection and rarefied beauty, Kai remains trapped in narcissistic self-absorption, struggling with the Snow Queen’s ice puzzle, which, when solved, will reward him, not only with the whole world and a pair of ice skates, but also with immortality. And yet “everything ends up in the trash,” as we learn in “Auntie Toothache,” Andersen’s most astonishingly dark anti–fairy tale. Works of art may outlive their creators, but the notion of “immortality” for artists and for their creations is nothing but a cultural lie. Even works of art are doomed to decay and crumble.
ANIMATING ART
Andersen is deeply committed to art, but at the same time he recognizes the dangers of a cold, austere cult of beauty that, in its quest for immortality, endangers the artist’s soul. These are grown-up matters, and the second installment of fairy tales in this collection was meant for adult audiences willing to follow the writer’s struggle to define exactly what is at stake in artistic creation. These “high-voltage” narratives map a deeply personal poetics that complicates the straightforward aesthetics of fairy tales like “The Ugly Duckling.”27 I will turn to two tales—“The Psyche” and “The Shadow”—to deepen our understanding of questions that troubled Andersen far more profoundly than the more prominent fairy tales let on. These are stories that need to be resurrected and put in dialogue with the earlier tales if we are to understand how devotion to beauty raises a legion of devilish ethical questions.
A beautiful work of art occupies the central position of “The Psyche.” Written in 1861, the story engages in its title the thematic nexus found in so many of Andersen’s fairy tales: beauty, spirituality, and transformation. Psyche, the legendary beauty who marries Cupid and breaks the taboo of looking at him, bears the Greek name for “soul” and is endowed by the gods with immortality. She is only one of many mythological figures invoked by the text, which reworks the Pygmalion story and also draws on the figure of Medusa to work out its narrative terms. As in many of Andersen’s tales, the pagan (Greek, Roman, and Nordic mythologies) in
forms the narrative in unexpected ways and bumps up against the overlay of religious themes.
The wondrous invented object in “The Psyche” takes the form of a marble statue sculpted by an unnamed perfectionist who destroys everything he creates until he achieves flawless beauty. Inspired by a young woman he sees in a garden, he molds a statue, not just of the young woman but also of an image familiar to him from his studies of art, Raphael’s Psyche. “He had never seen such a beautiful woman before. Yes, once! He had seen one painted by Raphael, painted as Psyche, in one of Rome’s palaces. Yes, her portrait was there—and here she was alive!”
When the young Roman woman sees the artist’s statue and hears his passionate declaration of love for her, she turns on him. In that instant, “the face of beauty bore a resemblance to that petrifying face with serpent hair.” Repeating the sculptor’s act of turning a person into an image of stone, she transforms herself from Psyche to Medusa. Pygmalion may have brought his statue to life, but here the statue’s model saps life from the artist. However much the artist’s masterpiece may succeed as a work of art, it turns on him in ways so powerful that he abandons art, hoping to find salvation in monastic life.
The artist never makes a name for himself, but his work of art is unearthed long after his death and acquires immortality: “He was gone now, scattered abroad as dust is destined to be. But Psyche—the fruit of his most noble labors and the glorious work that betokened the spark of the divine in him—remained, and she would never die.” The artwork effaces the artist, leaving him to molder while it gets its revenge as an admired, acclaimed, shining exemplar of beauty.