Dr. Seuss Panic Attack: Jibboo, Be Not Proud...

Once upon a time, when I was but an impressionable little child, I was innocently flipping through a Dr. Seuss book when I came face-to-face with death.

Don't believe me?

Remember this question?

"And what would you do if you met a JIBBOO?"

This enigmatic, vaguely racist-sounding query comes from the book Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! and it is accompanied by one of the most terrifying pictures it has ever been my misfortune to encounter in a children's book.

I won't post it here.  Yes, I still find it that unsettling.  Google it if you want to give yourself nightmares for a week.

No mere description will ever capture the utter creepiness of this image, but I'll try: Imagine a street running through an abandoned town.  This street is lined with the empty, decaying shells of ghostly white houses, and a pale sliver of moon glints weakly down from the night sky.  At the far end of the road stands the dark silhouette of a young boy, frozen with fear.

He is frozen with fear because of the thing that awaits him at the other end of the street.

The Jibboo--gaunt, stark-black, beaked like a vulture*--has him in its sights.  It advances on the boy, this boy who is the in-story avatar for the child-reader, with its long neck thrust eagerly forward.  It raises a long spidery arm in ghastly greeting.  There is nowhere for the boy to hide himself from its cold embrace; he is as naked and exposed in this blasted landscape as the single sickly dying plant that struggles out of the otherwise bare dirt road.

What makes this scene especially frightening is its radical shift in tone from the rest of the book. The "story" is actually a series of imagination-inspired vignettes, and all of the previous flights of fancy involved things like floating swimming pools and cute purple elephants.  The only other remotely scary things in these pages are the grumpy walruses glowering at Peter the Postman as he delivers mail to the igloo village, and even they look more like your curmudgeonly old neighbor than a genuine threat.

Then, with the flip of a page, you're staring directly into a gut-wrenching existential crisis.

And then, just to crank up the jarring factor to eleven, the narrative promptly returns to cotton-candy-sweet thoughts of pretty white horses galloping through candy cane forests.  I guess because Dr. Seuss understood that if you stare into the horror of your own mortality long enough, it stares into you.

*Incidentally, when I read The Last Battle--the final entry in the Narnia series--I realized how very much the evil god Tash looks like a de-Seussified version of the Jibboo and got traumatized all over again.  Screw you, C.S. Lewis.

Dr. Seuss Panic Attack: What If God is a Very Gullible and Somewhat Clumsy Elephant?

I never wanted to be an astronaut.

I didn't even daydream about an idealized future career as a death-defying spaceship pilot when I was a kid, though I'm pretty sure plenty of my classmates did.  My generation grew up on Star Wars and the Alien movies.  I had several classmates who owned ET dolls.

I wasn't one of them.  ET creeped the hell out of me.  But that wasn't the reason eight-year-old me wouldn't have accepted a career at NASA if it had been handed over along with a billion dollars, a live unicorn, and a lifetime supply of get-out-of-doing-math-homework-free cards.

The very idea of outer space itself scared me off.

The fear actually wasn't as intense when I was young.  Yes, I really, really disliked the idea that there was a big, black, gaping, lifeless void lurking beyond the comfy little atmosphere of this planet I call home, but I could live with it as long as it continued to stay where it was.  The night sky may have looked dark and spooky, but at least I knew it wasn't going to come down here and try to coax me into a windowless van.

It got worse as I got older and gradually developed the intellectual capacity to fully wrap my mind around how immeasurably huge space is.  How unknown and unpredictable.  How chock-full of horrendous things capable of snuffing out life as we know it on this fragile planet of ours in a heartbeat, without warning.  Sometimes I get to thinking about it, and I end up lying awake in deepening existential horror as my mind uncontrollably crowds itself with images of black holes, free-floating clouds of deadly cosmic radiation, supernovas, giant-ass meteors, and even gianter-ass solar flares.  Then I sleep through most of the next day and have to admit to myself that I didn't get any writing done and the house looks like a disaster area because I spent all night worrying about the possibility that the universe might kill us all with giant space-rocks.  

With all this in mind, what do you suppose child-me made of a certain children's book?

The one about a civilization inhabiting a tiny planet that hurtles at breakneck speed through the boundless ether, without even the small protection of being tethered more or less in one place by the gravity of a dying star.

The one in which a superior being comes to the aid of said civilization, promising to hold, protect and cherish their wayward world for all time.

The one in which said superior being is immediately beset by other, more vicious and small-minded superior beings, who tear the teeming planet away from him and callously cast it into the murky depths like the meaningless speck of dust that it is in their eyes, leaving its people to lie forgotten and abandoned in the darkness for however many years, centuries or millennia it takes for their protector to find them again.

You know which one I'm talking about.  

Yep, that's right.

Dang you, Horton Hears A Who.  Dang you straight to heck.  Not only did you speak to my fear of being an insignificant speck of dust floating through a hostile universe, you also planted the idea in my head that the greater forces controlling this universe may be sentient.  That some of them may be actively hostile.  That they may be DOING THIS SHIT ON PURPOSE.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I might as well take a nap now and get my nightmare about rogue planets out of the way as soon as possible.  I hope you're happy with yourself, you smug-ass, clover-loving pachyderm.          

  

Dr. Seuss Panic Attack: The Once-ler

I've been haunted since childhood by a face I never saw.

Specifically, the face belonging to this pair of disembodied arms:

I imagine the Lorax movie that came out last year brought relief to a lot of people who read the book as children and uneasily wondered why the Once-ler never showed himself.  It brought none to me.  The backstory I'd already imagined for this enigmatic character is cemented too firmly in my mind to be replaced by simple Hollywood fluff, however well-animated that fluff may be.

A teacher read this story to my second grade class.  Like my classmates, I looked at those arms-those scrawny, gnarled, sickly-looking arms-and wondered what sort of person or thing could possibly be attached to them.  But while my classmates probably latched onto the green fur and imagined a creature that resembled the Grinch, my mind went to a much darker place.

I decided that the Once-ler must be afflicted by some sort of horrific disfiguring disease.

The more I thought about it the more sense it made.  The story begins with a flashback of the Once-ler roaming the world, hiding his face in shame beneath the protective canopy of a covered wagon.  When he first encounters the lovely Truffula trees, he is entranced.  Those soft colorful tufts draw him like a moth to the flame; he must have these beautiful trees for his own, every single one of them, for to possess them is to regain the beauty that nature stole from him.

Yet the disease that afflicts him has twisted his mind as well as his body.  His intense love of the trees is inextricably entwined with a fierce hateful envy of their physical perfection.  This darker side of him festers and grows as the Lorax shows up again and again to remind him that the trees do not truly belong to him.  In his rage he defiles as many trees as he can, hacking through their trunks with axes and twisting their tufts into hideous shapes.*  All the while he continues to lurk in the shadows of doorways and desks like a robber-baron version of the Phantom of the Opera, still too ashamed to show his face to his customers despite the growing success of his business.

Then, suddenly, it's all over.  The last Truffula tree is cut down and the Lorax disappears into the sky.  The Once-ler is left alone in the pollution-choked valley, having finally succeeded in re-shaping the landscape into a wasteland as desolate and blighted as his own body and soul.  And as he looks over his work, he mourns.  Something in him has been lost, some pure and perfect and genuine facet of himself he didn't know he possessed until it died in the muck of rotted wood and industrial waste that surrounds his factory...

Then, as the sun sets on the barren valley, something tiny and round rolls from the tuft of the fallen tree.  A single seed.  Hope courses through him as he snatches it up.  The last traces of his shame and self-hatred melt away as he carries the little living seed to his house like a holy relic; the rest of his life will be spent in nurturing and guarding it, awaiting the day when new life will rise from the ashes of his greed and misplaced anger.

And that was the backstory I came up with for the Once-ler.  Looking back, I think it was one of my earliest exercises in trusting my imagination and looking beyond the obvious while building a character.

Or maybe it was just my brain being weird and twisted enough to see a Greek-tragedy-worthy tale of obsession, ruin, redemption and late-stage syphilis in a preachy 1970's environmentalism fable written for children.

It depends on who you ask.

*I've studied that flaccid, creepy, unidentified-decomposing-medical-specimen-looking thing in the Once-ler's hands a dozen times now, and I still can't figure out how "everyone" could actually need a Thneed, let alone keep one in their houses without having nightmares about it.      

Dr. Seuss Panic Attack: The Pale Green Pants With Nobody Inside Them

Imagine you're a five-year-old flipping through a collection of stories by Dr. Seuss.  You're just chilling out in your pink stretch pants and ruffly little-girl socks, enjoying all the cool-sounding imaginary words and fun illustrations, when suddenly this assaults your senses:

I don't know about you, but when I encountered the last installment* of "The Sneetches and Other Stories," one thought flashed through my mind.  And that thought went something like this:

AAAAHHHHHHOLYFLURKINSCNITBALLS Kill it! Kill it before it EATS THAT GUY'S SOUL!

Reading the story through to the end did little to assuage my fear of the evil vomit-colored possessed pants.  Looking back on my childhood, I've often wondered if my reaction was unfair. After all, the pants didn't actually turn out to be evil.  The tale was a simple fable about the importance of not judging others for being different; the narrator is initially afraid of the pants and tries to avoid them, but then he discovers that they're afraid of him as well.  They both get over their fear and become friends.

Sounds innocent enough, right?

Then I read it again as an adult.

I couldn't help but notice something disturbing, something I think I subconsciously picked up on when I was little but wasn't quite worldly enough to fully recognize for the big red flag it was.

The pants seem to be following the narrator.  And they seem to be putting themselves through a good deal of inconvenience  to do so.

He first encounters them while walking through the woods at night.  Startling, I'm sure, but that could at least be a coincidence.  

The next time he sees them, they almost mow him down on a city street.  On a bicycle.  Despite the fact that, even in a Dr. Seuss book, it must be extremely difficult for a disembodied pair of pants to ride a bike.  What with their lack of hands and feet and all.

Then the narrator tries to calm his nerves with a nice fishing trip, only to see the pants rowing ominously toward him on the river, even though a boat must be as hard for animated monster-pants to pilot as a bike.  That marks the third time the pants just "happened" to be where the narrator is. It was also when I began to suspect that none of these run-ins were accidents.

The big climactic encounter confirmed my suspicions.  The narrator goes out one night** to pick "a peck of Snide."  The text doesn't make it clear what Snide is or why he needs it, but I like to think that he planned to somehow distill it into a powerful pepper-spray-like substance and take care of those pesky creep-trousers once and for all.  Anyway, the narrator makes it clear that the Snide-field is a very big place: "almost nine miles wide," to be exact.  So of course, he unsuspectingly reaches into a Snide bush and finds himself touching...

The. Pale. Green. Pants.

Nine whole miles of Snide-field, and those damn pants just had to be right there beside him.

They're always there.

Seriously, there's no way that any of this is coincidental.  There's no avoiding the ugly truth: our dear narrator is being stalked.  The only time he briefly has a moment's peace is when he eludes the pants by hiding in a Brickle bush for two nights straight.  I doubt he can make that work again, though; since the pants were present at his Snide-picking session they probably saw him emerging from his hiding place.

And by the end of the story he's played directly into their nonexistent hands.  He approaches them without fear and says "Hi" when he passes them in the street.  He's given them his trust.

Trust that will indubitably be used against him when the evil haunted pants-people of the night finally rise up and take over the world.  

*The story's official title is "What Was I Scared Of?," but it's been forever cemented in my mind as "That Creepy Friggin' Pale-Green-Pants-With-Nobody-Inside-Them Story."

**I did wonder why the narrator kept going out at night, even though it seemed pretty obvious that the pants are more active after dark.  The best I could come up with is the possibility that the species of bear (or bunny, or chinchilla, or whatever) the narrator belongs to is naturally nocturnal in its habits.  That, or he's a sucker for punishment.

Hans Christian Andersen Beatdown: The Snow Queen, Fourth Round

Today is Hans Christian Andersen's lucky day.  I'm in a great mood from discovering a local health food store that carries amazingly delicious blueberry-flax granola, so as we wrap up this story I might just go easy on him.

Sixth Story.  The Lapland Woman and the Finland Woman

Gerda and the Reindeer take shelter for the night at a hovel belonging to "an old Lapland woman, who was dressing fish by the light of an oil lamp."  The Lapland woman listens to their story and warns them that they still have a long way to go before they reach Finland.  She writes a message on a dried haberdine and sends them along to her friend the Finland woman.

By the way, a haberdine is an Atlantic cod.  The word most often refers to one that's been salted and dried.  Another one to add to my Bananagrams arsenal.

The Finland woman's house is even more of a hovel, so much so that Gerda has to knock on the chimney because there is no door.  But the Finland woman receives them graciously, helps Gerda out of her gloves and boots and puts some ice on the Reindeer's head to help him cope with the house's warmth (wait a minute--if the house has no door, how did they get a reindeer inside? Heck, how did Gerda get inside?  Did she climb down the chimney, or was there a window she could squeeze through?) and reads the message on the dried fish.

I do like this passage:

"She read it three times: she then knew it by heart; so she put the fish into the cupboard--for it might very well be eaten, and she never threw anything away."

Grandpa? Is that you in another life?

I like details like that; simple little gestures that speak volumes about a character without being in-your-face about it.

The Finland woman seems to be what Medieval peasants would have tactfully called a "wise woman" (i.e. a witch who specializes in healing and fertility magic) and as such is the first person in the story able and willing to tell Gerda what the problem is: Kay still has those darn splinters in his eye and heart, and he won't start acting like a human being again until they're removed.  She also reveals that Gerda can save him, but only if she does it by herself:

"Two miles hence the garden of the Snow Queen begins; thither you may carry the little girl.  Set her down by the large bush with red berries, standing in the snow; don't stay talking, but hasten back as soon as possible."

Gerda and the Reindeer start off right away.  Unfortunately HCA doesn't seem to think Gerda has suffered enough yet; they are in such a hurry to leave that they forget Gerda's gloves and boots, and instead of taking the time to go back and get them they run straight to the bush with red berries and leave Gerda standing barefoot in the snow.  Oh, and on top of everything else, she gets attacked by the Snow Queen's army of snowflake-monsters:

"They had the most wondrous shapes; some looked like large ugly porcupines; some like snakes knotted together, with their heads sticking out; and others, again, like small fat bears, with the hair standing on end..."

But it's all good, because Gerda recites the Lord's Prayer, and a gang of angels appears to beat up the snowflake-monsters and magically help Gerda tolerate the cold better.

Oh sure, now the angels decide to get off their mean, holier-than-thou feathered butts and help.  There must be absolutely nothing on TV in heaven tonight.

Seventh Story. What Took Place in the Palace of the Snow Queen, and what Happened Afterward

This last part has some of the best description and the coolest setting in the whole story.

It also has some of the bits that annoy me most.

On the one hand, I love Andersen's conception of the Snow Queen's palace:

"The walls of the palace were of driving snow, and the windows and doors of cutting winds.  There were more than a hundred halls there...The largest was many miles in extent; all were lighted up by the powerful Aurora Borealis, and all were so large, so empty, so icy cold, and so resplendent!...In the middle of the endless, empty hall of snow, there was a frozen lake; it was cracked in a thousand pieces, but each piece was so like the others, that it seemed the work of a cunning artificer.  In the middle of this lake sat the Snow Queen when she was at home..."

This passage is so evocative.  I can vividly see this huge tomb-like palace of dead-white snow lit by the unearthly glow of the northern lights.  I can feel the cold and desolation and danger.  Or I could, if this weren't plunked down smack dab in the middle of it:

"Mirth never reigned there; there was never even a little bear-ball, with the storm for music, while the polar bears went on their hindlegs and showed off their steps.  Never a little tea-party of white young lady foxes..."

Damn it, HCA.  There's a time and a place to be cute and cozy and cartoony, and there are also times and places when being cute and cozy and cartoony ruins the mood.

Then we get to the climax of the story.  Gerda finally finds Kay, but it seems that rescuing him will be difficult considering the state he's in:

"Little Kay was quite blue, yes nearly black with cold; but he did not observe it, for she had kissed away all feeling of cold from his body, and his heart was a lump of ice.  He was dragging along some flat pointed pieces of ice, which he lay together in all possible ways, for he wanted to make something with them..."

When Gerda comes running into the room and calls his name, he doesn't recognize her.  He keeps listlessly dragging his puzzle pieces around the floor like a little zombie, intent on spelling the word "eternity" with them because the Snow Queen has promised him wonderful prizes if he manages it...the catch being that the pieces of ice are shaped in such a way that it's impossible to do this.  That is wonderfully creepy.

Gerda accidentally manages to bring Kay's memory back when she realizes that he doesn't remember her and starts crying.  Her tears melt the splinter in Kay's heart, whereupon he starts crying himself and melts the splinter in his eye.

So now Gerda has found Kay and helped bring him back to his senses.  That means they're ready to face the Snow Queen together, right? I mean, surely she won't give up her little zombified ice-slave without a fight.

Well...

Actually she does.

In fact, the Snow Queen doesn't even appear in the final chapter.  She's ducked out to stir up some flurries in the mountains of Italy and left Kay behind, and Gerda sneaks into the palace while she's gone.  Then, after they've exhausted themselves dancing for joy, the children lie down in the middle of the discarded ice-puzzle and discover that their bodies are the missing pieces needed to solve it.  Then they triumphantly sneak out of the palace before she gets back.  Oh well, discretion is the better part of valor, I suppose.  Or of heroes who skulk anticlimactically out the back door, thus depriving readers of an exciting showdown with the big bad.  I  get those two mixed up a lot.

The Reindeer meets them at the bush where he left Gerda and carries them to the Finland woman and the Lapland woman, who warm the children up and give them provisions for the journey home.  Then they set out again and SHRIIIEEEEKKK OMG YOU GUYS THE ROBBER-MAIDEN IS BACK:

"...out of the wood came, riding on a magnificent horse...a young damsel with a bright-red cap on her head, and armed with pistols.  It was the little robber maiden, who, tired of being at home, had determined to make a journey to the north...She recognized Gerda immediately, and Gerda knew her too.  It was a joyful meeting.
'You are a fine fellow for tramping about,' said she to little Kay; 'I should like to know, faith, if you deserve that one should run from one end of the world to the other for your sake?'"

AAAAAHHHH she's throwing a stiff middle finger to convention and riding out into the world to have adventures like a champ, and when she meets Gerda again she's all like, "My best friend ran all the way to Finland to save your sorry ass, boy, so you'd better treat her right" to Kay, and everything is sunshine and rainbows and...

Ahem.

(Pats hair.)

As you can probably tell, I liked this part a lot.

This part, not so much:

"'Oh! The Raven is dead,' she answered.  'His tame sweetheart is a widow, and wears a bit of black worsted around her leg; she laments most piteously, but it's all mere talk and stuff!"

That was...unnecessary.  I guess Andersen couldn't write a passable happy ending until he got that urge to kill something innocent out of his system.

Gerda and Kay take their leave of the robber-maiden and make it home to their families, realizing once they get there that they've grown up on the journey, while still retaining a sense of childlike wonder.

Conclusion:  I distinctly remember a scene at the end of this tale where Kay and Gerda explicitly faced the Snow Queen and won.  Maybe it was a TV special or play that I saw at a very young age and only partially absorbed.  I don't know.  The point is, I was expecting it to be there, and found myself feeling a bit jarred and cheated when it wasn't.

There are some aspects of it that haven't aged well.  I'm pretty sure I found some of the cutesier elements grating even when I was a kid, and the whole thing about the source of Gerda's strength being the fact that she's "a sweet and innocent child" doesn't quite sit right with me.  It almost seems to downplay her persistence in the face of adversity, her unwavering determination to find her lost friend no matter what scary obstacles she encountered on the way.  Also, I'm pretty sure the little match-girl was a sweet and innocent child too, and she freaking froze to death in an alley.

That said, there was also plenty of good stuff here.  I loved the imagery of the Snow Queen's palace, the creepy dreamlike feel of some of Gerda's journey, and of course the character of the robber-maiden.  It's also fairly impressive that this story features a heroine who sets out into the world by herself, with nothing except her dedication to saving her friend to sustain her, and instead of being punished for running off, is openly praised for her knack at getting "through the world barefooted," as the Finland woman would say.

All in all, I'd say HCA wins this one.  
      

Hans Christian Andersen Beatdown: The Snow Queen, Third Round

Note: For my last two posts on this story, I was mostly working from a fairly condensed version I found in a book at my in-laws' house.  I didn't feel comfortable borrowing the book, though, since it's an out-of-print antique, part of a set, and my in-laws live literally on the other side of the country, so I would have worried about something happening to it in transit.  Now that I'm home again, I'll have to make do with this full version from online-literature.com.  It has some interesting stuff the short version doesn't have, but it is also very florid.  Expect longer quotes from now on, with more ellipses riddling them.

Fifth Story: The Little Robber-Maiden

As I suspected in my last post, Gerda's flashy golden carriage turns out to be a very bad idea.  As she drives through a dark wood, a band of robbers (predictably) attacks her, chases away the servants the Prince and Princess sent along with her, and proceeds to steal all her stuff.

But these aren't just any robbers.  They have a cannibal bearded lady among their number.  For realsies:

"'How plump, how beautiful she is! She must have been fed on nut kernels,' said the old female robber, who had a long, scrubby beard, and bushy eyebrows that hung down over her eyes.  'She is as good as a fatted lamb! How nice she will be!'  And then she drew out a knife, the blade of which shone so that it was quite dreadful to behold."

But it's all good, because now we get to meet THE BEST HCA CHARACTER EVER:

"'Oh!' cried the woman at the same moment, for she had been bitten in the ear by her own little daughter, who hung at her back; and who was so wild and unmanageable, that it was quite amusing to see her."

The robber-woman's daughter distracts her mother to keep her from killing Gerda, since she has her heart set on keeping Gerda around as a companion.  At her demand, "for she was very spoiled and very headstrong," the robbers relent and take Gerda back to the ruined castle they use as their base of operations:

"They were in the midst of the courtyard of a robber's castle.  It was full of cracks from top to bottom; and out of the openings magpies and rooks were flying; and the great bull-dogs, each of which looked as if he could swallow a man, jumped up, but they did not bark, for that was forbidden."

I wish I knew how to make a dog understand that barking was forbidden.  I could see where it would be a very useful trick if you're a robber and want fierce dogs to guard your loot but don't want their barking to attract unwanted attention to your hideout, or if you just find the sound of a dog barking to be pull-your-hair-out annoying like I do.

Also, I wonder if Andersen was thinking of a mastiff or some other ginormous hunting dog and whoever translated the story got it wrong.  When I read this scene and pictured an English bulldog in my mind, I didn't really think, "totally looks like it can swallow a man whole" so much as, "totally looks like it could do some fairly significant damage to a man's ankles and lower calf, if it can catch him on its tent-peg-like little stub-legs."

But anyway, we've gotten off track.  Back to the Best Character in the Andersenverse.

While the adult robbers drink and roast up some wild game for dinner, the robber-maiden introduces Gerda to her many pets:

"They had something to eat and drink; and then they went into a corner, where straw and carpets were lying.  Beside them, on laths and perches, sat nearly a hundred pigeons, all asleep, seemingly; but yet they moved a little when the robber maiden came.  'They are all mine,' said she, at the same time seizing one that was next to her by the legs and shaking it so that its wings fluttered.  'Kiss it,' cried the little girl, and flung the pigeon in Gerda's face."

Tee hee, one of my sisters used to do something like that when she was younger.  She would suddenly shove a picture or a toy right up against the bridge of your nose while loudly telling you to look at it, whip it away two seconds later, and then yell at you for not looking at it properly.  Good times, good times.

The robber-maiden also has a larger, more exotic pet:

"...and she laid hold of the horns of a reindeer, that had a bright copper ring round its neck, and was tethered to the spot.  'We are obliged to lock this fellow in too, or he would make his escape.  Every evening I tickle his neck with my sharp knife; he is so frightened at it!' and the little girl drew forth a long knife, from a crack in the wall, and let it glide over the Reindeer's neck.  The poor animal kicked; the girl laughed, and pulled Gerda into bed with her."

Fearful because the robber-maiden sleeps with said knife in her hand as "there is no knowing what may happen," Gerda cannot sleep and passes the time by asking the captive animals if they have seen Kay.  Fortunately for her, they know where the Snow Queen dwells:

"'She is no doubt gone to Lapland [said the Wood-pigeon]; for there is always ice and snow there.  Only ask the Reindeer, who is tethered there.'
 'Ice and snow is there! There it is, glorious and beautiful!' said the Reindeer.  "One can spring about in the large shining valleys! The Snow Queen has her summer-tent there; but her fixed abode is high up toward the north pole, on the island called Spitzbergen.*'"

Gerda relays this information to the robber-maiden in the morning.  The two of them wait until the male robbers go out for the day and the robber-woman falls asleep by the fireside.  Then the robber-maiden provides Gerda with warm clothes and food for the journey, helps her onto the Reindeer's back, and sends her on her way to Lapland to rescue Kay:  

"'I can't bear to see you fretting,' said the little robber maiden.  'This is just the time when you ought to look pleased.  Here are two loaves and a ham for you, so that you won't starve.'  The bread and the meat were fastened to the Reindeer's back; the little maiden opened the door, called in all the dogs, and then with her knife cut the rope that fastened the animal, and said to him, 'Now, off with you; but take good care of the little girl!'"

Then Gerda rides the Reindeer off into the forest under the northern lights, leaving the robber-maiden behind...too soon, in my opinion.

I was completely blown away when I encountered this character.  I didn't remember this chapter from my childhood at all (it's possible that whoever read the story to me skipped or glossed over it to avoid giving me ideas) so the robber-maiden was an utterly unexpected treat.  Not just because she's so much more vivid and lively than any of Andersen's rosy-cheeked hyper-pure heroines, either.

What I really love about her is that she actually acts like a real kid--impulsive, boisterous, loud-laughing, unabashedly covetous of pretty shiny things, a bit too rough in her attempts to love her animals, capable both of threatening to kill her friends and of generously giving up food, clothes and her prized pet reindeer to help them out in a tight spot.  It feels more natural when she does these things, too; while Inger's torturing of insects in The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf felt almost like she was doing it because the author thought she should, so she could be punished for it, the robber-maiden's terrorizing of her pets seems to be more of an outgrowth of her wild, untamed personality.  Also, this:

"She now jumped out of bed, flew to her mother; with her arms round her neck, and pulling her by the beard, said, 'Good morrow, my sweet nanny-goat of a mother.'  And her mother took hold of her nose, and pinched it till it was red and blue; but this was all done out of pure love."

...is at once the most hilarious and the most genuine and honest-feeling portrayal of parent-child affection I've encountered in any of Andersen's work.

I almost wish there had been two reindeer tethered up in the robber's castle, so that the robber-maiden could ride off with Gerda and they could have all sorts of cool and weird adventures on their quest to rescue Kay from the Snow-Queen.

I'll stop here for now, in case I encounter anything reprehensible in the last two installments of the story.  After reading this chapter, I don't think I can be angry with Andersen for a while.

*Fun fact of the day: Spitzbergen is a real place.  Not only is it the biggest island of Norway's Svalbard archipelago; it's also the only permanently populated one.  It supports typically arctic wildlife such as reindeer, polar bears and arctic foxes.  Wikipedia doesn't say whether the reindeer are capable of understanding and speaking human languages, or whether the Snow Queen's palace is a popular tourist destination.

 

 

Hans Christian Andersen Beatdown: The Snow Queen, Second Round

Remember how the heroines of the previous HCA stories I read never actually got to do anything about their fate?

How what tiny actions they were allowed to take basically served the purpose of killing time until the cold embrace of death finally freed them from the relentless lifelong punishment heaped on them for relatively minor infractions? You know, that thing HCA just sort of does?

That's not exactly what happens next in this story.

I can't begin to tell you what a relief that is.

Third Story: Of the Flower Garden At the Old Woman's Who Understood Witchcraft

"But what became of little Gerda when Kay did not return? Where could he be? Nobody knew.  All the other boys could tell her was that they had seen him tie his sledge to another large and splendid one, which drove down the street and out of the town.  Little Gerda wept long and bitterly."

But she doesn't sit around feeling sorry for herself for long.  Unlike Andersen's other heroines, Gerda has a plan.  She puts on her best shoes and goes down to the river, thinking that Kay might have fallen in:

"'Is it true that you have taken my little playfellow?' she asked.  'I will make you a present of my red shoes, if you will give him back to me.'"

It's a rather...odd...plan.  I'm not sure what the river would want with a pair of little girl's shoes, even if it were holding drowning victims for ransom.  But at least she's trying to do something, dammit.

Gerda thinks she sees the waves of the river nodding as she makes the offer, so she tosses her shoes into the water.  When the current carries them back to shore she thinks she hasn't thrown them in far enough, and swipes a nearby boat to take them further out.  But the boat drifts away in the current with her inside it, and she seems not to know how to swim:

"Little Gerda began to cry; but no one heard her except the Sparrows.  So she sat quite still with only her stockings on.  Her little red shoes swam behind, but they could not catch the boat; it went so much faster than they."

She floats on, comforting herself with the thought that the river might take her to Kay, until she passes a strange cottage guarded by two wooden soldiers:

"Gerda called to them, for she thought they were alive; but they, of course, did not answer.  As the stream drove the boat quite near the land, she called out louder still and then an old woman came out of the cottage, leaning upon a crooked stick.  She wore a large broad-brimmed hat which was painted with the most beautiful flowers."

The old woman rescues Gerda from the river and gives her shelter in the cottage.  And here we come to a part of the story that really bothered me when I read it as a child, though I couldn't quite articulate why back then.

Revisiting it as an adult, I think the problem lies in the fact that we're not supposed to sympathize with the old woman.  After all, she is a witch who uses magic to make Gerda temporarily forget about Kay.  Once Gerda's memory returns thanks to the roses in the cottage's garden and she resumes her quest, we never see or hear about the old woman again.  She serves no purpose in the story except as a minor bump in the road of Gerda's quest to find Kay.

But here's the thing.  The old woman doesn't want to keep Gerda so she can eat her, or enslave her, or any of the usual evil stepmother/old witch in the forest nasty deeds.  She wants to keep Gerda because she has "often longed for such a dear little girl." She's going about it in exactly the wrong way, of course; but there is no indication in the text that the old woman is motivated by anything more sinister than a desire to have a daughter of her own and to do whatever she can to make said daughter happy.

She wants to keep Gerda because she's lonely.

And who wouldn't be, in her position? She lives in a cottage far removed from the village; Gerda seems to have traveled quite a distance before stumbling upon it.  The wooden soldiers seem to be the only thing resembling regular human contact she has, and they're, you know, made of wood.  Hell, the soldiers might be there in the first place because regular human contact flat-out isn't available to this woman; it isn't quite clear what time this story takes place in, but I'm pretty sure that old women who were a bit "off" socially or were suspected of possessing "suspicious abilities" were in significant danger of meeting a gruesome fiery end, or at the very least being beaten and run out of town.  She may already have been beaten and run out of town.  Maybe she wants Gerda so badly because she already does have a daughter out there somewhere, a daughter now forbidden to associate with her ever since the old woman's former husband discovered his wife's odd talents, drove her out of the house, and dedicated the rest of his life to bullying and beating "the sin of witchcraft" out of his little girl lest she end up like her freak of a mother...

Okay, now I've made myself sad.  I won't dwell any more on this part of the story except to note that Gerda has a very long-winded, disjointed and surreal conversation with the flowers in the old woman's garden that most abridged versions of the story seem to leave out.  It's worth reading, if you're up for a spot of brain-hurt.

Fourth Story: The Prince and Princess

Once Gerda continues her quest, she meets a helpful raven who thinks he might have seen Kay:

"The Raven nodded very gravely, and said, 'It may be--it may be!'
 'What! do you really think so?' cried the little girl, and she nearly smothered the Raven with kisses.
 'Gently, gently,' said the Raven.  'I think I know; I think that it may be little Kay.  But now he has           forgotten you for the Princess.'"

Gerda continues on anyway, confident that a little thing like a fabulously wealthy girlfriend with a royal title won't get in the way of winning back her man.  Certainly can't fault her for lack of confidence and bravado, which isn't such a bad thing for a girl-hero from an author who doesn't really do spunky, driven girl-heroes very well.

With the help of the friendly Raven's girlfriend (henfriend? What are female ravens called, anyway?), a tame pet who lives in the palace, Gerda manages to sneak into the very bedroom of the Prince and Princess.

"At last they came to a room where the ceiling was made of great leaves of glass; from this were hung by golden ropes two beds, each shaped like a lily.  One was white, and in this lay the princess; the other was red, and it was here that Gerda hoped to find little Kay.  She bent back one of the red leaves, and saw a brown neck--O, that was Kay! She called him quite loudly by name, and held the lamp toward him--he awoke, turned his head, and--it was not little Kay at all!"

Turns out the Raven saw him at a distance, and thought he kinda roughly fit the description Gerda gave of Kay...and that was good enough.  Oops.

So...now that Gerda's broken and entered into the palace and inadvertently harassed the Prince, she's going to have a real adventure, right? I hope those friendly ravens are handy with a set of lockpicks, or she'll be in the dungeon for a long time.

Except this happens instead:

"'Poor little thing!' said the Prince and Princess, and they put Gerda to bed...The next day she was dressed from head to foot in silk and velvet.  They offered to let her stay at the palace, and lead a happy life; but she would not.  She begged to have a little carriage with a horse in front, and a small pair of shoes, so that she should go forth in the wide world and look for Kay."

The Prince and Princess are apparently the nicest monarchs in human history.  They give her the things she asks for, in a supremely grand and impractical way; the carriage is made of pure gold and lined on the inside with sugar plums and gingerbread, and the coachman and footmen are outfitted with gold crowns.  So, basically flashy ostentatious gold everywhere.  Sounds like the whole getup would be awfully tempting for highwaymen and robbers...  

(Peeks ahead at material for next post)

Fifth Story: The Little Robber-Maiden 

Oh.

Hmm.  Maybe the Prince and Princess aren't so nice after all.  Maybe they've just come up with a clever way of saving dungeon space.
    

Hans Christian Andersen Beatdown: The Snow Queen

I have a confession to make.

(stares at floor and mumbles) I kind of, sort of...um...might not hate everything Hans Christian Andersen wrote.

Wow, that was hard to say.

I distinctly remember liking this particular story as a kid.  I'm not entirely sure I even realized that it shared an author with The Little Match Girl until I was years older.  It was just so different, in plot and characters and, to a lesser extent, in theme.  I mean, stuff actually happens in it.  The girl-hero goes out and, you know, does stuff to move the plot along instead of just sitting there and suffering on and on until God fixes things.

Of course, I was also pretty young when I read it.  Let's take another look and see how it's held up:

First Story: Which Treats of a Mirror and of the Splinters

"Once upon a time there was a wicked, mischievous Hobgoblin.  One day he was in a very good humor because he had made a mirror with the power of causing all that was good and beautiful, when it was reflected therein, to look poor and mean; while that which was good for nothing and ugly, stood out and looked worse than ever."

Huh.  I didn't know that those annoying distorted mirrors you see in carnival funhouses were manufactured by Hobgoblins.  But it makes sense, now that I think about it. 

Interestingly enough, I remembered this part a little differently; in my fuzzy memory the mirror did indeed make good and beautiful things look evil and ugly, but I thought it also made actual evil ugly things look pretty and shiny.  But apparently it just makes everything look icky and nasty and depressing, which...isn't quite the effect I'd be going for if I was an evil villain making a magic mirror to turn people away from the path of goodness.  Then again, the Hobgoblins don't seem to have much of a plan for this thing beyond running around with it and reinforcing each others' perceptions of what a crappy place the world is:

"In this mirror the most beautiful landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the best persons were turned into frights...They ran about with the mirror; and at last there was not a land or a person who was not represented there twisted all out of shape."

The text does not specify how long this goes on, but considering the rather large amount of ground the Hobgoblins seem to have covered, I think we can reasonably conclude that it was happening for a fairly big chunk of time, and Andersen makes it quite clear that the little guys are having the most rip-roaring fun they've ever had in their lives for the whole duration of it.  It would seem that Hobgoblins have way too much time on their hands.  

But disaster strikes when they try to carry the mirror up into the sky:

"The higher they flew with the mirror, the more terribly it grinned; they could hardly hold it fast.  Suddenly the mirror shook so terribly with grinning, that it flew out of their hands and fell to the earth, where it was dashed in a hundred million pieces.  And now it worked much more evil than before; for some of these pieces were hardly larger than a grain of sand, and they flew about in the wide world, and when they got into people's eyes there they stayed; and then people saw everything perverted, or only had an eye for that which was evil.  Some persons even got a splinter in their heart, and then their heart became a lump of ice."

I'm having trouble picturing exactly how a mirror would grin, or why grinning would make it shake to the extent that it would be difficult to keep hold of it.

However it happens, the wicked Hobgoblin laughs like a loon.  The story claims that this was because the evil done by the shattered mirror "tickled his fancy," but I like to think it was from relief once he realized that the unexpected side effects saved him from staring awkwardly at his shoes and muttering, "Uh...yeah...I...um...meant to do that..." while the other Hobgoblins glared at him for ruining their good time.

Second Story: A Little Boy and a Little Girl

We now shift our attention from the Hobgoblin, who never comes into the story again (Seriously, HCA? The toxic-mirror-making Hobgoblin doesn't get any comeuppance? Just like the creepy devil-soldier from The Red Shoes? Y U NO MAKE ANY EFFORT TO CONTAIN OR ELIMINATE EVIL MAGICAL CREATURES THAT ARE OBVIOUS THREATS TO PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAFETY?  (puff puff) Sorry about that.  Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming...) and meet our two young protagonists.

Kay and Gerda are two young children who are very good friends.  They live in a town "where there are so many houses and so many people that there is no room left for everybody to have a garden," but they are able to get around the no-garden restriction in a novel way:

"Their parents lived opposite each other in two attic rooms.  The roof of one house just touched the roof of the other with only a rain water gutter between them.  They each had a little dormer window so one had only to step over the gutter to get from one window to the other.  Out on the leads the parents had placed two wooden boxes, in which grew pea vines, vegetables, and some little rose trees. In summer the children were allowed to take their little stools and sit out on the roof among the roses, where they could play delightfully."

Wait a minute.  These kids are allowed to play on the roof? I was never allowed to play on the roof as a kid.*  That is so not fair.  (super sulk)

Anyway, Kay and Gerda spend a page or two having a rockin' good time just being kids.  Besides caring for their little rooftop garden, they listen to the stories Kay's grandmother tells of the mysterious queen of the white bees (i.e. snowflakes) who flies through their town during the winter and "peeps in at the windows," leaving "wonderful patterns that look like flowers" on the glass.

That little fairy tale takes on an extra shade of creepy when this happens one night while Kay is undressing for bed:

"A few snowflakes were falling, and one, the largest of all, remained lying on the edge of the flower-pot.  The flake of snow grew larger and larger and at last it was like a beautiful maiden, dressed in the finest white gauze, made of a million little flakes, like stars.  She was so lovely and delicate, but she was of ice; of dazzling, sparkling ice; her eyes glittered like two stars; but there was neither rest nor peace in them.  She nodded toward the window, and beckoned with her hand."

It's times like these when I shake my head in bemusement at those folks who wring their hands and moan about how trashy all the stuff written for kids and young adults is nowadays, and how the old classic tales are so much better because they're all so innocent and sanitized and free of even the faintest hints of innuendo or adult themes.  Because it's good clean fun when a sexually mature woman with a restless gleam in her eyes who wears a flimsy and possibly transparent dress appears outside a half-naked prepubescent boy's window at night and seductively beckons him to come join her outside.  Nope, nothing skeevy about that at all.

Fortunately for Kay, he has the good sense to be terrified out of his mind by this, and the snow-lady takes her questionable intentions elsewhere.

But we're not quite out of the woods yet.  Spring comes, and one day the two children are unsuspectingly sitting on the roof together with a book...          

"...when Kay cried 'O! Something struck me sharply in the heart; and now something has got into my eye!'"

This is very bad indeed, because the mysterious foreign objects are in fact invisible fragments of the Hobgoblin's mirror.  And they make Kay act like an utter doucheclown:

"When she next brought out her picture-book, he said it was only fit for babies, and if his grandmother told him stories, he always interrupted her; besides, if he could manage it, he would get behind her, put on her spectacles, and imitate her way of speaking.  He was soon able to imitate the gait and manner of everyone in the street.  Everything that was peculiar and displeasing in them,--that Kay made fun of."

He also loses interest in the flowers he and Gerda grow in their rooftop garden, preferring the snowflakes because they are perfectly formed while flowers come in different shapes and sizes.  It seems that exposure to the mirror-shards not only turns one into a surly teenager, but causes mild OCD symptoms.

Further disaster strikes one winter day when Kay leaves Gerda behind to play in the square:

"There, in the market-place, the boldest boys used to hitch their sledges to the carts as they passed, and so they got a good ride."

So nineteenth-century kids got to play on the roof and enjoy the low-tech equivalent of getting towed behind a car on a skateboard? I know I was just scoffing at people who wax nostalgic about the bygone days of yore, but...damn.  Maybe Victorian kids really did have more fun than us.

Kay's problems begin when an unfamiliar white sleigh drives through the square, and Kay hitches up to it for a spin.

"On they went quicker and quicker into the next street; the person who drove turned round to Kay, and nodded to him in a friendly manner, just as if they knew each other.  Each time he was going to untie his sledge the driver nodded to him, and then Kay sat still once more."

Uh oh.

"Suddenly he let go of the string he held in his hand in order to get loose from the big sledge, but it was of no use; his little sledge hung fast and on he went like the wind.  He cried out, but no one heard him."

Double uh oh.

"The snowflakes grew larger and larger, till they looked like great white birds.  Suddenly the large sledge stopped, and the person who drove rose up.  It was a lady, tall, slim and glittering, her cloak and cap of snow.  It was the Snow-Queen."

By the way, the text makes it explicitly clear that the Snow-Queen and the randy ice-hussy outside Kay's window are the same person.  Which makes it even worse that this happens:

"'Are you still cold?' she asked, and kissed his forehead.  Ah! The kiss was cold as ice; it went to his very heart, which was already almost a frozen lump; but a moment more and he grew to like it.  He no longer felt the cold that was around him."

She then drives off into the night with him, intending to keep him in her dark and creepy ice-palace forever.  Thus we know that Stranger Danger was an issue worth worrying about as early as the 1800's. 

I'd forgotten how long this story is, so tune in next time for part II.

*I did it anyway a few times, but that's beside the point.
 

Hans Christian Andersen Beatdown: The Little Match Girl

UNNNGGGG.

I just had to revisit this one.

It made sense at the time.  This is, after all, the story that set me off in the first place.  There was a sense of symmetry, of coming full circle, to reading it again.

I was a fool for thinking so.  Now here I sit, broken and drained.  This story sucks all happiness and joy out of the universe and leaves slimy grey slicks of condensed misery in its place.  I'm pretty sure that if you read this story aloud at midnight on Christmas Eve, a gaping fiery inter-dimensional portal will open and a thousand Lovecraftian elder gods will issue forth to devour humanity.*

So why exactly do I feel this way?

Let's start with the first two-and-a-half paragraphs or so, which kick off the Mandatory Long Suffering right away with an excruciating description of just how miserable and unloved and how abjectly bare-bones dirt-poor this girl is:

"...well, yes, it's true she had slippers on when she left home; but what was the good of that?  They were great big slippers which her mother used to wear, so you can imagine the size of them; and they both came off when the little girl scurried across the road just as two carts went whizzing by at a fearful rate."

"She hadn't sold anything all day, and no one had given her a single penny.  Poor mite, she looked so downcast as she trudged along hungry and shivering." 

"She didn't dare to go home, for she hadn't sold a match nor earned a single penny.  Her father would beat her, and besides it was so cold at home.  They had only the bare roof over their heads and the wind whistled through that although the worst cracks had been stopped up with rags and straw."

Then, of course, there's my favorite bit of unadulterated WTFery:

"The snowflakes settled on her long flaxen hair, which hung in pretty curls over her shoulder..."

Really? The girl is too poor to possess shoes or a coat, but she's not so poor that she can't have perfect flowing supermodel locks? Considering the state she's in, I would have described her hair as tangled, ragged and filthy, and possibly also lank and brittle from years of inadequate nutrition.  Also, what gives, HCA? I thought pretty girls made you all huffy and judgey and eager to sic mean angels on them...

"...but you may be sure she wasn't thinking about her looks."

Oh, I see.  The match girl's prettiness is special.  She's not a tramp like Karen or a bitch like Inger, oh no; she's pretty like an innocent little angel, because if she was ugly or plain we wouldn't feel for her suffering as much, see? But she can't be too pretty, or aware that she's pretty, or desire to be pretty, because then she'd be a dirty proud scarlet woman and would have to be punished for it.

I know that this was probably a pretty common 19th-century attitude and Andersen might not even have been aware that he was expressing it, but...damn.  I hate this.  I hate this so much.

Anyway, the little girl gets so desperately cold that she risks using up one of the matches that are her livelihood to get warm, and has a strange hallucination in its light:

"Such a clear warm flame, like a little candle, as she put her hand around it--yes, and what a curious light it was! The little girl fancied she was sitting in front of a big iron stove with shiny brass knobs and brass facings, with such a warm friendly fire burning...why, whatever was that? She was just stretching out her toes, so as to warm them too, when--out went the flame, and the stove vanished."

Still desperately cold, she lights another match and kindles another vision:

"It burned up so brightly, and where the glow fell on the wall this became transparent like gauze.  She could see right into the room, where the table was laid with a glittering white cloth and with delicate china; and there, steaming deliciously, was the roast goose stuffed with prunes and apples.  Then, what was even finer, the goose jumped off the dish and waddled along the floor with the carving knife and fork in its back.  Right up to the poor little girl it came..."

Of course the girl is too weak and hungry to flee screaming in terror from the heavily armed zombie-goose that's obviously intent on revenge against the humans who hacked its head off and shoved preserved fruit into its gutted body cavity.  Fortunately for her, the match goes out before it can reach her.

The next match she lights brings a vision of a gigantic Christmas tree "bigger and prettier than the one she had seen through the glass-door of a rich merchant's house at Christmas."  This also disappears when the match sputters out, and in the darkness that follows the little girl notices a shooting star:

"'That's somebody dying,' said the little girl, for her dead Grannie, who was the only one who had been kind to her, had told her that a falling star shows that a soul is going up to God."

Thanks for that extra little cheer-bomb, HCA.

As luck would have it, the next match summons Grannie in the flesh.  The girl quickly lights all her matches at once, quite rightly fearing that Grannie will fade away like the other visions once the light goes out...except...this time it doesn't happen! Grannie, looking stronger and healthier and happier than ever she did in life, takes her granddaughter into her arms:

"...and together they flew in joy and splendour, up, up, to where there was no cold, no hunger, no fear."

When I first heard this story as a child, this was the part where I assumed, for a brief happy moment of blissful ignorance, that the matches actually were magical keys to another dimension where the little girl would live happily ever after with her loving Grannie.**  I'm admittedly not sure about Andersen's claim that an alternate reality in which your dinner won't stay dead is legitimately fear-free, but hey, I'll take the no-cold and no-hunger bits.  It's considerably better than anything the little girl has gotten out of life so far.

But alas, I was wrong.  Remember that shooting star deal?

"But in the cold early morning huddled between the two houses, sat the little girl with rosy cheeks and a smile on her lips, frozen to death on the last night of the old year.  The New Year dawned on the little dead body leaning there with the matches, one lot of them nearly all used up.  'She was trying to get warm,'  people said.  Nobody knew what lovely things she had seen and in what glory she had gone with her old Grannie to the happiness of the new year."

Translation: And a small child died a horrible and entirely preventable death on a night that symbolizes hope for the future.  In the morning the very people who did absolutely nothing to help her find her body, tritely state the obvious, and get on with their day.  But it's all totes cool, 'cause she's in heaven with Jesus now! After all, God is the magical janitor-in-the-sky who sweeps away all the dingy poor people so they won't make us feel all sad and guilty on Christmas.  It's not like we have to take any action or responsibility for our glaring social problems or anything.

Conclusion:  Reading this little tale is kind of like reaching out to pet an adorable kitten, only to discover that its fur is made of steel wool and jagged shards of broken glass.  It puts forth some of the ugliest and most disturbing parts of human nature, wrapped up in a sickly-saccharine and cozy package of Christmas trees, warm fires and Grannies coming back from the dead.

In contrast, check out this passage from Oscar Wilde's tale "The Happy Prince," which seems to be a deliberate homage to this particular story:

"'In the square below,' said the Happy Prince, 'there stands a little match-girl.  She has let her matches fall in the gutter, and they are all spoiled.  Her father will beat her if she does not bring home some money, and she is crying.  She has no shoes or stockings, and her little head is bare.  Pluck out my other [sapphire] eye, and give it to her, and her father will not beat her.'
'I will stay with you one night longer,' said the Swallow, 'but I cannot pluck out your other eye.  You would be quite blind then.'
'Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow,' said the Prince, 'do as I command you.'"

The Happy Prince has more compassion and concern for a destitute child's suffering than the people in Andersen's universe.  More importantly, unlike any single one of the people in Andersen's universe, he actually gets off his ass and does something about it.

Which is pretty damn sad, considering that the people in Andersen's universe are flesh-and-blood living human beings and the Happy Prince is a statue whose only real friend in the whole world is some random little bird. 

*And whatever you do, don't play that wretched "Christmas Shoes" song at the same time.  That song and this story may well be the two most excessively glurgey things in existence, and I'm pretty sure the sugar-shock from being exposed to both at once will kill you on the spot.  I'm surprised they're not required by law to come with health warnings for diabetics.   

**I'm not sure how my brain somersaulted around the inconvenient fact that the Grannie was dead.  I guess I must have assumed she was like the dad in Tron, sucked into a super-awesome world of her own making one day when she carelessly fired up a magic match at the wrong time.

Hans Christian Andersen Beatdown: The Red Shoes

Well, the good news is that the protagonist of this story is not a horrible, awful brat.

The bad news is that unspeakable tortures are still visited on her, ostensibly as a way-out-of-proportion punishment for her "vanity."  Also, HCA is showing disturbing signs of a creepy sadistic little-girl foot fetish.

Don't believe me? Well, let's dig right in:

"There was once a little girl, very delicate and pretty, and yet so poor that in summer she always had to go barefooted and in winter she had to wear big wooden clogs which chafed her insteps  most horribly, until they were quite red."

Aaaand we come firing out of the gates already talking in great detail about a pretty little girl's feet.  I think I'll cut Andersen some slack for this one, though; I imagine it's hard to avoid putting foot-related details in a story about shoes.

Anyway, this little girl, Karen, is temporarily saved from her state of nonexistent/crappy footwear possession by a kindly neighbor woman who makes a pair of shoes for her out of some old scraps of red cloth.  Unfortunately for Karen, the first occasion she has to wear her new shoes is her mother's funeral.  But as she's following the coffin to the graveyard, she has an unexpected stroke of luck:

"Just then a large old-looking carriage drove up with a large old-looking lady inside it.  She caught sight of the little girl and felt sorry for her.  So she said to the parson, 'Look here, if you let me have the little girl, I'll take care of her.'"

Yeah, that seems legit.

But HCA had to keep this story family-friendly, so Karen is mercifully not shanghaied to an underground creepy-old-carriage-lady-run brothel of kidnapped tween girls.  Instead she is taught genteel Victorian pursuits such as reading and sewing.  People are constantly telling her how pretty she is, so naturally she starts developing a bit of an ego.  We are also told that she believes her red shoes were the reason for her newfound fortune--which is probably supposed to be a bit of foreshadowing, but seems like a pretty standard bit of kid logic to me.

Soon Karen is old enough to be confirmed, and she and the old lady go shopping for a suitable outfit for the ceremony.  Unbeknownst to the old lady, Karen has been quietly obsessing over the red shoes she saw the Queen's daughter wearing on her visit to town.  She is overjoyed to see that the shoemaker has a pair in stock:

"Among the shoes was a red pair just like the ones the Princess had been wearing--oh, they were pretty!...as they were a good fit, the shoes were bought.  But the old lady didn't realize that they were red, for she would never have allowed Karen to go to Confirmation in red shoes."

So what exactly is wrong with going to Confirmation in red shoes? Well, according to the next paragraph, it makes all the stodgy old churchgoers ogle her feet and clutch their pearls and gasp, and it's distracting to Karen herself:

"Everybody stared at her feet and, as she walked up the aisle to the chancel, she felt that even the old pictures over the tombs...were fastening their eyes on the red shoes.  It was these that filled her thoughts, when the priest laid his hand on her head and spoke of holy baptism, of the covenant with God, and of her duty to become a fully-fledged Christian."

The old lady finds out from gossip after the service that the shoes are red and forbids Karen to wear them to church again.  But that does not keep Karen from taking advantage of the old lady's fading eyesight once more:

"Next Sunday there was Communion, and Karen looked at the black shoes, and she looked at the red ones...And then she looked at the red ones again--and put the red ones on."

I should pause here to note that Karen hasn't done anything that sticks out at me as being egregiously wrong at this point.  Spending an entire church service daydreaming about one's appearance and disobeying the dress code set down by one's guardian are slightly obnoxious behaviors, yes, but I defy you to find a teenager who hasn't done either of these things.

So Karen goes to church in her prized red shoes once more, and on the way she has the bad fortune of encountering the creepiest character in this story:

"Karen and the old lady took the path through the cornfield, where it was a bit dusty.  At the churchdoor stood an old soldier with a crutch and a funny long beard which was more red than white--in fact, it really was red.  He made a deep bow to the old lady and asked if he might dust her shoes.  And when Karen also put out her foot, 'My, what lovely dancing shoes!" said the soldier.  'Stay on tight when you dance!' and he gave the soles a tap with his hand...Presently everyone came out of church, and the old lady stepped into her carriage.  As Karen raised her foot to get in after her, the old soldier, who was standing close by, said, 'My! What lovely dancing shoes!' Karen couldn't resist--she had to dance a few steps and, once she had started, her feet went on dancing just as though the shoes had some power over them."

Karen dances so hard that she has to be carried back to the carriage and stuffed in--and even after that she accidentally gives the old lady "some dreadful kicks" as her feet try to keep on dancing.  Finally the shoes are pried off her feet and the spell is broken, and even though it's not mentioned in the text I'm pretty sure the townspeople should be clamoring for that creepy soldier to be burnt as a witch right about now.  Dude's bad news.

The shoes are locked away in a cupboard when Karen and the old lady get home--I question the wisdom of not just pitching the damn things after all the trouble they caused--and remain there until Karen breaks them out for the one (in my opinion) truly punishment-worthy act she commits in this story: she leaves the death bed of the old lady who raised her to go to a ball, where she has a great time until this happens:

"Up among the trees she saw something shining.  It looked like a face, and so she thought it was the moon; but it was the old soldier with the red beard, sitting and nodding and saying, 'My! What lovely dancing-shoes!'"

GAAAH! That guy again? I'm...pretty sure he's supposed to be Satan in disguise.  Or just a skeevy pervert with a fetish for dancing girls in red shoes.  Either way, his attentions are bad news for Karen:

"This made her frightened, and she tried to kick off the red shoes, but they still stuck on tight.  She tore off her stockings, but the shoes had grown fast to her feet..."

After being forced to dance nonstop for an unspecified period of time--the text implies that it was at least several days--she finally encounters a real, live, honest-to-God angel in the church courtyard.  Good! Surely the kind and merciful angel will help her break free of her bondage to the Evil One, right?

Uh...nope.  This guy is actually more of the judgy asshole type of angel.

"'Dance you shall,' said the angel, 'dance in your red shoes until you are cold and pale, until your skin shrivels up like a skeleton's!'"

With that lovely little gem of good Christian mercy ringing in her ears, Karen continues to dance until she makes her way in desperation to the executioner's house and asks him to help her solve her problem in the most disturbing way possible:

"'Please don't cut off my head!' said Karen, 'for then I can't show how sorry I am for my sins.  Cut off my feet with the red shoes.'"

See what I mean about the whole sadistic foot fetish thing? It's not quite as bad as The Little Mermaid (which I will not review as I can never read it all the way through without wanting to kick a hole through the wall, and I'm renting my place) but it's still freaky as shit.  Also, this happens:

"...and she kissed the hand that had wielded the axe and went her way across the heath."

I...cannot begin to tell you how creepily kinky that sounds to me.  Whenever I read that line, I feel like it was added into the story by a sketchy guy who has a fully stocked S&M dungeon in his basement, but can't get sex partners to save his life anymore because he has a well-known reputation for repeatedly "forgetting" safe words.

Anyway, now that that little spot of unpleasantness is over, Karen hobbles back to town on the wooden feet the executioner kindly fashioned for her, repentant of her vanity and much wiser than she was before and...completely unable to live a normal life because her own severed feet keep following her around, still dancing in the red shoes.

Seriously.

Unable to go to church and show her repentance because the shoes keep chasing her off, Karen goes the Mandatory Long Suffering route of working as a servant in the parsonage.  Then, years of hard labor later, Douchiel the judgy angel finally decides she's suffered enough and helps her get to church:

"But instead of a sharp sword he was holding a beautiful green bough that was covered in roses, and he touched the ceiling with it so that it arched itself higher...And he touched the walls so that they grew wider...You see, the church itself had come to the poor girl in her narrow little room...they nodded to her and said: 'It was right you should come, Karen.' 'It was God's mercy!' she answered."

And then Karen promptly dies and ascends to heaven, "where there was no one to ask about the red shoes."

That's mercy in Andersen's world.

In Conclusion:  I can't get over how harshly this story punishes Karen for offenses that were--for the most part--rather minor and ultimately harmed no one but herself.  Yes, I will concede that ditching the dying old lady to go to the ball wasn't nice; but a teenage girl obsessing over her pretty new clothes isn't a deadly sin, it's an annoying-but-harmless normal behavior trait.  And if divine wrath was visited upon every child who daydreamed at church, then I--along with my siblings, childhood friends and pretty much all of my ninety or so classmates at Catholic high school--would be more screwed than an actual screw in a screwdriver factory.

Oh, and the soldier never gets his comeuppance either.  He's still out there somewhere, staring lecherously at young women's feet and awaiting his next opportunity to dust off an unsuspecting victim's shoes.  Yeah, I think I'll go throw away all my crimson footware now.  Can't sleep; Corporal Lucifer will make me dance.  

  

Hans Christian Andersen Beatdown: The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf

(Rolls up sleeves) Time for some deconstruction.

Before we begin, I'd like to note that when I wrote my last post, I was tired and cranky and mad at myself for setting off the fire alarm with my cooking...twice.  So it's possible that I was a wee bit uncharitable, that maybe these tales have their redeeming qualities after all, and I may even end up liking one or two.  We'll see.

So...The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf.

Our protagonist is a little girl named Inger.  Here's the first bit of description we get of her, right in the second paragraph:

"She was a poor child, proud and vain; there was a bad streak in her, as the saying is.  When quite a little child she enjoyed catching flies and pulling off their wings, so making creeping things of them.  She would take a cockchafer* and a beetle, stick each of them on a pin, and then place a green leaf or a little bit of paper up against their feet.  The poor creature would hold on tight to it, turning and twisting it to try and get off the pin."

Okay, so Inger's a right little shit.  But hey, she's a kid; she hasn't developed the capacity for empathy yet.  Good thing she has a mother to keep her in line and mold her into a good human being with a firm but loving hand...

"'It'll need a desperate remedy to cure your disease,' said her own mother.  'Often, when you were little, you trod on my apron; now you're older, I'm afraid you'll end by treading on my heart.'"

Or...not.

Because making passive-aggressive, woe-is-me, don't-you-love-your-poor-mother emotional appeals to bratty children works so well.  I know that bullshit like this pissed me off and made me want to misbehave more when I was a kid, and I was anything but bratty.  Quit your moaning and get out the spankin' plank, lady.

How do I know that this little speech wasn't delivered after dear old mom tried her best to discipline Inger, and Inger just shrugged it off like the bad seed she is?  Why, she's pretty, of course! And you can't spank pretty children! It's right there in the paragraph immediately before it, where Andersen notes that Inger would have gotten "slapped a good deal oftener than she was" if she wasn't so darn cute.  I'm inferring that this is one of the missed slapping opportunities on mom's part.

So eventually Inger "goes out to service" with a wealthy family.  Since this is the nineteenth century, I'm assuming this means that she works for them as a domestic servant.  Since, again, this is the nineteenth century, I'm also assuming that they will work her very hard and probably also mistreat her in a rather Dickensian manner, and she will be miserable but will also start gradually learning patience, humility and compassion...

"They treated her as if she was their own child and dressed her in the same way; she was very good-looking, and she grew vainer than ever."

Or...they'll just spoil her even worse.  Whatever.

After Inger has endured a year's worth of the harsh punishment of living in the lap of luxury, her mistress sends her home to visit her mother.  But as she nears the outskirts of her town Inger sees her mother in a dirty threadbare old dress, gathering firewood for the winter.  She is annoyed and "ashamed that she who was so finely dressed should have a mother who went about in rags collecting sticks" and turns back in a huff without talking to anyone.  Then her mistress sees that her entitlement complex has raged out of control and sits her down for a long-overdue lecture about the importance of respecting one's elders and not being ashamed of where one comes from.

Ha ha, just kidding.  Six months pass.  That's literally all that the story has to say about it, so it seems Inger suffered no consequences for her bad behavior yet again.

To her credit, the lady of the wealthy household tries again.  She sends Inger home with a "big white loaf" as a present for her mother and father.  Inger takes it, presumably with a sulky air, and schleps right on back to the Town of Apparently Embarrassing Poverty where her parents live.  But there's trouble brewing when she comes across a wet and muddy section of the path:

"...she flung the loaf down into the mud, so as to tread on this and get across without wetting her shoes."

That is about the stupidest plan to avoid stepping in a puddle I have ever heard.  That loaf is going to sponge up all the moisture and get soggy, and it'll almost certainly collapse under the weight of anyone who tries to freakin' step on it.  So you'd end up not only with mud on your shoes, but squooshy bits of waterlogged bread gunk as well.  Nice plan, Inger, you insufferable little dipshit.

Fortunately(?) for Inger, though, we're in the Hans Christian Andersenverse instead of reality, so the loaf doesn't squish when she tries to use it as a stepping stone.  It just starts to sink into the swamp, and pulls her down with it until she reaches the marsh-woman's brewery.  Once there she finds that the loaf has become stuck to her foot and rendered her immobile, which is some tough luck for her since a cesspit is apparently "a gay palatial apartment compared to the marsh-woman's brewery," which "stinks enough to make a man faint."  It seems no one has the heart to tell the marsh-woman that she sucks at brewing.

But Inger's in luck! The Devil and his great-grandmother** happen to be inspecting the marsh-woman's brewery that day, and if anyone can scare a bad kid straight it's the Devil.  Sure enough, Satan's great-grandma is very taken with Inger's monumental awfulness and decides that she would make a perfect statue for Hell's entrance hall.  The Devil obliges her, no doubt wishing that his crazy old nana would stop giving him weird knickknacks, and sets Inger up as the grisly infernal equivalent of one of those concrete porch-geese that little old ladies like to dress in funny clothes.

Then we have the Mandatory Long Suffering.  HCA seems to be ridiculously fond of these.  Since it's pretty much nothing but a whole two pages of Inger being passively tormented in Hell, I'll gloss over it a bit.  Basically, she can't move anything except her eyes, she's miserable because her nice clothes are all muddy now (horrors!) and she's so incredibly hungry that she longs to take just one bite of the nasty mud-caked loaf stuck to her foot.  The author waxes rhapsodic about these things for two pages.  Two. Full. Pages.

I would like to address these two passages:

"Then the flies came and crawled over her eyes, to and fro.  She blinked her eyes, but the flies didn't fly away; they couldn't, because their wings had been pulled off and they had become creeping things."

Okay.  I admit I sort of like this part.  People who torture animals push my 'exterminate with extreme prejudice' button.  Flies crawling in your eyes for eternity 'cause you pulled their wings off? Too bad.  You reaps what you sows, beeyotch.

"Then a burning tear fell on her head.  It trickled down her face and breast...Another tear fell--and many more beside...Sorrowing tears a mother sheds for her child will always reach it, but they don't set it free; they burn, they only make the torment greater."

This...not so much.

What is Andersen saying here? That mothers who have lost their children should go through life as emotionless robots, because if they let one careless tear fall dear departed little Suzie will instantly be afflicted with first-degree sadness-burns in heaven?  That is some seriously horrible and depressing shit right there.  If I were a teacher, and one of my students wrote that little detail into a story, I'd worry that he was biting the heads off chickens in his spare time.***

Anyway, apparently Inger was such a miserable excuse for a human being that people on earth start telling stories about how awful she was.  And because this is, after all, Hell she's in, she can hear every word of it.  Her mother pisses and moans some more about what a disappointment she was, someone writes a whole song about her nasty ways, and even her pathetic pushover old master and mistress get in on the action:

"'She was a wicked child,' they said.  'She had no respect for God's gifts, but trod them underfoot; the door of mercy will be hard for her to open.'
'They should have corrected me more often,' thought Inger, 'cured me of my bad ways if I had any.'"

Damn straight.

Understandably, Inger becomes a bit bitter about the whole thing...until she sees one little girl have an unusual reaction to hearing the Tale of Inger the Terrible Horrible No-Good Very-Bad Monsterbitch:

"...she noticed that the little girl burst into tears at the story of the proud Inger and her love of finery.  
'But won't she ever come up again?' asked the small girl.  And she was told, 'No, she'll never come up again...'
'Oh, I do wish she would,' said the little girl, and refused to be comforted.  'I'll give up my doll's house, if they let her come up.  It's so horrible for poor Inger."

Finally, someone realizes how deeply fucked up this whole situation is!

This is an important moment, because it plants the seed of hope in Inger's heart that is necessary for this to happen, decades later when the compassionate little girl dies and her soul ascends to heaven:

"She stood like a child in the kingdom of heaven and wept for poor Inger; her tears and prayers rang like an echo down into the hollow empty shell that hemmed in the imprisoned tormented soul, and it was overcome by all this undreamed affection from above."

Notice that these tears cause Inger no pain, presumably because they're a stranger's tears.  Only mothers' tears burn suffering children with toxic acid-fire in this universe, because Hans Christian Andersen was a very sick man.

Inger's stone shell crumbles away and she is reborn as a little bird, with the promise that if she does a good deed, she'll find her way to heaven.  So what good deed does she do?

She collects breadcrumbs that kind-hearted souls have scattered for the birds and gives them to other birds, having kept only a single crumb of each haul for herself.  I see nothing wrong with that.  It's pretty nice as good deeds go.  There is, however, one thing that bothers me:

"In the course of the winter the bird had collected and given away so many crumbs that the weight of them all would have equaled that of the whole loaf that Inger had trodden on so as not to dirty her shoes..."

And only then is she allowed to go to heaven.  Because redemption and grace and forgiveness are nothing but a petty game of debt repayment and the treasuring up of old grudges.

In Conclusion: The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf is, in my opinion, the tragic tale of a girl who was essentially left to raise herself while everyone who should have taken responsibility for reining her in--from her mom on down to the Devil himself--kept on passing the buck until it took another child being traumatized for life to redeem her.  Not the worst thing I've read, but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.  Good thing I have an emergency supply of chocolate I can raid.

*A kind of European beetle, according to Wikipedia.  It even appears in a German nursery Rhyme:

Cockchafer fly...
Your father is at war.
Your mother is in Pomerania.
Pomerania is burned to the ground.
Cockchafer fly!

I'm sure it's just as cheerful and upbeat in the original German.

**I am intrigued by the idea of the Devil having a great-grandmother.  If God created the Devil, and is therefore the Devil's "parent," does that mean that the Devil's great-grandmother is also God's grandmother? I must know.  Curse you, Hans Christian Andersen, for leaving the most intriguing details of your stories unexplored!

***And then I'd have no choice but to exterminate him with extreme prejudice.
  
   

December is Hans Christian Andersen-Bashing Month!

When I was in first grade, a well-meaning teacher read The Little Match Girl to my class the week before Christmas.

Apparently someone decided that, since it had a Christmas tree in it, it must be a Christmas story.  I'm sure this person immediately regretted their decision.

I don't remember being terribly affected by it myself.  In fact, my thoughts on the story at the time ran more like this:  "Geez, Mr. Andersen, you're really laying it on thick, aren't you? I mean, the girl's dead grandma was there to carry her up to heaven, where everything was warm and bright and cheery and she got a roast goose and a pudding and a giant Christmas tree with pretty candles on it?  You want a nice frothy schmaltz beer float to go with your glurge sundae?"

Mind you, this was coming from a kid who had ridiculously easy-to-manipulate emotions.  I cried at the end of that stupid live-action Casper the Friendly Ghost movie, for cripes sake.  It was not at all difficult to tug at my little heartstrings, but Andersen's match girl failed.  Spectacularly.

I pretty much put the story out of my mind until college, when I was forced to confront it--along with several others by the same author--during a course on reading and interpreting fairy tales.  Yes, my college had such a class.  I love my college.  Anyway, once I actually went back and read them with an adult eye, I was amazed to discover I had missed something that seemed glaringly obvious in retrospect.

Namely, the fact that Hans Christian Andersen often comes across like a vicious, cold-blooded sadist with a raging hate-on for children, especially when those children happen to be girls.

Think I'm exaggerating?

Then join me as I read through a few of Andersen's classic tales and detail what bothers me about them.  I'll do one a week, for the entire month of December.  Think of it as my early, twisted Christmas present to you, dear readers.  I'll even try to go easy and not pound your warm childhood memories too far into the ground, because I'm just that friggin' full of the holiday spirit.

First on the chopping block:  The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf.