Individual Text Feature: "The Little Mermaid" by Hans Christian Andersen

Da Hae Han

LIT4333, Section 1B85: Individual Text Feature

“Den Lille Havfrue”/“The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen (1837) & “The Little Mermaid” by Walt Disney (1989)

Word Count: 1124

Hans Christian Andersen and Walt Disney’s adaptation of “The Little Mermaid” story, tells the story of an adolescent, beautiful mermaid princess who strongly and forbiddingly yearns for the love of a handsome, human prince. Within Andersen’s 1837 classic story, it is upon her initial visit to the ocean surface on her fifteenth birthday that she first lays her eyes on the prince, who is on a ship, celebrating his birthday. A violent storm then causes the ship to sink. It is at this moment, when the little mermaid saves this prince, whom she is newly enamored with, from drowning, as she delivers him and his unconscious body to a nearby shore. She leaves prior to him regaining consciousness, so even upon awakening, the prince is unaware of whom his savior is. Once she leaves the shore, the mermaid becomes melancholy as she continues to long to be by the prince’s side. Simultaneously, contrastingly, in comparison to the well-known Disney version, the little mermaid yearns for more than the prince’s interest in her, something that is significant to factor in when she makes the decision to become a human, an immortal soul.

The little mermaid questions her elderly grandmother whether human beings can live forever compared to mermaids who cease to exist as they turn into sea foam after having a lifetime of approximately three hundred years as her rescuing of the prince had stemmed further interest in the upper world. To this inquiry, the grandmother has a discussion with her about the notion of humans’ souls living forever. To achieve this immortal soul, she had to find a man to love her to the point he was completely fixated on her and married her. She then states while the upper half of the little mermaid’s body is aesthetically pleasing, her lower, fish tail half is not in the human world, although it is under the sea. Choosing to ignore her grandmother’s warning and forsaking her kindred and her home, she makes a daring visit to see the sorceress. The sorceress then offers to give her legs in exchange for her voice. It is at this moment in which the audience is introduced to how the two versions of the story significantly differ from one another through the various consequences that are caused from the mermaid’s act of rebellion. While Walt Disney’s adaptation of the story is clearly child-centered, Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, in comparison, stirs up a lot of controversy, as many people would argue the story is quite evidently for a more mature audience rather than a younger one.

As discussed within a previous class lecture, in comparison to a story that is male dominated, stories in which there is the presence of a female rebel, there is a greater consequence to the rebellious act performed. In the Disney version, when Ariel, the character based off Andersen’s little mermaid, rebels against her family and her people in order to be with her prince, for the majority case scenario, she reaps the many benefits of it, and she even gets her happily ever after. This rewarding system that results from her rebellion is quite dissimilar from what typically occurs in female dominated adolescent novels. With that said, in Hans Christian Andersen’s story, the little mermaid’s rebellion against her institutional family and people are perceived as her being rather misguided. She undergoes several adversities as a result of her unseemly behavior and unfortunately she suffers from a very tragic ending.  A prominent instance of this is evident when the little mermaid goes to visit the sorceress/sea witch. In Walt Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” Ariel is magically, and quite painlessly transformed into a human. In comparison, in Hans Christian Andersen’s “Den Lille Havfrue,” the young mermaid’s tongue was cut off so that she was incapable ever speaking or singing. And once she was able to walk upon her human legs, every step she took felt as if she was walking upon sharp knives.

Additionally, another largely significant contrast to notice regards who is portrayed as the true antagonist of the story. Within the Walt Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” storyline, the sea witch Ursula, the character who is on a practical level, based off the sorceress in Andersen’s story, is portrayed to be the antagonist. As a stark contrast, Hans Christian Andersen’s classic “Den Lille Havfrue”/“The Little Mermaid” significantly differentiates from that as the sorceress in actuality holds a neutral position. The sorceress doesn’t really show to have any intention of tricking or harming the mermaid, which Ursula does besides asking for the little mermaid’s voice as the item she would like for trade in return for her legs. She does not treating her as a means to an end. She fully explains the potential consequences that the little mermaid will suffer through in the scenario she chose to go through with her decision, which she did. Rather, interestingly while the little mermaid isn’t deemed as the “bad guy,” within the original story, her vanity is ever so present as one of the large motivating factors of her wanting the prince to fall for her is to gain this immortal soul her grandmother had talked about.

The little mermaid sets up her own doom by making the choice to rebel against her institution. There is no trickery from the evil Ursula involved and it is completely her choice to undergo her desires. She chooses to forsake her family forever in order to gain this immortal soul and the love of a man she never actually met that are otherwise unattainable for her as a mermaid. In the Disney adaptation, Ariel’s sacrifices aren’t really held to great importance and she hardly has to pay any cost. In the end, Ariel receives the voice she once traded Ursula for her human legs, she gets to marry the prince, and she rebuilds the relationship with the family she chose to go against. Andersen’s little mermaid, on the other hand, loses the prince as he chooses to marry another woman and she was doomed to turn into sea foam, unless she had killed the prince. Although she chose the more moral action in choosing not to do so, she nevertheless had to go around and do good deeds for 300 years in order to be able to enter heaven. In the end, the original tale shows the consequences of her rebellion. It practically claims she shouldn’t have really revolted as she had and instead remained satisfied with what she was already given as a mermaid within the institution she belonged to.