I

Hans Christian Andersen's butterfly ("Sommerfuglen," ["The Butterfly"] 1862) flutters through life without finding anyone quite fit for marriage. When he finally proposes, he is firmly told by the desired object that too much time has passed to realize a marriage; friendship must suffice. As an old butterfly, he finds himself comfortably lodged in a parlor, but in spite of the warmth and protection of the locale, he passes judgment on his life by admitting that a butterfly ought to be outside enjoying the sunshine, the freedom, and the company of a little flower as a partner…. He deems his life to be wasted. At that point the inhabitants of the parlor notice him—presumably by his fluttering against the window-pane. They admire him, capture him, and stick a pin through him, and thus he becomes a decoration prominently displayed, an object to be seen by anyone who enters the room. He is "stuck," literally, in several senses. There should be no need here to offer biographical comments on Andersen, who proposed to several women, more or less seriously, but who remained a bachelor and who, as he composed this particular tale, knew that he would remain single. Much criticism, be it biographical, psychological, sociological, or a mixture of these, has charted the relationship between Andersen's life and his art. One recent example of such an investigation can be said to be P. O. Enquist's play Från regnormarnas liv (1981). But even the reader who knows next to nothing about Andersen's life is bound to notice that the butterfly's experience of ending up "stuck" is one that occurs in a great many texts. That experience can, of course, take many different forms, but the general situation, that of being captured, of being trapped, of being in bondage, of being forced to do something against one's will—in sum, of being denied freedom—is one that is repeated with alarming and frightening frequency in Andersen's texts. One may recall the broken darning needle ("Stoppenaalen," ["The Darning Needle"] 1847) that ends up stuck in the gutter, the bottle ("Flaskehalsen," ["The Bottle Neck"] 1858) that is finally broken and turned upside down to become a waterdish for a bird, and the ball in ("Kjærestefolkene," ["The Top and Ball"] 1844) whose final fate is to end up rotting away among other garbage.

Those situations are rendered in Andersen's fabulously poignant, whimsical language and, as Fredrik Böök has pointed out so well, with a wit that veers delightfully toward malice.² Andersen entertains marvellously and, at the same time, intimates with a sting and sadness that human beings are quite stuck and, at times, why they are so.

The butterfly offers some comments on his final situation that wittily and grimly suggest that being stuck is like being married…. Those comments reflect, of course, on the society that admired, captured, and literally pinned him down, for it is those people's mores and their marriages that the butterfly comments on. We are in that bourgeois or patrician parlor that Andersen knew so very intimately from his adult life in Copenhagen.

The butterfly resigns himself to the object role that society allots him… and thus he abandons any hope for a fulfilling life. By implication it is, however, quite clear that his captors are stuck as well. As he surrenders his earlier dreams of sunshine, freedom, and love, he is immediately taken to task by the potted plants…. In no uncertain terms he is told by the potted plants that his consolation is false, but since he is stuck, he cannot allow himself to accept their criticism. His reason for rejecting it suggests, so to speak by his own admission, that the potted plants know exactly what they are talking about….

II

A full investigation of Andersen's tales in this light is beyond the scope of this essay, and only a handful of texts will be discussed in the following. The tales chosen, of course, all deal with being "stuck," but the selection of those that are given a fairly full treatment—although exhaustive analyses are not attempted—has been motivated by the hope that a new or sharpened reading of them can be given. First, I shall comment on Andersen's view that, no matter on which rung of the social ladder the members of the bourgeoisie are to be found, they are trapped by their own habitual thinking. The examples chosen to clarify that point deal mainly with Andersen's artistic analysis of the sex roles of his times, but some will pinpoint other forms of social or psychic entrapment. Secondly, those tales will be examined that chiefly capture Andersen's own feeling of being held in bondage, a claustrophobic experience that would nearly be inevitable for an artist who could not quite accept, adapt to, or adopt the values of his social world. Consequently, in many texts Andersen could hardly avoid depicting his audience, for it was, in a sense, his antagonist.

What complicates matters is that the proletarian youngster—to use Böök's term—realized that in his quest to become an artist who would conquer the world, he would have to "fit in" among the patricians who supported him and gave him an education. If he did not please them, he would have little chance of reaching his lofty goal, which he had obviously desired since his early youth…. Andersen, who wanted ardently to be up there and who enjoyed the benefits of being precisely up there to the hilt, nevertheless retained his proletarian consciousness and never quite found peace of mind as "a writer for those up there." Thus, he vacillated or fluctuated in his moods—as his journal shows—as well as from tale to tale or even within a single text.

Andersen was the outsider who was allowed inside and who, in many ways, was warmly welcomed within the patrician parlor; thus, it would be wrong to see him as the odd man out; rather he was the odd man in. Therefore, one can see the reason for those two languages that P. O. Enquist finds in Andersen's works….⁴ Andersen was, thus, both blessed and cursed with that keen insight and sharp perception that only the outsider on the inside can possess.

Maybe the image of people being trapped or victimized by the ideology of the times emerges most clearly when sex roles are considered. This view can best be demonstrated through a brief consideration of "Tommelise" ["Thumbelina"] (1835), "Iisjomfruen" ["The Ice Maiden"] (1862), "Den lille Havfrue" ["The Little Mermaid"] (1837), "Den grimme Æiling" ["The Ugly Duckling"] (1845)—and somewhat out of context—"Dynd-Kongens Datter" ["The Marsh King's Daughter"] (1858), "Den standhaftige Tinsoldat" ["The Steadfast Tin Soldier"] (1838), "Hyrdinden og Skorsteensfeieren" ["The Shepherdness and The Sheep"] (1845), and "Svinedrengen" ["The Swine-herd"] (1842).

The tiny heroine of the first story is subjected to the pressure of a society that wants her to conform and to follow its seemingly sensible rules, and thus she is headed for one of those semi-arranged marriages that were not uncommon in the bourgeoisie of that time. If that marriage were to be realized, she would indeed be stuck. Her wealthy suitor, the mole, makes it clear that their marital life would exclude everything that brings joy to Tommelise's heart: open air, light, birdsong—the sunshine and freedom that the butterfly missed so bitterly—and, consequently, she will be walled up in the dark underground, a setting that to Tommelise must resemble a prison cell. The social pressures on Tommelise, as voiced by the kindly, but utterly conventional mouse, are tremendous, for she represents the persistent and authoritative voice of nineteenth-century bourgeois common sense.

It should be briefly mentioned here that Andersen elsewhere subtly compared a marriage undertaken for the wrong reasons to a prison cell. In "Iisjomfruen," the hero Rudy, about to marry Babette, has left his beloved mountains for a tourist trip to Chillon, the setting of Byron's The Prisoner of Chillon. Whereas Babette and her relatives are wonderfully entertained by viewing the ruins, the remnants of the torture chamber and the prison cell strike Rudy with horror. Numerous signs in the text, especially that of the cell, indicate that Rudy's marriage to Babette would be a self-imprisonment that could only lead to unhappiness for both of them. In another scene in "Iisjomfruen," Rudy, the wild and free hunter, performs a nearly impossible feat by climbing up to an eagle's nest to capture a young eaglet in order to gain Babette's father's acceptance. One might cheer the hero's audacity and success, but in reality Rudy is doing something that is foreign to him and wrong: he has become the stooge of society by imprisoning a wild bird that does not belong in a cage. In fact, one might see the captured eaglet as an ominous reflection of Rudy's potential fate.

Both Rudy and Tommelise are asked to give up what gives meaning to their lives and to fit in, and it is gratifying that they both escape the prison of marriage to the wrong partner. Tommelise is spirited away, meets a true partner, and assumes her true identity, which is signalled by her being renamed Maja. Smothering bondage is replaced by harmony. Rudy's escape route leads to death, but death is greeted with enthusiasm….

As in "Den lille Havfrue," which portrays the heroine's vehement quest not to be stuck in this world of the flesh, death is seen as a liberation.

These happy endings, however, deserve further scrutiny. Iona and Peter Opie in their The Classic Fairy Tales (1974) have remarked that Tommelise's final happiness seems to be conditioned by her having found one of her own kind.⁵ She may, thus, actually have something in common with the May bug, who, after his initial infatuation, rejected her because she did not conform to his society's ideals of beauty. And even if Tommelise is too pure and innocent to be accused of prejudice, the text is not necessarily so. Many of Andersen's sentimental and, as a rule, popular stories tend to offer happy endings that, sweet and satisfying as they may be, upon scrutiny seem tainted by compromises—an integration process that allows the protagonists to live in a society that in reality traps them. In "Den grimme Ælling," the wild bird becomes, as Georg Brandes has already noted, a tame pet, another object for admiration, one fed crumbs by the inhabitants of the manor.⁶ Both Tommelise and the swan eventually seem to fit into a benevolent society, but that integration process may also be seen as their submission to society—on the part, of course, of the author as well. Such an underlying sadness, within the subtext and not immediately noticeable, is caused by the fact that the one who had seemed to liberate himself or herself has, nevertheless, ended up stuck in some other sense.

That, of course, cannot be said about Rudy in "Iisjomfruen" or about those of Andersen's other he roes and heroines who find liberation in death, such as the young princess in "Dynd-Kongens Datter" and the little mermaid. But that radical, frequent, and romantic solution to the experience of life as imprisonment may testify to Andersen's acknowledgment that it is nearly impossible to escape from being stuck. It is telling that death, particularly in "Iisjomfruen," is often associated with brilliant beauty and that life within society is rendered as trivial. If in various ways, then, these stories confirm the butterfly's skeptical view of marriage as a condition of being stuck, others, like "Tommelise," reveal that both sexes may yearn to be together in the here and now. Often, however, the sexual ideology of the epoch holds both woman and man hostage and prevents a union of the lovers.

A glaring example of people yearning for love, but being too passive to reach fulfillment, can be found in "Den standhaftige Tinsoldat." Among all the toys, the soldier and the ballerina are the only ones who do not move during the nightly party, and if love is to be realized one cannot, of course, remain immobile; their deficiencies have been analyzed perceptively by William Mishler, who employs a Freudian approach.⁷ The soldier, in reality, follows the commands shouted to him by the nasty jack-in-the-box, who forbids him from laying his eyes on the ballerina. Even if the soldier steals fleeting glances at his heart's desire, he nevertheless obeys the orders given him by that restrictive voice of society and never approaches the ballerina. Only in death are the lovers united, and the flames that envelop them in the end can perhaps be seen as the destructive fire of unfulfilled passion.

In the story "Hyrdinden og Skorsteensfeieren," the couple does not make the mistake of obeying orders; thus, their chance of fulfillment in life seems more promising. When they move in order to escape from the bourgeois parlor, that world of immobility shakes with impotent rage against their daring. Their successful escape seems to prove that parental authority, as represented by the mandarin, has little power against those who dare to question its validity. But, sadly, their quest for freedom comes to nothing, for the shepherdess is so much a child of her society that the scary thought of unlimited freedom in an open world sends her fleeing back again to the prison she has just escaped. Although they return, some minor victory has been won, for she can now remain with the chimney sweep and will not be forced to marry one of the supposed pillars of society. But there seems to be no passion between the lovers, and their effort to become free human beings has ended in their assuming their former positions as immobile porcelain figures. They remain stuck in a world that they could not defeat, and it is telling and chilling that the only kiss exchanged between them is the one that she uses to convince him that they must go back home again.

The strength of the parlor mentality over the young is further emphasized by Andersen by his showing that the shepherdess clings to the safe man, the very clean chimney sweep—he is too clean, suggests Andersen—not because she loves him, but because she fears the sexuality of the arranged marriage. The banality of the relationship of the two, now completely immobilized figures is captured maliciously by Andersen in suggesting what they have in common….

It would be utterly simplistic solely to blame the shepherdess for the couple's failure to escape, for the way in which she has been molded and trivialized by male authority directs her actions. In fact, upon their return, she feels deeply guilty over the distress she has caused the mandarin. Instilled guilt is an excellent means of keeping someone stuck in his or her place.

The molding of both sexes is also the main, if underlying, issue in "Svinedrengen." At first glance it seems to be a curious—and rather sexist—literary adaptation of a well-known Schwankmärchen about how a shrew is tamed. For example, in the Norwegian version of this story, "Haakon Borkenskjæg," the woman is allowed to shed her ignorance and arrogance through the male's educational scheming and become a human being worthy of marriage.⁸ In "Svinedrengen," however, she is left standing in the rain, rejected by both her father and her suitor, who informs her that he has come to despise her.…

The concluding statement with which the prince takes leave of the woman he once desired may cause modern readers consternation. It is unpleasant to imagine the liberal Andersen, who called himself "half feminine," composing a story that is more sexist than the folktale that may have inspired it.⁹ But upon closer investigation of the subtext—one that was scarcely obvious to his contemporaries—"Svinedrengen" emerges as the exact opposite of a male chauvinist tale.

Even if the princess is a brat, it is those who have spoiled her who are to blame for her silly and thoughtless behavior and her lack of appreciation for the natural. It may be childish to reject nature's wonderful gifts and to desire the swineherd's mechanical gadgets, but she is a child. Since she has been formed to remain a child, she acts like an egocentric child who is used to getting what she wants. It is hardly laudable that she is willing to sell herself for those gadgets—a feature Andersen had to tone down in his literary adaptation of the folktale—but her punishment and the final, verbal verdict of the prince are hardly commensurate with her crime. Like the princess in "Haakon Borkenskjæg," she may very well need to be set straight, but by shortening the traditional narrative in his text, Andersen gives it—as Hans Brix cautiously intimates—a very brutal ending, leaving a dejected, cast-out princess, who is without any hope for the future and is utterly alone.¹⁰

Through this drastic revision of the folktale, Andersen lets the prince's final condemnation of the princess boomerang, so that the readers come to despise him for the cruel game he played with her. Here "Haakon Borkenskjæg" and "Svinedrengen" part ways, as they also likely do in the minds of the listeners and readers, for the prince in Andersen's story does not trick the princess to gain her hand but merely to take revenge. She emerges, thus, as the victim of those vindictive and manipulative tricks and ends up seduced and abandoned. She suffered her downfall because she was a product of a world that keeps women as children—she and her maids play the same silly game all day—and because she happened to wound a male ego. Having suffered humiliation, the male ego wants revenge and gets it. Both she and the prince are stuck in attitudes that separate the sexes from each other.

Even though Andersen often had to whitewash the folktales he adapted, their sting is retained—as is the case in both "Keiserens nye Klæder" ["The Emperor's New Clothes"] (1837) and "Lille Claus og Store Claus" ["Little Claus and Big Claus"] (1835). In "Svinedrengen," Andersen's radical revision of the folktale may well have occasioned a comparison between the attitudes of earlier, more tolerant times and those of his own day. If that is the case, the story is a stinging indictment of a society that makes women into children and men into self-righteous judges of the women they have created. That it can be otherwise, Andersen shows in "Klods-Hans" ["Jack The Dullard"] (1855)—and in his earlier rendition of that story in "Sneedronningen" ["The Snow Queen"] (1845)—where the young people get together on equal terms because they are able to disregard habitual thinking about sex roles.

Maybe some readers of the above comments on "Svinedrengen" would balk and, as is not uncommon when ideology is taken to task, would protest against making a beloved, simple tale into a scathing criticism of the sexual politics of the bourgeois nineteenth century. To that criticism, it is possible to respond that there is nothing innocent about Hans Christian Andersen; he could skillfully feign innocence, but such stories as "Keiserens nye Klaeder" and "Hun duede ikke" ["She was No Good"] (1855)—maybe Andersen's most politically radical text—demonstrate that he was not. It should also be recalled that quite early on Andersen wrote a wittily malicious text that is called "Det er Dig, Fabelen sigter til" ["This Fable Is Intended for You"] (1836). That Andersen knew the darkness and viciousness of the human heart—as well as how innocence can become self-destructive naiveté—is blatantly revealed in the chilling "Skyggen" ["The Shadow"] (1847). The fable in Andersen's works always alludes to the reader; but Andersen's contemporary reader may not have always been aware of that fact. Like Mark Twain, Andersen has been considered to be a rather harmless entertainer of children, but both Mark Twain and Andersen revolutionized the literary language of their countrymen by employing a stunning imitation of the vernacular, a feat they would hardly have achieved if they had been merely spinners of innocent tales for children.

III

It is tempting to continue for a moment this less than taxing search for people who are stuck in one way or another in Andersen's tales. The few texts mentioned above would suggest that the hierarchy of the class system traps people in terms of both their social standing and their attitudes. In "Keiserens nye Klaeder," all the characters, high as well as low, are so concerned with preserving their image of not appearing stupid and incompetent, that they prove to be exactly that. The only exception is the little child, not yet brainwashed into realizing that lies are preferable to truths. "Hun duede ikke" makes clear that those in charge and with power over other people's lives are stuck in their own limited outlook, one that falsifies reality; those below them are trapped into accepting their social superiors as authorities of nearly divine standing. When the young servant woman is told that she should not marry her mistress's son, she immediately accepts whatever her mistress says as, literally, the gospel truth….

But this wider investigation must, of necessity, be narrowed. In the following, I shall focus on those texts in which Andersen depicts the artist's relationship to his audience. That theme is, of course, one that Romantic poets everywhere have used quite often, and numerous texts pit der Dichter against the philistines. Since artists can only expect applause if they please, the artist who desires that gratification, as Andersen most certainly did, might have to compromise his convictions, as Andersen very likely did. Consequently, it is understandable that Andersen, like many of his colleagues, dreamt of the "dear reader" who is his or her soul mate, an ideal audience who will understand.

If, as is so often done, one can see "Den grimme Ælling" as Andersen's autobiography in the form of a tale, one finds a situation of bondage in which the poor misunderstood soul must repeatedly wail, as does the ugly duckling…. The story suggests that the swan, which has escaped from various kinds of duckyards, is finally among his peers, who will understand him, but—as mentioned earlier—that happy ending covertly suggests a compromise. The swan, in the future, must be the pretty pet, the ornament, the object to be admired—as the "stuck" butterfly is. How well did the admirers of the artist Hans Christian Andersen understand him—or how well did he feel understood? That is the underlying issue in many of his tales.

That topic is dealt with gently and generously in "Nissen hos Spekhøkeren" ["The Goblin and the Huckster"] (1853), in which the poor student saves a volume of poetry from being used as wrapping paper by the grocer. The grocer, his wife, and all the "servants" in the kitchen—inanimate objects given voices with Andersen's usual brilliance—have absolutely no use for poetry and probably will agree with the grocer that it is stupid to give up a tasty cheese for the sake of poetry. The discussion between the student and the grocer is, however, friendly banter, a point that the pixie misses entirely. Andersen thus benignly shows that one cannot ever expect everyone to grasp the beauty of art, but, as the ensuing transformation of the pixie demonstrates, some suddenly wake up to its wonder.

When the pixie ascends the stairs to take revenge on the student for insulting the grocer, he looks through the keyhole into the student's room and sees him reading the salvaged poetry. He is surrounded by an aura coming from the book that signifies the glory of his experience and the wonder and joy that art grants. The pixie, who had been completely satisfied with the grocer's world, suddenly understands that art opens a door to an unknown, marvelous beauty. If we see, then, in the student Andersen's conception of the ideal audience—the dear reader—the pixie becomes that part of the audience that has a potential to become one too. It remains, however, only a possibility for the pixie, for even though, when a fire breaks out one night, he saves the volume of poetry and thus proves his heart-felt devotion to art, he soberly realizes that he needs the grocer's porridge too; he cannot, therefore, devote himself fully to art. To this sadly funny summation of the relationship between audience and art, it should be added that the pixie at no point enters the student's room, but always partakes in his experience by standing outside observing through the keyhole. Even positively inclined audiences are stuck too, for mundane demands in their daily lives keep them from fully giving art its due.

As a rule, however, Andersen's view of those whose "butterfly" or "handsome swan" he had become was less good-natured than in "Nissen hos Spekhøkeren." As critics Peer E. Sørensen and Finn Hauberg Mortensen have discussed, one reason for that hostility may well be that Andersen was angered and at times infuriated by being that trapped "butterfly" or tamed "swan." As a proletarian who had made it to the top, he always had an uneasy relationship to those who had helped him up the social ladder, and he served them uneasily.¹¹ But often he served them well, and anyone who served as well as Andersen did—and here one must remember the much less controversial part of his oeuvre—can stand accused of being a toady or a bootlicker. In Heinrich Heine's opinion, Andersen was just such a toady, and Andersen's good, but blunt friend Henriette Wulff chastised his glorying in being honored by empty-headed princes.¹²

It would, however, be more precise to compare Andersen with the court jester of yesteryear, the person who is called upon to perform and amuse those that feed him, but who at the same time has a position so unique that it gives him a certain restricted freedom to express unpleasant opinions and truths. "Nattergalen" ["The Nightingale"] (1844), "Tante Tandpine" ["Auntie Toothache"] (1872), "Loppen og Professoren" ["The Professor and the Flea"] (1870), and "Den flyvende Kuffert" ["The Flying Trunk"] (1839), among others, support this contention.

The audience in "Nattergalen" is surely not given much credit. Throughout the story it is quite obvious that the majority of the people at court will never grasp the beauty of the song of the nightingale, and that those who pretend to have taste prefer an imitation of art that can be explained intellectually. The emperor, of course, is a man with the potential for being the ideal audience—and eventually he realizes it—but, initially, he misunderstands completely the role that both art and the artist should have in his life. Andersen delivers a consummate image of the artist trapped by philistine society; the artist is shackled, denied freedom to move, and kept in a cage under lock and key—all under the pretense of being rewarded…

It is also not surprising that the emperor is a man who is stuck, for the majority of those who surround him and give him advice never have and never will gain any understanding of the existential function art can have in a person's life. The nightingale is reduced to a court jester who understandably longs to escape from bondage.

In this text, Andersen strikes that Romantic note that allots wisdom and true appreciation of art to the poor, for they intuitively grasp the qualitative difference in song between the real and the artificial nightingales. More significant, however, is the fact that after a deadly crisis, the emperor is reborn as a new man; through art he will become a real emperor who can rule his realm justly and wisely. The nightingale envisions his future role as an artist who will inform the emperor of everything that goes on in his realm, be it good and evil. Art thus grants moral knowledge and a better human existence for all.

As in the case of "Den grimme Æilling," one cannot deny the ending of "Nattergalen" its grand triumph or its harmony, but if one first has gotten a piece of the devil's famous mirror from "Sneedronningen" in one's eye—and Andersen works hard to make that happen—it is difficult to ignore the underlying darkness of the subtext. This is not to say that all the happy endings are contradicted, but they are severely modified and undercut. When the nightingale asks the emperor, as they are about to part, not to tell anyone that his wisdom comes from a little bird, Andersen pinpoints once again the loneliness of the artist who can count on so few to understand him.

Andersen etched one of his sharpest portraits of his audience in "Tante Tandpine" (1872), the story with which he had concluded the last volume of tales he was ever to publish. The audience is embodied in the young artist's Aunt Mille, who refuses to see anything unpleasant in life. When her old suitor, Brewer Rasmussen, at one point suggests that friends can be false, she, who is normally kind and composed, lashes furiously out at him, for her perception of reality is threatened. She is, and wishes to be, stuck in a false reality, one that the poet-student captures when he depicts her claustrophobic room…. Hers is a place that is constructed to keep bothersome reality out. Such an audience makes certain demands, and undoubtedly many of contemporaries, for they wanted, as Auntie puts it, stories about unhappy people. Unhappiness, pain, and anguish are reduced to mere entertainment.

Two samples of the student's writing—and within the fiction of the text he is, of course, the author of the tale itself—suggest, however, that unlike his aunt he confronts harsh reality through art. Inspired by a fallen leaf on which an insect moves, he admits that human knowledge is severely limited and that all talk about God, the world, and eternity is mere conjecture. It should be kept in mind that the dutiful Andersen, serving his audience, had written numerous texts in which he preached about all those great issues. Later the student depicts a sleepless night and reveals himself to be a hypersensitive, lonely man who just records his sense impressions without giving them any transcendental value. He does not write as a romantic, but Auntie, who likes romantic stories populated with unhappy human beings, completely misunderstands both texts; she has no comprehension—or will not admit to any such—of the pain and anguish of her nephew's art.

"Tante Tandpine," thus, gives another picture of an artist stuck in a world that leaves him misunderstood and lonely. In a way, he is appreciated, for Auntie tirelessly eggs him on to write what she wants to read, and in his somber attempts to write, she finds what is not there. Auntie sees only what she wants to see. It might be that situation that finally causes the student to denounce art and life; the frame of the story informs us laconically that the student is now dead. "Tante Tandpine" is also a somber farewell to a life and a vocation that Andersen, the old author, felt had given him much pain and isolation. Both in "Tante Tandpine" and in "Hvad garnie Johanne fortalte" ["What old Johanne Told"] (1872), which, as Topsøe-Jensen has shown, is the last story Andersen composed, the vision is bleak.¹³

It may be the very same vision that is covered up by gallows humor in the sprightly, sparkling "Loppen og Professoren" (1870). The professor, who is a flim-flam man, can be seen as one more of Andersen's many artists. And the flea, whose presence guarantees the professor a living, may well be seen as Andersen's less than respectful caricature of art. Fleas can jump, perform, and bite, and audiences fall in love with such creatures to the point that they hold the artist hostage.

If the picture of the artist and art is snide, the one of the audience is no less so. It is made up of what are called savages and cannibals. Earlier, in "Vanddraaben" ["The Drop of Water"] (1848), Andersen had cleverly managed to describe the inhabitants of Copenhagen as conformists who would furiously tear to pieces and eat anyone who did not fit in. In "Loppen og Professoren," the audience captures both the flea and the professor; the artist's life is quite pleasant as long as he obeys the ruler of the realm, but he feels so stuck. There is surely heartfelt joy in those scenes in which the artist, utterly bored with his comfortable leisure, begins to scheme in order to free the flea and himself from the savages. He promises to provide them with "det man i Verdens største Lande kalder Dannelse!" (5:117). To savages it makes sense that "Dannelse" is a cannon that will make the earth tremble. The professor then constructs a balloon, but the savages remain steadfast in the belief that what is being built is a cannon, and thus the two escape from their bondage. To take off, the professor shouts: '"Slip Snorer og Toug!… "Nu gaaer Ballonen!' De troede han sagde: Kanonen" (5:118). The audience not unexpectedly misunderstands, but that is something one, now and then, can turn to one's advantage—at least within a fictional world. Here, with marvellous, malicious humor, Andersen deflates not only his own vocation and its results but also his audience, the deserving victim of the con man/"artist."

Finally, in "Den flyvende Kuffert," one again encounters not only the artist as con man, but also the audience as deserving victim of his conning. The rich man's spendthrift son finds himself with his flying machine in a land where storytelling is appreciated. He pretends to be divine—a nice jab at the Romantic notion of the elevated poet—and elbows his way into the home of the rulers, a king and queen, whose daughter he hopes to marry for the sake of convenience rather than love. To win her hand, he must tell a story that will amuse the king and satisfy the queen's wish for moral lessons. His story, the tale within the tale, is one of Andersen's joyous comedies in which inanimate objects come to life and mirror the life of the servants in the kitchen. As we, with the story's audience, listen to the voices of those servants, it becomes quite obvious that some of them, the matches in particular, predict that the end will come to absolute monarchies and that crowned heads may fall. This subversive message, as usual in Andersen's texts, is neatly and elegantly packaged among so many other seemingly harmless satirical or humorous points that one might excuse the audience for not understanding that an ominously, nasty prophecy is being aired. Besides, the king and the queen are very likely so stuck within their expectations about art that they—like Auntie in "Tante Tandpine"—hear only what they want to hear, and, like her, they are so stuck in their roles that they are deaf to any unpleasant truths.

The artist is fully accepted by the king and the queen and is just about to marry the princess when he loses his magical flying trunk. He wants to impress all with his power, so he starts a gigantic fireworks—a consummate metaphor for a grand performance—and a spark ignites the trunk. He thus loses the princess and now has to make a living telling stories that offer far fewer and lesser rewards. It is dangerous to make "Den flyvende Kuffert" too prophetic, but the text shows that the young Andersen, like the old man who wrote "Loppen og Professoren," looked at his own vocation with a splinter of that devil's mirror in his eyes. From very early in his career, Andersen was subversive toward, and derogatory about, his own strivings—as well as toward and about those whom he wanted to applaud him.

IV

Enquist's aforementioned observation that Andersen uses two languages is astute, but the word two can be amended to several without losing Enquist's major point. It needs to be modified, for the voices of the dutiful servant and of the subversive court jester—and of a number of voices in between these two poles—are to be found in the tales, and there are often subtle switches between them.

Whether and when sincerity and pretense can be separated, and where they may be found to overlap, presents a problem that no critic could or should hope to solve definitively. Andersen himself realized that the problem existed and, as usual, having encapsulated it within a larger narrative ("Noget" ["Something"] [1858]), he addressed it. In that text, one of the ambitious brothers, desirous of becoming an architect and joining the intelligentsia, agrees to serve, for the time required, as an apprentice to some carpenters. He knows very well that such service will result in some humiliation, but this he is willing to bear while masking his feelings and keeping his goal in mind….

It is also revealing that the ambitious speaker uses the term "Maske-Frihed," [mask-freedom], for through the use of masks one is able to retain some measure of freedom and can avoid becoming completely stuck in a single role.

The impossible question that ["Noget"] raises is how conscious Andersen was of the dichotomies that so often marked his nearly yearly publication of a volume of tales. The question begs to be raised, for the tales included in any one volume can differ to a surprising degree. Were they merely a gathering together of the tales Andersen had produced since the last collection and had stored away, or were they carefully composed so that some were sure to please the audience, perceptive or not, whereas others were to send subversive messages to, and against, the very same audience? That separation into an either/or is, however, most likely naive, for even if the first assumption, for practical reasons, may be the case, the question still arises why Andersen would write tales that were so much at odds with one another.

A general and sweeping, if by necessity inconclusive, answer to that question has already been intimated above: Andersen lived both actually and artistically a double life. It may furthermore be conjectured that Andersen, the man who knew that masks had to be used, made sure that those comforting, harmonious stories, beloved then as now, were, as a rule, accompanied by others that questioned such harmony. The fluctuation in the choice of tale, probably both conscious and not, was consequently caused by Andersen's lifelong obsessive, contradictory relationship to his audience.

It may seem simplistic merely to speak of one audience, but at the time Andersen was publishing he was mainly concerned with that circle of patricians in Copenhagen to which he had come to belong. That fact, at least, can be gleaned from his journals. It may well be that, as Andersen wrote his tales, he thought of other, less prosperous audiences, but the sting of his major tales seems directed at a narrow patrician circle.

"Maske-Frihed" can also be detected in Andersen's small collections of tales. Only a selection of them can be discussed, and occasionally two or three of them, when published sequentially within a few years, are considered together. It is not possible to let all the voices speak, but some curious fluctuation or—what maybe should be called—authorial strategy is undeniably present.

First, it should be remembered that when Andersen published his first collection, Eventyr, fortalte for Børn (1835), he was slapped on the wrist by the reviewers. He was therefore most likely apprehensive when he issued further volumes. To be sure, some of those critics were right on target, for as stories such as "Fyrtøjet," ["The Tinder-Box"] "Den lille Idas Blomster," ["Little Ida's Flowers"] and particularly the darkly humorous "Lille Claus og Store Claus" ["Little Claus and Big Claus"] show … the reviewers recognized an author with strongly subversive leanings. The uproar was justified and very likely alerted Andersen to the fact that publishing tales might require the use of masks.

In the many volumes that followed, there were some tales that would placate and please the audience: a dosage of Romantic idealism; some mild satire that would hurt no one; some grotesque, but unthreatening, comedy; some weepy sentimentalism; some consoling Christianity (of various varieties); and, not to be forgotten, some grimly pietistic pieces that condemned wordly pleasures. Any member of the audience could find what she or he preferred. Andersen knew how to put on the right mask—even when he wanted to take his audience to task.

The second volume Andersen published, also in 1835, may appear quite harmless, but if "Tommelise" ["Inchelina"] and "Reisekammeraten" ["The Travelling Companion"] seem to promote the idea that providence and justice rule, the buoyantly humorous tale "Den uartige Dreng" reveals that love guarantees life to be unfair. In this volume there is hardly much subversion, but, it should be noted, different voices—with very different outlooks—are speaking.

If, for brevity's sake, the next three collections (1837, 1838, 1839), are viewed together, the presence of several voices is also evident. "Den lille Havfrue" and "Keiserens nye Klæder" were issued together and have little in common—but if one wants to be naive, that may be explained by Andersen's imitation of an age-old prose fabliau in the latter story. More significant, however, is the contrast between "Den lille Havfrue" and "Paradisets Have" ["The Garden of Eden"] (1839): although the former lauds an ascetic ideal, the latter is boisterously sensual, as is "Den standhaftige Tinsoldat." Quite obviously, "De vilde Svaner" ["The Wild Swans"] (1838) is out-of-step with the radicalism and cynicism of "Den flyvende Kuffert."

In the first of the collections from 1845, the reader finds "Sneedronningen" and "Grantræet" side by side, but proclaiming widely different views of life. "Sneedronningen" speaks with a doctrinaire Christian voice, whereas "Grantræet" concludes with a view of death as nothingness; that contradiction was a lasting one within the oeuvre.

In the second collection from the same year, the humorous vision of the pleasure-loving creatures in "Elverhøi"—rather bourgeois Danes dressed up as folk figures—stands in sharp contrast to the grim and totally serious mood in "De røde Sko," in which pleasure is shown to be the road to hell. Here one wonders whether the starkness of the protagonist's suffering somehow signifies Andersen's disapproval of the stern voice that promotes the dismissal of all pleasure.

The collection published in 1848 contained, among other texts, "Historien om en Moder" ["The Story of a Mother"] and "Den lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne." In the latter, the poor girl—whose abominable poverty can be contrasted with the sugarcoated view of poverty found in other texts, such as "Nattergalen" and much more blatantly in "Lysene" (1872)—is finally taken home to God; once again a Christian view is expressed. That also seems to be the case in "Historien om en Moder," which superficially resembles the early poem "Det døende Barn" (written in 1826) and the later tale "Barnet i Graven" (1860). It should be noted, however, that the mother believes she has given her child to that God who will grant eternal bliss in Paradise, whereas Death consistently refers to the other side as "det ubekjendte Land" (2:164). With artistic mastery, Andersen lets that phrase conclude the tale. Although in some texts he is the doctrinaire Christian, or the Christian voicing acceptable views, in others he is the questioner or doubter. The voices cannot agree, and whereas one promotes order, the other appears to favor spiritual chaos.

The collections from 1852 and 1853 contain two very short texts, "Et godt Humeur" (1852) and "Hjertesorg" (1853). Among other topics, they ponder the costs of being an artist, for both texts suggest that the narrators take a lofty view of existence, one that prohibits an involvement in life. With their devastating self-irony, such meta-stories point backward to "Den flyvende Kuffert" and forward to "Tante Tandpine" and are told with very different voices than the other consoling stories to be found in the same volumes.

As Andersen's reputation grew, he might have felt less need to employ masks, but he may have had some trouble in letting them fall. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, he published nice Christian stories like "Det gamle Egetræes sidste Drøm" (1858), "Pigen, som traadte paa Brødet" (1859), "Anne Lisbeth" (1859), and "Barnet i Graven" (1860). But during the same period, he also published "Vinden fortæller om Valdemar Daae og hans Døttre" (1859), in which only the wind seems to have eternal life, and "Taarnvægteren Ole" (1859), in which Andersen, although he is twice removed as narrator, lets his main character voice opinions clearly suggesting that evolution, not religion, explains the world.

In 1868, Andersen once again included a story, "Den onde Fyrste," dealing with Christianity. On the surface it depicts God's victory over an evil prince who had challenged him. The tale suggests, however, that the distant deity interferes only when he himself is threatened, not when human beings are being tormented by the powers of evil.

The other stories discussed above suggest that a tension always existed between the voices with which Andersen spoke. In the second volume, published in 1872, "Krøblingen" ["The Cripple"] gives art credit for curing the protagonist, whereas "Tante Tandpine," as pointed out above, takes a much bleaker view of the powers of art. One cannot say that the two texts—or many other texts that are not in agreement—negate each other, for the reader is rarely provided with straightforward contradictions, but rather with a constant nagging questioning of any view held. As pure conjecture, it can be suggested that such a fluctuation may reflect an uneasy search for a story that would fully express a heartfelt opinion.

It can possibly be claimed that the tale, with its roots in several traditional subgenres, offered Andersen a unique opportunity to engage in that quest—an opportunity that the other literary genres he used could not grant him. The idea of imitating narrative folklore was fairly new at the time, and hence the composition of tales was not hindered by all those rules and regulations that, in spite of Romanticism, clung to the well-established literary genres. Thus, as Bo Hakon Jørgensen has argued, when Andersen resorted to tales, he was less restricted….¹⁴ Even if that opinion can be contested by showing how world views and morality differ between magic tales, prose fabliaux, and legends, the point is nevertheless well taken, for through Andersen's imitation and mixing of those subgenres, he fluctuates between their different styles and creates hybrid forms that can reflect any outlook.

In the short form of the tale, Andersen could breathe fairly freely. He could enjoy that "Maske-Frihed" that the ambitious brother mentioned as a means to avoid being stuck in "Noget" and thus deal with those problems that continued to nag him. The form of the tale, a genre not taken very seriously at the time, allowed him a freedom to experiment, and that freedom resulted in a perplexing fluctuation, as different voices speak, blend, overcome, or silence one another. As one reads the oeuvre, the complexity of the author and his problems—be they personal, social, or artistic—stand out and suggest why this man, so stuck in so many ways, had to fight back and attempt to become, at least in his art, less stuck. In his best subversive tales, he succeeded.

Notes

…..

² Fredrik Böök, H. C. Andersen (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1955), 235. The English wording used here is from George C. Schoolfield's translation of Böök, Hans Christian Andersen: A Biography (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962); 203.

…..

⁴ P. O. Enquist, Fra regnormenes liv: Et familiemaleri fra 1856, trans. Frederik Dessau, ed. Claus Jensen, Aage Jørgensen, and Bendt Pedersen (Copenhagen: Dansklærerforeningen/Skov, 1981), 89-95. This Danish edition includes Enquist's commentary to his play.

⁵ Iona and Peter Opie, comps., The Classic Fairy Tales (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974), 228.

⁶ Georg Brandes, Samlede Skrifter, vol. 2 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1899), 112.

⁷ William Mishler, "H. Andersen's 'Tin Soldier' in a Freudian Perspective," Scandinavian Studies 50 (1978): 389-95.

⁸ P. Chr. Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Samlede eventyr, vol. 3 (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1965), 101-10.

⁹ Lise Sørensen, "Bachelor Goes A-Wooing," Danish Journal (1975): 22.

¹⁰ Hans Brix, H. C. Andersen og hans eventyr (Copenhagen: Schubotheske, 1907), 233.

¹¹ Peer E. Sørensen [H.C. Andersen og herskabet Studier i borgerlig bevidsthed (Grenna GMT, 1973)], 91-92; Finn Hauberg Mortensen, "H.C. Andersen og den litterære dannelse," in H. C. Andersen og hans kunst i nyt lys, ed. Jørgen Breitenstein, Mogens Brøndsted, et al. (Odense: Odense universitetsforlag, 1976), 68-71.

¹² Elias Bredsdorff, Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of His Life and Work, 1805-75 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975), 153; 234.

¹³ H. Topsøe-Jensen, Buket til Andersen: Bemærkninger til femogtyve eventyr (Copenhagen: Gad, 1971), 307-16.

¹⁴ Bo Hakon Jøgensen, '"At tænke i eventyr'," in H. C. Andersen og hans kunst i nyt lys, 55.