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In the annals of childhood reading Hans Christian Andersen lurks, a latent wound. For many of us he provides the first whisper of pain that will not heal, of quests that fail, of desires that remain unsated. And yet his stories linger in the imagination, partly because they defy the words of comfort with which parents. teachers, and children's books attempt to blot out the terrors of childhood: terrors of isolation, abandonment, extinction. Ursula K. Le Guin writes that she "hated" Andersen's stories as a child, but "[t]hat didn't stop me from reading them, and rereading them. Or from remembering them" (61). Similarly, Rosellen Brown asks herself "why 'The Little Mermaid' so fascinated me that I shuddered and read it again and again" (57), musing that "perhaps [she] was a simple child to believe the worst," but she preferred the sad endings and couldn't accept the "fake good cheer" Andersen occasionally offers (56). Others recall that when they were children Andersen's most virulent females provided them with role models: Maria Flook identified with Inger's "macabre sense of humor" in "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf" (127). A. S. Byatt found something "secretly good, illicitly desirable, about the ice hills and glass barriers" of the Snow Queen's palace (71), which came to signify for her the desirability and the pain of the artist's quest for beauty.
These anecdotes by accomplished writers about their childhood reading belie the adult desire to mute or disguise the presence of pain in human experience by censoring or denying children access to depictions of it - adulteration, if you will. Pain, together with sexuality and other conflicts usually identified as "adult" pervade Andersen's writings, one reason his stories are often abridged and altered. Stefan Sullivan assumes in his review of Tiina Nunnally's recent Andersen translation that "darkness" is, by definition, adult: the review, titled "Ugly Duckling Grows Up," opens with the comment that these tales should be marked with a parental advisory sticker (Sullivan). The Disney Corporation's appropriation of The Little Mermaid (1989) transmutes Andersen's bittersweet ichor into G-rated diet soda, with the ostensible goal of making it child-safe. Whose fears are actually being assuaged?
The truism that the "dark" or cynical aspects of Andersen's works are directed toward adults...