Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller (review)

Zipes's exploration of Hans Christian Andersen's literary works arrives just in time for the tail end of the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of Andersen's birth. Through a series of essays, Zipes proposes that H.C. Andersen is, and has always been, misunderstood as a storyteller (a position that Andersen himself endorsed). To bridge this gap, Zipes offers a series of short essays that aim to elucidate the core of these misunderstandings. In the final chapter, he endeavors to show how popular film continues in the modern world to promote a persistent "misunderstanding" of Andersen's oeuvre. Although Zipes makes some gestures toward Andersen's complete oeuvre, he focuses his main theoretical attention on the fairy tales. This strategy turns out to be a good one, not only because this focus is of particular interest to folklorists but also because any attempt to present a unified theory of Andersen in a volume as short as this one would be doomed to failure.

The book is divided into four short essays that are only minimally interrelated. The opening chapter, "In Pursuit of Fame," offers a literary biography of Andersen, and then launches into an interesting (albeit brief) investigation of six Andersen tales, intended to reveal "hidden, ambivalent features" of the tales (p. 32). Already in the foreword, Zipes proposes to read Andersen as "pathetic" and he expands on this conceptualization in this essay, exploring Andersen's vanity, his obsession with acceptance, his narcissism and self-deception, his troubled relationships with his family and the Collins family, and his own difficulties in understanding his sexuality expressed both in the tales and in events in his life. Zipes mentions Andersen's sexuality throughout the volume, proposing at one point that Andersen "was apparently bisexual and did not know how to deal effectively with his bisexuality" (p. 82). Although this is a tantalizing suggestion, Zipes does little to back up this claim, and his discussion of this and other psychological aspects of Andersen and his tales often feels superficial. By contrast, the analysis of the tales that comprises the last half of the first chapter provides some nice close readings, informed by Zipes's considerable knowledge of the fairy tale. In turn, these readings help set up the arguments propounded in the following two chapters.

The second chapter, "The Discourse of the Dominated," is perhaps the most successful chapter of the book. A consideration of Oehlenschläger's "Aladdin" and the impact of the trope of Aladdin on Andersen, coupled to excellent readings of "The Nightingale," and several other tales, allow Zipes to explore the concept of domination both inside the tales and in Andersen's life. The only troubling discussion in the chapter is his characterization of Ørsted's philosophy of the role of God as "intelligent design." This term has become over-determined in contemporary American discourse, and may mislead readers to think of both Ørsted and Andersen as unabashed detractors of science and blind adherents of Creationism (p. 56). This notion of "intelligent design" appears in later chapters as well, and inadvertently attaches Andersen's religious beliefs to a contemporary American political debate, muddying the waters of an already complex authorship. This rhetorical slip leads to more misunderstanding, rather than less, of Andersen's storytelling.

The third chapter, "The Discourse of Rage and Revenge," explores the deep anger that seethes below the surface of many of Andersen's tales—and likely raged in Andersen's mind as well. Zipes offers a discussion of Andersen's troubled relationship with children—he did not have much experience with them—and proposes that Andersen had very strict ideas on how children should act; divergence from these norms leads to punishment in the tales. Again, Zipes is at his best when he is considering specific tales, and the readings he provides here—coupled to those in other chapters—offer a useful, often psychoanalytic, approach to many of these tales. But the comparison with J. M...