The Image of Faithful Frogs and Titillated Toads: The Human and Animal Hierarchy in Victorian Fairy Tale Adaptations

In nineteenth-century England, Charles Darwin threatened humankind’s preconceived superiority by declaring that humans shared genetic information with animals. Cultural anxieties about evolution were made manifest in a variety of print culture, including the burgeoning field of children’s literature. H.B Paull’s English editions of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms’ “The Frog Prince” (1868) and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Marsh King’s Daughter” (1895) present animal-human hybrids that are encouraged to perform a fixed human transformation. By reinforcing a schism between humans and animals, these widely read adaptations adhere to dominant contemporaneous values that deemed humanity as a unique and privileged entity.