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  • Fairy Tales and Modern Psychology
  • Celia Catlett Anderson (bio)
Lederer, Wolfgang . The Kiss of the Snow Queen: Hans Christian Andersen and Man's Redemption by Woman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Both scholars and practitioners in the field of modern psychology sometimes use examples from myth, folklore, and fairy tales for therapy or for illustrating theories. Using this tradition in The Kiss of the Snow Queen, Wolfgang Lederer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco points out analogies between common mental states and the trials of characters in Hans Christian Andersen's story The Snow Queen. He also, and in my opinion with less happy results, joins that school of literary critics which tries to construct psychoanalytic biographies of authors.

The strong elements in Lederer's book derive from his close, longterm analysis of the story itself. His interest grew out of a resident-training session held some years ago in the northern California Mendocino State Hospital for the Mentally Ill. Here a taped reading of Andersen's story was the center of discussion. And, as Lederer puts it, "Since then the Snow Queen has haunted me."

Lederer used his knowledge of psychology, mythology, and of Andersen's other stories to give us an interpretation of the adventures of the central characters: Kay and Gerda and the Snow Queen herself. For example, Lederer notes that Kay's behavior after the sliver from the evil mirror enters his heart is a common pattern for the adolescent boy: rejection of childish sentiment, affectation of knowledge superior to that of girls, use of such knowledge to gain power, fearful fascination with some idealized female sex symbol.

In reference to Gerda, Lederer carefully builds a case for the meaning of the red shoes that the girl sacrifices to the river as she begins her quest to save Kay from imprisonment by the Snow Queen. Lederer compares Andersen's use of the red shoes to that in his other famous story The Red Shoes and shows how in both cases the shoes symbolize the onset of female sexuality, and beyond that, forbidden license and self-centeredness. The heroine of the story The Red Shoes is almost destroyed by her decision to wear them; Gerda, according to Lederer, "makes the crucial—and Christian—decision to remain pure. . . She hopes to find favor with Life, and to find Kay, precisely because she is renouncing sexuality and choosing the path of virtue." Lederer is also astute in interpreting Gerda's stay in the perpetually flowering garden of the old lady. He notes that the flowers' stories are adolescent, "risk-free dreams of romance" and that if Gerda remained in this state of "self-absorbed, narcissistic isolation" she could not continue her quest. Lederer has interesting insights on the Little Robber Girl who frightens but befriends and saves Gerda and who "represents another possible defensive stage, . . .of the adolescent crush—of a girl's seduction by or infatuation with her girlfriends or older women."

And Lederer successfully brings together mythology and Andersen's life and works to suggest the meaning of the Snow Queen. He refers to the incident of Hans Christian Andersen's father pointing to "'a figure as that of a maiden with outstretched arms'" on a frosted window and saying (on the day he died) "'She is come to fetch me'" (Andersen The True Story of My Life 17-18). Lederer also compares the Snow Queen to a similar character in the story The Ice Maiden (who clearly represents death), and, acknowledging the influence of Nordic folklore on Andersen, he expands the symbol by reference to the Norse goddess Hel who "rules over Niflhein, or Nifhell, a cold and misty place" (the Nordic Hell). He further expands this by showing the connection between Hel and Holle, the Frau Holle of German fairy tales, a powerful and both harmful and benign figure.

With the exception that I disagree with Lederer's contention that Kay and Gerda when reunited and "grown-up but children still—children at heart" (last lines of The Snow Queen) are not destined for marriage and parenthood, I find much to praise in his interpretation of the tale...

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