The original story of the little mermaid is that she must kill the prince in order to be human, and in the end, she loves him too much and kills herself instead.
The artwork is too great not to reblog.
Ok, ok - important expansion: she only has to kill the Prince because the deal was if he fell in love with her she could be human forever, and he didn’t. By which I mean, he was a good person and genuinely nice to her, but he didn’t fall in love. He fell in love with someone else, also perfectly nice - not the seawitch in disguise, fu Disney. The Mermaid is told she can only return to the sea now if she kills the Prince. She goes into the room where he and his lover lie sleeping and they look so beautiful and happy together that she can’t do it.
That’s why she kills herself. And because it was a noble act she returns to sea as foam.
One moral of the story was that women shouldn’t fundamentally change who they are for love of a man, and in theory Han Christian Anderson wrote it for a ballerina with whom he fell in love. She was marrying someone else who wouldn’t let her dance.
I want this painted on my wall.
Much better than the Disney version…
The prince in the story can be interpreted as taking advantage of the little mermaid rather than “perfectly nice” depending on how you read some of the passages, but otherwise, yeah. It’s uncertain whether Andersen actually intended that moral or why he wrote it, and the story may have been fueled by the sheer pain of unrequited love (which Andersen suffered frequently, and the story can be read as forgiving and exalting the person who stays faithful to their unreturned passions to the end but cannot and does not act on them), but this is my preferred reading. I always felt that Disney completely reversed that message.
I’m all for broad interpretations of fairy tale source material, but in cases like this, Disney didn’t just make the story gentler and happier. When the mermaid’s (originally very painful) transformation, which results in the temporary (in Disney) loss of her voice, is successful in securing her “true love,” it can bring out the uncomfortable undertone that women must change their bodies and identities in order to gain the ever-necessitated love of a man. The character of Ariel could have been handled far better (I think they got it considerably more right with the TV series).
</Andersen fangirl>
(via supreme-thunder)
