Analysis of the fairy tale "The Little Mermaid". Another version
Everyone remembers the sad fairy tale about the little mermaid who fell in love with a handsome prince. This famous Andersen fairy tale has been published many times. In 1989, the Disney studio created a full-length cartoon based on the fairy tale, and since then the image of the little mermaid named Ariel, with red hair, a green tail and a swimsuit made of lilac shells, has become recognizable to both children and adults. I’ll tell you why the cartoon is “based on” a little lower, but for now let’s remember Andersen’s plot and pay attention to important details.
On her fifteenth birthday, the little mermaid, the youngest daughter of the sea king, receives the right to float to the surface of the sea. There she admires the beautiful ship and the young prince: it is also the prince’s birthday, the people on the ship are dressed festively and are setting off fireworks. A storm begins, the ship sinks, the prince, tired of fighting the waves, loses consciousness. The little mermaid swims with him to the shore and leaves him on the shore, where he is first found by a beautiful girl, a pupil of the monastery. The little mermaid is sad about the prince, sails to look at him, and then asks her grandmother about death and receives this answer:
“We live for three hundred years, but when the end comes to us, we are not buried among our loved ones, we don’t even have graves, we simply turn into sea foam. We are not given an immortal soul, and we are never resurrected; we are like reeds: you will tear them out it is uprooted, and it will not turn green again! People, on the contrary, have an immortal soul that lives forever, even after the body turns to dust; it flies to the sky, straight to the twinkling stars! How can we rise from the bottom sea and see the land where people live, so they too can rise after death to unknown blissful countries that we will never see!
- Why don’t we have an immortal soul? - the little mermaid asked sadly. “I would give all my hundreds of years for one day of human life, so that later I too could ascend to heaven.” (...) Is it really impossible for me to find an immortal soul?
“You can,” said the grandmother, “let only one of the people love you so much that you become dearer to him than his father and mother, let him give himself to you with all his heart and all his thoughts and tell the priest to join your hands as a sign of eternal fidelity to each other.” ; then a particle of his soul will be communicated to you and someday you will taste eternal bliss. He will give you his soul and keep his own. But this will never happen! After all, what is considered beautiful among us, your fish tail, people find ugly; they know nothing about beauty; in their opinion, in order to be beautiful, you must certainly have two clumsy supports - legs, as they call them."
Then the little mermaid secretly goes to the sea witch, and she agrees to brew a potion that will turn the little mermaid's fish tail into legs. In return, she takes away the beautiful voice of the little hand and warns her:
“Remember that once you take on a human form, you will never become a mermaid again! You will never see the bottom of the sea, nor your father’s house, nor your sisters! And if the prince does not love you so much that he will forget both your father and mother for you, he will not give himself up "You with all your heart and don't tell the priest to join your hands so that you become husband and wife, you will not receive an immortal soul. At the very first dawn after his marriage to another, your heart will break into pieces, and you will become the foam of the sea!"
In the morning, the prince finds a beautiful mute girl on the seashore and takes her to the palace. The prince was delighted with the little mermaid, he took her with him on walks, became attached to her, and she even "was allowed to sleep on a velvet pillow in front of the door of his room." However, it never occurred to him to consider her his bride, and he remembered the girl from the monastery, who, as he believed, saved his life.
The time came when the prince, at the behest of his parents, had to meet the princess of the neighboring kingdom. Imagine his happiness when she turned out to be that same pupil of the monastery. On the night after the wedding, the prince's ship sailed to his homeland, the newlyweds retired to the tent, and for the little mermaid this night was to be the last. The eldest daughters of the sea king rose from the sea and handed her a dagger:
“Before the sun rises, you must thrust it into the prince’s heart, and when his warm blood splashes onto your feet, they will grow together again into a fish tail and you will again become a mermaid, go down to our sea and live your three hundred years before you turn into into the salty sea foam. But hurry! Either he or you—one of you must die before sunrise!"
And the little mermaid kissed the sleeping prince and princess goodbye and threw the dagger into the water...
What happens next is not described in all editions of the tale. In some books, the fairy tale ends here - the little mermaid simply turns into sea foam. One of the reviews of the book "The Little Mermaid" says that the full version was not published after the 1917 revolution for ideological reasons. The fact is that, as can be seen from the quotes, the little mermaid wanted to become a human not only out of love for the prince - she wanted to find an immortal soul that would allow her to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Love here is the opportunity to enter eternity, and death is complete non-existence. Now the fairy tale is printed in its entirety in new, colorful editions, but in children's libraries it often exists in abbreviation.
What was filmed at the Disney studio? Of course, a love story with a happy ending. The sea king Triton, seeing that Ariel and the prince really love each other, turns his daughter into a human. The cartoon ends with a wedding and general happiness. Of course, there is no talk of any soul, immortality, or the like. But in the end, the little mermaid really saved the prince, she loved, suffered, sacrificed her voice, and the option with a happy ending, maybe not so bad?
However, the fact is that Ariel in the cartoon does not make a choice between the prince’s life and her own. In the book, her rival is a pious, beautiful princess very similar to her. I would even say - this is the alter ego of the little mermaid, it’s like she herself in human incarnation, and therefore the prince chooses the princess - after all, she is a human, and she already has a soul.
Illustration for the book "The Little Mermaid", artist Christian Birmingham, ed. "Good book", 2014
But in the Disney cartoon there is no princess, there is a witch Ursula who wants to seize power into her own hands. Taking the voice of the little mermaid, she turns into a beauty, bewitches the prince and leads him down the aisle. At the last moment, the little mermaid's friends disrupt the wedding, and the prince breaks his spell. Ursula is a cookie-cutter villain and there are no choices to be made to deal with her.
Still from the cartoon "The Little Mermaid" (1989): the wedding of the prince and Ursula
Accordingly, everything is clear to a child who has watched the cartoon - here is good, but here is evil, good has won, and evil has been punished. But in life, not everything is so simple, and this is why writers create their great works - to convey human wisdom and the complexity of choosing answers to the most important questions.
Well, those who carefully read the real ending of Andersen’s fairy tale will find out that after all, the little mermaid was rewarded for her difficult choice.
The sun rose over the sea; its rays lovingly warmed the deathly cold sea foam, and the little mermaid did not feel death: she saw the clear sun and some transparent, wonderful creatures, hovering in hundreds above her. She saw through them the white sails of the ship and the red clouds in the sky; their voice sounded like music, but so sublime that the human ear would not have heard it, just as human eyes could not see them. They did not have wings, but they flew in the air, light and transparent. The little mermaid saw that she had the same body as theirs, and that she was becoming more and more separated from the sea foam.
- Who am I going to? - she asked, rising into the air, and her voice sounded like the same wondrous music that no earthly sounds can convey.
— To the daughters of the air! - the air creatures answered her. - The mermaid does not have an immortal soul, and she can only find it if a person loves her. Its eternal existence depends on someone else's will. The daughters of the air also do not have an immortal soul, but they can earn it through good deeds. We fly to hot countries, where people die from the sultry, plague-ridden air, and bring coolness. We spread the fragrance of flowers in the air and bring healing and joy to people. Three hundred years will pass, during which we will do good as much as we can, and we will receive an immortal soul as a reward and will be able to experience the eternal bliss available to people. You, poor little mermaid, with all your heart strove for the same thing as us, you loved and suffered, rise with us to the transcendental world. Now you yourself can earn an immortal soul through good deeds and find it in three hundred years!
And the little mermaid stretched out her transparent hands to the sun and for the first time felt tears in her eyes.
During this time, everything on the ship began to move again, and the little mermaid saw the prince and his wife looking for her. They looked sadly at the wavering sea foam, as if they knew that the little mermaid had thrown herself into the waves. Invisible, the little mermaid kissed the beauty on the forehead, smiled at the prince and rose with the other children of the air to the pink clouds floating in the sky.
“In three hundred years we will enter God’s kingdom!”
- Maybe earlier! - whispered one of the daughters of the air. “We fly invisible into people’s homes where there are children, and if we find there a kind, obedient child who pleases her parents and is worthy of their love, we smile.”
The child does not see us when we fly around the room, and if we rejoice while looking at him, our three-hundred-year term is reduced by a year. But if we see an angry, disobedient child there, we cry bitterly, and each tear adds an extra day to the long period of our trial!
Based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" and its film adaptationsBooks
Director: Ivan Aksenchuk
Based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.
A film about love and friendship.
The little mermaid falls in love with a handsome prince and saves him from death. To be with him, the Little Mermaid loses her voice in exchange for a human form.
Director: Alexander Petrov
In the spring, during the ice drift, a young monk sees a mermaid in the river for the first time. Then she appears to him again, wanting to drag him under the water with her. Another monk, an elderly one, seeing this, understands that the mermaid is the girl he deceived in her youth and drowned herself. When a mermaid tries to drown a young monk during a thunderstorm, the old man fights with her, and both die.
USSR, Bulgaria
Director: Vladimir Bychkov
The film is dedicated to the memory of the great Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen and is based on one of his best fairy tales. The Little Mermaid fell in love with the Prince, who she once saved during a storm. For the sake of this love, the Little Mermaid sacrificed a lot: she was not afraid to leave her home and entered into a deal with an evil witch. The sorceress, using various magical spells in exchange for the Little Mermaid’s beautiful hair, created human legs for her instead of a fish tail and made it so that the Little Mermaid could walk and live on earth. The little Mermaid went through all these trials just for one thing - to be close to her loved one. But the prince, who never understood his happiness, loses her forever...
In this film, contrary to the plot of H.H. Andersen, the witch does not take away the voice of the little mermaid, and she can speak; in addition, she does not die after parting with the prince, but receives immortality. Despite these inconsistencies, the added subplots are quite interesting and add drama to an already very sad story.
A video game based on the Disney cartoon "The Little Mermaid", released by Sega in 1992 for the Mega Drive/Genesis and Game Gear game consoles (in Brazil, the Tec Toy company ported the game to the Sega Master System).
The game characters are the little mermaid Ariel and her father Triton, the ruler of the underwater kingdom. Playing for each of the heroes brings its own characteristics to the gameplay. So, Triton is armed with a trident, spewing out sheaves of sparks and some kind of laser beams, which allows him to carry out various “salutes” at his enemies, while Ariel uses sea foam as a weapon (buttons A, B).
When playing as Triton, you need to save his daughter, the little mermaid Ariel. If you play as Ariel, then you have the opposite task: to free your father, imprisoned in a dark cave at the bottom. To which, in both cases, you first have to swim, simultaneously freeing the loyal subjects of the Underwater Kingdom who have been turned into algae. This is one of the key points of the game: you can leave each game level only by freeing a certain number of mermaids and merman.
The Map (start button), from which you can find out the location of those who need to be saved, greatly helps to understand the intricate levels. It is possible to summon irreplaceable assistants (Summoned units) - the fish Flounder, raking up stone rubble, and the grumpy, but kind at heart, majordomo-accompanist of the underwater courtyard, Sebastian. Albatross Scuttle, a famous collector of various “things” from the upper world, organized his own business: in his shop (the trade screen is called up by touching the scroll with the image of a thrifty bird), the player can purchase additional “lives”, “hearts” and other things useful when passing the game .
14 years have passed since Ariel and Prince Eric defeated the treacherous witch Ursula. Ariel became human and married Eric. They had a beautiful daughter, who was named Melody. Against her mother's wishes, Melody decides to go to the ocean in search of the legendary city of Atlantica.
There is no plot as such in the game - the player controls the characters, performing various tasks in the scenery of the underwater cave familiar from the cartoon of the same name, where the treasures of Ariel, Triton's castle, etc. are stored.
The process is divided into levels reflecting various episodes from the cartoon: Ariel and Flounder on the sunken ship, the date of Prince Eric and Ariel, etc.
The player can choose their favorite mini-game right away, without having to complete the level to get to the next mission.
On various tasks, the player controls the little mermaid Ariel, the fish Flounder, the crab Sebastian or Prince Eric.
18 years after the release of the cartoon, the musical “The Little Mermaid” based on it was released on Broadway. It premiered on November 3, 2007, but the musical was temporarily closed on November 10, 2007, due to a workers' strike on Broadway. Initially, the show of the musical was supposed to be resumed on December 6, 2007, but the show date was soon postponed to January 10, 2008. In the American version, Ariel was played by Broadway musical actresses Sierra Boggess and Chelsea Morgan Stock (as a replacement for Boggess). The original Broadway production closed on August 30, 2009, a year and a half after the musical's release, largely due to poor reviews.
On March 15, 2012, the Stage Entertainment company announced the premiere of the Russian production of the musical “The Little Mermaid”. Musical actress Natalia Bystrova, who previously played Belle in the musical Beauty and the Beast, was appointed to play the role of Ariel in the musical. The musical premiered on October 6, 2012 at the Rossiya Theater on Pushkinskaya Square.
The premiere was attended by Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, many Russian theater and film stars, as well as Disney studio composer Alan Menken, who wrote several new compositions for the Russian production of “The Little Mermaid”, such as: “Daddy’s Little Girl”, “Her Voice”, “On a step closer" and others.
The musical director and chief conductor of the production is Mariam Barskaya. In connection with the participation of Mariam Barskaya in 2013 in the Stage Entertainment company's production of the musical "Chicago", the chief conductor in the second season is Irina Orzhekhovskaya, who worked as an assistant to the chief conductor in the first season.
In the fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen touches on one of the most important issues for a person: about love and self-sacrifice, about the ability to spare the feelings of people dear to you to the detriment of your own, about the fact that sometimes in the name of love you have to die in order to be happy beloved even without you.
The Little Mermaid is the youngest daughter of the sea king, who is not allowed to swim to land. She lives in complete prosperity in her father's palace at the bottom of the sea, but she is bored with such a life. One day, during a storm, the Little Mermaid sees a beautiful young man drown in a shipwreck. The sea princess's heart trembled; she could not allow his death and therefore managed to pull the young man onto land on her own. She liked the victim unusually, the Little Mermaid falls in love, but she is forced to return to the bottom.
The little mermaid cannot stop thinking about the beautiful young man. But the tragedy of the whole situation is that mermaids cannot love mere mortals. Their fate is to live three hundred years at the bottom and turn into sea foam. Love is deadly for a mermaid.
But the Little Mermaid finds herself under the control of her emotions. She makes an agreement with the sea sorceress and gives her her vote, in return receiving human legs (and, therefore, the opportunity to go ashore). However, the sorceress sets a condition: if within a few days the Little Mermaid fails to achieve mutual love from the prince, then at sunset she will die and turn into sea foam. The mermaid in love agrees, because life is not sweet to her without the prince.
Selfless love of the Little Mermaid
However, fate plays a cruel joke on the Little Mermaid: she actually manages to meet the prince, he invites her to his palace... however, the feeling he feels for her is rather the affectionate sympathy of his older brother (and he calls the girl “my dumb foundling with talking eyes "), but not the love of a man. He is forced to marry a princess from a neighboring country because his parents want him and expects the Little Mermaid to be happy for him. She is in despair because the prince’s wedding means death for her.
And the Little Mermaid accepts this death calmly, not succumbing to temptation: after all, her sisters, who also signed an agreement with the witch, offered her to kill the prince before the wedding, then she would become a mermaid again and live at the bottom of the sea for the three hundred years allotted to her. But the Little Mermaid does not agree; the happiness of her beloved is more important to her. She waits for their wedding, which is just at sunset, and quietly and imperceptibly disappears, turning into sea foam.
Thanks to this ending, Andersen leads his readers to the idea that the main thing in love is the ability to give your life for another and sincerely rejoice in the happiness of your loved one, even if he does not belong to you. The Little Mermaid in this sense is an ideal of self-sacrifice.
The love of the little mermaid for the prince is the main, central theme of the fairy tale. This is the theme not of ordinary human love, but of romantic, doomed love, love - self-sacrifice, love that did not make the heroine of the fairy tale happy, but which did not disappear without a trace for her, because it did not make her completely unhappy. In mythology, a mermaid, having lost her immortal soul as a result of evil committed against her as a person, can gain this soul if she makes a person love her. The love of a mermaid and a person does not have to be mutual. A mermaid may not respond to a person and destroy him by falling in love with herself. But a person’s love for her is the main step towards the mermaid acquiring an immortal soul. Therefore, she must provoke a person, evoke this love in him by any means and ways.
In Andersen, this theme is both preserved and rethought. The little mermaid wants to achieve the love of a person, wants to find an immortal soul. “Why don’t we have an immortal soul? - the little mermaid asked sadly, - I would give all my hundreds of years for one day of human life, so that later I too could ascend to heaven... How I love him! More than father and mother! I belong to him with all my heart, with all my thoughts, I would willingly give him the happiness of my whole life! I would do anything - if only I could be with him and find an immortal soul! .
Andersen's tale includes Christian motifs. Andersen reinterprets ancient pagan mythology from the point of view of Christian mythology: ideas about the soul, the afterlife, and life after death.
The combination of two motives is where the story of the little mermaid and the prince is born. The little mermaid saves the prince, she does good for a man who dies in the waves. Often, by the way, according to mythological beliefs, women who died in the water became mermaids. A person cannot live in an element that is not typical for his habitat. On the one hand, the little mermaid saves the prince, and on the other, she would like him to end up in her father’s palace. “At first the little mermaid was very happy that he would now fall to their bottom, but then she remembered that people cannot live in water and that he could only sail to her father’s palace dead. No, no, he must not die!.. He would have died if the little mermaid had not come to his aid... It seemed to her that the prince looked like the marble boy standing in her garden; she kissed him and wished him to live.”
For saving the prince, the little mermaid, of course, has the right to expect gratitude, but the fact is that the prince does not see her. He sees a girl standing above him on the shore and thinks that it was she who saved his life. The prince liked this girl, but she turns out to be unattainable for him, since she was in a monastery at that time.
If the task of the mythological mermaid is to make a person love herself, then the little mermaid cannot force anyone; her desire is to be close to the prince, to become his wife. The little mermaid wants to please the prince, she loves him and is ready to sacrifice everything for their happiness. For the sake of her love, she gives up her home, her beautiful voice, she gives up her essence, herself. The little mermaid completely surrenders herself to the power of fate in the name of her love.
But the prince sees in her “a sweet, kind child, it never occurred to him to make her his wife and queen, and yet she had to become his wife, otherwise she could not find an immortal soul and had to if he married on the other, turn into sea foam.”
The little mermaid’s dream is a dream of happiness, an ordinary, human dream, she wants love, warmth, affection. “And he laid his head on her chest, where her heart beat, yearning for human happiness and an immortal soul.” For the little mermaid, love is a constant overcoming of physical and moral torment. Physical - because “every step caused her such pain as if she was walking on sharp knives,” moral - because she sees that the prince finds his love; but this does not harden her. Love should not overshadow a person’s true vision of things and the world. “The little mermaid looked at her greedily and could not help but admit that she had never seen a sweeter and more beautiful face.” The little mermaid lost her voice, but gained sharper vision and perception of the world, because a loving heart sees more sharply. She knew that the prince was happy with his “blushing bride,” she kissed his hand and it seemed to her “that her heart was about to burst with pain: his wedding should kill her, turn her into sea foam!”
But Andersen gives the little mermaid a chance to return back to her family, to the palace of the sea king, and live for three hundred years. The little mermaid realizes that all her sacrifices were in vain, she loses everything, including her life.
Love is a sacrifice, and this theme runs through Andersen's entire fairy tale. The little mermaid sacrifices her life for the happiness of the prince, her sisters donate their beautiful long hair to the sea witch to save the little mermaid. “We gave our hair to the witch so that she could help us save you from death! And she gave us this knife - see how sharp it is? Before the sun sets, you must thrust it into the prince’s heart, and when his warm blood splashes onto your feet, they will again grow together into a fish’s tail and you will again become a mermaid, go down to our sea and live your three hundred years. But hurry! Either he or you - one of you must die before the sun rises! Here Andersen returns us again to the mythological theme. The mermaid must destroy a person, sacrifice him. The theme of shed blood is reminiscent of pagan rituals and sacrifices, but in Andersen’s fairy tales, paganism is overcome by Christianity, its ideas and moral values.
For Andersen, love makes irreversible changes to a person. Love always does good; it cannot be evil. And therefore, the little mermaid, holding a knife in her hand, still sacrifices her own life, and not someone else’s, chooses her own death, giving the prince life and happiness. “The little mermaid lifted the purple curtain of the tent and saw that the head of the lovely newlywed was resting on the prince’s chest.”
The first thing the little mermaid sees is the happiness and love of the prince. It would seem that this picture should arouse jealousy in her, and jealousy is unpredictable, jealousy is a force of evil. “The little mermaid bent down and kissed his beautiful forehead, looked at the sky where the morning dawn was flaring up, then looked at the sharp knife and again fixed her gaze on the prince, who in his sleep uttered the name of his wife. She was the only one on his mind!” The human world is beautiful for the little mermaid. He so beckoned her underwater, so enchanted on the day of her coming of age; she feels sorry for this world, she’s afraid to lose it, but she sees the prince who is pronouncing his wife’s name at this time. “The knife trembled in the hands of the little mermaid.” Love cannot kill another love - this is Andersen's thought. “Another minute - and she (the little mermaid) threw it (the knife) into the waves, which turned red, as if stained with blood, in the place where it fell. Once again she looked at the prince with half-extinguished gaze, rushed from the ship into the sea and felt her body dissolve into foam.” The little mermaid abandoned herself completely, but she had another dream - to find a human soul. This dream both came true and not. Love itself already gives a person a soul. It is no coincidence that the little mermaid does not turn into sea foam, love gave her the opportunity to move into another state, she becomes one of the daughters of the air.
The little mermaid again has a chance to find what she deliberately renounced. Her love and good deeds give her the right to gain an immortal soul. “Three hundred years will pass, during which we, daughters of the air, will do good as much as we can, and we will receive an immortal soul as a reward... You, poor little mermaid, with all your heart strove for the same thing as us, you loved and suffered, rise up together with us into the transcendental world. Now you yourself can earn an immortal soul through good deeds and find it in three hundred years!” And Andersen ends the tale with this theme.
Ancient mythological beliefs, having lost their power over human consciousness, were preserved in folklore and artistic images of writers from different countries. In our work, we turned to only one such image and saw how complex and individual the writer’s relationship with mythology and the mythological image is. Interpreting the image of the mythological mermaid, turning it into the little mermaid heroine of his fairy tale, Andersen partially preserves her mythological features and capabilities. But at the same time, the mythological image under the writer’s pen acquires human essence, human character, human destiny. The little mermaid, with the help of the witch's witchcraft, turns into a person, she selflessly loves the prince, this love turns out to be unrequited and even tragic, she sacrifices her life for the happiness of the prince.
Starting from pagan mythology, Andersen affirms the values and ideas of Christianity, affirms the power of human love as the greatest moral force in the whole world, regardless of whether this world is real or fantastic. And such metamorphoses in Andersen’s fairy tales occur not only with one mermaid. Any mythological characters, be it gnomes, a snow queen, an ice maiden, acquire individual characters and destinies under the writer’s pen, become like people, and are endowed with human dreams and desires. Mythological fairy-tale images are reinterpreted by the writer and used by him for the artistic reincarnation of such important moral ideas as the ideas of humanism, spiritual purity and selfless and devoted love.
