You Might Have Forgotten

How the pre-Disney "Little Mermaid" story went.  I remembered the part about how when she left the sea, each step she took with her legs felt like walking on knives.  But I'd forgotten that she gave up her voice, too.  And I completely forgot how it ended -- that the prince didn't choose her, after all, and that she chose not to kill him to save her life, and she ended up as the wind, a daughter of the air.... 

Comments

[Jill]

I hate those old fairy tales!

[hilllady]

That story used to give me nightmares as a kid. Now Disney gives me nightmares.

[yasmín]

I really liked it even if it was tragic.

[shanghaiman]

I like the fair tales when I am a child. And I now like it more though I have been an adult.

[Hippopotamus]

I read it a long time ago, as a child, and remember crying over it because it didn't have a happy ending like Disney movie. Reading it now, the story screams out allegory -- the mermaid experiences a pain like a "sword entering her body" and bleeds profusely during the same experience. And somehow, it's even sadder read as a sad story about female loss of innocence or first female sexual experience than it is purely as a sad story about a mermaid.

She ended up sea foam, actually. She had to kill the prince's wife to be allowed to return to the sea as a mermaid, but she couldn't do it. So she jumped off the boat and became part of the sea.

[AdriftAtSea]

Most fairy tales, at least the originals are fairly horrific in nature. Disney tends to corrupt them and make them have "happy" endings, which were really the exception, not the rule.

[Elfie]

I have never seen a Hans Christian Andersen with a happy ending -- hated him as a child. The Grimms were essentially ALL happy: reinforcing, really, because evil is always punished and good always prevails. The Russian ones are spectacular in this regard. My children LOVE baba yaga, in all her terrifying glory, because good will prevail in those stories. If you want a bad fairy tale ending, read the "Swan Princes" - HCA is a major downer.

I have always been fascinated by M.L. von Franz's Jungian analysis of myths and fairy tales. It is fascinating to me, culturally, that the myths that we tell ourselves (via Disney) are born of -- but distort -- the cultures that amalgamated to make the US. Our own myths portray the collective shadow as well as the "old world" ones do. What we're afraid of is failure. We will only countenance a winner with a happy ending. Now THAT is scary.