Okay so the rest of the essay be here:
I am going to preface this by saying the people involved in these stories did not intend for The Little Mermaid to be a 1:1 replica of their lives but it’s clear how significant their experiences shaped the telling of it.
Hans Christian Andersen’s sexuality isn’t easy to define especially since the society and culture he lived in wouldn’t have the language or the framework to discuss sexuality, and it would do a disservice to say he was gay when he didn’t have a known romantic life. But his love life has been defined by his numerous unrequited loves that ranged from women to men, but also his steadfast refusal to have sex.
Another aspect of Andersen is how heavily religious he was and how that showed through his work. Some of his other stories like “The Ugly Duckling”, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “Thumbelina”, and “Princess and the Pea”, all have themes around being alienated but that there isn’t a true villain in any of them and their happy endings be something close to divinity and good morality. Though not overtly religious in his stories it’s clear how much faith he had in God doing the right thing in the end.
The Little Mermaid however, is probably one of the most overt in how his religion and his sexuality intersected.
A brief overview of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid is that in his story, Mermaids are creatures born without souls, however they live significantly longer than humans.
But it’s precisely because of this, the titular Mermaid longs to become human in hopes she too will gain a soul. She chooses to trade her tongue to get a pair of legs to woo a human she rescued, and on these legs all she feels is pain and suffering, and she must do so in silence. If she cannot gain the love of her prince, she will die without a soul, and never get to heaven. All the while, the prince loves her only as a brother would in the time they spend together and eventually chooses to marry another girl.
The mermaid is then given a chance to return to her life as a mermaid if she kills the prince before she dies but in doing so she will never have a soul. She loves him too much to do so and chooses death over living as a creature with no soul.
But when she dies, she finds herself amongst the daughters of the air, and is told because of her love and her suffering she has the chance to gain a soul unlike any other mermaid. She can work for 200 years making sure children are happy and be granted a soul thereafter.
So, looking at this, you can draw clear parallels with this story and Andersen’s personal life.
Like the mermaid, Andersen saw himself as a creature without a soul. He too was in love with a man who only saw himself as a brother to Andersen. Andersen saw himself doomed to be silent, doomed to constantly feel like he was walking on knives and doomed to be alone.
But his idea of a joyous ending is that his suffering wasn’t all for naught, that his stories that he wrote for children and the joy they brought WOULD eventually grant his greatest desire to be granted a soul and accepted into heaven.
Of course there isn’t a villain, Andersen accepted that his culture that cruelly casted him out was correct in doing so, and that he had to work within the system to exist.
The Little Mermaid’s themes of suffering and love were tied to Andersen’s life and his sexuality intersecting with his religion.
The 1989 Disney version has consistently gone on record that despite have Musker and Clements being directors, Howard Ashman, a gay man with AIDS in the 80s, was the creative force in character writing, music and the creative direction the movie eventually went in.
In the movie, all of the religious aspects have been stripped away, and the motivations have been changed.
Ariel no longer wants to gain a soul, her desire to become human instead is tied with feeling alienated with her home life and wanting acceptance elsewhere. Her hobby of collecting human stuff HEAVILY echoes the experiences of many LGBT+ people who had interests outside of their gender roles, and being unable to to see eye to eye with bigoted parents. People often mistake her attempts at asserting her own identity as “being in love” when the narrative is about her wanting agency and respect for who she is.
Ursula being a villain in this version is tied to how LGBT+ people of the 1980s understanding at least part of their oppression was due to predatory and unscrupulous people, as well as being systematic. This contrasts with Andersen’s work because Andersen, despite suffering, always put faith in the systems surrounding him and only striving to work within them, while Ashman understood that to work with society you don’t do business with morally neutral people.
While Andersen sees the only option for people, or to him, creatures, like him to gain any morally good ending, they need to remain passive and work within the system to get what they want.
But the 1989’s response to that is, no, to get a happy ending, you NEED to question the system, you need to fight against it because it is a system that only uses you to get what it needs and it needs to be destroyed to get a happy ending. Like, you CAN NOT separate how this change in the story occurred with Howard Ashman being a gay man with AIDS during 1980s America.
In the end, Ariel reconciling with her bigoted father to be able to live her life as a human with another man thematically ties in to how Andersen saw his own happy ending.
The Little Mermaid is a story that can not be separated from two men who dealt with complex relationships with their own identities, and it’s disingenuous to say the 1989 film is a bad adaptation for not religiously following the plot points of the original.
The Little Mermaid is at its best when it explores how a person’s sexuality and identity is alienated from the culture around them, and how they navigate the system that oppresses them.
Andersen saw the system to be just and his idea of a happy ending clashes with Howard Ashman’s own experiences of a system that needed to be defied to have earned a happy ending.
All in all, the 1989 movie is a good adaptation, not for slavishly keeping every detail, but for reflecting where society is, and for keeping the themes of unrequited love, identity and coming of age relevant to their audience.
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