Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness is Paul Binding's enthusiastic endorsement of the work of Andersen as a major European literary figure whose significance reaches far beyond than of a children's writer. Binding situates the Danish writer (truly a poetic genius of the romantic age) as an enlightened “European witness” in the mainstream of nineteenth-century literary, philosophical, and scientific currents that shaped a remarkable century of social transformation. Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875), the only son of an itinerant shoemaker and an illiterate washerwoman, was born into an impoverished social milieu (the “duck yard” of the provincial city of Odense) and yet rose to become an internationally recognized writer and celebrity, feted by the royal houses of Europe. His tales and stories have been translated into every world language. The writer's life story, embodied in the proverbial fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling” and idealized in his best-selling autobiography The Fairy Tale of My Life, is emblematic of the nineteenth-century's favored rags to riches mythos. It is no wonder that tales such as “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” and “The Little Mermaid,” which empathetically render the painful experience of alterity (Andersen never shed his outsider status) and the rewards of suffering, still hold universal appeal for millions of readers. As Binding points out, Andersen's ascent from the proletariat to the literary intelligentsia parallels Europe's ascent to modernity and the Kingdom of Denmark's transformation from an absolutist monarchy to a modern democracy. Indeed, Andersen serves as a sensitive and poetic witness to this remarkable century in five successful novels, in six eloquent travel books (he made twenty-nine foreign journeys), and, arguably, in many of his 156 tales and stories. In some of his later futuristic fairy tales, such as “In A Thousand Years' Time” (originally published in 1852), in which Andersen prophetically depicts Americans touring Europe by “air-ship” in the next millennium, he anticipates advances in technology and transportation with wary skepticism. Paul Binding rightfully applauds Andersen's “pre-modernist” sensibilities in this most recent study.Thankfully, this study is not a literary biography adhering to a detailed chronology of Hans Christian Andersen's well-documented life and literary career; the famous Dane was a prolific diarist and letter writer and, with constant view to posterity, composed his autobiography in three versions. The task of sorting fact from fiction has already occupied many generations of scholars, most of them Danish. Most recently, H. C. Andersen's biography has been revisited by Jens Andersen (the surname is one of the most common in Denmark) in his two-volume Andersen—en biografi (2003); the present study has made use of the English translation of Jens Andersen's work, Hans Christian Andersen—A New Life (2004). Binding's new monograph focuses on Andersen's prose contributions, particularly his novels, canonical tales, and travel books. Binding reads these texts in dialogue with a much wider European context—that is, in conversation with Andersen's English, German, French, and Scandinavian literary antecedents, contemporaries, and descendants: the tales and novellas of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Adalbert von Chamisso, and Ludvig Tieck, as well as Goethe; the novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Walter Scott (much is made of Scott's influence), as well as those of Balzac, Stendahl and Zola. Naturally, the wider Scandinavian context is also considered (Asbjørnsen and Moe's Norwegian fairy tales, Henrik Ibsen's early dramas, and Frederika Bremer's Swedish novels), as well as the canonical literary and intellectual figures of the Danish Golden age (Adam Oehlenschläger, B. S. Ingemann, N. F. S. Grundtvig, and Søren Kierkegaard) and the Modern Breakthrough (Georg Brandes). Binding's frame of reference is far ranging, even including Russian writers, such as Turgenev and Tolstoy.Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness is structured according to a selection of Andersen's major prose contributions. For example, a discussion of Andersen's debut novel The Improvisatore (1835), which Binding claims as “a European novel, which deserves a firmer place in literary history” (86), precedes the pioneering collection, Fairy Tales Told for Children (first published in 1835 as Eventyr, fortalte for Børn). The many quotations in the original Danish are a welcome aspect of this study that allows the reader (with the English translations provided) to experience Andersen's animated prose. Further, Binding makes some useful thematic connections between Andersen's less recognized novels and the celebrated fairy tales and stories.Paul Binding is hardly the first scholar to pull the Danish romantic genius off the children's book shelves in order to place him on the world stage of adult literary classics (in Denmark, he has always been understood as an adult writer). Binding's ambition is to establish Andersen's centrality as a canonical literary figure in Europe by arguing that Andersen's works both anticipated the European masters and also influenced later novelists. Binding argues, for example, that Andersen's second novel O.T. (published in 1836) is a “forerunner of the great European novels of Dickens and Turgenev” (86) and that Andersen's third novel Only a Fiddler (published the following year, 1837), an immediate critical success (also, in English, French and German translations) is a “milestone in the history of the novel-form” (139). Filling in the gaps in previous Andersen scholarship, Binding offers lively and detailed summaries of these works and situates them in the historical and cultural context of post-Napoleonic revolutionary Europe. In some cases, it is difficult (from Binding's discussion) to judge what makes these works overlooked “masterpieces” on par with those of their canonized European counterparts. Is the young couple, “Naomi” (Jewish) and “Christian” (Protestant), the protagonists of Andersen's tragic novel, Only A Fiddler (who are revealed as half-siblings) related to Cathy and Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights (1847), published a decade later, as Binding suggests? Or, is this late romantic literary trope (sibling incest) simply a feature of English as well as Danish Gothic? There are many fascinating cultural and literary dimensions to Andersen's most successful novel, and Binding's study does much to illuminate these previously hidden elements.Overall Binding's study is characterized by gusto and critical ambition, lively and insightful plot summaries, abundant contextual details and imaginative new readings; nonetheless, Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness faces some challenges in executing its stated agenda. One vulnerability is the discussion of Andersen's “canonical stories” (194–255). Some critics may quibble about the selection of tales and the fact that Binding has overlooked some gems and given short shrift to others (notably, “The Nightingale” and “The Story of a Mother”). However, more problematic is Binding's reading of the acclaimed tales (“Snow Queen,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Shadow” and, later, “The Dryad”) which seem to overlook important contributions by previous critics and to incorporate only the most contentious readings (e.g., Bruno Bettelheim on “The Ugly Duckling” and Wolfgang Lederer on “The Snow Queen”). Occasionally, Binding misses the mark when interpreting Andersen's richly allegorical texts for a wide critical readership.This study also raises some questions about the significance of literary genres: novel, drama, travel book, fairy tale, or story. Andersen's fairy tales, while unique and distinctly his own, play into a long tradition of literary and folk fairy tales. Fairy tales (Eventyr, in Danish, is a word meaning both “adventure” and “tale”)—which were not generally considered entertainments for children until the early nineteenth century—follow conventions and engage intertextual allusions which are distinct from those of novels. Both the novels and the fairy tales consist of literary prose (yes, flowing marvelously from Andersen's quill pen), but Binding's readings of “Thumbelina” or “The Little Mermaid” (1837), just to take a couple examples, which draw on the literature (and Darwinian thinking) of the Modern Breakthrough (1870s), seem to lack methodology. For example, Binding enthuses that “Thumbelina,” an independent female figure (!) who cares for (and ultimately escapes with) an injured swallow, resisting the plan for her to become the mole's wife, “anticipates the first famous heroine of Andersen's admirer, Henrik Ibsen, Nora in A Doll's House” (122). Further, “The Little Mermaid,” Binding claims, “points to a later Ibsen, work, that most disquieting presentation of the invaded, disturbed female psyche, The Lady from the Sea” (122). Also somewhat problematic are Binding's assertions regarding Andersen's “devout Christianity” (Andersen was never a dogmatic Christian, although his tales often incorporate Judeo-Christian symbolism typical of romantic literary discourse). Binding reads “The Traveling Companion,” a tale rich in wit and playful allusions to folkloric and pagan antecedents, in reference to a Jewish wisdom story (The Book of Tobit) and concludes that this tale is an “all-encompassing tribute to the moral beauty of (non-doctrinaire) Christian faith” (121). Such readings do not seem critically cohesive.In the analysis of “The Snow Queen,” which embraces the pseudo-Freudian reading of Wolfgang Lederer, Binding includes so much contextual material (about the Arctic region, Sami culture and history, the Finnish Kalevala, the ancient myth of Aphrodite and Adonis, etc.), that an original reading of the fabulous fairy tale itself seems lacking. When dealing with Andersen's famously dark tale “The Shadow,” about the figure of a doppelganger, Binding draws out the “Kantian” aspect of the tale's protagonist, or “learned man” who writes about “the true, the good, and the beautiful,” a clear and verifiable tribute to Andersen's beloved mentor, Hans Christian Örsted, the Danish physicist. The tale, obviously Faustian in theme (and written during the period when Andersen was composing his idealized autobiography), deals with the profound angst of a writer, fearing the loss of genuine Selfhood to an unscrupulous celebrity persona. Here again, Binding sees another connection to Wuthering Heights, claiming that Heathcliff disappears and returns, like the shadow in Andersen's tale (both works were composed the same year).Andersen's lesser-known novels and travel books have long been deserving of greater critical attention. Binding's new study goes a long way toward filling this gap, even though it is unfortunate that not much attention is given to the poetic masterpiece among Andersen's travel books, In Sweden (originally published in 1851 as I Sverige). Perhaps, Binding could have left the canonical fairy tales aside (or integrated them only as thematic references) in order to create more cohesive and convincing study of the author's novels and travel books. Had the monograph included a full bibliography of Binding's primary and secondary sources, rather than merely citing the sources spontaneously in the end notes, it would have been easier for critics to find their way around in Binding's scholarship. Nonetheless, Hans Christian Andersen—European Witness is full of new material as well as entertaining and original insights regarding Andersen's position as a European figure in the literary mainstream

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