Fairy Tale Fridays - The Little Match Girl

One of the fairy tales I loved best when I was young was Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl." Perhaps it's because I'm especially fond of Andersen on the whole, being of Danish descent. But I'm more inclined to believe that it's because the story is so sad and yet so filled with hope. Unlike so many fairy tales, while this one pulls no punches, there is nothing in the story that has to be sanitized for children. In fact, in reading our copy of The Little Match Girl, illustrated by Rachel Isadora and published in 1987, I found that I was reading exactly the same story as the one I had just read in my "grownup" collection of Andersen's tales. The story of "The Little Match Girl" was first published in 1845 and was intended by Andersen to be a moral lesson about the plight of Europe's poor.

On New Year's Eve, a poor girl is on the streets, barefooted, cold and hungry. No one is buying her matchsticks and she can't go home until she sells some or her father will beat her. Finally, she seeks solace in a sheltered corner and lights one of the match sticks to keep warm. Suddenly she is seeing visions of a roasted goose. When that match stick burns out, she quickly lights another and can feel the warmth of the fire she sees before her. In one vision she sees a shooting star. Her grandmother had told her that shooting stars mean a soul is going to heaven, and when she lights her next matchstick, she sees her grandmother. Quickly the girl lights the rest of her matchsticks because she so wanted her grandmother to remain with her. The grandmother grabbed the girl up in her arms and together the two ascended to heaven. In the morning, the body of the little girl was found in the corner, a smile on her face.

Lovely and touching, yes? I think so. Which is why I can't, for the life of me, explain how Rikki Ducornet took that story as inspiration for her story "Green Air" which appears in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me. In her story, an unnamed woman (I assume it's a woman, she is locked in a drawer in a cedar chest the entire story so can it be a human), is married to a brute of a man who dreams of nothing but violent sex and abuses the woman. The only correlation I can see between this story and Andersen's tale is a note that the woman has a matchbox tucked in her pocket which she begins lighting, that and the idea of an abused person looking for an escape from an untenable life. At the end of this story, I had no idea what the heck had happened. Usually if I'm stumped with these stories, the author's notes at the end did nothing to enlighten me. It was the first tale I've read in the book that I didn't enjoy.

That wasn't the strangest thing I discovered as I researched the story of "The Little Mermaid." I had no idea that it had ever been made into a musical. I love musicals and I love this story but even I couldn't possibly see how you could take such a short story and stretch it that far (although I guess if you can turn Where The Wild Things Are into a feature film, anything is possible). Still, when I found this 1987 television adaptation of the movie on YouTube, I found myself irresistibly drawn to what I was certain would be nothing short of a train wreck of a movie. In that I was not disappointed. The music is awful, the story preposterous. Let's face it, if you're a movie starring Roger Daltry and Twiggy, there's not much hope for you. I'll give the little girl playing the match girl props - she did have a terrific voice. I wonder if she was ever able to recover from starring in this bomb?

Next, in honor of Valentine's Day, my focus will be on love in fairy tales.

Fairy Tale Fridays - The Mermaid In The Tree

This week at Fairy Tale Fridays, I'm featuring a story by Tim Schaffert from My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me titled "The Mermaid In The Tree."  Each of the stories in this compilation is based to some extent on another fairy tale.  Schaffert's story is based on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," a tale that Schaffert says is not only his favorite fairy tale, but also his favorite short story.

Desiree and her sister Miranda live in Rothgutt's Asylum for Misspent Youth where they have spent nearly their entire lives after being arrested for stealing candy from a baby.  The asylum is in the village of Mudpuddle Beach where mermaids regularly wash up and die on the shores.  Parades are held in Mudpuddle Beach featuring the bodies of some of the mermaids, preserved, posed and floating in giant tanks set on platforms pulled by rickshaws peddled by the girls of Rothgutt's.  After one of the parades, Desiree meets Axle, a young man who attends Starkwhip Academy of Breathtakingly Exceptional Young Men and the two are soon sneaking out to meet.  One night the two meet and Axle is in the process of giving Desiree an engagement ring when it slips from his hand and falls into the water below.  At nearly the same time, the two see a carousel figure break loose in a storm, wash out to sea and return to view with a mermaid clinging to it's neck.  Axle rescues the mermaid but Desiree is prevented from going with him to seek care for her and will not see him again for many months.  Axle falls in love with the mermaid and it proves his undoing.

 In the original tale of The Little Mermaid,  it is the mermaid who saves the prince and her love for him that proves to be her undoing.  In Schaffert's hands, there does seem to be more of a mutual affection although the mermaid's addiction to a drug that originally saved her seems to be more important to her than does Axle.

In addition to The Little Mermaid, Schaffert borrows the mermaid's name from a fairy tale (Rapunzel).  The darkness so prominent in early fairy tales is abundant in "The Mermaid In The Tree."  There is no living "happily ever after" for any of the characters.  But while the tale has many of the elements of classic fairy tales, there was nothing that set in a particular time.  In fact, there was something about it the had the feel of a dystopian story to me.  It also reminded me of Lemony Snicket's "A Series Of Unfortunate Events," notched up grown up levels. 

You may recall me saying that Schaffert is the driving force behind Omaha's Lit Fest.  He has also published several books which are part of Unbridled Books' catalog (you all know how much I love Unbridled Books!).  I'm looking forward to reading his "The Coffins of Little Hope" which will be published April 2011.