"The Ugly Duckling" is more troubling when you realize that it is not about a triumph over destiny and circumstance, which is the lesson you'd rather teach your children. It is about destiny fulfilling itself: "It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard if you've lain in a swan's egg" -- which is another way of saying you can work out all you want and sign up for online dating services, but you're still ugly unless you were born a swan.
Unlike in the Disney revision, Andersen's Little Mermaid does not win the Prince's love. The sacrifice of her beautiful singing voice in exchange for legs has been in vain, and she dissolves into sea foam. But her devotion does win her a chance at an immortal soul.
Some of the tales are beautifully dark, a quality of Andersen's we may have forgotten. In "The Little Match Girl," a barefoot child is wandering the snowy city on New Year's Eve, trying to sell matches. No one buys. When night falls she dares not return home penniless, for her father will beat her.
She seeks shelter in a nook between two houses. To keep warm, she begins to light her matches, one by one. With each flame, she sees a vision. The visions are increasingly elaborate: a warm stove, a Christmas trees, a table set with roast goose. Finally she sees in the glow her dead grandmother, the only person who had been nice to the girl.
She quickly lit the rest of the matches in the bunch; she so wanted Grandmother to stay. The matches burned with such brilliance that they were brighter than the light of day. Grandmother had never been so beautiful or so tall; she lifted the little girl in her arms, and they flew higher and higher in light and joy. There was no more cold, no hunger, no fear -- they were with God.
But in the cold dawn, the girl sat in the nook by the house. She had rosy cheeks and a smile on her lips: She was dead, frozen to death on the last night of the old year. New Year's morning brightened over her little body, sitting with her matches; most of the bunch had been burned. She had wanted to get warm, people said. No one knew the beauty she had seen or in what glory she had gone with her old grandmother into the joy of the New Year.
The understated ending of "The Emperor's New Clothes" casts a more devastating judgment upon imperiousness and puffery than the more slapstick way it is sometimes remembered:
No one would admit that he couldn't see anything, because then he'd either be no good at his job or else very stupid. None of the emperor's other clothes had ever been such a success.
"But he hasn't got anything on!" a little child said.
"Dear me, listen to that innocent voice," the child's father said, and people whispered to one another what the child had said: "But he's got nothing on -- a little child says he's got nothing on."
"He's really got nothing on!" everybody finally shouted. The emperor cringed, because he realized that they were right. But this is what he thought: "I have to see this through." He walked ever more proudly, and the lords-in-waiting walked behind him, carrying the train that wasn't there at all.
