In the Disney version, the Little Mermaid gets the prince, the legs, and the happily-ever-after. In Hans Christian Andersen’s original 1837 fairy tale, she gets none of these things. Instead, she gets silence, agony, and a death that is not quite a death – a dissolution into sea foam that transforms, at the very last moment, into something resembling hope. The gap between these two versions of the story is not merely a difference of plot; it is a chasm between two fundamentally different understandings of what fairy tales are for, what they teach us, and what they demand of us.
The Original Story
Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” tells the story of the youngest daughter of the Sea King, a princess who is more curious, more yearning, and more spiritually restless than her five older sisters. When she reaches the age of fifteen and is permitted to swim to the surface for the first time, she falls in love with a human prince – and with the human world itself. The world above the sea represents not merely romance but something the mermaids cannot possess: an immortal soul.
Mermaids, as Andersen’s grandmother explains, live for three hundred years, after which they dissolve into sea foam and cease to exist. Humans, by contrast, have immortal souls that persist after death. For the little mermaid, this is not an abstract theological proposition but an existential crisis. She does not merely want the prince; she wants the soul that he possesses and she does not.
To obtain one, she visits the sea witch – a figure who is not evil in Andersen’s telling but merely indifferent, a businesswoman who trades in magical services at a steep price. The price is devastating: the mermaid’s tongue, her voice, her means of communication. In exchange, she receives human legs – but every step she takes on them will feel like walking on knives.
The Sacrifice of Voice
The mermaid’s willingness to surrender her voice is the story’s most profound and disturbing element. Voice is not merely a tool of communication; it is identity, agency, the means by which we assert our existence in the world. To give up one’s voice is to give up the capacity to be heard, to influence, to resist. The mermaid trades her voice for legs – for the physical ability to walk in the world of the prince – but in doing so, she renders herself invisible in the ways that matter most.
This is Andersen’s most searing commentary on the condition of women in nineteenth-century society. The mermaid’s sacrifice mirrors the expectations placed on women of his era: be beautiful, be silent, be desirable, and never, under any circumstances, speak your own mind in a way that might disturb or challenge the men around you. The mermaid’s physical transformation – from fish tail to human legs – is a metaphor for the social transformations women were expected to undergo: the abandonment of their own natures in order to meet the expectations of a patriarchal world.
The prince, characteristically, is oblivious. He finds the mermaid charming, beautiful, and agreeable – qualities that are, precisely, the products of her silence. He cannot love her because he cannot know her; her voice, the instrument of her interiority, has been given away. When he marries another woman – a temple priestess whom he believes saved his life – the mermaid’s sacrifice is revealed as futile. She gave up everything for a man who never knew what she gave.
Andersen’s Autobiography
Andersen wrote “The Little Mermaid” during a period of intense personal suffering. He was in love with Edvard Collin, a young man who was engaged to be married to another woman. The story’s themes of unrequited love, of longing for a world that is inaccessible, of the impossibility of bridging the gap between two different kinds of being, are transparently autobiographical. Andersen, who came from poverty and spent his life feeling like an outsider in the refined circles of Danish society, identified with the mermaid’s yearning for a world she could see but never fully join.
The mermaid’s sisters – who are depicted as beautiful, carefree, and content with their underwater existence – represent the people who do not share Andersen’s particular form of longing. They visit the surface world, admire its wonders, and return home satisfied. The youngest sister is different: she wants more, and her wanting is her defining characteristic and her curse. This is the fundamental dynamic of Andersen’s fairy tales – the outsider who yearns for something the world is not willing to give, and who pays a price for that yearning.
The story’s ending, in which the mermaid is transformed into a “daughter of the air” rather than dissolved into foam, is often read as a happy ending. But it is, in fact, deeply ambiguous. The daughters of the air explain that mermaids do not have immortal souls and cannot obtain one through human love. They can only earn one through three hundred years of good deeds – spreading health and restoration to sick humans. The mermaid’s transformation is not a reward; it is a postponement of oblivion, a chance to earn what was not given.
The Disney Erasure
Disney’s 1989 animated film transformed Andersen’s story beyond recognition. The mermaid – now named Ariel – is spunky, rebellious, and vocal, qualities that would have been foreign to Andersen’s quiet, yearning protagonist. The sea witch, Ursula, is a straightforward villain rather than a morally ambiguous businesswoman. The prince falls in love with Ariel, defeats Ursula, and the mermaid receives both legs and a wedding. The sacrifice of voice, which is the heart of Andersen’s story, is reduced to a temporary plot device – Ariel gets her voice back in time for the final musical number.
The Disney adaptation is not a betrayal of Andersen’s story; it is a different story entirely, one that reflects the values of its era rather than the values of the 1830s. Where Andersen wrote about the cost of desire, Disney writes about its fulfilment. Where Andersen explored the impossibility of crossing boundaries, Disney celebrates the transgression of them. Where Andersen offered ambiguity and sacrifice, Disney offers certainty and reward.
Both versions have their place. But the erasure of Andersen’s darker themes – the sacrifice, the suffering, the unrequited love, the ambiguous ending – has had consequences for how we understand fairy tales as a genre. When we reduce fairy tales to simple morality tales with happy endings, we lose the depth and complexity that made them powerful in the first place.
What Fairy Tales Teach Us
Andersen’s fairy tales are not children’s stories in the modern sense. They are dense, emotionally complex narratives that explore the most difficult aspects of human experience: loss, longing, suffering, death, and the search for meaning in a world that often seems to offer none. They do not provide comfort; they provide truth. And the truth they offer is often painful.
The Little Mermaid’s story teaches that love is not always returned, that sacrifice does not always produce the desired result, that the most important things in life cannot be obtained through magical bargains. These are not lessons that children find easy to absorb, which is why Disney softens them so drastically. But they are lessons that adults need to hear – and that the fairy tale tradition, at its best, is designed to deliver.
The power of fairy tales lies not in their plots but in their emotional architecture. They create spaces in which readers can confront the most difficult aspects of existence – without the risk of real-world consequences. A child who reads “The Little Mermaid” is not merely entertained; she is introduced to the reality that the world is not always fair, that love can be unrequited, that sacrifice can be futile, and that sometimes the best outcome is not the one we wanted but the one we can live with.
The Silent Legacy
Andersen’s Little Mermaid, unlike Disney’s, does not get a happy ending. She dissolves into sea foam, then becomes a daughter of the air, and finally – after three hundred years of good deeds – may earn the immortal soul she sought. It is an ending that offers hope without guarantee, redemption without resolution. It is, in other words, an ending that tells the truth.
The statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen’s harbour – small, melancholy, gazing out at the water – is one of Denmark’s most visited landmarks. It is a monument not to the Disney princess but to Andersen’s creation: a figure of longing, of sacrifice, of the unbridgeable distance between what we want and what we can have. Tourists flock to it every day, many of them unaware of the story it represents. But the statue persists, silent as the mermaid herself, waiting for someone to look closely enough to see the sadness beneath the beauty.
Sara Bright is a literary critic and cultural commentator. She writes about fairy tales, folklore, and the stories we tell ourselves.
