HCA
The other day, the New York Times published an article by Sadie Stein entitled “My Love-Hate Relationship With Hans Christian Andersen.” (1) “When I was 7 years old, I disgraced myself,” Ms. Stein admits. The cause was Andersen’s story of the Little Match Girl, which caused the young Stein to break into a fit of tears.
As I sat in class, I started thinking about the friendless urchin, burning her last match in order to warm herself and conjure memories of her late grandmother — only to be found, frozen, on the streets of Copenhagen on New Year’s Day. And, well, I bawled.
Other young children had similar reactions to other HCA stories:
I was in 3rd grade, I believe, when the teacher read us the story of “The Fir Tree”. I had to be sent home because I couldn’t stop crying.
I also found myself randomly bursting into tears over one or another of HCA's stories.
My HCA story is The Little Mermaid. I have vivid memories of reading it as a child and sobbing and reading it so I would sob.
I don’t believe that as a child I was introduced to Andersen’s stories. Over time I have learned about some of them—much to my surprise. I did not know of the morbidity of his stories, that, for example, the Little Mermaid has her tongue cut out. I learned from Ms. Stein’s article that “The Emperor’s New Clothes” was an Andersen work. In that work a child doesn’t suffer, but with the clearsightedness of youth speaks the truth and destroys the illusions of the adults. It is a master work of satire, exposing gullibility, venality, and sycophancy. (2)
The story that frightened me as a child was another Scandinavian product—the Norwegian tale of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” It was the troll, who was hiding under the bridge, that got me. I’m not sure I’m over him to this day.
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Names
A) I haven’t been able to hunt down the original New Yorker cartoon (from circa 40 years ago, I guess), but let me describe it for you.
It’s a picture of a third or fourth year elementary school class. The students are identified beneath the photo as follows:
Scott, Jennifer, Jennifer, Scott, Scott, Scott, Jennifer, Scott, Jennifer, Jennifer (or in some other order).
B) Johnny Cash’s famous hit song “A Boy Named Sue.”
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When parents name their children they are doing it for themselves. If they were naming the child for the child’s sake they would wait. For example, if they found after a few months that the child is happy most of the time, then it would make sense to call him Felix. But, instead, we get the Scotts and the Jennifers (or whatever the fashion is that year). Or the opposite, the parents going overboard to be outré—a boy named Sue or Moon Unit or a girl named Apple.
The children have, of course, no say in the matter (they can’t even talk yet) and they’re stuck with their name.
I propose a solution for all those children who despise the name inflicted on them. Let there be a law which allows a child, upon reaching 14 years of age, to shed its old name and adopt one that he/she feels comfortable with.
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First Day of School
From The New Yorker Oct. 9, 1943:
We saw our daughter off on the school bus for her first day at kindergarten—a serious child, braced for the unknown, her nose running a little with excitement. Her eight-year-old brother, an upper-classman, sat beside her, wearing a strained and rather distant expression. He was, we knew, very conscious of his responsibility for the public behavior of this most unpredictable member of the family. "Don't get the idea you can go whooping around at school the way you do here," he had told her severely at breakfast and, because he seemed concerned about her nose, we had pinned an extra handkerchief to her blouse.
Now she was sitting as close to him as she could, but she had her hands in her own lap, having been instructed on this point and being anxious not to offend.
The bus pulled away from the door and we waved, admiring her dignity and wishing her well. We went back to our own breakfast, touched by all the profound and immemorial banalities of the occasion. We'd found nothing to say except goodbye when the bus left, and even now we could think of nothing that might have been helpful to a little girl on her way to school, to her first experience with the gathering perplexities that beset a lady on her own. Just try to take it easy, kid, was really the only advice we had to give her on such a solemn moment in her life, but somehow it didn't seem quite suitable.
It was wonderful advice, but as we knew from experience it had never been much use to anybody in a crisis.
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(2) It’s really a rebuttal to the authoritarian’s demand: “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”
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