Age(ism) in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales

1 The fantastic genre of fairy tales

To this day, Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) is one of the world’s best-known writers of fairy tales, or, to be more precise, of literary tales (“Kunsteventyr”, “Kunstmärchen”). Unlike folk tales (“folkeeventyr”, “Volksmärchen”) such as those collected by the Brothers Grimm, literary tales are not transcriptions of oral narratives but spring from the writer’s own imagination; they are generally characterized by, among other things, a heterogenic, often sombre world view which contrasts with the archetypically black-and-white happy-ending of folk tales (e. g., Mayer and Tismar 2003: 1–12; Klotz 1985: 1–6; Ewers 2014; for Andersen’s use of literary tales see Klotz 1985: 245–255; Bøggild 2020).^[1]

When interested in matters of age(ism), both literary and folk tales constitute a more than rich source, which is not least due to the genre’s abundance of (all too often clichéd) depictions of both youth and senectitude. In addition to that, matters of age also come into play through the specific audience of this genre, as although fairy tales are prone to be labelled as children’s literature ­– a result of the (stereotypical) equation of the genre with youth – they are commonly read to a child by an adult and are thus consumed across the ages. What is more, literary tales, in particular, were and still are usually written also with an older audience in mind (e. g., Fix 2008: 156; Deats and Lenker 1999: 90) – and Andersen himself explicitly addressed his tales to both children and adults (e. g., Neuhaus 2017: 139).^[2]

Age is, of course, an ambiguous concept, which can, for instance, refer to chronological age (the numerical total of years lived), biological age (physical strength, health and vigour), social age (the culturally constructed behaviours linked to a chronological age) or individual age (our own self-image) (Deats and Lenker 1999: 9). The two tales I will look at in the following rarely reveal the chronological age of their protagonists; instead, it is rather biological signs of ageing as well as socio-cultural assumptions about specific age cohorts that are brought to the fore. In Andersen’s tales, his specific approach to age also confronts the reader with practices of ageism, defined as “the stereotyping of and discrimination against individuals or groups on the basis of their age” (Swift et al. 2019: n.p.; see also Levy and Macdonald 2019; Chasteen et al. 2019). In this paper, I will focus in particular on forms of everyday ageism, a practice of social injustice manifested in “brief verbal, nonverbal, and environmental indignities that convey hostility, a lack of value, or narrow stereotypes” (Allen et al. 2022: 147), in the course of which persons of a certain age – in Andersen’s tales in particular older adults – become stripped of their individuality and are seen as part of a group “decidedly different from mainstream society and, by extension, not guaranteed the same rights, privileges, and respect” (148).

In Andersen’s work, depictions of (older) age as well as of socio-cultural conceptions of and reactions to it are generally framed by a subtle criticism of his contemporaries. In this context, I agree with Maria Sabina Draga-Alexandru when she argues that Andersen “uses the fairy tale form [...] as a means of challenging reality and of practising social observation.” (1999: n.p.) With that said, it will come as no surprise that Andersen – in concordance with the basic features of the fairy tale genre – made ample use of elements of the fantastic. Draga-Alexandru even feels tempted to categorize Andersen’s work not as “fairy tales” but “fantastic stories” (1999: n.p.). In contrast to that, Jacob Bøggild points out that fantastic stories

distinguish themselves by the fact that something potentially supernatural emerges as an unexpected intervention in an otherwise realistically described world, so that doubts or hesitations come up as to what is going on. This is in stark contrast with the world of fairy tales, where the starting point is that the supernatural is an integral part of the narrated world. (2020: 53–54; my own translation)

Following Bøggild, I thus understand Andersen’s texts as literary tales, in which facets of (older) age are approached with the help of a broad spectrum of elements of the fantastic, ranging from (unrealistic) forms of the supernatural such as anthropomorphic plants, animals, and things to our faculty of imagination and (religious) beliefs.

Against this backdrop, the article at hand aims to gain a better understanding of depictions and constructions of age(ism) in Andersen’s tales and the associated role of various elements of the fantastic. In this regard, I am also interested in how far both the tales’ narrators as well as the readers, as two of the key agents of literary communication, may contribute to the construction of age(ism). My analysis is based on a close reading of two tales in which these matters carry particular weight: 1) In my reading of “Grandmother” (“Bedstemoder”, 1845), I will first focus on the realm of the (realistically) imaginary, or, to be more precise, on the faculty of imagination. In this context, I will examine how the age-related juxtaposition of imagination and wisdom in “Grandmother” challenges reductive definitions of knowledge as a mere matter of intellect and experience, and, associated with that, will reflect upon the impact the narrative voice may have in this regard. 2) By taking the example of “The Old House” (“Det gamle Huus”, 1847), I will then turn to displays of ageist stereotypes and practices in anthropomorphic objects and will ask how far the fantastic serves as a mirror of socio-cultural conceptions of and reactions to older age. Drawing on the idea of an “ageist” reader approach, my analysis will go on to explore how the tale’s ambiguous openness towards both realistic and fantastic interpretations may affect constructions of age(ism).

2 Knowing age from youth to senectitude – and beyond (“Grandmother”)

Being frequently “exposed to age stereotypes by their environment, including outlets intended expressly for them” (Levy 2009: 333), preschool children are already at risk of internalizing age stereotypes (e. g., Levy 2009; Bergman 2019; Flamion et al. 2020). One of these socializing sources is children’s literature (e. g., Joosen 2015: 127; Joosen 2019). As Francelia Butler argues, literary depictions of older age can at times even be regarded as “educational-social propaganda to teach understanding of the plight of the old and to varying degrees, they succeed” (1987: 34). Although Andersen’s tales can be read as critical reflections of socio-cultural stances towards age,^[3] it has to be noted that his work is not free from (all too negative and all too positive) age stereotypes itself. As Sylvia Henneberg argues, Andersen’s portrayal of grandmother figures like the one in “The little Mermaid” (“Den lille havfrue”, 1837) seems paradigmatic for an ageist marginalization of older (benevolent) women:

Even children realize [...] that the wisdom the Little Mermaid’s grandmother imparts, that all beauty comes at a cost but that its acquisition is imperative, has its limitations. [...] Another problem is the fact that these elders give advice from an aloof position, far removed from the center of action. [...] All too often, fictional benefactresses are ultimately self-sacrificial lambs in disguise [...] existing only to develop other characters and plot lines rather than their own. (2010: 129)^[4]

In a way, Andersen’s literary tale “Grandmother” (1845) does not seem to be an exception in this regard, which is not least due to the tale’s implicit linking of youth and senectitude with the child’s faculty of imagination and the wisdom of older people. While I do not contest that this can promote stereotypical notions of both younger and older age, I would nonetheless argue that Andersen’s specific construction of this linkage challenges the idea that “knowledge” can only be acquired through intellect and experience. One of the pillars of my argument is to be seen in the narrative voice: in Andersen’s tale, (older) age is approached from the by and large “realistic” perspective of a (human) narrator, who apparently speaks about his or her own “Grandmother”, a term that, as its continuous capitalisation indicates, is also used as a name. In the course of the tale, this (largely unspecified) narrator seems to develop from a child to an adult: The further the story progresses, the more mature the narrative voice sounds.^[5] This is also strengthened by statements such as “[d]ust has been piled over the coffin; dust is inside it; the leaves of the hymnbook are dust” (Andersen 2004 [1845]: n.p.) that insinuate that the tale’s eponymous grandmother passed away several decades ago. As the narrator’s initial mode of speaking implies (e. g., “Grandmother knows a great deal”), the older woman is first presented through the eyes of a child. While the eyes of this child first glide over the older woman’s external appearance, her “many wrinkles, and her hair [...] completely white”, the attention gradually shifts to her inner life, which becomes most evident in the woman’s reaction to a withered rose in her own withered hands:

In the middle of the [hymnbook] is a rose, which is very flat and dry, and not nearly so lovely as the roses she has in the vase, yet she smiles at it the most sweetly of all, and the tears even come into her eyes. [...] every time her tears fall upon the rose its colors become fresh again; the rose swells and fills the whole room with its perfume; the walls sink as if they were made of mist, and all about her is the green, beautiful wood, with the summer sunlight streaming through the leaves of the trees. And Grandmother – why, she’s young again, a lovely girl with yellow curls and round red cheeks, pretty, graceful, fresher than any rose. (Andersen 2004 [1845]: n.p.)

It can be assumed that the sight of the rose awakens memories of a long-bygone love and all the emotions involved. While from the outside, the woman’s feelings are only visible through the tears in her eyes and the smile on her face, in the child’s inner mind the natural laws of temporal linearity are suspended, so that the dead rose is back to fragrant, colourful life and the old woman a young, glowing girl once more.

Subtly emphasizing the child’s ability to picture the older woman’s internal state of being, Andersen’s tale parallels the faculty of imagination with empathic interpretation. As features of our inner world, imagination and interpretation are often seen as an antithesis to (empirical) knowledge. At first glance, this seems to be supported by the tale’s contrasting of the child and its imaginative world view with the archetypical figure of the grandmother and, accompanied by that, a stereotypical depiction of wisdom.^[6] Our faculty of imagination can, however, also be understood as a “tacit” knowledge of its own: According to Benedetto Croce, “[k]nowledge has two forms: it is either intuitive knowledge or logical knowledge; knowledge obtained through the imagination or knowledge obtained through the intellect” (1922 [1902]: 1; italics in the original). When defining wisdom as a form of logical knowledge accumulated through years of experience, older age builds an (epistemological) antipole to the more inexperienced state of childhood. What the child in Andersen’s tale nevertheless displays – despite its young age – is an ability to observe what is perceptible from the outside (facial expression, gesture, etc.) and to use this information to draw a conclusion about another person’s feelings. Combining the empirical world view with the creative power of imagination, the faculty of (empathic) interpretation thus becomes a mediator to or translator of an otherwise invisible (inner) world. Its lack of comparable biographical experiences notwithstanding, the child seems to “know” what the grandmother is feeling – in this way presenting us with a sort of knowledge that touches on what can be described as “intuitive” knowledge.^[7]

In Andersen’s tale, the issue of (age-related) knowledge takes another intriguing turn when the narrator proclaims after the death of the grandmother: “A dead person knows more than all we living ones know. The dead know what terror would sweep over us if the strange thing were to happen that they should return among us. The dead are better than we.” (Andersen 2004 [1845]: n.p.) Whereas the initial rejuvenation of the older woman was still explicable as the child’s visual interpretation of the grandmother’s inner state, this endowment of the dead with abilities tied to the living (knowledge, goodness) is an anthropomorphism that ultimately leads from the realm of imagination to that of fantasy. While fantasy and imagination are often used as synonyms, there is a fine line between them: imagination denotes mental images that are realistically possible; in contrast to that, fantastic ideas exceed the familiar frameworks of human reality. As Brigitte Görnitz puts it: “Fantasy presents itself as a possibility to go beyond the limits of reality and the limits of space and time. Fantasy is not tied to the past or the present, but can make the future conceivable, visible, and tangible and does not have to be subject to logic” (2002: 21; my own translation). If we apply this definition of the fantastic to Andersen’s tale, the afore-cited proposition “[a] dead person knows more than all we living ones know” implies the idea of some sort of “ontological knowledge”, a knowledge that is fed by experiences of both life and afterlife, by an insight into both the physical and the metaphysical world. When pursuing this idea further, “ontological knowledge” becomes connected not (only) with the earthly but the unearthly, not (only) with the natural but the supernatural, and it is only in this unreachable world of the afterlife that the earthly unknown becomes “empirically” verifiable. In Andersen’s tale, phenomena such as intuition, imagination, empiricism, or wisdom thus seem, despite their differences, not to be mutually exclusive, but represent to every character in the tale their own form of “knowledge”. In light of the tale’s narrator’s apparent belief in an afterlife,^[8] and considering that religion is inherently a matter of faith, of venturing beyond the limits of empirical evidence, Andersen’s tale subtly evokes yet another facet of the “fantastic”: after all, by exceeding any real-life experience, the afterlife can never be approximated via the level of (realistic) imagination but only via the level of (unrealistic) fantasy.

But do all these considerations really correspond with the world view of a narrator who, as stated above, is still a child? Maybe they do, maybe they do not – and they do not have to: because, when considering the implied development of the narrative voice from that of a younger to that of an older person, the narrator’s thoughts on death and the afterlife are no longer expressed by a child but represent the religious beliefs of an adult. By and large, Andersen’s “Grandmother” thus presents the reader with a circle, in which knowledge, imagination, and even the realm of the fantastic are shown as indispensable elements of human life, from childhood to senescence – and beyond.

3 Fantastic mirrors of real-life ageism (“The Old House”)

In Andersen’s “The Old House”, matters of older age are foregrounded from the very beginning. At the centre of the tale is a 300-year-old building, visibly marked by decay: the mortar has fallen out, the rain spout is leaking, the flooring is full of holes. A stand-alone relict of long-passed times, the building forms a contrast to the modern appearance of the neighbourhood, much to the chagrin of its surrounding houses. It is, however, not the house’s dilapidated condition but its old-fashioned features and its obsolete architectural design which are the bone of contention:

All of the other houses in the street were so neat and modern, with large windowpanes and smooth walls, that you could easily tell they would have nothing to do with the old house. They evidently thought, “How long do you suppose that decrepit old thing is going to stand there, making an eyesore of our street? [...] It makes one feel ashamed!” (Andersen 2004 [1847]: n.p.)

In Andersen’s tale, the old house seems almost symbiotically connected with its occupant, whose well-groomed appearance cannot hide the signs of biological age: “An old man lived over there – an old man who wore old-fashioned plush breeches and a coat with big brass buttons, and a wig that you could plainly tell was a real one” (Andersen 2004 [1847]: n.p.). Like the old building, the man’s age seems to cause rejection in those around him. But in contrast to the anthropomorphic realm of objects, whose almost hostile reaction to their older counterpart exceeds simple equanimity (cf. words such as “decrepit” or “ashamed”), the human stance towards older age instead finds expression in the form of ignorance, in an indifferent disregard: “One day the little boy heard his parents say, ‘The old man over there is very well to do, but he’s terribly lonely!’” (Andersen 2004 [1847]: n.p.). Analogous to the labelling description of the house as an “old thing,” the phrase “old man” reduces the neighbour to his age and, like a magnifier of socio-cultural stereotypes, reflects the all-too-negative equation of older age with being alone and, correlatively, of being alone with loneliness. In addition, the lack of content and the general tone of the parent’s remark suggest an overarching age segregation^[9] that borders on structural ageism, i. e., the exclusion or de-prioritization of specific age cohorts through collective practices (Gendron 2022: 34).

Despite their assumption about his social and emotional state of being, the boy’s parents do not get in touch with their neighbour, contributing in this way to his social isolation. Instead, it is only the boy who befriends the man and keeps him company. Contrasted with the adults’ stance towards older age, the child is thus implicitly associated with a moral high ground, in the course of which ​​chronological maturity (cf. Latin adultus = “mature”) becomes, ironically, juxtaposed with social (or rather: moral) immaturity.^[10] Also, with regard to the house, the boy does not exhibit any attempt to ignore or alter older age, but rather associates it with the excitement of a vibrant palimpsestic vision of past and present: in the fantastic game of his imagination, the past and the inanimate are brought to life and, correlatingly, are even given a voice that enables them to revolt against the dread of oblivion:

When he [the boy] looked across at the wall where the mortar had fallen out, he could imagine the strangest pictures. He could see the street as it was in the old days; he could see soldiers with halberds, and the houses with their steps and projecting windows and pointed gables, and rainspouts in the shapes of dragons and serpents. [...]

Then the door opened. [...]

There were heavily carved chairs there, with high backs and arms on both sides. “Sit down! Sit down!” They cried. “Oh, how I creak! I know I’ll get the gout, like the old cupboard! Oh!” (Andersen 2004 [1847]: n.p.)

Despite the boy’s acceptance of the old, the ageist rejection of allegedly “outdated” things and humans is not overcome in the course of the tale but taken up once more in the form of an anthropomorphic toy, a little tin soldier the boy gives the old man as a present. For the tin soldier, the sudden confrontation with the lifeworld of older age is insufferable: “‘I can’t bear it any longer [...]. It’s so lonely and sad here! [...] How lonely this old man is! Do you think he ever gets a kiss? Do you think he ever gets a kindly look or a Christmas tree? He’ll get nothing but a funeral – I simply can’t stand it any longer!’” (Andersen 2004 [1847]: n.p.). In implicit reflection of both the (anthropomorphized) things’ and (human) society’s prevalent disregard of older age, the toy perceives the old man as lonely. Nonetheless, this observation does not cause any sympathy in the tin soldier – whose metal core is quite an obvious symbol of emotional and social hardness – but an all-pervasive striving to be affected by this as little as possible, without giving a thought either to a possible co-responsibility for older age’s assumed misery or to what such a dismissive (or rejecting) conduct might mean for oneself in the future.

Similar to the anthropomorphic houses, the callous toy in this way becomes an implicit mirror of real-life age stereotypes and correlating practices of social injustice. In this regard, it is precisely “[h]is use of non-humans (things, animals)” that allows Andersen

freedom to articulate the follies of human vanity and expose humankind’s fraught social behaviors. [...] Things-as-humans can have distinctive moral inflections that force humans (the readers) to see their own self-centered anthropocentricism. That is, readers are made to see themselves as humans by way of things. But because they are excluded from a human code of ethics, anthropomorphic objects can act out more freely [...]. (Sanders 2012: 31; italics in the original)^[11]

In this way, Andersen’s use of anthropomorphism reminds one of George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s argument that personifications “are extensions of ontological metaphors” as “they allow us to make sense of phenomena in the world in human terms – terms that we can understand on the basis of our own motivations, goals, actions, and characteristics” (1980: 34). Ēriks Bormanis expands on this thought when he says: “In other words, personification has an ontological function in language and thought. If we need to reason about the existence of something, we do so from a human perspective, and the primary and most important form of existence to humans is life” (2017: 100).

In “The Old House”, the socio-cultural rejection of older age mirrored in the anthropomorphized world of things is ultimately not reversed. Instead, and once again intensified by the tale’s linkage of the old house and its occupant, it is even carried to an extreme, when the reluctance to engage with the old does not end even with death:

[The old man] was going out into the country now, to lie in his grave. And so he was driven away, but there was no one to follow him, for all the man’s friends were dead. There was only the little boy who blew a kiss to the coffin as it was driven away. A few days later the old house was sold at auction [...]. In the spring the house was torn down, for everybody said it was nothing but a ruin. (Andersen 2004 [1847]: n.p.)

With only the child paying his last respects, the old man is buried and forgotten as soon as he has passed away, his property is distributed, his house torn down. Right up to death, older age is thus encountered with collective rejection: Society collectively waits until the aging processes have reached their anticipated end and everything old has become – or, in the case of the building, even been made – extinct.

In “The Old House”, the dichotomy between the fantastic and the real hence presents us with two forms of everyday ageism, one expressed in active rejection (represented by the world of things) and one expressed in passive ignorance (represented by human society).^[12] Although the anthropomorphic drawing of the houses and the tin soldier provide at least some insight into their inner life, the underlying reasons for ageist behaviour, especially when it comes to those of the human world, are nevertheless unexplained. Is the rejection of the old the result of an “intraindividual and evolutionary fear of death” or an “interindividual sociocultural devaluation of the elder in modern society” (Marcus and Sabuncu 2016: 1010)?^[13] “The Old House” gives no definite answer – which is not least due to the fact that Andersen hardly provides us with adult characters other than that of the old man.

When thinking of the tale’s readership, the implications of Andersen’s specific choice of characters seem quite interesting: As mentioned above, literary tales are likely to be consumed both by children and adults, all too often the parents. It can hence be assumed that a significant proportion of the readers of “The Old House” falls into the age cohort of those responsible for the discrimination of the older man in Andersen’s tale. However, by not giving us direct access to an adult point of view, adult readers are also denied the opportunity of surrogate introspection. Assuming that adult readers are more inclined to identify with human rather than fantastic protagonists, it is therefore the little boy who will most likely fulfil the role of a character with which readers can identify: after all, his pleasant and amiable personality encourages us to recognize and approve of his kindness and, correlatingly, to distance ourselves from the ageist disdain of his parents. As such, the character of the boy invites readers to reflect upon societal as well as their own attitudes to older people and to even take refuge in the thought that the younger generation’s appreciation of older people might eventually cause a societal change that one day will also turn to the (adult) reader’s own benefit.

However, it is precisely when following not a fantastic but a realistic interpretation that this pleasant image becomes damaged by subtle but unmistakable cracks. After all, the boy’s quarrel with the toy could also be read as an inner strife, and, consequently, an internalization of the adult’s way of seeing and dealing with older age. Against this backdrop, the reader has therefore reason to assume that the rejection of older age might one day also take hold of the boy when he has grown older: ageism would thus not be ended by generational change, but rather be repeated and consolidated over time. When following this train of thought, “The Old House” presents the readers with a nifty trick, as it would only allow them to overcome ageism when ignoring the tale’s realistic interpretation – and accepting the fantastic view of the child.

In the end though, the tale’s ambiguity leaves the decision as to which interpretation is ultimately chosen to the reader. Instead of being presented with explicit (moralizing) socio-cultural criticism, the readers are in this way put in charge of making their own judgements – not only about their preferred reading but also about their preferred conceptions of and reactions to older age.

4 Accepting ambiguity

With some restrictions, the two tales looked at in this article transcend the borders of space and time: even though their context ­– such as the specific depictions of objects, cultural costumes, or of flora, fauna, and climate – points to a geographical situatedness in Central and Northern Europe, the tales are not explicitly located in a certain country (which is also supported by the consequent avoidance of character names), giving them meaning beyond the borders of Denmark as the writer’s country of origin. Next to that, the rather a-historic design of the diegetic world also makes both the tales’ inherently ontological thoughts on (older) age, death, and the afterlife as well as their critical stance towards society’s dealing with these matters remain valid down to the present day. As Bøggild and Bom claim in this regard: “Andersen’s universe conveys something universal, something that can appeal to human beings across ethnic, geographical, and cultural boundaries and across time” (2020: 10). While Andersen’s tales are not free from stereotypical depictions of age themselves, they thus also display a unifying dimension, in that they counter age-bound exclusion – which is not least due to the author’s recourse to the fantastic. After all, Andersen’s broad use of elements such as anthropomorphic plants, animals, and things, as well as his appeal to our faculty of imagination and (religious) beliefs also makes it possible to deal with the physics and metaphysics of (human) life in a way that is equally understandable (and entertaining) for young and adult readers alike.

Related to that, the tales’ ambiguity as to whether a fantastic or realistic interpretation is to be preferred, eventually prevents, I would argue, the risk of an “ageist” reader: In general, a reader’s approach to a literary work can be accompanied by an (unconscious and indirect) form of ageism in that our rejection of an alternative interpretation may also include a rejection of those associated with this interpretation. An adult reader’s preference for a realistic interpretation might, for example, (unconsciously) go hand in hand with a dismissive stance towards a fantastic approach and, related to that, the perspective of children as the age group that is commonly considered most likely to accept such an interpretation. However, as pointed out and in accordance with the genre of the fairy tale (as well as most genres related to the fantastic), Andersen’s tales do not give any clues as to which form of interpretation is to be preferred – which not least implicitly contributes to the openness of his works for different age cohorts. Despite the proneness of the fairy tale genre to ageist character depictions, I would consequently argue that it is this twofold openness towards – or, as one could even say: acceptance of – both readings and readers that eventually forestalls an ageist reader approach.

By and large, Andersen’s specific juxtaposition of the realistic vs the fantastic, both within his tales and on a metalevel, is thus unmistakably linked with matters of age. For as much as the old and the young are mutually dependent and enclosed in each other, this is also true for the real and the fantastic – they are all part of one and the same life.