Frozen Heart: Growing Up with “The Snow Queen”

LISA LIEBERMAN

It was one of those glass splinters from the magic mirror, and poor Kai had now got it into his heart. It did not hurt any longer, but it was still there. Soon his heart would become hard and cold like a lump of ice. Even this tiny splinter had the power to make him see as evil everything that was good, and it had its effect immediately.

—Hans Christian Andersen, “The Snow Queen”



(Illustrations by Bagram Ibatoulline)

I was eight when I read “The Snow Queen” in a collection of Andersen’s fairy tales, a birthday gift from my Aunt Clementine in 1963. Earlier that year, my mother, a manic-depressive, had stopped taking her lithium and headed out to San Francisco, leaving my sister, our father, and me behind in Philadelphia. Periodically she’d call to fill us in on her doings; at some point she divorced Dad, married a truck driver she met in Haight-Ashbury, and moved with him to Arkansas. We did not see her for several years.

I still have the fairy tale book with my aunt’s inscription: To Lisa-Jo with love, Aunt Clem. Paging through it, I recognize all of Andersen’s best-known stories. “Thumbelina,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Ugly Duckling,”“The Little Mermaid,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” “The Little Match Girl,” “The Red Shoes.” Some of these tales were already familiar; others I encountered for the first time. “The Snow Queen” was the one I returned to again and again. Gerda’s quest to rescue her friend Kai from the Snow Queen’s palace spoke to my desire to get my mother back. I’m sure I found solace in the happy ending, when the two children returned home “and all around them glowed bright, warm, glorious summer.” But the resonances of Andersen’s story went far deeper, providing a way of looking at my mother’s illness that made sense to my eight-year-old mind while confirming my worst suspicions about the world.

Andersen was a perfectionist who could work for a year on a single tale. And yet he completed “The Snow Queen” in a matter of days; the story “came out dancing over the paper,” he marveled to a friend. At forty-three pages, it was the longest story in Aunt Clem’s book, but it danced for me as well. Indeed, it sang. Andersen’s heroines had a disconcerting way of dying at the end of their stories. The little match girl and the little mermaid (neither of whom had names) expired poignantly after failing to attain their desires. Crippled by the devilish red shoes, poor Karen’s heart broke and her soul was transported to heaven. But not only did Gerda achieve her goal and survive the ordeal, she went through a series of thrilling adventures in faraway lands not ordinarily permitted to girls in fairy tales. She took risks and got away with them, consorted with robbers and rough women, rode a reindeer to the very edge of the Snow Queen’s territory, and ventured as far as the North Pole without remembering to wear her warm gloves and fur-lined boots.

The story opened with the vignette of the goblins' mirror, a malicious device that magnified all the ugliness in the world and shrank the good to almost nothing. The mirror shattered and fragments of it blew through the air, lodging in people’s eyes and perverting their vision. “The worst off were those people who had by misfortune received a little splinter in their hearts. That had terrible results. Their hearts became cold and hard like lumps of ice.” The glass splinter in Kai’s heart turned him against his playmate Gerda and led him to torment the people who loved him most. One winter day he hitched his sled to the white sledge of the Snow Queen and was never seen again. 





The remainder of Andersen’s story follows Gerda as she sets off alone to find Kai and regain his love.

“The Snow Queen” explained the world I knew and I read it literally. Kai’s transformation after the glass splinter entered his heart reminded me of my mother in the grip of her illness: her increasing remoteness. The furious tirades I overheard late at night, when I was supposed to be asleep. The unaccountable outbursts of tears or rage. I couldn’t decide which was worse, the bouts of sadness that took hold of her for weeks at a time or her terrifying anger. In either case, I felt helpless and yet vaguely responsible. And when she left us, I feared that this too was somehow my fault.

The tale of the goblins' mirror absolved me. Gradually I stopped blaming myself for my mother’s problems, but I soon faced new problems of my own. My third grade teacher was exasperated with me. I held my pencil wrong and my handwriting was so poor that I was not allowed to learn cursive with the rest of the class. I handed in work unfinished and was afflicted with mysterious headaches in the middle of the school day, headaches so severe that the only remedy was to lie on a cot in a darkened room off the nurse’s office until I was sure that math was over. In the spring, when we were given standardized I.Q. tests, I couldn’t be bothered to read the questions and fill in the appropriate circle on the machine-readable forms. I amused myself by making zigzag patterns up and down the columns while my classmates laboriously followed the instructions. The school psychologist summoned me to her office and made me take the test again under her supervision. Then she began to ask me a series of questions about my “home situation.”

I knew what to expect. My sister and I had been interrogated by some of the kids on the school bus when Judy let it slip that our parents were separated; divorce was still uncommon in our community and first-hand information was hard to come by. But my mother’s non-appearance at birthday party pick-ups, P.T.A meetings, and synagogue functions piqued the curiosity of adults as well. I’d grown accustomed to being plied with questions about my “home situation” by the mothers of my friends during after-school play dates. How much anyone outside the family knew about my mother’s illness is unclear. She’d been in and out of mental institutions for several years, beginning when I was in kindergarten. I remember visiting her once or twice, playing with a wheelchair in the corridor while my parents talked in the lounge, drinking a coke in the hospital cafeteria. It seems unlikely that Dad could have kept up the façade of normalcy throughout these absences. Well before my mother left for good, my maternal grandmother had moved into the spare bedroom to help take care of us. She was the person who was waiting when we got off the bus and who went hunting around the neighborhood when we failed to come home in time for dinner, calling our names in her operatic voice that echoed across the suburban backyards. “Liiiii-sa! Juuuuu-dy!” The outline of my “home situation” was undoubtedly known, but the details may well have been sketchy.

I was never instructed on what to say and what not to say to the adults who asked questions about my mother. My own questions went unanswered, for the most part, and what little I managed to glean from eavesdropping on my father’s and grandmother’s conversations, I kept to myself. If the school psychologist wanted information, she’d have to find another source. I didn’t trust her; and besides, I had Gerda’s example before me. Along her journey to find Kai, she accepted the help of forest animals: a raven, a flock of wood pigeons, a reindeer. But trusting forest animals didn’t count; everyone trusted forest animals in fairy tales. They understood without having to ask for details: witness Bambi, another motherless creature.

Gerda’s self-reliance impressed me. Her closest human companion was a little robber maiden about her own age who slept with a dagger in her hand and threatened to hurt Gerda if she didn’t stop sighing about her beloved Kai. The robber maiden was not the wisest choice of companions, from the point of view of safety, but she had her uses. The wood pigeons who told Gerda where to find Kai belonged to the robber maiden, as did the reindeer who carried Gerda to the North Pole. Threats aside, the robber maiden was really quite thoughtful, tying Gerda firmly to the reindeer’s back, so she wouldn’t fall off, providing her with a little cushion for comfort, warm gloves (stolen from her mother) and the fur-lined boots (which she’d stolen earlier from Gerda), along with two loaves of bread and a piece of ham.

“The Snow Queen” taught me a valuable lesson: Don’t trust anyone unless you are desperate, least of all well-intentioned adults. 



The old lady who took Gerda in at the beginning of her quest turned out to be a witch, albeit a harmless one who only wanted a little girl for company, not to eat like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel.” But Gerda lost precious time amusing herself with the talking flowers in the old lady’s garden, bewitched into forgetting her friend. 



The prince and princess who took pity on her were completely out of touch with reality. They thought they were doing Gerda a favour by outfitting her with a golden coach complete with a coachman and footmen and outriders, all wearing golden crowns. The minute she left the palace grounds in this lavish get-up, robbers attacked the entourage, stabbed the servants, and looted the gold. Gerda herself was dragged from the carriage and would have become the dinner of an ugly old robber wife if the little robber maiden had not intervened in the nick of time.

Toward the end of the story, Gerda did accept food and shelter from a Lapp woman who possessed a kind of crude wisdom. The Lapp woman sent her to seek the aid of a more powerful enchantress, but even though the reindeer pleaded Gerda’s case, the Finmark enchantress claimed—much like the Wizard of Oz, another disappointing grown-up—that she had nothing to offer Gerda. “Her power is greater than anything I can give her,” the enchantress explained; “it proceeds from her heart—from her being a loving and innocent child. If this cannot give her access to the Snow Queen’s palace and enable her to pull the splinters out of Kai’s heart and eye, we can do nothing for her.”

Gerda eventually managed to reach the Snow Queen’s realm. Though barefoot and wearing only a summer dress, her prayers sufficed to protect her from the intense cold and cutting winds, not to mention a host of ice monsters. She found Kai in the frozen palace, playing with blocks of ice. Her friend was entirely without feelings: cold, silent, motionless. Gerda was wounded by his aloofness and began to cry. Her tears fell upon Kai’s chest and melted his icy heart, dissolving the splinter of glass. Would that my own wounds could be so easily healed! Tears had no effect upon my mother’s indifference and crying tended to make things worse when she was angry. Of course, I was nowhere near as pure and trusting as Gerda. It wasn’t obvious to everyone because I was quiet and generally polite—our grandmother schooled my sister and me in Old World manners—but my refusal to fill in the circles on the I.Q. test answer sheet was just the tip of the iceberg. At home too, I made my own rules, proud of my ability to look after Judy and myself, wary of even the most well-meaning offers of help or advice.

You never knew when you might have to go it alone. My paternal grandfather had killed himself during the Depression, abandoning his family when my father was still a boy. We didn’t talk about it often, but the knowledge hung there like a threat. Dad loved us without conditions; I never doubted his devotion. In an era when few fathers were involved with child rearing, he gladly took on the responsibility of raising us while working to get his business off the ground. More than one of his former associates has told me how he would walk out of a meeting in order to be on time for some performance of ours. On summer nights, we’d all get in the car and chase the ice cream truck through the neighborhoods of row houses just across the Philadelphia line from our suburban development. Once I was eating a push-up Popsicle and I pushed too hard, sending the tube of ice cream sailing out the car window. “There goes John Glenn!” Dad said. He always knew how to make me laugh in the midst of small disasters.

As Judy and I grew older, Dad worried about Grandmother’s ability to keep up with us. I think he also lacked confidence in his own ability to handle two teenage girls. He tried hiring a live-in governess, who turned out to be nothing like Mary Poppins and didn’t last long; Grandmother claimed that she drank. When I was eleven he remarried and we moved into a large new house with my stepmother and her three children. Taking a generous view, I can see how difficult the situation was, in the late sixties especially. Family therapy was in its infancy and the media barely acknowledged the existence of blended families like ours. There was the von Trapp Family, but Maria didn’t bring any children of her own to the marriage and the need to flee the Nazis soon overshadowed the family’s interpersonal problems. Sanitized sitcoms like “The Brady Bunch” missed the point entirely. The domestic dramas in our household could not be resolved in half an hour and none of those programs was about divorced families.

Fairy tales offered greater insights into our conflicts than television or movies. My stepmother was not wicked, but she did favor her son over my sister and me—and over her own daughters, I should add. Although I did not feel that she wished me ill, neither did she take pride in my accomplishments. It seemed as if there was not enough love to go around in our household. Damaging rivalries developed, many of which persist to this day. I saw myself as an outsider in the family, like Cinderella, and spent as little time as possible at home. I stopped being a problem child at school. In fact, I became a model student, a good girl. But the Finmark enchantress’s words haunted me: only a pure-hearted child had the power to restore lost love. How could I restore my innocence?

When I was thirteen, my mother moved back to Philadelphia with her husband and two-year-old son, my half-brother Mike. Shortly after the birth of my half-brother Rob, she left her husband, an alcoholic, and moved into an apartment near Grandmother’s. I recall an afternoon here, a weekend there, when traces of her illness emerged. Winter days when she kept the shades down in her apartment and never got dressed, letting Mike and Robbie watch television all day and eat cereal out of the box. Screaming arguments with Grandmother over everything and nothing. A trip we all made with an old friend of hers, a woman she’d met years before in the mental hospital, the two of them laughing, drinking, chain-smoking, talking ceaselessly and making no sense, when it seemed like we’d never get home. I still cannot pinpoint the time when our roles reversed, when I took on the burden of being the parent and she became the child.

I imagine another ending to “The Snow Queen” where Gerda finds Kai but cannot melt the splinter of glass in his heart. Despite Hans Christian Andersen’s assurances to the contrary, the power of childhood innocence is tragically overrated. So her friend remains cold and cruel, unreachable, and Gerda is stuck in the frozen palace forever. Or perhaps she never finds him but carries on the search to her dying day, always believing that he was a victim, a prisoner whom she failed to free. I suspect that it makes no difference, whether Gerda found Kai or not, because by the time she reached the Snow Queen’s palace, she had lost the ability to cry. Somewhere in the course of her journey to the barren north, a splinter of glass from that same mirror had pierced her own heart. It is there still.