Finally The Midnight Archives released their Ugly Duckling episode - and I couldn't wait to get to the part where the protagonist spends the winter on a farm with Lovecraftian, monstrous (sadistic in his eyes) children, so I skipped ahead:
The farm children crowd around, excited by this strange pet bird their father has brought home. They've never seen anything like him. They want to
touch him, to hold him, to play with him. But the ugly duckling doesn't understand play. He only understands danger. When the children reach for him laughing, he sees only hands coming to hurt him. The same human hands that have always hurt him. Every touch in his life has been violent. Every approach has been an attack. He panics. [...] The children laugh and try to catch him, which only makes his terror worse. The whole cottage descends into chaos. It's almost comedic if you don't think about what's happening inside the duckling's mind. He's been given a second chance at shelter, at
safety, at warmth, and he's destroying it because he can't recognize kindness.
He's been hurt so many times that even genuine friendliness looks like an attack.
[...]
From the very beginning, Andersen was marked as different. He was a tall and gangly ginger, with a prominent nose and hands that seemed too big for his body. And, moreover, left-handed. He moved awkwardly, spoke strangely, didn't fit in with other children. He preferred putting on puppet shows and reciting poetry to playing normal games.
While other kids in Odense rough-housed, he stood apart, watching, dreaming, already somewhere else. The other children thought he was bizarre, and bullied him. Most surely, he was autistic.
Very clever of the narrator to portray these children as "predators" from the Ugly Duckling's point of view! So far, the only humans he has known before them, the maid on the farm where he hatched (a teenage servant) and the huntsmen (adult men) have abused him; how can he understand play when all the other humans he's known are enemies? - and moreover small children ignore that a pet is not a toy - they haven't developed empathy yet. I have spoken before of Andersen's double standard - ie Children are Innocent (the Romantic ideal) when they're the protagonists VS. Kids Are Cruel (seen as predators by the non-human protagonists) when they're secondary characters. This is NOT unique to Andersen, but can also be seen in other authors, who, unlike Andersen, feature Innocent Children as the protagonists and Cruel Kids as the side characters (even as the villains!) in THE SAME stories. This includes Christoph von Schmid (Good Friedrich and Wicked Dietrich, Good Friederike and Wicked Dorothy, the list goes on), Victor Hugo (Cosette vs. Éponine, both as children and as teenagers), and most importantly Roald Dahl (Charlie Bucket vs. the four Bad Kids, Matilda vs. her brother Michael and Bruce Bogtrotter, the Narrator vs. Bruno in The Witches, the list goes on).
There seems to be a double standard. Whenever children are the protagonists (The Snow Queen, The Little Mermaid, Thumbelina, etc). they are pure and innocent, and victims of suffering we should empathize with
- but in Andersen's works of xenofiction, where the protagonists are non-human and the children are secondary characters, these children are portrayed as inhuman monsters who only want to play, to have fun, to eat sweets... But in that pursuit, they treat the non-human protagonists not roughly, but even cruelly, and lacking empathy (they chase the Ugly Duckling, pull the Fir Tree's branches, send the Tin Soldier downstream in a paper boat... Not even adult humans are spared, as seen in their treatment of the storyteller [Andersen inserting himself?] also in The Fir Tree, here).
Long story short: children as protagonists=pristine angels to empathize with, children as secondary characters in xenofiction=sadistic Lovecraftian monsters without empathy. This double standard, especially in the light of Romanticism (Rousseau's and Locke's ideas, Andersen as a Romantic), has always fascinated me.
Here are Maria Tatar's comments on the monstrous, sadistic children in Andersen's xenofiction:
In The Ugly Duckling:
the duckling was afraid they would hurt him. Andersen’s surprising dislike of small children, given the audience for his stories today, is well documented. In the plan for a commemorative statue in Copenhagen, he asked that the child looking over his shoulder be removed from the design. But his hatred of one of the sketches, which reminded him of “old Socrates and young Alcibiades,” may have been inspired by very different anxieties. As a child he was an avid reader, who stayed away from other children. “I never played with the other boys,” he reported in a letter to his benefactor Jonas Collin, “I was always alone.” (Moreover, Andersen was bullied! Note from S. Dermark)
In The Fir Tree:
(This tale is absent from Maria Tatar's annotated edition, but note here how they treat the storyteller [Andersen inserting himself!], showing that not even the human adults are inmune to their lack of empathy!)
Here is the scene as translated by Jean Hersholt:
Suddenly the folding doors were thrown back, and a whole flock of children burst in as if they would overturn the tree completely. Their elders marched in after them, more sedately. For a moment, but only for a moment, the young ones were stricken speechless. Then they shouted till the rafters rang. They danced about the tree and plucked off one present after another.
Then the children had permission to plunder the tree. They went about it in such earnest that the branches crackled and, if the tree had not been tied to the ceiling by the gold star at top, it would have tumbled headlong.
The children danced about with their splendid playthings. No one looked at the tree now, except an old nursemaid who peered in among the branches, but this was only to make sure that not an apple or fig or gingerbread man had been overlooked.
"Tell us a story! Tell us a story!" the children clamored, as they towed a fat little man to the tree. He sat down beneath it and said, "Here we are in the woods, and it will do the tree a lot of good to listen to our story. Mind you, I'll tell only one. Which will you have, the story of Ivedy-Avedy, or the one about Humpty-Dumpty who sat on a wall and had a great fall, tumbled downstairs, yet ascended the throne and married the princess?"
"Ivedy-Avedy," cried some. "Humpty-Dumpty," cried the others. And there was a great hullabaloo.
The fat little man told them all about Humpty-Dumpty, who sat on a wall, had a great fall, tumbled downstairs, yet ascended the throne and married the princess. And the children clapped and shouted, "Tell us another one! Tell us another one!" For they wanted to hear about Ivedy-Avedy too, but after Humpty-Dumpty the storytelling stopped.
In The Tin Soldier:
street urchins came running along. As is often the case in Andersen’s stories, schoolboys and street urchins can be counted on to engage in sadistic behavior. Saintly urchins like the little match girl are invariably female.
for no reason at all, (his owner) threw him right into the stove. The tin soldier seems to be a survivor, but in the end, he loses his life “for no reason at all”—just on a small boy’s whim. The Tin soldier attributes the boy’s urge to an evil power, suggesting that the jack-in-the-box has engineered his death.
......
So basically here we have the Kids are Cruel (sadistic, lacking empathy, caring only for their own amusement) trope in Andersen's xenofiction, in child secondary characters, stemming from his own hatred of children (misopaedia) stemming in turn from bullying trauma... One of the causes of the Kids Are Cruel trope in real life is explained in Developmental Psychology. It's called ego-centralism and until a child reaches a certain point in their mental development they don't understand that their actions can hurt others even though they are not hurt themselves. This is what happens in Andersen's stories, even though Andersen himself uses the trope to view them as sadistic monsters from the POV of non-humans, to channel his childhood trauma!
- vs. the Children are Innocent (pure, angelic, whose suffering elicits empathy) whenever children are the protagonists in Andersen, stemming from the Victorian / Romantic notions/Rousseaunian and Lockean myth of pristine, unsullied childhood as a black slate. This can lead to an unawareness that they are doing anything wrong. They can commit offenses unwittingly and face a Bewildering Punishment. Children have to learn empathy, and not to be self-centered, and also often have a poor grasp of consequences of their actions. This can then lead to Ambiguous Innocence. Again, ego-centralism.
A well-known experiment by Wimmer and Perner (1983) called the false-belief task demonstrates how children show their acquisition of theory of mind (ToM) as early as 4 years old. In this task, children see a scenario where one character hides a marble in a basket, walks out of the scene, and another character that is present takes out the marble and puts it in a box. Knowing that the first character did not see the switching task, children were asked to predict where the first character would look to find the marble. The results show that children younger than 4 answer that the first character would look inside the box, because the children have the superior knowledge of where the marble actually is. It shows egocentric thinking in early childhood because they thought that, even if the first character themself did not see the entire scenario, the first character has the same amount of knowledge as they did, and therefore should look inside the box to find the marble. As children start to acquire ToM (and empathy), their ability to recognize and process others' beliefs and values overrides the natural tendency to be egocentric.
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Andersen's xenofictional children see the world as a huge playplace and everything as a toy - they are ego-centralists, they only want to play and have fun, they're rough-housing all the time, but they haven't learned yet that a pet is not a toy, that a plant is not a toy either, and neither is an adult human, no matter how good stories he might tell. They simply haven't developed empathy yet. At heart, all young children are like that, and that is why they're perceived as "naughty" or "rough-housing." I was the same myself as a toddler; I made potions with my shampoos and other cosmetics, I cut my dolls' hair and doodled on their faces, I cut out the characters in fairytales to use them as paper dolls... fortunately all my pets were confined to their habitats (the fish in their fishtank, the turtles in their terrarium, the budgies in their cage) and therefore spared a rough treatment from a young child who moreover needed constant external stimulation, with her autism and ADHD! Like Andersen's bullies, I rough-housed, but like Andersen himself, I also spent the hours away in daydreams and in books, and was bullied both for my social awkwardness and Nordic looks (and I'm left-handed too!).
