According to fantasy writer and fellow fairytale nerd Sarah Viehmann, on the little foundling (little mermaid as a human):
Andersen’s Themes
When she finds her prince on land, he treats her as something more like a pet, [...] dressing her in boys’ clothes. The prince is betrothed to a human princess, whom he believes is the one who rescued him, [...]
Pardon me, Miss Viehmann, but I may ask: what has treating a person like a pet have to do with crossdressing? Where does the connection lie?
Now on to compare and contrast To Die Upon a Kiss with my own unofficial fanfic/playlist retelling, Daily Beauty...
Overview of my own genderflipped Othello postmodern AU.
AURÈLE (Othello)
Age: 28
Body Type: T (Physically fit, war orphan and child soldier)
Ethnic Group: Yoruba
Star Sign: Scorpio
Tutelar Deity: Ares (Ogun)
Siblings: None
Hair colour: raven, tips dyed crimson
Eye colour: black
Skin colour: latte or milk chocolate
Desmond & Cathy (Ruslana is below)
DESMOND (Desdemona)
Age: 25
Body Type: I
Ethnic Group: Celtic
Star Sign: Libra
Tutelar Deity: Hephaestus
Siblings: None
Hair colour: ash blond
Eye colour: green
Skin colour: white rosy
Childhood Friends with:
CATHERINE "CATHY" (Cassio)
Age: 25
Body Type: 8 (moderately fit nerd/Speculative Fiction Geek)
Ethnic Group: Celtic
Star Sign: Aquarius
Tutelar Deity: Hera
Siblings: None
Hair colour: strawberry/Titian blond
Eye colour: honey
Skin colour: white with freckles
Yara (Iara), Emílio, & Branca - the de Souza siblings (orphans after a tram accident/terrorist attack)
EMÍLIO (Emilia)
Age: 29
Body Type: T
Ethnic Group: Mixed
Star Sign: Virgo
Tutelar Deity: Demeter (Oshun)
Siblings: Yara and Branca (eldest brother)
Hair colour: raven
Eye colour: black
Skin colour: latte macchiato
YARA/IARA (Iago)
Age: 25
Body Type: I
Ethnic Group: Mixed
Star Sign: Gemini
Tutelar Deity: Apollo (Eshu)
Siblings: Emílio and Branca (middle sister)
Hair colour: raven, tips dyed platinum
Eye colour: black
Skin colour: latte macchiato
BRANCA (Bianca)
Age: 18
Body Type: 8 (naturally attractive, without any bodily enhancements)
Ethnic Group: Mixed
Star Sign: Leo
Tutelar Deity: Zeus (Shango)
Siblings: Emílio and Yara (youngest sister)
Hair colour: raven, tips dyed rainbow
Eye colour: black
Skin colour: latte macchiato
RUSLANA (Roderigo)
Age: 20
Body Type: 0/8 (spoiled/fit)
Ethnic Group: Slavic
Star Sign: Cancer
Tutelar Deity: Hermes
Siblings: None
Hair colour: wheat blond, tips dyed pink
Eye colour: icy blue
Skin colour: rosy
Sensei and the setting - inspiration from my all-female self-defense classes
The main setting is an all-female self-defense class in a coastal urban area inspired by Valencia, which serves as the home of the whole cast.
The themes of body image and coming out in my retelling - there's nothing wrong with looking or loving this way; in fact these themes outweigh race in my fic. This is related to "Beauty-and-the-Beast" type of tales (even those where the Beast is female and the Beau is male, or queer retellings), and the issue of outer vs. inner beauty - see below. The relationship can only blossom if both partners put inner before outer beauty and love one another warts and all (after all, we decorate evergreen conifers, not rosebushes, for Christmas!); inner beauty is the "daily beauty" in my title and Cathy & Branca bond over British comedy (Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, Monty Python...); as Desmond & Aurèle do over absent parents...
Outer Beauty vs. Inner Beauty (ie intelligence, wit, wisdom, kindness, sense of humour... inner beauty is the "daily beauty" in my title!). Most versions of Beauty and the Beast have, as counterpoint to the princely Beast, a brother-in-law or a suitor (if she is an only child, like Gaston in the animated musical) who is physically attractive yet dimwitted and shallow and in love with himself. Long story short a narcissist. //// Both Ruslana and Aurèle fear that they fit this character stereotype and are not acknowlegded for their depths (both suffer trauma because Aurèle was a child soldier in a revolution; Ruslana is a mafia clan heiress)...
Ruslana is manipulated by Yara because of Ruslana's insecurities about her own body image and the fact that she sees herself as a whale or hippo and that she feels Desmond will not like her and will prefer a girl who is more fit (even if darker like Aurèle)... in the end it proves her downfall --- MORE ON RUSLANA AND HER POISONING SHOVED DOWN THE BRIDGE LATER ON!!!!
In the meantime Cathy comes out with Branca and accepts herself as what she is, instead of what her mum and dad want her to be burning calories and striving to become... partly 'cause her new ladylove accepts her warts and all!!! and Cathy is all she has left with Emílio hospitalised in the ER and Yara on the lam... so Daily Beauty was all about Cathy's and Branca's daily beauty and not anyone else's... awwwww awwwww awwwww awwww awwww awwwww awwww caught in a queer romance (anyone else?)...
OBSERVE THE MASTER OF THE STRINGS!!! Yara as Spider in the (WW)Web and the weight of social media is real in making both Aurèle and (nearly) Branca embrace the scandal of Desmond and Cathy being in allegedly a carnal relationship... in our days, the element of the social network, added to the gris-gris (charm which replaces the handkerchief in this version), was something that did not exist in the seventeenth century and that adds more complexity to this Othello retelling. If everyone in an online peer group is convinced from photos uploaded on social media that Desmond and Cathy are together, what a Pandora's Box is opened for everyone (even the childhood friends and alleged "lovers" question their relationship at one point).... YARA is a master user of social media, with the rest of the cast as "insects" on her WWWeb.
DE TU SOMBRA (fragmento).
SI SÉ QUE ME QUIEN ME QUIERE ME ESPERA
Traducción de Sandra Dermark del sueco (Men bara om min älskade väntar, Ulf Dageby) y del inglés (Tomorrow is a Long Time, Bob Dylan)
Si hoy no fuera un camino infinito
ni una senda retorcida fuera ayer,
si el mañana no fuera tan largo tiempo...
la soledad no tendría razón de ser...
Si sé que quien me quiere me espera,
si puedo oír en su pecho el corazón,
sólo si estuviera aquí a mi lado
podría ser yo quien fui y quien soy...
No puedo ver en la cara a mi reflejo
ni decir palabras de felicidad,
no puedo ni siquiera oír mi eco,
recordar mi nombre ni mi identidad...
Si sé que quien me quiere me espera,
si puedo oír en su pecho el corazón,
sólo si estuviera aquí a mi lado
podría ser yo quien fui y quien soy...
Hay belleza en el canto de los ríos,
en la tarde y en el amanecer...
pero veo en los ojos de quien quiero
la belleza más hermosa que yo sé...
Si sé que quien me quiere me espera,
si puedo oír en su pecho el corazón,
sólo si estuviera aquí a mi lado
podría ser yo quien fui y quien soy...
Si sé que quien me quiere me espera,
si puedo oír en su pecho el corazón,
sólo si estuviera aquí a mi lado
podría ser yo quien fui y quien soy...
#OthElokuu
[...] the moment when Othello stands over the sleeping Desdemona, intending to kill her and yet admiring her beauty. Othello kisses Desdemona as she sleeps and adds: "Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee / and love thee after (5.2.18-19)." And he does kiss her exquisite corpse: "I kissed thee ere I killed thee; no way but this, / killing myself, to die upon a kiss (5.2.358-59)." His necrophilia is much like that of the prince charming in "Snow White" (and "Sleeping Beauty").
While praise of female beauty as red and white (for Caucasian standards) is of course conventional, Shakespeare may have consistently remembered the "snow white and blood/rose red" formula when writing these scenes of a man admiring an unconscious young woman. Othello compares Desdemona's life to a rose, and says: "Yet I'll not shed her blood /nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow (5.2.13, 3-4).
Othello is a persecuted heroine story, and, like the similar folktales, it is all about jealousy. Jealousy, we see, always tends towards death, making the beloved an unmoving, beautiful, possessable objects.
These references to the "Snow White" folktales allow Shakespeare to meditate on the single nature of jealousy in all of its guises: jealousy over beauty, over inheritance, over sexual possession, and over political power. In Othello, Iago manifests the connection between different forms of jealousy. He wants the promotion that Othello has bestowed on Cassio. Iago also claims to want Desdemona for himself, and to believe that both Cassio and Othello have slept with his wife. One of his most haunting lies, moreover, returns us to the folktale villainess's competition over beauty (recalling the wicked queen's obsession with being "fairest of them all"). Iago says of Cassio, "He hath a daily beauty in his life / that makes me ugly (5.1.19-20)."
You already know from El semen de los ahorcados that Courfeyrac had an ancestor who fought in the Thirty Years' War (and whom he dressed up as for a masquerade - before the rewrite, in which Courf dresses as Puss in Boots instead). Well, his story is about to be expanded upon, as a StrixAlluka 30YW AU with the Amis as Swedish Army deserters turned guerrilla soldiers of fortune is underway. It will be in Swedish and called "Efter Lützen". Enj is Prussian landed gentry and R a Moor by way of Marseille (Schönherr Engelhart and Razi/René)... most of the cast will remain French though with a few more exceptions (Musichetta, Leslie - Lesgle, Joellll - Jolllly)... Furthermore, Gustavus Adolphus will play the role Napoleon played in canon Les Mis!
The idea or bunny came partly from that reference to the musketeer Baron de Courfeyrac in El semen, partly from a mention of Lützen in Les Misérables canon, Colonel Pontmercy having fought in the Napoleonic battle. But I could not shake the idea of the 30YW battle off my head and wondered what if Les Mis had been set in that period and all the Amis sans Marius had been killed in that seventeenth-century war. And of course Colonel Pontmercy would have fought in a Swedish-French alliance and been killed at Lützen...
Schönherr Engelhart and Jules Combeferre + Hercule-Joffrey de Courfeyrac. There you have the rittmeister and his two lieutenants respectively, who keep the ranks they held in the Swedish military. The young Prussian of the landed gentry and his French teacher's son, who has a plan to sort out all flora and fauna a century before Linnaeus, both joined the Swedish military in their late adolescence in order to fight for freedom of worship. The young Gascon baron and lieutenant of musketeers came to the heart of Europe as an envoy to the Swedish camp, representing the Cardinal (Richelieu), with a certain Moor by way of Marseille (R, aka Razi, aka René) for a valet (and cupbearer, and squire...).
Razi (René), the Moor who never has laid eyes on his parents' birthplace of Castellón, started out with his widowed mother Miriam (Marie) on the docks of Marseille; her husband having been killed in a street fight on those same docks. He became a petty servant in Courfeyrac's entourage, and then the Baron's confidant, thanks to circumstances beyond his control
The Álvarez (actually Thénardier) family - camp followers, confidence tricksters, and corpse plunderers, whose wagon home can always be found when an engagement has just taken place. Cosette's former guardians, who pretend to be Spanish nobles (according to the Thénardiers themselves, he's from Barcelona ---Fawlty Towers reference!--- and she's from Santiago de Compostela). Éponine alone, their firstborn, is not supporting this elaborate confidence trick; unlike her younger siblings Azelma and Gavroche - although the latter joins Engelhart's company alongside his eldest sister, as per canon
Cosette, Marius, and Valjean "the snowy owl..." Innocent orphan adolescent Fantine was, in this era, ravaged by a thirtyish officer when her home village was raided; she entrusted her daughter to the Thénardiers just like in canon for the same reasons and became a worker in a uniform cloth factory in Wallenstein's province of Friedland, with Valjean for an overseer - his backstory is also just like in canon (older sister and fatherless nephews, bread theft, prisoner camp... lock stock and barrel - only sans kindly bishop and with Wallenstein instead).
Musichetta - here she is a North Italian (Ferrarese) opera singer who was soubrette until a while ago to fairytale collector and primadonna her southern friend Adriana Basile (who compiled the Pentamerone alongside her brother Giambattista!). Not long ago, they parted ways when she decided to move up north into the war torn heart of Europe with the half of the company that preferred opera buffa to opera seria - in order to bring smiles to the regions with commedia-dell'arte style plots and gags.
First things first, greetings from Gothenburg, which was founded by Gustavus Adolphus 400 years ago!!! I'll be staying up north until mid-August and then return to "sunny" Spain (actually, I loathe the hot sun because it causes chafing and triggers cold sores!)...
So I went to this bookshop here in Gothenburg and picked up the lavishly illustrated storybook Beneath the Moon, by Yoshi Yoshitani. Looked up The Snow Queen then scrolled down to what would be the Fourth Story or Part the Fourth. It was only one sentence or clause long, but remarkably well abridged!!! Mind that each story in this book only takes up one page, opposite its illustration, and therefore the longest of these tales are abridged to fit into the one-page format. Hence why the Fourth Story in this Snow Queen is only one sentence/clause long.
Before we move into the long story cut remarkably short, I would like to quote the introduction by Yoshitani-sensei. I have underlined some passages which are true for my experience of the prince and princess in the Andersenian subplot that I adore:
"This collection of stories is meant to serve as a short window into many different cultures. The average reader will recognise a few but many more will be unfamiliar. Some readers will see two or more pieces of themselves never seen before. As much as possible I've tried to indicate each story's point of origin, [...]
Like the tarot cards, each of these stories is equally relevant, and each offers valuable insights to the human experience.
I hope you enjoy this collection and leave wanting to learn even more about each other, all of us living beneath the same moon.
Yoshi Yoshitani."
And of course in Part the Fourth, AKA the Fourth Story, no matter if the telling is the usual five-page length or a single clause like here, I see two pieces of myself, or actually one piece broken into two and brought back together. This subplot also offers a valuable insight into the human experience or two: kindred spirits and altruism (the latter when the subplot crosses with the main plot of The Snow Queen), both of which I hold very dear..
And thus, without further ado...
[...]
[...] it was only a clever prince who had married a very wise princess.
[...]
That's all, folks. No mention of the coach/carriage or the massacre of the redshirt servants in the dark forest (in Part/Story 5), neither of the young royal pair's honeymoon in foreign lands (in Part/Story 7). It's just this clause. Talk about "long story short!" A lengthy subplot condensed into just this single clause or sentence. The two secondary yet favourite characters described with matching, near synonymous adjectives, and her intelligence being heightened by a "very" that may not have its match in his descriptions, yet puts her on a pedestal compared to other fairytale princesses (and again, no other fairytale princess is so well-read, and to quote Maria Tatar "no other fairytale princess seeks such qualities in a man") and allows for more intellectual equality on a more equal footing given traditional gender roles.
I hope you have enjoyed this one-clause retelling and that you feel curious to click on my "the snow queen fourth story" tag in this post to get to know more about this pair of favourite characters of mine.
