Andersen G-H. “The Little Mermaid” Reader's diary, summary

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Author: Andersen G-H.

Title: “The Little Mermaid”

Genre: literary fairy tale

Theme of the work: about love

Number of pages: 18

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Plot - summary

The little mermaid is looking forward to her fifteenth birthday, when she will be able to rise to the surface of the ocean and see the wonderful world around her.

She surfaces and witnesses a storm, during which she rescues a handsome young prince.

Having fallen in love with the prince, the Little Mermaid decides to be close to him and goes to the Sea Witch, who gives her legs in exchange for her voice.

The prince finds the Little Mermaid and settles her in the palace, where everyone admires the girl’s beauty.

But the prince decides to marry someone else, whom he considers his savior, and the Little Mermaid can only save herself by killing the prince.

The little mermaid cannot kill her beloved and with the first rays of the sun she becomes one of the daughters of the air, magical, invisible creatures who do good.

A summary of the work can be read here, and there you will also find another version of the summary for the reader’s diary

Could the Little Mermaid live in marriage?

However, the poor victim is still trying to flounder and flutter - he consults with his sisters and grandmother. Perhaps a mother could give kind, wise advice and support to her growing daughter? There is not a word about her in the fairy tale. It can be assumed that she died when the Little Mermaid was just a baby, perhaps in childbirth - that is why the older sisters are completely different, they managed to be imbued with maternal love.

The little mermaid grew up not only without a mother. She also lacks love from her father. The father is busy, he takes material wealth as a manifestation of love. This often happens when a man believes that since he has provided, he has already done everything for the family. In addition, grandfather was not near the grandmother. This means that the Little Mermaid had absolutely no idea of normal everyday relationships in marriage. And this is another reason why the “marriage choice” was made incorrectly.

Grandmother is old, but she perceives reality adequately. The grandmother warns that the Little Mermaid and the prince have completely different life values, different ideas about the beautiful and the ugly (using the example of a fish tail). It is unlikely that they will find a common language. The wisdom of the old mermaid, alas, is wasted.

The Little Mermaid's next step is to visit the sea witch. She went to her, although she was afraid. Hope for the impossible forced her to overcome her fear of the witch, but if only she had used this fuse, these spiritual strengths to listen to her grandmother’s opinion, to overcome her attraction! The Little Mermaid still has chances to escape, but they are melting, melting with every second...

From the point of view of a psychologist, it looks like this: there is still strength and energy, but it is spent unproductively. And who in their right mind and strong memory would go to a witch?

Proverbs for the work

True love neither burns in fire nor drowns in water.

Love is a fire, and once it catches fire, you can’t put it out.

Life without love is like a year without spring.

One heart suffers, and the other does not know.

You won't be nice by force.

“The central theme of Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid””

The love of the little mermaid for the prince is the main, central theme of the fairy tale. This is not the theme of ordinary human love, but of romantic, doomed love, love of self-sacrifice, love that did not make the heroine of the fairy tale happy, but which did not disappear without a trace for her, because it did not make her completely unhappy. In mythology, a mermaid, having lost her immortal soul as a result of evil committed against her as a person, can gain this soul if she makes a person love her. The love of a mermaid and a person does not have to be mutual. A mermaid may not respond to a person and destroy him by falling in love with herself. But a person’s love for her is the main step towards the mermaid acquiring an immortal soul. Therefore, she must provoke a person, evoke this love in him by any means and ways. In Andersen, this theme is both preserved and rethought. The little mermaid wants to achieve the love of a person, wants to find an immortal soul. “Why don’t we have an immortal soul? - the little mermaid asked sadly, - I would give all my hundreds of years for one day of human life, so that later I too could ascend to heaven... How I love him! More than father and mother! I belong to him with all my heart, with all my thoughts, I would willingly give him the happiness of my whole life! I would do anything - if only I could be with him and find an immortal soul! .

Andersen's tale includes Christian motifs. Andersen reinterprets ancient pagan mythology from the point of view of Christian mythology: ideas about the soul, the afterlife, and life after death.

The combination of two motives is where the story of the little mermaid and the prince is born. The little mermaid saves the prince, she does good for a man who dies in the waves. Often, by the way, according to mythological beliefs, women who died in the water became mermaids. A person cannot live in an element that is not typical for his habitat. On the one hand, the little mermaid saves the prince, but on the other, she would like him to end up in her father’s palace. “At first the little mermaid was very happy that he would now fall to their bottom, but then she remembered that people cannot live in water and that he could only sail to her father’s palace dead. No, no, he must not die!.. He would have died if the little mermaid had not come to his aid... It seemed to her that the prince looked like the marble boy standing in her garden; she kissed him and wished him to live.”

For saving the prince, the little mermaid, of course, has the right to expect gratitude, but the fact is that the prince does not see her. He sees a girl standing above him on the shore and thinks that it was she who saved his life. The prince liked this girl, but she turns out to be unattainable for him, since she was in a monastery at that time.

If the task of the mythological mermaid is to make a person love herself, then the little mermaid cannot force anyone; her desire is to be close to the prince, to become his wife. The little mermaid wants to please the prince, she loves him and is ready to sacrifice everything for their happiness. For the sake of her love, she gives up her home, her beautiful voice, she gives up her essence, herself. The little mermaid completely surrenders herself to the power of fate in the name of her love.

But the prince sees in her “a sweet, kind child, it never occurred to him to make her his wife and queen, and yet she had to become his wife, otherwise she could not find an immortal soul and had to if he married on the other, turn into sea foam.”

The little mermaid’s dream is a dream of happiness, an ordinary, human dream, she wants love, warmth, affection. “And he laid his head on her chest, where her heart beat, longing for human happiness and an immortal soul.” For the little mermaid, love is a constant overcoming of physical and moral torment. Physical - because “every step caused her such pain as if she was walking on sharp knives,” moral - because she sees that the prince finds his love; but this does not harden her. Love should not overshadow a person’s true vision of things and the world. “The little mermaid looked at her greedily and could not help but admit that she had never seen a sweeter and more beautiful face.” The little mermaid lost her voice, but gained sharper vision and perception of the world, because a loving heart sees more sharply. She knew that the prince was happy with his “blushing bride,” she kissed his hand and it seemed to her “that her heart was about to burst with pain: his wedding should kill her, turn her into sea foam!”

But Andersen gives the little mermaid a chance to return back to her family, to the palace of the sea king, and live for three hundred years. The little mermaid realizes that all her sacrifices were in vain, she loses everything, including her life.

Love is a sacrifice, and this theme runs through Andersen’s entire fairy tale. The little mermaid sacrifices her life for the happiness of the prince, her sisters donate their beautiful long hair to the sea witch to save the little mermaid. “We gave our hair to the witch so that she could help us save you from death! And she gave us this knife - see how sharp it is? Before the sun sets, you must thrust it into the prince’s heart, and when his warm blood splashes onto your feet, they will again grow together into a fish’s tail and you will again become a mermaid, go down to our sea and live your three hundred years. But hurry! Either he or you—one of you must die before the sun rises!” Here Andersen returns us again to the mythological theme. The mermaid must destroy a person, sacrifice him. The theme of shed blood is reminiscent of pagan rituals and sacrifices, but in Andersen’s fairy tales, paganism is overcome by Christianity, its ideas and moral values.

For Andersen, love makes irreversible changes to a person. Love always does good; it cannot be evil. And therefore, the little mermaid, holding a knife in her hand, still sacrifices her own life, and not someone else’s, chooses her own death, giving the prince life and happiness. “The little mermaid lifted the purple curtain of the tent and saw that the head of the lovely newlywed was resting on the prince’s chest.”

The first thing the little mermaid sees is the happiness and love of the prince. It would seem that this picture should arouse jealousy in her, but jealousy is unpredictable, jealousy is a force of evil. “The little mermaid bent down and kissed his beautiful forehead, looked at the sky where the morning dawn was flaring up, then looked at the sharp knife and again fixed her gaze on the prince, who in his sleep uttered the name of his wife. She was the only one on his mind!” The human world is beautiful for the little mermaid. He so beckoned her underwater, so enchanted on the day of her coming of age; she feels sorry for this world, she’s afraid to lose it, but she sees the prince who is pronouncing his wife’s name at this time. “The knife trembled in the hands of the little mermaid.” Love cannot kill another love - this is Andersen’s thought. “Another minute - and she (the little mermaid) threw it (the knife) into the waves, which turned red, as if stained with blood, in the place where it fell. Once again she looked at the prince with half-extinguished gaze, rushed from the ship into the sea and felt her body dissolve into foam.” The little mermaid abandoned herself completely, but she had another dream - to find a human soul. This dream both came true and not. Love itself already gives a person a soul. It is no coincidence that the little mermaid does not turn into sea foam, love gave her the opportunity to move into another state, she becomes one of the daughters of the air.

The little mermaid again has a chance to find what she deliberately renounced. Her love and good deeds give her the right to gain an immortal soul. “Three hundred years will pass, during which we, the daughters of the air, will do good to the best of our ability, and we will receive an immortal soul as a reward... You, poor little mermaid, with all your heart strove for the same thing as us, you loved and suffered, rise together with us to the transcendental world. Now you yourself can earn an immortal soul through good deeds and find it in three hundred years!” And Andersen ends the tale with this theme. Ancient mythological beliefs, having lost their power over human consciousness, were preserved in folklore and artistic images of writers from different countries. In our work, we turned to only one such image and saw how complex and individual the writer’s relationship with mythology and the mythological image is. Interpreting the image of the mythological mermaid, turning it into the little mermaid heroine of his fairy tale, Andersen partially preserves her mythological features and capabilities. But at the same time, the mythological image under the writer’s pen acquires human essence, human character, human destiny. The little mermaid, with the help of the witch's witchcraft, turns into a person, she selflessly loves the prince, this love turns out to be unrequited and even tragic, she sacrifices her life for the happiness of the prince.

Starting from pagan mythology, Andersen affirms the values and ideas of Christianity, affirms the power of human love as the greatest moral force in the whole world, regardless of whether this world is real or fantastic. And such metamorphoses in Andersen’s fairy tales occur not only with one mermaid. Any mythological characters, be it gnomes, a snow queen, an ice maiden, acquire individual characters and destinies under the writer’s pen, become like people, and are endowed with human dreams and desires. Mythological fairy-tale images are reinterpreted by the writer and used by him for the artistic reincarnation of such important moral ideas as the ideas of humanism, spiritual purity and selfless and devoted love.