I’m currently recovering from a big bout of biopsies earlier in the week and so sadly ‘Middlesex’, which I was reading and loving, has gone to the bedside table for a while and hasn’t been picked up. Oops. I have started cracking open some short story collections and thought ‘ooh if there is a short story that takes hold of me then maybe it would be nice to do a post based on just that tale’ and after the very first short story in my Hans Christian Anderson I already had a post. So today introduces ‘Occasional Shorts’. Now if you have only seen the film of ‘The Little Mermaid’ or haven’t read the tale then you might not want to read on as there is a rather massive spoiler coming, you have been warned…
.jpg "The Little Mermaid")
I was surprised when I read Perrault’s ‘Fairytales’ a while back that the endings of the tales were nothing like the lovely ladybird editions I was read as a child. Imagine my shock and horror when I read ‘The Little Mermaid’ and it was nothing like the Disney film that I watched, slightly excessively, as a child. You see everything starts as I remembered.
The youngest mermaid princess in the kingdom, both are unnamed in the edition I have read, wants to see the world above the waves and waits and waits until she finally turns fifteen after which she becomes a little obsessed with the world beyond. One night when viewing life above the ocean a boat sinks and she saves a handsome prince and falls in love, so much so she gives her voice (and her tongue, Disney didn’t feature that did they?) to an evil witch in return for legs and the condition that she must make the prince fall in love with her. So far it was much the same as I thought… so far!
However this then completely changed when her legs caused the pain of a thousand knives every time she walked. Poor thing, I thought, she better get the blinking Prince. So imagine my utter shock (spoiler coming) that she didn’t and instead he meets someone else and she is given the option of killing him, his blood turning her legs back into a tail, or turning into sea foam and dying. I wont say which it was but I was mortified.
This may seem a silly post, it could be the painkilling drugs, but I genuinely am quite disturbed and as I read on its getting darker and darker. Normally this would be something I would really like, oh ok I am enjoying how different and dark they are, but would I read these versions to a child? Is it changing my childhood subconsciously as ‘Sleeping Beauty’ did when I read the Perrault tales? Naturally I will have to read on to see what further shocks await!
Have you re-read any fairytales and been rather shell shocked by it all, or is it just me? Oh, and what’s your favourite fairytale?
Savidge Reads 