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The children's stories written by the nineteenth-century Danish author, Hans Christian Andersen, have become a part of our cultural heritage. They are charmingly like fairy tales, but as they also contain a strong note of moralism, Andersen's stories may contribute to a child's ethical development. However, the moral theme seems often to be neglected, and many editions of Andersen's stories for children omit or change the ending of such stories as “The Little Mermaid.” In fact, a recent popular animated version of “The Little Mermaid” changed the original story's tragic ending into a typical fairy tale happy ending. Most of the stories that are treated this way are about little girls who end up as angels. This angelic transformation recurs in several stories and is connected with Andersen's morality. I think this is one source of the stories' charm because it reflects an enduring maternal image that we readers share with Andersen. In order to explain this hypothesis, a small selection of his stories will be examined in some detail. Keeping in mind that we cannot confidently offer any real analysis of an author who is not available to provide his own associations, I will offer a conjecture that Andersen's creativity was partly sustained by his internal fantasy of an admiring maternal image.
Andersen would be disappointed to be remembered almost exclusively as a writer of children's stories. Although he wrote the stories for children, he also meant them to appeal to adults, and he would regret that his novels, his poetry, his plays, and his travelogues are not remembered. Andersen's stories are usually