The Ugly Duckling

the Ugly Duckling was written by Hans Christian Andersen in July 1842, after the failure of the play the Bird in the pear tree , which was whistled with the first. In this tale, Andersen placed the principal periods of its life.

Complete summary

The Ugly Duckling is born different from the other birds from the village, this one is rejected of all because of its physique. It is tiny room to leave not to more undergo the mockeries and the blows of the others. It will live alone because those which it meets really do not accept it. Until the day when it will dare to go towards swans: they do not drive out it; he discovers whereas he is itself a majestic swan.

Analyzes

One can speak about account of formation , even of initiatory account in connection with the Ugly Duckling , which shows how the child, while growing, must learn how to know itself and to accept itself such as it is, even if its entourage returns itself to him an negative image and does not help it to develop the regard of oneself.

But an autobiographical interpretation will retain the revenge of the poet (the swan) on ordinary people (ducks), when he discovers a medium which enables him to recognize its talent. Born in a middle-class man medium, Andersen child felt in the situation of Ugly Duckling. It seems that he had an effeminate appearance and its correspondence reveals homosexual inclinations, which contributed to its impression to be different and rejected.

The topic of the misunderstood genius is a romantic topic which rather often returns in the poetry of the XIXe century, at Alfred de Vigny, Charles Baudelaire showing incomprehension between the poet of the summits and the vulgar one in the Albatross . Theodore de Banville ( Wrongs of the swan ), Sully Prudhomme ( the Swan ) will exploit as this topic as some critical believed to find in the Virgin, the long-lived one. of Stephan Mallarmé. One also finds it in the novel, for example in the Red and the black , from Stendhal whose hero, Julien Sorel, modest young man of condition but of an exceptional intelligence, suffers to be born in a coarse and brutal mileu, or at Villiers of Isle-Adam, of which the hero Tribulat Bonhomet délecte with the middle-class woman psychologically to torture itself then to kill the birds poets .

critical Bruno Bettelheim rather hard this tale by noticing that it encourages the child to be believed of a species different from his entourage. It acts according to him of a tale which is addressed to the adults rather.

Adaptation

The studios Disney carried out an adaptation of the tale in cartoon in the Ugly Duckling , a Silly Symphony diffused for the first time the December 16th 1931.

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