SOURCE: "Personal Fantasy in Andersen's Fairy Tales," in Kansas Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 3, Summer, 1984, pp. 81-88.

In the following essay, Griffith contends that Andersen depicted death as a welcome escape for the innocent from the frightening sexuality of the world.

"We can begin by saying that happy people never make fantasies, only unsatisfied ones," Freud wrote in his essay on the relation between imaginative writing and day-dreaming. "Unsatisfied wishes are the driving power behind fantasies; every separate fantasy contains the fulfillment of a wish, and improves on unsatisfactory reality. The impelling wishes may vary according to the sex, character and circumstances of the creator; they may be easily divided, however, into two principal groups. Either they are ambitious wishes, serving to exalt the person creating them, or they are erotic."¹

There is little doubt that unsatisfied wishes inspired Hans Christian Andersen to write, and to write what he did...