The Child as a Model Reader of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "Ole Lukoie" The Child as a Model Reader of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "Ole Lukoie"
Abstract
Hans Christian Andesen's fairy tales have long been published in rich illustrated editions aimed at child readers around the world. Yet literary scholars have rarely analysed them as children's literature.
The present article considers this obvious paradox. In it, I take a closer look at the strategy Soren Baggesen's has aptly called 'dobbeltartikulation'.
Another scholar of literature, Gorm Larsen, has taken issues with this, stressing that the tales actually do not have two addressees: the difference is, he argues, inherent to the text. This means that the tales can legitimately be read on two levels: a concrete/heuristic reading and a symbolic/hermeneutical reading.
In my article, I argue that the text cooperates both with the child reader and with the grown-up reader and this cooperation is evident both in the concrete and the symbolic reading. In my argument, I make use of the classic theory of the model reader as proposed by Umberto Eco.
The evidence that I offer for the textual cooperation operating in Andersen's fairy tales comes from Anderesen's own statements about the addressee of the tales. I further substantiate this in a discussion of the fairy tales' paratext and peritext.
I then contrast these private and public statements with one particular fairy tale, 'Ole Lukoie', specifically the Friday episode of the tale in which a doll called Bertha gets married. Significantly, Andersen named the doll after a real-life little girl who had repeatedly asked him if she could appear in one of his fairy tales.
This episode is particularly useful in my reconstruction of the child's horizon in the fairy tale.