30 pages • 1 hour read
Hans Christian AndersenThe Emperor's New Clothes
Fiction | Short Story | Middle Grade | Published in 1837A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen was born on April 2, 1805, in the city of Odense, Denmark. Andersen grew up poor in Denmark, and his father passed away when Andersen was just 11 years old. Despite his difficult upbringing, Andersen was educated at some of Denmark’s most prestigious institutions early in his life. As a teenager, he was accepted into the Royal Danish Theater as an actor. While this career did not prove fruitful for Andersen, it did lead to his receiving further education and pursuing a literary career. Andersen would eventually go on to study at the University of Copenhagen.
During his time as a student in Copenhagen, Andersen first began publishing his writing. Andersen was already an accomplished writer with many published works before publishing his first collection of fairy tales. Much of Andersen’s early success as a writer stemmed from a collection of travelogues and satirical short stories. However, he achieved his greatest success with his fairy tales, and they remain well-known today.
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” was published in Andersen’s first collection of fairy tales, Fairy Tales Told For Children. This collection contains nine stories and was published in three volumes between 1835 and 1837. These volumes were not initially well-received in Andersen’s native country of Denmark. However, after being translated into other languages, Andersen’s fairy tales became immensely popular across Europe, particularly in England and Germany.
Andersen’s love of fairy tales is believed to have stemmed from his early childhood. According to Sven Hakon Rossen in his 1996 biography, Hans Christian Andersen: Danish Writer and Citizen of the World, Andersen’s father would regularly read to him from One Thousand and One Nights, a classic collection of Middle Eastern folktales. Andersen is also known to have been fond of the folktales of the Brothers Grimm, as well as local Danish folktales, which were recited to him as a child.
Andersen’s appreciation for folktales, as well as his extensive literary background and unique social upbringing, helped to infuse his original fairy tales with many of their defining characteristics. While Andersen’s fairy tales remain true to the genre in many ways, they also diverge in some key respects. Perhaps most notable is Andersen’s use of satire and sharp social commentary, which feature prominently in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
Literary Context: Fairy Tales
Fairy tales and folktales, while sometimes considered to be the same, are often seen as distinguishable by their content and origin. Folktales tend to be inspired by real places and scenarios and are typically passed down orally with no known author. Folktales likely predate written language. Many of the oldest folktales were passed down by oral tradition for generations before being recorded in writing.
Alternatively, fairy tales tend to be written, not oral, and usually have a known author. While fairy tales can vary drastically in subject, there are several key thematic and structural elements that are consistent throughout the genre. Most notably, fairy tales often involve a magical element or item and are often set in a nameless and timeless location. Fairy tales are often structurally simple, with a straightforward, linear narrative intended to deliver a universal morality lesson. While they are not exclusively for children, this structure also makes them suitable to be read or recited to young audiences.
Many of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales are original stories or highly original reimaginings of older tales. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is based loosely on a 14th-century Spanish folktale, which Andersen is believed to have read in German translation, according to biographer Elias Bredsdorff (1994).
“The Emperor’s New Clothes,” like many of Andersen’s fairy tales, experimented with the genre to a considerable degree. Most notably, Andersen’s tales employ satire and social commentary much more than traditional fairy tales would have. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is one of the most notable examples of this, as it serves as a strong criticism of social pretension, conformity, and unfair power structures.
“The Emperor’s New Clothes” also plays with the genre conventions of a fairy tale in its depiction of magic. Magic is often featured prominently in traditional fairy tales, whether in the form of a curse that needs to be broken (“Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty”), or magical transformation of items (“Cinderella,” “Jack and the Beanstalk”). “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” on the other hand, only features an item that is falsely purported to have magical qualities. The false claims made by the weavers about their ability to craft a magic fabric subvert the expectation that an enchanted item will reveal great truths or bestow great fortune on the story’s hero in the end. Instead, the false “magic” item brings only humiliation to the emperor.
