Who still mourns that the scene in which the little mermaid's tongue is cut out in exchange for legs has long since disappeared from modern versions of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The little Mermaid from 1837?
Stories keep changing when they are retold, rewritten or made into a film. This is what the new Disney film adaptation was like The little Mermaid' was still cause for protests in the United States in 2023, when the colored actress Halle Bailey was chosen for the leading role of mermaid Ariel. Under the cry #NotMyAriel – not my Ariel – there was criticism from people who thought that the Little Mermaid should be white, otherwise Andersen's legacy would be squandered. But was Andersen concerned about a white mermaid? He probably wrote the story for his sake ruined love for a beautiful young man (who chose a woman); fiction about doomed same-sex love, about which you were not allowed to stir your tongue in nineteenth-century Christian Denmark,
Who actually owns a story that is constantly retold differently over time? The exhibition is about that question The real story? From Anansi to The Little Mermaid in House of the Book in The Hague. Through Western and non-Western stories in books and films – and puppet shows (the Turkish Karagöz and Indonesian Kantjil) – constantly changing stories will be reflected on until September 1.
The new director of Huis van het Boek, Yoeri Meessen, illustrates how current that theme is when he gives a tour of the exhibition together with museum employee Aafke Boerma in March. Meessen: “Just in the week that this exhibition opens, a new novel by the black writer Percival Everett was published in America entitled Jameswhich tells the story of the famous The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, also in our exhibition, retold from the perspective of the black slave 'Jim'.” The book has already received rave reviews in the US: the New York Times mentioned this one retelling a 'masterpiece'. Meessen: “House of the Book wants to be a meeting place of people and stories, from past and present. Perspectives change, and culture is not a linear development, that is what we want to show here.”
Inspiration for the exhibition was provided Very much alive. How classic books change meaning, a book in which Saskia de Bodt investigates what happened to classic books such as Heidi, Pinocchio and Bambi. That story about the young deer was stripped of its political connotation by Disney and became extremely popular as a cartoon in 1942. But, as the exhibition shows, the original story about the deer hunted by hunters dates from the time of rising fascism and was written in 1932 by the Austrian writer (and hunter) Felix Salten. His original Bambi, recently translated by Jet Quadekker, can be understood as a story about the impending persecution of Jews in Europe.
The stories about Heidi and Pinocchio also changed over time.
Just like popular non-Western narratives. There is the book version of the stories of the spider Anansi that the Surinamese writer Anton de Kom made for his children, based on his grandmother's stories. The rogue spider Anansi originally comes from West Africa; via the slave transports, the stories traveled with the enslaved to America and the Caribbean, where they were often secretly retold and adapted: as comfort and as an opportunity for subliminal criticism of slavery. They came to the Netherlands with Surinamese and Antilleans, where they are now part of children's literature.
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