The little mermaid longs for the world above before she knows the prince. She shapes her garden like the sun, plants it with red flowers, and places among them a stone statue of a boy that has sunk from a shipwreck. In her grandmother's accounts of land, she marvels at flowers with a scent and birds singing in the trees. There are beautiful flowers under the sea, but not that fragrance. At night she often stands at her window, looking through the dark blue water toward the moon and stars. No one on shore is waiting for her yet. She already wants to go and see.
Her sisters turn fifteen one after another and gain permission to rise to the surface. They return with descriptions of cities, sunsets, woods, and human beings. The youngest can only listen and wait. Even when her sisters grow familiar with the sights and decide that home beneath the sea is best, she still longs for her turn. The prince will change her life, but he does not create that longing from nothing. He gives her someone to approach within a distant world she has wanted to reach for a long time.
On her first visit she sees a brilliantly lit ship celebrating a young prince's birthday. After the lights go out, a storm comes. Huge waves break the ship apart and the prince sinks. For an instant she thinks that at last he can come beneath the sea; then she remembers that humans cannot live there. She swims among the planks and wreckage, holds his head above water, and brings him ashore at daybreak. A white building stands nearby, something like a church or a convent. Bells ring and several young women come out.
Hidden in the water, she watches one of them discover the prince and summon the others. He wakes and smiles at the people around him. He does not know who kept him above the waves, and she does not come forward to identify herself. The whole rescue is preserved only in her memory. She knows the weight of his unconscious body and how she kept his head out of the water. His waking story begins with a different face on the shore. Their later misunderstandings grow from that morning they never fully shared.
Back under the sea, she goes on asking about human life until she asks about death. Her grandmother explains that humans live shorter lives than the sea people but have souls that do not perish with their bodies. Mermaids may live three hundred years; then they become sea foam and can never see the sun or flowers again. She would give those three centuries for a single human day followed by eternity. Her grandmother adds that a mermaid cannot gain a soul in that way on her own. A human man must love her more than his parents, marry her, and share eternal life with her.
The prince becomes more than someone she loves and has rescued. He is also the possible entrance she knows into a different kind of life. She wants the human world, wants his love, and wants an immortal soul. These wishes become entangled. To say that she abandons the sea for a man reduces her problem to whether romance is worth the sacrifice. To remove love and make the journey a pure quest for a soul would leave her no more fully understood. She goes to the sea witch as these desires draw one another onward.
Before she leaves, there is a ball in the undersea palace. Her singing surpasses everyone else's. Applause makes her briefly happy, but thoughts of the prince and the soul she lacks take her out through whirlpools and a dangerous forest. The witch knows why she has come and plainly describes the potion. Her tail will divide into legs; it will feel as if a knife cuts through her, and every step afterward will hurt like walking on blades. Once human, she cannot return by the same way. If the prince marries someone else, she will become foam the next morning. She turns pale at the warning and still agrees to bear it.
Then comes the payment. The witch wants the most beautiful voice in the sea. What will she have left without it? The witch points to her beauty, graceful movements, and eyes that can express love, believing these enough to win the prince. At last the mermaid puts out her tongue and completes the exchange. The gift that has just made the whole palace applaud cannot accompany her onto land. When she leaves with the potion, she can no longer say even a word of farewell to her family.
The witch supplies a potion that works and explains its principal risks. We should not rewrite this as a girl being deceived without knowing anything about the bargain. The mermaid hears about pain, silence, and possible death, then chooses to continue. But being told a price is not the same as understanding the life she will have to lead. She can imagine legs taking her to the prince. Before reaching land, she can hardly experience how many things will become impossible to tell him once she stands before him. This does not make her choice unserious. Its actual weight emerges gradually as the life begins.
She drinks the potion on the stone steps of the prince's palace and faints with pain. On waking, her tail is gone and he is standing before her, asking who she is and why she has come. At last she has her chance to speak to him. She can only look. He takes her hand and leads her inside, where people admire her beauty and grace. The palace singers perform; he smiles and applauds. Listening, she knows she once sang better than they do. Now she cannot tell him even that small piece of her past.
They grow closer. He gives her a page's clothes, takes her riding and climbing, and lets her sleep on a velvet cushion outside his door. Everyone applauds her weightless dancing. She climbs with him, her feet bleeding, and keeps smiling as she walks. Only at night, after the palace sleeps, does she go alone to the shore and cool her burning feet in the water. The body praised during the day finds some rest there. Her sisters come close to shore too and see what she has become.
This is not simply false closeness. The prince genuinely likes her; she receives companionship, care, and access to the human world. Being unable to speak does not make her unable to act. She expresses love through her eyes, dancing, and gestures and continues to make her own decisions. Yet in this particular relationship her most important experiences remain unexplained: where she comes from, why she chose this body, what happened in the shipwreck, and what each beautiful-looking step means to her. The court applauds her dancing without knowing what sustains its lightness each day.
The attraction promised by the witch has materialized. Mutual knowledge has not followed automatically. The prince can be moved by her and feel her love without knowing the hopes she brought into their relationship. He loves her as he might a dear child and does not think of making her queen. For her, marriage to him is her hope of gaining a soul and avoiding foam. The same companionship carries different weight for each. She has no way of putting that difference fully before him.
He later tells her that he truly loves the girl who found him beside the temple after the wreck. The mermaid resembles that girl and can partly stand in for the girl he remembers, so he wants to keep her with him always. His closeness is real. For her it creates another distance: her place in his life depends on a rescuer wrongly identified. She knows what she did and understands his account of the past, but cannot connect the two memories that have gone separate ways.
Nor is she only being misread. She is interpreting him too. When she hears he is to meet a neighboring princess, she trusts that he will not marry her: he has said that he loves only the temple girl. He has even said that if he had to choose a bride, he would rather choose the mermaid. These words give her hope; she believes she knows his heart better than others. Then the princess appears and he recognizes the girl from the shore. That hope abruptly loses its foundation. He embraces the princess joyfully and assumes the mermaid, who loves him most, will share his happiness. They are so close and have almost no common understanding of what this moment means.
At the wedding she carries the bride's train. Bells, music, and congratulations surround her; she thinks only of ceasing to exist after sunrise. That night her sisters appear from the water with their hair cut off. They have traded their long hair to the witch for a knife. If she kills the prince before dawn and lets his blood fall on her feet, her tail will return. She can go home to her family and resume her life in the sea. The earlier bargain took her into the human world. This one promises to take her home.
She enters the tent with the knife. The prince and bride are sleeping together, and he speaks his wife's name in his dreams. The mermaid does not kill him. She throws the knife into the sea and jumps into the water herself. When she decides, she does not know that another way will open. Her refusal cannot be explained as a calculation of a better ending. She really refuses to preserve her life by killing the sleeping prince.
She saved him, stayed with him, and paid a price he never knew in order to reach him. These facts can show the depth of her love. They do not make him owe her a life, or even a marriage. The knife makes the issue painfully concrete. Returning to the past is not always a repair involving only oneself. If restoring her tail requires killing someone else, the recovery of her old life has a limit she will not cross. The judgment is hers. It does not require later readers to treat self-destruction as proof of love.
At sunrise the body she expects to dissolve rises instead into the air. Transparent beings move in the sunlight. She discovers that she has a similar form and can ask who they are. Her new voice cannot be heard by humans: it is no opportunity to return to the prince and set the record straight. But it lets her speak to her new companions. They are the Daughters of the Air. They too lack immortal souls, they explain, but can strive for them through good deeds rather than placing all eternity in whether someone loves them.
This road still has a long term. The Daughters of the Air must do good for three hundred years, bringing cool breezes and the scent of flowers. The ending adds that good children's conduct shortens their trial, while bad children make them weep and prolong the wait. This is Andersen's religious and instructive conclusion, not freedom from every external condition. Nevertheless, the change from her grandmother's original account is clear. She no longer has only the prince's love to wait for. Her own actions can now take part in the prospect of a soul.
A new path does not prove that the earlier silence and pain were simply tuition she naturally had to pay. She has lost her old life with her family and never told the prince in her own voice what happened in the wreck. The ending permits continued existence; it does not reverse those events. To call all her losses worthwhile merely because hope finally appears is still to use an outcome known only afterward to answer for the person who had to choose before knowing it.
Should she never have changed, then? That answer would push her back into the safe undersea palace, as if three centuries of life, her family's love, and everyone's applause could decide that she ought to be content. Her longing did not begin with the prince, nor does it become wholly false because she fails to marry him. Leaving one's original home and learning another life can bring one closer to who one truly wants to become. The difficulty is the particular way she enters. After arriving, she can scarcely explain her purpose, make her pain known, or reconsider with him the relationship taking shape between them.
Perhaps the question is less how much a person changes than what room remains afterward. Can she bring her experiences into their shared life, express refusal when she cannot bear more, and make new plans if the other's wishes differ from hers? More than one kind of voice or language can support these capacities. This story makes the mermaid exchange her most important means for legs, then gives the pair no adequate replacement channel. She gains a chance to be seen and loved without ever becoming sufficiently known.
As a Daughter of the Air she can finally question her new companions and, for the first time, has tears. She has not become the prince's wife, recovered her old body, or made him pay for her disappointment with his life. Carrying unfulfilled wishes, she begins another existence with conditions and actions still ahead. The girl who once stood at her window dreaming of land has traveled far. Perhaps what is worth carrying onward with her is not only the courage to keep going toward a distant world, but also the possibility of making her past, wishes, and pain heard after she has drawn close to others.
Textual basis: Hans Christian Andersen's ‘The Little Mermaid’ (Den lille Havfrue, 1837), with reference to Jean Hersholt's complete English translation at the Hans Christian Andersen Centre. This is a reading of the tale, not a sentence-by-sentence translation. It retains her threefold longing for the human world, the prince, and an immortal soul; the witch's announced price; the prince's mistaken identification; the refusal to kill; and the Daughters of the Air with their three-hundred-year trial. The voice restored at the end belongs to an air spirit and cannot be heard by humans. It does not mean she has returned to the prince and explained her identity. Her loss of speech in this narrative is not generalized into a claim that people who cannot speak lack selves or cannot form full relationships.
Complete independent English reader prose written directly from the published Chinese essay, not an expansion of its earlier short English body. Andersen's selected version and the questions of this reading remain distinct. Refusal to kill and a religious ending are not made into duties of self-sacrifice for love; the particular failures of communication here are not generalized to people who do not speak. The existing English title and deck are retained.