Reflections on The Ugly Duckling

Last night, I rummaged through my dad’s “book mountain” to find a book, and I stumbled upon a collection of Andersen’s fairy tales. The stories I read as a child are still interesting to me now. I re-read Cinderella, The Ugly Duckling, and Thumbelina again. However, I found a problem, or rather, a misunderstanding from my childhood. Let’s take a look at a book review written by an elementary school student (which represents my original perspective)

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During the holiday, I read an interesting book - Andersen’s Fairy Tale Selection. The story that attracted me the most was The Ugly Duckling. This duck was excluded, ridiculed, and beaten everywhere. However, it always held onto a beautiful dream, and because of this dream, it didn’t give up in the face of difficulties, but instead persevered and finally became a beautiful and noble white swan. It felt happy and warm… After reading this article, I realized: appearance is not important, what’s most important is whether the heart is beautiful and pure. The Ugly Duckling became a white swan, and everything came from the eternal dream in its heart. Everyone can become a swan that spreads its wings and flies, as long as you have a firm belief, a beautiful dream, and persevere in your efforts, you will succeed, you will become a beautiful white swan, but there’s still a long, long way to go…

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Hehe, maybe our memories of this beautiful fairy tale are like this. But the original text is written like this

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“It matters nothing if one is born in a duck-yard, if one has only lain in a swan’s egg.”

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Oh my, it seems I was wrong (and many people were wrong too), the Ugly Duckling never actually “became” a white swan, it was a white swan from the start! It did experience hardships, but if it weren’t a swan, it wouldn’t have gotten a happy life. It seems Andersen isn’t that romantic after all, and “The Ugly Duckling” needs to be put in quotes. His intention was to say that a swan born in a duck farm is considered “ugly” by the ducks because it’s different. Broadening this idea, the author is saying: everyone uses their own philosophy to measure others, and in a narrow circle, geniuses are often seen as outliers and ignored. Andersen must have been excluded back then, which is why he wrote this (I’m just guessing) Through this incident, I discovered that our understanding of a known thing often has deviations, we tend to ignore some important words and misinterpret the whole story. Additionally, I highly agree with Andersen’s point, and if this article is summarized in one simple sentence, I think it would be - what’s golden will always shine! :)