The Moral Maze #1: The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

My obsession, right now, is morals within romance novels. Moral setting, moral assumptions, the morality of the characters and how all of that interacts with the reader. Fascinating.

It's been simmering for a while. I've touched on it in this post, and in this one. And mused on it further thanks to this post of Jessica's. And it's related too to other questions that have been interesting me about the reader-writer relationship and where the reader is when she reads and indeed who she is.

Now, I want to try and address it a bit more, probably through a series of irregular posts.

So I thought, where to start? And decided on a fairy tale.

Fairy tales are often heavily imbued with moral principles. One that I felt strongly about when I was a child was The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, a not terribly well known Hans Christian Andersen story. The eponymous girl, Inger, is presented at the outset as unpleasant, spoiled, selfish and cruel, though her crimes will be familiar to anyone who has ever been a child: she picks the wings off flies, fails to value the things she is given and treats her mother with disdain. Inger is given a place with a wealthier family who treat her like their own daughter. She is given fine clothes by them. When urged to visit her mother, she doesn't do so. One day her mistress sends her again to see her mother and gives her a loaf of good bread to take. But she decides to use the bread to protect her shoes from a muddy puddle. Unfortunately for her, she sinks through the puddle and into the underground brewery of the Marsh Wife. Even more unfortunately for her, the devil is visiting that day with his grandmother and the latter decides that Inger has 'aptitude'. She takes Inger to be a pedestal in her house.

And she got her. And this is how little Inger came to hell. People don't always rush straight down there, but they can get there by a roundabout way - when they have the aptitude!

Inger lives in hell for many long years. She hears her mother's last words as she dies. She hears her tale being told to children and their horrified reactions. She is motionless, stood on her pedestal of bread, ever open-eyed. Wingless flies crawl on her and she cannot brush them off. And all the time she is there, she is famished. She can't reach the bread beneath her feet.

She is angry and bitter. She blames others for her plight. Eventually, one day, one little girl cries for her and says Poor Inger. It creates a little teeny crack in Inger's anger. Long years later, as that little girl lies dying as an old old woman, she remembers the girl who trod on bread again and sends a prayer to God. We don't know if the prayer moves God, but it moves Inger. She accepts her responsibility and reaches her lowest moment of despair. It is her redemptive moment:

And then, much faster than the snowflake falling on the warm mouth of a child melts away to a drop, Inger's petrified figure faded away. A tiny bird, zigzagging like lightning, soared up to the world of mortals.

Inger has become a bird. And she spends her little bird-life collecting thousands upon thousands of crumbs of bread and giving them to other hungry birds until she has collected the equivalent of that whole loaf.

And when the very last bread crumb had been found and given away, the bird's grey wings turned white and spread out wide.

"A tern is flying over the sea!" said the children who saw the white bird. Now it ducked down into the sea, now it soared in the bright sunshine; it shone, it wasn't possible to see what had become of it. They said that it flew straight into the sun."

And that is the story of The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf; dire warning to small, stroppy children; harshly judgemental morality tale; uplifting story of a hard-won redemption.

This is a story that appears to have a rigid moral setting, so much so that I found it deeply disturbing as a wee girl. Inger is harshly punished for her crimes. She is spoiled - cruel even - but do these youthful character flaws justify the decades of unspeakable torment she suffers? Or the redemptive act she has to perform as a bird? It seems an unusually harsh morality tale.

You could read it that way. But there is another way of looking at it. Perhaps as a well-meant cautionary tale; a warning that life is harsh and your least transgressions may be your undoing. Or as something more allegorical. A reflection on the fact that it is these small and thoughtless transgressions that take us on a roundabout way to hell. A warning that the little things matter.

I love this story even as I find it troublesome. The language is interesting. At times, Andersen almost seems to gloat at times over Inger's suffering, suggesting a moral architecture that is set in stone. At other times, the tone is charity itself. And strangely, the sheer harshness of the treatment that Inger receives makes the reader question the degree of her moral turpitude and to cause the reader to question notions of fairness, proportionality, crime and punishment.

And so it seems to me that even when the moral setting is seemingly unyielding, there may be some 'wiggle room' for the reader.