Nutcracker and Mouse King and The Tale of the Nutcracker
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“Nutcracker and Mouse King” is all about igniting the imagination of Marie so that she can act and realize her inner dreams and desires in opposition to a conventional and prescriptive upbringing. It is not by chance that the household in which most of the action takes place is called Stahlbaum, or “Steel Tree.” The parents of Marie and Fritz are truly solid and made of steel, and they are somewhat anxious that Drosselmeier, even though a friend, might contaminate Marie’s mettle with his toys and foolish stories. He might even break the “steel encasement” in which Marie is placed to learn about proper manners and good behavior.
The question that Hoffmann asks in this tale—and also in “The Strange Child”—is how to infiltrate a good and proper bourgeois home to free the children’s imaginations so that they can recognize and fulfill their desires. In this regard, the title of Hoffmann’s fairy tale is misleading. The story is not about the nutcracker and the mouse king; rather, it is about the curious child Marie and the ambivalent, somewhat threatening figure of Drosselmeier, the mysterious artist and teacher. Hoffmann positions Marie as the learner, who grasps that she must use her imagination to see the world as it really is. Drosselmeier provides the spark for her imagination and tests her through his remarks and stories to see whether she will remain true to her inner desires and imagination before he will help her reconcile what she sees inside herself and around her. From the point of view of Marie’s parents and her brother, Fritz, and sister, Luise, she is delirious and talks nonsense. But Drosselmeier sees Marie differently: he is struck by the way that she associates her visions and imaginings with the world around her and how she combines them to enrich her daily existence. Consequently, Drosselmeier does his best to assist her almost magically to uncover the potential of objects and symbols to become alive and to animate her modus vivendi.
At the same time that Hoffmann depicts Marie developing insights and a new mode of perceiving herself in the world, he also prompts readers to read differently and to change their attitudes toward the fairy tale. This transformation is not imposed but emanates from the mixture of narrative modes and genres—from a labyrinthine narrative structure, doubling of characters, and an ironic omniscient narrator. Hoffman’s fairy tale does not begin with the traditional “once upon a time” rather, the beginning is a dry realistic description of the somewhat customary preparations for a Christmas Eve celebration in the home of a typical German bourgeois family at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
For the entire twenty-fourth of December, the children of Medical Officer Stahlbaum were not permitted to step inside the intermediary room, much less the magnificent showcase next door. Fritz and Marie sat huddled together in a corner of the back room. The deep evening dusk had set in, and the children felt quite eerie because, as was usual on this day, no light had been brought in. Fritz quite secretly whispered to his younger sister (she had just turned seven) that he had heard a rustling and murmuring and soft throbbing in the locked rooms since early that morning. Also, not so long ago (Fritz went on), a short, dark man with a large casket under his arm had stolen across the vestibule. However, said Fritz, he knew quite well that it was none other than Godfather Drosselmeier.
The narrator is formal, often tongue-in-cheek, toying with the readers because he will soon use his careful realistic mode to depict the inner world of Marie as though she were actually experiencing everything that she sees, whether it be in her mind or outside her.
The shifts in narration are challenging for readers of any age, but they are clearly aimed at bringing all readers to realize that there is no phenomenological difference between the life of the mind and physical reality. The significance of Drosselmeier’s satirical fairy tale “The Hard Nut” is determined by the doubling effect that allows Marie to have a more profound understanding of things that her immediate family cannot see and to determine how to fulfill her dreams. Like “Nutcracker and Mouse King” itself, “The Hard Nut” is an anti–fairy tale, that is, it is an antitraditional fairy tale or folk tale because it is unsettling, macabre, and provocative. The king and queen are fops; their daughter is spoiled. The mice, who substitute for witches, fairies, and ogres, are ridiculous creatures. The horror and threats of the mice are ludicrous. Hoffmann creates a parody of court life of his times. Food and the appetite are the most important matters for the king and queen, who can also arbitrarily execute anyone they desire if their subjects displease them. The narrator Drosselmeier enters the story as artistic inventor, whose life is endangered because he inadvertently causes the princess to become ugly; and as one of the main protagonists of the story, he introduces the double of his real nephew, who is also to become the nutcracker. The fairy tale ends unhappily, because it can only be completed happily by Marie, both in her imagination when she saves Nutcracker, and later when she marries Drosselmeier’s real nephew from Nuremberg.
The reconciliation of real and imaginative realms that Marie experiences and the emphasis placed on following one’s natural instincts are developed more didactically and theoretically in “The Strange Child,” which was published in the second volume of Children’s Fairy Tales (1817). Hoffmann had read Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s works as a young student and was strongly influenced by them, especially Rousseau’s notions of a natural education that would enable children to flower. Hoffmann never forgot Rousseau’s “lessons,” and in “The Strange Child,” he depicted two children, Felix and Christlieb, living in the country with their parents, Count and Countess von Brakelheim. The setting is idyllic, and despite the fact the Brakelheims have very little money and live like common farmers in a dilapidated house, the family is content. However, this harmony is broken by the “distinguished” visit of a wealthy and pompous uncle, his wife, and his dainty, disciplined children, who can spout their memorized lessons like automatons. The uncle is distressed by the lack of academic knowledge and poor manners of carefree Felix and Christlieb and offers to send a private tutor so that they might live up to the aristocratic reputation of the family. After his departure, Felix and Christlieb take the artificial toys that their rich relatives have given them as gifts into the forest to play with, only to realize how useless and boring they are. The next day, they meet a “strange child,” somewhat like an alien creature, in the forest, who unveils the magic of nature to them so that they feel liberated and inspired by everything they encounter. The androgynous child has magical powers and refuses to reveal its sex. Felix and Christlieb tell their parents about their encounters with the strange child, and the parents, though concerned, are happy that the children are at one with nature. Yet when the private tutor, Master Tinte (“Ink”), sent by the rich uncle, arrives and begins to control their lives with his pedantry, they lose their contact with the strange child. Fortunately, as Master Tinte begins to take over the family and oppress the children, they flee into the forest, where they once again encounter the strange child, who reveals how they can banish the private tutor from their lives. Soon thereafter, however, their father becomes ill and tells his children that he, too, had met a strange child during his childhood and that they should endeavor to stay loyal to this child. The father dies. His wife and children are forced to leave their home in nature. But because Fritz and Christlieb keep the strange child alive in their hearts, they continue to see the marvelous things that the strange child brings to them from his realm.
This short summary does not do justice to Hoffmann’s remarkable fairy tale, which prefigures the science fiction/fantasy film E.T. by some 150 years. Whereas the alien E.T., who comes from outer space to help young children learn to empathize with and tolerate strangers in their lives, eventually departs, Hoffmann’s strange child enters the lives of Felix and Christlieb to remain there forever. Hoffmann insists on keeping the child in us alive until we die. Without the imagination we can be instrumentalized and exploited. By no means was Hoffmann a devout follower of Rousseau’s precepts concerning the importance of raising children in nature without books. Through his fairy tales and fan
tasies, he sought to bring about a deeper understanding of the mysteries of the imagination and an appreciation of how our inner and outer natures cannot be divided. These were deeply held convictions, and he embodied them in his own life so that it is at times difficult to distinguish where Hoffmann’s life ends and his art begins. The ambivalent and enchanting figures of Drosselmeier, Marie, Felix, and Christlieb are good examples of how it is possible to discover the world through fairy tales and to blend all kinds of ontological phenomena to develop one’s identity.
The same cannot be said of Alexandre Dumas’s Drosselmayer and Marie in “The Tale of the Nutcracker,” the 1845 French adaptation of Hoffmann’s fairy tale. Dumas (1802–70), born in Villers-Cotterêts, a small town outside of Paris, desired to become a great writer ever since his youth. He moved to Paris in 1823, and within six years he had made a name for himself with his historical play Henri III; he went on to become the most famous playwright in France during the nineteenth century. He was also regarded as one of the finest novelists of his times, with such works as The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Cristo (1846), and The Man in the Iron Mask (1848–50). Unlike Hoffmann, Dumas became prominent as a young man and was amazingly prolific, in part because he collaborated with many writers, who supplied him with drafts and sketches for his works. Nor did he worship art in the same manner as Hoffmann, who lived for his art. Dumas lived for his public and churned out plays, stories, dramas, novellas, and novels at a fast rate in newspapers, magazines, and in book form. He wrote to entertain, rarely to teach or to theorize. He popularized history and wanted the populace to read his works, which they did. Why and how he translated Hoffmann’s “The Tale of the Nutcracker” is somewhat of a mystery. We do know, however, that he was familiar with Hoffmann’s tales and admired him. He even wrote a tale, “La femme au collier de velours” (“The Woman with the Velvet Necklace,” 1851), which features Hoffmann, who falls in love with a dancer. But Dumas had no facility with the German language, and it is unclear whether he translated “Nutcracker and Mouse King” or whether he had the tale translated for him to adapt.
The cultural significance of Dumas’s adaptation is minimal. Though it is somewhat popular in the field of French children’s literature, this popularity may have more to do with the popularity of Hoffmann and the Russian ballet. Not that Dumas’s tale is poorly written, but it lacks the irony and complexity of Hoffmann’s original. Dumas transformed “Nutcracker and Mouse King” into a charming tale intended to entertain a group of rowdy children who tie up the author when he falls asleep in a boudoir. The comical frame allows the author to introduce Hoffmann as the real author of the tale and to begin addressing his captors in a didactic tone to enable his implied readers, young French children, to grasp a story that he sets in Nuremberg in the eighteenth century. Dumas includes several religious references that Hoffmann would not have welcomed; the name of the Stahlhaus family is changed to Silberhaus (“Silver House”); and Godfather Drosselmayer is said to adore the Silberhaus children instead of maintaining an ambivalent attitude toward them. The sister Luise disappears from Dumas’s story, and a governess by the name of Mademoiselle Trudchen (originally a doll) is added for comic effect. After introducing the main characters, Dumas more or less sticks to the same plot, but places less emphasis on the bizarre nature of Drosselmayer and the significant learning experience of Marie. Dumas appropriates the “German” tale à la français for young French readers and often has his author explain incidents where Hoffmann created enigmas. It is strange that Dumas abandons the frame that he set at the beginning of his tale. It is almost as if he had forgotten it, for we never learn what happens to the author, who was telling the tale to liberate himself, whereas Hoffman’s narrator maintains his presence and manipulation to the very end. Dumas simply embellishes the proposal and marriage scene and closes the tale sweetly by writing:
At this hour, Marie is still queen of the gorgeous kingdom, where we see brilliant Christmas Forests everywhere, rivers of orangeade, orgeat, and attar of roses, diaphanous palaces of sugar finer than snow and more transparent than ice. And finally, all kinds of magnificent and miraculous things—provided your eyes are sharp enough to see them.
Hoffmann’s version reads:
Marie supposedly is still queen of a land where you can see sparkling Christmas Forests everywhere as well as translucent Marzipan Castles—in short, the most splendid and most wondrous things, if you only have the right eyes to see them with.
Both endings emphasize eyes and the perception of wonder, and clearly the question of vision is one that “haunted” Hoffmann during his entire life: how to envision and realize desire and not dampen curiosity as one matures within the confines of an orderly middle-class society. Freud recognized the significance of Hoffmann’s reflections about vision and repression in his essay “The Uncanny,” in which he analyzed Hoffmann’s famous fantasy story “The Sandman.” In that eerie tale the young protagonist, Nathaniel, is more or less driven to suicide because he cannot reconcile his imaginative projections with the rational approach to reality that his friends and family maintain. His eyesight is jarred, so to speak, and he becomes desperate and virtually loses his mind. Freud explains that Nathaniel had suffered from a traumatic wound in his childhood that he repressed, and because he never heals the wound, it returns to terrorize him. Insight into this dilemma, perhaps, might have saved him. It is difficult to say, but what Hoffmann keeps insisting in all his fairy tales and fantasies is that, if adults do not nourish the imagination in their children, the children will lose sight of their potential, and their imagination will take its revenge later by abandoning them in a banal, lifeless world. Life without the imagination in Hoffmann’s tales can be traced in the mechanical behavior of those “deadened” adults who want to regulate the lives of children, or in adults who have been traumatized because they cannot use their imaginations to gain appropriate recognition of their identities. Only by introducing disruptive and extraordinary characters like Drosselmeier, so Hoffmann believed, will children have a chance to glimpse the different worlds and alternatives to their lives that have already been chartered and prescribed before they were born.
Is this why his tale, transformed into a ballet, mediated by Dumas, Tchaikovsky’s music, and the choreography of numerous artists, has become so mythic and captivating? Does the enchantment of the ballet have something to do with the liberation of our imaginations and our nostalgia for a time when we perceived everything around us and in us as alive? It is very difficult to talk about the meaning of The Nutcracker as ballet because Hoffmann’s text has been “destabilized” by Dumas and other adaptations, just as the original libretto by Vsevolojsky and Petipa has been changed and altered hundreds of times throughout the world. However, despite the diverse interpretations of the ballet, which often clash with one another, there is a basic plot to the movement of the ballet that recalls the Hoffmann tale.
Act I, Scene 1—The Christmas Party. The Silberhaus, or Stahlbaum, family prepares for a Christmas Eve party. The guests arrive. The two children, Clara and Franz, are excited. Uncle Drosselmayer, a peculiar gentleman who is Clara’s godfather, appears almost magically and brings with him three mechanical dolls to display: a lovely ballerina, a dancing doll that blows kisses, and a marching soldier. Sometimes Clara is called Marie or Masha, and sometimes the mechanical dolls represent other figures. The guests are enchanted by his inventions. Franz receives a toy sword or a wooden horse, and Clara, a funny-looking nutcracker, which the jealous and raucous Franz breaks. However, either Drosselmayer or Drosselmayer’s nephew manages to repair the nutcracker and place it beneath the Christmas tree in a bed. Afterward there is some dancing, and then the guests leave, while the children get ready for bed.
Act I, Scene 2—The Battle Scene. Clara cannot sleep because she is concerned about the nutcracker. She returns to the room in which the nutcracker has been placed beneath the Christmas tree, but strange things begin to happen. The grandfather clock
turns into Uncle Drosselmayer, and mice come from all four corners of the room to attack the Nutcracker, who has come alive and assembles Franz’s toy soldiers to assist him. The dreadful Mouse King leads the vicious mice. There is a fierce battle, and it appears that the mice will be victorious until Clara throws her slipper at the Mouse King, allowing the Nutcracker to take advantage of the rodent and kill him. Sometimes the Mouse King is simply knocked unconscious and is carried away by his troops. All at once the Nutcracker turns into a handsome prince.
Act II—The Land of Sweets. Now the Nutcracker Prince leads Clara to the Land of Sweets ruled by the Sugar Plum Fairy. Sometimes the bed is transformed into a sleigh, and they ride through a winter wonderland. Snowflakes dance. Once they arrive in the Land of Sweets, they are treated like royalty, and the Sugar Plum Fairy invites them to enjoy a lavish festival. The sweets, drinks, and flowers dance in their honor. They present a suite of dances from other lands—China, Russia, Arabia. There may also be a large Mother Ginger with offspring or a Shepherdess with her lambs. Finally, the stunning Sugar Plum Fairy dances a pas de deux with her handsome cavalier. Thereafter, everyone dances in a grand celebration that appears to be a dream. Sometimes the ballet ends after this dance, and sometimes Clara awakens back home under the Christmas tree or in her own bed.
Depending on the choreographer and the production, Hoffmann’s emphasis in his original tale—keeping the imagination alive—is maintained through a diverting spectacle. But gone are the more serious issues of his artwork, such as the conflict between the philistine method of raising children that curbs the imagination and Hoffmann’s innovative use of a double anti–fairy tale that enables young Marie to discover the miracles of life and realize her dreams. The ballet is more about the coziness of home, hominess, and the taming of the imagination. The episodes in the ballet take place in one night; the transitions are elegant and smooth. The ballet masks the difficult struggle that Marie (Clara) undergoes over a period of days in Hoffmann’s tale, and it is not clear whether her miraculous adventure will change her life. There are only faint echoes of Hoffmann, the provocateur, in the music and behavior of the strange godfather Drosselmayer, whose role is more or less effaced in the ballet after the first act. Indeed, Hoffmann’s tale is more or less destroyed after the battle scene. The second act is all fluff without much meaning except to show off the talents of the dancers. Marie is made into a mere spectator, just as children today are more and more expected to remain spectators and consumers of spectacles. Hoffmann’s tale has been made into a candy-coated entertainment that wraps up the imagination instead of setting the imagination of audiences free to lead the lives of their dreams.