Eighteen Hundred and Frozen to Death:
Politics and the Threat of Superintelligence in Disney's Frozen Franchise
II. The Carrot or the Stick
It has been said that the Victorian Era invented our modern concept of childhood, (Walther) the very social infrastructure that allows Disney's business plan to even exist. Before the 19th Century, child labor and infant mortality were givens in the West. By the 20th, after decades of technological and social progress, these were generally perceived as great evils to be eradicated, the middle and working classes agreeing that leisure for play and the imagination were as important a debt owed to the young as a good education. Room was being made for the concept of the teenager, as well.
Hans Christian Andersen is one of the authors most credited as having invented the modern narrative that allowed modern childhood itself to be imagined.
Vilhelm Pedersen, illustration for Andersen’s “Hun duede ikke” (“She Was Good For Nothing,”) 1855.
It is one of the ironies of the relationship between his life and his art that Andersen, arch-creator of the 19th-century bourgeois idyll of childhood,1 grew up far removed from the charmed nursery circle that stories such as ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’, ‘The Little Fir Tree’ and ‘The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep’ encapsulate. Born in 1805 in Odense, a country town on the island of Funen in Denmark, he was the son of a shoemaker and an illiterate washerwoman and spent his childhood in abject poverty. In fanciful form, he retold his mother’s hard life in the story ‘She Was No Good’; Vilhelm Pedersen’s illustration - made in Andersen’s lifetime - faithfully captures its sad details. Andersen’s father, an intelligent, depressive, under-educated man who read his son tales from the Arabian Nights and made him toy theatres, died in 1814 [sic],2 and Andersen became known in the slums of Odense as a lonely, gawky, ridiculous boy who dressed his dolls, wrote plays and sang in a beautiful tenor voice while the other children were street-fighting. His grandfather was mad; his gentle grandmother worked in a lunatic asylum where she and other old ladies in the spinning room recounted old folk tales; his aunt ran a brothel and his half-sister, his mother’s illegitimate older child, was probably a prostitute; later she tried to blackmail him. (Wullshlager, 2005)
Drawing from his own youthful experiences of puppet theatres, reading, and hearing folktales, Andersen would populate his eventyr with sentient toys and other objects. Animals had been anthropomorphized since prehistory, and Aesop was the West’s nursery text in that regard. But recognizing how children’s imaginations gave inanimate objects independent identities and will—this was an achievement of Andersen’s. Perhaps this is why today an Internet of Things can be imagined, and imagined to be desired: As much to do with the magic of the nursery as it is with leisure and convenience.
Frozen (2013), the Disney animation inspired by Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” reintroduces us to a world where child labor is the norm.
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