Hans Christian Andersen didn’t write a fairy tale called ‘The Ugly, Pornographic Duckling’, yet his stories often feature alienation, exile and the struggle for acceptance. ‘Ugly and pornographic’, meanwhile, is how Politiken newspaper’s art critic, Mathias Kryger, has described the ‘Big Mermaid’: a 14-ton, 13-foot tall, notably buxom statue which between 2006 and 2018 stood on Copenhagen’s Langelinie promenade – only a few hundred feet away Edvard Eriksen’s iconic 1913 ‘Little Mermaid’ original (itself based on an Andersen fairy tale).
Andersen, who was teased for being tall and ugly as a child, might well pity poor ‘Big Mermaid
The ‘Big Mermaid’ has now been exiled twice – in 2018 she was moved ten miles south to Copenhagen’s Dragør Fort, after locals at Langelinie denounced her as ‘fake and vulgar’. Now she is set to disappear from public view altogether, having been deemed ‘not fitting’ with the cultural heritage of the 1910 fort by Denmark’s Agency for Palaces and Culture.
Andersen, who was teased for being tall and ugly as a child, might well pity poor ‘Big Mermaid’. She was originally commissioned by Danish entrepreneur Peter Bech, who had noted how frequently tourists were disappointed by the diminutive scale of Eriksen’s mermaid, which at little over four feet tall can feel swamped by the scale of its open-air harbour surroundings. Big Mermaid, in response, is big in all dimensions; but it’s her large, gravity-defying, perhaps prosthetically-enhanced breasts in particular – ‘a man’s hot dream of what a woman should look like’, according to one commentator – which are the main cause of critical concern.
‘Big’s’ breasts mean this statue strikes a very different tone to Eriksen’s original. The latter is nude, yet seems barely sexualised – perhaps appropriately, given she is based on a story of love and redemption by Andersen, a confirmed bachelor of possibly bisexual leanings who claimed never to have lost his virginity, and was modelled by Eriksen’s wife, a mother of five.
Bech’s version, meanwhile, appears influenced by a very different mermaid archetype – the siren temptress who will lure sailors into jeopardy; the kind of mermaid with the dazzling effect of Daryl Hannah, whose beauty upends Tom Hanks’s promising fruit-and-vegetable wholesaling career in the 1984 movie Splash.
In truth, attitudes towards the display of naked female breasts, whether on statues, in movies, or in real life, have changed very considerably, in both Denmark and the UK. In the UK, the Sun began publishing topless Page 3 girls in 1970 but ended the feature in 2015. Denmark’s Ekstra Bladet tabloid started a similar feature on its Page 9 in 1976 (sadly, the more felicitous Page 6 – ‘seks’ in Danish – was just too profitable a page for advertising); and this is still going, but only after 1,649 photos of underage girls featured before 2003 were blurred in its digital archives. Recent models tend to be much closer to 30 years old.
Public nudity on Danish beaches is generally legal, and from my childhood, I remember many naked bathers of all ages, shapes and sizes – some attractive, others very much not. But cultural homogenisation has led to Danish beaches looking just like beaches in California or Spain, and there are few nudists left. It has been excellent news for vendors of bikinis – after all, the only tailors who made ever made money from nakedness were Andersen’s, in The Emperor’s New Clothes.
For now, Big Mermaid will have no fairy-tale ending. Yet Hans Christian Andersen also liked to play around with scale, and if this were one of his fairy tales, an obvious solution to Big Mermaid’s plight would be found: an even greater statue – Huge Mermaid, with breasts as big as Copenhagen’s Round Tower, would be commissioned, creating a triptych of mermaids, including Eriksen’s, in which Big Mermaid’s merely very ample breasts would pale into insignificance. Reality, I fear, seems likely to disappoint profoundly.
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