The Ugly Duckling Analysis

What happens when you don’t meet society’s standard of beauty? After reading and analyzing The Ugly Duckling by Hans Anderson the answer is you are an outcast. Rejected and ridiculed by society because they are different. The ugly duckling wasn’t happy with himself or his life until the end of the story where he realized he was a beautiful swan. This isn’t the only fairy tale where the subject of beauty and ugliness shows up, in some fairy tales the protagonist is a beautiful maiden and the antagonist is an ugly crone. By applying key elements from The Ugly Duckling to: Cinderella, Little Brier-Rose and Snow White, it will demonstrate how in the world of these fairy tales stress the importance of beauty and that if the main characters of these

He suffers abuse, both physically and emotionally from his fellow ducks and the local farm animals. Eventually he is abandoned by his own family and lives with the wild geese until they are slaughtered. Throughout the story he finds new homes, but leaves because he is ridiculed for how he looks. In the end, fully grown, but alone and miserable decides to die by being killed by the beautiful swans but ends up discovering he has grown up into one of them and live happily with his new family. Over the course of this tale the word “ugly” is mentioned sixteen times. He is referred as ugly numerous times by other characters, even by his family and the duckling himself says he is ugly. At the end of the story after realizing he is a beautiful swan he says, “I have never dreamed of such happiness as this, while I was an ugly duckling” (The Ugly Duckling). Key points in this story: ugly equal’s outcast, becoming happy once one becomes beautiful and being ugly means you never dream of being happy. What happens when these points are applied to other fairy

The first thing we learned about the main characters was how they were so beautiful and their beauty was constantly mentioned throughout the story the exact opposite situation in The Ugly Duckling and again you come to the question, “If the heroines in fairy tales were ugly would they have their happily ever after?” The answer in all honesty would be now. In Grimm fairy tales the evil characters are described as ugly. If the heroines were ugly no one would notice them and there wouldn’t be any stories about them because the antagonists would have nothing to be jealous of and therefore have no vendetta against them. There would be no handsome prince to the rescue because they wouldn’t have looked twice if these heroines were anything but beautiful. So does one have to be beautiful to be happy?
In The Ugly Duckling that seems to be the truth. Throughout the tale the duckling never learns to love himself for what is inside because he only cared about he looked and he thought that way because that’s all what other people commented on, how he looked. He was never happy with himself. So in other fairy tales was the reason why the heroines were happy despite how miserable their lives were was because they were aware of how beautiful they