The Emperor’s New Clothes

Author: Hans Christian Andersen

Time Period: 1851 CE–1900 CE

Country or Culture: Denmark

Genre: Fairy Tale

PLOT SUMMARY

The story begins by introducing an emperor who loves clothes so much that he devotes all his attention and his money to what he wears. His obsession is such that he is said to have a different ensemble for each hour of the day and is often found in his dressing room. Visitors commonly come to the emperor’s town, so it is not unusual when two strangers arrive claiming to be master weavers, capable of producing the finest fabrics and patterns. Moreover, the weavers claim to have a special power: their cloth is “invisible to every person who [is] not fit for the office he held, or who [is] impossibly dull” (263). The emperor immediately orders the weavers, who are in fact swindlers, to produce such clothes for him so that he can discover who in his kingdom is incompetent or foolish. He pays the swindlers a large advance and provides them with costly silk and gold thread. They immediately set up their equipment and begin to weave, but there does not appear to be anything on their looms.

The emperor soon wishes to check on the weavers’ progress but decides to send someone else first, choosing a faithful minister for the task. When the swindlers point to the loom, commenting on the splendid colors and design, the minister fails to see anything and wonders to himself, “Is it possible that I am a fool? I have never thought so, and nobody must know it. Am I not fit for my post? It will never do to say that I cannot see the stuff” (264–65). So the minster praises the work and listens intently as the swindlers describe the pattern so that he can report back to the emperor.

The swindlers soon demand more money for their work, which the emperor grants. When the emperor sends another minister to check on the weavers’ progress, this man also wonders at his inability to see anything and concludes that he must be incompetent since he is not a fool. Like the first minister, he praises the swindlers’ nonexistent work. Finally, the emperor himself, accompanied by his ministers, visits the swindlers and is shocked to find that he can see nothing, worrying that he is not fit to be the emperor. Regardless, he and his ministers make a good show of praising the beautiful cloth, and the emperor is advised to wear the clothes for an upcoming important procession.

The night before the procession, the swindlers make a grand show of working with great urgency to complete the emperor’s clothes in time, staying up all night and burning sixteen candles. In the morning, they pretend to hold the clothes in the air and to dress the emperor, who goes along with the pretense. Everyone in attendance praises the emperor’s fine appearance, and as the procession begins, the chamberlains pretend to hold the emperor’s train. The spectators in the streets all marvel aloud at the emperor’s new clothes. The only exception is a little child who loudly exclaims that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. In response, the child’s father says, “Oh, listen to the innocent,” but people begin to repeat the child’s words, murmuring, “A child says he has nothing on!” (268). Finally, the crowd begins to repeat the child’s pronouncement. The emperor realizes that the child has spoken the truth, but instead of acknowledging it, he insists to himself that the procession must continue, “so he [holds] himself stiffer than ever, and the chamberlains [hold] up the invisible train” (268).

SIGNIFICANCE

Since its publication in Copenhagen, Denmark, in the first half of the nineteenth century, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” has remained a popular fairy tale throughout the world, with numerous translations in many countries. This popularity derives from the story’s enduring messages about the folly of social pretense and the power of honest vision. People are subject to rules that govern social behavior; these rules sometimes dictate the acceptance of social situations that people do not truly support or believe but still support for the sake of relationships, credibility, or social status. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” satirizes this phenomenon to show what can happen when social pretense goes too far. The emperor and virtually all of his subjects are drawn into the swindlers’ scheme, not just because they care too much about what others think of them. The point is that the scheme itself dramatizes and plays on the fear of social failure because the swindlers claim that seeing the cloth depends on two crucial elements of social acceptance: competence and intelligence. The child’s act of seeing and voicing the truth occurs in part because children are less subject to the social pressures manipulated by the swindlers. The child is therefore more honest and emerges as a model of courage and conviction surrounded by cowardly adults, not least the emperor whose vanity initiated the fiasco in the first place.

This vanity is also part of the story’s implicit political satire. The emperor’s obsession with his appearance and implicit distrust of his own judgment of his servants make him vulnerable to the swindlers. These are serious flaws in a ruler and imply that he is concerned primarily with himself rather than with the protection of his subjects, a dangerous condition for any society. The story acknowledges these flaws in the first paragraph by mentioning that the emperor “care[s] nothing about his soldiers, nor for the theater,” and unlike other emperors, he dwells in his dressing room rather than in government offices (263). Thus, the story satirizes not merely the foolishness of social pretense, but also the danger and hypocrisy of such pretense in political contexts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andersen, Hans Christian. Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Trans. E. V. Lucas and H. B. Pauli. New York: Grosset, 1945. Print.

Prince, Alison. Hans Christian Andersen: The Fan Dancer. London: Allison, 1998. Print.

Robbins, Hollis. “The Emperor’s New Critique.” New Literary History 34.4 (2003): 659–75. Print.

Tatar, Maria. The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen. New York: Norton, 2008. Print.

Zipes, Jack. Hans Christian Anderson: The Misunderstood Storyteller. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.