The Ugly Duckling

The Ugly Duckling is Hans Christian Andersen's tale of rejection, movement between social settings and eventual recognition. The summary follows the English text in Project Gutenberg's Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, eBook 27200. Its title page does not credit a translator.

Story summary

A large, awkward young bird hatches among ducklings and is mistreated in the poultry yard. He leaves and encounters further danger and rejection. In a cottage, a hen and a cat judge him by abilities they possess, failing to understand his desire to swim. He sees swans, survives a winter of hardship and approaches them the following spring, expecting attack. Instead he sees his reflection and recognises that he is himself a swan. The other swans welcome him, and children admire him.

Recognition and transformation

The ending changes several things at once: the bird has matured, he recognises his kind, and others respond differently. These should be distinguished. The story does not describe a biological duck magically becoming a swan. Earlier observers have placed a young swan in the wrong category.

That distinction creates two different possible readings. One stresses development: qualities become visible over time. Another stresses setting and judgement: a creature is treated as deficient when measured against the wrong expectations. Both can be argued from the story, without treating either as its exclusive psychological meaning.

The narrator explicitly separates birthplace from the bird's kind:

To be born in a duck's nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan's egg.

Narrator, Andersen's “The Ugly Duckling”, recognition scene near the ending.

The sentence makes the swan identity prior to its recognition. A reading about changed classification therefore has direct textual support, while a claim that the bird earns a new species through suffering would alter the account. The story's valuation of swans can also be examined rather than assumed to be neutral.

Images and movement in the story

The ugly duckling: settings and measures of worth

Setting or image	Close-reading question
The poultry yard	Which local hierarchies determine who is admired and who may be attacked?
The cottage	What happens when the hen’s and cat’s skills become the only accepted measures of usefulness?
Open water	How does a capacity that is dismissed in one setting become usable in another?
Winter	What must the bird survive before the later recognition becomes possible?
The reflection	What can he now recognise that was unavailable to his earlier account of himself?
The welcoming swans	Does belonging require approval from the original group, or can it occur elsewhere?

The story offers no simple instruction that exclusion is always resolved by departure. Within this narrative, movement opens possibilities and exposes the bird to additional dangers. Inside and Outside: Shelter, Confinement and Belonging helps separate physical refuge, social acceptance and a suitable environment.

Figurative language

Ugly duckling is a documented expression for a person or thing that initially seems unpromising but has potential, or subsequently develops recognised beauty, ability or value.

Original example: The abandoned station was the ugly duckling of the town's buildings before its conversion into a library. The comparison may concern a changed building, a changed public judgement, or both. Establishing which changed prevents a loose story of improvement from replacing a precise account.

Applying the expression to a person can also repeat the story's initial insult. The later promise of admiration does not make an earlier judgement of ugliness neutral. The Ethics of Metaphor is relevant to who chooses such a description and whose standards it assumes.

Narrative patterns and cultural influence

The rejected outsider and unrecognised identity are recurring patterns, but they do not require the same interpretation as Cinderella's changed clothes or the Little Mermaid's altered body. The mechanism of change differs in each tale.

The Walt Disney Family Museum distinguishes Disney's loosely based black-and-white The Ugly Duckling (1931) from the later colour production (1939). Its account relates the two productions to changes in animation techniques and storytelling at the studio. These are specific examples of adaptation; the films should not be treated as interchangeable records of Andersen's text.

Reading question: Does the ending challenge the practice of ranking creatures by beauty, or mainly reverse who receives the highest rank? What in the wording supports your answer?

Further reading: comparison and interpretation

belonging without a condition of worth develops this connection.

The ethical reading examines the narrator’s conditional statement about the swan’s egg. The story can support finding a more accepting community, but its later metaphorical use should not make beauty or exceptional status a condition for humane treatment.

Related pages

• Cinderella
• The Little Mermaid
• Mirrors and Reflections
• Inside and Outside: Shelter, Confinement and Belonging
• The Ethics of Metaphor

Browse the library

Fairy Tales, Idioms and Everyday Speech | Reading Fairy Tales: Archetypes, Motifs and Narrative Roles | Stories and literature | Subject index