𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝒮𝓉𝑜𝓇𝓎 𝑜𝒻 𝒶 𝑀𝑜𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓇 (𝐼𝓃𝓈𝓉𝓇𝓊𝓂𝑒𝓃𝓉𝒶𝓁)

Night and darkness shape the setting of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Story of a Mother” (1847). On a cold winter night, a mother watches anxiously over her seriously ill child. When she falls asleep for a moment, an old man, who is actually Death, takes the child away. The mother desperately searches for her child in the dark night. She first meets Night, an old woman dressed in black, who tells her the way after the mother sings all the songs she used to sing to her child. Next, she meets a frozen thorn bush. To learn the way, she presses it against her chest and warms it with her body. The thorns make her bleed, but she continues until the bush becomes green and blossoms. She then reaches a lake and gives up her eyes in order to cross it. Now blind, she arrives at Death’s greenhouse. There, an old woman tells her that she can find her child by listening to the heartbeats of the plants. In exchange for this help, the mother gives her long black hair and receives the old woman’s white hair. She recognizes her child’s heartbeat and finds its plant, a small, sickly blue crocus. When Death arrives, the mother tries to protect her child’s plant. Death gives her eyes back and tells her to look into a well, where she sees the lives of two people: one full of happiness and the other full of suffering. He tells her that one of these would have been her child’s fate, but not which one. The mother realizes that she cannot know what the future would have brought for her child or control its fate. In the end, she accepts this and allows Death to take her child away.