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By any evaluation, Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Snow Queen" (1845) hardly instantiates sex normativity.1 Concerning mutual (sexual) attraction between a young boy (Kai) and an adult woman (the Snow Queen); mutual (sexual) attraction between two children (Gerda and Kai) who, though not biologically related, are raised as siblings; and mutual (sexual) attraction between Gerda and the various women and girls she meets on her travels, the tale explores a variety of arguably homosexual and homosocial relationships as well as arguably heterosexual and heterosocial ones.
The term homosociality, associated with queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Between Men), refers to a range of apparently nonsexual same-sex relationships, including friendships. With its less familiar counterpart, heterosociality, it draws attention to the institutionalization of specific kinds of interactions between and among the sexes. Thus, for example, when homosexual relationships become conventionally tabooed-consider, for example, the number of North American jurisdictions failing to legalize or otherwise opposing same-sex marriage-homosocial relationships are rarely proscribed. Yet when heterosexual relationships are normative, heterosociality- especially in close dyads (between two individuals)-is not. Consider how often the idea of close friendship between a (nonkin) woman and man precluding sexual relations is represented in popular culture as an impossibility. Eventually, the two will realize they are really in love, as, it appears, do Kai and Gerda at the conclusion of Andersen's "Snow Queen."
Incorporating but not condemning taboos such as adult-child sex (sometimes characterized by the slippery term pedophilia), incest (between social if not biological siblings), and lesbian attraction (most obviously between the Little Robber Girl and Gerda)2 in one story, without nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century readers seeing the narrative as unsuitable for children, might seem quite a feat.3 Yet many literary critics deny this manifest content in the plot. It has been described as a "Christian allegory" (Boggild 272-75), a "Romantic allegory" (276-78), and "a fine example of the double articulation of Andersen's fairy-tales [sic]. The ideal child listener . . . will take pleasure in the happy end after all the troubles and digressions, while the ideal grown-up reader . . . might find he [sic] is left with some questions worth thinking about" (280). Similarly, Joan G. Haahr notes: "Juxtaposing doctrinaire piety with colloquialism, sentimentality with irony, 'The Snow Queen' addresses both...
