Instructions: After reading The Top and the Ball write an essay answering the below questions.  Make sure that you support your responses by offering paraphrased evidence from the story. Your response should be no longer than 2 typewritten pages and should be submitted through the  course website. Your essay should be a cohesive composition with complete paragraphs and sentences (not numerically organized answers), with proper spelling and punctuation, and satisfying all of the homework formatting requirements. 

1.After reading the entire story, do you think the top is truly in love with the ball?  Why or why not?

2.In your view, why does the ball refuse the marriage proposal from the top?

3.Do the criteria the top and the ball use for selecting marriage partners seem like the foundation for a life-long relationship?  Why or why not?

I enjoyed this little tale from Hans Christian Andersen. As with most successful ones of the genre, it could be appreciated by children but also carried deeper meaning for adults, who might have found themselves reading it aloud at story time. Anyone who has ever had a romantic overture rejected can relate to both the top's and the ball's situations.

The top was never really in love with the ball, but this is only hinted at in the beginning. The first appeal is based mostly on convenience; he suggests marriage because they live in the same box. The ball deems the request unworthy of even answering, but her reaction (as is often the case) does not settle the matter‒ our desires frequently increase for things we cannot have.

But then fortunes change for the top, and he receives a new coat of paint and some brass “bling" which emboldens him to try his luck again. This is again a misfire, believing that his superficial qualities make him more worthy of the ball's consent to marriage. (And it's a subtle and clever bit of foreshadowing):

When the ironic twist comes, and now the top becomes the pursued rather than the pursuer, the thrill of it all has passed. The ball has lost her looks, while his have improved. His pining for her has long since run its course, and his “love” is exposed for the shallow self indulgence it was all along. (I also enjoyed the fact that she, the ball, apparently neither recognized the top nor remembered it when they met again‒ breaking her earlier promise to him). Not a typical fairy tale ending...

The ball was as shallow, if not more so, than the top. Very proud, to the point of snobbery, about her Moroccan leather “skin” and her heritage, and this is the reason she refused the top's entreaties. Simply put, she considered herself too good for him. The symbolism of flight is used quite effectively in the choice of top, ball, and the swallow she would prefer to marry‒ each respectively can reach loftier heights, and the analogy to social status is a smart one; as are the use of “gutter” and “dust bin” for the depths to which things can plummet. (The story has a little more sting to it than the usual fairy tale, and I was not surprised to learn online that in his own life, Hans Christian Andersen had often fallen for women that were out of his league, and he had his share of heartbreak).

Relationships built on appearances and superficialities, social status, and other ephemeral qualities are not going to be structurally sound over a lifetime. They might indeed stand a long time, especially if both partners are equally shallow and pretentious, but they are a facade; flimsy and not well buttressed against the storms in life that can come. If you marry someone for their money, and the money goes away by some misfortune, then what do you have in the wake? If your strongest bond at a relationship's beginning is that you are a living “Ken and Barbie”, the prom king and queen... where are you when those looks inevitably fade (or worse, given some desperate enhancement?)

Strong relationships tend to survive the uglier, baser, and more mundane times and settings that befall almost everyone over extended lengths of time. The best and most enduring lovers, in my opinion, have to become best friends at some point in the relationship, and probably the sooner the better. They can soar with the swallows at times, hopefully... but they will still love each other, and make the best of it, even when they find themselves in the dust bin.