Our friends at Little Toller Books have recently published a wonderful monograph on Mermaids by Sophia Kingshill. We are delighted to publish an extract below. The book is available to buy from our bookshop.

Modern Mermaids 

IN 2012, AN INTERNET ARTICLE identified mermaid novels as the ‘hottest new trend’ of Young Adult fiction, but concluded that they were unlikely to oust vampires or schoolboy magicians from the bestseller lists ‘because they are, to put it bluntly, girls’ books’. Of the authors mentioned in the article, one is a man, sixteen are women.

A few of the books cited are actually about sea boys, but the article’s title refers to mermaids alone. This is standard usage, in spite of the fact that mermen have as ancient a presence, in legend and in art, as mermaids. Although witnesses report seeing bearded as well as breasted creatures in the waves, and if merfolk have a gender at all (given their lack of equipment), there’s nothing to say that their chromosomes should be more X than Y, the people of the sea are just about unique among creatures real or fabulous, in that the female term covers both sexes: as a collective noun, we’re far likelier to talk about ‘mermaids’ than ‘merfolk’. Mermaids, moreover, get more publicity than their he-counterparts. A Google search for ‘merman’ yields around eight hundred thousand results, ‘mermaid’ well over twenty million. Males are, for once, the second sex.

That doesn’t automatically empower the mermaid: quite the reverse. For most of her history, she’s been depicted, described, and voiced by male artists, seafarers, theologians and storytellers, and whether as object of desire or figure of fear, a half-naked woman is, or has been, obviously intended to delight or disquiet a largely male audience.

Now the pendulum’s swung the other way, and mermaids are inspiring women not just in Young Adult Fish Lit, but across the media. Artist Wangechi Mutu mounted a London exhibition of paintings, sculpture and video in 2014 under the title Nguva na Nyoka (Sirens and Serpents). The nguva or dugong is an aquatic mammal that is the equivalent of the Siren in Kenyan coastal legend; Mutu uses images of the nguva to explore questions of feminism, ecology and metamorphosis, and contrasts its intense and sometimes savage powers with ‘the sanitised mermaid of popular European culture’.

Singer Mariah Carey recorded her 1999 album Rainbow in Capri, and in an interview she recalled her pleasure when she saw the Scoglio delle Sirene, ‘Sirens’ Rock’:

The Sirens would sit there and lure in the men. They gave them this rock because women were considered less important than men, and that’s their revenge: they sexually entice men with their voices to come to this rock . . . I just fell in love with that.

The idea that the Sirens’ magnetism helped them get even with men has obvious relevance to the career of a pop diva like Carey, whose appearance and sexuality are exploited to market her singing.

The mermaid as spokeswoman for equality, typified by the Madrid graffiti I saw in 2013, goes back at least to the 1970s, when the name Siren was used for a feminist magazine in Chicago. A pattern has been established of women reclaiming the mermaid, reacting against male-dominated traditions defining her as submissive or seductive.

There are earlier examples of the belligerent mermaid, without any particular sex bias. Warsaw’s city crest, which evolved from a bird-legged, scaly monster (a classical Siren, in fact, as described in Chapter 12) to become, by the eighteenth century, a recognisable mermaid with a woman’s body and a fish’s tail, has remained militant throughout, carrying a shield and brandishing a sword. Between 1811 and 1915, under the Fourth Partition of Poland, the Syrena, as she’s known, was officially banned, but was displayed in many places as an assertion of the city’s identity, and in the Second World War she was adopted as the badge of the Polish II Corps.

Pablo Picasso, visiting a Warsaw apartment block under construction in 1948, drew the Syrena on an interior wall, giving her the Communist hammer to hold instead of a sword. This image survives only in photographs, since the mural wasn’t universally admired. The first person offered the flat in question refused it, on the grounds that he had small children and the mermaid had bare breasts, while the next (childless) candidates were equally horrified:

It was huge, my God was it huge. Her bosom was like two balloons, the eyes were triangular, at the end of her long, oddly long arm she held a hammer; and she had a short, tapering tail at the back.

After a couple of years, the flat’s tenants quietly had their private Picasso whitewashed, but the Syrena has continued to appear as a political symbol, employed by supporters of Solidarity in the 1980s, and more recently by the Warsaw Gay Movement.

The common modern perception of the mermaid, however, is of a whimsical and child-friendly fantasy. This image is based to a great extent on the ubiquitous kitsch spawned by the Disney cartoon: but the Little Mermaid herself is not so wholesome, on closer inspection.

Ariel, as she’s christened in the film, is drawn with a girlish figure and a pertly pretty face. Her hair is neither seaweed- green nor princess-golden, but a vibrant red, and she hides her breasts in a bikini top, modest for the family market. Ariel’s inquisitive nature leads her to take an interest in the human world, and while people-watching, she falls in love with the young prince Eric. When his ship sinks in a storm she saves his life, but swims away before he can see her. She bargains with the sea-witch Ursula for a spell allowing her to exchange her tail temporarily for a pair of legs, in return giving up her voice, which Ursula magically traps in a shell.

Unless she receives a kiss of true love, the mermaid is told, she must remain in the witch’s power forever. The wicked Ursula then transforms herself into an attractive woman, and sings in Ariel’s voice to bewitch Eric. True identities are eventually discovered, the witch is killed, and Ariel, having regained her voice and become fully human with the help of her father the sea-king, marries her prince.

The Danish original is an altogether darker affair, with a stern message about redemption through suffering. Early in Andersen’s ‘Little Mermaid’, as in the film, its teenage heroine (here nameless) rescues the prince from a shipwreck.

Then, however, it is not love alone that impels her to beg for a human shape, but the desire for an immortal afterlife. Her grandmother tells her that this can be achieved if a man marries her: at the moment the priest joins their hands, she will be granted a share of her husband’s soul.

In order to win her prince and thus her chance of eternal life, the mermaid visits a witch. She is warned that having her tail split into two legs will mean continuous agony – every step she takes will feel as if she is treading on a blade sharp enough to make her bleed – and, moreover, that becoming human is a one-way journey. She will never be a mermaid again.

In payment for her spell, the witch demands the mermaid’s voice, which she takes not with a reversible charm, but by cutting out her tongue. Dumb, and in terrible pain, the mermaid reaches the palace, where she is kept as a kind of pet, allowed to sleep on a cushion outside her prince’s door. The prince is fond of her, but his love is bestowed on a princess he believes to be the girl who saved him from drowning. He marries the princess, and the mermaid acts as bridesmaid at the wedding.

Her sisters, meanwhile, longing to bring her back to them, have acquired a magic knife from the witch. This, they tell the mermaid, must be plunged into the prince’s heart, and his blood will turn her feet back into a fish-tail. She can’t bring herself to kill him. Instead she throws the knife into the sea, then dives in herself, and feels her body melt into foam, a mermaid’s death.

Nevertheless she does not die, but is transformed into a spirit of the air, who can gain a soul by three centuries of good deeds. One of her ethereal companions tells her that for every good child she visits, the three hundred years will be shortened by one year, but at the sight of a naughty child she will cry, and every tear shed will add a day to her probation.

The religious trappings do have a certain authority behind them. Medieval theologians had speculated as to whether mermaids and other ‘monsters’ possessed souls, and some concluded that a mermaid did not, but wished she did. The idea that she could gain one by marrying a human being was proposed by earlier authors than Andersen, and the Little Mermaid’s metamorphosis into an airy form is based on philosophical concepts of the four elements, earth, fire, water, and air.

The physical and emotional torments that the mermaid undergoes are Andersen’s own invention, and however unpleasant to read, they are what gives the story its power both as tragic romance and as parable of a female rite of passage. Writing for children in the early nineteenth century, Andersen could not say straight out that in order to be a man’s wife, the mermaid would have to be able to have sex, and therefore must have sex organs. Instead, he has the wise grandmother point out that humans consider tails ugly, hence the need for legs. Then, whether intentionally or not, he invests the splitting of the mermaid’s tail with all the pain and secret mess of puberty and loss of virginity, her feet standing in for what in a woman is hidden and below. Wordless, in pain though no one sees you bleeding, unrequitedly in love, longing for a better world than this one: what adolescent can’t identify?

Sadistic and didactic, the tale makes uneasy reading, and one can readily understand Disney’s changes to make the plot palatable, but it was widely loved long before his studios got their hands on it. Operas and ballets have been based on it, Shirley Temple starred in it on television, and comic-book, manga and anime versions have been produced. Illustrations have tended to emphasise the Mermaid’s virginal purity and wistful charm, although one sketch by Lorenz Frølich hidesher breasts but gives her a suggestively cleft bum above her fishtail.

Most famous of all visual interpretations must be the statue which has become a national symbol of Copenhagen. After seeing a ballet based on Andersen’s tale, Carl Jacobsen, head of Carlsberg Breweries and a great patron of the arts, commissioned Edvard Eriksen’s sculpture, which was unveiled in 1913. Eriksen wanted to give his Little Mermaid legs, but Jacobsen held out for a tail, and a compromise was reached: the Copenhagen mermaid has clearly defined thighs, knees and calves, terminating in two large graceful fins. The sculptor may have realised how vital it was for Andersen’s heroine to be a forked animal – although locals have explained the legs as allowing their Mermaid to ride a bicycle, like the rest of the Danes. In fact the double-tailed mermaid is not a novelty, but a very old motif, as we’ll see.

Despite being visited and admired by countless tourists, the Copenhagen Little Mermaid, like her fairytale original, has suffered. In 1964, her head was sawn off, although it was quickly replaced using a cast from the original model. An arm was removed in 1984, she was decapitated again in 1998, and in 2003 she was blown right off her base by an explosive charge, while more superficial damage has been achieved with paint.

At least some of this vandalism has been motivated by protest. In one of the latest episodes, March 8 – the date of International Women’s Day – was painted on the Mermaid, and she was given a dildo to hold. You could say she’s an obvious target for feminist re-interpretation. Andersen’s Little Mermaid is a willing sacrifice, both to the insensitive Prince, and more importantly to the Church, which denies her a soul except at the cost of anguish.

Older than either the radical or the meek mermaid is the rapacious variety, of which the fearsome creatures who appear in Pirates of the Caribbean are recent avatars. The film does feature one ‘good’ mermaid who falls in love with a human being, but the rest of the breed are carnivorous and merciless. At their first appearance, a couple of nymphs raise heads and arms from the sea to beguile a boatful of sailors with their sweet voices and youthful faces; then the picture pulls back, to reveal more and more converging on the boat like minnows to bait, and finally we see shoals of them leaping around their terrified prey.

On dry land they appear as luscious women, legs and all (what’s between is never on display, and their breasts are obscured by long hair), but underwater, they are seen to have tails, and fanged mouths like vampires. Although they use their sex to entice, they only want men as food.

Much of this, including their appetite to consume men in the literal sense, is long-standing legend. Homer’s Sirens – who are not mermaids at all, as explained later, but who significantly inform the tradition – strew their surroundings with human bones. Themes of homicide and lust intertwine from an early date: a work of the third or second century bc, purporting to record the adventures of Alexander the Great in India, mentions women living immersed in a river, who were beautiful – ‘Their complexion was snow-white, like nymphs their hair spread over their backs’ – but who suffocated Alexander’s soldiers during or after the act of love.

A thirteenth-century encyclopedia (in sixteenth-century translation from Latin) describes the Siren as temptress and cannibal:

a beast of the sea wonderfully shapen as a maid from the navell upward, and a fish from the navell downeward, and this wonderfull beast is gladde and merrie in tempest, and sadde and heavie in fayre weather. With sweetnesse of song this beast maketh shipmen to sleepe, and when shee seeth that they be a Frederick Leighton, The Fisherman and the Syren (c.1856–58): the young man is helpless, as the mermaid wraps her tail round his legs and her arms round his neck

sleepe, she goeth into the ship, and ravisheth which she may take with her, and bringeth him into a drye place, and maketh him first lye by her, and doe the deede of lechery, and if he will not or may not, then she slaieth him and eateth his flesh.

Pirates of the Caribbean presents an authentic characterisation, and an unusually forthright one for the cinema. More commonly, films have expressed a mermaid’s predatory nature in terms of seduction: in Miranda (1948), Glynis Johns’s character creates emotional havoc among her string of suitors before returning to the sea, and in Splash! (1984), Madison (Daryl Hannah) ultimately takes her lover (Tom Hanks) under the waves with her. Although this is presented as a happy ending, it’s made clear that he can never come back to the world of humans.

It’s always a risk to meet a mermaid.

To buy Mermaids by Sophia Kingshill follow the link to the right.