Lixia Peña
Professor Jessica Pressman
ECL 305
14 April 2024
Close Reading Essay
The path of mermaid folklore across time takes us into the story of The Little Mermaid and Melusine in the 19th century. Here we see the mermaid form the desire to acquire a human soul through marriage with a human man. It is worth analyzing how the introduction of a human soul within mermaid folklore reflects the hierarchy by which the industrialized western world of the 19th century was structured. This is a hierarchy in which humans, specifically Christian, are at the top and dominate over nature. Through the analysis of this theme we can gain a better understanding of the Western understanding of what makes someone human and how it has shaped our current relationship with nature.
The text we are studying for our purposes is found on page 118. This is the scene in which the grandmother of our unnamed protagonist explains to her the difference between the life of humans and mermaids. The texts reads as follows, “-the term of their life is even shorter than ours. We can live to be three hundred years old; but when we cease to be here, we shall only be changed into foam and are not even buried below amongst those we love. Our souls are not immortal. We shall never enter upon a new life… human beings, on the contrary, have a soul that lives eternally – and that rises up through the clear pure air to the bright stars above…So do they rise to unknown and favoured regions, that we shall never be privileged to see.” In considering that the text reflects a western hierarchy of value we have to pay attention to some key details in this conversation. The story so far has established that the underwater kingdom parallels the same structures to be found on land. The environment is very similar and a monarchy also exists under water. The only difference lies then on the possession of a human soul. Where the mermaids only become an organic part of the natural world, humans have a soul with which they can ascend to heaven. We have previously discussed in class how western thought, shaped largely by Christianity, places emphasis on up v. down. Up being considered more favorable as it is in closer proximity to God whereas down is considered to be a realm much closer to hell. Humans live their mortal lives in a place already closer in proximity to heaven but their immortal soul is granted the “privilege” of ascending further. Mermaids by living in a realm below humans are not even given permanence through remembrance, they are not memorialized with a burial. Humans, when they ascend, are also privy to the privilege of knowledge. Here the myth of the mermaid possessing unknown knowledge is transposed. Humans are now the possessors of privileged knowledge and it is our mermaid who is drawn onto land hoping to one day acquire this same knowledge. The reader, so far, can surmise that being human is a far more privileged position than to be a being that would eventually just form part of nature. If we understand the mermaid to be a representation of nature then we have to surmise that under western ideas the natural world is not as important as the human world. So far, we can also presume that all humans have this advantage but the text goes on to provide further specificity.
The little mermaid’s grandmother goes on to explain to her under what conditions one could acquire a human soul. “Unless a human being loved you so dearly that you were more to him that either father of mother; if all his thoughts and his love were centred in you, and he allowed the priest to lay his right hand in yours…then would his soul glide into your body…he would give you a soul without forfeiting his own. But this will never happen!” We are no strangers to the presence of the contract of marriage in mermaid folklore. This text emphasizes that marriage, a Christian marriage specifically, is necessary for the mermaid to have a hope of sharing a soul with her partner. By making the requisite of a Christian marriage we can assume that not all humans have the privilege to having an immortal life in heave. Given that this is a story written for a Christian audience we can safely infer that it is the Christian God that the text is referring to. To understand how the story reflects the values of a western hierarchal society we must understand what is happening historically at this time. Colonization is in full force and indigenous peoples of the lands being exploited are being driven out of their homes; African natives are being kidnapped and trafficked into slavery and both groups of oppressed peoples are being forced into abandoning their religions and being converted to Christianity in the name of “righteousness”. In America western expansion is driving indigenous people’s out of their ancestral homes under the banner of “Manifest Destiny” and western settlers view the wilderness as land ready to be worked into production on Tobacco and cotton. Considering this history and the idea proposed by Andersen’s story, we have to wonder if the text implies that non-Christian peoples are then subhuman. This is certainly the understanding that colonial literature would present of enslaved and indigenous people as literature of the time will often use the word “savages” as a descriptor. It is worth mentioning that the origins of the word savage come from the French word Sauvage which means wild and from the Latin word Sivaticus which translates to “of the woods”. We can see here that under this Christian way of understanding, to live in a close relation to the natural world is to be less civilized and thereby less human. It is under this belief that the western world both justified its exploitation of non-christian peoples and forced them into converting to Christianity, so as to have a hope for their soul’s salvation and ascension into heaven. We could then understand the little mermaid as being the story of non-christian desiring a place at the top of the hierarchy, moving upwards into becoming a human i.e. Christian. The reader of the time in which this story is published is then taught that not only are they privileged above others but that these indigenous people are grateful to westerners for providing their souls salvation through conversion.
Through the focused exploration of this passage in Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, we can conclude that the story functions as a conversion story and further reinforces the idea that the natural world is in subservience to humans. It is something that ought to be used for the benefit of our own production and consumption. Even now as we work our way into de-colonizing our own thoughts and ideas it is clear that in order to do so our relationship with the environment is also something that needs to be re-examined. We need to understand our relationship the environment not as something to be dominated but as something to have a symbiotic relationship with. After all, when we put religion aside, the human body does eventually come to form a part of the natural world just as the mermaid becomes sea foam.