I remember reading the Hans Christian Andersen story of the little mermaid when I was quite young. I remember being surprised by the darker tone of this story compared to the Disney version that I knew. It wasn’t until the casting of the live action adaptation of the little mermaid that I started to hear more insight about the original story. Through social media I learned it that it is widely believed that the story is meant to be an allegory of queerness and particularly of a failed love of Andersen’s. I set off to re-read this story again with this in mind.

Immediately I noticed how different the point of view of the story is. It is still third person point of view but it seems that it is limited to the experience of the Little Mermaid. This makes it so that we can see the story through her experience rather than our known human experience. It is important to point this out because I do not believe we see this within any of our other assigned readings. Due to this we are able to see the Little Mermaid as closer to human than to the unknown. As I was reading this I was interested by what her grandmother tells her as she is asking about human lives. The grandmother says, “Your fish’s tail, which is a beauty amongst us sea-folk, is thought a deformity on earth, because they know no better.” (Page 119). It seems to me like Andersen could just as easily be talking about how society perceives queerness. Queerness, especially throughout the history of Christianity has been heavily stigmatized much like the mermaid. Here then, we see a story that is not necessarily meant to influence the reader into Christianity. Rather we start seeing the use of the mermaid to examine the other as being queer. It’s a fascinating shift on mermaid lore and one that applies to its time. This is also the century in which Oscar Wilde produces literature that goes on to become part of the literary cannon while at the same time we know he was incarcerated and eventually ostracized for his sexuality.