Author Archives: Lixia Pena

Discovery Assignment

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Lixia Peña

ECL 305

Professor Pressman

March 2nd, 2024

Considering Environmentalism in Ponyo

            Thesis: In his 2008 movie, Hayao Miyazaki, re-imagines the deceptively simple story of the little mermaid to consider our current with the natural world. His movie uses the children as a device to consider a different way to co-exist and respect the natural world.

The plot of the story would not be kickstarted without the presence of a man meddling with the natural world. It is the father of this little mermaid, initially named Brunhilde, who has forgone the human world in order to become a wizard focused on healing the ocean from human destruction. Ponyo is his child and the sea goddess’s child. Immediately it is explained that her magic ability comes from the human and the natural world coming together. Ponyo acts, like so many mermaids in folklore, as a bridge between the human and natural world. This little mermaid is brought within proximity of the human world after being caught in a human fishing net and being hurt by trash polluting the sea. Here Miyazaki immediately begins his criticism of the detrimental effect that human presence has had on the ocean. This daughter of the environment is partly exposed to the human world by human’s presence and destruction of the ocean.

Ponyo is then saved by a little human boy Sosuke who immediately aids and takes her into his care, declaring that he is responsible for her. I found this interesting because Miyazaki immediately does away with the Christian tones of so much mermaid folklore. Sosuke takes her in exactly in her fish’s form and never turns on her for being of the sea. Much of the folklore that we have studied, the man comes into contact with the mermaid when she is not in her true form. When the man and the mermaid come into the marriage contract we are often told of the riches that the mermaid provides for the man and his curiosity and need to control this being of the natural world inevitably lead to the man’s betrayal. It is important that Miyazaki imagines his own male and female characters as children. It’s is because of innocence that Sosuke readily accepts Ponyo, an extension of nature, wholeheartedly as she is without feeling the needs to control her. Ponyo is impulsive, adventurous and free and Sosuke never tries to change this. This is contrasted with Ponyo’s father who immediately snatches her back into the ocean against her wishes. He tries to, quite literally forces Ponyo back into the shape of a fish and trap her; hear reaction is to run away and create a Tsunami so she can find Sosuke. I believe that here Miyazaki is stressing the importance of doing away with thinking that nature is something that has to be controlled. Harmony can exist when we cohabitate with the environment and nature. To try to dominate it is useless and detrimental to all.

I found Miyazaki’s decision to depict a Tsunami to have been a very conscious choice. Only four years before this movie was released a Tsunami had devastated coastal cities of Japan. Japan has a long history with Tsunamis and so it was interesting that he would present a natural disaster within this children’s story. It is not presented with the horrifying images that we imagine when we think of tsunamis. This could be easily explained away with saying that this is a children’s movie. I believe that he chooses not to display the destructive power of the ocean so overtly because he is trying to comment on the nature aspect of the natural world. Nature after all, is functioning exactly as it is in its nature to do so. Instead the weight of destruction is mostly blamed on humans. It is used to depict the carelessness in how humans treat their environment. Through Sosuke, Miyazaki proves that it is possible for humans to interact in a more harmonious manner with the natural world. If we accept it as it is, without trying dominate it.

I also noticed, throughout the movie, that the figures of power within the story were were mostly women. Ponyo, her mother the sea goddess an Sosuke’s mother. These three figures all draw their power from nature itself. This is most noticeable with Ponyo and her mother given that they are magical creatures. Lisa’s power is not as noticeable initially. As a woman mostly raising her son alone, her husband is a ship captain, Lisa is often thrust into the position of, not just a nurturer but also a protector thereby subverting our expectations of gender roles. She is just as willing as Sosuke to take Ponyo into her care. Miyazaki is clearly commenting on the power of women to influence younger generations. It is interesting that Ponyo’s wizard father, for all his magic, is unable to exert his power over any of these women.

The Little Mermaid

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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.

“The Mermaid” article.

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While reading the article published, “The Mermaid” I was interested in how the depictions of the mermaid change so radically when race is added to the mythology. The mermaid stories we have read so far are always explicit in stating the beauty of the mermaid’s human half. So beautiful as to seem ethereal and other worldly. The source of evil and ugliness is always relegated to their animalistic lower half. On Page 234 of the text we get two completely different depictions of non-white/western mermaids. On the first one the article says, “It was a female with, with ugly negro features. The skin was harsh, the ears very large, and the back parts and tail were covered with scales.” This stands in such stark contrast with the previous descriptions we have previously encountered. The text explicitly state that this mermaid is not beautiful because of its ethnic features. Where the mermaid’s skin was previously pearlescent and so transparently white as to almost seem spirit like, this mermaid is described as having harsh skin. Though the description is brief it also gives the sense that it focuses more on how far from humanity this creature is. It struck me that it mentions the position of the mermaid when at rest. The text says “It’s position, when at rest, is always erect”. I don’t know if this is intended to be sexually suggestive but I am also considering that there is a history of Black bodies, particularly women’s bodies, being highly sexualized by the western world.

The second mermaid description that I noted is on the same page and it is describing a mermaid found in the Archipelagos of the Aegan Sea. This mermaid is described in fuller detail and it the text immediately zeroes in on its similarity to a young female human. Already this mermaid is placed in closer relation to humanity than the first mermaid. That being said she still has enough of that “exoticism” that the western world was so fascinated by in relation of Asian countries. She is not afforded the mythical flowing hair of western mermaids. Instead this one has “gills for respiration, which appear like curls… this one only has rolls which, at a distance, might be mistaken for short curls.” After this the article also mentions that she seems to have fins and her temples as if she was wearing a headdress. Here we see that this mermaid does not have the typical human head and torso and fish tail. It’s animal-like properties are distributed across her entire body.

Reading Response week 4

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Whilst doing this week’s reading, my attention was mostly concentrated on the stories of “Sedna” and “The Tuna of Lake Vaihiria”. This was particularly because of our class discussions of the christian misogyny that transformed the role of the mermaid. It is immediately noticeable, in both of these stories that women were held in a different regard across non Christian cultures. For example in “The Tuna of Lake Vaihiria” The authors of the text explain that in these stories the character of Hina is often represented as a woman of “High rank, and sometimes semidivine”. This is in stark contrast with schribner’s text which mentions in chapter 1 “churchmen adopted these pagan creatures in an effort to depreciate the feminine.”

I noticed that both of these narratives have to do with women and marriage. Hina runs away in order to avoid being forced to marry a monster and Sedna can only be made made to wed under conditions that she finds suitable. Already we see that women in Inuit and Pacific islander cultures are able to exert their autonomy without being condemned to be sinful monsters. Both Hina and Sedna contribute to the prosperity of their people, one by bringing about the coconut and the latter by providing Inuit people with their main food sources. Sedna becomes a deity and the Inuit people strive to honor and maintain a good relationship with her so that they can continue to enjoy the bounty of the sea.

Through these stories I noticed the connection that exists between women and the environment. Both of these characters are life-givers of sorts, to their people. It is interesting that even now a days we consider nature to be female in nature hence the term “Mother Earth”. In these stories both women exert disobedience of some sort. Hina runs away and refuses to marry the Eel and Sedna refuses to marry unless it is in her own terms. The Christian church, I imagine would focus on these acts of disobedience and punish them by turning them into sea monsters but both women in these stories are rewarded with respect by their people.

About Me

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My name is Lixia Peña. my pronouns are she/her/hers I am a transfer student and this is my junior year at San Diego State University. I am an English major and am particularly interested in the art of translating texts. I’m very excited about this class as mermaids have always been one of my favorite mythological creatures. My favorite hobby is reading (of course) and my resolution for this year is to improve my Spanish literacy since it is my first language. I’m excited about all of the discussions that will come out of this class.

On Mermaids, Beowulf and Christianity

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One of the aspects that I found most interesting in this week’s reading, was how the Christian church utilized and in some ways adopted the pagan figure of the mermaid in order to convert people to Christianity. It is common knowledge, I believe, that the church often employed this form of appropriation to convert worshippers of pagan religions. One of the topics that most interest me is how Beowulf is another story of pagan origins that was used and re-contextualized by Christian monks in order to promote Christianity. So much so that, the story as we know it today was adapted to the written word and visibly altered by its translator. It is interesting to read the account of Beowulf and see how the author is unable to avoid the staunch paganism of the story yet also makes the contradictory effort to condemn said paganism. A lot of scholarly work also examines the role of Grendel’s mother. She is commonly portrayed as a horrific monster within the narrative and is shunned and treated as a horrific other for being a woman that displays the characteristics that so many men within the story are admired for. It is therefore interesting to me that early concepts of this fish and human hybrid was originally conceived as a male creatures “of knowledge and improvement” (Schribner 30), and when the focus shifts to mermaids they are turned into monsters who often lure people by means of lust, and promises of knowledge. To bring in one more point of connection I recently read an essay of Toni Morrison titled “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” and she mentions how when the Western romantics where creating the cannon of Greece as the pinnacle of western civilization they chose to ignore the role that Egyptians and Semites played in shaping the idea of Greece. To me it seems that Christianity and Racism operate in similar ways to create their systems of power. It will be interesting to me to consider these topics as we go forward in the semester and I would like to consider the role of the environment with the text as we continue on.