I wanted to view The Little Mermaid as a story of colonization, how the little mermaid loses her identity–the things that make her a mermaid and that give her power–through the political transaction of rescuing a prince and exchanging her identity for his companionship. I will explore this through redrawing illustrations inspired by Helen Stratton’s illustrations and using Filipino pre-colonial and colonial fashions to dress the mermaid. I use pre-colonial Philippine fashion and a Filipino mermaid as a challenge to the “universality” of The Little Mermaid’s canon and mermaid canon as a whole, where mermaids are typically blonde, white women, as well as a way to map how Filipino identity has changed through the centuries of colonization. I will include a short essay to accompany these illustrations and to point out the details that I include. 

Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid was written in the 19th century, at a time when European colonization was at its peak. The Philippines was already heavily colonized by the Spanish in the 19th century and the changes enforced affected so much more than fashion–it affected appearances, lifestyles, and values. By recontextualizing The Little Mermaid through the context of Philippine colonization, we can also see how the story itself is as much a process as well as a product of colonization, its origins and associated images altered over and over again in the same way that the people and their identities are altered over and over again. Viewing The Little Mermaid as a story of colonization adds a new intersection to the little mermaid’s identity–not just as a woman, but as an individual who is forced to assimilate by altering her body to fit into the colonizing culture in order to avoid, at best, ridicule or, at worst, persecution.