The other day I was talking with someone about fairytales and I remembered my very favorite one from my youth. When I was eight years old, I read and reread Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid again and again and again. If you have not read the original version, let me assure you that the ending is nothing like in Disney. I felt offended when I saw the Disney ending and how they sanitized it and removed any of the point. To recap what the original is about.
The little mermaid gets her opportunity to swim to the surface and falls in love with the handsome prince who is on a ship. Later, she saves him from a shipwreck, deposits him on shore, and waits for another human to come along and make sure he is okay. That turns out to be a pretty girl from the temple, whom the prince assumes is his rescuer. Of course the prince falls in love with the temple girl.
The mermaid cannot forget her prince and gives the Sea Witch her tongue in exchange for a potion that will allow her to appear human … despite that it will be very painful for her to take and excruciating for her to walk. The deal is that if the prince marries her, she will get a soul and be human. If he does not, she will turn to sea foam at dawn the next day. The mermaid meets her prince, but he is to marry a beautiful princess. He tells the mermaid that he cannot marry the princess because he loves only the temple girl, though the mermaid is starting to take the temple girl’s place in his heart. The mermaid can only despair because she cannot say anything; she has no tongue.
It turns out the temple girl is the princess, sent to the temple to get an education, so she and the prince are married. The mermaid is frantic. She thinks of all of the pain that she has endured and all she has given up, and that it will be all for nothing—she will become only sea foam. Before dawn, her sisters give her a knife for which they have traded their hair to the Sea Witch. This knife will allow the mermaid to return to her former form as a mermaid and live out a normal mermaid lifespan if she uses it to kill the prince. But she loves him and she can’t do this. As dawn breaks, she throws herself into the sea and dissolves into foam, but instead of ceasing to exist, as she thought she would, she finds that she now exists as a spirit, a daughter of air, and that because she has striven with all her heart to gain an eternal soul, she has become one of them and will gain one by her own good deeds.
At eight years old, I thought this was a beautifully tragic story. We lived not too far from the ocean and when we would drive down the coast, I would see the foam and get excited, pointing out, “Those are mermaids!” When we would go on tide pool trips on the northwest coast, I would forget the tide pools after a while, mesmerized by the waves crashing on the rock, white foam writhing on the crests and receding with the tide. So much drowned hope and possibility, crashing about on the sea. While other girls were dreaming of being rescued by their handsome princes, in the manner of Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty, I loved the idea that someday I would be as free as the foam on the waves.
As an adult, I think that The Little Mermaid metaphor is an accurate one for depicting how I tend to relate to men now. The mermaid’s behavior toward her prince was how I related to boys as a younger woman. As a young girl, I watched from afar and was afraid to be noticed. Then, I became one of the boys. I would listen as they talked all about their feelings for other girls and I would give them suggestions on how to woo their other girls, which usually worked, and go home and cry.
