The Ascent of the Little Mermaid

I feel betrayed by my culture. I just found out that one of the myths that shaped my worldview was deliberately changed to shield me from the truth.

Some of my precious early memories involve a certain animated film. My parents, adult community members, and friends all loved the film at least as much as everyone else. Even though it was a bit of a girly movie, it was so sincerely engaging that even as a deliberately skeptical boy, I didn’t even feel the need to pretend I didn’t like as I sat with my cousins and sisters, our young minds becoming permanently impressed by this innocent, glowing piece of animated culture.

When the Disney corporation adapted The Little Mermaid into animated film in 1989, it became the de facto face of the story originally written in 1837. Just last night, urged by nagging curiosity, I read an English translation of Hans Christian Anderson’s original. Some of the glow-in-the-dark stars that used to be stuck to the ceiling of my childhood bedroom fell off and smacked my inner child in the face.

This is technically a spoiler, but the short book was written two hundred years ago, and it’s time to come out and say it. The little mermaid died.

In the actual fairy tale, love does not win. The little mermaid does not marry the prince. The prince does not slay the evil sea-witch. Neither the prince nor even the reader is ever told the little mermaid's name. After losing her tongue during her doomed encounter with the sea-witch, she never receives her voice back.

As a piece of tragic-genre literature, The Little Mermaid is unusual in that it emphasizes the innocence of the heroine. The failure is not even caused by any significant tragic character flaw other than the little mermaid's desire to escape the nihilistic fate of the soulless sea-creatures.

Andersen draws from high mythology in writing the mermaid race as being fearfully alien. He does not entirely leave the task of making charming characters out of them to the future decisions of the Disney team; even in the original book, merfolk are not only beautiful but also happy and mostly benevolent, living in a masterfully described undersea paradise. However, they carry with them the tragedy of being inherently separate from the mortal world. These mermaids live about 300 years; after that, they die and cease to exist. Unlike humans, they have no immortal souls.

The little mermaid’s society gives her the same kind of advice that many people in our century of fast pleasures and disposable identities seem to give her. “Let us be happy,” an elder mermaid tells her, “and dart and spring about during the three hundred years that we have to live, which is really quite long enough; after that we can rest ourselves all the better.”

Therefore, our little mermaid is not merely exercising a childish wish to go where she can’t or an immature romantic fantasy. She is grappling with the basic existential question, refusing to be willfully ignorant of the fact of death. Furthermore, the exposition of her desire to seek an immortal soul, as well as the story’s theological references in the framing of that possibility, strongly evoke a particular kind of existential dread that many of Andersen’s 19th century child audience, and even still many today, will relate to – the dreadful fear of failing to attain salvation. Those who did not grow up with the fear of Hell lack an understanding of the preternatural grip of horror that empowers the magic of these traditional stories.

But The Little Mermaid is not about Hell (which doesn’t have any correlation in the story at all). It’s about love, which these stories out of Old Christendom name as the way to Heaven. Both the romantic and the theological sophistication of The Little Mermaid is that even though she failed, dying with her love unrequited, she did not lose her love.

Andersen’s original story is neither dark and frightening nor whimsical and jolly. It is something better and more important than both. It is existentially honest and hopeful. This quality of transcendent hope, the other side of the best kind of tragedy, connects The Little Mermaid in both spirit and probably also in literary tradition with The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s description of euchatastrophe -- that is, the sudden glorious reversal of despair despite human failure and misery. Andersen’s little mermaid is clearly an archetypal ancestor of Lúthien Tinúviel and Arwen Evenstar. Moreover, the brilliant prose depiction of the undersea kingdom early in The Little Mermaid brought Bag End to my mind. Tolkien’s initial description in the first chapter of The Hobbit is similar in both structure and phrasing.

This tragic, hopeful way to approach the ambiguity and danger of life is intriguing in our time when so much of our culture is either so artificially sappy or else grotesque and edgy in the name of realism. We either have to tie together all the loose strings and send the lovers off to a “happily ever after,” or we have to show people doing horrible things and suffering abuses while leaving off with stark unresolved trauma.

Now I want to go back to that little boy, sleeping on the top bunk just below the glow-in-the-dark stars attached to the tile ceiling. I want to whisper into his dreams, telling him that he should neither expect happy success nor accept the brutal hard grind of the adult world. I want to tell him that living for your highest dreams is not in vain, because even though the little mermaid failed, her life produced every good that she had hoped for – the prince’s health and blessedness, and her own spiritual ascension into regions unknown.

That’s what this kind of transcendent storytelling can offer us today. It gives us the right both to fail and to be completely misunderstood and still to persevere to do all the good we long for, validating our tears and assuring us that we are going somewhere new and wonderful where those who misunderstand us cannot follow.

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Image by kokotewan, licensed via Adobe Stock