Mermaid

The English word mermaid corresponds to the Latin sirena, maintained in modern Romance languages (e.g., French sirène), but does not translate it exactly. Different etymologies have been proposed; for instance, sirens are those "who bind with a cord" or "those who wither" (Graves 1974, vol. 2, pp.154.3).

Since early Greek antiquity tales of sirens as enchantresses who bring seafarers to an untimely death have merged with an icon of temptation exercised by female wiles on powerless males. These images navigated into medieval bestiaries and eventually into the romantic and modern imagination. However, goddesses with fish bodies have been recorded as early as Egyptian and Sumerian times (Márquez-Huitzil 1991).

In several world folklores, the mermaid-siren is a form of the water lady, or water goddess, with strong death powers, as in the Germanic Nixes or Undines (Bulteau 1982), nineteenth-century Russian bird-sirens, and the Mexican pre-Conquest half-fish divine women among the Huichols of the Northern Sierra in Puebla and the Námatl goddess Chalchihuitlicue, who are both life- and death-giving (Márquez-Huitzil 1991).

THE ANCIENT WORLD

Originally, the classical mermaid was a winged bird creature entirely or completely covered with feathers except for the head. She was distinctly feminized through facial features or sexualized through the prominence of naked breasts, although later forms included male and childlike sirens. It was through the carmen, song and sorcery at once, that the mermaid lured navigators to their death. The Argonauts led by Jason, on their return to Greece with the golden fleece, passed the Islands of the Sirens safely because their singing was countered by the strains of Orpheus's lyre (Graves 1974) Sirens have also been linked to the story of the rape of Proserpine and would have been transformed into birds with female faces by Ceres as punishment for not having prevented her daughter's abduction or, on the contrary, as symbolic of their frantic flight in search of her (Ovid, Metamorphoses V, 551). According to some, the term is metaphoric and they were actually Sicilian prostitutes who debauched and "wrecked" men (Lempriere 1984). They were also said to have lost their wings when bested in a musical contest by the Muses who then plucked their feathers (Lempriere 1984, Graves 1974).

In all these stories a recurrent gendered element is that the sirens, as the ancient, pre-Olympian untamed destructive feminine, are punished or vanquished by the male order in art (Orpheus, the Olympian-identified Muses) or are unable to prevent violent male assault (Proserpine).

THE MIDDLE AGES

Medieval allegory reinforced the mermaid's destructive charge, especially with her entrance into Christian texts through a mistranslation of a passage of Isaiah 13:22 in Jerome's Vulgate, from forms of "wild dogs" in Hebrew into "sirens" in Latin (de Donder 1992). The influence of Honorius of Autun in 1150 was decisive in having the mermaid signify the temptations of the world, a sea of travails on which sinners float and to which they succumb (de Donder 1992). In medieval iconography wings, claws, and a fish tail vied and sometimes combined, but the fish tail became the dominant segment, especially unequivocally sexualized as female as a double and forked tail hinged at the front of the body by a sort of apron over the womb and vagina. This "apron" has been interpreted also as being linked to the building and prosperity function of mermaids, allowing the transport of stones (Bulteau 1982). Such images proliferated in architectural programs as well as in objects of daily use and manuscript illustration.

The mermaid's comb and mirror, also gendered as feminine, were linked both to Christian moral and didactic messages (vanity as a mortal sin, a dangerous temptation for the soul) and to a broader mythical content (the mirror as soul-gazing instrument, the connection to death through looking behind). In Western European folklore the comb evoked the treatment of plant fibers to produce textiles and the Sebastean cult of Saint Blasius, one of the major thaumaturgical saints of the Middle Ages (Gaignebet and Lajoux 1985).

In medieval France the mermaid also merged with the symbolism of motherhood, foundation myths, aristocratic genealogies, sexual transgression, and sexual prohibition in the fictional story of the fairy Melusina, whose demonic tail appears when she takes her secret bath, presumably to cleanse herself during menstruation (Gaignebet and Lajoux 1985) and is claimed as an ancestress by the powerful Lusignan family (Spiegel 1996).

THE MODERN ERA

In Victorian times the seductive mermaid evolved into a debased, grotesque form with the exhibition of monsters and morphological oddities in side shows, tavern backrooms, and curiosity museums that made the anthropomorphic mermaid into a hybrid with a zoomorphic misshapen and mismatched body exhibited in skeletal form, often wired together from parts of orangutans and salmons (Bondeson 1999, Ritvo 1997).

In the modern United States the mermaid's origins are less classical, derived primarily from the highly personal world of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" (1837) and migrating into Disneyan normative codes with a 1989 full-length cartoon animation feature.

Feminist theory has addressed gender roles and models for girls implicit in Disney's work (Ross 2004). For Laura Sells (1995) the Little Mermaid is a parable of bourgeois feminism destabilized by its own messages. She sees an opposition between "reformist demands for access" that leave existing gender identities intact and radical revisions that refigure gender as the symbolic change that is necessary for and preliminary to social change. Others have pointed to the highly sexualized and erotic charge of the mermaid's body since its earliest representations, posing an irresolvable task for the prudish gender conformist Disney and leading to cartoon interpretations of the figure, its garb, and lack thereof, all of which are, according to Elizabeth Bell (1995), a form of burlesque. Laurie Essig, in a study of the annual Coney Island, New York, Mermaid Parade, has suggested that the mermaid constitutes a riddle, centered around the existence and accessibility of the vagina "at the edge of the heterosexual imaginary as potential lover and potential monster" (Essig 2005, pp. 151-152).

Analyst Joyce McDougall (1995) interpreted the original myths of the siren in Freudian and Lacanian modes, as a siren-mother figure that threatens to envelop or "devour" the child, who is protected through verbal communication. The mother's voice "rekindles fantasies of fusion, with the consequent loss of both subjective—and sexual—identity" (McDougall 1995, p. 82). Thus, the original voice is at once attraction and danger, the siren's song that draws the child back into nonindividuation. The intervention of the father (the law), as the Lacanian voix du pere, becomes necessary to prevent reabsorption into the "voice" of the mother (Greenberg 1998, p. 50).

see also Animals, Sexual Symbolism of; Art; Folklore; Greco-Roman Art; Legends and Myths; Obscene.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, Elizabeth. 1995. "Somatexts at the Disney Shop." In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Sells, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Bondeson, Jan. 1999. The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Bulteau, Michel. 1982. Mythologie des filles des eaux. Monaco: Editions du Rocher.

de Donder, Vic. 1992. Le chant de la sirène. Paris: Gallimard.

Essig, Laurie. 2005. "The Mermaid and the Heterosexual Imagination." In Thinking Straight: The Power, the Promise, and the Paradox of Heterosexuality, ed. Chrys Ingraham. New York: Routledge.

Gaignebet, Claude, and Jean Dominique Lajoux. 1985. Art profane et religion populaire au Moyen Age. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Graves, Robert. 1974. The Greek Myths. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. (Orig. pub. 1955.)

Greenberg, Mitchell. 1998. "Racine, Oedipus, and Absolute Fantasies." Diacritics 28(3): 40-61.

Lempriere, J. 1984. Lempriere's Classical Dictionary. Proper Names Cited by the Ancient Authors. London: Bracken Books. (Orig. pub. 1788.)

Márquez-Huitzil, Ofelia. 1991. Iconografía de la sirena mexicana. Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Dirección General de Culturas Populares.

McDougall, Joyce. 1995. Many Faces of Eros: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Human Sexuality. New York: Norton.

Mustard, Wilfred P. 1908 "Siren-Mermaid." Modern Language Notes 23(1): 21-24.

Ritvo, Harriet. 1997. The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ross, Deborah. 2004. "Escape from Wonderland: Disney and the Female Imagination." Marvels and Tales 18(1): 53-66.

Sells, Laura. 1995. "Where Do the Mermaids Stand?" In From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Sells, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 1996. "Maternity and Monstrosity: Reproductive Biology in the Roman de Mélusine." In Melusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

                                    Francesca Canadé Sautman