Since it was written in 1837, Hans Christian Andersen's
The Little Mermaid has baffled and frustrated analysts. On first glance, it seems considerably more violent and pessimistic than the classic film that rebirthed Disney animation. For example, the little mermaid loses her voice by having her tongue cut out. The sea witch in the story is just a disgusting old crone, not the emblem of voluptuous female sexuality that is Ursula (ironically based on drag performer Divine).
Though having sanitized the original story, as they are wont to do, Disney's film still has unique qualities of its own. Unlike most of Disney's Princesses, Ariel is a flawed character. She is a teenager, rebelling against her upbringing and existential nature to forge her own identity, generally making bad decisions all along the way. It is only the love she has been able to inspire in others that redeems her choices and grants a happy outcome. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that she is also
somewhat controversial.
This is not the theme of the original story, however. The little mermaid does become obsessed with the surface world - she had five sisters visit it and come back with marvellous stories about it for half a decade before she was finally able to see it for herself - and there is a prince that becomes the object of her obsessions. What really troubles her, though, is the fact that mermaids lack an immortal soul. It is this puzzle that mermaids should live for 300 years and then dissolve into sea foam while humans should only live for 70 years on Earth but inherit Heaven that draws her to make the choices she does.
In the Western European lore inherited by Andersen, mermaids were not believed to have immortal souls. Rather, they took considerable delight in luring men to their deaths, ostensibly to rip their souls from them. Much of mermaid mythology developed out of Greek Sirens, who would lure ships only to have them dashed upon the rocks. Richard Wagner's four-part epic opera
Ring of the Nibelung, composed between 1848 and 1874, begins and ends with the aquatic Rhinemaidens who are morally innocent. Not morally pure... they still lure and seduce men... but almost pre-moral in their childlike innocence. The playwright George Bernard Shaw described the Rhinemaidens as "thoughtless, elemental, only half-real things," adding the dated punchline "very much like modern young ladies."
Andersen's mermaids are very similar. They live and frolic in the oceans as moral innocents, free of want but also free of souls. They live for a very long time in the Sea but eventually dissolve into nothingness. Being creatures of the Sea, they have a sense of the primordial about them, like Adam and Eve before the fateful fruit. Much like them, the little mermaid suddenly gains moral awareness and her childlike, pre-moral happiness is taken from her. She cannot be content knowing that humans have immortal souls and she does not. Finding no answers from her grandmother except to accept this fact and be content, the little mermaid makes the decision to visit the sea witch.
The deal that the little mermaid makes with the sea witch appears Faustian. She must allow her tongue to be cut out, her every step on Earth will feel like knives against her feet, and she must wed the prince to gain her immortal soul or dissolve into sea foam on the morning after he weds another. This superficially Faustian arrangement betrays a fundamental fact, much like Adam and Eve's punishment for eating the fruit: with an immortal soul comes moral awareness, and with moral awareness comes personal sacrifice.
Moral systems are ultimately extensions of metaphysical beliefs. They are, in a sense, optimal performance parameters based on how one thinks the universe actually operates. The metaphysical beliefs of the Modern Era have largely resembled those of the mermaids, in that belief in God and an immortal soul have been punted to the wayside, humanity having moved "beyond good and evil" to an infantile, primordial, pre-moral state where the concept of personal sacrifice is anathema. "If it feels good, do it." With belief in God and an immortal soul comes the idea that humanity is imbued with higher moral obligation to God and to one another that requires sacrifice of one's own ambitions, effort, affluence, and temporal happiness. The exchange is the paradoxical promise that by giving up these things on Earth, we gain back something infinitely more fulfilling in the Hereafter. "Store up treasure in Heaven."
Even then, this exchange and even our immortal soul is contingent on the will of God. Andersen metaphorically represents this by the little mermaid's immortal soul being dependent not on her sacrifice, but on how the prince responds to it. Her own deeds will not earn her a soul. She is dependent on another. I can sympathize with feminist readings of the text that might interpret this as women being dependent on men for a soul, but I would argue that this is missing its rich metaphorical, theological layering. The little mermaid, who has risen out of the primordial, pre-moral state is still dependent on the Son of the King for her immortality. Even if we do not go so far as to interpret the prince as a Christ-figure (what happens at the end of the novel makes this a more uncomfortable analogy), it still recognizes that as humans we do not live unto ourselves but in relationship to others.
The finale of Andersen's tale is what has provoked the most consternation for critics. It appears so out of place that many scholars have felt that it was simply tacked on to render a happy ending, or an end that is at least not as dire, pessimistic, and cynical as what it appeared to be leading up to. In order not to spoil it further, I will resume discussion of
The Little Mermaid after the text presented below. The following version was translated by Susannah Mary Paull for the 1872 anthology,
Fairy Tales of Andersen. Illustrations are by Bertall from an 1889 French edition.
