The slippery in-between-ness of mermaids has captivated writers across cultures for thousands of years. Once you start looking, you will find them everywhere, from Homer’s sirens to Kei Miller’s post-colonial ‘The law concerning mermaids’ (2010). Mermaids (also called undines, selkies, nixies, Loreleis and Mélusines) can stay on land with a mortal but only at a terrible cost. Fairy tales silence the voice of the mermaid, punishing her for her sexuality, as in Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid (1836–37), in which the Sea Witch cuts out her tongue, and finally ‘the only redemption [is] death through self-sacrifice’ (Warner 1994, p. 399).
In his ‘Song’, John Donne catalogues impossibilities, mermaids among them, to forge his speaker’s misogynist argument: ‘And swear,/ No where/ Lives a woman true and fair’ (ll. 16–18).
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