The Little Mermaid: Three Political Fables

Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid (1837) is a remarkable fairy tale, not least because its exemplary heroine actively plots to marry above her station. Unlike the usual run of female protagonist, whom "the fairies will reward with . . . a perfect husband" if only she "sacrific[es] herself" (Zipes, Myth 30), the mermaid bargains away her voice to gain the world, a prince, and through him an immortal soul. The narrative endorses, yet refuses any definitive realization of, these ambitious intentions. The story of the mermaid's self-exile from the sea and acculturation into humanity recapitulates the grotesque and painful transformations suffered by the exotically foreign and racially marked subject aspiring to be on equal terms with a "superior" race. Andersen's narrative adumbrates a collective fantasy whereby the "Other's" tragic relation to "Empire" would be happily resolved. But the story of the mermaid's struggle to transcend the physical difference and cultural and spiritual conditions of her underwater race problematizes imperialist and class-based morality.¹ When the prince fails to recognize her extraordinary merit and anguished love, omniscient providential authority, which does acknowledge her worthiness and sacrifice, monitors a continued rise through the ranks to paradise. The mermaid becomes an aerial spirit serving an apprenticeship in a sentimental purgatory. Thus the heathen and untutored mermaid, despite having internalized dominant values, remains a marginal figure. Deep acceptance of the self-deprecating supplicant is promised but indefinitely deferred.²

That this achievement of the colonized consciousness, problematic in itself, is filtered through the process of feminine identity construction taxes the narrative still further and points to what Carole Pateman calls the "repressed problem" (2) of women's social function in the capitalist state.³ This filtering is reflected, in narrative terms, by Andersen's wedding of two disparate genres, the male bildungsroman and the female marriage plot.⁴ The heroine's aspiration to progress and perfection is forwarded by the virtues appropriated from feudal romance by the male bourgeoisie, including imaginative sympathy, resourcefulness, courage, and self-discipline. Yet the tale is also predicated on the marriage quest, although in the end the mermaid renders invisible care to the sick and the young, not to a husband. Thus The Little Mermaid exposes the unresolved contradiction in political theory and practice between women's particular, sexualized role and the normative (masculine) value of autonomy.

It is a feminist insight amounting to a truism by now that normative theories of the state, in consigning women to the private and men to the public realm, fail to "take account of the dialectic between individual and social life" (Pateman 28). Women are associated with birth and the maintenance of life, men with the rational capacity to make moral decisions. Since the inception of modern contract theory in the seventeenth century, the usual view of women's duty as citizens has comprised a conceptual paradox: the female activity of providing life-giving, life-enhancing care is at once natural and obligatory. The female body is construed as entailing primary responsibility for the undeniably necessary work of sustaining affective social life. Yet women's relegation to the devalued space and time of contingent social relations compromises their desire to share the privileged male status of moral autonomy. And so the mermaid must sacrifice for the welfare of the prince, who oafishly overlooks it (Solomon 145). She does so, however, to further her own self-conceived ends. The Little Mermaid's ambivalently rendered plot and provisional resolution mark it as a fable of modern culture's feminine dilemma, that of the false choice between fulfilling feminine sexual functions and realizing female desire.

Significantly, several versions of The Little Mermaid, variously refracting the discourse of contemporary race, class, and gender identity politics, have been published in America since the mid-1980s.⁵ The re-emergence of Andersen's narrative occurs within an embattled context. In the wake of a twenty-year explosion of emancipatory consciousness, changing the self is not merely a matter of will: the lived experience of personal memory, group praxis, and persistent systemic discrimination complicate and seemingly confound the quest for individual and collective transformation...