Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England by Tara Pedersen (review)

In the Introduction to this short monograph, Tara Pedersen interrogates ‘those elusive and captivating hybrids’, mermaids (p. 1), and argues that the mermaid is a useful tool in thinking about identity. Her interest is in how the mermaid helps to ‘picture the body, especially the sexed and gendered body that resists clear categorical frameworks and that holds erotic potential’ (p. 3). Pedersen is aware of recent feminist, post-humanist, and queer scholars that have investigated the animal–human and machine–human boundaries, and gives a brief sketch of this literature, but remains interested in questions of identity that mermaids provoke in early modern England.

The first chapter, ‘Identifying Mermaids: Economies of Representation in Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl’, examines a play in which the protagonist, Moll Cutpurse, is difficult to categorise, and has been variously explained as a feminist tomboy, excluded working class citizen, and so on. Pedersen focuses on Moll’s characterisation as a mermaid by Sir Alexander, who fears his son Sebastian is in love with her. The mermaid is dangerous; her beauty causes shipwrecks, and her sexual attractiveness is undercut by her fishtail. Moll resists marriage, and at the play’s close ruminates on how the audience might ‘picture’ a woman. It is odd that Pedersen fails to mention that on the stage, a young man would have played this extraordinary woman.

Chapter 2, ‘“We shall discover our Selves”: Practicing the Mermaid’s Law in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure’, examines a later text that is also about marriage, and posits ‘the convent space to be a place where bodily pleasure is paramount and bodily autonomy remains intact’ (p. 66). A mermaid appears late in the play and undermines the heterosexual marriage that the main character, Lady Happy, makes at the end.

Chapter 3, ‘Perfect Pictures: The Mermaid’s Half-Theater and the Anti-Theatrical Debates in Book II of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene’, focuses on the theatre and forms of representation. Guyon’s journey to Acrasia’s bower features mermaids, and Pedersen argues that Spenser asks ‘readers to consider the way … a text (be it a play or written narrative) is always already staged within the mind of the reader’ (p. 99). In ‘Reading Like a Mermaid: Antony and Cleopatra’s (Un)Mysterious History and the Case of the Disappearing Snake’, Pedersen notes that a mermaid steers the barge of Cleopatra. She follows the now-familiar motifs of cross-dressing women and argues that the mermaid is significant as Cleopatra eludes categorisation, claiming she will return by barge to Cydnus just moments before she commits suicide.

The Afterword shifts attention to Hamlet, and the description of the drowned Ophelia as ‘mermaid-like’ (p. 132), which Pedersen views as Gertrude’s way of understanding how a woman might elude the control of men and ‘find a home in the waters’ (p. 134, emphasis in original).

This book is well written, thoughtful, and interesting, though it betrays its origins as a doctoral thesis. It is recommended to readers interested in early modern English drama, women’s studies, and gender studies.