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

Hybridity, monstrosity, and difference: these unstable early modern ontological categories are difficult to locate precisely or theorize vigorously. Tara E. Pedersen’s Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England, however, deftly mobilizes conceptions of sexuality and identity to argue for the cultural relevance of mermaids as objects of mystery and knowledge in the early modern English imagination. Pedersen begins with Sir Thomas Browne’s discussion of the mermaid as a “picture” in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica and charts the circulation of its representation and conceit. Pedersen notes how it “becomes a way to ‘think’ or picture the body” (3). The introduction highlights several theoretical trends to which the work speaks, including feminism, queer studies, and animal studies. Pedersen’s research deliberately intersects with these approaches but then moves beyond them to demonstrate how the mermaid asks us to reconsider the mechanics of seeing and acquiring knowledge on the early modern stage. In this inquiry, Pedersen also sketches some of the more resonant associations of the mermaid in early modern culture. Adorning religious and domestic environments, the mermaid traversed many iconographic landscapes and genres, including science, theology, and literary representations. In occupying a position of mystery, contradiction, and monstrosity, Pedersen shows, the mermaid is a touchstone for exploring a diversity of early modern connections and forms of understanding.

Chapter 1, “Identifying Mermaids: Economies of Representation in Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring Girl,” focuses on urban topographies and the figure of Moll, frequently identified as a mermaid, within economies of exchange and sexual energies. Such representations, however, are structured by the viewers’ perspectives, shifting and altering the image of the woman—virgin or whore—that one encounters. Moll elicits such contradictory responses and serves as a source for the play’s engagement with considerations of London as a sprawling urban locale and the body of a woman as both monstrous and dissembling. Drawing on strands of criticism that identify Moll as a subversive figure, Pedersen argues that the many representations of Moll—particularly as a mermaid—elucidate the many signifiers of identity and economics in Dekker and Middleton’s drama. The mermaid was identified with the siren and often disparaged as a figure who seduces sailors to their doom through beauty and deception. Pedersen cites Queen Elizabeth’s Armada portrait and Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI in her analysis of how the mermaid disrupts economies of exchange and production. Interestingly, Moll is not the only figure to be likened to a mermaid in The Roaring Girl. Sir Alexander, the worrying father, is also positioned as inimical to trade and changeable in categories of identity: in cheating or refusing to obey the tradition of open methods to exchange and instead acting secretively, Sir Alexander undermines the play’s London market of marriageable bodies and goods. Like Sir Alex, Moll resists expected roles and the rules of commodity exchange.

The following chapter, “‘We shall discover our Selves’: Practicing the Mermaid’s Law in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure,” pairs the Duchess’s closet drama with representations of the mermaid in religious buildings in early modern Britain. Regarding the singular scene with the figure of Lady Happy as a sea nymph, Pedersen argues “the mermaid’s role is pivotal because she functions as a critical metaphor for the pragmatic process of becoming (or self-construction) that we see Lady Happy undertaking throughout the play” (55). Pedersen begins with a discussion of early modern shifting understandings of empiricism and Cavendish’s response to the role of women as producers of scientific knowledge in early modern England. Through the figure of the mermaid, Cavendish opens up a space for considering agency within a socially restrictive scientific and gendered community. In The Convent of Pleasure, Cavendish works not simply to overturn strictures in legal and scientific participation, but rather from within institutional restraints to renegotiate the limits of feminine agency. To this end, Pedersen turns to...