On Mermaids

When you have a three year old girl, you find yourself re-watching a lot of movies you haven’t seen in a while, especially Disney. I saw The Little Mermaid when it first came out, in 1989 (I was seven) and liked it, though even then I was aware that it was intended more for girls than boys. Watching it again now, with an adult perspective, I’ve figured out why – and it’s more than just Disney’s incessant and slightly irritating marketing of the “Princess” concept.

The release of The Little Mermaid marked the beginning of what’s been called the Disney Renaissance, a series of films in which the study broke out of the slump it had been in since the seventies. The renaissance continued with Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. How long the streak continued depends on your opinion of movies like Mulan, Pocahontas, Tarzan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but the core of the period is those first four films. The torch was largely passed to Pixar after Tarzan, and Disney started making stuff like Dinosaur and The Emperor's New Groove, meh.



Anybody else think she looks like
Kristen Stewart?

  Of the four, the best is arguably either Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King, but an informal poll of women in my life indicates that The Little Mermaid had the most long-term influence. It’s that influence that I want to explore here.  There is a considerable amount of analytical writing on the Disney oeuvre available online, and much of it takes a negative view of the films' influence, a prime example is this piece by Chey on Helium.com.  While I agree that early exposure to these cultural artifacts has an effect, I disagree with the view that these effects must be negative, and in se reinforce the "patriarchal myth".  The Little Mermaid’s power rests in buried psychosexual messages that ultimately provide a positive guide for adolescent girls’ development. To start with, the central event of the movie – Ariel’s transformation from mermaid to human – is a clear metaphor for sexual awakening. The important conflict is how that awakening is handled by Ariel and by those around her. It’s become a common game to spot supposed subliminal sexual messages buried in the frames of Disney movies – like the famous tower on Triton’s palace, or the dust that swirls around Simba in The Lion King. I’m not interested in such facile pastimes. Instead, I want to go deeper, and discuss symbolic and even archetypal characters and objects that give The Little Mermaid its intense hold on the imagination.



First, to deal with the transformation, which is the hinge on which the whole movie turns. Ariel is obsessed with a world that is just out of her reach, her fins restrict her to the undersea world, separate from the fascinating and slightly frightening human world. The mer-people are friendly enough, but apparently lack the cachet and spark that humans possess and that Ariel desires. Speaking for myself, the description of the human world pretty well matches my perception of the world of adults when I was balanced on the edge of adolescence, and I’ve been informed that the ledge can seem even more daunting for girls. The thing that changes everything, of course, is sex, or more accurately, the dawning awareness of oneself as a sexual being.

 The sexual appeal of mermaids has been established ever since dehydrated sailors came back with tales of half-fish half-human women who sang or brushed their hair seductively. There was of course, an obvious problem – their fish parts made consummation of the sailors’ desires impractical, to say the least. The problem was treated concisely on a very funny episode of Futurama.



The obvious solution is presented in the art of the romantics: simply give the mermaids the power to change their form.


This trope is common in several similar stories in European culture, such as those of Melusine , a French water spirit; the selkies, seal women from Britain’s Celtic shores; or the sirens who are represented in Ancient Greek art as avian creatures, but by the romantic period had become synonymous with mermaids (indeed, the word for “mermaid” in all of the Romance languages except for French is “sirena”, in French it’s “sirène”). This provides a precedent for the shape shift undergone by poor Ariel, and also provides the parallels that move me to believe in the transition’s deeper significance.

The clueless friend.

Ariel is sixteen years old, which places her at exactly the correct age (or maybe a little late) to be undergoing this profound change (assuming the mermaid lifespan is analogous to humans’). She provides a character with whom adolescents and pre-adolescent girls can easily identify, and is presented as rebellious, with vague notions of wishing to escape to the mysterious human world, but no real understanding of how that world functions. She is not helped by her friend Scuttle the seagull, who pretends great knowledge of human affairs but is just as clueless as Ariel - he fills the roll of the supposedly "more experienced" friend many young people seem to acquire at this vulnerable stage in their lives.

The external focus of Ariel’s desires takes the form of the handsome prince Eric – which more or less sums up his character. He continues a long tradition of Disney princes who lack much in the way of a personality, see also Snow White and Cinderella. Apparently not overburdened by affairs of state, his primary function is to play with his dog Max on the beach, and to give Ariel a concrete human to admire, rather than mooning forever over humanity’s baffling artifacts. At these early stages of the plot, Eric functions only as the catalyst that forces Ariel into actively seeking escape.

In wishing to escape the proverbial nest, Ariel shares a common goal with several other Disney heroines, including Jasmine from Aladdin, Belle from Beauty and the Beast, and Rapunzel from the Disney’s most recently released Tangled. Each has different reasons for escape and different goals upon doing so, but their initial focus is the same.

In Ariel’s case, escape will be from the control of her father Triton, who is described as the “Sea King” and “Ruler of the Mer-People”. The former characterization gives a fuller description of his powers, as is demonstrated by Ursula when she acquires them for herself: “The waves obey my every whim”. Despite this responsibility, Triton is an attentive and loving father, which is precisely the problem. He is over-protective of his daughter, forbidding not only from contact with humans, but with the surface of the sea, and expects rigid compliance with his edicts. He seeks to prevent Ariel’s blossoming and keep her an innocent girl forever, as has many a father over the ages. Triton’s embodiment of the masculine principle is emphasized by two images: his palace, which even without the infamous “modification” that appeared on some video cover art, is unmistakably phallic in form; and the trident he uses to work his will, and which is equally evocative. In the end, though, like all good fathers, Triton recognizes the inevitability of his daughter’s transition to womanhood, and facilitates it lovingly, effecting the transformation that has caused so much strife throughout the film. Interestingly, the transformation effected by Ursula is depicted as painful, while Ariel barely notices the one by Triton until it is completed – Triton may be rigid and authoritarian, but he is no monster.

The counterpoint to Triton and antagonist to Ariel is Ursula the Sea Witch, whose lower body is that of an octopus. It is suggested that Ursula was displaced by Triton at some point (perhaps during the Devonian period, when fishes became dominant over invertebrates?) and has been nursing her resentments ever since. She’s willing to give Ariel what she wants, but at a price – Ariel must give up her voice. This is important. Let’s put it in terms of the metaphor: Ursula will initiate Ariel into the world of sexual maturity, at the cost of her self-expression and individuality. She also sets a deadline, Ariel will have three days to win the true love of her prince (demonstrated physically, with a kiss), or she will be added to Ursula’s little garden of wormy creatures. Ursula offers the promise of a purely carnal existence, the being of a pin-up model or porn star, without distinguishing characteristics beyond those granted by her physicality. She argues in song that “on land it’s much preferred/for ladies not to say a word”. Ariel, having no way of knowing better, believes her, and accepts Ursula’s terms. The deadline appears to be a way out, but is rather a cruel twist of the knife, because true love cannot be won solely by physical charms.

Ursula’s alignment with the carnal is emphasized by her environment and her appearance. Her body is that of a voluptuary – a female Nero – though she says that she’s “wasted away to practically nothing”. She’s clearly never been one to deny herself sensual pleasures. Her home, the frightening cavern, makes the nature of Ursula’s offer all the more clear. Take a look at the details of the cave in these images :

I believe the Sanskrit term is “yoni”, and the prevalence of these images serves to reinforce Ursula’s emphasis on the physical aspects of Ariel’s dilemma. While we’re on the subject of genital surrogates, I also find it interesting that Ursula’s ultimate goal seems to be the theft of Triton’s trident. Apparently she seeks the best of both worlds, so to speak.  To emphasize the point further, compare Triton and Ursula's thrones:

I think that's enough Freud for now...

Ariel finds that convincing Eric to love her is not easy without her voice – especially when her voice was for him the most memorable element of their initial encounter, without it, he doesn’t remember her, and she has to start from scratch. Here’s where the film’s real value lies. Ariel cannot win her true love with only her “looks…pretty face, and … body language”, as Ursula suggests. Eric seeks the voice, the personality, the person behind the outward, admittedly attractive appearance, even as others suggest that the voiceless Ariel might be an acceptable substitute. For all the flak Disney gets for promoting unhealthy body images and anti-feminist tendencies, The Little Mermaid, and to a lesser degree all the films of the Renaissance period, provides a useful guide to navigating the dangerous waters of adolescents, for both girls and parents.

Contemporary pop culture offers girls a few modes of becoming adult, more now than in the past, but the dominant one, which has become even more dominant in the twenty-odd years since Mermaid’s release, is that of the seductress, whether packaged in the teasing materialism and short shorts of the Bratz line of dolls, the repetitive sex advice of magazines like Cosmopolitan (which always seem curiously focused on his pleasure), or the pornography that has become all but ubiquitous since the advent of the Internet age. Mermaid makes the points about all of this that wise parents might like to, if only they could hold their daughters’ attention long enough: that physical attraction is fine, but is not a synonym for true love, that requires a meeting of personalities, and the ability to communicate. The fact that in this case True Love manifests itself as a heterosexual marriage is simply a reflection of majority culture, not an attack on feminist principles.  Indeed, the film promotes an essentially feminist message: love, both of others and of oneself, lives in what cannot be seen or touched, not in what can.

Mermaid carries a lesson for parents of girls too. For them, the most important transformation is not Ariel’s, but Triton’s. Our daughters will grow up, whether we want them to or not. They will discover the joys and complications of adult relationships, and find that the world they so longed for is much more complicated and confusing than they could ever have dreamed. We may deny it, to them and to ourselves, but to do so is to drive them into the arms of those that would reduce them to objects, the Ursulas of the world. Instead, we must come to the conclusion that Triton does in the end. After Eric has demonstrated that his devotion to Ariel is real, Triton sadly gives Ariel a new set of legs with which to fulfill her dreams. He has come to accept the reality of his daughter’s maturity and chosen not to impede it, but rather to guide it. As an additional blessing, he causes the seawater to form a sparkling dress for her, so that she can enter the world with dignity – not cast to the shore naked and frightened, as Ursula did. The goal of every parent of daughters must be to emulate Triton, and give them the help they need to enter the world that they desire.