On Mermaids

1.

Undine is a mermaid.  A mermaid is a sea creature that looks like a woman.  (Or, conversely, a woman that behaves like a sea creature.)  

There are many different kinds of mermaids.  The most famous are shaped like lissome, beautiful young women.  But others are grisly and monstrous.  Grendel’s mum, who lives at the bottom of a murky tarn, is described as grund-wyrgenne / mere-wif mihtig – that is an “abyss-dwelling woman, a mighty mere-wife.”  Her lair is so deep under the water that it takes hwil daeges (either “most of a day” or “days”) to swim down to it.  Beowulf accomplishes this feat – therefore, I assume that he can either hold his breath for a long time, or may be a mere-man (or merman) himself.  

2.

Undine’s story appears in literature in 1811, embodied in the short novel Undine by the Prussian writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouque.  Born in 1777, Fouque was the descendent of French Huguenots who had fled to Berlin in the previous century.  A member of the Prussian nobility, he amused himself by writing literary versions of old European legends.  Before composing Undine, the only of his works read today, he wrote tales about the Norse gods, including a version of the Siegfried legend that influenced Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs.  He seems to have been prolific and published many poems and stories, although by the time of his death in 1843, his fame was waning and his romantic fairy tales were regarded as relics of a literary sensibility that had gone out of style.

In translation, Undine was popular in the United States and is mentioned with some enthusiasm in Little Women by Louisa Mae Alcott. (The English translator was no less than Thomas Carlyle.) The tale was adapted as an opera on several occasions – by E.T.A. Hoffmann in 1816 and, later, by Tchaikovsky (Undina 1869) and, then, Dvorak (Rusalka) in 1901.  In 1938, Jean Giraudoux, a French writer, composed a play on the subject Ondine – this play is reputedly impressive and, sometimes, revived.  A list of works inspired by the story would fill many pages with pointless notations, probably culminating in a reference to the Disney film The Little Mermaid (1989) and the logo on Starbuck’s coffee cups.  

There’s a more sinister application of the legend in medicine.  In one version of Undine, the mermaid says that she will be “the shoes in which (her beloved) walks” and “the breath in his lungs.”  Since the story of Undine is inevitably one of betrayal, she curses her faithless lover by extracting the breath from his lungs, leaving him to drown, as it were, in the sea of air like a fish out of water.  Ondine’s Syndrome is a chronic condition in which the autonomic nervous system fails to regulation breathing.  To live, we must breathe and this function we perform without thinking or volition, that is, by virtue of autonomic nervous impulses.  If, for some reason, those impulses fail, we cease breathing and die.  Perhaps about 1500 people today suffer from this syndrome and their lives must be maintained by mechanical ventilation.

3. 

Fouque’s Undine is a variant of the old European legend of Melusine.  Melusine is a beautiful young woman who entices men into marrying her.  She imposes a curious condition on these men – namely, that they should never see her while bathing.  This wasn’t too much of a burden because medieval people bathed rarely.  Melusine’s problem seems to have been that, when exposed to water in her bath, her legs would fuse into a single fishy tail, a condition not conducive to connubial bliss.  

Melusine is considerably more fearsome than Undine.  When exposed by her oath-breaking husband, she was wont to thrash about wildly and, then, become an enormous winged serpent that would fly away from her faithless spouse.  Martin Luther knew the story and thought that Melusine was a succubus, a demonic spirit that sexually molests men in their sleep.  Goethe prints a version of the story in his novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, the text appearing as “The New Melusine” in the 1808 first edition of the book.  Melusine gets confused with Undine and appears in various operas (including one by Mendelssohn) and ballets throughout the 19th century.  

4.  

There are different ways to think about the soul.  (Of course, one way is to deny that the subject has any meaning at all.)  Undine represents a certain way of thinking about the soul.  Undine’s love for Huldbrand, the knight that she meets in the story, results in the water creature becoming “ensouled” – that is, beseelt in German.  The novella is about how this happens and its consequences.  

Undine’s encounter with Huldbrand, the somewhat dim-witted knight who is the love-interest in the story, results in him becoming enraptured, smitten, with her.  A wandering priest, Pater Heilmann (the name means “Father Healer- or Salvation-man) consecrates their union by marrying them.  Marriage poses a problem.  In the Catholic Church, marriage is a sacrament – dogs and sparrows don’t marry because they are “soul-less”.  Marriage is a sacrament and, therefore, available only to those creatures with a soul.  Although Fouque, as a Huguenot, probably didn’t believe marriage was a sacrament (the rite doesn’t have that significance to Lutherans), he was a committed medievalist antiquarian, and, in the context of his tale, Undine requires a soul in order to be properly married.  (Lutherans don’t bring their horses and goldfish to church to be married either – so, although the issue is a bit blunted by Fouque’s Protestant beliefs, nonetheless, the writer requires that the soul-less sea creature acquire a soul to be properly wed to Huldbrand,.)

Undine’s ensouling raises a “chicken or the egg” problem.  Does her love for Huldbrand, and his reciprocal affection, implant a soul in her?  Or does Huldbrand’s love, that is the love bestowed by a creature with a soul, somehow create her new-born soul?  Fouque opts for a sacramental answer: the rite of marriage makes Undine’s soul.  (From a logical perspective, this seems problematic since the prerequisite for the rite seems to be that both participants possess souls – but it’s quixotic to search for logic in a story about a mermaid and her lover.)  

Undine is fearful about being invested with a soul.  She says to the priest: “There must be something lovely and terribly fearsome about the soul.  Pious man, wouldn’t it be better not to be involved with such a thing?”  The problem with having a soul is two-fold.  Once the soul is embedded in you, it is ineradicable.  And many vibrant creatures, clearly the majority of existence, get along perfectly well without a soul, a spiritual quality that turns out to be an encumbrance. 

Late in the book, Fouque shows us Undine sitting at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea.  (It is an article of faith in the novella that all of the bodies of water in the world are connected to one another, by rivers that flow into seas that overlap with one another or, perhaps, by subterranean channels.  The aquifers deep in the earth are part of this network of world encompassing waters.)  Huldbrand is half-asleep and has a vision in which he sees Undine in her underwater palace, beneath its “crystal vaults.”  She is weeping inconsolably for her lost love.  Undine is accosted by her kinsman, her sinister Oheim (“uncle”) Kuehlborn, who can’t understand her grief.  She says:

“Even though I am living here, under the water, I have, nonetheless, brought my soul into the deep with me.  Therefore, I weep even though you will never understand the what such tears mean.  And those tears are holy just as everything is holy in which there is a soul.”

The soul, therefore, is related to love and sorrow.  It is the soul that causes beings to weep.  Tears, which are salt, however, partake of the water.  Indeed, perhaps, the sea is salt because of the infinite number of tears poured into it.

Before she became ensouled, Undine understood herself to be an “elemental” – that is, a blithe spirit associated with the element of water, just as gnomes and dwarves embody the earth and salamanders, who bathe in flame, represent fire.  The elementals enjoy their existence and are fearless.  They have no souls and, therefore, nothing in them remains after the wind and the rain destroy them.  They are forever in the process of becoming and have no fixed being –being is a characteristic of the soul.  Nonetheless, they have essence for the elementals are the essential components of earth or air or water or fire.  Elementals are neither evil nor good.  Undine describes herself, before becoming ensouled, as part of the natural cycle of nature and, therefore, immortal in a certain way:

“...unlike you others (humans) who wake to a purer existence, we remain wherever sand or spark or wind or wave remain.  Therefore, we have no souls: the element animates us, often obeys us, as long as we live – reduces us to dust as soon as we die, and we are happy, without ever being troubled, just as the other sweet children of nature, the nightingale and the goldfish, are free from worry.”

This happy state, however, is subject to a Hegelian rule:

“But every being desires something higher than its state.”  (This is the concept of Aufhebung or “transcendence”) So my father, who is a mighty water-prince of the Mediterranean ocean wished that his only daughter participate in being ensouled and, therefore, she must experience the many sorrows that those who have souls endure.  Our kind can gain a soul only through the innermost union in love with one of your species.  Now I have a soul, for which I must thank you whom I love with inexpressible love, and I will always thank you for my soul so long as you don’t make me miserable for my entire life on that account.  Because what would become of me if I were to seem repellant to you and, thus, be cast away?  If you betray me, I won’t remain.  And if you plan to cast me aside, do it now – I’ll go alone back to the bank of the brook and dive into this stream, which is my uncle.  Here he lives as a miraculous lonely pilgrim, far from his friends.  But he is mighty and has the worth and value of many great rivers and just as he led me to this fisherman as a frivolous, laughing child, he will bring me home to my parents as an ensouled, loving, and suffering wife.”

So we understand that Undine’s father, a mighty merman, desired that his daughter acquire a soul.  For this purpose, he dispatched Undine’s uncle, Kuehlborn (“cool spring-source”) through the rivers of the world, bringing his daughter to the lake where the child was granted a human (if incomplete and soul-less) existence with her foster family.  The world is the “vale of soul-making” as we are assured by another Romantic poet, greater than Fouque, John Keats.      

5.

There is a peculiar pagan underpinning to the idea of the soul.  The etymology of the word “soul” discloses a fundamental paradox.  Perhaps, the elementals, without human souls, embody the only real soul in existence.  Perhaps, there is an universal world-soul in which all creatures participate.

“Soul” derives from precursor forms siola, seula, and sai waila – each of these words contains the concept of water, that is, the sea or lakes.  (This etymology is very different from that of the Greek word psyche which seems to refer to a butterfly – that is delicate, winged being within each of us.  Greek theories of the soul have an Egyptian and Mesopotamian origin in which the soul is part of an intricate economy of spirit, intellect, and passion.)  In northern European languages, soul means that which is “water-born”, something that comes from the lake – this is the proto-Germanic saiwaz meaning “from the lake.”  This etymology is also obvious in the German word for soul – Seele which seems to mean (in a literal sense) “lake-ish”.  In northern pagan religions, souls were imagined as coming from bodies of water and returning to those places after death. 

So there is another way of reading Undine, albeit contrary to Fouque’s understanding – the elementals are, perhaps, the only beings with soul.  The knight and the other humans don’t own souls.  Only Undine, whom the book posits as being initially without a soul, is, in fact, ensouled.

6.

Fouque’s tale also interprets male - female relationships.  The hero’s encounters with women (or women-like beings)   The component of the story requires a summary of the narrative that Fouque presents. Clearly features of this narrative  strike a chord even to this present hour.  (As I write, the German film-maker Christian Petzold has just directed a film called Undine, a version of the story set in contemporary Berlin.)

Fouque initiates his story with descriptions of an obviously symbolic landscape.  An old fisherman is mending his net on the edge of a big lake.  Fishermen mend nets, of course, but the artifact suggests motifs of entrapment and escape from entrapment, “catch and release” as it were that animate the story.  Creatures with souls are trapped, it seems, in a certain way – that is, they have a destiny; the soulless elementals are free as the wind and the rain, but exist within nature’s futile and endless cycles of birth and death.  The fisherman has a cottage at the tip of a “tongue” of land enveloped by the “loving” waters of the lake  – the way that the land penetrates the water and is clasped in an embrace by the lake is pretty schematic.  Fouque isn’t a subtle writer and it’s pretty obvious that he starts his novella by equating the male principle with land and the female with the watery element.  

Along comes a knight, gentil and parfit pricking his way through the dark forest to the peninsula where the fisherman.  The forest is full of monsters that, apparently, won’t molest those who are perfectly virtuous.  For this reason, the old fisherman can cart his fish to market in a city on the other side of the woods without being overly oppressed by the various evil spirits that live in between his hut and the town.  The forest creates a sort of narrative quarantine, isolating events that occur in the city from the fisherfolk – this is required by Fouque’s narrative.  Fouque’s binary imagination also devises a series of contrasts between city and country that are also important to his symbolic system.  The city is full of erotic temptation, pernicious class distinctions, and governed by money; the country operates according to a simpler economy and is as virtuous as the city seems depraved.  

Huldbrand is the name of the knight, described in elaborate detail with respect to his cloak and waistcoat.  We are also provided with an account of his steed, not really a war-horse, prancing lightly over the green meadows on the point of land, doing them “not the slightest injury.”  Oddly, Fouque doesn’t tell us anything about what the Knight looks like other than his colorful garments.  (I may be mistaken but don’t recall a single description of his face, height, or other features in the book.)  Figuratively speaking, Huldbrand is “an empty suit” – just a vessel on which others act.  He’s not much of a character, really more of a caricature of a medieval knight than a successfully drawn character – his name, Huldbrand, by the way, means something like “honored or valorous sword.”   Like the spit of land, he’s pretty much just a phallus – in this case, a penis on horseback.

Tired from his journey through the scary forest, Huldbrand asks to spend the night with the fisherman and his wife.  He’s just settling down for supper when water suddenly splashes upon the window to the house.  The water is Undine’s calling card.  She is described as blonde, beautiful, and mercurial – about 17 or 18, she darts around the cottage, precociously flirting with the knight.  The knight learns that the girl has a strange background.  About fifteen years earlier, the fisherman and his wife were blessed with a beautiful baby girl.  One day, when the child was a toddler, she lunged out of her mother’s arms and fell into the lake.  (The child was reaching for something that glinted in the water, a “wunderschoenes” object.)  The little girl apparently sinks like a stone beneath the waters of the lake and, notwithstanding the best efforts of the fisherman, her little corpse is never recovered.  Then, a few months later, another beautiful toddler appears, a little girl who is richly dressed when she stumbles through the door of the cottage and, also, soaking wet.  The mourning man and woman adopt the child and raise her as their daughter.  She babbles incoherently about an undersea palace with crystal vaults.  The fisherman and his wife select a name for her but she rejects it: she demands to be christened as “Undine.”  

A terrible storm now intervenes.  Huldbrand and the fisherman search for Undine.  In the raging tempest, Huldbrand glimpses a tall white man standing on the other side of the stream that flows down to the tip of the peninsula and spills into the lake.  The tall white man seems sinister and makes menacing gestures.  Later, we will learn that this is the merman, Kuehlborn, Undine’s uncle, a water-creature or elemental associated with streams and springs.  Huldbrand sees Undine in the tempest standing at the very point of the tongue of land.  The lake rises up and breaches the peninsula, isolating Undine on tiny, freshly formed islet.  Huldbrand wades out to the island, rescues Undine (who truth to tell, doesn’t need to be rescued from anything watery – in fact, she may be the efficient cause of the tempest.)  Men like to rescue maidens in distress, even those who aren’t really in any danger at all.  There’s a kiss and Undine’s fate, as well as that of Huldbrand, is sealed.   

The narrative is now ripe for us to learn a bit more about Huldbrand.  Returning from the island to the spit of land, Undine is reunited with the fisherman and his wife.  Huldbrand, then, tells them how he came to be traversing the notoriously haunted forest.  Eight days earlier, Huldbrand attended a jousting tournament in the Reichstadt (presumably medieval Vienna).  After acquitting himself succesfully in the tourney, Huldbrand encounters a young woman Bertalda.  (As soon as she is mentioned, Huldbrand squeals with pain – Undine has sunk her “pearly teeth” into his finger.)  Bertalda, proud and imperious, flirts with Huldbrand and tells him she will bestow upon the knight a love-token, one of her handkerchiefs, if the hero dares to penetrate the dark woods surrounding the lake.  Huldbrand sets forth and immediately encounters various monsters and wood-sprites lurking in the forest.  His horse is spooked and gallops wildly through the woods, stopped only a swift-flowing brook that bars the animal’s passage – and keeps the beast and rider from plunging off a cliff.  This brook coalesces into a tall pale man, Kuehlborn, whom we later learn to Undine’s uncle.  Continuing his trek into the woods, Huldbrand discovers that he can somehow see through the earth’s surface, peering through a sort of greenish crystal into subterranean caves where dwarves (“earth” elementals) are laboring in their mines.  A bit later, possibly shepherded on his way by Kuehlborn, Huldbrand meets the fisherman mending his nets on the shore of the lake, thus, bringing us up to the present moment in the story.  

Huldbrand, then, marries Undine in a ceremony conducted by Pater Heilmann.  She explains that she is an elemental, a water creature, but now has become a human woman since Huldbrand’s love has created a soul in her.  Huldbrand and Undine, with Kuehlborn tagging along, make a honeymoon trip to the Reichstadt (the imperial city).  There Bertalda is trying to convince other young knights to venture into the spooky woods to search for the missing cavalier, Huldbrand.  (Fouque drily notes that none of the other knights were willing to risk their lives for a mere kiss from Bertalda, particularly since their quest would be self-defeating – if they were to rescue Huldbrand, of course, they would immediately lose their claim on his fair lady, Bertalda.)  Bertalda and Undine meet and, oddly, becomes fast friends.  Kuehlborn retreats into a fountain in the townsquare, becoming embodied, as it were, in the splashing, plashing water.  Undine and Bertalda feel kinship – this is not surprising for within the mythos of the story, the two figures seem to represent differing aspects of femininity.  It’s the standard opposition of the blonde lady to the dark, the maternal to the dangerously seductive, the humble handmaiden in contrast to the proud and arrogant great lady.

Bertalde’s name-day arrives, a festive occasion in which the beautiful maiden is richly dressed, accoutered with jewels and flowers, like “the goddess” of Spring, a sort of Primavera figure.  The name-day is a bit problematic because Bertalda has been raised a powerful duke and duchess, her foster-family, and doesn’t know the identity of her real parents.  (The Duke came upon the toddler one day while riding his horse by the lake.)  Undine attends the party with Huldbrand and she brings a lute with which to accompany herself as she sings a ballad recounting the circumstances of Bertalda’s birth.  The child, she sings, was born to the poor fisherman and his wife.  However, she was lured into the watery depths of the lake (presumably by Kuehlborn) and conveyed by the waves to the lakeshore where the little girl was found by the Duke.  At that moment, the ragged and humble fisherman and his wife appear at the party.  Undine says that she was a changeling, substituted for the fisherman’s lost daughter, separated, as they say, at birth and that Bertalda was raised by the Duke in great pomp and circumstances.  Her true lineage is a horrible blow to Bertalda’s pride and she denies that the story could be true.  But there’s a birthmark hidden on her person, known only the fisherman and his wife, and so Undine’s story is corroborated.

The rather kinky threesome involving Undine, Huldbrand, and Bertalda persists.  After a while, Huldbrand with the two women depart from Vienna, the emperor’s city, and return to the knight’s ancestral castle, a place called Ringstetten.  At that castle, of course, the three encounter a lean, pale man who says that he is the “master of the fountain” in the courtyard in the castle.  Kuehlborn turns out to be well-nigh inescapable.  The trip to Ringstetten turns out to be disastrous for Undine.  Gradually, Huldbrand loses interest in her and begins to court Bertalda.  Undine, who seems to have expected this betrayal, tells her husband to seal up the fountain with a great stone.  If her father’s loyal henchman were to grasp that Undine is about to be abandoned, he would rise in fury from the well, flood the place, and drag the mermaid back to her father’s crystal palace at the bottom of the sea.  This would be fine with Bertalda and, in fact, she contrives to have the stone rolled away from the mouth of the fountain.  A enormous jet of water pours out, flooding everything, and washing Huldbrand away.  Somehow, Undine rescues him and Kuehlborn is once again confined in the plugged-up well. 

The threesome, then, decides to flee Ringstetten Castle and return to Vienna.  While sailing along the Danube, a strange phenomenon, an impaled head, keeps pace with the boat on which Huldbrand, Undine, and Bertalda are traveling.  At a stop along the river, Huldbrand adds insult to injury, buying an expensive gold necklace for Bertalda.  A little later, Bertalda is idly playing with the necklace, drooping it into the river current, when a giant hand arises from the depths, seizes the jewelry and drags it into the depths while a peal of inhuman laughter rings over the river.  Huldbrand is outraged and angrily says that this theft is Undine’s fault, cursing her as a siren, a witch and a nixie.  Deeply aggrieved, Undine fishes around in the water and pulls to the surface a beautiful necklace of sea-coral that she humbly hands to Bertalda.  Again, Huldbrand is outraged.  He shrieks that Undine should leave human beings alone and that she is a damnable conjuror and witch.  Then, he pitches the coral necklace back into the river.  Undine dives overboard and the little wavelets breaking over the ship’s prow seem to sigh: O weh!  O weh! Ach bleibe treu! O weh!  (“O woe! O woe! Stay true to me!  O woe!”)   Huldbrand, regretting his cruelty too late, swoons.  (This chorus may remind readers of Wagner's Rhine Maidens melodiously lamenting the loss of their treasured Rhine-gold in The Ring of the Nibelungs.)

Huldbrand recover from his sorrow with unseemly haste.  He and Bertalda return to Ringstetten.  While preparing for his nuptials with Bertalda, Undine appears in the knight’s dreams and warns him about getting remarried.  He ignores those premonitions and summons a priest to perform the wedding.  Pater Heilmann is lurking around the castle.  He has arrived on the eve of the wedding and, even, built himself a little hut, “made from tree-branches bent over together and furnished with moss and twigs” – this is a very odd detail and I can’t quite assimilate this image to the story.  Why does Fouque pause to show us this peculiar little wigwam pitched in the forest near the walls of Castle Ringstetten?  When consulted about the wedding, Pater Heilmann makes this ominous remark: “There are sacraments other than holy matrimony and, if I’m not invited to this wedding, it could be that I’ll be needed for another ceremony.  We’ll have to see what happens.  But, in any event, Trauen (betrothal) and Trauern (mourning) are not that dissimilar and one, who has not willfilly blinded himself, should be able to see this for himself pretty easily.”  Here, Fouque seems to reflexively slip into the motif of the wedding guest wrongfully disinvited from the ceremony – in fairy tales, evil stepmother’s who are slighted in this way, tend to put a curse on the proceedings.  The German can’t be exactly translated.  But Heilmann is noted that only the letter “r” separates Trauen (“betrothal” or here “wedding”) from Trauern – that is “mourning”.  It’s like saying “wedding” isn’t that remote from “weeping.”

No one pays any attention to the hermit-priest in his rustic wigwam.  The marriage is celebrated and, then, consummated.  Bertalda rises from her wedding bed and is thirsty.  Out of an excess of pride, she demands that she be brought a cup of water from the well plugged-up again with the big stone.  The stone is pushed aside and a geyser of water spurts forth. This column of water takes the shape of a veiled woman.  Huldbrand rises from his wedding-bed and is told that the well has been re-opened.  There’s a knock on the door.  It’s Undine standing in full watery majesty, a veil puddled over her face.  Huldbrand is afraid to look at her, terrified of how she will appear behind the watery cascade covering her features.  Undine says: “I’m as beautiful now as I was on the spit of land in the lake where you wooed me.”  “If that’s true,” Huldbrand says, “then, I want to kiss you.”  Undine lifts her veil and she “kisses him with a heavenly kiss”.  This turns out to be lethal.  Huldbrand drops back on the pillows (Kissen in German), a corpse.  (Fouque seems to be impressed so much with his ghastly joke about trauern and trauen that he repeats the effect, rather farcically, with the words Kissen - “pillows” - and Kuessen - “kisses”.)  

Fouque has one more trick up his sleeve.  Pater Heilmann appears and presides over Huldbrand’s burial.  He leads the funeral procession to the church cemetery.  Of course, Bertalda accompanies the body to the grave, but there is also a watery presence taking up the rear of the funeral march.  At the grave, Bertalda demands that Undine depart.  But, then, in a peculiar turn of events, Bertalda recalls how Undine replaced her lost golden necklace with the coral jewelry.  Tears fill her eyes and she falls to her knees next to the open grave.  After the grave is closed, a spring bursts through the sod and the waters rise to create a Weiher (“pond”) surrounding Huldbrand’s tomb.  Thus, the “poor spurned Undine, in this manner, will always embrace her darling in her loving arms.”  

Fouque ends his novella with a landscape symmetrical with the topography at the outset of the story: a bit of land is surrounded by water.  However, the narrative has shifted the meaning of this landscape – it’s like one of those optical illusions in which the profile of a duck becomes a rabbit.  At the beginning of the story, the land was a spear penetrating the water – “the tongue of land,” out of love stretches out into the lake which embraces.  The focus is on the land, the grassy sward, the flowers and the trees that cast their wind-tossed shadows onto the water.  At the end of the book, the emphasis is on the pond, Undine’s lagoon, that embraces the islet on which the grave is located – Fouque is a little vague as to this terrain: the pond is said to be beside the grave, but also embracing it with watery arms.

It’s important to grasp that Undine is not a creature that lives in water.  As an elemental, she is water, associated, it seems, with ponds and lakes.  It would be seductive to argue that Undine as an elemental represents nature and Huldbrand signifies culture, but this is too simple and false to Fouque’s presentation of his supernaturals.  Kuehlborn, who is decidedly male, is an elemental constituted by running water, streams, brooks, and floods.  Presumably, Undine’s father, ensconced in his undersea palace, is Oceanus or Neptune, the embodiment of the ocean.  The earth elementals, dwarves, are clearly male.  Therefore, Fouque’s system doesn’t ascribe a particular sex to the elementals – they are both male and female.  

However, Fouque implies that the two women in the story are, more or less, fungible – one can be substituted for another.  This is literally true: Huldbrand enters the dark forest in a quest compelled by Bertalda; he is fickle and replaces her with Undine.  Then, when Undine vanishes into the Danube as a result of the contretemps on the river-vessel, Huldbrand replaces her with Bertalde.  The three characters form a triad – Bertalda and Undine are glued together when it comes to Huldbrand; the three are inseparable.  In the book’s economy, as far as Huldbrand is concerned, the two females are sufficiently alike that one can stand for another – this attitude on Huldbrand’s part turns out to be lethal to him.  Although the dullard knight seems to think that one woman is as good as another, this isn’t true and, in fact, the sea creature has her revenge on him, correcting the erroneous notion that a mortal woman and sea monster can be simply exchanged according to the whims of male desire by murdering him, albeit, perhaps, unintentionally and with love.  (Perversely, most crimes of passion are committed out of love and Huldbrand’s death is no exception.)

The masculine perspective of the author, and the gendered system of linguistic signs, participates in this economy of substitution.  I have pointed out the peculiar pairing of words that, in German, differ by only one letter: Trauen - Trauen (marriage - mourning), Kuessen - Kissen (kisses - pillows), and Weiher - Weihen (pond - to consecrate or dedicate).  These words imply the error of Huldbrand’s thinking – one woman differs from another only in specific details: there is an iota’s difference between women, signified in the story’s language by the substitution of one letter for another – the words look similar, but the difference of a letter makes all the difference in the world, a lesson that Huldbrand learns only too late and with fatal consequences.  (A similar economy of exchange manifests in the curious detail of the golden necklace that is switched for a necklace made of sea-coral.  Huldbrand doesn’t accept the validity of this exchange on the boat floating on the Danube – but Bertalda seems to confirm that the exchange was legitimate at the end of the novella when she recalls the sea-coral necklace, appreciates it, and allows the watery phantom of Undine to follow the funeral procession to Huldbrand’s grave.) 

Although Fouque is not in complete control of some of his effects, the contour of the novella suggests a certain plasticity of sexual identity and response – “fluidity” of sexual identity intending the pun.  Desire is liquid; it flows, surges, floods, and spurts.  Huldbrand, as a knight, can be conceived as armored.  If he were to fall into water, he would sink like a stone.  His castle, Ringstetten, is armored as well – the name for the fortress suggests circular walls (“rings”) surrounding a central castle-keep.  But Ringstetten is also equipped with a urethral opening in its center – the well that Huldbrand closes with the stone.  On her wedding knight, Bertalda unclogs this drain, as it were, with dire results.  The well ejaculates a foamy white geyser into the air that contains Undine.  Despite his armor, the knight has Undine’s watery stuff inside his fortified castle – that is, within his own body.  His discharge brings Undine back into the novel so that she can have her revenge on her faithless lover. 

8.

In Philadelphia, on the green, wooded banks of the Schuykill River, you will find a miniature castle built of heavy ashlar blocks.  The castle has a turret and flies a colorful pennant.  This is the Castle Ringstetten, the boat-house for the Undine Rowing Club, founded in 1856.  The Castle has a tavern and ballroom within its heavy rock walls.  For more than 160 years, the rowing club has sponsored competitions in double scull, and sweep rowing – on the evidence of several very beautiful videos at the Undine Rowing Club’s website, the organization has fielded (“rivered”?) coxless and coxed quad teams and, even, octuple coxed quad shells.   

  

9.

Minnesota is a watery State.  Freeways traversing Minnesota enter over bodies of water.  On the East, Interstate 94, the freeway from Chicago, reaches across the border on the St. Croix river in a dramatic, steep-sided gorge pressed tight around the water.  Sailboats glide over taut expanses of wave between shaggy bluffs and there is an ancient prison in the hills and, at a bend in the river, a power-plant. Interstate 94, the freeway that crosses Minnesota’s southernmost tier of counties, spans the Mississippi river, several bridges stretched tributary waters and big oxbow lakes fringed with dead forests, a higher iron span rising over the main channel.  If anything, the landscape at this southeastern corner of the State is more dramatic – high bluffs loom over the valley spotted with marshes and vast wetlands through which geese and ducks migrate twice a year and, in some places, the hill sides are sheer, with bald meadows towering over the river valley and broken cliffs from which artesian springs well forth, freezing into immense ice scimitars in the Winter.  Interstate 35 bisects the State running from Des Moines to Minneapolis – in fact the freeway extends between Houston and Duluth, in effect, bisecting the continental United States.  Immediately upon crossing the Minnesota border, the freeway swoops down into a shallow valley where a long, windy causeway crosses a blue lake cupped between rolling wooded hills.  I have driven I-90 from Seattle to New York and the Mississippi River crossing is one of the most spectacular features on the highway, similar to the Delaware Water Gap on the border of New Jersey – for rest of the way, the road runs prosaically through corn and soybean fields mostly flat land until Pennsylvania and, even, among the long blue parallel ridges of the Appalachians there is nothing quite so impressive as the valley and bridges over the Mississippi.  The same is true of I35.  The road runs flat across the farm land for a thousand miles and there is only one place, so far as I can recall, where the interstate actually crosses a big, blue body of water – and this is Albert Lea Lake, seven miles or so, from the Iowa border.  It is as if the rivers and the lake at Albert Lea are signposts announcing that one who enters Minnesota is entering the land of lakes and rivers. 

 

10.

Of course, the question that this poses is whether there are mermaids in Minnesota waters.  The gorge of the Mississippi near Minneapolis is adorned with graceful bridges and waterfalls are hidden in the deep, rocky ravines dropping down to the river.  The waterfalls churn night and day with ceaseless, futile energy in pits shaped like big stony pots.  Probably, water-monsters hide behind the veils of falling stream, but they are hard to see, even at night, when the falls are luminous with an eerie phosphorescence, moonbeams and starlight caught in the plunging water.  Lorelei haunt the dams and locks on the river, but nothing is known of them – you only see a Lorelei and hear her song in the instant before your canoe or sailboat plunges over the concrete rim of the lock and you are lost.  The innumerable lakes in the North are too cold for naked mermaids (and mermaids are almost always naked).  Icy waves slosh against basins of bare granite and tiny islets, red with iron ore and, sometimes, bearing a tiny pine or fir tree, like a display of Japanese bonsai, dot the lakes that stretch in long, lonely corridors toward the Canadian boundary.  From the air, the chains of lakes occupy more terrain than the feeble forested isthmuses between them and the place is an enormous, silent wilderness.  Sometimes, camped on rib of stone dotted with orange and moss-green lichens, an explorer in this enormous solitude will hear the wild cackle of a loon in the fog – an uncanny sound that chills the heart and makes the hair stand on end.  But a loon, notwithstanding its sinister cry, isn’t a water-monster.

11.

Even states with relatively little open water can host a water-elemental. In west Nebraska, the country of the Oglala Sioux, a crooked dog-leg of water stands among pine ridges and sand hills.  This is Hay or Alkali Lake.  I’ve driven to the edge of the grey shallow water, an anomaly in the arid country.  There’s a picnic table in the grass and the trash barrel of filled to overflowing with beer bottles and cans.  Supposedly, the lake is haunted by a water-horse, an eel-like creature that is sometimes seen, usually by drunken local teenagers after midnight, disporting itself in the open water beyond the fringe of reeds and cattails.  The creature has a body like a long broad snake and, sometimes, it shows coil upon coil, writhing exposed over the limpid, grey of water that smells like bleach.  The head of the water-horse has been described variously as that of a stallion or a woman or a lynx.  In Winnebago, Nebraska, a small museum maintained by the Hochunk Nation (an Indian tribe previously called the Winnebago) displays a facsimile of a stone carving of a water monster.  The provenance of the carving is uncertain.  The rock is soft yellow sandstone, marked with neatly incised lines that show an elongated beast with its head turned to look out of the rock.  The beast is hatched with marks to represent scales and so the trunk of the animal is, apparently, serpentine, The creature’s head is engraved as a small diamond-shaped hex with tiny eyes and wearing a weird cowl-like hat, something like a Bishop’s miter.  The water-monster has four tiny legs extruding beneath it’s long scaly body and seems to be smoking a  calumet or pipe. (There is a similar image pecked into a stone at Mesa Prieta in New Mexico – it shows a water serpent with buffalo horns, a Pueblo Indian avanyu, apparently, playing a flute.  It may be that the creature in the Hochunk museum is musical and the elongated form is a flute.)  It’s impossible to know whether this stone is an ancient artifact, chiseled off some crumbling limestone cliff, a folly carved by a madman, or simply a hoax.

    

12.

The City of Albert Lea, Minnesota is built on a ridge of land between three lakes, Albert Lea Lake, Pickerel Lake, and Fountain Lake.  (Three other smaller lakes are also within the boundaries of the City.)  There is a mermaid in Fountain Lake.  She is not Undine, but, rather, the sea creature described in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy-story, “The Little Mermaid.”  

13. 

German critics derided Fouque.  One said that the writer’s characters were just “stuffed” armor and that the only psychology in is works was equine – he has “mastered” the psychology of horses but not human beings.  Heine said that Fouque’s knights were composed of “courage and iron” with no trace of “flesh or reason”.  

Hans Christian Andersen’s fables are too dire to be readily dismissed.  If Fouque has no psychology, Andersen’s Maerchen are all psychology – and abnormal psychology to boot.  

14.

Undine is narrated from the point of view of its human characters: the story is about humans who encounter inscrutable supernaturals – that is, the water-elementals with whom the humans transact business.  Fouque’s perspective is prosaic and land-bound; his narrative is grounded, as it were, on terra firma.  By contrast, Andersen’s “Little Mermaid” is told from the perspective of the sea-creature.  Andersen is resolute in narrating his story from the point-of-view of the mermaid.  The mermaid is a fully characterized being whose psychological states are carefully delineated.  The humans inhabiting the tale are caricatures, cardboard cut-outs, mere types – a prince, slave-girls, a temple-maiden.  None of these humans has any heft or depth.  The only figure worth caring about in Andersen’s morose tale is the little mermaid.  

Andersen’s decision to remain within the mermaid’s point-of-view has consequences for the story.  “The Little Mermaid” is not grounded – it contains abysmal depths, bizarre digressions and non sequiturs, weird shifts in tone.  The story is watery and, at the end of the tale, the plot literally dissolves into thin air: the text ends with air elementals, sylphs, rising like champagne bubbles up through the prose toward heaven.  In effect, Andersen’s tale simply evaporates like sea-spray.  Nothing has any lasting substance: the sea dissolves ships and drags them to the watery depths, human beings are dissolved in skeletons and their bones used to build houses, mermaids suddenly perish, transformed from vibrant beings into a scum of sea-foam.  Water signifies death and transformation, the “sea-change” that Shakespeare says happens “full fathom five”.  The only perdurable substance in Andersen’s fable is soul-stuff – but to have a soul means to risk damnation and the fate of those ensouled is to suffer.  

15.

“The Little Mermaid” is a sexualized carnival of masochism.  The little mermaid, who is “quiet and pensive,” falls in love with a prince that she has rescued from a tempest.  She is beautiful, has a wonderful, euphonious singing voice, but, instead, of legs, of course, has a fish’s tail.  (The tail makes her agile and seems to symbolize the freedom of her maiden state – she can move in all dimensions with great alacrity and grace.)  Like Undine, the sea-elementals are blithe spirits but soul-less – they live for 300 years and, then, painlessly dissolve into sea froth.  But the little mermaid, inspired by her love for the prince, wants to acquire a human soul.  This can only be accomplished by experiencing union with a human being who, forsaking all others (“loving her more than father and mother”) joins himself to his beloved so completely that his soul somehow spills over into her piscine body.  As in Fouque, the concept derives from the Bible in which marriage is portrayed as two persons becoming one flesh – and, presumably, therefore, sharing one fused soul.  But Andersen reverses Fouque’s order: in Undine, the sacrament of marriage seems to create a soul in the water-elemental; in “The Little Mermaid” the water-elemental borrows the human’s soul that flows freely, an ejaculate, as it were, into the supernatural being’s flesh.  (For Andersen, the sacrament of marriage seems secondary to the union by which the soul-stuff is injected into the mermaid.)  Implicit to Andersen’s conception is the requirement that the mermaid be prepared for copulation – that is, divested of her fishy tail.  This process involves terrible suffering.  The mermaid must be mutilated by a sea-witch.  The witch cuts off the mermaid’s tongue, rendering her mute.  (There’s an explanation in the story for this gratuitous act of torture – but the reader won’t be able to remember it.  I’ve read the story several times and, by the end, can never recall why the horrible sea-hag cut out the mermaid’s tongue.)  The witch provides her mermaid supplicant with a potion made from her own blood – the witch draws the blood from her breast, substituting this mutilating poison for maternal milk.  (Apparently, mother-figures, at some point, require their daughters to be mutilated just as they were themselves mutilated a generation earlier – the nurturing breast becomes a source of disfiguring poison.)  The poison-portion, when swallowed by the mermaid, rips open her fishy tail, dividing it as if “a double-edged sword passed through her delicate body.”  The mermaid can’t speak any longer – her tongue has been amputated –but she can dance to seduce her lover.  Unfortunately, when the mermaid walks and dances, she suffers enormously – her legs feel like raw stumps to her and, “every time her feet touch the ground, it feels as if she were treading on knives.”  Sometimes, Andersen enlivens his gory descriptions by saying that the mermaid’s human feet experience walking and dancing as moving on “pointed awls” and her gait on dry land causes her to bleed, apparently to the amusement of the other “slave girls”.  

The mermaid’s love and her yearning for a soul require her to embark on a course of violent mutilation.  From a free natural being, she becomes corseted – tongueless, split open by a “double-edged sword”, and walking on razor-edged knives until she bleeds.  From the maternal sea, the little mermaid has entered a phallic world of knives and pointed awls.  (Andersen who is determined to spare his readers none of this horror shows the mermaid standing ankle-deep in the sea to cool her burning feet.)  Rape is the rule of the prince’s world – the price of admission is the loss of your tongue.  (East African women have their clitorises removed to prepare them from marriage.)  The amputation of a tongue is a longstanding metaphor for rape – rape silences women; we see this motif in the classical myth of Philomela raped by her sister’s husband and, then, transformed into a nightingale.  Of course, Shakespeare reworks this motif in Titus Andronicus in which a rape victim has her tongue removed to keep her from reporting the crime as well as in The Rape of Lucrece.  The excision of the mermaid’s tongue means that she must satisfy her prince, not by discourse or words, but through the motions of her dancing body.  The mermaid is reduced from a speaking being into mute, suffering flesh.  

In Undine, the water-elemental, at least, enjoys the love of her prince and, even, is married to him.  Andersen’s mermaid suffers a far more disturbing fate – she is never joined to the prince and, in fact, is rejected by him.  (He marries the Temple Maiden.)  So the mermaid’s complete destruction accomplishes nothing – she doesn’t have sex with the prince, can’t embrace him, never gets married, and, for all her strenuous exertions, ends up without a soul.  Even more humiliating is the detail that the mermaid’s rival for the affections of the prince is her own Imago – that is, the Prince’s idealized vision of her.  When his ship, sailing on a birthday cruise, sunk in the tempest, the little mermaid embraces the drowning man and carries him to a spit of sand on the shore.  The Prince has glimpsed the mermaid’s face through his swoon but confuses her with the Temple Maiden who later appears to succor him on the sand-bar.  In effect, the Prince is in love with his image of the rescuing mermaid, but has substituted the Temple Maiden for his true love.  As in Undine, female figures are fungible in the terrestrial world –all women are, more or less, alike.

Of course, the transaction between the Prince, who really loves the mermaid but can’t recognize her (and she can’t explain the misprision) is profoundly unfair.  On the land, male-female transactions proceed in only one direction.  It never seems to occur to Andersen that if the prince’s love bestows a soul on mermaid, the prince should also get something from the water-elemental: for instance, gills or the ability to breathe water.  The Prince can pump his soul into the beloved; but there’s no reciprocity – except for her suffering, the water-elemental has nothing to give in exchange.  Not surprisingly, the mermaid’s misfortunes enrage the sea-supernaturals.  The mermaid’s five sisters rise to the surface of the ocean and hand the mermaid a knife so that she can kill the Prince.  (You can’t really call him “faithless” like Huldbrand in Undine – although he loves the mermaid as the image of his rescuer, he rejects her from the outset in favor of the bland Temple Maiden.)  The mermaid still loves the man and can’t kill him – she lingers sword in hand over the sleeping couple (they’re in a tent on the Prince’s ship) but, then, pitches the weapon overboard and immediately feels her body “dissolve into foam.”  This substance is variously designated as “foam on the water” or “deadly cold sea foam” that I interpret to be a post-coital scum of spilt semen – something that is lifeless and “without even a grave.”  Readers may protest the vulgarity of this interpretation.  Consult the story, assess Andersen’s hysterically morbid imagery, and decide what you think.  

16.

On first reading, “The Little Mermaid” might be construed as presenting two realms that mirror one another, albeit defined in terms of gender.  It is tempting to read the sea and water as female and the earth as masculine.  But this dichotomy doesn’t survive closer study.  In fact, the mirrored realms and land and water are, more or less, completely female.  The mermaid lives with her five sisters in her father’s castle – he is described as a “sea king” but lives as a widower in a palace maintained by his elderly mother.  The sea king, who is a shadowy figure, never described in the story and without any real agency, seems to be the only male entity in the ocean – there is a sea-hag, the six mermaids, the sea king’s mother, but no other men (or mermen).  The little mermaid cherishes the figure of “a lovely boy” carved from “clear white stone” that has sunk from a shipwreck to the bottom of the sea – a rather creepy detail: the statue of the boy sunken to the sea bed is said to resemble the prince on the ship with the mermaid falls in love: it’s possible that the mermaid is conditioned to love the prince by her experiences cuddling the statue.  In any event, the stone boy, like the “sea king”, are inert male figures.  They don’t act.  Indeed, the prince himself is essentially inert as well – in his two most important encounters with the mermaid, he’s unconscious (that is, when half-drowned in the tempest and later sleeping with his bride when the mermaid approaches with the knife.)  The little mermaid’s affection has a necrophiliac aspect – she loves only someone (or something) incapable of returning her affection.

As I have noted, it would be convenient to regard the sea as female and the land as male.  But the realm of terra firma turns out to be equally female.  There is a prince, to be sure, but everyone else seems to be a woman or girl.  On the land, the prince lives in a palace filled with slave girls.  The only other figure of any significance on solid ground is the “girl of the holy temple” who becomes the prince’s wife.  The fact that the sea and land have similar gender values is a consequence of Andersen’s mirroring imagery.  The undersea realm and the land, to the limited extent that it is described, possess all of the same features.  Andersen takes pains to point out that the forests and deserts on dry land are mirrored by barren terrain and polyp-groves in the sea.  The sea is full of meadows of “blue sulphur” – this is a bit hard to imagine, but, apparently, some volcanoes produce blue sulphur lava that has a neon aspect.  There are meadows and weeping willows on the bottom of the sea.  “You mustn’t think,” the writer admonishes, that there’s nothing underwater “but a white sandy bottom”; rather, he describes submarine “trees and plants” that move with the rippling water and “the fish, big and small flit through the branches like the birds up here in the sky.” Andersen describes the sea king’s palace in terms nearly identical to his account of terrestrial palace where the prince lives.    The terrain in the tale is not heterosexual – that is binary with male and female aspects; rather, the landscapes are homosexual – both sea and land have the same features.  (This is not an aspect of Andersen’s own conjectured homosexuality.  Fouque’s novella has the same feature: whatever we find in the sea exists on the land as well, albeit in a slightly different form and Undine is noteworthy for the figure of Kuehlborn, the sea-king’s lieutenant, an aggressively masculine sea-elemental.)  

Although no real gender distinction exists between sea and land, Andersen implants some differences that are arguably more significant.  Solid ground is characterized by “churches and cloisters” – because landlubber humans have souls, they also have places of worship.  The prince will wed a temple maiden raised in a cloister “where she...learn(s) all the royal virtues.”  (Land also has picturesque birds, for instance swans, although these are described as similar to fish swimming in the luminous sea.  In addition, there are fireworks, fountains, and sunsets.)  Andersen begins the story with a dramatic image: to illustrate, the depth of the sea, he tells us: “Scores of church towers would have to be set on top of each other to reach from the bottom up to the surface of the water.”  This is an important concept: the sea is the place where churches are drowned.  The piety of the humans with their immortal souls gets submerged in the pagan, soul-less waters of the ocean.  Andersen’s measures the depth of the sea by the number of drowned churches you can stack underwater.  And, of course, the real ruler of the sea is not the wan invisible sea-king but the sea-hag or witch.  She embodies the “bad mother” (or stepmother), a familiar figure in fairy tales.  The sea-hag is a master of poisons and potions.  The enemy of humans, she lives in a cottage made from the bones of drowned sea-men.  She wears a belt of writhing fat sea-snakes marking her as a medusa figure.  As a parody of the nurturing mother, she has “big spongy breasts” and makes her mermaid-mutilating potion from “black blood’ drawn from her bosom.  Andersen takes pains to relate the sea-hag’s mutilating potion to maternal advice that women must suffer for beauty.  In a bizarre detail, mermaids clip oysters to their tails for adornment.  The little mermaid’s grandmother is a “wise woman” but also “proud of her noble birth” to the extent that she affixes 12 oysters to her own tale – although other nobles are “only allowed to wear six.”  (The oysters, of course, bear pearls within them “any one of which would be a great jewel in the crown of a queen.  Integral to these images is the notion that the oyster transmutes its pain or irritation into a beautiful jewel.)  When the little mermaid prepares for a ball, her grandmother “made eight big oysters oyster clamp onto her tail”.  “Oh how that hurts!” the little mermaid says.  The old woman says: “Yes, but do have to suffer a little for our finery.”  Being beautiful requires pinching ear-rings and, I suppose, mutilating corsets.  The advice from the grandmother as to suffering “for finery” turns into the nightmare disfigurement inflicted by sea-hag.     

Throughout the tale, Andersen imposes a curious double perspective on the romantically described landscapes and accoutrements in the Maerchen.  Features of both land and sea are described with naive, open-eyed astonishment.  But we have seen that these things are, in fact, eerily familiar to the reader – the wonders of the undersea world are astonishing, but they mirror quite precisely the sorts of wonders that we see on dry land.  Similarly, the mermaids are amazed at the beauties of terra firma and the human world, but, in fact, the sea creatures are only beholding idealized aspects of the world familiar to his readers.  The bottom of the ocean is exotic and wonderful because unknown to us – but it isn’t really different than what’s on the land.  From the perspective of the mermaid, the terrain of the shore with its palaces, sailing ships, and temples is also uncanny and remarkable – but it contains the same fixtures on the bottom of the sea.  Andersen’s uncanny skill is to make everything seems wonderful and, yet, also familiar at the same time.  This includes the entire story with its elaborate mise-en-scene – we have always known this story even before reading it: it is part of our cultural patrimony, something experienced through countless repetition in the from of denatured story books, popular legend, and, even, Disney cartoons.  Andersen’s Little Mermaid is perverse and strange in its details, but also something with which we have been intimately familiar all our lives.  

17.

The story of the little mermaid has some kind of personal meaning to Andersen.  Critics have argued that the story is an allegory about Andersen’s own identity and, therefore, represents a sort of lesion on his imagination – an itch that he has to scratch although it injures him.  This is evident by Andersen’s peculiar approach to the narrative – the actual plot is so morbid and painful that the storyteller appears to delay reaching that part of the story.  The little mermaid has no fewer than five sisters, all older than her.  As a rite of passage signifying their sexual maturity, the mermaids upon reaching their 15th birthday ascend to the surface of the sea to behold the wonders of the land – this seems obligatory.  (The notion is that sexual maturity compels a broader and more complex understanding of reality – one puts away “childish things.”) Fairy-tales operate in patterns of threes – so one might expect their to be two (or, perhaps, three) sisters who swim to the surface and report on proceedings on dry land or among the humans.  Anderson has no fewer that five mermaids who each, one after another, surface on the sea, inspect their surroundings and return with gaudy accounts to the deep.  About a fourth of the story is devoted to detailing the adventures and observations of the little mermaids five sisters.  This feels like preliminary “throat-clearing”, a delaying tactic – Andersen seems loath to get to the sequence with the sea-witch resulting in the little mermaid’s mutilation and, then, the misery that follows.  The reader expects a detailed account of the mermaid’s adventures with the Prince on land – but this part of the story is handled very economically and briefly.  The little mermaid can’t really lament her relationship with the Prince.  She has no real relationship with him.  Before she consults with the sea-hag, Andersen provides a lavish description of an undersea ball.  It’s as if he can’t bring himself to depict the disfigurement of the little mermaid and the cruelties that the endures among the “slave girls” in the prince’s harem.  

Andersen published the story in 1837 and it was one of his first widely successful works.  He composed the tale on the island of Fyn, a place to which he had retreated to avoid the wedding of a friend, Edvard Collins.  Letters written by Andersen show that he was in love with the young man.  Although he wrote ardently to him, Andersen’s most explicitly romantic letters were never sent – he suppressed them as too overtly homosexual.  Andersen’s sexuality is ambiguous.  Although he aspired to romances with women, the writer generally selected objects of affection that were clearly off-limits or unattainable – for instance, he later wooed the famous singer, the “Danish nightingale,” Jenny Lind while carrying out an affair with a male Danish aristocrat.  In 1836, Andersen wrote, but did not post, love-letters to Collins.  When Collins married, Andersen, like his “little mermaid” was devastated and he seems to have expressed his sorrow in the fairy-tale.  An amphibious creature, the mermaid, can not express her love – she has lost her tongue.  Similarly, social convention prevented Andersen from forthrightly proclaiming his love for the young man that he desired.  Required to dance on the bleeding stumps of her feet, the little mermaid may represent Andersen’s sense that he had to perform and entertain, transmuting his sorrow into art. 

The unsatisfactory ending to “The Little Mermaid” seems consistent with the notion that the story encoded a sorrow beyond words, something too painful to admit.  Andersen redeems the mermaid from the dissolving froth of sea foam.  She is lifted above the clouds by air-elementals – sylphs who are allowed to earn an “immortal soul” by doing good deeds for humans.  (These good deeds seem strangely inconsequential – the breezes waft the scent of flowers to humans and cool them when they are warm and suffering from “pestilent air”.  Of course, air-elementals as zephyrs also blow the stench of death and corruption into our noses and the miasmic “pestilent air” is an aspect of these beings as well.  Andersen’s concept of the sylphs or air-elementals is not worked-out, sketchy, and strangely inconsistent.)  As if grasping that the metamorphosis from mermaid to sylph is inadequate to the horrors and sorrow earlier depicted, Andersen then grafts a moralizing coda onto the story.  Good deeds and obedience shown by virtuous children “shortens the time of trial” of the air-elementals aspiring to their immortal soul.  Obedient acts performed by good children reduce the air-elementals purgatorial service “by one year.”  Conversely, bad deeds and wicked intentions punish the sylphs, each disobedient act adding “one day to (the) time of trial.”  None of this makes any sense and the notion that Andersen would preach morality on the basis of the profoundly perverse and, even, kinky, tale of the little mermaid is both appalling and mawkish at the same time.  The degree to which these last couple paragraphs falsifies the rest of the story shows how Andersen experienced the subject of his fable as both dangerous and disturbing – he ends the story running away as fast as he can from its implications.    

18.

Hans Christian Andersen is an important figure in Danish literature whose fame has only increased since his death in 1875.  (Arguably, after Disney’s mermaid cartoon in 1989, Andersen’s posthumous fame worldwide has far eclipsed his not inconsiderable glory during his lifetime.)  Indeed, many Danes are pleased to be identified with Andersen and his most famous creation, the little mermaid.  A small bronze mermaid graces Victor Borge’s grave in Greenwich Cemetery, Massachusetts.  A recent poll showed that almosts 40% of Danes surveyed thought that their nation should be represented by an image of the little mermaid.  And, of course, an iconic image of that sort exists, den lille Havfrue perched on a boulder along the Lanelinie promenade in the harbor at Copenhagen.

The Copenhagen mermaid was unveiled on Augusts 23, 1913.  The bronze figure is a little more four feet tall and weighs 385 pounds.  The sculpture is affixed by two plates to a large boulder, a jutting outcrop of the sort that the Germans call a Fels, that is a cliff-face.  The Fels is part of a tiny promontory of smaller stones culminating in the large upright boulder on which the mermaid rests.  

A Danish sculptor named Edvard Eriksen cast the bronze.  A celebrated local ballerina Ellen Price served as the model for the figure’s face.  Eriksen wanted to model the figure’s torso on Price’s body – apparently, she was a celebrated beauty.  Price was unwilling to pose in the nude and so the sculpture’s shoulders, breast and arms imitate the figure of Eriksen’s wife.  

19.

Three times in his story of the little mermaid, Andersen describes his heroine as “quiet and pensive.”  Eriksen’s interpretation elegantly embodies these values.  The mermaid’s face is classically serene, depicted in repose and reverie as she seems to scan the watery horizon, lost in thought.  Women in Oaxaca (and the Mayan world) sit on the ground with their legs flexed to the side.  (This is a singularly graceful way of sitting.)  Similarly, the mermaid rests on the rock with legs (or tail) tucked partially under her but extended to her left.  Eriksen has chosen to depict the mermaid in the process of transformation: her lower extremities remain outlined by her tail and she has no feet, but rather a complicated assembly of sleek fins at the bottom of her legs – this part of the statue is abstract, grooved overlapping flippers, a bit like something invented by Gaudier-Brzeska.  The mermaid’s thighs and calves, however, are rounded and fully developed, curving up into her human torso.  The mermaid’s shoulders are rounded, almost hunched, and her left hand, resting on her thigh, grips some sort of brawny looking, rope-like cord that runs across her lap, veiling her pubis, and ending at her right hand.  This part of the sculpture is ambiguous – probably, the eel-like cord, which seems braided, is supposed to represent sea-weed.  No one really notices this part of the bronze sculpture but, once seen, it is a wee bit uncanny, even unpleasant, as if the mermaid is clutching a muscular whip or flail.  The mermaid’s hair forms a helmet-like halo around her face, an aerodynamically practical swimmer’s coiffure.  The creature’s eyes and nose and brow are polished into obscurity, as if the action of the waves were in the process of smoothing her features into a schematic, ghostly mask.  (If she has eyeballs, I can’t see them in the cool, dark sea-caves of her eye-sockets.)  The figure’s color depends upon the light and the color of the adjacent sea.  In some photographs, she looks seal-black, and, indeed, could be mistaken for an animal of that kind – pictures taken in brighter light, show her nether flippers and her shin and knee-caps glowing with a mirror-smooth golden radiance.  

Like all successful sculptures – and, clearly, Eriksen’s “Little Mermaid” must be so accounted – the figure looks radically different depending upon the angle from which it is photographed.  From some vantages, the bronze has a stoic, philosophical aspect; from other angles, the figure seems abject and crouched, withdrawing into herself; viewed in profile, the bronze form is serene and classical in form.  However, if you look into her face, from beneath the miniature cliff on which she reposes, the creature seems alien, blurred, like a slick of oil blazing with iridescence before the water dissolves it into discolored foam.   The most placid and pleasing perspective on the mermaid, unfortunately, opens onto the ugliest view of the harbor – over her shoulder, we see big warehouses with stark, planar surfaces, smoke-stacks, and, even, several crane-shaped aerial hoists.  Another angle shows the estuary under her Fels with a round boulder like a turtle’s shell in the shallow water under her tribune-shaped cliff.  An excursion boat, lined with tourists passes along the promenade, a couple hundred feet from shore.    

20.

The little mermaid bronze is readily accessible.  This has resulted in a long history of vandalism.  In some ways, the mermaid’s repeated mutilation is consistent with Andersen’s tale – after all, “The Little Mermaid” chronicles the horrific mutilation of its principle character.

In 1963, Situationist’s staged a Happening in Copenhagen harbor.  There were a lot of naked people, chanting and thrashing about and, in the chaos, someone took a hacksaw to the mermaid and sawed off her head.  The City Fathers of Copenhagen were appalled and the homicide investigation team was deputized to solve the crime.  The head was never recovered and the perpetrator ever arrested.  (On his death bed, an elderly hippie named Joergen Nash confessed to the crime – if he knew where the head was stashed, he didn’t say.)  Around this time, the family of the sculptor took custody of the original bronze (or, perhaps, had always had custody of that object) – a replica was posed on the rock.  The whereabouts of the original casting remains undisclosed to this day.  The figure was beheaded by vandals in 1969 as well, although in the latter case, the head was discovered in the bushes in the park a few days later.

In 1984, the figure’s right arm was amputated.  A couple days after the mutilation, some school boys returned the severed limb.  Someone painted the bronze figure white in 2003.  No sooner had the white paint been blasted off the bronze, then someone drenched the mermaid in blood-red paint – this gesture was to protest whaling in the waters of the Danish protectorate, the Faroe Islands.  2003 was a bad year for the mermaid.  Explosive charges blew her off her perch on the rock and the mermaid was found shattered in the shallow water at the base of her boulder – this attack occurred at three a.m. on November 9, 2003.  Again the mermaid was restored and some city officials suggested moving the boulder out into deep water so that it would be harder to vandalize the figure.  The Danes are humane people and I assume they reckoned that most of the vandals were pretty far into their cups when they assaulted the mermaid – drunk people have always been wont to clamber all over the boulder and pose for pictures of themselves embracing the stoic little mermaid.  If the boulder were in deep water, undoubtedly, like her sister the Lorelei, she would claim more than a few victims by drowning.

If anything the pace of desecration has increased.  We live in iconoclastic times.  The mermaid was covered from head to foot in a burqa to protest Turkey’s planned admission to the European Union.  Feminists painted her pink in March 2007.  Someone strapped a dildo to her belly and painted the date March 8 on her boulder – March 8 is International Women’s Day.  In 2017, the mermaid’s rock was defaced with the enigmatic graffiti Befri Abduli, an inscription said to reference a Somali woman who had fled to Denmark in the context of a child custody case and, then, been arrested.  Later that year, someone decorated the boulder with the words “Free Hong Kong.”  In June 3, 2020, Black Lives Matter protests erupted in Copenhagen, hundreds of people marching in remembrance of George Floyd, a drug addict and grifter, murdered by the Minneapolis police.  Someone in the crowd of protestors painted the words “racist fish” on the little mermaid’s boulder.  Danish media was bemused.  How was the little mermaid racist?  And what exactly is a “racist fish”?    

21.

Ninety years ago, the Professional Women’s Club of Albert Lea paid to install three fountains in a shallow cup-shaped lagoon in the lake that divides the city’s downtown from its well-to-do residential neighborhoods on the opposite shore.  The lake is sizeable, often graced with white sails or turbulent with the wakes of speedboats and the body of water funnels from its broad northwest lobe to the southeast, opening into a narrow channel that cuts through the isthmus on which the commercial buildings rise.  Beyond the channel, spanned by low concrete and iron bridges, a forlorn and shallow appendage to the lake spreads its grey sheet of water between marshy mud-flats.  Once a meat packing plant stood on the far side of this desolate pool of water, but the place burned down many years ago and nothing remains except some scabrous slabs of concrete on a low barren terrace grooved with old, abandoned railroad tracks.  The two aspects of the lake are an emblem for Albert Lea – the industrial pond servicing the slaughter-house and, then, the stone-lined canal dividing the isthmus and leading, beyond to the perpetual jet and shimmer of the fountains in the corner of the big lake, everything green and shady on that side of the water with big houses bending down over the shoreline, gleaming bays with woods around them, and the height of land where the city pitches up its small, masonry skyscrapers, downtown trailing off into lake-side parks with running paths and copses of old trees and the hospital and alcohol treatment center occupying the center of the ridge above open water broad and long enough for speedboats to accelerate to full-speed as they bounce and crash across the waves.  

Facing the fountains, blasting white jets up that, then, fall to form pale splash patterns where the water rains down onto the placid lake, a bronze mermaid sits on a big rock.  The mermaid is almost life-sized and she raises her right hand to wave at the pale plumes of the ninety-year old fountains.  Beyond the lunging and splashing water, a tiny round island sits in this corner of the lake, sides curbed with pale retaining walls.  An arched wooden bridge riding on iron trestles spans the space between the lake shore and the island.  Set like flag-like masts on the center of the island, a half-dozen pines grow out of the earth.  At the corner of the lake, water laps and makes musical sounds against the boulders carted there to line the shore and keep the flood from oozing into the green lawns.  The mermaid turns her back to the channel opening a water-corridor to the slaughterhouse-lake.  She faces the fountains and the little island, where in the summer, in fine weather, sometimes weddings take place.  Unlike her counterpart in Copenhagen, this mermaid rests of a boulder that stands half-sunk in the bay, four or five feet or so from shore so that vandals have to wade over slippery submerged rocks to reach her.    

22.

Here is an odd thing, a trick memory has played on me.  As long as I have known Albert Lea, a town 16 miles from where I live in Austin, a mermaid has graced the southeast corner of Fountain Lake.  I don’t recall a time when she wasn’t resting on her rock, a little apart from the shore, lifting a raw-looking bronze paw toward the lake.  When I first came to Austin in 1979, I tried a half-dozen or more cases in Albert Lea, at the old courthouse for Freeborn County.  I visited clients in various parts of the town, surveyed accident scenes near Fountain Lake, and recall marveling at the bronze mermaid.  But, in fact, memory serves me poorly.  The mermaid on the rock at Fountain Lake was riveted to her stone in 1994 – that is, fifteen years after I came to southern Minnesota.  So, contrary to my recollection, the mermaid is much newer than I thought.  Indeed, it was my assumption that the mermaid was an artifact of the sixties or, even, the nineteen fifties.  But, apparently, there was no mermaid in this park on the lakefront when I made my first appearance in town, even though I can’t recall a time when she wasn’t bolted to her boulder.  

Another dressed boulder on the shore-line advises that the mermaid was placed in the municipal park in 1994 by Danish Brotherhood Lodge #75.  Names are embossed on the metal plaque, a list of donors.  The mermaid was forged by George Bassett for a place called “Lincoln Park” – that is, the old name for the lawns, gazebo, sidewalks, and the bridge to Katherine Island on this edge of the lakeshore.  Today, the park is named “New Denmark Park,” in recognition of earlier Danish settlers in this area. (None of the metal signs record when the name of the place was changed.)  The contribution of these Danish pioneers is acknowledged by another statue, a three-quarters life-size bronze of a sturdy-looking young man, a bit like the redoubtable Hans Brinker, the famous Dutch skater.  Like Hans Brinker, the lad wears a leather cap tightly screwed down on his bronze head.  He steps forward with one large square-shoed foot, appearing both resolute and, also, a bit timid.  The youth has a suspenders holding up his bell-bottomed, vaguely nautical-looking trousers.  His coat is slung over his left arm, falling as drapery along the side of the figure.  The proportions are not quite correct: viewed from a certain angle, the Danish immigrant has arms like Popeye the Sailor man: his biceps balloon out above his elbow, but his forearms seem pitifully puny.  The Danish boy stands on a cylindrical plinth in the middle of another fountain, empty, with yard-high walls of chipped white stucco surrounding the dry basin.  The bronze immigrant seems strangely unaware of the mermaid lurking at the edge of his perspective.  His face is dull, bovine, placid and not particularly alert – if he sees the mermaid, he pays no attention to her.

23.

On an afternoon in late June, the air is very warm and humid at New Denmark Park.  Prevailing winds have pushed a thick bloom of algae up against the boulder rip-rap at the edge of lake.  The algae is moss-green and floats in slimy rafts around the base of the rock on which the mermaid rests.  Indeed, the algae carpets the water as far out as the plunge-pools where the jets of the Professional Women’s fountains are splashing back into the lake.  

Although it’s rude to make mention, the mermaid stinks.  There is a fishy odor in the air, a stench of rot like earthworms decaying on a sidewalk after a hard rain.  Probably, the smell wafts up to me from the algae bobbing in the water, filling in the shallows behind the mermaid on her rock with a thick green mat.  The bronze mermaid is not as elegant as her sister in the Copenhagen harbor.  She has a haggard-looking face, sharp as a weapon, and her arms seem long and simian, disproportionate to her torso.  Viewed from behind, the mermaid has a fat ass – her hips are much wider than her slender, sloping shoulders.  Her breasts are Hollywood-sized, bigger and more voluptuous than those on the Copenhagen mermaid.  George Bassett didn’t dare the bravura craftsmanship required to show the little mermaid mid-transformation.  This sea-creature is unabashedly half fish.  She has a long tubular fish’s tail that ends in flukes such as you might see on a whale.  Her legs are welded together with a shingling of fish scales beginning at the middle of her thighs and, then, becoming a solid sheath from her knees to the split fins cantileverd out over the bloom of algae.  The mermaid is more alarming than beautiful, a frightening apparition on her granite boulder.  She has long straggly hair, falling straight and wet-looking over her ragged-looking shoulders.

24.

Why did the Danish Brotherhood opt for this grisly design, something more akin to a mermaid by P.T. Barnum than Hans Christian Andersen’s little sea-nymph so “pensive and quiet”?  Probably, it was a matter of economics.

There are, at least, thirteen copies of Eriksen’s statue scattered around the world.  One of them is located in Greenwood, Michigan and was installed in 1994, the same year that the mermaid was cast and erected in Albert Lea.  That copy was unauthorized and Eriksen’s grandchildren, acting as the so-called Little Mermaid Foundation sued the Michigan city for a licensing fee.  In Denmark, copyright exists for seventy years after the death of the person holding that right.  Eriksen was long-lived; he didn’t die until 1959.  Accordingly, his heirs possess the sole copyright on the mermaid design free and clear through 2029 when the sculpture will enter the public domain.  The lawsuit in Michigan involved a claim for licensing fees sought in the sum of $3800.  Greenwood’s lawyers said that their version of the mermaid was only 30 inches high, had bigger breasts, and a different face – whether these variants on the original design would be sufficient to defeat the licensing claim is uncertain.  Apparently, the case wasn’t tried and may have been settled – in any event, the suit was dropped.  (Vancouver wanted a copy of the mermaid as well.  But negotiations with the Eriksen family and the Little Mermaid Foundation stalled.  So the Canadians settled for a buxom girl in a wet suit, half-reclining on a boulder in Stanley Park, looking out over a fjord-like inlet of the Pacific Ocean.  The girl invokes the Little Mermaid but is sufficiently different to avoid copyright problems – she has a snorkel-mask pushed up over her forehead.)  Greenwood’s mistake was erecting a plaque identifying the mermaid as “identical to” the statue in Denmark.  Another town, Kimballtown in Iowa, has a bronze mermaid on its lakeshore.  In 2009, the City raised $12,000 to renovate the mermaid.  The City Manager noted that she hoped that no one in Denmark would become aware of their replica.  In an interview, that woman observed that there “is a town in Minnesota” with a similar mermaid (presumably Albert Lea) but “ours is much prettier.”  

The Little Mermaid Foundation offers exact replicas for sale.  A nine-inch bronze mermaid costs $3120; a three foot mermaid can be purchased for $35,700.  If you want the big version, five feet long, the charge is $90,500 – considerably higher today (2021) than $55,820, the charge stated in 2009.  

25.

Albert Lea has three famous natives.  Eddie Cochrane, the fifties rock and roll star, came from the town.  (The City celebrates Eddie Cochrane Days each summer).  Marion Ross, most famous for playing a role from 1974 to 1984 on the sit-com Happy Days, is claimed by Albert Lea as a daughter and, in fact, there is a community theater in the town named after her.  But, in fact, she was born to Canadian immigrant parents in Watertown, Minnesota and lived in various other places in the State before moving to Albert Lea.  She completed her sophomore year of high school in Albert Lea and, then, moved to Minneapolis and, then, ultimately, southern California where she was “discovered” and performed in Hollywood movies and TV shows for many, many years.  Richard Carlson was indisputably a product of Albert Lea.  His father was a Danish immigrant and well-known as the town’s dentist.  Carlson, who had chiseled Aryan good looks, worked in Hollywood as well after graduating with a theater degree from the University of Minnesota.  Carlson had the sort of blandly handsome features that qualified him to play courageous men of science in 1950's horror movies.  He was often stranded in the desert, expressing alarm about alien invaders or giant insects.  In The Maze, directed haphazardly in 1953 by William Cameron Menzies, Carlson investigates strange events at a Scottish castle.  (The place has a sinister topiary maze, very much like the garden labyrinth in The Shining).  The laird of the Scottish castle turns out to be a giant frog.  Carlson is most famous for playing the scientist in The Creature from the Black Lagoon; the creature is a gill-man or merman if ever there was one.