"The Little Mermaid" and the Situation of the Girl

ALL READERS who have felt the impact of this haunting tale must be at least vaguely aware, Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" 1 is an extraordinarily intense dream-exposition of the metamorphosis of Girl, as Andersen encountered her, from Child to Woman. The story expresses quite eloquently some general features of human adolescence; but what makes it extraordinary is its depiction of the relation between this general human situation and the special situation of the girl in Andersen's world. The fact that this special situation still obtains in our own world, less grossly and consistently than in Andersen's but far more profoundly than is officially recognized, may help to account for the story's haunting quality: What is eerie is to be confronted, in archetypal(1)* symbolic terms, with intimately familiar phenomena which have been kept out of their rightful place in articulate awareness. The story may be summarized as follows:

The little mermaid, youngest of six sisters, lives in a magically beautiful underwater palace with her father, the Sea King, and (her mother, like so many storybook heroines' mothers, being dead) her queenly grandmother. She looks forward passionately to being allowed (as each sister is allowed on her fifteenth birthday and thereafter) to rise to the surface of the sea and experience the sun, the open air, land, and human beings. Meanwhile she cultivates her garden at the sea's bottom, which (unlike the gardens of her sisters)