The Little Mermaid as Cultural Symptom - Essay Example

The Little Mermaid as Cultural Symptom No cultural artifact of any import leaps wholesale from the blank slate of some inventors head. Instead, every invention emerges from a complex cosmic soup of ideas, concepts, and cultural norms, and these in turn shape and structure the art or text or film. As such, the recycling of stories in different cultural contexts or in different media offers a particularly insightful way of exploring the conditions from which these stories emerge. Repetition of a story is always repetition with a difference, and those differences can tell us a lot about what informs each repetition. A story like “The Little Mermaid” offers a case in point. Originally a fairy tale penned by Danish author Hans Christian Anderson, the story has found recent fame in two animated movies, ostensibly written and directed for children. The first is a well known Disney film with the same name as the original Anderson story, and the second (also distributed by Disney) is a Studio Ghibli adaptation of the story called Ponyo. While all three of these iterations tell the same core narrative, they do so with substantial differences, and these differences provide “representative anecdotes” (Burke, 1969) that tell us much about the circumstances of each versions creation. This paper will thus treat the three different versions of the story as symptoms of something larger than the narrative itself. In order to establish something of a baseline, it makes sense to begin in chronological order and to focus first on Andersons story. In “The Little Mermaid,” published in 1837, the title character lives underwater with her family, including five older sisters. By custom, a mermaid is allowed to swim to the surface and observe humans when she turns 15, and as the youngest, the Little Mermaid builds up a Romantic sense of the world above the surface of the water, based upon the stories told by her older sisters. When her turn finally comes, she encounters a prince, believes herself in love at first sight, and ends up rescuing him from a particularly powerful storm. Captivated by the human world, she inquires into human life, learning that humans have souls that live forever in heaven (something mermaids do not, since mermaids return to the green foam of the sea upon death). Between her feeling of love for the prince and her interest in an immortal soul, the Little Mermaid strikes a deal with a Sea Witch, trading her beautiful voice for a potion that will transform her mermaid tail into human legs. She can then acquire a soul by making the prince fall in love with her, and when they marry, part of his soul will then be hers, and she will be truly human. Failure to marry the prince, by contrast, will result in the Mermaids death. Alas, love between mermaid and man does not win out, and the prince ends up marrying a princess from a neighboring kingdom. The Little Mermaid, devastated, prepares for her end, only to be confronted by her sisters, who have also made a deal with the sea witch, trading their long hair for a special knife. If the Little Mermaid uses the knife to kill the prince, his blood will then transform her legs back into a tail, and she will be well. Of course, she cannot go through with such an act, and instead throws herself back into the sea, where she transforms into foam. But instead of death, she transforms into a spirit of the air, a transformation made possible by her quest for a human soul. She might even earn a soul eventually as a spirit if she does good deeds, and if children behave her soul can travel onward to Heaven. The themes in this first story tell us much about the time of its composition. The romance, both literal and literary, of the nobility is present in predictable twin components: the longing of a girl on the outside to have love transport her into a new station in life, and the tragic reality that nobility marries nobility, and is often unaware of the world outside their station. At the same time, the story highlights the mutability of identity—the idea that people can change who they are and that these changes will be rewarded, if not necessarily in the way that the individuals undergoing change desire. The final suggestion that the behavior of children will decide the Little Mermaids spiritual fate serves as standard fare for these sorts of stories, a kind of implicit blackmail parents might use over their children. That ending also frames the story in a larger Christian ideological structure, which would be appropriate for Anderson and the time and place in which he wrote the story. The Disney version of the story reveals a far different approach to the core narrative, and while the Christian blackmail of the original is no doubt transparent and disappointing to contemporary readers, the Disney incarnation is a far more damning condemnation of its cultural roots. In the Disney version (released in 1989), the mermaid has a name – Ariel – and sports a clamshell bikini top. She has the same fascination with the surface world, but here the witch is more stereotypically evil, and her deal with Ariel to become human is part of a plan to take revenge on Ariels father. A host of supporting characters are tossed in that arent in the original, including a crab and a dog, with these characters providing much of the comic relief and emotional narration. There is no princess that woos the prince away; instead the evil witch herself attempts to romance the prince by disguising herself as a beautiful princess. The objective of marriage (which implies physical intimacy in obvious ways but does so implicitly) has been replaced by the “kiss of true love,” which Ariel must receive from the prince or be owned by the Witch for ever. He sea witch bewitches the prince, and he is to marry her until Ariel and her friends discover the witchs disguise and disrupt the wedding. The prince realizes he loves Ariel, and goes to kiss her, but the time limit expires and Ariel is subject to the witchs complete control. The Sea King trades himself for Ariels freedom, the witch takes over the oceans, growing to titanic size, and all appears to be doomed, until the prince heroically rams her with a boat, splitting her open and killing her. The Sea King is freed, and he happily transforms Ariel into a human so that she and the prince can wed—smiles and music and roll credits. The sexualization of Disneys fifteen year-old mermaid is obvious, but perhaps the more pernicious twist on the original is the happy ending, which (typical of Disney movies) stresses that in the end true love does win out, and that a girl from one world can indeed move up (literally in this case) into a different world. In addition, the mermaid here is far less empowered than the Anderson version. Rather than choosing to risk death, here Ariel is to be owned and controlled. She is not rewarded for her good deeds or her adventuresome spirit, questing for a human soul; rather her prince saves the day and her father, and she is given her happy ending because of the love she has for her prince and he for her, and that is that. Rather than letting audiences learn from the tragic story, or rather than demanding good behavior from children, the Disney version of the story teaches a very different lesson: an attractive minor with little clothing who can win over the affections of a strong and powerful man can have it all. This is, of course, standard operating procedure for Disney films, which do very well, of course, because the feed the fantasies of American girls even as they work to reinforce them. As an artifact of American culture, this story demonstrates the perverse combination unique to younger American girls: they are often treated as if they have no agency, except for the agency that comes from being pretty, even sexually attractive, before they are of age. It is a culture of Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus (both former Disney stars), and the film version of The Little Mermaid provides the map to a strange land we already know but too often pretend we do not. Ponyo offers a very different interpretation of the story. Made by the famed animation company Studio Ghibli, headed by Hayao Miyazaki, Ponyo takes the story of the little mermaid and offers a decisively Japanese take. There is no evil sea witch, stereotypical or otherwise. Instead, the title character, Ponyo, is an adventurous young girl who is extremely curious about the world above. She travels up to the surface as a sort of guppy with human-like features, where she is caught by a young boy who believes her to be a stranded fish. He takes her home, and takes care of her, until agents of her father (aided by natural forces) return her to the sea. Longing to see the boy again (the love between the two never slips into anything erotic), she uses substances her father employs to keep the seas in balance to transform into a human girl and travel to the surface, where she reunites with the boy. Doing so, though, upsets the balance of nature, and all sort of natural calamities occur, including a tsunami like wave, mass flooding, and the return of creatures of the ocean long extinct. Eventually, her father and her mother (who represents the spirit of the ocean itself) work to bring things into balance, and the tipping point rests on whether the boy can love Ponyo, even knowing that she is part fish. The boy announces that he loves her in whatever form she is, and Ponyos mother restores balance to the ocean and lets Ponyo become human. The story here mixes in some of Disneys changes (the happy ending, for example), but removes the bargaining with the evil witch, and radically reconfigures the nature of the love between the mermaid and the principle boy in the story. There is no nobility here, both are children, and while they do kiss it is a joyfull kiss that reads more like an expression of intense friendship than anything romantic or erotic, and there is no implied sense of impending physical intimacy—they are children after all. And Ponyo is drawn as a child, not a budding sexual entity. In addition, the theme of the balance between human and natural worlds, and the corresponding sense of the raw power and mystery of the ocean is one of the key components of the film. This theme and the attending visuals make perfect sense for a Japanese iteration of the story, given their own dependence on the sea for food, and the impact that the sea and natural calamity can have on the countrys well being. As this essay has shown, each version of the Little Mermaid story reflects the spirit and times of its origin. Understanding the Little Mermaid as a tale that is both instructive and symptomatic of its cultural framing allows us to see the differences between the different tellings as insights into the time and places in which each version is created. These insights are not always positive, but they are informative. And as such they demand that we pay closer attention to the narratives being retold and remade today, in our image, not because they will shape and transform who we are, but because they may already show us what we too often overlook about ourselves and our place in the world. Bibliography Anderson, H. C. (1837). “The little meraid.” http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheLittleMermaid_e.html Burke, K. (1969). A grammar of motives. Berkeley: University of California Press. Musker, J. (producer) and Clements, R. (director). (1989). The Little Mermaid. Walt Disney Pictures. Suzuki, T. (producer) and Miyazaki, H. (director). (2008). Ponyo. Toho/Walt Disney Pictures. Wilson, H.W. (2006). Book review digest. Michigan: The University of Michigan. Read More