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The Little Mermaid: An icon of woman's condition in patriarchy, and the human
condition of castration

Article in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis · November 1995

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 1
Efrat Tseëlon (1995)
The Little Mermaid: an icon of woman's condition in patriarchy,
and the human condition of castration
The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 76, 1017-1030

Abstract
Using a primarily Lacanian framework Hans Christian Andersen's story The Little
Mermaid is read as a creation myth and a metaphor for woman's condition in
patriarchy. In the first part, the psychoanalytic concept of castration (broadly
conceptualised as containing any existential severance which forms the basis for
sexual difference and subjectivity) is utilised to argue that the myth is about a
construction of (mostly female) subjectivity through a series of separations or splits:
1)birth 2)growing up 3)desire and 4)death. Birth and death are read as representing
real separations. Growing up is read as structured around a symbolic castration of
tongue and voice, while desire as structured around lack. In the second part the
ideological implications of Disney's adaptation of the original for its symbolic status
are explored. It is argued that by simplifying and externalising internal complex
conflicts in the Andersen story, Disney's version reduces the myth to a fairy tale, and
reproduces the ideology of romantic love.

Synopsis
This paper is a meditation about a story. It is about the Hans Christian Andersen's
The Little Mermaid. The little mermaid is the youngest and loveliest of the daughters
of the Mer-king. But unlike her sisters who are happy in their world and desire
nothing better the little mermaid is always yearning for distant worlds. She is
obsessed by the world of humans who can climb up and achieve a broad perspective;
she envies them for possessing an immortal soul. Finally she falls in love with a
prince she saves from drowning when he is shipwrecked. The prospect of an
immortal soul together with a blissful love of the prince appeal to her so much that
she is willing to pay the high price demanded by the sea witch in return for
transforming her fish tail to human legs. She has to sacrifice her tongue together
with her beautiful voice, and she is warned that walking would feel as painful as
walking on sword edges. But worst of all, the moment the prince marries another
woman she will die like a mermaid - and will turn into foam on the waves.

The little mermaid agrees and ventures into her new world. She charms the prince
enough to make her his companion but not his wife. His heart belongs to the
beautiful woman who discovered him on the beach whom he mistakes for being his
saviour. In the end he discovers his lost desire and marries her. In a last minute
attempt to save the mermaid, her sisters bring her a knife they got from the witch.
She has to kill the prince and when his blood flows on her legs they will turn to a fish
tail again. The mermaid refuses, and when she dies she is rewarded for her
sacrifices and turns into an air-spirit who may one day gain an immortal soul.

Structure of the paper

In this paper I would like to argue that The Little Mermaid is a myth because it
contains fundamental insights regarding woman in patriarchy. In the words of
Fischer "even in the more common case where a myth or tale is not consciously
created to symbolize an abstract lesson, it may nevertheless embody one for the
narrator or the audience. It may be a way of approximating an abstract statement
through concrete images" (1963, p. 244). While discussing in some detail some of
its mythic themes (e.g. castration and separation) I would like to distinguish a myth
 2
from a folktale which is represented by the Disney film version. But first I would like
to give some background. I will start by explaining the characteristics of myth.

What is a myth?
There is a diversity of modern approaches to myth and a fragmentation of its study.
According to the dictionary of literary terms (Cuddon, 1991) a myth is a story which
involves supernatural beings. It is always concerned with creation, often with
explanations of the natural order. In fact its nature is not as clear-cut as this
definition implies. Myth has been defined as a metaphorical form of explanation of
natural or social phenomena (Kirk, 1974), which reveals and shapes fundamental
values of the society and attitudes toward life (Halbertal and Margalit, 1992), as a
form of poetic symbolic expression (in the work of Cassirer), as validating social
institutions (Malinowski), justifying a ritual (Frazer, Raglan), creating and
maintaining social cohesion (Durkheim)(Cohen, 1969), as expression of individual
unconscious fantasy and the collective unconscious (Freud, Jung, Fromm), and as a
device for resolving contradictions or oppositions (Lévi-Strauss, 1958; Leach, 1969;
Kirk, 1970).

In terms of its validity it has occupied the whole range from being considered a
primitive pre-scientific mode of thought and contrasted (in pre-socratic times) with
logos, to being considered an alternative mode for investigating areas of reality that
cannot be explained by discursive language or scientific method.
In eighteenth century Enlightenment an evolutionary mode of thought (e.g. Tylor,
Frazer) viewed primitive pre-scientific thinking as characteristic of the "savage mind"
and contrasted with scientific rationalistic thought (Fischer, 1963). In nineteenth
century Romanticism mythic thought was treated as a source of knowledge of a non-
scientific kind, a high mode of mystical truth, poetic truth, a creative process and a
symbolic expression of fundamental existential insights (Bidney, 1967). The
twentieth century saw a second revival of sympathetic interest in myth in the works
of Nietzsche and Freud including acknowledgement of the Dionysian, violent,
irrational side in the work of Sorel (Rouanet, 1964).

Why is The Little Mermaid a myth?

The Little Mermaid is a myth because of its theme and its truth value. It is a
narrative of the supernatural. The little mermaid finds her place along the chain of
beings included in myth: beginning with the first race (nonhuman, mortal,
nonrational beings), the chain goes on to the second race (human, mortal, rational
beings), then to the third race (nonhuman, immortal, rational), and finally to the
fourth race of immortal beings that govern the universe. Between these groups are
"in-between creatures" such as mortal heros whose activities resemble those of the
third race, and who sometimes earn the right to become immortal and join the third
race as a reward for their activities. (Halbertal and Margalit, 1992, pp. 79-80). The
little mermaid belongs to the category of the "in-betweens" who rise to the level of
the third race, because she belongs to the sea dwellers who have long life (300
years) but mortal, and because her devotion earns her the right to get an eternal
soul. Outside the context of Andersen's story the mermaid is a well known mythic
creature and a very peculiar one. Like the female in patriarchy she is full of
contradictions and resists univocal categorisation. Her ambiguous nature is also
suggested by her history. She is, in fact, a medieval hybrid between a mermaid and
a siren. The Mermaids are half-fish half-humans whose origin dates back to
Philistine, Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian gods and deities (see Consoli, 1974;
Goodman, 1982). The Sirens are Greek mythical anthromorphic birds (daughters of
Achelous the river-god and Melpomene the muse of tragedy), who feature in
 3
Homer's Odyssey. Their alluring music enticed sailors to come close to their island,
only to be shipwrecked on the island's reefs and devoured by the sirens. A motif
similar to that of the mermaid is also found in a medieval French deity, Melusine,
who was half-woman half-serpent. In the Renaissance such mixed-up curiosities
were considered monstrous mutations alongside giants and dwarfs, but not as devils.
What distinguished them from humans was that, like animals, they possessed no
souls. Concerned with the natural order, Renaissance philosophers tried to
incorporate the mermaid into the cosmic scheme since nothing was written about
them in the Holy Scriptures. As such they were regarded as signifying the
misfortune that is threatening people, or a warning that sinning against god would
lead to a destruction of the human race and its replacement by such human-like
creatures (Goodman, 1982).

And if her origin positions the mermaid between man and woman, fish and bird - her
essence places her between a person, an animal, and a supernatural being, and
between love and death (seduction and danger). Paradoxically, the impossibility of
satisfying the desire she provokes is inscribed into her body, her tail. Her
cosmological anomaly prefigures her present-day alignment with the enigma of the
woman caught up between conflicting images of nature and culture, seduction and
nurturing, evil and holiness. To these general inconsistencies the particular ones
that belong to Andersen's mermaid should be added. She is a circumstantial witness
(if not a causal agent) to the wreck of the prince's ship on his birthday party, yet she
is not a seductress. Quiet the contrary. Hers is a true empathic love. When the
prince drowns she first rejoices in the prospect of him coming to her palace but as
soon as she is reminded that humans cannot live under water ("only as a dead man
could he come down to her father's palace") she rushes to his rescue. But after she
saves him she hides and witnesses powerlessly how the prince opens his eyes to be
greeted by the woman who discovers him on the beach.

The hero, Otto Rank tells in his psychological interpretation of a myth (1914), is a
child of noble birth, whose relationship with its family are severed, and who is
surrendered to the water and lifted from it (which is a symbolic representation of
birth). As in childhood phantasies the hero endeavours to replace the parents with
more distinguished ones. All these elements are present in the Little Mermaid story.
She rejects her father's underwater world, and emerges from the water in an
attempt to find a place in the prince's kingdom of immortal souls. In order to enter
the human world and to gain legs, she has to pay the price of losing her voice. The
little mermaid agrees and joins the prince only to discover that she has lost the
quality that would make her most attractive to him, while the prince looks for her
lost image in a substitute princess. The mermaid thus surrenders her voice in order
to gain entry into the (human/patriarchal) symbolic order. Like hysteria, the loss of
her voice is inscribed into her female body as that which is repressed within
patriarchal culture. By submitting her voice in order to gain her sexuality (according
to the terms posed by the castrating sea-witch) the mermaid is losing her most
desirable quality and is constituting herself as a phantasy: as that which is
permanently desired, never to be fulfilled. The prince, therefore, falls in love with a
human substitute for the fantasy desire. Given this predicament, the mermaid is
offered two options: she can either wait for the prince to give his love to another and
then dissolve into non-existence. Or she can murder the prince and let his blood
flow over her legs and restore her pre-sexual existence (in the form of the tail).
True to the patriarchal tradition of female masochism she prefers to die than to
murder, and is rewarded for it in heaven.
 4
Castration
In psychoanalytic epistemology castration is a myth of origin about the separation
process and about sexual identity (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1968). It is an unconscious
representation derived from an unconscious phantasy desire of the mother, the
Oedipus complex. It arises from the discovery of the anatomy of the female genitals
which the child translates into an image of a mutilated male and is expressed in the
girl's realisation of her imperfect status, and the boy's fear of a similar fate as his
mother's. As a result both take up their positions in the order of sexual difference by
transferring their libido away from the mother (the girl to her father, and a baby,
and the boy to other women) (Freud, 1925). The fear of castration is superimposed
on another primordial fear of separation from the pre-Oedipal mother: the
inevitability of separation that is inherent even in the safety of protection.
(Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1981). Thus in An outline of psychoanalysis Freud (1940)
writes

Children are protected against the dangers threatening them from the
external world by the care of their parents; they pay for this security by a
fear of losing their parents' love which would deliver them over helpless to the
dangers of the external world.

Freud made the castration complex the focal point of the development of sexual
difference (but privileged the genital over symbolic forms). Lacan extended the
definition of castration from the genital sphere to include the constitution of the
subject through socially signifying practices. In his formulation the penis is replaced
with the phallus as a master signifier: a stable anchor of certainty in meaning. This
construct is an a-priori impossibility, hence an illusion (and a repressed illusion at
that) shared by both male and female. The subject according to Lacan is constituted
through a series of "splittings" or alienations. It is a process of separating self from
others (e.g. the mother's breast), as well as acknowledging the otherness within
oneself: that which is perceived (as in the idealised mirror image), and defined (as in
symbolic (linguistic) categories) by others (Lacan 1977, 1979; Lee, 1990).

The first of the splittings or gaps which produce subjectivity occurs at the mirror
stage where the child perceives the difference between its own fragmented
uncoordinated sensation and its coherent reflection in the mirror. This "idealised"
identity is the first experience of otherness within the self: the self as perceived not
as experienced. Second, the Oedipal splitting (separation from the mother) occurs
when the mother is lost as an object of desire. The child replaces her loss through
substitute objects (objets petits autres) whose very presence signifies and masks the
lack. Third, the child's entry into language (the symbolic order) marks a split
between parts of oneself and the corresponding symbolic coordinates through which
identity is designated (from the first-person pronoun, through all the categories of
social and sexual difference, symbolically termed "the name of the Father").

Through the paradigm of castration broadly conceptualised as containing any

existential severance, The Little Mermaid can be read as a series of separations:
1)birth 2)growing up 3)desire 4)death.

1) Birth
The first separation is marked by the mermaid's departure from her safe intra-
uterine sea world (mer=sea/mère=mother) and her venture into the unknown air
kingdom. The association between birth and castration is alluded to by Freud in a
 5
footnote to Analysis of a phobia in a five year old boy (1909) where he refers to birth
as "a prototype of all castration" (p. 8). However birth is also experienced by the
mother as castration (Flügel, 1924, p. 178-9; Freud, 1926, p. 130).

In the story though, it is the little mermaid who experiences the separation while the
prince, like the narcissistic foetus remains unaware of her existence, as well as of
losing her. And so the loss of her protective pre-natal environment is marked by
grief both for the mermaid and her maternal world (since her mother died, her
maternal world is represented by a father, grandmother, and sisters). Like in
mourning she detaches her libido from her loved ones
She could see her father's palace, the lights were out... They were all certain
to be asleep in there by this time; but she didn't anyhow dare to look for
them, now that she was dumb and was going to leave them for ever. She felt
as if her heart must break for grief. She stole into the garden, picked one
flower from the bed of each of her sisters' flower-bed, blew a thousand finger
kisses towards the palace, and rose then through the dark blue sea
(Andersen, 1846, p. 57).

Her departure causes similar rupture in the world she left behind: "Her sisters rose
up arm in arm singing so mournfully as they swam on the water... [they]... told her
how unhappy she had made them all" (ibid, p. 59), and on their last visit "our old
grandmother has been sorrowing till her white hair has fallen away" ibid, p. 62). But
the mermaid remains loyal to her choice. Her final separation from the maternal
world is marked by her refusal to murder the prince in order to transform back into a
mermaid. Instead she points the knife her sisters brought her towards the maternal
body of the sea, "she flung it far out into the waves; they glimmered red where it
fell, and what looked like drops of blood came oozing out of the water" (ibid, p. 62).

The mermaid's transformation into a human following sleep echoes a folktale motif
where difficult and painful growing experiences are inevitable. Sleep followed by
rebirth marks a crucial point of the protagonist's development. "Each reawakening
or rebirth symbolises the reaching of a higher stage of... understanding... change
signifies the need to give up something previously enjoyed" (Bettelheim, 1985, p.
214). Rank's theory is that man spends his life trying to undo the trauma of birth
which has ushered him into a world of pain and insecurity from the protective and
pleasurable surrounding of the womb. That the birth of the little mermaid marks
severance as well as a new start is also suggested from the obvious allusions to the
Biblical story of the expulsion from paradise.

2) Growing up
But this already takes us to the second separation: growing up which is further
divided into exiting a) the pre-sexual world, and b) the the pre-linguistic world.
a) Exiting the pre-sexual world and entry into sexuality is represented through the
symbolism of the transformation of the fish tail into legs, and through the framing of
the expulsion from paradise scene. The mermaid substitutes split legs for a singular
tail. The fish tail is like a fetish: the imaginary maternal phallus which denies the
traumatic vision of castration (Freud, 1927). Paradoxically, it is the transformation
from phallic to genital stage of sexual development (and from wholeness and unity of
the pre-sexual world to a reality of female sexuality which is not singular but multiple
(Irigaray, 1980) - which underlies the mermaid's real castration. For this transition
has its price. The mermaid's every step involves excruciating pains, and her feet are
constantly bleeding. While the bleeding and the pain recall menstruation, the
bleeding feet combine erotic and mythic elements. The foot is a long standing erotic
 6
symbol (as evidenced, for example in Cinderella, fetishism, and the Chinese custom
of feet binding). And Lévi-Strauss (1958) reminds us also that in mythology sore or
bleeding feet are a universal characteristic of people born from the earth at the
moment of emergence. The whole scene acquires additional meaning through its
Biblical connotations. The little mermaid's yearning for the love of the prince is
combined with her quest for immortal soul. Thus her desire is for the forbidden fruit:
of the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. And knowledge implies sexuality as
well as knowledge of good and evil (the phallus often appears in free associations as
the organ of knowledge as well as of reproduction, and the snake is the symbol both
of the phallus and of knowledge, Flügel, 1924, p. 163). This is why Adam and Eve
having eaten from the forbidden fruit "knew that they were naked and made
themselves fig leaves aprons to hide their shame". Similarly, like Adam and Eve,
when the little mermaid wakes up and sees the prince, she is ashamed as "she was
quite naked and she wrapped herself in her long flowing hair " (Andersen, 1846, p.
57). Further, the mermaid is condemned to a series of pains. "Every step she
took... was as though she were treading on sharp knifes and pricking gimlets". In
addition, her birth into womanhood feels "as if a twoedged sword pierced through
her delicate body" (ibid, p. 57). This fate invokes the Biblical curse God delivered to
Eve "I will greatly multiply your sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt
bring forth children" (Genesis 3, 16). Ironically the mermaid receives the Biblical
curse without the Biblical blessing (giving birth) or the consummation of her love.
Thus the Biblical framework prefigures the connection between mature sexuality and
pain. Yet with all her sacrifices the mermaid does not achieve the prince's attention
to her as a sexual being. And as much as she was dear to him "he loved her as one
loves a dear good child, but he didn't dream of making her his queen" (Andersen,
1846, p. 59). And it is this erasure of her being which links it to the next separation,
or split, that of growing up through exiting the pre-verbal world and entering the
symbolic order. At the outset the mermaid enters the world of adulthood mutilated
and muted. She is not sure-footed because her feet are tender, and her steps are
"graceful", not firm. She moves "as lightly as a bubble" (ibid, p. 58). Worse still,
her tongue is castrated and she can neither communicate her feelings or sacrifices,
nor display in singing "the most beautiful voice on earth or sea", nor correct people's
erroneous conceptions of what life in Mer-kingdom is like. And it is in this
predicament that The Little Mermaid seems so closely to epitomise the female
predicament in Western culture. Deprived of access to official prestigious genres,
discouraged from public speaking, denied forms of expression that are suited to
convey her experience of the world - while being categorised, interpreted, and
misrepresented - she is rendered socially mute (Cameron, 1990).
In Lacan's formulations language is the medium through which human beings are
placed in culture and their sexual identity formed. Language encodes the culture's
values and perspectives and transmits them. Like other representations it reflects
the place of the woman in culture, and constitutes one means by which that place is
maintained. Social silence is part of the constitution of female identity. Folklore
abounds with sayings and tales which portray the ideal woman as beautiful but
dumb, captured, perhaps most poignantly by Magritte's painting The collective
invention which depicts an inversion of the mermaid myth: it is composed of an
upper part of a fish and a lower part of a woman.

The social silence of the 'muted group' was first theorised by the anthropologist
Edwin Ardener (1975a+b). In Perceiving Women he argued that in every culture
dominant modes of expression fit best the experience and perspective of the
dominant group. Such arrangement forces the powerless into a choice between
channelling their communication through the dominant modes, or being rendered
 7
inarticulate. Thus, French feminists advocates of l'écriture féminine' believe that the
institutions and signifying practices of Western thought have been based on a
systematic suppression of women's point of view. This suppression, linguistic as well
as sexual meant that the basis of female identity which is an embodied subjectivity
was completely absent (Cameron, 1990, Cixous, 1976; Jones, 1985). Women came
to define their essence and their mode of desire and pleasure through phallocentric
eyes. Irigaray refers to this alienation as exile from their auto-eroticism.
It is quite false to say that there is no specific female desire. It is a specific
social and cultural structure which deprives women of their desire and of the
possibility of expressing it ... because language and the systems of
representation cannot "translate" that desire (1977, p. 71).

Embodied subjectivity extends beyond sexuality to modes of thought and being.

Thus the clear, precise, univocal scientific mode was attributed to a phallocentric
thinking and contrasted with the female characteristic mode which is more diffuse,
intimate and multivocal (Fonow & Cook, 1991; Harding, 1986; Rosenberg-Zalk &
Gordon-Kelter, 1992). Control of women's bodies was not limited to the symbolic
plane. Indeed the history of mental illness shows madness to be a female malady
(Showalter, 1987). In his Civilization and its Discontents (1930) Freud contends that
people become neurotic out of frustration society imposes on them in the service of
its cultural ideals. And Szasz summarised the female predicament of institutionalised
madness thus
the more intensely [women] realize and articulate their predicament, the
more likely they are to be... psychiatrically punished (1974, p. 12).

Failure to comply with culturally determined ideals of feminine behaviours which

threatens the system of sexual difference and sexual roles is psychopathologised in
the same way that witches were sacrificed at the altar of Christian values. And as
Foucault has argued (1965) medicalisation of the body is a technology of control
employed since the 17-18 centuries, striking hardest at those who have neither the
economic means to satisfy their desire, nor the strength to resist cultural constraints
on satisfying this desire. Not surprisingly the female body became the arena for the
power struggle between men and women. Suppressed by patriarchal domination
women made use of legitimate vocabularies as subversive strategies of expressing
distress or dissent. This is one explanation for the epidemic levels of hysteria in the
second half of the 19th century. (Similarly, anorexia nervosa sprang to the public
scene in the second half of the 20th century, Gordon, 1990). Hysteria has been
specifically linked both to the rise of the suffragette movement and its consequent
disturbance of categories of gender. The vocabulary of hysteria consisted of
repressed fantasies written on the body as symptoms (in the same way as the
vocabulary of Anorexia contains unexpressed anger turned depression, Yates et al,
1983). The body spoke what the voice could not. Thus hysteria came to be
regarded as quintessentially female, and theorising hysteria has always involved
theorising the feminine (Kahane, 1990).

In the Hippocratic tradition humoural theory linked hysteria to the migrating uterus,
essentialising the disorder as organically feminine, and linking a weak body with
reduced moral integrity (Strong, 1989). Freud reversed the relationship between the
physical and the mental. His studies (and Breuer's, 1895) showed hysteria to be not
a mental disorder arising from a physical cause, but a physical disorder arising from
unconscious repression of sexual trauma or desire. Yet Freud's method of analysis
as exemplified in the Dora case provides yet another illustration for the conflict of
power and the suppression of the female voice. As Masson (1988) argues Freud's
 8
interpretations of Dora's behaviour were influenced by his own agenda. He was
concerned to discount the role of external causes of hysteria in favour of a psychic
fantasies. He was not entirely able to extricate himself from the web of deceit woven
around Dora. Instead of validating her correct perception "he was yet another man
in authority who knew best what was best for Dora" (ibid, p. 103). In his therapy
masculine discourse mediated the cure: the cured hysteric was to learn to "talk
right" i.e. according to his idea of rationality and clarity (Strong, 1989, p. 18).
Although hysteria has no specific organic locus, the more famous cases (Anna O. and
Dora) exhibited forms of speech impairments. For example, Anna O started off by
experiencing two states of consciousness: one melancholic, the other 'naughty' and
abusive. Later she lost command of grammar and syntax, became deprived of
words, used a limited vocabulary, combined words from various languages to form
unintelligible texts, or speaking and reading foreign languages in preference to her
own German - sometimes without noticing. Breuer observed that what triggerred
her lost of speech was mortifying fear, suppression of a remark, or being unjustly
accused for something. Her catalogue of discursive disorders is as revealing about
the social context in which it was produced as about her pathology, and supports the
treatment of hysteria as a metaphorical as well as a real disorder.

It is in this symbolic mode that I proceed to read The Little Mermaid as representing
the human condition, or rather the female condition in patriarchy structured around
a very particular castration of tongue and voice. Like the hysteric she rejected what
was most valued in her own world. Both her grandmother and the witch warned her
of the ugly human stilts called legs for "the very thing so beautiful here in the sea,
your fish's tail, seems ugly to people on the earth" (Andersen, 1846, p. 54). And her
grandmother also reassured her that the mermaids are quite happy to live longer
than humans (three hundred years) and afterwards to dissolve into sea foam. Yet
the little mermaid was not quite convinced by the mer-world's definitions of 'beauty'
and 'happiness'. This world stood in her way to a wider perspective (offered from
the high grounds of humans) and immortality. She had ideas of her own and was
willing to take the risks involved in pursuing them. Against this background her
muteness appears more like that of the hysteric than that of the passive woman.
Her silence conveyed the frustration of being misinterpreted and trivialised. But in
the economy of the folktale silence is not necessarily an obstacle to communication.
For example in another of Andersen's stories The wild swans an exiled princess
undertakes to remain silent until she finishes knitting nettle shirts for her eleven
brothers bewitched into swans so that she can undo the spell. In the course of her
work she is discovered by a king who falls in love with and marries her despite her
continued silence. In comparison the little mermaid's vocabulary of graceful
movements, most beautiful dance, and speaking eyes cries out loud. The
comparison between the tales shows that beyond the little mermaid's failure to
communicate - her muteness represents that she is locked into a system which
prevents her from expressing her desire - a desire which is not coded in the
phallocentric frame known to the prince.

3) Desire
The third split, or separation, I am going to discuss is desire as conceived by.Lacan
(1982). Lacan's subject is created through a split, a being that can only
conceptualise itself when it is reflected from the position of another's desire. Thus
identity is an illusion or fiction arising when the subject forms an image of itself by
identifying with others' perception of it (the mirror image, and later the linguistic
designations). But Lacan's subject is not a divided self that could potentially be
made whole. Rather it is a self which is only created within a division, or alienation.
 9
Similarly, desire itself, including sexual desire, can only exist because of its
alienation. It comes into being only when the mother's breast is withdrawn from the
baby as a loss of what it regards as part of its body. Thus any subsequent
satisfaction will always contain this loss within it. The baby's need can be met, but
its desire only exists by virtue of its initial failure of satisfaction. It is the later
resolution of the Oedipal complex, and the libidinous displacement away from the
mother following recognition of the castration fantasy that formulates the relation to
the mother as a desire for a perpetually lost object.

This structure creates the following consequences:

a) desire is built around an absence; a lack is a prerequisite to desire, b) this
absence is constitutional, not circumstantial; it is a defining feature of a divided ego,
c) since desire persists as a result of a primordial absence, an impossibility of
satisfying the desire is built into its very structure. The impossibility of fulfilling a
desire is also indicated in the Greek mythical legend about the origin of desire - the
story of the birth of Aphrodite. Aphrodite was born from the sea foam. The foam
was formed from the castrated penis of Uranus (Heaven) thrown into the sea. It was
his wife Gaia (Earth) who persuaded one of their sons, Chronus (the youngest of the
Titans) to avenge thus Uranus's mistreatment of their other offsprings, the
Hectoncheires (Grimal, 1965). The origin of desire is in the lost phallus of the father,
castrated without any hope of being rejoined. And the foam from which Aphrodite
rose is the fate awaiting the little mermaid at the failure of her desire. The
impossibility of satisfying desire implies that fantasy (wish-fulfilment through
imaginary happenings) is an inextricable companion of desire. It is set into motion
at the point where desire shifts from the primary lost object (mother) and becomes
narcissistic (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1968). And as Cowie (1984) points out fantasy is
not about achieving a particular object; it is about the pleasure of staging the desire.
The pleasure of anticipation, preparation and imagining, and not the moment of
fulfilment is, in her words, "the refusal to narrate an ending". Because once the end
is reached and the desire materialises, it becomes a past event and a new lack opens
up. Fantasy is not found within the framework reality/illusion but in the psychic
structure of desire (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1968, p. 27).

In The Little Mermaid the looking-glass surface of the sea is a dividing line between
two worlds: above and below. It is hard to establish which of those worlds is 'inside'
and which is 'outside', or what is 'real' and what is the 'imaginary' (Consoli, 1974).
The prince and the mermaid cannot unite in either world. The prince can only exist
in the sea world as a corpse, and the mermaid can exist in air world as a foam. And
while the mer-world is the real world of the mermaid, it is the world of humans which
is the subject of her fantasy. Similarly, the underwater world is the realm of the
impossibility for humans. At a moment of illusion, the mermaid indulges in the
fantasy of a loving union with the prince "and he kissed her red mouth, played with
her long hair, and laid his head against her heart, so that it dreamt of human
happiness and an immortal soul" (Andersen, 1846, p. 60). The kiss, alas, remains
for the little mermaid a public allusion to private sexuality which does not materialise
(Phillips, 1988).

Freud (1908) considered fantasy as the privileged point where one may catch the
process of transition from repression to the return of the repressed material. The
structure of The Little Mermaid seems to provide just such a point where the prince's
desire is repressed (he desires the woman whom he mistakenly thinks saved him,
instead of the fantasy being who actually saved him). The mermaid's desire is the
return of the repressed: the prince is not really the all-powerful signifier (the Other)
 10
that she longs for but an imaginary objet petit a, a mere illusion. The end of the tale
subverts the mermaid's desire. She does not die like a mermaid: instead she turns
into an air spirit whereupon a horizon of three hundred years of good deeds opens
up for her in which to stage her displaced desire for an immortal soul.

The specificity of the female desire is according to Lacan "the desire for an
unsatisfied desire". Montrelay (1978) argues that what the woman lacks is "lack" -
the ability to represent for herself a distance from the body which is a prerequisite
for desire. It is this distance which is at the bottom of the desire created by a
mermaid. By avoiding sexual intimacy she creates a distance. This distance spares
the victims of her seduction a painful awareness of lack. Unlike a real mermaid the
little mermaid does abolish this distance, and offers her availability. Yet in line with
the economy of desire, it is this very availability - the lack of distance - which
renders her less desirable, and opens a space for the absent maiden from the beach
(who turns out to be the future arranged bride) to fill the role of the desired object.

4) Death
The fourth separation is death, the ultimate castration. The analogy between death
and castration is suggested by Freud in Inhibition, symptoms, and anxiety (1926)
where he says that because death has not been experienced it cannot be
represented in the unconsciousness except as an analogue to the fear of castration.
In his paper On the theme of the three caskets (1913) Freud observed a common
motif in fairy tales, literature and myth of a man's choice among three women
(sometime sisters). The choice always falls on the third, the most quiet, reclusive
one. Freud also noted that in psychoanalysis silence represents death and wandered
why the hero chooses death, and why the third one was always the best, the fairest
and the most desirable. Applying the principles of analytic interpretation of
unconscious material (as in dreams) he derived that the choice of the goddess of
love is a replacement by opposite of the moira (fate) of death. And so he concluded
that the choice of the goddess of love was a wish fulfilment, erected as a defence
against the recognition of the inevitability of death.

This analysis utilises the Lacanian understanding of the link between death and
desire through castration (Lacan, 1958-9). In both the loss of object of desire
asserts the illusory nature of the phallus. Desire is the longing for the exclusive
focus of the (m)Other's attention. Mourning is the coming to grips with the loss of a
desired object. What unites desire and mourning is the yearning for the impossible,
the Other. In the case of desire the demand arises out of the fantasy loss of the pre-
Oedipal mother as an object of desire. In the case of mourning the longing is
created by a real loss of an object of desire. The tragedy lies with the realisation
that the phallus - the all powerful signifier which satisfies all desire and guarantees
truth of meaning does not exist in the real. The moment of death is a moment of
truth regarding one's own mortality. It reveals to us that desire is essentially
fetishistic in so far as it substitutes fantasy objects of desire for the absent phallus in
order to mask the lack of that phallus (see also Tseëlon, 1995). And it reminds us of
the essential nothingness that marks us as mortal beings.

And to come back to Andersen. The little mermaid was the youngest and the
loveliest of the king's daughters, and had the most beautiful voice. Yet she was
quiet and reflective. Even her desire was elusive: she was hiding after she saved the
prince, and on all occasions where she came to gaze at him without him knowing.
Thus in the symbolism alluded to by Freud she is constituted as a representation of
death. And her desire is framed by the recognition of her mortality. Death was
 11
always lurking behind the possibility of her failed desire and when the witch
recounted the terms of the spell '"I'm ready" said the little mermaid, pale as death'
(Andersen, 1846, p. 56). And so The Little Mermaid becomes the symbol of the
tragedy of castration which foregrounds all human desire.

Disney and the maiden

Over a century after it had been written, the tragic mermaid of Andersen has been
reshaped by Disney according to a happy ending formula. In the Disney film there
are four major players: The sea king Triton, Ariel his mischievous favourite daughter,
Eric the prince, and Ursula the sea witch. Ariel is always rebelling against her
father's authority. But the father who is both strict and soft hearted while chastising
her also appoints a fish and a crab to watch over her and get her out of trouble, if
necessary. Her desire to become human is really a by-product of a scheme by
Ursula who seeks to use her to revenge king Triton. She hypnotises Ariel to desire
Eric and offers her the potion that would turn her tail into legs. Ariel, in fact, has to
be lured into doing it. The price she has to pay is her voice, (not her tongue) which
Ursula stores in a sea shell and wears as a necklace. The condition of the deal is
that Eric should kiss Ariel in three days. Otherwise she would turn back into a
mermaid and move under the control of the Ursula. In order to make this happen
Ursula transforms herself into a beautiful princess, uses Ariel's voice, and tries to
seduce Eric. She almost succeeds, but is failed by daddy's helpers who sabotage the
plot. A struggle ensues between the forces of good (Eric) and evil (Ursula) in the
course of which the necklace gets broken, the voice returns to Ariel and the happy
couple gets married.

The Disney version has changed the character of the story, and the reader's
involvement in two ways. First, it turned the myth into a folktale. Myth is serious,
often tragic, while folktale is entertainment (Fischer, 1963; Kirk, 1970, 1974). A
myth is taken with seriousness to represent the truth, while a folktale is understood
to be make-believe (Bidney, 1967). Bettelheim (1985) hypothesizes in
psychoanalytic terms that myths project an ideal image (represented by superego
demands) while fairy tales deals with satisfaction of id desires. Thus

While the mythical hero experiences a transfiguration into eternal life in

heaven, the fairy tale hero lives happily ever after on earth (p. 39).

And so the tragic story of the mermaid who desires mortal love and immortal soul
and does not get it, becomes à la Disney a story of a mermaid who desires marriage
and gets it. Second, Disney's version transforms the text from open to closed. An
open text invites the reader to engage in multiple interpretations allowed by virtue of
its absences, spaces, silences, and ambiguities. The closed text, by contrast, is an
overdetermined cliché narrative (Eco, 1979). In Disney's adaptation every space is
filled, every absence articulated, every silence annotated by sweet human-like
marine creatures. Conflicts are polarised, dramatised, and caricatured, ambiguities
are clarified, internal dilemmas are ironed out, and feelings are externalised and
fetishised through objects. The Disney adaptation, like the Romance (Radway,
1984) and unlike the original, is reproducing a particular ideology and manufacturing
dreams that sustain this ideology. It is a celebration of consumerist patriarchal
values where relationships become a spectacle, where feelings and ideas are
concretised in objects, and where marriage, idealised romance and domestic bliss
are presented as the woman's ultimate route to selfhood (see also Dorfman &
Mattelart, 1971). The following are a few examples:
 12
*The story is more conceptual. In the film abstract concepts are materialised.
Thus male-female relationships are transformed into a permanent spectacle, power
is concretised in the king's trident (or the mermaid's fork which signifies to her an
object of (human) desire). Seduction is concretised through the witch's shell where
the mermaid's voice is physically stored. Love is concretised in the first kiss which
has to occur within three days.

*In the story the major female characters - the grandmother and the witch are
complex. In the film they are black and white. The grandmother while teaching the
mermaid to be proud of her inheritance is willing to concede the good points in the
world of humans, and to suggest to the mermaid the route of getting there.
Similarly, the witch is sympathetic but correct. She tries to discourage the mermaid
of the trying experience ('"How stupid of you! Still, you shall have your way, and it'll
bring you into misfortune, my lovely Princess', Andersen, 1846, p. 56). But when
the mermaid persists, she is willing to help her at a price which makes the
experience ever more trying. And at the last moment, when the mermaid's sisters
ask for help, she comes up with a device that would undo the spell. In the film there
is no grandmother, and the witch Ursula is unidimensional and evil incarnate. Far
from having sympathy for the mermaid, Ariel, she is using her as a tool in her power
struggle with king Triton who had banished her from his kingdom.

*In the story the mermaid acts bravely and independently. In her pursuit of
material love and spiritual immortality she owns up to her every decision. She is
willing to sacrifice everything that she has and is for her ideals, and suffers all the
consequent ordeals. In the film Ariel assumes no agency for her actions. Ruled by
one ambition, to get married, she is a passive witness to the struggles, conspiracies
and manipulations involving Ursula the witch, Triton the father king, and Eric, the
prince. And she hardly suffers. Her only major loss, her voice, is returned to her in
due course after the defeat of Ursula. Finally, both mermaid and prince are
constructed as reactive to other people and to over-determined situations, and not
as agents of their own choices.

*In the story whatever inner conflicts and choice dilemmas occur they are the
mermaid's own. She is torn between her love for her family and between her love
for the prince and what he represents, she is scared by the consequences of her
irreversible wish, and she is facing yet another dilemma whether to kill the prince
and save her life - or to die. In the film her inner conflicts are articulated by the
mermaid's sea patrons (who are completely absent in the story), and are
externalised onto king Triton who exercises oppressive authority to forbid the
mermaid's pursuits of the world of humans. Alternatively, those internal conflicts are
externalised onto violent struggles between witch and king, prince and witch, good
and evil.

*In the story the mermaid's unselfish love is not consummated, the prince marries
his "true" love, and the mermaid dies, only to secure entry into a spirit world with a
prospect of gaining a human soul. In the film, after the powers of evil and seduction
in the shape of Ursula have been destroyed, Eric and Ariel were married and in line
with the patriarchal text of "romantic love" and happy endings they lived happily
ever after.

Epilogue
The Little Mermaid can be either read as a story of woman under patriarchy actively
pursuing a narcissistic object choice (Reich, 1986), or ultimate passivity (=death). It
 13
can also be seen as a story of a woman who defies patriarchy and pursues her ideals
beyond romantic love, as a moralistic fable of the tragic destiny of those who aspire
to worlds which are alien to their nature, or of the unworldly rewards that befall
those who pursue the good and true love. Indeed the mermaid story generated
various interpretive readings (e.g. Cravens, 1992; Consoli, 1974; , Dahlerup, 1991;
Litvin, 1982; Trites, 1991). Andersen's story is told from the mermaid's perspective.
It is a story of castration. Disney's version (which is embedded in the original tale)
tells the prince's story. It is a story of a fetishism of romance. But as far as the little
mermaid is concerned: in both versions she is trapped in an epistemology of
castrating narratives and modes of existence. For her, there is never a real happy
ending.

Acknowledgements: My thanks go to two anonymous reviewers who made helpful

suggestions, to David Tuckett for his encouragement, and to Sara Flanders for her
excellent advices.

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