In “The Day after the Wedding, from Undine,” found in The Penguin Book of Mermaids, religious imagery stands out thematically, driving the chapter’s narrative. As Undine gives her speech to Huldbrand she confesses that her kind “vanish into dust, and pass away, body and spirit, so that none of the stage of us remains behind; and when you mortals hereafter awake to a purer life, we remain with the sand and the sparks and the wind and the waves” (105). This elemental imagery of dust reflects that of Genesis 3:19 “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” The scripture from the Book of Genesis is supposed to be a reminder that there is no amount of human achievement that can defy human destiny. Allusions to such scripture heavily frames the context in biblical cosmology, where there is one divine order that holds the power to determine what life holds value. Yet Undine had referred to this process of returning to “dust,” “sand,” “sparks,” and “wind”  as a sort of “evil.” The prevalent hierarchy of the divine order and the soulless is represented syntactically where the divine mortals “awake to purer life,” while the soulless nature spirits “remain” in the material world, one with the elements. The chapter’s biblical imagery depicts the ways in which Christian essentialism is legitimized falsely naturalizing religious teleology. 

Undine’s speech to Huldbrand lays the ground for the idea that all beings aspire to have and desire a divine soul, under the notion that moral advancement is dependent on Christian faith. In the following quote from that stated previously Undine goes on to say that water spirits “have no souls; the element moves [them], and is often obedient to [them] while [they] live, though it scatters [them] to dust when [they] die; and [they] are merry, without having aught to give [them] […] but all beings aspire to be higher than they are” (105). The environment and its elements, in this case, are personified—“the elements moves us”—making nature both animated and simultaneously passive. Nature is alive yet lacks free will. The water spirits are depicted as beings without divine agency, very much alive but not sanctified. The elements “move” them, yet are “obedient” to them, making Undine and other water spirits paradoxically passive and active in life. It lays a foundation for ideology that believes if a being “has no soul” then they are drifters in life and the environment. The final line presents that theological claim generalizing that “all beings aspire to be higher than they are.” It essentially claims that all life strives toward salvation because that is part of the order of life. 

The chapter sets the narrative that these “soulless” beings may be joyful but they are incomplete. By doing this Christian essentialism is put onto the pedestal as divine and part of natural evolution. That everyone must be incomplete and therefore feel the need to aspire to a “higher” way of life. Depictions of religious teleology is a way to dictate rhetoric of moral and cultural superiority.