I have two distinct topics to address this week, which I wasn’t able to connect.
1
Eames’/Barnum’s mermaid specimen was exhibited in 1945, and by 1950 newspapers (according to Scribner) had moved on from wonder to scorn– publicly, officially, mermaids were a hoax. In 1959, Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, one of the most important works in Natural History since Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae 100 years earlier. I was fascinated by a paragraph from the newspaper article based on one of Barnum’s staged letters, reproduced in Penguin p. 241 (“The Mermaid“). The third paragraph provides support for the plausibility of mermaids by presenting similar examples of recently discovered “hybrid” animals; the orangutan (“ourang outang”) “linking” animals and humans; bats and flying squirrels “linking” quadrupeds and birds, the flying fish “linking” aquatic animals and birds. I wonder how much this editorial reflects actual scientific thought at the time, and how much it is a layman’s interpretation, a fundamentally distorted perception of scientific consensus, the way popular science news is even today. Either way, it seems to represent an interpretation of the diversity of life somewhere between Linnaeus’s mostly arbitrary groupings (he was far better with plants than he was with animals) and Darwin’s “tree” of life. This idea of distinct groups of animals being connected by hybrids, or “links”, brings to mind a diagram not like a tree– but a web.
2
One line of Scribner’s chapter on Mermaids in the 19th century stuck with me
“… belief in merpeople still held stock in certain areas, as did the lingering hope that these creatures might exist.” (128)
This chapter discusses the movement of mermaids in Western culture from a frontier of scientific exploration (held equal in plausibility to the recently discovered platypuses and dinosaurs) to a debunked myth, but Scribner maintains the thread of human interest in mermaids, whether they believed in them or not. This line stood out to me especially because it expresses something I believe to be true– whether we accept or argue about the existence of mermaids– or, I’d posit, the modern equivalent, extraterrestrial life– there exist many of us who have a personal emotional stake in their existence. My theory? It has something to do with us not wanting to be alone.
First, I think you meant 1850s not 1950s. But I think you are under something we start to push towards an interpretation of us not wanting to be alone. Can you start here? What does us not wanting to be alone mean, suggest, compel us to dream of alien others?
Hi Gale! During this reading, my mind also flew to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, specifically the slippery slope (influenced by racism, enslavement, and orientalism) that led to Social Darwinist approches to anthropology and biological studies. This theory supported a century (and in my opinion still does) of scientific support for the subjugation of brown and black bodies on the basis that they were almost human, but not quite yet. This is the root of hybridity. I think you’ve also honed in on an interesting facet of this wanting to not be alone, while simulataneously fearing the strange and unusual.
Hi Gale! I appreciate that you pointed out the scientific anomalies that were used as “evidence” for mermaids. I can only imagine these things puzzled scientists at the time. It seems they may have found it easier to accept hybridity across species of animals, and much more likely to dismiss hybridity with humans as we are a “superior” species.