The first thing that struck me and intrigued me in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid was the motif of tears and one’s ability, or lack there of, to cry. When the little mermaids’ sisters rise “up arm-in-arm through the water, the youngest would stand alone, looking after them, and felt ready to cry; only mermaids have no tears, and therefore suffer all the more” (113). Symbolically the absence of tears represents the mermaid’s separation from humanity, or what makes something human. Though she can internally feel sorrow and longing she cannot externally express those emotions. Furthermore, there is an irony to her environment; the sea, which is made of endless water, surrounds her and contrasts her inability to cry tears. Externally, she is surrounded by water, yet lacks inner “water” of empathy or a soul. Andersen uses this moment to depict that suffering without expression (tears) is cursed pain, and it is with this awareness of her lack of tears (emotional expression) that the little mermaid starts to yearn for a soul.
By the end of the story the little mermaid is able to transcend with the daughters of the air, marking the turning point in her journey. As one of the daughters of the air welcomed her as an “aërial spirit,” “the little mermaid lifted her brightening eyes to the sun, and for the first time she felt them filled with tears” (130). Her tears are now symbolic of her “true” humanity and capacity for moral and emotional depth. As she looks up at the “sun” she becomes spiritually enlightened, the sun represents her transcendence to having a divine soul. Suggesting that emotional pain, when expressed and understood, is the way to immortality. Her tears are a literal presentation of her invisible soul.
Moreover, the daughters of the air explain that “when [they] see an ill-behaved or naughty child, [they] shed tears of sorrow, and every tear adds a day to the time of [their] probation” (130). The story ends with the tears not just being a representation of having a moral soul or a pathway to immortality, tears now carry a moral consequence. Andersen’s motif of tears is used to define humanity. Tears, in this case, transform ones suffering into a sort of salvation, without tears or the ability to cry there is no hope of such salvation.
This is a great blog post, and it could certainly serve the foundation for a midterm essay. You do a really nice job explaining the irony of being surrounded by water but being unable to cry a single water tear. I also appreciate how you tie the mermaid’s paradox to the ending, with tears as punishment. I’m not clear why this matters or presents salvation, though, and should you decide to pursue this for an essay, I would spend a little more time deriving your claim about tears from the text itself. Are tears signifier of otherness or a punishment or something altogether different?
The whole tears thing reminds me of our early beliefs about animal intelligence, sociality, and emotions. “Ignorance is Bliss”– so animals, which are “not intelligent”, cannot know sadness, they cannot be evil. Undine and her associated nature spirits, and the mermaids, are really consigned to non-human animality because they know only “joy”.
Of course, today, we understand that the biological processes which create our emotions exist in many other animals, even if ours are (to our knowledge) the most complex. We often wonder whether it wouldn’t be preferable to be “simpler” creatures, more joyful (“smooth brained”). But we contrast that with some cultural/religious/philosophical sense that our very complex mental world is a “higher” form of existence, and that the loss of the ability to cry equates to the loss of a soul, to the loss of some inherent humanness, which is something scary, undesirable.
Hi Sierra,
I really enjoyed your discussion about the motif of tears and how they represent the presence or lack of a soul. I think you raise very interesting points, especially the idea of their ‘inner water’ representing a lack of empathy/soul from mermaids. the ability to have tears “transform suffering into a sort of salvation” by demonstrating humanity and vulnerability alludes to the idea that vulnerability creates room for Christianity. Without suffering, why would one seek salvation?