In “Freakshows and Fantasies” Chapter 4, Vaughn Scribner writes, “Just as Eades’s and Barnum’s mermaids brought the Western merpeople craze to fever pitch ( in London and America respectively), so did they implode it.” The moment when a widely accepted belief and a communal sense of wonder turn into disbelief and ridicule represents a pivotal point in society’s ongoing negotiation between truth, spectacle, and cultural imagination. This observation captures a central paradox of the nineteenth century: Even though science progressed and skepticism evolved, the public’s desire for mystery and spectacle only grew greater. The mermaid craze is a perfect example of how the elements of modernity’s fascination with the marvelous and its faith in reason and progress intersected. The reveal of mermaid belief showcases how easily fascination can turn into cynicism when confronted by modernity’s competing demands for both reason and wonder. The change of mermaids from potential objects of wonder to objects of fraud and satire depicts a larger trend in nineteenth-century Western culture. It shows how the same forces that wanted to encourage science, media, truth, and capitalism, also perpetuated they very myths they tried to disprove.
The Western fascination with mermaids did not spring up in a vacuum. It grew, as did empire and exploration, and the age’s desire to know more about the unknown. While sea expeditions reached more new land, and new discovered species were being documented such as the platypus and kangaroo, the line between possible and impossible started to become faint. The global awareness of these curiosities developed fertile ground for hybrid creatures such as the mermaid to possibly seem real. Spectacle and science continued to grow in tandem with the other and both continued to feed off each other’s inspiration. The public was deeply fond of this tension, and they began to blur the boundaries between true knowledge and myth.
The ultimate demise of this mermaid craze, especially after the Fejee Mermaid by Barnum, revealed contradictions around modernity during the nineteenth century. Society celebrated rationality but still adored spectacle and emotionality. Barnum’s mermaid captured that tension. While his mermaid was fully described as fact and real, it was ultimately taken as entertainment. Audiences were enraptured based on the confusion between real or fake. The mermaid was never scientific; it was about the joy of deception but a joy felt in the moment of believing, however temporary.
Barnum perfected a technique he called “humbuggery,” an intricate process of conjuring belief without the not-so-simple act of demanding it. He prompted spectators to enjoy their own indecision–to be both skeptic and believer. This typified a cultural moment where a promise of the grand truth would no longer be held as a situated, ideal way of understanding the world but instead exhibited, called into question, and eventually turned into profit. Barnum’s mermaid was representative of the contradictory affection for wonder in modernity: A culture prideful of rational progress, but eager for amazement. That audiences were drawn in to this event demonstrated that even in a supposed age of enlightenment, people still longed for the delight of mystery–especially when wearing the clothing of science.
While this was happening, the media that had stimulated the public’s curiosity was also engaged in dismantling it. As scientists examined the material and newspapers began exposing hoaxes, the idea of mermaids shifted from legitimate curiosity to ironic amusement. What had been touted as a mystery of nature had become a story of gullibility. Nonetheless, debunking did not erase mermaids from the cultural landscape, it only adjusted their form. The belief underwent a transformation from a possible reality to a sign of deceit and mass credulity. The unveiling of the Fejee Mermaid demonstrates how the mass media, on the one hand could manufacture excitement, yet, on the other, could destroy it, profiting from the very wonder it later disparaged. The same presses the printed enthusiastic accounts of discovery sold issues by ridiculing the credulous. Disbelief, it seems, became entertaining in its own right.
This change in tone demonstrates the broader media logic of the nineteenth century. Newspapers and periodicals put curiosity into commerce. Reports of mermaids sightings made appearances before 1845, sometimes with semi-serious musings that relied on natural history or comparative anatomy. After hoaxes were revealed, journalists took on a more cynical tone, using mermaid reports to ridicule ignorance and the human desire to believe. This represented the professionalization of journalism, and however simplistic, the skepticism became an indicator of modern intelligence. But it also demonstrated how capitalism and and mediation had mechanisms by which they can carry on impressions while emoting them wrecked them. By retrievably printing, ridiculing and mentioning mermaids, the media had ‘realized’ a cultural presence, even without consideration for belief.
The enduring popularity of the mermaid myth highlights something basic about spectatorship in the nineteenth century. Modern viewers were not merely duped; they engaged in a performance for credulity. To attend a freak show, or to read about a peculiar specimen, involved a social experience where wonder was shared as a form of collective wonder, where curiosity was counterbalanced with irony. This shared disbelief went on to become a characteristic of modern culture and continues to inform out enjoyment of mass media and spectacle today. Thus, Barnum’s presentations anticipated the cultural patters of modern entertainment, where disbelief and fascination are enjoyed together.
The shift of mermaids from potential objects of wonder to objects of fraud and satire represents a larger trend in nineteenth-century Western culture. As science allegedly “banished” superstition, the same social processes – capitalism, mass media, and the hunger for spectacle – ensured the survival of the very figures they mocked. The mermaid, then, persists not as an object of belief but as a cultural icon that reminds us that even in a so-called age of reason, the distinctions between knowledge, entertainment, and belief are not clearly distinguished.
Overall, the similarities among science, media, and myth in the nineteenth century captured a deeper dissonance in modernity: disbelief and belief are not oppositional; they are rather alike. Although the true reveal of the Fejee Mermaid did not stop the fascination of the Mermaid, it did transform it. Myth continued as satire, while the truth became yet another performance. The mermaid swims in the Western cultural memory because she encapsulated that which modern life cannot fully abandon – a yearning for wonder amid an obsession with proof.