“What bears keeping in mind is that the value of stories is not the degree to which they are authentically native, but the ways that they reflect the concerns or values of the group who tells and retells them” (Penguinn xv). This week, all of the historical understandings and ways of consider mermaids legitimacy are just as interesting as last week; although this week’s takes a much more opinionated approach from the get-go. In reading this passage about mermaids, and recognizing how methods of story passage reflects human thought, it really only becomes clearer how fear drives us in thinking of mermaids.
While we convey them as beautiful sea creatures to be fawned over as princesses or to be immortalized in art, we still consider them other. The passage begins outright with admitting how their existence is something humans inherently do not trust; their ability to be half aquatic, half part of a world we understand so little of, and half able to disguise themselves and coexist with us. The introduction truly names this as a result of our view of that which confuses us: “We humans do not deal well with the betwixt and between – liminality makes us anxious” (xi).
As outlandish as it sounds, this phenomenon appears majorly in children’s television, with monsters completely unrelated. The biggest example I can think of was watching Wizards of Waverly Place as a kid, a show about a family of wizards in New York City, and how major the plot point of them keeping their powers a secret is. The threat was if they were to be found out, they’d expose the rest of the Wizarding World to be questioned/dissected by the authorities to discover more about these unnatural beings, effectively dismantling their society (which eventually actually does happen in a two-parter in the later seasons). It’s similar to the characters in Harry Potter, who cannot expose magic because of regular people’s dangerous curiosity that borders on harm. Looking at it as an adult, it’s clearly a result of human anxiety; if we don’t understand something, we need to pick it apart until we do, and we disregard how it impacts whatever we’re researching for the sake of our peace.
The same occurs with even more ridiculous examples, like my favorite adult sitcom, American Dad. The existence of Roger, an alien who puts on human clothes and appears to everyone outside the family as an actual human, plays a joke on the human conspiracy that aliens walk amongst us, but have the ability to blend themselves in with regular people. Because the main character works for the CIA, Roger’s nearly discovered multiple times, but utilizes his personas to throw them off his trail by accusing anyone else, or claiming to have random powers that he could hurt them with so people avoid provoking him. People truly believe him blindly, and puzzle us, the audience, into wondering how an alien with basically zero tangible powers could be both incredibly powerful and so unrealistically feared. It all ties back to this idea that humans won’t tolerate something “other” that exists and can be indistinguishable; it terrifies people enough that they’ll believe anything negative told about it once, because it means they don’t have to accept something that disobeys natural order.
While it all seems entirely unrelated to mermaids when you look at it from a perspective outside of mine, it comes together when we recognize how these beings are treated because of their differences. They’re ousted, and painted to be villains, so nobody really cares what happens to them in the television shows, except the outside audience that understands them on a deeper level. With mermaids, unless we actively seek to study them, and recognize their relevance to our lives, or their relevance in the overall natural environment that’s currently deteriorating, they just seem like monsters to be pushed aside. Humanity doesn’t care about mermaids, in spite of the rich background and cultural understanding they hold about our past, present, and vulnerable future. They act as warnings the way monsters should, as told by the quotes presented in class, and as a major reflection of our vital interaction with the Earth itself; we can only begin to see these if we reject this apathy as a result of artistic anxiety.
