Tag Archives: Chapter 4: Freakshows and Fantasies

“Sirenomelia, also called mermaid syndrome, is a rare congenital deformity…”

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There are three individuals known to have survived infancy with Sirenomelia. They are the stars of inspirational documentaries, the subjects of research publications, and featured on blogs dedicated the the macabre. It goes without saying; humans are fascinated by disease, deformity, and abnormal morphology. We see these anomalies through various lenses; as symbols of strength in the face of adversity; as demonstrations of the state of medical technology, or merely as perversely, fascinatingly, bizarre. In any case, individuals with physical abnormalities are monsterified. They take on that role; non-human emblems, culturally imbued, figures which demonstrate something, make us aware of something, make us uncomfortable, demand our attention.

In one extreme, these real live Monsters are stripped entirely of their humanity– their individuality, their dignity. “Freak shows” are an example– the people responsible for the profits were often unpaid, especially if they were people of color, and, to the public, unnamed (The Bearded Lady, The Elephant Man)– treated as animals. In some cases, even, they become inanimate objects– the human value of respect for corpses does not extend to preserved specimens of monsters, such as these fetuses presenting Sirenomelia, preserved in the Medical Museum of Copenhagen. Preserved collections of biological specimens can be critical to studying and understanding disease. But these specimens are stored and displayed as curiosities; these prenatal humans were too strange to be buried. 1

Bringing the name of a medical condition this loaded into a short film representing a fantasy mermaid is a powerful choice. Škarnulytė portrays a graceful mermaid with a glittering tail, swimming powerfully through water barely above freezing. Her mermaid is not disabled, she is not a medical miracle, and she is not a guest on Oprah. But– she is also a monster. She operates to show us our world from a different angle– in fact, through this mermaid’s eyes, our “normal” world becomes as strange and fascinating as abnormal physiology. This defamiliarization (or distortion! 1:11) of things like satellite dishes (1:51), roads (2:43), and bridges (3:32) has a powerful effect; it allows us to bring everything to a level playing field– the human and nonhuman, the terrestrial and aquatic. Icebergs are as strange as ice-cutting ships. Trees are as strange as tunicates (3:14). From this new perspective, we see, briefly, unburdened by our associations, biases, our values, and our deeply programmed sense of “normal”. From this perspective, for a moment, we might see infants born with sirenomelia not as monsters, not as objects, but as babies, as strange and fascinating as all babies are.

Our instincts to collect, cultivate, categorize, and understand are powerful traits of our species. Those instincts are responsible for our technology. Our ability to form cultural values has allowed the unification of our societies. Our extreme sensitivity to “normality”, evidenced by the uncanny valley effect, the narrow threshold between normal and abnormal, is an artifact of remarkably powerful brains, capable of processing incredible amounts of information. Whether or not we assign positive or negative value to these human traits, we cannot escape them; they are part of being human.
However– every once in a while, we benefit from lifting those blinders; Sirenomelia is an opportunity for us to release the need to categorize, to pathologize, to separate water and air, to understand.


  1. What might different spiritual practices say about the fates of their souls, due to the lack of burial ritual? Undine, Melusine, and the Little Mermaid were born without souls, and ultimately each failed to acquire one. Do souls come from a pair of legs? ↩︎

The Rise and the Collapse of Mermaid Belief in Chapter 4: “Freakshows and Fantasies”

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A significant statement from Chapter 4, “Freakshows and Fantasies” that stood out to me is when Scribner writes, “Just as Eades’s and Barnum’s mermaids brought the Western merpeople craze to fever pitch (in London and America, respectively), so too did they implode it.” The moment that a widely accepted belief and a communal sense of wonder turn into disbelief and ridicule represents a pivotal moment in the negotiated game of truth, spectacle, and cultural imagination in society.

The unraveling of the mermaid craze after Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid illuminated a key contradiction in the modernity of the nineteenth-century Western world: While scientific rationalism and mass media were increasing, the desire and demand for spectacle and sensationalism were growing too: Revelations of hoaxes would pivot popular excitement from sincerity to ironic attachments, while the mermaid would have a permanent place in cultural memory.

Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid was not in the least a curiosity which any scientist would have given a second thought. It was a marvel of its time, not because of any serious scientific claim, but because it was a perfectly constructed piece of “humbuggery.” This mermaid was the hybrid product of a monkey and a fish that was fervently marketed and unflinchingly defended by an elaborate publicity machine. The willingness of the public to believe, or at least put aside believing signifies a culture still deeply committed to wonders and the chance of their possible manufacture. Advancements in science and discoveries such as the platypus and the kangaroo were already eroding the line of what was reasonable and what was impossible, and the existence of the mermaid was only slightly less unbelievable than yesterday’s impossibility.

Still, the same media that fostered this wonderment were responsible for its demise. Gradually, scientific examination and exposé reporting revealed the truths behind the Feejee Mermaid and other fabricated stories. While discrediting the historical and cultural relevance of mermaids, they became objects of ridicule and symbols of credulity, and became a new topic of satire in the political arena.

roIn the nineteenth century, the surge in newspapers and periodicals facilitated the extension of, and ultimately, the erosion of belief in mermaids. Before 1845, stories about sightings of mermaids and similar tales were published with some credulity, excitement, and even with a willingness to be precise in scientific inquiry into the mermaids. However, when the hoaxes were revealed, we see newspapers have now shifted to mockery, not only of the myths themselves, but of the people who “believed” in those myths. This mockery does not remove mermaids form the public domain or remove belief either; it shows the transition from sincere belief to the thrill of disbelief. This displays how the media can go from inspiring curiosity to nullifying it (yet still keeping the topic alive in the public, albeit with some discredit).

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.