For Halloween, I wanted to dress as a sailor since they are a critical part of mermaid stories and folklore. As we’ve discussed in class, stories about mermaids were often circulated by those who were constantly at sea. In order to make sense of what they had seen while at sea, they used mermaids to explain the myriad of sea creatures that they encountered during their time on the water. Plagued with tiredness and isolation, it was easy for them to mistake certain creatures for mermaids – making them believe that animals such as a manatee could be a mermaid. Sailors then become the eyewitnesses who recount their tales to those they come in contact with. These stories and folktales told by sailors are then the basis for some of the mermaid tales that we know and love today. In turn, stories such as “Odysseus and the Sirens” are possible because they are composed of the accounts that sailors had while on their voyages. While mermaid tales were being circulated long before it was simply a “sea tale,” sailors still hold a pivotal role in continuing the tradition of passing down these stories as a warning and explanation of what they have seen on their journey.
While thinking of our relationship with the natural world, I wanted to embody something less tangible than animals or plants–but as something we oftentimes take for granted and can’t live without: air! Air, in its invisibility, surrounds and sustains every living thing in this world, yet we rarely notice it until it’s either gone or polluted. That invisibility feels symbolic of how easily we overlook what’s essential, how often we ignore the unseen forces that hold together our world–and our emotions. Dressing as “air” became my way of representing both that invisibility and necessity.
In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the idea of air takes on a spiritual and moral weight. After all of her suffering and transformation into a human, the little mermaid becomes an “aerial spirit,” a daughter of air, freed from the physical confinement of the sea and her body. She can no longer belong to the water, nor can she belong to the human world–so she transitions into something of the between, a breath, a presence that moves unseen. That transformation struck me as deeply environmental. Air exists between worlds: the sea meets it, the earth breathes it, and it circulates through everything. To me, dressing as “air” was a way of acknowledging that liminal space, that delicate threshold and boundary where transformation and connection all coexist.
In the ending of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the mermaid’s transformation into an air spirit is bittersweet. She loses her voice, her body, but gains a kind of transcendence–a second life of observation and care, unseen yet intimately involved with the world. That mirrors our own relationship to nature today because of the way we impact what we can’t see. It also reminds me of the moral undertone Andersen ties to the air spirits–they earn their souls by performing good deeds, by aiding humankind. I thought about that while putting together my costume–how air, in its quiet omnipresence, is always giving, sustaining, even when we don’t notice.
So, in choosing to dress as “air,” I wanted to embody that unseen grace of Andersen’s aerial spirit–the aftermath of longing, the cost of transformation, and the quiet power of something that exists everywhere but is rarely seen. It’s all about presence without visibility, giving without reward, and how even what seems weightless can carry the heaviest of meanings.
I really enjoyed getting to celebrate Halloween in class with everybody who dressed up. As an homage to the origins of this beloved holiday, I chose to dress up as a Selkie from the legend in our Penguin Book of Mermaids. Upon reading these stories, which cover both Scottish myths and Irish legends, I was struck at the way these women, either as mermaid or seal, are taken against their will and forced to become mothers, especially in the case of Tom Moore and his Selkie bride.
Although this version ends with the seal woman kissing her children goodbye, and returning to the ocean, there are versions in which she drowns her children in her attempt to take them to sea. This reminded me of the story I grew up with, La llorona, about a weeping woman who is abused and abandoned by her husband, and in a sort of mercy killing, drowns her children in the river and herself. She haunts lakes and watery spaces and weeps for her children.
These two myths from completely separate parts of the world, position the water as both a danger to humans, and a power beyond our comprehension, that a mermaid could prefer returning to it, than to life on land. These stories discuss the limited options that women have in cases of abuse, forced marriage, or marital rape, which is to leave by any means. It deeply contrasts to the Grey Selchie (male) having custody of his child, but the mothers having to leave their children behind in an act of desperation.
I appreciated that in the Penguin version, when she leaves, her children and descendants are marked by webbed feet and the ability to swim. Through her, the Ocean becomes a part of their DNA. Their relationship with their mother becomes one with the Ocean. This physical mark of the relationship with sea creatures on humans bodies, reminds us of the deep connections with the Ocean we are capable of having, if we respect it´s autonomy.
