It is almost like Cristina Bacchilega and Maria Alohalani Brown read my mind from last week. In their Introduction chapter of The Penguin Book of Mermaids, Bacchilega and Alohalani Brown write, “There is something deeply unsettling about a being whose form merges with the non-human. Whether they dwell in fresh or salt water, aquatic humanoids raise questions about what it is to be human and what lies beyond a human-centered world. Physically, they are both like and unlike us” (xi). This is something I touched on last week in my blog post, focusing on how Scribner observes the human interest in hybridity. Here, in Bacchilega and Alohalani Brown’s introduction, they agree with Scribner’s astute observation on hybridity, putting more of an emphasis on how, not only are we interested in the mermaid’s hybridity, but we are astonished, and, in a deeper sense, somewhat unsettled because of this merging with the familiar and unfamiliar.
Bacchilega and Alohalani Brown go on to say, “We humans do not deal well with betwixt and between—liminality makes us anxious. We prefer our world organized into well-ordered and sharply defined categories, and we prefer to be in charge of it. Nonetheless, we are strangely drawn to the other, who is in part a mirror image of us and appears within reach, even if mentally ungraspable” (xi). While, yes, the hybridity of the mermaid—and other mythological creatures, for that matter—does make us uneasy most of the time, it is the peculiarity and similarity that draw us to the mermaid.
Humans have, and likely always will be, drawn to mermaids. Whether it is their similarity or difference to us, there is something so alluring about their mix with something we know of (separately, a human and a fish). But together, we still get this uncanney-valley-like feeling when we think about mermaids. They are like us from the waist-up, but from the waist-down, they are something completely different. We like to be in control, according to Bacchilega and Alohalani Brown, but also, we are “drawn to the other” (xi). This fascination will never die, as long as we crave something otherworldly and unlike our natural world.
