By becoming an aerial, a daughter of the air, is the little mermaid saved or sentenced to 300 years of suffering? Either way, she has attained a soul at the end of her sentence, a soul that is not tied to a man who treated her like an animal.
Like most, I grew up watching and loving Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and Prince Eric was the sweetest and most handsome to me. I’m sure you can imagine my surprise when I read how he treated her like a pet, and gave her “leave to sleep on a velvet cushion before his door (124).” It was heart-wrenching to read of her dehumanization by the prince and the way he expected her to be happy at his marriage.
I can see how Han’s Christian Anderson wrote this story as insight into life as a queer man in a society that punished it through moral and religious doctrine encoded into rule and law. Living a queer existence meant living a life in hiding, and even if love found a way to flourish, it would not be socially accepted. The little mermaid must make constant sacrifices to appeal to the prince and the people of his kingdom, and she is often warned: “Your fish’s tail, which is a beauty amongst us sea-folk, is thought a deformity on earth, because they know no better.” However, I appreciated this clarification and assurance by her grandmother; that humans’ lack of knowledge was not the fault of the little mermaid, and how this was Anderson’s way of commenting on queerness as something beautiful and misunderstood due to the fault of society, not the individual.
Nonetheless, I can not excuse the actions of the prince in this tale, because he was completely in power, and never under the spell of the sea witch (although I’m not 100% sure what happened with the bride being mistaken as his savior). He had complete autonomy and flaunted it in the face of The Little Mermaid, whom he took advantage of because she could not speak for herself. He paraded her around, essentially kept her as his pet, and likely intended to keep her as his mistress if she had not become a daughter of the air. He was despicable, and I’m glad she got the soul that she wanted without any help from him, but despite him.