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.
