Project lead
Marion Troxler
Abstract
Long, shiny hair, a beautiful voice, a naked torso with barely covered breasts – seamlessly transitioning into an animal body, with scales, feathers or claws, mixing seduction with threat, crossing seemingly clear-cut boundaries between species. Mermaids, Selkies, Sirens and other female hybrid creatures populate the seascape in literature, theatre, opera, film and music, but also fed the imagination in the scientific discourse. Despite their human likeness, “mers are cryptids – […] incontrovertibly not human” (Davis, “How Do You Know a Mermaid When You See One?”, 257, emphasis added). Their bodies can overcome the limitations of the sea and explore freely where no full member of the human species can go without risking their life, a privilege which is often either abandoned or exploited in the encounter between the hybrid and the human. The littoral zone often becomes the contact zone where the two worlds overlap, and neither is fully home. While the animal part of the hybrid body hinders free movement and puts mercreatures at a disadvantage, the human body runs the risk of being dragged into the depths of the sea. From Homer’s sirens to Undine taking shape in German Romanticism and to Disney’s The Little Mermaid, the encounter between merfolk and (hu)man comes with a risk and potential death, but also promises romantic love and sometimes maddening erotic passion.
It is no surprise that these bodies are distinctly sexed. There exists a clear imbalance in the representation of the sexes, while male merfolk is not unknown, they are severely underrepresented in comparison to their female counterparts. The emphasis on these creatures’ hyper-femininity has served different purposes through the centuries, from warnings, sparking (sexual) fantasies and hunger for world exploration to arousing consumer appetites (see Scribner, Merpeople: A Human History). While body markers such as long hair and breasts, as well as gendered activities – often emphasising women’s assumed preference for self-adoration and self-adornment – indicate their femininity, their sex is most often rendered unintelligible by the animal part of their bodies. The body of these female hybrid creatures is a site of contestation, a threat to seemingly stable boundaries between human and non-human species, a platform to project desires and fantasies, a reinforcement of sexist gender stereotypes and an empowerment of female sexuality, as well as a challenge to notions of binary sex. Further, it instils both wonder and fear as it allows survival in an environment that is usually hostile to human bodies.
The littoral is where these merfolk bodies become visible, where the hybridity of the landscape reflects the hybridity of the body. It serves as a space where the difference between land and water is highlighted, but also where the two seemingly opposites merge. Shifting sands and coastlines are as intangible as the bodies of mercreatures. The element of water is crucial to narratives of merfolk: Its fluidity, its movement and its interaction with the land is often interwoven with them. It is the focus of this project to examine the interaction between the beach and the fantastical female hybrid body, as well as encounters between human/non-human/half-human bodies which are made possible in this space. This will add an aspect to littoral as well as merfolk studies that has barely been explored and provide a significant contribution to the SNSF-funded project “The Beach in the Long Twentieth Century”.
Building on approaches from the Blue Humanities with a focus on feminist critique (e.g. Astrida Neimanis, Stacy Alaimo), the analysis of four to six literary texts featuring mermaids and selkies will constitute the core of the dissertation. Depending on the type of hybridity – the mermaid often being both fish and human at the same time, while the selkie is either human or seal – their encounters with the littoral and with humans are affected by the shape and animality of their bodies. Exploring their transformability, I will analyse both their physical transformations as well as the changes they enable within the narration with a focus on gender and gender relations.
Discipline
Modern English Literature
Supervision
Prof. Dr. Virginia Richter
PD Dr. Ursula Kluwick, University of Bern
