Lust, Loss, and Immorality in the Little Mermaid Essay -- Fairy Tale C

The Little Mermaid: Of Lust, Loss, and Immortality Under the sea, in an idyllic and beautiful garden, stands a statue of a young man cut out of cold stone – for the Little Mermaid who knows nothing but the sea, the statue stands as an emblem of the mysterious over-world, a stimulus for imagination and sexual desire, an incentive for expansion of experience, and most predominately, an indication that something great and all-encompassing is missing from her existence. Traces of curiosity and a vague indication of the complexities of adult desires mark the child mermaid; in such a stage of development, the statue will suffice. However, as the Little Mermaid reaches puberty, the statue must allegorically come alive in order to parallel the manifestation of her new-found adult desires – the statue must become a prince in his world of adulthood above the sea. Thus, powered by an insistent and ambiguous longing for self-completion, the Little Mermaid embarks on a journey of self-discovery, and, to her ultimate misfortune, prematurely abandons her child-like self as sexual lust and the lust for an adult life takes hold of her. The paradisiacal kingdom under the sea is symbolic of childhood. At the onset of the story, the sea kingdom is described: â€Å"where the waters are as blue as the petals of the cornflower and as clear as glass, there, where no anchor can reach the bottom,† and where â€Å"[one] would have to pile many church towers on top of each other† in order to reach the surface (Andersen 217). The sea describes the deep consciousness of the Little Mermaid as a young child, which is characterized by emotion, beauty, imagination, purity and innocence - representative successively of the water, flowers, the imaginative sim... ...rom an agonizing mistake offers hope. Works Cited: Anderson, Hans Christian. â€Å"The Little Mermaid.† Folk and Fairy Tales. 3rd ed. Eds. Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek. Toronto: Broadview, 2002. Cashdan, Sheldon. The Witch Must Die: The Hidden Meaning of Fairy Tales. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Collins, Emily. â€Å"Nabokov’s Lolita and Anderson’s The Little Mermaid.† Nabokov Studies 9 (2005): 77-100. 10 Oct. 2006. http://muse.jhu.edu.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/journals/nabokov_studies/toc/nab9.1.html Easterlin, Nancy. â€Å"Hans Christian Andersen’s Fish out of Water." Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 251-77. 6 Oct. 2006. http://muse.jhu.edu.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/journals/philosophy_and_literature/v025/25.2easterlin.html Pil, Dahlerup. â€Å"Splash! Six Views of ‘The Little Mermaid.’ Scandinavian Studies 62 (1990): 403-429.