The Prairie Mermaid Love-Tests of Pioneer Women

CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Summer 1984 The Prairie Mermaid Love-Tests Of Pioneer Women Robert H. Solomon University of Alberta Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Solomon, Robert H., "The Prairie Mermaid Love-Tests Of Pioneer Women" (1984). Great Plains Quarterly. 1808. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1808 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. THE PRAIRIE MERMAID LOVE~TESTS OF PIONEER WOMEN ROBERT H. SOLOMON In some fictional, historical, and autobiograph Garden Cities movement, describes the period ical accounts of the lives of married women on in question as "the time of hard fighting and the prairies of North America during the brief unceasing struggle," when one could see "set period between initial exploration and perma tlers come in, but settlers go out again, sick of nent settlement, there appears a rather wide the country.,,1 She records this experience in spread and complicated motif. In it the woman her book In Western Canada before the War, lives on an empty prairie, usually far from the which also contains proud and sympathetic edge of town; physically isolated with her hus accounts of successful marriages on the prairie, band, she is psychologically alone, too, and similar to those in the work of Willa Cather, friendless, especially in terms of female com Nellie McClung, and others.2 Mitchell's account panionship. Often her family is far away; always of unhappy marriages on both sides of the in her husband is insensitive and unsympathetic, ternational border closely resembles fictional and, in general terms, unworthy of her devo accounts in Wolf Willow by Wallace Stegner, tion. Sometimes even before she is able to voice "The Painted Door," by Sinclair Ross, and or demonstrate her needs for friends, family, "Snow," by the German-born, naturalistic love, and beauty, the woman must pass a cruel writer, Frederick Philip Grove. In his auto love-test; she has to silence all that she has biography, A Son of the Middle Border, Ham learned about the failure of her life, love, and lin Garland presents at least two generations of lover on the prairie. women caught in the same type of unsatisfying Elizabeth Mitchell, a journalist interested in marriage. Not every woman on the prairies contemporary reforms, emigration, and the during this period fits the motif. But the theme of the unappreciated, devoted, and silenced prairie wife exists in Canadian and American An associate professor of English at the Univer sity of Alberta, Robert H. Solomon is engaged fiction and nonfiction, created by writers of in research on prairie fiction in the United both sexes. By coincidence or intention, this States and Canada. motif follows the most popular of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, "The Little [GPQ 4 (Summer 1984): 143-51.) Mermaid.',3 143 144 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, SUMMER 1984 ANTECEDENTS OF ANDERSEN'S MERMAID a man she trusted; then she is transported above human indignities to the realm of the birds. "The Little Mermaid" (first published in If Andersen's story contains references to Danish in 1835) was well known in Europe and older traditions, it also resonates with concerns America in the second half of the nineteenth peculiar in origin or intensity to the period in century. It was available in translations, autho which he lived. The theme of the seduced and rized and not, the latter much to Andersen's abandoned young woman fills nineteenth chagrin. Andersen, who wrote several fanciful century literature, as early as Austen's Pride autobiographical stories, including one called and Prejudice, and appears in popular literature "the fairy tale of my life," maintained that the such as cautionary paperback novels.5 Migra mermaid story was his creation. Nevertheless, tion after the industrial revolution intensified he admitted to knowing the popular Danish universal concerns about the fate of young song "Agnete and The Mermen," and Ander women who leave home. Emigration to the sen's other tales demonstrate that he knew North American plains offered a particularly European folk literature and mythology, where arduous test, redoubling the significance of the ancestors of the little mermaid can readily be theme. Andersen's tale also reflects Victorian identified.4 fears about the dangers of female passion. Examples of female water-deities in Mediter Finally, the story undoubtedly stirred Ander ranean, North European, and English mythol sen for personal, as well as literary and social, ogy and literature include sirens, naiads, Rhine reasons. A lifelong virgin, Andersen visited maidens, Lorelei, and the Arthurian "Lady of brothels only to tell fairy tales to the youngest the Lake." Hesiod records Aphrodite of the women. He lied about a dull, insensitive father; Waves, born from the blood-flecked seafoam ignored his bastard sister ("my mother's daugh following the castration by Cronus of the ele ter," he called her); and never admitted the ille mental god Uranus; this motif informs Botti gitimate birth of his own mother and her two celli's painting of a Christianized Venus rising sisters.6 Andersen's tale is an amalgam of the from rose-decked waves. The goddess of birth old and the contemporary, the universal and and love bestows magical gifts of secret knowl the personal. Across the Atlantic, the pattern edge, wealth, or power. Other water-deities, of emigration, isolation, and privation on the such as the sirens in The Odyssey, offer seduc prairie set the stage for a reappearance of the tion, confusion, enslavement, or death instead. mermaid motif. Andersen adopts the bloody feet and the sea foam of Aphrodite and the singing of the sirens ANDERSEN'S MERMAID STORY for his tale. His mermaid is silenced, as were the sirens when Odysseus closed the ears of his The mermaid story by Andersen is simple men to them, and this recalls another source, and direct. Six sisters live beneath the corn the myth of the rape of Philomela. flower-blue sea with their father, a king, and his Philomela was "outraged" by her sister Proc mother. Each maid tends a garden, in the center ne's husband; in order to hide his identity, Tereus of which stands a topiary monument. The sisters cut out Philomela's tongue. In some versions, sculpt fish or mercreatures; the little mermaid Procne also is silenced, but the motif is the same: shapes the sun, reflecting her dangerous interest the silencing of a sexually betrayed woman. In in things Apollonian, masculine (as the sun is the myth the women triumph, gain revenge, and in myths), and unreachable. In the center of the are saved from lives of humiliation by becoming sun-spot is a statue she has rescued from a a nightingale and a swallow. This motif can be wreck, a bust of a handsome man. The maid is seen in art from the Renaissance to the poetry of fifteen, the age of sexual awakening. Omens of William Faulkner. Like Philomela or Procne, An danger surround her on her birthday, when she dersen's maid loses her voice and is betrayed by surfaces to spend a ritual time in the world of THE PRAIRIE MERMAID 145 men as her sisters have done before. It is sold their tresses (symbols of femininity) for winter; icebergs and freezing spray make the a magical dagger with which the maid is to stab surfacing painful and dangerous. Nevertheless, the betrayer. But she cannot; instead, the mer she sees a handsome prince, falls in love with maid undergoes her final humiliation. She kisses him, and rescues him from death. Hiding her the brows of the sleeping couple and stabs her face in seafoam, she dives beneath the sea to self. But as she starts to dissolve, she is miracu avoid capture by his companions. But as she lously rescued by "sisters of the air" (Andersen's sinks, the maid plans to become a woman and version of the Philomela-birds). The tale has be seek her love. come a children's story, with a happy ending A seawitch gives her an odious potion, a and a cautionary message: the young readers drink made from the bosom-blood of the witch, are warned that the mermaid's life is shortened symbolizing a second nurturing. The new kind when a child misbehaves, lengthened when a of milk and knowledge represents passage to a child is good. Thus Andersen retreats from the new life. The mermaid also loses her tail to gain problems presented by sexual maturation and legs; every step will feel like a thousand stab the pressures that force women to be devoted bings. She loses her mermaid's lifespan of three to callous lovers. Unlike Andersen, those who centuries; further, should her prince marry a record prairie mermaids write for adults. On mortal, the mermaid will dissolve into seafoam the prairie, at the earliest time of settlement, (reversing Aphrodite's birth). Finally, the mer rescue is impossible; the stories are more can maid will be silent, giving up her sirenlike voice. did, and the mode of expression is that of gritty As in those nineteenth-century marriages that realism. coincided with emigration and homesteading, selecting the wrong husband will be grievously "CARRION SPRING": A DOG'S LIFE painful, even fatal: her choice of prince deter mines the fate of the mermaid, in the tale and Of the writers who utilize the motif of the on the prairies.

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