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Modelling Gender in Clara F Guernsey's the Merman

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Modelling Gender in Clara F Guernsey's the Merman “I’D LIKE TO BE UNDER THE SEA” Modelling gender in Clara F Guernsey’s The Merman and the Figure-Head [Received 22nd April 2018; accepted 19th May 2017 – DOI: 10.21463/shima.12.2.15] Marea Mitchell <[email protected]> ABSTRACT: The focus of Clara F Guernsey’s short novel The Merman and the Figure-head: A Christmas Story is a merman who mistakes a ship’s figurehead for a nymph. Alongside this, in sharp and humorous parallel, runs the story of the merchant who commissioned the figurehead, which is based on a local woman whom he admires and then marries. Guernsey specifically refers to a tradition of writings about the mer-world, including Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Den lille Havfrue’ (‘The Little Mermaid’), The Arabian Nights, and Moby Dick. Funny and light-hearted, the story uses the idea of an alternative underwater world to raise questions about human love and values, and challenges 19th Century assumptions about gender and behaviour. When one old mer-professor indignantly challenges the argument that human beings are undeveloped mermen, to staunchly argue that humans are, in fact, undeveloped walruses, Guernsey wittily employs “the world under the water” to satirise its above-water counterpart. Mer-culture enables a critique of human culture. KEYWORDS: Mermaids, mermen, American literature, utopias, Clara F Guernsey Introduction: Material and Imaginative Worlds 1 In 1969 Ringo Starr’s song ‘Octopus’s Garden’ (recorded by The Beatles) created a deliberately fictive world of innocence and imagination, a world under the sea, where boys and girls can play, sing and dance, “warm below the storm.” It’s a world safe from (presumably adult) interference (“No one there to tell us what to do”). Who wouldn’t want to be there? The joyfulness of the song partly lies in its silliness. Listeners know that they cannot rest their heads “on the sea bed” and from the first two lines of the song “I’d like to be under the sea/ In an octopus’s garden in the shade” listeners know that they are in a fantasy land. Centuries earlier in 1516, in a very different context, Thomas More created a popular and highly influential imaginative world called Utopia.2 This imaginary land is an island, surrounded by sea, set apart from the known world. The sea distinguishes the island from other lands, and provides a physical barrier from them, matched by the ideological differences of the islanders. Stephen Duncombe argues that this imaginative world, incredible in many ways in terms of the values of its inhabitants, nevertheless has lessons to teach readers: 1 The lyrics of ‘Octopus’s Garden’ are available at: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/beatles/octopussgarden.html and the audio of The Beatles’ recording of the song at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqZp327u39c - both accessed 18th April 2018. 2 There has been much debate about how seriously readers are supposed to take More’s work; see Duncombe (2012: xxxii-xlii). ______________________________________________ Shima <www.shimajournal.org> ISSN: 1834-6057 Mitchell: Guernsey’s The Merman and the Figure-Head The brilliance of More’s Utopia is that it is simultaneously satirical and sincere, absurd and earnest, and it is through the combination of these seemingly opposite ways of presenting ideals that a more fruitful way of thinking about political imagination can start to take place. (2012: xxxix) It is the combination of the “satirical and sincere, absurd and earnest” qualities of Utopia, Duncombe argues, that might make us think differently about our own ‘real’ world (ibid). The implausibility of both Utopia and the octopus’s garden are obvious. Could people really deplore the valuation of gold as Utopians do? Do octopuses have gardens? How would we breathe under the sea? While tides and times separate these two worlds, what both share is a joyful, playful and absurd exploration of deliberately unreal worlds. Far from seeing such fictions as escapist non-sense, Duncombe suggests that we use different measures in assessing their merits. Neither Utopia nor the octopus’s garden are promised lands, they are more like ”hallucination[s] in the desert” (2012: xlv), but by being both impossible and imaginative, he argues, they act as prompts to our imaginations, to keep thinking about how things might be differently better. Rather than provide closed systems of perfect other worlds, it is their impossibility and imperfections that encourage acts of imagination and fantasy, and promote critique of ‘real’ world conditions. Having invoked these two worlds, one or both of which might be familiar to readers, I now want to focus on a little-known text by Clara F Guernsey that uses some of the same strategies as More’s and Starr’s texts to engage with an audience. In the rest of this essay I explore how this 19th Century American writer used an underwater world populated by mermaids, mermen, whales and nymphs to call into question some of the specific values of her own time. Using humour, satire, the absurd, and many intertextual references she pokes fun at gender stereotypes to suggest that under-water creatures might have a thing or two to teach to teach humans or “forked creatures” (Guernsey, 1871: 43). Two different figures in The Merman and the Figure-Head suggest that, “there’s more fish in the sea than ever come out of it.”3 At first this might recall the advice given to rejected lovers that there are “plenty more fish in the sea.” However, in the context of the novel the phrase takes on the meaning of Hamlet’s rebuke to Horatio that we do not know all there is to know: There are more things in heaven and earth… Than are dreamt of in our philosophy. (Shakespeare, c1600: I v 168-9) Used twice in the novel, the phrase “fish in the sea than ever come out of it” is a useful reminder to readers to use their imagination to create spaces for new values and ideas. Clara F Guernsey’s The Merman and the Figure-Head: A Christmas Story4 (1871) Little seems to be known about Clara Florida Guernsey (1836-1893), who lived in Rochester, upstate New York.5 As an adult, she seems to have lived with her sister Lucy Ellen Guernsey, who was also a writer. Guernsey, generally, wrote short novels, often pitched at children, 3 This comment is made first by Job the wood carver who makes the figurehead, and it is repeated with a slight variation by the narrator - “There are more fish in the sea than ever came out of it” (ibid: 32). 4 The subtitle of the story is not explained. Perhaps it goes back to the medieval tradition of telling magical and mysterious stories in Northern Hemisphere winters. 5 The information that I have been able to find comes from Maineiro (ed) (1981) v1 & 3 and White (2012). _______________________________ Shima Volume 12 Number 2 2018 - 182 - Mitchell: Guernsey’s The Merman and the Figure-Head published by the American Sunday School Union (ASSU), including some about the Seneca, a tribe of native Americans. It is not clear why there has been so little consideration of her writing, but one view of her work is dismissive, suggesting that it is “[c]learly didactic in purpose and rather limited in… literary achievement” (Krabbe, 1981: online). If her novels generally “are most important as reflections of the values and attitudes the American Sunday School Union and its supporters wished to inculcate in American Children in the latter years of the 19th Century” (ibid) then The Merman and the Figure-Head has some compelling and unconventional values to share. The Merman and the Figure-Head was not published by the ASSU, but by J.B Lippincott, a long running publishing company with a special interest in bibles and religious materials.6 The story is replete with intertextual references, both to classical American literature, such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851),7 international literature such as The Arabian Nights, classical mythology, including nereids and nymphs, deployed in a joyful and lightly managed way. The Merman and the Figure-Head has a curious and unexplained role in the history of mermaids and mermen in fiction. Guernsey’s narrator expresses the hope that his audience is already familiar with mer-culture: “Concerning the kingdoms of the sea and their inhabitants Hans Anderson [sic] has written a pretty story, which I hope you have all read” (Guernsey, 1871: 29). Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ seems to have had its first known English translation in 1872, the year after Guernsey’s story was published, but it is possible that she had come across it in another language, perhaps German. Similarly, she may have been aware of Andersen’s poem, then play, ‘Agnete og Havmanden’ (‘Agnes and the Merman’). Other mermaid stories preceding Guernsey’s, but not mentioned by her, include Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘The Merman’ (1830), and Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Forsaken Merman’ (1849), so there were English literary precedents for Guernsey.8 In what follows I first lay out the narrative line of the story. Second, I analyse the way that the story employs detailed description to immerse the reader in the fictive world, and then employs humour to undercut the credibility of that world. Finally, I give a reading of the whole story that draws on Duncombe’s analysis of More’s Utopia and argues that mermen, mermaids and talking whales have plenty to offer to our political imaginations, particularly in relation to sexual politics. Mer-culture and a marine world provide a critique of 19th Century human values.
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