Feminist Appropriations of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ and the Ways in which Stereotypes of Women are Subverted or Sustained in Selected Works Linda Ann Mostert 6 January 2011 Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the degree Magister Artium in English Literature in the Faculty of Arts at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Supervisor: Dr Neville Smith Co-Supervisor: Dr Mary West Contents Page 1. Introduction 1 2. Chapter One: ‘Mermaids’ 24 3. Chapter Two: Tipping the Velvet 43 4. Chapter Three: The Imagenius mermaids 60 5. Chapter Four: The Undrowned Child 79 6. Conclusion 98 Bibliography 104 Introduction According to Lewis Seifert, “Fairy tales are obsessed with femininity … These narratives are concerned above all else with defining what makes women different from men and, more precisely, what is and is not acceptable feminine behaviour” (1996: 175). This study, then, will demonstrate how certain patriarchal ideas associated with fairy tales are disseminated when fairy tale elements are reworked in film, visual art and the novel. The aim of this project, more specifically, is to show how certain stereotypical representations of women endure in works that could be read as feminist appropriations of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’. Stereotypical representations of women are numerous and may include: depicting females as fitting neatly into what is often called the virgin/whore or Madonna/whore binary opposition; 1 depicting women as being caring and kind, but also passive, submissive and weak; and depicting older women as being sexually unattractive and evil (Goodwin and Fiske 2001:358; Sullivan 2010: 4). It must be said that the list of stereotypes relating to women given here is far from exhaustive. I have decided to examine the appropriation of Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Little Mermaid’, or ‘Den Lille Havfrue’ to use the original title,2 for two reasons: (1) it includes several misogynistic ideas typical of popular fairy tales in the Western canon;3 and (2) it exemplifies the binary opposition of good woman/ bad woman in the characters of the Little Mermaid and the Sea Witch. As Virginia Borges explains, while the Little Mermaid offers “an oppressive mix of self-sacrifice” and “silence”, the “only fully fleshed out counterpoint” to the Little Mermaid in this story is “the sea witch” who is “grotesque sexuality incarnate” (2007:1 - 4). My study will focus on four works which have intertextual relationships with ‘Den Lille Havfrue’: ‘Mermaids’, a film by Richard Benjamin; Tipping the Velvet, a novel by Sarah Waters; ‘The Imagenius Mermaids’, a series of digital montage artworks by Karin Miller; and The Undrowned Child, a novel for young adults by Michelle Lovric. The works that 1 I prefer to use the term ‘good woman/ bad woman’ binary because this appellation embraces a greater complexity than issues of sexual purity or impurity only. Ideas of so-called ‘good women’ and ‘bad women’ may also be combined with the binary oppositions of quiet/loud, submissive/controlling, helpless/powerful or young/old, to mention but a few examples. 2 For the sake of clarity, throughout the rest of this dissertation I will use ‘Den Lille Havfrue’ to refer to Hans Christian Andersen’s story of ‘The Little Mermaid’ while I will use the name of The Little Mermaid to refer to the protagonist of this story. 3 Examples of these would include ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Snow White’. 1 appropriate Andersen’s tale have been selected because they are seldom if ever critiqued as rewritings of ‘Den Lille Havfrue’, unlike, say, Disney’s film version of ‘The Little Mermaid’ which has received much critical attention. For example, From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture, first published in 1995, includes a chapter by Laura Sells which critiques the Disney film (1995: 175). Her chapter is often cited in other critical works. Incidentally, the Disney version of ‘The Little Mermaid’ is very different from Andersen’s tale and the film has been described as “overly sweet” compared with the “terrifying” original, but this film version still dichotomizes women into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, as is all too evident in Figure 1 (Nunnally 2006: 38). Figure 1: (1989) Film Still from Disney’s ‘The Little Mermaid’. Available: http://www.virginmedia.com/homefamily/kids/villains.php?ssid=44 I have chosen works from different media and genres because I feel that privileging printed texts over visual media perpetuates certain hegemonies, as does privileging so-called literature over what is disparagingly termed popular culture; hence I will examine Tipping the Velvet, which is not only a printed text but might also be considered as ‘literary’, along with a children’s novel, digital images and a popular film. My decision to include works from 4 This image exemplifies the good woman/ bad woman dichotomy. Note that the villain Ursula is depicted as fat and old, as well as domineering and frightening, in keeping with the usual stereotypes of Western patriarchal society. 2 different media is not an unusual one as feminism tends to be interdisciplinary in its inquiry (Johnston 1999:19). Moreover, what Chris Weedon says about popular fiction also applies to other products of popular culture, whether Hollywood films, television commercials, joke emails or internet pornography: “[T]he fact that they are not defined as ‘literature’ does not detract from their discursive power to transmit meanings and values” (1992:171). A Theoretical Framework of Feminist Poststructuralism The theoretical and critical approach I have utilized for this dissertation is broadly that of feminist poststructuralism. According to Chris Weedon, feminist poststructuralism “is a mode of knowledge production which uses poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, social processes and institutions to understand existing power relations and to identify areas and strategies for change” (1992: 40-41). Furthermore, for Weedon, the tactics of feminist poststructuralism “can be applied to all discursive practices as a way of analysing how they are structured, what power relations they produce and reproduce, where there are resistances and where we might look for weak points more open to challenge and transformation” (1992:136). She goes on to claim that this theory “is able … to explain the working of power on behalf of specific interests and to analyse the opportunities for resistance to it” (1992:41). For me, feminism is ineffectual if it cannot offer resistance to patriarchal dominance so feminist poststructuralism is an attractive theory. Weedon also points out, however, that the term ‘poststructuralism’ “does not have one fixed meaning but is generally applied to a range of theoretical positions” (1992:19). Feminist postructuralism, then, is diverse because it draws on the works of theorists who sometimes describe phenomena in very different ways. One theorist whose work is of special interest to feminist poststructuralism is Jacques Derrida. Feminists have found deconstruction, the critical practice that is based on his work, very useful. As Tahira Manji puts it, binary oppositions help to “create the hierarchy of our society” (2005:4). But Derrida offers various techniques for undermining oppositions such as male/female or white/black, such as reversing oppositions or revealing “undecidables” in a text. An “undecidable”, put simply, is an ambiguous term that can neither be contained in a binary opposition nor constitute a third term. As Jeff Collins and Bill Mayblin explain, “Undecidability disrupts the binary structures of metaphysical thinking. It displaces the either/or structure of oppositions … It leaves no certainty of privileged foundational term against subordinated second term” (2005: 48). The practice of deconstruction is vital to my 3 project, then, because deconstruction decentres or undoes the “hierarchical oppositions which underpin gender” (Weedon 1992: 165). Along with deconstruction, it has been noted that feminist scholarship is indebted to psychoanalysis. As Mary Caputi points out, one contribution of psychoanalysis to feminist thinking is “its illustration of the fact that gender archetypes function as metaphorical interpretations of the world, discursive creations which powerfully influence empirical reality” (1993: 328). There are, in fact, also certain links between feminist poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, which are most apparent, perhaps, in the works of Julia Kristeva and the other so-called French feminists like Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous. It should be remembered, however, that psychoanalysis, too, includes several different theories. Also worth noting is that, much as feminists have found the works of Freud and Lacan useful, they have also criticised these theorists. As Melanie Feratova-Loidolt explains, “French [feminism] … argues that Lacan’s and Freud’s model aptly describes … patriarchal cultural processes … however, [it also claims that] psychoanalysis becomes prescriptive, because it refuses to recognise that it is historically determined like other disciplines” (2005). Taking a feminist poststructuralist stance in this dissertation, I accept the view that the discourse of psychoanalysis “is governed by and perpetuates dominant cultural phantasies”, rather than assuming it faithfully reflects objective reality (2005). Julia Kristeva, Barbara Creed, Imogen Tyler and Abject Criticism I find Barbara Creed’s and Imogen Tyler’s readings of Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1982)