Maidens of the Deep
The Little Mermaid’s “Salvation”
This is actually our last day with Anderson’s Little Mermaid. That being said, I hope the ending stays with you. It has certainly stayed with me. It is, I think, the most tragic of all the Mermaid stories I’ve read…
The Little Mermaid in Love
Yes, our Little Mermaid is able to meet the prince, and all who see her are taken with her. She is beautiful, and dances so gracefully! And yet, the prince only “loved her as he would love a little child, but it never came into his head to make her his wife.”[1]
This is bad. For if the Little Mermaid cannot get him to marry her and he marries another, she will “dissolve into the foam of the sea.”[2] That was the deal she’d struck with the Sea Witch, after all.
But then the prince’s parents wish him to marry a princess from another kingdom. The prince does not want to, for he was in love with the girl who had saved him long ago – a girl…who was a nun at the abbey where he was rescued from his shipwreck.[3]
But, if he could not have that girl, he says he will take the Little Mermaid as his wife. And so “she dreamed of human happiness and an immortal soul.”[4]