Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 1984, pp. 143-51.
Abstract
In some fictional, historical, and autobiographical accounts of the lives of married women on the prairies of North America during the brief period between initial exploration and permanent settlement, there appears a rather widespread and complicated motif. In it the woman lives on an empty prairie, usually far from the edge of town; physically isolated with her husband, she is psychologically alone, too, and friendless, especially in terms of female companionship. Often her family is far away; always her husband is insensitive and unsympathetic, and, in general terms, unworthy of her devotion. Sometimes even before she is able to voice or demonstrate her needs for friends, family, love, and beauty, the woman must pass a cruel love-test; she has to silence all that she has learned about the failure of her life, love, and lover on the prairie.
Elizabeth Mitchell, a journalist interested in contemporary reforms, emigration, and the Garden Cities movement, describes the period in question as "the time of hard fighting and unceasing struggle," when one could see "settlers come in, but settlers go out again, sick of the country." She records this experience in her book In Western Canada before the War, which also contains proud and sympathetic accounts of successful marriages on the prairie, similar to those in the work of Willa Cather, Nellie McClung, and others. Mitchell's account of unhappy marriages on both sides of the international border closely resembles fictional accounts in Wolf Willow by Wallace Stegner, "The Painted Door," by Sinclair Ross, and "Snow," by the German-born, naturalistic writer, Frederick Philip Grove. In his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border, Hamlin Garland presents at least two generations of women caught in the same type of unsatisfying marriage. Not every woman on the prairies during this period fits the motif. But the theme of the unappreciated, devoted, and silenced prairie wife exists in Canadian and American fiction and nonfiction, created by writers of both sexes. By coincidence or intention, this motif follows the most popular of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, "The Little Mermaid."
ANTECEDENTS OF ANDERSEN'S MERMAID
"The Little Mermaid" (first published in Danish in 1835) was well known in Europe and America in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was available in translations, authorized and not, the latter much to Andersen's chagrin. Andersen, who wrote several fanciful autobiographical stories, including one called "the fairy tale of my life," maintained that the mermaid story was his creation. Nevertheless, he admitted to knowing the popular Danish song "Agnete and The Mermen," and Andersen's other tales demonstrate that he knew European folk literature and mythology, where ancestors of the little mermaid can readily be identified.
Examples of female water-deities in Mediterranean, North European, and English mythology and literature include sirens, naiads, Rhinemaidens, Lorelei, and the Arthurian "Lady of the Lake." Hesiod records Aphrodite of the Waves, born from the blood-flecked seafoam following the castration by Cronus of the elemental god Uranus; this motif informs Botticelli's painting of a Christianized Venus rising from rose-decked waves. The goddess of birth and love bestows magical gifts of secret knowledge, wealth, or power. Other water-deities, such as the sirens in The Odyssey, offer seduction, confusion, enslavement, or death instead. Andersen adopts the bloody feet and the seafoam of Aphrodite and the singing of the sirens for his tale. His mermaid is silenced, as were the sirens when Odysseus closed the ears of his men to them, and this recalls another source, the myth of the rape of Philomela.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln