Of Tails and Tempests: Feminine Sexuality and Shakespearean Children's Texts
Erica Hateley, Monash University
Abstract
This paper reads a range of nineteenth-century texts for children that retell either Shakespeare's The Tempest or mermaid narratives, considering the models of feminine subjectivity and sexuality that they construct. It then moves on to two key contemporary texts — Disney's film adaptation of The Little Mermaid (Clements and Musker 1989) and Penni Russon's Undine (2004) — that combine the Shakespearean heroine with the mermaid, and reads them against the nineteenth-century models. Ultimately, the essay determines that, while these texts seem to perform a progressive appropriation of the two traditions, they actually combine the most conservative aspects of both The Tempest and mermaid stories to produce authoritative (and dangerously persuasive) ideals of passive feminine sexuality that confine girls within patriarchally-dictated familial positions. The new figure for adolescent female subjectivity, the mermaid-Miranda, becomes in turn a model of identification and aspiration for the implied juvenile consumer.
The literary domestication of Shakespeare for children emerged simultaneously with the literary domestication of the fairy tale for children in English during the early nineteenth century. The title of my paper intentionally calls up Janet Bottoms's work on prose retellings of Shakespeare's The Tempest for children (Bottoms 1996; 2000; 2004), but also invokes the "absent-present" signs of the two figures of femininity on which I focus: the tail and the tempest that represent metonymically the mermaid and "the" Miranda within these traditions. In fairy tales, as Jack Zipes argues, the protagonist "is either given a task or assumes a task" that is related to some "interdiction or prohibition. The protagonist is assigned a task, and the task is a sign. That is, his or her character will be marked by the task that is his or her sign" (Zipes 1988, 10). Functioning as signs of the characters as types, the tempest and the tail also mark the task of feminine development on the part of those characters: If mermaids have long represented the competition between sexuality and spirituality within the feminine, Mirandas have represented the competition between autonomy and familial obligation. My interest here is in how, during the last two decades, these traditions have merged to produce a new "mermaid-Miranda" figure in children's texts that knowingly refer to the figure's double origin through intertextual gestures and in how these children's texts articulate the "mermaid-Miranda"'s adolescent femininity in terms of sexuality. When signs become tasks, the implied reader is embedded in a model of "reading" that conveys obligation; in such cases, intratextual sign-task models can readily become extratextual ideals of behavior to emulate. In this way, the mermaid-Miranda becomes a model for young girls.1
Undine, Illustration by Arthur Rackham |
The mermaid is, of course, a peculiarly ambiguous figure of the sexualized female body, signifying at once excess and containment. Emerging from a cultural history in which she emblematized fertility and seduction (and later prostitution), the mermaid is arguably a sanitized version of the monstrous feminine.4 It was initially surprising to me that recent texts also deployed the mermaid, but as I looked backwards through the history of mermaid-Miranda texts for juvenile readers in search of a genealogy for Disney and Russon, I realized that they belonged to a long tradition in which a sexualized feminine subjectivity that could, if allowed to remain marginal, pose a serious challenge to patriarchal normativity is subsequently confined and sanitized. Given these contradictions, it is unsurprising that nineteenth-century writers began producing mermaids for children, especially girl readers, who themselves were made the sites of contradictory codings of sexuality and chastity, knowledge and innocence, the future virginal-maternal.
The domestication of Miranda follows a comparable logical trajectory, for if Prospero was the nineteenth century's "ideally wise and protective father" (Bottoms 2004, 10), Miranda became the nineteenth century's ideally chaste, but potentially sexual daughter. The storm that gives the play its name is, like the mermaid's tail, both present and absent: it has a seeming reality, yet can have no effect beyond Prospero's intention. So too, must the sexuality of Miranda (and the adolescent girl) be present, but inactive outside socio-familial structures. The play-text itself circulates Miranda's sexuality (or lack thereof) as a category of value: Caliban's alleged attempted rape is the "reason" for his treatment, and Ferdinand's early question to Miranda — "if [she] be maid or no" (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.428) — connects to his later conditional proposal of marriage:
. . . O, if a virgin, And your affection not gone forth, I'll make you The Queen of Naples. (Shakespeare 1999, 1.2.448-50) |
A feminist critique of this aspect of the play leads, perhaps inevitably, to a view of Miranda as an object of exchange or token of value, Prospero's "gift and [Ferdinand's] own acquisition / Worthily purchased" (Shakespeare 1999, 4.1.13-14): Miranda's subjectivity and agency are subordinated to her sexual status. Jyotsna Singh points out that although "Miranda has a position of colonial superiority over Caliban, she nonetheless has a marginal role within a kinship system in which all three males are bonded through their competing claims on her" (Singh 2003, 213). The issue has also been conflated with questions of familial-political identity: "Miranda, the Anglo-European daughter, offers us a feminine trope of colonialism, for her lack of selfhood in The Tempest exposes the subjection of daughters to their biological or cultural Fathers before they come of age" (Zabus 2002, 105). I certainly believe that The Tempest can be read as a narrative of the female child's emergence into the adult world, a separation from parental dominance that is crucially constructed as an entry into matrimonial bliss or as a passage from one masculine authoritative gaze to another. (A reasonably common argument against this reading is that Miranda acts against her father's wishes in speaking to, and assisting, Ferdinand during the wood-carrying scene [Shakespeare 1999, 1.3], but I would note that the interaction is anticipated, approved of, and observed by Prospero, thereby limiting our sense of Miranda's rebelliousness. Further, while Miranda's independent speech appears to signal autonomy, she also engages in self-censorship.) It is hardly surprising, then, that Ann Thompson asks, "What kind of pleasure can a woman and a feminist take in this text beyond the rather grim one of mapping its various patterns of exploitation? Must a feminist reading necessarily be a negative one?" (Thompson 1998, 242).
"Positive feminist" interventions into this debate have depended heavily on constructing Miranda as a specifically adolescent feminine subject. Jessica Slights, for instance, argues that Miranda "is presented as an imaginative and headstrong young woman who shows no signs of acquiescing unthinkingly to her father's wishes" (Slights 2001, 367), and Sharon Hamilton offers a similarly romanticized (and infantilized) view of Miranda:
The Tempest depends on conflating the feminine and the juvenile, as I am suggesting, creative performances of this conflation in fact undermine a feminist project by subordinating their Miranda to Prospero's "natural" authority. Children's texts that characterize Miranda as "daughterly" demonstrate the extent to which this filial model applies as well beyond the texts' boundaries: as Miranda is to Prospero, so the young female reader is (or should be) to Shakespeare. This is certainly true in the case of early adaptations of The Tempest for young girls."Shakespeare for Children" in English essentially began in 1807, with the publication of Henrietta Maria Bowdler's Family Shakespeare and Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. The latter is of interest here because the Lambs, rather than edit the play-texts, sought to retell in short prose pieces the "story" of twenty Shakespeare plays. The Tales' introduction famously identified their intended audience as "young ladies" (Lamb and Lamb 1953, 17), and the advertisement for the second edition (1809) noted that their style was "not so precisely adapted for the amusement of mere children, as for an acceptable and improving present to young ladies advancing to the state of womanhood" (cited in Bottoms 2000, 15).
As does the First Folio (1623), the Lambs open their collection with The Tempest. Bottoms notes that "Mary Lamb presents a paternalist Prospero whose power is used for benevolent ends . . . [and] it is clearly Prospero's perspective that is privileged by the narrator, silencing the views of both Ariel and Caliban on their enforced servitude" (Bottoms 1996, 82-83). Crucially, although Bottoms has argued elsewhere that the Lambs "focussed their stories on the women whenever possible" (Bottoms 2004, 4), Miranda remains absent, however, from both her first argument and the opening of the Lamb text. I agree with Bottoms that "nor should we forget [that] Miranda, also, may have a point of view to be discovered in her words and her silences" (Bottoms 2000, 23), but merely noting this does not ameliorate a lack of discussing her suppression. An 1878 editor of the Tales, Alfred Ainger, noted (perhaps unconsciously) the suppression of Miranda's voice when he praised this version for its treatment of:
Wolfson 1990, 28-29). The "difficulties" from which the text is freed presumably include Miranda's sexuality as the following quotation suggests through its tone and narrative strategy: The Tempest, 1.2.320-75, the passage eliminates all tangible evidence of Caliban's "bad nature," specifically his attempted rape of Miranda. Not only is Miranda's sexuality coded as valuable because of its passivity, but there is no active model of sexuality (for either gender) present in the play. Instead, as Jean Marsden notes, "the [Lamb] tale becomes the story of Miranda and Ferdinand's developing love" (Marsden 1989, 53).Indeed, the Lamb version of The Tempest constructs the romance between Miranda and Ferdinand as a "love-at-first-sight" experience that is legibly sexual, but simultaneously suppresses the play's dialogue about Miranda's maidenhood (as virginity) and emphasizes instead the language of divinity:
She timidly answered, she was no goddess, but a simple maid, and was going to give him an account of herself, when Prospero interrupted her. (Lamb and Lamb 1953, 23) |
Condensation of plot, which contributes to the "fairy tale" aspect of Lamb's retelling, may have been invited by the play itself, if Loughrey and Taylor are correct in their suggestion that The Tempest's "characters, [who] though never losing individuality, tend towards the simplified archetypes of romance — the pure young virgin, Miranda; her Prince Charming, Ferdinand" (Loughrey and Taylor 1982, 116). This slippage between romance and fairy tale may explain not only the register of Lamb's narration, but also a tendency throughout the nineteenth century to envision Miranda as "simple, apt to wonder, guileless, and because guileless, of easy belief, compassionate and tender" (Richardson 1797, 346) — in other words, as the ideal daughter. In the Lamb version, Miranda seems little more than the embodied marker of a détente between Milan and Naples.
In neither Shakespeare's play nor the Lamb adaptation is the marriage or romance plot an end in itself. The political expediency of the marriage is emphasized by the discovery of "Ferdinand and Miranda, playing at chess" (Shakespeare 1999, stage direction at 5.1.171). I would suggest that given the context of "queen's chess" in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Miranda's sacrifice of authority or agency on the chessboard resonates with sexual as well as national politics. Marilyn Yalom notes that "'Queen's chess' spread from Spain to other parts of the continent, where it was not always greeted enthusiastically. During the last years of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth, reactions to the chess queen's new power ranged from positive acceptance to frank hostility" (Yalom 2004, 214). The tableau in Shakespeare can arguably be seen as invoking this context, but also portrays Miranda as voluntarily refusing to appropriate the queen's symbolic power.
William Poole notes that while it would be "excessive" to "suspect that the wager here can only be Miranda's virginity, the dialogue does have sexual overtones that are also present in the [literary chess] tradition" (Poole 2004, 66). If the chess match symbolically marks Miranda's sexuality, Lamb effects a permanent suspension of that sexuality, so that "Ferdinand play[s] at chess with Miranda" (Lamb and Lamb 1953, 26). Nothing more of the chess match is presented, however, and Miranda neither does nor says anything further in the tale.
In the prose Tempest, Lamb produces a reader-identification that is aspirational: the implied pre-adolescent female reader is encouraged to look forward to becoming the kind of late-adolescent woman who will please her father and marry well. The implied reader is thus encouraged to "look at" Miranda in anticipation of emulating her actions and identity. That sexual maturity, which is reified in the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare as matrimony, involves the regulation of both body and voice and so provides an ideological link between Shakespeare and the construction of feminine sexuality in mermaid texts for children during the same century. The naturalizing of a young woman's development as movement through patriarchally endorsed and defined roles (daughter to wife) may be facilitated in these texts by the absence of any alternative discourse to patriarchy. There are no mothers or maternal figures here, with the exception of the marginal and invisible Sycorax. I make this point because nineteenth-century mermaid texts and contemporary Tempests actively produce maternal figures within their patriarchal models.
Given the increasing popularity of literary fairy tales for children in the nineteenth century, it is unsurprising that Edith Nesbit, in her Children's Shakespeare (1897), later published in expanded form as Twenty Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare, combines the story of The Tempest with the register of the fairy-tale genre, replete with a framing narrative of a female storytelling adult (Nesbit 1907). The collection's preface represents "modern" girls as asking to be told about Shakespeare's stories, constructing a willing audience with whom the implied reader can identify. But this paratextual construction of active girls' voices is undermined by the production of feminine voices within the text itself. If the reader's proxy is allowed to ask for information, Nesbit's Miranda has only one line of direct speech, in which, significantly, she affirms her attraction to Ferdinand:
For Miranda, who had never, since she could remember, seen any human being save her father, looked on the youthful prince with reverence in her eyes, and love in her secret heart. |
"I might call him," she said, "a thing divine, for nothing natural I ever saw so noble!" (Nesbit 1907, 38) |
It is important for my purposes that Nesbit combines the genres of the fairy tale and "Shakespeare for Children," because I believe that it contributes directly to the twentieth-century's conflation of the mermaid and the Miranda. The nineteenth-century names which are immediately suggested by the fairy-tale genre are Hans Christian Andersen, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Andrew Lang, Joseph Jacobs, and Oscar Wilde. With the exception of the Grimms, all these writers produced mermaid texts, although here I will consider only two of the most influential mermaid stories of the nineteenth century: Friedrich Heinrich Karl Fouqué's Undine (Fouqué 1932) and Andersen's "The Little Sea Maid" (Andersen 2002). These texts offer a model of mermaid-identity that parallels the trajectory of Miranda narratives, as outlined above.
As a sub-species of the mythological mermaid, Undines are "a scaled-down descendant of . . . powerful water deities, a being midway between the supernatural and the human, and midway again between the human and the animal" (Easterlin 2001, 258). The Undines' liminality, however, is signalled not by their physical bodies (they lack the tail of a fish), but rather by their unfamiliar spirituality and ability to communicate with and through bodies of water. Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de La Motte Fouqué's Undine, first published in German in 1811, was translated into English shortly thereafter. It is not specifically addressed to a juvenile audience, but makes a significant contribution to the tradition in which water sprites fall in love with men, become mortal, gain a soul, and then are betrayed. Combining this narrative with the traditions of German Romanticism, Fouqué established a template for nineteenth-century creators of mermaids. In an echo of The Tempest, the knight Huldbrand — having arrived at the home of a fisherman and his wife in a forest by supernatural means — felt himself isolated on an "islet" (Fouqué 1932, 28) and "had the illusion that no world existed on the other side of the encircling torrent, and that it was quite vain to imagine that he should ever mix any more with his fellow men" (Fouqué 1932, 29). Huldbrand, who exhibits elements of Shakespeare's Ferdinand, soon becomes enamored of Undine, the only young girl on the island. I do not mean here to imply that Fouqué is producing a version of The Tempest, but his tale seems to suggest that once a writer places a family on an isolated island, the narrative forms of Shakespeare's play are readily available for comparison or intertextual reference. What Fouqué does contribute to the narrative traditions I am examining is the domestication of the mermaid. Indeed, his story thematizes the attempt to domesticate a water-spirit; that the attempt fails may have influenced Andersen's construction of a self-domesticating mermaid.
Undine is no Miranda, however, but a changeling who believes that "[t]o have a soul must be a delightful thing" (Fouqué 1932, 40). In Undine's descriptions of her race and her quest, elements that later are manifested in Andersen's tale are legible:
soaring stream [that] took the shape of a pale woman veiled in white" (Fouqué 1932, 98).As the wronged bride, Undine enters Huldbrand's chamber:
5 Fundamentally I believe that Fouqué's tale lacks the aspirational identification present in the Lambs' Tempest, primarily because its implied reader is not necessarily juvenile; Undine nevertheless represents the "necessary" feminine sacrifice that will become crucial in later nineteenth-century mermaid texts and in more recent mermaid-Miranda texts.Perhaps the best-known mermaid text for children, Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Sea-Maid," was first published in 1835 (Andersen 2002). Although Andersen is commonly discussed as an inventor rather than a transcriber of fairy tales, his mermaid text clearly was influenced by Fouqué. The story of Andersen's little mermaid opposes the physical and sexual realms to the spiritual, obviously privileging the latter. Andersen's undersea world is a matriarchy, for although the heroine has a father who "had been a widower for many years" (Andersen 2002, 61), it is the father's mother who educates the little mermaid and her five older sisters. After visiting the surface as part of a coming-of-age ritual that all mermaids experience at age fifteen, the mermaid falls in love with a human prince. After the grandmother has explained to her the metaphysics of mermaid existence, the sea-maid's love for the prince (and by extension, a love of the human world) produces in her a desire for an immortal soul. The story is governed by a symbolic opposition between the feminine/material and the masculine/spiritual: as the grandmother says, mermaids
. . . |
"Then I am to die and be cast as foam upon the sea, not hearing the music of the waves, nor seeing the pretty flowers and the red sun? Can I not do anything to win an immortal soul?" |
The mermaid pays for the draught the witch gives her with her voice, here represented by her tongue, which the witch cuts out; this symbolic castration (removal of sexuality) is dismissed by the witch as potentially ameliorated by physical presence:
"But if you take away my voice," said the little sea-maid, "what will remain to me?" |
Nineteenth-century Mirandas thus offer ideal daughterly identities and model a relationship of subordination to paternal figures (Prospero and Shakespeare), while nineteenth-century mermaids demonstrate the dangers of unregulated sexuality and the necessity of self-sacrifice. In either case, the implied juvenile feminine consumer is encouraged — by identification or instruction — to regulate both her body and voice.
Body And Voice in The Little Mermaid
The domestication and sanitization of the mermaid-Miranda for a child audience intersect powerfully in the Disney Corporation's film adaptation of The Little Mermaid (Clements and Musker 1989). Overtly an adaptation of the Andersen tale, Disney's film recasts the story as "a father-daughter Oedipal tale" (White 1993, 192) that is informed intertextually by The Tempest to produce a text that has attracted much attention from critics of children's literature. Central to critical response is the issue of fidelity to Andersen's tale, particularly in terms of the film's "happy ending." The "moral simplification" in Disney's film, about which A. Waller Hastings complains (Hastings 1993) is, arguably, facilitated by the The Tempest. Hastings argues that the film "accentuates the most sentimental and romantic aspects of the story" (Hastings 1993, 85); that "order is restored through the discovery that the parent's and child's wishes are the same" (88); and that the film makes "a shift from a predominantly matriarchal world in Andersen's tale to a strong patriarchy" (88). It is precisely these elements of hetero-normative romance, feminine subordination to patriarchal structures, and a sustained affirmation of paternal figures that Disney appropriates from Shakespeare. Thus, Disney combines the opening of Andersen with the closing of Shakespeare, drawing on the cultural capital of both authors while simultaneously erasing from their texts those elements that challenge dominant notions of gendered childhood. The mermaid who refuses to kill and the Miranda who acts against her father (in the most generous reading of the play) are effaced in favor of a mermaid who gets married and a Miranda whose rebellion is really a form of commodity consumption. In doing so, the film joins a culturally powerful genealogy of fairy-tale films that is bolstered by Disney's claim to represent "classic," "timeless," and "universal" themes.
At the beginning of The Little Mermaid, the patriarchal order, signified by the lyric "Ah, we are the daughters of Triton / Great father who loves us and named us well" (Clements and Musker 1989), establishes Triton as the Prospero of this world. His daughter Ariel (whose name invokes the enslaved spirit of Shakespeare's play and who is renowned for her singing voice), embodies many of the film's tensions, as Richard Finkelstein notes: "The corporate Ariel conflates Miranda and Shakespeare's spirit in her innocence, her announced desire for knowledge, and of course, her position with regard to her father" (Finkelstein 2003, 136). Ariel falls in love with a human, and when her father refuses to acknowledge her feelings, she travels to see this film's incarnation of Sycorax — Ursula, the witch who originally ruled the ocean until ousted by Triton. In her history and machinations, Ursula combines the figures of Caliban and Sycorax. Ariel, furthermore, is every inch the nineteenth-century Miranda, the favored daughter of a powerful father, until her lust for belongings becomes lust for humanity.
The link between voice and sexuality, which in Andersen's tale is represented by the mermaid's tongue, is also present in the Disney film, although due to the "requirements" of Disney politics, their mermaid must achieve a romantic happy ending. Thus, the codings of sexuality become more complex. Just as Miranda's sexuality in The Tempest must be present but passive, so must Ariel's voice be present but controlled. The film's opening musical number, which revolves around Ariel's singing debut (much like a formal debutante ball), identifies the public performance as a display of passive sexuality, but also marks Ariel's unwillingness to "sing for her supper." She is absent from the performance, thus raising her father's anger. Later in the film, during the musical set-piece "Under the Sea," Ariel also fails to display passive obedience. The music builds into a crescendo, and the many undersea creatures who have been performing choreograph a climax to be sung by Ariel; but as they all point towards her space, she has disappeared.
Shortly after the first performance, as Ariel enjoys playing truant, she rescues Prince Eric from a shipwreck. As she sings to him, he is attracted to her voice; in this way, the film fulfils its understanding of voice as display of available sexuality. It would be a mistake, however, to read this as a trajectory of autonomy or independence, for the film ultimately reveals that Ariel must retain her voice and sexuality within a patriarchal model of personal relations. Thus, I agree with (even as I am concerned by) the claim that Ariel:
The Little Mermaid, aberrant or excessive feminine sexuality (uncontrolled feminine voice) must be exorcised (from both the film and fantasizing self) in order to achieve a happy ending.Ariel, I would suggest, is more conservative than any of the Mirandas or mermaids produced in the nineteenth century because in their combination, these discourses are stripped of any potential for resistance, challenge, ambivalence, or — even more important for my purposes — independent feminine sexuality, experience, or knowledge. Just as the sexuality of Andersen's tale was located in the marginal space of the witch, Disney locates its version of feminine sexuality in Ursula's cavern. But while Andersen's mermaid experiences asexuality in pursuit of a soul, Disney's mermaid gambles her soul in pursuit of sexuality.
Andersen's "wise woman" is neither evil nor absent; Shakespeare's Sycorax is famously the absent evil. In seeming to negotiate between these texts and produce a present evil, Disney in fact contradictorily produces a figure so excessive that there is no possibility of sustained challenge to the patriarchal model of femininity. Ursula's vocal set-piece is the unashamedly burlesque "Poor Unfortunate Souls," during the performance of which she revels in her obese body, enormous hips, belly, and breasts and makes herself up in the style of a drag queen. Julian Stringer provides the most succinct account of Ursula:
Still . . . she hints at truths about the body and sexuality, the kind of knowledge that Disney perennially seeks to disguise or ignore. (Stringer 1990, 299) |
Although Disney overloads the screen with explicit and implicit images of the monstrous feminine and of dangerous maternity, the scene has actually provoked a positive reading from a feminist critic:
The foregrounding of Ursula as the performative, excessive, sexualized feminine ultimately discredits these categories as viable for the juvenile feminine reader or viewer. Conversely, Ariel is established as lacking these qualities and so is presented as an idealized figure with whom the viewer can identify. The implied viewer is therefore inculcated as an aspirational consumer of two authoritative cultural traditions — the fairy tale and Shakespeare — even as those traditions are sanitized, desexualized, and made subordinate to the ultimate neo-cultural authority: Disney. Rather than circulating as an "emptied classic text" (Willis 1987, cf. 85-86), Shakespeare is called up by Disney's The Little Mermaid as the ultimate paternal authority, used in turn to authorize Disney's own preferred model of paternalism.
The Enchantment of Shakespeare In Russon's Undine
Undine, Illustration by Arthur Rackham |
Indeed, it may be that the figure of the mermaid offers a necessary model of supernaturally powerful femininity to combine with the Shakespearean referents because the obvious point of identification for such power in the play itself is Sycorax. Within children's literature, the witch-figure tends to be a negative model; when sexualized or maternalized (or both, as with Ursula) she is certainly not to be aspired to by the adolescent female. Undine gestures towards a critique of the traditions on which it draws even as it rewrites them, but despite the novel's suggestion that female autonomy is to be achieved despite the father rather than through the father, Undine nevertheless produces problematic codings of feminine sexuality and knowledge.7
Undine is aware of herself as an "intertextual subject" in that she feels "like Rapunzel or Juliet, or some other fated and mysterious woman" (Russon 2004, 9), but this knowledge is not self-reflexive, despite the fact it calls up the fairy tale and Shakespearean traditions I am discussing here. As a "reader," both of self and others, Undine tends to be passive. In terms of the novel's use of Shakespeare (and indeed the narrative tradition of the "Undine"), Undine remains either unknowing or uninterested. While the text produces a positive model of feminine development that includes agency and autonomy, it does so separately from the very cultural capital it uses to add weight to that narrative. In short, The Tempest is used to structure the plot and deepen the characters, but Undine herself remains oblivious to this transformation. It is indicative of the novel's mode of appropriation that Undine knows the etymological genealogy of her name, but is not aware of the literary-mythological genealogy behind it that is familiar to her male friend Trout:
pooled from a cut on her hand onto the benchtop" (Russon 2004, 26). This wound, which is caused by broken glass, becomes a site of rupture on Undine's body that marks her connection to the sea: "Undine remembered the sensation of opening the wound and could feel the sand and the shell and the crabs moving — living — under her skin" (Russon 2004, 31). This realization has been instigated by vivid dreams, voices that tell her "it's time to come home" (Russon 2004, 24) and the appearance of dead fish, as though from nowhere, in her bedroom. Undine unburdens herself of anxiety about these events by reporting them to Trout.Throughout the novel, Trout is an alternate focalizer who not only provides the reader with another perspective on Undine and her life, but also establishes his gaze as superior in analysis and understanding. The pattern established early, in which Trout explains Undine's name to her, is maintained throughout the text, as he sees and understands signs and symbols that Undine cannot or will not examine. A fish that appears in her bedroom has inside it a piece of paper inscribed with a quotation from The Tempest. It is Trout who finds the paper and recognizes the quotation, functioning as a literary interpreter. In the novel's first direct use of Shakespeare, Undine is literally outside the space where Trout confirms his understanding of the paper by consulting a book: "Ms. Hague reached up and pulled an enormous book off the shelf. Undine knew which one it was straight away. 'Pff, Shakespeare,' she breathed aloud, dismissively. [Ms. Hague and Trout] were both mad about Shakespeare. No doubt they would be in raptures for the whole period" (Russon 2004, 48). Trout's direct engagement with the Shakespearean text, here and for the remainder of the novel, allows him to interpret Undine's experiences (past and future), while she remains deliberately ignorant of "Shakespeare" beyond her school's requirements (Russon 2004, 53). Having decoded the message, Trout gives the quotation to Undine:
Why am I reading Shakespeare? What's it from? What does it mean?" (Russon 2004, 52). Trout offers an interpretation of the quotation, explaining in a plot-based way thatSet against Trout's rational consideration of events are Undine's emotional and bodily responses: she unthinkingly explores her newfound powers and is quickly marked as a potential Prospero (to a knowing reader), but one shown to lack personal control when she causes a storm in her backyard, but is not able to manipulate it:
Just because you were stupid enough to get yourself knocked up when you were a teenager . . . just because you opened your legs . . .. I mean, I'm not like you" (Russon 2004, 70).The rejection of her mother leads Undine to directionless experimentation, and ultimately, to her father, but only after she has fallen prey to the temptation to experiment with her new powers. Undine's relationship with Richard, the boyfriend, initially offers her an escape from the emotional challenges created by her new powers, but leads to a stereotypical struggle for sexual control when Undine asks Richard to stop kissing her:
"God, Undine," he said, and prowled around the couch like a caged animal. "What have you done to me? I've never felt like this before." |
The Shakespearean text, as a symbol of superior knowledge, is offered to Undine as a guide to her experiences and self. Again, however, she fails to read the text beyond the handwritten address, which she uses to find her father. In doing so, Undine leaves the realm of her mother and enters that of her father, creating a symbolic island inhabited by herself and her father, who is named, rather heavy-handedly, Prospero Marine and who lives in a beachfront house with a parrot named Caliban and a dog named Ariel. This Prospero does not in fact want to marry his Miranda off, but to keep her for himself so that he may have access to and, ideally, control over her magical power.
When Prospero discovers that Undine is not a Shakespearean, he is "dismayed" (Russon 2004, 154) and realizes that his carefully constructed messages to her have not achieved their intended impact:
Prospero made a deep grumbling sound. "But my note. Full fathom five thy father lies . . . ," he intoned. "Don't tell me it had no dramatic effect whatsoever." |
"Oh yes, absolutely," Undine assured him. "I had a good interpreter." (Russon 2004, 155) |
Undine temporarily finds power exhilarating because Prospero has been grooming her to hand over that power to him. Having established his authority through manipulation and citation of Shakespeare, Prospero then convinces Undine that her power is inherited patrilineally. Like Prospero in the play, however, he can only achieve power only by controlling his daughter, telling her "[i]t's not about what we should do. It's about what we can do. We have enormous power. We can use it. We can do anything we want. Normal laws, normal rules, don't apply to us" (Russon 2004, 170). Undine's magic becomes seriously dangerous when Grunt starts questioning her about her relationship with Richard. Although she does not necessarily seek to destroy Grunt, she nonetheless allows herself to have a "tantrum":
just wants to disappear, to break off and become an island, a place that can't be left or travelled to" (Russon 2004, 217). This separation would mark his transition into a Shakespearean Prospero and would also depend on his exploitation of "Miranda" as daughterly commodity.In this sense, the novel would seem to activate a critique of the father-daughter relationship constructed by Shakespeare's play (and indeed of Shakespeare generally), but given Undine's sustained and willful ignorance of Shakespeare, this critique is logically only available to Prospero and Trout. Undine herself certainly critiques Prospero's presumption of authority and appropriation of her magic: "'It's not yours to give', she said, marvelling at this new idea. 'It's mine. All the magic, all the power. You're using it, but it's mine'" (Russon 2004, 217). In this articulation of ownership (which implicitly entails an acceptance of responsibility), Undine realizes that her father "didn't love her. He didn't want a daughter. He simply wanted her power, to possess her magic. Well, she wasn't going to let him have it. It was hers and she would protect it. Instinct. Survival" (Russon 2004, 219). This recognition of her autonomy is linked with the recognition that her power is derived matrilineally. Undine's mother helps her to defeat Prospero, appearing unexpectedly at the beach: there, "a last haze of magic framing her like sunlight, emanating from her — soft, warm, curved, female — was Lou" (Russon 2004, 229), who is revealed unequivocally as the source of Undine's power. (Russon does not, however, code "magic" entirely as feminine, even though it is constructed as matriarchal: Undine's younger brother Jasper clearly has the capacity for supernatural insight and communication, presumably inherited, like Undine's own magic, from Lou. One might suggest that this gesture by Russon is a symbolic rewriting of Sycorax, but it also veers dangerously toward models of the witch-woman.)
When Undine questions Trout about his "reading" of events, he avoids responding by claiming that he was thinking about "Shakespeare" (Russon 2004, 236), but the reader is made privy to his self-appointed future as protector and watcher of Undine: "He still felt that pull, that scientific urge to dissect the magic, to analyse its parts. So Trout would still get to protect Undine. He would rescue her a little bit every day, from his own desire, and she would never thank him for it" (Russon 2004, 237). Such an emphasis on the superiority of the masculine gaze, and of rationality's superiority to feminine sexuality, renders the novel's last revisionary performance of Shakespeare vexed, indeed. The final line of the novel is spoken by Undine, as the novel's figure for Shakespeare's Miranda: "'O brave,' Undine said to the wind, 'new world'" (Russon 2004, 245). The reader has no way of knowing if this citation is performed knowingly or is a random saying that seems familiar and fitting to Undine. I am not convinced that, within a novel that circulates Shakespearean cultural authority as valuable, an unknowing citation can be read as positive. Undine has certainly achieved a separation from (and thus authority over) her father Prospero, but rather than appropriating his Shakespearean knowledge, she bans Shakespeare altogether, telling Prospero that "no Tempest names" (Russon 2004, 244) should be used for future pets. This comment reveals that Undine understands generally that Shakespeare's play has been crucial to her father's actions, but does not indicate whether she has any detailed or specific knowledge of the play beyond details given by the men around her. Thus, the novel reinforces the division between masculine and feminine types of knowledge, characterizing "Shakespeare" as masculine and self-regulating sexuality as feminine. In the split between intellectual and physical ways of being and knowing, Russon's erasure of spirituality creates a gendered binary model of subjectivity.
Where Disney's The Little Mermaid participates in "the expropriation of women from the mother's genealogy to the father's" (Sells 1995, 179) — a move in keeping with its use of The Tempest — Russon reverses this move, rewriting both Disney and Shakespeare in a celebration of the matrilineal. If Russon's appropriation is more empowering to its implied juvenile feminine reader than are earlier texts, it is made so by actively installing a matriarchal model of authority over Shakespearean elements that undermine the feminine. I am not suggesting that Undine activates an unequivocally feminist appropriation of these textual traditions — far from it, given the dangers created in the novel by Undine's unregulated feminine sexuality and the text's valorization of Trout's "rational" gaze — but Undine does move toward offering the implied feminine reader a position of autonomy. Like The Tempest itself, Undine has at its center a book that suggests "how powerful in effecting purposes and changing reality language might be" (White 1999, 11), but as in the play, that book ultimately remains in the realm of the paternal even as some magical power shifts to the feminine.
The shift in identification strategies developed from the nineteenth century to contemporary texts, from objective to subjective, ironically produces a more regulated reader/viewer. No longer are young women asked to be Miranda or to learn from the mermaid; rather, they are asked to be that mermaid-Miranda and thus to become self-regulating. Similarly, as is consistent with the secularization of contemporary popular culture, sexuality in these texts is no longer negatively opposed to the spiritual quest for the soul — as problematic as that opposition may be — but is designated as negative in and of itself. Thus, feminine sexuality is no longer a threat to a specific ideology of religion or ethics, but is to be excised regardless of context.
Contemporary juvenile readers are consistently offered Tempests that suggest that feminine sexuality is to be present but passive, looked at but not touched, and the very presence of Shakespeare lends cultural authority to this message. I look forward in the future, however, to reading a text that combines feminine autonomy with the cultural capital of Shakespeare, that has a heroine who knowingly cites and rewrites our understanding of the "brave new world" — one who originates, rather than bears, the knowing gaze, who controls her own tail (or tempest), who is self-determining rather than self-regulating, and who enjoys a sexuality independent of patriarchal family structures.
Notes
1. | I would like to express my gratitude to the following people, each of whom provided me with thoughtful feedback on this paper at various stages: Alan Dilnot, Heather Scutter, Sujata Iyengar, and the readers for Borrowers and Lenders. |
2. | This is not necessarily a negative function, as "[c]hildren's literature has an important role to play in the socialization of children, [. . . ] who are still very much learning reading and 'life' skills" (Cross 2004, 56). My concern is, however, the extent to which sexual/moral didacticism in two contemporary children's texts is masked by their participation in these earlier traditions. |
3. | See, for example, Zibby O'Neal's In Summer Light (1985), Tad Williams's Caliban's Hour (1994), and Dennis Covington's Lizard (1991), all of which appropriate The Tempest for adolescent readers within an explicitly patriarchal framework. |
4. | For a concise genealogy of the mermaid as "fact" and tradition, see Waldemar and Schroeder 2004, 122-26. They note that the English tradition of the mermaid culminated in the seventeenth century and "reflected the variety and disparity of the cultures that had influenced English culture through the centuries. Greek legends, the Christian Physiologus, the old Norse descriptions, and no doubt Celtic legends were all jumbled together to create the mermaid and the merman" (Waldemar and Schroeder 2004, 125). |
5. | Undine is awarded more agency in a recent retelling of Fouqué's tale for young adults: Haunted Waters, by Mary Pope Osborne (originally published in 1994). In this novel, Undine retains her supernatural origins, but her protective uncle Kühleborn is reduced to a nasty spirit, and her husband is the unknowing victim of her all-consuming "strangeness." Osborne's narrative choices give the reader a degree of sympathy for Huldbrand by virtue of a first-person narration that simultaneously attributes and denies sexuality or agency to Undine. So, for example, Huldbrand tells the reader that as "the moon-bright waters streamed down her naked body, I was filled with jealousy. She looked more like the shimmering consort of a pagan god than my wife" (Osborne 1996, 86), but he also states that Undine's "mystery was my fault, not hers; it was my fear of the unknown that kept me from truly knowing her" (Osborne 1996, 98). Hence, in the Osborne novel, Undine is purely the object of a masculine sexual gaze, stripped of any agency or knowledge. |
6. | For a point of comparison, compare the final kiss in Gil Junger's teen film, 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), which rewrites Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Of this film's concluding kiss, it has been argued that The Little Mermaid. |
7. | Russon may also be invoking Ruth Park's My Sister Sif (1986). Park's novel is well-known in Australia and features a female protagonist, Riko, who is half mermaid and half human. Her journey involves reconciling herself with this genealogy and ultimately committing herself to environmentalist causes (the didactic focus of the novel). The novel also includes an authoritative masculine, scientific gaze in the figure of Henry Jacka. I believe this model is replicated by Russon's novel. |
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Permissions
Arthur Rackham's illustrations from Undine are reproduced by kind permission of the Hargrett Library, University of Georgia.