Of Tails and Tempests

Feminine Sexuality and Shakespearean Children's Texts

Authors

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.

Author Biography

Erica Hateley, Monash University

Erica Hateley is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne (Department of English with Cultural Studies), and recently completed her graduate studies in the School of English, Communications, and Performance Studies at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). Her thesis, "Shakespeare's Daughters: Children's Literature and the Production of Gendered Readers," addressed a wide range of contemporary children's texts. She has published on contemporary British literature, Shakespearean Children's Literature, Jane Eyre in popular culture, and Shakespearean detective fiction.