16 The New York Review
anthology such as The Penguin Book of
Mermaids (2019), for which the fairy-
tale scholar Cristina Bacchilega and
the Hawaiian specialist Marie Ahohani
Brown have gathered a feast of myths
and legends from original sources the
world over, while in Atlante delle Sirene
(Atlas of the Sirens, 2017)—another
delectably illustrated volume, await-
ing translation into English—Agnese
Grieco offers more philosophical and
poetic reflections.
The long history of reported encoun-
ters with mermaids inspired Scribner
to use computer technology to plot
such sightings on a world map. He can’t
resist quoting affirmations from such
notables as David Attenborough, who
comments in his l975 book, David At-
tenborough’s Fabulous Animals, that
“the stories of mermaids persist and
have some ring of truth about them.” (I
suspect this gentle claim was made for
the benefit of the younger reader.) Spec-
ulation about realms under the sea, and
dependence on water sources—lakes
and wells and streams—gave rise to a
multifarious population of watery be-
ings, including rusalkas and undines
and goblins.^1 Scribner offers a rapid
tour d’horizon and enlists examples of
water spirits from North America be-
fore settlement by Europeans, South
Africa before colonization, Japan,
India, the Caribbean, and Australasia.
Folklore material of this kind often
enshrines preindustrial societies’ re-
spect for natural forces; as reposito-
ries of organic, ecological knowledge,
such tales deserve more attention than
they have been given hitherto. In a fine
recent novel, The Mermaid of Black
Conch,^2 the Trinidadian writer Mo-
nique Roffey develops such folk be-
liefs in a contemporary setting, when a
dark- skinned, mysterious fish- woman
is caught by rich white trophy hunters
out for excitement on a small Carib-
bean island. She’s rescued by a young
local fisherman, who discovers she’s a
revenant from the precolonial past and
remembers the language and culture of
the Taino, the indigenous people of the
region.
In the nineteenth century the possi-
bility that mermaids might represent
evidence of prehistory and even a key
to human evolution was seriously en-
tertained by scientists, much to Scrib-
ner’s amusement—and alarm. In the
archives of the Royal Society and the
pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine,
Scribner found serious correspon-
dence, expressed in the most scrupu-
lous scientific terms, identifying any
number of life forms with the mermaid
of myths. He quotes a letter from Lin-
naeus, written to the Swedish Acad-
emy of Science in 1749, “urging a hunt
in which to ‘catch this animal alive or
preserved in spirits.’... Perhaps these
creatures could reveal humankind’s
origins?”
The Enlightenment’s scientific in-
quiries into hearsay and surmise had
a paradoxical—and, to me at least, bit-
ter—result, since it betrayed the very
principles that spurred on the search
in the first place: the exhibition of al-
leged mermaid mummies and skele-
tons, including heads, hands, and ribs,
as proof positive of their existence.
In a chapter called “Freakshows and
Fantasies,” Scribner uncovers unlikely
claimants—species from the deep
that resemble eels and lizards, which
eager scientists identified as sirens. The
grisly, wizened, and contorted effigies
concocted in Japan, often from baboon
and salmon body parts, couldn’t be fur-
ther from the erotic promise of the sea
nymphs of story.
And yet in 1842, when P. T. Barnum
joined in the bonanza and purchased
a “Feejee Mermaid,” as he called the
grotesque, grimacing figure, crowds
flocked and paid to see it in London,
New York, and elsewhere. Barnum
used to seem a colorful, larger- than- life
character, but with today’s public char-
latanry in mind, he epitomizes a real
danger. “The shrewd businessman,”
Scribner writes,utilized the very network of news-
papers that had maintained a
debate over the legitimacy of mer-
people over the preceding decades
to announce his Feejee Mermaid
to the world. And he was smart
about it, sending supposed scien-
tific accounts from the American
South (written by himself).Barnum followed this up with testi-
monials and eyewitness reports about
“one of the greatest curiosities of the
day” in a cascade of leaflets and flyers.^3
Scribner documents the pruri-
ence, gullibility, and hucksterism of
news papers of the time, which he has
combed online: he’s an adept of data-
bases, declaring that he received over
95,000 results from his searches of The
New York Times and other papers, and
is consequently able to state confidently
that there were “31 verified merpeo-
ple sightings” between 1800 and 1900,
twenty- four of them in the first fifty
years. They burgeoned and became en-
tangled with more sensational reports
of fakes and frauds. A hugely success-
ful show like Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
deliberately reveled in the outrageous-
ness of the exhibits, and make- believe
was an essential part of the enjoyment,
as I experienced when meeting a mer-
maid—in a long blond wig and a silver
tail—in the 1980s at one of the show’s
venues on the West Coast.
Fantastic beliefs, in the form of false
claims and urban legends, have been
traveling irresistibly—you might say
virally—since the eighteenth century,
mimicking and mutating with subtle
shifts adapted to circumstances. The
effect today has been amplified by so-
cial media; mermaid sightings rank in
popularity alongside those of aliens,
angels, fairies, and unicorns. The prob-
lem lies with our human curiosity and
our intellectual need to verify some-
thing that our imagination conceives,
to test the idea in the laboratory ofdirect experience. But the outcome
inverts this purpose, and the figment,
actualized, replaces reality and then, in
a spiral of counterfeits, distorts knowl-
edge itself.As the title Merpeople indicates,
Scribner wishes to include the male of
the species—as in the case of tritons
and mermen—and he alludes briefly to
the Mesopotamian figure of Oannes,
a majestic, bearded, fish- tailed sea di-
vinity who teaches humanity wisdom—
writing and the arts and sciences.
“Orcas” could have been mentioned,
too: one appears in jewels and a splen-did turban in an illustration in Chet
Van Duzer’s Sea Monsters on Medie-
val and Renaissance Maps (2013),^4 a
rich source for the watery imaginary,
on which Scribner has drawn, as he
acknowledges. But material about mer-
maids’ male counterparts is sparse, and
not all male sea creatures are as be-
nign as Oannes: Proteus, whom Homer
calls the Old Man of the Sea, savagely
rapes Thetis, the sea goddess; the child
of this union is Achilles. As related in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this myth re-
veals the metaphorical range of watery
beings—allure, mystery, slipperiness,
sex, and power.
Scribner also turns his attention
to male adventures with mermaids,
and gives an entertaining account of
several movies, such as Mr. Peabody
and the Mermaid (1948) and Miranda
(l948). He must have concluded his
research before the release of The
Shape of Water (2017), Guillermo del
Toro’s uncanny, stirring modern fable
of two beings at odds with conventional
bodily norms. Cowritten with Vanessa
Taylor, whose original story was a fairy
tale crossing “The Little Mermaid”
with “Beauty and the Beast,” del Toro’s
film responds to these braided motifs
in the mythology of merpeople: the
heroine was wounded in the throat as
a baby and is voiceless; the hero is a
mysterious deep-sea being, close kin to
the Creature from the Black Lagoon,
who has been captured and subjected
to scientific experiments of appalling
brutality.
The grim bunker- like setting of The
Shape of Water, in a cold war–era USmilitary research facility, presents a
powerful and frightening critique of
clandestine operations going on in
our Western democracies today. As
the passionate love between the mute
young woman and the mutilated won-
der of the deep intensifies, the watery
metaphors deepen; during the long
consummation (which we are not
shown), water pours out of the bath-
room where they are making love and
floods her lodgings—a visual realiza-
tion of their ecstatic union. At the end
they escape together, plunging into the
canal that will lead them to the ocean.
He touches her on her wounded throat
and she develops gills; it is implied her
voice will return.
Familiarity with water—and hence
with fluidity and transformation—be-
longs, alongside their siren song, at
the heart of the mermaid’s allure as a
figure of desire. Scribner is alert to the
contemporary significance of this met-
aphorical affinity with fluidity: toward
the end of his book, he explores the
possibilities of gender polymorphous-
ness as performed in events like the an-
nual Mermaid Parade in Coney Island,
held since l983. In a jubilant carnival
mood, “mermaiders” explore “becom-
ing other.”
However, say the word “mermaid”
today to a child and they will, as like
as not, imagine a glamour girl who re-
sembles the Little Mermaid of the 1989
Disney film—one of the biggest box of-
fice hits ever, with merchandise featur-
ing dolls of the heroine Ariel. Mattel
soon brought out a series of Barbies in
assorted mermaid costumes, and then
tried to make amends to boys, giving
“Merman Ken” a sparkly aqua sheath
as well. Scribner reproduces these and
comments, scornfully, that as “a thin,
white merman with platinum blond
hair, blue eyes and six- pack abs, Mer-
Ken was hardly representative of the
diverse audience of children and adults
who might purchase him.”
The design of these figures only
looks sparkly new; it in fact reprises
those early images scattered on Re-
naissance maps and combines them
with many morbid Pre- Raphaelite and
Edwardian paintings that render, in
slick oil paint, the silvery iridescence of
the sirens against the deathly pallor of
the sailors whom they have lured and
whose corpses they are bearing down
below to their secret underwater cham-
bers. But even as Scribner focuses on
the sightings, frauds, and artifacts, he
does not fail to engage with the quarrel
at the core of the mermaid myth: the
cultural engineering of femininity.
As Dorothy Dinnerstein crystallized
in her 1976 polemic, The Mermaid and
the Minotaur:The images...have bearing, not
only on human malaise in general
(this they have in common with
all the creatures of their ilk—har-
pies and centaurs, werewolves and
sphinxes, winged nymphs, goat-
eared fauns, and so on—who have
haunted our species’ imagination)
but also on our sexual arrangements
in particular. The treacherous mer-
maid, seductive and impenetra-
ble female representative of the
dark and magic underwater world
from which our life comes and in
which we cannot live, lures voyag-
ers to their doom. The fearsome
minotaur, gigantic and eternally
infantile offspring of a mother’s un-(^1) For an example, see Teffi, Other
Worlds: Peasants, Pilgrims, Spirits,
Saints, translated from the Russian by
Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chan-
dler (New York Review Books, 2021),
in which Nadezhda Lokhvit skaya
(under the pen name Teffi)—a collector
and re- visioner of Russian fairy tales
and ghost stories heard in childhood—
tells of a water spirit who is a terrifying
shapeshifter, appearing now as a man,
now as a woman, and then vanishing al-
together back into the river.
(^2) Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2020. It won
the Costa Book Award in the UK in
January.
(^3) For more on Barnum, see Nathaniel
Rich’s “American Humbug” in these
pages, April 23, 2020.
(^4) See my review in these pages, Decem-
ber 19, 2013.
‘Seated poet (possibly Orpheus) with two
sirens’; terracotta sculptures with traces of
polychromy, Tarentum, 350 –300 BCE
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