Mermaids and the Nineteenth-Century Bildungsroman

Why do certain narratives become so important at given historical moments that they become almost a language, almost an environment? This paper tries to think through that question in terms of children’s literature by... [ view full abstract ]

Why do certain narratives become so important at given historical moments that they become almost a language, almost an environment? This paper tries to think through that question in terms of children’s literature by investigating what one historian of the book calls the “astonishing preoccupation” (Blamires) in the nineteenth century with the German romanticist Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte Fouqué’s mermaid story Undine (1811).  Appealing and marketed to children and adults alike, this famous “made up” fairy tale or kunstmärchen provoked a transatlantic, intertextual, as well as intermedia, dialogue which highlighted competing ideas about childhood development, particularly in terms of gender/sexuality, race, and ableness.  For this seminar, I focus on why Undine became a site of transatlantic theoretical debate specifically for nineteenth-century women writers seeking to revise the male bildungsroman to depict the girl’s development into a woman.  I compare how the American Louisa May Alcott’s popular Little Women (1868, 1869) and the South African Olive Schreiner’s posthumously published Undine (ca. 1874-1876) used de la Motte Fouqué’s mermaid story to imagine the girl’s development to maturity through both the framework of race and ability/disability.  To be clear, I do not claim that Schreiner read Alcott (most likely she did not), and Alcott did not (and could never have) read Schreiner’s novel.  Instead, my interest lies in why two white women writers from two different settler colonial nations—nations whose historical development and racial politics are nonetheless often seen as comparable and mutually illuminating—found de la Motte Fouqué’s text important to revise as they wrote their respective female bildungsroman.  What might the mermaid tell us about the nineteenth-century cultural imaginary, particularly the complicated emergence of feminist consciousness in settler colonial nations?