“She was lying face down, her body twisted into a loose curl, her hair matted with scraps of seaweed.” A mermaid, in conventional wisdom, is a mythical creature of great beauty and mystery. Why then does the author use language such as ‘twisted’ and ‘matted with scraps’ to describe what should normally be a legend of pulchritude? Her scales are described as ‘glinting with an oily light’, ‘wet and slippery’, with a coat of ‘slime’.This shows the man, who is the first character who is associates with the mermaid, and observes her as something strange and bizarre, almost animal. Later in the story, the priest who exorcises the mermaid’s spirit, has a dream about her, and she is represented as a huge eel. The mermaid is not seen by any character besides the man, yet she is able to instill the image of her animalism upon the minds of the villagers, as well as the readers.
Secondly, I will look into how the characters respond to the mermaid.
As I have discussed above, the man who first discovered the mermaid is scared of her. She’s described so bizarrely, and he flees when he discovers that she is alive. She actually welcomes him, smiling, but his fear of what she is, as something so strange that only belongs on a church door, brings him running across the stones. This shows how the fisherman fears the unknown, because he had never seen a mermaid in his life. In contrast, the other characters- the villagers, who never actually see the mermaid, also seem to fear it. After the man sees the mermaid, the author writes about the ‘consequences’. A lady is heard crying in the night. A cow dies for no apparent reason. A woman gives birth to a deformed boy that dies after a few hours. And what happens? ‘Everyone agreed that this must be the mermaid’s fault.’
The cow may have had an underlying condition. The baby may have been always malformed. The lady may have been crying for any mundane reason. But the fact that this happens after a man sees a mermaid on the beach causes the people to blame it on that unseen, paranormal being that is unfamiliar to them. It appears that everyone in indirect contact with the mermaid is ‘cursed’. The priest sent to exorcise the spot where she was found, later has a nightmare about her slithering upon his body, tail wrapped eel-like around his legs. People ‘wait with growing apprehension’ for what is to come.
Thirdly, the mood and atmosphere of the story in the Mermaid contributes to the air of fear that hangs over the minds of the characters. In the beginning, on the beach while the man looks at the mermaid, it feels almost surreal as he examines her body, running his hands over her scales and tail in fascination in wonder. It gives the story a dream-like quality at the very beginning. The mood undergoes a transition, suddenly when he flips over the mermaid’s body. He sees her staring, blue eyes and her smiling face – and he is frightened. A dark cloud is cast over the whole story. He runs, into a darker, more realistic area, through ‘grey scrub’ and ‘sharp empty shells of clams and oysters’. Once he notices the mermaid is alive, sentient, and aware of her surroundings, the world grows dark and moody, growing only more serious until finally the consequences of the mermaid (the townsfolk misfortune) are revealed.
Fourthly, the ending of the story concludes the suspicion of the villagers.
The cycle of fear is complete… the man who discovered the mermaid travels ‘further and further’ from shore. His curiosity returns and he wants to find her once again, perhaps in regret for the villagers blaming all the negative repercussions on her, perhaps to say sorry for burying the lock of her hair. He remains fascinated with her, she lives ‘in a corner of his mind’ and he hopes to find her. He no longer fears her. But it is too late, for she is already gone, and the magic that he could have experienced is an opportunity lost. He watches for the ‘glistening among the fish’, she has become a treasure to seek, but his own fear in the beginning of the story kept him from seeing the mermaid’s beauty. If he were to see her again, would the cycle of fear simply begin anew?
In conclusion, it is very evident that Julia Blackburn is using all the above techniques to illustrate the story’s main theme: people are frightened of what they don’t understand. Through the use of imagery, the characters, the mood and the ending of the story, it emphasizes that when one encounters a situation of which they have no previous experience of, no anticidents or rules on how to react, as the event of the mermaid reveals, they panic, escapes, and blame the problems on the great unknown.
