Editorial Introduction
Published in 1891, Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Fisherman and His Soul” is a retelling of two Hans Christian Andersen tales, “The Little Mermaid” (1836) and “The Shadow” (1847). “The Fisherman and his Soul” follows a young fisherman who falls in love with a mermaid, a soulless being and therefore a socially unacceptable match for the fisherman. Our critical edition of this text explores Wilde’s ideas about love, inclusivity, spirituality. Because this edition is a collaborative project involving twenty-seven editors, annotators, and interpreters of illustrations, it necessarily shares an array of often contrasting views. We choose to think of this array less as a disagreement than as a rainbow.
We also exhibit some of Ukrainian-American artist Theodore Nadejen’s original illustrations of Wilde’s story, from his opulent 1929 coffee-table book The Fisherman and His Soul and Other Fairy Tales. To our knowledge, ours is the first critical edition of “The Fisherman and His Soul” to address Nadejen’s adaptation.
Finally, to emphasize the modernity of Wilde’s mermaid tale, our editorial paratext touches upon the story’s relationship with other, more modern contributions to the ‘Little Mermaid’ transmedia tradition. Created by undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, the edition is not a scholarly resource, but an experimental deep dive into the Digital and Public Humanities. We invite our readers to also become “part of that world.”
Kana Coonce
The “Fisherman’s” Queer Idealism
Wilde regularly examined queer themes in his works – works that include “Fisherman,” which, despite revolving around the love between a man and a woman — or a mermaid, as the case may be — touches upon themes that would have been relevant to a gay man of his time and remain relevant today. Was “Fisherman” itself a coming-out allegory? Almost certainly, yes. While shrouded behind heavy religious imagery and a rather bizarre tale of of man’s shadow gone amok, at its core, “Fisherman” is a story about a socially unacceptable love and the toll it takes upon a man and all of his parts to pursue it. “Fisherman” also serves as wish-fulfillment with an idealistic view of human nature. While “Fisherman” could be read as a pessimistic tale of the lengths to which a person must go when their love is deemed unacceptable by the world around them, it projects an ultimately idealistic view of humanity and our capacity to transform the world around us with — and be transformed by — love.
In his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891), Wilde argues that when taking in art, “the more completely [man] can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question” (65). In “The Fisherman and his Soul,” the Priest is Wilde’s “man.” As a man of God, the Priest believes himself superior to the soulless creatures who “tempt” him with their songs and stories. Already, by virtue of believing himself to hold moral authority over the nonhuman inhabitants of the world, he has muted his ability to appreciate their art for what it is.
When confronted with the beauty of the white flowers on his altar on the third anniversary of the Fisherman and the Mermaid’s deaths, however, he has no one to attribute them to than God himself. While the Priest is at first discomforted by the flowers’ beauty just as he was by the creations of the soulless inhabitants of the earth, this time, he is allowed to sit with his own discomfort. He arrives at an idea of God that is new to him–though not to Christian theology. So moved is the Priest by the flowers brought to the altar by the people that his speech on the wrath of God is transformed. The Priest “spake not of the wrath of God, but of the God whose name is Love,” Wilde says. Although the Priest “knew not… why he so spake,” his theology returns to the original Christian belief in love. Only after he has already declared his own feelings for the flowers – that they are a representation of God’s love – does he learn of their source – “the corner” of the barren “field” where the Priest had the Fisherman and the Mermaid buried three years before. In living as their true selves, which requires following one’s heart, the source of love, the Fisherman and the Mermaid inspire art – the flower arrangement – that even the Priest recognizes as divine.
If the Mermaid and the Fisherman serve as a stand-in for a same-sex couple, then the Priest’s change of heart and blessing of the pagan creatures of the earth represents a shift toward acceptance, a casting off of his socially-prescribed bias in favor of loving for the sake of loving. Notably, Wilde does not cast aside the Priest’s religious affiliation; instead, he reaffirms Christianity as a religion born of love. Homosexuality, in being a true reflection of love between two souls – or hearts, in the case of “Fisherman” – fits into the tenets of Christianity, contrary to the mores of the time. In particular, this makes “The Fisherman” a Christian theological response to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which in the year that Wilde came out to a few people harshened the legal punishments for “gross indecency” (homosexuality). Wilde places emphasis on the teachings of Christ more than he does Christianity, ultimately placing divinity in the souls of men. Thus, in changing his heart, God performs a miracle. In changing the hearts of others – filling them “with joy and wonder” – God builds a brighter future for men like the Fisherman.
Mermaids and Selkies
By Carly Schmidt
Every culture around the world has their own version of the myth of the mermaid. Furthermore, most mermaid myths are darker than the fairytales you may have grown up with. Many of us know Andersen’s tale “The Little Mermaid” (1836). Since the Disney animated film was released (1990), the protagonist, whom Disney renamed ‘Ariel’, has been many young girls' favorite princess.There is also a mermaid in J.K. Rowling’s novel Harry Potter: The Goblet of Fire (2000) and its film adaptation, and a school of cannibal mermaids in the film Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011). In that film, the “fish out of water” mermaid in love with a human was distinguished by her nonviolence. Rowling and Pirates’ merpeople are certainly scary and intimidating.
What, then, is the origin of the “mermaid,” and what kind of creature is she? A mermaid is technically a mythical creature with the top of a human, and the bottom of a fish. The earliest Western mermaid appears in an Assyrian dated circa 1000 BCE (Chainey). In Homer’s epic The Odyssey, Odysseus resists the beautiful, female, swimming sirens and their dangerous songs.
The story spread quickly across the world. Christopher Columbus “famously reported a sighting during a voyage in 1493” ...“declaring the mermaids he had seen as ‘Not half as beautiful as they are painted’” (Chainey).
The mermaid myth is especially visible in Wilde’s native Ireland. The Irish mermaid, the “selkie” is a frightening cross between a human and a seal. In the legend of the selkie, folklorist Jason Mark Harris explains’, ‘men who covet a mermaid [selkie] as a domestic partner can only obtain this through stealing the scaly covering of the mermaid when she has removed it while temporarily on shore, or otherwise preventing her from entering the water’ (Harris 2009). More generally, “selkies, mermaids, and merfolk, have constituted a crucial part of Irish folk tradition” (Blanco).
The danger of the mermaid’s love is an important theme in Irish and other variations of the myth. Many stories of mermaids claim they have a power for “enchanting mail sailors with their beauty and irresistible singing voices, and then luring bedazzled men to watery graves” (Alexander). Another common theme among stories of mermaids and selkies is that “despite their destructive natures, mermaids sometimes have mortal lovers. However, they are not amorous creatures that seek out romance, and it is generally only through precise measures that men gain their contractual allegiance” (Harris). Wilde followed this theme when he wrote about a fisherman who fell in love with a mermaid and would sell his soul in order to spend the rest of his life with her. Although, in other ways Wilde actually did not follow the track of many other authors who would write about mermaids. Unlike the textual history of mermaids, his mermaid lover did not kill or tease him. Once he sold his soul, he lived happily in the sea with his mermaid lover. Many could say Wilde was ahead of his time, because “modern mermaids have relinquished their devastating power over men”, they are “fun-loving and flirtatious instead of frightening” (Alexander). Even in Disney’s 2023 version, however, mermaid stories are tales about heroes - whether mermaids or people - who venture out of their comfort zone, or are tempted to do so. For that reason, we’ll always keep listening to their siren songs.
The Little Mermaid Tradition
By Kayla Erickson and Rebecca Nesvet
More so than the Faust legend, though, “The Fisherman and His Soul” is indebted to the story “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Anderson, which concerns a young female mermaid who longs to live as a human on land. “H.C. Anderson’s mermaid can be understood as a siren in reverse. “Instead of seducing human beings, she wishes to live as one herself” (Mortensen, 451). The mermaid learns that humans have immortal souls that go to heaven once they die. However, the role of the soul does not play a rather big part in this story, instead the focus is on her falling in love with a human prince and selling her tongue to a witch so that she can obtain legs and walk on land. When the prince marries another she has to make the choice to kill him or herself and she ends up choosing the latter (Fass, 292).
In “The Fisherman and His Soul,” the roles are reversed. Instead of the mermaid looking for a soul so that she can be with the male human, the male human is looking to rid himself of his soul so that he can be with the mermaid. “...he held out his arms to the Mermaid. “I will send my soul away,” he cried, “and you shall be my bride, and I will be thy bridegroom, and in the depth of the sea we will dwell together…” (Wilde). This telling is a revisionist take on Anderson’s classic, but not very revisionist, because in the end, the mermaid still dies.
Perhaps the most famous adaptation of The Little Mermaid is the Disney animated film scripted and composed by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (1898). This telling is more lighthearted than both Anderson’s and Wilde’s versions. The story appears designed to appeal to a child audience. “It became a genuine success in the U.S. precisely because it gave American girls an opportunity to continue playing the mermaid” (Mortensen, 450). It gave young girls a fantasy version of love and adventure, without the scary ending of the Anderson version. In this adaption, the mermaid Ariel longs to walk on land and she falls in love with a male prince when she sees him on a ship. Ariel then goes to the sea witch and gives up her voice in exchange for legs. In the end, the prince and Ariel live happily ever after. This version does not feature the topic of the soul and nobody dies. The film became very popular and “more than fulfilled artistic expectations in receiving Oscars for best music and best song” (Mortensen, 448). Because of the popularity of the movie, it obtained a large amount of fans which led to the continuous marketing of the movie.
However, it also became a cult classic fable about LGBT+ life experience. TAshman and Menken were well known as authors of the cult classic musical Little Shop of Horrors (1982), which was widely understood as a satire of American heteropatriarchal suburban mores. Ashman was an out gay man and was struggling with HIV+ (he was diagnosed in 1988) while writing The Little Mermaid. He died of AIDS-related complications two years after The Little Mermaid’s premiere, in 1991, and so did not live to see his Beauty and the Beast premiered. According to journalist Peter Knegt: “as subconscious as it may have been at the time, The Little Mermaid was, for many queer kids born in the 1980s, a pre-coming out of sorts”; it was for him, Knegt says (Kneght). As Kneght explains, “it doesn't take a psychiatrist to decipher why a five-year-old gay boy”--himself, in 1989– “would be so drawn to [these] lyrics” from Ariel’s most memorable anthem, “Part of Your World”:
When's it my turn?
Wouldn't I love
Love to explore that shore up above
Out of the sea
Wish I could be
Part of that world!
This reading is further developed in Pulitzer Prize winner and LGBT+ activist playwright Doug Wright’s 2007 Broadway musical adaptation of the 1989 film.
Nadejen’s Reimagining: An Art Deco “Fairytale”
By Jacob Braatz
The artist Theodore Nadejen, who created the illustrations, is not a well-documented person; personal effects and legacy are complex to contribute. However, we know some information that can help us infer based on his life and how he could relate to the story.
Nadejen was born in Russia in 1889. He fled his parents and home in his early teens, joined the Russian Imperial Volunteer Navy, and became a captain. Then, at the height of the 1917 Russian Revolution, he fled to the United States and ended up in Los Angeles. He married another Russian immigrant named Ida Zeitlin, a writer for whom he would primarily illustrate. He spent time in New Mexico, which was a center for American art and influenced his imagery.
Nadejen used an art style that was iconic at the time, known as Art Deco. However, he went beyond traditional metropolitan Art Deco themes, often depicting Native Americans and indigenous architectural styles. His style was known as ‘Pueblo Art Deco’ and has been described as “historic Native symbols were substituted for the jazzy, streamlined symbols of the modern machine age.” In Nadejen’s illustrations for “The Fisherman and his Soul” as in Pueblo Art Deco in general, “low- and medium rise, rough-skinned, sandy colored buildings were ornamented with stylized” pseudo-Indigenous “chevrons and turquoise sun-bursts that looked like… sand paintings.” (Katz and Katz 71). This was an all too common appropriation of the Indigenous art and architecture of the American Southwest.
The influence of Indigenous cultures on Nadejen explains the reasoning behind his illustrations and sheds light on his particular interpretation of Wilde’s storytelling. Nadejen was interested in folklore. He had previously illustrated a book of Russian folktales. He may have thought of himself as an indigene of sorts, due to Russian and then Soviet imperialism in his native Ukraine. The inclusion of native American imagery projects Wilde’s story into the context of an ancient tale, maybe one of story that has lasted from generation to generation. Each of the features described in Wilde’s novel is exaggerated in a way where a story is told through voice. Each of the describable features is shown to have distinct features but retain a single color or geometry.
How Nadejen recontextualizes the story is a story retold through speech, mostly in line with how Wilde structured the story. Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” came out close to 60 years before Wilde’s version, meaning Wilde’s version can be interpreted as a generational rendition, or a telling of a story that relies on people passing it from generation to generation, often shown through bedtime stories or oral history. Nadejen would have known that many Native American cultures significantly value oral history. He purposefully gives his art book’s audience the experience of imagining a story experienced orally over generations. His imagery evokes a feeling of familiarity but a sense of change. Within the illustrations, years of oral retelling appear to unfold.
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