Once Upon a Fishtail in Aquamarine, an Ecofeminist Fairy Tale: Mermaids as Water Girls from the Nineteenth Century to Twenty-First-Century Disney

ABSTRACT Guided by ecofeminist philosophy and fairy tale criticism, this article theorizes the metaphorical potency of mermaids via Alice Hoffman’s Aquamarine (2001). The novella narrativizes mermaids’ twined applicability to girlhood and the environment while resisting Disneyfied depictions of wish fulfillment. Although Hoffman actively distances her fishtailed water girl from Disney’s source, Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale, she recovers the little mermaid’s folkloric predecessors, the fairy Melusine and the water nymph Undine. Allusions to and divergences from this identifiable mermaid legacy in girl culture serve Aquamarine’s environmental metaphors. Hoffman’s ecofeminist critique also rejects neoliberal postfeminist discourses that prioritize the individual as consumer, epitomized by Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989), which influenced the cinematic adaptation Aquamarine (2006). Messages about decentering the individual and serving a higher purpose resonate in the literary Aquamarine, which perceives nature as a living entity and is prescient about the consequences of human activity in relation to climate change. Two decades after the novella’s publication, Aquamarine’s insight is pertinent as we reckon with global warming with the help of other water girls, including, ironically enough, Disney’s 2023 Ariel.