The European-Atlantic Mermaid and the Shadows of Empire

Abstract: This essay argues for the close connection between the history of race and empire and the explosion of mermaid textuality in the nineteenth-century US and throughout the European-Atlantic world. Focusing on the most circulated and revised mermaid narrative of the period, Undine (1811), by the German romantic writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, the essay demonstrates how this text preserves in fantastic form a characteristic response to the Haitian Revolution. In the wake of the first successful revolt of the enslaved, Undine returns to the European encounter narrative to meditate on the hope and possibility of "love" across the cultures and "races" of humans and mermaids, only to insist melancholically on such love's tragic failure. To understand the extraordinary resonance this mermaid story had in the United States, the essay tracks the transatlantic exchange of ideas about Undine from story to a sensational ballet to a famous Currier and Ives lithograph. Watching this mermaid story cross national boundaries and media genres, we gain insight into mermaids, the cultural forms they inhabited, and the ways the fascination with them was continually renewed in the age of empire. Finally, this essay suggests two main ways that nineteenth-century European-Atlantic mermaid narratives continue to cast a long shadow on the present.