“My Dear Mute Foundling with Those Telling Eyes of Yours”: female agency, visual forms, and the disabled gaze in “The Little Mermaid”

Helm, H

Abstract

The article explores the disabled female gaze through the titular character in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid” (1837), arguing that sight is a strategy of empowerment that challenges the able-bodied male gaze. Andersen’s fairy tale—and its accompanying visual forms, including sculpture and illustration—is placed in dialogue with Literary Disability Studies, examining how the little mermaid is depicted as an objectified spectacle. Throughout the narrative, she contends with gendered constraints and bodily impairment as a result of her transition from mermaid to human. However, the article also suggests that the little mermaid’s gaze is an implicit, interrogative device for female emancipation because she challenges the able-bodied male gaze. Existing scholarship has considered gender and disability in “The Little Mermaid,” but the gaze is yet to be addressed in relation to these arguments. Examining the intersections between femininity, disability, and the gaze disrupts and reimagines critical traditions of the gaze, and Andersen’s representation of the little mermaid character does in part uphold feminine and ableist norms. However, this representation also offers a tantalising glimpse into how new approaches toward the female disabled gaze (in contrast to the highly theorized male gaze) can be derived from nineteenth-century children’s literature.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 4, 2022
• Publication Date: Feb 2, 2023
• Deposit Date: Feb 7, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 7, 2023
• Journal: Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies
• Print ISSN: 1757-6458
• Electronic ISSN: 1757-6466
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 23-40
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2023.2