Monster or Missing Link? The Mermaid and the Victorian Imagination
While the evolutionist hypothesis was gaining ground in the early decades of the nineteenth century and paleontology showed that species had existed and become extinct, many natural scientists were led to think that the fantastic animals which peopled classical mythologies maybe were not the fantasi...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2017-03-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/3188 |
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| Summary: | While the evolutionist hypothesis was gaining ground in the early decades of the nineteenth century and paleontology showed that species had existed and become extinct, many natural scientists were led to think that the fantastic animals which peopled classical mythologies maybe were not the fantasies of creative minds but lost species. In this context, mermaids that had been household names for ages were perceived as hybrid creatures, possibly even missing links between the aquatic and terrestrial forms of life. Moreover, the mermaid species did not seem wholly extinct: some were reported to have been sighted off the coast of Scotland as recently as in 1809 and 1812, and when the Feejee mermaid was exhibited in London in 1822, it raised a zoological debate. While some scientists such as Sir Everard Home seriously suspected a hoax, others, including Dr Rees Price, were convinced that the mermaid was the ‘found link’ in the chain of evolution, and were ready to accept it in the grand table of living beings in the space that Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, had left especially blank because he thought that mermaids might exist. Nineteenth-century audiences were used to oddities. The newly discovered platypus was a more puzzling creature than the mermaid after all, but it clearly was an animal. Human ‘monsters’ such as Siamese twins or Joseph Merrick, the ‘Elephant Man’, were known and toured in fairs, but their humanity was not disputed. A contemporary form of human-animal hybridism, however, raised serious questions about the ontological definition of human nature. What started as a zoological debate heated up in an intellectual war because the ‘mermaid question’ was imbedded in larger issues related to hybridism. This paper purposes to explore these issues and to follow their development throughout the Victorian period. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |