In 1830, a very young Alfred Lord Tennyson composed a tender poem called “The Mermaid.” In it, he imagined himself as a “mermaid fair” with “a comb of pearl.” He saw himself frolicking under the sea, where “I would fling on each side my low-flowing locks,/And lightly vault from the throne and play/With the mermen in and out of the rocks…”

The poem may be coded longing for a queer life that was impossible to act upon in Tennyson’s day. But it’s also something else entirely: a prime of example of how mermaids have been co-opted as cultural memes stretching back thousands of years.

With the release this spring of Disney’s new live-action film, The Little Mermaid, mermaid-fever is reaching a new pitch. So what else is new?

We are drowning in mermaids—painted, illustrated, sculpted, filmed, or written about (more than 75 pages of mermaid books listed on Amazon alone). Almost every nation on earth has a mermaid mythology. Mermaids are, and have always been, whatever and whoever we (read: the dominant gender-race-power hierarchy) has needed them to be. Some mermaid folklore is benign, some is not, and not surprisingly, water always plays a role. Reduced to parts, the mermaid is human above the waist and wet, wild, and unpredictable below it: the womb, and the birth process itself, are wet, terrifying, often mysterious.

No wonder the Assyrian goddess Atargatis, half-woman, half-fish, served as a hopeful symbol of fertility. Or that men have nearly always sought to limit the mermaid’s movements and force her to conform to prescribed roles. On an ancient terracotta tablet from Chandraketugarh in Eastern India, one of the earliest known renderings of a mermaid shows her swimming beneath a lake, ensnared by the fishing nets of men who have formed a barricade around her. Ah, not so fast, sweetheart.

In Thai folklore, Suvannamaccha (“golden fish” in Sanskrit) becomes embroiled in a human scheme to build a causeway made of rocks. Long story short, instead of minding her own business beneath the waves, she falls in love with a man and bears his children. 

Then there are the temptresses, legions of them. Large-breasted, gorgeous mermaids who ended up as colorfully carved figureheads on sailing ships even as they were maligned for seducing men and luring them to their deaths at sea. Woman as savior and seductress. The Javanese Queen of the Southern Sea, Nyai Roro Kidul, is one of many like this. As ruler of an underwater empire, she lured men into the sea with her supernatural powers and irresistible beauty.

Mermaids, we can’t quit you. At the turn of the 20^th century, the mermaid’s hold on the public imagination was as strong as ever. Hans Christian Andersen’s famously bleak mermaid story (one bad decision after another!), which ends with the miserable mermaid dissolving into foam, is a mere drop in the mermaid-story bucket.

For sculptors over the last century, the mermaid has proven an irresistible draw. New York City, for example, is positively lousy with mermaids. The Rockefeller Plaza Channel Garden Fountains feature six fountainhead sculptures created by New Jersey artist Rene Paul Chambellan in 1935, all showing a triton or mermaid interacting with a sea creature.

The Fountain of Life sculpture from 1905 at the New York Botanical Garden shows a startled mermaid, twisting in surprise as she catches sight of a seashell chariot barreling toward her.

One of the oldest in the region, the Lorelei Fountain in Joyce Kilmer Park in The Bronx, dates from 1899. Three mermaids are seated at the base of the fountain, representing Poetry, Satire, and Melancholy—concepts connected to poet Heinrich Heine to whom the sculpture is dedicated, and which have absolutely nothing to do with mermaids per se. Yet more proof that mermaids show up almost anywhere because we love them. (Lorelai was a siren, not a mermaid, okay?)

Up the road in Bridgeport, Connecticut, you won’t want to miss the improbably placed mermaid rising above a traffic intersection. The artist, Gutzon Borglum, also designed Mount Rushmore.

Fun fact: Borglum’s mermaid was completed in 1912, one year before the famous little mermaid statue in Copenhagen was erected to honor native son Andersen’s tourist-magnet tale.

Which brings us to a dark turn in the history of mermaid representation.

In 2020, the famed Copenhagen mermaid, who perches on a rock at the harbor’s edge, was defaced by stickers and black graffiti saying “racist fish.” (The reason behind the message is unclear, though the incident occurred in the first flush of the Black Lives Matter movement.) That wasn’t even the first time. In 1964, that same statue was beheaded, which caused an uproar.

In Mexico, where roughly 10 women are murdered each day, photographer Pablo Tonatiuh Álvarez Reyes launched the disturbing Siren Project. He poses models encased in realistic mermaid tales in gruesome and disturbing settings, including as a murdered corpse on the ground and as an inanimate trophy on a shelf in a man cave. Reyes’ aim is to “highlight that many violent acts are of a sexual nature.” He chose mermaids specifically because they have been so hyper-sexualized.

By now, it’s common knowledge that when Disney released the trailer last September for the live-action The Little Mermaid starring Black singer and actress Halle Bailey, a racist backlash ensued.

Fortunately, mermaids today are resilient, and so are their creators and fans. In Rivers Solomon’s 2019 novel, The Deep, water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard build their own underwater society. Kat Leyh’s 2021 novel, Thirsty Mermaids, is a queer story about acceptance and finding family, starring three tipsy mermaids who masquerade as humans.

According to Google Analytics, people ask the search engine almost every day whether mermaids are real.

To which I say: Mermaids are as real as you need them to be. And as strong, as independent, as brave, as queer, as Black, or as brown as you want them to be.

For 21^st century mermaids, this really is a whole new world.

– Amy Bernstein

Note: The essay originally appeared in The Bigger Picture, an e-zine on Medium.