“Et max laryngitis”: Silencing the Siren in The Little Mermaid

This chapter will explore the silence of the siren through a posthuman perspective in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and the 1989 Disney animation of the same name. The siren has ridden the watery boundary of silence and sound since antiquity, luring sailors to their demise with her evocative song. Dorothy Dinnerstein situates the appeal and danger of the siren as stemming from her environment, “the dark and magic underwater world from which our life comes from and in which we cannot live.” Water is a silent space. Inhuman and uncanny, the water calls to us just as much as it deters us. To enter into a watery space means to lose our sense of sound, to lose our voices and our breath. Children’s literature explores this inhuman loss from the perspective of the siren. In Andersen’s classic children’s tale, voice and silence become the tropes through which to explore what makes us human and what makes us other. The most alluring quality of the mermaid protagonist is her stunning inhuman voice. In a reversal of the drowning man trope, the mermaid must willingly sacrifice her voice in order to exit the water. The 1989 Disney film further explores the concept of the voiceless creature, underlining the lost voice within its epic musical production. Through her song and her silence, the mermaid gives voice to unique tensions between adult and child, human and non-human.