Read "The Seas" by Samantha Hunt

Read "The Seas" by Samantha Hunt

In two whole paragraphs answer the following question.

The narrator of The Seas decides that she is a mermaid. However, being a mermaid in this novel is nothing like the Disney version, in which a mermaid is a pretty princess. What does it mean to be a mermaid in this novel? What stories does she tell about what it means to be a mermaid? How do these stories shed light on her “human” life? What longings does being a mermaid fulfill for her?

Then respond to the following two statements that two other students wrote. A paragraph for each would be good enough.

"Fuck the dry land, I am a Mermaid." The narrator of The Seas, says this and makes us aware that she wants her vision of being a mermaid help her flee the dry land. This is her way of escape from a town she doesn’t want to be apart of. A town where she doesn’t fit in and a town where she can’t have the one thing she wants. Becoming a Mermaid for her is not just an escape, it’s something she believes will bring her close to her father, who once told her she was a mermaid. She believes her father left her family because he needed to be in the sea. It’s true that being a mermaid is no where like the Disney fairy tale. In the Disney movies, they describe a happy and safe sea life, where princesses live, and have a great life. But from what her mother describes, the real life mermaids, live a very dark and dull life where they kill sailors.

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As I am making my way through the novel I am reminded time again of the novels of Janet Finch and Suzanna Cason (White Oleander and Girl, Interrupted, respectively). The female protagonist in all of these stories suffers from a deep void left by an absence in their family history. I believe women are inherently tribal, they seek to create family groups. Their friendships are more intimate and intense than those of men. When young women lack a male figure in their lives, especially during puberty, this can leave one feeling alone, vulnerable, and unprotected.
The father figure represents a safe harbor for a young woman, especially our narrator. His promise is to care for her and protect her until she can find a man to take over the responsibility. This may be a subconscious desire that when not fulfilled – left a whole inside our narrator.
I think that she is experiencing some form of a Dissociative episode. She has taken the information that her father is "lost at sea" literally, and in turn has dealt with this grief by creating a world in which it is possible for her to become a part of the thing that consumed her father. To join him in some way…
We can see this in several subcultures in America today. Goths, pagans, satanists, etc.- all lost souls seeking some kind of validation- some desire to belong, even at the expense of their mainstream priviledge. I feel like the father isn’t literally looking for her father, she is looking for herself. She just doesn’t have the emotional language to articulate the ‘yearning’ she feels, or the tools to develop a better understand of that yearning. She believes she is looking for the father that she lost, she wants to become a Mermaid because she wants to belong, to be a part of, instead of apart from. King Neptune represents, in an ironic way, reality for our protagonist. He is the truth behind her delusion- he represents the father figure she has lost… trying to protect her even at the expense of her dream. She has found a way to internally guide herself, to establish her own internal adult resource person, even in her warped sense of reality. There is no sense of going back, her father is gone, he will never return.

 

 

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