As a mermaid, she already felt like an outsider. Woon’s narrator is a mermaid who sought the land not due to her obsession over a human prince, but because she wanted to escape the control of her older sisters who regularly made decisions for her. The Little Mermaid was already a tale about ideas of belonging and spaces that prevented access, but Woon’s reimagining of the tale focuses on the way that our social and physical environments are made to exclude and reject certain bodies. In “The Mermaid and the Prince of Dirt”, Angeline Woon takes the exploration of essential otherness in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and reworks it into a tale of disability and trying to fit into a world that actively prevents spaces of accommodation. Accessing the MermaidA review of Angeline Woon’s “The Mermaid and the Prince of Dirt” in Those Who Make Us: Canadian Creature, Myth, and Monster Stories, edited by Kaitlin Tremblay and Kelsi Morris (Exile, 2016)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |