By Susan Fletcher
When I was a kid, I loved fairytales. We had this ten-volume set of children’s stories that came with our encyclopedia set: ‘The New Junior Classics’. My favorite volume was the second one: ‘Stories of Wonder and Magic’. Even when I was in high school, I would take it into my bedroom and close the door and not tell anybody what I was doing, because it would be so uncool for anybody to catch you reading fairytales when you were old enough to drive a car.
As I grew older, I still loved that fairytale wonder and magic. But there was one thing about some of the tales I read as a child that began to bug me as I experienced more of life: the fairytale girls.
I grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Okay, don’t remind me – that was a long, long time ago! Things have changed a bunch since then—thank goodness. But back then, most of the girls in the fairytales I read or saw in the movies didn’t actually do all that much. They would sit around being beautiful, singing nicely, and being kind to little birds and animals.
Then, they would get in some kind of trouble. And instead of actually doing something, they would sit around being beautiful, singing nicely, and being kind to little birds and animals…and wait for their boyfriend—The Prince—to solve all their problems for them.
By the time I was in my twenties, I’d had enough experience with boyfriends to know that you can’t count on them to solve all your problems. Sometimes boyfriends actually create worse problems. Sorry to say, I realized I was going to have to solve most of my problems myself. And some of them were going to be hard and scary.
So I wrote my own fairytales, ‘The Dragon Chronicles’ series, with a heroine who has to scrape up more courage than she ever thought she had to solve a bunch of hard and scary problems, involving baby dragons.
As the years went by, the girls in modern fairytale retellings became braver, stronger. They took action to solve their problems. Brava! I wrote other kinds of stories—historical fiction, mostly. I thought I was done with fairytales. But then, for various reasons, ‘The Little Mermaid’ drifted into my mind. I remembered how much I loved the particular wonder and magic of that story, though I really didn’t care for the ending of Hans Christian Andersen’s original version.
Meanwhile, Disney had come up with an animated version of that story and, though Disney’s ending was an improvement on the original, I wasn’t all that crazy about that one, either. (Note: Disney’s live-action ‘Little Mermaid’ came out in 2023, after I had finished ‘Sea Change’ and it had been accepted for publication.)
Somebody really ought to retell that story, I thought.
Why not me?
So I wrote ‘Sea Change’, a young adult science fiction novel that has lots to say specifically to 21st century readers. It’s set in a future world of accelerated global warming and human gene editing; our “mermaid” can breathe underwater due a rogue gene hacker’s mistake. ‘Sea Change’, loosely based on ‘The Little Mermaid’, also has a completely different ending from either the Andersen or Disney versions.
How a story ends tells so much about what the story means. And in this case, the endings of the Andersen and Disney versions of “The Little Mermaid” offer different interpretations of what it is to be a woman. How much agency and resilience she has. How important it is for her to value her authentic self, versus changing herself in order to be with a man.
You know the basic premise: a mermaid falls in love with a human man (a prince, natch!) She changes herself so that she is human, too—in order to be with the guy she’s crushing on. The transition requires pain. Lots of pain. And then…
Well, in the Andersen version, the romance doesn’t “take.” The Prince falls for someone else. And at that point, our mermaid pretty much gives up. And because the Prince won’t marry her, the rules of magic in the story world dictate that she must die. Which she does. She may or may not go to heaven—but basically, she is dead.
And so what does that say?
I mean, Andersen came up with this super-compelling premise, and he infused his story with wonder and magic aplenty. His ‘Little Mermaid’ has captivated readers for literally centuries. It captivated me. All the same, he was a man of his times and, thematically, the story says that if a girl changes herself in order to win a guy’s love, and the guy doesn’t choose to be with her, she, well, ceases to exist.
So what about Disney?
In both the animated and live-action versions, Disney’s Ariel is spunky, smart, brave, full of life. She’s a bit of a rebel, too. And she saves the Prince’s life more than once! I love that! But she still changes herself—completely—in order to be with him. And in the end, it works out just fine.
I don’t know. Something about that makes me the tiniest bit uneasy.
When I told one of my friends that I was writing ‘Sea Change’, and that my main character was going to change herself in a really big way in order to be with the guy she adores, my friend said, “Like that ever works.”
Meaning, it never does.
Is that right? I’m not sure. Maybe it does work out, sometimes. But what does that say about authenticity? When a girl has to change herself—painfully and permanently—in order to get the guy?
I could be overthinking. (It wouldn’t be the first time.) But that just isn’t the story I wanted to write. So in my story…
Well, no spoilers! Though I will say that in ‘Sea Change’, radically changing oneself in order to be with the “prince” may turn not out to be such a great idea, after all. In order to find true love, our “mermaid” first has to learn to be truly herself.
Susan Fletcher is the award-winning author of fourteen books for young readers, including ‘Dragon’s Milk’, ‘Shadow Spinner’, and ‘Journey of the Pale Bear’. Her novels have been translated into nine languages and have received a Golden Kite Honor from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, as well as acclaim from the American Library Association, the Children’s Book Council, Bookriot.com, Natural History Magazine, Western Writers of America, Women Writing in the West, and many more. Susan taught for many years in the M.F.A. in Writing for Children program at Vermont College. Her new novel, ‘Sea Change’, a YA science fiction love story, comes out in June 3, through Abrams Books. Visit Susan at www.susanfletcher.com, and follow her on Instagram and Facebook.
ABOUT THE BOOK: ‘The Little Mermaid’ gets a futuristic cli-fi spin in Susan Fletcher’s ‘Sea Change‘ where a gene-hack gone wrong produces babies born with an extra set of lungs and gills. Living in a post-climate change world, one young woman lives peacefully among other gene-hacked friends off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. But when she falls in love with a “Normal,” someone without the gene mutation, and finds out that her father has been released from prison for the gene-hack accident, Turtle must choose between being herself among her fellow mer-friends and family or choosing to change herself to fit into the world of her love.
