Mermaids

Mermaids are a recurring figure in Possession through which the novel connects folklore with questions of identity, freedom, language, and the transmission of stories. They appear both as images carried across generations and as creatures of tales told in winter gatherings: at once bodies marked by transformation and beings who make the border between ordinary life and another world imaginable.

Appearance and Personal Associations

Maud Bailey’s mermaid brooch brings the motif into the material present. Found when she was young in her family’s box of old buttons and costume pieces, it had been dismissed by her mother as unattractive Victorian junk. Maud kept it because it reminded her of the Little Mermaid; more recently, she had also thought of Melusina. Its history in Maud’s family was not something she had questioned, and she recognizes that it looks different when seen among the objects in a shop.

The brooch depicts a small mermaid seated on a rock, her glossy black shoulders turned toward the surface, with hair trailing down her back and a tail extending along the rock. What Roland had taken for twigs around the figure he sees, through the shopkeeper’s attention, as branching coral. The craftsmanship makes the mermaid a carefully made object rather than a generic emblem: hair, tail, and enclosing coral preserve an older artistic skill. The shopkeeper calls the piece unique and advises Maud to look after it, treating it as a companion to a flower-language brooch. Maud instead chooses a friendship brooch for Leonora, leaving the mermaid’s distinct family and imaginative associations intact.

The scene also connects the brooch to Christabel LaMotte’s books, which Maud has inherited. Roland’s remark prompts Maud to recognize that an object long present in her family may carry an inheritance she had not considered. The mermaid therefore joins material survival to belated interpretation: its meaning shifts as Maud encounters new contexts and stories.

Folklore and the Boundary Between Worlds

The novel places mermaids within Brittany’s winter storytelling season. From Toussaint through the dark months toward Christmas, people gather indoors with their work and listen to tales. The season makes the stories part of a recurring communal practice, not merely written records of supernatural belief. Sabine describes her father’s learned, exacting manner of telling, which nevertheless made the creatures of myth and legend feel entirely credible to her. His account of Brocéliande, whose name and borders shift among many variants, presents the legendary landscape as elusive rather than fixed.

Gode’s stories depend even more directly on the conditions of performance. Sabine says that the closeness of listeners indoors and the outer darkness matter to the telling. In the great hall, the fire’s changing light falls on the circle of listeners while people knit, plait, or prepare food; Gode’s gestures make shadows move across the room. The teller’s body, the fire, and the audience combine to give the tale an effect that a bare written transcription cannot reproduce. Mermaids enter this performed world in Gode’s account of a sailor who journeys far across the sea, where they sing among green scales and winding hair. They belong to the dangerous, distant realm reached by voyages beyond familiar boundaries.

The tales also associate mermaids with places where worlds meet. In a story about the Baie des Trépassés, the name may refer not only to shipwrecked dead cast ashore but to those who have crossed from this world to another. The bay is linked to an ancient route by which the dead travelled to the Île de Sein, where priestesses received them; some legends place an Earthly Paradise of golden apples beyond the storms and dark waters. Later, Maud’s account of the island’s nine female figures links its legends to Dahud, queen of Is, who becomes Marie-Morgane, a siren or mermaid who draws men to their deaths. The mermaid thus inhabits a shifting boundary between sea and land, living and dead, and story and place.

Transformation, Language, and Women’s Freedom

Christabel’s reflections give the mermaid a personal and linguistic dimension. She describes herself through the figures of Melusina, the Sirens, and Mermaids: divided among French, English, Breton, and Celtic inheritances, with her thoughts shifting shape along with her languages. She distinguishes the language that gave her the desire to write from the language in which she writes, tracing one to her father and her mother tongue to her mother. English, which she learned early, seems to her composed of separate, solid facts; her account makes linguistic difference part of the difficulty of finding a stable voice.

In conversation with Sabine, Christabel asks whether women are inherently double and rejects that as her claim: the doubling lies in the way men see women. Her question about what Melusina might have been in freedom, without eyes upon her, turns the myth toward the pressure of observation and interpretation. The mermaid’s fishtail becomes a pointed image of that problem. Discussing Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid, Christabel says that the tail was the mermaid’s freedom; exchanging it to please the Prince leaves her voiceless and unwanted, and walking on legs means walking on knives. The story’s transformation is therefore not simply a passage from animal form to human form. It can represent the painful cost of remaking oneself for someone else’s approval.

The novel places these versions beside legends of female power. Maud recounts that the women associated with the Île de Sein were said to control tempests and attract sailors like sirens, and connects them with Dahud and the drowned city of Is. In this strand of the tradition, the mermaid is not only an object of a man’s gaze or desire; she is also a figure of female power, danger, and resistance to easy classification. Christabel’s questions and Maud’s scholarly retelling preserve that tension rather than reducing the creature to a single meaning.

Oral Performance and the Written Tale

Sabine’s journal makes the transmission of stories part of the mermaid motif’s significance. Her father has tried to record Gode’s tales verbatim, preserving the rhythms of her speech, but he finds that the life goes out of the words on the page. He concludes that this helps explain why the Druids regarded spoken words as the breath of life and writing as a kind of death. Sabine initially considers using her journal to record what she hears, following Christabel’s advice, but finds that the intention to write interferes with listening. She stops, then returns to writing for another purpose: to discover what she herself saw and to turn pain into curiosity.

The difference is dramatized when Sabine attempts to write down Gode’s story of a sailor. She recognizes that her version has missed the patterns of Gode’s voice and acquired a literary quality of its own, unlike either the Brothers Grimm or La Motte Fouqué’s Undine. The contrast does not make writing useless: the journal becomes a private means of reflection. Instead, it shows that oral performance and literary retelling have different powers. Mermaids, carried through Gode’s spoken tales, Christabel’s multilingual imagination, and Maud’s inherited brooch, are never simply preserved unchanged; each telling or encounter gives them another form.