Monstrosity and humanity

Monstrosity and humanity names one of the novel’s central struggles over the sea people: whether they are beings with intelligence and claims of their own, or creatures whom human authorities may classify, display, study, and confine. The boundary is tested through anatomy, communication, religious doctrine, and acts of fear and care. No single observer controls the answer. Instead, the changing argument exposes how judgments about personhood can serve the interests of those who hold power over the judged.

Anatomy and the Limits of Classification

When Yves de la Croix presents his findings to Louis XIV, his first account places the sea monster within the known order of animals. Every feature he has studied, he reports, has a counterpart among creatures known to natural philosophy. During the dissection, he notes that the body has neither gills nor a swim bladder, compares it to a dugong, and identifies internal organs normal to mammals. These findings unsettle any simple assumption that the sea monster is an ordinary fish, but they do not by themselves establish that she is human or intelligent.

Louis XIV makes clear that a biological category is not the question he wants answered. He is interested in the supposed organ of immortality, not whether the creature is a fish or a beast. Yves says he has found no evidence for such an organ and places immortality with alchemy, which he regards as abhorrent to both the Catholic Church and natural philosophy. Their exchange sets up a conflict between evidence and expectation: the King’s desire for an extraordinary discovery does not make one anatomically present, while an accurate account of shared mammalian features cannot settle the creature’s moral status.

The novel thus distinguishes physical resemblance from personhood without making anatomy irrelevant. Louis XIV’s categories are practical as well as descriptive: if the sea woman is only a wild animal, exhibition and coercion appear easier to authorize. But the measurements and comparisons that make her legible to human inquiry do not give those observers the final word on what she is.

The Captive Seen by Others—and Seeing for Herself

At the Fountain of Apollo, the still water becomes a stage on which visitors expect the sea monster to appear. When she does not, one visitor proposes shooting at her to bring her out. Marie-Josèphe de la Croix answers by imagining the scene from the captive’s position: she asks whether a person would feel at ease with a thousand people clustered around her bed. The comparison turns a public spectacle into an invasion of private space. The crowd’s expectation that the creature perform is not neutral; it overlooks her fear and treats her absence as a problem to be solved by force.

The sea monster’s actions beyond the visitors’ view further resist the idea that she exists only as an object of human curiosity. She crawls up the steps, crying a warning, while a woman of the land walks bleeding toward predators whose roars fill the darkness and dawn. The sea monster repeats the woman’s simple song, but receives silence in reply. Afterwards, the narration describes her washing salt tears from her eyes before swimming to shelter beneath Apollo’s horses. The episode gives her a perspective and an emotional life that do not depend on human recognition: she warns, tries to communicate, grieves, and seeks shelter even when no human answers her.

This scene also reverses the usual assignment of monstrosity. The sea monster’s fear is intelligible, while the land-dwelling woman’s approach to predators is described as fearless and foolish. The threatened creature is not simply the source of danger; she can be the one who recognizes danger first. Yet her warning goes unheard, showing that the capacity to communicate and the willingness of others to listen are separate matters.

Speech, Proof, and Religious Authority

The dispute becomes explicit when Marie-Josèphe tells Louis XIV that she understands the sea woman and that the sea woman understands her. She argues from speech and intelligence to a shared humanity, insisting that the creature is a woman rather than a monster. Louis XIV asks what the being is if not a monster; Yves de la Croix, by contrast, denies that she is intelligent and dismisses her appearance. Marie-Josèphe directs attention to the bones and hands of the sea woman’s dead mate and asks that the living woman be heard. The disagreement is not merely about what can be seen in a body: it is also about whether another being’s communication counts as evidence.

Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien, gives that question a political and historical dimension. He recalls that the Catholic Church once treated beasts as demons and argues that a status changed before may change again. Rather than claiming that resemblance or compassion settles the matter, he frames the next step as proof: if the creature speaks a human language, she cannot simply be treated as a creature. His appeal to scientific inquiry gives Marie-Josèphe an opportunity to establish her claim, but it also shows that the people in power still determine what will count as an acceptable demonstration.

Pope Innocent sets a different test. He asks whether Marie-Josèphe has discussed souls or Christian faith with the sea woman, or converted her. She has done none of these things. The exchange reveals a fault line between recognizing intelligence and granting religious standing: communication may persuade some observers that the sea woman can understand, while the Pope asks for theological evidence and conversion. The novel presents these standards as competing grounds for judgment, not as interchangeable proofs.

Recognition, Power, and the Costs of Naming

The classifications matter because the sea woman is captive. Treating her as a monster or wild animal makes it easier for visitors to demand a display and for people with weapons to contemplate forcing her to appear. The language of monstrosity can therefore do more than express fear or distaste: it can obscure the fact that a conscious being is being held and controlled. Conversely, Marie-Josèphe’s insistence on womanhood and intelligence challenges the assumptions that make such control seem ordinary.

The danger does not vanish when the sea woman is approached as a person. Much later, sailors following Sherzad remain afraid of nets, guns, and explosive charges that could stun her and return her to captivity. Sherzad stays near the mouth of the cove, ready to flee at a threat, then dives and disappears. Their fear reflects a world in which human pursuit has made caution necessary; recognizing the sea woman’s agency does not undo the danger that human power poses to her.

Across these episodes, humanity is not simply a label awarded once and for all by anatomy, the Catholic Church, or royal authority. It becomes a question of what observers will accept as evidence, whose speech they will hear, and what they believe that evidence permits them to do. The sea woman’s own warnings, songs, fear, and escape press against every classification that reduces her to an exhibit or specimen. The novel’s challenge is not only to decide whether she is a monster, but to notice how readily that name can turn a person into something others feel entitled to use.