The Birth of Denmark’s Most Famous Statue
So he wants sex with a woman who is half fish. But has he thought it through? wonders Eline Eriksen as she pours more schnapps for the visiting tycoon. Carl Jacobsen, founder of the Carlsberg Group and veteran art collector has come to her husband’s sculpture studio on a mission. “I want a sculpture that does justice to Miss Price de Plane’s curvaceousness,” Jacobsen is telling Edvard.
Eline Eriksen
The twentieth century is in its early adolescence and the Carlsberg man has gone crazy for the lead ballerina in a new production of The Little Mermaid. Crazy with love, crazy with lust, crazy with a queasy, brain-dissolving mixture of the two.
She is so sexually hot, so goddam appetizing, that the ageing beer man is virtually frothing at the mouth.
Ellen Price de Plane in costume as The Little Mermaid
Eline Eriksen sighs inwardly. She has seen a myriad manifestations of the Male Gaze in Jacobsen’s antique art collection at the Glypoteket gallery. She also knows that commissions are the urgent, expensive expression of an unachievable fantasy. The richer the client, the louder his roar of need.
“I’m on it,” says the sculptor. “Though I suggest bronze. I’ll get my people to talk to her people, see if she’ll pose nude.”
“And when she does, I’ll drop by the studio,” says Jacobsen, gulping down a third schnapps. “Oh, and you’d better stick some sort of tail to her, I guess. A mermaid needs a tail. Can something be organized?”
“What do you say, skat?” Edvard asks Eline.
(Skat means treasure or darling in Danish. It also means tax.)
Eline has seen this coming. But few challenges faze her, and she can turn her hand to most things. She’s green-fingered, a speedy knitter, a genius with fish-cakes and meat-balls, a puff-pastry queen. Her brood of children will soon expand to five. Most importantly, in this moment, she’s nifty with a sewing machine.
“No problem. So where would you like this tail to start, Mr Jacobsen?” she asks, wondering: does the tycoon’s wife know about his obsession with a dancer? They say she’s an odd fish herself. Rumour has it they’re estranged.
In Danish, the word for married – gift – also means poison.
“Waist level’s the norm for mermaids.” offers Edvard. He’s evoking the classic boobs-and-a-tail model you see frolicking, along with winged cherubs, at the margins of Italian oils. “They’re supposed to be half and half, right?”
But this is not what Jacobsen has in mind. Not at all. For Miss Price de Plane’s long, elegant legs are almost as fascinating to Jacobsen as her breasts.
“Start the fish part lower. Much lower,” says the beer tycoon. He wants the most intimate part to be visible, but he can’t quite bring himself to say so in front of Mrs Eriksen. Can’t quite say that a man needs to imagine access. That there must be legs, and those legs must be spreadable.
“So, upper thigh, like a stocking, or mid-calf level, like a knee-sock, sir?” Eline inquires.
“More like an ankle-sock might start if you didn’t roll the top,” decides Jacobsen. “And make it trail a bit. Make it feminine-looking.”
“An inspired idea,” says Edvard. The customer is always right even when he’s wrong. Eline pours more schnapps and the men say skål and clink on it.
The deal done, Jacobsen returns to the Carlsberg Brewery and waits, eagerly, for a summons from the studio to see his piece of tail.
Not really a tail at all, thinks Eline, hauling out her sewing machine and rummaging through some old curtain fabric.
Hans Christian Andersen
Perhaps before coming up with the commission, the beer tycoon should have re-read Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairy tale, reflected on the nature of obsession, seen the ugly parallel between his story and the Little Mermaid’s – and thought twice. But then if that had happened there’d be no sculpture, no internationally famous tourist attraction, and fewer cruise ships in Copenhagen harbour.
Few people nowadays are familiar with Andersen’s swishy, flip-flopping mermaid story. Despite its dreamy, fantastical depictions of the natural world it’s too gory, too creepily masochistic and too un-cathartically tragic for twenty-first century comfort.
Nut-shelled: visiting the world above earth, a sea-princess witnesses a shipwreck, saves a handsome prince from drowning – and falls in love. Faced with an underwater curfew, she swims off. But she’s determined to do all in her power to make the prince love her back.
So far, so Disney.
But it gets darker. Have you ever been in desperate, unrequited love? If you have, then you know how easy it is to say yes to a Faustian pact with a sea-witch who dwells in a sinister seaweed grove patrolled by sharks.
“You can have those legs you so desire,” the witch will tell you, exhaling green bubbles. “But there’s a price to pay and it won’t be nice.”
“Just do it,” you’ll say.
And you’ll never utter another word, because once a magical transformation is initiated there’s no going back. Suddenly, your tail is gone – whoosh! – and you’ve sprouted legs. Two of them. That’s a novelty. But each step stabs you like a thousand daggers. It’s agony. As for your mouth…oh, oh, oh, that’s the worst part. It hurts so much it’s as if your face is going through a miniature childbirth. Ew. In fact you’re literally spitting blood, because the sea-witch sliced off your tongue with her rusty cutlass. Disney skated over that bit.
On land, you seek out the prince. He doesn’t recognize you. You start to stalk him. When you finally get his attention, he “just sees you as a friend.” Oh, that hated line. Worse, he confesses he’s in love with someone else: a mysterious girl who saved him from a shipwreck once, then disappeared.
NOOOOOO! That was me, that was me, that was me! You want to yell. But you sacrificed your tongue, remember?
Appalled, your family cuts a new deal with the sea-witch: if you kill the prince by stabbing him in the marital bed, your life will be spared. But you can’t bring yourself to commit murder, so you hurl your dagger into the water and dissolve into foam.
End of Sucky Story.
If there is a moral to it, it’s that Obsession is a dangerous mental state, best avoided. Yet we are compulsive creatures: we can’t help it.
Visitors to Copenhagen are no exception. The most common idee fixe is that they haven’t “done” Copenhagen until they’ve posted a Little Mermaid selfie on Facebook.
“She’s smaller than I thought,” they’ll say, eyeing the range of mermaidobilia at the souvenir stall next to The World’s Most Disappointing Tourist Attraction. “Oh well. I guess she’s not called little for nothing. And isn’t she slouching a bit?”
She cuts a modest figure. The newty tail starts just above the ankles, so her thighs are theoretically spreadable, just as Jacobsen not-so-secretly desired. But one arm nonchalantly – or is it strategically? – covers a crucial section of her lap. Her breasts are undeniably naked, and sleazier tourists will pose with a hand grabbing, fondling or cupping one. But despite that, even the sexually terrified Hans Christian Andersen might have approved of the way she embodies his young sea-princess’ virginity.
Can this really be the curvaceous creature who Jacobsen lusted after, and who drove so many male Copenhageners wild with desire?
Rewind a hundred years.
“I’m not stripping off for anyone!” the ballerina told Eriksen’s people. No-one had taken a rusty cutlass to her tongue. “Especially not that old goat. I’m copyright from the neck down. I’ll give you ten percent. My head and hair and nothing more. Take it or leave it.”
Rumour has it that when he heard of the ballerina’s refusal and canny counter-deal, Carl Jacobsen drank so much of his own Carlsberg beer, chased down with schnapps, that he was almost poisoned by his own product. That he never recovered from the disappointment, and that it hastened his death the following year. That he could hardly bear to look at Edvard Eriksen’s sculpture when it was unveiled, so furious was he that Miss Price de Plane had refused to appear butt-naked on a rock for the remainder of the Anthropocene.
But if the ballerina said no to the body…then whose is the torso, whose are the arms, the legs, and the tiny scrap of tail?
Narrative justice might have it that Mrs Jacobsen stepped in by way of twisted revenge on her lustful husband – but she did not. She had long lost interest in Carl and had other fish to fry.
So take a guess.
Remove that apron and that modest cotton frock, Eline Eriksen, you green-fingered speed-knitter, you fish-cake and meat-ball supremo, you sewing-machine whiz, you puff-pastry queen. Wriggle out of your camisole and drawers and then, in the name of Art, sit on this wooden stool that we will now call a boulder, pull on that weird sock you sewed from some old curtain fabric, and prepare for immortality.
Should you ever visit the tranquil, odourless, seagull-free Baltic of the Langelinie waterfront, dear reader, take this thought away with you. That our globally-celebrated pisci-humanoid was once upon a time an equally wondrous and dazzling thing: a life-sized, flesh-and-blood matriarch in a home-stitched mono-flipper.
