A Mermaid's Tale: A Personal Search for Love and Lore

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Adams wanted to be a mermaid when she grew up. From childhood, through
her teen years, as a young career woman, and as a bride-to-be, she
related to the mermaid, responding to the spellbinding siren song from
the sea.

In this evocative account of her personal search for the meaning of the
mermaid, she leads us through history and folklore, imagination and
myth. She explores mermaid legends from around the world, probing their
symbolism in an attempt to identify why they are eternal. Her quest
includes identifying her close friend as a silkie, the sister to the
mermaid that is a seal in water and a woman on land. She sees traits of
“mermaidism” in other women, and even selects her clothing and
accessories to enhance her connection to the tailed beings.

Why, she asks, did many cultures, from the Arctic to Africa, know the
magnetism and magic of the mermaid? Mermaids, she finds, embody the
purest form of temptation, speaking to the lust of both body and mind.
They are a “lyrical reflection of human desire,” yet we see in them
much more than sensuality and sexuality. One of their manifestations is
as guardian spirit. At other times they are the mother spirit, nurturer
of women and children. And, of course, as murderers who lure men to
death beneath the waves. They are “the blithe spirits of woman
untamed,” for “in the end all women are the very sea.”

Adams’s prose style has many elements of the ocean, the mermaid’s
environment. It drifts from poetic to academic, at times buoyant as a
journal or diary, only to run, like retreating surf, into a history
lesson. At times she plunges into deep water to chase meaning in
folklore and myth. At other times her writing floats on waves of pure
imagination as she seeks to pin down the mermaid’s relevance today.

Some 30 colour plates of mermaids in art, historic and contemporary,
support the lyrical text.