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Global Flows in Coastal Contact Zones

Selkie Lore

The animal spouse is an enduring motif, not only in traditional folktales but also in contemporary film and literature. Folklorists generally agree that, traditionally, tales of animal bridegrooms have been told primarily among women (Warner 1994, 276; Tatar 1999, 27), while animal bride tales mainly have circulated among men (Sax 1998, 21; Leavy 1994, 118). Since storytellers past and present “have always told tales relevant to their lives” (Zipes 2012, 95), story worlds function metaphorically as mirrors that reflect the social and cultural registers of the tellers’ lived experience, geographical location, and historical time, thus refracting gendered points of view through the prism of the story’s plot. From the latter perspective, animal bride tales interrogate woman’s cultural role as other in relation to man, her body as locus of sexual desire and wellspring of children, and her ambiguity as bearer of culture. In animal bride lore, woman’s otherness is symbolized by her transbiological transformation from animal to woman, and by the assumed subservience of both woman and animal to man. Exotic, strange, and tragic, the animal bride crystallizes conflicts and tensions arising from men’s hegemonic power over women and the way marriage, as a patriarchal institution, enforces men’s right to control women’s sexuality.

At the same time, animal bride tales destabilize the validity of male hegemony by emphasizing through various plots involving trickery, violence, forced marriage, domestic drudgery, escape, and orphaned children that male control over women ultimately is doomed to fail. Like “Bluebeard” (ATU 312), one of the few classic fairy tales directly dealing with the prohibitions and transgressions within marriage, folktales about seal wives unsettle notions of a happy-ever-after. When the seal wife finds her skin, she follows her heart and returns to the sea, thus demonstrating women’s capability of taking agency and breaking free of the chains that patriarchal society has imposed upon them. In Lacanian terms, by finding her husband’s key to the chest, the seal wife swiftly appropriates the phallus as the means to access knowledge and possession of her own identity (symbolized by the sealskin), leaving behind an empty chest (home) and a key (phallus) that has lost its significance as a symbol of control. Shuli Barzilai notes, “It is indeed issues of power and control that generate the successive stories of texts designed to represent the humiliation of women and vindicate the hegemony of men. The affirmation of male dominion is dialectically dependent on female fallibility. In terms borrowed from Jacques Lacan, the husband is constantly compelled to seek reassurance about the whereabouts of the phallus” (quoted in Zipes 2012, 54). As in the story “Bluebeard,” which Barzilai refers to, the phallus in selkie lore is represented by the husband’s control of the key to the chest that hides the selkie’s coat, and more abstractly by his knowledge and possession of the magic sealskin, her only means of escape from his house.

“The Sealskin,” a folktale from southern Iceland, provides an example. A man from Myrdal steals the skin of a seal woman while she dances on the beach and locks it in a chest so that she cannot return to the sea. Unmoved by her tears, he takes her home. They marry and have children. One day he forgets to take along the key to the chest while he is away. The woman immediately gets hold of the sealskin and heads for the sea. Her final words to the children are:

Regional legends about seal folk (called selkies, selchies, or silkies in the British Isles), who temporarily shed their skin to dance or linger upon the shore, are known throughout the North Atlantic region. Alan Bruford reports of the migratory legend of a man stealing a selkie’s hide that “there are hundreds recorded all along the Atlantic coasts from Ireland to Iceland” (quoted in J. M. Harris 2009, 9). Selkie narratives belong to a large cluster of legends, folktales, and fairy tales about animal brides who transform from beast into human form, and sometimes back to animal form again. In contrast to many beast bridegroom tales, for example, “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” (ATU 425A), “Beauty and the Beast” (ATU 425C), or “The Frog King” (ATU 440), whose male protagonists are cursed with animal form and attain happiness only when transformed into wholesome human form through the mediating effect of a good woman, the human form is usually a curse for the animal bride because her human incarnation separates her from her animal kin and entraps her in a patriarchal human social order where women function “as domestics and breeders, born to serve the interests of men” (Zipes 2012, 80). The impermanence of both her animal and human form suggests transbiological fluidity and unsettles the boundaries within which the human condition is perceived as distinct from the animal world. Selkie narratives depict this fluidity as a parallel, otherworldly social order by positing the seal woman as bound by social and emotional obligations to others in the ocean-dwelling community of seals (Leavy 1994, 200). Unlike the animal bridegroom, who often is represented as a cursed princeling wielding social rights in the human world, which he, despite his beastly form, is part of, the seal woman is a stranger, an exotic other, in the human world. She has a past history of family and kin in the ocean, which precedes the obligations imposed upon her as wife and mother on land. In this regard, seal wife tales bear witness to women’s resistance to traditional gender roles as mothers and wives as well as to men’s fear of the runaway wife.

My purpose here is twofold: in order to examine how folkloric texts inform contemporary cinematic and literary depictions of women, immigration, and otherness, I first contextualize Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan’s film Ondine (2009) and Icelandic-born American writer Solveig Eggerz’s novel Seal Woman (2008) with folktales from Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Ireland, Scotland, and the Scottish Isles that involve a union between a man and a seal woman.² Taking into account how gender conflicts and the ambiguity about transbiological transformation in folktales speak of complex social realities, my next step is to consider Ondine and Seal Woman in relation to postmodern intertextuality and generic flexibility by exploring Trudier Harris’s point that any text “can have a variety of relationships to comparable texts and categories of genre that have preceded it” (1995, 523). Ondine is set in present-day Ireland and Seal Woman in Iceland in the late 1940s; in both, historical realism about the social facts facing solitary women immigrants mingles with legends about supernatural seal women who get caught along the shoreline and eventually marry landsmen, though never losing their longing for the sea. As postmodern texts, Ondine and Seal Woman demonstrate how expansive selkie lore has become, and how their representation of gender ties in with generic choices (Bacchilega and Rieder 2010, 32).

Unlike the enchanted long-long-ago, far-far-away settings of animal bride fairy tales grouped under “The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife,” (ATU 400) or “The Animal Bride” (ATU 402), selkie narratives have typically been told as legends relating to specific places and common people within the living memory of the local community. Seal wife tales often have some traditional fairy-tale motifs, most notably the use of magic numbers (three and seven), helpers (a child accidentally finding its mother’s sealskin), and the transformative power of the selkie’s magic coat.³ But they also include many real-life, strikingly modern themes relating specifically to ideas about gender, power, and otherness as well as the social and economic pressure to marry and rear children in the rural subsistence economies along the North Atlantic shores.

David Thomson’s collection The People of the Sea: A Journey in Search of the Seal Legend illustrates these concerns. He wrote down the stories he heard while traveling from the Shetland Islands to County Kerry, Ireland, in the late 1940s. A Kerry man, Sean Sweeney, told him about the MacNamaras, whose “first father found their mother on the strand, and he hid her cloak away in the thatch and married her.” The woman apparently never spoke. She laughed only three times: once when a stranger refused a meal she offered, a second time when a girl slipped on a flagstone that hid a treasure of gold, and the third time when her cloak fell to the floor from where her husband had hidden it in the rafters (1980, 171).⁴

Like many other collectors of folklore, Thomson sensed that cultural change was imminent: “I came to the seal places during the years of transition and knew even then that contact with industrialized society had begun to make some storytellers shy of expressing themselves to their own children” (1980, xxii). The foreboding sense of social change, in particular depopulation of small coastal communities, gives Thomson’s collection a sheen of nostalgia and a sense of urgency to capture the associations and connectedness between people, places, and stories in folktales and local legends. Thomson and Traveler storyteller Duncan Williamson, who started collecting stories on the west coast of Scotland in the early 1940s, both mention the sacredness of the stories, the need to protect family secrets, and the humility required to live in close proximity to the sea. Williamson explains, “Stories from tradition are magic—because they are given to you as a present—you are let into the personal lives of your friends” (2005, 3). In the preface to his recollection of growing up on the Outer Hebrides in the 1940s, John M. MacAulay writes, “One learned to respect, not only the sea, but also what lived and moved upon and within it” (1998, xvii).

Emerging from the intimate setting and haunting narratives about magical seal folk recorded by Thomson, Williamson, and MacAulay is a double vision, similar to that of fairy tales, “on the one hand charting perennial drives and terrors, both conscious and unconscious, and on the other mapping actual volatile experience, [which] gives the genre its fascination and power to satisfy” (Warner 1994, xxi). This observation connects to postmodern retellings because stories “enable us to live through the present’s uncertainties . . . [thus tying] story to history (knowledge), values (ideas), and figuration (vision) . . . [and signaling] that mastery of such narrative ingredients produces power, as both privilege and empowerment” (Bacchilega 1997, 24). As the following discussion will show, these narrative ingredients also allow double vision to function as a gendered perspective in storytelling both in film and fiction.

Double vision is a central dimension of both Neil Jordan’s and Solveig Eggerz’s adaptation of traditional selkie lore. Three questions guide my discussion of their works: first, what makes selkie stories meaningful in the intertextual and ontologically ambivalent, gendered discourses in which they emerge? Second, how does selkie lore narrate geographical place in relation to shifting historical currents in settlement and migration? And third, as metaphor, how are selkie legends incorporated into cultural discourses that (re)produce images of the other?

Ondine

Ondine was conceptualized during the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike. Unable to work on his American studio production, director Neil Jordan took the opportunity to return to his native Ireland and make a low-budget fantasy movie on location in the small seaside town where he owns a house. Jordan, who has written and directed films on both sides of the Atlantic, has often depicted Ireland as a place of brutal conflict and intolerance. His Irish films include the critically acclaimed The Crying Game (1992), the historical drama Michael Collins (1996), and the uncanny portrayals of disturbed youth in adaptations of novels by Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy (1997) and Breakfast on Pluto (2005). In one interview, Jordan states, “I’ve done so many things in Ireland about brutality and violence—punishing, unforgiving things. I suppose I wanted to do something just gentle, like those early fairy tales of Yeats and Lady Gregory, which are terribly childish, terribly romantic, quite beautiful” (Rafferty 2010). In another, Jordan adds that Ondine “is my version of ‘The Little Mermaid,’ I suppose” (Faust 2010).

Ondine, a complex family melodrama, engages in the nostalgia for the west of Ireland, which since the days of W. B. Yeats and the Celtic Revival has been claimed by various nationalist movements both as a repository for authentic Irish culture and identity and as a place of mythic meaning (Ó Giolláin 2000, 3–29). Ondine was filmed with support from the Irish Film Board in Castletownbere, a West Cork fishing village on the Beara Peninsula (Faust 2010). Cinematographer Christopher Doyle turns the dull, overcast, damp Irish summer landscapes and seascapes into an otherworldly place, strangely liquid and fluid with promise of enchantment. An Irish Times reviewer calls this place “a lovely Nowhere” and an “unreal dreamland,” further questioning the film’s supposed regional authenticity by noting that actor Colin Farrell’s “Cork accent comes and goes” (Clarke 2010). American reviewers more readily accept the premodernity of “one of those wee Irish fishing villages that belongs to another time” (Rea 2010), describing the film as “blarney carried to rhapsodic heights” (Rainer 2010).

Inevitably, reviewers also note Ondine’s thematic affinity with American director John Sayles’s Irish fantasy film The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), adapted from the Scottish novella Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry by Rosalie K. Fry (1959). Ondine, however, incorporates a broader array of European folktales and fairy tales, including “the German folktale from which the film derives its title, the Scottish Selkie tradition, and Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’” (McGuirk 2010, 243). It makes overt references to the Grimm version of “Snow White” (ATU 709) and to Alice in Wonderland. The Secret of Roan Inish, securely focused on selkie lore, allows no major global flows in popular culture or politics to dilute the magic or disrupt the fetishization of the west of Ireland as the land of Celtic myth and folklore. Sayles’s exclusion of other folk traditions allows Emily Selby and Deborah Dixon to situate The Secret of Roan Inish’s selkie lore specifically in relation to the Celtic “Otherworld,” which they argue is a female space “dominated by powerful female Celtic deities and other supernatural entities” (1998, 20). Ondine, less concerned with origins of tradition, refers vaguely to selkie lore as a “Scottish thing” and mingles it with broad references to European folklore, including undines (water nymphs), mermaids, and the haunting singing of sirens. Both films associate femininity with water, the supernatural, and the exotic, but only Ondine is concerned to show the vulnerability of the female other in a predatory masculine social order.

Further, The Secret of Roan Inish has characters with Irish names (e.g., Fiona, her cousin Tadgh, and the selkie Nuala) and uses the Gaelic language to express resistance to English colonialism.⁵ Ondine has much broader geographical scope. Its cast speaks English with various regional dialects and foreign accents, and names like Syracuse and Ondine refer to places and myths from beyond Ireland. The Secret of Roan Inish concerns healing and reestablishing a family broken apart by death, migration, and loss of home by way of one brave girl’s determination to find her little brother, reared by seals. Ondine deals with moving on after loss and trauma, and trusting a foreigner, who may or may not be a magical creature, enough to form a new family with her. Several reviewers express disappointment with Ondine’s lack of fixed genre. Donald Clarke describes the central story as “slippery” and “insecure” (2010), while other critics note the perpetual and essentially unresolved questions the film raises: “Is Ondine a selkie (seal woman) or is she simply a girl on the run seeking asylum?” (Rainer 2010).

Syracuse (Colin Farrell), a scruffy fisherman down on his luck, struggles to stay sober for the sake of his wheelchair-bound daughter Annie (Alison Barry), seriously ill from kidney disease. Stuck with the nickname Circus for his erstwhile drunken antics, Syracuse has a recalcitrant relationship to Maura (Dervla Kirwan), his alcoholic ex-wife. Annie, a precocious child who compensates for her lack of physical mobility with wise observations about the blundering adults around her, lives with Maura and her hard-drinking Scottish boyfriend, Alex (Tony Curran), who—seal husband style—has abandoned his wife and three children in Scotland.

One day, Syracuse finds a barely breathing young woman (Alicja Bachleda-Curus) in his trawl net. Fearful of the authorities, she refuses to be taken to the hospital. He wonders if she is an asylum seeker, and if she has swum “all the way from Arabia.” She claims to have no memory of who she is or where she is from. She calls herself Ondine, has long mermaid tresses, and wears a netlike, knitted dress.

Syracuse takes her to his mother’s abandoned cabin, nestled picturesquely among the rolling green hills overlooking a secluded cove. Under his breath, Syracuse muses, “If it depends on me, you can stay forever, happily ever after, once upon a time.” Like Disney’s Snow White, another vagrant persecuted heroine, Ondine starts cleaning house and tidying up—performances communicating her “natural” inclination toward homemaking and hence her inherent female goodness. She also helps herself to some of Syracuse’s mother’s old clothes and sleeps in her bed with the innocent trust of a fairy-tale orphan.

Ondine changes Syracuse’s luck for the better. She sings fish into his nets and lobsters into his pots in montages that meld her singing with the soundtrack’s ambient, dreamy serenades by Icelandic band Sigur Rós. To Syracuse, Ondine and her ways are very “strange and wonderful,” an expression that he often uses when he asks Annie about her day. While Annie is in dialysis, he tells her a story about a fisherman who pulled in his nets and found a woman. The girl wants to know how the story ends, but Syracuse has no answer. “That’s a real shitty story,” Annie remarks. She suspects there may be more to her father’s half-finished fairy tale. She drives her electric wheelchair to her grandmother’s cabin and finds Ondine swimming in the cove. Annie decides that Ondine must be a seal woman.

While Annie desperately wants to believe that Ondine has come directly out of an enchanted world, Syracuse is too wrapped up in his own post-alcoholic euphoria to question her identity. Maura soon becomes jealous. The uglier and more evil-stepmother-like Maura, the biological mother, becomes in her possessive, aggressive behavior toward Syracuse, the more angelic Ondine, the beautiful stranger, seems. Paul McGuirk notes, “There is never any real conflict between Syracuse’s position and Ondine’s” (2010, 245). The real conflicts are between Ondine and Maura for Syracuse’s love and attention, and between Ondine and the drug smuggler Vladic (Emil Hostina), who comes to claim her back. Maura and Ondine are responsible for the film’s two deaths: Maura kills Alex in a car accident, and Ondine, who knows that Vladic can’t swim, pushes him into the harbor. Both deaths inaugurate new beginnings. Annie receives a kidney transplant from Alex. Syracuse decides to marry Ondine, whose real name is Johanna, to prevent her from being deported. The wedding brings closure to Ondine as a contemporary fairy tale, but it also illustrates the social fact that marriage to a national citizen is one of the few ways solitary immigrants without independent means can settle legally in another country. The wedding, presented with deportation as its only alternative, makes the romance between Syracuse and Ondine more pragmatic than a Disneyfied fairy-tale ending. Although the characters seem to genuinely care for one another, the complexity of Ondine’s immigration status suggests that her behavior toward Syracuse and Annie may, at least at some level, have been calculated with marriage in mind.

Yet, fairy-tale style, Ondine must prove her worth in crucial tests: she saves Annie from drowning and she kills the beast, Vladic, whom she describes to Syracuse as “a monster from a fairy tale.” The fact that Ondine takes action where Syracuse hesitates exposes her bravery vis-à-vis foes stronger than she, and it reverses her role from victim to saving angel. By marrying Syracuse, she saves both him and Annie from Maura’s alcoholic clutches. As McGuirk observes, “Syracuse, like many of Jordan’s male protagonists, operates with extremely fuzzy and blurred boundaries. Syracuse is a rather well-intentioned, if somewhat hapless character” (2010, 245). Syracuse’s passivity and selfishness, his inability to break with poisonous Maura and fully commit to Ondine, the fact that he falls off the wagon, and his many other displays of weakness of character aid in strengthening Ondine’s position as the film’s most caring, self-sacrificing character and stereotype her as an ideal woman.

The colonial fantasy about the sexualized, exotic woman who willingly betrays her own kind (Vladic) out of love for a White man (Syracuse) is perhaps Ondine’s lasting point. McGuirk explains that, like the “grumly guest” in the old Scottish ballad of the seal man of Sule Skerry who returns to claim the child he fathered with a human woman,⁶ Vladic is demonized as the dark, evil foreigner

Indeed, when Vladic accuses Ondine/Johanna of betraying him, he snarls, “You speak their language now.” She counters, “You don’t belong here.” Her wish to belong, speak the language, and shed her old identity is valorized discursively within the film by showing how this abused, exploited Romanian woman, who is goodness incarnate, desires the flawed but essentially wholesome West, (im)personated in Syracuse’s character. Eggerz takes a different perspective on this colonial fantasy in Seal Woman. Comparing Ondine to Seal Woman expands on the generic choices and values embedded in both works, and the ways in which folklore can serve multiple intertextual functions in postmodern texts.

Seal Woman

Seal Woman incorporates the violent themes of Faroese and Icelandic selkie narratives, in which men’s cruelty toward captured selkies leads to bloodshed and murder, to enable the protagonist Charlotte to process the violent events she witnessed in Berlin during World War II. Max, her Jewish husband, was humiliated, harassed, and eventually died in a concentration camp, her child disappeared, and she ended up having to prostitute herself when the Red Army entered Berlin and soldiers bought sex with food. Eggerz turns to folklore and a sense of place in order to explore the powerful motif of the dislocated, traumatized war bride in this narrative based on historical events. During the late 1940s, 314 German agricultural workers arrived in Iceland on one-year contracts. The vast majority stayed on and eventually married Icelanders (Eggerz 2008).

After the chaos of World War II, Charlotte, still reeling with pain from having lost her beloved husband and been separated from her only child, travels to Iceland to work as a contracted farm laborer. Dazed by trauma and numbed by violence, Charlotte immerses herself in the near-medieval working conditions on an isolated coastal farm in Iceland. The farmer, Ragnar, a quiet man, has lost his first wife to tuberculosis. He lives with his widowed mother, a healer fluent in the myths and lore of the land. Charlotte and the old woman form a bond of mutual respect and solidarity, but the younger woman lacks Ondine/Johanna’s strong desire to assimilate culturally and linguistically. Charlotte’s mind is constantly haunted by the memories of the war and her losses. Resigned to accept her new life, she eventually marries Ragnar and bears him two sons.

The novel contrasts two very different worlds: the old-fashioned, otherworldly farm in Iceland with its drudgery of physical labor and minimal comforts, and vibrant, decadent, cosmopolitan Berlin where Charlotte lived a privileged life as an artist with a caring husband. In Iceland, overcome by longing for her old life, she desires to die. She finds comfort for her distress in the legend of the seal woman, who has, in Charlotte’s retelling, “two children on the land and two in the sea” (Eggerz 2008, 221). Similar to Ondine/Johanna’s double identity, Charlotte identifies with the seal woman’s divided self because she cannot reconcile her past with her present. In Charlotte’s version, a landsman steals the seal woman’s hood while she dances naked on the beach; he promises to return it if only she’ll marry him. She complies, but he rescinds his promise, saying he will give the hood to her “later, after we’ve been married for a while” (219). She becomes a mother, and he forgets his promise. However, the sight of three dead seals on the beach, killed by hunters, awakens the seal wife’s longing for the ocean. As her husband helps skin the seals, she falls ill. As soon as she is well enough, she rummages through her husband’s chest until she finds her hood. Then, like Henrik Ibsen’s Nora, “she walked out the door,” returning to the sea (221).

Charlotte tries to drown herself twice. Eggerz frames her protagonist’s unsuccessful suicide attempts and her odd memories of them with the folktale. In contrast, the descriptions of her relationship with Ragnar and the hard work on the farm are solidly grounded in historical realism. But the beach and the tug of the ocean’s rolling currents draw her into a strange nowhere, a blank space harboring her repressed memories, a dark abyss aching with tumultuous pain threatening to well up and drown her. If the ocean symbolizes the destructive forces of historical change, it is significant that Ondine needs to be rescued from it, while Charlotte willingly throws herself into it.

Charlotte reaches a consciousness of being a link in a long chain of women whose entire existence has been defined by their gender roles in traditional Icelandic fishing and farming communities. “Standing high on the hill, overlooking the ocean, Charlotte felt her place in time, right behind the medieval women who had stood here, breathing in the muttony steam, seeking the longship that carried their men on the ocean” (Eggerz 2008, 164). Yet, even though the “tug of the ocean” and its “barking sound” echo her past and intrude into her present to cause chaos, they also produce in her a sense of freedom from the bonds that bind her to Ragnar and the land they work together (216–221).

Charlotte throws herself into the sea when she thinks she hears her lost child calling her. She recognizes, upon being pulled ashore, that she likes her Icelandic children’s fear of losing her. In the absence of a truly caring husband, their fear makes her feel wanted: “It matched her own fear for the safety of these pups born to her in middle age” (Eggerz 2008, 18). The vocabulary of the folktale—“pups”—helps her identify her loyalties. She also finds some happiness with the clumsy Ragnar, but to her chagrin she must compete with the farm animals for his love: “She knew he’d never look at her the way he looked at a cow that gave rich milk, or at [a] horse that could carry him to the interior without a slip. But she sensed that he considered her an asset to the farm” (244). The breaking point comes the day Ragnar asks her to paint their sons and the child she lost. Art becomes an outlet that allows Charlotte to reconnect with the individualistic, creative part of herself that she has repressed in her life on the farm.

Eggerz’s incorporation of the traditional selkie story projects complex images of gender roles into what appears to be a monolithic cultural landscape. Charlotte’s transformation speaks of how women often learn to compromise and adapt by entering into preexisting gender roles that await them as constituent parts of any patriarchal structure. Like the selkie whose coat is taken away, Charlotte must learn to adapt to life without a magic portal back to happy prewar Berlin. In comparison, Ondine/Johanna hides her coat (a backpack full of drugs) so that she can stay in Ireland.

Ragnar’s needs seem almost primitive in comparison to Charlotte’s, but his life, too, is complex and hinges on forces beyond his own control. He wants a wife who can work with him on the farm. He wants children to carry on the work when he is old. Ragnar is tied to the land and his role as farmer and husband; it is the only life he knows. He does not care to know anything about Charlotte’s previous life. What he wants is someone who will stay in his life, on his farm, in his country. As soon as Charlotte acquires the rudimentary vocabulary for working on the farm, he stops teaching her new words. Her inability to master Icelandic becomes a social muteness that disempowers her as woman and makes her other, stranger. It prevents her from belonging, speaking (out), or forging a sense of self strong enough to cope with the intrusion of the past into the present. Eggerz’s representation of Charlotte’s self-destructive inclinations thus offers a stark contrast to the way in which Jordan represents Ondine/Johanna as deftly slipping into the social position awaiting her as Syracuse’s bride and Annie’s stepmother. Eventually Ragnar is forced to accept as part of his responsibility that he must help Charlotte cope with her past. Unlike Syracuse, who remains the same immature boy-man throughout Ondine, Ragnar grows and becomes a better man.

Like the man from Myrdal who steals the selkie’s coat in the folktale, Ragnar does not court Charlotte. He just says, “‘Is it alright then?’ His look said he meant her—and him. ‘Yes,’ she said for the second time in her life” (Eggerz 2008, 39). On their wedding night, she had “vowed to make love to him all night long. But suddenly he opened her legs and thrust himself inside her. It was over too quickly” (48). The next morning she wonders, “How many aprons would she wear out with no reward but this man’s hands on her at night?” Amorous rewards belong to her happy days in Berlin with a sophisticated lover for a husband. The wearing out of aprons, a symbol of female domesticity, counts the days of her present reality in Iceland. For Ragnar, a wife is a first and foremost a work partner. Romance is far from his way of thinking. Grounded in the settler culture of the North Atlantic, he knows that successful farms depend on the ability of married couples to work together to ensure the survival of crops and livestock. Charlotte’s romantic notions of spending the mornings making love are rudely interrupted by a neighing horse—Ragnar whispers, “He’s happy for us”—and “the sound of chickens fussing in the henhouse” (49). There is no happy-ever-after for Charlotte, except for the possibility that she may in the end be reunited with her lost daughter. Even so, the novel hints at the complexity of such a reunion and the pain it may entail.

Eggerz’s depiction of Charlotte’s destiny offers a historical perspective on labor-seeking migration and settlement in northern Europe. But in spite of the novel’s narrow historical focus, its attention to the individual destiny of one woman does not detract from its deeper perspective on what Gayatri C. Spivak (1988, 271–313) refers to as the silencing of the subaltern woman—economically, politically, and culturally—and the need for the subaltern to speak for herself. Charlotte’s ability to “speak” through her paintings underscores Spivak’s point that patriarchal Western societies’ logocentrism imposes the illusion of cultural homogeneity in heterogeneous populations. The story of the seal woman allows Charlotte to understand her own transformations in nationality, location, and identity while at the same time giving narrative frame to the historical memory of migration and settlement in the coastal regions of the North Atlantic.

A Postmodern Perspective on Selkie Lore and the Coastal Contact Zone

In the broadest sense, selkie lore is about humans’ relationship with nature and about the precarious boundaries that culture maintains to define humanness. At the same time, selkie tales express desires, longings, and social tensions that arise from cultural norms and gender roles in specific cultural and geographical settings. Ondine’s and Seal Woman’s generic complexity reflects and refracts the gender and identity politics performed in coastal contact zones. As contemporary retellings, Ondine and Seal Woman are situated in “a web whose hypertextual links do not refer back to one authority or central tradition” (Bacchilega and Rieder 2010, 25) but reflect the expansive “crystallization,” or “interplay of multiple structures” (Walter Burkert, quoted in Zipes 2012, 9), of postmodern fairy tales.

Since the turbulent aftermath of World War II and the fall of the Iron Curtain, new patterns of cultural and national identity have emerged in Europe. In Ondine, the Romanian drug mule slips into the fairy-tale identity of the selkie because Syracuse and his daughter want to believe in her reality. As Ondine/Johanna says, being a selkie “is one truth.” Other “truths” become meaningful in other contexts because identity is performed and negotiated situationally. Like Charlotte in Eggerz’s novel, Ondine/Johanna seeks to mend a fissured identity in a tight-knit fishing community that defines itself by its homogeneity and is suspicious of strangers. Where Charlotte eventually learns to live with her scars visible and some wounds still bleeding, Jordan aims for smooth suture and a happy-ever-after in Ondine.

Both works support John Frow’s claim that “texts—even the simplest and most formulaic—do not ‘belong’ to genres but are, rather, uses of them; they refer not to ‘a’ genre but to a field or economy of genres, and their complexity derives from the complexity of that relation” (2006, 2). Frow’s understanding of texts as responding to, and organized by, “the social setting in which they occur (a setting which is a recurrent type rather than a particular time and place), and . . . the genre mobilized by the setting and by contextual cues” (16) complements Cristina Bacchilega and John Rieder’s discussion of hybridization and generic complexity in contemporary fairy-tale films (2010, 26–27). They agree with Frow that “genres create effects of reality and truth” and work semiotically (2006, 19), stating, “To say that generic strategies involve an economy of genres means, first, that generic choices have values attached to them, and, second, that making those choices involves taking a position on other choices and values” (Bacchilega and Rieder 2010, 32).

In Ondine and Seal Woman, the range of values embedded in choice of genre reflects two competing but mutually informing positions. On the one hand, they demonstrate an undercurrent of nostalgia for traditional gender roles, place (Ireland and Iceland, respectively), and a mythic past (Celtic and Norse) seen as made stable by patriarchy, monocultural sovereignty, and pastoralism. On the other hand, they challenge such idyllic perceptions of the mythic past with the intrusion into the local environment of global flows stemming from wartime displacement, survivor’s trauma, illegal immigration, and drug trafficking. Both texts incorporate pastoral representations of a simple life in tucked-away rural communities at the edge of the sea, but neither sentimentalizes the drudgery of work, the poverty, the sexual predation, or the xenophobia that rural isolation harbors. Rather, film and novel alike incorporate the shoreline to signify a site of cultural transmission, with female strangers coming from unknown lands—with histories muted by violence and trauma—and their attempts to settle and create families with the local men who find them.

Two main themes emerge in Ondine, Seal Woman, and the folklore on which they draw. First, the narratives occur in coastal contact zones, which mark a geographical frontier as well as a metaphorical border between land and sea, civilization and wilderness, the known and the unknown. The shoreline is, metaphorically speaking, a threshold with a liminal tidal zone where cultural beliefs transacted between natives and strangers, humans and animals, the natural and the supernatural collide and “compete along that border for interpretative dominance” (J. M. Harris 2009, 6). Shorelines and borders, and the cultural values and choices they represent in relation to gender and identity, offer compelling metaphors in the postmodern reworking of selkie lore in these two texts. But border sites are also heavily invested with territorial markings and performances where meaning about the female stranger, doubling as foreigner and other, is continuously produced and interpreted in terms of territorial dominance and national identity. The selkie’s shedding of her skin and transformation into a woman happens precisely where ocean and land meet, and where she, being literally out of her own element, is most vulnerably exposed to a social environment alien to her own. Here, also, the landsman immediately recognizes her as a valuable prize—a bride without (apparent) kin of her own, which removes any obligation on his part to honor social duties to in-laws.⁷

Furthermore, the border locates power imbalances between naturalized citizens and illegal immigrants, which are translated into the legal language of social rights and entitlements. Jason Marc Harris points out, “Globally, borders are historically fraught with anxiety” (2009, 6), not only because invaders cross borders but because frontiers as semiotic frames establish ontological domains and thus participate in narrating human existence in relation to geographical place. In this situation, Mary Louise Pratt’s definition of contact zones as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (1992, 4) may extend to reflect the fundamental struggles between disparate, gendered, ontological domains embedded in selkie lore that involve a man who sees a seal woman shed her skin, steals it, conceals it, and forces the selkie to become his wife.

Second, as suggested by Bacchilega and Rieder (2010), one set of values and choices entails others. Said differently, culturally constructed borders participate in, interact with, and reflect upon other aspects of social organization. In my intertextual positioning of these texts, selkie lore participates on various narrative and semiotic levels in articulating desires and anxieties in human relationships with others, notably those involving specific gender roles (husband and wife) and assumptions and fears about others (illegal immigrants, strangers, animals). Animal bride tales may indeed, as Barbara Leavy argues, express universal, slanted views of women as being closer to nature than men. She states, “A basic assumption about woman is that her beast form defines her essential being” (1994, 222). But in light of Ondine’s and Seal Woman’s incorporation of global flows in immigration and their two female protagonists’ social positioning as defined in relation to the complexity of such flows, historical time and geographical place also play a role in the representation of gender and social conflicts.

Animal bride tales may, as Leavy points out, communicate universal themes about “culture’s triumph over nature” (1994, 40). However, selkie lore also thematically concerns the culture clashes Pratt (1992) refers to as taking place in the contact zone between creatures of different social domains and with disparate understandings of the world. Perceptions of seals as a different “people” with their own moral codes and cultural organization are apparent in Williamson’s collection of seal legends. In one instance, three young men meet seal people “dressed in furry kind of suits. And talking among themselves, some talking in half Gaelic, half broken English and Gaelic” (2005, 131). Such descriptions suggest a perception of human-seal relations as similar to intercultural human relations and the unease and difficulties that arise in such encounters. At the same time, the reference in several of the legends collected by Williamson to seals speaking Gaelic evokes mythology about cultural and linguistic affinity between seals and humans. The seal may function as symbolic exponent of the ancient Celtic culture that historically has been oppressed linguistically, politically, and economically by the English.

The prominence of history and geographical place also means that Ondine and Seal Woman invariably evoke the social aspect of folktales and contemporary folktale retellings, by which I mean these two texts’ commitment to think critically about historical and current issues—the aftermath of World War II for German civilians and the effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union for people in Eastern Europe; the breakdown of traditional family structure and the current downturn in the economy; and the legal and illegal international trafficking of women as brides and/or workers. The 2008–2012 financial crises that plunged Iceland and Ireland, after years of unprecedented prosperity, into severe economic hardship also invite a consideration of how Ondine and Seal Woman as cultural texts pass on allusions to the vulnerability of small national economies in late capitalism, in particular fringe economies depending directly or indirectly on larger structures like the European Union. Generic choices and values thus interact with other sets of choices and values, in which coastal contact zones function as social spaces of multivarious cultural interaction awash in “the fundamental struggle to define identity and power amid a chaotic world whose borders ebb and flow with countless perils” (J. M. Harris 2009, 6).

Postmodern trends in generic complexity and mixing do not seek to exclude the existence of meaningful generic structure. The point to recognize is that “genre is quintessentially intertextual” (Briggs and Bauman 1992, 147). The blurred boundaries between a novel or film’s realism and legend or fairy tale do not dissolve ontological differences between the fictive and the factual. Rather, Linda Hutcheon observes, “The boundaries may frequently be transgressed in postmodern fiction, but there is never any resolution of the ensuing contradictions. In other words, the boundaries remain, even if they are challenged” (2002, 69). Ondine and Seal Woman, set in the “real” world at specific historical times and geographical locations, both weave strands of legend and fairy tale into the narration to destabilize or decode the way the protagonists experience the “real.” The “real” is, of course, a generic strategy. As Hutcheon warns, “Our common-sense presuppositions about the ‘real’ depend upon how that ‘real’ is described, how it is put into discourse and interpreted. There is nothing natural about the ‘real’ and there never was—even before the existence of mass media” (31). Similarly, there is nothing “natural” about gender because it is a social construct. Jordan’s invocation of the domestically inclined, persecuted fairy-tale heroine naturalizes a patriarchally endorsed female gender role as a result of his choice of genre (fairy-tale/fantasy film), while Eggerz’s contrastive narrative flow between historical realism and folktale allows gender roles to remain dialogic rather than fixed.

Indeed, as Cathy Lynn Preston argues, “The blurring of the boundaries between fairy tale and legend, like the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, creates a site of cultural production in which social transformation has both imaginative and material possibility” (2004, 209). Noting the fragmented, piecemeal nature of fairy-tale retellings in electronic media texts and television that communicate information about gender and identity by intertextual references, Preston concludes that “contemporary texts have cumulatively achieved a competitive authority [vis-à-vis older fairy tales], one that is fragmented, multivocal, fraught with contestation, and continually emergent” (212). Ondine and Seal Woman try to make sense of human lives that have been fractured and violated by historical events. Old stories cannot save people cut adrift from their homelands and traditional way of life; rather, in both texts, new circumstances force the protagonists to generate new identities based on meaningful fragments of old stories that are repositioned and retold in relation to changes in space and time.

The colonial fantasy of “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak 1988, 296) that emerges in contemporary selkie lore shows the importance of situating contact zones in the context of gender, migration, and cultural difference. In Ondine, Ondine/Johanna is pursued by a swarthy “seal husband.” He wears black clothes, drives a black car, and eats fish out of the can using a pocketknife. He lurks, scowls, and uses violence to gain what he wants. Knowing his secrets and alien (seal) nature, Ondine/Johanna kills him. Slaying the villain/drug smuggler, though, does not make her a heroine. Her goodness and selfless willingness to assimilate into Western culture certainly ennoble her, but the position of true hero goes to a male protagonist. Syracuse becomes Ondine/Johanna’s Western prince because only he can save her from deportation back to Romania (understood as a fate worse than death) by offering her marriage. In this manner, the underlying perception of Eastern Europe as violent, primitive, and dangerous is confirmed in a representation of the West as the subject of desire and the geographical site of Ondine/Johanna’s happy-ever- after.

As a result of migration—be it under the banner of slavery, conquest, migration, or human trafficking—cross-cultural exchanges have generated “new and complex identities” (Loomba 1998, 175). The cultural transmutations resulting from these historical movements implicate folklore studies because, as Donald Haase argues, “creolization, multivocality, and hypertextuality” are constituent parts of the way folklore is transmitted and (re)incorporated in specific historical contexts and locales (2010, 31). Intertextuality follows global flows. Ondine and Seal Woman are only two examples of the rich body of folklore-inspired narratives in various media that demonstrate the intertextual complexity and generic flexibility of postmodern texts.