The Mermaid

Tags

cannibals, English Renaissance, hybrid monsters, maps, Mary Queen of Scots, mermaid, NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge, Othello, Shakespeare

Introduction to ‘The Mermaid’

The story ‘The Mermaid’ is my second submission for the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge 2011. I had forty-eight hours to write a horror story set in an aquarium incorporating mouthwash in a thousand words or under. In the English Renaissance, mermaids can be grouped with the monstrous hybrids that are located in the deserts and frozen wastelands occupying the map edges. These creatures are indicative of what John Gillies calls, ‘The link between monstrosity, margins and sexual “promiscuity”‘ (Gillies 13). Therefore, hybrids are ‘the offspring of literally “promiscuous” unions between creatures of different kinds’ (13). Such fecundity occurs far from Europe’s civilised borders in the barbaric lands of Asia, Africa, the East Indies and the New World.

The themes of barbarity, promiscuity and miscegenation are prevalent in Shakespeare’s Othello (1602). Othello’s barbaric roots that are often attributed to his descent

The Elizabethan’s Exotic Identity

Tags

barbaric, Edmund Spenser, England, exotic, Guiana, Hariot, Ireland, maps, New World, Ralegh, Virginia

The Elizabethan adventurers Thomas Eliot, Sir Walter Ralegh and Edmund Spenser travelled overseas to meet cultures different from themselves. The acknowledgement of these cultures that are ‘other’ to the dominant Elizabethan civilization are what John Gillies terms the exotic, wondrous, strange and barbaric (Gillies 25). However, I am arguing that the Elizabethan notion of individuality is challenged, because they identify an exotic or a more pleasing variation of themselves in the people they label as their inferiors.

These exotic identities are illustrated by Hariot

Customising a New World

Tags

English Renaissance, King Lear, maps, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Tamburlaine Part One, The Tempest

Gerard Mercator's 1587 World Map

This month’s featured image is a segment from Gerard Mercator’s 1587 world map. It is a minimised version of Mercator’s 1569 cartographic masterpiece that allowed mariner’s to plot their voyages in a straight line. However, Mercator’s son, Rumold, reduced the map to the double hemispherical form so that it could adorn wealthy merchants’ walls.

Condensing the world to a viewable size preoccupied the English Renaissance. In 1570, Abraham Ortelius created the first