Every Valentine’s Day, we sell little girls the same lie: give up everything for love, and you’ll get your happily ever after. But Hans Christian Andersen knew better when he wrote “The Little Mermaid” in 1837. His mermaid doesn’t get the prince. She gives up her voice, every step on her new legs feels like walking on knives, and when the prince marries someone else, she dissolves into sea foam rather than murder him for her freedom. That’s the real story—love as sacrifice, transformation as agony, and the price of becoming something you’re not: complete dissolution of self. The Ringling Brothers understood this when they displayed their “authentic mermaids” in glass cases and tanks across America. They weren’t selling wonder; they were selling the same tragic fantasy Andersen warned against. Look closely at the beautiful creature who gave up everything to be here. Now pay your nickel and move along before you notice she’s drowning.
The circus mermaid hoaxes were magnificent in their grotesquerie. P.T. Barnum started it with his Fiji Mermaid in 1842—a monkey’s torso sewn to a fish tail, pure nightmare fuel marketed as exotic beauty. But the Ringlings elevated the con. They displayed “living mermaids” in tanks, women who could hold their breath for impossible lengths, their legs bound in costume tails that made actual swimming near-impossible. These performers would press their palms against the glass, making eye contact with children, mouthing words no one could hear through water and glass. The souvenir postcards called them “Beauties of the Deep,” but the performers called it “the drowning act”—eight shows a day, holding your breath until your lungs screamed, smiling underwater while tourists tapped the glass like you were a goldfish who might do tricks.
Here’s what’s delicious and devastating: the original Little Mermaid was Andersen’s love letter to Edvard Collin, the man who would never love him back. Andersen, gay in an era when that meant death or worse, wrote about a creature who could never speak her truth, who transformed her body into something acceptable but still wasn’t chosen, who faced the choice between killing the one she loved or disappearing entirely. He knew what it meant to perform an acceptable version of yourself until the real you dissolved. The circus mermaids lived this metaphor daily—women who transformed themselves into fantasy creatures for audiences who wanted the myth, not the human. They held their breath, hid their legs, surrendered their voices to the water, all for crowds who’d forget them the moment they walked to the next tent.
The Florida circus winters made the mermaid acts especially cruel and especially popular. Sarasota’s warm waters meant year-round mermaid shows in outdoor tanks, but salt water destroyed the costumes and freshwater had to be heated in winter. The performers developed chronic ear infections, skin conditions from the costume adhesives, joint problems from swimming with bound legs. But here’s the thing about love and sacrifice—the myth only works if it looks effortless. So they smiled underwater, waved through the glass, and embodied every little girl’s dream of being special enough to make someone change their whole world for you. Spoiler alert: the prince never changes his world. You change yours, and then you disappear.
One Ringling mermaid from the 1950s, who went only by “Marina” in the programs, left a diary that surfaced in a Gibsonton estate sale. She wrote about the Valentine’s Day shows being the worst—all those couples wanting to see “true love’s transformation,” buying into the fantasy that love meant becoming unrecognizable. She described watching fathers hold their daughters up to the tank, telling them how beautiful the mermaid was, how magical, how perfect. “They never ask if I can breathe,” she wrote. “They never ask if the tail comes off. They see what they need to see—a woman who gave up everything to be here, smiling for them. The fact that I’m drowning is part of the appeal.”
The real horror of both the fairy tale and the circus act is that they’re teaching the same lesson: love requires the complete annihilation of self. The mermaid gives up her voice, her body, her family, her entire world, and it’s still not enough. The circus performers gave up their names, their comfort, their ability to breathe freely, and it was never enough either. The audience always wanted more transformation, more sacrifice, more proof that someone would suffer beautifully for the chance at love. The Ringlings knew this and marketed accordingly—every poster showed the mermaid reaching through the water toward someone just out of frame, forever longing, forever drowning, forever almost but not quite human enough to be loved.
Today, we’ve sanitized the story. Disney gave the mermaid her voice back, her prince, her happy ending. We don’t tell children that Andersen’s mermaid was given one last chance: kill the prince and return to the sea, or die at dawn. We don’t mention that she chose dissolution over violence, that she became foam on the waves rather than hurt the man who never even knew her real name. And we certainly don’t talk about the circus mermaids who performed that dissolution nightly—women who erased themselves one held breath at a time, becoming myths for audiences who preferred the fiction to the woman drowning behind the glass. But every Valentine’s Day, when we celebrate love with hearts and flowers, remember that somewhere in Sarasota, in Gibsonton, there are old women who still can’t take deep breaths, whose joints still ache from swimming with bound legs, who survived being mermaids long enough to warn us: any love that requires you to lose your voice is not love. It’s just another sideshow, and you’re the one in the tank.
