While right-thinking Victorians were elevating woman into an angel, their art slithered with images of a mermaid. Angels were thought to be meekly self-sacrificial by nature: in this cautiously diluted form they were pious models of a good woman’s submergence in her family. Mermaids, on the other hand, submerge themselves not to negate their power but to conceal it… The mermaid is a more aptly inclusive device than the angel, for she is a creature of mysterious transformations and interrelations, able to kill and to regenerate but not to die, unfurling in secret her powers of mysterious pre-Christian prehuman dispensation.

 

Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth