30/03/2023
🌊🦭What are selkies? 🦭🌊
Our playwright and co-director Eleanor Pitt is here to tell you a little bit about this mythic creature…
Originating from Celtic and Norse mythology, the selkie most are familiar today is found in the folktales of the Northern Isles of Scotland. Selkies are shapeshifters: they are seals in the ocean and shed their skins to become human on land. Many of the Scottish tales revolve around a human man stealing a female selkies skin, hiding it, then essentially forcing her to become his wife and mother of his children. But she is distant, longs for the sea, her home, and usually the tale ends with her finding her sealskin and running back into the ocean, never to be seen again.
These selkies and stories in some respects generally support the ways patriarchal society controls and others the identity of women, through the emphasis on their beauty and mysterious qualities, the empathy usually afforded to the husband character, and as their bodies literally become animals. The other world they come from, the ocean, suggests ideas of an unknowable identity, and their husbands can ignore, control, and shape this identity in both their immediate infatuation with the selkies and in the stealing of her skin.
At the same time, they specifically and empathetically represent the experience women have historically had in their marriages. With little social or economic power, women relied on men, on marriage, and so were essentially forced to leave their homes and adapt to unfamiliar circumstances. Absorbed into this unfamiliar family, many of our foremothers would have experienced a loss of identity to an extent, whether through becoming part of a new family or culture, or even moving to a new country. Most of our own mothers, in the system of marriage, lose their family names…which were their fathers. And so on.
Selkies ultimately are an incarnation of women throughout time who never comfortably fit into this narrative, who just didn’t seem quite right to those around them. Perhaps some were talented in ways deemed not fit for women, were LGBT+, or experienced neurodivergence. Perhaps some merely dreamed of a life different than their own. But, undoubtedly, the selkie represents any woman who in some way rejects the language and coding of the situation she is placed in. Who has a different story or chooses to rewrite it. Who really is from another world…
As the writer Theodora Goss put it:
“It occurred to me that there have always been selkie women: women who did not seem to belong to this world, because they did not fit into prevailing notions of what women were supposed to be. And if you did not fit into those notions, in some sense you weren’t a woman. Weren’t even quite human. […] Selkie women are the ones who look as though they came out of fairy tales, because they did. The ones who look at the sea longingly, who look at the sky as their home. They do not fear death. They only fear imprisonment.”
Come and see The Selkie on the 3rd and 4th April 2023, tickets at link in bio!
