The Little Mermaid is a well known story about the mermaid who was yearning for the life out of the sea. She wanted to be part of the human world and explore all of the wonderful things of living below the stars. The original Little Mermaid story was written in 1836 by a man named Hans Christian Andersen. The Little Mermaid was created into a Disney movie in 1989, many of the aspects of the stories followed the path of one of Vladimir Propp's spheres he created for folktales. He came from Russia and studied many, many folk tales. Vladimir was able to write a book called 'Morphology of the Folk Tale', and is was about the 31 plot elements seen in many tales. These elements could easily be combined and created into the spheres of actions, which are the general outline present in the tale.
The main one that consists with the storyline of The Little Mermaid is the sphere of action of a princess (a sought-for person) and her father. In this sphere the tale normally goes through the following actions;
The assignment of difficult tasks(M)
Branding(j)
Exposure(EX)
Recognition (Q)
Punishment of a second villain(U)
Marriage(W)
When the story was first written in 1836 the times were a lot different then they were in 1989 when the Disney movie was first released. The relationships between the fathers and the daughters were seen a lot differently. In the 1800's this was during the time when people were still working on farms and horses were being used for transportation. In this era the men worked on the farm and the ladies did the housework. The fathers mostly interacted with the sons since they were working in the fields together, and the mothers were interacting with their daughters by teaching them to do laundry and cook. In the original The Little Mermaid the main authority figure in the little mermaid's life was her father, but the person she spoke to most was her grandmother. She went to her grandmother