The Sea Lady

In The Sea Lady H. G.Wells employs a time-honored technique of satire: the alien perspective. A mermaid finds the ordinary world we inhabit not altogether sensible, her previous experience making it strange to her, and therefore strange to us as well. Herein lies a good deal of humor. In an early scene Wells burlesques the way popular literature represents his world and then uses the rest of the story to criticize the world as it truly is.But the lady has an agenda, too, and it isn't at all what she leads her hostess to believe. When we learn this, Wells's satire grows dark. Or does it rather grow brighter? The ending is mysterious.Yet it is not quite as mysterious as the ending of the novel on which this play is based. The novel is narrated like a documentary, as if the data were gathered from interviews of witnesses, and for this reason the final scene cannot be reported, since only the principals, now gone, witnessed it.Readers' inability to forgive Wells for depriving them of this climactic scene may account for the novel's relative obscurity. This adaptation uses much of Wells's own writing, both in this novel and in other stories, to fill in the blank.