A Rebirth of the Siren >>> Whitney Reed In England, 18th and 19th century literature concerning female criminals depicted many of the women in a startling manner. There were generally two different categories of women: the victim and the siren. The characterization of empowered female criminals as sirens reveals a great deal about the social attitude toward women in 18th and 19th century England. Through the novels of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), by Mary Elizabeth Braddon; the collection of short stories The Sorceress of the Strand (1902-1903), by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace; and the play Salome (1896), by Oscar Wilde, female criminality is revealed to be deadly and dangerous due to the aspects of the siren in the strong women criminals. The siren-esque qualities and characteristics in the women works to display the danger in empowered agency in women. These literary works’ incorporation of the siren in the female criminal reveals the dangers of a woman using her femininity to commit crimes. In these works, the use of the feminine in women’s crime is highlighted to reveal society’s anxiety over the deadly power women were beginning to realize and use to their advantage. The portrayal of the use of the feminine to promote women’s crime and power is compared to the siren to send the message that using the feminine is deadly, dangerous, evil, and ultimately corruptive to society. The siren is a mythological being that has been sighted in literature for centuries before this infusion of the siren in the 18th/19th century criminal. In the ancient Greek mythology of Odysseus, the sirens were formed with the head of a woman and the body of a bird. Odysseus was legendary for surviving the call of the siren and safely guiding his ship and crew past the temptation. Paul Murgatroyd cites Homer’s poem The Odyssey, revealing Odysseus’ warning by a sorceress, “First you will come to the Sirens, who/enchant every single man who comes to them. If anyone draws near to them in ignorance and hears the Sirens’ voices, there is no homecoming for him” (Murgatroyd 44). This is considered a widely celebrated feat in the myth because sirens personify temptation to men. The siren is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary in Terri Windling’s introduction to a collection of articles, Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, as being, “a woman with an irresistible allure, dangerous to men” (Windling vii). She follows this definition by adding, “The word comes from the sirens of Greek mythology: beautiful bird-women, dangerous and desirable, feared for their fatal beauty . . .” (Windling vii). The siren is considered a monstrous formation of the feminine. Typical later lore contains tales of sirens who lure sailors to their island with sexual promises and enchantment. Once the sailors were tempted, the sirens have been said to rip them apart to the bone, sink their ship, or even drown them. The form of death to the sailors is varied, but their death is never averted. The idea of the fatalistic lure of feminine beauty is immortalized in the siren. Sirens are mythological creatures that have been adapted by societies and literature to take many forms. Though the bird-woman form is found in the Greek mythology, the mermaid is also a form of the siren. Meri Lao notes in her extensive book on sirens, Sirens: Symbols of Seduction (1998), “Another type [of siren] emerged that would prevail over all others: the fish-formed Siren . . . The Sirens became mermaids” (Lao 82). This duality with
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