Through the Siren’s Looking-Glass:

Victorian Monstrosity of the Male Desiring Subject

by

Marko Teodorski
 Through the Siren’s Looking Glass:
Victorian Monstrosity of the Male Desiring Subject

Dissertation
zur
Erlangung des akademischen Grades
Doktor der Philosophie
in der Philosophischen Fakultät

der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

vorgelegt von

Marko Teodorski

aus

Smederevo, Serbien

2016

2
Gedruckt mit Genehmigung der Philosophischen Fakultät
der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen

Dekan: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Leonhardt

Hauptberichterstatterin: Prof. Dorothee Kimmich

Mitberichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Jonathan Pollock

Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 19.12.2014

Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen: TOBIAS-lib

3
TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 7

The Levels of Monstrosity ............................................................................................... 11

Combining the Inappropriate ........................................................................................... 14

The Monster of Our Own ................................................................................................. 23

The Object of Our Own ................................................................................................... 27

On Things to Come .......................................................................................................... 33

PROLOGUE ............................................................................................................................ 38

NEVER-ENDING HORROR OF ULYSSES’ ABJECT FACES ....................................... 38

Ulysses’ Abject Self ......................................................................................................... 40

PART ONE .............................................................................................................................. 52

MIRROR: THE NIGHTMARE I INHABIT ....................................................................... 52

The Spectacular Modernity of the Mirror Image ............................................................. 54

The Cornucopia of Selfhood ............................................................................................ 59

The Haunting Strangeness ............................................................................................... 68

FALL 1: EXHAUSTED AT THE LAKE’S SHORE .......................................................... 77

Jouissance as the ‘Pleasure-in-Pain’ ................................................................................ 78

The Context of the Mirror ................................................................................................ 79

Elephantiasis of Ornamentation as the ‘Horror of Sight’ ................................................ 84

Experience of Wonderland as the ‘Horror of Sight’ ........................................................ 92

FALL 2: ALICE IN MIRRORLAND.................................................................................. 99

Stuck at the Border of the Beyond ................................................................................. 100

That Horrifying Materiality ........................................................................................... 106

In the Beyond ................................................................................................................. 110

The Small Shop of Consumerist Curiosities .................................................................. 113

The Violence of the Fall ................................................................................................ 119

PART TWO ........................................................................................................................... 122

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 IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD OF DEATH ................................................... 122

In the Beginning, All Things Shine Bright .................................................................... 124

At the Fish-Tail Apocalypse and Beyond ...................................................................... 135

Mirrors and Souls of Victorian Sirens ........................................................................... 145

The Victorian Subject’s Monstrous Skin ....................................................................... 151

SPIRAL 1: ‘THE LITTLE MERMAID’; OR, SPLIT SKIN FROM THE INSIDE OUT 157

Silence and Sight............................................................................................................ 162

Hide that Monstrous Skin .............................................................................................. 167

SPIRAL 2: ‘THE SIREN’; OR, THE ANGST OF THE SPLIT ....................................... 170

Monstrosity of the Subject ............................................................................................. 172

The Heart as Commodity ............................................................................................... 174

Warning of Death as Jouissance Expected .................................................................... 178

The Fall, and What Happens After ................................................................................ 182

SPIRAL 3: ‘THE SEA LADY’; OR, THE OTHER SIREN ............................................. 187

Becoming a Cripple; or, the Victorian Face of Miss Waters ......................................... 190

The Great Outside of Better Dreams; or, the Post-Victorian Face of Miss Waters ....... 192

PART THREE ....................................................................................................................... 200

THE AGE OF THE WORLD PICTURE: ULYSSES’ ARRIVAL ................................... 200

The Pre-Raphaelite Love ............................................................................................... 202

The Wider Picture .......................................................................................................... 205

The Spectacle of the World............................................................................................ 207

From Naturalism to Exhibitionism ................................................................................ 213

The Arrival ..................................................................................................................... 217

Introducing the Fragments ............................................................................................. 223

FRAGMENT 1: PEEPING OF THE VICTORIAN SUBJECT ........................................ 226

The Fall .......................................................................................................................... 228

The Redeemer of Victorian Modernity .......................................................................... 231

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 The Curse of the World as a Stage................................................................................. 235

Death by Drowning ........................................................................................................ 237

The Loss ......................................................................................................................... 239

FRAGMENT 2: AT THE GATES OF LANGUAGE ....................................................... 243

The Depths of the Sea .................................................................................................... 243

The Birth ........................................................................................................................ 248

The Void ........................................................................................................................ 252

At the Gates.................................................................................................................... 255

CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................. 261

Today ............................................................................................................................. 262

BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................. 270

6
INTRODUCTION

The terrifying is unsettling: it places everything outside its own nature. What is it that
unsettles and thus terrifies? It shows itself and hides itself in the way in which everything
presences, namely, in the fact that despite all conquest of distance the nearness of things
remains absent 1
Martin Heidegger

We live in a world of dreams.

It sounds absurd, it is true, to introduce a discourse, especially a critical, academic one, with
such a prosaic statement. Written like this, out of the blue, the statement appears thoroughly
vague, we might even whisper ridiculous. One cannot live in a dream, or in a number of dreams;
one can only dream a dream, at the end of which one is bound to awake. Strictly speaking,
dreams are uninhabitable, they cannot be possessed by the dreamer from the outside, they
emerge from within, and their uninhabitability comes as a result of the fact of awakening. For
if there were no awakening to come, no sober reality to shake the dream off of the dreamer,
how could we say that the dream had been dreamed at all? If there were no end to the spectral
plight of dreaming, how could we even say we lived in a world of dreams? We would simply
say we lived in a world: period. Dreaming, which presupposes awakening, becomes a
consequence of awakening. In this sense, awakening ontologically precedes dreaming, but
dreaming itself assumes the primary epistemic position. Without awakening, there could be no
dreaming; without dreaming, there could be no knowing, unless knowing is knowing a dream,
from within a dream.
It is my intention to write about awakening, or the lack of awakening, about a missed
opportunity of awakening and the pervasiveness of a dream. The dream I would like to write
about is one of a peculiar Victorian horror – of sinister places and shifting monsters. This
horrific dream is precisely of the kind introduced above: persevering and deceptive, a dream
that dreams its own awakening, like Jacques Derrida’s ‘labyrinth that includes its own exits.’2
This dream, or a web of dreams, is a cultural one, spanning centuries and hypnotizing nations.
Being so wide and profound, the statement that opened the discourse (that we live in a world

1
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing,’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and
Row, 1971), 164.
2
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 104.

7
of dreams) holds for us the very key to questioning this dream; maybe even to the awakening
itself.
As a constative, the statement informs us that there is a world made of dreams, and that we
live in this world. By that we presume a possibility of such a world: the statement rests upon
the idea that a world can exist as a phantom, a specter, a ghost or a dream that comes before
the dreamer. For how could we ‘live’ in this world, if there were no ‘world’ to live in? And
what does ‘living’ inside this world mean? Dreams just might be inhabitable after all. But far
more important in this statement that breaks the silence of a blank, yet unfilled page, is who
‘we’ are, we who are permitted to live, not just anywhere, but in this world of dreams. The
introductory statement, being a constative, apart from saying that we live in some spectral
world, incorporates all the above-mentioned issues: how does ‘one’ ‘live’ in a ‘world of
dreams’? These issues could appear benign, unimportant, or even completely unnecessary, just
a vain exercise of mental gymnastics. Unless, what is at stake is the very world of dreams that
is invoked. We could call it a world of dreams, or, viewed from a different angle, from a
different horizon, a world of fears. Between these two worlds, between the realm of dreaming
and the realm of fearing, there is a small, infinitely diminishing semantic space that opens to
us the culture that dreams, the culture that is both the subject of dreaming and the object of its
own fearing. And inside this opened space, this space that opens to us in the act of a cultural
reverie, fears are materialized, desires are provoked, subjects are summoned, monsters are
born.
The monstrous dream in question, the one that is brought about by the fact of its own
uninhabitability, is a dream that the European mind has been dreaming, mostly without
knowing, for centuries. For this mind, which has just been uncritically generalized as European,
this dream has never actually happened, it has never become an unfolding reality, a reality that
was unfolding, and is unfolding as we speak/write. Since it is considered uninhabitable, it has
always been just a text, just a space of cultural production devoid of actuality, a world always
of the second order, always ‘only’ a dream. And in this ‘only,’ in this graphic and cognitive act
of cultural naturalization, the dream reveals its powers, it spreads its stygian wings that cover
the land, the sky and the sea, eclipsing all possible exits, overshadowing a possibility of
awakening.
What is precisely this ominous dream that has stayed with the European mind for so long,
quietly and imperceptibly lulling it back to sleep over and over again? Being so persistent and
enduring, one would assume that it is a pleasant dream, a fairy tale without an end, a happily
ever after for the enchanted dreamer. Maybe it is indeed a tale of fairies, maybe it is pleasant
8
to the dreamer, but from the outside this dream looks like a nightmare. From the second half
of the eighteenth century onwards, from 1764 and The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
at least, the European mind has been hexed by the centrality of a hellish nightmare of
monstrosity. Ruined and haunted castles, demonic priests, gloomy villains and monsters of the
night, animated corpses and ancestral curses: horror and monstrosity settled into the very heart
of European literature, leaving the margins of medieval manuscripts and Renaissance
unexplored lands behind. What was named the Gothic novel, a perverse pleasure of a few, stole
the heart and soul of the nineteenth-century European public.3 Thus began a monstrous fantasy,
and the European mind has been dreaming it ever since, along with dreams about an ostensible
reality, about a beyond of the dream where the actuality of real life occurs. A dream that
includes its own awakening, a maze that includes its own ends, a fantasy that fantasizes about
its own death, a dream within a dream within a dream: monstrosity.
It is my intention to discuss this circular dreaming maze that has been haunting European
imagination for centuries now. The nightmare of horrid beings, disquieting, hybrid bodies and
split, psychopathic personalities has been incredibly persistent and powerful. At the beginning
of the twenty-first century, Western imagination is occupied with horror more than ever, and
even a superficial glance at primetime TV shows, the pulse of audiences, reveals the
truthfulness of this statement. With Dexter we root for a serial killer, who uses his murdering
impulses for ‘good’; with Hannibal we take pleasure in killing by the cookbook, every murder
bearing a name of a dish; in True Blood vampires ‘come out of the coffin,’ as they try to
integrate into the human world; in Penny Dreadful we are taken back to the good old Victorian
monstrosity of vampires and Dorian Gray. American Horror Story, Supernatural, Crime Scene
Investigation, The Fall, The Twilight Saga, Underworld, Blade, Resident Evil, The Walking
Dead, 28 Days/Weeks Later – examples of horror narratives are countless and they go on and
on, as the saga of mutants, hybrid beings and bodies turned inside-out unravels. The fact is that
today’s global population takes extreme pleasure in types of dread, torture and esthetics of
mutilation that would make the heads of Marry Shelley, and the company from Lake Geneva,
spin in disbelief of their own naïve horror.
There is a feeling that Victorian times, the nineteenth century, is something far away,
something finished, done, severed from the twentieth- and twenty-first-century modern life;

3
For Gothic fiction in general, see Clive Bloom, Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), or J. E. Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002). For gothic imagination, see Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: 400 Years of Excess,
Horror, Evil and Ruin (London: Fourth Estate, 1998).

9
there is a feeling that Victorian horror is enclosed within the appropriate confines of the term
‘Gothic’ and that, once imprisoned in that nominal cell, we can approach it from a safe distance
of another world, another time and another reality. Although it is not my aim to discuss all
these historically contingent forms of horror, this thesis still aims at a particular kind of
Victorian monstrosity. The small reminder above of the present-day situation only serves to
point to the fiendish dream that, in many forms and going by many names, has plagued the
European imagination for too long. I say for too long, because a dream must have an awakening
if it is to be a dream; without an awakening, the dream becomes reality. And the European
imagination has not awoken from its hellish fantasy yet, but it has only kept dreaming about its
end instead.
As Gil Anidjar truthfully observes in the preface to the Serbian edition of The Jew, the Arab:
A History of the Enemy, there is no such thing as the ‘West,’ or at least that is what has been
constantly repeated. There is no entity that has acted throughout history as an integral, coherent
European self, but there is a specific context that such a claim comes from.4 In the same sense,
there can be no specifically European dream, nor a specifically European subject, but there is
a context, at the beginning of the globalist twenty-first century for writing about it. This
especially rings true for the nineteenth-century Europe, whose interconnectedness of nations
was of a far lesser degree than that of our own time. We live in a globalized world, in a Global
Village, where technologically mediated (and thus circularly (re)constructed) knowledge is,
sometimes and for some, only a click away. But saying that, confronting the nineteenth-century
flow of ideas and meanings with the (post-post)modern one, does not make the former a
conglomerate of separate national knowledge, a reality devoid of cultural exchange. As Eric
Hobsbawm observed, seemingly contrary to Anidjar’s view, the nineteenth-century Europe
was one juxtaposed entity, although far from global or coherent.5 Cultural exchange between
the countries of the ‘Dual Revolution,’ (French and Industrial) as well as between the Old and
the New World was live, but knowledge met with diverse semantic demands, depending on the
latitude and longitude, reappropriating meaning, reconstructing and reinventing it. We could
say that what we experience today – a cultural difference in sameness, as well as a cultural
sameness in difference – has its roots in the nineteenth century. Monstrosity, the main focus of
this research, is no different from any other cultural palimpsest, from any dream that had

4
Gil Anidjar, Preface to the Serbian Edition of The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Beograd: Beogradski
Krug & CZKD, 2006), 7.
5
Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972); Eric J.
Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975).

10
crossed national boundaries and in that flight became reborn. For instance, though they both
treat the same topic of an inanimate matter ‘brought’ to life, there is a difference between Mary
Shelley’s ostracized monster from Frankenstein, who has an identity and a history, and E. T.
W. Hoffmann’s uncanny, passive automaton Olimpia from Der Sandmann. Faced with this
difference in sameness and sameness in difference, much as my own desire disagrees, I am
compelled to narrow down the abstract European mind to one small part of itself, to only one
facet of the vast universe of the nineteenth-century horror. Bound by a limited textual space,
we will have to settle for a specific, mostly Victorian British horror, the horror that surfaces
throughout the British nineteenth-century cultural production.
This being said, one may immediately assume that the subject of this book, or at least the
material to be discussed, is that of undying Gothic horror; that I hint at works of Ann Radcliffe,
Mary Shelley, Elisabeth Gaskell, or any of their later successors, like Bram Stoker or Robert
Louis Stevenson. No: the horror of Gothic bodies, Gothic skin, and the Victorian femme fatale
has been written about so extensively that I hardly find it an innovative enough topic to be dealt
with here.6 Without wishing to diminish other works in the mentioned area, what I have in
mind, the dream that I would like to write about, the dream within a dream that precludes
awakening and induces a false sense of reality (the only one possible after the dream has begun)
is slightly different. It is an agonizing dream of love and ecstasy that has largely been neglected
so far; it is a dream of sirens.

The Levels of Monstrosity

At the beginning of his capital work Orientalism, Edward Said says:

The idea of beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act
of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material,
separated from the mass, and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point,
a beginning.7

6
See, for example, Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin-de-Siècle
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the
Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995); Jennifer Hedgecock, The Femme
Fatale in Victorian Literature: The Danger and the Sexual Threat (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press).
7
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1798), 16.

11
 At the beginning of this book, we face the same problem of delimitation. When one needs
to write about a dream that dreams about itself, about a never-ending horror of textual
circularity, the idea of a beginning appears to be particularly difficult. Thus, for the purposes
of clarity and easier treading through the dreaming, enchanted forest of Victorian monstrosity,
I will separate the issue/argument of the book into two levels of generality.
At the broadest level, the book discusses the relationship between the languages of
monstrosity and commodified materiality in the nineteenth-century Britain. It presents the way
the changes in the materiality of things, due to the Industrial Revolution, have influenced a new
conceptualization of monstrosity. In addition to being haunted by vampires, curses and ghosts,
the Victorian imagination gave birth to a particular type of fantasy that questioned the new
relationship of man to things. Precisely at the historical moment when, according to Michel
Foucault, a fundamental opposition between life (as organic, growing) and death (as inert,
barren) emerges, animated matter in the form of golems, Frankenstein’s monster, and living
portraits, becomes a burning Victorian fantasy.8 Giorgio Agamben calls this particular spin-off
of Victorian fiction the ‘disturbing literature,’ and the dread that looms behind it ‘bad
conscience with respect to things.’9 Building on Karl Marx’s work on commodity and Sigmund
Freud’s work on fetishism, he argues that the new type of alienated capitalist production
introduced a new type of alienated commodity that restructured man’s relationship to things,
as well as man’s imagination of them. As the boundary between man and things grew blurry,
animated objects began invading the Victorian imagination, while the humanity itself became
commodified, objectified, and embodied in the figure of a ‘dandy,’ a human being bordering
on a commodity. For Agamben, this process of people becoming inanimate things signaled an
extreme human condition in the era of capitalist production – ‘the commodification of the
real.’10 Starting from his imaginative analysis of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth century, I would like to argue that the change Agamben correctly observed, apart
from obviously having had a strong impact on the idea of humanity, had a profound impact on
the idea of monstrosity, as well. The changed ideas of materiality and monstrosity, of alienated,
animated objects and monsters summoned into the very heart of the Victorian fantasy, echoed
the same epistemic change at the level of the Victorian language, where the language is not to
be understood as a living language, but as a structure of signs, langage. Inside this language, a

8
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Tavistock/Routledge
(London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 251-252.
9
Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis and London: Minneapolis
University Press, 1993), 47.
10
Ibid., 52.

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blank, unsignifiable space opened, a dark place of sinister desire, calling the monster into the
heart of the Victorian subject, calling the subject as a monster into existence, and opening an
unknown semantic space between people and things. Thus, in the last instance, this book
discusses precisely this empty space of representational interruption, a part of language that
cannot be expressed, described or attained – the burning object of the Victorian subject’s desire,
namely, death proper.
At the other, more concrete, level of analysis, the book is narrowed down considerably.
Developing the idea of a representational interruption inside the Victorian language (thus inside
the Victorian subject, the Victorian subject as an interruption in language), the book focuses
on one specific commodity and one specific monster – the mirror and the siren. Both mirrors
and sirens, together as well as separately, underwent profound changes in the nineteenth
century, making them a perfect case study for the discussion of a rupture inside the Victorian
language and the relationship of this rupture to the Victorian desiring subject.
Firstly, during the nineteenth century, mirrors changed from hard-to-come-by things into
fetishized commodities found literally on every corner. Secondly, during the same period sirens
changed from vicious, pernicious seductresses into fragile virgins in pursuit of their own
happily ever after. Thirdly, the relationship between mirrors and sirens changed: inseparable
in their iconography at least since the medieval times, sirens and mirrors departed from each
other in the Victorian times, the examples of sirens holding mirrors being almost impossible to
find (thus the book, in a way, revolves around another absence, around the nonexistence of a
specific material).11 It is my intention to show that these changes (of the commodified
materiality of mirrors and the monstrosity of sirens) were related, echoing deep inner
displacements at the level of language and the production of knowledge. Inside both the
language of materiality and monstrosity settled a dark, unsignifiable object of desire, a place
that will, as the book proceeds, turn out to be death itself. This place was the nature and the
birthplace not only of the Victorian monstrosity, but of the Victorian desiring subject: it was
the birthplace of the Victorian subject’s monstrosity.
The Victorian subject in the book has been defined as male. This has not been done
accidentally: the book essentially discusses language as desire of the male subject. By saying

11
In the field of material culture studies there are those who have already considered an approach to materiality
through its absence. In Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 2001), Victor Buchli and
Gavin Lucas discuss the very foundation of archaeology as based on fragmentedness of the archaeological records
and an inevitable speculation on what materials have not survived or have not been deposited in the records at all.
In An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2000) Victor Buchli calls for a ‘shifting away from
our preoccupation with presence [of the material record and material culture in general] towards one of absence’
(5).

13
this, I do not assume that the subject is fundamentally male, in the way the Biblical subject is,
the female subject emerging as his reflection only. As far as mirrors are concerned, many, if
not most, of the arguments in the book could be, and sometimes indeed are, easily applied to
the female subject as well, but since the thesis is about Victorian mirror narratives in relation
to the representation of sirens, I have decided to limit the study to the male desiring subject
only. Sirens have always been an essentially male fantasy, and bringing the female subject into
the analysis would complicate it to the point of impossibility, at least in this book. Also, less
important but still pertinent to the text is the fact that the field of the Victorian nineteenth-
century cultural production was largely (but certainly not exclusively) male, most of the
material analyzed having been produced by male authors. This might seems to be a limitation
and inconvenience, but it actually gives an interesting and original twist to the problem we are
dealing with. I would like to show that in the representation of siren bodies, bodies primarily
sexualized as female (with notable exceptions such as Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘The Forsaken
Merman’ (1849) and John William Waterhouse’s visual treatment of the poem, The Merman
(1892)), we can find a topology of a subject that is primarily sexualized as male. Contrary to,
or, better, building upon, the readings of Victorian sirens (scarce as they are) as expressions of
misogyny and acts of female discursive subjugation, I would like to propose that sirens in the
nineteenth-century Victorian culture were not exclusively indicative of changing female gender
roles (which they definitely were), but also (or even more so) indicative of the male subject
who created them. This male subject had a very important idiosyncrasy: he essentially lived in
the world of dreams we started the book with. And his Being, or a signifying illusion of it, was
every bit as nightmarish and incoherent as the dream he inhabited.12 Using Jacques Lacan’s
concept of the split subject, or rather appropriating it for my own ends, I would like to propose
that the male Victorian subject himself was as monstrous as the siren body of his imagination.
I would like to propose that the siren body was the Victorian male desiring subject’s vessel.

Combining the Inappropriate

The Victorian monstrous subject that the book discuss in relation to the representation of
sirens is a fundamentally split subject, and its expression by means of the language of siren
monstrosity is only a symptom of a deeper epistemic turmoil of the Victorian culture. The book

12
In order to distinguish between the metaphysical ‘being’ (Heideggerian ‘being’) and ‘being’ as a ‘creature,’ the
prior will always be capitalized. ‘Being’ in cited paragraphs and sentences will be left in its original version.

14
draws primarily upon the theoretical works of two great twentieth-century French authors,
Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. In spite of Foucault’s early praise of psychoanalysis in
The Order of Things, one might say that Foucault and Lacan are completely antithetical,
especially having Foucault’s later view on psychoanalysis in mind. 13 But, confessedly, this is
exactly where I take my joy from – from combining the inappropriate. While Foucault’s
analysis of the changed configuration of knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century
provides the starting point for the book’s theoretical framework, Lacan’s concepts of the split
subject, mirror stage, aphanasis, jouissance and objet a give us tools for an analysis of a
specific Victorian subjectivity. Combined together, Foucault’s historical research into
language and its relationship to representation, and Lacan’s research (following Sigmund
Freud) into the very precondition of this language – the unconscious – allow us to explore the
relationship between the subject and the language of monstrosity in the representation of
Victorian sirens. The idea hiding behind my research is that the emergence of a Lacanian split
subject, a semantically incoherent subject – an idea that Lacan, in a way, raises to the general
level of human condition within culture – is highly historically specific and particularly
pertinent to the nineteenth century.14
According to the Lacanian psychoanalysis, a subject appears as a subject only at the moment
of his invocation by/into language (I will specify the gender of the noun ‘subject’ in accordance
with the general discussion of the male subject).15 In this sense, Lacan’s conceptualization of
the subject does not differ considerably from Louis Althusser’s ideologically ‘interpellated
subject,’ or Judith Butler’s subject resulting from performativity and exclusionary practices of
language.16 Derrida too denies self-presence of the subject before speech and signs, arguing
that

13
For Foucault’s early praise of the boldness of psychoanalysis, see Foucault, Order of Things, 411-424. For a
summary of his ambivalent relationship to it, see Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Michel Foucault et la psychanalyse,’ in
Michel Foucault philosophe, ed. François Ewald (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1989).
14
For example, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan says: ‘Consciousness has to come to terms with that
outside world and it has had to come to terms with it ever since men have existed and thought and tried out theories
of knowledge’ (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-
1960, trans. Dennis Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 56). This is one of the places where Lacan
presumes universality of language. In his view, there has always been an outside to the representation and thought
and thus of consciousness.
15
See, Jacques Lacan, ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,’ in Écrits, trans. Bruce
Fink (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006), 179-268.
16
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),’ in Mapping
Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London and New York, Verso), 132-136; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 3.

15
 the subject becomes a speaking subject only in its commerce with the system of
linguistic differences; or yet, the subject becomes a signifying […] subject only
by inscribing itself in the system of differences. Certainly in this sense the
speaking or signifying subject could not be present to itself, as speaking or
signifying, without the play of linguistic or semiological différance.17

According to all of them, language, structurally formalizing culture (in the Lacanian
language, the Symbolic), is the signifier that calls the subject into existence. But in Lacan, by
the very act of this call that cannot be ignored, the subject himself (previously a subject-to-be)
becomes an element in the chain of signification, petrified into a signifier for another signifier.
At the very moment of the subject’s entrance into culture, the subject becomes a sign in the
chain of signification that moves on and on. Fossilized at the gates of the Symbolic (a culture),
in order to became a bearer of meaning the subject has to die as Being, a process Lacan calls
aphanasis. By this logic, although a sign himself, the subject as Being has no place in language;
the subject, as Being, is literally not.0 What is left of the subject, though, after his initial
appearance/disappearance, is language of the unconscious, the unconscious that is structured
like language, through which the subject emerges. Emerging essentially from this language (of
the unconscious), in which there is no place for him as Being, the subject is always not, always
a negativity without coherence or stability. For Lacan, there is no coherent, solid core of the
subject, or the subject per se; the centrality of the Freudian ego is only an illusion of the subject,
initiated by the ‘mirror stage.’18 Since the book revolves heavily around these Lacanian
concepts, it is vital that some of them be clarified from the start.
The term aphanasis (from the Greek ἀφανής, aphanes, ‘invisible’) was originally employed
in psychoanalysis by Ernest Jones in 1927 to designate the fear of seeing desire disappear.19
As we have seen, Lacan uses the term to refer to the fundamental disappearance of the subject
as Being. He argues that the subject is called into existence by a signifier in the field of the
Other (in this case the Symbolic, language, culture) – an illustration of this invocation being
the ‘mirror stage.’

17
Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance,’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982),
16.
18
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,’
in Écrits, trans., Bruce Fink (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006).
19
Ernest Jones, ‘The Early Development of Female Sexuality,’ Introduction to Journal of Psycho-Analysis 8
(1927): 459-472.

16
 Lacan first outlined his idea of the mirror stage at the Fourteenth International
Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936, relying on the previous work of Henry
Walton. Walton had argued that chimpanzees, as well humans, seem to recognize their mirror
images as images of themselves at the age of six months. While chimpanzees soon lose interest
in their reflection, humans invest a lot of time into its inspection. This investigation into the
relationship between the body and the image helps toddlers to develop a sense of selfhood.20
Lacan developed this idea further, reshaping it in the decades that followed, making it the focal
point of his writing on the split subject, as evidenced in first of his Écrits, ‘The Mirror Stage
as Formative of the I Function.’ Somewhere between the first six and eighteen months of a
toddler’s life, the Other (which is usually a parent) shows the toddler (who is a subject-to-be),
a reflective surface (a mirror or any other device). As part of this act, usually followed by the
words ‘Look, it is you!’ the Other signals to the subject-to-be (the toddler) to identify with his
own mirror image. The subject-to-be looks at the mirror image and, verbally invited by the
Other, for the first time recognizes himself as a whole. This whole appears to the subject-to-be
the final resolution of his inner incoherence, fragmentation, struggle and anxiety, so he
identifies with the external image, appropriating it as his own coherent core, his own coherent
ego. This is the initial promise of the mirror – a wholeness that, once attained, ends the
restlessness of the subject’s chaos of fragmentation. But, this identification of the self with an
exteriorized image has a profound effect on the subject’s psychic life. By identifying with his
externalized corporeal existence, by appropriating it, a fundamental méconnaissance of the
ego’s coherence is initiated: the appropriation is only an illusion, as the subject is no more
coherent and whole than he was before the encounter. The subject remains split between the
promise of coherence and the essential illusion of that promise.
At the Congress, Lacan’s idea met with a lack of interest, and universal validity of this idea
still remains unproven. Raymond Tallis remarked, quite justifiably, that a literal interpretation
of Lacan’s mirror-stage presupposes that blind people are incapable of forming a sense of
selfhood, and are denied entrance into culture.21 Regardless of this doubt, we shall see that the
scenario of the mirror stage is a powerful tool for discussing the Victorian monstrous desiring
subject.

20
Dylan Evans, ‘From Lacan to Darwin,’ in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, ed.
Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 38-55.
21
Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (London: Macmillan Press,
1988), 153.

17
 Returning to the issue of the subject’s relation to language, what we can deduct from the
mirror stage scenario is the subject’s invocation into the circle of language, into the maze/chain
of signification. Facing his mirror image, invited to identify with it, the subject-to-be enters the
symbolic relations of culture, emerging as a full subject by the power of the signifier (the
language), emerging as an effect of language. But, according to Lacan, as soon as he appears
as a subject, as soon as he enters the language, he becomes a signifier himself – for another
signifier and the chain of signification moves on. This way, by acquiring meaning, the subject
‘loses’ his Being; he identifies with his external image, with the fullness of this image, which
is an illusion nested in the very core of the subject’s existence. Thus, the moment the subject
enters the language, he becomes a split subject, split between his fundamental incoherence and
the illusion of coherence dwelling in his core, between his ‘lost’ Being and gained meaning,
between the Real (of his Being) beyond language and the Symbolic (of his meaning) which is
that language. Lacan calls this eclipse of the subject’s Being by meaning aphanasis, the ‘fading
of the subject.’ It is one of the fundamental vels of logic for Lacan – either/either – that exist
in language, as well as in experience. ‘Aphanasis is to be situated in a more radical way,’ says
Lacan,

at the level at which the subject manifests himself in this movement of

disappearance that I have described as lethal. In a quite different way, I have
called this movement the fading of the subject. […] There is no subject without,
somewhere, aphanasis of the subject, and it is in this alienation, in this
fundamental division, that the dialectic of the subject is established.22

The scenario described above will provide us with a basic model for dealing with the
Victorian mirror culture and its relationship to Victorian sirens and male Victorian desiring
subject. It is vital, though, to note that one cannot take the Lacanian mirror stage for granted,
since it suffers from several obvious flaws. Apart from the already mentioned visual issues,
Lacan’s idea of the split subject, as well as that of the mirror stage, rest heavily on a relationship
between the subject and language. This relationship has been argued about and criticized in the
Western philosophy at least since the appearance of Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural

22
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
1963-1964, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 207-208; 221.

18
linguistics.23 As Foucault, among others, has shown, language, as a formalizing relationship
between meaning and representation, is historically specific, while Lacan’s psychoanalysis
deals with language in absolute terms.24 Also, the applicability of the mirror stage is diminished
by the idea’s gross generalization, and, as soon as it is presented, one may rightly wonder what
happens with the subject in case a mirror is lacking? How can one use this scenario historically
for a discussion of cultures with no mirrors, or clear reflecting surfaces? We could agree that
there has always been a certain level of recognition of one’s reflection in stagnant waters, such
as ponds, lakes or polished stones, but Lacanian identification with an external coherence takes
the clarity of the reflected image to a whole new level. Was there no subjectivity before
mirrors? These are all sensible questions to ask.
Since there is no room for dealing with the history of subjectivity, I have decided to turn the
above questions the other way round and ask: what whold be the necessary conditions for the
mirror stage scenario to be possible? What kind of culture would allow identification with the
mirror image, so intense that the mirror image becomes a reality? Firstly, the culture in question
would have to be one in which mirrors are common and frequent enough. Secondly, it would
have to be a culture in which mirrors are not only frequent, but large and clear enough, so that
the subject could fall prey to his illusion. Thirdly, and most importantly, if the subject is
fundamentally dependent on and subjectified by language, and the language is historically
specific, it would have to be a culture whose language is appropriately incoherent so as to
reflect, and produce, an incoherent subject. The Victorian nineteenth-century culture was
precisely that kind of culture and the Victorian nineteenth-century language was precisely that
kind of language.
According to Foucault, the classical episteme, spanning roughly the seventeenth and the
eighteenth centuries, was characterized by a ‘duplicated representation,’25 an organization of
meaning where ‘representation in its peculiar essence [was] always perpendicular to itself,’26
cancelling meaning as we know it. The sign in the eighteenth century, was a sign only if it
expressed in itself the relationship to the thing represented. The sign had to represent, but the
representation had to be represented in it. Foucault calls this relationship of the sign to the

23
For an account on conceptualization of the relationship between the subject and language in Western
philosophy, see Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Philosophy in Twentieth-Century France (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987).
24
The investigation of historicity of language pervades Foucault’s work as a whole, but the most explicit works
on the topic are The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1972).
25
Foucault, Order of Things, 70.
26
Ibid., 72.

19
representation, and of meaning to language, the ‘binary organization of the sign.’27 He takes
images rather than words to be crucial examples of this perpendicularity of representation. An
image is, at the same time, a sign of what is represented and the content of the representation
itself. Following this logic, according to which everything available to representation is already
contained in the sign that represents, not only does the theory of signification collapse but also
meaning as we know it (a differential relationship between the signifier and the signified)
cannot even emerge. Foucault says that ‘[t]his universal extension of the sign within the field
of representation,’

precludes even the possibility of a theory of signification. For to ask ourselves

questions about what signification is, presupposes that it is a determinate form
in our consciousness. But if phenomena are posited only in a representation that,
in itself and because of its own representability, is wholly a sign, then
signification cannot constitute a problem. Moreover, it is not even visible.28

Foucault concludes that no meaning is exterior or anterior to the sign, because there is no
intermediary element, no opacity between the sign and its content. Signs, therefore, have no
other laws than those that govern their content: everything that is to be represented has already
found its place within the representation, leading the representation to always fall back on itself.
He goes on to exemplify the ‘duplicated representation’ by analyzing the fields of eighteenth-
century natural history, language and the theory of value.
The nineteenth-century, i.e. modern episteme, witnessed a different relationship between
meaning and language. For Foucault, this shift was ‘certainly one of the most radical that ever
occurred in Western culture,’ when the classicistic configuration of knowledge changed into
that ‘from which, even now [in 1966], we have doubtless not entirely emerged.’29 The
representation stopped being perpendicular to itself, and the sign stopped encompassing
everything that gives itself to representation. Within language, an irreducible element has been
born: a representational blank space that could not be reduced to representation. From that
moment on, ‘what gives value to the objects of desire,’ writes Foucault, ‘is not solely the other
objects that desire can represent to itself, but an element that cannot be reduced to that

27
Ibid., 71.
28
Ibid., 72.
29
Ibid., 239.

20
representation.’30 The fullness of the classicistic configuration of meaning has been shattered,
representation and language becoming incoherent, due to this disturbing element that exists
‘exterior to the actuality of the representation itself.’31 A radical opposition emerged between
the representation and what is represented, a blank space of rupture surfacing in-between and
pervading the language of representation. And through this unsignifiable rift that now stands
at the core of the representation, Being itself fell through. ‘The very being of that which is
represented,’ continues Foucault, ‘is now going to fall outside representation itself.’32 Things
represented now offer themselves only partially to representation, in fragments or profiles, in
pieces; knowledge is created in the cracks and crevices of language. This withdrawing of
knowledge and meaning beyond the reach of representation, this unrepresentability of Being,
for Foucault crystallizes finally as metaphysics, as well as a transcendental subject whose
metaphysical existence depends upon a space beyond language, representation and meaning; a
subject whose impossibility becomes the very condition of his possibility.33
It becomes clear that, as incompatible as Lacan’s idea of the split subject and Foucault’s
archaeology of knowledge may seem, they actually converge in their antihumanistic attitude
towards the subject. What Foucault describes as the split language and the metaphysical subject
is just another, and more historically precise, face of the Lacanian split subject. Foucaldian
‘falling of being outside representation,’ is structurally the same as Lacanian aphanasis. What
is vital for my own argument is that both authors emphasize a space beyond language and
meaning as the precondition of the subject’s existence: Foucault argued that this beyond was
typical of the nineteenth-century configuration of knowledge, while Lacan maintained it to be
the human condition within culture per se. Foucault’s space beyond language could quite
plausibly be read as the Lacanian Real.
Summarizing the theoretical argument outlined so far (and its pertinence to the idea of this
book), I have decided to take Lacan’s psychoanalytic concepts and, through their placement
within the structure of the Foucauldian historicity of knowledge, appropriate them as tools for
a historically specific discussion of the Victorian male desiring subject. I do not claim that they
would prove equally useful for analyzing other historical periods, but, through a more detailed
analysis in the chapters to come, I hope to prove their usefulness in discussing nineteenth-
century commodified materiality, monstrosity and subjectivity. The Victorian time was the

30
Ibid., 257.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid., 260.
33
Ibid., 263-265.

21
very first moment in history when mirrors, known and limitedly used on both sides of the
Atlantic, became overabundant and thus an inescapable part of the everyday life; they became
a commodity. Though the production of glass mirrors capable of reflecting a full image of the
subject’s corporeal existence had existed since the thirteenth century, the Victorians were the
first to encounter their externalized corporeality almost on every corner. In this respect, the
nineteenth century introduced a phenomenon, whose extreme version is known to most people
living in the (at least) Western cultural sphere today: the first thing to do when one is out of
bed is to look in the mirror and reconfirm the coherence of one’s image. As it will be shown in
the first part of the book reserved for an in-depth discussion of this phenomenon, at the
beginning of the century, the interaction of the subject with his reflected image was still
sporadic and frail, but it became a normalized cultural practice by its end. The introduction of
mirrors into everyday life had a series of profound effects on the subject’s relationship with
himself, and as a consequence, with the language of representation of the self. The subject
gazed into his external coherence materialized before him in every street, on every corner, and
he fell prey to the game of the appearance that the reflecting surfaces nurtured. He took this
external image to be his own coherent self, entering a dream so profound and so reverberating
(and so monstrous) that he would never awake again. The core of what he now perceived as
his stable, coherent self, a permanent place of agency identified with the pronoun ‘I,’ rested on
an illusion, masking the fundamental incoherence of the subject and his ego. Split between the
illusion of semantic coherence that became a reality, and the reality of incoherence that was
felt but not perceived, the subject became imprisoned in the realm of the in-between, reaching
for a phantom fullness presented by the mirror, always falling short of it, experiencing the
aggression of this fall time and again. As I discuss the material on mirrors, considered as mirror
narratives in their essential relationship to the language of representation, we shall see, over
and over again, that what the subject sees in the mirror is never what he wishes to see.
Whenever in contact with a reflecting surface, or, rather, whenever testifying about this contact,
the subject finds himself unable to express the fullness he desires, continuously falling short of
words (language), with every attempt falling back into the rabbit hole of signification and
expressing his ineptitude in a language of lack and excess. What, in these narratives, the subject
perceives in the mirror is always more or less than the language he possesses, thus always more
or less than the subject himself. Every confrontation with a mirror image invokes a haunting
strangeness of reflection, a différance as sameness which is not identical; it summons a creature
hardly recognizable as what the subject understands as the ‘self’ – incoherence, confusion, a
nightmare, a monster. Through the looking-glass, the subject is drawn into a world of dreams,
22
a world made of dreams of a fullness that never comes, never achieves itself, never satisfies,
but always calls, beckons, seduces and implores; a dream that dreams about awakening. Caught
in this vicious circle, the subject fails to notice that what reflecting surfaces now actually mirror
is a blank, unsignifiable space within him, a fissure in language that both Foucault and Lacan
talk about: mirrors begin expressing the subject’s desire for this ravenous place, his essential,
yet historically contingent, desire for death.

The Monster of Our Own

Before we proceed to the to the close reading of the material, there are two more issues to
be discussed, if we want the analysis to be clear and tangible. We are dealing with languages
of monstrosity and materiality in connection with the Victorian subject. Since we have already
discussed the relationship between the subject and language, we need to turn briefly to the
subject’s relationship to monstrosity, as well as to his relationship to materiality.
How does monstrosity relate to subjectivity? This question is, of course, historically specific
and it is my intention, by reading the monstrosity of sirens, to offer a possible answer that
would prove convincing for the Victorian times. In the Victorian Britain, monstrosity, placed
at the heart of literary and visual production, changed its language considerably. In 1981, Loren
Daston and Katharine Park, later followed by a number of authors in the field of ‘monster
studies,’ showed that from the Middle Ages until today, the conceptualization of the monster
went from that of a prodigy, to a wonder, and then finally to a naturalized object.34 In 1998,
they reconceptualized this linear evolution of the monster in their book Wonders and the Order
of Nature, adopting a more heterogeneous approach, and historicizing the order of nature itself
in its connection to the concepts of wonder and the pleasures of wondering. They showed that
in the Renaissance appreciation of wonders there was a highly class-distinctive element of the
European elite culture, a practice that changed in the Enlightenment. They pointed to a ‘sharp

34
Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, ‘Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century France and England,’ Past & Present 92 (1981): 20-54. There is no an academic discipline
called ‘monster studies.’ Under this term, I include many diverse studies on monstrosity drawing upon old works
such as Ambroise Paré, Des monstres et prodiges (Genève: Droz, 1971) written in the 16th century. Some of them
are, Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings (London: Penguin Books, 1974); Jeffrey J. Cohen, ed.,
Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1996); John Block Friedman, The
Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 2000), Jurgis Baltrušaitis,
Le Moyen Age: antiquités at exotismes dansdans l’art gotique (Paris: A. Colin, 1955); Georges Canguilhem,
‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous,’ in Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Martin Monestier, Le Monstre. Histoire encyclopédique des phénomènes
humains (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2007); Marie Hélène-Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1993) and many others. French authors were definitely a vanguard in this area of studies.

23
rupture in [their] narrative,’ the moment when wonders of nature became part of popular
culture. ‘When marvels themselves became vulgar,’ Daston and Park conclude, ‘an epoch had
closed.’35 With this rupture the epoch of their study closed, but that of this book opened. Most
other studies on monstrosity throughout the twentieth century examined the monster from the
perspective of natural history, but what I am interested in is the monster as a trope of
imagination, as expressed in the arts. My own reading of the nineteenth-century material on
monsters leads to a conclusion that the Victorian monster was essentially connected to the
language of the subject’s desire.
Two major ways of thinking about monstrosity dominate today’s criticism. They are
inseparable, being locked in the dialectics of mutual reshaping, but for the purpose of clearer
argumentation, they are artificially divided here into distinctive categories: the monster as an
external and the monster as an internal condition of the subject’s possibility of existence.
External (from the outside toward the beyond). The perspective on the monster as a
dialectical outside of the humanity and the self has been immortalized by Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen’s influential essay, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses).’36 Published in 1996, the essay
capitalized on a long tradition of understanding the monster as a borderline entity. As the
essay’s title anticipates, Cohen’s theory has seven theses and the fourth thesis states that the
‘[m]onster dwells at the gates of difference,’ echoing Donna Haraway’s famous quote from her
1983 essay A Cyborg Manifesto: ‘[m]onsters have always defined the limits of community in
Western imaginations.’37 The view of the monster as foreign to sociality, as outlandish or
liminal, is the most common approach in cultural criticism. In this view, the monster defines
what it means to be human, and it does so from the outside. The monster’s inappropriately
articulated body is scattered all around the field of subjectivity, drawing lines and painting a
negative landscape whose shifting contours articulate the equally shifting notion of humanity
and the self. For Judith Butler, these ‘zones of uninhabitability’ are irrevocably the land of
monsters, of ‘those who do not enjoy the status of the subject’; they are places ‘which a subject

35
Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 19.
36
Jeffrey J. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven These),’ in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen (Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 1996), 6.
37
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century,’ Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 180. In the
same spirit, the seventh thesis of Allen S. Weiss’ ‘Ten Thesis on Monsters and Monstrosity’ states: ‘Monsters
exist on margins. They are thus avatars of chance, impurity, heterodoxy; abomination, mutation, metamorphosis;
prodigy, mystery, marvel. Monsters are indicators of epistemic shifts.’ (Allen S. Weiss, ‘Ten Thesis on Monsters
and Monstrosity,’ The Drama Review 48:1 (2004): 125). This tendency to discuss monstrosity in theses is an
attempt to anti-historicize the notion of monstrosity, as well as to subjugate its semiotic impossibility to a possible
categorization.

24
fantasizes as threatening its own integrity with the prospect of a psychotic dissolution.’38 Where
one’s notion of the self feels threatened, where the coherence of one’s illusion of the self falls apart,
the monster is born. This monster, which faces one either from the other side of the abyss that
protects one from what one is not, or which is itself precisely the abyss in question, polices the
borders of imaginable possibilities. The monster thus becomes the very condition of the subject’s
coherence, a place of refuge sine qua non. The subject exists as a coherent whole in so far as the
monster cannot, the dialectical relationship shaping both of them in a never-ending play of the Self
and the Other. This epistemic position of the monster is a perfect illustration of the Julia Kristeva’s
abject, ‘something rejected, from which one does not part.’39 The abject gives the monster a chance
to be not the Other, not a conditional negative of humanity, but the very border that puts the Self
and the Other each in their respective places. The monster becomes the identity figure over and
above all identity figures; it becomes the anti-identity whose impossibility bestows on it
tremendous powers. In a way, we could say that, fleeing dialectics and becoming the dialectics
itself, the monster, as a semantic trope, becomes a metaphysical entity capable of crushing any
signifying order from without.
In the same respect, Haraway theorizes the monster as an ‘inappropriate/d other’; not as that
which is ‘not in the relation,’ ‘the authentic, the untouched,’ but that which is a ‘critical,
deconstructive relationality,’ that which is ‘not […] originally fixed by difference.’40 In Haraway’s
appropriation of the monster as an ‘inappropriate/d other,’ we can trace this move from dialectics
to metaphysics. Leaving the field of the Other and becoming the very relation between the Other
and the Self, the monster (that Haraway names ‘the cyborg subject position’41) is postulated as a
critical modality whose purpose, and/or power, lies not in deconstructing the preexisting categories,
or in a return to them; the power of the monster, as a critical modality, lies in opening a space of
‘elsewhere’ beyond the clashing dualities.42 The monster gains the power of a beyond, an
‘elsewhere’ which is a gift and a promise of the monster.
Internal (from the outside inwards). The perspective on the monster as an internal quality of the
subject has been developed in another highly influential essay, written in 1962 by the French
theoretician Georges Canguilhem, entitled ‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous.’ Canguilhem starts
from a general view that the monster is that which is ‘other than the same, an order other than the

38
Butler, Bodies that Matter, 3; 242 (note 3).
39
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 4.
40
Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,’ in Cultural
Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 299.
41
Ibid., 300.
42
Ibid.,131, 328, 330.

25
most probable order.’43 But he does not stop there, nor does he move to placing the monster beyond
the system of signification, as Haraway does. On the contrary, Canguilhem moves the monster to
the very heart of the subject, the monster becoming an inner condition of the subject’s possibility.
He assumes that the idea of monstrosity essentially refers to organic beings (‘[t]here are no mineral
monsters’), and that the fundamental value of life is its integrity of form – ‘by the regeneration of
mutilated organs in some species, and by reproduction in all.’44 For Canguilhem, the monster, as a
detour of integrity from itself, points to the contingency of life and living forms. Thus, the opposite
of life is not death. Death is just part of life’s form, it is the condition that has already been included
into life itself; death is ‘a limitation from without, the negation of the living by the nonliving.’45
Monstrosity, on the other hand, is ‘the accidental and conditional threat of incompleteness or
distortion in the formation of the form; it is the limitation from within, the limitation of the living
by the nonviable.’46
As we can see, Canguilhem also opposes the Self (as the living, the same) and the Other (as the
monster, the nonviable), but in doing so he moves in the direction opposite to that of the
theoreticians of the outside, pulling the monster into a conditional accidentalness of life. Instead of
postulating the monster as a theoretical figure capable of transcending the dualities of modern
dialectics from the outside, Canguilhem’s monster is the very condition of humanity from within.
But in both approaches to monstrosity, in the external one that envisages the monster at the borders
of the imaginable sociality (‘zones of inhabitability’) as well as in the internal one that takes the
monster’s accidental singularity as the subject’s limitation from within, we perceive that, one way
or the other, the monster epistemically faces the subject from without, no matter whether we
conceptualize this without as an inside or an outside of the subject. The monster is that which is
opposite to humanity, it is that which is the Other to the subject, be it an abyss of the abject that can
never be crossed, or the transcendental Other that surmounts dialectics completely. The monster
simply cannot be a subject.
I found it necessary to sketch this opposition between external and internal approaches to
monstrosity as the subject’s conditionality, artificial as their separation may be, so that their clash
can make a theoretical middle ground for my own understanding of the Victorian monstrosity. I
would like to argue that the Victorian monstrosity that is to be discussed throughout the book is of
neither kind, but that it borrows from and builds upon both of them. I would like to propose that

43
Canguilhem, ‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous,’ 134.
44
Ibid., 135.
45
Ibid., 135-136.
46
Ibid., 136.

26
reading Victorian cultural texts about monsters (‘text’ taken as a formalization of the language of
representation) unearths a subject whose Being is neither limited not conditioned by the language
of monstrosity, but essentially identified with it. The Victorian subject that we find buried in the
bodies of Victorian sirens is not a negative of these bodies, nor is it their product: the Victorian
subject we find in the texts is himself a monstrous subject, his very Being conforming to the
language of Victorian monstrosity. Neither dialectic, nor metaphysic; the Victorian subject is a
monster himself. The monster can be a subject, after all.

The Object of Our Own

This brings us to the other issue to be discussed, namely, the relationship between materiality
and subjectivity, or between man and things. It may seem that, by separating this duality from the
monster/human one, I advocate its ontological or epistemic independence. On the contrary, I
believe that the language of Victorian materiality conforms to the same structure to which Victorian
monstrosity and subjectivity were subjected. In the last instance, I believe that the language of
Victorian materiality, expressed in the commodity form, was as monstrous, as semantically
incoherent, as the language of the Victorian subject.
‘The definition of humanity has often become almost synonymous with the position taken
on the question of materiality,’47 says Daniel Miller, as he develops a theory of things. What
Miller, along with other leaders in the anthropological field of material culture studies, rightly
observes is that the question of humanity and its historically contingent definition, is often, if
not always, the question of the thing’s ‘thingness’ too, as Heidegger describes it.48 Defining
what constitutes humanity is a problem of the epistemological grounding of animate and
inanimate matter itself. In this definition, whole worlds are contained, the totality of
mechanisms of social realities. The recognition of a shady and shadowy differentiation between
humans and things, present in the nineteenth-century, allows the différance to slide in, to

47
Daniel Miller, ‘Materiality: An Introduction,’ in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2005), 2.
48
Material culture studies are a borderline discipline between archaeology and anthropology. The central authors
in this field are Daniel Miller, Christopher Tilley, Michael Shanks and Victor Buchli (among many others). They
all come from different fields of archaeology and anthropology, treating material culture as a cultural palimpsest
or an ideological, racial, gender (etc) battleground. Titles such as Christopher Tilley, Metaphor and Material
Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999) or A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments
(Oxford: Berg, 1994), Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Polity, 2008) or Clothing as Material
Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2005), and Arjun Apadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) exemplify the diversity of their interests well.

27
penetrate fixed appearances and summon unknown possibilities. A deconstructive journey
leading to an inquiry into the issue of Where is the human? is always already an inquiry into
the issue of Where is the thing? Giorgio Agamben says that things are not properly anywhere,

they are not outside of us, in measurable external space, like neutral objects (ob-
jecta) of use and exchange; rather they open to us the original place solely from
which the experience of measurable external space becomes possible.49

But, ‘[d]o we really need anything like thing theory the way we need narrative theory […]?’
rightly asks Bill Brown. ‘Why not let things alone?’50 Materiality comprises our whole known
world, but the way we conceptualize it is always a fantasy, full of historical imagination and
preconceptions rooted so deeply in our doxa that they disappear out of sight. Miller calls this
disappearance ‘the humility of things’51: things are important not because they are common
and obvious or because they have an evident power of agency, but because they are culturally
imperceptible. They determine what takes place to the extent to which we are unconscious of
their capacity to do so. Objects are so thoroughly embedded into the veil of material and social
reality that they are the most active participants in the creation of man. Pierre Bourdieu argued
that ‘a whole cosmology [can be instilled] through [...] seemingly innocuous details,’52 and the
more imperceptible material things are, the more we take their materiality for granted – it’s just
a book, it’s just a mirror, it’s just a chair.53 The more we take the materiality of things for
granted, the more we construct the abstractions from which the ultimate power of the things is
derived. At the precise moment of saying ‘it’s just a mirror,’ the mirror is given a new life, an
introduction into cultural naturalization, and a new phantasmagoria of revived inanimate matter
comes to life by sinking the mirror into the world of cultural preconceptions.
Judith Butler argues that materialization is not something that simply is, but something that
happens – a story that unfolds like a palimpsest, a construction through performance of social

49
Agamben, Stanzas, 59.
50
Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory,’ Critical Inquiry 28:1 (2001): 1.
51
Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1987), 85-108.
52
Pierre Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1981), 69.
53
In the 1980s, the material culture studies have been strongly influenced by the Marxist theory (of commodity
and ideology). Along with Miller’s ‘humility of things’ Shanks and Tilley have discussed this imperceptive ‘only’
as a tool of ideology (Marx) or hegemony (Antonio Gramsci). Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley, Social
Theory and Archaeology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987). This was also one of the points
of their highly influential book Re-constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987).

28
norms, and a mutation of those norms through the cracks in their repetition.54 Finding its root
in the one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old tradition of historical materialism, it restates the Marxist
argument that humanity is a product of its capacity to transform the material world through
production, as a mirror in which humanity recreates itself.
In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations wrote of commodity as
triviality, something given, a conduit of exchange, a force external to sociality – like gravity –
and therefore infinitely removed from the notion of humanity.55 The nineteenth century was
the age in which changed social relations, in connection with technological progress, made an
impact on the fragile understanding of the human/thing relation. Karl Marx’s famous chapter
on commodity fetishism from Capital, describes the ‘mysterious character’ of commodity as a
consequence of an ideological process, in which social relations between producers have been
substituted in the minds of people for natural, objective relations between commodities. As a
corollary of this alienation of humans (producers), an estrangement of the things produced
(commodities) appeared, imbuing their use-value with a personified afterlife of commodity
fetishism. The disturbing sentiment of commodity fetishism was for Marx so strong that he
compared it to the ‘misty realm of religion’ where creations of the human mind ‘appear as
autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own.’56
‘How does the thing presence?’ asks Heidegger, and he immediately replies: ‘The thing
things. Thinging gathers.’57 In the nineteenth century, the thing does not thing anymore, its
Being disappears behind its existence as a representation, as a sign. This play of symbolic
substitution is essential for the understanding of the human/thing differentiation in the age of
accelerated technical progress. Once awakened, the change in the social relations of the
industrial era put into motion an uncanny transformation of everyday things into fetishized
commodities. According to Agamben, from the Industrial Revolution on, ‘the owner of [the]
object will never be able to enjoy it simultaneously, both as a useful object and as value.’58 The

54
Butler, Bodies that Matter, 9-10.
55
Adam Smith, ‘Of the Natural and Market Price of Commodities,’ in The Wealth of Nations (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1982), 157-66.
56
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 165.
57
Heidegger, ‘The Thing,’ 172.
58
Definitions of the fetish are countless. For Marx, the mystery of fetishized commodities is ‘all the magic and
necromancy that surrounds the products of labour’ (Capital, 169); for Freud it is a ‘substitute for the penis […]
but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been
lost […]: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s penis (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in
and […] does not want to give up’ (Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism,’ in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Vol. XXI (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1927), 151-152); for G. A.
Cohen, to make a ‘fetish of something, or fetishize it, is to invest it with powers it does not itself have’ (C. A.
Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 115). Agamben’s
analysis of the fetish in Stanzas, 37. is the only analysis that I find as imaginative and playful as Slavoj Žižek’s

29
appropriator will be able to do anything with the object, even destroy it, ‘but in this
disappearance the commodity will once again reaffirm its unattainability.’ 59 This
unattainability is precisely the new life that the commodity gained – the life of a fetish. The
commodity, which in Freud would be a fetish object, became a negative reference, a
summoning of presence into existence by absence. The interplay of absence and presence in
fetishized objects – not only their mutual substitution, but the very actuality of their opposition
– would dominate the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Resting at the heart of the
commodity, thus at the heart of consumerism, this breaking of the inanimate shell of the thing
would bring a truly pervasive, uncanny feeling toward humanity’s semiotic control over things
and also toward humanity’s self-possession.60 As we shall see, in one of the following chapters,
Victorian commodities are literally running loose, confirming the validity of Thomas Richards’
comment that ‘things appear as independent actors on the historical scene,’61 and arousing
Agamben’s ‘bad conscience with respect to things’.62 Out of this shaken language of things, a
whole new genre of uncanny interests and literature would arise, such as Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), E. T. W. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (part
of Die Nachtstücke, 1817), Edith Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle (1907), Lewis Carrol’s Alice
series (1865 and 1872), Lucy Clifford’s The New Mother (1882) Android Clarinetist, a life-
size robot created by Cornelis Jacobus van Oeckelen in 1838, a procession of Madam
Tussauds’ uncanny wax figures and many of Charles Dickens’ novels. 63 All these works
explored the topic of inanimate matter wondrously coming to life, where reawakening was
understood as a real event or as a personal nightmare of the real and the unreal, of the animate
and the inanimate, as in the case of Hoffmann’s Olympia. Der Sandmann and its disturbing

analysis of commodity fetishism in the postmodern era in ‘Fetishism and Its Vicissitudes’ (Slavoj Žižek, The
Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997)).
59
Agamben, Stanzas, 37..
60
By referring to humanity's self-possession, I would like to introduce Agamben’s the idea of semiotic
instability—the ever harder struggle to retain control over fixed definitions of humanity. An emphasis here is on
control, on the inability of humanity to dominate the semiotic earthquakes of the nineteenth-century materiality.
61
Thomas Richardson, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914
(London and New York: Verso, 1991), 11.
62
Agamben, Stanzas, 47.
63
Many critics have commented on this aspect of Charles Dickens’ writing, where objects emerge as subjects
while humans (protagonists) emerge as objects. See Richards, Commodity Culture, 2; Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas
in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006),
140-141; Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Fiction (New York: Rinehart, 1953), 129; Catherine
Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 189.
Also, see Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 2003), where he regards Dickens as a
‘necessary reading for the historian of things,’ (7) and quotes Dickens himself: ‘The mightier inventions of the
age are not to our thinking, all material, but have a kind of soul in their stupendous bodies.’ There is a story of a
talking hat-stand titled ‘My Mahogany Friend’ by Dickens in Bradbury Evans, Household Words; A Weekly
Journal, 1851: Conducted By Charles Dickens. Vol. 2. 1851 Reprint (London: Forgotten Books, 2013), 558-559.

30
subtext actually helped Freud in 1919 to develop his famous concept of the ‘uncanny’ –
something repressed that comes back to haunt the subject, a peculiar feeling of strangeness
aroused by an encounter with something vaguely recognized.64 The thing ceased to be an
innocent object, its spectral existence coming back to haunt the Victorian subject in his desire.
As a commodity, the thing became an abject entity, its abjection being, in Michael Taussing’s
words, ‘the preeminent state of living death where subject and object stage their epistemic
panic.’65 In Marx’s world, from the moment it appears as a commodity, a table

not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other
commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain
grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own
free will.66

Commodity fetishism opens a vortex leading to a new area of the thing’s Being, ‘the mystery
that has now become familiar to anyone who has entered a supermarket or been exposed to the
manipulation of the advertisement: the epiphany of the unattainable,’ as Agamben concludes.67
This book focuses precisely on this unattainable aspect of the commodity in the form of mirrors.
As we have already seen in Foucault’s work on the modern episteme, language, as a formalizing
aspect of a new configuration of meaning, opened the same unattainable space, an element of
language impossible to reduce to representation, impossible to represent. I would like to read this
representational void, this interruption, as the key element of the language of the commodity. As
Richards observed in his extraordinary analysis of the Victorian commodity culture, while writing
about the fetishized commodity Marx himself had to change metaphors over and over again,
incapable of dealing with the commodity’s fleeting language.68 The very nature of commodity is
that it cannot be described, it cannot be attained and it cannot be possessed, if only for one reason:
the commodity is the ravenous heart of capitalist desire. ‘The real consumer,’ Guy Debord points
out, ‘becomes a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this factually real illusion […].’69 As a
true Lacanian objet a, a desiring object which is lacking and which ‘is not nothing but literally is

64
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny,’ in The Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. XVII. (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, 1919), 217-256.
65
Michael Taussing, ‘Dying Is an Art, like Everything Else,’ Critical Inquiry 28:1 (2001): 315.
66
Marx, Capital, 163-164.
67
Agamben, Stanzas, 37-38.
68
See, for example, Stephen Prickett, Victorian Fantasy (Hassocks, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1979).
69
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), thesis 47.

31
not,’ the commodity, in its nineteenth-century fetishistic form, constantly offers itself to the
consumer, recreating itself in the consumer’s falling short of attaining it.70 As testified by the
Victorian imagination gone haywire, the commodity in the nineteenth-century language has a life
of its own, resting fundamentally upon this break in language that induces a différance, a spatio-
temporal dissimilarity of meaning ‘[that] derives from no category of Being, whether present or
absent.’71
Understood in this sense, as an object of desire, as ‘beyond-of-the-signified,’72 a specter of a
lost object that can never be found since it is always already found in its absence, the commodity
is literary not, establishing a metonymic relationship with the subject who desires it. By reading
various Victorian monstrous narratives (siren, as well as mirror narratives), I would like to show
that what burns inside the commodity, inside every desired object in the Victorian culture, is that
small unsignifiable place in language that epitomizes death (a Beingless signifier) itself. ‘Why is
death the harbinger and index of the thing-world,’ capitalizes Taussig on the strangeness of death
in things, ‘and how can it be, then, that death awakens life in things?’73 He might have described
the very nature of Victorian, and post-Victorian, commodified materiality.
The argument for the relationship between Victorian humanity and materiality thus goes in
circles. The Victorian male desiring subject is called into existence by the omnipresent mirror. The
mirror, on the other hand, is the Victorian fetishized commodity par exellence, essentially
embodying the rupture, death, the monstrosity of the Victorian language. Thus, the subject appears
as split and as monstrous as the commodity he faces, as incoherent as the language he came from,
reproducing the commodity and the split in language within himself, and reproducing it in many
monstrous, disturbing forms, scattered across the Victorian mindscape – including the form of the
siren. He reaches for the wholeness promised by the mirror, promised by the commodity, promised
by the objet a; he reaches for a semantic fullness promised by the mirror as a commodity, as objet
a. He reaches and falls short of this fullness over and over again, only to reach for it again. He
dreams a dream of coherence, beyond broken language and meaning, a persistent and profound
dream; he dreams about a beyond of the Real, he dreams about it as an awakening from his dream;
he wanders through the maze of language, but the maze includes its own exists, so he strays; he
fantasizes about death; he revels in his own monstrosity.

70
Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 77.
71
Derrida, ‘Différance,’ 6.
72
Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 65.
73
Taussing, ‘Dying Is an Art,’ 305.

32
 Seen from this point, from the perspective of the world of dreams the subject lives in, from the
angle of his desire for death and his devotion to the ‘shrine of Nothing,’74 the book, beyond all the
narrative layers of sirens and mirrors, is about that dream of fullness beyond language; it is about
nothingness, which is the other face of the fullness that the subject is longing for; it is about a
promised awakening, which is a symbolic death within the Victorian language itself. Without it,
without this Real of death that keeps calling the subject from the beyond, the Victorian language
would not be possible at all. Just like in Lacanian aphanasis, the death of the subject, invoked by a
mortal language, becomes the condition of his very possibility.

On Things to Come

The corpus of this study is very vast and very diverse. In order to connect the dots between
monstrosity, materiality and subjectivity, I was compelled to discuss the sources that could not
be enclosed within the rigid confines of a single medium. Consequently, I considered all the
analyzed material in view of its connection to the Victorian language, or rather as constituent
parts of the Victorian language as such. The language (of monstrosity, of materiality, of the
subject, of the monstrosity of the subject and of the monstrosity of materiality), is not to be
understood in its literal sense of a living, specific language spoken or written; it is to be
understood in its sense of langage, an ordering of signs, as language in its essential relation to
representation, as the language of representation. Thus, the Victorian language that I will
discuss in relation to the subject, assumes all the forms of structuration of signs, spoken, as
well as written, visual, as well as material. It is my intention to show that the monstrosity of
the Victorian subject originates from within the language taken as described, and also that it
emerges from the material analyzed (the cultural production of the subject). In the same spirit
of a constant return to the beginning of the text, to the ‘world of dreams’ that has been the
world of the subject since the nineteenth century, the language of the book constantly returns
to the monstrosity of the Victorian male desiring subject, and in describing and creating,
creating by describing that monstrosity, the language collapses right next to itself never
achieving a semantic fullness. This inevitable spiraling of the argument, where the subject is
called into existence by language, only to recreate the language in the same act, brings forth a

74
‘Death is the shrine of Nothing,’ says Heidegger, ‘that is, of that which in every respect is never something that
merely exists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of Being itself. As the shrine of Nothing,
death harbors within itself the presencing of Being. As the shrine of nothing, death is the shelter of Being.’
(Heidegger, ‘The Thing,’ 176).

33
set of issues concerning the relationship of the text at hand (the book) and the text(s) analyzed;
between the author of the text at hand (the author of the book) and the author(s) of the text(s)
analyzed.
The text of the book, apart from the introduction, the prolegomenon and the conclusion, is
divided into three chapters, each dealing with the subject’s ‘world of dreams’ from a different
perspective and further developing the argument of the book. Each chapter is divided into three
or four parts: the first one is introductory to the chapter, while the following two (or three) are
close readings deepening the argument of the introductory part.
Chapter One deals with the Victorian glass/mirror culture and with the language of the
mirror image in its relationship to the mostly male desiring subject. If mirrors are concerned
independently from siren narratives, the argument could be freely applied to the female desiring
subject as well. After a brief historical overview of the mirror culture in general, the chapter
looks into a new status of the mirror in the Victorian imagination. In the nineteenth century,
the mirror stopped being a vehicle of religious moralization, or of didactics of proper conduct,
and became an expression of the subject’s desire. The image perceived in the mirror is never
what one wishes to see, it is always more or less than that; the mirror image is a stranger looking
back at the subject, promising fullness and delivering the aggression of the subject’s fall. The
chapter discusses the language of mirrors in connection with the language of commodity,
therefore structurally revolving around the epicenter of the Victorian consumerist life and the
epicenter of the commodity culture – the 1851 Great Exhibition. Analyzing the mirror
narratives surrounding the Great Exhibition, which was held inside an enormous structure made
of glass (the Crystal Palace), it becomes clear that most of the narratives struggle to verbally
express the encounter with reflecting surfaces, but are unable to do so. The language of this
encounter is always a language of lack and excess, the encounter being always either
insufficient or excessive for the subject to express it. The subject constantly reaches for a place
beyond language, but in his ineptitude to attain it, he experiences jouissance of the fall.
Chapter Two is dedicated to my monster of choice, a monster chosen as the cornerstone of
the topology of the male desiring subject – the siren. Siren narratives undergo a dramatic
change in the nineteenth century, when previously vicious murderesses with no respect for
human life, turn into fragile maidens with sorrows of their own. The chapter traces this change
in what I call the ‘siren literature,’ focusing my attention primarily on written, authorial

34
production of their monstrosity and the textual pleasures the Victorian sirens embody.75 I have
identified a list of traits of these new modern sirens, but there are three of them that strike me
as the most important. Firstly, in many of the narratives sirens become the protagonists. This
movement toward the center of the Victorian narrativity is the first trait of their new-born
subjectivity. Secondly, they tend to be depicted as innocent and pure, not responsible for the
deaths of their victims (if any), or not in control of their murderous impulses. This shift usually
turns them into victims in the stories, making it hard for readers to distinguish the prey from
the hunter. This leads us to the last trait: the sirens and their victims tend to switch places so
often and so profoundly that their monstrosity becomes absolutely inseparable from the
humanity of their victims. In the Victorian narratives, the ‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ topos
becomes an indispensable tool for analyzing the Victorian male desiring subject. As the
protagonists (sirens and Ulysses in his many guises) change places back and forth, the male
subject emerges both from the language of Ulysses as from that of the sirens. Building upon
the analysis in Chapter One and the analysis of the language of the mirror-seduced subject,
Chapter Two develops the argument that siren bodies (with the indispensable ‘Ulysses’ element
in them), provide us with a topology of precisely this kind of a subject, the one caught inside
the illusion of his own mirror image.
Chapter Three discusses siren narratives and their relationship to the mirror-seduced male
subject from another perspective. One of the traits of Victorian sirens recognized in Chapter
Two is their new, strongly visual nature. Nineteenth-century Sirens actually stopped singing,
and the power of their monstrosity got transferred from their voices into their bodies. Chapter
Three takes this notion further, as we discover Victorian scopic regimes of voyeurism in the
visual nature of Victorian siren bodies. Not coincidentally, sirens and mermaids were an
obsession of those who epitomized these scopic regimes in paining – the Pre-Raphaelites. By
analyzing works of John William Waterhouse and Edward Burne-Jones in the wider context of
the Pre-Raphaelite painting and philosophy, I demonstrate that behind the luscious mermaid
and siren bodies they so eagerly painted, lurks not (only) a femme fatale, not (only) misogyny,
but the male Victorian desiring subject in all his monstrous glory.

75
For oral narratives, legends and myths coming mostly from Ireland and Wells see, Miceal Ross, ‘Anchors in a
Three-Decker World,’ Folklore 109 (1998): 63-75; Juliette Wood, ‘The Fairy Bride Legend in Wales,’ Folklore
103:1 (1992): 56-72; T. J. Westropp, ‘A Study of Folklore on the Coasts of Connacht, Ireland (Continued),’
Folklore 32:2 (1921): 101-123. Mermaid legends and myths have quite different narratives and structure from
authorial narratives that I call ‘siren literature,’ and thus are excluded from the analysis.

35
 The approach of the book would be accused by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick of ‘paranoid
reading,’ paranoid as in having ‘faith in exposure.’76 Sedgwick claims that since Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud, critical theory has been irrevocably paranoid, unearthing truth from the
material analyzed and turning paranoid pleasure into truth. Paranoia, as a critical approach,
presupposes the existence of hidden knowledge in the text analyzed, a thief veiled in darkness,
so the paranoid reading initiates a game of cloak and dagger in which one sets ‘a thief (and, if
necessary, becomes one) to catch a thief; […] “it takes one to know one.”’77 Her problem with
this kind of reading is that it presents itself as the only cognitive/affective theoretical practice;
it appears to be the one and only plausible approach to reading and knowledge that excludes
all other readings. Though I agree that critical theory has been profoundly paranoid, and that
my own approach is as paranoid as the rest of its history, at this point I depart from Sedgwick.
I do not claim my reading to be ‘true’, and I confess enjoying playing with texts in Derridian
sense; I enjoy keeping the conversation going.78 It is true that I take the greatest pleasure in
uncovering the monstrous subject in the material that does not talk about him; in reading
between lines; in searching through the areas of silence and cracks in language; in what has not
been said and what has not been represented. But some of the material is very explicit about
the issues we are dealing with, allowing me to proceed with a straightforward reading. My
approach thus distinguishes between Lacan’s ‘subject of statement’ and ‘subject of
enunciation.’ Resting upon his idea of the split subject and the fundamental méconnaissance
of the self’s coherence, the subject of statement is the author of the material analyzed; the one
who refers to himself as ‘I,’ as having an ‘I’ as the core of his writing/painting/sculpting. But
this subject is always lying by telling the truth, since what he says comes from a fundamental
illusion at the core of his conscious speech/act, what he presents as the obvious truth (the work
of art/literature he produces) inescapably lies. On the other hand, the ‘subject of enunciation’
always tells the truth by lying, because unlike conscious speech his words does not come from
the miscomprehended core of the self, but emerges from within this speech, from what is not
said, from between the words, slips of the tongue, parapraxis.79 This subject is, thus, always
lying, but by doing so he is always, actually, telling the truth. The material analyzed will often

76
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably
Think This Essay is About You,’ in Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham & London: Duke University Press,
2003), 139.
77
Ibid., 127.
78
Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,’ in Writing and Difference
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), 278-293.
79
‘At the level of the unconscious,’ Lacan observes, ‘the subject lies. And this lying is his way of telling the truth
of the matter.’ (Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 90).

36
be regarded as the subject’s language of the unconscious. The inconvenient and troubling part
of this speech is that it fundamentally rests upon the reader, upon the one who interprets the
speech in question.
I am fully aware of this consequence of my approach, but I also believe that it is an
inescapable part of hermeneutics. That does not mean that ‘everything goes.’ It means that
‘everything goes’ within the internal coherence of a specific ‘reading,’ within the coherence of
the argument presented. The very nature of this introduction, and its opening statement (‘we
live in a world of dreams’), points to the irreducibility of the analysis to the material analyzed.
I have discussed this statement as a constative, analyzing what is impressed upon us as the truth
of the statement, as the statement of truth, and we have seen that beneath the hard crust of its
superficiality there are questions waiting to be asked: about the ‘world of dreams,’ about
‘living’ in it, and, most importantly, about the pronoun that starts the chain, the ‘we’ that was
allowed to emerge as the subject of the statement. Now, it may seem that the statement is a
pure constative, that it only informs, says, delivers an inner truth, that it simply states, but that
is only one of its faces, as far as the world of dreams we are discussing is concerned. As a
perfomative, the statement not only informs about its content, about the fact that we live in a
world of dreams, but it performs its content in so far as the Victorian language of monstrosity
that I write about in the book continually recreates itself through what it says. The text of this
book participates in the creation of the world of dreams as much as it discusses that world; the
text performs the drowsiness of the subject by recreating the subject from the language
analyzed.
I find it hard to imagine an approach to text that does not include the researcher becoming
enmeshed in the subject of his research, the process Bourdieu describes as ‘symbolic violence’
or the ‘transfer into the Other.’80 In dealing with desire of the Victorian subject, the writer of
these lines, along with their reader is inevitably drawn into the interpretative spiral by his own
passion, by his own desire, by his own objet a. If he is to talk about the Victorian ‘world of
dreams,’ the reader/writer is bound to invade this world as well. There is no such thing as
writing/reading from the outside.

80
Pierre Bourdieu, On Television, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (New York: The New Press, 1998), 17;
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. N. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),
80, 82.

37
PROLOGUE

NEVER-ENDING HORROR OF ULYSSES’ ABJECT FACES

She is a darker Venus, fed with burnt-offering and blood-sacrifice; the veiled image of that
pleasure which men impelled by satiety and perverted by power have sought through way as
strange as Nero’s.81
Algernon Swinburne

The story of Ulysses and the Sirens is very old, one might say ancient; the story is as old as
the European literature itself.82 It starts with the words of a blind man, a bard whose actual
existence has never been proven. Victorians adored this bard, his every word being as sweet as
honey, and as moral as their belief in him.83 From Homeric epics, or more precisely from Book
XII of the Odyssey onwards, the sirens have been aural seductresses, always on the lookout for
another body or another soul. Their nature has been carnivorous, and their appetite insatiable.
Depending on the period we peruse, we find them as envoys of the apocalypse, symbols of
earthly sins, and facets of lies and deceit, as they hunt men down with their enthralling voices,
destroy their dreams and lead their minds into the never-ending darkness of the sea.84 The sirens
are all about love and death, about lure, ecstasy, and destruction. Their monstrous bodies invite
men to drown themselves in them, to forget who they were, are, and could be, and to experience
the violence of love and the ecstasy of death. Their voices, bodies, and faces – an impossible
mixture of different species – cry out a wish for disappearance, promising omniscience, but
delivering oblivion instead.

81
Algernon Swinburne, Notes on Poems and Reviews (London: J. C. Hoten, 1866), 12.
82
‘Ulysses’ is the Latin version of Odysseus’ name. I have decided to use it to avoid confusion and because many
nineteenth-century sources I discuss, like John William Waterhouse’s painting in this prologue, use it. The noun
‘siren(s)’ will be capitalized, when it refers to classical sirens (explained further in Part Two). When refers to
sirens in general, or sirens from any other era, the noun will not be capitalized.
83
See, for example, Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).
84
For sirens as envoys of the apocalypse, see, for example, William J. Travis, ‘Of Sirens and Onocentaurs: A
Romanesque Apocalypse at Montceaux-Létoile,’ Artibus et Historie 23:45 (2002): 29-62. For the general manner
of their representation in the Middle Ages, especially as symbols of deceit and lies, see Leofranc Holford-Strevens,
‘Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,’ in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 16-51.

38
 It seems strange that, after millennia of siren lust and cruelty, Victorians invented a type of
sirens opposite to all the evil that their age-old sisters represented. Hans Christian Andersen
took care of that, his tale The Little Mermaid becoming a prototype of the Victorian ‘siren
literature.’ Ostensibly in accordance with the prevailing discourse of Victorian femininity, this
type offered a seductive vision of mute virgin girls in search of their own happily ever after, of
an ‘angel in the house,’85 or poor creatures desperately in love with their (former) prey. The
situation is not so black-and-white, though. As Nina Auerbach remarks,

[w]hile 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 emblems
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.86

One feels compelled to wonder if the mute sirens were indeed disempowered by this
silencing representational act. We have been given an opportunity to question the reality of
their vocal deaths, and reveal sirens as essentially visual monstrous subjects. In order to do
that, it is vital to understand that the language of sirens has never been theirs alone: it has
always depended upon the language of their victims, whose faces bore the sign of Ulysses. For
the language of Victorian sirens, the oscillation between these two figures, between the
huntress and the prey, is essential, and it is the purpose of this prologue to introduce it. Its other
purpose is to raise questions related to Ulysses’ desire and show that in the background of all
his attempts not to succumb to the siren song, Ulysses craved one thing above all others – death.
The core of the language of Ulysses and the Sirens, the object of desire inside the Victorian
language as a whole was semantic oblivion of death itself.
Analyzing the nineteenth-century visual masterpiece titled Ulysses and the Sirens and the
twenty centuries older literary one, we observe deadly sirens as they rise from the abyss
between words and images, from the blank spaces within representation, mapping the male
Victorian subject for us. Taking the path of abjection, I would like to expose the constant game
of absence and presence in the economy of representation of sirens, a game of interruption,
which is the source of monstrosity of sirens and of the subject in the Victorian age. In their

85
Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House (London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1866).
86
Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London:
Harvard University Press, 1982), 7.

39
atrocious faces that besiege the subject’s desire, we see the abject topology of the Victorian
subject – split, horrified and deceived by his own mirror-image.

Ulysses’ Abject Self

Figure 1 John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens (1891)

In 1891 John William Waterhouse, one of the most famous late Victorian painters, eternally
enraptured by the inner, implicit female power of transformation, presented the painting
Ulysses and the Sirens (fig. 1) to the public. Modeled on the Greek red-figure Stamnos vase
from the fifth century BC (fig. 2), the painting represents Ulysses in his ordeal of surviving the
Siren song.87
At first glance, it appears that the painting follows the well-known story in order to
communicate the dread of the Sirens’ bodies and voices to the public. Christopher Wood, who
wrote extensively on Victorian painting, with particular emphasis on the Pre-Raphaelite
obsession with female devouring seductiveness, explains the subject of Ulysses and the Sirens
as follows:

It depicts the moment when Ulysses and his companions are threatened on their
voyage home by the sirens, female monsters who lure men to destruction by
their song. To counter them, Ulysses stopped up the ears of his men with wax,
and had himself tied to the mast. All around flap the sirens, huge birds with the

87
The Siren Vase is currently in possession of the British Museum, registration number 1843, 1103.31.

40
 faces of beautiful women. […] The boat, the frightened figures of the sailors,
and the bleakly rocky setting are all painted with strong realism, and the
intrusion of the sirens gives the picture a sinister and terrifying effect.88

Figure 2 Ulysses and the Sirens, Stamnos (ca. 500 BC)

In his straightforward description of the subject at hand – the well-known story of Ulysses
– Wood’s explanation seems reasonable enough. But an eye in pursuit of what is not
represented reveals certain discrepancies between the canvas and its final model, Book XII of
the Odyssey. These discrepancies may seem unimportant and small, but they are indicative of
the historical and cultural moment of the painting’s appearance. The choices Waterhouse made
in his work are the ones made by an artist working within the late Victorian discourse of
femininity, building upon the prevailing male fantasies of womanhood and constructing his
perspective on the allure, danger and cultural fear of woman’s unleashed sexuality. As we shall
see, although the model and the artist are separated by two millennia, Waterhouse can himself
be seen as not so different from Ulysses, and yet quite different from him. Between the artist
and the hero, there is a sameness which is not identical, a semantic postponement within the
representational language of Ulysses that epitomizes the Victorian age. An abject desire resides
in Waterhouse and Ulysses alike, a place of dark passion arising from fear and dissolution of
the self. The difference is that, for the Victorian Ulysses, this place of tenebrous passion
becomes the foundation of his subjectivity. This blank space in representation gave birth to the
monstrosity of sirens and to the Victorian male desiring subject as well.
But before we set our sails for Victorian Britain, let us first turn to the Sirens themselves
and the first mortal ever to resist their enrapturing song.

88
Christopher Wood, Olympian Dreamers: Victorian Classical Painters (London: Constable, 1983), 230.

41
 *****

Ulysses has been warned. He knows that the endeavor can cost him his life. But still, the
unimaginable delight, and the danger that comes with it, keeps him from stopping up his ears.
He has to hear them, he has to know. He is willing to encounter death with his eyes wide open
and ears liberated from ignorance. He approaches them thinking that what he wants – what he
needs – is the charm of their voices and the knowledge these voices offer. It is high noon, the
dog hour, and the demon of the hour is ready; it is the time of the Sirens, the moment when
everything melts away like the wax in Ulysses’ hands.89 The temptation, though, starts well
before the voices, long before the Sirens: it consumes Ulysses from the moment he was warned,
his desire, introduced by Circe’s words, called upon by language, invited by her words acting
as the signifier. There is a place inside Ulysses that craves and cries for what in his mind
appears to be beauty, knowledge, and immortality. He is convinced, by the apparent and the
obvious, that what drives him towards this distant shore and makes him face the danger so
boldly, is a spark of heroism and curiosity mixed together in the image of ecstasy Circe
presented to him:

‘First shalt thou reach the Sirens who, once heard,

Charm with their strains the souls of all mankind.
If unawares come floating on the wind
That clear sweet music which the Sirens pour,
He who hath quaffed it with his ears shall find
No voice, no welcome, on his native shore,
Shall on his dear wife gaze and lisping babes no more.’90

What are these creatures that possess such power? What is the nature of their voices if they
are capable of translating destruction into joy?

89
In Ancient Greece the planet Sirius was called the ‘Dog Star’ and it symbolized the hottest days of summer.
The dire influence of the ‘Dog Star’ was said to cause fever in men – and madness in dogs. During the Middle
Ages, it came to represent the hottest hour of the day – noon – the time of dizziness, sloth and temptation, the
moment when medieval monks were tempted away from their discipline and faith. Sirens, being symbols of flesh,
deceit and earthly sin, epitomized this hour in the medieval mythography, but as we can see in the Odyssey, the
connection between the two is far older.
90
The Odyssey of Homer, Vol. 1, books I – XII, trans. Philip Stanhope Worsley (Edinburgh and London: William
Blackwood and Sons, 1861), XII, verse 6, 289.

42
 So it began – the tradition of sirens’ alluring faces. Although it would last for centuries, it
begins and ends with the first one who dared open himself up to them, because from that
moment on, every man will always be Ulysses, as far as sirens are concerned. For what he
craves is neither simply the Sirens’ love, nor the fulfillment of his desires, nor is it a simple
yearning for the mythical female body or voice. No human love can ever compete with that of
the Sirens, since no human love can dissolve the essence of selfhood so profoundly, forcing
the subject to drown in his own ecstasy. Thus what Ulysses truly yearns for, although he does
not recognize it, is death and decay itself.
By deciding not to stop up his ears, to encounter the Sirens, and to literally expose himself
to them, Ulysses embodies a desire that comes not from celestial place of beauty, love and
everything divine, but from hell-like depths of the netherworld, from the lair of death,
destruction, and fear. Ulysses’ desire is, to appropriate the view of George Bataille, an ecstatic
experience of looking not towards the light from above, but towards the things from below
(choses d’en bas); it is a diversion of the gaze that leads to the underground (souterrain) of
lucid consciousness, a hidden, essential dimension of human existence, where Eros and
Thanatos meet.91 This desire, already visible in the ancient Ulysses, will be the essence of the
Victorian one. He is both afraid of and aroused by dread. Horror is what keeps him going, but
also what makes him order his shipmates to tie him even more tightly:

“First of the Sirens, couched among the flowers,

She warns us fly from the delusive song.
I only, as we pass the fatal bowers,
Have leave to listen; yet with many a thong
Need is ye bind me, and with cordage strong,
Against the socket of the mast upright,
Lest I should move; and though I urge you long
To loose me, and implore with all my might,
Still bind me with more cords and strain them yet more tight.”92

91
For Bataille’s conceptualization of desire from below and the relationship between desire and death, see George
Bataille, Histoire de l’oeil (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), L’Expérience intérieure (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), as well as
L’Érotisme (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2011).
92
Odyssey, XII, verse 23, 294.

43
 ‘The phobic has no other object than the abject,’93 Kristeva says, and in the moment of
Ulysses’ peril, the Sirens appear as what he desires and fears the most – they appear as his
abject self. Their song of knowledge and bliss has its dark and sinister side, the one that leads
to disintegration of selfhood, transformation of the Self into the Other and back again, tapping
the ‘deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.’94 Like a subject and
his abject, Ulysses and the Sirens are interlocked in one and the same image, inseparable in
their mutual haunting, as the abject becomes a subject and the subject repels the abject. As it
will be shown in the chapters to come, Ulysses and the Sirens are both irreducible words in the
sentence of the Victorian male subject’s monstrosity.
Ulysses is an archetype of the Victorian male abject fascination. Kristeva explains that the
abject is

a treat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside [of being],
ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies
there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and
fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced.
Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects.95

Following Kristeva’s thoughts, we are able to approach that dreadful place inside Ulysses,
this death in language that has become the heart of the subject in the nineteenth-century. It
became the dream that has not receded since, still manifesting itself in our obsession with, and
pleasure in horror at the beginning of the twenty-first century. From the nineteenth century on,
deep down inside the subject, inside us, dread-consumers and terror-seekers, close to the
imaginary wellspring of our Being, dwells a fiercely burning horror-driven desire. Its flame is
black and cold and if we approach it too openly, we risk losing that which we name ourselves.
This desire entices us, seduces us to come closer and look directly into its heart. But the desire’s
very voice hurts us, penetrates our skin from the inside, repelling us. We cannot but want this
horror of torment, we yearn to be scared. From our own psyche rises the all-pervading horror
that haunts our minds, our lives, and our self-knowledge. We are afraid of the monster under
the bed or inside the closet, but what we fear most is that once the monster announces itself
letting out an anguished roar, we will hear its horror, comprehend its voice, and connect to its

93
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 6.
94
Ibid.
95
Ibid., 1.

44
words.96 It is then that we realize that the monstrosity we dread – the true abject – is the one
within. If we read the episode of Ulysses and the Sirens bearing this key in mind, we will see
that the Sirens are Ulysses’ own dreaded monstrosity, as well as his subjectivity, the rejected
and desired part of his ego that can never be overcome and will always hover over the
construction of his identity.

“For the shrill Sirens, couched among the flowers,

Sing melodies that lure from the great deep
The heedless mariners to their fatal bowers […]
Thou through the waves thy course onward keep,
And stop with wax your comrades’ ears, that they
Hear not the sweet death-songs which through the wide air stray.
But if thyself art fain to hear their song,
Let thy companions tie thee, hands and feet,
Upright against the mast with cordage strong.
So mayst thou hearken to the voices sweet
Of the twin Sirens, as thy white sails fleet
Along the perilous coast; yet though thou yearn
To linger, and with tears thy friends entreat,
Let them remain hard-hearted, doubly stern,
Yea, with more chains enwind thee, and thy anguish spurn.”97

Circe’s wise counsel, which Ulysses scrupulously follows, enables him to continue his
voyage unscathed. What matters here, though, is not the storyline, which is all too well known,
but Ulysses’ desire to encounter death, his unfathomable will to expose himself, his senses and
his mind, against all odds, to a landscape that is truly transgressional, truly abject, and truly

96
Joseph Conrad addresses this fear explicitly in his 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, at the moment when Charles
Marlow encounters the natives. I have italicized some parts of the cited paragraph to emphasize his desire for fear:
‘The Earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but
there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly and the men were – No, they were not
inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come
slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the
thought of their humanity – like ours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.
Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you
just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dumb suspicion of there being a
meaning in it which you – you so remote from the night of first ages – could comprehend’ (Joseph Conrad, Heart
of Darkness (New York: Dover Publications, 1990), 68).
97
Odyssey, XII, verse 7-8, 289.

45
monstrous. It is very important to note a sharp contrast between the Sirens’ voices and
everything that surrounds them. Their enthralling song comes from a pile of rotting corpses,
human skins are stretched on the rocks, and horror is looming in the air. Still, Ulysses is
seduced; the words of Circe have imprisoned him.
As he approaches the Sirens, Ulysses is taken by the landscape as a whole. To borrow the
expression from Inna Naroditskaya and Linda Phyllis Austern, he is captured by ‘the nameless
and deadly sirens in their bone-strewn seaside meadow,’98 which makes Ulysses want to jump
from the ship, free himself from the ropes of reason and unite with the dread and the love, in
one last act of all-consuming joy. Analyzing the painting by Waterhouse, Patrick Hunt
expresses a general view on the episode as a whole, where Ulysses is drawn to the voices of
the Sirens:

There is an urgency throughout the painting as his men pull hard on their oars,
a tautness in this dramatically imagined scene […] only because its intention
seems to be showing Odysseus in a moment of madness he will survive,
straining in ecstasy at which any other human, less heroic, could only wonder.
This is the moment […] Waterhouse chose, a tantalizing image of musical
madness that ravished the soul until the body gave in and men threw themselves
overboard, often to drown in churning seas. Odysseus is rapt, internally safe
from their “honeyed voices” [translation of the Odyssey by Robert Fagles] only
as long as the external ropes hold him tight.99

Ulysses’ ecstasy has always been explained as an aural experience, a vocal drug causing
him to go crazy and jump overboard, but this emphasis on the aural aspect of the Ulysses and
the Sirens topos renders the landscape of the encounter almost completely imperceptible and
Ulysses almost completely blind. In this tradition, Lawrence Kramer argues that ‘[f]or Homer’s
Odysseus, the siren’s song is a lure to simple dissolution; for his modern descendants, the
dissolution is the sirens’ song itself, the pleasure of which is its own fatality.’ 100 But, in the

98
Inna Naroditskaya and Lynda Phyllis Austern, ‘Introduction: Singing Each to Each,’ in Music of the Sirens, ed.
Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 5.
99
Patrick Hunt, ‘Homer’s Odyssey in Art: Sirens from Greek Vases to Waterhouse,’ last modified 4 October
2009, Viewed 13 April 2013,
http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/philolog/2009/10/homers_odyssey_in_art_sirens_f.html.
100
Lawrence Kramer, ‘“Longindyingcall:” Of Music, Modernity, and the Sirens,’ in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda
Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 199.

46
image of the Sirens’ accursed isle, we are presented with so much more than vocal enticement,
much more than a simple dissolution:

Where around about them, piled in many a heap,

Lie the bleached bones of moldering men that sleep
For ever, and the dead skins waste away.101

From the stack of human bones, where death lurks, abject is calling.
‘These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with
difficulty, on the part of death,’ says Kristeva. ‘Such wastes drop so that I might live, until,
from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere,
cadaver.’102 The sweet alluring Sirens’ voices and the rotting, decomposing landscape are a
single abject image, virtually inseparable from each other. The abjection of the corpses
encroaches upon Ulysses and limits between life and death are fading away – fainting away, as
Kristeva says.103 The border between life and death has become an object itself. It has become
the object of Ulysses’ desire. The Sirens, with their invisible bodies (since physically not
described at all in the poem) sing and lure from a place where death reins, and Ulysses will die
for it. Not for the Sirens – he will die for death itself. The Sirens’ song is a call to death, but it
is also a call to otherness – Ulysses is in the process of becoming the Other at the expense of
his own life. ‘If dung signifies the other side of the border,’ continues Kristeva, ‘the place
where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a
border that has encroached upon everything.’104 This blurring, fading away of the boundary
between life and death, is a rhapsody of decay, of bodies dismembered and turned inside out.
It is an ecstasy of devoured flesh; it is the expulsion of the ego.
As remarked before, there are some notable discrepancies between the Homeric description
of the Ulysses and the Sirens episode and the canvas by Waterhouse. One of the most obvious
is that the despicable shore of rotting human flesh on which the Sirens dwell has changed into
a rocky, narrow passage, with only one way out. The semiotic disturbance in Homer, caused
by the violent relationship between the sweetness of the Sirens’ voices and the landscape that
surrounds them, moved into the half-female sexualized bodies of the Victorian Sirens

101
Odyssey, XII, verse 7, 289.
102
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
103
Ibid. In the English translation we have been using, Kristeva’s s'évanouir has been translated as ‘fall in a faint.’
We have translated s'évanouir as ‘fainting away,’ in accordance with our sentence.
104
Ibid.

47
themselves. This shift from the horrendous landscape to the menacing Sirens’ bodies is exactly
where the late nineteenth century portrayed itself most clearly. Describing the Victorian
cultural imagination, Auerbach rightly observes that the nineteenth century was above all a
mythical era – one in which female sexuality, and its connections to the unbridled nature and
power of transformation, found expression in the most subtle and innocent looking female
representations.105 By the end of the Victorian era, feminist thought and gender changes have
become powerful and demanding, giving birth to the cultural paranoia of the ‘New Woman’
and drilling their way into works of art that at first sight had nothing to do with them.106 The
changes at a deeper cultural level were in motion, molding cultural imagination in previously
unimaginable ways, the misogyny of the period creating the devouring femme fatale of the fin-
de-siècle and her serpentine hair, enchanting hands, and shifting body.107 This is the climate
behind Waterhouse’s visual choices, shaping his mindscape, and leading his hand between the
sharp rocks of Ulysses’ ordeal – a visual, representational and cultural one-way passage.
In the Odyssey the Sirens were only two. And most importantly: they were not physically
described at all. We, western readers, writers and dreamers picture them with feathered arms
or fish-like lower parts, but the Odyssey does not give us that information. From their first
appearance in the Western literature, the Sirens appear as a visual void, an interruption in visual
semiotics. ‘Everything starts with an interruption,’108 says Paul Valéry, and by embracing this
view, I am making the Ulysses episode a strong issue of spatiality of language, as well as of
the visuality of the episode itself. The real space, the repulsive landscape of the Odyssey moved
into the loathsome bodyscape of the Sirens in Waterhouse’s painting, following the myth of
female transformational power, increasing their number to no less than seven, while they haunt
Ulysses not from afar, like in the Odyssey, but this time from up close. Derrida once said that

105
Auerbach, Woman and the Deamon, 1. The most notable examples definitely come from the Pre-Raphaelitism
(like works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John William Waterhouse or Edward Burne-Jones), but, according to
Auerbach, the characters of Trilby O’Ferrall from Trilby by George du Maurier, Lucy Westenra from Stoker’s
Dracula and ‘Frau Emmy’ from Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, fall into that category too. Poems such as ‘The
Origin of the Harp’ by Thomas Moore, and ‘The Mermaid’ by William Butler Yates, can be said to belong to the
type.
106
See Duncan Crow, The Victorian Woman (London: George Allen & Uwin Ltd, 1971). For the Victorian
woman, see also the book by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).
107
In the now unavoidable guide for any student of Victorianism, Walter E. Houghton describes the many faces
of the fundamental Victorian anxiety. See Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957). For the Victorian fascination with women’s hair, see Meghan
Edwards, ‘The Devouring Woman and Her Serpentine Hair in Late Pre-Raphaelitism,’ last modified 26 December
2004, Viewed 14 December 2012, http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/prb/edwards12.html, but also the
seminal paper by Elisabeth G. Gitter, ‘The Power of Women's Hair in the Victorian Imagination,’ PMLA 99: 5
(1984): 936-954.
108
Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres (Gallimard: Paris, 1943); our translation.

48
a woman seduces from a distance and that it is necessary to keep the distance in order to
succumb to that distance.109 This is particularly true of the Victorian culture and its
representational spiral. Waterhouse’s Ulysses wants to surrender to the fascination, but the
Victorian Sirens are too close. He cannot succumb to them, nor can he embrace them, because
they are both parts of the same mortal Victorian language. They are all around him, populating
the representational space of the painting that Wood describes as ‘weird, menacing, and
nightmarish.’110 They are invading his boat as a floating piece of land, his own little heterotopy,
in a reverse semiotics of the social order where monstrosity now embodies social norms and
Ulysses, in turn, embodies a detached piece of stray territory floating in abject waters. There is
a semiotic confusion in this representation, an implosion of meanings.
Reading the Sirens of the Odyssey with their bodies visually left blank echoes gazing at
them in midair on the canvas by Waterhouse. These remarkable beings, capable of knowing
everything, promising everything and destroying everyone, are neither properly here nor there
– there is a rupture in their representation. Kristeva says that ‘[abject] is what disturbs identity,
system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous,
the composite.’111 And exactly there, in that in-between, in the rift of representation and the
temporary blank space of collapsed meaning, is the birthplace of the Sirens’ abject monstrosity
and of the Victorian male desiring subject alike. The Sirens and Ulysses are one and the same
image, two parts of the topology of the Victorian male subject.
Blank space is what Ulysses often encounters on his journey. He expects the sweetness of
the Sirens’ voices, but if we go back to their dreadful isle once again we shall see that, being a
heterotopy in itself, a place where all norms and values are perverted and turned upside-down
(or inside-out like putrefying bodies), their home presents itself first as an abrupt nothingness,
as another interruption in language:

Anon the wind slept, and for many a mile

Some god in silence hushed the marble mere.
Forthwith, our men the canvass furl, and pile

109
‘A woman seduces from a distance. In fact, distance is the very element of her power. Yet one must beware to
keep one’s own distance from her beguiling song of enchantment. A distance from distance must be maintained.
Not only for protection (the most obvious advantage) against the spell of her fascination, but also as a way of
succumbing to it, that distance (which is lacking) is necessary. Il faut la distance (qui faut),’ in Jacques Derrida,
Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979),
48.
110
Wood, Olympian Dreamers, 230.
111
Kristeva, Power of Horror, 4.

49
 Safe in the hollow ship their naval gear,
Lean to their oars, and whiten the blue waters clear.112

As if at the gates of Hades itself, the home of the Sirens, a presumed residence of joy and
bliss, is actually this still, smooth, aquatic grave, covered in human gore. But Ulysses
nevertheless is seduced by the ghoulishness of the place, by the threshold of the beyond. No
other place can offer him the thrill of enjoyment like the residence of fear itself. This non-
existent place to which Ulysses and his companions arrived is ‘[t]he Nether Nightmare of
misogynist fantasy, home of the subject as devoured and drowned’ 113 as Kramer puts it, but it
is also Kristeva’s place of fear – the word which hollows out representation and fills it with a
‘hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer.’114 This calm place of nothingness is exactly what the
nineteenth century bestowed on the monstrosity of sirens and on the male desiring subject.
As stated above, while introducing Ulysses into his transgressive search of ecstasy from
below, from fear, destruction, and death, what we fear the most is the monster that dwells inside
us. Monstrosity is a text-book example of Kristeva’s realm of the abject,

something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not
protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it
beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.115

Victorian monstrosity is not an object, it cannot be fixed and properly introduced into a
semiotic system; it rests on its cultural impossibility that haunts identity, leading to that dark
flame inside of us. Victorian monstrosity is an abject, but an abject taken as the very essence
of subjectivity. However paradoxical it may sound, I would like to argue that the male Victorian
subject is that abject, he is that monster, and has been ever since. We cannot deal with the dread
of our own skin, so we compel ourselves to express it, to render it intelligible. We write the
monstrosity, paint it and sculpt it, rarely recognizing in it the exhausting and painful path of
self-knowledge.
Thus the Sirens, coming from the netherspace of the monstrous subject, are not opposed to
Ulysses, and he cannot reject them by himself. He has to be tied to the mast of the ship, that

112
Odyssey, XII, verse 24, 295.
113
Kramer, ‘“Longindyingcall,”’ 198.
114
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 6.
115
Ibid., 4.

50
symbol of defense against the piercing, deadly voices of the Sirens. But they are not the same
with him either, so he craves them. Ulysses and the Sirens, in their representational language,
are the ‘sameness which is not identical,’ they are words of the Victorian language, a language
in whose heart resides a différance. Filled with desire and at the same time afraid, robbed of
his reason somewhere half-way there, Ulysses is trapped facing the Sirens, trapped by the fact
of their inseparability. He is neither the subject nor object, but the abject – that Other which is
always already in the core of the ego, because the Other comes before the ego, before
representation, before meaning.116 The abject screams from the undivided space of always
already before, a space beyond language and meaning the male Victorian subject had been
dreaming of since he appropriated his mirror image. The Sirens are Ulysses’ abject mirror
image, calling, imploring, promising fullness, promising happiness and stability, just like it was
in the beginning, like it was in front of the mirror. They promise the whole that will never be.
Because it is false, because it is not who we are (if we are at all), it is always the Other we seek,
and the Other we need. In the age of mirrors, Sirens are monstrous faces of the male Victorian
subject. Risen from this eternal abyss of self-recognition and self-identification, the abject
roams the semiotic space and reaches out, while Ulysses the Victorian and his sinister abject
siren faces, steering his dream-bound vessel, approach.

116
Ibid.,10.

51
PART ONE

MIRROR: THE NIGHTMARE I INHABIT

In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up
behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own
visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia
of the mirror.117
Michel Foucault

Reflection: This morning I caught myself staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror.
It was not just a passing glance, like any other morning, nor was it a vain gaze that appreciated
or rejected what it saw. It was more a look of wonder, one that interrogated the image perceived.
And it was not alone, that look that penetrated the clear, alluring, imperceptibly silvered surface
of the looking-glass; it was followed by a sentiment, haunted by puzzlement, overburdened by
doubt. It was a stare that asked – what? – something ungraspable to my half-benumbed mind.
It lasted a moment, an effervescent heartbeat maybe, but it felt like ages to me. And I
wondered – not what one would expect from a dialogue with a mirror, namely, who was that
person looking at me from behind the glass, peering into my eyes with feverish intent; what I
wondered was who was ‘I’ who stared at the mirror and was I, as I know myself as ‘I’, there at
all. As I continued staring, a half-forgotten verse came to my mind: ‘Take off your faces from
your masks.’ How could I have been sure that there was anything even remotely extant as a
perceiving ‘I,’ a point in the experiential life of an individual, a convergent spot of thoughts,
emotions and sensations capable of a true act of seeing? Was this person an individual at all,
or was it a void of chaos that stared at this smooth, rounded phantasmal being whose left eye
was my right and whose right eye was my left? There was a sort of bewilderment in the
encounter that morning, as I could not shake off the feeling of emptiness, and a certain scent
of death that filled the space between me – whoever ‘I’ was, and whatever ‘I’ signified – and
the mirror. Something was not there, where I had assumed it would be; something was lost to
me, something that might not had been there at all. But I could tell with certainty that I lacked
it, that I felt its absence – and I could feel it was absent since the beginning, any beginning.
How come that, from that moment on, my reflection carried an imprint of death? How come

117
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité 5 (1984): 4.

52
that this emptiness would not go away, disappear, wither away? How come that what I saw
was somehow not what I wished to see, but both more and less than my wishful image? And
how come that at the thought of it, at the most distant inclination of that void that stared at its
own fully rounded reflection, I felt an urge to stretch out my hand and reach for it? How come
I felt excited?

*****

Gazing at oneself in order to see the Other, and imagining the Other in order to embrace
oneself – these are only two of the limitless possibilities of a mirror. It is said that a mirror
could tell us who we are, if we just looked at it from the right angle. In truth, it could show us
what we wish to see, but it could also terrify us with fears and desires that are hard to fathom.
As an instrument of self-knowledge, the mirror allows endless possibilities for the self and the
Other, reaching toward the inside, while exteriorizing an abject self like a fleeing ghost of a
man eternally chained to its tomb. There is a monster behind the mirror, because even in a full-
length reflection all we can see are fragments of possibilities, never knowing if the next time
the mirror image will be a nightmarish one. Sabine Melchior-Bonnet observes: ‘monstrosity –
the part representing the whole.’118 The eternal dread of facing fragments of the self, while
imagination and culture do the rest, leads a fixed gaze right into the center of the silvered
phantasm, only to expose a monster that lurks on the other side – the unfathomable self.
The task undertaken in this chapter is to show the way mirrors, as Victorian commodities,
embodied the semiotic interruption of the Victorian language discussed in the introduction.
Scattered across the Victorian mind- and cityscapes, mirrors became vehicles of a new
monstrous/fragmented subject, the one who dreamed about his semiotic wholeness; he
inhabited a queer dream of his own perverted mirror image. It will be shown that mirrors
embodied the semiotic incoherence of commodities and expressed the monstrosity of the
subject through the language of material culture – a new, shifting, troubling space that, within
the culture, opened up between men and things. This space was a small one, as small as a slip
of the tongue, as minute as the blank space between words in a sentence. And it was essentially
empty, meaning that it acted as a symbolic, nameless residue that attracted desire. This
impossible, monstrous space arrived on the wings of three new moments in the history of

118
Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine H. Jewett (New York and London:
Routledge, 2001), 226.

53
mirrors that separated the Victorian culture from its previous history: 1) As commodities,
mirrors became omnipresent in the second half of the nineteenth century, they grew in size and
advanced in clarity, enabling a perceiving subject to grasp himself as a visual, almost clear,
corporeal unity for the first time; 2) The spectacularity of mirrors in the nineteenth century
accounts wore off as the century wore on, making them naturalized, culturally inperceptible;
3) In most of the accounts, mirrors came not to reflect the world without but the world within
the subject – his desires, fears and fantasies. These factors, taken together, changed something
at the level of desire. Among countless Victorian objet a commodities, one of them transformed
the male desiring subject into a stranger to himself, into a monstrous, haunting subject. If the
Victorian subject was monstrous because he was split between his existential chaos and a
miscomprehended illusion of coherence, Victorian mirrors, as semantically shifting
commodities, were fragments of the grotesque and monstrous Victorian modernity’s endless
dream.

The Spectacular Modernity of the Mirror Image

What happens when the gaze penetrates its own reflection so deeply that the spot from which
it reaches the upside-down world disappears? This absolute loss of representational parameters
is the story of our own times. The first half of the nineteenth century was in this respect still
young, although not innocent. The representational labyrinth that started eating away at Being
from within the language was new to the century that had just become overloaded with mirrors.
In the first half of the century, mirrors, abundant as they were, still inspired awe; they were still
culturally perceptible, freshly taken into the world of devious commodities. They were still
spectacular, their conspicuousness resonating with wider scopic, voyeuristic tendencies of a
culture that began manifesting itself as a theatre.
Nothing exemplifies this convergence of spectacle and mirror image better than the
‘mirrored curtain’ of the Royal Coburg Theater. On the south bank of the river Themes, at the
New Cut that connected Blackfriars and Westminster road was the Coburg, one of the smaller
theaters of London.119 In its day it was famous for its name ‘Blood Tub,’ a name earned by
frequently staging violent melodramas.120 The Coburg’s patrons were Their Royal Highnesses,
Princes Charlotte and Prince Leopold, and it struggled to survive, competing with major

119
Thomas Kenrick, British Stage, and Literary Cabinet 2 (June 1818): 136.
120
Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34.

54
London theaters right into the twenty-first century. Today it is still there and bears the name of
Old Vic.
The interior of the Coburg was extravagant itself. In 1822, Augustus Frederick Glossop
Harris, the first manager of the theatre, commissioned a marine salon that featured panoramic
views by the prominent English marine painter Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, representing the
recent triumph of the British navy in the bombardment of Algiers in 1816, huge mirrors, as
well as portraits of the theatre’s patrons.121 Two large galleries encircled the building, providing
the majority of seats. But more than anything else, the Coburg stayed remembered for the visual
spectacle of the ‘mirrored curtain’ novelty (fig. 3).

.
Figure 3 The Mirrored Curtain, The Royal Coburg Theatre (1821)

121
Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 151-152; see bill for 21 November 1822; Edward Wedlake Brayley, Historical
and Descriptive Accounts of the Theatres of London (London: Architectural Library, 1826), 92.

55
 In December 1821, the managers of the Coburg installed in the proscenium of the stage an
enormous plate-glass mirror, later to be called the ‘mirrored curtain.’ Since it had still been
impossible to produce a one-piece mirror of that size, it was comprised of sixty-three mirrored
panels carefully put together and enclosed in an extravagant gilded frame featuring a radiant
sun and groups of nude female bodies resembling Caryatides of the Athenian Erechtheion. On
the evening of December 26, 1821 the mirror was lowered between the stage and the audience,
inspiring awe, provoking the feeling of strangeness and causing commotion. It was so big that
it reflected the majority of the perceiving subjects who waved at themselves and at each other.
Thirty years before Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, everyone in the audience became everyone
else’s reflection, surveying one another, the mirror homogenizing the crowd and killing the
distance between the subject and the reflection. In a single, discontinuous stroke of the sixty-
three panels of a fragmented monstrous mirror, the audiences could see themselves as
participants in their own spectacle. Entering the world of commodities – abstracted in awe,
spectacularized in a Victorian voyeuristic fantasy and alienated in the same extravaganza – this
mirror embodied the scopic pleasures of the Victorian culture, reflecting, as Edward Fitzball
said in 1859, ‘every Form and Face in the gorgeous house, from the topmost seat in the
galleries, to the lowest bench in the pit.’122 Richardson believes that the society of spectacle
consolidated itself around The Great Exhibition of 1851, but we can see that some traits of this
scopic cultural phenomenon had already emerged in small, dim ‘places of noise, dirt […] and
unbridled sexual commerce,’ as Jane Moody describes Georgian theaters.123 The very act that
allowed the boundary between the perceiver and the perceived to be obliterated in the Coburg
mirror, allowed audiences to enter a representational loop of appearance, introducing a distance
from Being in the visual spectacle. Later we shall see that the Victorian age was an age of the
world picture where Being came into being only by being represented, but we have already
discussed aphanasis as the subject’s dying as Being and emerging as meaning. Nothing
exemplifies better this distancing death of Being at the conjunction of spectacle and commodity
than this mirror that reflected ‘every Form and Face,’ accentuating the illusion and eclipsing
the reality of the stage.

122
Edward Fitzball, Thirty Five Years of a Dramatic Author’s Life, 2 vol. (London: T. C. Newby, 1859), vol. 1,
v.
123
Moody, Illegitimate Theatre, 3; Thomas Richardson, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England:
Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (London and New York: Verso, 1991). The main argument of his book is
that consumerist culture preceded consumerist economy and not the other way round, and that this culture, as a
culture of spectacle, consolidated only during and after the Great Exhibition of 1851.

56
 The responses of the spectators to the curtain were diverse. Horace Foote was carried away
by the enchantment of the commodity, where ‘crowded audiences testified their delight at
seeing themselves in this immense mirror, and for the first time “on the stage”.’124 So, as early
as 1821, mirrors came to embody the awe of the Victorian voyeuristic stare, returning the gaze
of the subject to him and catching him behind the peephole of the world. Everyone could see
everyone else – not like in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon where vision was dominated from
an invisible blind spot of the architectural state power, but in a democratized illusion of scopic
equality. The viewers became protagonists of their own melodrama allowing the mirror – the
looking-glass – to look back from the ‘flesh of the world’ that would otherwise have stayed
concealed. Imagining the novelty of the mirrored curtain, Foucault’s words ring true: ‘The
mirror […] enables me to see myself there were I am absent,’ in the blind spot of the
existence.125 The bill from the evening of the premiere summarized the new phenomenon of
the mirror-commodity concisely: ‘the most NOVAL, SPLENDID & INTERESTING OBJECT
ever displayed in a British Theatre’ – the very definition of the commodity.
Matthew Kaiser commented that the Coburg mirror ‘implicates its audience, resituates them
onstage, and reduces the whole world to a melodramatic spectacle.’126 But there is more to this
mirror than an inversion of the perceiver-perceived relationship. This grand mirror introduces
a semiotic interruption in the visible public space, not only by inverting the roles in the scopic
spectacle, but by perverting them, leading them astray (as in Latin pervertere: ‘to overthrow,’
‘to turn away’). This distortion of meaning is the blueprint of the Victorian spectacle. In this
spectacle the epistemic lines between people and mirror-commodities were not erased or
inverted but convoluted, leaving the perceiving subject in a nameless spectral space that drives
the desire to always crave for more – never becoming satiated and always creating a stronger
distance from Being. In the Coburg mirror we can see the same implosion of meaning that we
will observe latter in the monstrosity of the mirrorless sirens of the Pre-Raphaelite painting:
the spiral labyrinth of signification, which includes its own exits, and in which Being dies at
the expense of meaning, while the desire of the perceiving subject roams in never-ending
torment of dissatisfaction, searching for a satisfaction. Another contemporary account, a bit
less flattering, by James Robinson Planché, clearly expresses this monstrous labyrinth of the
visual drive:

124
Horace Foote, A Companion to the Theatres and Manual of the British Drama (London: William Marsh &
Alfred Miller, 1824), 74.
125
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ 4.
126
Matthew Kaiser, The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2012), 53.

57
 […] it was a large mass of plate-glass, and in those days must have cost a great
deal of money. There was a considerable applause at its appearance. The
moment it ceased, someone in the gallery, possessing a stentorian voice called
out, “That’s all werry well! Now show us summat else!” What more cutting
commentary could the keenest wit have made upon this costly folly? 127

In the world of commodities, desire always craves for more. In the field of desire, objet a is
never reached, never attained, the thirst for more of ‘it’ is unquenchable. The mirror invoked a
vortex of a broken signifying chain, broken somewhere half-way between the audience and the
mirror image. In this chain, the representation did not fall back upon itself like in the ‘duplicated
representation’ of Foucault’s eighteenth century, cancelling the meaning as we know it.128 In
the Coburg mirror, as in the Victorian language as a whole, the signifier falls not upon itself
but always upon something else, introducing the différance into signification. This epistemic
premise of the nineteenth century – the death of Being and the birth of the
monstrous/fragmented subject from the body of a differential sign – assumes that what is
revealed by the mirror (however nonsensical and disturbing it may be) is the ‘truth’ of the
subject. In 1821, George McFarren sharply summarized this in a satirical verse on the Coburg
mirror submitted to the periodical Drama:

The giant houses, t’other side the water

Who give to our humility no quarter,
Say, nought but nonsense live within our portals,
And call our heroes monsters, and not mortals;
And henceforth to astound these native elves,
Our portals must be true for you’ll behold yourself.129

In this verse, we see that as long as the subject beheld himself what came as an image
presented itself as the truth. As the subject was entering the labyrinth of signification and

127
James Robinson Planché, Recollections and Reflections: A Professional Autobiography, 2 vols. (London:
Sampson Low, 1872), vol. 1, 127.
128
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Tavistock/Routledge
(London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 70.
129
Drama 2 (December 1821): 393; my emphasis.

58
revealing himself as rambling, hence monstrous, the words of Matthew Kaiser resonated true:
one should know how to ‘survive the looking-glass.’130
Horrid as this semiotic implosion, and thus desire, might have been, the perceiving subject
was still both frightened and astonished by the revelation of the mirror, its spectacularity not
allowing the mirror to sink completely into the third world of commodities, to gain the
introductory element: ‘just (a mirror).’ In 1821, mirrors had still not been naturalized; the image
in them still not appropriated fully, hence the fear and astonishment. On the surface of the
Coburg mirror, one could see the imprints of the workers, greasy smudges that still alluded to
the world without, outside the reflection in the mirror and outside the semiotic implosion of
différance. ‘The glass was all over fingers or other marks,’ said the unimpressed Planché.131
The monstrous subject still wrestled his image and his monstrosity, the imprints hinting at the
Real outside the representation. As Kasier wittily observes, big as the Coburg mirror was, it
‘was not large enough to swallow the world. […] [It] might have swallowed [it]; the signifier
might have devoured the referent, existence might be irrevocably in play.’132 But it had not,
yet. The relationship between the subject and his mirror image was not inverted, but perverted.
Mirrors had not acquired their humility yet, and the troubling effect they had on the subject
was the striking feature of that time. Once mirrors had become fully integrated into the fabric
of the society – naturalized, imperceptible, and taken for granted – the mirror image either
disappeared or was broken, as in so many twentieth-century narratives. This scenario slowly
began unfolding in the second half of the nineteenth-century. The early nineteenth century
subject summoned his will to penetrate his own reflection, and the image he perceived did
come to life. There was still a spectacular reflection to be grasped, one that would, by the
second half of the century, turn into a nightmare.

The Cornucopia of Selfhood

By the end of the nineteenth century, mirror, as an artifact, had come a long way from being
a rare object, used only by the nobility, highly expensive and hard both to make and acquire.133

130
Kaiser, World in Play, 54.
131
Planché, Recollections and Reflections, 127.
132
Kaiser, World in Play 52, 55; my emphasis.
133
Geneviève Sennequier, Miroirs: Jeux et reflets depuis l’antiquité (Paris : Somogy éd. d`art, 2000), 57.

59
The history of mirrors is very long and complex.134 Most of their story is not directly pertinent
to our argument, but a short survey could illuminate the argument’s background.
When Venetian glassworkers were moved to the famous Murano islands in 1291, mirrors,
although extant in various forms for centuries before, were miracles of technology.135 For
centuries, Venice had the monopoly over the production of mirrors, so pure and so clean that
they were called crystalline, and for a long time these mirrors were perversely expensive.136 In
the second half of the seventeenth century, by a series of events worthy of the best espionage–
counterespionage novels on The Cold War, France broke the Venetian monopoly and founded
the Royal Company of Glass and Mirrors. The Sun King was crazy about mirrors, and for
another century, mirrors basically remained limited to those connected to the court.
The mirror was never larger than what could be cut from a glass ball, and the curvature gave
it a bulging shape that could be found in Flemish paintings and German engravings of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.137 This is the mirror on the table in Quentin Metsys’
Moneychanger and His Wife, and on the bedroom wall in Van Eyck’ Arnolfini Portrait; no
larger than a tea saucer and reflecting a distorted image. The game of looking into oneself had
different rules, because what one could see was only a distorted image of reality, literally
darkened and twisted. In the late Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance, mirrors were
associated with good as well as evil.138 They had strong religious significance, and Heinrich
Schwarz shows that

134
The history of mirrors and the history of glass are inextricably linked. Some authors, such as E. Barrington
Haynes, place the origins of glass in Egypt, Glass (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1948), 16-20. For variously
detailed histories of glass and mirror production, see Gerry Martin and Alan MacFarlane, The Glass Bathyscapes:
How Glass Changed the World (London: Profile Books, 2002); Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass
Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Hugh Tait, ed., Five Thousand
Years of Glass (London: British Museum Press, 1991); Hisham Elkadi, Cultures of Glass Architecture (Aldershot
and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006), 1-15; Harold Newman, ed., An Illustrated Dictionary of Glass (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1977). For a more history-of-science oriented brief survey, see Seth C. Rasmussen, How Glass
Changed the World: The History and Chemistry of Glass from Antiquity to the 13 th Century (Berlin and
Heidelberg: Springer, 2012). There are authors who argue for the Mesopotamian origins of glass, see A. von
Saldern, et al., Glass and Glassmaking in Ancient Mesopotamia (New York and Cranbury: Corning Museum of
Glass Press and Associated University Presses, 1970). For more mirror-oriented surveys, see Mark Pendergast,
Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with Reflection (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Melchior-
Bonnet, The Mirror. For the history of mirrors in art, see Jonathan Miller, On Reflection (London: National Gallery
Publications, 1998) and Heinrich Schwarz, ‘The Mirror in Art,’ The Art Quarterly XV (1952): 97-118. Margaret
J. M. Ezell analyzed seventeenth-century mirrors, predominantly in literature, in ‘Looking-Glass Histories,’
Journal of British Studies 43 (January 2004): 317-338. There is also an interesting, comprehensive survey of
mirrors as metaphors and ways of seeing by Richard Gregory, Mirrors in Mind (London: Penguin Books, 1998).
135
Melchior-Bonnet, Mirror, 99.
136
Mark Pendergrast, Mirror, Mirror, 146.
137
Melchior-Bonnet, Mirror, 14.
138
Heinrich Schwarz, ‘Mirror in Art,’ 97-118.

60
 the mirror – that is to say, the unblemished mirror, speculum sine macula – was
the symbol of the Virgin’s purity, one of the many symbols referring to St.
Mary’s Perfection and the miracle of Christ’s incarnation.139

The mirror also became the symbol of Truth or Veritas, as well as of the Deadly Sins:
Superbia or Pride and Luxuria or Lust were frequently represented with a mirror in medieval
miniature paintings, as well as in sculptures (Bordeau, Moissac and Arles) and stained glass
windows (Notre-Dame, Auxerre and Lyons) of the great French cathedrals.140 In the Italian
Renaissance the classical heritage connected Vanity and mirrors, transforming them into the
‘tools of Venus’ – emblems of seduction and prostitution.141 Thus, although the mirror had
always been an ambiguous and contradictory symbol, its most persistent attributes were those
of lies and deceit — one could not trust its reflection, nor could one identify with it. Mirrors
were regarded as miraculous or demonic, capable of predicting the future.
As long as the mirror remained rare and luxurious – existing, but somewhere else – one’s
disappearing inside one’s own image, objectifying oneself, was not possible. Clear reflection
and a persistent gaze were still quite far away.
But things changed. With the French aristocracy, crystal mirrors gradually replaced metal
ones, which almost completely disappeared from estate inventories in the last third of the
seventeenth century.142 When the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a joint project of architects
Charles Le Brun and Jules Hardouin-Mansart, was presented to the public in 1682, it was met
with resounding admiration. As the production of mirrors became cheaper, mirrors slowly
started populating everyday space of illustrious salons in the eighteenth century, giving rise to
the cabinet de toilette. ‘Mirrors thus invaded household decor,’ explains Melchior-Bonnet, ‘and
transformed furniture throughout the eighteenth century.’143 A certain amount of time was
needed to get accustomed to mirrors, however, for their visual effects ‘turned the relationship
between empty and full surfaces on its head and defied equilibrium. But soon people could not
do without the light brought by looking-glasses.’144
Then, a very curios mirror-piece appeared, one that can be quite interesting for a discussion
of mirror-commodities and their impact on loosening the border between people and things.

139
Ibid.,98.
140
Ibid.,105-106.
141
Cathy Santore, ‘The Tools of Venus,’ Renaissance Studies 11:3 (September 1997): 179-207.
142
Melchior-Bonnet, Mirror, 25.
143
Ibid,, 81.
144
Ibid.

61
The mirrored armoire, a mirror embedded in furniture, emerged in the nineteenth century
capturing one of the paradoxes of commodity.145 Once a mirror of God or Satan, held by Vanity
or Pride, this amazing invention that merged luxury and everyday life, now held piles of sheets,
household linens and utensils. In our own time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it
is hard for us to appreciate the grandeur of this invention. Today, every apartment, house or a
household possesses a piece. We wake up in the morning, we open our closet or approach a
sideboard, and as we fold our sheets or arrange our china, we see our faces reflected within
these commodities. In our time, we do not even acknowledge it – a human face within a
commodity has become our everyday reality. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the
mirror was still young in pulling the subject into this space of blurred semiotic boundaries, but
the more common mirrors became, the more enchanting they were. As we have seen in the
introduction, this is what Daniel Miller calls the ‘humility of things’: once a thing becomes
common, we tend to take it for granted. Our vigilance, then, becomes low and we start referring
to the thing as ‘just (a mirror).’ But the less vigilant we are the greater the impact of the thing
on our lives, the stronger its influence on the construction of meaning becomes. The thing then
sinks into the third world of objects – an imperceptible, marginalized reality that strongly
influences us nevertheless.
The amazing discovery of the mirrored armoire allowed the monstrous subject to appear to
us once again – in order to see himself, the subject gazed into the furniture. His image was now
part of the thing, not framed in gold, ivory or wood, but covered in shelves, blankets and china.
The commodity, an alienated human child, an offspring of changed relations of production,
expressed the anxieties of the Victorian language, taken as the Lacanian Symbolic, and created
a background from which the agonized, disjointed subject both appeared and announced
himself, spirally enraptured by his own reflection. In the nineteenth century, the future of the
post-modern self was born: to see one’s own face was to see a commodity. To gaze into oneself
was to gaze back into one’s own commodified nature.
The Victorian culture was undoubtedly a culture of glass and mirrors. Due to the intense
innovation in the technology and production of cheap glass, London – as one of the capitals of
the nineteenth century – was, by the middle of the century, completely covered in it.146

145
Pendergrast, Mirror, Mirror, 200; Serge Roche, Mirrors, trans. Colin Duckworth (London: Gerald Duckworth,
1957), 302.
146
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 133. Glass became cheap in the second half of the nineteenth century. For
its circulation, see John Cassell, ‘A Visit to Apsley Pellatt’s Flint Glass Works,’ in The Illustrated Exhibitor and
Magazine of Art: Collected from the Various Departments of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, History,
Biography, Art-industry, manufactures, Inventions and Discoveries, Local and Domestic Scenes, Ornamental
Works, Etc., Etc., Volumes I and II (London: John Cassell, La Belle Sauvage Yard, 1852), 54-59, 70-74. See also

62
Everything could be made of this old but new material. ‘Ink stands, paper weights, knives, pen
trays,’ lists the Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Arts in 1852, ‘lamp pedestals, candelabra,
candlesticks, salt cellars, knife-rests, mustard pots, sugar basins, butter coolers, smelling-
bottles, flower-vases, door-knobs, moldings, panels, chandeliers, surgeons’ speculae, railway
and other reflectors.’147 Every building in the center of London had ground floor covered in
glass shop windows (fig. 4). Interiors of cafés, shopping malls and restaurants reflected
consumers as they browsed the goods.

Figure 4 Shaftesbury House, Aldersgate street, Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (26th July 1830)

In his essay The World as Exhibition, Timothy Mitchell recounts a story describing the
experience of two Egyptians who traveled to France and England in the company of an English
orientalist. The 1882 story Alam al-din by Ali Mubarak was one the first fictionalized accounts
of Europe to be published in Arabic. On their first day in Paris, the visitors walked into a

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor: Cyclopedia of Conditions and Earnings (London: Griffin,
Bohn and Company, 1861). For the glassing of London shops and public spaces see, George Dodd, ‘London
Shops and Bazaars,’ in London, 6 vol., ed., Charles Knight (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1851), vol. 5, 385-
400; Charles Manby Smith, The Little World of London: or, Pictures in Little of London Life (London: Arthur
Hall, Virtue, and Co., 1857), 319-400. Henry-Russell Hitchock’s Early Victorian Architecture in Britain, 2 vols.
(London: Architectural Press; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954) illustrates nearly a dozen large-windowed
shop complexes dating from the 1840s in London and elsewhere, see figures 5-7, 13, 15, 22-27, 29, chapter 12.
See Mark Wiggington, Glass in Architecture (London: Phaidon, 1996), for the use of plate glass in architecture.
See also, N. Whittock, On the Construction and Decoration of the Shopfronts of London (London: Sherwood,
Gilbert & Piper, 1840); Raymond McGrath, Glass in Architecture and Decoration (London: Architectural Press,
1937); Kathryn A. Morrison, English Shops and Shopping: An Architectural History (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2003).
147
Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Arts 1 (1852): 70-71.

63
wholesale shop and lost themselves in the endless corridors and crowds of people infinitely
multiplied by omnipresent mirrors. As they wandered in horror through the endless maze of
reflections, passers-by did not even acknowledge their desperation. ‘They stared at the two in
silence as they passed,’ concludes Mitchell, ‘standing quite still, not leaving their places or
interrupting their work.’148 This and similar stories show how the glass culture appeared to the
subject from outside the Western representational labyrinth, and how exuberant mirrors
actually were. Today, mirrors are so completely naturalized in our culture that it is really hard
to appreciate the astonishment of the Middle-Eastern visitors, and a sense of novelty the
Western subject experienced. In the city’s shop windows, public mirrors, barber mirrors and
café mirrors, one never saw one’s own image from the same angle, there was always a different
subject reflected back to the perceiver. The copiousness and size of public reflective surfaces
literally revolutionized the way a subject interacted with his own corporeal and psychic
coherence.
There is ‘an inordinate love of plate glass,’ complained Charles Dickens in Gin Shops, ‘[…]
door knocked into windows, a dozen squares of glass into one [in shops and gin palaces].’149
Transparency and reflection became prime architectural, artistic and social elements. Isobel
Armstrong shrewdly observes that Victorian ‘glassworld’ – the fantasy of the ‘dreaming
community,’ to borrow Walter Benjamin’s phrase – embodied the cultural dream, or better the
illusion, of a transparent, democratic society.150
By the middle of the nineteenth century the fetishization of the mirror and its turning into a
commodity became evident at the Great Exhibition, which Benjamin immortalized as
‘pilgrimage-sites of the commodity-fetish.’151 Tracing the steps of Marx, Agamben concluded
that Marx’s visit to London in 1851 when the first Great Exhibition took place in Hyde Park
led his thinking to the analysis of commodity fetishism. ‘The “phantasmagoria” of which he
speaks in relation to the commodity,’ argues Agamben, ‘can be discovered in the intentions of
the organizers, who chose, from among the various possibilities presented, Paxton’s project for

148
Timothy Mitchell, ‘The World as Exhibition,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:2 (1989): 225-
226. Another story he recounts is of the same nature, taken from the story by Rifa’a al Tahtawi, al-A’mal al-
Kamila. It also tells about an Egyptian writer and his experience of mirrors on his first day in a European city:
‘There were a lot of people in there, and whenever a group of them came into view, their images appeared in the
glass mirrors, which were on every side. Anyone who walked in, sat down, or stood up seemed to be multiplied.
Thus the café looked like an open street. I realized it was enclosed only when I saw several images of myself in
mirrors, and understood that it was all due to the peculiar effect of the glass’ (226).
149
Charles Dickens, ‘Gin Shops’ in Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People, ed.
Charles Dickens (Philadelphia: Getz, Buck & CO., 1852), 101.
150
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds. This is one of the main arguments in the book.
151
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University
Press: Cambridge (Mass.), 2002), 50.

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the enormous palace constructed entirely out of glass.’152 This exhibition used glass and
reflection game to capture,

the transfiguration of commodity into an enchanted object [...] In the galleries

and pavilions of its mystical Crystal Palace, […] the commodity is displayed to
be enjoyed only through the glance at the enchanted scene.153

Reflecting surfaces proved themselves as commodities, objects miraculously came to life

by acquiring the bluish halo of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Wherever they turned, people
were haunted by their own reflections. In the streets, during meals, in city shops, transparent
and reflecting surfaces surrounded the subject every step of the way. For the first time in the
history of the West, the subject was not only able to encounter himself on every corner, but
also to experience fully the externalization of his body. The full-length image of one’s body
was a new experience. In 1889 The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, the governess
experiences her full-length mirror image for the first time.154 In the course of the century, the
Western world became a mirror; the subject was being mediated by reflective surfaces
everywhere.
The sentiment that the world of the nineteenth century (the age of the world picture, the
world as a stage, or a peepshow) itself became a mirror grew strong. In the 1930s, Benjamin
was able to note in one of his convolutes from The Arcades Project:

Paris is a city of mirrors. The asphalt of its roadways smooth as glass, and at the
entrance to all bistros glass partitions. A profusion of window panes and mirrors
in cafés, so as to make the inside brighter and to give all the nooks and crannies,
into which Parisian taverns separate, a pleasing amplitude. Women here look at
themselves more than elsewhere and from this comes the distinctive beauty of
the Parisienne. Before any man catches sight of her, she already sees herself ten
times reflected. But, the man, too, sees his own physiognomy flash by. He gains
his image more quickly here than elsewhere and also sees himself more quickly
merged with this, his image. Even the eyes of passersby are veiled mirrors, and

152
Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis and London: Minneapolis
University Press, 1993), 38.
153
Ibid.
154
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (New York: Courier Dover Publications, 1981), 7.

65
 over that wide bed of the Seine, over Paris, the sky is spread out like the crystal
mirror hanging over the drab beds in brothels.155

There are a myriad of things to read in this convolute by Benjamin. In his account, in his
male fantasy, women see themselves multiplied, the same as male subjects, but always in
anticipation of the male gaze. Their reflection cannot step out of Benjamin’s fundamentally
male, objectifying gaze. Also, man merges with his image. He appropriates it quickly,
embodying the exteriorized image of the self. The hyper-abundance of and obsession with
reflection is clear in Benjamin, even exaggerated. Every little thing – passersby, their eyes,
even the sky above the river – sends the subject’s image back to him, pointing to the same
circle of desire that troubled Freud in his excerpt from the ‘Uncanny.’

As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a
provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter
of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted
women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to
leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for
a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same
street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away
once more, only to arrive by another detour at the same place yet a third time.
Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny,
and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while
before, without any further voyages of discovery.156

As Freud always comes back to the same red-light street, performing the repetition of a
repressed sign, so does Benjamin’s gaze always come back to him no matter where he looks,
staging the trauma of the lost self-coherence (the one that is experienced as a lack, as an absence
of something that has never been there in the first place), a dissatisfaction of desire, a misstep
– like grabbing water in a hollow cup. As Hanna Arendt observes, Benjamin’s imagination was
essentially superannuated, essentially Victorian, ‘as though he [Benjamin] had drifted out of

155
Benjamin, Arcades Project, 537-538.
156
Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny,' in The Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. XVII. (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, 1919), 236.

66
the nineteenth century,’ and his writing reflects the Victorian age haunted by its own mirror
image – precisely because this image was false.157 Beyond this reflection, where the ‘true’
coherence of the self dwells, waits the Real that always comes back to itself. It inhabits the
space beyond the representational labyrinth that the subject will never reach. Is not this
convolute by Benjamin perturbing; is it not something uncanny that comes back from beyond,
or below, like from Bataille’s ‘underground’? Does it not make us apprehensive, this reflection
that comes at the same time from everywhere and nowhere? Is it so unimaginable that in an
age obsessed and haunted by its reflection something changed at the level of desire?
Another convolute by Benjamin citing S. F. Lahrs shows that the reality of 1837 was quite
similar to his own experience of a reflective Paris.

Egoistic – “that is what one becomes in Paris, where you can hardly take a step
without catching sight of your dearly beloved self. Mirror after mirror! In cafés
and restaurants, in shops and stores, in haircutting salons and literary salons, in
baths and everywhere, ‘every inch a mirror’!”158

In the above quotation, we see the subject enraged by the encounter with himself every step
of the way, his external existence loathed and despised; he is almost tired of this skirmish with
mirror images. As Armstrong suggests, these abundant public reflective ‘surfaces, recording
the random, dispersed, and evanescent images of the body in the world, gave a new publicity
to the subject, who could exist outside of itself in these traces.’159 This external existence, and
its re-appropriation, is the new Being of the Victorian male desiring subject.
In an environment in which, for the first time, the subject was able to live his own reflection,
to visually experience an almost clear (a mirror is never completely clear, especially in the
nineteenth century) and coherent image of the self, what happened with the perceiving subject?
What did this change mean to him? As we shall see shortly, the narrative of the mirror, the
fantasy it conveyed, inevitably had to change. The spatial democratization of reflective
surfaces, the mediation of the self by mirrors and windows, by the glass of the nineteenth
century, led the subject into the same representational loop of the Victorian language that we
have already diagnosed for the materiality of the commodity in general – because reflective

157
Hanna Arendth, Introduction to Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin (London: Pimlico, 1999), 25.
158
S.F. Lahrs, Briefe aus Paris, in Europa: Chronik der gebildeten Welt, ed. August Lewald (Leipzig and Stuttgart,
1837), vol. 2, 206. (Cf. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 539).
159
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 95.

67
surfaces were commodities. Through the looking-glass, the Victorian world of appearances
opened, it started descending into the nothingness of its own reflection. ‘It blinks,’ this mirror
world, says Benjamin. ‘[I]t is always this one – and never nothing – out of which another
immediately arises.’160 The mirror world, the Victorian ‘glassworld,’ slowly established a
world of simulacra at the expense of the unattainable Being. ‘The space that transforms itself
does so in the bosom of nothingness,’ continues Benjamin anticipating Gilles Deleuze’s claim
that the ‘modern world is one of simulacra.’161 Contrary to the absolute transparency of the
twentieth-century glass culture, Armstrong argues, the subject of the Victorian transparency is
a ‘subject in difficulties,’ signified by scratches and fingertips on the glass that created internal
contradictions.162 In a counter-movement to the externalization of his image, the subject
appropriated the image perceived taking it as his own coherent self. And out of this
misrecognition the split was born, a dark and horrid place impossible to signify, which kept
summoning the subject in, the subject in search of congruity and escape out of the
representational horror. Towards the Real, towards the lack, towards the object a that has never
been there – towards a coherence of the self. From this anxiety of an attainable desire, the one
reaching towards commodities as false objects of satisfaction, a dream arrived, fundamental to
the Victorian modernity – a dream of wholeness, a dream dreaming its own awakening. This
dream expressed its spiral horror in a new mirror narrative, one that kept haunting the subject
and the culture for more than a century – the narrative of similarity that is not identical, of
anxiety and strangeness. Once more the subject expressed himself in a disquieting, agitating
language of the unconscious – in a haunting mirror image – as yet another face of the haunting
commodities, the inanimate things miraculously came to life. And the subject kept dreaming
his fantasy. But the dream that came to him, the one he was born from, turned out to be a
nightmare.

The Haunting Strangeness

In 1891, through the pen of Oscar Wilde, Lord Henry said to Dorian Gray: ‘It is only shallow
people who do not judge by appearances.’163 Fleeting as it might be, this remark bears in itself
a culture, a history, and a language. As any cultural creation, it reaches deep down into the pool

160
Benjamin, Arcades Project, 542.
161
Ibid.; Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press,
1974), ix.
162
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 14
163
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 30.

68
of socially possible and impossible imageries, bringing back to the surface the inner structure
of the society itself. If something as an appearance, which has been for centuries conceived of
as a synonym for the superficial – even diabolic – could have emerged as its own opposite,
then this substitution tells us about the specific cultural moment of fin-de-siècle, as much as it
speaks of the inner demons that haunted Dorian Gray. At the core of this remark, we find an
inversion of form and content, absence and presence, humanity and commodity – an inversion
that established itself as a prerogative of the society of spectacle. Putting it into the wider
context of the novel from which it appeared, what Dorian Gray allowed himself was to abstract
his existence and transcend his humanity. By doing that, he entered a game of categories that
were not erased but blurred, raising with this act the mentioned fears of an uncanny
transgression of commodity. He became an object, materiality deprived of growing old, his self
eternally stored in a picture frame which would be his reward and punishment. Oscar Wilde,
the dandy of the era, captured the spirit of the age in a single evanescent remark.
As the commodity became the ‘centerpiece of everyday life,’ the ‘focal point of
representation,’ and the ‘dead center of the modern life,’ as Richards stresses, the mirror joined
the vast and diverse family of commodities and assumed a primary position in Victorian
culture.164 By its newly acquired commodified and fetishized nature, this curios object
developed a new narrative, showed its new face – one that proved essential to the new male
desiring subject. It showed, or was beginning to show, the essential dependence of the subject
on the material language of commodity. Contrary to its medieval, Renaissance and
Enlightenment history that considered the mirror as an instrument of God, as well as an
instrument of Satan, a tool of moral purity or fall – but rare and small all the same – the moment
the mirror became omnipresent as a cheap, widespread commodity, its representation in art and
literature stopped reflecting God, sins and virtues – it stopped moralizing and educating on
proper values of life as it did in the ages past. Now a new role of the mirror consisted not in
reflecting what was without and external to the subject who gazed into it, but precisely what
was within and internal to him – his dreams, his fears, his fantasies. The mirror and its fantastic
story became a playground for the subject of the unconscious, causing the subject to reveal
himself from inside the language. In a nutshell, mirror, in its guise as a commodity – an object
raised to the status of a Thing, desired, yearned for, ostensibly acquired, but always leaving a
craving for more – became, almost literally speaking, a creature of desire.

164
Richards, Commodity Culture, 1.

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 In the poem The Lament of the Looking-Glass by Thomas Hardy we can see this twisted
nature of the mirror’s materiality that gets morphed into the selfhood of an object. In it, the
looking-glass laments its forsaken existence, revealing the subject that once stood before it,
confusing the categories of the perceiver and the perceived. The mirror discloses the ghosts of
the perceiving subject’s desire: ‘I flash back phantoms of the night / That sometimes flit by me
[…],’ says the mirror.165 The limits of representation of materiality collapse in the mirror-
commodity, leaving man immobile and inanimate, and turning a thing – the mirror – into a
talking subject. The looking-glass literally looks. It is alive. It discloses for us the language of
monstrosity, and in its disturbing undead materiality, it reveals the monstrosity of the Victorian
subject who dreams of it. This subject has a nightmare without realizing it, expressing his
tormented non-Being in a displaced representation of the animate object. Time and again in
Victorian poetry we encounter the same theme of strangeness and appropriation of the
reflection in the mirror.
We are principally discussing the male subject, as expressed in his creations (poetry,
painting, sculpture, etc). But, as it has been said in the introduction, many of the issues
discussed could be seen as relating to the female subject too. We will analyze a couple of
examples together with the examples of the male subject.
In A Royal Princess (1866) by Christina Rossetti, mirrors obsessively reveal to the princess,
dissatisfied with her golden cage, her ubiquitous, multiplied and fragmented self:

All my walls are lost in mirrors, whereupon I trace

Self to right hand, self to left hand, self in every place,
Self-same solitary figure, self-same seeking face.’166

She cannot escape her mirror image, reflected in her every move, on every wall. The face
in the mirror image, the same as her own, keeps searching, isolating her in a solitary figure. As
she sits on the dais, her mirror image keeps haunting her, showing both her fear and her desire,
as she comes to despise her comely face: ‘A mirror showed me I look old and haggard in the
face.’

165
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Lament of the Looking Glass,’ in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James
Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 675.
166
Christina Rossetti, ‘A Royal Princes,’ in The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. R. W. Crump (Baton
Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 149-150.

70
 In George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), a husband observes his wife’s struggle to
confess:

She has desires of touch, as if to feel

That all the household things are things she knew.
She stops before the glass. What does she view?
A face that seems the latest to reveal!167

We can almost feel the desire for the comfort of things, the subject’s reaching for
subjectified commodities, ‘things she knew,’ as the wife turns towards the mirror to view the
reflection in which her face comes to be reflected last. The subjectivity of the wife (in the eyes
of her husband) is first expressed in the form of familiar commodities, leaving a chasm of
unsignifiable space gaping from the mirror, between the revelation of things and the revelation
of the human face.
In By the Looking-Glass (1866) by Augusta Webster, a girl sitting in front of a mirror,
displeased by the superficiality of the society says:

A girl, and so plain a face!

Once more, as I learn by heart every line
In the pitiless mirror, night by night,
Let me try to think it is my own.
Come, stranger with features something like mine,
Let me place close by you the tell-tale light.168

The girl pretends that the face she sees in the mirror is hers, precisely because it is not,
because the mirror reflects not what it is, but what the perceiver desires. The image is here
literally a stranger, with features that resemble the girl’s, but they are not hers nevertheless.
The mirror again opens a nameless part of the language, it opens up a différance, in which what
one sees is always both more and less than what one wishes to see. Desire pulls the subject in,

167
George Meredith, ‘Modern Love,’ in Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside with Poems and
Ballads, ed. Rebecca N. Mitchell and Criscillia Benford (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012),
44.
168
Augusta Webster, ‘By the Looking-Glass,’ in Augusta Webster: Portraits and Other Poems, ed. Christine
Sutphin (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), 117.

71
towards the appropriation of this nameless, horrid, and troubling stranger. ‘There,’ the girl says,
‘looking back from the glass, is my fate.’
Finally, The Other Side of a Mirror (1882) by Mary Coleridge, capitalizes on all the
fragments of the strangeness of the mirror image we have discussed. Almost every line of the
poem is dripping with the queerness of one’s reflection, hinting at the void in representation,
introduced and epitomized by the mirror’s commodified nature. ‘I sat before my glass one day,
/ And conjured up a vision bare […] / The vision of a woman, wild / With more than womanly
despair.’169 This image is not only wild and overly desperate, emotionally too much and too
little, but it is conjured, summoned like an otherworldly minion in a hellish fantasy. This
specter invoked through the commodified nature of the mirror comes to our summoness as an
essentially silent image – mute and commodified.

Her lips were open – not a sound

Came through the parted lines of red.
Whate’er it was, the hideous wound
In silence and in secret bled.
No sigh relieved her speechless woe,
She had no voice to speak her dread.170

This silence of the subject is a dreadful silence. It is the silence of desire’s dreadful spiraling
around the semiotic implosion of the Victorian language. This desire grows mad, enraged,
furious, berserk, its dissatisfaction never-ending, jealous, vengeful and unceasing.

And in her lurid eyes there shone

The dying flame of life’s desire,
Made mad because its hope was gone,
And kindled at the leaping fire
Of jealousy, and fierce revenge,
And strength that could not change nor tire.171

169
Mary Coleridge, ‘The Other Side of a Mirror,’ in The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge, ed. Theresa Whistler
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 88.
170
Ibid.
171
Ibid., 89.

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 And then it collapses in the jouissance of appropriation, in the experience of the fall of the
subject:

Shade of a shadow in the glass,

O set the crystal surface free!
Pass – as the fairer visions pass –
Nor ever more return, to be
The ghost of a distracted hour,
That heard me whisper, “I am she!”172

The poem perfectly embodies the themes of strangeness of the mirror; a mirror reflection
that presents itself as haunting, mad, insatiable, ghostly, silent; a reflection that reveals the
within of the perceiving subject; and finally the appropriation of the hallucinated image as
one’s own in the final ‘I am she.’ The poem epitomizes the Victorian world as a mirror, a
maddening desire of the subject in search of coherence, dreaming about wholeness, but
misrecognizing the external mirror fantasy as her own self, and, by doing that, expressing
herself as fundamentally incoherent and monstrous.

*****

There are authors who have already acknowledged this shifting narrative of the mirror in
various spheres of the Victorian culture. Isobel Armstrong takes up this new notion of the
reflection in the mirror. Discussing Victorian ‘glassworlds’ – the metaphors and socially
constructed meanings of the Victorian glass culture – the chapter on the Victorian mirror-poetry
includes themes such as ‘ghosts,’ ‘fragments,’ ‘surfaces and depths,’ and ‘a stranger’s look’ as
common tropes in the nineteenth-century poetry.173
Analyzing the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romantic poetry and criticism, M. H.
Abrams identifies two great metaphors of artistic creation, and the role of poets and artists in
it: the mirror and the lamp. He explains them as two ‘common and antithetic metaphors of the
mind, one comparing the mind to a reflector of external objects [the mirror] the other to a

172
Ibid.
173
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 111-113.

73
radiant projector which makes a contribution to the objects it perceives [the lamp].’174 The
mirror had been a basic metaphor for critical thinking since Plato, until the end of the eighteenth
century, while the lamp exemplified the romantic tradition. Abrams sets an artificial dividing
line between these two attitudes around the year 1800, taking Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical
Ballads as a convenient document to ‘signalize the displacement of the mimetic […] by the
expressive view of art in English criticism.’175 Although he identifies that the mirror metaphor
disappears precisely in the period of our analysis, this disappearance speaks. As the mirror
slowly entered the world of commodities, disappearing into naturalization towards its cultural
imperceptibility of ‘just (a mirror),’ (that would not happen suddenly, but slowly in the course
of the century), the mirror disappeared from the language of art criticism too, giving way to the
metaphor of the lamp, to ‘the internal made external.’176 Thus the mirror and the lamp embody
a change, not only on the surface of words, preferring one to the other, but they express the
cultural imagery of art which, from the nineteenth century onwards, describes the Victorian
subject as ‘the internal made external,’ (the radiating lamp), just as the haunting strangeness of
the mirror presented the internal as external. In the same fashion, Oscar Wilde exclaimed in the
Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really
mirrors.’177
The above poetic material shows that the Victorian subject appears as a fundamentally
tortured and shattered one. The abyss in the representation of the commodified materiality
pushes the mirror to the fore in form of an object that miraculously comes to life, expressing
the anxiety of a disjointed subjectivity. This rift in the representation of mirrors as tools of a
monstrous, split, desiring self, reveals itself to us in a number of Victorian narratives. We have
already found it in the mirror poetry – various nineteenth-century poems that use the ‘mirror
reflection’ trope, expressing this new, disturbing, unknown place within the subject, which
presented itself as ghostly, strange and nameless. We will find, shortly, the same rift in Through
the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, the undying Victorian classic that deals explicitly with
this disturbing figure of language wrapped in the images of mirrors. We find it in the
unavoidable image of the Crystal Palace of the World Exhibition of 1851 by Paxton, which
materializes Victorian social, political and class fantasies, as Armstrong shrewdly observes. In
the next chapter, it will be shown how the Palace embodies the desiring fantasy of the male

174
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford
University Press, 1960), vi.
175
Ibid., 22.
176
Ibid., 48.
177
Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray, 6.

74
subject – a place where the subject falls, exhausted and overwhelmed by his own reflection,
dissolved in the joissance of materiality. Finally, we find this new mirror figure in a number of
monstrous narratives that span the century: from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Bram
Stoker’s Dracula, as well as in a number of siren stories that are the subject of Part II of the
book. In all of these cultural pieces – material, visual, and written – the mirror expresses a new
relationship of the perceiving subject with the thing reflected and perceived, or better, revealed.
In all of them, something disturbing lurks behind the reflected image, a dark fantasy that haunts
the subject and his relationship with his image. For this reason, Lacan’s analysis of the mirror
stage proves convenient for thinking about the dream behind this change in representation. For
Lacan, the ‘mirror stage is always a drama,’ a place where everything begins and ends in a
swirl of misrecognition of the image perceived.178 Nothing can be truer of the Victorian
mirrors. The subject who looks in the mirror rarely sees what he expects to see; he rarely sees
what he wishes to see. He always sees more or less. As we dive into the Victorian mirror
reflection through the two segments to follow this introductory chapter, time and again we find
an exhausted, puzzled subject, one afraid of what might appear next in the mirror. In this
context, the Lacanian mirror stage is completely Victorian. Arriving from the intellectual
milieu of the mid-twentieth century (precisely at the moment when everything Victorian gains
its strength again), the imaginary of the Lacanian mirror stage seems as nineteenth-century in
its nature, as any heir of Freudian psychoanalytic vocabulary. As Auerbach convincingly
showed, analyzing Freud’s narrative of hysterical Dora, Freud’s theory was brutally subjected
to the Victorian male fantasy about female sexuality, an unknown field Freud himself
confessed he had never understood.179 Building on Freud’s theory, Lacan argued for the split
subject that mistook the coherence of his mirror image for his own self. In this image, he
exposed the fanciful reality of the Victorian desiring subject.
Though, on the surface, many things Victorian met their respective deaths at the hand of the
twentieth century, the desiring subject of the twentieth stayed profoundly Victorian in his
nature. The split that opened in representation and inhabited language from within – the chasm
that, circularly, both gave birth to the monstrous subject and emerged as a result of his split self
– stayed there in the centuries to come, becoming wider and more bloodthirsty as it grew. What
was a dilemma in nineteenth-century narratives, what presented itself as exhaustion of the

178
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,’
in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006), 78.
179
Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London:
Harvard University Press, 1982), 26-34.

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subject and the impossibility of coherence that troubled the mind of the Victorian desiring
subject, became the nature of reality itself for his twentieth-century descendants.
One thing remains certain: the encounter with a reflecting surface must have profound
effects on the perceiving subject, regardless of the age when it takes place. Whether we agree
that the trans-historicity of Lacanian analysis is questionable, or that his mirror scenario can
help us deal better with the representation of the self in the nineteenth century and the centuries
to come, the moment a subject first sees himself as whole, comes as an important moment in
the construction of selfhood. This is the point in time when the subject realizes that he is not
the Other that cares for him (a parent) and that he has a corporeal existence of his own. In this
light, the historical moment that introduces the mirror as an everyday, omnipresent artifact,
revealing reflective surfaces at almost every step, must be considered as an important moment
in the history of selfhood, as well as in the history of language. The nineteenth century was that
moment, the first moment when the looking subject could gaze at his own reflection
everywhere, all the time. It was a time of commodities and a time of mirrors – it was a time of
mirrors as commodities. In this chapter we saw how this particular conjunction of the
historicity of mirrors and that of commodities resonated together through the Victorian
semiosphere, transforming mirrors from elite, luxurious, hard-to-get object into everyday
commodities, at the same time when an afterlife of these commodities, in the form of desire,
expressed the split of the subject. The transformation of mirrors and the afterlife of
commodities were two sides of the same nineteenth-century modernist dream – a sustaining
dream of a whole, coherent, untroubled selfhood in the age of a split, fragmented self –
monstrous precisely due to his unending, semiotically troubling nightmare that weaved itself
into the very fabric of the society.

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FALL 1: EXHAUSTED AT THE LAKE’S SHORE

[A]ll of the things that are used to signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to
something else, a power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane
things, which raises them into a higher plane, and which can, indeed, sanctify them.
Considered in allegorical terms, then the profane world is both elevated and revalued.180
Walter Benjamin

In the previous chapter we saw how, at the historical moment of the mirror’s overabundance,
its commodification transformed the perception of the self. The mirror introduced a split in the
language of representation through which the perceiving subject fell. The anxiety of this fall
we read in the language of the mirror’s materiality and of the mirror’s reflection. In the
nineteenth-century mirror narratives, the image coming to the perceiver back from the mirror
was still extant; the mirror was not broken, nor did it reflect an absence. Instead, it reflected a
stranger who was often more or less than what the perceiving subject expected. The Victorian
imagination brought the mirror to life, the mirror assuming a speaking subjectivity and looking
back from within its silvered, smooth surface. Even more often, the reflection in the mirror
appeared as a menacing selfhood, haunting the perceiver in a troubling, nightmarish dream. In
this respect, the mirror and its image embodied in their spectral existence the very nature of
commodity fetishism discussed in the introduction – the phantasmal desired object in the
commodities, death itself.
This fantasy of convoluted and perverted epistemic lines between people and commodities
was one of the expressions of the split subject – the subject seduced by the congruity of his
own mirror image, by the omnipresent reflection of his corporeal existence. In this respect, the
materiality of Victorian mirrors presents itself to us as a borderline between the perceiving
subject and the object of his gaze, as a battle for the humanity of people as distinct from the
materiality of things. In this Fall, as well as in the following one, it will be shown that the
mirror in the Victorian imagination became a dividing line, beyond which inanimate things
came to life and animate humans turned into objects. We are talking about the workings of the
Victorian imagination that allowed the subject to overcome the rigid boundaries of the animate
and the inanimate and reach towards a place that does not exist, or better, that exists only in its

180
Walter Benjamin, On the Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books,
1977), 175.

77
own absence – the objet a – the coherence of the Self, the awakening from the dream of
language. This coherence that lured the desire, as a fundamental illusion of the Victorian (and
post-Victorian) culture, has been rediscover through the mirror narratives, but only to be sought
again, since it was rediscovered only in its absence, as an absence that was there in the first
place. In this illusion the subject keeps reaching out through the mirror for this empty space
that promises wholeness, continuously enacting his own fall, and experiencing jouissance as a
result. This jouissance of an unattainable object – an experience that leaves only the absence
of the objet a behind – is the topic of this chapter. By analyzing the narrative of ‘The Grand
Boudoir Glass’ through the prism of a larger architectural structure also made of reflective
surfaces – the Crystal Palace – we shall see how the subject experiences jouissance of the fall
in face of the unattainability of commodified materiality that mirrors came to embody and
signify.

Jouissance as the ‘Pleasure-in-Pain’

Lacan developed his concept of jouissance on the wings of Freud’s late introduction of the
‘death drive’ to his theory. Being only ostensibly a sort of pleasure, the title of the work in
which the ‘death drive’ appears clearly states that it is Beyond the Pleasure Principle.181 The
difference between the ‘pleasure principle’ and the ‘death drive’ beyond it is at the level of
excitation a person experiences in relation to the object of his/her desire. While the pleasure
principle functions as an ‘economic speculator,’182 as Adrian Johnston calls it, calculating the
probable and possible level of satisfaction – maximizing pleasure and minimizing
pain/displeasure – the ‘death drive’ goes beyond this moderated/mitigated level, bringing
extreme pleasure to the subject. Freud developed this concept by identifying a strong tendency
among war veterans and neurotic patients to keep reliving their painful experiences over and
over again, their psyche constantly repeating the pain in spite of its obvious displeasure. 183
Lacan identifies his idea of jouissance at this register. Jouissance as an extreme psychic
experience of transgression always involves a limit to be transgressed. There has to be a line to
be crossed, a Law to be broken, after which jouissance is promised to the subject. In The Ethics
of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues for this concept by criticizing Kant’s example from the

181
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Seattle: Pacific Publishing Studios, 2010).
182
Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern
University Press, 2005), 234.
183
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 11-35 (Section II and III).

78
Critique of Practical Reason. Simplified for the purposes of this chapter, Kant says that a man
faced with a choice between sexual satisfaction that results in death or non-satisfaction, by
default chooses the latter. As an example he takes a man who is offered a choice to sleep with
the woman of his dreams but be hanged afterwards, or not to sleep with her at all. Contrary to
Kant, Lacan says that the psychoanalytic experience shows that there are many cases where
individuals actually choose the former; it even shows frequent examples when they choose
satisfaction precisely because it involved the possibility of death.184 We have seen an example
of this scenario in the prologue, with Ulysses desiring death itself. Seen in this way it seems
that jouissance involves a final satisfaction, a pure pleasure by transgressing against the Law
and finally attaining the Thing (das Ding) – the phantasmal, always already absent objet a of
desire. But, of course, this is not the case. In the Encore, Lacan distinguishes between two types
of jouissance – jouissance expected and jouissance obtained.185 The subject expects the
jouissance promised by the very existence of the Law (that prescribes the limit of socially
acceptable satisfaction) to be transgressed in the attaining of the Thing, but in the process of
reaching for it he always falls short – the Thing always stays out of reach by its very absence,
which orients the desire towards it. In this fall the subject experiences jouissance obtained, a
sort of extreme pleasure that, nevertheless, falls short of the idealized standard. Thus, this
jouissance of ‘falling short,’ of not reaching the goal, in most cases manifests itself as
‘pleasure-in-pain.’ This jouissance, through the fall and exhaustion of the subject, always says:
‘This is not it!’ Jouissance expected is a mythical experience orchestrated in the libidinal
economy by and around the missing object; jouissance obtained, the only existing type, is an
‘enjoyment that is enjoyable only insofar as it doesn't get what it's allegedly after.’ 186 Extreme
pleasure does not have to be pleasant.

The Context of the Mirror

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations was the epicenter of Victorian
commodities, and thus we will be returning to it again and again. Signifying the temporal center

184
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, trans.
Dennis Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 134.
185
‘“That’s not it’ is the very cry by which the jouissance obtained is distinguished from the jouissance expected.
Structure, which connects up here, demonstrates nothing if not that it is of the same text as jouissance, insofar as,
in marking by what distance jouissance misses – the jouissance that would be in question if ‘that were it’– structure
does not presuppose merely the jouissance that would be it, it also props up another.’ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar
of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 1972- 1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton and Company,
1998), 111-112.
186
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 164.

79
of the nineteenth century (1851) as well as the center of the world – politically, socially,
culturally, evolutionary – it was hosted at the Crystal Palace (fig. 5), an enormous glass
structure designed by Joseph Paxton.187 As it shall be seen in a drawing by George Cruickshank
from Henry Mayhew’s 1851: or, The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys, the Crystal palace
literally embodied the center of the world by pulling the works of industry and all the nations
towards its reflective/transparent structure. The Palace was made out of 300,000 plates of glass
covering a 92,000 m2 area, its size and its glitter causing amazement, the effect of what
Agamben calls a ‘bluish halo.’188

Figure 5 The Crystal Palace designed by Joseph Paxton, Sydenham (1854)

Being such a huge and enchanting structure, it hardly suffices to say that it received a
reaction of equal magnitude. It came to represent the very tissue of the Victorian culture and
the role of Britain as the leader of economic and evolutionary progress. The Exhibition, said
Eliza Cook’s Journal, was

187
After the Exhibition the Palace was moved to Sydenham. The social, cultural and colonial implications of the
Great Exhibition were extensively covered in Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), as well as in his famous essay ‘The World as Exhibition,’ Comparative Studies in Society
and History 31:2 (1989): 225-226. Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995) is a postcolonial study worth mentioning, as well as a more class-
oriented essay by Lara Kriegel, “‘The Pudding and the Palace”: Labor Print Culture, and Imperial Britain in 1851,’
in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and Through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Duke: Duke University
Press, 2003), 230-246.
188
Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis and London: Minneapolis
University Press, 1993), 38.

80
 to industry what galleries of painting and sculpture are to art – what a library is
to literature – what a museum is to science – what a zoological and botanical
garden is to natural history – a chart of the progress of mankind.189

The number of written reports from the years of and after the Exhibition, was superseded
only by the number of academic works about the Exhibition that runs through the second half
of the twentieth century. The Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great
Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations (maybe the only creation more monstrous, larger
and more incomprehensible than the Exhibition itself) was published in six volumes by the
Royal Commission, its size and unintelligibility giving birth to a number of explanatory works,
such as The Crystal Palace Exhibition Illustrated Catalogue or The Crystal Palace and its
Contents, as well as a vast number of unofficial reports and accounts. When, from the 1950s
onwards, academics became interested again in everything Victorian, the Crystal Palace and
the Great Exhibition became unavoidable parts of every analysis of the Victorian culture.190
There, inside that gargantuan structure, we encounter ‘Section 22 (General Hardware),’
where the object of our interest is stored. ‘The Grand Boudoir Glass’ (fig. 6), as it was called
by the Official Catalogue, was made for the Duchess of Sutherland by the flamboyant

189
Jericho, ‘Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations,’ Eliza Cook’s Journal 2:40 (2 February 1850): 217.
190
The literature on this topic is so vast that it would be impossible to cover it completely. Some of the more
important and comprehensive studies, besides the already mentioned Mitchell and McClintock are: Christopher
Hobhouse, 1851 and the Crystal Palace (London: John Murray, 1950); Yvonne Ffrench, The Great Exhibition of
1851 (London: Harvill Press, 1950); Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great
Exhibition and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Louise Purbrick, ed.,
The Great Exhibition of 1851. New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001);
Patrick Beaver, The Crystal Palace 1851-1936: A Portrait of Victorian Enterprise (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1970);
John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Sutton: Stroud, 1999); Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition and
Historical Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); C. R. Fay, Palace of Industry, 1851: A Study of
the Great Exhibition and its Fruits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951); George W. Stocking Jr.
addresses the Exhibition in the context of the idea of civilization before and after 1851 in Victorian Anthropology
(London and New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1987); Paul Young, Globalization and the Great
Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); many authors
use the Exhibition to discuss the commodity culture in the nineteenth-century novel, such as Andrew H. Miller,
Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995); Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2006). James Buzzard, Joseph W. Childers and Eileen Gillooly, ed., Victorian Prism:
Refractions of the Crystal Palace (Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 2007) is an excellent,
relatively recent, compendium of important issues on the Crystal Palace, including an analysis of ‘The Grand
Boudoir Glass’ by Isobel Armstrong; Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England:
Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (London and New York: Verso, 1990) is an extraordinary, in-depth analysis
of the Exhibition as a consolidating point of the Victorian society of spectacle; I favor the view of Isobel
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), where the Exhibition and the Crystal Palace are approached as part of the wider context of the
Victorian glass and mirror culture. This list is far from exhausted. From the 1950s, the Victorian culture has
become an object of various types of academic interest, with the Palace in its epicenter in every sense.

81
manufacturer of ornamental products, William Potts from Birmingham, and embodied the
paradoxicality of glass under glass.

Figure 6 ‘The Grand Boudoir Glass’ by William Potts (1851)

The Crystal Palace and its Contents – one of the guides to the Official Guide of the
Exhibition – stated that this ‘toilet-glass’ was one of the ‘largest mirrors cast in bronze
manufactured in England and that its design and workmanship reflect[ed] the highest credit on
its spirited manufacturer.’191 Henry Cole, a hard and rigid Victorian authority on design,
occasionally commented on the work of William Potts as expressing ‘exuberant fancies,’ as
well as having ‘much fertility of imagination, much cleaver modeling, much originality and

191
The Crystal Palace and its Contents: An Illustrated Cyclopedia of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Warwick
Lane: W. M. Clark, 1852), 407; the image of ‘The Grand Boudoir Glass’ is on the page 408.

82
dash.’192 A year later, he commented on a fascinating candelabra made by Potts and exhibited
at the Society of Arts (fig. 7) as embodying ‘vigor and originality in the grotesque.’193 In the
light of his other works, William Potts was exhibiting ‘progressive improvement’ with his
grotesque creations that crashed human forms onto animal ones.

Figure 7 Candelabra by William Potts (1850)

In this chapter we will see how the perceiving subject experiences jouissance in the
encounter with this looking-glass and how he expresses a ‘pleasure-in-pain’ in a language of
excess and wonder. We will show how the same exuberant experience resonates with the
accounts of the Crystal Palace and its content, as well as through the accounts of other
encounters with reflective surfaces in the nineteenth century. The Palace, as a large mirror, and
the Exhibition as its diagnosis, are in the accounts always too much, beyond words,
unrepresentable, they are surfaces that transform things into a spectacle of commodities,
bestowing upon them an imaginary afterlife. In the encounters, the subject marvels at the
Palace’s excess and reaches for the jouissance expected beyond the Palace’s symbolic limit.
This limit, that presents itself as the possibility of this jouissance, is the limit of materiality and

192
Henry Cole, ‘Exhibition of Arts and Manufacturers, Birmingham’ The Journal of Design and Manufacturers
2 (1849): 66.
193
Henry Cole, ‘Miscellaneous,’ The Journal of Design and Manufacturers 3 (1850): 116.

83
it is embodied in the mirror-commodity. Even the very name ‘Crystal Palace,’ given by the
editors of Punch, illustrates this language of excess and exorbitance, since, in reality, the Palace
was just a large greenhouse made of glass. As Richards observed, this enormous
reflective/transparent structure ‘built to house one hundred thousand commodities had been
designed to make ordinary glass look like crystal and the shape of a greenhouse look like the
outline of a palace.’194 Victorian commodities in their semiotic incoherence were objet a of the
Victorian capitalist culture, the mirror being a special case among them. In our mirror made by
William Potts, we will find encapsulated this wider context of the unattainability of
commodities, the dream of representational stability and wholeness, a Real that always keeps
receding in loops, a labyrinth of language that includes its own exits. The jouissance that the
subject experiences in the process, in the accounts on the Exhibition comes to us in two
different versions: as exhaustion by ornamentation and exhaustion by wonder. Both of them
express a similar overload of visual experience that the subject cannot bear, the exhaustion
finally leading to the fall.

Elephantiasis of Ornamentation as the ‘Horror of Sight’

Armstrong has noted that Potts’s mirror perfectly embodies the Victorian grotesque –
representation of different species forced into one another, producing disturbing effects of a
grotesque material amalgam.195 The mirror’s grotesqueness notwithstanding, we will move the
emphasis to a different aspect of its materiality. On the surface of the mirror, two nymphs are
gently and idly seated on both sides, as they gaze into the silvered surface of the glass. Their
soft, pale porcelain bodies make a strong contrast to the rest of the mirror’s physicality. All
around them, dark bronze twists and twirls in the shapes of an aquatic fantasy, water lilies
underneath the nymphs’ soft bodies mimicking a lush shore of a fairytale lake. At the top of
the frame a pair of herons holds two candle-burners whose long, straight chains visually cut
the spirals of the mirror’s plant life and the voluptuousness of the nymphs’ bodies. Both
nymphs are almost naked, only their thighs are covered with silky drapery exposing their bodies
to a voyeuristic gaze of the spectator. Leaves of reed spring from the wild floral undergrowth,
and hard straight lines of cast bronze frame the mirror at its bottom. At the top of the reflecting

194
Richards, Commodity Culture, 6.
195
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 234-239.

84
surface, flanked by the herons, there is a sign that reads: frangas non flectes.196 The words
frangas and flectes flank a small cast, hardly perceptible, face.
As the spectator gazes at the mirror, the mirror tells a story. In fact, it tells a number of
stories, when put in the wider context of the language of commodified materiality, which
expressed the anxieties of the age. The first and the most obvious story is the designer’s intent
to convey the calmness of an enchanted lake. There is almost a successful totality in the
execution of this idea. All the elements are present: the stillness of the lake’s surface
represented by the reflective surface itself; the abundance of plant and animal life at its shore;
and, of course, the figures of delicate and apathetic nymphs, whose presence introduces an
enchanting, fairytale element into the mirror’s narrative. The first extraordinary thing is that in
a relatively small space (small comparing to the abundance of details) we encounter a plethora
of species – plants, animals, fairies – the fairies, by their humanoid nature, also bringing a
human element into the picture. They are all forced into the frame of the mirror, simulating the
calmness of the shore, but actually pushing one another around the silvered surface whose
conspicuous emptiness seems to be the center of the representation. The only element that was
actually not crafted, but introduced ready-made (the mirror itself), in the light of the fabula that
unfolds around it, becomes the center of the image. The stillness of its surface highlights the
saturation of the frame, the frame’s species being in a clash for the representational space. On
this calm shore the ornaments are running loose, enveloping the bodies of the nymphs, pushing
them towards the mirror’s surface. Seen from this perspective, it seems only natural that the
nymphs are facing the surface, since they are being claustrophobically forced into the only
open space left. And there, in the salvation of the mirror’s depths they see their own reflected
faces.
Commenting on the commodities of the Exhibition, Agamben says that there is an aura ‘that
bathes the commodity-fetish, so the elephantiasis of ornament betrays the new character of the
commodified object.’197 He might as well have commented on Potts’ mirror itself. The
ornaments of this mirror frame are so abundant and so densely packed that the eye that gazes
at the mirror becomes invaded by the grotesque cornucopia of overstressed details, the
perceiving subject becoming suffocated by the busyness of the frame. As the eye stares in the

196
In the only two drawings of the mirror, from Tallis’s History and from the Illustrated Cyclopedia, we find two
different versions of this motto: the first reads FRAGAS NON FLETES, the other FRANGAS NON FLECTES.
Armstrong thinks that the version from the Illustrated Cyclopedia is the correct one, the other one’s Latin being
too eccentric and corrupted. She translates it as ‘You may break me but you will not bend me,’ arguing that
depending on who reads it – the owner, the designer or the commentator – the motto, just as the mirror itself, reads
different social and class relations (Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 237).
197
Agamben, Stanzas, 39.

85
mirror, reaching towards the reflection, one experiences exhaustion by ornamentation, the
reflected image literally being drowned at the bottom of the lake the mirror is intended to
represent.
This exhaustion by the ornamental elephantiasis of commodities was not limited to Potts’
mirror and its alluring narrative of the ostensive calmness of a secluded aquatic wonderland. If
we broaden the scope of our interest, we see that the same exhaustion appears over and over
again in the accounts dating from the year of, and years after, the Exhibition. It is the same
exhaustion that we will find latter, in the panoptic ‘naturalism’ of the Pre-Raphaelite painting,
best exemplified by Holman Hunt’s The Awaking Consciousness. What can be seen in Potts’
mirror frame is not only the Victorian exhibitionism, voyeurism and scopophilia (to be
discussed later in greater depth), but a type of jouissance, an aggressive experience that follows
encounters with reflective surfaces at the 1851 Exhibition, as well as with its content. This
jouissance arises as a result of the subject’s investment in his own image through the troubled
materiality of mirrors – artifacts that bring the blurred boundaries of the humanity/commodity
relationship into play. As the subject gazes into his own reflection, entering the loop of a
disrupted signifying chain, reaching for a phantasmal wholeness, the only thing he gets, the
only thing he can get (since wholeness is always found only as absence) is jouissance, as a
substitution for the fundamental dissatisfaction of desire. This is the place where the subject
falls: what he craves he cannot get, experiencing jouissance in the fall.
For the visitors at the Great Exhibition, where our mirror was exhibited, the Crystal Palace
was a magical place. 14,000 exhibitors showcased 100,000 items. As Benjamin pointed out,
Victorians of the mid-nineteenth century experienced, for the first time, ‘the intoxication of the
commodity around which surges the stream of customers.’198 For 1851 this number was beyond
imaginable, and it was represented as such. A quick glance at the Official Catalogue shows
pages and pages of numbers and names and lists attacking the eye of the reader in an
incomprehensible jumble that was supposed to help the readers digest the Exhibition, but all it
did was make them tired (fig. 8).

198
Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983), 55.

86
 Figure 8 A page from the Official Catalogue (1851)

As a response, a number of ‘official’ guides to the official guide emerged, systematizing the
plethora of commodities. Until 1851, there had never been an occasion that induced such a
proliferation of discourse, all in an attempt to survive the semiotic anxiety of the overabundance
of commodities. A cunning story in Punch by Henry Morley – intended to be sarcastic and
funny – captured this discursive maze by conjuring the image of a talking catalogue giving an
account of itself. ‘I am the Catalogue of the Great Exhibition,’ begins the catalogue:

[…] I, as a celebrated Catalogue had much to go through with ere I lernt that
which I reach now in the illustrated edition, the official edition, the French
edition, the German edition, and the twopenny edition.199

Through the insurmountable chaos of the visual and semantic overload of the Exhibition,
the language that was supposed to describe the commodities got transformed into a commodity
itself, taking on a new life of selfhood – literally becoming alive. This language turns upon

199
Henry Morley, ‘The Catalogue’s Account of Itself,’ Household Words 3 (23 August 1851): 519-23.

87
itself (or upon him/herself), creating a paradoxical spin of signification in loops worthy of M.
C. Escher’s mid-twentieth century op-art.
The same overload can be found in George Cruikshank’s two drawings from Henry
Mayhew’s 1851: or, The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys. Both drawings wonderfully
express this ‘horror of sight’ induced by a ‘sensory overload,’ as Armstrong calls it.200 The first
drawing was named ‘All the World Going to See the Great Exhibition’ (fig. 9) and it has already
mentioned it as an example of the Exhibition as the center of the world. But this time the
emphasis will be, temporarily, shifted from the Crystal Palace to the rest of the drawing, so as
to appreciate the overload of the visual field.

Figure 9 ‘All the World going to See the Great Exhibition,’ by George Cruikshank (1851)

A monstrous crowd, of all shapes and colors, populates the world taken, literally, as a
picture. Cruikshank’s work is a prime cross-sectional example of the exhibitionistic nature of
the Victorian culture and the incomprehensible visual maze that surrounds the Exhibition as
the center of commodity culture. The crowd inhabits the representational space that keeps
getting denser the closer people get to the Palace; the closer they are to the Palace the more
indistinguishable they get too. The eye finds it hard to follow the invasion of details in the

200
Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 250; Henry Mayhew, 1851: or, The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys
and Family who came up to LONDON to enjoy themselves and to see the GREAT EXHIBITION (London: George
Newbold, 1851).

88
image, but the tension develops in the opposite direction in the other Cruikshank’s image called
‘The Dispersion of the Works of All Nations from the Great Exhibition of 1851’ (fig. 10).

Figure 10 ‘The Dispersion of the Works of All Nations from the Great Exhibition of 1851,’ by George
Cruikshank (1851)

Here the ‘horror of sight’ moves in the opposite direction: the things are fleeing the Crystal
Palace with an invasive aggressiveness that threatens to shatter the drawing’s frame. These
things are alive, they are running loose – in the most sincere sense of the word. There is a pair
of boots that flee without an owner in the lower left-hand corner; stuffed animals are holding
hands in exile; there is even a pot running away in the lower right-hand corner. There is too
much of them, they overlap in the madness of their flight. And at the center of their exodus is
the Crystal Palace – the immense reflective structure that fills spectators with wonder and
horror. Considered together, these two drawings tell a two-way story: people are entering the
palace of glass and reflection, but anthropomorphized commodities are coming out instead. A
machinery of human/commodity transformation, these two images embody the fantasy of the

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limits of materiality that follow the reflective surface of the Victorian culture of glass, with the
subject going through an excessive experience in the invasive ‘sensory overload’ of
commodities.
The visual madness and overload of the Exhibition was so strong that hardly anyone was
capable of experiencing its totality in one visit. People kept coming back over and over again,
magically drawn to the abundance and aura of commodities. A Punch reporter, Mrs. Fitzpuss,
confessed:

Ever since the 1st of May, I’ve driven directly after early breakfast to the Palace
of that Great Jin, Paxton, in Hyde Park, where for hours I’ve done nothing but
think myself a great Princess of the Arabian Nights, with the Koh-i-noor my
own property, whenever I liked to wear it.’201

All people could do was look at the commodities, since the policy of the Exhibition was that
there were no price tags and the exhibits were not for sale. This must have heightened the
scopic pleasure of the visitors, whose experience was limited to ‘just looking.’202 Deprived of
other forms of consumption, the visitors must have been extremely susceptible to the impact
of the visual overload in question. Many of the objects at the Exhibition expressed the
‘elephantiasis of ornaments,’ particularly visible in the design of furniture and gadgets. A funny
example of sheer invasiveness of details would be the now famous ‘Eighty-blade Sportsman’s
Knife,’ by Joseph Rodgers & Sons, with gold inlaying and etching of Windsor Castle (fig. 11).
Literally unusable, the knife hosted blades that struggled within the physical space of the
exhibit, making it plainly monstrous.

201
Mrs. Fitzpuss, ‘How We Hunted the Prince: Mrs. Fitzpuss, of Baker Street, to Mrs. Macthistle, of Klinkumpans,
N. B.’ Punch 20 (1851): 222.
202
For the introduction of ‘just looking’ into the nineteenth-century consumerism, see Rachel Bowlby, Just
Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1985).

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 Figure 11 Eighty-blade Sportsman’s Knife,
by Joseph Rodgers & Sons (1851)

The ‘sensory overload’ or the ‘horror of sight’ that leads to the language of excess in the
experience of jouissance is nowhere better expressed than in Tallis’s account of the Exhibition:

Fountains were sparkling and flashing in the subdued sunlight: in living

sculpture were suddenly seen the grand, the grotesque, the terrible, the beautiful;
objects of every form and colour imaginable, far as the eye could reach, were
dazzlingly intermingled; and there were present sixty thousand sons and
daughters of Adam, passing and re-passing, ceaselessly; bewildered
charmingly; gliding amidst bannered nations – through country after country
renowned in ancient name, and great in modern: civilized and savage. […] The
soul was approached through its highest senses, flooded with excitement; all its
faculties were appealed to at once, and it sank for a while, exhausted,
overwhelmed.203

203
Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851, 3
vol. (London and New York: The London Printing and Publishing Company, 1852), vol. 3, 1.

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 In this passage we find all the elements of the excessive experience, as well as a reaction of
the subject to it: the objects are seen as both ‘grand’ and ‘grotesque’ and ‘beautiful,’ in ‘all
forms and colors imaginable.’ In the visual experiences of the perceiver, they are all
‘intermingled’ together in the grotesqueness of their overwhelming juxtaposition, just like the
overlapping madness of Cruikshank’s fleeing commodities. There are too many things, too
many colors, too many people; the subject experiences an overload he cannot bear. His eye is
excessively invaded and he is ‘flooded with excitement.’ He experiences the ‘sparkling and
flashing’ of fountains. The chosen language is brisk and strong, intended to strike and move.
He is promised an experience of transgression against the symbolic law, brought about by the
intermingled objects, transcending crude materiality where objects morph one into another. In
the jouissance promised, everything appears as elevated and enchanted, like Henry Mayhew’s
description of the crystal fountain at the entrance to the Palace:

[S]hining, as the sun’s rays came slanting down through the crystal roofs, as if
it had been carved out of icicles, or as if water streaming from the fountain had
been made solid, and transfixed into beautiful forms.204

The materiality changes in the jouissance promised, the potentiality of ‘as if’ heavily
populating the sentence. Water becomes solid and is aggressively elevated into the realm of
beauty. But the promised pure experience is an illusion – like the illusion of the fountain – and
the subject falls in jouissance ‘exhausted’ and ‘overwhelmed,’ as it was melancholically
concluded in the Tallis’s account.

Experience of Wonderland as the ‘Horror of Sight’

Now we should go back to the mirror we started from, ‘The Grand Boudoir Mirror’ by
William Potts. There is another story of excessive experience in the narrative of the mirror’s
design, and it is centered on the nymphs’ bodies and faces. Their enticing figures are given the
task of introducing a fairytale into the representation. The seductiveness of their bodies’
exposure is obvious and this is probably as close as we shall get to a Victorian representation
of sirens/mermaid mirror reflections. Of course, they are neither sirens nor mermaids, not
having feathers or tails. The context of the lake also precludes such a conclusion, sirens and

204
Mayhew, 1851, 134; my emphasis.

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mermaids being mostly creatures of the open sea. Adding to the lure of their bodies, what
strikes a spectator is the game of gazes that the seductresses play with the surface and with the
spectator himself. Though tridimensional, the mirror is designed for the spectator to see the
nymphs’ faces only as reflections. In the only drawing of the mirror where we can actually see
the reflection of their faces, from the Official Catalogue, we encounter not two nymphs, but
four – two made of porcelain and two made of reflection, occupying the male desiring subject’s
dreams. The pair of nymphs on the left seem consumed by each other, the spectral nymph
gazing at the porcelain one, the porcelain one into the spectral. On the other hand, the pair on
the right almost seem as if looking at the left pair, making it the visual center of the image. But
no one is looking at the spectator, cutting him loose from the voyeuristic pleasure of this
secluded scene. Unlike a painting or an image, analyzing a tridimensional object in this respect
is questionable, since the spectator may have more than one point of view. But the gazes of
nymphs do show a certain asymmetry that slightly confuses the viewer regarding the possible
visual center of the mirror. For Victorian male spectators, though, it seems that the allure of
their naked flesh was enough to summon the famme fatale experience into the picture and
transport the spectator into a fairyland. A reporter from Reynolds’s Weekly Newspapers framed
his experience of the mirror as following:

Suppose the frame of a mirror modeled after aquatic objects, such as the lotus,
with fowl congenial to the watery element, and so arranged that they convey to
the mind an outline of the performance in question; again, suppose two Naiads,
sculptured in porcelain, seated on aquatic foliage on each side of the mirror,
whose beautiful forms are reflected in its surface, while in the act of trimming
their locks after bath. 205

This excerpt is of great value to us because, if we look at the language of the description,
we can see that the reporter has already been transported to the beyond of materiality of the
mirror-commodity, to a place where inanimate things come to life. In accordance with the
Victorian male obsession with women’s hair, these Naiads are in ‘the act of trimming their
locks after bath’ (an act that is usually reserved for mermaids), while, in fact, there is nothing
in the physicality of the design that points to that conclusion. Neither are the nymphs holding
combs, nor do they appear like they just had a bath. In his account, we can sense movement in

205
Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper (4 May 1851): 5; my emphasis.

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the otherwise still physicality of the mirror: the figures move to plunge into the surface of the
mirror/lake, they move to comb their hair. By the sheer presence of nymphs, the spectator revels
in an exhibitionistic male fantasy that has taken him over the threshold of crude materiality. In
the fantasy of the Reynolds’s reporter, the mirror becomes alive. The language expresses not a
rigid materiality of ‘here,’ but a fluid potentiality of ‘elsewhere.’ Even as we are presented with
the hard matter of the mirror, we are invited to ‘suppose a mirror’ (some indefinite, fantastic
one), as in ‘assume,’ ‘imagine,’ the same as in the already mentioned Mayhew’s description of
the fountain. The male subject loses himself in the experience of a wonderland beyond
materiality; he reaches out to something ‘out there’ in his dream, but he falls short of it in his
encounter with it. The Victorian reflective surfaces had a substantial role in this fantastic fall.
We can trace this exhaustion by wonder and awe in other encounters with reflective surfaces
and commodities at the Exhibition.
In ‘Languages of Glass,’ Armstrong marvels at ‘how often representations in the Exhibition
portray states either steeped in sleep or reverie or else galvanized into startled and violent
life.’206 This strikes true, especially in the representation of mirrors and of the Crystal Palace
itself. These states of ‘sleep/reverie’ and of ‘violent life’ apply particularly well to the fantasy
of reflective surfaces, where the experience of reflection is more or less than the subject
expected, like depression and rage we saw in ‘The Other Side of a Mirror’ by Mary Coleridge.
The language of excess is clearly evident in the accounts such as the one from Sharpe’s London
Magazine: the Crystal Palace felt like ‘stolen from the golden country of the “Thousand-and-
one-Night”,’207 or in a description from the Times:

The vast fabric […] an Arabian Nights structure, full of light, and with a certain
airy unsubstantial character about it which belongs more to enchanted land
than to this gross material world of ours. The eye, accustomed to the solid heavy
details of stone and lime or brick and mortar architecture, wanders along these
extensive and transparent aisles with their terraced outlines, almost distrusting
its own conclusions on the reality of what it sees, for the whole looks like a
splendid phantasm, which the heat of the noon-day sun would dissolve, or gust
of wind scatter into fragments, or London for utterly extinguish […] The vast

206
Isobel Armstrong, ‘Languages of Glass,’ in Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace, ed. James
Buzard, Joseph W. Childers and Eileen Gillooly (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2007),
71. Her analysis of ‘The Grand Boudoir Glass’ by William Potts was republished in 2008 in her book Victorian
Glassworlds in a slightly modified form, without any noteworthy changes.
207
Sharpe’s London Magazine 14 (1851): 250.

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 extent of area covered, the transparent and brilliant character of the structure,
the regular and terraced elevations, the light airy abutments, the huge transept,
with its arched and glittering roof shining above the vitreous expanse around it,
and reminding one of nothing that he has ever heard of before.208

This extensive exposé on the marvel of glass architecture, as well as the short one from
Sharpe’s Magazine, convey the omnipresent language of experiential and emotional excess in
the encounter with the reflectivity of the Crystal Palace. Over and over again, the Palace
becomes a wonderland of pleasure, an ‘enchanted land’ of promised ecstasy. Through its
reflective surfaces, all that is solid melts into the air, hard materiality dissolves through a
fantasy of the mirror-narrative. In the Times account, materiality is ‘dissolved,’ ‘scattered,’
‘extinguished.’ The Palace is a ‘splendid phantasm’ that invites the subject into a fairytale of
jouissance that cannot be reached, leaving him exhausted instead. ‘Nothing can strike us as
more preposterous than an attempt to convey by language any adequate description of the
Crystal Palace,’ says Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal. ‘Everyone who has seen it will have felt
the impossibility of giving the account of either the fabric or its content […].’ 209 The Crystal
Palace is literally beyond words, but the subject tries to express it nevertheless. He tries to reach
for the fullness of the experience, but realizes that what he gets can never be up to the mark
with that which he has been promised in his desire. The Crystal Palace, as well as other glass
surfaces around London, always reflects a world beyond materiality in the Victorian language,
presenting an epistemic limit, and within that limit a possibility of transgression and excessive
experience – of pure, unattainable, mythical pleasure of the void, the pleasure of semantic
death.
Richard Sennett wrote that plate glass is a ‘material which lets [one] see everything
inaccessible to desire.’210 This is more than true for the Crystal Palace and ‘The Grand Boudoir
Glass,’ where the semiotic coherence of materiality is what is desired. What the Victorian male
subject sees while looking at reflective surfaces is what he cannot get, but he desires it all the
same, he wants the amazement of the jouissance expected. We can see that, for example, in
Jude the Obscure, the last novel by Thomas Hardy, where Jude experiences an emotional

208
Times (January 15 1851); my emphasis.
209
William and Robert Chambers, ‘A Glance at the Exhibition,’ Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal (31 May 1851):
337.
210
Richard Sennett, ‘Plate Glass,’ Raritan 6:4 (1987): 1.

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excess, because of the impossibility to approach the barmaid’s face directly, but only as a
reflection:

At the back of the barmaids rose bevel-edged mirrors, with glass shelves
running along their front, on which stood precious liquids that Jude did not
know the name of. The barmaid […] was invisible to Jude’s direct glance,
though a reflection of their back in the glass behind her was occasionally caught
by his eyes […] when she turned her face for a moment to the glass […] he was
amazed.211

Commenting on glass shop windows, Charles Eastlake said that iron columns ‘are furtively
introduced, and as carefully concealed […] by craftily contrived mirrors, so that when all is
finished the upper portion of the building seems absolutely suspended in the air.’212 Mirrors
summoned a new vision of materiality that inversed the architectural principles of solidity and
void. This fantasy is always accompanied by the language of wonder and awe, by an ineptitude
of expressivity. ‘Silvered mirrors of polished plate glass, in gilded frames cannot be too
profusely employed in a drawing room,’ advises John Claudius Loudon, ‘[…] and when the
cut-glass chandeliers are lighted at night […] the scene becomes fairy-like and brilliant beyond
description.’213 In the jouissance promised by mirrors, everything ‘sparkles,’ ‘flashes,’ is
‘brilliant,’ ‘magnificent,’ ‘fairy-like’, ‘beyond imagination,’ ‘beyond words,’ ‘beyond
description.’ Like in ‘The Grand Boudoir Mirror,’ in all the accounts of the marvelousness of
the mirror experience, the readers are invited to ‘suppose’ the completeness of that experience,
to ‘imagine’ or ‘assume’ it, because to the writers this totality of the textual pleasure was
continuously being denied. Lacan would probably say that they kept missing the appointment
with the Real. In the Real, there is no beyond, the Real does not fall somewhere else; it is what
always comes back to the same place.
At the end of the century, though mirrors started sinking into a cultural status quo, the awe
of reflecting surfaces was still occasionally encountered. In The Arcades Project we find
Benjamin citing Julius Lessing and his memory of the Exhibition’s marvels:

211
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 236; my emphasis.
212
Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details (London: Longmans,
Green and Co., 1869), 23.
213
John Claudius Loudon, The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion (London: privately printed, 1838), 102.

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 […] At the center stood an imposing crystal fountain. To the right and to the left
ran galleries in which visitors passed from one national exhibit to the other.
Overall, it seemed a wonderland, appealing more to the imagination than to the
intellect. ‘It is with sober economy of phrase that I term the prospect
incomparably fairy-like. This space is a summer night’s dream in the midnight
sun’ (Lothar Bucher). Such sentiments were registered through the world. I
myself recall, from my childhood, how the news of the Crystal Palace reached
us in Germany and how pictures of it were hung in the middle-class parlors of
distant provincial towns. It seemed than that the world we knew from old fairy-
tales – of the princess in the glass coffin, of queens and elves dwelling in crystal
houses – had come to life…, and these impressions have persisted through the
decades.214

The dream and ecstasy of the Crystal Palace were almost indestructible, thanks to the
reflective fantasy of transgressed materiality. The glass transformed everything behind it and
anyone in front of it, offering the experience of an extreme pleasure. As Anthony Trollope said,
‘[t]o that which is ordinary, [the glass] lends grace; and to that which is graceful it gives a
double luster.’215
‘The Grand Boudoir Mirror,’ in its design and in its narrative, functions along the same lines
as the Crystal Palace and the rest of reflective surfaces around London. For us, it serves as a
suitable example of the wider context of the mirror fantasy of fetishized commodities, where
materiality changes through the looking-glass, allowing things to become alive, while the
perceiving subject experienced the jouissance of the fall. This wider context of the language of
excess, of exhaustion by ornamentation and by wonder, materializes in William Potts’s
creation, placing the mirror firmly into the semiotic coherence of the fantasy of materiality.
The optical shock and the exhaustion of the subject are the effects that keep pulling the subject
into the world of appearances, where he hopes to reach the Real that always comes back to
itself, evading the subject. And the subject keeps dreaming the world of the beyond, a
wonderland, though he cannot express it, making this impossible fantasy a driving force behind
his endless search. As a mesmerized, enchanted commentator in Tallis’s History exclaimed

214
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University
Press: Cambridge (Mass.), 2002), 184; my emphasis.
215
Anthony Trollope, The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1870), 37.

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about the Crystal Palace: ‘It was like – like nothing but itself, unsurpassable, indescribable,
unique, amazing, real!’216

216
Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851, 3
vol. (London and New York: The London Printing and Publishing Company, 1852), vol. 1, 100; my emphasis.

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FALL 2: ALICE IN MIRRORLAND

To the Looking-Glass world it was Alice that said,

“I’ve a scepter in hand, I’ve a crown on my head;
Let the Looking-Glass creatures, whatever they be,
Come and dine with the Red Queen, the White Queen, and me!”217
Lewis Carroll

Picking up the threads of the argument so far, we have seen that the Victorian culture was a
culture of mirrors, as well as a culture of commodities – of mirrors as commodities.
Furthermore, we have seen that the fascination with reflecting surfaces lead the subject towards
the fall, an unfulfilled promise of pure enjoyment. The Victorian male subject, expressing
himself in various forms, dreamed about the Real beyond the representational labyrinth that
opened inside the Victorian language as a result of the appropriation of his mirror image. This
appropriation, which sparked an illusion, was expressed by the subject in many semiotically
incoherent, monstrous forms – commodified mirrors being one of them.
The incoherence of commodities has already been discussed in the introduction, but it is
important to remember that this incoherence took many forms, many of which resonated with
the theme of inanimate things coming to life. The mirror fantasy quite frequently played out
this theme – the mirror becoming alive or acting as a transgressive surface, beyond which the
materiality changes, categories implode and forms collapse into one another. In the fantasy of
a mirror-reflection, the difference between subject and object collapses, while the subject is
trapped at the border itself, reaching for the other side that always remains an illusion. In a
way, the subject is trapped in a permanent state of the abject, where the boundary between life
(animate) and death (inanimate) encroaches upon everything, as Kristeva says.218 There is no
beyond to be grasped, the Real keeps backing away, but the subject keeps dreaming about it all
the same. We have seen this scenario in many mirror examples, as well as in the language of
excess that frequently followed the accounts of the largest reflecting surface of the nineteenth
century, the Crystal Palace.

217
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 157.
218
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 4.

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 But what happens with the subject at the border? What happens when the subject touches
the surface of the mirror and gets caught in the process, disappointed by the insatiability of
desire?
Materially, as well as historically, this moment was caught in the semiotic incoherence of
the Victorian material culture of mirrors. This incoherence that plagued the Victorian subject
found its expression in a materiality that destroyed the fragile limits of the animate and the
inanimate; a materiality that crashed humans and objects into one another, instilling fear,
apprehension and horror in spectators. From this perspective – of a materiality that does not
conform to the strict rules of the Linnaean species or to the accepted rules of the animate and
the inanimate – we shall approach the immortal novel by Lewis Carroll Through the Looking
Glass. We are not interested in the fantasy of a dreaming child, the nonsense of logic or
Carroll’s so-called ‘infatuation’ with children (or girls more specifically).219 By reading the
novel through the language of the material grotesque and the mirror fantasy, we approach the
transformation of materiality in the encounter with the mirror. The grotesque materiality in the
novel, though quite innocent-looking, drew a fragile line between species, embodying the
nature of the capitalistic fetishized commodity in its fullest. The peculiar relationship between
people and things captured in it is the core of the mirror fantasy – it is the core of the fantasy
of commodified mirrors. Through the Looking Glass plays out this fantasy fully, it dreams the
dream to the end of its loop.

Stuck at the Border of the Beyond

In Guildford, Surry on September 18, 1990, two days after the centenary of the death of
Lewis Carroll, a sculpture was unveiled to the public. Slightly over a meter high, the bronze,
made by the local artist Jeanne Argent, depicts the famous Alice at the moment she steps

219
Scholarship on Lewis Carroll in general and on Alice books in particular is probably among the most extensive
ones. Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice (New York and Scarborough, Ontario: A Meridian Book, 1960) gives
a decent bibliographical overview, until the 1960s, of the most extensively researched subjects, such as the life
and work of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and John Tenniel (the illustrator), nonsense, logic and mathematics, as
well as an overview of the most important psychoanalytic works. Other, more recent, comprehensive works
include Edward Guiliano, ed., Lewis Carroll: A Celebration. Essays on the Occasion of the 150 th Anniversary of
the Birth of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1982); Donald J. Gray, ed., Lewis
Carroll, Alice in Wonderland: Authoritative Texts of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking
Glass, The Hunting of the Snark, Backgrounds, Essays in Criticism. A Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1971); Harold Bloom, ed., Lewis Carroll’s Alice Adventures in Wonderland: Bloom’s
Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2006); Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis
Gladstone, The Alice Companion: A Guide to Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books (New York: NYU Press, 1998). These
books are a good starting point for a deeper research, since the books on Carroll’s ‘child issue,’ photography and
imagination, his personal letters and diaries included, are beyond count.

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through the looking-glass (fig. 12). For Lewis Carroll, Guildford had for decades been a family
retreat and a place of inspiration. He visited it for the first time in August 1868, two months
after his father died, looking for a house that would be suitable for his six unmarried sisters.
The same year in November, the family moved into the house, which has remained famous to
this day by its name ‘The Chestnuts.’ It was here that, in 1971, he would write the novel that
interests us, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.
The bronze sculpture – cast in plaster of Paris with a metal armature – stands in the part of
the Guildford Gardens that the Guildford Borough Council acquired in Castle Street in 1988.
Designed by Argent, the final work was cast in bronze by the Morris Singer foundry and it
incorporated a sheet of bullet-proof glass.

Figure 12 Jeanne Argent, ‘Alice’ (1990)

This sculpture perfectly combines all the important points of mirror narratives. In one single
piece of plaster, we see a human figure merged with a mirror, two forms (or two species –
animate and inanimate) crashed into one another, collapsing the limits of human subjectivity,
but also of the thing’s objectivity. With her right hand stretched, Alice is reaching for the world

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beyond the mirror, while rest of her body stays eternally imprisoned on the other side. An
attempt to cross the fragile border of the beyond and to merge with what dwells ‘out there’ is
an attempt at the final appropriation of one’s mirror reflection – the Victorian mirror fantasy
pushed to its extreme. If taken together with the novel from which it draws inspiration, the
Guildford sculpture proves incredibly useful in understanding this fantasy, following the
encounter with mirrors in the Victorian culture. Argent’s work is recent, for sure; it does not
belong to the era of the Victorian material and mirror culture, but if we keep this historical and
temporal distance in mind and approach it only as a vivid illustration of the issue in question,
we will see that the nature of the Guildford Alice is far more Victorian than it seems.

*****

In the material Alice, from the end of the twentieth century, a crucial moment in the subject’s
fantasy is frozen, but what happens to the textual Alice? How does her adventure embody this
fantasy of shifting notions of materiality? It seems that what we are left with are only words,
but Alice, published in 1872, was intended to be much more than a linear textual story from
the start. John Tenniel, a famous Victorian cartoonist, worked quite closely (and sometimes in
strong disagreement) with Lewis Carroll on the illustrations for the book, and it so happens that
sometimes Tenniel’s brilliant drawings push the structure of the story even further than Carroll
intended.220 The illustrations and the text complement each other, the drawings being not
always completely true to the text. But both languages of the story, the visual and the textual,
conform to the prevailing notions of overcoming of materiality in mirror encounters, and we
shall glide through both of them simultaneously. If we add the above-mentioned sculpture,
which is a hundred and fifty years older, to the representational bundle, we see that all forms
of language (textual, visual, and material) follow the same structural lines. It might be that
mirror narratives were still the same in 1990, but it might as well be true that Jeanne Argent
complied with the structural rules of the Victorian fantasy that allowed Through the Looking
Glass to exist.
The fabula of Through the Looking Glass is quite famous and its outline is well-known. It
picks up the story of Alice six months after she returned from her trip to Wonderland. Alice is

220
For Tenniel’s illustrations and their social and political background and implications, see Michael Hancher,
‘Punch and Alice: Through Tenniel’s Looking-Glass,’ in Lewis Carroll: A Celebration. Essays on the Occasion
of the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, ed. Edward Guiliano (New York: Clarkson
N. Potter, Inc., 1982), 26-49.

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now ‘exactly’ seven and a half years old, but her imagination remained restless. Her mindscape
is full of dreams and stories, and her life revolves around her favorite sentence ‘let’s pretend.’
‘I could tell you half the things Alice used to say,’ says Carroll,

beginning with her favourite phrase “Let’s pretend.” She had had quite a long
argument with her sister only the day before – all because Alice had begun with
“Let’s pretend we’re kings and queens;” and her sister, who liked being very
exact, had argued that they couldn’t, because there were only two of them, and
Alice had been reduced at last to say, “Well, you can be one of them then, and
I’ll be all the rest.”221

From the very beginning of the story, even before she climbs the fireplace and reaches for
the other side, Alice’s world is fictional and unstable. Through the Looking Glass being a
children’s story, we could ascribe Alice’s worldview to the perspective of a child enraptured
by the creations of the mind, before the reality kills the wonder. But, childish as this amazement
by things not possible or logical may seem, Alice’s world perfectly embodies the Victorian
culture itself. As we approach the mirror in the story, ‘let’s pretend’ and ‘as if’ become modus
operandi of the narrative, and we are asked, alongside Alice, to assume the possibility of the
impossible, to expect a transgression that brings joy, jouissance expected. For Alice, the
journey through the looking-glass she is about to take is not the first fantastic trip. She has
already visited Wonderland. But, unlike the imaginative introduction to the mirror encounter
in Through the Looking Glass, where we are being prepared, invited and promised a fairyland
before the story even started, Alice in Wonderland does not involve this language of excess. In
Alice in Wonderland we are pushed straight into the fantasy itself, chasing the white rabbit as
he disappears underground literally on the first page of the book. There are no mirrors in the
story, no ‘let’s pretend’ or ‘as if’ to make the language of the fantasy work anticipatively. We
cannot be sure that it is a fantasy at all (except for the rabbit with a watch). Through the Looking
Glass introduces the mirror properly, as a mirror should be introduced; it promises a
transgression instead of just pushing the subject into it. There is no joy without a promise.
At this moment – the moment of a fantastic promise – the adventure starts. But whose
adventure? Alice’s? Perhaps, but also the adventure of Victorian commodified, fetishized

221
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 18.

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materiality itself. Once the looking-glass is introduced, we immediately witness, the now
familiar story of transcendence of materiality.

“Let’s pretend that you’re the red Queen, Kitty! Do you know, I think if you sat
up and folded your arms, you’d look exactly like her. Now do try, there’s a
dear!” And Alice got the Red Queen off the table, and set it up before the kitten
as a model for it to imitate: however, the thing didn’t succeed, principally, Alice
said, because the kitten wouldn’t fold its arms properly. So, to punish it, she
held it up to the Looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was – “and if
you’re not good directly,” she added, “I’ll put you through into Looking-glass
house. How would you like that?”222

We are still on ‘this’ side of the looking-glass – on the ‘right’ side, the firm side – and the
morphing of materiality comes both as a promise and a threat. On this side of the mirror,
humans and animals are what they seem to be – they are alive and animate. On this side of the
mirror the kitten resists the guise (or materiality) of a chess-piece; it resists the form of a thing.
What Alice needs to do, then, is to introduce it to the ‘other side’ – she has to promise something
more than just a game. Alice has to promise a possibility of transgression; she has to threaten
the kitten with the looking-glass. When things and beings refuse to morph by themselves, a
mirror always does the trick. ‘How would you like that?’
Alice turns to the mirror – a barrier between the worlds and a conduit of desire – just to
realize that the only thing she cannot see is the very spot on the fireplace where she is standing.
‘I can see all of it,’ she says, ‘when I get upon a chair – all but the bit just behind the fireplace.
Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit!’223 As soon as she encounters the mirror, Alice’s eye
searches for wholeness of vision, a completeness eclipsed by the point of view. What she sees,
though, is not what she wishes to see, so the desire for exposure and wholeness drives her
toward the mirror. All the sentences end with exclamation marks, accentuating Alice’s wish to
see what escapes the eye, what is beyond. She needs to appropriate her image completely, to
catch herself in the visual spectacle of the mirror reflection. This is a Victorian mirror narrative
par excellence. As it will be discussed in one of the chapters to follow, the Victorian culture
was above all voyeuristic and exhibitionistic. In accordance with the secretive lines of

222
Ibid.
223
Ibid., 19.

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Victorian voyeurism, Alice, though a female and conveniently veiled by the asexuality of a
child, still expresses Lewis Carroll’s fantasy. ‘You can just see a little peep of the passage in
Looking-glass House,’ decides Alice,

“if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it is very like our
passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on
beyond.”224

The very language, as well as the idea of the paragraph, hints at something that should not
been seen, something that the subject feels apprehensive about witnessing. Alice does not look
openly at what she wishes to see; she ‘peeps’ – secretly and alone. She wants to embrace an
empty wholeness in the mirror, an invisible and unreachable spot behind the glass, a lure that
pulls the desire towards the unattainable coherence of the reflection in the mirror. But what lies
‘beyond’ might be quite different from what it appears to be. The subject is caught in the act
of voyeurism.
The only thing left for Alice to do now is to actually step through the looking-glass and see
what the reflection in the mirror is all about. It is very important to bear in mind that the
workings of imagination are what we are dealing with here. We are dealing with Lewis
Carroll’s imagination – the male subject’s imagination – embodied in the character of Alice.
The moment Alice passes through the glass, we are immediately transported into the dream
that characterizes the Victorian commodity culture – things immediately become alive.
Invoked by the language of lack and excess – something too small, something too big,
something smaller and bigger that the crude materiality itself – things are summoned to invade
the imagination of the subject and to embody the cultural tendencies of the Victorian material
anxiety.
What is the first thing that hints at a wonderland when Alice finally touches the mirror?
What is the first thing that is promised to the subject in the mirror? ‘Let’s pretend that glass has
got all soft like gauze,’ calls Alice, ‘so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of
mist now, I declare!’225 Alice ‘declares,’ by the right and by the might of the imagination, that
the first thing to happen is for materiality to change. The glass becomes soft and liquid and the
subject is immediately invited to experience it, to enjoy the transformation of the mirror image

224
Ibid., 21.
225
Ibid.

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and the materiality itself, as the ‘glass [is] beginning to melt away,’ tells us Carroll, ‘just like a
bright silvery mist.’226 It is almost impossible to imagine any other description of this
transgressive experience, than in terms of something ‘silvery’ and ‘bright,’ something that
flares up the imagination and hints at a fairyland beyond. As we move through the text and
through the encounter with the mirror, it becomes increasingly clear that Through the Looking
Glass shares the same explosive, excessive language with the rest of the mirror narratives of
the nineteenth century. It almost seems that the language appropriates the excitement that
promises, but as in all other mirror stories, what comes about is far from satisfaction. If a mirror
promises something that cannot be, then what comes next always manifests itself as troubling
at the level of meaning. And what comes for Alice is a very grotesque aspect of the Victorian
material culture itself.

That Horrifying Materiality

We are still at the very beginning of the story, but if we look at the scene from the proposed
angle – from the angle of a change in materiality in the face of a mirror – we shall see that this
scene is so powerful and so important that it sustains the rest of the story. As soon as Alice
passes through the glass, formerly inanimate things come to life. ‘[T]he pictures on the wall
next the fire seemed to be all alive,’ noticed Alice in amazement,

and the very clock on the chimney-piece (you know you can only see the back
of it in the Looking-glass) had got the face of a little man, and grinned at her.227

The mirror creates a crack in the representation of materiality, a void born of the split subject
himself. At this frontier things are talking and running, while animate beings – like Alice
herself – slowly deteriorate to ‘object-ness’ by the end of the book. And Carroll is not the only
one to play upon this theme. If his mind had resonated with the wider ideas and anxieties of
materiality at the moment of the book’s creation, Tenniel was in no way bound to push the
same idea himself. But not only do we read about things becoming alive – ‘The chessmen were
walking about, two and two!’ – and not only do we see (in Tenniel’s illustration) the mentioned
clock on the mantelpiece smiling, but we also see the vase on the other side smiling too!228 (fig.

226
Ibid.
227
Ibid., 22.
228
Ibid.

106
13). Tenniel was having a hard time illustrating the story in accordance with Carroll’s wishes,
even though they were both operating within the same framework, within the same Victorian
fantasy. Here we depart from the textual narrative for a moment and shift our focus to Tenniel’s
illustration of the scene. Nothing in the text describes the smiling vase, but the vase in the
drawing is smiling all the same. The moment Alice steps through the mirror is the moment
things assume their new faces and bodies – in the text, as well as in the independent elements
of the illustration.

Figure 13 John Tenniel, ‘Alice on the other side of the Mirror,’

in Through the Looking Glass (1872)

These new, animate things embody the same fear and fantasy as Victorian fetishized
commodities, overstepping the limits of forms, and postulating a semiotic implosion as the
essence of their existence. The things are freed from their crude inanimate materiality and are
running loose in the same fashion as the commodities flee the Great Exhibition in the drawing

107
by George Cruikshank. Becoming alive, they establish a new relationship with people.
Agamben calls this anxiety a ‘bad conscience with respect to objects,’ but Shelagh Wilson has
a better term: she calls it the ‘double body’ of Victorian commodities.229 Discussing the
grotesque design of many Victorian objects (such as the ‘Man-eating tiger mounted as an Arm
Chair’ (1896) or earrings made from stuffed hummingbirds (c. 1875)), Wilson analyzes the
debates concerning the widespread Victorian design that invoked fear and apprehension by
clashing different species and forms one with another. This kind of design was ‘ritually labeled
monstrous by design reformers and Modernists.’230 A story by Henry Morley, ‘A House Full
of Horrors,’ from Household Worlds illustrates vividly the contemporary preference towards
this grotesque material miscegenation. The story satirically deals with the new Museum of
Manufactures established by Henry Cole, a Victorian authority on design, and its collection of
objects that was to instruct the population on the ‘false’ principles of decoration. In the story,
Mr. Crumpet, after visiting the collection, comes home only to find that ‘he had been living
among horror up to that hour.’ Since he has educated himself on the false principles of
decoration, he takes up his butterfly cup (a cup with a little butterfly at the bottom that appears
when the liquid is gone), and exclaims in horror: ‘Butter-fly-inside-my-cup! Horr-horr-horr-
horr-ri-ble!231
In Through the Looking Glass we see the same clash of species and forms. Human faces are
literally crafted onto the hard materiality of everyday objects and the only reason why these
objects do not exhibit a visible grotesqueness is because they are situated within a children’s
story, where the semiotic incoherence of materiality and monstrosity are disguised by the
sanitization of the narrative. But otherwise, the materiality in Through the Looking Glass
follows the same principles as the materiality of the grotesque Victorian design – a design that
disturbs and frightens. From the beginning of the story to its very end, Through the Looking
Glass follows the Victorian script of transcendence of materiality. The story itself is a perfect
example and embodiment of the split subject that we are after in his many expressions and
guises.

229
Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis and London: Minneapolis
University Press, 1993), 47. Shelagh Wilson, ‘Monsters and Monstrosities: Grotesque Taste and Victorian
Design,’ in Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, ed. Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow and David Amigoni
(Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1999), 151.
230
Wilson, ‘Monsters and Monstrosities,’ 151.
231
Henry Morley, ‘A House Full of Horrors,’ Household Worlds (December 1852): 266-270.

108
 And what about Alice? If previously inanimate things strive towards their new materiality
as alive and animate, humanoid and grotesque, what happens to Alice as she passes through
the mirror?
The story of Alice goes in the opposite direction, it seems. As soon as she is in the beyond,
she appears to be broken, incoherent, and insufficient. She sees the White King and Queen
(chess pieces) struggling to get out of the ashes of the fireplace – the graveyard of things – and
she tries to help them by lifting them to a nearby table. ‘I don’t think they can hear me,’ Alice
observes, ‘and I’m nearly sure they can’t see me. I feel somehow as if I were invisible –’232 As
in so many other mirror narratives, the reflection that the mirror shows is troubling, strange,
uncanny, ghostlike. At this point, Alice acknowledges herself for the first time since she arrived
at the ‘Looking-glass House’ (the house on the other side of the mirror), but she does it only in
reference to the Other who does not recognize her existence. And this Other, in this scenario
the White King, breaks the lines of visibility too: ‘[…] the King took no notice of the question:
it was quite clear that he could neither hear her nor see her.’233 The invisible and voiceless
Alice is Alice’s own reflection in the mirror-world and it shows the fundamental fantasy of
wholeness we have been talking about. What the subject wants (coherence, wholeness, totality)
and how he expresses it in his fantasy is never the same thing. The subject dreams about the
wonderland, something he cannot have, and this impossibility of his desire turns into a
nightmare, albeit a sweet and sugared one like Alice’s. On this side of the border, where
everything slips away like too much water in an open palm, it is Alice that instills horror in
others by her monstrous split – invisible to everything and everyone but herself. As she lifts
the White King into the air the only thing the King can see is a void – nothingness lifting him
out of nowhere. ‘The horror of that moment,’ […] admits the King, ‘I shall never, never
forget!’234 For Carroll, it was obviously not enough to voice the dread once and deal with the
horrific void of the silent subject; it was necessary to repeat it, and them to italicize it, too.
Fantasies and narratives are rarely what they seem on the surface. If we dig deeper beneath
the surface of the words, we find hidden motives for representation, usually the ones at least
partially shared by the rest of the culture. The narrative of the rest of the story is a good
example. Throughout the book, Alice encounters many extraordinary creatures and goes
through many, sometimes obscene and irrational, adventures. The world beyond the mirror is
actually a chessboard, and Alice has to go through all the fields in order to reach the end of the

232
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 22.
233
Ibid., 24.
234
Ibid., 26.

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game of chess. What happens there, at the end of the mirror world? Alice is to become a queen.
But not any kind of queen: she is to become a chess piece herself. So here is the two-way street
of a classic Victorian mirror fantasy: while everything previously inanimate becomes animate
and alive in the encounter with the mirror, Alice (the dreamer, the perceiver, the voyeur) strives
to become a thing herself. Alice arrives as a silent and invisible subject, and her ultimate goal
is to transgress against her own humanity by becoming a full-fledged chess piece. But this
fantasy beyond the mirror has its drawbacks, as ever. The jouissance expected is a myth, a lure,
and it never says ‘That’s it!’

In the Beyond

After the mirror scene is over, Alice starts her journey towards objectification. What Alice
would not do to become a thing! She boards a train full of strange talking animals; she mediates
between Tweedledum and Tweedledee; she loses her name in the nameless forest and she eats
a cake only to cut it afterwards. Alice’s journey through the looking-glass is very much like
Homer’s Odyssey, with temptations and curious events lurking at every corner of the newly
discovered world. There is even Circe in the guise of the Red Queen (also a chess piece). Just
as Circe explains to Ulysses what ordeals lie ahead, so does the Red Queen explain to Alice
what she has to do to become a thing. In a way, Alice’s odyssey is an odyssey of the Victorian
materiality. But this world, the world behind the looking-glass, has its own rules. Seemingly,
Carroll imagined the looking-glass world to have no rules at all, except maybe that not having
rules is its only and thus basic rule. Martin Gardner says that

any work on nonsense abounds with so many inviting symbols that you can start
with any assumption you please about the author and easily build up an
impressive case for it.235

That is why Alice and her adventures inspired such diverse readings, ranging from
reflections on Carroll’s own life as Charles Dodgson, to the psychoanalytic reading of Alice’s
tears as the amniotic fluid and the birth trauma in ‘The Child as Swain.’236 Since Through the

235
Gardner, Annotated Alice, Introduction, no page indicated.
236
William Empson, ‘The Child as Swain,’ in Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland: Authoritative Texts of Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, The Hunting of the Shark, Backgrounds, Essays in
Criticism. A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Donald J. Grey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), 337-365.

110
Looking Glass was conceived as irrational and without a reference point, it easily makes the
commentators of Alice ‘amateur head-shrinkers,’ as Alexander Woollcott says.237 Gardner
might be right. But if we drop the idea of psychoanalyzing Carroll’s life and analyze the culture
he came from instead, there is a very strong argument for the resonance of Through the Looking
Glass with wider cultural tendencies and fears.
By now, Alice has left the Looking-glass House, and the first place she arrives to is the
‘Garden of Live Flowers.’ As the name of the chapter indicates, in the Garden Alice encounters
talking roses and lilies and daisies, as the story continues to unravel in ever more fantastic
ways. But this Garden has very specific rules of physics: wherever Alice goes and whichever
way she chooses, she always comes back to the house – she always returns to the mirror.

[W]andering up and down, and trying turn after turn, but always coming back
to the house, do what she would. Indeed, once, when she turned a corner rather
more quickly than usual, she ran against it before she could stop herself.238

The house, and the mirror in it, is the central reference point for Alice; it is the place where
her adventure starts and it is where it ends, too. Thus, the house stands as a border itself, the
barrier between fantasy and reality, the place where materiality transforms into a fluid and
disturbing concept – it stands for a looking-glass. If Alice’s adventure through the looking-
glass is a journey in pursuit of wholeness as a thing, pushing the fantasy of transgression to the
extreme, the mirror is where it all ends: the end of desire, pure enjoyment, the jouissance
expected. That is where Alice is going, in the end – back home – but before she can do that,
desire lures her the other way in pursuit of material completeness and semiotic stability. ‘I’m
not going in again yet,’ declares Alice running into the house again. ‘I know I should have to
get through the Looking-glass again – back into the old room – and there’d be an end of all my
adventures!’239
The return back is the ultimate satisfaction, but the insatiability of desire always takes the
subject on a longer route, never a straight one or the shortest one. ‘Full satisfaction implies a
kind of “psychical death,”’ says Adrian Johnson discussing the jouissance in Lacan, ‘an
evacuation of the tension of dissatisfaction that perpetually drives the libidinal economy.’240

237
Alexander Woollcott, ed., The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (New York: The Nonesuch Press, 1939), 15.
238
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 31.
239
Ibid.
240
Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern
University Press, 2005), 239.

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There is no pure jouissance in the end, and Alice will not pass through the glass again to go
back home, so going back is not an option; it would mean the end of desire, the end of the
subject’s ‘psychical life.’
In the ‘Garden of Live Flowers’ (the name of the chapter, as well as of the garden), we are
deep inside the subject’s fantasy, and we find ourselves lost in the confusion that the Garden
presents us with. But in terms of the Victorian mirror fantasy, the Garden perfectly embodies
the elements of a labyrinth of meaning that pervades the Victorian language. The garden is
where everything comes to itself, but also where things are not what they seem. On the one
hand, we have the semiotic labyrinth opened by the looking-glass through which Alice arrived;
on the other, the ‘Garden of Live Flowers’ is the ‘Garden of the Real’ – the one which always
comes back to the same place.
Let us take the encounter with the Red Queen as an example. Alice has found a way around
the Garden by walking ‘in the opposite direction.’241 This turning away from the Real leads her
deeper into the semiotic confusion that lurks behind the Garden and, eventually, she stumbles
upon the Red Queen. Like all other animate chess-pieces, the Red Queen is a walking and
talking thing too. But, whatever comes out of Alice’s mouth appears to actually be something
else, just like in the Victorian mirror fantasy of commodified materiality.

“I only wanted to see what the garden was like, your majesty –”
“That’s right,” said the Queen, patting her on the head, which Alice didn’t like
at all, “though when you say ‘garden,’ – I’ve seen gardens, compared with
which this would be a wilderness.”
Alice didn’t dare to argue the point, but went on: “– and I thought I’d try and
find my way to the top of that hill –”
“When you say ‘hill,’ the queen interrupted, “I could show you hills, in
comparison with which you’d call that a valley.”
“No, I shouldn’t,” said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at last: “a hill
can’t be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense –”
The Red Queen shook her head. “You may call it ‘nonsense’ if you like,” she
said, “but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible
as a dictionary!”242

241
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 37.
242
Ibid., 38-39.

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 We are not dealing only with nonsense to be rejected or discarded, since even nonsense does
not stay still here. We are dealing with a perversion of meaning where the hill becomes a valley,
and the garden a wilderness, with a displacement of meaning, with the Being postponed, where
things turn into each other and slide down the spiral of signification ad infinitum. This
perversion is a characteristic of the Victorian mirror language, as well as of the Victorian
language in general, just pushed to its obvious extreme in the Alice books – the structure of the
Victorian language stripped bare and exposed. But this exposure makes it tame and funny,
allowing the perversion of language to hide in plain sight. Like in Alice in Wonderland, the
subject is falling down, down, down the rabbit hole (‘Would the fall never come to an end!’243),
only there is no hole or rabbit here, just a mirror and an endless différance of meaning in the
never-ending labyrinth of semiosis. The garden started as a promise of the real, of wholeness,
of an end; it started as ‘The Garden of the Real’ that always came back to the same place, but
as soon as Alice found her way through – ‘walking in the opposite direction’ – the Real kept
receding, wrapping Alice in layers of semiotic displacement, pushing her away from the house,
away from the mirror, deeper into the mirror-world, towards the final transformation of her
humanity into thingness. For a moment, it almost seems that the mirror fantasy will bring the
final satisfaction, but the chain of signification moves on, carrying Alice on its tide. She will
have to find another way out.

The Small Shop of Consumerist Curiosities

The odyssey of materiality that Alice fantasizes about consolidates itself again pages later.
By that time, Alice had passed through the Third and the Forth Square of the chess-board, and
all of a sudden she found herself in a small, very curious shop (fig. 14). In this shop, the story
of Victorian commodities comes to its fullest. Asa Briggs says that ‘Lewis Carroll […] was
almost as interested in things as in numbers, recognizing just how important things – and their
names – were for the secure scaffolding of Victorian life.’244 All the other places in Wonderland
and the looking-glass world aside, the small shop of the Fifth Square is where Briggs’s words
ring truest. Here Tenniel’s illustration penetrates the story again. The shop in the illustration
that Alice mysteriously arrives to is faithfully modeled on a real grocery shop at 83 Saint

243
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 13.
244
Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 2003), 3.

113
Aldgate’s Street in Oxford.245 Although Alice (and the reader) sees the Sheep sitting behind
the counter, knitting in an arm-chair, making small pauses to look at Alice through her
spectacles, this shop is as far as the book goes in the representation of the ‘reality’ of the
Victorian Oxford.

Figure 14 John Tenniel, ‘The Shop,’ Through the Looking Glass (1872)

And as in the ‘real world’ of the nineteenth-century England, Alice decides to just ‘look
around’ adopting a real-time Victorian attitude to consumption that triumphed at the Exhibition
in 1851. ‘My Dear, it is so very agreeable,’ says a reporter from Punch:

“You cannot tell how amusing it is! It is much better than going a-shopping.
The whole place is full of some of the prettiest things in the world – laces-silks-
brocades – and such lovely jewels – and the beauty is you may look at them
ever so long, without being expected to buy a single thing!”246

Thus, on this side of the mirror, the Victorian fantasy becomes scopic again. ‘You may look
in front of you,’ says the Sheep, ‘and on both sides, if you like, […] but you can’t look all

245
Sidney Herbert Williams and Falconer Madan, A Handbook of the Literature of the Rev. C. L. Dodgson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931), 19 (Note 10).
246
Punch 20 (1851): 212.

114
round you – unless you’ve got eyes at the back of your head.’247 Alice, unfortunately, does not
have them, so again she is faced with the impossibility of complete visual satisfaction and the
tension escalates as she stares at the goods carefully arranged along the shelves.
Like a visitor to the Crystal Palace, where all the wonders of the commodities shine bright
and tempting and where the visitor can look but not possess, Alice turns to the goods in this
little shop of curiosities just to find that what she desires, what she wants to have, is always
slipping away.

The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things – but the oddest part
of it all was, that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly
what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty: though the others
round it were crowded as full as they could hold.248

This is the place where Victorian commodities fully express their disturbing semiotic state
– things fleeing the Exhibition, things fleeing ownership, things slipping to the semantic
afterlife of fetishism from where they lure desire. We have already discussed in the introduction
that for the Victorian subject, commodities were much more than things; they were out of reach,
their significance surpassed the simplicity of man-made objects. Following Freud, Lacan calls
these sublimated and unreachable coordinators of libidinal life – the objet a – the Thing (das
Ding), and it is hard to imagine any other term to stand for the unattainability of
commodities.249 The subject always reaches for the Thing – as Alice will – but the Thing
belongs to the Real, so its attaining would mean the end of the psychic life. Instead, the subject
substitutes the Thing with many different things throughout life, always expecting that the next
one will be ‘it.’ In our analysis of the nineteenth century, the subject seeks the wholeness
promised by the mirror at the entrance of the Symbolic (the culture). But since it is only a
promised illusion, it exists only by being absent (like the empty shelf in the shop), a phantasm
that the subject’s split self exhibits in many monstrous, semiotically incoherent forms,
commodity being one of them. The nineteenth-century capitalist production that went (and still
goes) hand in hand with commodity culture is all about desire, all about a promised fulfillment
if the alienated and estranged product – the commodity – is attained. But the very incoherence

247
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 86.
248
Ibid.
249
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, trans.
Dennis Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 138.

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of the commodity resists possession, it resists satisfaction, always asking for more and more –
more things, more objects, more phantasmal ‘it.’ Lewis Carroll belongs to the era one hundred
years before Lacan, but a reader familiar with Lacanian psychoanalysis would be hard-pressed
not to interpret Alice’s shop scene in terms of the Thing.

‘Things flow about so here!” she [Alice] said at last in a plaintive tone, after
she had spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large bright thing, that looked
sometimes like a doll, and sometimes like a work-box, and was always in the
shelf next above the one she was looking at. “And this one is the most provoking
of all – but I’ll tell you what –” she added, as a sudden thought struck her, “I’ll
follow it up to the very top shelf of all. It’ll puzzle it to go through the ceiling,
I expect!”
But even this plan failed: the “thing” went through the ceiling as quietly as
possible, as if it were quite used to it.250

Alice is reaching for the Thing – and we can freely capitalize it here, since it is obviously a
specific thing whose nature and description is not evident even to Alice – but the Thing keeps
running away, making Alice want it even more. Seen in the context of a shop, a consumerist
space par excellence (even identifiable as a real space in Oxford), the workings of the
consumerist desire are evident, since the things ‘flow about so here!’ Things in this shop, as in
the Crystal Palace and other ‘places of pilgrimage of commodity fetishism’ are unstable and
incoherent; they cannot be possessed for they reveal their monstrous nature, which is constantly
changing along the signifying chain. The Thing Alice wants the most is, of course, ‘large’ and
‘bright’ as only the spectacularized Victorian commodities could be, and it keeps changing its
shape and meaning from a bright, unnamed ‘something’ into a doll, from a doll into a work-
box; it flees Alice’s desire on the shelf and all around the shop. Things in this shop are like
things at the Exhibition, and the ‘modern exhibition always means things out of place,’ says
Armstrong.251 They are never where one expects them to be. In her fantasy, Alice thinks she is
saved – she thinks that she has found a way of chasing the Thing, the object of her desire, to
the top shelf, but the Thing knows no bounds, has no beginning and no end, because it was

250
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 86.
251
Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 221.

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never there in the first place. So the Thing disappears through the roof, forever escaping Alice’s
grasp.
The Thing always belongs to the Real.
Alice’s temptation is not over, though. The rest of the scene follows the same pattern of
insatiable desire. The knitting Sheep and she are in a boat now – the naturalness of the transition
being understandable in a dream – and Alice is rowing down a river. All around her are ‘darling
scented rushes,’252 so alluring, provoking, and enchanting that Alice has to pick them up.

“Oh, what a lovely one! Only I couldn’t quite reach it.” And it certainly did
seem a little provoking […] that, though she managed to pick plenty of beautiful
rushes as the boat glided by, there was always a more lovely one that she
couldn’t reach.253

The Thing from the shop – the one always changing into something else – continues to evade
Alice’s reach, as the boat keeps moving further downstream. Nothing can satisfy Alice’s desire,
not even the beautiful rushes. As soon as an ‘it’ is acquired (all those ‘its’ that present
themselves to us as embodiments of the Thing which literally is not), there is another ‘it’ even
better than the previous one, more beautiful, brighter and more alluring. ‘The prettiest are
always further!’254 says our sad Alice. Not even the beautiful, darling rushes that she has
already picked up can make her feel less empty, because as soon as an ‘it’ is acquired, desire
loses interest in it and rejects it. Like a bird of prey, the nature of desire is to conquer the
unconquerable, to appropriate the unappropriable, and to reach the fullness promised at the
beginning, in front of the mirror. But this fullness is an illusion, and the desire surpasses all the
conquered ‘its,’ moving forward (or in spirals), ever forward. Desire – the ‘primer of my
culture,’ as Kristeva remarks about the abject.255

What mattered it to her just then that the rushes had begun to fade, and to lose
all their scent and beauty, from the very moment that she picked them? Even
real scented rushes, you know, last only a very little while – and these, being
dream-rushes, melted away almost like show, as they lay in heaps at her feet.256

252
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 89.
253
Ibid., 90.
254
Ibid.
255
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1.
256
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 90.

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 Even the real scented rushes cannot fill the void of the subject, cannot stand for the
wholeness of Being, forever gone before it even existed. Along the signifying chain, down,
down, down the spiral of representation, the Victorian language leads desire further and further
away, morphing the ‘it’ into something else, into some new illusion, while ‘dream-rushes’ –
rushes made of dreams – ‘melted away almost like snow.’
Where does it end, this odyssey of Alice’s desire? Where does the Thing lure the subject to?
Does it end at all? Of course it does not, because Alice’s desire runs in circles, so before she
even realizes it, she (and the Sheep, for sure) are back inside the small shop of curiosities – at
the Exhibition of commodities – at the heart of the Victorian material (and consumerist) culture.
‘Now what do you want to buy?’ asked the Sheep. All the way around, down the river and
through the beautiful rushes, we are back at the consumption point where the shop scene
started. Somehow, it seems that the whole boat trip was just a ride in circles that always comes
back to its source.

“To buy!” Alice echoed in a tone that was half astonished and half frightened –
for the oars, and the boat, and the river, had vanished all in a moment. And she
was back in the little dark shop.257

Like the reporter with Punch magazine - the visitor at the Exhibition from the previous
chapter, who always comes back to the Crystal Palace – Alice always comes back to the place
where the fascination with the Thing started, a murderess coming back to the crime scene.
Riding in circles, on the wings of desire, the crime scene – the shop, the Exhibition – brings
joy and fear, ‘astonishment’ and ‘fright.’ In order for Alice to get anywhere, she has to find
another way out again; she needs to do things backwards. Thus, she stops ‘looking around’ and
she settles down for something not so bright, not so shiny, not so enchanting or everlasting –
an egg. Is it finally over? Can Alice finally move on with the egg in her hands?

[S]he groped her way among the tables and chairs, for the shop was very dark
towards the end. “The egg seems to get further away the more I walk towards
it.” […] However, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human:
when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose

257
Ibid., 91.

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 and mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was
Humpty Dumpty himself.258

No, it never ends. The Thing never stays still, because it is not absent, it is literally not. The
bright, shiny ‘something,’ the doll, the work-box, the beautiful rushes, the egg – all things made
of air, all the ‘its’ made of dreams, of illusions. As the Thing lures Alice towards the ‘very dark
end’ of the shop, deep towards the black heart of the subject’s desire, a place reachable only in
a dream or a fantasy, things become alive once again – with eyes, and noses and mouths. And
as in a final stroke of irony, or maybe of a psychical justice, the egg Alice thought she acquired,
the egg that turned half-human – Humpty Dumpty himself – falls from a wall and breaks into
pieces as Alice experiences the fall as a subject. The chain goes on and on, never ending and
never pausing, while the boundaries disappear, commodities flee and change and change and
change. ‘Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else,’ says
Benjamin rightly from the fringes of the Victorian age. ‘With this possibility a destructive, but
just verdict is passed on the profane world.’259 And on this side of the mirror, everything ends
in the fantasy of transformation of materiality and in the fall of the subject in the face of the
impossible, incredible, world-breaking jouissance expected. ‘Well, this is the very queerest
shop I ever saw!’260 concludes Alice. Wouldn’t we agree?

The Violence of the Fall

As the story draws to an end, the transformation of materiality on this side of the mirror is
getting more and more violent. Alice has passed all the Squares and now she is at a dinner party
in her honor. She has finally achieved her goal – she has become a Queen, a full-pledged chess-
piece. She is seated between two other figures with a weird material transformation, the Red
and the White Queen, as they celebrate her successful journey through the looking-glass world.
Over the brooks and through the squares, Alice came to her final destination. But is it really an
end? In Carroll’s marvelous story, does the subject, our Alice, get satisfaction in the end? Has
she redeemed herself in the face of the semiotic monstrosity of slippery animate/inanimate

258
Ibid., 92-93.
259
Walter Benjamin, On the Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books,
1977), 175.
260
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 92.

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phantasms by pushing her objectification to the extreme, to its own logical conclusion – the
chess-piece?
As it is always the case in mirror narratives, the subject reaches for wholeness, for the pure
jouissance expected, but he always falls short of it. This fall is always beyond words, beyond
description, something lacking and excessive at the same time; there is always a certain degree
of violence involved. Alice’s destiny is no different, it seems. She can only fantasize about the
end, about completeness, but its impossibility always turns the fantasy into a nightmare. As she
sits at the table, where all the impossible things have found their place – from a walking leg of
mutton to a talking pudding (not to mention the talking chess pieces we are accustomed to by
now) – the fantasy of ‘queenhood’ (or rather, of ‘thinghood’) turns into a violent mess.

And then […] all sorts of things happened in a moment. The candles all grew
up to the ceiling, looking something like a bed of rushes with fireworks at the
top. As to the bottles, they each took a pair of plates, which they hastily fitted
on as wings, and so, with forks for legs, went fluttering about in all direction:
“and very like birds they look,” Alice thought to herself, as well as she could in
the dreadful confusion that was beginning.261

The dream turns into a nightmare, as things go completely berserk. They are running loose,
just like in the previous chapter, jumping in a bowl of soup or just simply fleeing the (crime)
scene. It almost seems like George Cruikshank had this scene in mind when he drew ‘The
Dispersion of the Works of All Nations from the Great Exhibition of 1851.’ Or it might be that
the similarities are so striking because Through the Looking Glass shares the theme with the
Crystal Palace – a grand mirror-fantasy of material transcendence and the subject’s
impossibility to grasp wholeness. The moment the subject thinks to himself ‘That’s it!’ the
desire says ‘That’s not it!’ and in the violence of the fall, the subject experiences the horror of
the jouissance obtained. ‘I can’t stand this any longer!’ cries Alice in desperation, ‘as she
jump[s] up and seize[s] the table-cloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes,
guests, and candles c[o]me crushing down together in a heap on the floor.’262
At the end of the fantasy, violence and dissatisfaction are waiting; a feeling, or an awareness
that, after everything, the objet a, the Thing, is still out there, out of the subject’s reach. It still

261
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 163.
262
Ibid., 164.

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calls, lures, and fascinates desire, transforming a dream into a never-ending nightmare. After a
fantasy – a fall. After the fall – an awakening. Is it? That would be too easy; that would be a
way out. This dream does not have one, as Alice asks in the end: ‘Which dreamed it?’ Thus,
after the awakening there is no salvation. The subject is forever haunted by the mirror image,
by the phantom of fullness, roaming through the endless maze of the Victorian language.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.263

263
Ibid., 173.

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PART TWO

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD OF DEATH

The Sirens, say one, are the charms of the Gulf of Naples. No, says another; they were chaste
priestesses. They were neither chaste nor priestesses, but exactly reverse. They were
sunbeams. They were perilous cliffs. They were a race of peaceful shepherds. They were
symbols of persuasion. They were cannibals. They were planetary spirits. They were
prophets. They were species of Oriental owl. They were harmonious faculties of the soul.
They were penguins.
Penguins! This is the final pronouncement of commentatorial erudition. 264
Norman Douglas

A long time ago, in a past so distant that one finds it imperceptible and hence natural,
somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea, on a pile of pallid bones and rotting flesh, stood two
creatures called Sirens, waiting to offer ignorant sailors the joys of ultimate knowledge and
bliss. We could not see them, the shape of their bodies being so utterly wrong that it was
eclipsed by their voices. On a pile of cadavers they sang of glorious deeds, promising future
and everlasting happiness, luring equally the innocent and the guilty, and abusing the deepest
desires of souls. The water was deathly calm in this baleful place of desiring sorrow, there was
no wind to warn or distract, and no omen that the grace of their seductive voices was an entrance
to Hades itself. For whoever approached these bodiless, aural beings, left everything they
possessed behind, all the loved ones, all the hated ones – they left behind the reality and
firmness of life itself. And in return they got nothing but blue depths, a watery grave, waiting
on the other side of the promised bliss.

264
Norman Douglas, Siren Land and Fountains of the Sand (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957), 15.

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 But there have always been those who managed to escape, whose eyes bore witness to death
and joy, beauty and decay, cruelty and love, without succumbing to any of them. Their ears
were stopped; their arms tied fast; and their ships sailed steadily between desire and demise,
silencing the great lure of the most intimate depths of their Being. Those extraordinary men
fought wildly to fulfill their destinies and bequeathed the antidote to the Sirens’ call to the
generations of men to come. From the farthest corners of the Greek epics to nineteenth-century
Europe, all men, each in their own way, bore the name of Ulysses.
In this chapter we will introduce us with the history of these chimerical beings. Examining
their history in its entirety is beyond possible, considering that sirens – and all their sisters
mermaids, naiads, nymphs, rusalkas – span the whole history of humankind, defying the
natural borders created by oceans, mountains, rivers and continents.265 There are no imaginary
and mythical creatures more familiar to people in all corners of the world, in almost every
known historical era. Sirens, in their local versions, roam the Andes as well as Russian lakes;
they are known in Japan and are spotted combing their hair and beckoning to sailors in both
northern and southern seas. And in all the accounts, their beauty and voices are pervasive, the
ecstasy they offer is unending: existentially unbearable and historically indestructible. And as
if it were not enough this geographical and historical omnipresence bestowed upon their
melodious sounds and everlasting grace, sirens assumed another unsurpassable feature: a
staggering ability to change. Ancient feathered enchantresses or medieval fish-tailed whores,
sirens and mermaids never cease to morph, mutate, to transcend their impossible corporeal
existence, merging into one another, abandoning feathers for tails, the instruments they play
for the fish they hunt, the fish for mirrors, mirrors for souls.
Facing their worldly pervasiveness, both spatial and temporal, and a constant fantastic flux
of their bodies, the desire for a comprehensive survey collapses exhausted, depressed. This
chapter, as well as the rest of the book, deals with only a fragment, located narrowly in the
Western European countries at its widest, Victorian Britain at its narrowest. The Victorian
sirens and mermaids underwent profound changes during the nineteenth century, changes even
more radical than their bodily transmogrification. The only assets that loyally remained with
their figures since their Homeric Genesis – their voice – and the medieval/modern one – their
mirror – disappeared into thin air in Victorian times. For that reason, this book draws an
arbitrary dividing line at the time of Hans Christian Andersen’s conception of The Little

265
The sheer range of topics coming from all parts of the world and all historical periods in the collection of essays
Music of the Sirens by Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya serves as a good example of this extraordinary
versatility.

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Mermaid (Den Lille Havfrue) in 1837, discussing siren and mermaid narratives of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries in greater depth. But if we want the argument to be fruitful
and intelligible, if we want the reader to truly understand the dramatic change and the turning
point in the history of sirens, a short introduction, or better a survey of the main representational
traits should precede it. This task follows or precedes every work on sirens ever written, and
for that reason we will go though it briefly, leaving more room for some new insights on the
Victorian times.

In the Beginning, All Things Shine Bright

Before we start with the basic concepts of ‘sirenology’ it is very important to understand
that sirens came to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – and thus to us – in two different
monstrous forms. For the population that came of age with Disney’s adaptation of Andersen’s
heartbreaking story, it might come as a surprise that mermaids and sirens are actually not the
same (though they could be), and that the modern Victorian, post-Victorian and post-modern
era all suffer from a major misconception regarding their nature. Mermaids – those professedly
lovely, fragile beings we sympathize with – are fish-women, that much is clear, but sirens (bird-
women) are of a different sort altogether.
The linguistic distinction between sirens and mermaids still troubles the authors who let
themselves become immersed in this wonderland of joy and suffering – of joy in suffering. On
the one hand, the mermaid hybrid form – chilling, aquatic and soothing, but diabolical and
covertly dangerous – appears more or less unambiguous. When the term ‘mermaid’ is used, it
always means a fish-tailed maiden. But the ‘siren,’ believed to be a feathered creature, is far
more complicated; the term covers the fish-tailed femme fatale form too, and is truly worthy of
a Victorian monstrous narrative. The ‘siren’ is a linguistic and semiotic battleground of
elements, merging water with air and vice versa, accommodating every meaning the history of
sirens and mermaids brought to light. Sleek as a mermaid’s tail, evanescent as the siren song,
the term itself dwells in a place of the in-between, leaving a blank representational space to be
filled with dreams, fears and fantasies. As such, it comes as no surprise that the Victorian male
subject – the split, tortured and hollowed one – emerges through the language of this creature
to express his otiose desire for completeness.
Sirens are old, very old, and when they appear in the European imagination, they descend
from the sky with wings widely spread, and claws sharp and ominous. Both sirens and
mermaids, more or less until the nineteenth century, share the same narrative traits – they sing
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and lure and deceive men to their doom. But their histories, intertwined as they are, can still be
separated and distinguished, at least as far as ancient sources are concerned.
Winged sirens arrive at the dawn of European literature. What better place for a fantastic,
mythical creature to be born from (especially from a Victorian perspective) but the heart of the
Homeric epics? A famous passage from Book XII of the Odyssey sets the stage for the sirens’
long and complicated history. Since this particular episode has already been discussed from the
Victorian perspective in the prologue, we will just give the basic overview here, beginnings
and roots always being essential to historians.266
Ulysses has just broken Circe’s spell and is eager to continue his journey home. Although
it has been more than ten years since he left his beloved Ithaca, Penelope and Telemachus, his
desire for life and return is inextinguishable. He is prepared to survive all the ordeals that gods
(mostly Poseidon) have prepared for him. Three millennia later, in 1833, Tennyson’s Ulysses
will lament his unbearable, sedentary life; he will be tired of waiting, benumbed by the
boredom of mundane existence.267 But at the beginning, ‘when [things] emerged dazzling from
the hand of a creator or in the shadowless night of the first morning,’ as Foucault says of the
beginnings, Ulysses’ desire for return was insatiable, leading him even into Hades itself.268
Circe warns Ulysses that once he leaves her enchanted home, many hardships await him, and
the first of these is the dreaded isle of the Sirens. These ephemeral creatures are irresistible and
unique, in ancient Greek culture always capitalized and personalized. They sing, they kill and
their promises strike in the dark recesses of the listener’s soul:

First the shrill Sirens, couched among the flowers,

Sing melodies that lure from the great deep
The heedless mariners to their fatal bowers,
Where round about them, piled in many a heap
Lie the bleached bones of mouldering men that sleep

266
For a summary of the genealogy of sirens, see Silla Consoli, La Candeur d’un monstre: Essai psychanalytique
sur le mythe de la sirène (Paris: Éditions du Centurion, 1980), 11-52; Leofranc Holford-Strevens, ‘Sirens in
Antiquity and the Middle Ages,’ in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 16-19; Meri Lao, Sirens: Symbols of Seduction,
trans. John Oliphant of Rossie in collaboration with the author (Vermont: Park Street Press, 1998), 23-29; as early
as 1908, Wilfred P. Mustard systematically discussed the classical, medieval and Renaissance sources on sirens
and mermaids, see Wilfred P. Mustard, ‘Siren-Mermaid,’ Modern Language Notes 23:1 (1908): 21-24.
267
Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses,’ in Tennyson: Poems Published in 1842 (London: Claredon Press, 1947).
268
Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1984), 74.

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 For ever, and the dead skin waste away.269

Ulysses follows Circe’s advice: he stops his shipmates’ ears with wax and gets himself
leashed to the mast lest he should succumb to the song of the Sirens. For all those who had
heard their silky, enthralling song lost their minds in the ecstasy of sound, ending up on the
Sirens’ isle, inanimate, hollow and putrefying. Ulysses withstands the Sirens, though their song
is forceful, their promises euphonious and canning, and he yells and begs and orders and
threatens to be released and allowed to drown in the jouissance promised.
Thus in the beginning was a word: the dulcet, destructive word of death. In the beginning
was the end itself, the desire promised, la petite mort. In the three thousand years that followed,
this episode of seduction, death and desire remained at the heart of the siren legend. While
mortals had to let themselves be mollified, drowned, devoured or to simply disappear,
occasionally, in cracks and crevices of history, there had been those who annihilated the Sirens,
but those were largely gods, demigods and undisputed heroes of old. Ancient tradition knows
of these obliterating occasions that persisted as borderlines of the siren myth.
From the moment Ulysses stepped on his adventure-bound ship to Ithaca (in the tenth to
seventh century BC, depending on the school of classical scholarship we follow), Sirens had
been feathered and winged creatures.270 True, in the Odyssey itself we cannot see their form.
Intentionally or not, this information was denied to us, possibly because the general bardic
audience had already been introduced to their shape. J. R. T. Pollard claims that scenes from
the Odyssey are rare in the seventh century BC visual art and that the earliest depiction of the
episode comes from a black-figure Corinthian aryballos from the second half of the sixth
century.271 This is to be expected, since the Greek Dark Ages suffered from an almost complete
loss of human representation. After centuries of silence, following the collapse of the
Mycenaean civilization, the Geometric style of pottery decoration gave way to human figures
only at the end of the eighth century BC.272 Discussing, like Pollard, the prominence of Sirens

269
The Odyssey of Homer, vol. 1, Books I – XII, trans. Philip Stanhope Worsley (Edinburgh and London: William
Blackwood and Sons, 1861), XII, verse 7, 289.
270
Ian Morris, ‘Periodization and the Heroes: Inventing a Dark Age,’ in Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism,
Perodization, and the Ancient World, ed. Mark Golden and Peter Toohey (London and New York: Routledge,
1997), 96-131, reprinted in Morris’s Archaeology as Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000); and
Michael Shanks, Classical Archaeology of Greece: Experiences of the Discipline (London and New York:
Routledge, 1996) are two very informative works on this inexhaustible subject.
271
J. R. T. Pollard, ‘Muses and Sirens,’ The Classical Review 2:2 (1952): 63. The Aryballos is now property of
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, ‘Oil flask (aryballos) with Odysseus confronted by Sirens,’ no 1.8100.
272
The scholarship on this topic is vast and diverse, but I am, very subjectively, singling out certain studies: for
the geometric style of pottery decoration and the Dark Age Greece in general, see, for example, James Whitley,
Style and Society in Dark Age Greece: The Changing Face of a Pre-literate Society, 1100-700 (Cambridge:

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in visual arts, Leofranc Holford-Strevens holds that at the beginning (as in the Odyssey) their
number was always two, but that shortly after, they began appearing in trios. When there were
only two, one of them would play the aulos and the other the kithara. When coming in threes,
the remaining one would assume the role of a singer.273 This formula persisted for two
millennia.
On the famous Attic stamnos from Vulci in Italy, dated ca. 475-460 BC (fig. 1, mentioned
and shown in the prologue), the one that inspired John William Waterhouse to paint his timeless
work Ulysses and the Sirens in 1891, we find Ulysses’ ship surrounded by three Sirens. Two
of them are perched on the nearby cliffs, while the remaining one is diving headfirst into the
sea. The scene may represent the Siren’s suicide as a result of the defeat that never happened
before, but it is quite possible that the diving Siren represents the same one perched on the rock
above.274
Unlike their medieval descendants, classical Sirens all had names; their figures assumed a
place in the overall universe of gods, men, heroes and monsters, as developed by Homer and
Hesiod.275 Nevertheless, the facts of their characters, their names as well as their number and
parentage, were an issue of dispute in ancient times. The Catalogue of Women gives Sirens
their family tree and history for the first time, elaborating on their unending story: ‘[T]heir
names are Thelxiope or Thelxinoe, Molpe and Aglaophonus’ (‘Charming-with-her-voice’ (or
‘Charming-the-mind’), ‘Song,’ and ‘Lovely-sounding’).276 According to The Library, an
ancient source previously attributed to Apollodorus of Alexandria of the second century BC,
Sirens were daughters of Sterope and Achelous, an Aetolian river god, whom Hercules wrestled

Cambridge University Press, 1991), 97-136; Anthony Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece (Abington: Psychology
Press, 1971), 22-105; Morris, Archaeology as Cultural History, as well as works of V. R. d’ A. Desborough,
Protogeometric Pottery (Oxford: Claredon, Press, 1952), The Last Mycenaeans and their Successors (Oxford:
Claredon Press 1964), The End of Mycenaean Civilization and Dark Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1964) and The Greek Dark Ages (London: Ernest Benn, 1972). All the authors mentioned are leading
authorities in the field of classical studies and entire body of their work is considerably larger.
273
Holford-Strevens, ‘Sirens in Antiquity,’ 18.
274
Servius’s Commentary on Aeneid of Virgil is of this opinion. On the other hand, the events from the
Argonautica presumably happened before the Odyssey, so this discrepancy breaks the plot of the Greek myth a
bit.
275
For the resonance of Homeric epics with a wider cultural context, see a beautiful study by Barbara Graziosi
and Johannes Haubold, Homer: The Resonance of Epic (London: Duckworth, 2005).
276
Catalogue of Women is a compendium of myths presumably attributed to Hesiod. The work itself does not
exist anymore, though, and the edition in circulation is a compendium of later references by various ancient
authors. Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-
White (Catalogue of Women) (Cambridge, (Mass.): Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd.,
1914), fragment #47. Holord-Strevens, in ‘Sirens in Antiquity,’ 40, n.8, translates their names more romantically
and with much more charm as ‘Beguiling the Mind’ (Thelxinoe) or ‘Beguiling of Speech’ (Thelxiope), ‘Song’
(Molpe) and ‘Illustrious of Voice’ (Aglaophonos).

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in one of his tasks.277 Though this has become their most common lineage, in Epitome 7.18ff
of the same source, we find a Muse to be their mother and we learn the Sirens’ names too:

[n]ow the Sirens were Pisinoe, Aglaope, and Thelxiepia, daughters of Achelous
and Melpomene, one of the Muses. One of them played the lyre, another sang,
and another played the flute, and by these means they were fain to persuade
passing mariners to linger.278

Melpomene was first the Muse of Singing, before she became the Muse of Tragedy, both of
her aspects suiting the imagery of Sirens. Other sources, though, had a different opinion on the
Sirens’ genealogy. According to one of Sophocles’ lost tragedies, Sirens were daughters of the
old Phorcys, the father of the Gorgons and other menacing creatures of the Greek mythology.
In this Sophoclean fragment, Ulysses places the Sirens at the heart of the ravenous Hades: ‘I
came to the Sirens, the daughters of Phorcys, the two that sing the lays of Hades.’ 279 Siblings
of Echidna, Medusa and possibly Scylla, they were born out of darkness, lethal elements –
poison, death and destruction – forming the very tissue of their noxious bodies.
Although they come to us as sinister enchantresses of a half-human nature, Sirens have not
always been under the curse causing them to look like animals. In ancient Greek culture, being
half animal to some extent meant being less than a human, the vertical scale of being
descending from gods to men and ultimately to animals. Demigods and hybrid creatures existed
in this vertical universe precisely to mediate these fluctuating and historically contingent
concepts.280 There are a number of versions of the tale how sirens became half-birds, and most

277
Apollodorus, The Library, with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, 2 Volumes (Cambridge,
(Mass.): Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1921), 1.7.10. The Library or Bibliotheca
is a compendium of myths similar to the Catalogue of Women, sourced from old Greek epics and plays of the
Tragedians. The work was traditionally attributed to Apollodorus of Alexandria, a Greek scholar who flourished
in the second century BC, but his authorship has now been rejected. The work is generally believed to be a second
century AD compilation.
278
Ibid., E.7.18.
279
Tragicorum Greacorum fragmenta 4: Sophocles, ed. Stefan Radt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977),
fragment #861., translation by Leofranc Holford-Strevens in Holford-Strevens, ‘Sirens in Antiquity,’ 40, n.12. In
Hesiod’s Theogony we read: ‘And again, Ceto bore to Phorcys the fair-cheeked Graiae, sisters grey from their
birth: and both deathless gods and men who walk on earth call them Graiae, Pemphredo well-clad, and saffron-
robed Enyo, and the Gorgons who dwell beyond glorious Ocean in the frontier land towards Night where are the
clear-voiced Hesperides, Sthenno, and Euryale, and Medusa who suffered a woeful fate: she was mortal, but the
two were undying and grew not old’ (Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle and Homerica with an English
Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Theogony) (Cambridge, (Mass.): Harvard University Press; London:
William Heinemann Ltd., 1914,) 270-275).
280
Developing a vertical, structuralist, co-ordinate system of Greek culture and mythology, Marcel Detienne
shows in The Gardens of Adonis how exciting and fun classical scholarship can be. See, Martin Detienne, The
Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology, trans. Janet Lloyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1994.

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of them, if not all, tell us that their avian form came as a kind of punishment, a personal story
gone wrong. According to the Catalogue of Women, Sirens earned their feathers as a result of
their incessant virginity, a behavior that Aphrodite, the goddess of love and their nemesis, could
not bear. After acquiring their feathered wings, they left for the Tyrrhenian Sea and settled on
an island called Anthemoessa.281 In a different version, rewriting the Sirens’ fate centuries later,
Ovid tells us in the first century AD Metamorphoses, that they grew wings so they could search
for Proserpine, Ceres’ daughter, after she disappeared into the Underworld:

The Gods were kind:

ye saw your [Siren Maids] limbs grow yellow, with a growth
of sudden-sprouting feathers; but because
your melodies that gently charm the ear,
besides the glory of your speech, might lose
the blessing, of a tongue, your virgin face
and human voice remained.282

Sirens have always been on the side of oblivion, their existence marked by the word of
death. Chaos has always lurked close to their velvety voices and hideous bodies. The ancient
world, starting from Homer was enthralled by their otherworldly scent, producing endless
versions of Sirens’ histories, transformations and destinies.
Being the symbols of the gates of the Underworld, in Ancient Greece, Sirens not only
perched atop rocky cliffs, waiting for new souls to arrive, but also lamented the deceased, as
their statues decorated tomb stones.283 Holford-Strevens asserts that, being frequently
represented on graves, Sirens ‘constituted a poetic commonplace, being made into mourners
themselves,’ placed even in the Underworld itself, like in Sophocles’ mentioned fragment or
Euripides’s Helen.284 In this play from 412 BC, Helen cries: ‘[w]inged maidens, virgin

281
Holford-Strevens, ‘Sirens in Antiquity,’ 18; Hesiod, Catalogue of Women, fragment #47.
282
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Brookes More (Boston: Cornhill Publishing Co., 1922), 551-557.
283
The Siren from Xanthos is a good example of sirens appearing along with harpies, see Catherine Draycott,
‘Bird-Women on the Harpy Monument from Xanthos, Lycia: Sirens or Harpies?’ in Essays in Classical
Archaeology for Eleni Hatzivassiliou 1977-2007 (Oxford: Stelios Ioannou School for Classical and Byzantine
Studies, 2008), 145-153. A. A. Barb interprets the Siren from Xanthos as a child-steeling Lilith, see A. A. Barb,
‘Antaura. The Mermaid and the Devil’s Grandmother: A Lecture,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 29 (1966): 8.
284
Holord-Strevens, ‘Sirens in Antiquity,’ 19.

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daughters of Earth, the Sirens, may you come to my mourning.’285 At the time, Euripides’
Sirens were at least five centuries old, and in Ovid’s time almost a millennium; they had been
defeated or punished for their insolence. But one thing was constant: whether to call mariners
to the Underworld, to ironically mourn them after they died (the nineteenth century will
playfully exploit this irony), or to lure their souls (Pseudo-Plutarch preferred this option),
Sirens preserved their puissant voices, those enchanting tones throbbing with desolation and
death.286
Never having any allies, the Sirens were essentially creatures of solitude, and the wrath of
gods was their only faithful companion. Male heroes were able to defeat them (which says a
lot about gender roles hidden in the myth), but female goddesses and demigoddesses
encountered the Sirens only in contests. Besides Ulysses and his crew, only the Argonauts were
important enough to be remembered as the survivors of the siren song, thus they represent the
first group of siren conquerors: the male heroes. All of the siren tales are strikingly aural, their
visual potency overruled the narrative only in the Victorian vast and in-depth rewriting of the
myth. As such, the story of Jason, Nestor, Philoctetes and Hercules (to name only a few of
more than eighty-five members of the Argo’s crew) follows the same route of ravishment, ruin,
and vocal ecstasy. In the only surviving Hellenistic epic (the third century BC), Argonautica,
Apollonius Rhodius tells of their heroic encounter with the Sirens on their quest for the Golden
Fleece, one generation before the Trojan war and the events of the Odyssey. We learn again
that Sirens are daughters of a Muse, this time Terpsichore (the Muse of Dance), and that ‘they
were fashioned in part like birds and in part like maidens to behold.’ But Orpheus, famous for
the power of his voice and lyre, ‘rung forth the hasty snatch of a rippling melody so that their
ears might be filled with the sound of his twanging; and the lyre overcame the maidens’ voice.’
One of the shipmates, Butes, jumped overboard nevertheless, almost proving that sirens always
receive their share. But before he arrived to their flowery island Anthemoessa, the one we
already know from the Catalogue of Women, he was rescued by Aphrodite, leaving the Sirens
empty-handed.287 A much later version of the same tale, Argonautica Orphica from the fourth
century AD or later, adds an interesting moment to the plot: defeated by Orpheus’ song, the

285
Euripides, The Complete Greek Drama (Helen), 2 volumes, ed. Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr. (New
York: Random House, 1938), 167-170.
286
‘[T]he power of their music is not inhuman or destructive; as souls depart from this world to the next, so it
seems, and drift uncertainly after death, it creates in them a passionate love for the heavenly and divine, and
forgetfulness of morality; it possesses them and enchants them with its spell, so that in joyfulness they follow the
Sirens and join them in their circuits.’ Plutarch, Plutarch’s Moralia in Fifteen Volumes with an English
Translation by Edwin L. Minar, Jr. (Cambridge, (Mass.): Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann,
1961), 279-281 (745D).
287
Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica, trans. R. C. Seaton (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1912), 892, 894-895.

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Sirens dived into the sea.288 In the beginning was the word of death, but if reflected back,
reproduced, the word could be vanquished and banished into oblivion.
Muses belong to the second group of those proving that sirens can be overcome and
punished: the divine contests. The Greek mythology is full of these, as contests between gods,
mortals and demigods served as moral and historical guidelines. The myth of the Sirens and
the Muses has been retold in a number of sources, namely Pausanias (the second century AD),
Julian the Apostate (the fourth century AD) and Stephanus of Byzantium (the sixth century
AD).

Figure 15 Signed S. Olrik, Musernes Kamp mod Sirenerne (ca. 1900)

Pausanias informs us that the Muses, elsewhere considered to be mothers of the Sirens, were
challenged to a singing contest by the Sirens, foolish enough to offend the gods. Doomed to
defeat, the Sirens were punished for this daring attempt at vocal supremacy. The Muses plucked
the Sirens’ feathers, turning the loot into extravagant accessories and mortifying Sirens by this
mutilation.289 A relief on a sarcophagus from Villa Nero, Rome, dated to the third century AD

288
Martin Litchfiled West, ed., The Orphic Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 25, 32.
289
‘On the market-place of Coroneia I found two remarkable things, an altar of Hermes Epimelius (Keeper of
flocks) and an altar of the winds. A little lower down is a sanctuary of Hera with an ancient image, the work of
Pythodorus of Thebes; in her hand she carries Sirens. For the story goes that the daughters of Achelous were
persuaded by Hera to compete with the Muses in singing. The Muses won, plucked out the Sirens’ feathers (so
they say) and made crowns for themselves out of them’ Pausanias, Description of Greece, trans. W. H. S. Jones
and H. A. Omerod (Cambridge, (Mass.): Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1918),
9.34.3; Julian, Selected Works of Julian the Emperor and Some Pieces of the Sophist Libanus, 2 volumes, trans.
John Duncombe (London: J. Nichols, 1784), volume II, 108; Stephaus of Byzantium, Stephani byzantii
Ethnicorum quae supersunt, ed. August Meineke (Berlin: G. Reimar, 1849).

131
commemorates this event.290 This aggressive story of song and demise will be quite popular in
the nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting. Signed S. Olrik’s (1874-1921) despondent
Musernes Kamp mod Sirenerne (fig. 15) is plunged into an azure, aquatic mermaid palette in
the manner of Edward Burne-Jones’s The Depths of the Sea (1886), chromatically merging (or
confusing) the Sirens’ avian nature with the mermaids’ marine one. Much more disquieting
and malevolent in the choice of colors and strong, rough surfaces, is Rupert Bunny’s (1864-
1947) The Muses Plucking the Wings of the Sirens (ca. 1922) where the Sirens’ pale,
otherworldly bodies provide a sharp contrast to the pinkish flesh and carnal, red hair of the
Muses (fig. 16).
The Muses and the Sirens have moved in tandem since the beginning of the Sirens’ journey.
Both were believed to have the power of voice and the ability to bestow eternal knowledge
upon heroes.

Figure 16 Rupert Bunny, The Muses Plucking the Wings of the Sirens (ca. 1922)

Iliad beseechingly opens with Achilles’ wrath and an invocation of the omniscient Muse:
‘The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus’ son, Achilles [...].’291 And so embarks the European

290
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘Marble sarcophagus with the contest between the Muses and the Sirens,’
no. 10.104.
291
Homer, Iliad with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, 2 volumes (Cambridge, (Mass.): Harvard University
Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1924), 1.1

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literature on its epic journey, and along the way it summons the Muses to reveal what was (‘[...]
who was far the best among them do thou tell me, Muse [...]’292) by using their ‘sweet voices’293
resonant of the Sirens’ seduction. Like the Muses, the Sirens from the Odyssey promise
knowledge and satisfaction with their song that brings rapture:

We know what labours were in ancient day

Wrought in wide Troia, as the gods assigned;
We know from land to land all toils of all mankind.294

Holford-Strevens holds that the Sirens were symbols of ‘the false and the trivial,’ contrasted
to the ‘truthful and serious Muses.’295 Generally, it was hard to mistake these two kinds of
beings one for another, the Sirens being utterly sinister and Muses personifying everything
beauteous and praiseworthy, as Porphyry says in The Life of Pythagoras in the third century
AD:

Of pleasures there were two kinds; one that indulges the bellies and lusts by a
profusion of wealth, which he compared to the murderous songs of the Sirens;
the other kind consists of things honest, just, and necessary to life, which are
just as sweet as the first, without being followed by repentance; and these
pleasures he compared to the harmony of the Muses.296

Nevertheless, occasional equalizing of the two was bound to happen, like in Alcman’s
fragment #14 (‘The Muse crieth aloud, that Siren clear and sweet’).297 One of the rare places,
though, where this merging of Sirens’ and Muses’ attributes is evident, is an obscure passage
from Plato’s Republic that recounts the myth of Er (the myth about the Underworld). Here we
find celestial Sirens that stand on top of the eight spheres that represent stars and planets. They
all revolve around the spindle of Necessity:

292
Ibid., 2.734.
293
Ibid., 1.568.
294
Odyssey, XII, verse 27, 295.
295
Holford-Strevens, ‘Sirens in Antiquity,’ 21.
296
Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras, visited 20 June 2014,
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/porphyry_life_of_pythagoras_02_text.htm.
297
Lyra Greaca, Volume I: Terpander, Alcman, Sappho and Alcaeus, trans. J. M. Edmonds (Cambridge, (Mass.):
Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1922), fragment #14.

133
 And the spindle turned on the knees of Necessity, and up above on each of the
rims of the circles a Siren stood, borne around in its revolution and uttering one
sound, one note, and from all the eight there was the concord of a single
harmony.298

In this passage, the menacing Sirens are closer than ever to the benevolent Muses, and some
critics claim that the myth of Er represents the very dawn of a parallel siren mythography, one
that paints them in benign and propitious shades.299 It would be tempting to search for the roots
of the Victorian virgin-like sirens in this soothing image. Pollard even undertook the task of
distinguishing the Sirens and the Muses once and for all, arguing against Ernst Buschor’s view
that the Sirens were the Muses’ infernal counterparts. He states that their natures are so
radically ‘opposed that is seems misleading to describe one, however loosely, in terms of the
other.’300
Defeated, beaten, plucked or killed by their celestial superiors, the Sirens still held an
unprecedented dominion over their mortal inferiors. They were believed to ‘tear them [mortals]
to pieces,’301 as Pliny the Elder suggests in Historia Naturalis, and their song was an invitation
to an ecstasy that should never be, devastating the minds and souls of sailors and depriving
them of their property, bodies, and, ultimately, of their lives. It might seem surprising that what
we, modern readers, find to be the most familiar aspect of the Sirens – their penetrating sexual
lure – consolidated itself firmly only in the late Middle Ages with the arrival of their fish-tailed,
demonic sisters. But the Sirens’ sexual nature was introduced at least as early as the third
century BC if not earlier, if we are to believe a writer named Heraclitus:

They [sirens] were harlots outstanding in both instrumental music and

sweetness of voice, very beautiful; those who approached them found their
property eaten up. They were said to have birds’ legs because they departed with
speed from those who had lost their money.302

298
Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes (Republic), trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, (Mass.): Harvard University Press;
London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1969), 10: 617 B 4-7.
299
Elena Laura Calogero, ‘“Sweet Alluring Harmony”: Heavenly and Earthly Sirens in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century Literary and Visual Culture,’ in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna
Naroditskaya (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006).
300
Ernst Buschor, Die Musen des Jenseits (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1944); Pollard, ‘Muses and Sirens,’ 60; J. R.
T. Pollard, Seers, Shrines and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution in the Sixth Century B.C. (London: Allen
and Unwin, 1965).
301
Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, trans. John Bostock (London: Taylor and Francis, 1855), 10.70.
302
Cf.Holford-Strevens, ‘Sirens in Antiquity,’ 24.

134
 We find the same theme seven centuries later in Servius’ Commentary on the Aeneid of
Virgil from around 400 AD:

Those whom they enticed with their music they led into shipwreck. But in fact
they were harlots; it was because they reduced passers-by to beggary that the
fiction arose of their causing shipwrecks. Ulysses, by scouring them, brought
them to death.303

Since the dawn of their mythical creation, theirs was the realm of air and water, merging the
fantasies of sexual excitement with deep, dark dreams of dissolution and drowning. These two
aspects went hand in hand and the Sirens’ promises hinged on this will to die, the necessity of
perishing, the desire to encounter the great beyond of water, of matter, of life. Whenever they
spread their nightmarish wings, the wind would die out, calm would ominously creep in on a
hot, sunny, dog-day of the high noon, matter would transform itself, life would turn into death,
solid bodies into putrefying half-liquid cadavers, steady minds into voracious insanity. Their
monstrous, voluptuous bodies and their devouring lustrous voices – their punishment and
reward – persisted for centuries, millennia, surviving wars and nations. As it will be seen, many
of the elements rising from the bottom of the siren history endured until the present day: some
changed, some did not. But some faded away completely, and this book, despite all the
meandering and delaying, aims at this representational death that is more than just a change of
fashion. Once the Sirens were annihilated and silenced, they rose as heralds of a new modernity
to come.

At the Fish-Tail Apocalypse and Beyond

With the Middle Ages and the wide spread of Christianity, the siren myth began meandering
and gaining additional complexity, meaning and confusion. Its structure remained virtually
unchanged: sirens were still luring men to death with their song. But new elements appeared
in their iconography. Mermaids (fish-tailed sirens) from the park-fountains of European

‘[…] quae inlectos suo cantu in naufragia deducebant. secundum veritatem meretrices fuerunt, quae transeuntes
303

quoniam deducebant ad egestatem, his fictae sunt inferre naufragia. has Vlixes contemnendo deduxit ad mortem.’
Maurus Servius Honoratus. In Vergilii carmina comentarii. Servii Grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina
commentarii; recensuerunt Georgius Thilo et Hermannus Hagen, ed. Thilo Georgius (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner,
1881), 5.864; translated by Leofranc Holford-Strevens in Holford-Strevens, ‘Sirens in Antiquity,’ 24.

135
capitals, celluloid tapes and the Starbucks logo and coffee cups, were a late arrival in written
European history. It was quite queer, this beautiful metamorphosis that the sirens’ bodies
slowly underwent in the course of the ‘dark’ centuries. Not many fantastic beings were allowed
to change their corporeal form so profoundly, becoming almost unrecognizable. Sirens came
to the Homeric mind in the shape of a void – two invisible, unison voices, singing the song of
omniscience and desire. In Classical times they grew wings, soared into the sky and mastered
the sweet, irresistible sounds of their instruments. And then, in the Middle Ages, they exuviated
their feathers, as their lower-bodies crystallized into scaly, aquatic, sexless tails, splashing the
water and capturing desire once again. This being said, it is not implied that the classical Sirens
simply changed their feathers for tails. Sirens have not actually transformed into mermaids, but
fought them for the representational space in the Middle Ages.
Mermaids have their own personal history. The term itself came into use only after the battle
between them and their winged sisters was partially over. We know them by this name since
Chaucer noted that ‘mermaydens’ is English for ‘sereyns.’ 304 The story of their beginnings is
far more obscure and veiled than the sirens,’ as they do not surface at the dawn of the European
imagination. For almost a century, authors searched for the earliest representations of human-
fish hybrids, female as well as male, in the old Babylonian culture: the Syrian goddess Atergatis
was known as a ‘fish-goddess,’ and the Babylonian Ea or Oanness was represented as part man
and part fish.305 But, this pursuit for the origins of human-fish hybrid iconography is brimming
with methodological issues and leads inevitably into comparative religion studies at best. These
waters are too far removed from the purposes of this chapter and not directly pertinent to them.
In visual arts, creatures with fish tails have been known since ancient Greece, some of them
in the proper siren context. Half-fish half-women, the monstrous hybrid bodies remained

304
‘Song of mermaydens of the sea; / That, for her singing is so clere, / Though we mermaydens clepe hem here
/ In English, as in our usaunce, / Men clepen hem sereyns in Fraunce.’ Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Romaunt of the
Rose,’ in Geoffrey Chaucer: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. W. W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894),
680-684. See also, L. A. J. R. Huowen, ‘Flattery and the Mermaid in Chaucer’s Nun’ Priest’s Tale,’ in Animals
and the Symbolic in Medieval Art and Literature, ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1997), 77-
92.
305
There is a possibly some truth in this idea, having in mind Martin Bernal’s influential argument about the
Middle Eastern roots of ancient Greek culture, see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical
Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). On the Babylonian origins of mermaids, from the
nineteenth century to the 1960s, see Llewelynn Jewitt, ‘The Mermaid of Legend and of Art,’ The Art Journal
(1875-1887), New Series 6 (1880): 117-118; F. S. Burnell, ‘Ino and Her Veil,’ Folklore 60:1 (1949): 202; Arthur
Waugh, ‘The Folklore of the Merfolk,’ Folklore 71:2 (1960): 73-74; Margaret Robinson, ‘Some Fabulous Beasts,’
Folklore 76:4 (1965): 276; Gwen Benwell and Arthur Waugh, Sea Enchantresses: The Tale of the Mermaid and
Her Kin (London: Folklore Enterprises, Ltd., 1962), 14; Michel Bulteau, Les filles des eaux (Monaco: Éditions
du Rocher, 1997), 7-26; Richard Carrington, Mermaids and Mastodons: A Book of Natural and Unnatural History
(London: Chatto and Windus, Ltd., 1957), 6-8; Boria Sax, ‘The Mermaid and Her Sisters: From Archaic Goddess
to Consumer Society,’ ISLE 7:2 (2000): 44.

136
vehicles for the power of voice. We can see this representational confusion on a bowl from the
third century BC found on the Athenian Agora. On the bowl, Odysseus is shown tied to the
mast of his ship in a trance of the siren song, surrounded by two human-fish beings, along with
figures that Homer A. Thompson identified as Scylla and Charybdis.306 Fish-tailed sirens
appear in a similar context on a lamp from Volubilis from the second century BC, which Michel
Ponsich discussed in his exhaustive study on more than five hundred lamps found in
Mauretania Tingitana.307 Ever since ancient Greece, sirens and mermaids have occasionally
been mistaken for each other, their power over elements of both air and water not equal, but
existent. But what had been sporadic iconographic confusion in the classical world, became a
continuous, enduring reality of the Carolingian Middle Ages.
The first written record of fish-tailed sirens appeared in the seventh century AD with Liber
Monstrorum, an Anglo-Saxon catalogue of marvelous creatures. For the author of this
compendium, sirens

are sea-girls, who deceive sailors with the outstanding beauty of their
appearance and the sweetness of their song, and are most like human beings
from the head to the navel, with the body of a maiden, but have scaly fishes’
tails, with which they always lurk in the sea.308

As we can see, the accent was still on the ‘sweetness of their song,’ but with the introduction
of tails, the ‘outstanding beauty of their appearance’ strengthened. This change, small and
insignificant as it may seem in the seventh century, will gradually advance in anticipation of
the nineteenth century and the annihilation of the sirens’ voices by their bodies.
Like many things ancient, the siren/mermaid iconography was gradually appropriated by
Christian mythography, and sirens throughout the Middle Ages (and later) became a graveyard
of all the earthly sins mortals were accused of. Passages from the Septuagint (Greek Bible) and

306
It is hard, if not impossible, to discern whether the depicted hybrids are mermaids (as Homer A. Thompson
believed in 1948) or tritons (as Susan L. Rotroff believed in 1982). Simpson described the scene as ‘a figured
piece rather more ambitious’ than the rest of the Megarian pottery found on the site. Led by the obvious narrative
of the Odyssey, he remarks that the whole scene is ‘apparently a fantastic contamination of the story of Scylla and
Charybdis with that of the Sirens. See, Homer A. Thompson, ‘The Excavation of the Athenian Agora Twelfth
Season: 1947,’ Hesperia 17:3 (1948): 160-161; Susan L. Rotroff, Hellenistic Pottery: Athenian and Imported
Moldmade Bowls, The Athenian Agora 22 (Princeton: The American School of Classical Studies in Athens, 1982),
67, #190 (catalogue).
307
Michel Ponsich, Les lamps romaines en terre cuite de la Maurétanie Tingitane, Publications du Service des
Antiquité du Maroc 15 (Rabat : Service des Antiquités du Maroc, 1961), 54, #176-177.
308
Andy Orchard, ‘The Liber monstrorum,’ in Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the ‘Beowulf’
Manuscript (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 263.

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the forth-century AD St. Jerome’s Vulgate (Latin Bible) laid the foundation for a meaning of
the siren myth far more malevolent than its ancient predecessors. While the ancient Sirens had
been pernicious and all-knowing, the medieval sirens were straightforwardly diabolical – they
were creatures of sin and the world’s suffering. Isaiah 13.21-22 says in the description of the
destruction of Babylon that ‘[n]ow beasts make their home there,’ in the ruins of the erring
city, ‘and an empty echo is heard in the houses. Sirens have their habitation there and demons
dance.’309 No one could mistake these sirens for Muses anymore, as their nature became
generic, bleak and demonborn. From this moment on, they have no names or parentage; they
are only abstract symbols of everything wrong with the mortal flesh of the world. Their image
has been hollowed, used to describe an ‘empty echo’ of a devastated city. ‘And nettles shall
sprout up in their cities,’ prophesied Isaiah 34.13 in the destruction of Edom by the Lord, ‘and
in the securest places in the land and the hamlet shall be full of sirens and the house shall be
full of sparrows.’310 In biblical texts and the medieval ethics of purity, sirens had no right to be
capitalized any more. They were turned into pure signs of destruction and desolation,
embodying fear and suffering, but most importantly signifying the iniquitous pleasure. ‘But
wild beasts shall rest there,’ St. Jerome’s Vulgate adds, recounting the destruction of Babylon
once again, ‘and the hairy ones shall dance there and owls shall answer one another there, in
the houses thereof and sirens in the temples of pleasure.’311 William J. Travis has sagaciously
observed that from the Greek to Latin translation of the Bible, everything became ‘darker,
eerier, [and] noisier.’ In the Latin version, the ‘empty echo’ of the houses is gone, and the
melancholic cries of owls fill the air instead. He notes that sirens changed too: in the Greek
Bible ‘their existence recalls the desolation of Babylon, but in the Vulgate they desecrate the
very idea of worship.’312 Steering through the medieval sources, Travis makes a powerful
argument about the role of the medieval siren imagery. He concludes that, read in the wider
context of Christian iconography, sirens invoked images of the Apocalypse, their unholy bodies
signifying all the undoing of the world’s order. Being essentially female, sirens embodied the
Original Sin, their sleek lower-bodies becoming more dominant and connected to the body of
the Snake. Sirens became harlots once again, but this time the moral lesson of the narrative
drew on an ever wider context of the Christian mythology. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies,

309
See Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum, ed. Joseph Ziegler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1983), 172f. (Cf. William J. Travis, ‘Of Sirens and Onocentaurs: A Romanesque Apocalypse at Montceaux-
l'Etoile,’ Artibus et Historiae 23:45 (2002): 33).
310
Ibid.
311
See Vetus Latina: die Reste der altlateinische Bibel, vol. 12, part 1 (Esaias), ed Roger Gryson (Beuron: Vetus
Latina Institut, 1987), 9-29, 388-390 (Cf. Travis, ‘Of Sirens and Onocentaurs,’ 59, 20f).
312
Travis, ‘Of Sirens and Onocentaurs,’ 34.

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from the seventh century, stole the description of the sirens from Servius’s Commentary on the
Aeneid almost word for word, but still succeeded in transforming them into creatures of pure
flesh.313 By the twelfth century, the meaning of the sirens expanded from ‘luxuria and voluptas,
to vice, vanity and vainglory, pride and presumption, flattery, hypocrisy, betrayal, sloth, greed,
malice, false happiness, demons, evil portents, and Hell.’314 As centuries went by, sirens kept
attracting more and more sins and negative connotations. Physiologus or Naturalist, written in
the second century AD and translated into numerous languages throughout the medieval period,
played a significant role in the process. Its Latin version came into existence around 600, and,
in the words of Travis, ‘based on scripture, easy to understand, and colorful, the Physiologus
became a medieval bestseller.’315 Depending on the version, sirens were half-birds or half-fish,
generally fish predominating in earlier versions. Physiologus was the ancestor to numerous
bestiaries rampaging through the Middle Ages, introducing, describing and composing natures
and histories of a plethora of fantastic beings that populated the margins of medieval
manuscripts and fringes of the Christian world.316 In a version of Physiologus by Bishop
Theobald, who was believed to have lived in the eleventh century, sirens finally became
beautiful fish-virgins, a melancholic image that was to reign over the nineteenth century.

Those who have seen them will say, that the nature / of them is as follows, /
From the waist upwards they’re shaped in the form / of a beautiful virgin, / What
makes the wonder so great, is from thence / lower down they are fish like.317

Feathered sirens and fish-tailed mermaids had unobtrusively begun their battle in classical
times, but through the Middle Ages the fish-demon prevailed. From the twelfth to the

313
’People imagine three Sirens who were part maidens, part birds, having wings and talons; one of them would
make music with her voice, the second with her flute, and the third with a lyre. They would draw sailors, enticed
by the song, into shipwreck. 31. In truth, however, they were harlots, who, because they would seduce passers-by
into destitution, were imagined as bringing shipwreck upon them. They were said to have had wings and talons
because sexual desire both flies and wounds’ (The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. Stephen A. Barney, W.
J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), XII. iii.30-31, 245)
314
Travis, ‘Of Sirens and Onocentaurs,’ 39-40.
315
Ibid., 36.
316
Already in 1880, Llewellynn Jewitt, a Victorian illustrator, writer and natural scientist, covered a wide range
of Bestiaries and medieval manuscripts describing or representing siren/mermaid images. See, Llewellynn Jewitt,
‘The Mermaid of Legend and of Art,’ The Art Journal (1815-1887), New Series 6 (1880): 232-233. Travis, ‘Of
Sirens and Onocentaurs,’ and Holford-Strevens, ‘Sirens in Antiquity,’ both comment extensively on medieval
sources. My favorite study on medieval fantastic creatures is John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in
Medieval Art and Thought (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000). Umberto Eco in Baudolino (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003) has masterfully transposed the fantastic fringes of the Christian medieval world
(the kingdom of Prester John) into a novel.
317
Theobald, Physiologus, a Metrical Bestiary of Twelve Chapters, trans. Alan Wood Rendell (London: John and
Edward Bumpus, Ltd., 1928), 87.

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fourteenth century, the clash raged in written and visual sources, but as the medieval period
drew to a close, the scaly, voracious virgin-like whores were winning.
Both versions would continue to exist until the present day, dominating different contexts
that emphasized classical or medieval imagery in turns. It is quite interesting to observe how
in the thirteenth century – the period marked by indeterminacy regarding this matter – authors
expressed this shifting notion of sirens’ fantastic, monstrous existence. ‘Syrenas, popularized
in poetic fable, are marine monsters,’ says Augustus Magnus,

whose upper body has the figure of a woman with long pendulous breasts with
which it suckles its young; its face is horrible and it has a mane of long free-
flowing hair; bellow they have eagle’s claws, and above are aquiline wings, and
behind a scaly tail used as a rudder to guide their swimming.318

A number of images echo this description of sirens and mermaids clashing, merging into
one body, a female body with claws, wings and a fish tail, like in the late thirteenth-century
Psalter from Artois (fig. 17) or Brunnetto Latini’s Li livres dou tresor in the century that
followed.319 The artists could not decide what kind of body suits the sirens best, pilling up
centuries of their history onto these images.

318
Albertus Magnus, ‘Man and the Beast: De Animalibus,’ in Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 47,
trans. James J. Scanlan (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 412.
319
Psalter, late thirteenth century England (Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 118, fol. 9r); Brunetto Lattini,
Li livres dou tresor, fourteenth-century France (London: British Library, MS Yates Thompson 19, fol. 50v);
Brunetto Lattini, Li livres dou tresor, fourteenth-century France (St. Petersburg: National Library of Russia, MS
Fr. F. V. III, 4, fol. 47r).

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 Figure 17 Psalter Artois, late 13th century
(Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 118, fol. 9r)

With the advent of the early modern era, the Age of the Encounters began. Boria Sax notes
that the image of the mermaid known to us today emerged in maritime culture with the
expansion of trade at the end of the Middle Ages. Aboard ships, the folklore of cultures from
around the world blended.320 All over the world, seafarers, condemned to months of solitude
and surrounded only by miles of deep, dark, moody aquatic fantasies, began reporting the
sightings of sirens and mermaids on their travels. Still dangerous and cruel, these beings now
populated the uncharted waters of the unknown gloomy sea, their bodies signifying the
unfathomable and the unexplored: the place where no ship has ever sailed to was marked on
the map with words: ‘hic sunt sirenae’ (‘here be sirens’). In 1625, Henry Hudson testified to
the existence of sirens by recounting his voyage to Novaya Zemlya:

This evening (June 15) one of our company, looking overboard, saw a mermaid,
and calling up some of the company to see her, one more of the crew came up,
and by that time she was come close to the ship’s side, looking earnestly on the
men. A little after, a sea came and overturned her. From the navel upward, her
back and breasts were like a woman’s, as that saw her; her body as big as one

320
Sax, ‘Mermaid and Her Sisters,’ 47-48.

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 of us, her skin very white, and long hair hanging down behind, of colour black.
In her going down they saw her tail, which was like tike the tail of a porpoise,
speckled like a mackerel. Their names that saw her were Thomas Hilles and
Robert Rayner.321

Hudson’s description is formulaic of a siren encounter in the modern era, and these
encounters were abundant. Sir Richard Whitebourne, a sea captain of Exmouth in Devon,
reported one in 1620 and published the account in his Discourses and Discovery of New-found-
land.322 In 1610, Captain John Smith encountered a mermaid in the West Indies, with ‘large
eyes too round, finely shaped no […], well-formed ears, rather too long, and her long hair
imparted to her an original character by no manes unattractive.’323 Sirens and mermaids were
always witnessed by someone else, their existence always both second-hand and undeniable at
the same time. Richard Carrington humorously observes that in the seventeenth century the
‘existence of sirens was as firmly established as the existence of shrimps,’ while Celeste
Olalquiaga comments in The Artificial Kingdom that precisely in the age of reason, when one
would expect otherwise, ‘an unprecedented number of mermaid sightings took place on the
European coasts, witnessed and legally certified by highly respected professionals and
community members.’324 Like all fantastic creatures, sirens reflected dominant epistemologies
and construction of knowledge. Their bodies resided between observers, inside words and
sentences, their split hybrid skin invoking fantasies and delineating the humanity itself. But as
the eighteenth century began, sirens and mermaids started their steady descent into zoological
taxonomies or outside of them; one part of their narrative was reduced to natural history, the
other to folklore. François Valentijn, a Dutch colonial chaplain, published his Natural History
of Amboina in 1726. In the book, in the caption underneath the drawing by Samuel Fallours,
the official painter to the Dutch East India Company in 1718, Valintijn describes the siren:

ZEE-WYF: A monster resembling a Siren caught on the coast of Borneo in the

administrative district of Amboina. It was 59 inches long and in proportion as
an eel. It lived on land for four days and seven hours in a barrel filled with water.

321
Cf. Carrington, Mermaids and Mastodons, 9.
322
Richard Whitebourne, A Discourse and Discovery of New-found-land (London: Felix Kingston, 1622), 97-98.
323
Waugh, ‘The Folklore of the Merfolk,’ 80; Horace Beck, Folklore and the Sea (Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 1973), 248; Douglas, Siren Land, 3-4.
324
Carrington, Mermaids and Mastodons, 9; Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of Kitsch
Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 252.

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 From time to time it uttered cries like those of a mouse. Although offered small
fish, mollusks, crabs, crayfish, etc, it would not eat. After its death some excreta,
like that of a cat, was found in its barrel.325

As far as zoological nomenclature and natural history were concerned, the siren myth was
officially dying. Facts mattered now – length, proportion, life span – not lure, voice or grace.
This poor, wretched creature with a voice of a mouse from Valentijn’s record, was so
profoundly different from the Sirens of the Odyssey, or even the demons and harbingers of the
Apocalypse. The siren from Valentijn’s account was so degraded and debased that it died inside
a barrel, helpless, leaving only excrement behind, the final proof of her wretched nature. In
Erik Pontoppidan’s 1755 Natural History of Norway we find a similar, though still fantastic,
story of a merman who spoke Danish fluently and foretold the birth of King Charles IV.
Pontopidan says:

When such fictions are mixed with the history of Mermen, and when that is
represented as a prophet and an orator; when they give the Mermaid a melodious
voice, and tell us that she is a fine singer; one need not wonder that so few
people of sense will give credit to such absurdities; or that they even doubt the
existence of such a creature.326

Lynda Phillis Austern says that the ‘siren’s body and voice were severed by scholars during
the eighteenth century as completely as her literary and natural scientific histories.’ Pontopidan
testifies to this new attitude. Sirens became, Austern continues, ‘silent objects of systematic
inquiry or creatures of the human imagination.’ They were banished to the ‘fields of history,
folklore and the manifold realms of the poetics and the mind.’327
These realms of the poetics and the mind are exactly what we are concerned with in the
book, because the nineteenth century banished sirens even in the deepest recesses of the poetic
and literary imagination. This death was not in vain – it expressed a new Victorian
epistemology and a new Victorian desiring subject.

325
Cf. Carrington, Mermaids and Mastodons, 11.
326
Erik Pontoppidan, The Natural History of Norway (London: A. Linde, 1755), 187; Carrington, Mermaids and
Mastodons, 12.
327
Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘“Teach Me to Heare Mermaids Singing”: Embodiments of (Acoustic) Pleasure and
Danger in the Modern West,’ in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 72.

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 Literature notwithstanding, the Victorian sirens fell even deeper into the silencing abyss that
opened within their monstrous bodies. On the wings of the eighteenth-century natural history
and the nineteenth-century Darwinian evolutionism, sirens were further petrified into grotesque
exhibits intended for mass consumption, entertainment and advertisements. Skeletons and
‘stuffed mermaids’ became an enormous attraction in London and the States, P. T. Barnum’s
famous ‘Fiji Mermaid’ being only one of many.328 Francis Buckland mentions a number of
these exhibits in Curiosities of Natural History published in 1889.329 All of them ended up
being elaborate hoaxes, mostly made of upper parts of monkeys and lower parts of fish. Richard
Carrington explains how a whole little industry of these grotesque silent things existed in Japan,
supplying the British market.330 In this sad commodified and still state, sirens embodied the
‘grotesque design’ we have already discussed. Artificially produced, two or more species were
merged into one another, causing the collapse of the Linnaean classification, and exhibited for
the visual pleasure of the audiences. Sirens were completely tamed by capitalism, consumerism
and industrialism. Sax might be right in saying that the mermaids’ power waned as the ocean
lost its terror.331 The Egyptian Hall at Piccadilly or the White Hart at Spitalfields’ walls and
exhibition chambers were the final resting place of sirens.

*****

In the light of this short exposé on the history of sirens and mermaids, we have to agree that,
in their own respective ways, both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries scientifically
silenced, tamed or killed sirens so profoundly that the image that remained has been one of
benevolence until the present day. Sirens became mere toys, exhibits, objectified on the shelves
or under glass, offering themselves to the gaze of visitors and scientists. This image still
remains with us, for example in the movie Splash! (1984) where we see Daryl Hannah as a
mermaid, literally falling apart in a tank of muddy water, an image reminiscent of the three
centuries old Valentijn’s story. It seems that sirens have been dying for centuries now, the
length of their death reminiscent of the length of their fantastic lives.
Now, on the verge of the Victorian times, the ones that we care about the most in this book,
we hear the melody that all these traits played in the minds of Victorian and post-Victorian

328
‘Fiji Mermaid’ was a very popular mid-nineteenth-century hoax devised by the American entertainer, P. T.
Barnum. It was a ‘mermaid’ skeleton made of fish and monkey skeletons glued together.
329
Francis Buckland, Curiosities of Natural History (New York: Rudd and Carlton, 1859).
330
Carrington, Mermaids and Mastodons, 14-15.
331
Sax, ‘Mermaid and Her Sisters,’ 51.

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artists and writers. The Victorian sirens assumed a role quite specific to the Victorian culture.
Their myth was being rewritten in such peculiar ways that one feels compelled to ask what this
rewriting actually meant to the Victorians. Every monster is a culture waiting to be read, a
palimpsest of cultural fears, dreams and desires, but what characterized the Victorian sirens,
and truly separated them from the rest of their history, is the literal meaning of ‘reading.’ In
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we read about them as frequently as ever. The Victorian
sirens were pushed into the very heart of popular culture: novels and poems and countless
multivolume works. Certainly, sightings of sirens continued, the inquiry into their nature
undying. In 1809, a letter from a certain Mr. William Munro, was published in The Times with
the headline ‘The Mermaid Seen on the Coast of Caithness,’ where Mr. Munro described the
mermaid he had seen as ‘combing its hair.’332 Five years later, York Chronicle wrote that their
‘curiosity has been greatly excited by appearance of a mermaid on th[at] coast.’333 Even today,
YouTube is full of ‘real’ mermaid videos.334 But sirens of the nineteenth-century live mainly
in the realm of the poetic mind and in literature, and it is here that we encounter the real object
of our study: the Victorian male desiring subject. Contrary to the three-millennia-long history
of reading about the sirens’ voice or threat, in the nineteenth century we read about their lives.
The sirens have become the protagonists of their own stories. They suffer in silence, but what
they truly want is something new; something shiny and worth living for; something that
represents the unprecedented fullness of existence; something that constantly keeps receding;
something dreaded and desired at the same time; something that mirrors jouissance promised;
something the male subject might want too – a soul as the signifier of the fullness of death.

Mirrors and Souls of Victorian Sirens

Two characteristics of medieval and Renaissance sirens have been left for this small,
separate sub-chapter, so that their significance could be emphasized. Throughout their long
history, sirens and mermaids have appropriated a number of objects as their symbols, but from
the Middle Ages right up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, their iconography was
inseparable from the fish and the mirror. The depiction of these two objects in medieval and

332
The Times, ‘The Mermaid Seen on the Coast of Caithness,’ (8 September 1809); Carrington, Mermaids and
Mastodons, 3-4.
333
York Chronicle (1 September 1814); A. R. Wright, ‘Mer-Folk in 1814,’ Folklore 40:1 (1929): 87-90.
334
At the link https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mermaid+caught+on+tape, viewed 24 September
2014, the first five hits are ‘Mermaid 3000 Feet Deep Off the Coast of Greenland Mermaid Caught on Film,’ ‘Real
Mermaids Caught on Tape,’ ‘Dog Sees Mermaid Caught on Tape (Amazing Footage!),’ ‘Real Mermaid Caught
on Camera (Seen on Animal Planet),’ and ‘Real Mermaid Attack Caught on Camera! (Insane Home Footage).’

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Renaissance times could be discussed in relation to one another, but that analysis would go
well beyond the scope of this thesis. Since, in medieval Christian iconography, fish was a
symbol of the soul and mirror was a symbol of lies and deceit and/or of the purity of soul, the
connection between these two objects could seem obvious. The middle ages were the times of
sirens and mermaids as soul-catchers, frequently represented holding fish in their hands or
having them inserted between their two tails, if they had them. Most of the examples come
from bestiaries (fig. 6), or other medieval manuscripts.335

Figure 18 Bestiary, 13th century England

(London: British Library, Sloan 3544, fol. 28v)

Victorian sirens are closely connected to the soul narrative and symbolism, but, as we shall
see shortly, in an altogether different fashion. Medieval sirens devour men, hunting their souls
as trophies and food; Victorian sirens desire them, even at the expense of their own
monstrosity.
As far as mirrors are concerned, most of the authors writing on the subject of siren lore agree
that the mirror is the siren’s inseparable traditional iconographic accessory, as the voluminous
medieval and modern material confirms.336 Again, as with the iconography of the fish, most

335
Bestiary, thirteenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, MS Ii. 4. 26, fol. 39r); St.
John’s Manuscript (Cambridge: St. John’s College, MS 61, folio 47); Bestiary, thirteenth-century England
(Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1511, fol. 65v); Bestiary, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England
(Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 88, fol. 21vb), etc.
336
Lao, Sirens, 108-111; Holford-Strevens, ‘Sirens in Antiquity and Middle Ages,’ 36; Carrington, Mermaids and
Mastodons, 5; Sax, ‘Mermaid and Her Sisters,’ 53; Jewitt, ‘Mermaid of Legend and of Art (II),’ 172. Examples
of mermaids with mirrors: Cesare Ripa, ‘Falsita di Amore,’ in Iconologia del Cavaliere (Perugian: Piergiovanni
Constantini, 1765); painting St. Christopher by Jost Aman, second half of the sixteenth century (lower right-hand
corner); Book of Hours, fifteenth-century France (Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 62, fol. 51r); Psalter
Artois, late thirteenth century England (Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 118, fol. 9r); Jan Van Eyk’s
Annunciation (1435) (tiles on the floor); Bestiary, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England (Oxford: Bodleian
Library, MS Douce 266, fol. 56ar); Queen Mary Psalter, fourteenth-century England (London: British Library,
MS Royal 2 B VII fol. 96v); Bestiary, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England (Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS
Douce 6, fol. 4r); Bestiary, fourteenth-century England (Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Buchanan e 18 fol. 60r);

146
medieval examples come from manuscripts like The Book of Hours (fig. 19) or Artois Psalter
(fig. 17), while Renaissance examples come as emblems in books.337 There are also examples
of the already mentioned conflation of sirens and mermaids, but now with mirrors, like in
Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna.338

Figure 19 Book of Hours, France, ca. 1400 France

(Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 62, fol. 51r)

All the authors, unequivocally, or maybe simply uncritically, assume that this tradition has
continued uninterrupted until the present day. Meri Lao believes that mirrors in the siren hand
mean to ‘speculate, in the sense of searching, examining, investigating, sounding, scrutinizing,
meditating […] knowing.’339 Although the nineteenth century could be the right place for this
interpretation, we would not go so far as to claim that it is applicable to the medieval history
and symbolism of mirrors. Taken in a different context, medieval mirrors could be interpreted
as symbols of speculation, scrutiny and knowledge, but in the context of the representation of
sirens, the message appears far more religious and moralizing – the sin of flesh, vanity,
femininity, witchcraft, and the devil.
Sax reads the siren and the mirror as an image that ‘anticipates the self-absorption that is
characteristic of consumer society,’ an opinion close enough to the view of the book, except

Crest of British family Ellis from Lancashire, in Fairbairn’s Book of Crests of the Families of Great Britain and
Ireland, vol. 1 (London, Edinburgh: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1905); Zennon Church, sixteenth-century Cornval, Ireland
(one of the two remaining church bench-ends); St. Lawrence Church, thirteenth-century Ludlow, England
(misericord), the examples go on and on.
337
For example, the emblem ‘Youth,’ in Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentlemen (London: Printed by John
Haviland, 1630)
338
See Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna or a Garden of Heroical Deuises (London: Wa. Dight, 1612), 58.
339
Lao, Sirens, 109.

147
for the fact that mirrors disappear from the siren/mermaid iconography exactly during the
Industrial Revolution and the boom of consumerist society.340 Sure enough, her reading will
prove true for the twentieth-century consumerism. For Austern, the mirror was a symbol of
vanity, having a ‘longstanding association with the female pudenda,’ while Calogero explains
the siren and mirror connection in terms of the ‘sixteenth- and seventeenth-century revival of
equation of sirens with prostitutes.’341
But probably the most famous example of this famous duo comes from Nuremberg Bible
(1483). This image, apart from combining mermaids and mirrors in one biblical scene,
reinforces the story of the sin of siren reflection in the mirror (fig. 20).

Figure 20 Nuremberg Bible, woodcut (1483)

It tells the story of Noah as he embarks on his voyage toward salvation of

human(animal)kind, carrying his family, and two of each animal species onboard. But sirens
are left behind. Sure, they are aquatic monsters, capable of surviving the biblical storm, but the
apocalyptic waters of the obliterating diluvium were more than mere waves and thunder. The
Noah story is about one’s worthiness for salvation, absolution from sin, and starting again with
a clean slate. There is no place for mermaids and their inviting flesh in the new world order,
their vanity and the Original Sin of seduction and femininity emphasized by the mirrors they
are holding. It is not just vanity, though, that keeps the gates of the Ark closed to them, since
peacocks, traditional symbols of vanity, are depicted as allowed to enter (the upper right-hand
corner of the Ark). It must be something else, then: it must be the reflection of their monstrous
skin.

340
Sax, ‘Mermaid and Her Sisters,’ 53.
341
Austern, “Teach me to Heare Mermaides Singing,” 80; Calogero, “Sweet Aluring Harmony,” 152-153. For
prostitutes and mirrors in the Renaissance, see Santore, ‘Tools of Venus.’

148
 Figure 21 P. T. Barnum's Pamphlet for ‘The Fiji Mermaid’ (ca. 1850)

In the nineteenth century, portraits of sirens holding mirrors conspicuously disappear. While
the soul theme has been rewritten, turning sirens from soul-catchers into soul-seekers, mirrors
have entirely vanished, with only a couple of examples left that continued to linger on as
remnants of the medieval and Renaissance tradition.

Figure 22 W. M. Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis (1848-50)

The only examples to be found are P. T. Barnum’s pamphlet for the mid-nineteenth century
attraction The Fiji Mermaid (fig. 21), an illustration from Thackeray’s The History of
Pendennis (1848-50) (fig. 22)342, and his description of mermaids in Vanity Fair:

“They look pretty enough when they sit upon a rock, twanging their harps and
combing their hair, and sing, and beckon to you to come and hold the looking-
glass; but when they sink into their native element depend on it those mermaids
are about no good, and we had best not examine the fiendish marine cannibals,
reveling and feasting on their wretched pickled victims.”343

342
William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis (London: H. Frewds, 1851), 686.
343
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963 [1848]), 617.

149
 Even in Thackeray, mermaids do not hold the mirrors themselves, but they invite victims to
come and hold the mirrors for them.

Figure 23 August Moreau, ‘The Siren’ (ca. 1900)

In the sphere of material culture, there is an unnamed mirror made by the French artist,
August Moreau around 1900, later wrongly dubbed ‘The Siren,’ although it depicts a nymph
with human legs (fig. 23).
Our overall conclusion is that in the age of mirrors, when mirrors could be found at almost
every corner, the monsters that for centuries firmly held onto their mirrors were denied them.
This change is striking, and not even a couple of examples we were able to find reduce the
severity of this iconographic transformation.
Since we are interested in the relationship of various mirror and siren narratives, and their
relevance for the Victorian desiring male subject, this sudden, sweeping change seems pivotal
to the argument of the book. It gives an impetus to the crucial question we are to proceed with,
the one around which all other questions revolve: what does this change mean for the Victorian
concepts of monstrosity, materiality and subjectivity? How do we approach the illusion of
fullness created by the mirror, the monstrosity of sirens and desire of the male Victorian subject
from this point?

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The Victorian Subject’s Monstrous Skin

In this conclusion on the life of the siren myth, all the scattered pieces of the puzzle called
‘Victorian male desiring subject’ will be put together, in order to show that Victorian literature
was one of the places where the subject assumed his monstrous form. The main argument of
the chapter, as well as of the book in general, is that in the age of the mirror’s commodification,
something went amiss at the epistemic level of the production of meaning, and slipped into
language. A void opened inside language, introducing a differential order of meaning in
representation. Seduced by the mirror’s promise, by an illusion of fullness and semiotic
coherence, the subject fell through a signifying rabbit hole, and from that moment on he has
not stopped spiraling down the signifying chain. His eyes were blind to this semiotic maze that
put up walls tall and firm, leading the subject through the corridors of différance, never
allowing him to attain the object of desire that the illusion promised – the wholeness of the self,
the subject’s objet petit a. This pursuit is both compulsory and futile, because the object he has
been searching for has never been there to begin with, the subject falling prey to his own
nightmarish fantasy. In front of the mirror, the subject looked at himself; he gazed into his
exteriorized image and could not look away. At the end of the nineteenth-century, his image
was everywhere, the subject’s externalized corporeal fullness transfixing his eye at every
corner, in every café, in every shop, in every room. If there ever was a perfect embodiment of
the capitalist desire, the mirror was it and conquered this realm.
Since the nineteenth-century, commodities have embodied the capitalist production of
desire, leading the subject through an ever darker maze of symbolic displacement. The
language of commodity holds onto a shady, unsignifiable place in representation, from where
it signals the subject that there is always some new object to have, a new place to see, a new
thing to desire. Entangled into the alienating, enchanting, and acutely desiring nature of the
nineteenth-century capitalism, the Victorian subject stared into this place for too long, reaching
for the tenebrous flame of the inexistence of the desired object. Friedrich Nietzsche
immediately comes to mind: ‘Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not
become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back
into you.’344 Writing these chilling words he might as well have had the commodity or the

344
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 69.

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Victorian subject in mind. The subject appropriated his mirror image, taking it for its own inner
coherence. He fell for this sly illusion of totality, and remained trapped between the reality of
his inner chaos and the fallacy of coherence – split, disjointed, and interminably seduced by
obscurity of the desiring void. He truly stared into an abyss for too long.
The game of appearance and reality brought about by the mirror’s flight into
commodification and ubiquity – where the ‘real’ reality was taken as something whole, pure
and bright, something that transcends the crudeness of materiality, as well as the power and the
incoherence of language – had another important consequence for the subject. From now on,
as a split subject, he produces split ontologies, too. How can an estranged subject produce
anything but an estranged object, a commodity, a thing robbed of its ‘thingness,’ as Heidegger
says. In the heart of the subject dwells a void of the split, a little death, thus nothingness dwells
in the heart of his produced, commodified progeny too.
It was shown how this split subject, the Victorian dreamer, expressed his own inner rift in
the narratives about the very commodity that drew a veil of fantasy over his eyes in the first
place – the mirror. It is worth remembering that when we talk about the split subject as a result
of the mirror’s omnipresence in Victorian culture, we do not assume that the subject had
previously been whole. The fantasy of wholeness appears only as a consequence of the mirror
image; but it is still only a fantasy, a supporting, dreamy web weaved around the missing object.
Its role is that of a script, a scenario that supports circles of desire, all of which revolve around
the objet a – semiotic wholeness. Before the nineteenth-century mirror, there had been other
dreams, other fantasies, as well as other desired objects; before the Victorian age there had
been other splits and other scripts to support desire. But for the Victorian subject, the object a
was within the language itself. The language (langage, structure of representation) of the
Victorian epoch, being both the subject’s creation and the place of the subject’s entrance into
culture, exposes itself as differential and split against the background of the Victorian holistic
fantasy. In the nineteenth century literature, monsters (as embodiments of the differential
organization of language) became words in the sentence of the subject’s existential anxiety and
chaos. Monsters became textual, visual and material bodies of the subject himself.
The illusion of the wholeness of the mirror image, thus, introduced a historically important
objet a – the semiotically coherent Self – or rather a dream that there was a coherent Self on
the other side of materiality, language, and desire. At one level, the Victorian subject was
having a nightmare; he was dreaming of monsters – of vampires and the Frankenstein’s
monster, of golems and mermaids and sirens. The abominations of his dreams were
substantially incoherent, figments of his imagination acquiring hideous forms, split skins and
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shifting bodies. But beneath this outer, phenomenal layer, beneath the veil of fantasy, beneath
this straightforward language of the ‘subject of the statement’ that always lies by telling the
truth, we find a desire for wholeness, for the coherence of the Self, hidden and buried in these
monstrous bodies, in these palimpsests of the historical contingency of language. This desire,
in literature or painting, is not expressed straightforwardly (I desire a cake, so I dream
about/write about/paint eating one), but we can ‘paranoically’ read it off the material we
analyze, and will continue to analyze. It appears as Lacan’s ‘subject of enunciation’ – that
which in an analyzed narrative is not said, what is omitted, barred from sight, like the split,
barred subject himself. It is the language of the unconscious; the very structure of knowledge
in its historical contingency. Thus, since the subject lives and breathes within the supportive,
indispensible dream he will never fully realize (because it is only a dream), he expresses his
desire for a coherent self (that he cannot have) in all the incoherent, fragmented bodies he
manages to imagine, continuously re-enacting his own fall. He expresses his own shattered
Being through monstrous bodies, monumentalizing his existential agony of rupture in their
broken skin.

*****

It is from this perspective that sirens of the Victorian era are to be approached. It is the
book’s aim, and desire, to show that many, if not all of the traits of the split subject that we
have found in the mirror narratives, can be found in siren and mermaid narratives too. This
structural overlap of the languages of monstrosity and the mirror’s commodification, leads to
a conclusion that siren and mermaid bodies of the century hold for us a topology of the male
desiring subject, seduced into a nightmarish fantasy by the reflective surfaces of the Victorian
glass/mirror culture.
Though one would never guess it, judging by the lack of scholarship on Victorian sirens,
literary works starring sirens and mermaids are abundant to say the least. There are famous
pieces that have been discussed extensively, and they appear in almost every survey on sirens
and mermaids written in the second half of the twentieth century. The most famous one,
especially for the generation coming of age watching Disney in the 1990s, is, of course, The
Little Mermaid, by Hans Christian Andersen, written in 1837. Its conception is taken here as
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an artificial starting point for the modernity of sirens, or rather for the historical moment
signaling their crossing from myth into literature, where they began expressing the male
subject. Andersen was Danish, and thus not so far from the Victorian cultural circle. His
enormous popularity in the fin-de-siècle culture, and the first translation of The Little Mermaid
in 1872, puts him in the center of this study.
As a piece of siren literature, The Little Mermaid was a flash of thunder in the blue sky, its
uniqueness unrivalled. It was the first literary work to turn the three-thousand-year old history
of siren representation on its head. Its main character, the Little Mermaid (in Disney’s version
called Ariel, like the air spirit from Shakespeare’s The Tempest) is a young, innocent aquatic
virgin, in love with a human prince and enraptured by the idea of a human soul. Another story
with the same blasphemous crime perpetrated against the traditional siren lore is Undine by
Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué published in 1811, and written with the French folk-tale of
Melusine in mind. Undine is a young, willful nymph and she too is in search of a soul, but her
being a nymph and not a siren makes her inappropriate for our analysis.
Another famous piece of siren literature is Oscar Wilde’s The Fisherman and His Soul.
Published in a book of short stories, A House of Pomegranates, in 1891, Wilde’s story revolves
around the destiny of a fisherman who, in order to be loved by a siren, banishes his soul. The
main protagonist of the story is actually the soul itself, roaming the world in search of its
fullness, an interesting twist on the sirens’ nineteenth-century quest.
The next famous piece, though not as famous as the previous two, is an infrequently read,
atypical short novel by H. G. Wells, The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine, written in 1902.
Wells conjures a mermaid who has come to land to teach men ‘better dreams’ of limitless
actuality. The story has a very strong political substratum (as most of Wells’ fiction). We find
an overwhelming mermaid, a creature existentially both more and less than the limited
existence of man, a creature of the Great Beyond. She belongs to what we consider the last
phase of the modernist siren lore, when sirens became abstract to the point of total
representational emptying. In a way, The Sea Lady anticipates the The Professor and the Siren
by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa from 1957, a short story that, in our view, closes the era of
the modernist Victorian siren fiction. This story was written long after Queen Victoria’s death
in 1901, even long after everything Victorian had been refuted and discarded as sentimentalism
and kitsch. It comes from the period of Victorian revival, but structurally and in terms of the
problems it explores, it continues the Victorian siren tradition. The same applies to a short
parable from the 1920s, written by Franz Kafka, entitled The Silence of the Sirens. All three of
them belong to the nineteenth-century’s closing act or to the Victorian dying throbs, whose
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nature is close to the Victorianism of Walter Benjamin. But once analyzed, their importance
for the Victorian times becomes undeniable, so they are all included in the analysis. If nothing
else, they show that the West essentially continued to live in a post-Victorian age, a time
culturally removed from its etymological source by the length of a four-letter prefix and a
hyphen.
These are the cornerstones of all previous analyses. In the world of siren and mermaid
literature, these titles have been, and still are, pop stars. They have been analyzed for their
melancholic tone, psychoanalytic value, structural inversion of the human and aquatic worlds,
for their dreams. But, all around, underneath, and above them, the Victorian space was teeming
with siren/mermaid poems, stories and novels, and it is our intention to bring at least a couple
of them up to be discussed within this book.345 Henry Carrington’s poem about a desiring and
tormented siren, entitled The Siren, will be of particular importance, as well as The Siren by F.
Anstey (Thomas Anstey Guthrie), The Story of the Siren by E. M. Forster and couple of other
distinctive short siren stories. Many of them are, unfortunately, left out, the textual space being
of an insufficient size to accommodate close readings of all of them properly. Such a fate will
befall The Siren by Thomas Trollope, a three-volume novel that would require a separate book
to analyze it.
The fragments of the subject’s fundamental illusion, his pursuit of transcendental
wholeness, were not just accidental and occasional occurrences, separated by decades of
silence and darkness rising between the most famous siren-related creations of the age. Sirens
and mermaids populated the mindscape of the nineteenth century so densely that it might come
as a surprise that their literary proliferation remained unnoticed. However, for those of us who
read between the lines, pursue voids and blank spaces, and love unuttered ‘paranoid’ truths,
this critical silence becomes the most fertile analytical ground imaginable.
Sirens and mermaids of the nineteenth century arrive on the Victorian stage in a number of
awkward forms, their mixed avian-aquatic nature being only one of them. Their skin is still
pale, and, in some instances, the fatality of their nature and song still persists. But in general,
Victorian sirens break the bonds of the classical and medieval lore, becoming consistently more

345
Only a couple of examples will be mentioned here, in poems: Thomas Moore, ‘The Origin of the Harp,’ in
The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, Complete in One Volume (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1863),
239; William Butler Yeats, ‘The Mermaid,’ in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. I: The Poems (New York:
Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989), 222; Zavarr Wilmshurst, The Siren (San Francisco: unspecified, 1876);
Miss Crumpe, ‘The Siren’s Song,’ The National Magazine 2:2 (1831): 196; H. C. ‘The Piper and Mermaid,’ The
Dublin Penny Journal 2:104 (28 June 1834): 415; Allen Upward, ‘The Mermaid,’ Poetry 2:6 (1913): 195; in
notes, John A. Scott, ‘Patrick Henry and the Siren,’ The Classical Journal 17:4 (1922): 1922; in novels, Grant M.
Overtone, Mermaid (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920); Lilly Dougall, The Mermaid: A Love Story
(New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1985); Thomas A. Trollope, A Siren (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1870).

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and less than their previous nature allowed. It would not be too harsh a judgment to say that in
the nineteenth century sirens were reborn. In short, the most important changes fall into the
following themes:
1. Sirens become protagonists of their own narratives;
2. Sirens lose their mirrors, their representations almost completely divorced from their
centuries-old weapons;
3. Paradoxically, in the face of the previous theme, sirens grow overly visual, their
appearance becoming the focus of their changed powers;
4. Sirens become silenced, or the narrative of their skin deals with the issue of silence in
some way;
5. Ulysses and the Sirens begin shifting their places back and forth, sometimes even in the
same narrative, suggesting that they convey a message of semiotic confusion together, and that
they cannot be separated;
6. In the post-Victorian twentieth century, sirens become transcendental beings, portrayed
by the same language of lack and excess discussed in the context of mirror narratives, only
from the perspective of fullness instead of a lack;
7. Finally, sirens begin expressing, and embark on, a deep search for a transcendental
wholeness, structurally identical to the subject’s search from the mirror narratives.
At the bottom of this overview of modern siren traits a conclusion awaits: sirens became an
expressive vehicle of the Victorian male desiring subject who created them, the one seduced
by the illusion of coherence of his omnipresent mirror image.

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SPIRAL 1: ‘THE LITTLE MERMAID’; OR, SPLIT SKIN FROM THE INSIDE OUT

She knew it was the last night that she would breathe the same air as he, and would look
upon the mighty deep, and the blue starry heavens; an endless night without thought and
without dreams awaited her, who neither had a soul, nor could win one. 346
Hans Christian Andersen

Sirens have shed their mythical veil to reveal the interior of the male Victorian subject. In
the ages past, they had embodied cultural dreams, fears, and religious morals; in the nineteenth
century they embodied desire itself, and their face grew theatrical. Victorian sirens ceased
being just objects of desire, they became desiring subjects themselves. They stopped being a
conditional limit for the understanding of danger, punishment, and sin, and assumed the leading
role in their dismal narratives: they became protagonists of their own stories.
This is the first and the most significant change pertinent to the argument that the Victorian
siren bodies hold for us a topology of the subject, hidden in their scaly or feathered (or neither)
bodies. As the nineteenth century progressed, sirens migrated from the corners of imagination
– from the margins of manuscripts, hidden or less exposed architectural ornaments, from the
fringes of scientific inquiry – into the heart of popular literature. Book pages no longer featured
accounts of heroes’ wayward encounters with sirens in uncharted waters of the moody mother
sea; now the pages became the playground of sirens as the main characters, allowing us to read
about their quests, dreams, and desires. Haraway’s ‘limits of community in Western
imaginations,’ and Butler’s ‘zones of uninhabitability’ collapse, faced with an overwhelming
number of examples where Victorian monsters were positioned as subjects of literary works,
not as the subject’s limits. In this overwhelming buzz of subjectified hideousness, nineteenth-
century literature was swarming with inversed ‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ episodes, where the
reader could not distinguish the huntress from her prey. Leaving Frankenstein’s monster, Lucy
Westenra (or Mina Harker) and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde aside, as the examples too obvious to even
be considered, a couple of examples from siren literature would back up this new emergence
of monstrous subjectivity.
Undine (being a nymph) aside, Hans Christian Andersen introduced this change of
perspective, inventing the Little Mermaid and inviting the reader to identify not with the siren’s

346
Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Mermaid,’ in Faery Tales from Hans Christian Andersen, trans. Mrs. E. Lucas
(London: J. M. Dent, 1910), 19.

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victim, but with this melancholic and melodramatic heroine whose only wish in life was to get
human love and a human soul. In Andersen’s story we find most of the traits characteristic of
modern sirens converging. The younger audiences inculcated with Disney’s sanitized version
of the fairytale could be convinced otherwise, but the original story of The Little Mermaid is
hard, grievous, dramatic and overly abject. The story starts under the sea, in the dark recesses
of the ‘primordial mother’s body,’ as Silla Consoli describes it, where five mermaid sisters,
each a year older that the next, are waiting for their fifteenth birthday to come to be allowed to
go to the surface and witness the glorious world above.347 Their father, the king, is a widower
and the mermaids are raised by their grandmother, a strong-willed figure who teaches them an
important lesson in life: mermaids do not have souls. Instead, they live a long, long life,
spanning almost three hundred years, turning to foam at the end. The only way for a mermaid
to acquire a soul is to marry a human being.

“Man […] have a soul which lives forever, lives after the body has become dust;
it rises through the clear air, up to the shining stars! Just as we rise from the
water to see the land of mortals, so they rise up to unknown beautiful regions
which we shall never see.”348

The youngest mermaid is the prettiest and the most restless one. She has been dreaming of
the surface for too long, and when her time comes she surfaces in the night, only to witness a
storm wrecking a ship having a prince on board, a human the Little Mermaid falls in love with.
Although she is not to get involved in the fates of men, the Little Mermaid rescues the prince,
brings him to the shore, and sings gently to him until he wakes up. But when his eyes open,
she hides from his view and prince never gets to find out about her heroic deed. Desperate, the
Little Mermaid decides to visit a sea-witch’s cave, where she trades her captivating voice for
human legs. In a painful act of splitting of her tail she arrives to the surface as a professedly
human being. But then, she cannot express herself vocally, all her powers leaving her
millennia-old aural nature and moving to her body. ‘With every motion her grace and beauty
became more apparent,’ says the narrator, ‘and her eyes appealed more deeply to the heart than
the songs of the slaves.’349 It is her appearance and not her voice that enchants humans, while
every step she takes feels like knives slashing her feet, the enormous pain being the price of

347
Consoli, Candeur d’un monstre, 77-78.
348
Andersen, ‘Mermaid,’ 10.
349
Ibid., 15.

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her bodily transformation. The Little Mermaid has to suffer if she wants the love of the prince
and a human soul that would grant her the immortality she longs for. Unfortunately, although
the prince grows very fond of her, he never really falls in love with the Little Mermaid, deciding
to marry a princess from another kingdom instead. During the wedding, on a boat far away
from the coast, the Little Mermaid is given the last chance to save herself and undo the
unfortunate mutilation of her fragile body. Her sisters rise from the sea, hairless because they
have sacrificed their beautiful braids for a magic dagger that would help their sister in her
doom. Now all the Little Mermaid has to do is kill the prince with the dagger, and when his
blood splashes her legs, she will turn into a mermaid once again. This being a tale of unrequited
love and sacrifice, the Little Mermaid decides to give up her own life, and her desire for a soul,
so the prince can live. ‘Once more she looked at the prince,’ the storyteller says, ‘with her eyes
already dimmed by death, then dashed overboard and fell, her body dissolving into foam.’ 350
But the tragic story has a moral: the Little Mermaid is rewarded for her sacrifice with ascension
to the celestial realm of daughters of the air, to a world of spirits even higher than the world of
men, where she earns her immortality by bringing smiles to children around the world.
It was necessary to recount this famous story because it has all the elements we are to find
in most of the nineteenth-century siren narratives. Critics have observed that the world down
below mirrors the world above, with fish swimming through the sea like birds flying through
the air, and that there is a plain hierarchy of worlds in the tale which cries out for a structuralist
analysis.351 Our goal here is of a different kind, for we are approaching the tale from the
perspective of the change in the mermaid’s representation that characterizes the Victorian
subject.
It seems that the tale falls into the category of impossible love stories, but the Little Mermaid
also intrinsically embodies the topology of the Victorian male subject, the creator of the story,
whose spasmodic, incoherent self is expressed by the mermaid’s monstrous skin. As in the
mirror narratives from the same century, the subject, epitomized this time by the body of the
mermaid, is in search of wholeness, of crossing the limits and boundaries of materiality and
language. The longing mermaid, being a nineteenth-century male fantasy, expresses the desire
for a corporeal totality, an illusion offered by the ubiquitous mirror reflection and appropriated
as an illusionary core of the self. The story, in its plot and its details, reveals all the traits of the
new modern siren lore, traits characterizing the body of the subject. The mermaid is a mirror-

350
Ibid., 20.
351
For an interesting overview of different readings of The Little Mermaid, see Pil Dahlerup, et al., ‘Splash! Six
Views of “The Little Mermaid,”’ Scandinavian Studies 63: 2 (1991): 140-163.

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less, silent being, her visual nature eclipsing her aural one. She is a sad protagonist of her
poignant story, and the reader is pushed into her perspective, into her body, instead in that of
Ulysses, or another siren/mermaid victim. Now we look at the story from behind the mirror,
gazing inside the mermaid’s selfhood instead. And this selfhood craves wholeness, a
transcendental experience of the human soul, an object a that keeps escaping through all the
material and spiritual transformations she endures.
As a monster, the Mermaid bears a void; there is a blank space inside her, a nothingness that
lures the desire that drives her forward. The human world constantly ‘seem[s] so infinitely
bigger than hers,’ says the narrator, in the same fashion as the human soul seems better than
her long, carefree life undersea.352 Willful as she may seem, she is still slave to a specific
fantasy, to the illusion of an object in front of her that says: ‘This void you are feeling could be
filled, if only you acquired a human soul.’ The soul is her objet a, a dark, empty space of desire
waiting to be touched, attained, possessed and impossible to describe. There is a distressing
love story between the mermaid and the prince, but scratching the surface of the text (the plot
that gives itself to us) we find more existential issues raised by the Little Mermaid’s quest. In
the center of the tale, just as in the mirror narratives we analyzed, there is a jouissance expected,
a promise of pure pleasure beyond desire and the split existence. It is interesting to note that
the same could be said of commodities of the century, the soul becoming the ultimate
commodity that never stops slipping away down the signifying chain of différance. The Little
Mermaid is prepared to endure an otherworldly pain, she is even prepared to renounce her
nature and take human legs, just to get closer to acquiring what she has been dreaming of – that
which she finds again and again in its absence – a void beyond language, beyond signification,
beyond materiality; the Little Mermaid is in search of semiotic coherence and immortality
promised by the breaking of the Law leading to jouissance, promised by the highest commodity
of the age – the soul.
But this final jouissance will never happen, just as it never happened for Alice. In so many
ways, the story of the Little Mermaid distressingly resembles that of Carroll’s favorite heroine.
Both of them are on the path to transformation and they both succumb to the illusion of
wholeness that the mirror of the age promises. Alice and the Little Mermaid both live out their
personal odysseys, following in the footsteps and taking advice from old, powerful women who
know everything about the marvels and dangers of the world. With Circe as a role model, Alice
listens to the Red Queen, while the Little Mermaid has her grandmother and the sea-witch, all

352
Andersen, ‘Mermaid,’ 10.

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of whom are summoned into existence by the Victorian male obsession with grandiose, female,
magical figures and their power of transformation. In both stories, the male subject is hidden
behind a fictional female character, expressing his fragmentary self through a seemingly
innocent narrative of a wandering child/adolescent. But there is an important disparity between
The Little Mermaid and Through the Looking Glass, a difference that strikes us as odd in the
face of their structural similarities: there are no mirrors in the Little Mermaid’s world.
Since the Middle Ages sirens and mermaids have been represented with mirrors (and
combs), mirrors symbolizing their demonlike, insidious, wicked nature. The reflections in the
mirror witnessed their carnal sin that left them outside the Ark, while the world was being
drowned into oblivion. Because of them, sirens were literally beyond redemption, envoys of
the Apocalypse, flesh related to the voracious nature of sex and seduction, demons of the noon-
day heat, huntresses of souls. But the nineteenth century obliterated this connection to the point
of obscurity, and The Little Mermaid stands at the inception of this new siren lore. Now there
is a gap in their representation, an emptiness dwelling where their mirrored images used to be.
This gap is the center of this book: the gap of missing mirrors. It is always there, behind
every narrative that is to be analyzed, not always called upon explicitly, due to its conspicuous
absence (the fact that the mirror is not there). In the age of glass and mirrors; at the time when
mirrors populated every corner of the Victorian world; at the moment when the language of the
subject’s representation was reshaped by them; precisely when this subject, seduced by the
mirror image, began expressing himself in the monstrous siren/mermaid form that had been the
symbol of the mirror’s deception for centuries – sirens lost their mirrors. If nothing else, one
would expect to find mirrors in every monstrous image, in every hideous figure, every siren
narrative. How do we read this change? How do we account for this sudden transformation of
the age-old narrative? The disappearance of mirrors from the representation of sirens is actually
the main trait of the male Victorian desiring subject; it is where the languages of the Victorian
commodity and monstrosity converge. As the nineteenth-century went on, and as mirrors
became more and more present in everyday life, reflecting desire and a haunting strangeness
of the Self, monstrosity became the focal fantasy of the subject, his fierce expression, his prime
vehicle of unconscious speech. In this kind of monstrous universe, where the monster is an
identity worthy of a leading role and not the margins of the subject’s possibility, where the
monster is the subject, sirens became the subject’s mirrors themselves, acquiring all the
characteristics of the mirror’s language. Mirrors themselves disappeared from the
representation; alienated and culturally naturalized, their materiality was absorbed into the
sirens’ split skin. The monstrosity of sirens became the strangeness of the subject’s shattered
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Being, a mirroring surface put in front of the subject’s face uncovering desire and fear; it
became the fabric of his profound dream of the Real beyond the signifying chain, of his sleep
he was never to awake from.
Although the structure of The Little Mermaid perfectly expresses the path of the subject’s
desire for coherence beyond the incongruity of the Victorian representational language, we will
not dwell on it too much, focusing more on the details of the mermaid’s image than on the
overall narrative. The plot that expresses the subject’s search for fullness is characteristic of
many siren/mermaid narratives of the time and we will delve deeper into it in the next chapter,
giving voice to a literary work not written about as extensively as The Little Mermaid.

Silence and Sight

Introducing an insightful idea of deafness as a critical modality, Lennard J. Davis observes

that ‘from the eighteenth century onward, the reading public has increasingly valorized sight
over hearing.’353 This is not a new insight for us, the scopic turn in the visuality of mirrors,
exhibitions and voyeurism already having been touched on in the previous chapters. What is
interesting and important in his observation, though, is that sight overtook the realm of the
voice, reading eclipsing hearing as a modality of narration. Further, Davis concludes that while
blindness has been the primary expression of insight in the West (we just need to remember
Homer), deafness has signified a simple absence of language.354 From this perspective silence
arrives as the outside of language itself, appearing from pauses in speech or in a sentence, from
between words, from empty visual spaces. Turned upside down, silence becomes nothingness
from within the language, nihil that gives meaning to representation itself. Silence as a critical
modality, assumes the role of Derrida’s silent a of différance, the part of meaning that cannot
be read or heard, but which essentially conditions the existence of a continuously postponed
meaning.355 We will approach the silence of sirens from Davis’ perspective. At this point, we
are not interested in scopic regimes of the Victorian culture, leaving this issue for the part on
the visuality of sirens in the Pre-Raphaelite painting. We are interested in the move away from
orality, the absence of speech gaining precedence. If we could agree that the narratological shift

353
Lennard J. Davis, ‘Deafness and Insight: The Deafened Moment as a Critical Modality,’ College English 57:8
(1995): 890.
354
Ibid., 886.
355
Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance,’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982),
5-8.

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pushed sirens into the role of protagonists, the subject’s very own monstrous bodies, we would
like to explore the ways in which the silence of sirens develops the idea further.
After she got her legs, the Little Mermaid is doomed to silence, all her formerly vocal
powers now fleeing into her body, accentuating visual pleasures of the Victorian culture and
making the tale revolve around the mermaid’s corporeal mutilation, and the insufficiency of
her human body. Two main issues here are the lack of voice and visual nature of the Victorian
culture, as two inseparable semiotic moments. To make the argument stronger, we will include
other siren narratives into analysis to show that they all involve substitution of voice by visual
pleasures.
One of the most popular examples – the most straightforward one at least – is the famous
parable by Franc Kafka, The Silence of the Sirens. In the space of just three superb pages of
rewritten siren lore, Kafka managed to capture and immortalize the epistemic shift from vocal
to written knowledge discussed by Davis, the voyeuristic nature of (post)Victorian culture and
the subject’s silenced Being. Ulysses has approached the Sirens, we read in Kafka’s parable,
but this time he had his ears stopped with wax. In this slightly distorted encounter, distorted
from the perspective of the original story, the Sirens have already learned their lesson too: they
have learned that their silence is stronger than their song, and decided not to sing at all.
However, that proves to be insufficient for Ulysses, for in his mind, in his fantasy, he actually
sees their voices nevertheless:

For a fleeting moment he saw their throats rising and falling, their breasts lifting,
their eyes filled with tears, their lips half-part, but believed that these were
accompaniments to the airs which died unheard around him.356

Ulysses has always been a cunning hero, but Kafka’s parable gives us an example of a new,
visual, modern nature of his encounter with the Sirens: what matters here is not some fragile
idea of reality, of truth or objectivity; the appearance of the Sirens’ voices is what matters, the
fantasy that materialized in Ulysses’ mind. We are not able to distinguish the huntresses from
their prey anymore, the Sirens being seduced by Ulysses’ appearance in turn:

Franz Kafka, ‘The Silence of the Sirens,’ in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories & Parables, ed. Nahum Glatzer
356

(New York: Quality Paper Book Club, 1983), 431; my emphasis.

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 [T]hey – lovelier than ever – stretched their necks and turned […] They no
longer had any desire to allure; all they wanted was to hold as long as they could
the radiance that fell from Ulysses’ great eyes.357

The visual nature of the siren story converges with its aural death as well as with the semiotic
confusion that pervades the episode as a whole. The protagonists are confused, the insubstantial
nothingness of appearances becoming the very foundation for the establishment of reality. The
silence of the Sirens’ voices collapses under their power of visuality, and absence as the core
of the story – absence of voice, absence of action – crushes the participants in this floating
theater of shadows. Semiotically merging Ulysses and the Sirens, and merging them into one
and the same subjectivity, seduced by the power of appearances, a form without content
(nothingness, death), Kafka’s parable depicts a modern Victorian subject, devoured by the
power of the signifier. Meanwhile, both Ulysses and the Sirens remain mute, subdued, tamed,
broken.
In The Siren by F. Anstey, published in 1884, a siren is sitting on a rock on a faraway island,
singing to passing ships and bringing them destruction and doom, as usual. But one day, as she
gazes into the distance, she misses a small boat drifting close to the shore. She sees it only as
a man disembarks on the beach, and the Siren decides to let him approach her, because she
feels a strange curiosity to hear his voice, a feeling she has never felt before. Here the inversion
begins. After the man approaches her without going mad, the Siren realizes that ‘it was only
her voice – nothing else, then – that deprived men of their senses.’358 So the man sits on a rock
below and reveals to her what love is: unconditional care for the other as an equal. The Siren
is puzzled by this notion, since she never knew of such a thing as love; but then, she never
knew of death either. The tide claims all the men who perish on her beach, and she never sees
their dead or dying bodies. ‘I did not know,’ she says, ‘I did not mean them to die. And what
can I do? I cannot keep back the sea.’359 If she knew what love was, she would certainly have
to die. So she starts singing to the man at last, weaving her irresistible song around him, as
everything he has ever known fades away from his memory. Her voice ‘[takes] away his power
to speak,’ and as he gazes at her radiant beauty, ‘[h]e wished for nothing better now than to lie
there, following the flashing of her supple hands upon the harp-strings and watching every

357
Ibid.
358
F. Anstey, ‘The Siren,’ in The Black Poodle, and other Tales (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896
[1884]), 172.
359
Ibid., 175.

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change of her fair face.’360 But as the waves begin rising to claim the body of the wretched
man, the Siren notices she cannot part from him, that she wants him forever to stay by her side.
In the final stroke of her song, her voice gives up on her, and she falls silent and in love with
the man she was leading to destruction. She decides that she cannot go on with this loathsome
act, and as the result of her finding love, she jumps into the sea and dies. For a siren, the
experience of love brings only silence, an emptiness that can only be ravenous and annihilating.
The story tries to be a vocal one, but its Victorian nature surfaces in the end. The man cannot
stop looking at the Siren, at every detail of her face. The Siren is thoroughly scrutinized by the
man’s gaze, stripped bare in the act of enchantment. She is seduced by the thought of his voice
at the beginning, but her victim falls silent in the end. Than the tables turn: the Siren falls in
love with her victim, her voice disappearing, as her existence is torn by desire. At the end of
the path, the Siren is promised absolution, a re-appropriation of coherence, but the price is, as
usual, death.
As the last example of the sirens’ vocal deaths, we shall briefly analyze E. M. Forster’s The
Story of the Siren, dating from the same time as Kafka’s The Silence of the Sirens, 1920s. In
The Blue Grotto on the island of Capri, traditionally the ‘Siren Land,’ a ‘magical world apart
from all the commonplaces that are called reality,’ 361 an unknown Sicilian boy is telling a siren
story to a girl whose book he is about to rescue from the water. ‘Have you ever seen her [the
Siren]?’ she asks.

“Often and often.”

“I never.”
“But you have heard her sing!”
He put his coat and said impatiently. “How can she sing under the water?
Who could? She sometimes tries, but nothing comes from her but great
bubbles.”362

The Siren of the story is impossible to hear, all her vocal properties disappearing within her
monstrous body. But the image of her body is ever more dangerous than her voice now. The
Sicilian boy continues the story of his brother Giuseppe who, diving into the big blue for the
pleasure (and money) of British tourists, encountered the Siren, and went mad. ‘We pulled him

360
Ibid., 178.
361
E. M. Forster, The Story of the Siren (Richmond: Leonard & Virginia Wolf at the Hogarth Press, 1920), 7.
362
Ibid., 8.

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into the boat,’ the boy says, ‘and he was so large that he seemed to fill it, and so wet that we
could not dress him. I have never seen a man so wet.’363 How wet a man who dived into the
sea can be? In this siren story, even objective facts like this are exaggerated, being too much
or too little for language to express their fullness. ‘We put him to bed, though he was not ill.
[…] He was too big – like a piece of the sea.’364 Giuseppe went mad and was ostracized from
his village. Having found a girl who was as mad as he, who had the same ‘silent demons,’ he
married her and got a child. ‘They loved each other,’ the boy says, ‘but love is not happiness.
We can all get love. Love is nothing. Love is everywhere since the death of Jesus Christ.’365
Like in so many siren stories, death (as nothingness) and love (as fullness) converge to express
their mutual ambiguity: love is just the other face of death, fullness is just the other face of
nothingness. Song is just the other face of silence. Death and love both transcend the radical
incongruity of language, and sirens and their victims both yearn for this illusionary place,
because they are all subjects now.
Giuseppe’s wife was killed in the end, and he left the village. But an old witch prophesized
that their child would return to the sea and ‘fetch up the Siren into the air and all the world
would see her and hear her sing,’ as she brings the Apocalypse about.366 ‘I do not suppose there
is anyone living now who has seen her,’ concludes the boy.

“There has seldom been more than one in a generation, and never in my life will
there be both a man and a woman from whom that child can be born, who will
fetch up the Siren from the sea, and destroy silence, and save the world! […]
Silence and loneliness cannot last forever. It may be a hundred or a thousand
years, but the sea lasts longer, and she shall come out of it and sing.”367

The siren of this narrative is part of a distinct literary fashion of post-Victorian sirens,
transcendental beings of the beyond that leave men not dead, but in a profound existential crisis.
As such, she is the topic of the last chapter of this part and we shall get back to her shortly. But
there is the prophesy that ‘silence and loneliness cannot last forever’: the world has been
plagued by silence; both sirens and their victims – these inseparable, shifting embodiments of
modern visual pleasures, of alienating human condition and of a split, visually exposed

363
Ibid., 10; my emphasis.
364
Ibid.
365
Ibid., 11.
366
Ibid., 12.
367
Ibid., 14; my emphasis.

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(exhibited) subject – are mute and tamed, lost in a maddening signifying maze of the Victorian
and post-Victorian language. ‘Silence equals death, absence, meaninglessness,’ Davis tells us.
‘Silence becomes the modernist’s answer to words, to narrativity.’368 If this is true, than the
siren body becomes the answer to her silence, and she carries the answer to the silence of the
Victorian subject inside her skin. Time and again, we are seduced into empathizing with sirens’
silent destiny, just so we could be moved into the human skin of their victims. The narrative of
The Story of the Siren silences the Siren’s voice, and accentuates her body as a vehicle of
Victorian scopic regimes. At the time when reflective surfaces invaded the subject’s existence,
sirens lost their mirrors, but their nature, though broken and subdued, became fundamentally
visual, their bodies saturated with voyeuristic pleasures.

Hide that Monstrous Skin

After this brief digression, we come back to the beginning, to the Little Mermaid, her silence
and her disappearing monstrous skin. In The Little Mermaid, although monstrosity assumes the
leading role, the reader almost forgets that he/she is reading about a monster. This is another
characteristic of the new siren lore, or better, of the sirens’ crossing from myth into the poetic
realm of literature. Just like a commodity – an alienated thing, naturalized to the point of its
own cultural imperceptibility – Victorian sirens became exploited as protagonists, while the
incongruity of their representation sank into cultural naturalization. This attitude would
progressively continue into the early twenty-first century. Paradoxically, though, the reader of
the nineteenth-century siren narratives is pushed into the viewpoint of a monster who is (now
we can say ‘who,’ because the monster is a subject) agonizingly aware of her/his own physical
(or emotional) odiousness. Victorian monsters – and at this point we are not talking only about
sirens, but about other creatures of the dark like Dorian Grey or Frankenstein’s monster, too –
are all self-conscious, they understand that they are different, nefarious and ugly, that they do
not belong. Frankenstein’s monster is compelled to roam on the fringes of social space, his
shameful escape leading him to the North Pole; Dorian Gray’s picture is hidden in an attic; the
Little Mermaid pushes her own nature away, hiding it behind human legs. Victorian monsters
have monsters of their own, their hidden skeletons; they shed their skin and appropriate the
other’s image. These monsters appear inconsolably human, slowly burying their monstrosity
under piling layers of humanity. But, actually, monsters are not the ones to have become aware

368
Davis, ‘Deafness and Insight,’ 888.

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of themselves: rather, it is their creators who became aware of their monstrosity. For sirens,
along with their desire for wholeness and their falling prey to the illusion of semiotic coherence,
dwelling somewhere beyond the fathomable world of materiality and language (be it a soul or
death or love or a heart), they loathe and despise their cursed destinies as split subjects,
expressing the Victorian subject, their Creator, to the fullest.
It is interesting, this change in Victorian siren monstrosity that compels the sirens to hide
their monstrous skin. Their repulsiveness has been tamed, and sirens of the age are becoming
sorely aware of the inappropriateness of their skin. The Little Mermaid’s shrewd grandmother
teaches her grandchild the lesson of the times well: ‘That which is your greatest beauty in the
sea, your fish’s tail is thought hideous upon the earth.’369 So the Little Mermaid tries to hide it,
to hide the essence of her aquatic nature and the fierceness of the price she is willing to pay is
excruciating. ‘You have to endure pain for the sake of the finery!’ exclaims the grandmother
in one of her lessons, and she hits the bull’s-eye as far as the Little Mermaid (and the Siren
from our next chapter) is concerned.370 For Victorian sirens nothing is too high a price for
humanity, nothing is as valuable as a human heart or a human soul. This narratological twist in
their destinies leads the reader towards a place in their representation that has never been
explored before in literature. As we browse numerous pages describing sirens’ rising self-
consciousness and self-abjection, we are invited into the very heart of these aquatic monsters,
whatever that heart may be and whatever it may consist of. As the perspective oscillates
between sailors, marines, doomed souls, putrefying bodies and the emotionality of sirens, we
dive deeper into the sirens’ inner lives, into their merriments, obsessions, sadness and, most
often, misery. In the same representational sweep that turned the mirror from a moral and
religious symbol of lies into the language of Victorian desire, the sirens’ diabolic, apocalyptic
nature has been turned into the reflection of the subject’s desired object. Now we see her fears,
we stare into her passionate life, as she tries to hide her nature from our view. There is
something profoundly voyeuristic in this new attitude towards Victorian sirens. In the
nineteenth century, these creatures are exposed, presented to the public in a new fashion,
resembling world fairs and commodity culture once again. In a way, literary sirens have been
dissected and depicted as more solid than their fake, material counterparts from the last chapter
could ever have been. For our eyes and pleasure, their souls (or the lack thereof) have been
delivered to us, their bodies turned inside-out, forcing their monstrosity to flee, to hide from

369
Andersen, ‘Mermaid,’ 11.
370
Ibid., 6.

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our penetrating gaze, behind an ostensible humanity that is bound to be exposed as a fraud.
Victorian sirens moved from the marginal medieval space and Renaissance uncharted waters
into the heart of popular literature, but in this flight our gaze followed them every step of the
way, robbing them of their monstrosity. ‘Surely I have caught all the fish that swim […], or
some thing of horror,’ exclaims Wilde’s Fisherman, as he pulls the heavy fishnet into his boat.
‘But no fish at all was in it nor any monster or thing of horror, but only a little Mermaid lying
fast asleep.’371 There is no horror in the siren body for the Fisherman, only a sleepy, inert,
peaceful Mermaid. Leaving myth and entering literature, sirens became literary expressions of
textual pleasures, fears and dreams of the male Victorian desiring subject. They became words
referring both to his desire for semiotic wholeness and his nightmarish dream, bestowing upon
him, and upon themselves, a hellish fantasy that would last till the present day.

371
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Fisherman and His Soul,’ in A House of Pomegranates (Rockville: Arc Manor, 2008), 49.

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SPIRAL 2: ‘THE SIREN’; OR, THE ANGST OF THE SPLIT

“Yourself shall writhe with every cry,

With every death yourself shall die.” 372
Henry Carrington

The change of perspective, the point of view from which we witness the monstrosity of
sirens, is crucial in a marvelously written poem by Henry Carrington, simply entitled The Siren.
Written in 1898, this siren story structurally resembles The Little Mermaid, as it fits perfectly
into the modern siren literature. It addresses many, if not all, issues raised by this book. We
shall see how a familiar siren narrative, in its very structure, manifests the path of the subject’s
desire, as the subject repeatedly reaches for his objet a only to experience jouissance in the fall.
The poem follows the eponymous Siren in her epic, inner struggle for a gentle and
compassionate heart, a gift that has been allowed to mortals only. Having been previously
denied this glorious thing, not even being aware of its existence (or of the lack of it) the Siren
was spending her immortal days with her two sisters in reckless mirth. Singing to the passing
ships was undeniably in her nature, love and compassion meant nothing, anguish and pain even
less. Drowned bodies and rotting cadavers had been piling up on her faraway shore, but the
sight of them meant little to her, death of men being the very air she breathed. Then one day,
as she was swimming with a triton, the Siren realized that the triton could understand the
animals that swam by their side, so she turned to Jove (Jupiter) to grant her this provoking gift.
The new knowledge of animal speech opened a whole new world to her, one in which she
began longing to know, have, and possess. She learned from the animals she now could
understand, that she was the vilest and the most despised of them all, because, while they
hunted for food, she killed for nothing, not even for joy. Something irreversibly changed inside
of her; a desire for a heart that can feel invaded her immortal peace. She turned to Jove once
again, but Jove was wise and compassionate enough to warn her that the heart of mortals would
bring her excruciating pain and eternal sorrow, a kind of suffering that inevitably leads to
craving death in the end. Though kind and compassionate, she would still have to perform her
task of lethal singing, bodies and shipwrecks would still suffocate her rotten shore. But, in her
resolution, she noticed that now she wanted it even more, so Jove promised her a gentle heart,
but to her future suffering he added a one-time way out: when the Siren could bear the anguish

372
Henry Carrington, The Siren (London: Elliot Stock, 1898), 98.

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no more, she would be allowed to take the heart of stone once again. After her transformation
into a compassionate being was complete, the Siren, being able to feel, fell into a dark abyss
of desperation and agony. For now she empathized with the men she was luring to death, but
she was a slave to her voice, to her own monstrous nature, both killing and morning her victims,
going round in circles unable to stop the endless horror of her own monstrosity. Incapable of
coping with her fate any longer, and repulsed by the peaceful evil with which her sisters
continued performing their deadly task, the Siren fled to an isolated island, where the beginning
of the poem finds her, grieving the rotting fruit of her thralldom, desiring only one thing – to
die.
The poem is dramatic and tragic from its first verse almost to its very last and, like The Little
Mermaid, it is a story of sacrifice and pain. At the very end of the poem, Jove decides that Circe
is going to release Ulysses (who appears only then in the story), and that the Siren must be
tested, so she could prove her worthiness. So Ulysses continues his journey home, passing the
Siren’s two sisters unscathed on the way. In disbelief, or despair, not understanding how it
could happen that a mortal did not succumb to their voices, the two sisters fall from a cliff into
the sea, where they are saved by Neptune and turned into nymphs. The Siren itself is offered
the heart of stone once again, or the gift of death instead. Of course, the Siren realizes that the
lives of innocent men are worthier than her own, so she jumps from a cliff in a final act of
sacrificial desperation. But winged Hermes catches her in the fall and Jove proclaims her queen
of her island, bringing back to life all the men who had fallen prey to the Siren’s song.
Heart-breaking and dramatic, The Siren is, in my view, the most beautiful piece of Victorian
siren literature ever written. The Little Mermaid is overly melancholic and predictable, written
as a fairytale, and as such it succumbs to the vanity of a love story that melts hearts of stone.
Its approach is moralizing and Christian, and in the last instance, it builds upon the medieval
notion of the mermaid as a soul catcher. The Siren, too is a story of love and sacrifice, but it
pushes the narrative of The Little Mermaid to the extreme, delving deep into the realm of desire
and ‘psychical life’ of an individual, thus having a tremendous importance for the
understanding of the male desiring subject. The poem is a most curious combination of the
Homeric siren episode and the modern mermaid plot introduced by Hans Christian Andersen.
As such, as we discuss the inception of the subject’s desire typified by the Siren’s hurting
image, a slightly comparative approach would be useful. We will proceed with a closer reading
of the poem and show that the poem beautifully weaves a net of the objet a, it tells a tale of the
invocation of the subject into/by language/culture; it describes the never-ending path of desire,
on whose nonexistent, illusionary end death (the object of desire) awaits, death that is the very
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nature and echo of all other desired objects. Death is pure void, a dark flame of desire burning
fiercely, and, as with a mirror, if we approach it too openly we risk losing that which we name
ourselves.

Monstrosity of the Subject

The Siren is a poem written for audiences familiar with the classical Homeric narrative, but
at the same time it clearly speaks to its own age. The setting draws heavily upon the Roman
version of the Greek mythology, featuring Neptune and Jupiter, Hermes, Ulysses and Circe,
and the very ‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ episode is constructed so as to explain and expand on the
events in the Odyssey. Although he is mentioned sporadically throughout the poem, we actually
meet Ulysses only in one of the last chapters. By then, the emotionally ruined Siren had already
fled to her isolated island, far in the west. The Siren had earned her poisonous voice as
punishment for assuming she could sing better than the Graces (Muses), and we are also given
a solution to another issue that troubled ancient authors: the Sirens had previously been three,
but due to the events described in the poem, only two of them remained to witness the passing
of Ulysses. For a knowledgeable audience, this is a very shrewd invention, playing both with
the ancient lore and its modern counterpart. In a true Victorian spirit that finds everything
classical sacred, we are invited to revel in the imagination of Henry Carrington, clearly brought
up on classical scholarship. On the other hand, the differences with the Odyssey might be more
than just a pleasant guessing-game for specialists – they might give us more than an outline of
a creative mind. In Carrington’s poetic imagination, the famous companion of the Sirens,
namely Ulysses, has been reduced to a single chapter – one out of thirty-two. The roles have
been reversed: instead of following Ulysses on his epic journey around the Mediterranean Sea,
we follow the Siren on her spiraling journey around a desired object. Instead of being oriented
towards an outside adventure, a physical voyage home, the narrative of The Siren revolves
around the Siren’s inner journey, around her thorny path to the heart of desire. As much as it
struggles to be classical, the poem ends up being devastatingly modern in nature, with the
Victorian take on siren lore being the core of the narrative, transforming the classical myth into
the Siren’s odyssey instead. Though abundant, scenes of voracious shipwrecking are not the
focal point of the plot – the main emphasis pushes us towards the Siren’s crumbling within.
We are beckoned to understand, empathize with and pity her cursed existence, her grief-
stricken life and her intrinsically split self. The Homeric Siren turns into a profoundly Victorian
one, the very reverse of her monstrous nature – she assumes the role of the human subject.
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 The poem goes a long way to establish the candor and sincere mildness of the Siren’s nature,
suppressing her monstrous body as the result. We are told that the Siren’s beauty is beyond
compare: her face, her hair, her lips, her eyes.373 But, the question of whether this beauty hides
hideous monstrosity is what interests the narrator as he paints the Siren’s glittering portrait:

Not so! That form no fraud we find,

No veil by Nature’s freak designed
To hide the foul reality;
The monster ill, that lurks behind!
Her face did not her heart belie;
But 'twas an index of the mind;
Where all its secrets you may know;
Or ‘twas a mirror framed to show
The charms, that in her spirit lie.374

The verse gives us an image of the Siren after her transformation, and if we read the
Victorian siren lore closely we shall find that normalized monstrosity is a prerogative of most
stories. The monster has to abandon its monstrous nature; it has to keep its murderous,
unacceptable features and impulses hidden. Some other analysis could make a clear parallel
between Foucault’s view of the nineteenth century, as the time when normalization of the
subject occurs, and this tendency towards normalization of monstrosity.375 But for us, this
normalization leads straight to humanity that lurks beneath the monstrous skin, straight to the
subject who created the monster, infusing it with his own alienated humanity. As we shall see,
the issue at hand in the poem is our Siren’s trying not to be a monster. Her face reflects her
genuine kindness and empathy, but she carries on performing her fatal task all the same:

She, but the passive instrument.

The slave, that doth his lord's command. […]
The Siren is compelled to sing:
A captive longing to be free.

373
Ibid., 13-14.
374
Ibid., 18.
375
His argument is best developed in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (New York: Vintage Books,
1977), but, see also The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin Books, 2008).

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 And, that her song must ruin be […]376

The Siren is not to blame for her monstrous actions; she is but a thrall, slave to her ‘lord’s
command’: she is a slave to Jove, to the highest power, thus to the Law, to the Symbolic, to
culture (in the same fashion as F. Anstey’s Siren says ‘And what can I do? I cannot keep back
the sea.’377) Other aspects of her figure having been sanitized – her body beautiful and pure,
her gorgeous face reflecting a candid heart and a caring mind – the only monstrous part left is
her ‘poisonous voice,’ that ‘intoxicating balm / That all around, above, beneath, / Through soul
and senses found[s] its way’378 The monstrosity of the Siren has been cornered into this small
part of her existence, but this part, a remnant of her true nature, is exactly the one she cannot
resist. She is still compelled to sing, bound to her monstrous nature. Like a proper creature of
desire, she is swept away by this vocal stream that leaves her in the jaws of fate.
Once again, Victorian monstrosity becomes a vehicle of desire. Bound by the heavenly Law
that does not allow her to cease to sing and that makes her crave one thing over all others, death
establishes itself as that which is beyond the Law, beyond materiality, the place of jouissance
expected. A desired object (heart equals death, as we shall see) had been promised to the Siren,
but this promise was bound to bring pain. As I have already discussed in the Exhausted at the
Lake’s Shore chapter, there is no jouissance without a Law to be broken, without a limit to be
transgressed. In the same fashion, there is no abject without a ‘border that has encroached upon
everything,’379 without the shifting notion of the beyond promised. Going back to the prologue
of the book, we see more clearly that this poem corresponds well with Ulysses’ desire, with his
unfathomable wish to, against all warnings, indeed exactly because of them, touch the dark
flame of desire and encounter death itself.

The Heart as Commodity

As the subject of the poem, the Siren sets off on her dim, consuming inner path. The
approach the poem takes on desire, as well as the language and expressions used to describe it,

376
Carrington, Siren, 18, 20.
377
F. Anstey, ‘The Siren,’ in The Black Poodle, and other Tales (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896
[1884]), 175.
378
The phrase ‘poisonous voice’, or the ‘poisonous nature’ of the Siren’s singing is a constant throughout the
poem (pages, 9, 19, 21 etc); 2.
379
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 4.

174
are so curiously Lacanian, that if we had not known that the fate of this Siren was originating
in the late nineteenth century, we would have placed it into the Lacanian times. On the other
hand, the similarity with the psychoanalytic notion of desire shows, once again, Lacan’s
profoundly Victorian imagination, the one he inherited from Freud. From the very start of the
poem, even before we are introduced to the Siren’s sable journey that led to her miserable state,
we face a subject ravished by an inner split. The Siren is perched on a rock as she gazes into
the distance, fearing that another ship might come and compel her to destroy it by her
irresistible singing, and we feel that the state of her existence is intolerable, that she explicitly
has only one wish – to die.

When she at last may sink to rest,

All pains and wrongs and woes forgot.
Upon the earth, her mother’s breast,
Or in the ocean’s stilly deep.
Where motion, sound, and sight are not,
Find that unbroken stilly sleep.
The happy envied mortal lot.
The only boon she asks; – to die.380

She feels torn, split inside between the Law that forces her to kill, and her kind heart that
rejects the aggressiveness of destruction. But even more, she is torn by her inability to attain
absolution for her deeds; she is torn by the impossibility to reach the nothingness of fullness
that once was her existence. The Siren is in a desperate need of stillness, of silence, of the gift
bestowed upon mortals – she is in a desperate need of death. There is a Promised Land: beyond
materiality, beyond sound and motion. It is in the ‘ocean’s stilly deep, where motion, sound,
and sight are not’; it is the safe place on the mother’s breast; it is where mortals go when
everything is over and done, and they are allowed a totality of existence – a darkness that sooths
‘all pains and wrongs and woes,’ an emptiness that promises oblivion. She wants it, she needs
it and envies mortals for it, and she desires it – death.
How did it come to this? How did the Siren become insufferably tormented by the specters
of her murderous deeds? Before the fateful events described in the summary took place, before

380
Carrington, Siren, 23.

175
she understood animals and came to the realization of her lack, the Siren was semiotically
whole. There were no waves in her soul, no cracks in her selfhood. ‘She felt her life,’ the
narrator says, ‘[w]ithout a want, without a pang.’381 She never knew what loving, hating or
desiring meant. Incapable of any inner motion aside from a ‘reckless joy’ that has been
established in the poem as wholeness of her existence ‘performed in mirth and peace,’ 382 the
Siren had a direct access to others’ objet a, she was the objet a, thus she was a perfect objet a
for others, for men unfortunate enough to stumble upon her faraway shore. She could not desire
herself, thus everyone desired her.

Her beauty sank into the heart.

And stole the heart away, it left.
Once seen, instead, ne’er to depart.
A hunger, thirst, a longing void,
A craving never satisfied:
The captive soul, by love subdued,
Of all resistance was bereft;
And thus, the charms her singing wrought
Were by her loveliness renewed;
Which, though but for a moment viewed,
Was ever loved, and ever sought.383

The Siren of the poem, the honeyed, seductive voice and face of the ‘pleasure in pain,’ was
a wholeness incarnate, the subject’s fantasy of coherence prior to invocation into language, into
culture, before the appropriation of his external coherence that would imprison the subject
inside his split ego forever. She was death personified, the creature of the Real: for her victims
she was what haunted their minds, souls and Beings – their own lack, their own objet petit a.
Then the word arrives: the enticing, shattering word of death that will crush the Siren’s
‘reckless’ wholeness and introduce her as the subject to her lack. Taken over by curiosity, like

381
Ibid., 80.
382
Ibid., 24.
383
Ibid., 15-16; my emphasis. Her voice and her face (we are in the modern siren narrative after all, thus the visual
aspect must come to the fore), could easily be read as Lacanian partial objects, embodiments of the fetishistic
absence – gaze and voice. Freud establishes four partial objects in his psychoanalytic framework: mouth, breasts,
penis and anus. Lacan adds voice and gaze. Slavoj Žižek goes further adding smell to the list. The object a is
characterized by the absence of its presence and by establishing what the subject cannot possibly attain. The Siren
has direct access to objet a – the wholeness of language – thus she is what her victims’ libidinal lives revolve
around.

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a toddler in front of a mirror, the Siren asks the highest power (Jove) to grant her the knowledge
of the animal tongue. The summoning of the subject into culture begins: the moment she
understands the language around her, the Siren hears the animals talk of something precious,
bright and worthy; from them she learns that ‘she lives for ever, dispossessed / Of all most
joyous, brightest, best / Among the gifts that fortune deals’; she lives without a heart, so she
begins desiring it.384 The circle of wanting is open and the Siren will never be the same again.

That much she longed to know, to feel,

What could that strange possession be,
Which all the forms of life reveal
As height of all felicity.
True, she herself no guilt could own,
Nor want, nor lack; yet, all the same,
Compassion like she not, not blame […]
And long this thought possessed her mind,
And with desire strong and strange,
She more and more became inclined
To claim of Jove the promised change.385

It is interesting to see how slowly desire creeps on the Siren. She is not consumed by it
immediately in an inextinguishable fire that burns flesh and blazes bones into dust. She is
introduced into the Symbolic by the power of language, of the animal tongue; the understanding
of the world around her is revealed to her, a landscape that we call culture. A crack opens
within her, and she cannot fathom this ‘desire strong and strange.’ In the above passage we see
that previously she has not been able to understand want nor lack, wanting and lacking taken
as two sides of the same coin, same as the above opposition between compassion and blame,
one leading to another in a game of desire. The moment the game began, an eternal
displacement of the language took place, a substitution of one object of desire for another. ‘If
I entreat thee to resume,’ prays the Siren to Jove the Father,

That former gift, and one bestow,

384
Ibid., 86.
385
Ibid., 87; my emphasis.

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 Which all thy creatures here below,
Whose speech thou gavest me to know,
Have made me long for – in its room.386

The knowledge of animal language is not enough anymore, as nothing is ever enough where
objects of desire are concerned. There is something better this time, a shiny thing everyone
(animals) is talking about, an elevated substitution for the last gift given. It is almost distressing
to read how the inner life of this modern Siren develops in a fashion familiar to ‘everyone who
has entered a supermarket or been exposed to the manipulation of an advertisement,’ as
Agamben ironically says.387 The narrative of the poem revolves around the heart, death and
desire – and the heart, appears as just another commodity, just another facet of the already
mentioned commodified soul, to be asked for, given, taken, or otherwise acquired. Thus Siren
asks for a gentle heart, she wants to feel and she wants to know. The object of desire moves
away from speech to the heart, which

Is the best boon that from on high,

Thy bounty to creation deals;
A heart that pities, loves, and feels.388

The heart is the shiny thing that lures desire; it is the ‘it’ of the moment. It is better than the
previous ‘it,’ better than the ability to understand animals. As much as Carrington would have
liked it to be classical in theme and structure, The Siren consistently shows an essentially
modern, consumerist nature of its narrative.

Warning of Death as Jouissance Expected

At this point in the narrative the poem structurally converges again with its classical role
model. In fact, at this point it merges with all the texts on sirens and mirrors we have analyzed,
showing once again that the structure of the mirror narrative persists at the heart of the modern

386
Ibid., 89.
387
Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis and London: Minneapolis
University Press, 1993), 38.
388
Carrington, Siren, 90.

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siren narratology. As it was in the case of Ulysses, Alice and the Little Mermaid, a moment of
warning comes. This moment is crucial for them all, because under the surface of praise-worthy
bravery (Ulysses), curiosity (Alice), and sacrifice (the Little Mermaid), a profound desire for
an utter dissolution of selfhood, devastation of Being, and transcendence of the limits of
language is hidden. In a word, the moment carries in its pregnant womb a dream of escaping
the semiotic incoherence, of exiting the maze of signification, of awakening and reaching out
for the absolute – it holds on to the Victorian fantasy of the beyond. On her journey towards
becoming a chess-piece, Alice was reaching out for a material transgression leading to the
beyond of the materiality promised by the mirror. In her departure from the sea, the Little
Mermaid was reaching out for a spiritual and bodily transgression leading to the beyond of her
hideous body and soulless being. The Siren, being an authorial creation and expressing the self
of the author in question, reflects the same desire to transcend existence that we have seen in
the analysis of Ulysses and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse in the prologue. They both
embody a subject who, seemingly against all odds, decides to ‘sleep with the woman of his
dreams but be hanged afterwards.’ But only apparently, I would argue. The transgression the
Siren and Ulysses are both rushing to is a transgression of the boundaries of life itself, an abject
desire to reach the desired object that in Victorian culture stands behind all desired objects –
death. Being of an impossible nature and essentially nonexistent, always found again only as
an absence of the object desired, every objet a is in its essence a death epitomized – nothingness
without a beginning and an end, the Real beyond every reality, ex nihilo that gives birth to life
itself. When I say death, I do not necessarily mean the physical death (as death of the body),
but what Adrian Johnston calls ‘psychical death’ as death of desire, as stillness of meaning,
pure enjoyment beyond language. At least since the nineteenth century, every desired object
has always relied on the realm of death as a pure signifier – a signifier without a signified,
without Being. Every commodity ever produced has been a small death incarnated, carrying an
impossible unsignifiable void that lured desire ever forward, ever in circles, promising fullness
at the end, promising a jouissance pure as death itself.
Every death needs a prophet, though, a benefactor and a limit setter combined. Otherwise,
there is no expectation; the subject does not know that there is a jouissance waiting for him on
the other side. Alice was warned by the Red Queen of all the ordeals, hardships and sufferings
she would endure (funny as they may seem, veiled as an ostensibly children’s narrative of
Through the Looking Glass). The Little Mermaid had the witch, a monstrous figure woven out
of Victorian male misogynist fear. Ulysses had Circe, another witch-whore, a figure

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representing dangerous female sexuality, promising death to those who do not follow her
advice. Our Siren has Jove, and his warning, or should I say his ‘promise’ is as follows:

‘Tis doomed by fate that you must sing,

And doomed by fate you must bring
Ruin, and death, on all that hear; […]
But soon as by this heavenly guest,
This loving, melting human heart,
Your bosom’s threshold shall be crossed, […]
Then shall those other guests depart,
That now within your bosom throng –
Laughter and mirth, and piece and joy,
The careless, jocund company […]
But every note [of thy song] shall wound you ear,
And shall hate you late-loved song,
And feel its witching powers pierce,
The soft kind heart for which you long. […]
Yourself shall writhe with every cry,
With every death yourself shall die. […]
Anguish unheard of, and unknown,
Shall so consume your life with grief,
That you shall supplicate for death:
To sleep the earth or waves beneath,
As sole succor and relief,
From terrors that your soul appal.
Ask death with eager vehemence,
With longing, craving more intense
Than you can e’ver imagine now.389

The Siren has been warned, though this warning comes as a long promise of pain, anguish
and misery. It was necessary to quote this long passage, so that the reader becomes aware of
how intensely disturbing is the warning/promise given to the Siren. I have quoted only the

389
Ibid., 94-99.

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smallest piece of it, the horrendous promise stretching through two whole chapters! Compared
to this, the price the Little Mermaid pays seems ridiculously naïve – her loss of voice and
bleeding feet (along with possible death in the end), appear almost benign comparing to this
promise of an abiding infernal agony. The Little Mermaid at least had a chance at winning the
prince and the soul; Ulysses at least had a weapon – the wax, and mast and cords. But for the
Siren the price is not only death; there is no advice for her, no tools of salvation. Her destiny
has been promised to her clearly from the start: ‘Yourself shall writhe with every cry / With
every death yourself shall die.’ The price of a heart is eternal damnation, searing pain and an
endless fall. Faced with this choice, we would have thought that the Siren would side with the
Kantian perspective, at least: no being would choose enjoyment if promised not death, but
perennial horror afterwards. Thus the answer that the Siren gives to Jove, becomes important.
‘The words, the danger, you disclose,’ she says,

Increase, not lessen my desire:

An impulse that I strive in vain
Myself to fathom, or explain,
Such as I ne’er have felt before,
Makes me all future chance disdain,
This unknown region to explore:
This craving fills and rules my soul,
And brooks not reason or control.390

Desire works in roundabout ways, as I have discussed in the chapter on the language of
excess in mirror narratives; it does not strictly follow historically contingent rules of rationality
though it follows culturally contingent objects of desire. Alice does not go back home through
the mirror right away. What all of the above mentioned characters have in common is that they
have all been warned, and that every single one of them decided to pay the price. Even more,
desire begins consuming them from the moment the warning is uttered, the warning itself
becoming a spark adding flames to the fire already burning in the void within, waiting to be
filled. They all follow their objet a towards the promised jouissance, a pure enjoyment beyond
the limits of materiality, body, language, life, existence. They all crave the nihil where it all
began, and the jouissance of transgression gets pushed to the extreme and explicitly framed in

390
Ibid., 102; my emphasis.

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the poem we are analyzing. Enjoyment does not have to be pleasant; jouissance can be pleasure
in pain. But it has to be promised – a line has to be drawn somewhere, so that the subject can
be seduced by the fantasy of crossing it. This line, the promise made, signals an emotional
overflow, a semiotic surplus; it lures with images of purgatorial ecstasy, transcendence worthy
of life itself. The fiercer the price, the more the Siren wants it: ‘The words, the danger you
disclose, increase, not lessen my desire,’ she says, as her monstrosity is fading away. The
monster is seduced by the promise of death itself, suppressing its abject nature and bringing
out, through its doomed monstrous skin, the male Victorian subject in its stead.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, what is desired when a demand is made to another is, in its
essence, a cry for love. ‘I love you,’ says Lacan, ‘but, because inexplicably I love in you
something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you.’391 This desire for something
more in a person, more in a thing, signifies the absence of the desired object. What I love in
you is not something you have, but something I find in you and recognize as my own lack.
Taking this symbolic absence further, one could say that every desire is a cry for death, driven
by the impulse of nothingness that can be acted upon, but it cannot be satisfied, it cannot be
fulfilled. We could say that every desire, as a reaching out for this emptiness, is ecstasy in itself,
a little death, une petite mort. In the image of a siren, especially a Victorian siren, epitomized
by our torn heroine, is there a difference between love and death? They both merge with each
other, just as the huntress and her prey merge in this extraordinary, (but historically
conditioned), inversion of the plot of ‘Ulysses and the Sirens.’ The mirror, the Victorian symbol
of desire, structurally sharing its narrative with that of monstrosity, stands between the subject
and his Victorian monstrous face, merging them into an epiphany of jouissance waiting on the
other side of the subject’s monstrous nature.
The Fall, and What Happens After

The last episode of the Siren’s inner journey arrives with the Fall. As the Siren begins to
understand animals, as the crack opens within her allowing desire to appear, the signifying
chain moves on, in an everlasting substitution of desired objects. Never will an object be
enough, though, because the fundamental dream that supports desire is one of pure wholeness
delivered only in death. As long as there is a subject who desires, as long as there is a desire
which, along its path, constitutes the subject, satisfaction is bound to be postponed, always

391
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
1963-1964, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 268.

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introducing new objects to the game. The poem we are analyzing presents us with this scenario,
making explicit the mechanics of longing. Since it is unattainable, reaching out for the objet a
inevitably leads to the fall of the subject, to the place where the subject falls short of jouissance
expected, of the ecstasy mythically promised by the Prophet of Death. Instead, the subject
experiences jouissance obtained, an extreme emotional overflow barely within the limits of the
Law, at the gates of the Purgatory, excessive enough to allow the substitution of objects, but
insufficient enough to bring a semiotic resolution of death to the split subject.
In the prologue I called this void, this death in a desired object and in the subject himself, a
dark flame of desire burning fiercely. I painted it in somber, monstrous colors because of a
strong belief that this unsignifiable part of the self is the very core of the subject’s existence as
well as of his modern Victorian monstrous skin. Desire lures the subject to approach it, to look
at its ebony, blazing heart, but since that heart is present only as its own absence, as
nothingness, the subject cannot actually arrive at the point of encounter. The subject always
misses the appointment with the Real. An encounter not missed would be the end of the
subject’s ‘psychic life,’ as Adrian Johnston says; it would mean Alice coming straight back
through the mirror home; it would mean Ulysses breaking the ropes and dying at the Sirens’
shore or at the bottom of the sea; it would mean the Little Mermaid acquiring an immortal soul.
Finally, it would mean the Siren ceasing to exist.
Is that what happens to our wretched heroine? Does she succeed in reaching death? At the
end of her libidinal existence the Siren would have to die, she would have to actually see and
touch the flame of her desire. Is that what happens in our story? Almost. In her search for
wholeness, for silence, stillness and peace, the Siren approaches the limit of existence, of life
itself. After the promise and her acceptance of the price, the transformation begins as an
aggressive experience of the fall. We have seen the same scenario in Through the Looking
Glass, with things going berserk in a mad semiotic haze of the final dinner, and Alice crashing
things and falling short of her goal, falling short of a complete material transgression. We also
saw it in The Little Mermaid, with the eponymous heroine jumping overboard and dissolving
– turning into foam, just so she could ascend once more, falling short of her spiritual
transgression, a soul.
The Siren goes through the same, agonizing, excessive experience, worthy of an ecstatic fall
of the subject. She is ready to receive her gift, the thing that is the momentary ‘it’ (a gentle
heart) embodying her objet a (death). She is put to sleep by Jove, so she could survive the
aggression of the transformation, and first to visit her are Furies, sinister creatures of Hades

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whose task is to suck out all the poison from her stony heart. The black flame of desire
approaches:

From Pluto’s realms of ghastly gloom,

From the black land of pain and death; […]
Bade the fell snake-haired sisters come
Nor dare the Furies to delay.392

The following scene, in which the Siren is transformed into a modern diva worthy of our
sympathy and pity, is a horrifying experience of bitterness and pain. The Furies approach the
Siren with their ‘icy touch’ and they press their ‘deadly lips’ on the Siren’s pale face. ‘Terror
and anguish [are] such,’ the narrator says, that ‘her soul amazed [is] seek[ing] to fly.’393 The
Furies lay their ‘cold hands,’ on the Siren’s chest, and

[W]hile each shuddering fibre quakes,

With threat’ning hiss and livid fold,
Entwine and mix the Furies’ snakes,
Amid her locks of tangled gold.394

The Siren’s soul is attempting to flee, the experience of the transfer being too much even
for her immortal body. She is covered in the Furies’ snake hair, the drama of the scene rising
in an agonizing crescendo. In the apogee of ecstasy, her beautiful body is tainted; her golden
locks that covered her lower part like a fish tail are full of snakes, as the Furies hiss and her
body quakes. The Siren’s Being is literally dying away, ‘[f]rom her soft cheeks, in horror sped,
[t]he blood, and all her colour fled.’395 Her body is losing its natural properties, turning into
stone, into a monstrous nothingness of inanimate matter, reaching out for the other side of life
itself. At the gates of Hades, the siren’s natural habitat reserved for human victims since time
immemorial, the Siren is on the road to death, the objet a upon her reach. Death is encroaching
on her:

392
Carrington, Siren, 106.
393
Ibid., 107.
394
Ibid., 108.
395
Ibid.

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 Her own [eyes], then shrinking ‘neath the sway,
Appeared to die, to fade away,
Burnt out to darkness by dismay;
Then closed again, and all had said,
So white, so cold, the maid was dead. […]
When these Tartarean forms had left
The Siren, as of life bereft,
She lay, pale, cold, and motionless;
A marble statue, you had said,
To represent some beauteous maid,
Who died of terror and distress.396

It may seem that the Siren finally arrived at the end of her path, that the search for the objet
a is over; she has found wholeness again, her body turning into stone, into a ‘marble statue,’
the jouissance experienced being pure, leaving only an empty shell behind, ‘pale, cold, and
motionless,’ empty as death itself. But this, of course, cannot be. After Furies had departed,
love, pity and compassion were poured into her heart by Graces, restoring the Siren back to
life, and instilling the void, the split into her once again. What appeared to be an end, what
appeared to be the jouissance promised to her, was only the Siren’s fall, an experience of
jouissance obtained, an extreme emotional overflow at the limits of the Law, at the gates of the
beyond. Before the fall – desire; after the fall – desire again; an indestructible circle of objects
lining one after another, a never-ending chain of signification that is the alpha and omega of
desire never ceasing to exist and to instill the différance into the heart of the subject’s split.
The Siren came a long way on her inner odyssey, and at the end of her long journey there is
only the beginning to be rediscovered – the infinite circle of horror of alluring nothingness. She
wanted the ability of animal speech, and then she craved a gentle heart. The poem starts with
the Siren desiring death, desiring absolution, a way out, and it returns to the same place of
sorrow and misery, reproducing the narrative structure of the Odyssey, along with the libidinal
structure of the Ulysses’ desire. After the split, after she has received a gentle heart, she moves
to an island in the far West, in the land of death, where tormented souls find their final resting
place of peaceful wholeness. Even space itself betokens the Siren’s desire for death. Far in the
West, in this Land of the Dead, we see the Siren sitting on a rock, mourning the devastated and

396
Ibid., 109-111.

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decaying bodies of dead and dying men scattered across the landscape that seems to be her
whole world. Her nature is fundamentally abject, bound to her monstrous voice, unable to attain
what she desires the most.
At the end of the poem and of our analysis, we turn briefly to the last scene: the Siren jumps
into the sea, but is saved by Hermes from her fall, and restored as a queen to her island. The
moral of the story follows: only an external higher power can bestow absolution; the subject is
mercilessly immersed in the culture that shapes his libidinal existence, and is incapable of
making the transition alone. After the warning, after the promise of death, the only thing the
subject is capable of is the jouissance obtained, an ecstasy of the fall from a cliff into the sea,
right into the embrace of his own dream that does not allow him to awake from the libidinal
circle. If not reached and saved by gods, by the winged Hermes or the almighty Jove, without
a deus ex machina the sea envelops him, lulling him into sleep once again, turning the
jouissance obtained into just another turn of the deathless circle of desire. The sleeping subject,
the Victorian dreamer, be it a Ulysses or a Siren, dreams his dream of transcendence, unaware
of the agonizing circles, time and again thinking he has been saved.

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SPIRAL 3: ‘THE SEA LADY’; OR, THE OTHER SIREN

“It is illusion,” he said. “It is a sort of glamour. After all. Look at it squarely. What is she?
What can she give you? She promises you vague somethings… She is a snare, she is a
deception. She is the beautiful mask –” He hesitated. 397
H. G. Wells

As the twentieth century opened and parts of the Victorian culture began descending towards
a new modernism or oblivion, in terms of its relationship to the issue of desire, siren lore
apparently came full circle, returning to the same place where it had been before the nineteenth
century. The history of the lore arrived at the point we have been calling, lacking a better term,
‘post-Victorian’ siren literature, whose two main examples are The Sea Lady by H. G. Wells
and The Professor and the Siren by Guissepe Tomasi di Lampedusa. ‘Post-Victorian’ mainly
serves the descriptive purpose of referring to the siren lore of the first half of the twentieth
century, but it also emphasizes its fundamental connection with the preceding century. The two
stories appeared in the following order, separated by more than five decades, the first one
written in 1902, the other in 1957. In our view, these two works respectively mark the
beginning and the end of a new phase of siren representation, the issues raised in The Sea Lady
having their logical climax in The Professor and the Siren.
As the twentieth century moved on, sirens regained their traditional properties, namely their
mirrors. We find examples on cover pages of The Siren advertisement magazine,398 as well as
in Hollywood movies that were gaining momentum at the time (Mad About Men (1954), or Mr.
Peabody and the Mermaid (1948)). In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography from 1928, we
find the mermaid/siren and the mirror conflated again, with Orlando gazing at her mirror
reflection:

[T]he glass was a green water, and she a mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in
a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to
embrace her; so dark so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly
seductive that it was a thousand pities that there was no one there to put it in

397
H. G. Wells, The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine, A Critical Text of the 1902 London First Edition, with an
Introduction and Appendices, ed. Leon Stover (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2001).
398
The Siren 3:1 (September 1913). We see a beautiful, modern siren looking at herself in a mirror, while a young
man with a cane and a cigarette looks at her. The image of a mermaid holding a mirror also appears around the
title of the magazine in number of the magazine’s issues, for example The Siren 2:1 (October 1922).

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 plain English, and say outright, “Damn it, Madam, you are loveliness
incarnate,” which was the truth.399

In the light of the proposed approach to the relationship between the subject, the mirror and
monstrosity of sirens, the return of reflecting surfaces becomes indicative of a new
configuration of humanity/monstrosity. If sirens began reappropriating mirrors, as visible parts
of their representational language, the subject’s relationship to their bodies must have changed
again to account for this reappraisal. And sure enough, sirens did change, their bodies and their
nature displaying some old/new properties.
The main characteristic of post-Victorian sirens, as portrayed by Wells and Lampedusa, is
their otherworldly, transcendental nature. While the Victorian sirens mainly assumed the roles
of heroines in pain, virgin-like creatures worthy of pity and sympathy, seeking a soul, a heart,
love and death that would never be, the post-Victorian sirens are immense, overpowering
creatures, their nature is semiotically whole, transcending materiality reserved for mortals, and
almost exclusively expressed by the language of excess. Their existence and their revelation to
mortals, is literally beyond language, their presence impossible to be fully described and
conveyed by words. Their agenda is not to catch a human soul, like in the medieval times, not
even to acquire one through sacrifice and pain like the Victorian sirens; their purpose is to
bestow souls on mortals, to teach them how to dream ‘better dreams,’ better than their small,
harrowing existence allows them.
The Sea Lady is the first one to introduce this theme, but we will be analyzing both works
as we go along. One reason is that, apart from sharing the idea of a utopian, limitless existence
hidden in the mermaid’s body, they actually cross-reference each other while characters of both
stories read the same source, Undine by Motte Fouqué.
The Sea Lady tells a story of a gorgeous, enchanting mermaid, who, rescued from a fake
drowning, manages to insinuate herself into the household of her rescuers, the Bunting family.
The family is large, and the characters are many, but the important for ones are Mrs. Bunting,
the matriarch; Adeline, her elder daughter, a serious girl with her head in books; and Harry
Chatteris, Adeline’s fiancé, socialist, the victim of the siren in the novel. The story is mostly
told from the perspective of a nameless narrator, who acquired all the information on the
curious events at the Buntings from Melville, his second nephew. Melville actually plays the

Virginia Woolf, ‘Orlando: A Biography,’ in Selected Works of Virginia Woolf (London: Wordsworth Editions,
399

2005), 489.

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leading male role in the story and is a partial victim of the mermaid’s song himself. After she
is rescued, and the Buntings in horror realize she has a fish tail, the Buntings take the poor
‘girl’ in, Mrs. Bunting taking it as her duty to teach the mermaid what being human is all about.
The mermaid gets a proper name, Miss Waters, pays the Buntings for her stay with gold from
a hidden treasure chest and confesses that her real agenda has been to come to the world of
men and learn all about their existence. On the surface, the story is just a slightly updated
Victorian siren narrative, but Miss Waters is not what she seems to be: as the plot unfolds, we
find out that her real target is Mr. Harry Chatteris, and that she came to land to teach men
‘better dreams,’ to show them their blindness and their essentially illusionary existence. She
enchants Harry with her promises, as she lures him to his doom.
The other story in our analysis, The Professor and the Siren, is of a completely different
narrative. Paolo Corbera, having been left both by his mistress and his girlfriend, spends time
in a loud bar frequented by intellectuals in Turin, in 1938. There he meets a curious,
misanthropic professor, a famous Italian Hellenist, whom he befriends in the course of several
nights. During one of Paolo’s visits to the professor’s house, the professor confides in him a
story from his youth he never told a soul, an extraordinary tale of his encounter with a siren,
portrayed as an otherworldly, omniscient being, whose full existence escapes the
comprehension of mortals. After he had related the story to Paolo, in what was for him an
unprecedented outburst of loquaciousness, he sails away to Portugal, only to disappear
somewhere in the blue depths of the Mediterranean Sea.
At the level of the plot, these two stories could not be more different. Wells’ story is highly
satirical and political, Mr. Chatteris being a liberal political figure and Miss Waters’ ‘better
dreams’ hinting at utopian totalitarian future.400 Lampedousa’s story is a romantic piece on the
disease called the ‘human condition.’ We are not interested in the structure of the plot, though,
and we will leave the political notions for some other, more suitable occasion. What we are
interested in is the language of siren representation. We will discuss the image of this larger-
than-life aquatic creature and see if we could find a solution to the question: what is the
relationship of this character to the subject’s split self? It has been said so far that the Victorian
sirens are topologies of the Victorian subject who created them, and the argument was
supported by discussing the disappearance of mirrors from siren representations; of the

400
This is mostly how Leon Stover, the annotator of the novel’s 2001 edition, reads the plot. See, Leon Stover,
Editor’s Introduction to H. G. Wells, The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine, A Critical Text of the 1902 London
First Edition, with an Introduction and Appendices, ed. Leon Stover (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc.,
Publishers, 2001).

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oscillation between Ulysses and sirens as protagonists of narratives; of the silence of sirens and
their victims, as signs of a suppressed monstrosity and the split of the subject himself; and of
the self-awareness of monsters as the language of the subject’s split. Victorian sirens were
fundamentally split beings, like haunting images breaking loose from the subject’s mirror
reflection. They sought souls and craved wholeness; they were not the subject’s desired objects,
they were Victorian desiring subjects themselves.
What happens, then, in the twentieth century, when sirens/mermaids return to being full
again, not split like the subject seduced by his mirror image? How do they relate to his notion
of the self, previously conveyed by siren bodies proper? Not seeking fullness anymore, but
being fullness themselves, sirens stepped out of the subject’s body becoming his objet a again
and bringing about the semiotic absolution that the subject sought. These sirens are not oddities
anymore, nor nightmares looking from the mirror, but the mirror’s promise itself, the
wholeness of the corporeal illusion the mirror offers, the very dream the subject has been
dreaming for more than a century at least. Sirens now come to teach the subject ‘better dreams,’
to expose the illusionary nature of reality to him, to save his split self and give him a soul, but,
as we shall see, they just deepen the subject’s dream further, their fullness being another, and
necessary, face of the subject’s fantasy.

Becoming a Cripple; or, the Victorian Face of Miss Waters

The Sea Lady is a watershed in the modern siren lore, a borderline identity whose two-faced
presence reflects what was and what shall be. Appropriately, she appears at the very turn of the
century. Behind her is the long nineteenth century whose sirens suffer, loathe and despise their
abject nature; in front of her is the even longer twentieth century, in whose first half sirens bath
in a godly omniscience. The Sea Lady’s nature is of the latter kind, but her appearance is of the
former.
As she infiltrates the Buntings’ household, her image is shown to be fragile, her nature pure
and sincere. Her body is held back by her monstrosity, her tail making her a cripple in the land
of humans. The moment she is rescued, the horror of her inappropriate skin begins.

“Mother,” said Nettie [the younger daughter], giving words to the general
horror. “Mother. She has a tail!”
And then the three maids and Mabel Glendower [a family friend] screamed
one after the other. “Look!” they cried. “A tail!”
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 “Oh!” said Miss Glendower, and put her hand to her heart.
And then the one of the maids gave a name. “It’s a mermaid!” screamed the
maid, and then everyone screamed “It’s a mermaid.”401

The mermaid tail is where the horror of her body begins; it is the place of her dread’s
inception. She is both a monster and a protagonist of the story, revealing to the Buntings the
secrets of life undersea and learning about life on land. As a mermaid she inspires fear, so she
must be hidden, her monstrosity must be suppressed. As a subject/protagonist she breaks down
at her waist, the split of the subject appearing where her monstrous tail begins. Here, in the
land of men, everyone is appalled by her tail, the wretched thing ruining the mermaid’s chance
at seduction. ‘She had a beautiful figure, I understand,’ says the unknown narrator, ‘until that
horrible tail began.’402
The Sea Lady enters the home of the Buntings and pays them in gold to teach her humanity.
This desire for humanity presents itself as a two-way normalizing process. Both of the parties
want it: the Sea Lady wants it; the Buntings want it. ‘She wants to be treated exactly like a
human being,’ Mrs. Bunting confesses to Mr. Melville,

“to be a human being, just like you or I. And she asks to live with us, to be one
of our family, and to learn how we live, to learn to live.”403

From Mrs. Bunting’s perspective, there is only one way of living, and that is not the
underwater way, that is not the monstrous way of a mermaid. Her stigma and taint needs to be
covered so that the threat of her body is disposed off. By now, we have learned the lesson from
other Victorian siren stories – a monster can never fully become human, thus the Sea Lady
could never become a flawless woman. Conveniently, in order to hide her embarrassing, horrid
tail, Mrs. Bunting turns Miss Waters into a cripple. ‘[F]or everyone except just a few intimate
friends,’ continues Mrs. Bunting in her confession to Mr. Melville,

401
Wells, Sea Lady, 28.
402
Ibid., 32.
403
Ibid., 44; my emphasis.

191
 “she is to be just a human being who happens to be an invalid – temporarily an
invalid – […] and we shall dress her in long skirts – and throw something over
It, you know –”404

The mermaid tail is so dreadful, or more precisely, inappropriate, that it is hard to say the
word, at first. It lingers in silence of the unfinished sentence, in an empty space of the
unutterable dash, turning the tail into nothingness, canceling existence of the mermaid’s very
nature.
The Sea Lady’s transformation needs to be all-encompassing, the erasure of her nature
complete. Since in the sea she has been denied a name, on the land she takes one of Miss Doris
Thalassia Waters, leaving the fullness of her nameless existence behind and entering the
shattered realm of the mortal language. Her material possessions speak the language of her
transformation, too. One could ask how a mermaid pays mortals for their normalizing deeds.
Miss Waters points the Buntings to a place on the beach where she hid a rope with a treasure
chest attached. The treasure belonged to some shipwrecked sailor (whom she had seduced to
his death, no doubt), whose name was Tom Wilders, as the name on the chest testifies. As she
turns her monstrous skin inside-out and appropriates a human name, the name Tom Wilders
disappears from the chest, only to be substituted for Miss Doris Thalassia Waters. ‘Wilders’ as
‘the one who leads astray’ is erased, in this act of cultural oblivion of writing, and water, the
element obviously susceptible to humanization in this novel, takes its place instead. The
deceiving face of Miss Waters – the Victorian face of hers that has the appropriate traits of
humanity – is the face that will lead Mr. Chatteris astray. When all is said and done, all the
changes in the physicality of Miss Waters finished, ‘save for her exceptional beauty and charm
and the occasional faint touches of something a little indefinable in her smile, she had become
a quite passable and credible human being.’405

The Great Outside of Better Dreams; or, the Post-Victorian Face of Miss Waters

That ‘something indefinable in her smile’ will never go away, because her nature can never
be normalized completely. This impossibility of her complete taming occurs due to the fact
that this ‘something indefinable in her smile’ belongs to the nature of her other face, the one

404
Ibid., 45.
405
Ibid., 63.

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that Miss Waters is so eager to hide. This other face is the face of post-Victorian sirens, and
Miss Waters arrives as their harbinger. In the above passage, these two faces collide; they both
dwell in the same sentence hinting at each other, the otherworldly presence of a twentieth-
century siren not capable of diminishing its intense and ravishing radiance. The Buntings are
completely fooled by this game of appearances, or at least Mrs. Bunting is. As a real audience
for the Victorian siren, Mrs. Bunting actually empathizes with and pities the mermaid’s soulless
destiny. The connection of Miss Waters’ image with the rest of the modern siren lore is made
explicit:

“You know it’s most extraordinary and exactly like the German story,” said
Mrs. Bunting. “Oom – what is it?”
“Undine?”
“Exactly – yes. And it really seems these poor creatures are Immortal, Mr.
Melville, – at least within limits, creatures born of the elements and resolve into
the elements again – and just as it is in the story – there’s always a something –
they have not Soul! No Souls at all! Nothing! And poor child feels it. She feels
it dreadfully. But in order to get souls, Mr. Melville, you know they have to
come into the world of men. […] To get a soul. Of course that’s her great object
[…]”406

The Sea Lady’s first face is the face of a Victorian siren par excellence. It belongs to Undine,
whose translation into English was a great success. In preparing her disguise the Sea Lady has
studied her recent history well. But, though it might seem that the novel is going in this
direction, that we are about to read of one more tormented siren/mermaid in the pursuit of a
soul, death or love, it becomes evident that it is only a mask, only an outer layer, a veil hiding
the future of the siren image. The Sea Lady pretends to be what all her Victorian predecessors
and cousins had been, namely Undines, but beneath the fragile skin, easy to manipulate and
easy to normalize, another face lurks, more glorious and overwhelming that any of the Buntings
could imagine.
The post-Victorian face of Miss Waters has been hinted at from the beginning, all the
participants in this little drama sensing something, but unable to put their finger on it.

406
Ibid., 43-44.

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Inexpressible, incomprehensible – that is the Sea Lady’s real nature. ‘There were times when
it seemed to [Melville],’ says the narrator,

you might have hurt her or killed her as you can hurt and kill anyone – with a
penknife, for example – and there were times when it seemed to him you could
have destroyed the whole material universe and left her smiling still.407

As soon as we see the Other face of Miss Waters (we might appropriately capitalize it, to
express its otherworldly, transcendental nature), everything that could possibly be described
begins to elude language, escaping the possible images and existing words, scattering blank,
unexplainable spaces and silence around the sentence. This Other mermaid is not a subject; she
is not a split being in search of fullness, peace, or stillness of the beyond. She is the stillness
beyond language and materiality, beyond the small, limited world of mortals. She is the illusion
incarnate of the reflection in the mirror. As Adeline, the elder daughter, points out, Miss Waters
comes from ‘an Inconceivable World,’ ‘the strangest World,’ the one mortals cannot attain,
since it exist only as an absence, as the presence of an absence.408

She [the Sea Lady] regarded them for a moment with a frank wonder, the
undying wonder of the Immortals at that perpetual decay and death and
replacement which is the gist of human life.409

The very core of human existence is what this grandiose figure lacks: the replacement – the
never-ending circle of reproduction, of life and death, of différance; of a continual
re(dis)placement of meaning. Being beyond language, on the side of death, as a pure signifier,
she has the ability to influence things, to control the flow of meaning, never succumbing to it.
‘It is a digression,’ says Adeline to Mrs. Bunting, sensing the alienating power behind the frail
story of an Undine. ‘She diverts things. She puts it all wrong. […] She alters the value of
things.’410 Wherever there is death, things lose their meaning, transcendence is revealed to
subjects as a Promised Land that will never be reached.

407
Ibid., 40.
408
Ibid., 51.
409
Ibid., 53.
410
Ibid., 72.

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 *****

This is the right moment to bring the other story into the analysis, if only to emphasize the
transcendence in the Sea Lady’s image. Lampedusa’s professor encountered the same type of
a siren, the one that alters the value of things, leaving the professor in an agony of
disenchantment that was the real source of his misanthropy. ‘[Y]ou people,’ exclaims the
professor, ‘slaves to decay and putrescence, always with ears strained for the shuffling steps of
Death.’411 The disgust for humanity as an incurable disease is, for the professor, the
consequence of a ‘diverting of things.’ During the hot summer that the professor spends with
the Siren, she reveals herself as a creature of the beyond, the fullness of her image being the
embodiment of death and emptiness. ‘I am everything because I am simply the current of life,’
says the Siren,

“with its detail eliminated; I am immortal because in me every death meets,

from that of the fish just now to that of Zeus, and conjoined in me they turn
again into a life that is no longer individual and determined but Pan’s and so
free.”412

Death is just another name for fullness, just another name for the ultimate object of desire.
The siren is everything and thus nothing; she is all the possible deaths in one, merging into the
stream of life. Death is life generalized, without waves, without motion; it is the final, promised
resting place of the split subject.
The same alteration of values is encountered in Forster’s already mentioned 1920 The Story
of the Siren, falling historically within the frame of the post-Victorian siren lore. Giuseppe is
saved from the water where he encountered the Siren and returns onboard ‘so large [and] so
wet’ that he is pulled into the boat with difficulty. He looked ‘like anyone who has seen the
Siren. […] Unhappy, unhappy, unhappy because he knew everything. Every living thing made
him unhappy because he knew it would die.’413 Giuseppe looked the fundamental illusion of
life in the eye, and saw the illusion of the life’s reality. The Siren has changed the value of
things for him; she has seemingly ‘put it all wrong,’ as Adeline said. All Giuseppe ‘cared to do

411
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, ‘The Professor and the Siren,’ in The Siren and Selected Writings, trans.
Archibald Colquhoun, David Gilmour and Guido Waldman (London: The Harvill Press, 1995), 72.
412
Ibid., 81.
413
E. M. Forster, The Story of the Siren (Richmond: Leonard & Virginia Wolf at the Hogarth Press, 1920), 10;
my emphasis.

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was to sleep.’414 But, in fact, the Siren put everything right, as she revealed to Giuseppe that
the life he was living was a dream, a nightmare as haunting as the strangeness behind a
reflection in the looking-glass.
This is the real purpose of the post-Victorian siren, of the Sea Lady, the professor’s and
Giuseppe’s Sirens – to ostensibly expose the fraud of reality, to confront the subject with his
soulless existence and give him a real, eternal soul in return. This Other Siren comes to the
Victorian subject to shake off his exhausting dream. ‘[A]ll the elements of your life,’ explains
the Sea Lady, finally revealing her real nature and intentions to Melville,

“the life you imagine you are living, the little things you must do, the little cares,
the extraordinary little duties, the day by day, the hypnotic limitations, – all
these things are a fancy that has taken hold of you too strongly for you to shake
off.”415

Her transcendental nature starts revealing itself, and the Sea Lady admits why she has come.
And as she unveils her towering existence, Melville cannot help but feel like he is drowning.416
Looking at her eyes ‘was like looking into deep water. Down in that deep there stirred
impalpable things.’417 The mermaid’s figure is becoming larger than life, pulling the subject to
a dark, deep bottom, textually enacting Edward Burne-Jones’ The Depths of the Sea. With this
image in mind, that Melville saw a long time ago, ‘of a man and a mermaid rushing downward
through deep water,’ the Sea Lady is pulling him ‘elsewhere,’ a metaphysical place that is, in
Haraway’s words, promised by the monster.418 She is here to seduce Harry Chatteris and
explain this ‘elsewhere’ to humans. ‘He is a man rather divided against himself,’ says Melville
of Harry Chatteris, ‘[w]e all are.’419 The human subject is desperately divided against himself,
eternally seduced by the mirror’s fantasy of reality. But there are places that do not belong to
reality, places not real but of the Real. ‘What you too are beginning to suspect…,’ continues
the Sea Lady,

414
Ibid.
415
Wells, Sea Lady, 94.
416
Ibid., 100.
417
Ibid., 99.
418
Ibid., 102; Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,’
in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992),
131, 328, 330.
419
Wells, Sea Lady, 98.

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 “[ is t]hat other things may be conceivable, even if they are not possible. That
this life of yours is not everything. That it is not to be taken too seriously.
Because… there are better dreams!”420

There are better dreams… the promise of the monster. These dreams are what the Other
Siren brings to the subject. She is not yearning for these dreams like her Victorian ancestors –
she embodies them with the semiotic fullness of her Being, with a coherence that is
simultaneously both fullness and emptiness. In the final act of desperation, after Harry Chatteris
has been seduced, Adeline begs Melville to tell her, to explain to her ‘[w]hat is this Being who
has come between him [Harry Chatteris] and all the realities of life?’421 At this point, for Wells
it was impossible not to capitalize the word ‘being,’ since it became obvious that this Being is
beyond all other earthly creatures, that there is a difference between Her and everything that
exists. ‘What is the difference?’ Adeline insists. As ever, the answer comes as a broken
discourse, as a silence within the human language. ‘There are impalpable things,’ replies
Melville, ‘[t]hey are above and beyond describing.’422 The Sea Lady is ‘above and beyond’
language, but just like in the encounters with reflective surfaces, the subject tries to describe
this impossibility nevertheless, to appropriate it by language, the very falling short of the
illusion’s appropriation bringing jouissance obtained. ‘She is – she has an air of being –
natural,’ says Melville as he struggles to reach for this inexplicable fullness.

“She is as lax and lawless as the sunset, she is as free and familiar as the wind.
She doesn’t […] respect him when he is this and disapprove of him highly when
he is that – she takes him altogether. She has the quality of the open sky, of deep
tangled places, of the flight of birds, she has the quality of the high sea. That I
think is what she is for him; – she is the Great Outside.”423

The post-Victorian siren is the Great Outside. She crosses the boundaries of language and
meaning, she leads the subject to the illusion of wholeness, ‘she takes him altogether,’ as a
coherent, not a split subject. The Sea Lady is the illusion incarnate; she whispers that ‘other
things may be conceivable, even if they are not possible.’ She is not a strangeness of différance,

420
Ibid.
421
Ibid., 124.
422
Ibid.
423
Ibid., 125-126; my emphasis.

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an uncanny familiarity of something postponed or repressed, but still the same; she is a
difference, an opposite, the subject’s limit of existence and possibility, the condition of his
possibility. ‘She comes,’ Melville sighs,

“whispering that this life is a phantom life, unreal, flimsy, limited, casting upon
everything a spell of disillusionment […] She is a mermaid, she is a thing of
dreams and desires, a siren, a whisper, and a seduction. She will lure him [Harry
Chatteris] with her –”
He stopped.
“Where?” she whispered.
“Into the deeps.” “The deeps?” They hung upon a long pause. Melville
sought vagueness with infinite solicitude, and could not find it. He blurted out
at last, “There can be but one way out of this dream we are all dreaming, you
know.”424

Death. We arrive again at the beginning of our introduction and at the ultimate nature of the
post-Victorian siren – nothingness, emptiness, absence that ‘[hangs] upon a long pause’: the
inexplicable, unattainable, inappropriable non-nature of desired objects that weave the dream
that dreams about awakening. ‘You are young and handsome,’ implores the professor’s Siren,

“follow me now into the sea and you will avoid sorrow and old age; come to
my dwelling beneath the high mountains of dark motionless waters where all is
silence and quiet, so infused that who possesses it does not even notice it. I have
loved you; and remember that when you are tired, when you can drag on no
longer, you have only to lean over the sea and call me; I will always be there
because I am everywhere, and your thirst for sleep will be assuaged.”425

For all the differences between Victorian and post-Victorian sirens, there can be only one
way out of the subject’s hellish dream of the semiotic maze called reality, in which he
constantly falls short of the fullness he is yearning for – death. Harry Chatteris, Giuseppe,
Melville, and the professor have all been promised a one-time way out, the same exit point that

424
Ibid., 127.
425
Lampedusa, ‘Professor and the Siren,’ 81; my emphasis.

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Jove promised the Siren from the previous chapter. The Sea Lady, as well as the professor’s
Siren, comes as a savior of humanity, she comes to give humanity a soul, but this soul is just
another dream, another absence of the objet a, another call to death that resides in the corners
of every desire, in the hidden recesses of every desired object. ‘She is nothing’ says Melville
finally. ‘She is the hand that takes hold of him, something that stands for the thing unseen. […]
Something we never find in life […]. Something we are always seeking.’426 The image of the
Sea Lady is both death of the subject and his birth, like the death of the subject at his very birth,
this Lacanian image of aphanasis perfectly embodying the Derridean différance, an absence
within the signifying chain that keeps the chain moving on and on. It is the place where ‘every
death meets,’ ‘the current of life, with its detail eliminated.’ Destruction by the Sea Lady or the
professor’s Siren leads to a birth ‘elsewhere’ where there are ‘better dreams’ than the subject’s
small, finite existence – it leads to an illusion of awakening. ‘So small, so infinitely small!’ the
Sea Lady cries, lamenting the human condition. But that ‘elsewhere’ is just a dream, ‘a blind
mute place of formless waters, eternal, without a gleam, without a whisper,’ attainable only in
death, thus essentially forbidden to the subject. The Sea Lady, the post-Victorian siren, is the
presence of an absence, a creature of the Real calling the subject to step out from the circle of
language, to enter the Great Outside and transcend his limited existence. She whispers to his
sleep-bound mind that the appropriated exteriorized fullness is just a chain that binds him to
the bottomless pit of his reverie. But she does that from within this dream, from within the
subject’s fantasy. Once again the subject steps out, reaching for an absolution, thinking he has
finally attained it. In a way, the Sea Lady has come to fulfill the promise of Anstey’s witch, to
‘destroy the silence, and save the world,’ because ‘[s]ilence and loneliness cannot last forever.’
But it is all just a labyrinth that includes its own exits. It is all just an ineluctable vortex of
dreams…

426
Wells, Sea Lady, 128.

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PART THREE

THE AGE OF THE WORLD PICTURE: ULYSSES’ ARRIVAL

To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle
is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than
its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.427
Guy Debord

So far we have discussed the impact commodifiction of mirrors had on the perceiving male
Victorian subject, as well as the changes in monstrosity of Victorian sirens/mermaids. We have
seen how the new, omnipresent mirror pulled the subject into a spiraling loop of representation
and conveyed the language of semiotic incoherence of commodities, thus revealing the
monstrous fragmentedness of the subject himself. At the same time, the representation of sirens
underwent profound changes introducing a new, quite original narrative of sirens/mermaids as
virgin-like, occasionally religious, victims in pursuit of their happily ever after. They have lost
their two faithful weapons – their voices and their mirrors. Arguments were provided for the
existence of the monstrous semiotic incoherence of the male subject himself by analyzing his
monstrous dream of haunting, uncanny mirrors and of the split sirens’/mermaids’ skin. It was
shown that narratological and representational changes in sirens lead to a conclusion that their
monstrosity is not a condition sine qua non of the subject’s humanity, but that the sirens
topologize the Victorian male subject himself.
An important issue of the changed modality of the sirens’ powers was also raised. Previously
essentially aural seductresses, Victorian sirens stopped singing, the power of their voice
shifting into their bodies. They became profoundly visual, epitomizing nineteenth-century
scopic regimes of visual pleasure and voyeurism. In this last part of the book, that is entirely
dedicated to the Pre-Raphaelite painting, we will discuss this visual pleasure in connection with
the dreaming labyrinth of language we have been deconstructing all along. We will discuss the
place where the two previous sections intersect – the Pre-Raphaelite visual field populated by
images of sirens. By analyzing the role and place of mirrorless sirens/mermaids in the Pre-

427
For an extraordinary discussion of the modern society as a society of spectacle, where spectacle is the ‘heart
of the unrealism of the real society,’ see Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983). My
debt to this book is tremendous. The above quotation is the thesis 21.

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Raphaelite painting, we shall see once again that the age-old topos of ‘Ulysses and the Sirens,’
comes in a new, essentially visual form.
‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ is a topos that has retained its strength for millennia. As we have
seen from the prologue onwards, Ulysses’ ordeal of seduction, love, knowledge and death is,
in a word, timeless. In every era, this struggle against seduction expressed the immediate fears
and dreams of the culture in question. Harry Vredeveld has shown that this topos in the
Renaissance, for instance, had a different meaning: Ulysses actually stopped his ears and
became deaf to the cries of the feral Sirens.428 The whole Part Two of the book emphasized, in
different ways, the fact that, throughout the nineteenth-century, Ulysses and sirens kept
changing places, being irrevocably interlocked in one and the same image. But in Spiral 1:
‘The Little Mermaid’, we saw how, at the fringes of the Victorian era, Kafka turned this topos
up-side-down, making Ulysses use his eyes and not his ears as the tools of his hallucinatory
revelation. In all the narratives we tackled – in the new, modern siren lore – visuality as a
modality of knowledge eclipsed the previous predominance of orality. The Pre-Raphaelite
visual field was no different regarding historical contingency: the Pre-Raphaelite artists shared
their reveries and desires with the age that gave rise to them. But in the Victorian culture, this
episode exploded in such a great number of images that James Joyce’s so obviously titled
Ulysses is just one example from the edges of the Victorian age. Sirens, symbols of seduction
and death, were called into existence in the nineteenth-century to epitomize and deal with a
new form of modernity – with new gender roles and subjectivities, new types of spectacular
pleasures. Their monstrosity, transformed into silence and virginity through the works of
literature, was just one facet of the changes that pervaded the age as a whole.
In this part, the book builds upon the conclusions of the previous chapters regarding
changing places of Ulysses and the Sirens, as each other’s mirror images. We follow the
change of ‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ topos further into the Victorian visual field, with a clear
understanding of the relationship of the topos with a peculiar Victorian scopophilia, reading
Ulysses in different places, even if he is not represented – sometimes exactly because he is not
represented. Sirens are monsters that are essentially relational: like Medusa and unlike the
centaur, they need an object in order for their monstrosity to emerge. Without an object, without
a Ulysses somewhere on the horizon, their existence is benign and meaningless. Thus we will
see that in the images of mirrorless sirens in the Pre-Raphaelite painting we can always find a

Harry Vredeveld, ‘“Deaf as Ulysses to the Siren's Song”: The Story of a Forgotten Topos,’ Renaissance
428

Quarterly 54:3 (2001): 846-882.

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Ulysses lurking, craving the gift of death they can bestow. In their mutual, sometimes silent
relationship, in their narrative, sometimes expressed only in fragments, we can again find the
topology of a male desiring subject and his appropriation of his own mirror image. This subject
is essentially incoherent, bound to the Victorian scopic field in the corridors of the visual
labyrinth, where he sleeps and dreams – of himself, of sirens. Not every nightmare is an ugly
one.

The Pre-Raphaelite Love

September 1848, the year of revolutions: three young friends, painters and enthusiasts met
in a house in Gower Street, off Bedford Square, London and signed a secret pact that marked
the foundation of a group that would forever change the artistic face of England, if not Western
Europe altogether. Their names were William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante
Gabriel Rossetti and they swore to oppose the traditional painting of the Royal Academy of
Arts and express their own original world view. Their fervor was most in earnest and – being
young and gifted – they felt it their duty to transform modern painting and give something
different and true to the world: a new way of structuring perception. What they did not know,
however, was that the little movement they called ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’ would prove
as powerful as any social, political and artistic earthquake shaking Europe on a global scale at
the time. Robin Ironside calls it ‘a small explosion,’429 but another late twentieth-century
authority, Christopher Wood, asserts that ‘they set in motion an artistic revolution that was to
have momentous consequences.’430 Derek Stanford even goes so far as to insist that ‘[i]n
whatever direction we turn in the later nineteenth century, whatever seems new, proves, as
likely as not, to have its roots in Pre-Raphaelitism.’431 So the importance of Pre-Raphaelitism,
in its broadest sense, was tremendous. Their enthusiasm was a prophetic one, best captured in
the words of Holman Hunt himself:

If an open road ended in an impassable waste, we had to make a new way; it

might be to push through the forest darkness, to root out venomous

429
Robin Ironside, Pre-Raphaelite Painters (London: Phaidon Press, 1948), 13.
430
Christopher Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), 9.
431
Derek Stanford, ed., Pre-Raphaelite Writing: An Anthology (London and Totowa, New Jersey: Dent, Rowan
and Littlefield, 1873), xxiii.

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 undergrowth, to substitute wholesome stock, grafting these with shoots, to ripen
hereafter for the refreshment of travelers overcome by their toilsome march.432

The Brothers’ mission was to make a novel, fresh path for generations to come. Soon after
the formation of the Brotherhood – an event that left history and transcended into a myth – four
new members arrived; William Michael Rossetti, a writer, critic and chronicler of the
Brotherhood, and also brother to Dante Gabriel Rossetti; James Collinson, a narcoleptic painter
who soon left the Brotherhood and entered a Jesuit college in pursuit of priesthood; Frederick
George Stephenson, who quit painting, became a critic and loyally defended the Brotherhood
to its end; and Thomas Woolner (1825-1892), the only sculptor in the Brotherhood, who soon
left for Australia after the initial founding of the alliance.433 With them a seven-member group
had been established and the official story of the movement began. But Hunt the ‘reformer,’
Millais the ‘executant’ and Rossetti the ‘dreamer,’ as Percy H. Bate called them in 1901, were
the real heart of the group, and each of them, in their own fashion, paved the way for others to
follow.434
On the first day, the Brothers signed a manifesto that would guide them in their efforts to
oppose the institutionalized contemporary painting. Michael Rossetti, who never truly became
a painter, but took the role of the chronicler of the Brotherhood, said that what they fought for
‘was simply this:

to have genuine ideas to express; to study Nature attentively, so as to know how

to express them; to sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in
previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and

432
William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press,
1967), xii.
433
The bibliography on the legend of the founding of the Brotherhood is immense. Almost every volume on Pre-
Raphaelitism includes, one way or another, a section on the founding. See Wood, Pre-Raphaelites; Ironside, Pre-
Raphaelite Painters; Stanford, Pre-Raphaelite Writing; Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism; William E. Fredeman,
ed., The P.R.B Journal: William Michael Rossetti’s Diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 1849-1853,
Together with Other Pre-Raphaelite Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Audrey Williamson, Artists
and Writers in Revolt: The Pre-Raphaelites (Newton Abbot, London, Vancouver: David & Charles, 1976); John
Dixon Hunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination, 1848-1900 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968); Raleigh
Trevelyan, A Pre-Raphaelite Circle (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978); Percy H. Bate, The
English Pre-Raphaelite Painters: Their Associates and Successors (London: George Bell and Sons, 1901). For
general notes on Victorian painters, see Christopher Wood, Dictionary of Victorian Painters (Woodbridge,
Suffolk: Baron Publishing, 1971). The best bibliographical work on Pre-Raphaelitism, up to 1965, is William E.
Fredeman, Pre-Raphaelitism: Bibliocritical Study (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1965).
434
Bate, English Pre-Raphaelite Painters, 5.

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 learned by rote; and most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good
pictures and statues.435

The manifesto spoke against the prevailing tide of triviality of the Grand Style that was
embodied in the teachings of the Royal Academy of Arts. The Academy had utmost
institutional power over the recognized artistic production at the time. And although the
Brothers were all part of the community that they condemned fiercely, they continued to oppose
the artificial chiaroscuro of the preceding centuries, determined as Wood says, ‘to paint with
complete fidelity to nature, studying each figure from a model, and painting landscape on the
spot, out-of-doors.’436 The walls of the annual Summer Royal Academy exhibition, the most
prestigious event in the lives of young, aspiring artists of the time, were populated by
uninventive historical scenes, still lives and portraits, all subjugated to the same rules of
composition painted with one purpose: to be ‘beautiful.’ Madox Ford Brown, one of the
external associates of the Brotherhood, who was for a short time a teacher of D. G. Rossetti
and a precursor of their ideas, thought that the art of the age was caged in by conventions and
rules that were utterly obsolete; that instead of rendering a painting beautiful, the focus should
be on the reality of the represented action.437 The prevailing color of paintings tended to be
dim-brown, engulfing them in a veil of somber despondency. The Brothers, on the other hand,
argued that the real, true expression died after Raphael, and assumed the name ‘Pre-
Raphaelites’ so as to distinguish themselves from centuries of mannerisms, conventions and
traditions of the Old Masters that came after, killing expression and suffocating the painting’s
life, as the Brothers saw it. They found their inspiration in the Italian Quattrocento, venerating
painters such as Giotto, and Fra Angelico, and resuscitated painting by using white plaster as a
background on which colors shone vividly, luminously and full of life. The effect that their
colors had on the public was astounding. Lionel Stevenson maintains that ‘their brilliant
coloring almost hurt the eyes of the mid-nineteenth century, […] by the contrast of high lights
and dim shadows and by death of perspective.’438
The subjects they usually chose to depict were revolutionary as well. Historical scenes were
commonplace in British painting, but the Pre-Raphaelites painted contemporary scenes under

435
Fredeman, The P.R.B Journal, 104.
436
Wood, Pre-Raphaelites, 10.
437
Bate, English Pre-Raphaelite Painters, 5.
438
Lionel Stevenson, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 15.

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the guise of historical ones.439 As we shall see, this technique was one of the true expressions
of the age, when a distance emerged between the subject and the world. For Victorians, only
by assuming a distance from the present, by shrouding it in the robes of historicism, history
itself could be perceived and reality could be approached. But for now, it is sufficient to note
that in their crusade for a different worldview, the Pre-Raphaelites, at times, emphasized
contemporary social issues, addressing ‘risqué subjects,’ as John Dixon Hunt referred to them:
fallen women, prostitution, brothels, madhouses, slums, anything that would ‘épater le
bourgeois.’440

The Wider Picture

Before we delve into a more detailed analysis of Pre-Raphaelite painting, it is very important
to remark that what the Pre-Raphaelites did, what they fantasized about and craved for, was by
no means an event ex nihilo, a revolution out of a cultural vacuum that abruptly discharged its
electric power over the British artistic landscape. Nor was the revolution limited, in its reveries
and its new worldview, to the Island and the Pre-Raphaelites alone. Wood argues that many of
the novelties, in the technique as well as in the ideas, traditionally attributed to the first Pre-
Raphaelites, actually had their antecedents during the 1830s and the ‘hungry’ 1840s. The
technique had been anticipated by artists such as William Mulready, who used white
backgrounds for his paintings to emphasize their colors in the early 1840s. William Henry Hunt
was ardent in his detailed visual rendering, ‘anticipat[ing] the Pre-Raphaelites’ reverence for
the minutiae of nature.’441 Oriental scenes of John Frederick Lewis were familiar to the Pre-
Raphaelites, and the writings of Lord Lindsay and Mrs Jamesone had already played a part in
resurrecting the interest in the early Italian ‘Christian’ art. Ford Madox Brown himself was
engaged with another romantic German group called the Nazarenes who worked along the lines
similar to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.442 On a wider scale, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
inspired, directly or indirectly, a great number of painters, sculptors, poets, artists of all kinds,
widely across Europe. Dixon Hunt’s discursive analysis of the Pre-Raphaelite imagination
makes a particularly strong case for Pre-Raphaelitism as an aesthetic introduction into

439
Graham Parry, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Image: Style and Subject 1848-56,’ Proceedings of the Leeds
Philosophical and Literary Society 17:1 (1978): 37-8.
440
Dixon Hunt, Pre-Raphaelite Imagination, 212.
441
Wood, Pre-Raphaelites, 12.
442
Ibid., 10-12.

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Aestheticism and French Symbolism of the fin-de-siècle.443 French Impressionists, although
disliked by the Pre-Raphaelites on the grounds of ‘mere transcription of the surface of
nature,’444 also shared with them the ideational and technical mindscape, in their application of
light, distinction between daylight, sunset and sunrise, and practice of painting en plein air.
The formidable effect that Pre-Raphaelite ideas had on wider European audiences is the reason
why William E. Freedman, in his seminal work Pre-Raphaelitism: A Bibliocritical Study, calls
for broadening the term ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ to include three different, but not mutually
exclusive, stages of the phenomenon: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of the mid-century, the
Pre-Raphaelite Movement, and Pre-Raphaelitism, as ‘sequential terms descriptive of a
continuous, if not unified aesthetic force.’445 This tripartite scheme corresponds to Wood’s first,
second and third stage: the first stage is foundational for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-
1860), embodied by the Brothers themselves, the period Quentin Bell calls ‘hard edge’446; the
second corresponds with Pre-Raphaelitism and the Aesthetic Movement (1860-1890), adding
William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones into the picture; their death, around the end of the
century inaugurated the third phase (1890-1920), incarnated, most importantly, in the work of
John William Waterhouse, whom Peter Trippi calls ‘the modern Pre-Raphaelite.’447
‘Although the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established as a rebellion against Victorian
art,’ observes Dixon Hunt, ‘it soon manifested interests and anxieties that link it intricately to
the movement of mind and art in the period.’448 Something stronger than a simple artistic revolt
manifested itself in the vehemence and devotion of the Brotherhood, an epistemic change
burning its way behind their eyes and their brushes – a new visual order of representation that
would restructure reality itself and become one more expression of the void out of which the
Victorian subject, Ulysses the Spectator (accompanied by the sirens, or the other way round),
would emerge. We will try to descend into that very void.
Although the Brotherhood, as such, existed for a very brief period of time, after which it
formally fell apart – Hunt went on his religious journey to Palestine, Woolner to Australia,
Stephenson turned to art criticism, and Rossetti to his new ‘Oxford boys’, to Edward Burne-
Jones and William Morris – their ideas continued to live on in the form of a ‘continuity of

443
Dixon Hunt, Pre-Raphaelite Imagination.
444
Ibid., 9.
445
Fredeman, Pre-Raphaelitism, 1.
446
Quentin Bell, ‘The Pre-Raphaelites and their Critics,’ in Pre-Raphaelite Papers, ed. Leslie Parris (London:
Tate gallery, 1984), 17.
447
Wood, Pre-Raphaelites; Peter Trippi, et al., J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite (London: Royal
Academy Books, 2009); Peter Trippi, J. W. Waterhouse (London: Phaidon Press, 2002).
448
Dixon Hunt, Pre-Raphaelite Imagination, 16.

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admiration,’449 as Dixon Hunt describes it. Their dream was trans-cultural; their legacy trans-
temporal. But what intrigues us here the most is how this dream of a new visual reality
resonated with the rest of the Victorian culture; how, without even knowing, it absorbed the
convulsions of the cultural unconscious and reproduced these spasms of imagination in the
least conspicuous cultural products. We have already connected the Brotherhood with wider
artistic tendencies of the nineteenth century, but it should be understood that something greater,
stronger, more prodigious and innate to the age crept into their dreams, shaping their desires,
inviting their eyes into the gaze of the world, personifying an epistemic change that transformed
the cultural world from the ground up. The Pre-Raphaelites where children of the society of
the spectacle, the one that brought the dream to the subject in the first place. As they painted
their adulteresses, fallen women, saints in ragged clothes and angels, a new ocean of visual
possibilities opened up in front and around them. It rested behind the eye, in a place emptied
of meaning, in an unreachable place of the object of Pre-Raphaelite desire that gave birth to a
new visual subject feeding on a void, on a distance of the subject from the world, from Being,
from the ‘Real.’ Over this empty ocean without a beginning or end, the protagonist of our visual
epic sails to embody the world that becomes a picture – Ulysses the Spectator has arrived.

The Spectacle of the World

It was, at first, as if the Brotherhood looked at the world without eyelids; for
them, a livelier emerald twinkled in the grass, a purer sapphire melted into the
sea. On the illuminated page that nature seemed to thrust before their dilated
pupils, every floating, prismatic ray, each drifting filament of vegetation, was
rendered, in all its complexity, with heraldic brilliance and distinctness; the floor
of the forest was carpeted not merely with the general variegation of light and
shadow, but was seen to be plumed with ferns receiving each in a particular
fashion the shafts of light that fell upon them; there were not simply birds in the
branches above, but the mellow ouzel was perceived, fluting in the elm.450

This elegiac paragraph, taken from Robin Ironside’s book The Pre-Raphaelite Painters,
exquisitely captures the nature of Pre-Raphaelite naturalism. This new visual phenomenon

449
Ibid., 1-15.
450
Ironside, Pre-Raphaelite Painters 13.

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could be approached in terms of realism, which – taken in a wider artistic, literary and cultural
context – would prove useful and true. But Holman Hunt himself insisted that the ‘Pre-
Raphaelite Brethren were never realists.’451 True, they were always more romantic than realist,
which is why Ironside sees them as ‘one expression of that phase of the Romantic movement
that was the flower of European reaction amid the ruins […] of the ambitious generalizations
of 1789.’452 But in their effort to represent nature as accurately as possible, to ‘make us feel
that every blade of grass is a window into the infinite,’453 sometimes they went to great lengths
to dissolve the vision into details of reality. A couple of examples will, without doubt, throw
some light on this new phenomenon: when painting Ophelia, a beautiful stream-bound cadaver
of a young drowned female, Millais had Elisabeth Siddal lying in a tub full of water until she
got sick, so that he could catch all the peculiarities of a half-submerged physicality454; when
dealing with a subject of the underwater world in his The Depths of the Sea, Burne-Jones
actually borrowed a large tank filled with a green-blue tint from his friend and colleague Henry
Holiday who used it for the same purpose while creating his picture Das Rheingold455; Ford
Madox Brown borrowed some pictures of Italy from William Michael Rossetti which he used
for painting the background for his Romeo and Juliet,456 and so on. On the surface, it seems as
if the artists were just concerned with the exactness of their representation, but seen in a wider
cultural context, what they expressed, every single one of them, was a new vision of reality.
This panoptic approach to the real, penetrating the interstices of physicality, was an artistic
counterpart of the wider ‘exhibitionary’ issues of the Victorian culture.
At the time of the Brothers’ most fervent efforts and their greatest struggles with the
authority of the Academy, other important events took place in London, Europe and the western
world in general. We are going back to the event we have already discussed from another
perspective, namely, the perspective of commodities and visual and semantic overload. On
May 1st 1851, the same day the annual Royal Academy exhibition was held, a monstrous glass
project of Sir Joseph Paxton, the Crystal Palace, opened its doors to the public in Hyde Park.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 began and in the six months that followed, about six million
people visited the exhibition, which, at that time, corresponded to one-third of the British

451
William Holman Hunt, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: A Fight for Art,’ Contemporary Review XLIX (May
1886): 740.
452
Ironside, Pre-Raphaelite Painters, 10.
453
Parry, ‘Pre-Raphaelite Image,’ 7.
454
Gay Daly, Pre-Raphaelites in Love (Fontana: Collins, 1990).
455
Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London:
Faber and Faber Ltd, 2011), 367.
456
William Michael Rossetti, ed., Rossetti Papers, 1862-1870 (London: London Sands, 1903), 226.

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population. The audiences were stunned. Inside the Palace the whole world was put on display.
The bedazzled visitors wandered through the architectural giant and encountered new miracles
of technology, experienced a new magic of Orient, or consumed a new commodity at every
corner. The official descriptive and illustrated catalogue of the event (the monstrously
confusing one) lists exhibitors, not only from all over Britain, but also from its ‘Colonies and
Dependencies’ and 44 ‘Foreign States’ of Europe and the Americas.457 13,000 in total, the
exhibits included a Jacquard loom, an envelope machine, kitchen appliances, steel-making
displays and a reaping machine sent from the United States.458 An average rate was 42,823
visitors per day, culminating on October 7th with 109,915 visitors.459 For an ordinary visitor, it
must have seemed like the whole world was there within the reach of the hand, contracted into
one building, one single piece of space and time, and in that piece, the whole history of human
progress appeared to be enveloped. In this new visual spectacle, every spectator could find their
own place in the general grid of things, which unfolded backwards into the past and forward
into the future. Walter Benjamin, in The Arcades Project, cites A. J. Wiertz, a Belgian romantic
painter and sculptor, who commented on the Exhibition:

What strikes one at first is not at all the things people are making today but the
things they will be making in the future. The human spirit begins to accustom
itself to the power of matter.460

This illuminating insight from the 1870s reflects profoundly on the way people interacted
with the phenomenon of world fairs. The Great Exhibition was not an exception but part of a
trend, an expression of a new visual ordering of the reality that was uniquely Victorian. 461 All
at once, the world was in a place where the reality presented itself in one stroke of spatial
architecture, as the world and the age became a picture.

457
Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations,
1851 (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), 1.
458
Ibid.
459
Appletons’ Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of the Important Events of the Year: 1862 (New York: D.
Appleton & Company, 1863), 412.
460
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLughlin (Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 176.
461
On the subject of the nineteenth-century representational shift towards Being, Martin Heidegger says that this
could not have happened in any other age except the modern age, because in no other age the world had ever been
appropriated as picture. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ in Off the Beaten Track, ed. Julian
Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 71.

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 The evolutionary, orientalist and epistemic causes and consequences of world fairs have
been thoroughly investigated, and studies on these issues will prove useful for the background
of our search for the Victorian subject.462 But our focus is on how this new way of perceiving
the reality, or rather the new way of producing the reality as such, corresponded to the structural
level of Pre-Raphaelite painting. As we draw lines between these two revolutionary
phenomena, we will see a new, peculiarly Victorian subject emerging from a void in
representation in the age the world became a picture. He emerges from the illusion of coherence
of his own appropriated mirror reflection, the illusion that introduces the subject into language
where he dies as Being so he can emerge as meaning. The age of the world picture is the age
of the mirror image. The age of the mirror image is the age of the subject’s birth as aphanasis.
‘Initially, the word “picture” makes one think of a copy of something,’ says Martin
Heidegger, as he penetrates the spectacle of the modern era. ‘This would make the world
picture, as it were, a painting of beings as a whole. But “world picture” means more than this.
We mean by it the world itself.’463 As we stand in front of the world picture and grasp a new
reality in the optical order of ‘the Panorama, the Cosmorama, the Diorama, the Europorama
and the Uranorama’464 we are witnessing not the representation of the world, but the world
itself, emptied of Being and shrunk to a sign. As we look at it, this world keeps receding,
because the nineteenth-century perception of reality keeps losing itself in the circles of
representation. Timothy Mitchell marvelously deconstructs the phenomenon of exhibitions,
concluding that world exhibitions represent the world and construct reality as a representation,
as something different and detached from reality itself. But, as it was obvious to the eastern
visitors – whose ordering of reality did not follow the same structural rules of a distance
between representation and Being – once they had left the exhibition, they realized that the rest
of the city – and the western world for that matter – kept producing the same representation in
circles. ‘Everything seemed to be set up as though […] it were the model or the picture of
something,’ explains Mitchell, ‘arranged before an observing subject into a system of
signification, declaring itself to be a mere object, a mere “signifier of” something further.’465
However, this labyrinth of representation that kept reproducing itself was a precondition and a

462
In addition to all the works cited in Part One, see also three studies crucial for this section, Raymond Corbey,
‘Ethnographic Showcases, 1870-1930,’ Cultural Anthropology 8:3 (1993): 338-369; Timothy Mitchell, ‘The
World as Exhibition,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:2 (1989): 217-236; Tony Bennett, ‘The
Exhibitionary Complex,’ New Formations 4 (1988): 73-102.
463
Heidegger, ‘Age of the World Picture,’ 65.
464
Mitchell, ‘World as Exhibition,’ 220. These are all devices for conveying a panoptic view – invented,
constructed and displayed over the course of the nineteenth century. Their names differ according to their objects.
465
Ibid., 222.

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consequence of the dream of modernity. ‘The real has to be sought beyond the dream – in what
the dream has enveloped, hidden from us,’466 says Lacan, and, as we have seen in mirror and
siren narratives, modernity kept dreaming this beyond. It was a fundamental fantasy that
supported the existence of a new shattered subject, a subject that mirrored within himself this
perpetual reaching out for the Real that never stopped backing away. In this labyrinth, the
Victorian male subject was born as a sign, at the expense of his own Being.
Heidegger argues that this fundamental change in perception, where the representation of
Being is foregrounded, put in front of us as a reality, is the condition of Being in the modern
era. To represent something means that

the matter itself stands in the way it stands to us, before us. […] Understood in
an essential way, “world picture” does not mean “picture of the world” but,
rather, the world grasped as a picture. […] Whenever we have a world picture,
an essential decision occurs concerning beings as a whole. The being of beings
is sought and found in the representedness of beings. Where, however, beings
are not interpreted in this way, the world, too, cannot come into the picture –
there can be no world picture.467

In the age where the world has become a picture, a being acquires its Being only by being
represented, so the main epistemic condition for the modern being to come to being is to be
absorbed and eclipsed by meaning. This paragraph leads us to the conclusion that in order for
the subject to be, he has to acquire a distance from Being. So, paradoxically, in order to be, the
subject has to die as Being, so that a sign – understood as radically divorced from Being – can
be born. For Heidegger, the ‘representedness’ of Being and the emergence of the subject are
two sides of the same coin, the essence of modernity.468
Distance is exactly what we have been aiming at in the age of the world picture. The moment
when the world became a picture, when the subject took his mirror image as his reality, when
Being changed its epistemic precondition requiring a distance in order to be, is the moment
when a new subject appeared, the one that required the same distance from Being itself.
Therefore, in this new visual order of the world, the world was grasped as a panorama of reality,

466
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
1963-1964, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 60.
467
Heidegger, ‘Age of the World Picture,’ 67-8.
468
Ibid., 69.

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from a specific panoptic and deeply penetrating viewpoint – from the outside of the reflection.
As a precondition of his own arrival, this new subject, had to die as Being so that he could be
born as a sign – aphanasis.
The nineteenth century assumes this new way of capturing reality through a process that
Tony Bennett calls the ‘exhibitionary complex,’469 but the term ‘denuding of culture’ would
suit it better, emphasizing its voyeuristic nature. Tony Bennett quite shrewdly observes,
building upon the work of Michel Foucault on prisons and asylums that the world had
transformed into a public spectacle in the nineteenth century by opening previously restricted
areas of culture to the public, like museums and fairs. Timothy Mitchell adds theaters, zoos
and botanic gardens to the list – all the little heterotopias where the world was put on display.470
But, these public spaces were not all there was to it. By the turn of the century, Dean
MacCannell notes, visitors to Paris

were given tours of the sewers, the morgue, a slaughterhouse, a tobacco factory,
the government printing office, a tapestry works, the mint, the stock exchange
and the supreme court in session.471

This process of disclosing restricted spaces to wider audiences is much more than an
exhibition. It is an exhibition, for sure, but by gazing at the intestines of the society and culture,
into excrement, dead meat and decaying human flesh, the Victorian era became not only
exhibitionary, but also morbidly exhibitionistic, scopophilic and voyeuristic, revealing a new
desire that revolved around an abject wish to see and be seen. Bennett sees this as a structural
panopticon by concluding that the world on display at exhibitions was, in return, visually
controlled by visitors who were also on display.472 But, being concerned with other issues, he
failed to perceive the profound resonance between this panopticon and the voyeuristic desire
of the age. In this novel sweep of scopic fantasy, the spectator, the tourist, stands not only as a
perceiver of things, he stands as a voyeur, taking pleasure in this distance, inviting the Other,
the culture he is peeping at, into his own exhibitionistic fantasy, enacting the loop of the scopic
drive out of which Ulysses the Voyeur appears.

469
Bennett, ‘Exhibitionary Complex.’
470
Mitchell, ‘World as Exhibition,’ 221.
471
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 57.
472
Bennett, ‘Exhibitionary Complex,’ 82-87.

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 In Lacanian theory, a drive secures satisfaction (jouissance obtained) in the face of desire’s
inability to attain the impossible objet a, the only thing with which it can be satisfied. Lacan
distinguishes the aim and the goal of the drive. While the aim of the drive is inevitably inhibited
because ultimate satisfaction (jouissance expected) is impossible, the goal of the drive
(jouissance obtained) is always attained because the very path and restlessness of the drive is
its goal, a movement that always brings satisfaction. By circling around an objet a, the drive
brings the Other into play, in enacting its passive aspect – for example, to be seen. This ‘inviting
of the Other’ is fundamental for the drive’s return and results in the appearance of the subject.
‘The appearance of ein neues Subjekt [is] to be understood as follows,’ says Lacan,

not in the sense that there is already one, namely the subject of the drive, but in
that what is new is the appearance of a subject. This subject, which is properly
the other, appears insofar as the drive has been able to show its circular course.
It is only with its appearance at the level of the Other that what there is of the
function of the drive may be realized.473

Ulysses, as the other face of Victorian sirens, enacts his visual fantasy of strangeness,
uncanniness and incoherence, reaching for a whole that has never been and will never be,
perpetually caught in the dissatisfaction of desire, caught in the loops of the scopic drive,
appearing from the loops of the drive. Therefore, out of the distance that opened up between
Being and the subject, the spectator and the world, in a world that became a picture, a mirror
image, the Victorian male subject emerged as a fundamentally broken, split subject, whose
Being died as soon as he emerged as the effect of the signifier. Aphanasis of the subject was
the new reality of the Victorian age.

From Naturalism to Exhibitionism

After this excursus into the exhibitionistic nature of the Victorian visual field, we shall go
back to the naturalism, or ‘realism’ of Pre-Raphaelite painting. The intense Pre-Raphaelite
insistence on a panoptic, overarching view of their chosen subjects – a ‘cult of detailization’ or

473
Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 178-179.

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a ‘poetry of particulars’474 as Derek Stanford calls it – stands in line with the process of cultural
voyeurism. Some time before the actual founding of the Brotherhood, in a period when Hunt
and Millais were still only discussing their desire for change in their work, Hunt came to Millais
with a copy of Modern Painters, burning with enthusiasm and urging his friend to read the
book that he felt was talking directly to him. In it the author, John Ruskin, one of the most loyal
defenders of the Brotherhood, brought the importance of their artistic ideas to the fore by
saying:

[The artist] should go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her
laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate
her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting
nothing, and scoring nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and
rejoicing always in the truth.475

The influence Ruskin and other figures, such as Rossetti, had on Hunt, especially the
astonishing eloquence and pertinence of Modern Painters, cannot be emphasized enough. The
book itself and this quote in particular, went straight to the heart of the Pre-Raphaelite myth.
Audrey Williamson describes it as a ‘revolutionary work, which helped to inspire a whole
generation of young artists; and it set a pattern for descriptive and imaginative criticism, in all
branches of the arts […].’476 Although, of course, it is impossible for an artist to grasp
everything and omit nothing, it is clear that some of the Pre-Raphaelites – Holman Hunt
particularly – took Ruskin’s words almost religiously, as a sacrament leading him to his own
artistic enlightenment. We can see this clearly in his Awakened Consciousness (1853) (fig. 24),
where a fallen woman is caught in the act of adultery, while a hyper-abundance of objects and
details threatens to drown the eye of the spectator in the confusion and sharpness of the new
naturalism. We can also see this in the more class-aware Work (1863) (fig. 25) by Ford Madox
Brown, a painting that takes a truly panoramic and panoptic view of a workday street; or we
can see it in a masterpiece Ophelia (1852) (fig. 26) by John Millais, where the realism of the
plants was, at the time, almost uncanny.

474
Stanford, Pre-Raphaelite Writing, xviii.
475
John Ruskin, Modern Painters. Edited and Abridged by David Barrie (Worcester: Ebenezer Baylis & Son
Limited, 1987), 178-179.
476
Williamson, Artists and Writers in Revolt, 19.

214
 Figure 24 William Holman Hunt, Awakened Consciousness (1853)

This new attitude towards composition, a way of divulging reality to the eye of the viewer,
an overload of details that exhaust the viewer, runs parallel with the exhibitionism of Victorian
world fairs. Annual Royal Academy exhibitions, or the exhibitions in the prestigious, more
progressive, Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street, were structurally not so different from the rest
of the exhibitions of the age. Dozens of paintings hung densely on the high walls of the
Academy, lined one next to the other, every painting a miniature of the world, the gaze of the
era caught in between. In an age without television, cinema or the internet, nineteenth-century
artists were like movie stars, and the annual exhibitions places of worship and rejection. In
these halls, visual rules of culture were being established; a new bare, devastated and distressed
modernity was being created. In order for the Victorian modernity to be, a representational
distance towards Being was necessary, and we can see this act in the strength of Pre-Raphaelite
naturalism that stripped the reality bare, so that it could expose it (as though) at an exhibition.
Culture was stripped bare in these paintings, leaving a void in representation, a distance or a
blank space of Being, allowing the Victorian subject to appear.

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 Figure 25 Ford Madox Brown, Work (1863)

But in dealing with the emergence of the subject, in dealing with his birth, it is not possible
to order events in a linear fashion, arguing for the precedence of one over the other. We are
still dealing only with the symptoms of the age, where what we are looking at is not what we
wish to see. And our wish is to go deeper into the existential register of the age, and delimit a
particular desire that revolves around this core, this distance, around this objet a, a phantom
object that the desiring subject is yearning for but cannot reach, permanently circling around
that void that cries, implores, and beseeches him – coherence, Being, the Real, death. This void
got unleashed across all forms of cultural expression – material, visual, and textual, but in this
part of the books we shall deal with the visual aspect of the representational rupture, ever
searching for the hopelessness of the Victorian desiring subject. And we shall find the subject
emerging from the void in the wake of the voyeurism of the scopic drive, to express and re-
signify a denuded, exposed culture, and we shall follow him back to the nothingness of his
mirror image from which he came, only to be born again in loops of never-ending
representational horror.

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 Figure 26 John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1852)

The Arrival

Let us imagine: from a far-away, half-forgotten time Ulysses steers a vessel of dreams. On
the deck, chained to the mast of a broken, disrupted representation, the eternal voyager-dreamer
gazes into the terrifying Sirens’ faces. He is struggling, trying to break free, but the more he
struggles the stronger the ropes get. Every new effort, every new dream of congruity, every
effort of transcending his mirror-induced split, is getting him closer to his own doom. We
assume that his ship struggles bound for the putrid, decomposing island of the Sirens, but as
we can see with John William Waterhouse (fig. 1) and Herbert James Draper (fig. 27), the
Victorian sirens/mermaids are not waiting on the rotting shore, but are besieging him from up
close.477 He listens, but the sirens are silent; he gazes, but what he sees is only an illusion, a
fantasy, Franz Kafka says.478 Ulysses is in a trance as his desire pulls him towards the dark,
watery depths and he leaves his small isolated piece of ground rocked by the waves, says
Edward Burne-Jones, to drown his soul and his Being in an irresistible embrace of a mirrorless
mermaid.479 This is to be the final resting place of the Victorian Ulysses, at the somber and
troubling bottom of the sea, inside the horrid crack of representation. Ulysses is to fall through
his own mirror image, reaching out for coherence. But his desire for Being comes as a
nightmare, because Ulysses actually desires death itself.

477
Ulysses and the Sirens (1891) by John William Waterhouse and Ulysses and the Sirens (1909) by Herbert
James Draper.
478
Franz Kafka, ‘The Silence of the Sirens,’ in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories & Parables, ed. Nahum N.
Glatzer (New York: Quality Paper Book Club, 1983), 430-432.
479
The Depths of the Sea (1886) by Edward Burne-Jones.

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 Figure 27 Herbert James Draper, Ulysses and the Sirens (1909)

The game of seduction and restraint had been played for centuries and millennia, until
Ulysses finally arrived at the Victorian shores and landed in their visual field. And there – he
drowned, so as to be born again as a sign. For Ulysses had not been prepared for the void that
opened up in front of him – on his very boat, between his very feet – in the form of a whirlpool
that devastates and consumes all life and all knowledge. And as he gazed into nothingness, and
gave himself to the empty horror of desire, his Being left his body never to return, morphing
him into a picture, a spectacle, a performance, chaining him to a seat in an all-consuming and
all-representing show. The eternal Wanderer became a Spectator, peeping through a keyhole
at the society of spectacle, his body slowly turning into a commodity, and his soul into an
exhibit, just one more commodity, like the heart of Carrington’s Siren. Seeing himself at the
ever-lasting exhibition of humanity, Ulysses died as Being and rose from the ashes as a sign,
caught in the voyeurism of the Victorian culture.

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 Figure 28 John William Waterhouse, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses (1891)

Ulysses – our Victorian hero and the Siren’s inalienable complement – the Siren’s mirror
image, if we are to believe the siren literature of the age, could appear in the world that became
a picture only at the expense of his own Being, because the Ulysses we are talking about is the
one that manifests himself only as a sign. We can see this, for instance, in the painting Circe
Offering the Cup to Ulysses (1891) (fig. 28), by John William Waterhouse. The witch Circe is
seducing our Ulysses into a corporeal transformation, but he appears only in a mirror behind
her tremendous, arcane body, revealing his coherent existence only as a reflection, only as a
sign, a call of the Other on the threshold of subjectivity.

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 Figure 29 William Whitley, A Sail! (1898)

William Whitley also caught this moment perfectly in his work A Sail! (1898) (fig. 29). In
this painting, we see a jugged sea rock engulfed by a hysterical, raging sea, waves crashing
onto the hard surface of the sirens’ rocky lair. On the rock, the sirens in their human disguise
call and lure the ship in the distance, exposing their bodies to the voyeuristic gaze of the
nineteenth century. These sirens are human, they have legs, but the context of the painting is
obvious. The plainness of the scene would be enough to show us the bareness of cultural
expression, but we should account for the ship that disappears in the upper left-hand corner,
hinted at only by the title. The ship is all but invisible, rendered as a mirage amid dense sunset
fog, and it reveals itself only to a very keen eye. The only reason we would even look for it are
the nude bodies of the seductresses that signal Ulysses for us, and the title that signals to us
that there is A Sail! in the picture. So we gaze into the painting only to understand that the
Ulysses we are looking for has disappeared altogether, turned into a sign, conveyed only by
language of his arrival. Ulysses has been chained in the visual spectacle of the age of the world
picture, and what he left behind is a void that he himself brought on his vessel woven out of
dreams.

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 Figure 30 Lajos Márk, Sirens' Nest (1900)

In 1900, at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, Lajos Márk, a Hungarian painter, exhibited a
painting called Sirens’ Nest (fig. 30).480 Following the usual line of fin-de-siècle ‘idols of
perversity,’ Dijkstra describes it as

showing a nest of sirens stylishly coiffed in turn-of-the-century hairdos, all

remarkably naked, receiving offers of gold and jewelry from a massed throng
of madly desirous – who could blame them? – males of all ages. It was
abundantly clear from Márk’s image that the impetuous fervor of their male
admirers was likely to end in a fall from the precipitous cliffs on which they
were huddled in the throes of temptation.481

Yet, keeping in mind the argument about the exhibitionism of the era, and the role the
Victorian painting of sirens and mermaids played in it, what we discover in the painting is a
nest of sirens on display, bodies exhibited as if on stage, a performance of a denuded culture to
be consumed, a culture whose representational loops never end. As we gaze into the picture,

Anthony Geber, ‘Lajos (Louis) Márk: His Life and Art,’ Hungarian Studies 8:1 (1993).
480
481
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 259.

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we become aware of the painted audience’s gaze and, in the loop of the drive in its search for
satisfaction, the gaze of the audience is diverted back to us, transforming the spectator into
Ulysses the Voyeur once again. There is only a slight slip of the tongue between Ulysses the
Voyeur (the Spectator) and Ulysses the Voyageur (the Tourist), and not even that much cultural
space between them.
Many other contemporary paintings structurally deal with the topic of the sirens’
exhibitionism and the death/birth of the Victorian male subject.482 All of them feature a more
or less secluded scene, where the spectator sits behind a peephole in a show, feeling like an
uninvited guest, participating in the loop of the visual drive of the painter’s desire. The
paintings all appear from this loop, pushing the split subject into the fore. Close framed,
submerged into silence and calm backgrounds, as in a somewhat later painting The Echo (1911)
(fig. 31) by Jean-François Auburtin, these paintings bring the void of the sirens’ representation
into the picture. Victorian mermaid and siren paintings actually stand for the picture of the
world. They are a playground of the visual coquetry that circles around the rupture, the
unfathomable objet a, around the lack of the world in the process of appropriation of its
reflected image – the loss of Being, of the self, eternally caged in an abject call of the Other.

Figure 31 Jean-François Auburtin, The Echo (1911)

482
For instance, J. Humphreys Johnston’s The Mystery of the Night (1898), Gustav Moreau’s The Poet and the
Siren, all the mermaid paintings of John William Waterhouse, Arnold Böcklin’s Calm at Sea (1887) and many
others.

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Introducing the Fragments

Edward Burne-Jones and John William Waterhouse were stars of the Victorian art world.
Both of them were, at least for a time, members of the Royal Academy, but the thoughts and
creations of both were part of the Pre-Raphaelite mindscape.483 John William Waterhouse was
the younger of the two, and his more classical choice of topics occasionally got him excluded
from Pre-Raphaelite studies. Wood assumes that he was excluded from one of the first
comprehensive works on Pre-Raphaelitism, that of Percy H. Bate, on the grounds of his being
a follower of Leighton, who dedicated himself more to classical than medieval imagery. 484 On
the other hand, Edward Burne-Jones was a clear, bright, shining star of the movement, tapping
the very source of Pre-Raphaelite inspiration. He was a protégé of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
artistically came of age on the wings of Dante’s uniquely charismatic and medievalist
imagination. He followed the philosophy of the Brotherhood in his own way, with a bent for
fantasy, painting angels, sirens, knights, sorceresses and other characters of his extraordinary
dream world, earning the title of a ‘licensed escapist’485 in the process. D. G. Rossetti called
him ‘one of the nicest fellows in Dreamland,’486 while Aubrey Beardsley considered him ‘the
greatest living artist of Europe.’487 Both of the artists – together with everything Victorian for
that matter – ostensibly faded away after World War I, Waterhouse dying in 1917, as the war
raged on, Burne-Jones long before that, in 1898. But, during the Victorian revival, after the
World War II, and particularly during the 1970s, they both came into the spotlight, as the
academic material on Pre-Raphaelitism started piling up. John Russell Taylor said in The Times
in 1978 that Waterhouse was ‘not a forgotten painter; it is just that nobody remember[ed]
him.’488
A thing that Burne-Jones and Waterhouse had in common, a passion that they shared with
their age, was their obsession with female beauty – a particular type of beauty that Dixon Hunt

483
Burne-Jones was a member only briefly. During that short period he exhibited The Depths of the Sea, the work
we shall be dealing with. After that, he never exhibited at the Royal Academy again, staying loyal to the more
progressive Grosvenor Gallery until its closure in 1887.
484
Wood, Pre-Raphaelites, 141. In the last quarter of the century, parallel with the works of Edward Burne-Jones
and William Morris, emerged another stream of romantic painting, connected to the Pre-Raphaelite ideas in terms
of the employment of painting techniques, but more concentrated on the classical imagery. John William
Waterhouse was the most prominent figure of that style, following in the footsteps of Lawrence Alma-Tadema,
Frederick Watts and Frederick Leighton who, in 1878, became the president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Wood
thinks that Waterhouse was actually the only painter to have successfully reconciled the purely classical and the
Pre-Raphaelite visual thought.
485
MacCarthy, Edward Burne-Jones, xix.
486
Cf. Stanford, Pre-Raphaelite Writing, xx.
487
Williamson, Artists and Writers in Revolt, xxxi.
488
Aubrey Noakes, John William Waterhouse (London: Chauser Press, 2004), 6.

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calls ‘Rossetti’s ideal.’489 This gorgeous, majestic, fantastic figure, that was ‘ubiquitous in her
desultory existence’490 would eventually be appropriated by Art Nouveau artists, where its
grandeur of expression would become a vehicle of design, a mere decoration, emptied of its
raging, irrational fullness.491 But this wide-eyed, red-haired glamazon appears with both
painters as a devious virgin-monster, hiding behind its relationship to Ulysses the topology of
the Victorian male subject. This larger than life figure is the one we will be dealing with.
Waterhouse and Burne-Jones approached sirens in their own unique fashion: Waterhouse
being overzealous where details of facial expression were concerned, Burne-Jones painting
them in a transcendental, otherworldly fashion. While Waterhouse’s ‘nymphs and goddesses
[as] flesh-and-blood people’492 call the viewer to drown in the depth of their minutely painted
faces, Burne-Jones’s are offering nothingness, as if their being was all but erased. Nevertheless,
both types convey their monstrosity at the level of visual language. By penetrating the surface
of two impressive siren/mermaid paintings created by these unique minds, we shall show that
the realism, abstraction and plainness of Burne-Jones’ mermaids, and the naturalism of their
Waterhouse’s counterparts, although on the surface the antipodes of one another, were actually
two sides of the same phenomenon that ran deeper in their background. Both nothingness and
hyper-naturalism were parts of a new visual approach to Being, expressions of a denuding of
culture in the voyeuristic spectacle of consumption. Sirens and mermaids of the era stood in
the center of the world picture, signifiers robbed of their signified. Their monstrosity was an
expression of the inability of language to convey the impossibility of their existence, and this
inability was a uniquely Victorian issue; it carried the subject away from ‘here’ to the
‘elswhere’ of the void – the non-Being of language. In the next two chapters/fragments
dedicated to two of the most cherished Victorian painters, we shall see how monstrosity appears
in the field of the visual drive announcing once again the chained Ulysses of the modern age.
The Pre-Raphaelite mermaids/sirens are as much subjects and protagonists as the
mermaids/sirens from the literature – protagonist of their own visual narratives, succumbing to
the same relationship of the male subject to a female monstrous body. We shall follow the
language of Waterhouse’s A Mermaid and Burne-Jones’ The Depths of the Sea focusing on the
ways in which it conveys the never-ending horror of the Victorian male subject – Ulysses the
Chained, the Spectator, the Voyeur. Both representations of mermaids have the same nodal

489
Dixon Hunt, Pre-Raphaelite Imagination, 178.
490
Ibid., 196.
491
Ibid., 200-210.
492
Wood, Pre-Raphaelites, 142.

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reference point, an unapproachable black heart of desire that Lacan calls objet a – an
inexpressible break in signification rising from the appropriated mirror image of the age.

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FRAGMENT 1: PEEPING OF THE VICTORIAN SUBJECT

Whatever it is, I must go there.

Sigmund Freud

The semiotic incongruence of a monster’s body leads the eye of a viewer through uncanny,
peculiar loops: not to the image of the body, not even through that image, but right back to the
eye itself. Although every representation involves this interplay between a viewer and an
image, looking at a monstrous figure results in a particularly painful restructuring of the eye in
the process. The viewer’s gaze vivisects this impossible representation, but this game of
meanings, the restlessness of signs as they unfold in a signifying chain, is only a game of
appearances. What happens beyond appearances? What becomes of the desiring subject in this
game? Or, pertinent for this book, what becomes of the male desiring subject that comes into
existence only as the effect of a sign? A picture is always only an external screen, a façade
hiding the subject from the unwanted, meddling gaze, but it is possible to peer into the picture
and plunge through, to pierce the screen of the image and go deeper into the background, if one
only knows how to look. The act of looking is at stake here, because ‘what I look at is never
what I wish to see.’493
How does one look at a picture and insinuate oneself into the world of the visual? What is
there to be witnessed beyond a picture and how does the subject relate to the act of witnessing?
What is needed is a cautious gaze, not one that feeds on the obvious and the given, but one that
lingers between words, between signs, detecting meaning, and thus, desire itself. When one
plays in the field of the scopic drive, in the realm where what matters is not so much what one
sees, but where the act of seeing comes from and leads to, one has to lose oneself completely
in order to find one’s way. The heart of every picture is an elusive, hollow place where the
object of desire resides. It cannot be reached nor seen, but it lingers there signalling,
conditioning, and challenging the desire that will never be satisfied. Thus visual drive, once
awakened and feeding on desire’s desperation, relapses into its source, delimiting the phantom
object, re-enacting the subject’s fall. It is exactly this path, the boomerang-shaped path of the
scopic drive, which we will try to pursue here. As we meditate on the painting A Mermaid by
John William Waterhouse, the pleasures of visual coquetry of seeing and being seen will lead

493
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
1963-1964, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 103.

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us, through the artist’s desire, to the nineteenth-century male desiring subject who created it
and his relation to visual representation. It shall become clear that A Mermaid is the Victorian
male subject’s (Waterhouse’s, in the last instance) mirror image, a screen that merges Ulysses
and his Siren into one and the same image. Victorian sirens lost their mirrors because they
came to embody the desiring subject himself, and we shall see that the structure we found in
the written siren narratives, persists through the visual mermaid/siren culture as well: Ulysses
is always ‘in the picture,’ even if he is not there. As it was the case with all the other
siren/mermaid narratives analysed so far, monstrous bodies are, essentially, the male subject’s
expression of, and interaction with, himself.
The male Victorian subject appears in all his glory as an essentially disrupted self, one that
gorges himself on his own dissolution and destruction. In other places, we called him Alice,
we called him The Little Mermaid, and we called him the Siren. Here, we call him Ulysses
(and we will call him A Mermaid), owing to his essential dependence on his murdering
enchantress, the mermaid (in accordance with the painting we are about to analyse). Ulysses
arrives as a fundamentally seduced subject in the spectacle of the world. He appears as a split,
spasmodic self once the world becomes an exhibition, once the mirrors are widely introduced
into everyday life, and once he dies as Being in order to be. In his core, gasping for air from
the dark chasm of his non-Being, lies the same note, the same rhapsody of a gap and a perpetual
lack around which the unconscious weaves its web. What is this formidable place and how can
we approach it? By following A Mermaid in a spiral, centrifugal stroke, we shall empty the
painting of its meanings and reach out for the unsignifiable part of the subject’s desire – his
objet a. This attempt – both rewarding and futile from the very start – will leave us empty-
handed. But these empty hands are exactly what we need, for in them we shall find that which
is lacking – the object of Waterhouse’ desire – the lost, fundamentally absent, core of the
Victorian subject.
The best way to approach nothingness and depict the path of the visual drive in pursuit of
its lacking goal, is to start from the obvious, from what we know and what has already been
given to us – what ‘gives itself’ to us. Searching in a picture for an object always already lost,
the objet a, is never an easy task for a viewer. He (we will presume a ‘he,’ since we are dealing
with the male phantasy of sirens and with a male subject) has to follow the crumbs left by the
artist, he has to dive into a mosaic with no order and no meaning, and what he brings back with
him is, in the last instance, his own lack, his own desire. Thus, these crumbs do not lead
anywhere, because the object has been lost in the first place. Nevertheless, this is precisely
where the viewer’s gaze has to go, so he has to lose himself right from the start.
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 This crusade for emptiness involves two separate modes of temporality at the intersection
between perception and consciousness, forming the ‘interval that separates them, in which the
place of the Other is situated, in which the subject is instituted.’494 At one level, the viewer sees
the picture, he perceives it as a whole, arranging all the crumbs, all the clues that the drive – in
its return to the source – has left for him. At this point, the viewer is drawn into the picture; the
picture ensnares him, flashing his own desire back at him. At another level, the viewer discerns
the marks of the path; he becomes conscious of the symbolic baggage left for him. On the
surface, he decides to abandon his desire and to go along the path, hoping to attain the
mysterious object that imperceptibly seduces him from the heart of the picture. This conscious
abandonment is just an illusion, though, because one way or another, the subject who looks at
the painting merges with the subject that emerges from the painting. This merging disrupts the
ostensible continuum of the picture, enlisting the subject in the gap of the unconscious that
Lacan, after Freud, calls die Idee einer anderer Lokalität,495 the Other’s playground between
perception and consciousness.

The Fall

A Mermaid, John William Waterhouse’s final diploma work for the Royal Academy, saw
the light of day in 1900, when it was shown in a public display for the first time (fig. 32). The
painting stands at the end of a relatively long line of sketches and exercises on the same subject.
On a 96.5 x 66.6 cm canvas, we face a mermaid in a private act of combing her hair. She dwells
in a secluded alcove walled by rocks, her tail ‘tucked almost felinely beneath her.’ 496 Her red,
burning hair falls softly down her curved body, long red wisps touching the body’s nonhuman
lower part. Her arm is stretched fully in the act of combing, while her gaze disappears
somewhere in the distance, halfway between the spectator and the background. Right next to
her, we see a cornucopia of pearls in a shell that reminds us of a seaborne treasure washed upon
the shore.497

494
Ibid., 45.
495
Ibid., 56.
496
Meghan Edwards, ‘The Devouring Woman and Her Serpentine Hair in Late Pre-Raphaelitism,’ last modified
26 December 2004, viewed 14 December 2012, http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/prb/edwards12.html.
497
Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London,
England: Harvard University Press, 1982), 64.

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 Figure 32 John William Waterhouse, A Mermaid (1900)

The water in the alcove is tranquil, as gentle waves roll pebbles in the shoal. Titanic rocks
enclose the little dwelling place of this sensuous, calm and benevolent being. The scene is
luminous, indicating (like in every Victorian siren narrative) high noon, the siren’s time, where
everything gets dispersed and all secrets are revealed, as low tide brings forth the marvels of
sea depths.498 The mermaid’s lips are slightly apart, suggesting a millennia-old siren song. The

The heat of the summer or high-noon is traditionally the sirens’ time. Almost every siren narrative from the
498

Odyssey to the Victorian England features this element. Apart from the Odyssey where we see wax malting in

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general sentiment of the painting follows a soft mermaid lullaby: familiar with the
mermaid/siren lore, we can almost feel her caressing us with her soothing voice, the heat of the
hour making us dizzy and sleepy, the velvety waves rocking our half-conscious mind. But as
it is always the case with paintings of mermaids, the creature begging for our company with
her indolent gaze and the hypnotic movement of her hand attaches herself to the core of our
own ruptured self, the stretched hand reaching into the split, right into our unconscious,
uncovering fear, anxiety and desire. In every painting there is always more than meets the eye.
Exhibitionistic like the age it embodies (and a clear objectification of monstrous flesh), this
painting spreads out of a violated coherence that is introduced by the mermaid’s inconceivable
body. As Nina Auerbach says, commenting on another Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite mermaid, ‘the
mermaid arrests us because nonhumanity in human form looks out at us.’499 We, the viewers,
are Ulysses too, subjects born out of the enticement of the visual spectacle, and if we look
deeper into the painting, beyond the gentle gaze of the mermaid, we will see our own ejected
Being and perceive the path of desire that encompasses the visual field of the late nineteenth
century. In this painting something is missing, something is eluded and refused, something that
preys upon the ecstasy of the gaze, where the subject faces his own loss, his own lair of
monstrosity. Between the obvious and the expected, between what one sees and what one
wishes to see, lies an infinite punctiform space of creation and fear that spreads centrifugally
from the heart of the picture. If we look hard enough into the place which is not there, we will
meet the lack of the subject who created the painting, which is the same as the lack of the
subject who emerges from the language of the painting. Ultimately, we are bound to see our
own lack as well.
Right from the start we are faced with two different viewpoints in A Mermaid, two lines of
eyesight that shape the picture and give it a twist through the space delineated by that-which-
is-not-there. We might say that we are presented with two gazes, mapping for us the field of
the visual drive, out of which the male Victorian subject appears. One of them is obvious and
starts from the mermaid’s enthralling eyes, it follows the line of her hand, tracing the long,
carnal-red mane of her hair, ending somewhere outside the picture. Although it is tempting to

Ulysses’ hands, in Bret Harthe ‘The Mermaid of Lighthouse Point’ in Under the Redwoods (Leipzig: Bernhard
Tauchnitz, 1901) a mermaid appears on ‘a bright summer morning’ (97) and during ‘the hottest hour of the day’
(112); The Siren of Henry Carrington sings two times per day: once at noon and once at midnight; in The Sea
Lady by H. G. Wells, the mermaid appears on ‘a bright blue day in August’ (21), etc. Educated on this issue, we
imagine the same element in this painting. But the low tide, that reveals the treasure by the mermaid’s tail, cannot
occur at high noon, but when the moon is high. There is an obvious discrepancy in the painting, since Waterhouse
painted daytime scene and daylight is seen through the rock in the background. Thus, either it is not low tide, or
Waterhouse made an (un)conscious mistake.
499
Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, 94.

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assume that her gaze falls upon the viewer himself, it would be too easy, too obvious and
gratifying, if we restricted ourselves to this interpretation exclusively. For, after all, what we
are searching for in the picture is that which is outside meaning, where the male subject irrupts,
surprising us in his abyssal ‘fullness.’ He simultaneously appears both full and broken because
his abyss, his lack, is fundamental for his life-sustaining miscomprehension of his own psychic
unity. The chasm of absence creates the mirage of wholeness. This unity, ‘that is introduced by
the experience of the unconscious, is the one of the split, of the stroke, of rupture [...] not the
non-concept, but the concept of the lack.’500 Thus the mermaid gaze does not lead to the viewer
directly, but to the viewer’s own lack, his objet a which is literally not. There is nothing
surprising in a mermaid luring a subject into an abyss, thus rather than saying that the gaze falls
upon us, spectators, we shall say that it passes right by us, leaving an impression that if we
move a bit to the left, we will be able to catch it, and drown in the mermaid’s eyes. Bram
Dijkstra shows that at the time of the painting’s creation, the curious and wicked gaze was
particularly fashionable in Britain and France, where the tradition of the femme fatale thrived.
He observes that ‘diabolic women with the light of hell in their eyes were stalking men
everywhere in the art of the turn of the century.’501 As an example he takes Arthur Hacker’s
Sir Percival stalked by a cat-like lady, but he also turns to our hero, John William Waterhouse
in a brief analysis of his Hylas and the Nymphs. If, as Dijkstra argues, it became fashionable to
paint ladies ‘looking malevolently at the viewer from under partially lowered eyelids,’502 we
could assume that our painting appears against the same iconographic background. But our
mermaid has a different kind of look, not the one that tells all its secrets up front, but one that
reveals things precisely by not disclosing that which it hides. By following the mermaid’s look
slightly aside, somewhere towards the lower left-hand corner of the painting, what we
experience here is the fall of the subject right at the moment when he leaves the scene, when
he tries to walk away, his guard down. The subject has been caught.

The Redeemer of Victorian Modernity

There is also another gaze in the painting, but in order to see it, in order to trace its move
and penetrate the game of visual pleasures that is essential to the Victorian subject, we need to

500
Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 26.
501
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 252.
502
Ibid.

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restructure the image of the mermaid and look for the lines that are not visible. ‘In our relation
to things,’ says Lacan,

in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the
figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to
stage, and is always to some degree elided in it – that is what we call the gaze.503

That which is omitted in the picture is the gaze around which the picture revolves; it is the
object of Waterhouse’s desire, since he himself is the Victorian subject who emerges from the
language of the picture. Later on, we will be able to describe this apparition of an object more
precisely, but for now let us follow the path of the scopic drive in the painting and its return to
the source.
At this point we must ask what is beyond the appearance of this painting. What structural
demarcations can we perceive in the unspoken field of the split, in the sombre cave where the
unconscious dwells?
To answer these questions and return to the gaze, it is important to address again the issue
of what we know, by virtue of it being presented to us. The end of the nineteenth century was
the age of fierce gender struggles. This issue has been raised in the prologue, so now we will
go back to it shortly. In his fantasy that had a profound impact on reality, the Victorian male
subject created an obedient female being, caged inside a drawing room, an ‘angel in the house’
waiting for him to come home after a hard day’s work. But, as Auerbach already perceived,
the Victorian era was engulfed in images that expressed the other side of this fantasy, a dark,
sinister side hunting the souls of men.504 Dijkstra argued, rightly, that scientifically and
historically autopsied woman was a culturally base creature, appearing from the previous stages
of the evolution to serve as a bowl for misogynous attitudes at the fin-de-siècle.505 On the other
hand, Auerbach shrewdly perceives that textual, material and visual manifestations of female
wickedness were also an empowering element of female representation.506 Born out of male
fear, this new image promote the idea of infinite female power of transformation that

503
Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 73.
504
Auerbach, Woman and the Demon.
505
Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity; see, also, Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (vol.
1), trans. Stephen Conway in collaboration with Erica Carter and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1987), or Patrick Bade, Femme Fatale: Images of Evil and Fascinating Women (New York:
Mayflower Books, 1979).
506
For a different version of the female myth (the female aquatic evolution), see Elaine Morgan, The Descent of
Woman (London: Souvenir Press, 1985).

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transcended the shrinking male world of reason by appropriating the traditional border-images
of expected womanhood, such as devils, sirens, fallen women and spinsters, recreating them in
the light of woman’s immense power over the material world. ‘As woman and character,’ says
Auerbach about Diana Verno, using Walter Scott’s character as an embodiment of new
devastating Victorian femininity,

[she] is realer than her fiction, wiser stronger, and freer than the historical man
who imagined her; her independence of love and marriage leads to
transcendence of all that does not enhance her own enlarged existence. She
alone possesses an infinitely expanding life, animating by the richness of her
presence those limited beings, her novel, her author, and her reader. The
freedom she promises is both aesthetic and cosmic, a grand and tantalizing hint
of possible human divinity.507

The male fear of loose sexual boundaries and gender roles created this immense creature
called woman, summoning it from the realms of obsession and anxiety. We have seen them as
Prophets of Death in the Victorian siren literature (The Red Queen, Circe in her Victorian skin,
the sea-witch from The Little Mermaid, as well as the Little Mermaid’s grandmother). The Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood imagined it along the same lines, where painting female models was a
release from hard Victorian sexual taboos imposed on the middle class. As Gay Daly shows in
her almost heart-breaking biography of the five most prominent members of the Brotherhood,
while painting women obsessively, they actually knew quite little about them, and even less
about sex itself.508 Desire, fuelled by the barred object, a constant attraction without a
possibility of getting close to it, created an impossible atmosphere of anxiety, which, in their
case, exploded in the images of sirens and mermaids.
We are already familiar with the story of Victorian cultural misogyny, since it provides the
canvas of this book, as something already discussed extensively by other authors. It was
important to reintroduce it here since it is a cultural milieu that provided the backdrop against
which our painting was created. This was the language that invited the Pre-Raphaelite painters
into existence as subjects, filling them, like empty receptacles, ready to be impregnated with
the fears and desires of their times. Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.509 Although the

507
Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, 182.
508
Gay Daly, Pre-Raphaelites in Love (Fontana: Collins, 1990), 19.
509
‘Man’s desire is the desire of the Other’ is one of Lacan's immortal phrases.

233
issue of femininity was, and still is, quite obvious and we have no attention of diminishing its
importance, what the Pre-Raphaelite artists also painted – as they drew the balmy, inviting
bodies of their models with tails, wings and claws – was not just misogyny or praise of
earthborn goddesses; they painted their own shattered selves. So, what we are interested in here
is not the representation of women per se, at least not exclusively, nor the ways in which
femininity became constructed/subjugated in various monstrous images. We are not interested
in what offers itself as self-evident in Pre-Raphaelite painting. We are interested in the subjects
who constructed/subjugated this femininity: the painter himself tells us about the cultural
perception of women by painting it, but the language of the painting, its unconscious structure
– the one emerging from within the language of the painting, from between the ‘words’ – tells
us about the male Victorian subject himself, about the painter himself. The painter (the artist
in general) cannot obliterate himself while painting – on the contrary – he exposes himself in
the act of painting fully. Ulysses, in a constant struggle to save his soul from the attacks of
marine, submerging dreams that sing repeatedly about death, destruction and joy, paints his
own tattered self on a mermaid canvas, once again expressing the love/death from the
‘underground,’ as Bataille would say, from the souterrain that resides in his brush stroke. A
Mermaid (as does Ulysses and the Sirens, in the last instance), having been painted by
Waterhouse, always comes back to Waterhouse himself; it represents Waterhouse’ own desire,
selfhood and his abject face; it shows his own desire for death, fear, decay and everything
perversely divine. It represents Waterhouse’s horrid nest of monstrosity, his split subjectivity
itself.
One cannot approach the abyss within oneself, which opens the moment one is called into
the Symbolic. It is too painful – this primal trauma – too dreadful and unbearable. One cannot
even paint it directly, nor write about it. That is why one fantasizes about it, veiling it in
unrecognizable images. The gulf of Being belongs to the Real, the domain that always escapes
us and stays always beyond our reach; it belongs to the awakening from the dream, to the final
appropriation of a desired object. This gulf calls us to meet it, to understand the beyond of the
signifying chain – Being itself – cursing us with ‘an appointment to which we are always called
[...] that eludes us.’510 We cannot follow the Real because it always comes back to the same
place, to itself, the only place we are not allowed to go. But fantasy makes the trauma bearable;
it makes it lucid and viable, because we believe that our fantasy has no rules. However, fantasy
follows the same path of desire that always leads us back to our own loss, our own unattainable

510
Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 54.

234
object – always back to our own gaze. That is why there is always more in a picture than is
depicted. Being fundamentally a visual medium, it is only natural that this truth that disguises
itself as a lie, appears somewhere along the lines of the scopic drive – between the pleasures of
seeing and being seen.

The Curse of the World as a Stage

So far we have seen that A Mermaid is a veil. In its structure it hides a lack, an elision that
keeps the whole painting together by simultaneously disrupting its meaning, obstructing its
semiotic coherence. Somewhere between the eye of the viewer and the eye of the mermaid
(qua the eye of the artist), lies this stygian hole of the Victorian language, structuring and
deconstructing the painting through a gaze that resides in its background. What this gaze is, is
our final issue. It is the objet a, the always already list object. It is the fullness, the Being, the
exit, the awakening. But, in order to face the gaze, in order to understand its onerous and
illusory nature, all we can do is go around it, circle it, and weave a net of meaning that will,
hopefully, present us with the gaze in the end. Thus, we have to go back to the painting again.
In its cracks and crevices, it still hides the path of the scopic drive, it still fulfils the reveries of
the Victorian subject.
One of the ways of approaching desire of the subject is addressing a disturbing feeling that
the calmness of the picture conveys. Caught in a beautifying act of combing her hair, the
mermaid radiates a void. Plain, almost smooth rocks are nothing like the jutted peaks of The
Merman, a 1885 painting by the same author (fig. 33). These two paintings should be
considered counterparts in a way, since both came into existence on the wings of Tennyson’s
poems, The Mermaid and The Merman. With Tennyson, these poems were obviously parts of
the same structure of thought.511

These two poems are quite parallel in structure and language. See Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘The Mermaid,’ in
511

The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Karen Hodder (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 21 and
Tennyson, ‘The Merman,’ in The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Karen Hodder (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth
Editions, 1994), 20.

235
 Figure 33 John William Waterhouse, The Merman (cc. 1985)

But while Waterhouse’ The Merman oozes the sharpness and violence of rocks, figures and
water – of brush strokes in general – A Mermaid is sunk into an almost lethargic state. The
rocks in the distance, the peaceful surface of the water, the plainness of the alcove; everything
calls oblivion to the scene, drowning the aggressiveness, lure and sexual seduction coming
from the mermaid. Oblivious to the danger and death that the mermaid embodies, of the dread
that a monstrous existence hides in the folds of her deviant skin, the male subject strays to the
excluded grounds of desire. The abject face of Waterhouse, the mermaid, from whom our
Victorian subject does not part, is, as Julia Kristeva says in another context, ‘a land of oblivion
that is constantly remembered.’512 But as the background of the picture is an empty, stark
surface of inactivity, falling upon itself in a trance of lethargic desperation, the mermaid, in a
sharp and visible contrast to the merman, is rendered so vividly and in such detail, that it comes
as a flash of consciousness in a half-forgotten dream. ‘The time of the abjection is double,’
continues Kristeva, ‘a time of oblivion and thunder, or veiled infinity and the moment when
revelation bursts out.’513 With her hand hypnotically stroking her hair, the mermaid reveals the
return of death into the picture, waking the dreamer who gets confronted with the painful abject
realization that nothing can be hidden, nothing can be simply put away or subtracted from the
land of shadows which is called the unconscious, the navel of dreams that the abject feeds
upon. Her pale, almost marble skin flashes the unconscious right back into the picture. The
‘once-upon-a-blotted-time,’514 when our subject was a bowl for the desires of the Other,

512
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 8.
513
Ibid., 9.
514
Ibid., 8.

236
suddenly re-emerges from the abyss of the mermaid’s monstrous skin, arousing fear and
apprehension, turning fascination into shame. What should be salvation – the love, the bliss,
the fantasy – has been invaded by death. The uncanny feeling, the disturbing sense of
strangeness that creeps up into the picture, signals that the subject that emerges from the
language of the painting has been caught. He faces his own gaze.
Let us image once again: there is a painter in front of a canvas, and the painter paints a
mermaid. Only, while painting a mermaid – an expression of his deepest desires – he is actually
painting, topologizing, himself. The painter and the mermaid, the painter and the canvas, stand
against each other as in a mirror but for a fact that the mirrored image does not stare directly
back, its gaze falling next to the painter. The painter stares at himself as through a peephole, in
a perverse (distortive) act of voyeurism. Thus, at this point, in the act of voyeurism that the
painting facilitates, there is a spiralling relationship between the painter and the subject that
appears from the language of the painting. In the exhibitionistic spectacle of the mermaid’s
exposure, the painter sees himself looking through a keyhole. He is surprised by his own gaze.
He enters a loop of the scopic drive circling around his loss, around his absent object. This is
the point where the boomerang trajectory of the drive in the painting manifests itself. Our male
Victorian subject descends upon the scene in an act of self-awareness. In the painting, the
painter is shown to himself from the only, utterly paradoxical, point that potentially brings the
pleasure of the circling drive – he sees himself from the geometral point from where he sees
the others. In this game of lines of visions, he sees himself from the ‘flesh of the world,’515 he
sees himself from the geometral point of the painting that is his distorted mirror reflection. But,
from that point on, the painter disappears as such, he is ‘scotomized,’ he vanishes in the blind
spot of the world’s vision, deriving pleasure from the act of being seen, as long as he is not
aware of it. But as soon as the awareness of the gaze breaks in, the lines of voyeurism are
broken, and the painter’s surprise turns into fear, into an awkward, shameful, abject feeling.
This is the curse of our painting, of the male subject’s mirror image, at the age when the
world became a stage.

Death by Drowning

515
‘The flesh of the world’ (la chair du monde) is an expression that Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses in his book The
Primacy of Perception, trans. William Cobb (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), arguing that ‘the
perceiving mind is an incarnated mind’ (3) In our case, the term is used to refer to that phenomenological ‘other’
space of human intentionality, the material world, that ‘sees’ us from the point of view of material totality.

237
 Through the voyeuristic tendencies of the nineteenth-century visual field, the male subject,
objectified and banished from his own representation, is paradoxically drawn back into it. A
Mermaid presents us with this paradox, but in order to grasp it fully we have to turn to the
givens once again.
The Pre-Raphaelite painters revolutionized Victorian painting around the middle of the
nineteenth-century, in such a profound way that by the end of the century Pre-Raphaelitism
became a driving artistic force on the Island. The way the Brothers approached reality and
nature itself, as an everlasting source of artistic inspiration, emerged as a result of their
discontent with the trivialities of the Grand Style of the Academia. At the structural level of
their art, the old/new approach to naturalism resonated with issues related to the subject and
his relationship to representation. Graham Parry says that ‘[f]or the Pre-Raphaelites, naturalism
meant basically a particular way of confronting the object, an attitude of mind which considers
the object more important than the style.’516 Thus, although light-coloured canvases overthrew
the brownish, dim atmosphere of the Grand Style, their interest lay in a peculiar dissolution of
the subject. A Mermaid shows this aspect of their legacy, albeit in a hidden fashion. The alluring
curves of her body, her arm stretched in the act of calling, her slightly open mouth signalling
the joy of jouissance, implore the viewer to drown in the picture and lose his misunderstood
subjectivity. In a slightly different context, Parry calls this dissolution an

imaginative penetration of the subject which makes us conscious of the life

within. [...] [W]hen a painter can force us into a feeling of becoming part of the
subject. And they [Pre-Raphaelite painters] were right to concentrate on the
intensity of the scene, to emphasize those eyes which are almost mesmeric – for
it is the kind of mesmerism which effects a union between the viewer and the
object. The most effective paintings depend on this relentless staring between
subject and object until the distinction is broken down and we move into the
painting.517

In A Mermaid, the distance between the viewer and the object – the mermaid veil
topologizing the male Victorian subject – vanishes, and with a flashing intensity we are called
right into the mermaid’s mesmeric eyes. Through the mermaid’s image, the viewer is called to

516
Graham Parry, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Image: Style and Subject 1848-56,’ Proceedings of the Leeds
Philosophical and Literary Society 17:1 (1978): 5.
517
Ibid.

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dissolve in the details of her face and body, to disappear in the over-consciousness of the
material world, to kill the distance. This desire of disappearance of the distance is what the
nineteenth-century has brought into the cultural West in general – cultural maintaining of a
distance that creates a desire to completely succumb to it. The world on display has caused the
breaking of the lines of vision, where losing one’s own reflection in fetishized mirror-
commodities left the modern subject empty and abject, it left him monstrous. The ‘hypertrophy’
and ‘elephantiasis’ of ornaments and details, that we have discussed in the Exhausted at the
Lake’s Shore chapter, found their way into Victorian painting, where, as Perry argues, ‘[t]he
Pre-Raphaelites really envisaged a style in which naturalism merged into supernaturalism.’518
Ascending from the pacifying, still, almost meek background of the picture, from the land of
oblivion in the long-gone field of the Other, the mermaid in our painting appears as that double
time of the abject, as the thunder clad in details that ravishes the picture’s fullness. The scales
of her tail, the strands of her hair, her burning lips and hypnotic eyes, claim the ecstasy of the
visual, where ‘[t]he naturalist painter denies himself in favour of his subject.’519

The Loss

From the mermaid’s gaze, as the abject gaze of the male Victorian subject (our Ulysses,
John William Waterhouse), through his dissolution in the act of peeping at himself, we have
come full circle, returning to the field of the scopic drive. But in order to complete this journey
(though when dealing with infinite loops of loss, completion is never possible) and round off
the peeping of the Victorian subject, we shall return to the beginning once again and ask: what
happens to the subject in this canvas, in this game of meanings and appearances?

518
Ibid.
519
Ibid.

239
 Figures 34, 35, 36 John William Waterhouse, Studies for A Mermaid (1982)

A painting is a ‘function in which the subject has to map himself as such,’520 Lacan says,
and if we line up the painter’s studies for A Mermaid, we shall see the subject’s topography
appear. As the face of the mermaid becomes more specific, stronger, clearer and more
enrapturing from study to study, the self-awareness of the male subject emerges; he reveals his
abject, monstrous face. In the same act, the dehumanization of the female subject unfolds: a
serene female portrait turns into a seductive monster. From a vague and crude female face
(fig.34), through a fleshier one against a blurred background (fig.35), once again we are back
to the mermaid’s monstrous body and the male subject’s split skin (fig.36). Structured by the
nineteenth-century visual and iconographic ecstasy and fantasy of female unbridled sexuality,
the male subject appears once again in the form of a female monster. Painting an object of his
desire and fear, John William Waterhouse, mapped himself for us, in an uncanny topography
of a parapraxis, of a disturbed body, arising from the trauma of separation caused by the
entrance into the symbolic, when the subject died as Being and appeared as meaning. A
Mermaid, a ‘topology of catastrophe,’521 is a painting in which an expression of love and desire
corresponds with a symbolic cry of need for these feelings. But this catastrophe is exactly where
our Victorian subject of the scopic field finds himself, ejected and devastated in no man’s land,
between the eye and the gaze, in a whirl of the drive whose wandering does not satisfy the
subject in the end; but it shows. It shows the split, it strips naked the subject in question,
bringing forth the monstrosity of the mermaid’s body in a desperate act of desire, denuding the
culture that invoked the subject in the first place. As soon as it appears from the void of the

520
Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 100.
521
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9.

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signifying chain, the monster brings violence to the scene, disrupting the pleasure of the
voyeuristic nature of the nineteenth-century visual representation, turning joy into shame,
dejection and repulsion. Through the monstrosity of the mermaid’s body, the Victorian subject
interacts with himself, merging Ulysses with the Siren (or, in this case the mermaid) once again,
his craving insatiable, despairing over the lost object, that one object that is behind all other
objects of his desire. He reaches out for the wholeness promised to him at the gates of the
Symbolic, in that forgotten, forbidden and suppressed time when he stood in front of the mirror,
falling for the fantasy of escape from semiotic incongruence, deepening the incongruence in
the process. So, in that precise moment, he was deceived; he mistook his mirror image for his
own coherent self, opening up his Being to the meaning, desires, fears and obsessions of the
Other, believing in the Real, somewhere beyond language and meaning. And from that day on,
embodied in many monstrous forms he had been roaming the labyrinth of language, the dream
that never ends, misrepresenting himself in the acts of representation, not realising that at the
core of his existence, at the end of the bottomless pit, in that ravenous, menacing and
unreachable non-existence of ‘psychical death,’ stands méconnaissance in which the world is
a stage.
From this perspective, the Victorian subject is literally objectified in the spectacle of the
world, the legacy of the nineteenth century. Our painting is not named The Mermaid, like the
above-mentioned The Merman, but A Mermaid instead, the choice of an indefinite article
indicating a vague existence of the creature. She is both a distant mermaid and any mermaid.
Linda Phyllis Austern assumes that her parting lips sing the siren song, known for centuries for
its destructive, seducing power over victims.522 But could we imagine that this mermaid sings
another song – the familiar song of silence? Objectified, commodified and broken, she still
lures and prays, but being the subject herself, manifesting the male subject in her abject face,
her lure is not the same. Her song now lures by what it does not say – like in Kafka’s parable
– it lures by the void, slip of the tongue, parapraxis. It lures by the imperceptible powers of
objectified modernity. As at the Great Exhibition, where the whole world was put on display,
the Victorian subject crops up from the split between the eye and the gaze, in the voyeuristic
pleasures of the visual field. From this unholy lair of monstrosity, over the hypnotic hand of a
mermaid, through the Pre-Raphaelite painting and right onto the stage of the world, the
subject’s abject face revolves around an imperceptible object, the one which is not there, that

522
Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘“Teach Me to Hear Mermaids Singing”: Embodiments of (Acoustic) Pleasure and
Danger in the Modern West,’ in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 64.

241
cannot be sustained and cannot be represented, namely, the lack, the loss, the gap, the void –
death as a pure signifier.

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FRAGMENT 2: AT THE GATES OF LANGUAGE

Monsters symbolize alterity and difference in extremis. They manifest the plasticity of the
imagination and the catastrophes of the flesh.523
Allen S. Weiss

In this last chapter on the Victorian visual field, we will gaze into another nineteenth-century
Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece and we will read it as the representation of a crucial moment in the
life of the Victorian subject – his birth. Through a scopic game of presence and absence, we
will expose ourselves to The Depths of the Sea by Edward Burne-Jones, and show, once again,
the essential dependence of Ulysses on his Siren (in this example, it is again a mermaid).
Edward Burne-Jones is especially suitable for this task, because, as Wood observes, ‘[t]he
world of Burne-Jones is a Victorian dream world, and epitomizes the spirit of late Victorian
civilization.’524 If we want to deal with the Victorian visual imagination, with Edward Burne-
Jones we know we are on the right track.
Late Victorian painting, particularly that of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was
characterized by displaying the subject on the stage of the world, or better, in the world as a
stage, as a picture. The representational exhibitionism of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and their
female characters that often crossed over into the distant past or a mythological scene, is a
hallmark of the Victorian era. A distance appeared: a distance that allowed the subject to see
himself from the outside, from the eye situated in the field of the Other, ‘the flesh of the world,’
experiencing reality in a constant, escapist loop of the visual drive. We named the hole that
opened within that distance – between the eye and the gaze – the birthplace of the subject
himself, the void, the ‘irreducible element’ of the Victorian language, as Foucault says. Now
we are interested in the visual expression of this distance, so we are turning to a painting that
could be read as the gates of language, where the male Victorian subject is born.

The Depths of the Sea

The Depths of the Sea (fig. 37), just like the great majority of recognized Pre-Raphaelite
paintings, appeared at the Royal Academy exhibition in Burlington House in 1886. It belongs

523
Allen S. Weiss, ‘Ten Thesis on Monsters and Monstrosity,’ The Drama Review 48:1 (2004): 125, thesis vi.
524
Christopher Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981), 134.

243
to a late phase of Edward Burne-Jones’s oeuvre, to a period by which he had already developed
his distinctive dream world of ‘lunar landscapes’525 and otherworldly ‘gods and goddesses
enacting a cruel myth on a remote, barren planet.’526 Its subject is, for most of the critics,
straightforward enough: Wildman and Christian see

a mermaid, [that] having seized the body of a drowning sailor, drags him down
to the depths of the sea; her smile expresses her sense of triumph, and she is
unaware that he is already dead.527

Wood considers it to be a ‘subject based simply on his own [Burne-Jones’s] private dream
world,’528 while Fiona MacCarthy sees in it ‘images of passion but in the end bleak pictures of
men’s and women’s incompatibility.’529 Dijkstra is, in his own stylistically superior fashion, a
bit more elaborate:

In Burne-Jones’s The Depths of the Sea […] a woman with hypnotic eyes and a
vampire’s mouth has already completed her seduction and is carrying her prey
– as if it were a huge, flowery bouquet of lost male morality – into the oblivion
of her sensuality, where, we can be quite certain, he is to suffer the brain death
which unfailingly accompanied the state of perpetual tumescence promised by
the hollows of siren’s cave.530

525
Ibid., 119.
526
Ibid., 126.
527
Stephen Wildman and John Christian, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer (New York: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 264.
528
Ibid., 122.
529
Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London:
Faber and Faber Ltd, 2011), xxiv.
530
Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 296.

244
 So once again, we are behind a keyhole,
peeping at a distant and private scene of
death, destruction, and – due to the presence
of a mermaid – we presume of love. The
lovers are abandoned by the world, the
forlornness and stillness of the picture
interrupted only by a small school of fish
moving swiftly in the upper right-hand
corner, and by the stiffness of the mermaid’s
tail. A pale, almost surreally smooth and
evanescent mermaid’s body is pressed
tightly against the strong, masculine and
grim human body of her male victim. His
eyes are closed, as in a puzzling act of
intoxication, dream or death; his arms are
invisible, ‘castrated,’531 as Kramer says,
behind his back. His groins are gone too,
substituted by the crook of the mermaid’s
arm, as the couple slowly descends into the
depths of the sea. By contrast, the mermaid
is vital and alert, her pallid body fading
away into her livid tail that hales the picture
strongly towards the bottom, in straight,
stiff strokes of the fins. The whole scene is
submerged in cobalt despondency in so
many different ways, that it does not come
as a surprise that we may imagine the image
rocking us to sleep once again, while we are
being penetrated by the firmness of the
mermaid’s gaze. This palette of blue

Figure 37 Edward Burne-Jones, The Depths seduction is hopelessly empty, the

of the Sea (1886)

Lawrence Kramer, ‘Longindyingcall: Of Music, Modernity, and the Sirens,’ in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda
531

Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 194.

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surroundings disclosing a ‘somewhere’ like the dusky corners of a sea grotto, where everything
known dwindle away, except for the pebbles that spark at the bottom of the cavern.
The first contrast with our previous painting, A Mermaid: while the surroundings of A
Mermaid reveal the waves wash sea treasures up to the shore, in The Depths of the Sea the light
of awareness and knowledge is slowly dying away. While A Mermaid lights up the scene,
bathing us in the midday sun, here we are submerged deep into the unknown, where everything
is transformed or simply dissolved. ‘[T]he water that thus transforms substance into shadow,’
comments Kramer on the everlasting human obsession with the deep,

leaving only the hard bones behind, also serves as a medium that jumbles, blurs,
and transforms the constituents of the world above while still preserving their
intelligibility. The preservation is both dangerous, because irrational – fluidity
here belongs as much to categories as to bodies – and transfiguring.532

Gazing at the death in the deeps, the viewer is provoked into drowning symbolically; he (we
will assume it is a ‘he’ again, for the same reasons as before) is provoked to take a leap into
the unknown.
We are tempted to call the cave of The Depths of the Sea a grave; even more so if we are
familiar with another image by Burne-Jones, called the Grave of the Sea (fig. 38). It is an
illustration from The Flower Book, a series of 38 small watercolors, each about fifteen
centimeters in diameter, made by Burne-Jones from 1882 to 1898. In 1905 they were
posthumously published by his wife Georgina.533 Grave of the Sea, Plate XVI, features a dead
male lover in the depths of a mermaid’s cave.
A mermaid is swimming in the upper left-hand part of the composition, the sight of her
fallen lover, for whose death she is probably responsible, appears to have left her in a state of
disbelief. A bell above his head, sinister and gloomy in equal measure, tolls away the last hour
of his earthly existence.

532
Ibid., 199.
533
On making of The Flower Book, see MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, 312-314. For a more detailed
account on Edward Burne-Jones, his personal life and relationship with his wife – his dreams, passions and desires,
see Gay Daly, Pre-Raphaelites in Love (Fontana: Collins, 1990).

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 Figure 38 Edward Burne-Jones, Grave of the Sea (ca. 1890)

These two pictures structurally complement each other; the Grave of the Sea semantically
reveals what The Depths of the Sea is hiding: the male lover is dead and we are invited to
meditate upon his inert body. A proposition for reading The Depths of the Sea: the male figure
is the actual center of the picture; his is the body that acts in the painting, the body that
transforms it, giving it a meaning at the moment of the male subject’s death. F. G. Stephens,
one of the founding Brothers who decided to quit painting and dedicate himself to art criticism,
wrote in Athenaeum that The Depths of the Sea was ‘a picture of importance, representing a
new and difficult subject. It possesses noble and subtle charms of color, it is finished with
extraordinary care.’ But he considered the male body to be ‘the weak portion of the work’ in
comparison to the intoxicating effect of the mermaid.534 Not many things can compete with the
seductiveness of a mermaid’s simplicity and curves of her body. However, by gazing into the
nothingness that the lifeless male body semantically introduces into the painting, the viewer is
pressed to allow himself to face the Other once again.
As always, we are not interested in the givens in the painting, because the givens always lie.
In an act of self-miscomprehension, in which the painter takes himself as the locus of (visual)
speech and meaning – in the act of miscomprehending himself for a coherent whole capable of
unambiguous speech and meaning – whatever comes out of his mouth/brush is bound to be a
lie before it has even been conceived, since this locus of speech is an illusion. What we are
interested in is the structural language of the painting, the language of the unconscious, the one
that lies in order to tell the truth – the language of desire that emerges from within the painting.
In empty places of a visual sentence, in disturbance of an ostensible semantic coherence, in

534
Frederic George Stephens, Athenaeum (April 24, 1886): 561; Athenaeum (May 1, 1886): 590.

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what one does not represent (or even think), we seek the meaning beyond appearances, beyond
a sentence or an image. It is true that dealing with the unconscious is always an interpretation.
But just because it is an interpretation, it does not make it less true or valuable. It is not just
any interpretation we seek; it is not just any connection we are looking for. ‘Interpretation is
not open to all meanings,’ says Lacan.

It is not just any interpretation. It is a significant interpretation, one that must

not be missed. […] What is essential is that [the subject] should see, beyond this
signification, to what signifier – to what irreducible traumatic, non-meaning –
he is, as a subject, subjected.535

Interpretation is, in a sense, identical with desire; it is desire itself. But how can one face a
desire? One does not face it, one circumscribes it.
Therefore, transposing visual to textual is never an easy task, but here, in the linear space of
a sentence, we are to delineate the subject’s visual dreams, fears and fascinations – which are
precisely the dreams, fears and fascinations of the Other – facing an event that comes to us in
the form of death. We read The Depths of the Sea as the birth of the Victorian male subject, the
radical separation of his Being from meaning: aphanasis.

The Birth

How does one face a semiotic birth? Where is the place that the subject comes from? It
comes from the lack, from the illusional objet a that is always hidden, always already
somewhere else. So in order to approach this lacunal, horrendous place of non-existence and
catch the Victorian subject in the process of becoming, we have to go deeper into the structural
level of the painting and see what the picture is hollering by being silent about.
‘Everything emerges from the structure of the signifier,’ tells us Lacan, and if we manage
to deconstruct the painting properly, we will see the Victorian male subject appear. By
‘everything’ Lacan precisely means ‘the subject,’ namely, the subject of the unconscious, the
unfathomable one, the subject of desire that spreads in the unconscious like a mycelium.536 The

535
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
1963-1964, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 250-251.
536
Lacan uses this phrase to discuss Freud’s notion of the central point of a dream. ‘Everything that blossoms in
the unconscious spreads, like mycelium, as Freud says about the dream, around a central point.’ (Lacan, Four
Fundamental Concepts, 26). This central point is objet a, to which the subject clings.

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proposed reading of the painting revolves around as an essential dependence of the
siren/mermaid language on her victim (and the other way around), of Ulysses on his Siren, of
meaning on Being. The Depth of the Sea epitomizes the moment in which the subject arrives
as a signifier, a time when Ulysses appears from the split. Kramer shrewdly argues that

Edward Burne-Jones’s painting pretends nothing else is involved by the simple

device of showing exactly that. It gives us virtually nothing but a male form in
the fatal grip of a female one. […] But this nothing is not a mere absence; it
signifies.537

Here, Kramer follows an idea very close to ours. By going further and beyond of what the
picture says, what the picture wants us to see, Kramer investigates the symbolic climate that
stands in the background of the picture. But in his analysis, he ends up following the old
interpretation of the mermaid’s monstrous existence in the fin-de-siècle culture by emphasizing
social and gender elements of the event. ‘The loving but mindless grip of the mermaid’s
femininity,’ Kramer continues,

effaces not only her victim’s masculinity but also the symbolic foundation of
his identity, his whole familiar world of signs, projects and possessions. The
painting makes this explicit in the bareness of the cavern to which its couple
sinks, and it all but explicitly presents this effacement as a double castration –
his arms gone, his loins a slot for the crook of her elbow.538

It is not frequent to find an interpretation of sirens’/mermaids’ monstrosity that surpasses

this point of equating their monstrosity with the fantasies of changing gender roles in the
Victorian culture.539 That is the reason why Kramer’s analysis is of the greatest importance for
us. For, even if he gives the usual, generally approved opinion, he manages to transform it in

537
Kramer, ‘Longindyingcall,’ 195.
538
Ibid.
539
On gender readings of the monstrosity of sirens, see Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a
Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1982), 7-11, 88-96;
Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 235-271; Kramer ‘Longindyingcall’; Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Women (New
York: Stein and Day, 1972); Laura Sells, ‘“Where Do the Mermaids Stand?”: Voice and Body in The Little
Mermaid,’ in From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas
and Laura Sells (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 175-192. Klaus Theweleit, Male
Fantasies, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987); Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the
Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).

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the end. ‘But far more is being effaced here than simple masculinity,’ he finishes, ‘[c]ulture
itself is stripped bare.’540 This idea, that the culture ceases to exist as soon as masculinity is
‘castrated,’ might be read as part of the same misogynist fantasy in which the masculinity is
‘culture’ (while femininity is ‘nature’). But the act of drowning, in Kramer’s eyes, goes beyond
the expression of a cultural misogynist phobia. It stands as a canvas on which the whole culture,
the whole era in question is represented by way of what has been omitted. With The Depths of
the Sea we are presented with much and more than a simple act of gender-based romantic
homicide, of a dying ‘steely-browed and lean-loined Ulysses,’ as Dijkstra would say.541 We
are witnessing the Victorian culture itself becoming exposed.
At this point we shall just briefly recall the examples we went through, so that we can
proceed to the interpretation of The Depths of the Sea by way of the previously gained insights
into the Victorian male desiring subject. In Ulysses and the Sirens we encounter sirens invading
the realm of the subject. In his insatiable desire to jump over the edge, to plunge into the sea,
Ulysses expresses a new distance of modernity, the distance of desire, necessary for the subject
to succumb to it, to succumb to the distance: the distance he needed to become modern, the
‘representedness’ of Being, as Heidegger puts it. Sirens paint his abject face, his unattainable
yearning to eject his selfhood in the precipice of the Other. Through many siren/mermaid
literary narratives, Ulysses and the Sirens kept changing places, sirens becoming protagonists
and subjects enchanted by Ulysses, their former victim (The Little Mermaid and the prince, F.
Anstey’s Siren and her prey, Henry Carrington’s Siren and all her victims, etc.). We saw that
their relationship is essential, that Ulysses and the Sirens mirror each other in their subjectivity
(thus the disappearance of the mirror itself), and that, in the last instance, the Sirens are Ulysses
abject faces again. In A Mermaid we were faced with a lone, wooing mermaid, and we followed
the path of the scopic drive in its loops around death as objet a, concluding that the visual
flirting of the mermaid topologically mapped the male subject for us, the subject that lost his
mirror reflection in the devastating sweeps of the commodified culture of spectacle. But in The
Depths of the Sea, we face Ulysses (the male body, the victim) in the last act of his life, which
is, consequently, his first one. Desire does not have a beginning and an end; it does not
culminate in a reachable object that concludes our life-long quest for ‘it.’ Desire always returns
to itself, it returns to us, to our own fall, to the place that we cannot face and will not directly
describe, so we dream about it. It always leads us back into the nothingness that we came from,

540
Kramer, ‘Longindyingcall,’ 197; my emphasis.
541
Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 235.

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to the trauma at the gates of language. If we follow the desire, we will always end up in front
of a mirror, searching, hoping, wanting. In the proposed reading, The Depths of the Sea
embodies this age-long quest by capturing the male Victorian subject in the act of drowning,
read as the moment of his appearance – by the fact of his death – as a sign in the field of the
Other. We are not talking only about the male body here, but about the painting as a whole. So
far it was maintained that the siren/mermaid body held the topology of the subject who created
it, and that this body was essentially dependent on, and reflective of, the body of her victim.
The Depths of the Sea, that show us these two bodies in a fatal embrace, linked by a bond that
cannot be broken, as a whole presents the topology of the male Victorian subject.
‘The subject is born insofar as the signifier emerges in the field of the Other,’ says Lacan.
‘But, by this very fact, the subject – which was previously nothing if not a subject coming into
being – solidifies into a signifier.’542 The subject appears as meaning, only insofar as his Being
has disappeared somewhere else. Lacan calls this effect of the signifier on Being of the subject
the aphanasis. In The Depths of the Sea, we see a mermaid, in whom the Victorian subject is
mapped, looking directly into our eyes, summoning us into the picture, but maintaining the
distance nevertheless. The male figure appears as her counterpart, her symbolic residue,
gripped tightly in the process of becoming.543 As life is leaving the motionless, castrated body
of the male, carrying with itself the Being of the subject-to-come, Ulysses, the male Victorian
subject, arrives wrapped in the split skin of the mermaid’s monstrous body that invades the
picture with its symbolic incongruence.
The Depths of the Sea is a rare example of a siren holding a dead body of her lover, deep
down at the bottom of the sea. This time we are on her territory, we are playing in the field of
the Other. Burne-Jones’s painting is a priceless representation of this field. Although fin-de-
siècle culture was overloaded with images of sirens and mermaids, most of them frolicked on
the surface of the sea or on the shore, calling souls into their embrace to drown them in the blue
deeps.544 As we gaze at the mermaid in our painting we see the embrace of bodies, a bond born

542
Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 199.
543
‘Symbolic residue’ is desire itself. It is what is left of the subject after need is subtracted from demand. Need
is any natural necessity, such as the need for food, air, water, while demand is a need transformed through language
in the moment of its verbal articulation. By being articulated by language, the need enters the symbolic (the
culture) and acquires a ‘surplus’ that is always more than just its satisfaction. When a child asks for food by using
the code of language, he/she also asks for attention, so for Lacan, every demand is, in a way, a demand for love.
Thus this ‘surplus,’ or ‘symbolic residue’ is what is left of the subject upon his entry into the symbolic – desire.
Lacan even provided a formula: demand - need = desire.
544
A selection of various contemporary artists across Europe would include Herbert Draper, The Sea Maiden
(1894), Adolph La-Lyre, A Nest of Sirens (ca. 1906), Constantin Makovski, The Roussalkas (1890s), Otto Greiner,
Ulysses and the Sirens (1902), John William Whiteley, A Sail! (1898), Gustave Moreau, The Poet and the Siren
(1895), Charles Shannon, The Mermaid (ca. 1900), Aristide Sartorio, The Green Abyss (ca. 1895), Friedrich

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out of a distance between Being and meaning, the boundary beyond which Being of the subject,
the male body, is left a shell – motionless, inert, ostensibly insignificant, but with a force of
agency. It is this dead male body, the beautiful cadaver, that makes the birth of the subject
mapped in the body of the mermaid possible. The mermaid and her lover are one and the same
image; they are the aphanasis of the subject, the eclipse of his Being and the arrival of his
meaning in the monstrous field of the empty cave’s nothingness.

The Void

Nothingness, nullity, invalidity are the central theme of this picture, for if we read the image
as the birth of the subject, we also read the void that the subject comes from and brings into the
picture with him. From the dawn of their image, Ulysses and the Sirens deliver emptiness into
the representation, the stillness snatched away from the gates of Hades, that place of the Other
that embodies death itself. On his ship of dreams Ulysses carries the void of the Sirens’ bodies,
over the centuries, arriving into the visual field of the Victorian painting. As Kramer observes,
the desolation of the cavern and the blankness of the mermaid’s face is what reveals the nudity
of culture, its essential exposure.545 We can observe the same theme in a poem of another
contemporary artist closely connected to the Pre-Raphaelite circle – William Butler Yeats’ The
Mermaid.

A mermaid found a swimming lad,

Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.546

Yeats’ poem resembles the subject of our discussion in so many ways that it is hard not to
include the poem in it. As Kramer also observes, The Mermaid expresses the same emptiness

Heyser, The Fisherboy and the Water Nymph, John William Waterhouse Hylas and the Nypmhs (1896), The Siren
(1900), Ulysses and the Sirens (1891), etc. The list of fin-de-siècle paintings representing sirens on the surface of
the sea or on the shore is overwhelmingly long.
545
Kramer, ‘Longindyingcall,’ 197.
546
William Butler Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. I: The Poems (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company, 1989), 222.

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as The Depths of the Sea, pretending to say only what it says.547 But in the simplicity of the
verse, in the awkward, uncanny bleakness that weaves its way through the poem, again we see
the exposure of culture, exposure of the poem’s silent background by its simplicity. The
Mermaid is as exhibitionistic as any Pre-Raphaelite painting, disrobed in front of the reader’s
eyes. We are faced with a mermaid in the act of careless love that obliterates Being of the male
figure, reducing it to herself, to meaning. Its textual poetics resonate with the visual imagery
of Grave of the Sea, where a mermaid mourns the death of her lover. The culture exposes itself
to the subject in the poem, in a final, alienating, distancing effect of theater.
But we are not interested in cultural attitudes per se, we are interested in the deeper epistemic
register of the Symbolic that is always more and less than the culture itself. This register is
what calls the subject into being, what creates the spark of life just so that it can take it away
by the same act. At this level, the subject appears not in attitudes, but in non-attitudes; in what
has gone wrong, what manifests itself as misleading and untrue; not in cultural codes, or in
their enactments and reflections, but in the lived experience at the level of what Foucault calls
the ‘discourse.’ At this level, the bareness of the cavern in our picture says much more about
the discourse than about the cultural attitudes; the cave’s eerie stillness and emptiness adds to
the monstrosity of representation. In it, in the siren’s sunken lair, there is literally nothing –
nothing to be seen, nothing to be described. But this nothingness speaks; more than that, it
beseeches us to drown with the subject himself.
The void of the cave revolves around the center of the picture, in which, once again, we see
a mermaid’s face. But this face is different than the one we encountered in A Mermaid. While
the latter shows us parted lips and a gaze that captures the fall of the subject, this face is wholly
taciturn. Its lips are sealed, its hair is gone, and the gaze transfixes us as a viper’s, in the act of
saying nothing whatsoever. The mermaid’s face is a void – cold, distant, silent. This kind of
face became the trademark of Burne-Jones’s female characters. We can see it in The Last Sleep
of Arthur in Avalon (1881-98), The Baleful Head (1886-87), The Sleeping Princes from Briar
Rose series (1873-90), The Golden Stairs (1880), etc. In all Burne-Jones’s paintings, female
characters are marble-like, expressionless, abstracted, cold, alienated, otherworldly. But at this
point, it would have been of the greatest help if we compared it with the faces of Waterhouse’s
mermaids.

547
Kramer, ‘Longindyingcall,’ 195.

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 John William Waterhouse pursued a single artistic vision for most of his carrier. Wood
describes his success by saying that he ‘had one song to sing, but he sang it very beautifully.’548
He dedicated a great part of his life, time, and talent to painting mermaids, sirens, nymphs and
naiads. But there is a curious feature in many of his paintings that might be discarded as a minor
deficiency of his oeuvre: many of his paintings of mermaids and female characters have
thoroughly identical faces. We can see that in Ulysses and the Sirens (1891), Hylas and the
Nymphs (1896), The Awakening of Adonis (1900), A Tale from the Decameron (1916), The
Enchanted Garden (1916), etc. But having overcome the literal reading of works of art, what
we see here now is a slip of the tongue, or rather a slip of the mind; an expression of numbness
and sameness, of objectification and obliteration of individual traces. As Ulysses arrives
carrying the void in his waterborne vessel, on the surface of the Victorian culture women are
commodified and fetishized in the works of the greatest artists of the time, like those by
Waterhouse. But elsewhere, in the works of Burne-Jones, this emptiness appears from beyond
the aloof faces of mermaids and female characters, rendering them monstrous and desirable.
From their monstrous bodies, dread appears to violate the structure of a sentence, break the
coherence of an image, shatter the consistency and solidity of things. The subject without a
center, reliving over and over again his everlasting entrapment in the field of the Other,
searching for his mirror image, appears once again to announce a new attitude towards things,
towards Being, meaning and representation – a new attitude towards reality itself – the attitude
of the world as a stage.
If we moved now to the face of the mermaid in The Depths of the Sea, or any other Burne-
Jones’s female character for that matter, we would see the same blank space of the distance
from Being as in his other works. The Depths of the Sea belongs to a phase when, as Wood
observes,

his work has become incredibly austere, monumental and withdrawn. His
figures move as if hypnotized in stark, barren landscapes, their robes glittering
as if woven from metallic thread. Henry James, who remained a faithful
admirer, noted how his late work was growing ‘colder and colder,’ and ‘less and
less observed,’ the picture becoming almost abstraction.549

548
Wood, Pre-Raphaelites, 142.
549
Wood, Pre-Raphaelites, 126.

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 Audrey Williamson says that Burne-Jones always preferred the simplicity of design over
the complexity of painting.550 All Burne-Jones’s female characters assume a plain, divinely
radiating emotional restraint; an expression that can be called nothing but ‘expressionless.’ For
Williamson this was ‘a quite deliberate reduction of the human factor to a symbol,’551 and
Stephenson described it as ‘a marvel of wicked witchery.’552 But here again Kramer hit the
bull’s eye by saying that the mermaid reflects

the world of culture […], blank-faced and simpering, her arms tightly
enwrapped about the naked man doubly castrated (loins and arms effaced) by
her grasp and brought down to a cavern that contains, precisely, nothing.553

Her face is a melancholic void, an opening into the vortex of cultural dreams and anxieties,
the central feature of the painting, its objet a, death incarnate. This is a face without a face, a
face without a reflection. Both Waterhouse and Burne-Jones’s paintings map their own
shattered selves in a semiotic game of presence and absence of mermaids’ faces and bodies.
But there is a difference between our chosen paintings, there is a directional mismatch
between A Mermaid and The Depths of the Sea. As structural lines of the visual field revolve
in a centripetal whirl around the mermaid’s face in A Mermaid, pulling the whole image into
her gaze, through her face and right back to the painter himself, the mermaid from The Depths
of the Sea radiates the void in the opposite direction, enveloping the painting in a centrifugal
stroke. One draws the language of representation in and through, while the other disperses it
out; one pulverizes it while the other discharges it. But death as a signifier without the signified,
in both paintings invades the language, drowning the subject in the watery depths of jouissance;
two monstrous faces, and in them more than a culture preserved.

At the Gates

As we get entangled in the visual play of the Pre-Raphaelite exhibitionism, our eye gives in
to the loop of the scopic drive that again turns around a visage, an expressionless face that
stands for the unattainable objet a of the artist’s desire – death. And in the process we find

550
Audrey Williamson, Artists and Writers in Revolt: The Pre-Raphaelites (Newton Abbot, London, Vancouver:
David & Charles, 1976), 156-57.
551
Williamson, Artists and Writers in Revolt, 149.
552
Frederic George Stephens, Athenaeum (April 24, 1886): 561; Athenaeum (May 1, 1886): 590.
553
Kramer, ‘Longindyingcall,’ 194.

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ourselves standing behind a peephole, as it were, a peephole constructed by the gaze of the
painting. But this time, as we read the silence of the subject’s birth, we are exposed to the force
of the mermaid’s ‘neither human nor diabolic’554 gaze that stares directly at us. Her gaze locks
us in the interruption of the painting’s structure, our eye consumed by the violence of emptiness
and implosion of the dead body in its submerged tomb. The voyeuristic nature of the painting
becomes apparent if we accept Lacan’s view that ‘what the subject is trying to see […] is the
object as absence.’555 So, the instant the painting opens up from the inside out, in the act of
staging Ulysses’ birth to the world, the eye of the viewer is seduced into the loop of the drive,
drawn into the absence of the mermaid’s face. We assume that presence is what we are looking
for, but we end up being enthralled by the very absence breaking loose, once the distance
between the subject and his mirror image appears. ‘What the voyeur is looking for and finds is
merely a shadow, a shadow behind a curtain,’556 continues Lacan, and in the restructuring of
our own eye, which the painting imposes on us, we reach out for the lost object, never to be
retrieved. In the last instance, every interpretation reveals our own lack, our own objet a, our
own desire. Ostensibly safely hidden behind the distance of the picture, behind our own gaze
– a looking-glass turned keyhole – we can fantasize about ‘lost’ coherence, hunting for the Real
that forever escapes us. ‘It is not only victim who is concerned in exhibitionism,’ finishes
Lacan, ‘it is the victim as referred to some other who is looking at him.’557 In their eternal
embrace, the language of the mermaid’s monstrosity calls Ulysses into existence, and the only
way that he can arrive at the scene of birth is as the unreal, articulating itself as the negative of
the real. For after all, Ulysses comes to the nineteenth century from the space of oblivion, from
the ‘once-upon-a-blotted time’ of the abject.
The Depths of the Sea functions as a dream, as a fantasy, a vessel for the Victorian subject,
an expression of his entry point into the eye of the viewer. The mermaid calls Ulysses into
existence, as mermaids have been doing from the beginning of time, but now she also gives
him her monstrous body to be a vehicle of his birth. And Ulysses comes, drawn from the void,
from the split between the subject-to-be and the mirror, but he comes as a broken self. Through
his relationship with the signifier, he comes as a ‘subject with holes’ (sujet troué).558 The
painting we are analyzing is one of these holes. In it, Ulysses appears as if at an exhibition,
called upon by the loop of the scopic drive as ein neues Subjekt that appears in so far as the

554
The Times (1 May 1886): 10; The Times (8 May 1886): 8.
555
Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 182.
556
Ibid.
557
Ibid., 183.
558
Ibid., 184.

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drive has been able to show its circular course – in so far as the jouissance obtained has been
experienced.559 He is castrated, exposed, revealed, but still enchained by his own birth. This
reading proposes the painting as exposing of the Victorian subject, of an objectified Being, a
Being that can be only if represented, as Heidegger says. The picture is his stage to which he
is tied, as a spectator and as an exhibit, without visible agency, in a trance. Adorno and
Horkheimer captured this moment at its height: ‘The prisoner [Ulysses] is present at a concert,
an inactive eavesdropper like later concertgoers, and his spirited call for liberation fades like
applause.’560 He is sitting in the audience looking at himself, overloaded with cultural products
and images, looking at everything and never seeing what he wishes to see – his own coherence,
his own ‘psychical death.’ And he dreams, not realizing that the dream is not reality, not
realizing that the exit from the labyrinth of language, the beyond he is dreaming of, is just
another turn on the path of desire.
The Depths of the Sea has told us many things about the visual field of the late Victorian
culture so far, that when we turn to one of the most important biographers of Edward Burne-
Jones – Fiona MacCarthy – we find an unconscious truth in her words: ‘The life is there, self-
evident, embedded in [his] art.’561 ‘Unconscious’ because the life is there, but not self-evident.
It is in a significant interpretation that is not to be missed. It is, finally, in our own desire, as
we play with the painting, reaching out for our own lack.
The painting reveals itself to us as a void, as a birthplace of the subject, of the mermaid’s
monstrosity and of cultural creation, as a vessel for the monstrosity of the male Victorian
subject himself, to whom sirens/mermaids are his abject faces. We call it the arrival of
Victorian Ulysses – the Spectator, the Voyeur, the Tourist, the Wandered, the Chained – but it
is equality the arrival of Victorian sirens too. The subject, in both of his faces, both as Ulysses
and as the Siren, arrives at the gates of language – and he dreams. In the painting he looks
exactly like he does in Ulysses and the Sirens by Waterhouse, with his arms chained, this time
not by cords but by his profound dream. The Depths of the Sea is a fantasy that supports his
desire; it is a life-sustaining dream, the only thing that holds the pieces of reality together. And

559
By circling around an objet a, the drive brings the Other into play. This invitation of the Other is fundamental
for the drive’s return and results in the appearance of the subject. Lacan says that ‘the appearance of ein neues
Subjekt [is] to be understood as follows – not in the sense that there is already one, namely the subject of the drive,
but in that what is new is the appearance of a subject. This subject, which is essentially the Other, appears insofar
as the drive has been able to show its circular course. It is only with the appearance at the level of the other that
what there is of the function of the drive may be realized.’ (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 178-179).
560
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London, New
York: Verso, 2008), 34.
561
MacCarthy, Last Pre-Raphaelite, xxiv.

257
he must dream, as he must die as Being, if he wants to become modern. He must become a
signifier.
Kramer argues that

[t]he sirens were called back to life in the nineteenth century not simply to help
cope with modern forms of identity and desire, but to help cope with the form
of modernity itself. In a multiplicity of versions and variants, the sirens and their
song represent precisely what modernity and modern subjectivity have lost,
precisely that which they must lose or alienate from themselves to become
modern. For that very reason, the sirens also represent that which the modern
must fantasize about regaining, even only in treacherous glimpses […].562

What modernity has to fantasize about regaining, what Ulysses has to dream of, is the
beyond of language and meaning, it is death as an eternal stillness of the Real, his objet a that
haunts Victorian modernity through many monstrous forms. Ulysses dreams about the void,
because objet a appears always as an absence only. His reveries are always about attaining the
lost object, meeting with the Real that he keeps missing. In his dreams, he always leaps into
the unknown where he is chained to the mast of the void, somewhere between words, in the
empty spaces of sentences, in the cracks and crevices of images, enchanted, intoxicated, deaf
or drowned. These are all the most adored topics of the Victorian era.563 He needs to look death
in the eye, so as to be able to fantasize about himself, and stay in the state of méconnaissance.
But on his ship, or chained to a concert seat, he leaps into the unknown all the same.
And the sirens are always there to welcome him.
In The Depths of the Sea, Ulysses is shown at the moment of the leap, in the act of drowning
that gives birth to him as a subject. The space of the canvas is a crack in the image that unveils
the space that sailors of the modern era used to mark as unexplored waters by writing the sign
hic sunt sirenae (‘here be sirens’) on their maps. The painting represents the unknown waters
of the void, of the subject’s split, where the monstrous silence of the mermaid is the signifier
that calls Ulysses into existence in the field of the Other. But they are two faces of the same
subject. The monster is an unsignifiable place in language, a place of semiotic violence, an

562
Kramer, ‘Longindyingcall,’ 197.
563
For the examples of sleep, see Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, 42; for death, suicide and drowning, see
Margaret Higonnet, ‘Suicide: Representations of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century,’ Poetics Today 6:1/2
(The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives) (1985): 103-118; for death and fetish of sleep, see
Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, 25-64.

258
expression of a cultural trauma conveyed by language. Sirens and mermaids embody this
sullen, desolate, uncharted space of the self, they embody Ulysses’ fantasy of death, dissipation
and destruction in the face of an emerging distance, in the face of the Victorian modernity. In
the game of fetishism and substitution, sirens and mermaids stand for the subject’s fundamental
illusion brought about by the mirror, accentuated by the fact that throughout the whole era
sirens and mermaids are always represented without it, without the mirror. Like the Victorian
male subject’s abject faces, they appear with Ulysses from the rupture between words and
things, expressing the anxieties of materiality that introduced the loss in the first place. The
modernity they represent is not only an exhibited, visual, voyeuristically interrupted, but also
a Beingless modernity, in which the subject is radically alienated from himself. This alienated
subject, chained by his own dream that never ends, sees himself only from the field of the
Other, he sees only his mediated, represented Being. As a consumer, he looks into a mirror and
sees a commodity. Without Being, he arrives as a meaning through the semiotic incoherence
of commodities.
In his dream, in all the narratives analyzed as expressions of this dream, the Victorian male
subject tries to break free to become modern, but he doesn’t understand that it is this fall, this
enchainment, this dreaming maze, this mermaid’s grip that makes him modern in the first place.
The more he struggles, the more strongly he is tied to the mast, as the Odyssey says. So he
drowns and dreams. He dreams of the loss that he will never extinguish, he paints it, sculpts it,
and writes about it. Ulysses represents. He is John William Waterhouse, as well as Edward
Burne-Jones. He is Henry Carrington, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carrol, he is F. Anstey.
He maps his soul for us on the canvas that he names Ulysses and the Sirens, A Mermaid, Grave
of the Sea, Through the Looking Glass and so on, until he arrives at his own birthplace – the
void. And there, in The Depths of the Sea, he finally stands before a mirror. In the painting we
see him in the arms of the Other, his monstrosity and his subjectivity are one. The mermaid
introduces him to his own mirror reflection – the gates of a labyrinthine language, the entrance
of modernity. She is facing us, gazing at us, holding Ulysses in her arms, but what does she
want from us – what does the other want? The mermaid is everywhere in the picture and
nowhere, overwhelming and insufficient, like Wells’ the Sea Lady or Lampedusa’s Siren; she
is pulsating with the desire of the Other, which is the male subject’s own desire. This question
of a lack that the mermaid poses to the subject, Ulysses answers with his own death,
appropriating the false image of wholeness which he is shown in the beginning. To the lack he
answers with a lack, creating a link between him and the Other which will finally allow him

259
the everlasting fantasy about his own completeness. He will finally become modern. Ulysses
thinks he is saved.

260
CONCLUSION

We all have something to hide, some dark place inside us we don’t want the world to see. So
we pretend everything is ok, wrapping ourselves in rainbows. And maybe that’s all for the
best, because some of these places are darker than others.564
Dexter

A myth persists that a monster can be written about or painted on a canvas. In the nineteenth-
century literature, we read about vampires, golems and sirens, and in these words we believe
we see a whole, we are convinced that we have experienced the creature’s fullness. But the
experiential fullness of a monster does not actually exist, because the monster has no Being, it
has only meaning. For a monster to be fully representable, that monster has to stop shifting. In
order for words to capture a monster, to assign a specific and permanent image or a written
word to it, the monster has to enter the language and be represented in it as Being: in other
words, it has to be.
If there is a place where a monster can exist in the Victorian culture, though, even as a
haunting glimpse of possibility, that place is precisely in language. While language cannot
capture it, it can channel its impossible existence. Only words and images are capable of
translating and overcoming what cannot be approached by Being. The Victorian monster is an
abject subject, an expelled and forbidden entity, whose nature is one of the protagonist, and
language is its signifier. Writing about Victorian monstrosity means giving existence to the
impossible, the monstrosity that changes even as it is articulated.
Accordingly, reading monstrosity is reading a text without an object – a signifier without its
signified. That is why a Victorian monster always destroys semiotic systems, assuming the role
of the subject in the process – it cannot be (re)presented, yet there it is, on a sheet of paper or a
piece of linen, veiling itself in empty words and hollow images, crying, loving, hating and
suffering. In the last instance, the Victorian monster lurks in the eye, mouth, and hand of the
beholder.
This fundamental existential impossibility of the monster in the Victorian era is closely
connected to the notion of linguistic space. If it is non-representable, and still stares at us from
a painting or a page, where does it come from? What is this place that allows it to be, to spread

Tim Schlattmann, ‘Once Upon a Time…,’ Dexter, episode 602, directed by S. J. Clarkson, TV show (2011;
564

USA: John Goldwyn Productions, 2012), DVD.

261
and fill this blank, still unexplored, creative space? Like an apparition born from the
interruption of a sentence, the Victorian monster dwells in the unknown white zone betwixt
words, flanked by two signs, referring to neither of them. In Victorian representation, the
margins of imaginable possibilities collapse, opening up a new world seemingly free of subject-
object desperation, where non-imaginable impossibilities have a place as subjects. The world
of abject bodies, tenebrous and icy passion, is a universe of plausible ambiguities and equally
plausible transgressions.
This place where meanings implode, is a place where the subject of Victorian monstrous
representation is born. Its viewers/readers cannot but be seduced and admit that the cry of the
damaged bodies is too sweet and beyond horrifying. They must resign themselves and lend
their eye to the structuring of these repulsive corporealities. As they read, they transform
themselves from the inside out, because text (graphic, visual or material) is coming from
within, even if it has been written by others. Through readers/viewers, through their textual
pleasures, the text frees its own shackled soul, and ejects itself in a boomerang-shaped flight
path. Invading the eye and recreating the self of the consumer, the text continuously recreates
itself by simultaneous self-construction and deconstruction, luring the viewers/readers closer
to the heart of darkness that flickers inside of their dreadful desire. The readers become ‘tireless
builders’ – they stray, to use Julia Kristeva’s expression.565 The reader wanders blindly,

on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding. He has a sense
of the danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object attracting him represents for
him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart.
And the more he strays, the more he is saved.566

The viewers/readers, as vagabonds, nomads, or strays, without a beginning or an end,

wander through the monstrous text, searching for salvation, for catharsis that never comes
because this kind of text leads nowhere but to itself, to its own rejected world, the Netherworld
of creation. In the Victorian monster the readers/viewers face their own shattered selves.

Today

565
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 8.
566
Ibid.

262
 Snapshot one: every year, since 1983, on the Saturday closest to the summer solstice, Coney
Island USA art group has been organizing a parade that celebrates ‘the artistic vision of the
masses.’ A procession of people, mainly (but not exclusively) New Yorkers, streams through
streets named Mermaid and Neptune, in a district ‘often regarded as entertainment.’ 567 They
are a curious group of people: led by a King and a Queen, riding in huge vehicles or simply
following on foot, the crowd enacts life under the sea, and the event is named the ‘Coney Island
Mermaid Parade’ for a very simple reason – everyone is dressed like a mermaid. In this colorful
walking theater, we can spot high fashion mermaids, mermaid nurses, Hindu mermaids, drag
mermaids, mermaid bodybuilders, as well as mermaid kids whose birthday happened to be on
the same date so their parents arranged for places in the parade to be provided for them. For a
day, it seems that mythology accidentally spilled hundreds of fantastic creatures in a
carnivalesque explosion of public joy. And it seems only natural, to dress as your favorite
Disney character, to assume Ariel’s, the Little Mermaid’s, role – at least for a day.
This is the contemporary monstrous subject’s snapshot number one.
Snapshot two: as a passionate mermaid-lover, for the last couple of years I have been
following the trend of ‘mermaid professionalism.’ Yes, this term actually exists. Who are
mermaid professionals? Mermaid Melissa, Hannah Mermaid, Mermaid Kariel: these are all
women who dedicated their professional lives to entertainment, channeling the mermaid myth.
They bought or made customized mermaid tails of all shapes and colors, and they perform
mermaid theatricals in large water tanks. Most of them are green activists, raising their voices
against pollution, whale killing, and rainforest eradication. The example of Mermaid Melissa
will make the phenomenon clearer: Mermaid Melissa (says the home page on her website), is
the ‘only woman in the world legally named Mermaid!’ Her slogan is: ‘Let’s help save the
oceans before all creatures become mythical.’ She performs with Mermaid Entertainment
Aquatic Company, which includes ‘trained professional mermaids, mermen and pirates.’ She
performs underwater breath hold showcases and does ‘live featured performances in
aquariums, poolside parties, marketing promotions for companies, and VIP events for clients.’
Just a bit further down in the text on the home page, the visitor has an option to ‘Hire a
Mermaid.’ ‘It was an ultimate fairy-tail for any young girl who has watched The Little Mermaid
and Splash!’ comments Mermaid Melissa on the reasons for becoming a mermaid, ‘a way that
I viewed to find a balance between staying human, and joining their world as part dolphin. […]

567
‘The Mermaid Parade,’ viewed 29 September 2014, http://www.coneyisland.com/programs/mermaid-parade.

263
Our belief in dreams coming true,’ she concludes, ‘can be lived, with each new passion that we
pursue.’568 Mermaids are going professional, before humans turn into myth.
This is the contemporary monstrous subject’s snapshot number two.
Snapshot three: ‘2014 Is the Year of the Mermaid,’ informs us Groupon.com, a large and
very popular website that features discounted gift certificates usable at local or national
companies. Twenty-two-year-old designer Eric Ducharme, who is spending time tailoring
mermaid tails and using them in his own private life, is also the CEO of Mertailor, LLC, a
company he founded when he was only thirteen. There is a thing about Eric: he ‘does not only
believe in mermaids – he can help you become one,’569 by making perfect custom mermaid
tails that will allow you great agility underwater. In 2013, Eric appeared in TLC’s show ‘My
Crazy Obsession,’ talking about his obsession with mermaids, about his merman lifestyle, and
the problems he has with other people because of it. His ‘mother’ and his boyfriend have been
interviewed too, expressing appreciation, understanding and support for Eric’s curious
lifestyle. ‘Eric is obsessed with mermaids,’ said Candy Ducharme, self-proclaimed merman’s
mother. ‘We have our own passions. That’s Eric’s life.’ ‘When I put on a tail, I feel
transformed,’ Ducharme says in an interview. ‘I feel like I’m starting to enter into a different
world when I hit the water. Being under water I feel, I’m just totally away from the world.’570
Seen from the perspective of Eric and his family, 2014 might indeed be the year of the
Mermaid.
This is the contemporary monstrous subject’s snapshot number three.

*****

It is the year 2015, and mermaids are literally everywhere. In major European and American
cities, at every corner there is a Starbucks coffee shop with its two-tail mermaid shining bright.
Every cup of Starbucks coffee bears this sign too and so do their other commercial products.
Mermaids are used in advertising everywhere, even in the places where you would, never, ever,
expect them, like shoe stores (fig.39).

568
‘Professional Mermaid Performer “Real-life Mermaid” Mermaid for Hire,’ viewed 29 September 2014,
http://www.mermaidmelissa.com/.
569
‘2014 Is the Year of the Mermaid,’ viewed 29 September 2014, http://www.groupon.com/articles/2014-is-the-
year-of-the-mermaid-sb.
570
‘Eric Ducharme: Meet Real-Life Man Mermaid, AKA “Merman,” and Owner of The Mertailor [VIDEO],’
viewed 29 September 2014, http://www.ibtimes.com/eric-ducharme-meet-real-life-man-mermaid-aka-merman-
owner-mertailor-video-1171525.

264
 Figure 39 A Berlin shoe store (2013)

From the above snapshots, we can conclude that at the beginning of the twenty-first century,
the mermaid, as a creature and as an idea, has become a profession, immersed deeply into the
fabric of consumption and capitalist desire. The professional mermaids are not only
‘professional’ at what they do; not only do they earn a lot on money (some Eric’s tails cost
$2,759 and his customer list includes celebrities, like Lady Gaga); professional mermaids are
all beautiful, voluptuous, sexy and alluring, their image and their bodies selling the products
they advertise, or rallying people around a cause. Their monstrosity is erased: little girls, like
the one that met Mermaid Melissa, want to be mermaids. They advertise shoes despite the fact
that they do not have legs; their bodies are turned human, appropriated as signs referring to
consumption. When thinking about contemporary mermaids, the words of Benjamin Disraeli
from a faraway context echo true: ‘the East is a career.’ Well, in 2014 I say: ‘the mermaid is a
career.’ And no one can deny it.
But there is a far more important issue at work here. Sirens have been luring men to their
doom since the time immemorial, so in the era of high capitalism, it seems only natural that
their powers have been transformed into visual pleasures of commodities. This has been
265
happening over the entire twentieth century. We have discussed, in many different ways, the
relationship between the monstrosity of sirens and the language of commodities throughout the
nineteenth century. But, once again, we need to ask the question: what does this new fashion,
of sirens taking possession of human bodies completely, mean for the subject?
This is not a question to be analyzed here, in the conclusion, and I would like to raise it only
as a graphic way of taking the pulse of the contemporary Western society. In all the snapshots
above, in the example of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, Eric the Merman and Mermaid
Melissa, beneath all the commercialism and consumption, we can see a new relationship of the
subject to monstrosity, a configuration of their game that we, contemporary consumers, find
natural, if a bit eccentric. In 2014, the examples of monstrosity we have discussed so far are
such that compared to them nineteenth-century monstrosity seems ridiculously naïve. In the
Victorian era (early years of the twentieth century included), the monster was the subject and
the bodies of sirens, in conjunction with the bodies of their victims, contained the topology of
the male Victorian subject. On the surface, it seems that the same is true for the contemporary
mermaids: Eric Ducharme lives his life as a merman – what can be more of subject nature than
that? But on the other hand, this is exactly the radical difference between Victorian and
contemporary monstrosity: we do not need to read the monster ‘paranoically’ any more. It is
not hidden within the language, in the cracks and crevices of representation; it does not hide
from view suppressing its monstrous skin. In the twenty-first century, there is a tendency for
the monster to live on the surface of our body; there is a tendency not for the monster to be an
implicit subject, but for the subject to be an explicit monster. In the snapshots above – and I
have chosen only three out of many – monstrosity is shown off publicly, it does not live in
literature or cinema, it does not need the language to exist. The monster of today is the one that
tries, with all the representational power it has, to roam free: not in the semantic space like in
our prologue, but the real public space of the Coney Island. The monstrosity of the nineteenth
century has become an imperceptible reality of the twenty-first.
Strange as it may seem, I find this tendency to have monsters step into the public space of
real life liberating. There are several reasons for this, the most obvious one being that, due to a
new configuration of knowledge and meaning, the monster is not a monster any more. In 1889,
lamenting mythical monsters, Joris-Karl Huysmans said: ‘The monster in art does not exist
anymore […].’571 He might have commented on the twenty-first century. The monster has

Joris-Karl Huysmans, ‘Le Monstre,’ in L’Art moderne: Certains (Cacém, Portugal: Gris Impressores, S.A.R.L.,
571

1976), 379.

266
never been ‘just a monster,’ it has always been connected to other identities that were seen as
different. But monstrosity, as a radical alterity to what is generally accepted, pales in the face
of an endless stream of new monsters that the twenty-first century keeps producing by the tons.
Monstrosity, as something disturbing and gloomy, something that implodes semiotic systems
and crashes meaning, just does not stand as a concept today, when we turn on the television
and just slide into the narratives featuring dismembered bodies and vampire-like blood-sucking
creatures on every channel. I am aware that monstrosity is a historically contingent concept,
and that if it dies in its nineteenth-century incarnation it will rise in a new one. That is way I
emphasize the need to stop discussing monstrosity as liminality, as something ‘elsewhere,’
because, in doing that, we are applying a defunct concept with no real power in the
contemporary pop-culture (understood broadly). In the world of monsters, nobody is a monster.
Only in the twenty-first century, Lady Gaga can sport an image explicitly modeled on
monstrosity, making of it a new fashion, an individual choice that involves ‘being a monster.’
Her esthetics is as eclectic as it gets, her costumes are comprised of inappropriate elements,
things turned into something else, like cigarettes into eye glasses, or a police ‘crime scene’ tape
into a bodice in her video Telephone. And Lady Gaga is the mainstream popular culture. Only
in our times can Lady Gaga openly call for what I find the crucial feature of today’s
monstrosity: a complete appropriation of the monster within.

When they're young, all Little Monsters learn that they are scary.
Ugly, stupid, shunned by Cupid, overweight, and hairy.
But every Monster needs to find that secret deep inside
that transfers Dr. Jekyll into sexy Mr. Hyde.
All my Monsters are beautiful, discostoodiful, squarerootiful, oldcootiful.
Monsters don't need implants or a bitchin' Monster car,
Monsters only need to love the Monsters that they are.572

Psychoanalysis has been teaching us the same thing: we all need to turn to the inside and
look at our own lack. We need to face it, and we need to embrace it. These are the essential
tactics for survival in the contemporary world of alienation: the only way to deal with the
monster within is to accept that this monster is exactly who we are. We need to accept that the

572
Lyrics of Lady Gaga’s song ‘You Are All My Little Monsters,’ the phrase she repeatedly uses to refer to her
fans.

267
loss we carry is our own reality and that the objet a that we are constantly reaching out for will
never be attained. But out of this recognition an exit is born: a monster accepted is not a monster
anymore, and in today’s world of monstrosities (emerging as visible esthetic, political or
individual actions against the alienation of the post-human man), I understand monstrosity as
the very condition of the monster’s absolution. The monster within, the one the European mind
has been dreaming of for centuries, the one that epitomizes the labyrinth of language that
included its own exists, the dream that dreamed about awakening, has to be pushed to its
extreme in order to absolve itself from monstrosity – it has to be made visible and appropriated
completely, if it is to stop being a monster. For the monster to disappear, a human has to become
monstrous. The appropriation of the monster within, as the true incoherent self of the individual
is the only way out of the dream that never ends; it is a way out of the search for the beyond of
semiotic incoherence thanks to the ultimate revelation that there is nothing there and that the
subject’s core is this incoherent, monstrous self that needs to awake and face its own face in
the mirror. It needs to face the mirror image as what it is: an illusion, a mirage, a dream that
feeds on the dreamer’s compulsion to sleep.

The final snapshot of the contemporary monstrous subject: Dexter is a man who, when he
was only three years old, watched his mother being killed and dismembered with a chainsaw
as he sat in a pool of her blood. Since then, he has an urge that consumes him, a passion that
runs his life: he needs to kill and to feel another living being dying. And so he kills, he acts
upon his dark, inappropriate desire, but he has a code given to him by his Father: Dexter kills
only those deserving death – he kills only other killers. And most importantly, Dexter is the
protagonist of the eponymous TV show, and we all root for him. Dexter is our (anti)hero of the
alienated twenty-first century.
As a subject, Dexter is a split subject par excellence. He has two faces, one dark, substantial
and confusing, the other ‘normal,’ superficial and friendly. I say superficial, because at the
beginning of the show, this other ‘normal’ face is just a mask, a cover for his life of a serial
killer. Dexter does not feel, he is a shell of a man, but his dark face is real and it even has a
name: Dexter calls it the Dark Passenger. In his night life, Dexter tracks killers, and once they
are his he wraps them in plastic, stabs them through the heart, cuts them into pieces and dumps
them into the ocean. This way Dexter continually reenacts his primal trauma, from day to day
recreating his mother’s murder. Dexter, the real one, the one that lives out his dark passion, is
born out of a sign, called into culture by the monstrous language of his mother’s fragmented
body. So the main theme of Dexter’s life is coping with the stygian place inside him, coping
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with his inappropriate desire. He needs to look into the heart of his desire directly, but in his
inability to do so he moves from one dismembered body to the next, reaching out for
satisfaction that none of the bodies can provide. They are all insufficient, they are all just a
passing ‘it,’ while the real objet a always withdraws from him, and Dexter misses absolution,
he misses the appointment with the Real. Dexter’s desire remains insatiable, his thirst for blood
(and for the life of his victims that is slowly dying away) unquenchable.
As described so far, Dexter perfectly epitomizes what I have called ‘the male Victorian
subject.’ He personifies the Victorian quest for the exit from the labyrinth of language, and the
ineptitude of the subject to find it, to stop dreaming. But Dexter has for us another message
coming: the monster stops being a monster if appropriated as such. The whole critically
acclaimed show, which lasted for eight years, conveys Dexter’s search for wholeness. And the
only way for him to achieve that wholeness is not to die, like our Victorian sirens, but to accepts
himself as who he is: to accept himself as a monster. Only by accepting the Dark Passenger as
the real core of his self, and understanding that the Dark Passenger is not something beyond
him, but the very condition of his possibility, can Dexter find peace and release from his
tortured state of mind. He needs to fully become a monster in order to be.
Dexter, our modern Ulysses whose desired object is his own self, is the true protagonist and
redeemer of the twenty-first century alienated world. He pushes his monster to its extreme, so
he can cease being one. He kills the monster with its own monstrosity.
There is a future for the monster, after all – that is for the monster with a human face.

269
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