Sirens were dangerous female-animal hybrids who lured sailors to their deaths with enchanting singing and music. Often depicted as being part bird or fish, sirens were painted by fin de siècle artists as beautiful and cruel; the men who fall victim to their songs are portrayed as entirely enraptured, fixated on the creatures' beauty, unable to resist their dangerous charms.
SIRENS
Artists readily depicted part-woman, part-beast creatures from mythology and legend among the ranks of mythical and biblical femmes fatales. Just as queens and powerful individuals became alluring, dangerous threats under painters' brushes, so did sirens, mermaids, and at the end of the century, vampires.
Fantastical Female Figures
Frederic Leighton | 1856-1858 Here, intense sexuality is emphasized as the root of danger. The siren's coiled tail wrapped tightly around the fisherman's leg and her arms clasped about his neck highlight her physical power over the man's lax body. Her skin radiates a sensual warmth as she pulls the fisherman into the sea. His splayed limbs and downcast eyes are reminiscent of a crucifixion scene; Leighton casts him as a martyr for all men prey to the fatal control of women's sexuality.
John William Waterhouse | 1900 Waterhouse captures the fixated gaze of a man sinking beneath the sea's waves as a fatally beautiful siren looks cooly and pitilessly down upon her victim. She remains untouched by the turbulence of the sea, steady and self-composed upon her rocky perch away from harm.
Herbert Draper | 1909 To guard his crew against the sirens' calls, Odysseus made his men fill their ears with beeswax. He strapped himself to the mast of his ship in order to be restrained from his overwhelming desire to pursue the sirens' songs. Here Draper portrays the sirens as lithe, alluring women calling out to Odysseus and his crew; they pull themselves over the ship's sides in their attempt at dangerous destruction.
Frederic Leighton | 1856-1858 Here, intense sexuality is emphasized as the root of danger. The siren's coiled tail wrapped tightly around the fisherman's leg and her arms clasped about his neck highlight her physical power over the man's lax body. Her skin radiates a sensual warmth as she pulls the fisherman into the sea. His splayed limbs and downcast eyes are reminiscent of a crucifixion scene; Leighton casts him as a martyr for all men prey to the fatal control of women's sexuality.
Vampires occupied a dark territory laced with seduction, deception, and uncontrolled sexuality in the fin de siècle imagination. Though Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula is the most well-known literary example of vampires, in art, literature, and popular culture the vampire was almost exclusively embodied by cunning, deceitful women with a lust for blood and money posessing frenzied sexual desires. A dichotomy between the hungry-eyed vampire and idealized saintly woman fit perfectly into society's existing virgin/whore classification. However, unlike a mere prostitute, the vampire not only played upon men's desires for money, but frantically sought to deplete unsuspecting males' wealth and well-being; her frenzied sexuality merged with her need for blood to drain men of all essence and reduce them to penniless, feeble shells.
"By 1900 the vampire had come to represent woman as the personification of everything negative that linked sex, ownership, and money" (Djikstra, 351); the medical community soon incorporated vampirical tendencies into the barrage of pathological indicators levelled upon the behavior of women. Dr. William J. Robinson, author of the popular Married Life and Happiness articulated the vampirical characteristics of women who did not share the appropriate desires of 'normal' wives –
"there is the opposite type of woman, who is a great danger to the health and even the very life of her husband. I refer to the hypersensual woman, to the wife with an excessive sexuality. It is to her that the name vampire can be applied in its literal sense. Just as the vampire sucks the blood of its victims in their sleep while they are alive, so does the woman vampire suck the life and exhaust the vitality of her male parner – or victim"
Philip Burne-Jones | 1897 Many depictions of vampires portrayed them as youthful women in contemporary clothes. Here, Burne-Jones presents a lustful woman in a modern nightgown crouched predatorily upon a man deep in sleep. The man's face turned toward the viewer and his limp helplessness implore us for sympathy with the male and condemnation of the nightmarish woman preying upon him.
Félicien Rops | 1877 Any woman could be a vampire in the fin de siècle imagination; any woman who seemed too active, too interested in money, too eager, too unattached, and especially too sexual was a threat to men's status. Deceitful vampire-women were everywhere conspiring to lustily suck men's very masculinity right out of them – from poetry to popular literature to artwork, theatre, and soon, cinema, the fin de siècle world was crawling with the terrible creatures.
Edvard Munch | c. 1893 Here munch expressively captures the terror and threat embodied by the vampire: helpless man, who already strives daily as "the creator, the discoverer, the defender" (Ruskin), is in one stroke defeated by Woman's deceitful nature; without a defense against her sensual charms he is consumed by her malicious, greedy passion and fades to nothingness into the black, dark world.
Philip Burne-Jones | 1897 Many depictions of vampires portrayed them as youthful women in contemporary clothes. Here, Burne-Jones presents a lustful woman in a modern nightgown crouched predatorily upon a man deep in sleep. The man's face turned toward the viewer and his limp helplessness implore us for sympathy with the male and condemnation of the nightmarish woman preying upon him.