In Homer, the Sirens don't sing about love. Circe warns Odysseus about them, and when he finally hears them, lashed to his mast while his crew row on with wax in their ears, what they offer is knowledge. They sing that they know everything the Greeks and Trojans suffered at Troy, and everything that happens on the earth. The danger was never lust. It was the promise of understanding everything, if only you'd stop rowing. That's worth keeping in mind with Waterhouse's The Siren (c. 1900), because his sailor doesn't look seduced. He looks transfixed.
Waterhouse kept returning to these sea-creatures, and you can watch his idea of them change. His Ulysses and the Sirens (1891, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) follows ancient Greek art, where sirens were birds with women's heads, and shows them swarming the ship like hawks. By 1900 he had moved to the later northern tradition of the siren as mermaid; his diploma painting for the Royal Academy that year was A Mermaid. The Siren sits between the two, a woman with a lyre and scaled legs who belongs to both traditions and fully to neither.
What gives the painting its charge is how still it is. There's no storm and no ship breaking apart, only one man in the water looking up and one woman on the rock looking down. Her expression is hard to read, more curious than cruel, possibly even sorry. It's a picture of mutual fascination with a known ending. Victorian painters loved the fatal woman, and critics often tie those images to the period's anxiety about female independence. Waterhouse keeps making the simple reading harder to hold.
Writers have circled the myth for centuries. In a short piece written in 1917, "The Silence of the Sirens," Kafka imagined they had a weapon worse than their song: their silence, which Odysseus, proud of his precautions, never even noticed. Economists and psychologists use the term "Ulysses contract" for any commitment we make in advance to protect ourselves from a temptation we know is coming, the modern version of tying yourself to the mast. And the most recognized siren in the world today is probably the twin-tailed one in the Starbucks logo.
That's why the myth still works. Everyone has a siren song, something that promises everything and costs the voyage. Odysseus's solution was not to avoid hearing it. He wanted to hear it. He just arranged in advance to be unable to follow it. It's a practical sort of wisdom, and a more honest one than pretending to be immune.
Our Shipwrecked design is named for the man in the water. Waterhouse's The Siren appears on our: