After Death, Death: The Mechanics of Longing in Henry Carrington’s The Siren

Teodorski, Marko (2019) After Death, Death: The Mechanics of Longing in Henry Carrington’s The Siren. Amaltea Revista de mitocritica, 11. pp. 71-86. ISSN 1989-1709

Text Marko Teodorski - After Death, Death The Mechanics of Longing in Henry Carrington’s The Siren (Amaltea. Revista de mitocrítica 11 (2019), 71-86).pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (340kB)

Abstract

This essay deals with the mechanics of longing in a late Victorian siren poem by Henry Carrington, The Siren (1898). Although Victorian literature teemed with short stories, poems and novels on sirens, this genre, that builds upon and reverses Homeric siren tradition, remains neglected in literary discussions. With the translation of The Little Mermaid into English in 1872, the image of a “longing siren” was born. No longer were these the stories of Odysseus who had survived the siren song: now they were about the sirens’ own sorrows, griefs and desires. Sirens became profoundly human – they became desiring subjects themselves.

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