Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination and death.

An allusion is a reference to a work or cultural artifact outside the text that offers additional context, meaning, or associations. The title of Hart’s novel, The Sirens, is a reference to the female figures in the epic ancient Greek poem The Odyssey, attributed to Homer. These sirens are supernatural hybrid creatures with bodies half-woman, half-bird, who sang in beautiful voices to entice sailors to come closer. In so doing, the ships would wreck on the rocks and perish. In the poem, Odysseus is advised by a witch, Circe, to stop his sailors’ ears with wax so they cannot hear the song and have himself bound to the mast so he can hear the sirens’ voices but not follow them to his death. The word “siren” thereafter entered the cultural consciousness of Western Europe as a symbol representing a temptation that led one to self-destruction. Hart retains this traditional sense of the sirens posing a danger to men, with the twist that the men the sirens lure are being punished for their violence against women and children.

Other allusions to Greek mythology add to the sense of myth and legend that contextualizes the narrative. Jess likes a particular painting, Pandora by John William Waterhouse. The myth of Pandora, the woman who peeks into a forbidden box and thus releases all sorrows and ills on humankind, is often used as an admonition against curiosity. However, the novel subverts this idea with Lucy’s inquisitiveness and her love of journalism, which lead her to find out the truth of things, correcting injustice rather than causing it.

Cameron Hennessey shows Jess a painting of Orpheus and Eurydice by Carl Goos. In that myth, the gifted poet Orpheus ventures to the underworld to reclaim his beloved wife, Eurydice. He is told not to look upon her until she is safely back in the human world, but an anxious Orpheus looks behind him too soon, and Eurydice disappears back into the underworld. The two are a metaphor for doomed lovers, foreshadowing that Jess and Cameron will part. Jess interprets the painting as Orpheus rescuing his wife, reflecting the way that she hopes Cameron will see and possibly rescue her. In a sense, Jess rewrites this myth when she is the one who lures Cameron to the underworld, the world of the sea cave, and then kills him in self-defense.