The Sirens

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.