The Sirens
60 pages • 2-hour read
Emilia HartThe Sirens
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Symbols & Motifs
Jess’s Paintings
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Jess’s paintings serve as a glimpse into her mind, giving Lucy a way to understand Jess’s obsessions while Jess isn’t there to explain them. Her paintings for The Sirens exhibit especially reveal Jess’s preoccupations with the experiences she’s witnessing in her dreams and her connection to the women who inhabit them. In this way, the paintings come to symbolize Jess’s unconscious, as she’s recalling an ancestral memory that was formative for the woman who gave birth to her. The paintings, the product of Jess’s subconscious, demonstrate The Pull of Familial Relationships as Jess can access these genetic memories and feel drawn by them.
The paintings of the convict women in the dark hold also represent Jess’s own feelings about being trapped or feeling different because of her skin. She initially feels a sense of isolation and disconnection from her past because she doesn’t know her biological origins or why her birth mother might have left her in the cave. The painting of the two women on the easel signals Jess’s wish to reconnect with Lucy, to acknowledge and be acknowledged by her daughter. She feels the powerful pull of motherhood and likewise the sense of Female Connections as Protective Influence. When Jess realizes the finishing touch for the painting is to add the snakeskin to represent the women’s skin, she’s anticipating the final scenes when she does reunite with Lucy, and they are both able to express what they think of as their true form, speaking to the theme of Discovering and Expressing Oneself.
The Naiad
The name of the ship that carries Mary, Eliza, and the others from Ireland to New South Wales alludes to another type of female water spirit that inhabits the myths of ancient Greece. Naiads were beings that inhabited bodies of fresh water, like springs, lakes, rivers, and fountains. In art, they were typically represented as beautiful young women. They were regarded as light-hearted and beneficent spirits who sometimes served a protective function. The name is ironic as applied to a ship meant to carry imprisoned women across the world, but the boat, in one sense, serves as a protected space where the women form a community in which they confide in, share with, and support one another.
Like the mermaid figure on her prow or the sirens alluded to in the book’s title, the Naiad is also a destructive entity when the ship wrecks on the rocks in Comber Bay. For all but the handful of women who escape, their journey was a death sentence. The Naiad lingers in the Comber Bay community memory, part of the bay’s history and heritage, as a symbol of painful or tragic events of the past that cannot be escaped. In another sense, the ship is the vehicle that delivers Mary to her discovery of her true self, helping complete her transformation as the exposure to the water slowly brings out the physical qualities that let her adapt to life in the sea.
The Snakeskin
The snakeskin is a symbol of transformation, the sign that a creature has entered a new state of maturity. In its appearance on Page 205, the snakeskin is also a symbol of the connection between Lucy and Jess, as Lucy finds the shed skin and, thinking it beautiful, saves it to give to her sister. Jess keeps the snakeskin during all her moves and travels as it becomes a symbol of that connection and, later, of the nature that Lucy inherits from Jess. The snakeskin, painted into the canvas, is “translucent, shimmering with pink and violet and blue. All the colors of the sea” (259). It lends a beautiful, otherworldly quality to the skin of the painting women, suggesting they are something more than human.
Applying the snakeskin to the canvas to complete the painting that is the centerpiece of her exhibit marks Jess’s maturation into full self-acceptance and awareness of her past and the way she belongs in the water. The fact that it adds to and complements the two women in the picture, who might be Mary and Eliza or might equally be Jess and Lucy, cements the sense that the women holding hands are bound by love as much as genetics. The snake itself, as an image that often inspires horror, revulsion, or alarm, symbolizes the distaste that others feel for the skin condition Jess calls The Flakes. Separate from its associations with danger or fear, the snake holds associations with beauty and power, continuing the novel’s exploration of the tension between beauty and danger.
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