“To hear the mermaids sing”: Visual Figuration, Myth and Desire in the Case of the Waterwoman

The idea of a female spirit attached to a place of water has endured for millennia in literature, folklore and the visual arts. Supernatural aquatic women – mermaids, sirens, nymphs and nereids – attached to sea, shore, spring, river and cave, manifest at the interface between the natural world and the otherworld; they also serve as markers for that boundary. They have been visualised in a remarkable variety of forms, from ideal female nudes to monstrous hybrids. Central also to the mythos of the water-woman is the transformative power of desire; experienced by, or exerted on, either the entity herself or her beholder. Focussing on traditions involving the Homeric sirens and the aquatic transformations described in Ovid, with excursions into Celtic, Northern European and folkloric sources, I explore how issues of hybridity and desire are related in treatments of the water-woman from Classical antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.