“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 hasendured for millennia in literature, folklore and the visual arts.Supernatural aquatic women – mermaids, sirens, nymphs and nereids – attached tosea, shore, spring,river and cave, manifest at the interface between thenatural world and the otherworld; they also serve as markers for that boundary. Theyhave been visualised in a remarkable variety of forms, from ideal female nudes tomonstrous hybrids. Central also to the mythos of the water-woman is thetransformative power of desire; experienced by, or exerted on, either the entityherself or her beholder.

Focussing on traditions involving the Homeric sirens and theaquatic transformations described in Ovid, with excursions into Celtic,Northern European and folkloric sources, I explore how issues of hybridity anddesire are related in treatments of the water-woman from Classical antiquitythrough the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.