Through the Siren's Looking-Glass: Victorian Monstrosity of the Male Desiring Subject

Abstract

"Through the Subject’s Looking-Glass" is a book about Victorian siren literature, siren painting and mirror culture. Its main argument is that the widespread emergence of mirrors in the nineteenth century drastically reshaped the concepts of desire and self-perception, introducing a specific, consumerist type of subjectivity. The representation of this new configuration of selfhood found its way to quite an unexpected place: the siren literature and painting of the era. In the nineteenth century, mirrors had become mass-produced, spectacularized and could be found in every corner, thus the narratives from the era started sketching a subject lost in the simulacrum of consumerism, everlastingly imprisoned within a circle of desire. At the same time, the representation of sirens changed. The previously lethal vocal seductresses turned into innocent maidens in pursuit of happiness and fulfillment. By becoming profoundly human, for the first time in the history of their representation, they appeared as subjects themselves: monstrous subjects lost in the circle of desire. The book argues that in the images of the Victorian sirens, writers and painters topologized their own consumerist selfhood of the age.