Among modernist women writers, none are more distinctively associated with the sea than H.D. and Virginia Woolf. Both writers keenly draw upon the Western philosophical-literary tradition of thalassic metaphors—in which these tropes are often used to perpetuate a number of dominant discourses (Muscogiuri 102)—reappropriating and shrewdly reworking them so as to challenge those discourses in ways that are remarkably comparable and complementary, configuring a shared dimension that is simultaneously aesthetic and political. Hence, reading their respective handling of these pivotal metaphors together can better elucidate fundamental aspects of their feminist politics and poetics. In particular, this paper will highlight their approach to language and writing in connection with gender politics, notions of identity, subalternity, and aesthetics by engaging with one specific element of thalassic metaphors which, albeit significant in their formation and politics, has been so far overlooked in studies of either writer: the ancient mythological configuration of woman as siren and mermaid.

Since its first literary appearance in The Odyssey, the myth of the Sirens has been questioned, rewritten, and reconfigured in disparate ways. Yet, remarkably, the implications of the Homeric episode—in terms of knowledge, language, poiesis, and their interconnections— are seldom considered in theoretical discourse (Adorno and Horkheimer being a notable exception). Furthermore, the interrelated gender politics underpinning this masculinist construction of a female myth—noted by De Beauvoir in The Second Sex—are entirely disregarded by male theorists and rarely discussed by women, except in recent works in iconography, mythography, and classical studies, pioneered by Jane Ellen Harrison. However, these works generally ignore the question of the cognition of the Sirens (linked by some with the tree of knowledge) and the crucial fact that, with this episode in The Odyssey, “a change is effected in the historical situation of language” (Adorno and Horkheimer 60). Indeed, as representatives of a predominantly female oral tradition, and as human/animal/divine hybrid beings, the Sirens unified intellect and the senses, thought and experience, in their enrapturing song.