Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

In the early twentieth century, the Celtic Twilight writers continued to give a covert erotic touch to works drawn from folklore and myth, such as the Irish fairy poetry of Yeats (“Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam…”) and the opium-dream prose of the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany. But as the century progressed, fairy lore was relegated to the nursery (much like furniture that has gone out of style, as J.R.R. Tolkien has pointed out), and thus was stripped of all but the most tenacious elements of sensuality. To find magical eroticism as fin-de-siecle fairy lore became passe, we must turn instead to the Surrealists, whose dreamlike imagery often drew on the symbolism of mythic archetypes. Particularly notable in this regard are the stories and paintings of Leonora Carrington and her close friend Remedios Varo, both of whom had a keen interest in magical esoterica. The paintings of Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, and Salvadore Dali also display vivid, haunting, deliberately disturbing mytho-erotic elements. Loosely connected with the French surrealists was the Parisian writer Anais Nin, who went on to become one of the best known writers of literary erotica in this century. The stories published in Little Birds and Delta of Venus (some of which have a dreamlike, magical flavor) were written in New York when Nin was one of a circle of writers (along with Henry Miller) producing erotica, paid by the page, for the delectation of an anonymous Collector.

As Surrealism, too, faltered with the change of fashions after the second World War, magical erotica became harder to find… unless one looked at its darker manifestation: the vampire’s kiss. From Hertzog’s film Nosferatu to Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice, the erotic element inherent in vampire tales surely needs no explication. While it is not the intent of this book to delve into eroticism in horror fiction (a vast subject all on its own), vampire tales seem to cross that elusive line between works of fantasy and horror, holding an irresistible appeal even to readers who traditionally avoid the latter (perhaps because of the close connection of vampires in traditional lore with the seductive, soul-sucking creatures who haunt the woods of the Faery Realm). As the century closes, and the field of literary fantasy enjoys a popular resurgence, we find that the magical tales which have a sensual or erotic edge still tend to hover close to that fantasy/horror divide, combining the symbols of myth and folklore with the tropes of Gothic horror. Angela Carter’s brilliant fiction, for instance, is sensual, sexual, magical and very dark—such as The War of Dreams, a voluptuous work of modern surrealism, and The Bloody Chamber, which brings adult eroticism back into fairy tales. (The Company of Wolves is a film based on some of the stories in the collection, with an excellent, rather Freudian screenplay written by Carter herself.) Tanith Lee’s Red as Blood is a collection of adult fairy tales retold in a similar vein, rich in sensuality and devilishly dark in tone. Sara Maitland’s The Book of Spells, Robert Coover’s Briar Rose, and Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins are three more superb variations on this theme. Anne Rice has also eroticized fairy tale themes (with an S&M twist) under the pen-name A.N. Roquelaure: The Claiming of Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, and Beauty’s Release.