Ellen Datlow: 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.

With the ubiquitous pairing of sexuality and violence in our modern culture, it is more difficult to find eroticism when we stray from the dark edge of the fantasy field… and yet a few “high fantasy” books exist containing lush, sensuous imagery—such as Ellen Kushner’s Thomas the Rhymer, a deliciously adult retelling of the Scottish ballad of that name; Patricia A. McKillip’s Winter Rose, a passionate reworking of the ballad “Tam Lin”; Delia Sherman’s The Porcelain Dove, a subtle and elegant exploration of sexual mores during the French Revolution; Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, an earthy, tactile, deeply mythological tale set in an English wood; and Midori Snyder’s The Innamorati, an exuberantly lusty saga based on old Italian myth. Beyond the genre shelves, we find sensuously magical works by the Magical Realist writers—such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Love in the Time of Cholera); Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate); and Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic and Second Nature). Pleasure in the Word: Erotic Writing by Latin American Women, edited by Margaritte Fernandez Olmos and Lizbeth Paravisini, contains Magical Realist works among other gorgeous selections of poetry and prose. In poetry, a number of writers have used folkloric themes to sensuous effect, including Anne Sexton, Olga Broumas, Bill Lewis, Liz Lochhead, and Jane Yolen. In the visual arts, Brian Froud explores the sexual nature of fairy lore (Good Faeries/Bad Faeries and Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book); while painters like Paula Rego and Leonor Fini portray starkly erotic, psychological symbolism drawn from fairy tales. “Doll art” is an unusual area in which to look for eroticism, since dolls, like fairy stories, are thought to be the exclusive province of children; yet in the annual Dolls as Art show at the CFM Gallery in New York one finds phantasmagoric imagery with deeply erotic elements by sculptors such as Wendy Froud, Monica, Richard Prowse, and Lisa Lichtenfels.

In both the literary and visual arts, fantasy is used as a potent means to express the inexpressible, to evoke archetypes, to provoke the Gods, to cross over known boundaries into the unknown lands beyond. Erotic art, like fantasy, is a realm the “serious” artist is not encouraged to travel or linger in. But fantasists learn early to ignore such limiting rules and boundaries, preferring to follow the beguiling creatures who beckon them into the woods.

“Regarding her whole self as an ear,” writes Toni Morrison (in the novel Tar Baby), “he whispered into every part of her stories of icecaps and singing fish, the Fox and the Stork, the Monkey and the Lion, the Spider Goes to Market, and so mingled was their sex with adventure and fantasy that to the end of her life she never heard a reference to Little Red Riding Hood without a tremor.”

In the following pages we offer stories mingling sex and fantasy, stories to produce a tremor or two, stories both dark and bright. These are tales dedicated to Eros, that capricious God of love and desire. And to the sirens, for somewhere in this wide world they’re still singing…

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN in the world have a cat-like quality. They slink, they purr; claws sheathed in silken fur. In the privacy of their summer gardens, in the green depths of forests, I believe they shed themselves of their attire, even to their human flesh, and stretch their bodies to the sun and their secret deity. She, the Queen of Cats, is Pu-ryah, daughter of the Eye of the Sun; who both roars the vengeance of the solar fire and blesses the hearth of the home. Given that the goddess, and by association her children, has so many aspects, is it any wonder that men have ever been perplexed by the subtleties of females and felines? Yet even as we fear them, we adore them.

When I was young I had a wife, and she was a true daughter of Pu-ryah. It began in this way.

When my father died, I inherited the family seat on the edge of the city, its numerous staff, and a sizable fortune. The estate earned money for me, administered by the capable hands of its managers, and I was free to pursue whatever interests I desired. My mother, whom I barely remembered (for she died when I was very young), had bequeathed her beauty to me: I was not an ill-favored man. Yet despite these privileges, joy of the heart eluded me. I despaired of ever finding a mate. Thirty years old, and romance had always turned sour on me. I spent much of my time painting, and portraits of a dozen lost loves adorned the walls of my home; their cold eyes stared down at me with disdain, their lips forever smiling. It had come to the point where I scorned the goddess of love; she must have blighted me at birth.