Cages and Escape: Delving into Margaret Atwood’s “Siren Song”

A stereotype is a trap, a cage, which restricts individuals to one identity. Once a stereotype is created, it is hard to overcome and leaves traces of prejudice. In agreement with Alicia Ostriker’s The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking, Margaret Atwood’s poem “Siren Song” is a reach out for women to express feelings on gender discrimination without coming across in a way that would engender negative support. “Siren Song”, is written from the perspective of a siren, in a mythological setting but with a contemporary tone, that is restricted to the stereotype of a seductress who seeks to sing men to their deaths but in reality, she wants to break free and find someone that will not fall for her song.

Opening the poem, the siren introduces her song as “the one everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible” (Charters 914). Many people, leaders or middle-class, would love to use the song to control over others and defeat their enemies. Grazing the surface of the poem, the siren appears to have a tone that is mocking, sarcastic, and condescending towards her victim as she sings her song. The men know that death awaits them if they fall for the song, “they see the beached skulls, but they still “leap overboard” (Charters 914). The Siren entices her victim by promising to tell them the secret of the song in return for helping her escape from her “bird suit”. There are two version of the siren, one with a mermaid tail and the other with harpy wings (Charters 914). Women are very often associated with birds and their songs. These women, just like pets, are sometimes locked up in a cage made of different stereotypes of what a woman could or should be. It was thought that is women were allowed to do wha...

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...ce from men. Atwood is not a lone though, Alicia Ostriker attests to many female writers and poets changing the way language is used. Women are not just defined as weak, vulnerable, conniving, and evil, they can also be strong, intelligent, loving, and fierce. The Siren is a woman stuck in a stereotype but if set free, as contemporary women seek freedom, then she will show everyone a different character that they may have never imagined her to have.

Works Cited

Charters, Ann, and Samuel B. Charters. "Siren Song." Literature and Its Writers: An

Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford, 1997. 914. Print.

Ostriker, Alicia. "The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking." The

Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking 8.1 (1982): 68-90. JSTOR. Web. 14 May 2014. .