Sexual Fables
This article accompanies the fable
Homer's Women


The Lady of Shalott

The Lady is a lonely and doomed figure and Tennyson used her in several poems and plays, just as he used Fair Rosamond. This painting of The Lady is by John William Waterhouse in 1888. The implication I'm making is that The Lady resembles Calypso, except she is in the boat, not Odysseus, going to find her mortality.

Lady of Shalott

The same principle underlies Swiss Symbolist Arnold Böcklin's series, Isle of the Dead (Die Toteninsel) - so named by others - and below is the third he produced in the series, also during the 1880's. Like Waterhouse, he painted various characters from the Odyssey.

Bocklin-Isle-of-the-Dead

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