A significant part of the Scottish heritage for women writers now is the figure of the dangerous woman. In twentieth-century writing she may sometimes seem to align herself with a feminist perspective, but she refuses to become quite ideologically sound. She is too sinister for that. She has appeared since the ballads as the daughter of the other world, with all the danger and the glamour that that implies. In modern fantasy her refusal to accommodate herself to a world of known boundaries and social realism maybe related to her psychological alienation from the patriarchal model. But with the other world open to her, she becomes more than subversive, she is perilous, and perhaps, in terms of accepted moralities, downright evil.[1] 

With these words Margaret Elphinstone described one of the four persistent traditional elements in contemporary fantasy fiction by women in Scotland in an article published in 1992. While introducing the concept of 'the dangerous woman' as a focal point, Elphinstone established three crucial points about this recurring traditional trope:

1. Evil = Glamour.
2. The dangerous woman rejects the patriarchal world.
3. Her role has consequences on narrative tradition and theory.

The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, especially during 'La Belle Epoque', started to witness a process of social integration and emancipation women were being involved in. Inevitably, then, 'Women outside their traditional, imposed roles appeared as a threat to [...] [men], as an evil force promising to destroy established institutions, rights and privileges.[2] Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, the dangerous woman becomes more and more ambiguous a creature. In their study The Madwoman in the Attic (1984), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar attempt to exlplain the origin of the two man-made myths about women. Whether angel or monster, the American scholars argue that the opposite characters embodied by women inevitably coexist and are ambiguously represented:

Male dread of women, and specifically the infantile dread of maternal autonomy, has historically objectified itself in vilification of women, while male ambivalence about female 'charms' underlies the traditional images of such terrible sorceress-goddesses as the Sphynx, Medusa, Circe, Kali, Delilah, and Salome all of whom possess duplicitous arts that allow them both to seduce and to steal male generative energy.[3]

The dangerous woman escapes definition. She is, simultaneously, a witch and an angel; mother and temptress; sister and lover; a monster and an unobtainable beauty. This is why, in order to define Thompson's employment of the traditional trope, I thought of gorgons:

Gorgons were very popular subjects in ancient art. In the earliest versions they are very uglyb with snaky hair, staring eyes, fearsome grins and lolling tongues, boar's tusks and a striding gait. Later, however, Medusa can be beautiful.[4]

Originally repulsive creatures, gorgons evolve into evil femme fatales. As we will see in Thompson's novel, modern gorgons are beautiful, evil and not easy to capture. Their essence is impossible to comprehend and their beauty impossible to possess fully. Escaping the lover's embrace, Thompson's gorgons, escape definition. This is why rather than the gorgons, it would be more appropriate to talk about chimeras, when trying to discuss Thompson's dangerous women. A mythical monster with three heads (a goat's, a serpent's and a lion's), the chimera epitomises paradox.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is the madman, the lover, all as frantic
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The form of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.[5]

The epigraph anticipates the numerous intertextual references in the subplot of the novel, pointing towards a strong presence of literary and mythological tradition in the stories. Moreover, the epigraph anticipates the novel's themes. The plot of the novel is a complex network of obsession and desire for unobtainable objects of beauty. Male characters struggling to control and understand reality, are opposed by the gorgons (or are they chimeras?) that lead them through a path of apparent destruction. Gender identity and roles slowly crumble as the narrator's ability to understand and comprehend collapses. Doubts sweep away any certainty and ability to define and explain, ultimately posing the metafictional question about the possibility for a story to be narrated.

Like a ghost, my mother, in transparent silk, her back turned to me, stood on its wide steps. On of her pilgrims stood beside her, his face reflecting blankly the light of the moon. From the centre of the cool water of the lake, I watched this strange man shut his forget-me-not eyes, as with her mouth she plucked out his heart through his open lips. (p. 6)

The reference to the number thirteen, always associated with ill fortune, and the vampiric action performed by the ghostly apparition of the mother are elements that contribute to the strange black magic aura of the scene. This sinister marriage of death and beauty embodied by his mother has haunted the narrator from the earliest stages of his childhood as he admits at the very beginning of his memoir. The obsessive nature of this cult of beauty reaches its extreme in the mother's inability to accept its end. The mother's physical decay is followed by a process of mental disintegration. Unable to cope with the end of the myth she has nurtured all her life, the mother starts mutilating all the objects of beauty she enjoyed collecting when she was blossoming in her youth. The mutilations, reminiscent of the mutilations suffered by Sade's Justine, are performed 'with surgical precision' (p. 7) and emphasise the sinister aura permeating the narrator's perception of his own mother.

I generally conceived myself to be two people. When I lay in bed, I deemed there were two of us in it; [...] The most perverse part of it was, that I rarely conceived myself to be any of the two persons. I thought for the most part that my companion was one of them, and my brother the other.[8]

The place he finds himself in is 'on the verge of unreality'. This, together, with countless other references to the dream state and hallucinations of the opium smoking narrator throughout the story, is a crucial statement to understand the meaning of the novel.