Real Gorgons or Fantastic Chimeras? Re-shaping Myth and Tradtion in Alice Thompson's Justine

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.