“The Kiss of the Enchantress,” painted by English artist Isobel Lilian Gloag (c.a. 1890) depicts a monster from Ancient Greek mythology called a Lamia. Like so many stories about horrifying females, the Lamia’s backstory involves a grizzly subversion of the ideal woman — she destroys children rather than nurtures them, and seduces men in order to kill them. The Greek myths discussed the original Lamia as a woman whose own children were killed by the Goddess Hera out of jealousy, for Zeus her husband had had (yet again) an extramarital affair. In revenge, the Lamia (generalized into a monster versus an individual) haunts and kills other women’s children. In the 1880s the English poet John Keats wrote the poem _Lamia_, which depicted the beast as an alluring, beautiful, and terrifying seductress: “she was a Gordian shape of dazzling hue, vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue . . . . She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf, some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s own self . . . “
Source(s): See Wikipedia and mythology.net. p.s., Keats was typical in the way the Romantic movement showcased alluring women who take down men with their beauty and sexuality.
