Galatea and Pygmalion: The Root of Centuries of Inspiration

  

Galatea (2013/2022)

By Madeline Miller

Ecco, 64 pages

★★★★

 

Madeline Miller has won deserved acclaim for her reimaging of Greek mythology. I have read both Song Of Achilles and Circe, both of which made me go back to stories I read in undergraduate literature and history classes. In 2013, Miller wrote a short story/novella titled Galatea, which is the source for numerous Pygmalion plays, novels, poems, movies, and TV show variants (including several Star Trek episodes).

 

Pygmalion is best known in antiquity as a poem within Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In 1913, it became a play by George Bernard Shaw that the theatre and movie industry presented as My Fair Lady. Other movies you might know that are inspired by Pygmalion include Lars and the Real Girl, Ex Machina, Bicentennial Man, and Ruby Sparks. In essence, though, just about any cultural product involving some sort of magical or unexpected transformation owes a debt to Ovid.    

 

Rodin's Version

 

Painting by Gerome

 

 

Ovid’s Pygmalion was one of several Greek and Roman stories of an inanimate object that comes to life. (You could think of it as the inspiration for Pinocchio as well.) In Ovid’s telling and Miller’s modern reading, a Cypriot sculptor named Pygmalion carved a statue so beautiful that he literally falls in love with it to the point of kissing and caressing the female ivory body. (Miller has Galatea made of stone, but that’s a small matter as numerous sculptures were so rendered.) During a feast for the Aphrodite, the goddess is so moved by Pygmalion’s devotion and situation that she makes Galatea slowly come to life. She and Pygmalion have a daughter named Paphos. (In some tales Paphos is a son and a daughter named Metharme is their second child.)

 

Painting by Boucher

 

Miller’s story is unique in that it flips the switch and, like most of her work, tells the story from the woman’s perspective–even to the point of probing what Galatea was thinking when she was still made of stone. Her feminist takes on Greek myths would have been considered shocking, perhaps even subversive, in antiquity. Lucky for us, she’s writing now. Hers is a charming and thought-provoking tale that can be read in about half an hour or so. Ecco has reissued this 2013 story with a (slightly) revised afterword from Miller. If you’ve not read it, I highly recommend it. If you have, it’s worth revisiting. As the many uses of Pygmalion myth indicate, a good story never grows old.

 

Rob Weir