Galatea by Madeline Miller
I liked Miller’s earlier works, The Song of Achilles (2012) and especially Circe (2018), so I was interested in this “book”—actually a short story. This story actually could be part of Nina MacLaughlin’s the Wake, Siren collection, another retelling of Ovid’s transformations. And this certainly fits in the feminist readings of classics a la Natalie Haynes (Pandora’s Jar (2020), A Thousand Ships (2021), and especially Stone Blind (2023)).
Miller’s retelling of the Pygmalion story is very contemporary, and that’s not a great thing. She highlights the perverse male psychology involved in rendering images of female bodies—not whole people, just pretty bodies. Passive, compliant bodies. He is attracted to a fantasy, with contempt and fear of the real woman. She must play the role he defines, however degrading.
In this version, we get Galatea’s side of the sick story. Transformed from a gorgeous marble carving into a living woman, she is “perfect”. An “ideal” woman. I.e., a statue that is alive enough to have sex with, at least as long as she poses and says nothing. He created her (he seems to forget the divine intervention), owns her, and demands her compliance with his fantasies. Her own thoughts and feelings are irrelevant, only his (twisted, if you ask me) pleasures.
It’s a very sad story, because she is magically tied to him. She “loves” him, needs his attention, desires his approval, and cannot leave or even resist. She also has a human daughter, who he treats as an object, and separates from her mother. The whole thing is awful.
Readers of Miller will be expecting a comeuppance. And, indeed, this relationship comes to a most appropriate ending.
- Madeline Miller, Galatea: A Short Story, New York, Harper Collins, 2022.
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