Pygmalion

Pygmalion is a legendary sculptor of Cyprus best known from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Disgusted with ordinary relationships, he creates and falls in love with an ivory woman, whom the goddess Venus brings to life; the tale became a lasting myth about art, desire and transformation.

Ovid’s account turns Pygmalion’s crafted statue into a living woman after the sculptor prays to Venus. The woman is unnamed in the ancient poem, although later tradition often calls her Galatea. The story became a durable metaphor for artistic creation and for attempts to shape another person according to an ideal, inspiring works from painting and opera to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and its later adaptations.

Madeline Miller’s Galatea reverses the traditional Pygmalion story by giving the sculptor’s magically animated wife her own voice. Pygmalion is no longer the fortunate artist rewarded with an ideal woman: he is a possessive husband who treats Galatea’s beauty and dependence as proof that she should obey him, confines her when she shows independent thought and plans to control their daughter in the same way. The retelling turns his act of creation into a study of ownership, coercion and a created woman’s struggle for autonomy.