Melissa Gallegos

Dr. Hubert

ENG 650

December 8, 2004

Women on Their Own Terms: The Figure of Galatea in Modern Times

Galatea was created, loved, brought to life, made a bride and a mother without so much as a peep. Her husband, Pygmalion, does the talking for her. The story of Pygmalion has become subsumed in our culture to reinforce the patriarchic principal of male dominance. Though G. B. Shaw attempted to depict a Galatea who did not need Pygmalion for the long haul in Pygmalion, popular demand changed his story to conform to the constricting romantic pattern set by the myth. However, the heroines of recent young adult literature curb this tendency – proving themselves to be capable of self-determination and possibly acting as an indicator of the improvement of gender relations.

THE MYTH

The myth of Pygmalion has no traceable history beyond Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Some historians have surmised that this story remnant may refer to an ancient ritual performed by the king of Cyprus in which he “marries” the goddess Aphrodite, but the myth may have no more mythic roots than Ovid’s own literary mind. There would be no little irony in Ovid creating a beautiful myth that would take on a life of its own. Either way, the story as we know it concentrates on three basic areas: love, creation and sincerity or piety. The story, as summarized by Geoffrey Miles, runs as follows: Pygmalion

was a sculptor of Cyprus who turned away in disgust from the local women because of their sexual immorality. Instead he fell in love with a statue of a beautiful woman that he had himself carved from ivory. He courted it as if it were a woman, dressing it in fine clothes, bringing it gifts, even placing it in his bed. Finally in despair he prayed to Venus, and Venus granted his prayer: as he embraced the statue, it softened from stone into flesh and turned into a living woman. Pygmalion married his statue-wife, and they founded a royal dynasty. (332)

The most remarkable aspect of this story is its ending. Greek stories of love did not, especially those meddled with by Venus, customarily end well for most of the parties involved. That Pygmalion got to have and keep his beautiful woman sets this story immediately apart from a long tradition of disappointment and disaster. The Beautiful Lady is the counter of that original created woman, Pandora. She is beautiful and virginal and, contrary to what Mary Lefkowitz says the Greeks found attractive in women: not obviously intelligent (136).

Pygmalion receives a perfect woman – a woman to replace the imperfect ones derived from Pandora who seem to be whoring around town – for two reasons. The first and most explicit reason is his piety. Pygmalion patiently petitions the goddess Venus for her intervention (Miles 333). Unlike a good many of the heroes in Greek myths, Pygmalion lets his life rely on the benevolence of his gods. The second reason is his artistic ability. Ovid’s description gives little space to Pygmalion’s concrete act of creation, but the lines are significant in their succinct power:

Meanwhile he carved his snow-white ivory

With marvelous triumphant artistry

And gave it perfect shape, more beautiful

Than ever woman born. His masterwork

Fired him with love. (Miles 346 of Melville translation, lines 298-302)

Pygmalion’s art moves beyond the sphere of the mortals through his control of beauty. He deserves perfection because he can create perfection in art.

It is important to remember, though, that Pygmalion can only create the form of a woman. The “divine spark” must come from the divine. The form is important, of course. That beauty, which he has created, causes him to fall in love, and through his love Pygmalion performs the second, less concrete, act of creation by praying. Though Pygmalion cannot give her the breath of life, it is his goodness and his desire that causes Venus to do so. Whatever possible bitterness toward Pygmalion by the gods on account of his seemingly god-like powers to create beauty would be erased by his humility and dependence. Miles notes that without that Divine spark, the story becomes that of Frankenstein, whose monster is the opposite of Galatea – bringer of death, ugly and male.

Pygmalion is the woman’s creator nonetheless, first creating her beautiful form and then, less directly, her humanity. As a creation, it is not surprising that the woman does not receive a chance to speak or act in Ovid’s tale beyond giving birth to children, looking and blushing – all reactionary, dependent, passive actions. As a woman, however, we must be uncomfortable with her “as entirely passive, literally constructed by the artist’s hands and gaze, and brought to life to be his submissive child-lover, without even the individuality of a name” until the eighteenth century (Miles 334). From this century, the story of Pygmalion and the woman who would be called Galatea seems the essence of male socio-sexual fantasy.

Unfortunately, the centuries between then and now did not change much in regards to who got to be creators. For many hundreds of years, this myth was referenced in Western thought only through Pygmalion – by male writers, of course. Some laughed at him, some sympathized. A few yelled at him for idolatry, but were unable to explain the happy ending if this were a moral lesson. Miles identifies three general categories of Pygmalion references: those dealing with the artist-creator, the sexual and marital interaction, and the “fable of class and education” (338). The last category is in fact not separable from the first – education acting as the act of creation with the new mind standing for the newly-fleshed Galatea.

The first interpretation of the story as one of class occurred in the fifteenth century, in relative isolation. William Caxton saw the story as a metaphor for a man who trains up a servant-girl and then marries her (Miles 334). Caxton wrote: “And when he saw her drawn to good manners, he loved her so much that it pleased him to espouse her and take her to his wife” (Miles 353). The wording sounds as though God were looking on one of his creations. Only one other recorded interpretation exists before Shaw deals with the story in terms of mentor: Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett, written in the 1750s. The story is highly satirical of societal snobbery and mirrors Shaw’s play very closely.

The main difference between Shaw’s Pygmalion and Pickle is the worth of the Galatea figure, who is a low figure in Pickle that marries Peregrine’s valet and seems quite content about it. The breech of social status becomes bigger in Shaw’s play – Eliza’s taste and her mind is allowed to alter along with her manners and appearance, making her desire to remain in the comfortable society she has been taught to mimic and made to mock. Two hundred years of societal progress gives Eliza the room to grow in more than the external ways.

THE MYTH IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Shaw’s Pygmalion uses the Pygmalion myth ironically, to expose the Pygmalion figure, Henry Higgins. Higgins attempts to keep Eliza strictly within the power framework of the original myth, but Eliza/Galatea ultimately releases herself from slavish submission because she was not created body and soul by Higgins (Wartenberg 36). The “hero,” Professor Henry Higgins, does not at any moment depart from his role of creator and dominator. As a man of science, he has developed the habit of objectifying people, displayed in his description of “her” – Eliza – as though she were an inanimate object (530). He says even at the last that “I paid [her father] five pounds for her,” keeping her in the realm of object (585). He gets to work creating this object, “inventing new Elizas” through his phonetic power, making Liza the “Eliza, Elizabeth, Betty and Beth” of the schizophrenic joke in the very beginning (565). Though he voices denial at his mother’s remark that he and Pickering are a “pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll” (564), he does not hesitate to say, “I have created this thing,” simultaneously reinstating her object-status and his perceived creator/owner-status (588). Eliza is a joke, a plaything, a vehicle for amusement to Higgins – just a block of ivory to make a trophy to himself.

Eliza puts up a great fight against being made into a passive thing in the beginning. In the first scene, she rejects his perceived attacks on who she really is by saying “He’s no right to take away my character” (523). She is described in the stage direction as “still preoccupied with her wounded feelings,” a wonderful, and unfortunately brief, moment when Eliza is focused firmly and unquestioningly on herself. She retains some of that sense of self when Higgins tries to cast her as a romantic figure in his spiel to get her to participate. She laughs at him, not wanting to be turned into an object of love and adoration. He does not understand how she could resist the urge to be adored as he simultaneously is hurt by the fact she was able to resist his best charms of elocution. Eliza, as the men say, is brilliant on her own, even a genius (565). Higgins does not, in fact, create the radiant duchess Eliza all by himself; she does a good deal of the work. In fact, the “air of divine right” that Nepommuck calls proof of her princess status – the ultimate compliment of womanhood – is an inherent quality that Higgins could not have taught (570), though it comes from the testing process he provides unwittingly. After all, Eliza may have had a good sense of self to start with, but, as Wartenberg points out, she has no momentum for improving herself for the future unless a force like Higgins pushes her.

Eliza cannot withstand the pressures to conform to her Pygmalion’s chipping and shaping. Mrs. Pearce’s cleaning of Eliza, on Higgins’s orders, parallels the first creative act in the old myth – she is made outwardly beautiful. That beauty becomes the focus of Higgins’s vision, much as Pygmalion became fascinated with Galatea’s physical nature. He dresses her to match her beauty. He tries to console her with her beauty, “You go to bed and have a good nice rest; and then get up and look at yourself in the glass; and you won’t feel so cheap,” not understanding that beauty has no ability to console wounds of the mind and heart (576).

For a moment, Eliza lets him get the better of her completely. After the ball, she falls into a despondent moment of fatalism and passivity. She moans, “What’s to become of me?” the repetition of this phrase reminding the audience of her first repeated phrase “I’m a good girl” (579). She has moved from positive statements about herself to a question encompassing her entire future and existence, which she cannot seem to answer.

But only for a scene. She then decides, albeit melodramatically, to take her fate into her own hands, and she leaves Walpole Street. The reason this Galatea can rebel against her Pygmalion is because she has more than one. When Higgins says melodramatically, “I can’t turn your soul on” (593), he is absolutely right. It is not Higgins who causes Eliza’s most important transformation. Eliza says in the final scene of the play that Colonel Pickering nurtured her self-esteem, her belief in her own humanity. Colonel Pickering brings about the second creative moment of the old myth. Pickering is not so very different from Higgins, and still a man, to be sure. When Eliza says, “the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated,” she relies still on an identity determined by outside agents instead of self-determination as she once did when just a “guttersnipe” who wanted to be a flower girl and took action to make her vision come true (589). It will be a few months before she shakes off most of her “sculpting” time with the two men and returns to her idea of a flower shop and the self-determination of education classes and a profit, but their dual contributions save her from romantic enslavement to Higgins alone. Instead she likes Pickering and hates Higgins (Shaw 609).

But she can love Freddy, free from power distortions caused be creation. She replies to Higgins’s derisive “Can [Freddy] make anything of you? That’s the point.” with “Perhaps I could make something of him. But I never thought of us making anything of one another; and you never think of anything else. I only want to be natural” (595). She instinctual seeks the most natural, the least power-driven and miraculous, pairing. She turns away from being the object or the actor of creation by man.

Fundamentally, as Miles points out, Shaw’s “determinedly anti-romantic conclusion … goes against the comic convention and the dynamics of the Ovidian story” (344). That is, there is no love in the love, creation and sincerity equation. However, what the critics fail to see is that there is also no sincerity or true creation in this Pygmalion. Like the Peregrin story, Shaw’s Pygmalion is not about Love as the original myth is, nor is it certainly about religious peity. It is about mocking society, a little bit of misogyny and playing a joke to fool all. Just as “Peregrin, now bored with the joke, is happy to marry her off to his valet” (Miles 344), Higgins marries Eliza off to Freddy. From the beginning until the end, no true equality exists between Eliza and Higgins. Since this Galatea was not wholly created by Pygmalion, with all of his thoughts and wishes programmed into her flesh, she cannot match his expectations because someone else already does.

Just as Eliza has more than one Pygmalion, Higgins has more than one Galatea, according to Shaw. The author points out in his “sequel” that Higgins adored his mother and was constantly holding all young women to her example. His imagination created this vision, and his imagination gave it life. The philosopher-poet Fulke Greville, who lived during the Renaissance, would have pointed out that Higgins also had a Galatea already in his intellectual idol of phonology (Miles 335). Indeed, Higgins’s love of the scientific makes him supremely immune to the love of a mortal woman. Eliza cannot be his adored object because he already adores others without reservation.

Another reading raises the question of whether Higgins himself was not able to love on a human level. Eliza describes him as “made of iron, that man,” invoking the image of a great iron man-statue (539). Perhaps Higgins needs his own Pygmalion to change him into a living, feeling man. Because he created that iron image to begin with, only he can breath life into himself in an ideal translation of the original story. But he never desires it, and so Henry Higgins remains a statue.

Shaw’s depiction of a problematic Pygmalion/Galatea relationship, one that accurately depicted the outcome of the story with a strong Galatea in the role, was too advanced for his time. At every turn, he found the public wanted the ending to contain a romantic reconciliation between Higgins and Eliza. The movie and the musical based on this play alter the ending to include a scene which depicts Eliza returning to Walpole Street and, the viewer must assume, fetching the professor’s slippers. She does not speak, but to repeat what she has already said before, an accented phrase from her distant past. Scholar Wartenberg remarks that, “with this upbeat ending, Pygmalion [the movie] obscures its own critical perspective” – the perspective Shaw intended (22). The public’s reasoning in unconsciously seeking this resolution is clear; they are used to happy endings, not the least because of a myth that has the adoring woman conforming precisely to the dominating man’s every wish because he loves her. However, an informed reader cannot help but look with horror at the dynamic Eliza trapped in her undeveloped past, seen and not heard, treated as a child or object instead of as a woman.

The book for the musical My Fair Lady shows that, at least initially, Lerner did not mean to thwart Shaw’s blissfully disruptive re-imagining of the Pygmalion myth. The end stage instructions read for Higgins, “If he could but let himself, his face would radiate unmistakable relief and joy. If he could but let himself, he would run to her. Instead, he leans back with a contented sigh pushing his hat forward till it almost covers his face” (186). Here, at least, Higgins has changed a little by admitting his feelings in order to match Eliza’s concessions. Unfortunately, this moment does not come across clearly in production. Furthermore, even, without the inevitable myriad of perceptions of the moment, this description of Higgins, with its “if he coulds” reinforces the idea that Higgins himself is still locked in a statue, waiting to be let out into the world of real feeling. Always conservative, the consuming public needed an uncomplicated – and happy – ending.

THE MYTH IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

For most of the twentieth century, the greatest attempt at seriously considering and ultimately rejecting the Pygmalion myth had thus been subverted into a conformist reading of female submissiveness to masculine determinism. Not until the most recent years has there been a subtle and largely subversive attempt to negate this pattern. Ironically beginning with the remarketing of Disney Animated Features like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and the release of Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, the youth of America (mostly the female portion) developed a taste for viewing themselves as princesses. The cultural connotation of this word has changed greatly in the past ten years, making room for an alternative to the docile, beautiful young woman who waited for her prince.

That alternative has been relatively slow to formulate, but the presence of a princess who does not let her power be controlled by others (particularly men) such as Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Jasmine do would make Eliza proud. More so than the Cockney girl who made good, the young women in such books as The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted have control over their own transformations into living, beautiful women, not the least because these books are being created by women. Without even looking at the stories, these books appropriate the Pygmalion story purely through authorial (creator) gender shift. Looking at the stories, we see these characters have appropriated the moments of transformation while the men in their stories now only suggest and appreciate what they have.

As a case example, Mia Thermopolis of The Princess Diaries is launched into a radically new world when her father tells her she is a princess and heir to the throne of a small country in Europe. Prior to this moment, she is most definitely a Work in Progress, and when her math teacher suggests that she would be a “good Eliza Doolittle,” Mia immediately responds that he’s “SO far off” in his casting (Cabot 27). Mia is not beautiful or graceful and her self-assertiveness is vastly lacking, but she, like Eliza, is a natural “princess” in character and ability. By the end of the first book, Mia is able to manage her own beliefs by rebelling against her grandmother’s strict rules of propriety in order to do what is personally sensible, just as Eliza finally puts her foot down with Higgins and marries Freddy.

Mia makes the transformation by controlling her own moments of “creation.” These moments are still driven by males and popular conceptions of Beauty and Love, but Mia decides how those moments become part of her as an individual, asserting herself as independent in both cases. The moment of beauty comes when her grandmother tricks her into going to a stylist, Paolo. Mia is outraged at being judged unworthy physically and forced to change: “There isn’t a single inch of me that hasn’t been pinched, cut, filed, painted, sloughed, blown dry, or moisturized … But I am not happy” (115). She struggles momentarily between remaining true to her own image instead of letting others form it:

it is sort of hard when all these beautiful, fashionable people are telling you how good you’d look in this and how much that would bring out your cheekbones, to remember you’re a feminist and an environmentalist, and don’t believe in using makeup or chemicals that might be harmful to the earth. (114)

Ultimately, however, she realizes that “she’s turning me into someone else” and, despite great quantities of coaxing from her father, manages to develop naturally as a princess, on her own terms – by emphasizing the internal instead of the easily controlled external (115, 119).

Mia’s second moment of “creation,” when she becomes “alive” – or, in this case, makes a leap toward womanhood – occurs as she arrives at her high school’s Cultural Diversity dance. Previous to this moment, Mia has let herself be duped by the school hunk, Josh. She has just spent a miserable time with him and his friends at dinner because of their rude behavior. Though she is “in love” with Josh, Mia does not let her feelings cloud her self-respect. Like Eliza with Higgins, when Josh doesn’t respect Mia’s feelings or her “rights,” she leaves him behind (220).

This action is only possible, as Mia admits, because of her path. As Galatea needed the creation of Pygmalion to even exist, as Eliza needed her learning experience with Higgins in order to stand up for herself, so Mia needs her sudden, father and duty-induced catapult into princesshood in order to establish self-respect: “If it hadn’t turned out that I’m a princess, maybe I might still be all that stuff. You know, unassertive, fearful of confrontation, an internalizer. I probably wouldn’t have done what I did next” (225). She confronts Josh and finishes with, “Well, thank you, Josh, but I can get my own publicity. I don’t need you” in an echo of Eliza’s departing speech (227). This Galatea escaped the age-old problem of letting others form her into the idol of their hopes by appropriating the traditionally male role of creator while still keeping hold of the feminine inner and outer Beauty that allows her to form a relationship with a boy who likes her for her personality and has no plans to change her – much like Freddy.

THE MYTH AT THE MOVIES: THE FUTURE OF GALATEA

With such young adult literature disseminated among the youth, we might suspect that the future for Galatea will soon be comfortably independent of complete domination and owndership. We may not be wrong, but it will take quite some time. Like the popular versions of Shaw’s Pygmalion, the movie versions of The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted among others undo some of what the books accomplish. Wartenberg notes that “commercial pressures push these mass entertainments toward a kind of narrative and emotional closure that is in tension with the social critical potential” (22). The movies must make a profit, so they must be palatable to the greatest number of people. Inevitably, this means that the storylines, no matter how inherently liberating and pleasing, must conform to standard expectations.

For the movie version of Diaries, called by the same name, this means that the two pivotal creation moments are recast so that Mia appears less independent, and the ending, much like the Pygmalion movie, is made romantic. In the beauty scene, Mia (played by the beautiful Anne Hathaway) is pleased by her makeover. She, unlike the book Mia, is unequivocally beautiful now. In the self-esteem scene, Mia does not stand up to Josh, but runs away, only to be further humiliated by a trio of other girls. Mia never does seem to become confident in herself in the movie. In a completely new ending, Mia announces that she will be the heir of the throne of Genovia, only to then dance with the boy who truly likes her for who she is. The book leaves Mia without press conference and bashful first love’s kiss – quite rightly. Of course, this is the same movie that changed the location from New York to California, aged Mia by three years, and has Julie Andrews for a grandmother instead of the chain-smoking, dour old puss from the book.

Lefkowitz, in her book Women in Greek Myth remarks,

What the myths themselves seem not to describe, at any time or places, is the possibility of true independence for women, apart from their families or society as a whole. There are in myth no successful communities of women apart from men, or conditions in which women continuously dominated over the other members of society. (133)

Galatea is the product of general beliefs about womanhood, and those beliefs did not leave room for her to independently form a place for herself and those like her. She was determined by an outside mind from the very beginning. Are we still searching for a place in which women can dominate? Are we still being determined before we are even allowed to spring to life? Recent Young Adult Literature – especially those aimed at females – suggest that the ideal community might be found in the developing mind of adolescents. What will come when these adolescents come into their own chances to create and be created? What will Galatea do then? Will she ever be able to choose a life apart?

Works Consulted

Asquith, Anthony, dir. Pygmalion. MGM, 1938. 96 mins.

Cabot, Meg. The Princess Diaries. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.

Cukor, George, dir. My Fair Lady. Warner Brothers, 1964. 170 mins.

Lefkowitz, Mary R. Women in Greek Myth. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1968.

Lerner, Alan Jay. My Fair Lady. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1956.

Levine, Gail Carson. Ella Enchanted. New York: Harper Trophy, 1997.

Marshall, Gary, dir. The Princess Diaries. Walt Disney Pictures, 2001. 114 mins.

Miles, Geoffrey, ed. Classical Mythology in English Literature. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Sabin, Frances E. Classical Myths That Live Today. New York: Silver, Burdett & Company,

1927.

Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. In Bernard Shaw: Selected Plays. New York: Dodd, Mead

& Company, 1981.

Wartenberg, Thomas E. Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism. Boulder,

Colorado: Westview Press, 1999.