Galatea

“Galatea” is, at its heart, a counternarrative: It undermines, contradicts, and builds upon its source material, the story of Pygmalion from Metamorphoses (8 CE), a Latin poem by Roman poet Ovid. The most fundamental transformation is the shift in perspective, with the central figure no longer being Pygmalion but Galatea (who is nameless in the original story). While Miller retains the essential narrative details from Ovid’s tale, she also updates the story, setting it in a modern (albeit ambiguous) time period, with characters who possess noticeably modern patterns of speech and behavior. While the original dynamic between Pygmalion and Galatea still serves as a framework and reference point for the text, the sexual politics with which the story is concerned are now infused with a liberatory strain of 21st-century feminism. Ultimately, the story’s structure, tone, and style work together to demonstrate how myth is not a stable form of expression but can be actively transformed into a subversion of its own traditions and of readerly expectations about what a myth should look like.

The majority of the narrative takes place in the hospital, which is one of the story’s most significant modern updates. It not only reflects the kinds of medical amenities available today but places “Galatea” in a literary tradition stretching back to the 19th century in which female characters are hospitalized or confined by male characters who believe they are mentally unstable. One well-known example of this is Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), in which a man locks his allegedly mentally unwell wife in the attic for over a decade. Another is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), in which a husband locks his wife in a room as an alleged cure for her postpartum depression; the woman eventually experiences a mental break and believes she sees another woman, who symbolizes her own entrapment, trapped underneath the wallpaper.

This literary trend reflects, among other historical phenomena, the anxieties and frustrations many men felt about the increased presence of women in public life. Galatea’s husband confines her to the hospital because, when attempting to escape him, she was asserting her right to exist in the public as well as domestic sphere. He abuses her in a way that mirrors male characters’ behavior in similar texts, telling the doctor and nurse that her claims to have been made of stone are fanciful and encouraging them to ignore her. His forcible interference in what is supposed to be his wife’s medical care represents one of the story’s transformations of ancient myth into modern feminist narrative.

The story also transforms mythic tradition through Galatea’s successful effort to stop the continuation of her husband’s work, and thus halt his personal narrative about himself, his desires, and his abilities. Many scholars have noted that the myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses describe or engage in unstoppable forward movement: As a cohesive text, the tales are all connected, with one leading directly to the next (even if those connections do not necessarily make logical sense). Many of them, even the ones that contain acts of violence and cruelty, are focused on creation, production, and generative powers, similar to those that Pygmalion the sculptor displays in his studio.

However, when Galatea arrives at their shared home toward the end of the story, time seems to grind to a halt, and even symbolically reverse itself. When she sees her husband’s new statue, she sees herself before the goddess gave her life and before she accumulated any human flaws: “She was perfection […] she had no scabs, and no sand beneath her fingernails. She did not chase the goats, and she did not disobey” (45). In killing her husband, Galatea not only terminates his story but prevents his new statue from being given life, and thus stops the mythic cycle from starting over again.

Finally, Miller makes Paphos a fully developed character, acknowledging that she is mentioned only briefly in the original version of the myth. Today, Paphos is a major city on the island of Cyprus; its founding myth is associated with Aphrodite, the goddess who brought Galatea to life. However, Paphos is virtually absent from classical mythology outside of this brief line of poetry. In Miller’s story, Galatea visits her daughter one final time at the end of the story but chooses not to wake her; rather, she writes “Paphos” with sand on the floor of her daughter’s bedroom: “Paphos, I spelled. I would have said more, but that was most of what I knew” (43). On one level, this suggests that the only word Galatea can write is her daughter’s name; however, it also gestures toward the lack of knowledge anyone has about Paphos’s fate. Most of what we know comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and that provides very little. By transforming Paphos into a smart, spirited, loving, realistic character, Miller’s story provides another example of mythic updating and the power of the counternarrative.