MADELINE MILLER Galatea: A short story. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Madeline Miller reimagines Ovid’s story of Pygmalion and Galatea, the work of art brought to life.

… he sculpted white ivory happily

 with wondrous art and wondrous skill and gave it form with which

 no mortal woman is born, and he fell in love with his own work.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10:247-9

This, then, is the ivory statue carved by Pygmalion of Anathus, which is brought to life by Venus in answer to his prayers. This is Galatea, although in his version, Ovid does not name her.

Ovid describes how Pygmalion, an ardent devotee of Venus-Aphrodite, was so offended by the shameless sexual vices of the women of Anathus (who had been cursed by Venus for denying she was a goddess) that he shunned the society of women and became celibate. His love for the beautiful, inanimate statue he has created is, however, all-consuming and physical, even in its inanimate state:

He gives it kisses and he thinks kisses are returned. He speaks
and he holds the work and thinks his fingers are sinking into the
limbs and is afraid lest a bruise arise on the touched limbs
And now he offers flatteries and brings
that girl dear gifts.

Metamorphoses, 10:256-260

No sooner is Galatea brought to life than she is married to him and begets a child, Paphos. What happens after that, Ovid does not recount, but Madeline Miller does.

Miller brings Galatea to life again and now she has a voice. And, like any living woman, she has a mind and a will of her own:

After I was born,– and maybe that’s not the right word, but if not, then I don’t know what is. Woke? Hatched? No, I am not an egg.

 I will say born. After I was born he tried to keep me inside as much as he could.

Of course that did not work for long. ‘I don’t think he expected me to speak,’ says Galatea, and now, ten years later, she and her daughter are being punished by an increasingly tyrannical Pygmalion for trying to run away. They have been separated from each other, and Galatea is confined to bed in a bare room attended only by nurses and a doctor, and told that she is sick. To avoid being made to drink a special tea that stupefies her, Galatea pretends to be comfortable and compliant, and to be waiting only for Pygmalion’s visits.

She has become expert at dissembling and faking her responses to others, especially to Pygmalion, who requires her to re-enact the moment she came to life before having sex with her. ‘My job,’ she tells us, ‘was to lie on the couch without moving so that he might murmur “Ah, my beauty is asleep”.’ Once or twice she had ‘let out a little snore, just for verisimilitude’, but Pygmalion didn’t like that.

Galatea describes his increasing jealousy when he sees the tutor hired for Paphos looking at her. She no longer blushes, as she did when newly awakened, so he suspects she has become ‘shameless’ like other women. He sacks the tutor and keeps Galatea and Paphos inside; and he is annoyed by Paphos’s youthful impertinence and independence: ‘She wasn’t quite what her father wished to brood,’ says Galatea. He is also distressed by the stretch marks pregnancy has left on Galatea’s stomach – she is no longer perfect. ‘If you were stone I would chisel them off,’ he says crossly.

So, Galatea plots and carries out her revenge.

Madeline Miller’s Galatea is, as she says in her Afterword, ‘a small morsel’: a short story that her heroine, it seems, dictated to her. Galatea ‘broke through’ whilst Miller was working on her bestselling novel Circe and ‘demanded her own words’. Miller duly fell in love with ‘her startling matter-of-factness, her cleverness and her courage, her complexity, her ability to keep her sanity and still offer love to her daughter’. All of this is true of the Galatea in Miller’s small gem of a book – as it was not in Ovid’s version. So, like Pygmalion, Miller fell in love with her creation, and, through her, Venus, goddess of love, has once again brought Galatea to life.

Madeline Miller Galatea: A Short Story Bloomsbury 2022 HB 64pp $9.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Galatea, Madeline | Miller, Metamophoses, mythology, Ovid, Pygmalion