Ovid's Pygmalion: a summary 

 

Pygmalion, according to Ovid, 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; their grandson was Cinyras, the unfortunate father I
grandfather of Adonis. In passing it should be noted that in Ovid the statue is
nameless; her now-traditional name 'Galatea' is an eighteenth-century invention.

Ovid is the inevitable starting-point for any discussion of Pygmalion. ...For Pygmalion, Ovid's is the oldest version we have, the only substantial ancient version, and the source of all subsequent versions. Indeed, the story as we have it may be essentially his invention - a literary creation rather than a genuine myth. 

Ovid's Pygmalion, a story with an happy ending

Ovid frames the story as one of the songs of the bereaved Orpheus. He omits
all mention of Pygmalion's kingship; instead, by making the hero himself a sculptor,
he focuses the story on the power of art. Pygmalion's 'marvellous triumphant
artistry' counterfeits reality so well that it could be mistaken for it ('Such art his
art concealed'), and in the end is transformed into reality; more successful than
Orpheus, he is able to bring his love to life. At the same time, while dropping the
idea of the sacred marriage, Ovid leaves Pygmalion's relationship with the gods
as central. In Orpheus's sequence of songs of tragic and forbidden love, this one
stands out as having a happy ending, and the suggestion is that this is because of
the hero's piety: unlike other characters, including Orpheus himself, who came to
grief through disobedience or ingratitude to the gods, Pygmalion humbly places
his fate in Venus's hands, and she rewards his faith. This moral is emphasised
by contrast with the immediately preceding stories, of Venus's punishment of
the murderous Cerastae and of the Propoetides, the first prostitutes, who 'dared
deny Venus' divinity', and whose transformation into stone mirrors the statue's
transformation from stone to flesh.

Other interpretations of Pygmalion 


 

Of course (as female readers may be about to protest) the story can, if viewed
from a slightly different angle, become an unsettling or distasteful one. The two
main areas of unease are Pygmalion's role as the artist-creator, and the sexual
politics of the story. It is perhaps not too fanciful to focus these issues by looking
at the slightly different objections of Clement and Arnobius to the story. 

Clement of Alexandra

 

Clement is conducting an argument against idolatry: the worship of a statue, a
thing made by human art out of wood or stone, as if it were divine. He frames his
argument in terms of a distinction between art and nature: art is deceptive, an
illusion pretending to be truth, and those who are deceived by it may be
'beguile[d] ... to the pit of destruction'. Clement's argument leads directly to
Renaissance condemnations of Pygmalion's sin of idolatry. Less directly, it
suggests problems with the figure of Pygmalion as the artist who desires to create
life, transcending the limitations of human ability and perhaps transgressing on
the prerogatives of God the creator. The Romantic period, which took most
seriously the idea of Pygmalion as godlike artist-creator, also gave rise to the figure
of Frankenstein; and these two mythic figures, suggesting respectively the benign
and the horrific possibilities of creating life out of inanimate matter, have
remal.ned closely associated ever since. 



 

Arnobius of Sicca 

 

Arnobius (a much less sophisticated thinker than Clement) is also arguing
against idolatry, but he focuses in a rather tabloid-newspaper manner on the
sexual perversity of Pygmalion's relations with the statue. It is true that, treated
without Ovid's tact and humour, the story could appear nastily perverse. For a
twentieth-century reader the story is more likely to seem objectionable in its
portrayal of a woman 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. This male-fantasy aspect of the story has been cheerfully
exploited by some writers; others have questioned it, raising realistic doubts about
the success of the marriage of Pygmalion and Galatea, or giving Galatea a voice
to answer back or the power to walk out on, betray, or even (like Frankenstein's
monster) kill her creator. 

 

William Caxton 

 

William Caxton, in a brief comment in his prose summary of the Metamorphoses, has a less obvious allegory: the story symbolically relates how a rich lord took a beautiful but ignorant servant-girl and educated her to become a suitable wife for himself.  This interpretation of the story as an allegory of class and education can be seen as the seed of Shaw's Pygmalion.