Review: Galatea by Madeline Miller
Galatea: A Short Story by Madeline Miller Originally published July 2013 This edition published March 2022 ☙ ☙ ☙ First, click here for a quick primer on the Pygmalion & Galatea myth. Pygmalion was a sculptor. He created in statue form the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen and fell in love with her. Then Aphrodite brought her to life. It is a tale that has been told and retold over the centuries by artists such as Ovid, Rodin, George Bernard Shaw, and many others. If you've seen My Fair Lady, you've seen an interpretation of it. Here, Miller's Galatea , as she states in the afterword, is a response to Ovid's version in his Metamorphosis, which has rather misogynist undertones. In Miller's version, we discover that Galatea (living in a slightly more modern, if unspecified, time period) has spent the last year hospitalized, being told to rest, continuously gaslighted and tranquilized by medical staff. Her husband (Pygmalion) comes to visit but isn't ...