Galatea

by Madeline Miller

The room smelled sweet and sour at once, as though a thousand suffering people had lain sweating in it, which, I suppose, they had, and then ground roses into the floor with dirty feet.

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

‘Fine,’ he said. Just that ugly, nothing word.

‘My love, it is the sign of our child. Where the belly stretched.’ He stared. ‘How long have they been there?’ ‘Since she was born.’ Ten years ago, now. ‘They are ugly,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry, my love. It is the same for all women.’ ‘If you were stone, I would chisel them off,’ he said.

The thing is, I don’t think my husband expected me to be able to talk. I don’t blame him for this exactly, since he had known me only as a statue, pure and beautiful and yielding to his art. Naturally, when he wished me to live, that’s what he wanted still, only warm so that he might fuck me.

Everyone looked at me, because I was the most beautiful woman in the town. I don’t say this to boast, because there is nothing in it to boast of. It was nothing I did myself.

For millennia there have been men who react with horror and disgust to women’s independence, men who desire women yet hate them, and who take refuge in fantasies of purity and control. What would it be like to live with such a man as your husband? There are too many today who could answer that. But that is the mark of a good source myth; it is water so wide it can reach across centuries.

Madeline Miller’s thoughts in the afterword of this book.