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“I’m always this color,” I said. “Because I used to be made of stone.”
But I say this so that you understand what I was up against: that I was worth more to her sick than I was well.
I would not escape but die.
“I used to be stone,” I said. “I can’t hurt myself from just a walk.”
And that’s when I’m supposed to open my eyes like a dewy fawn, and see him poised over me like the sun, and make a little gasping noise of wonder and gratitude, and then he fucks me.
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.
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.
sent me to bed, and after, in the torchlight, he wondered at the marks on me, the red around my neck, and the purple on my arms and chest where he had gripped me. He rubbed at them, as though they were stains, not bruises. “The color is perfect,” he said, “Look.” And he held up the mirror so I could see. “You make the rarest canvas, love.”
You will be all right, she said. I have done it, and look, I live.
But the baby doesn’t live, I said. No, she said.
If only I could go outside, I said. I want to give the baby to the goddess.
Still others (myself included) have been disturbed by the deeply misogynist implications of the story. Pygmalion’s happy ending is only happy if you accept a number of repulsive ideas: that the only good woman is one who has no self beyond pleasing a man, the fetishization of female sexual purity, the connection of the “snowy” ivory with perfection, the elevation of male fantasy over female reality. Galatea does not speak at all in Ovid’s version. Even more tellingly, she is not given a name—that was one of the few details I took from other sources. She is only called the woman. She is meant
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Galatea broke through when I was working on Circe. Although the two women are different in many ways, their stories both center around transformation, on finding freedom for yourself in a world that denies it to you.
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.
