Galatea: A Short Story

by Madeline Miller

“I’m always this color,” I said. “Because I used to be made of stone.”

“Lie down this instant,” he said. Then, when I obeyed, he took my wrist and held it. “Your pulse is slow,” he said. Of course my pulse is slow, because I used to be made of stone, but I didn’t say that.

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.

A few times in the past, I had let out a little snore at that moment, just for verisimilitude. But he did not like that at all.

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.

I had expected him to say “young.” When I had once asked him how old he meant for me to be, he had said, “A virgin.”

Why are men?

“It is, I know, I know it is. I’m so sorry, darling. I was such a fool, I don’t even know what I was doing.” “A fool,” he said. He was looking at my breasts again.

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.

And he 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.”

Next came the rose oil that my husband pays extra for, which she put on as though she was making bread, slapping my skin with both hands. She meant it to hurt, but I sort of liked the vigor of it, the sound and the way my skin went pink.

“No,” I said. “I am very well.” He was about to say, “Then why are you lying down?” but that would have meant admitting that I was not sick to begin with. Ha, I thought.

And anyway, he did not know what women looked like. To him, if there was anything, it was strange.

The ocean floor was sandy and soft as pillows. I settled into it and slept.

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.

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 to be a compliant object of desire and nothing more.

Although the two women are different in many ways, their stories both center around transformation, on finding freedom for yourse...

As for Pygmalion, I accepted him exactly as Ovid made him. The term “incel” wasn’t in wide circulation when I wrote this, but Pygmalion is certainly a prototype.

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.

But that is the mark of a good source myth; it is water so wide it can reach across centuries. I hope you enjoyed the swim.