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.
Galatea broke through when I was working on Circe. Although the two women are different in many ways, their stories both centre on transformation, on finding freedom for yourself in a world that denies it to you. Galatea’s voice came to me late one night in a lightning bolt. I had been trying to fall asleep when the character and the first sentences of her story popped whole into my mind:
It was almost sweet the way they worried about me.
“You’re so pale,” the nurse said. “You must keep quiet until your colour returns.”
“I’m always this colour,” I said. “Because I used to be made of stone.”
I sat up and started typing.
From the beginning, I knew that Galatea was not in the same strictly mythological world as Circe and The Song of Achilles. She demanded her own world, and in creating it I drew inspiration from many works of feminist literature, as well as Ovid’s own love of boundary-crossing and genre-mixing. From there the character continued to grow – I loved her startling matter-of-factness, her cleverness and her courage, her complexity, her ability to keep her sanity and still offer love to her daughter.
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. 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, 2022. From Galatea, published by Bloomsbury at £6.99 on 3 March
