Pygmalion’s Chisel
Pygmalion’s Chisel:
For Women Who Are “Never Good Enough”
By
Tracy M. Hallstead
Pygmalion’s Chisel: For Women Who Are “Never Good Enough”
by Tracy M. Hallstead
This book first published 2013
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2013 by Tracy M. Hallstead
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-4611-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4611-0
For Elise and Eva
No written law has been more binding than unwritten
custom supported by popular opinion.
—Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947)
CONTENTS
Foreword .................................................................................................... ix
Joan D. Hedrick
Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... xi
Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii
Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1
Who Are Pygmalion and Galatea to Us?
Pygmalion and Galatea Retold
Background
Pygmalion at Home
My Pygmalion and Galatea Story
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 15
The Reality of Patriarchy
Pygmalion Within: Psychological Patriarchy and Contempt for Women
Patriarchy and Abuse
It’s Not About Women After All
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 27
Galatea’s Silence
Pygmalion Without, Then and Now
It’s Not What You Say but What You Are: Having No Right to Speak
Galatea Wreaks Havoc in the Public Square: Fearless Maria Stewart
Continued Havoc : The Grimké Sisters
Confronting Shame: Our Grandmothers’ Lessons for Modern-Day
Galateas
Be a Man and Be in Control
Pygmalion Now: A Silencing Force on the Internet
viii
Contents
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 47
Galatea’s Immobility in Woman’s Role and Woman’s Work
Pygmalion’s Female Mouthpieces
“Dirty Jokes”
Women Need Not Apply
The Pink-Collar Dilemma
Summers, Pinker, and the Feminine Brain
Devalued Work and the Devalued Self
Galatea’s Guilt
“Women Nag”
Questioning the System: Harriet Martineau
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 81
Pygmalion’s Chisel on Our Bodies
The Debate is Over: Eating Disorders Are Culturally Driven
Eating: A Morally Charged Act for Women
A Diet Industry that Primes Us for Failure
Misogyny: A Coiled Spring of Emotion That Ads Release
Patriarchal Backlashes
Why Misogyny?
The Dynamics of Pornography and Its Pull on Our Consciousness
The Resistance of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Advancing a Responsive Feminism
Appendix ................................................................................................. 115
Notes........................................................................................................ 117
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 121
Index ........................................................................................................ 133
FOREWORD
JOAN D. HEDRICK
In the best style of second-wave feminism, Tracy Hallstead once again
demonstrates that “the personal is political.” Written with passion and
conviction, Pygmalion’s Chisel: For Women Who Are “Never Good
Enough” has the current generation of young women in mind as they
struggle with defining themselves and expressing their own voices. As the
author notes, the “waves” of feminist thought and agitation in the United
States have been followed by resistance and backlash in which patriarchal
ways of thinking and acting are reinstated as normal and unquestioned. In
this process, feminist voices of the past are denigrated, muted and lost.
Thus each generation (alas) needs a retelling of stories and a rekindling of
consciousness in order for women to see their personal problems as part of
a larger pattern. Pygmalion’s Chisel supplies this need for today.
In Greek myth, Galatea was the woman whom Pygmalion attempted to
chisel down to size and immobilize in a statue. Using this myth and her
own experience in a partnership in which she was made to feel “never
good enough,” Hallstead analyzes the underlying misogyny that posits
women as essentially flawed. In the process she concisely synthesizes a
wide range of feminist thought. She revisits first-wave feminism to
recover voices from the past who resisted the silencing and diminishment
of women. From the second wave she takes not only her method, but
classic insights, such as Beauvoir’s concept of woman as Other. And in
good third-wave fashion, she quotes Vogue and Rolling Stone as well as
Naomi Wolf, demonstrating how the battle has recently been fought. The
rawness and specificity of her contemporary examples—such as Internet
bashing and the pejorative media portrayals of powerful women—pack a
punch. Hallstead understands how the daily warfare against the psyches of
women in contemporary American culture, from the home to the
workplace to popular media, makes it tempting to internalize these
misogynist messages, especially when psychological binds are reinforced
by economic and social realities.
What I like best about this book is its balance between clear-eyed
understanding of the backlash against the gains of women and a realistic
x
Foreword
awareness of the possibilities of resistance. Calling for a “responsive
feminism” that finds “pockets of instability” within the system to push for
transformation, Hallstead weaves practical suggestions into her analysis
and provides institutional resources for change. Beautifully organized and
accessibly written in a first-person voice, this book is bound to change the
consciousness of readers.
(Middletown, Connecticut 1/20/2013)
Joan D. Hedrick is Charles A. Dana Professor of History, Trinity College,
Hartford, Connecticut. Her biography, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
(Oxford, 1994), won a Pulitzer Prize.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Milla Riggio, whose rigor and warmth inspired me to
aim for demanding research that nonetheless connected to readers. I am
likewise indebted to Beverly Wall for her substantial understanding of the
potency of rhetoric. And I thank David Rosen, whose keen insights into
George Orwell cultivated my fascination with how a power over others
model works.
In addition, Allan G. Johnson, author of The Gender Knot: Unraveling
Our Patriarchal Legacy, deserves considerable acknowledgment for his
bold naming of patriarchy’s damages. He has done much to discredit the
ubiquitous “Oh, this again!” response to feminism that keeps women
apologizing for renewing the conversation.
I also recognize Adam Katz for his theoretical sophistication, which
helped a hopeful tone emerge in the final draft. Additionally, Paul
Pasquaretta and the Quinnipiac University Writing Across the Curriculum
program deserve acknowledgment for establishing peer review opportunities
and quiet venues for drafting and revision.
I am profoundly grateful to Irene Papoulis. Mindful of my shyness yet
believing in the importance of this work for others, she sensed vital ideas
in the air and coaxed them back to the page where they belonged.
Heather Grace Shubert deserves thanks for her compelling poem, “She
is the Soft Whisper,” which gives voice to the woman who feels she is
never good enough. And I am deeply indebted to Joan Hedrick not only
for wise words, but for healing love. I also thank the many women, past
and present, who fill these pages with stories and fighting words that have
challenged Pygmalion in their lives. I respect them for their continued
struggle, especially against misogyny turned inward.
To my husband, Christopher, and my daughters, Elise and Eva, thank
you for bearing with me as I cursed my rebellious computer or left the
house for yet one more trip to the library. And many, many thanks for
doing your part with the household work that—as I’ve noted in this
book—keeps us alive. It is the hope for a better world for you, Elise and
Eva, which drives me to write.
xii
Acknowledgments
Please Note: In order to protect the anonymity of those who appear in the
personal stories, names and settings have been changed. Several of the
conversations represent composite encounters with the same individual.
INTRODUCTION
In the relatively new millennium, we may be lulled into thinking that
we live in a post-feminist era. Because first-wave feminists from the midnineteenth century to the early twentieth century pioneered voting rights
for women and because second-wave feminists in the 1970s built
successfully on their legacy, we may believe that the old wounds of gender
discrimination have surely healed. Today, we often hear an “Oh, this
again!” response to feminism, as if the whole distasteful subject of
women’s inequality, along with racism and homophobia, has been
resolved. Worse, we hear young women assert that they are not feminists,
as if feminism connotes personal ugliness and male disapproval, while the
right to vote, own property, feel safe in one’s home, and work alongside
men—the premiums for which feminists sacrificed lives and reputations—
are taken for granted.
I wrote this book because I have sensed an enduring critical presence
in the culture that scrutinizes, critiques, and sizes women down in their
daily lives, despite rights gained through the centuries. I named that
presence “Pygmalion,” after the ancient mythical sculptor who believed all
women were essentially flawed and who therefore endeavored to chisel a
statue of a woman he called “Galatea” to perfection. My research confirms
that our popular culture, a Pygmalion in its own right, chisels women
down to this day. Our culture also tells men that they should improve, but
not in a way that diminishes them or reduces their power, as in weight loss
campaigns disproportionately aimed at women or a cultural double
standard that punishes women for the aggrandizing qualities it rewards in
men, such as assertiveness or outspokenness.
My book consists of five chapters and an appendix. The first chapter
provides background on the Pygmalion and Galatea myth—including my
own personal Pygmalion and Galatea story—and explains how the myth
reflects the story of modern women’s lives. Chapter Two argues for the
existence of a patriarchy that still surrounds us and lives within us, making
its onerous demands of women in the new millennium.
In the remaining chapters, I explore three key ways in which modern
woman experiences patriarchy’s “chisel” carving her life down into
something much smaller than it should be. First, as in Pygmalion’s
Galatea, patriarchy still requires modern woman to be silent relative to
xiv
Introduction
men and to keep her opinions to herself, a theme I cover in Chapter Three.
Next, patriarchy mandates that women remain relatively immobile
economically, and so I explore women’s stunted economic status and the
devaluation of women’s work both in public and in the home in Chapter
Four. Finally, patriarchy requires that women be physically small, and so I
examine the means by which Pygmalion’s chisel—our patriarchal
culture—carves down our bodies in Chapter Five. My appendix offers a
concise summary of resources for women seeking further aid in resisting
Pygmalion’s chisel.
I also thread an examination of rhetoric throughout this book. Rhetoric
is much more than the empty or inflated language with which it is
associated. In fact, Aristotle defined rhetoric as “discovering the best
available means of persuasion.” Our culture effectively persuades women
of what they should and should not be through images (as in advertising
photos, Internet offerings, film, and video), books, magazines, and speech,
among other “best available means.” All of these rhetorical “texts,” if you
will, are part of a conversation about women in modern Western culture.
Examined together, they confirm that something is very wrong in that
conversation: Pygmalion has eroded the ways women define and talk
about themselves.
Throughout this book, I often refer to the Victorian era’s treacherous
rhetoric that mired women’s lives in a sort of ideological quicklime. I do
this because the woman-hating of the nineteenth century is reflected in
patterns of woman-hating in the relatively new millennium. Though
misogyny dates back to the earliest civilizations, Victorian misogyny is
similar to the misogyny of our day because both use women’s literacy
against them. The rhetoric in both a nineteenth-century lady’s gift book
and a twenty-first-century fashion magazine can effectively keep a woman
in her place by promoting disempowering behaviors, such as silence
before one’s husband or excessive weight loss, respectively.
This parallel between then and now does not mean that women have
made no social progress since the nineteenth century. Rather, our path has
moved forward through enlightening periods, as in the second-wave
feminism of the 1970s, with loop-de-loops that spin us painfully backward
from time to time, as we have experienced in the early decades of the
2000s. Patriarchy has never really left us since the Victorian age; it merely
sleeps during our progressive times till we spiral backward on a retrograde
loop again. And interestingly, the arguments against women’s empowerment
in the 2000s echo the old Victorian cadences about woman’s essentially
flawed nature. For this reason, my discussion flows back and forth
Pygmalion's Chisel: For Women Who Are Never “Good Enough”
xv
between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, as I explore parallel
themes in both.
In providing for women a way out of the Galatea predicament that has
fettered us for centuries, I analyze the arguments of nineteenth-century
women who, in their speeches and writings concerning slavery and
women’s rights, faced down the patriarchal lie that the female of the
species is inherently flawed.
Though it may seem odd to juxtapose Victorian women’s lives with
our own, nineteenth-century female speechmakers and writers—such as
Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Maria Stewart, Harriet Martineau, and
Charlotte Perkins Gilman—offer enlightening lessons that women believe
we have learned or resolved, but in reality have not. Virginia Woolf’s
obedient specter, the Angel in the House, still demands perfection and
self-sacrifice of women, who, for the most part, feel overwhelmed in their
daily lives and work, especially if they have children. The historical
thinking women are strangely forgotten by most modern women, yet their
voices beckon us to follow them on a clear path outside Pygmalion’s
chamber door.
I also weave in several private experiences of women in patriarchy
along with my own, in order to illustrate Pygmalion’s potent grip on the
female psyche. A man who seemed to draw ready-made arguments about
“female flaw” from the air nearly broke my spirit. The memory of that
destructive relationship inspired me to question the Pygmalion and Galatea
myth that haunted me. I hope that my recollections of living the myth form
a compelling backdrop for its exploration.
As powerful as Pygmalion’s voice is, however, women can choose not
to believe him. The dynamic can change as we adopt new consciousness
of how our culture carves us down. We can then insist on alternative
messages by training ourselves to no longer “buy in to” the unhealthy
ones. There are pitfalls within a purely “victimary” point of view, in which
the victimizer/victim mentality is impossible to escape. According to
anthropologist Eric Gans (1997), the oppressor/oppressed binary that has
marked academic writing in recent decades leaves no room for other types
of interaction; for instance, role reversals in which the oppressed may,
temporarily or not, wield more power. The result is a sort of “rhetoric of
resentment” that detects oppression everywhere—even behind neutral
ideas—but does not seek to change it:
The imposition of this radically dichotomous model obliterates the
historical nuances of social differentiation and interaction, reducing all
social roles to those of persecutor and victim. It sacrifices to the power of
xvi
Introduction
its resentful rhetoric the means to understand the very movement toward
social equality that it is promoting (165).
Oddly, a “rhetoric of resentment” needs the oppression to continue in
order for the theory to resonate, and so such theories can potentially
exploit marginalized people, when they should instead uncover chinks in
oppressive systems so that we can destabilize them.
There is little hope for women’s lives if we see patriarchy as an
inevitable state from which there is no escape. I see patriarchy, rather, as a
byproduct of entrenched behaviors that can nevertheless change through
an informal education that uncovers where women have agency. The
patriarchal atmosphere may be oppressive, but it is no Holocaust.
Consistent with Gans’s view, there are “nuances of social differentiation”
in which Western women do wield more power than men; for instance,
women hold more buying power in certain consumer markets. And
thankfully, many of our laws have tackled gender discrimination,
affording women more opportunities for education and thus economic
power. Yet our popular culture, for the most part, has lagged behind the
progression and still disempowers women. Our problem is that men and
women alike have allowed Pygmalion to speak unchallenged in popular
culture for too long.
Above all, therefore, this discussion invites women to empower
themselves by seeing patriarchy for what it is—a system we don’t
necessarily have to buy in to—and to dismantle its powerful lies about
what women should be. I believe many women are hurting simply
because they locate fault in themselves when they are actually dealing
with the enormous burden of what their patriarchal culture requires of
them: to be the silent, immobilized, chiseled-down Galatea, who is
patriarchy’s perfect woman. We forget that she, devoid of life and a
purpose of her own, was created from a wellspring of contempt. We can
choose whether to follow our culture’s cues and become Galatea, but the
stakes are high. Becoming her could destroy us.
CHAPTER ONE
WHO ARE PYGMALION AND GALATEA TO US?
Pygmalion and Galatea Retold
I see Galatea, recumbent, exquisitely silent, impeccably still. Pygmalion
has rewarded his perfect beauty with a soft couch and with gem bracelets,
pearl strands, and a laurel crown. What more could she want? She has
his attention, too—the chisel she greets daily. Pygmalion finds live women
contemptible—loudmouthed, blind to their own flaws and stupidly
resistant to the perfecting touch. But Galatea is hollowed where hollowing
is needed, rounded where rounding is needed, glassened by the sculptor’s
loving rasp. What could be more generous? These improvements are his
daily graces freely bestowed upon her.
Satisfied with his finishing touches, Pygmalion leaves his beloved statue
for the city. A breeze stirring in his courtyard goes unnoticed. Enamored
by his creation, he will return in time.
A breath flows through the window, rustling the silk veil from the statue’s
face. This breeze, Venus’s will, is not the sculptor’s love. A deep nerve—
within the softening ivory—twitches new muscle and skin. Galatea raises a
warming arm. She can lift herself and walk! She moves forward through
the door (he thought he could leave it open) and up the hillside, feeling not
cold chisel, but sun on new flesh. Thigh muscle senses heft but pushes her
up just the same. From atop the hill, she descends into the city where
Pygmalion, King of Cyprus, rules. How can she hide from the king and
still move through his world?
***
After Galatea wreaks insufferable mischief in the city, Zeus, on the king’s
behalf, extracts an apology from her before returning her to Pygmalion in
her original state. Venus, as Zeus’s daughter, is forced to comply and to
keep her distance. The god of gods decrees that on the first day of spring
2
Chapter One
each year, Pygmalion is to prop Galatea in the marketplace as an example
to all women who love to roam about on their own, rather than staying put
and yielding to improvements. For generations hence, each woman is
granted an honorary chisel which she must carry on her person as a
reminder of the price she must pay for love.
Background
The ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea has often haunted
me. In the conventional myth that has passed down to us through the
generations, Pygmalion, who despises human women, copes with his
hatred of the sex by creating Galatea, a female form made of ivory. Caught
in a cycle of artistic scrutiny and admiration for his work, Pygmalion can
hardly keep himself from his statue. So daily he chisels every tiny,
unwanted mark, every slight imperfection, with his skillful hands as she
grows more beautiful before his eyes. The sculptor falls in love with his
lifeless statue and treats it as a doll, decorating it with baubles and silks.
Languishing with desire for his own creation, Pygmalion prays for
Venus’s help from his well of lust and self-love. And the goddess of love
rewards Pygmalion by warming the statue to life. Galatea, a virgin (how
could she be otherwise?) blushes and kisses him in return and he is thrilled
and fulfilled. The two marry at once. Pygmalion rules over both Cyprus
and the perfect wife he has created in serene harmony (Hamilton 1969,
108-111; Bulfinch 1979, 62-64).
Romantic poet Friedrich Schiller (1795-1796), the champion of heroic
freedom in other works about the American Revolution, sings a paean to
Pygmalion’s artistic, amorous triumph:
And then, in all my ardor sharing,
The silent form expression found;
Returned my kiss of youthful daring,
And understood my heart’s quick sound.
Then lived for me the bright creation,
The silver rill with song was rife;
The trees, the roses shared sensation,
An echo of my boundless life
(trans. S.G.B. in Bulfinch 64).
In Schiller’s poem, Galatea (whom we remember Pygmalion has created
according to his own specifications) “lives for” and through Pygmalion,
her obedient heart keeping pace with his. She has no purpose or spirit of
her own but is merely a reflection of him, an object created by him and for
Who are Pygmalion and Galatea To Us?
3
his glory, not a subject with individual will. No one seems to have a
problem with this. All of nature’s minions—the trees, even—cant hymns
of praise to Pygmalion, who is positioned at the center of the universe,
drinking it all in. All is well for him.
And so unfair to her.
I never liked this myth. It takes too much for granted: Why should a
man go unchallenged for believing all human women are worthy of
contempt? And why should Galatea, his grandiose tribute both to his scorn
for real women and to his own ego, be his everlasting reward?
I looked for other versions of the story and came up with precious little
variation, until I found the following sentence tucked away within the
glossary of my worn Bulfinch’s Mythology:
Galatea. … [A] statue made by Pygmalion, which became animated,
caused much mischief, and [was] returned to her original state (907).
This may likely be an earlier version of the better-known story. But I
wondered why the idea of a wandering, mischief-making Galatea was
missing from the traditional tale. If Galatea had a will of her own even for
a moment, I thought, the outcome would have been far different. Perhaps,
awakening slowly by the divine will of Venus rather than spontaneously
and miraculously to fulfill Pygmalion’s desires, she would have resented
the chisel that daily gouged away at her being. Perhaps she would have
left Pygmalion and the couch he made for her. And he (backed by
Almighty Zeus, who represents masculinity personified) would have
retaliated for sure. This seemed more realistic to me, so I began my
discussion here with my recast myth based on the version in Bulfinch’s
glossary. My story adds the tension that is the natural outgrowth of a
Galatea with a small, though significant, will of her own. Though my
ancient Cyprus is still a man’s world, where men make and enforce the
rules, I have included there the possibility that Venus breathed a life force
into the girl that is not necessarily the personal property and exclusive
domain of Pygmalion.
Then I saw my recast tale for what it has been: the story of women’s
lives.
Throughout history, women, like Galatea, have been most beautiful to
Pygmalion— men with privilege and the institutions they dominate—
when they are silent and still under his scrutinizing gaze. In order to
perfect his woman, Pygmalion chisels her to size her down and polishes
her flaws to make her worthy of his love while she quietly yields to him.
But I believe Galatea is never perfect according to Pygmalion’s standards,
because to maintain his power over her, he must forever remain her critic
4
Chapter One
and sculptor, filing flaws away until there is little left of the original
material from which she is made. And her “flaws” are the painfully
familiar bugbears that women still strive to avoid in order to be more
pleasing in a patriarchal, male-centered world: If a woman is too vocal, too
ambitious, too physically or psychically large, she must fix herself—or
else face male rejection and perhaps even public ridicule, including the
disapproval of other women who have internalized and propagated the
culture’s misogyny.
Though my Galatea has a modicum of will, getting up from her couch
and leaving the sculptor’s chisel behind her is profoundly threatening to
patriarchy. This is why, perhaps, Bulfinch’s glossary entry (and thus my
recast myth based on it) mention a Galatea “returned to her original state.”
Once she returns to her form as a lifeless statue after asserting her will,
then Pygmalion can maintain his power over her, filing flaws away until
there is little left of the bone from which she is made.
This is certainly the case for women in Western society who have
flouted the standards of feminine perfection embodied in the statue
Galatea: silence, immobility, and slenderness. As to silence, once the
conservative media successfully spread its caricatures of the 1970s
second-wave feminists as ugly man-haters, trivial bra-burners, and “femiNazis,” then women, stung by male disapproval, chose to muffle their
voices and disown feminism. “I’m no feminist, but…” we hear young
women say in the young millennium, prefacing pleas for simple respect.
Yet feminism was the only force in Western culture that gained women’s
right to vote as well as the laws protecting us from rape, which was once a
husband’s proprietary right. I believe that young women hold their futures
lightly when they simultaneously exploit these rights and reject the
boldness of the historical women who illuminated patriarchy’s onerous
expectations for the female life.
Concerning their professional immobility relative to men, no sooner
did women become comfortable with their mobilization in the public
square, where they had helped with the World War II effort, than ladies’
magazines, run by all-male editorial boards, disseminated the message
that women would pay for a career outside the home with a “cold
dimension of loneliness” (Friedan 1963, 270).
In regard to slenderness, no sooner did women gain access to the
convenient, inexpensive birth control pill in 1965 than Twiggy, a British
teenager, appeared on the cover of Vogue magazine to reassert a beauty
standard of “weakness, asexuality, and hunger” (Wolf 1991, 184). The
ubiquitous image of Twiggy, “the face of 1966,” appearing in print media
and television could successfully contain women’s growing power over
Who are Pygmalion and Galatea To Us?
5
their own bodies. It asserted a patriarchal standard of beauty that was, at
32-23-32 (Twiggy’s measurements) physically incapable of reproduction
and too plagued by starvation and weakness to have all that much personal
power (Wolf 1991, 184). And that emaciated standard of beauty remains
with women to this age. The consumer lens through which we are
encouraged to see the world distorts our irregular bodies so that we regard
ourselves as flawed and ugly.
Now, in the young millennium, despite the political and social strides
made through two waves of feminism, centuries-old oppression against
women is still profoundly alive. We need look no further than current
statistics concerning violence against women, economically disadvantaged
women, or eating-disordered women for confirmation. Men are simply not
required to pare down their lives in such disempowering ways. Saddest of
all, Western women have internalized Pygmalion’s misogynist messages
and chiseled themselves according to the patriarchal standard. It has
always been safest for them to do so, because presenting a silent, relatively
immobilized, smaller version of the female self in patriarchy—the malecentered and male-identified world we still occupy—has traditionally
guaranteed women the culture’s second-place prize: the love of a man and
any labile economic security that comes with it (Johnson 2005, 6-10). The
culture’s first-place prize, power—with the status, prestige and earned
income it generates—is disproportionately reserved for men, who have
been encouraged to move and to express themselves freely in the public
square.1
Fortunately, Western men have sometimes been taken to task for the
Pygmalionlike view that women are inherently flawed and need fixing.
Respected male literary figures have criticized the principle of a
presumptuous man improving his woman to his specifications and for his
glory. In a wonderful 1843 story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Birthmark,”
a brilliant scientist wastes his life away in his laboratory, where he plumbs
the secrets of “man’s ultimate control over nature” (300). Aylmer’s
highest aspiration—perfecting nature with science—applies to his
beautiful wife, Georgiana. On her cheek is a tiny flaw, a birthmark in the
shape of a human hand that he tolerates early in the marriage, but that
grows into an obsession bordering on a nightmare later on:
“[D]earest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from the hand of
Nature…that this slightest possible defect—which we hesitate to term a
defect or a beauty—shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly
imperfection.”
“Shocks you! My husband!” cried Georgiana, deeply hurt; at first
reddening with momentary anger, but then bursting into tears. “Then why
6
Chapter One
did you take me from my mother’s side! You cannot love what shocks
you!” (301).
Georgiana is right. Aylmer cannot love what shocks him, and neither
can she. Georgiana comes to loathe her birthmark and thus herself, having
internalized Aylmer’s deadly conclusion that her flaw makes her
unbearable as a wife. In reality, the “visible mark of earthly imperfection”
is simply a physical reminder of the flawed, mortal state that all human
beings, including Aylmer, share. Refusing to acknowledge his own faulty
nature, however, Aylmer must displace it from himself by excising its sign
from his wife. In the end, he does remove the birthmark with a potent
elixir he has invented, but once unblemished, Georgiana dies from the
procedure, as no mortal on earth can live in a state of perfection, body and
soul.
The story explores the overweening hubris with which man judges a
fellow human being, obsessing over a superficial flaw in her while
ignoring defects much deeper and more loathsome in himself: egotism and
cold-hearted judgment. However, a large part of the story’s tragedy lies in
Georgiana’s willingness to buy Aylmer’s reasoning that she not he, is
intolerably flawed.
In a more lighthearted work, the 1914 play Pygmalion, playwright
George Bernard Shaw also illuminates the dynamic of an egotist
perfecting a so-called flawed female for his glory. Henry Higgins, a
linguistics professor, undertakes the ultimate improvement project: He will
make a crude cockney flower girl into a lady. After taking Eliza Doolittle
from the London streets and dusting her off in a Wimpole Street Studio,
Higgins and his assistant, Colonel Pickering, use linguistics exercises and
a phonograph to transform her grating mother tongue into the stately
Standard East Midlands English of the British upper middle class. By the
end of the play, Liza is so perfectly metamorphosed into an elegant lady
that Higgins can hardly take his eyes off her. The whole process is thrilling
to him, as is evident in this interchange with his mother, who sees through
the men’s Pygmalionlike arrogance concerning Liza, their “Galatea”:
MRS. HIGGINS: You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with
your live doll.
HIGGINS: Playing! The hardest job I ever tackled: make no mistake about
that, mother. But you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a
human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating
a new speech for her. It’s filling up the deepest gulf that separates class
from class and soul from soul (63-64).
Who are Pygmalion and Galatea To Us?
7
Naturally, Higgins refuses to acknowledge the depth of pain that he has
caused Liza in the process. He has effectively separated her from her East
End family and friends, making her unfit to return to them while the gulf
between herself and the English upper middle class is still firmly fixed.
Before leaving the professor to seek her admirer, Freddy, a commoner, she
gives Higgins a piece of her mind:
LIZA (desperate): Oh, you are a cruel tyrant. I can’t talk to you; you turn
everything against me: I’m always in the wrong. But you know very well
all the time that you’re nothing but a bully. You know I can’t go back to
the gutter, as you call it, and that I have no real friends in the world but you
and the Colonel. You know well I couldn’t bear to live with a low common
man after you two; and it’s wicked and cruel of you to insult me by
pretending I could. You think I must go back to Wimpole Street because I
have nowhere else to go but father’s. But don’t you be too sure that you
have me under your feet to be trampled to and talked down. I’ll marry
Freddy, I will, as soon as I’m able to support him (102).
In Liza, Shaw portrays a realistic Galatea with more than a modicum
of will. In this way, she differs from Hawthorne’s Georgiana, who
internalizes her husband’s disdain for her birthmark and quietly submits to
her perfecting process. After Liza’s linguistic “flaws” are polished
according to Higgins’s standard, she becomes furious when she realizes
that the whole improvement project has benefited Higgins at her expense.
In this sense, because Liza questions her creator long enough to walk away
from him, George Bernard Shaw’s play resembles the alternate, lesser
known version of the myth that I found tucked away in Bulfinch’s glossary
and that I used to compose my recast version of the story. Shaw’s play is a
fair portrayal of how a real-life Galatea might feel about her “sculptor,” so
to speak.
However, when Shaw’s play was adapted by W.P. Lipscomb and Cecil
Lewis into their script for the 1938 film version of Pygmalion, starring
Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, the tacked-on happy ending resembled
the traditional Pygmalion tale, where the creation falls in love with its
lovelorn creator. Eliza dumps Freddy for Higgins.
Shaw was furious after seeing the film. He railed against Hollywood’s
“‘ready-made, happy endings to misfit all stories’” (Dennison and Shaw in
Shaw, 107). When asked by a Hollywood reporter why he allowed this
new ending, Shaw retorted,
I did not. I cannot conceive a less happy ending to the story of
“Pygmalion,” than a love affair between the middle-aged, middle-class
professor, a confirmed old bachelor with a mother-fixation, and a flower
8
Chapter One
girl of 18. Nothing of the kind was emphasized in my scenario, where I
emphasized the escape of Eliza from the tyranny of Higgins by a quite
natural love affair with Freddy (108).
Nevertheless, the alternate ending that Shaw loathed remained intact
for both musical adaptations, called My Fair Lady, produced for the stage
in 1956 and made into a film in 1964.2 Rewritten by lyricist Alan Jay
Lerner and set to music by Frederick Loewe, the revised script, like the
1938 film, ends after Eliza decides that the commoner Freddy is not for
her, since she is now a lady, not an East End flower girl. Eliza therefore
returns to the lovesick Higgins:
ELIZA (gently): I washed my face and hands before I come, I did.
(HIGGINS straightens up. If he could but let himself, his face would
radiate unmistakable relief and joy. If he could but let himself, he would
run to her. Instead, he leans back with a contented sigh, pushing his hat
forward till it almost covers his face.)
HIGGINS (softly): Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?
(There are tears in ELIZA’S eyes. She understands.)
The curtain falls slowly (Lerner 1964, 219).
In this gooey revision of Shaw’s original script, patriarchy’s status quo
reasserts itself—as it often does in Hollywood productions. A much more
docile Eliza falls into the gentle “understanding” that is the key to
propping up Higgins’s ego. She must return his love out of gratitude for
his improving, even creating her. Her life must serve as a tribute to his
artistry and genius. In this so-called “happy” ending, we can almost hear
echoes of Schiller, who, referring to the traditional version of the tale in
his poem, wrote that when the statue Galatea came to life to return
Pygmalion’s love, she “Returned my kiss of youthful daring, /And
understood my heart’s quick sound” (emphasis mine, see p. 2). It’s as if
Eliza cried, “Yes, my darling, you did it, and I love you for it!” on the
sidelines while Higgins gleefully crooned, “By George! I really did it! I
did it! I said I’d make a woman/And indeed I did!” at the end of the film
(214). One may as well imagine Georgiana, free of her birthmark at last,
thanks to her husband, embracing him in joy and everlasting gratitude,
leaving his toxic ego intact. There is no Galatea “wreaking havoc” in this
script. Unlike Shaw’s refreshingly mutinous Eliza, this recreated doll has
no will or purpose of her own. She serves to prop up her male creator. My
Who are Pygmalion and Galatea To Us?
9
Fair Lady’s ending, to which Hollywood producers thoughtlessly
defaulted because its comfortable familiarity would sell more tickets, is
the dangerous, stifling script women have been handed through the ages.
And we should fight it for all we’re worth.
In the young millennium, we women still live by Henry Higgins’s (or
Pygmalion’s) objective to improve us, though we are not necessarily
conscious of its scope or disempowering effects. If women feel that we are
never good enough as is, we may not realize that it is because we are
targets of a patriarchal culture that makes us feel flawed, needing
improvements that we should embrace and for which we should be
grateful. These messages are omnipresent, appearing in advertisements for
cosmetics or weight control products, parenting or housekeeping manuals,
Internet advice blogs, television “makeovers,” and self-help books. At
every turn, our culture tells women that we need to look better by making
ourselves up and driving our weight down; that we must parent and keep
house better; that we must revise traits that surely make us unpleasing to
others.
Our culture also tells men that they should improve, but not in a way
that assumes a priori flaw, a belief consistent with the Pygmalion and
Galatea myth. A serious look at the myriad ads for anti-aging creams or
for weight loss products tells us that they are disproportionately aimed at
women, who are assumed to exist in a defective state, needing desperately
to be more acceptable to others.
Interestingly, as in the birthmark removal program imposed on
Georgiana by Aylmer, such improvement campaigns usually benefit men,
not women, since the corporations and advertising firms that market these
products are, for the most part, run by male executives who profit from the
insecurities they can insidiously sow in women. In the most extreme cases,
the beauty treatments—especially surgical procedures—may even harm or
kill women, as Aylmer’s birthmark-removal elixir killed Georgiana.
Pygmalion At Home
Yet Pygmalion’s message that women are inherently flawed is not
found solely in the public forum, outside the private realm. In their homes,
too many women are cruelly barraged by the message that they are never
good enough as to reveal the “private” crisis of domestic abuse for what it
really is: an American institution. Cultures are comprised of individuals,
who carry their private attitudes into the public sphere, where they can
combine with political power then flow back into the home again. I have
10
Chapter One
come to see the division we have made between the “private” and “public”
realms as highly contrived and artificial.
The questionable division between a public sphere that has status and
importance and a private sphere in the home that has far less significance
and regard is a socially constructed paradigm. This ideology trivializes
and discredits women’s experiences based on what it sees as the low-status
environment, the home, where women live much of that experience (Young
1999, et al).
Feminist theorists have long noted that the “personal is political”
(Hanisch 2006). By this, they mean that experiences that seem highly
personal because they are not in public view—verbal and physical abuse,
rape, sexual harassment, lack of money, unremitting and uncompensated
work in the home— are often the result of skewed, unjust systems in
society. Furthermore, private experiences tend to be discredited as that
which does not comprise real or trustworthy knowledge, since we look for
experts out in the world to tell us what is true. Though social media could
easily render our private experiences “viral,” abused women who live with
eroded self-regard as well as the threat of retaliation will often blame
themselves for such problems, doubting what their own experiences tell
them is really happening in their lives. But if we listen carefully to the
stories of women around us, we hear a collective experience, regardless of
its venue in private places. Nevertheless, breaking silence about this
collective experience can seem inappropriate, audacious, and even
dangerous. We are afraid of accusations of “male bashing.” We are afraid
of sounding “shrill,” as patriarchy tends to describe female voices that are
not docile, compliant, or self-doubting, like Galatea.
For these reasons I have chosen to break my own silence regarding
how I arrived at this study of a myth so resonant and yet so painfully
archetypal in the lives of women. The Pygmalion and Galatea myth
haunted me, in large part, because I was a “Galatea” too. In an earlier part
of my life, my then-partner assumed a certain masculine prerogative to
perfect and fix me, and I have no doubt that his attitude in the home was
inspired by the Pygmalionlike contempt for women in our culture at large.
When I was younger, I would have kept the story to myself, fearful that it
would have eroded my credibility or made me look as though I had, in
Virginia Woolf’s words, an “axe to grind” (A Room of One’s Own
preface). But because the personal is political, and because women’s
stories heal one another, I have included it here with new faith in its
importance for other women.
Who are Pygmalion and Galatea To Us?
11
My Pygmalion and Galatea Story
In private, Carl, my former partner, used language with a potent
rhetorical effect of its own. His objective was often to convince me that
there really was something wrong with me. In the spring of 1990, we were
driving to our apartment in Central Connecticut after a dinner at his
divinity school in New York, where he was preparing for ordination in a
mainline protestant church. I had irritated him—certainly not for the first
time. It had become a pattern in our relationship for me to sit docilely
during these lectures about my flaws, because if I did not, Carl’s’
criticisms would “explode like torpedoes” inside him and I’d eventually
have a much bigger price to pay than a tongue-lashing. That price almost
came at the end of our relationship—more about that later. In this particular
instance, according to Carl, it was time for me to work on my awkward
language, which contrasted too starkly with the discourse he used with his
ivy-league colleagues. I peppered my sentences with juvenile, effusive
words like “so” and “just,” he said. This deeply embarrassed him.
“‘I just learn soooo much about theology and church history now that
he’s in this program!’” he mocked, in lilting, hyperfeminine tones that
reminded me of Marilyn Monroe. “Are all high school English teachers
soooo inarticulate?” he jeered.
In the midst of my struggle teaching high school students full time in a
challenging school system, this barb hurt. Though Carl had once told me
that my teaching job perfectly suited my abilities and though it paid our
bills while he attended graduate school, he had no respect for the “lowstatus” work. His disdain for my language was bad enough, but his
contempt for my job wounded me, though I knew better than to resist him.
When I had last fought back during another harangue in the car, he had
come within four feet of hitting a dingy gray dog stumbling across the
road. At that point, the act seemed like a statement. This time, Carl was
driving again, and if I provoked him and we crashed, I knew he would find
a way to convince me it was my fault. I would lose any battle with him
just the same. He was that good at discrediting me.
Still, a question burned in me. Summoning the deference required for
him to bear it was excruciating: “Why do you devalue me?” I asked. From
his rolling eyes, I knew I had made another incompetent word choice and
felt instant regret.
“Devalue?” he landed on it. “How can you say devalue? It’s a stupid
word. I cannot devalue you when you come to a graduate dinner with an
inherent lack of intellectual zest in the first place. Don’t say I devalue you
when you have little of value to offer a theological conversation to begin
12
Chapter One
with. Instead, acknowledge that when you lack the mental rigor and
gravitas that you find at a seminary, you embarrass yourself unless you
keep quiet. When we’re there, smile more and talk less. It’s more
attractive and mysterious.”
I cannot remember much more about that car ride. When I look back
on the failed relationship (thankful that there were no children for him to
destroy with his contempt), I simply recall a sensation of being eroded by
him, of being whittled down and muffled, perpetually flawed in the
presence of his accusing voice. The price I paid for harmony was my
obedience to his agenda for my improvement.
Perhaps to many, Carl’s assessment of me sounds outrageous and
unreasonable, easily dismissed; and perhaps I sound hopelessly weak,
naïve and foolish for believing him. But he had trained me well. The
partnership had started off glorious and strong. Everyone we knew
respected Carl for his keen intellect, spirituality, and “compassion.” Carl
began our life at home as the model of respect and consideration. But
through the years he became gradually more irritable and demanding,
leading me to believe that if I simply changed to please him, all would be
well. By the time I reached my late twenties, after several years of living
within the ever more stifling den of his reality, I had lost sight of who I
was outside his dim view.
And his view of me was remarkably sophisticated. Through his
rigorous studies of Freud, Jung, transactional analysis, and various New
Age schemata that left me dizzy as he explained them, he had me all
figured out. I was inherently flawed, and as my natural physical,
intellectual and spiritual superior, he was entitled to fix me. In Carl’s
thinking, two things had empowered him to do so: First, his divinity
studies at an ivy-league seminary gave him incisive vision into my
spiritual and mental shortcomings. Second, he was a man, and a certain
masculine prerogative empowered him to dismiss my ideas as irrational,
emotional female arguments with everlastingly trivial concerns (our
relationship; the messes he left in the apartment and refused to pick up; my
“low-status” high school teaching career, which contrasted sharply with
his brilliant future as an ordained theologian and professor of religion).
Like Galatea, I needed Carl’s chiseling touch to perfect me and make me
acceptable.
Perhaps many would fault me for staying with Carl as long as I did, but
his profound rejection of me when I rebelled from his “corrections” was
painful enough to send me, begging for renewed approval, back to him.
Even worse, his detailed descriptions of my flaws had the ring of truth to
them, as if there must be something deeply wrong, something profoundly
Who are Pygmalion and Galatea To Us?
13
unacceptable about me. And the soothing, albeit dubious gratification I felt
whenever I confessed my defects and repented to please him hooked me
for years.
After eight of those years, his approval became hollow and even
repulsive, and when he knew this and ultimately threatened me with his
fists, I left him. The labyrinth of threats and recriminations that I groped
through before reaching a clearer reality is too unwieldy to describe here.
I suppose one could see my experience as utterly unique—that of an
isolated woman in a strange sort of emotional thralldom with a twisted
man. There must be numerous relationships with milder forms of the
Pygmalion-Galatea dynamic that do not involve emotional abuse, and
surely many “Pygmalions” are women who set about to improve their
male partners. But there are far more women than men on the receiving
end of insidious contempt. Contempt, after all, is Pygmalion’s default
stance toward all women.
It was as though Carl could pull ready-made anti-female arguments
from the air. His comments about women’s irrationality, the triviality of
women’s concerns, and the problematic nature of women’s bodies seemed
fully-formed, as if he drew from a misogyny that existed long before our
particular struggle began and that justified his superiority.
In the healing years since that relationship, I have wished to explore
the contempt that not only once held me spellbound with an (ostensibly)
powerful man, but whose influence runs through our patriarchal society at
large, where it silences women and chisels them down to size, though
perhaps in more subtle ways than I experienced. I believe my own
memories as a “Galatea” reflect the lives of many women who have been
taught to blame themselves for their individual “defects” instead of
understanding the context—the patriarchal culture—within which they
have been so shamed, muffled, and whittled to become smaller than they
should be.
And though it’s true that too many women in contemporary America
have been “messed over” by a world that values what is male more than
what is female, men should nevertheless be invited to join such a
discussion (Hanisch 2006). Feminist thinkers have often been wrongly
labeled “man-haters.” In contrast, rather than hating men, feminists should
recognize that too many men have been, in Malcolm X’s words,
“hoodwinked” and “bamboozled” to regard women in unhealthy ways.
Through its incessant media violence against women and its dehumanizing
pornography, our culture teaches men that a life of control over women is
acceptable. But relationships based on control are warped and toxic, and in
the long run, such a belief system corrupts and harms men too.
14
Chapter One
Control is an efficient isolator, and the one who dominates over
another is perpetually separated from her. When men value this
domination of women, failing to recognize exactly what the culture’s
misogyny has cost men and their important relationships, anti-woman
beliefs coalesce and become normalized. This normalization results in the
cultural atmosphere we know as patriarchy.