Galatea (as she has become known, albeit only relatively recently) isn’t given any agency in the story, and is instead first a dumb statue and then, so far as the narrative goes, an equally dumb flesh-and-blood woman, voiceless and passive. This is obviously a less positive interpretation of the Pygmalion myth, because it suggests that men can only like or love women who are made in the man’s own image, like ordering a bespoke tailor-made suit. Quite what that meaning and significance might be, however, is less easy to answer: we somehow feel that the story conveys something truthful about art, about inspiration, about masculine attitudes to femininity and womanhood (and, indeed, to their own desire for women), but reducing the various strands of the Pygmalion myth to a single line – as Aesop-like ‘moral’, if you will – is not at all straightforward.

The name is, however, entirely fitting for the ivory statue in the story, because it means ‘she who is milky white’ in ancient Greek (it’s related to words like lactic and galaxy and even, ultimately, latte, all of which mean ‘milk’).Īnd the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea (if we choose to call her that) is one that is laden with meaning and significance. Indeed, according to the twentieth-century classical scholar Meyer Reinhold, it was only in the eighteenth century when Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a play about the Pygmalion myth that the name Galatea began to be associated with the sculpture.

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