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Re-Viewing Pygmalion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

John Eisner  and
Alison Sharrock
John Eisner
Affiliation:
University of Keek
Alison Sharrock
Affiliation:
University of Keek
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Extract

On 5th February 1989, the review section of The Observer carried a full-page article on a film about Camille Claudel, the sculptress who was Rodin's mistress and who spent the last thirty years of her life in a mental asylum. The iconography of this page, supposedly concerned with the film and the woman, was telling. A large central image of Rodin, arms crossed and staring masterfully forward, is ringed by three, small, peripheral images of Claudel. Each is (of course) a photograph: one of the woman herself, one of the statue of her by her lover Rodin, and one of the actress who represents her in the film. The images display the slippage between women and artistic representations or creations (of women)—a slippage which is at the heart of the Pygmalion story. The title of the article is Love that turned to stone.

In Metamorphoses 10.148-739, Ovid has the master-poet, Orpheus, react to the double loss of his wife, Eurydice, by singing to surrounding nature a set of tales, including that of Pygmalion (245-97). Pygmalion, it will be remembered, created a beautiful statue, with which he fell in love. With the help of Venus and in response to the artist's erotic attentions, the statue came to life.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , 1991 , pp. 149 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1991

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References

1. ‘Womanufacture’, JRS 81 (1991), 36–49Google Scholar. I shall often refer to the story as Pygmalion, in italics, for simplicity. I am grateful to John Eisner, Maria Wyke, John Henderson and Gerry Nussbaum for their helpful comments on this paper.

2. See Adams, J.N., The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London 1982), 157Google Scholar, who says opus applies particularly to the male part in the act.

3. I call the statue ‘Eburna’ for convenience, and also as a reference to the personification so often imposed on it/her.

4. Gubar says of Pygmalion that he ‘has evaded the humiliation… of acknowledging that it is he who is really created out of and from the female body’ (Gubar, S., ‘The Blank Page and Female Creativity’, in Abel, E. (ed.), Writing and Sexual Difference [Brighton 1982], 73Google Scholar).

5. See J. Eisner in the companion to this essay: Clement of Alexandria Protrepticus 4.51, Arnobius Aduersus Gentes 6.22. See Miller, J.M., ‘Some Versions of Pygmalion’, in Martindale, C. (ed.) Ovid Renewed (Cambridge 1988), 205–14Google Scholar, at 205.

6. Fränkel, H., Ovid A Poet between two Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1945), 93–7Google Scholar; Otis, B., Ovid as an Epic Poet (Cambridge 1966), 191Google Scholar; Griffin, A.H.F., ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, G&R 24 (1977), 57–70Google Scholar, at 66.

7. Miller (n.5 above), 208.

8. Frazer, J.G., The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Part 4: Adonis, Attis, Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion3 (London 1914), i.31–56Google Scholar, esp. 49; Bömer, F., P. Ovidius Naso Metamorphosen: Kommentar Buch X–XI (Heidelberg 1980), 93–7Google Scholar and on 10.270.

9. Frazer (n.8 above).

10. This point bears on ancient attitudes to statues generally. Gordon, R.L. has argued (The Real and the Imaginary: Production and Religion in the Graeco-Roman World’, Art History 2 [1979], 5–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 15) that the ancients ‘believed simultaneously that statues were gods and that they were not’.

11. A simple witness to this is the use of uenus as a term of endearment (OLD s.v. Venus 1b).

12. See Lyne, R.O.A.M., The Latin Love Poets: From Catullus to Horace (Oxford 1980), 250Google Scholar; and generally Lieberg, G., Puella divina: die Gestalt der göttlichen Gelieblen bei Catull im Zusammenhang der antiken Dichtung (Amsterdam 1962Google Scholar).

13. I am grateful to John Henderson for pointing this story out to me.

14. See Pfister, W., RE 1922Google ScholarPubMed, s.v. Kultus, 2142f; Bömer (n.8 above) on 264f.

15. See the note on this passage in Brown, R.D., Lucretius on Love and Sex: A Commentary on De Rerum Natura IV, 1030–1287 (Leiden 1987Google Scholar), for the sexual connotations of words of motion. Michael Reeve and Duncan Kennedy have contributed to this point.

16. But even here there is a certain ambiguity in the fact that Lucretius’ language is highly sexually explicit—medical, coarse or erotic?

17. Cf. moueri in Lucr. 4.1274 quoted above.

18. See for example the copy of Praxiteles’ statue which is now Munich 258.

19. Isid. Orig. 10.179.

20. For the elegist also, love of creation involves the creation of a composite figure, adapted at any moment to the particular requirements of the lover’s emotional discourse.

21. See Kris, E. and Kurz, O., Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven and London 1979), 89Google Scholar. See also Ahl’s ingenious reading: Ahl, F.M., Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and other Classical Poets (New York 1985), 255–60Google Scholar.

22. See Frontisi-Ducroux, F., Dédale: Mythologie de l’artisan en grèce ancienne (Paris 1975), 95–117Google Scholar; Kris and Kurz (n.21 above), 67–9. Aristotle connects the automata of Hephaestus and Daedalus at Politics 1253b.35ff.

23. Kris and Kurz (n.21 above), 71.

24. See for example Detienne, M., ‘Entre Betes et Dieux’, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanatyse 6 (1972), 231–48Google Scholar, translated in Gordon, R.L. (ed.), Myth, Religion and Society (Cambridge 1981Google Scholar), together with the other essays in that collection.

25. This is not to undermine the meaning ‘real’ in uerae, since that is involved in all the plays on reality and image, summed up in this phrase in the internal quasi-contradiction of uerae and facies.

26. The gifts given to Pandora by the gods provide the aition for one explanation of her name.

27. The first metamorphosis was from raw material into statue, the second from statue into woman.

28. See Davisson, M.T., ‘Parents and Children in Ovid’s Poems from Exile’, CW 78 (1984), 111–4Google Scholar.

29. He whips out his sword in a passage replete with sexual overtones: pendenti nitidum uagina deripitensem (‘he whips his shining sword from its sheath’, 10.475).

30. See J. Fetterly, , The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Literature (Bloomington 1978Google Scholar).

31. The chiastic syntax is telling. Moreover, mATRIS Paelex anagrammatises to PATRIS.

32. See Rabinowitz, N.S., ‘Aphrodite and the Audience: Engendering the Reader’, Arethusa 19(1986), 171–85Google Scholar, at 181f.

33. See Delcourt, M., Hephaestus ou la legende du magicien (Paris 1957Google Scholar),